The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

A Distracted Diversion

Previously: "It's a Date!" 

by Wordsmitty

As Alex keeps stirring your mind with possibilities and schemes to copy someone or have fun making masks and using all the spells available, you keep remembering your promise to Caleb to get the dirt and set things up. You're torn, or at least divided, by the two minds in your head, one with a wild imagination for projects and one with friendship tinged with a bit of guilt.

It's not that you could really do much as Lizzie in just a few hours, and there's the possibility of being spotted again and having it all spin off on its own like happened before. Sure, Alex tells you she can handle it, but maybe Caleb is right, and you've just been lucky so far. It did feel good to be someone else, and you are now completely comfortable in Lizzie's character and form. Alex's mind even thinks it a hoot that she met herself and chuckles wondering what it would be like to let "The Guru" help her own self as Lizzie.

Then there's the spells you'd have to do to try anything more. You need to make a mask and polish it to get Alex's body or carve one of those metal mind copiers if you were to get it on Joe. But why waste it on Joe, Alex has you ponder. Who needs the brain of a narc? There's plenty of others at school that it would be great to know their secrets and reasons they do things. Unfortunately, that just resurrects thoughts of your ex-girlfriend Lisa, and why she dropped you. You could finally find out the truth by placing one on her. Or maybe it could be a bonding experience bringing you two back together as a couple if she had your mind as well?

Maybe not.

You wonder if there's a way to limit access to certain memories. Perhaps there's a spell further on after you do the next one. Where and how are you suppose to get hundreds of pounds of graveyard dirt?

By the time your fantasizing lets a small crack of reality peek through, you find yourself nowhere near downtown. Houses are disappearing into more trees as the road rolls lazily left and right. Scanning around for bearings, you see the sun scattering long Fall streaks through trees waving shadows onto a field of stone markers.

Geez! How'd I end up on Farm Road by the Masonic Cemetery? you wonder.

Fate! Alex replies in your head.

Visible, just on the other side of the wall, is a backhoe, preparing for the next tenant. A couple scoops of that and you'd have enough for sure. All you need is a ruse to get them to fill the truck bed. There must be leftover when they drop a coffin in the hole. Tell them it's a school garden project. Maybe they wouldn't believe some guy, but what if it was a girl?

Or maybe it would be safer to sneak back later. But would mean shoveling because not even Alex, who's gotten into lots of various vehicles to do so many projects, knows anything about running a backhoe.

Your house is back the other way, so half a mile up the road you pull onto the shoulder to turn around, and fetch up next to a high, whitewashed stone wall. Before you complete the turn, though, you glance through a wrought-iron gate set in the wall, and brake to a hard stop. Your jaw slackens as you stare at the house and grounds on the other side.

Squatting like an immense stone brick at the end of a long walk is a two-story villa. Though the westerning sun is pouring light onto its peach-colored face, there is an air of dreary desolation about it, so that the dark windows resemble the eyeless sockets and toothless maw of a skull. What little of the yard you glimpse appears to be as flat and dead as pavement, only browner. A lone, leafless tree, grasping at the sky like a claw, stands sentry at the nearest corner of the house.

Drawn by the possibilities of using the house as a canvas—Shut up, Alex—you kill the motor and get out to approach the gate and peer through. Your eyes widen when this closer inspection reveals a small stone building in the side yard, with a sprinkling of monuments trailing away from it. Obviously, a crypt and the plots of the family that owns, or still owns, the place. A private graveyard like that could probably give up some topsoil without any of the occupants noticing or caring.

The gate is unlocked, and you slip through. Better and better! As you approach the crypt you see that there's a wheelbarrow and shovel next to the mausoleum, and the ground is already scored with a wide, shallow trench.

That shovel and wheelbarrow give you pause, though. Does that mean that the house isn't as deserted as it appears? Alex's first instinct is to grab the dirt while the grabbing is good—you'd just have to dump as much as you can into the wheelbarrow, cart it out to your truck, and return until you had moved four hundred pounds' worth. Your own, more cautious instinct is to fetch the scale and the sandbags you bought on Amazon, and return to this house as "Lizzie," to ask permission to dig up some of the dirt for a school art project.

But your most cautious instinct is to return to the cemetery. There are no gates on that place, so there's nothing to prevent you from driving into it after dark and taking whatever you want from some back corner.

Next: "Work and Play" 

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