This choice: Tell Keith what you find inside Lucy's mask • Go Back...Chapter #43What You Remember by: Seuzz   You would love nothing more than to sit on the floor of Lucy Vredenburg's bedroom and slide Lucy Vredenburg's fingers in and out of Lucy Vredenburg's cunny.
But there's something gone wrong, and you really need to talk to Keith or somebody about it.
Oh, there's nothing wrong with your physical set up, not that you can see. The body appears to be Lucy's. Looking yourself up and down, from you toes to your boobs and elbows, everything is where it should be, and is the way Lucy would remember it, though it's quite a bit grimier than she would like.
But that's the problem: You know what Lucy would expect to see, because you've got her memories. But according to Keith and them, you shouldn't have them, at least not yet.
You stagger over to the closet, where there's a kimono-like dressing gown hanging exactly where you expect to find it. You wrap it about yourself and stumble over to the door. "Cindy!" you call. "Can you come in here please?"
You're leaning against the far wall when Cindy puts her head in. "You ready to move that giant dildo out of your bed?" she says.
You make a face at her. "Do you remember what we were talking about last Tuesday, about Mom's birthday?"
Her faces scrunches slightly with thought. "You mean about those napkin rings?"
"Right. About me killing you if you got them for her."
"Yes." She looks at you expectantly.
"I remember that too," you tell her. "But I thought you said I wasn't supposed to start getting Lucy's memories until tonight."
Cindy blinks. "Well, that's the way it usually works. Sometimes a couple of stray thoughts come in earlier." She cocks her head. "Are you remembering anything else?"
You shrug. "Try me."
"When's Dad's birthday?"
"May 3," you reply without hesitation. "No, wait, that's my dad's birthday. July 31."
"What's something you've told me about Seth?"
"Oh, God." You shudder. "I know I've— Lucy has told you she's through buying condoms for you when he should be the one out buying the goddamned things himself."
Cindy catches her breath. "Can you do a handstand?"
"Sure." You step forward, take a breath, judge the turn, and throw yourself forward with your hands out and up. The world turns upside down, and the hems of your robe fall down around your waist. "Pervert," you gasp from down below, for you've just given Keith an eyeful of your ass.
"Can Will Prescott do a handstand?"
"Will Prescott would bust the ceiling lamp with his elbow if he tried doing a handstand." You walk forward easily on your hands, then tip yourself forward back onto you feet in one smooth, flowing motion. "He'd probably fall out the bedroom window, too," you finish while re-settling the robe about you.
"Dude," Cindy says, her eyes wide. "You're already talking like her. Tell me some more about Seth and why I shouldn't be dating him." Her eyes sparkle.
"Fuck, this ain't no goddam parlor trick, Keith. You guys said I wouldn't get the memories and stuff until tonight. So what are these things I'm remembering?"
"Lucy's memories, I guess," she says.
"You mean those things I remembered are true?"
"Close enough."
You sink onto the bed. "Then we better get Fairfax and them out here. Because I can also tell you where she's been and what she's been doing. And who with." You shiver.
* * * * *
"You'll vouch for these memories that Will says he's got?" Maria says. She looks between you and Cindy, as though watching for signs of collusion. Keith nods.
You're all sitting in a circle of the floor of the storage unit that Carlos and Mike use as a studio. Jessica is there to represent both Garner girls; Maria represents both Philip and Josiah, who (you were told at the start of the conference) doesn't much trouble himself with these kinds of business meetings. So the circle is actually more of a slightly lopsided square.
"This is interesting," Maria continues. "I suppose it's a property of Lucy's mask, but we can test for that later. For now— Well, I suppose we just have to go off of what you say you remember. Do you have any idea where Lucy might be?"
"The same place that you put the real Maria and Cindy?" you ask. The suggestion makes you uneasy, for it reminds you of just how much about this stuff you don't understand.
"I suppose it's possible," Maria says after a pause. "Though it would, technically, be a similar place and not the same exact, er, place." She takes out her phone. "And her abductor's name was?"
"Aubrey Blackwell. Spelled like it sounds. Professor of Archaeology at the university."
"Lucy had him for a class?"
You nod. "Anthropology Thirty-Two-Forty-One. Magic in the Western European Tradition."
"And the last time Lucy was ... herself?"
God, you're not sure of that. "The first week of September? Maybe the second?"
"Tell again what happened?"
You close your eyes and suppress another shudder. You really want to punch Keith in the face. It's a silly thing to want, of course, because it's not his fault you got into Lucy's mask and got her memories and so have to live through it again. But you do resent his earlier smirking talk about "grabbing yourself all over" when you got to be Lucy, and the fun to be had.
"So I had this— I mean, Lucy had to write a paper for this guy's class," you say, and lean forward with your hands burrowed down deep in your lap. "And while we were talking in his office—"
The details of how it happened are no clearer the second time through, and you have to tell Fairfax that you don't know how it happened, only that Lucy found herself walking along with the professor while he kept talking in a very low voice, and got into a car with him, and he talked all the way across town until they came to a villa just off Farm Road near the river, and he talked her into the house and upstairs to a bedroom, where he beguiled her into laying down on a bed, and he put a thing that looked like a mask onto her face ...
And then she woke up. He spoke to her in a rather sharp voice, reminding her that she had to do whatever he told her to do, that she was his "most obedient familiar," and she dutifully agreed. Then she dressed and went back to the college with him, and met some friends for dinner, where she acted as though nothing had happened to her.
But from that point on, she would occasionally get phone calls from the professor. He would summon her to his house, where she would disrobe upstairs in a bedroom decorated like something out of a Chinese whorehouse. Then he would lean over her and pull at her face ... and she would wake on his bed and get dressed and leave, almost always to attend a party. The next day or a few days later, she would return to his house, where she would disrobe and pull at her own face ... and wake to get dressed while the professor stood in a corner of the room and watched.
"He's been pretending to be Lucy," Maria says. "These scenes you describe, they are exactly what it would look like to a beta if the master was sometimes wearing the mask himself, and sometimes putting it onto the beta. The one that's under Lucy's bed now." She pauses. "I suppose it's just our good luck that this Blackwell guy wasn't under the mask when we pulled it off her."
You have to grimace, for you—thanks to Lucy's memories—know what Aubrey Blackwell looks like naked. He's a fat, middle-aged man, hairy all over, with a balding head and a greasy moustache and goatee. It's loathsome to think of him under Lucy Vredenburg's beautiful face, inside her beautiful body.
"So I guess this guy owned the book before we did," Jessica says.
"Stands to reason," Maria says. But then she gets up and leaves the room. Jessica asks a few more questions of you—like, when's the last time you think Professor Blackwell was inside the mask—before Maria returns.
"Will, does, um, Lucy remember seeing anything like this?" She holds up a book.
You rear back.
Yes, Lucy does remember seeing the book, and reading through it. But you do too. It's bound up in red leather with gold thread running through it, and when you take it from Maria and open it, you find the end leaves decorated with faces that seem to alter and shift. You turn a page, and notice a rust-colored smear: a bloody thumb-print.
It's that crazy book you found in Arnholm's, and lost in a scrum with Joshua Call and George Mendoza and a bunch of other bullies. "This is the book that tells you how to make the masks and stuff?" you ask. "Yes, I've seen it. It was at the professor's and once, maybe a day or two after he got Lucy out to his place, she— Except I guess it was him, wearing her mask—" Again you suppress a shudder. "She sat down in this horrible library he has and started reading it and taking notes." You look up. "Where did you get it?"
"From someone at school," Maria says. "He sold it to Carlos."
"What are we going to do?" Jessica says. "Go talk to this professor, tell him we have his book?"
"Will," Maria says, "I'd still like to try out Lucy's mask, on myself and on everyone else, to see how quickly the memories come. I barely had time to put it on earlier before you, uh, came in and caught us. But for now, do you think you could get us into this professor's house?"
* * * * *
"His car's not where it's usually parked," you tell the other girls when you drive past the villa—the last place Lucy Vredenburg was seen alive.
You have the following choice:  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
| Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author