The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

The Path Through the Protective Maze

Previously: "A Prisoner in the Attic" 

Your heart hammers as you open the door and look into the dark hallway. Down one end are stairs leading up to the third-floor workroom; at the other end are the main stairs leading down to the first floor. From overhead comes a sound like claws scrabbling at a hard surface; it sounds like something is trying to dig through the ceiling to get to you.

No place in the house is truly safe anymore, and you curse the sense of guilt that led you to so foolishly break the seal that kept you safe inside your own bedroom. You have to get out of the house; indeed, you have to get past the outside wall. That would argue for running like a greyhound down the stairs and out the front door. But just because the guardian is on the third floor at the moment doesn't mean you won't meet it on the main staircase; it doesn't work that way. Diving out a window would probably be safer, assuming you didn't break your neck.

You look between the main staircase and the window in your own room, trying to quickly gauge your chances of success at each. Then your heart leaps: the door to Blackwell's bedroom is still open. Taking a deep breath, you throw yourself into the hall and run low toward it. There's a crash like collapsing plaster and something very big and heavy drops onto the floor behind you. You skitter into the bedroom, grab the knob and hurl the door shut with a bang. It rings like a timpani under the blows that follow, but the seal, which activates each evening when the door is shut for the night, holds. You hear a soft scraping as of hands running along its edges, feeling for a crack or gap, but there is no edge for it to grip.

Then a wall bends inward. You cower in the middle of the room.

In it bends, billowing like a sail that's caught a stiff wind, and a picture falls to the floor with a crash. The wall flexes and releases, then flexes again at a higher spot, and releases. It flexes a third time, higher still, and the edge of the ceiling droops to meet it: the guardian is climbing the wall back onto the third floor. It trods heavily over your head—you kneel and scuttle back toward the door—until it reaches a far wall; there's a sliding sound and another great thump.

The first blow falls like a hammer against the wall behind the bed, the one that separates it from the bedroom next door. The second blow is like a sledgehammer; the third like a battering ram. Cracks appear in the wall, rippling outward like filaments of a spider web; dust shakes into the air and onto the ground. Brown stains spread out from under the paint, and a foul odor rolls in like a wave. You edge toward the window and look out.

By the light of the sinking moon you see a tree branch hanging close to the sill: it runs back to the yew tree over the top of the mausoleum. The mausoleum itself is close to the back wall of the garden.

You really have no other option.

You throw the window and grab the branch. It bends under your weight and you swing over to the mausoleum, landing heavily on its roof. Your fleet slide from under you as you scramble over it, and you nearly topple off, but you make it to the far edge and dive head-first for the wall. You catch the top of it just below your rib cage, busting all the air from your lungs, but you grip and pull yourself over. It may be your imagination, but you think you feel something very sharp nip at your heel as you go over.

From outside the garden there is nothing to suggest anything wrong with the house, but you know appearances are absolutely deceptive; the guardian is almost certainly watching you with hunger and malice.

You find Lucy's SUV nearby. You climb into it and doze fretfully until dawn.

* * * * *

The house shows no sign of damage on its first floor when you go back in after the sun is well up over the horizon. There is no smashed cabinetry, no hole in the hallway ceiling, no dents in the walls.

Of course, there wouldn't be.

Up on the third floor you find the work room empty and Lucy's complex maze of sigils in ruins, with a hideous brown stain cutting right to its empty center. You fetch a mop and bucket of warm water and get to work erasing the broken sigils before they can attract anything unpleasant.

Only when this is done do you look into Blackwell's bedroom and find real damage: the wall the guardian attacked is completely demolished. This sobers you, for the guardian can do physical damage only when it is forcing its way through a vulnerable magic barrier to get to the object it wants. If you hadn't gone out the window ...

You examine the wall carefully, and find that it held a kind of hidden closet; you are excited to realize that this was a secret room inside Blackwell's bedroom. There is a large pipe inside the room, running up to the third floor; you ponder this, and realize it is the drainage pipe for the sink in the bottom of the workroom floor. You go back upstairs to look: The sink was at the center of Lucy's maze.

You scratch your head as you puzzle it out.

The link between the sink, the pipe, and the maze Lucy tried constructing to foil the guardian suggest that she was drawing on some kind of power located in that secret room. What was that power, and how did she know it was there?

Then you see that this is how the guardian got past the bedroom seal: it followed the earlier path it carved through the maze and followed it down into that pocket next to the bedroom. That also suggests there was some kind of charged path connecting the bedroom and the workroom for it to follow.

Back in the bedroom you dig through the debris. There was a kind of shelf in the hidden closet, and you find a book buried under the broken plywood and plaster.

Next: "The Sexton's Scarecrow" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 1)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)"