This choice: Use Carlos in this spell! • Go Back...Chapter #18Recasting Carlos by: Seuzz   You're thinking with your fingers, not your head, when you snatch up the mask and lob it at Carlos Montoya.
In what seems like slow motion, you see his widening eyes as you slam the mask into his face. He falls backward into the hallway, hits the door across the way with a sound like thunder, then slides to the floor. His head lolls and his eyes bulge and his mouth hangs open.
"Dude!" a voice calls behind you, and you whip around with a cocked fist. But it's only lackey-Keith. He scrambles over to your side and stares down at Carlos. "The fuck did you do?"
"I didn't—! He's okay!" you yell. "See? He's breathing!"
"You knocked him out cold," your lackey exclaims as he kneels next to the prostrate Carlos.
"But he's still alive!"
"I guess." Lackey-Keith gives you a doubtful look. "What'd you do it for?"
Yes, why did you do it?
Panic, you suppose. After a week of getting away with your shit at his place, he finally caught up to you. How could you explain how you got into one of his storage units, and why you were with a naked Keith Tilley? In a flash you imagined him making all kinds of other lurid deductions. You stole his money! You disguised yourself as him! You're a fucking black magician!
He can still expose you. In twenty minutes or so, after the mask you jammed into him has fallen out, and after he's woken up.
Your breath is coming in haggard gulps as you glance back into the storage unit, and at the supplies you've been putting together. The next spell calls for a human body. You've no idea what it will do a person. Will it kill him? Turn him into a frog? Give him superpowers?
But at this point you don't care. You drag Carlos into the unit and tear his clothes off him. You pile all the ingredients onto him. You send Keith (still naked) to the foyer at the hallway to see if there's anyone—like Mike or Philip or Josiah—waiting outside for Carlos to appear. He reports that the coast appears to be clear.
Then when the mask appears on Carlos's face, you put a lighter to him.
The world briefly turns purple.
After you've checked yourself over for burns, you turn to Carlos. Flames consume him from head to foot. You turn away, sick with horror. You dodge your lackey's reproachful looks.
It's going to kill him. You're sure of it. It's going to kill him. And then where will you be? Besides being a murderer. You'll have dispose of the body, but then a search will be launched, and the body will be found and somehow it will all come back to you and not only will be branded a murderer but you'll be a black magician too. You'll be famous, but not in a way that you've ever wanted to be famous.
You're interrupted by this train wreck of morbid fantasies by the sight of a mask laying next to Carlos. It's the mask you put onto him, to knock him out. You pick it up and blink at the name inside it: CARLOS ENRICO MONTOYA Y ALVAREZ. It's a copy of Carlos, like the copy you already made of him, but up-to-date with all his most recent memories, you'd hazard.
A shiver runs down your spine as you look up at Keith. Your lackey's expression turns guarded. "What?"
* * * * *
"I was coming in to check up on things," Carlos says. His tone is mulish, and his eyes glitter with anger. You had to order him back when he lunged at you after waking up.
It sure looks like he's back to normal. But as in the case of Keith Tilley—who, still naked, is also on hand—looks are deceiving.
Despite the brainwave you felt as your fingers closed around the mask, you still weren't sure what you were going to do. Okay, you were pretty sure that someone, somehow, was going to have to start impersonating Carlos Montoya. That's why you picked up his mask. But were you going to wear it yourself? Were you going to take Keith's mask off the pedisequos and replace it with Carlos's?
While you were thinking it over, you glanced up and noticed that the purple fire had gone out. You scrambled over to relight it, then stared like a dumbfuck at it when nothing happened.
That's when you noticed that something very funky had happened to Carlos.
He was white all over, but not the splotchy, peach-like color of yourself or Keith. He was a dusty, grayish white, not far in color from the concrete floor he was resting on. It took a moment for the horrifying fact to register: He was now made out of concrete!
Okay, probably not concrete, not literally concrete. It would seem stupid for a magic spell out of a book a hundred years old or more to, y'know, turn a guy into concrete, like he was a highway overpass. But he was a stony color all over, and when you brushed his face a little of that same fine, talcum-like dust as coated the pedisequos came away on your fingertip. His flesh was stiff when you pushed at it.
But was he dead or just transformed? No breath that you could detect escaped his nostrils or lips, but you could detect a very shallow rise and fall in his chest, as though he still breathed.
You laid the book on his chest, as you had done with the pedisequos; as had happened before, the page fell away, and you read of what you had done.
You now have two of the things: one made of graveyard earth, and one made of the kind of the thing that goes in graveyards. Just like the first pedisequos, this thing is a lackey onto which you can place a mask, giving it the form of the person contained in the mask and making of it an obedient lackey.
Why would the book give you two ways of making a pedisequos? More: Why in the hell would it give you a way of making a pedisequos that requires the sacrifice of a human being?
You numb all over when the answer comes to you. It's obvious: It's a spell for replacing someone with an obedient pedisequos.
More conveniently still, it gives you a place to hide the body.
So, numbly, you set Carlos's mask onto the thing that was once Carlos Montoya, and ordered it back when it lunged at your throat. Then you ordered it to explain itself.
So, he came back to the complex to check on things, lackey-Carlos tells you. The security footage showed that someone was coming in every night at around the same time, between eight and nine, after the complex was supposed to be closed for the night. Carlos didn't say anything to his uncle about it, because the person looked suspiciously like Carlos himself. He had come back early this evening, around eight, to watch, then gone off to meet guys before going to the Warehouse. But he'd got a nagging feeling that something was bound to happen. He returned to the complex to check the footage, and spotted your truck. That's when he came in. What the fuck is going on, he demands at the end of his explanation.
You don't answer. You just tell him to get dressed, to open up his studio, and to wait for you there. "Don't text anyone," you tell him.
After he's gone you catch lackey-Keith staring at you. "Dude, this is all fucked up," he says. "Are you going to let me go home any time soon?"
"There's already one of you there," you tell him, and when he gasps you shut him by telling him to lay on the ground. You remove his mask and pack it into the bag with the others.
You still have everything else to put away, but you're so sick of the mess you've made that you don't even want to touch it. Instead, you drag out the book again. The spell that turned Carlos into stone doesn't contain any instructions on reversing it—no more than the previous spell had explained how to turn a pedisequos back into dirt and chemicals—but you turn to the newly unlocked spell to see if that gives you a lead.
It doesn't, and it turns your stomach to see that it calls for more or less the same set of ingredients as the last two spells. Except for a human body, for which you are grateful. And it calls for even less of the stuff: no more than a handful of graveyard dirt in this case.
Maybe it's a hair of the dog that bit someone? you wonder.
You don't have any great hopes, but you've nothing else to do, and your curfew is still forty-five minutes off, so you prepare the ingredients and fire them over the sigil. This time the flame sets off a tiny purple mushroom cloud, no more, and leaves in the bowl a wet slurry the same color as the pedisequos in the corner. The page comes away as you lift the bowl from it, and you turn it to see what you've made.
You paint the stuff on the inside of a mask, like a sealant. And no, it doesn't reverse the previous spell.
It's coming up on your curfew now, but you don't move, and stare thoughtfully at the bare pedisequos in the corner. You don't have a mask of yourself, but you could quickly make one. Set it on the pedisequos, and you'd have an obedient twin you could send home in your stead. Then you could go out to the Warehouse with lackey-Carlos.
Or you could set lackey-Carlos's mask on yourself and go out as him.
Or—you rub your eyes, for you are suddenly bone-tired with stress and exhaustion—you could just go home.
... But while sending your pedisequos out as yourself to the Warehouse, where at least it could have fun?   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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