The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)

Breaking Points

Previously: "The Continuing Misadventures" 

"I got in another fight," you tell Patterson.

"Whatever," he mutters, and goes back to studying his textbook.

"It was Mendoza and Thomason. They were hauling me out to the portables." You wince a little as you test the muscles it feels like you pulled. "But I'm not mad about that."

"Glad to hear it," Patterson says in a very dry tone.

"Mr. Barrientos broke it up, but he didn't see them, he only saw me kicking at Mendoza after I got loose."

"Kicking?" Now Patterson looks up, and he sneers. "Sounds like you fight like a girl."

"He was on the ground. And I was mad."

Patterson's eyebrows go up, and he looks almost a tiny bit impressed.

"But anyway, Mr. Barrientos sends me to the office, and Sagansky gives me a week detention. Which I could give a fuck about, except those guys—"

"Detention's a joke, Prescott. Don't bust your hymen over it."

"I'm just pissed off because it's unfair, is all."

Patterson rolls his eyes. "Get the fuck out. This isn't fucking kindergarten. Christ!"

You flush, and turn to go.

But at the door you wheel and hurl your bag back onto the mat. Patterson actually looks up in surprise. You trudge over and drop down to sit on the bag. You and he glower at each other a minute before you speak.

"You're right, this isn't kindergarten," you tell him. "So why the fuck am I running away from you?"

Patterson snorts. "I could make you go," he says.

"Yeah," you retort, "but you'd have to. Like it was fucking kindergarten."

Patterson's laugh is like the hiss of cracking ice. "I could and I will, Prescott, I guarantee it. One of these days I will make you, and you will sob like a little bitch when I do. Just not today."

He returns his attention to his Chemistry book, and the last thing he says all period is, "Don't you got any studying you to do?"

* * * * *

Two of those same undergraduates are back in detention when you report after school. Kirkham arrives after you do, and he stops in the doorway to meditatively roll his toothpick in his mouth before taking a chair on the opposite side of the table. All hour he scribbles on little slips of paper, folds them tightly into little bundles, and flicks them at you. Every one is a variation on the same theme: I'm going to fuck you up. I'm going to make you eat my cock. You're my little bitch until the day I graduate.

After the fifth or sixth one, you stop collecting them, but instead flick them unopened to one of the grungy underclassmen. He scowls at you hard after the first, but when he notices that you're just passing them along to him unread from Kirkham, he gets a little grin and starts flicking them at the other undergraduate. Soon the two of them are making a game of it, scrawling notes of their own to kick back and forth between them and you, and giggling. You snicker along with them. This pisses off Kirkham enough that he stops, and instead leans back to glare at you from behind his shades and folded arms.

He probably would have tried something with you afterward, except that Gordon was waiting for you in the front lobby. "Hey," he calls to you, and doesn't even glance as Kirkham slinks off down a side corridor. "Can you give me a ride?"

"Sure. But what happened to your Bug?"

"I got dropped at school today." He glances around, then bends down to say, in a confidential tone, "By a guy who looks like me."

You start, violently. "Caleb?"

He shakes his head. "It's more complicated than I can figure out. But he told me to get a ride from you, said we should go out to the basement when school let out."

* * * * *

You wind up dropping him off at the old school—and you note Gordon's orange VW Bug parked near the basement door—because you figure you should put in an appearance at home first. It's probably best that you did, for your mother is in a mood. Mr. Sagansky called her, she tells you, to say that you got into another fight at school, and what is this all about?

You explain to her that it was the other guys' fault, that they grabbed you and were taking you off for a beating—a claim that shocks her no end—and that you were just resisting, but you also have to admit that those guys didn't get punished because no teacher saw anything until you were fighting. She insists that you stay until your dad gets home. To your own astonishment, it appears that he didn't tell her about the first fight and your first set of detentions.

Your dad looks very tired when he gets home, and he flinches when your mom tells him, in a very sharp tone, that your son has something to tell him. He takes you back to his study and listens with an expression of pain as you tell what happened at school. He questions you a little—enough to establish that the goons that grabbed you are friends of the first guy you got in a fight with—and because you scooped up some of Kirkham's notes you're able to give him some evidence of your tormentor's character.

He looks very gray in the face, and he kneads his temples, but he only says that he's sticking to the bargain he struck with you last week. "You get hurt?" he asks you.

"No sir," you tell him. "Except I think I kind of pulled a muscle or something." He examines you, and grunts that, yes, it looks like a slight strain, but you'll be alright. He says he'll take care of your mother, and you wind up having to text Gordon and Caleb, to tell them it will be 7:30 or so before you can meet up with them. At least you got almost all your homework done during detention.

* * * * *

"Yeah, I came out here instead of going to school today," Gordon confesses when the three of you are finally together down in the old basement. "I wanted to try that thing out." He nods at that stony, man-shaped blob you made, which is now standing in a different corner. "It wouldn't do anything I told it to, when I got the mask on it," he says. "But I dunno. We were simpatico or something, so it said it would go to school for me, and get a ride back if I dropped it off."

He wanted some time alone to think, he goes on to explain. (And it's to you that he explains it, and pretty brusquely too. Caleb, who is swinging around in a newly unearthed swivel chair, has already heard it all from him.) He wanted to think through for sure if he really wants to break up with Chelsea, and decided that yes, really, he does. And he took advantage of the time to rearrange the basement.

So there is now a much bigger open space to work in, with some chairs (like the one Caleb is entertaining himself with) arranged around the big conference table you've been using. He's also arranged some cabinets and shelves to hold your supplies, and he pulled out a floor-length mirror that had been hidden in a corner. He also blocked out all the windows with shelves detached from book cabinets, and he made a run into town to buy a couple of cheap lanterns so that the space is illuminated with bright, acridly white lights.

Then he played around with the golem a little after you dropped it off after school. After talking to it a little—enough that it didn't fight him because (he told it) he was pretty sure he'd be sending it out to do stuff for him again—he got the mask off it and put it on himself. As expected, he got the memories of what the thing did at school as him (like he got the memories of what you did as him when you were wearing it). But also, when he put the mask back onto the golem, the thing could remember what he had done that day. This means that a mask of yourself can be periodically updated so it doesn't fall out of sync with your own life when you want to put it on a golem again.

But the big discovery is in the book. That's what he and Caleb have been talking about. The next spell.

It looks a lot similar to the last spell, using almost exactly the same ingredients and being lit on fire in the same way. The difference is—and this is why Caleb and Gordon both look a little spooked—that although it uses a lot less cemetery dirt (only a few pounds) there is one other, new ingredient.

A person.

Yeah. If you're going to perform this spell, and unlock the rest of the book, you're going to have to experiment on someone.

But who? You? Caleb? Gordon? None of you volunteer.

But do you need a volunteer? It's Gordon who points out that you could just grab someone. You wince at the idea, and Caleb does too. "We don't know what it'll do to them," Caleb points out. "What if it—?" He swallows. "Kills them?"

Gordon kicks at the floor. "It might not," he says. "It might just scare the fuck out of them."

"It'd scare the fuck out of me," you say. "Having that stuff dumped on me and being set on fire."

"There's some people could stand to have the fuck scared out of them." Gordon hesitates, then he looks at you. "Steve told me you hung out with him in the loft fifth period. He also told me why. It was Mendoza and Thomason?"

"Yeah."

"Bullshit. It was Kirkham. Leastways, he's the one that sent 'em."

You don't argue.

And you also don't argue when Gordon suggests that Kirkham could maybe be your guinea pig.

Next: "A Final Confrontation" 

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 2)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 2)"