The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)

A Surprise from Teresa

Previously: "Restroom Raids" 

"Like I said," Caleb shouts. "He got a text, so we had to let him go home!"

You exchange a skeptical glance with Keith, then look at Teresa.

"Couldn't you have ordered him to stay?" you ask her. "I mean, if you really did—"

"We had to let him go, Will," she says through gritted teeth. "I don't know why this is so hard for you to understand."

You push your cap forward on your head to scratch at the back of your head, and turn to stare at the big pile of dirt in the corner.

"Why don't you believe me?" Caleb says. "Believe us?" he adds, gesturing at himself and Teresa.

Well, it's because of Teresa, isn't it? If it was Caleb alone who had done it, you'd believe him. But you can't believe it of Teresa.

So given that the evidence (according to them) got in his car and drove home, you can't help but feel like you're being pranked.

"Okay, lemme see the book," you sigh, and put out your hand.

"You know what the spell does," Caleb growls as he picks the book up from off the busted, teetering table in the corner of the barn. "We've been over this."

You give him a look as you flip to the last open spell. You run your eyes over it, even though you can't read the Latin nor decipher the sigil.

"So you're telling me that you knocked out whatsisname—"

"Cody Larsen."

"—and you laid him down and poured all that shit over him." You point to the stack of chemicals that you've been using to make golems. "And you set him on fire." You give Teresa a very direct look. "You set him on fire," you repeat.

She turns very red, and her expression stiffens, but she holds your eye with an unwinking gaze.

"What we all said we weren't going to do," you continue. "You did it."

Caleb reaches over to flip the page and point to the other side.

"Yeah, we did it, and if you don't believe what happend, read for yourself what— Oh, hey!" he exclaims. "If you really think it didn't happen, how come the page now turns?"

Because you found a way to get around it? you silently suggest. But you don't say it out loud, because that does seem to be pretty definitive proof that they executed the spell.

Yet that still doesn't convince you that they aren't lying about something. You glance again at Keith.

He got the same text you did—You need to come out to the barn. Now.—and drove out after you, and he listened to the same story. He was initially dumbfounded and amazed by the story Caleb and Teresa told. Only after you started questioning them did he retreat back into something like the skepticism you started with.

We got out here and were just getting started, Caleb related to you. He and Teresa both looked sick and nervous as he related events, and only recovered their spirit when you started pushing back at their story. And just as we were getting stuff ready, Cody drove up. He came in here and caught us. I didn't know what else to do, except that I had that blank mask with, the one I was bringing to school, so I pulled it out and jammed it at him. After that—

He looked long and hard at Teresa. Then he said, Then while he was knocked out, we pulled his clothes off him. And when the mask came out of him, I performed that spell on him.

Horrified as you were to hear that Cody Larsen—one of the boys whose family owns this barn—had caught your friends out here, you were even more aghast to hear Caleb confess to using that terrible spell on him. You asked Teresa if she had really gone along with it.

She had to go along with it, it wasn't her choice, Caleb said.

But then Teresa said, firmly, It was my idea. I even lit the match. There wasn't any other way.

It is that confession that you can't swallow. Teresa, the girl you let join you so as to keep you from going too far, is the one who set fire to Cody Larsen and turned him into a golem. She says she even used her own hair in the spell.

Turned Cody Larsen into a golem. That's what it did, according to them. After a short burn—itself an incredible detail, given the two weeks it took you to craft the first two golems—Cody ended up as a very life-like statue of himself. Petrified with a stone skin.

Luckily, Caleb had also brought the mask sealant along. And since they had made a mask of Cody, they put that onto the golem, and were relieved (though also a little sickened) to find that it worked on him. He came back, but as the same sort of thing Mickey is when you put her mask on a golem: something that has to obey a master (in this case Teresa).

They had questioned it, then sent the text to you to get out to the barn. But in the meantime Cody had gotten a text of his own, ordering him home. So, reluctantly, they had to let him leave before you and Keith arrived to see the evidence with your own senses.

* * * * *

Even beyond the incredible idea that Teresa had gone alone with it, the result is amazing.

You and Caleb had been thinking of making fake versions of yourselves to send to school or out on errands. Now he and Teresa have made a fake version of Cody Larsen—and sent it back home as a replacement for the real high school student.

For a lack of anything else to say, you now ask, "Before you sent him back, did you ask him why he even came out here?"

"Yeah. He said his dad asked him to stop by and look around. The people who live over there"—Caleb gestures toward the nearby rambler—"noticed people'd been coming and going, and called to tell him about it."

"Did they find the golems?" you ask in alarm. "While they were burning?"

"If they did, they didn't say anything. But Cody was coming out this way to pick up some sports equipment from friends, so his dad asked him to stop by and look around, see if anyone had been messing around out here."

"What'll he tell them when he gets home?" you wonder aloud with a sense of dread.

"What we told him to tell them," Teresa interrupts. "To say it was just some school friends coming by to hang out here, and that he told them to stop it."

"And you think he will?"

"He was doing everything we told him to, Will," she primly declares, and Caleb nods. "Besides, he wouldn't have been so calm after he woke up if he wasn't, you know, going to do like we said. He was yelling pretty hard when he came in here."

You let out a deep breath, and look around.

"Well," you say, and gesture at the mound of dirt, and the rest of the supplies. "I guess we better take this stuff back to the basement."

* * * * *

You still have the hardest time believing what you were told, and after supper you call Caleb to talk about it all.

"It was Teresa's idea to set the guy on fire?" you ask.

Caleb sighs heavily.

"Yes," he says. "I was going to take the blame, but she—"

"You know that's why I don't believe you. Because she says she went along with it."

Your words seem to have knocked him off his feet, for it is a moment before he can reply.

"So you still don't believe us?" he asks.

"No, I guess I do. I mean— You're right, that page turns now, so I guess you did perform the spell. But I can't believe it was Teresa's idea!"

"I can't either, really," Caleb admits, "and I was there."

"She's the one who was supposed to stop us from doing shit like that!"

"I know! But she—"

Caleb swallows heavily.

"She was just very matter of fact about it. 'We'll try the new spell on him,' she said after he was knocked out. I said, 'Are you crazy', and she said, 'We won't be in any worse trouble if we do'. Because, you know, he'd caught us out there."

"Jesus!"

Then after a pause, you ask, "Would you have done it, if you'd been alone out there?"

He sighs. "Don't ask me that, Will. I don't— I don't know."

You wonder, too, what you would have done. You can't really imagine pouring lighter fluid over someone and setting him on fire—even if, it being magical lighter fluid—you couldn't be sure it would have even hurt him. On the other hand, in the panic of the moment, fearful of the consequences of being caught, would you have?

"Well," you sigh, "we got past that spell. Have you looked at the next one?" Given how awful the just-completed one is, you dread looking at what comes after.

"I just glanced through the ingredients," Caleb says. "No dead bodies, or live ones either. Unless there's something nasty I missed, I think it just uses the stuff we've been playing with already."

"But no idea what it does? Huh."

You're both silent a moment. Then you ask, "Are you going to bring that blank mask to school tomorrow? Help me and Keith score some faces?" It was almost as an afterthought that you had told him, while moving supplies back to the old school, how you and Keith had failed.

"You don't want to take a break from this stuff?" Caleb asks. "After today?"

"Do you?"

"I don't know, Will," he sighs. "I guess I'm just thinking about how dangerous this stuff is. And how easy it is to get into trouble."

You tell him you understand, and how you won't expect him to participate, at least not yet.

But after you have hung up, you start to get second thoughts yourself.

Next: "The Spell on the Other Side" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 5)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)"