The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)

The Warlock's Lair

Previously: "The Graveyard" 

You're up early the next morning, half from excited anticipation and half out of dread that if you don't get moving soon your dad will find something for you to do. "Meeting Caleb and Keith for donuts," you tell your astonished parents as you dash through the dining room. "Then we're gonna go do some stuff together, if that's okay." You give your dad a direct stare. "I'm gonna stop off for a haircut after lunch. I won't forget, I promise."

He looks too surprised to be skeptical.

Then you're out the door.

* * * * *

Your first stop is the old elementary school a few blocks from your house. And in this case "old" really does mean old. It's a tall, imposing two-story building with a bell tower at one corner, built in the 1930s or something or like that. It was closed before you were born, when a new school was built south of the village, and part of the old building was converted into a community recreation center. You've never been inside, that you can remember.

The part of the school you want, fortunately, is on the opposite side from the community center. There, in an otherwise blank wall, a long line of windows, screened by weeds and long tufts of grass, peek up just above ground level. A sloping pit is cut into the ground at one end of this line of windows, and a short set of concrete stairs lead down to a heavy metal door that's secured with a latch and a heavy padlock.

It's your padlock.

Well, it was your lock last year, when you put it on the door. You'd been exploring the school grounds and feeling more than a little destructive. On finding that door, went off to get a crowbar and used it to pry the latch open. On the other side of the door was a short set of wooden stairs leading down into a dirty and cluttered basement.

It was a huge basement, cluttered up with old desks and tables and chairs; with tall bookcases and dark, heavy cabinets; with globes and old sinks and pommel horses, and even a floor-to-ceiling mirror in a tarnished gilt frame.

You rummaged around the place, opening drawers and peering onto shelves and finding nothing but dead insects, old paper, and piles of dust. You rearranged some of the furniture to open up a spot where you could put some squeaky old desk chairs—the kind that roll around on cast-iron wheels—and opened up a tunnel into a cranny near a back wall. Then, when you were grimy and hot and tired, you went away.

You came back a little later, though, with a padlock of your own and hung it on the door. You put there, originally, just to disguise the fact that someone had broken in. But a few weeks later, when you returned, you found it still on the door. You watched for a few weeks, decided that the groundskeepers and maintenance staff had mostly forgotten about the basement, and showed it to Caleb and Keith. You made it a kind of "secret clubhouse" for a little while, and last Halloween you and your friends even spent the night there, drinking whiskey and trying to tell ghost stories.

Then you mostly forgot about it. You haven't been back since Christmas, at least.

Now, you park on a wide patch of ground next to the basement door and descend the steps. You found the old key in your dresser drawer, and when you put it in the lock it snaps open easily enough. You loose a low whistle. It's been a year since you swapped out locks—and the staff still haven't tried to get in the basement?

You spend about twenty minutes exploring it again, and clearing off a large conference table. You wish you'd remembered this place before—it would make a dandy spot for making masks. Then you move down the sacks of dirt you got from the graveyard, and the other supplies you'd picked up at Walmart.

Then it's in to town—first to get some donuts and coffee, for you're ravenous—then to a couple of specialty shops to pick up those things you couldn't get at Walmart.

Oh, and the haircut.

* * * * *

It's a little after two o'clock before you return home from your various errands. Your dad orders you to take your cap off, and grunts a reluctant approval of the trim you got. At least your bangs are out of your eyebrows now, and most of your ears are visible. You scooped up most of what got chopped off—telling the hair dresser that you're saving it for a "project," an explanation that she only shrugged at—and put it in a baggie along with the other things you picked up. It's all still in the back of your truck.

But you're not home to pick up the grimoire for transport to the basement. Instead, you prop up on your bed with it and a newly purchased sketch pad. You flip open to the spell, eyeball it closely for awhile, then begin to copy the sigil onto a fresh page of heavy parchment.

You got the idea for copying it out while at the military supply store next to your dad's workplace. You went there to pick up some fuse cord, and the clerk—who gave you a rather fish-eyed stare, you thought—wanted to know what it was for. You gave him a story about wanting to set off some model rockets for your cousins, and how your aunt insisted that little fingers be kept very far from the propellant. You doubt that he believed you, but he didn't put up any further argument.

Anyway, after that you got to thinking again about the kind of explosives that you've been buying. You're supposed to pile it all onto the sigil inside the book. But the only thing worse than blowing up the school, in your estimation, is blowing up the book.

So instead of using the sigil inside the book, you'll make a copy.

You'd been dreading the work, for the sigil—a circle filled with intricate overlapping whirls and doodads—is very complicated. But once you start, you find the work strangely soothing and satisfying. The lines form very easily under your fingers, and as you concentrate on the original and on your copy it seems to you that the abstract, patterns come to resemble faces and forms: a maze that sometimes looks like a minotaur. You catch yourself smiling as you work; and when you're done and look up to pop the crick from your neck, you find that an hour has flown by with your scarcely noticing.

You spend a further fifteen minutes carefully comparing the two copies, and are surprised, and a little worried, to find no great errors. But when a second examination turns up nothing, you shrug and take the grimoire and the sketchbook back down to your truck. Your dad is asleep on the sofa, and your mother is knitting, so no one stops you as you go out again.

The basement is as you left it, and after propping the grimoire open for consultation, you begin to assemble this, the most complicated spell yet. You lay the sigil copy onto the conference table and, one five-pound bag at a time, weigh out the spoils of last night's raid in a set of scales you bought before piling them onto the sigil. That takes a tediously long time, after which you douse it all in liquids and powders. A large pinch of your hair you tuck into the middle of it all.

Then you stick one end of the fuse cord into the mess, run the other end to the bottom of the stairs, and take out a lighter.

You pause. Jesus, you think to yourself. Am I really going to do this?

Apparently you are, for without quite willing it, you flick the lighter and put the flame to the end of the cord.

Then you haul ass like a son of a bitch up the stairs and to your truck. You turn the motor on and back into the street. You drive around a corner, park in front of the school, and wait with the motor running.

For two minutes nothing happens.

You shut off the motor and, with a pounding heart, trot around the side of the school. Cautiously you approach the open door to the basement. You hold your breath, and look inside.

The dirt is on fire. Great plumes of purple flame billow and smoke off it. There is no hiss, no fizzle, no crackle—just sheets of lavender and violet that shimmy into the air. You put out your hand, then stick it into one of the flames. No heat!

You whistle, long and low, and watch, mesmerized, as the fire dances. Then you double-check the instructions you'd cobbled together out of translations. The fire is supposed to burn, and you must relight it when it goes out, until it will not relight again.

There's no indication how long that will take, so you tear yourself away long enough to run home to gather up all the other supplies you've collected over the past few weeks, and transport them to the basement.

The fire is still burning when you get back, and you busy yourself by setting up a little workshop. When you're done, you sit back and watch the fire.

It burns and burns and burns. You take out your cell phone and check texts and surf the internet.

* * * * *

Finally, you can't take it anymore. You've got to do something. Make some more masks. Go hang out with Caleb and Keith—they've been pestering you with texts you've mostly ignored.

Go out in public again as Coach Schell?

Next: "In Which Life Grinds On" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 3)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 3)"