“One other thing, Harry.” The lawyer shifted uncomfortably in his seat. My father’s will spread out across his massive desk. “I was instructed to give you this.”
The envelope he handed me felt surprisingly sturdy.
“What is it?” I asked without thinking. The immaculately-dressed, white-haired man in front of me blinked like I’d insulted him.
“I was instructed to give it to you, Harry. Not to look inside.”
I don’t know why I waited until I was back in my father’s silent study before opening his package. Maybe I just wanted some doors between myself and the rest of the world, with their platitudes and their pity. Besides, I felt closest to him here. The study was my father’s sanctuary, and the walls told his story. Musician, stockbroker, author. Sailor, inventor, artist. One of those lucky people who just seemed to have a knack for everything he tried.
I did my best to tell myself that he’d led a rich and varied life, that death was a natural thing that happened to everyone–but I couldn’t quite believe it. Whenever I looked at a photo of that tanned face with its salt-and-pepper stubble and enigmatic grin, I just wanted to feel it nuzzle into my neck in one of the boozy bear-hugs that he always gave when I visited. It was like a veil had fallen between us, and the only thing still connecting him to me was–
The envelope.
I tore it open and poured the contents into my hand a note and a small silver key.
Simone de Beauvior. 5th shelf, 3rd from left. Your legacy.
My eyes leapt to the bookshelf. I traced my finger along the leatherbound volumes until it stopped at All Men Are Mortal. I pulled it out, leafed through–nothing. No documents hidden in the binding or between the pages, noth–
I saw a keyhole in the wall through the gap de Beauvior’s book had left. I slipped in the silver key, and with a click, the bookshelf swung outward. A secret door?
Dad always did have an eccentric side.
Not just a secret door, but a giant safe, I realized as I stepped over several feet of thick metal. I looked over my shoulder, paranoid that the bookshelf might slide shut, trapping me in here. I felt along the wall until my fingers grazed a lightswitch.
Pale faces with black eyes glared at me from every angle.
Wait, not faces–masks. At least fifty of them lined the walls of the closet-sized room. Fascinated, I reached out to touch one: a half-mask with a hooked nose and thick brows that, for some reason, made me think of an elderly mathematics professor. Its surface was as cool, smooth, and hard as marble–yet paper-thin. The masks weren’t made out of any material that I recognized, nor did there seem to be any way to attach them. Even so, I brought the ‘professor’ to my face. There was that strange sensation of disappearing beneath another set of eyes and features…then nothing.
It balanced perfectly.
Still concerned the mask might suddenly fall, I sprinted up the stairs of the empty house to the mirror in my father’s old bedroom. At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
No mask appeared on my face in the mirror.
I took it off; the Professor mask appeared in my hand. I placed it on my face; the Professor disappeared. I repeated this trick several times, with the same result. While I wore the mask, it seemed, it couldn’t be perceived by anyone but me. Almost as if it had melded into my face. I shuddered.
Then it occurred to me that the mirror hung at an eighty-eight degree angle. I nudged it back into place, then wandered through my father’s quiet halls–thinking. Oil stocks historically showed a twelve-percent growth at the end of the quarter…shouldn’t I be investing? I could use the money I made to buy a new timing chain for my car, since the make and model I owned statistically experienced timing failure at around my mileage point…
I had some idea of what was happening..
Sitting excitedly at my father’s desk, I started scribbling on any scrap paper, breezing through all those equations that had been so painful in school. Halfway through one, I removed the mask–
And once again I was lost in the wall of numbers. Mask on, I solved it easily.
How can I explain the next few weeks? Not only had I found the keys to my father’s success–but I could even use them myself! Questioning what the masks were or where they’d come from hardly crossed my mind. I could do that later–
After seducing Emma Shakleford at the county fair using the mask of a playboy dancing champion, for example. The words I’d always struggled to say flowed out confidently through the Dancer mask’s cold lips; my feet glided effortlessly across the polished floor, and for the first time I understood why the professionals describe the tango as ‘walking on air.’
I felt the presence of the Dancer on my face, but knew that it was my eyes Emma was staring into, completely smitten. Was that sneer and the urge to let my hands wander mine, or the Dancer’s? I couldn’t say.
I would’ve look into the mystery then, I’m sure of it, except I found the chubby-cheeked, good-natured mask of the Handyman–and my college rental apartment was in shambles. I’d always wanted to do my own plumbing, and it was so simple after all! Insert pipe A into slot B, nothing more–why hadn’t I seen it sooner? After a long day of plugging leaks, re-hanging stuck doors, and sealing drafts, I swapped the Handyman for the sharp-chinned perfectionist Chef. An hour later, I enjoyed a fine three-course meal with a glass of wine. Thanks to the Chef, I could finally appreciate its delicate notes and finer qualities.
Curiosity got the better of me–not curiosity to know the truth about the masks, but rather curiosity to try them all. In the few months since I’d had access to the masks, my life had improved dramatically. It felt like the world was at my fingertips–and I’d only tried the first fifteen!
I wondered what other abilities I’d soon find at my disposal. As far as I could tell, every mask was unique; the only thing they had in common was the strange material they were crafted from.
The subtleties in their features sometimes seemed to speak to me, telling of their powers…
The square-jawed, lumpy full mask of the Fighter for example–the one I used to pummel my high school bully while Emma screamed for me to stop. It was true, I (or the Fighter) thought, crushing weaker people with brute strength was too fun to just quit. I suppose at some point I allowed someone to pull me off him. I really can’t recall.
Yet the later masks felt different somehow. More complex. When I looked at them, I got no sense of what their ‘specialty’ might be. Yet when I touched one, I felt a kind of electricity jump through me–like it wanted me to wear it. I looked deep into their empty eyes, trying to get a sense of what would happen if I did, but I found nothing. They had something, those last twenty-odd masks. Something made me reluctant to put them on…
But eventually, I felt like I didn’t have a choice.
You see, I needed the face of a lawyer.
Emma had been demanding a wedding, but by then I was done with schoolboy fantasies. I’d been to New York, Tokyo, Paris. I’d known a better class of woman, the kind who understands that marriage has nothing to do with anything so pathetic as ‘love’–rather it is a union of bloodlines, along with all their economic and political power. I couldn’t tell whether the thought of marrying a girl from my unimportant hometown made me blush or scoff, but it was all the same to me–
Until Emma asked her brothers to talk with me. I couldn’t stand the sight of those uppity hicks on my own father’s front stoop. I had to use the Fighter to push them off and I suppose I did more harm than was strictly necessary.
Two brothers were hospitalized, and one stayed in a coma for the rest of his short life. A warrant was coming, I was sure of it–
and so I panicked. What did I know about the law?! I ran through mask after mask, searching for a hint of legal expertise, until I finally reached the final twenty-two.
The moment the mask touched my face, I knew something was different.
I held my hands up and turned them in front of my face, as though I was looking at them for the first time. I laughed with joy from the bottom of my guts, although I couldn’t imagine what was funny about the situation. Then I watched with horror as my own fingers moved to the sides of my face and…lifted me away…just to be placed on the wall.
Alongside the others.
“Well, young sir, good day to you. I suppose you might be might my great-great-grandson, or some such thing,” the thing wearing my body said to me. “Played out the rest already, have you? But goodness that was quick!” It paused, seeming to take in information from my body. “Seems you’ve gotten yourself in a spot of trouble. No matter. I’ll hire a fine lawyer, as you ought to have done, hah. But never fear. One day another young inheritor will come ‘round to take you down from the wall, and in the meanwhile the others will impart great secrets to you…while you wait your turn.”
I watched my own body walk off to go about my great-great-grandfather’s business. If the sounds from the rest of the house were any indication, he rather enjoyed being young again. Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games.
There were those blind men he hired to help him dig up my father’s coffin, and the gruesome ritual he performed in order to hang dad’s face on the wall beside mine. Then there was the way I watched my own body kill those four blind workers to keep our family secret safe.
Occasionally, a supremely talented individual was brought in to join the ‘other masks’–the ones outside the family, only used for their talents.
At first I was sickened by the sacrifices, but by my own grandson’s generation I was even looking forward to them. The light. The bright innocent faces. The sudden splatter of red, so brilliant that not even God could make a color so intense. Anything was better than the darkness and the whispers.
It seems that my great-grandson (or rather, the great-grandson of the body I lost control of when I was twenty-one) is even more profligate than I was. He’d burned through the masks by the time he was sixteen; it was pure chance that he grabbed me down off of the wall when he needed a face that could fix his phone, instead of any of the others. No matter.
All this new technology is fascinating. I can’t imagine how far it will have advanced by the time my grandson gets a shot at a warm, living body again. Just imagine! An electric machine that types! All of humanity’s knowledge at one’s fingertips! I wish my father could see this–
–but not enough to trade places with him on the wall.