Ch. 9 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask
At the center of the Blackwood mansion, three capacious rooms, each three stories tall, clustered into a cavernous honeycomb, the Blackwood Library. The largest ingress/egress from each room opened into a small entry hall for each of the mansion’s three wings, such that traveling from one wing to another required a person to pass through.
Thirty foot inbuilt book shelves walled the chamber, stuffed with hardbacks and grimoires and dusty old notebooks, accessible and navigable via several brass ladders running along brass rails; a library metro.
A sprawling labyrinth of archival detritus filled the rest of the space. Shoulder-high piles of books and notes, stacks of VHS tapes and DVD cases, boxes full of rattling cassettes and legal envelopes, antique book shelves and old filing cabinets—all manner of towering documentation formed the maze. And at its unicursal core, Nora and Olly kept their office.
Jerry-rigged from two massive desks, two leather armchairs, and more recently, Deirdre noticed, a yoga mat, their ‘office’ wasn’t much. But it provided the adopted, teenage siblings a place to hide away, burrowed in a nest of research and theory, their laptops their only connection to the outside world. It provided a place they felt safe and sheltered, even from their loving—if occasionally overbearing—father.
Both siblings wore their hair in variations on the undercut. Nora, seventeen, had chestnut roots at the base of her bleached-white locks, the sides and back shaved to the scalp, the heavy body on top braided and woven into dense Celtic knots that spilled unevenly down her back. Olly, nineteen, their sharp bone structure already accentuated by curling facial tattoos, wore the dark length of their crown at a harsh angle across their forehead, barely missing their right eye.
Nora, narrow, bird-boned, cloaked herself in layers of oversized, second-hand clothes. Baggy jeans belted her waist somewhere beneath a tent of hoodie bought at a Bush-era punk show she couldn’t have possibly attended.
Olly garbed their own athletic frame with somewhat more sophisticated, if pricier, tastes. A purple suit jacket, so fine it shined, draped from their shoulders, sleeves rolled halfway up their golden-amber forearms. The white button-up beneath, accented in small purple-black skulls, either had short sleeves or its own sleeves rolled up even farther. Below a thin, silver-clasped belt, black denim vanished into high-top fashion sneakers, black with purple features.
“Kids.” Victor stood between two bookshelves and six file cabinets all arranged into a makeshift threshold, a broadening of a tight hallway of filed research into Nora and Olly’s equally-makeshift office. He gestured to Deirdre and Paul, just behind him. “You have visitors.”
“Hey, Dee,” Olly said, using a nickname they’d picked up from Razz when Razz and they had dated. A nickname Deirdre still couldn’t hear without remembering the boy. Without remembering…everything. “You doing okay?”
Deirdre shrugged.
Nora set her logo-less, matte gray laptop aside. “Okay, cool. So before we get to any conversation, uh, Deirdre, you already know this, I think, but Paul, y’know, it’s been a while since you’ve been around and…well, anyway, Olly uses they/them pronouns. Even Victor still makes the occasional mistake, but if you don’t try, you have to leave. Like, immediately, like, right now. Good?”
“Uh…yeah,” Paul answered. “Of course.”
Nora bobbed her head once. “Alright, then. Uh. Olly and I are digitizing the library. I think those are all the updates.” From her perch, sitting on a broad desk with a pile of books piled on the corresponding chair, she peered over at Olly. “Right?”
Olly dropped their gaze from Deirdre. “Huh? Oh, yeah. Years of digitizing files ahead of us, plus figuring out how to get into college with a GED, uh…” they nodded a couple times. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“We need your help,” Paul said.
“Uh, yes. Obviously.” Nora rolled her eyes exclusively with her voice. “Usually when people show up unannounced in the middle of a quarantine, it’s because they need our help. So…”
“There’s a killer,” Deirdre passed Victor and entered the office. “The one on the news.”
Nora and Olly stared, attentive.
“We don’t know much. Me and Paul got kind of connected to it. Rehani, too, I think,” she explained. “It’s something that scares ghosts but it’s related to the killer, too. And we have…well, we have what we think is a case number.”
“It’s not much,” Nora said. “But it’s enough to find something.”
“We’re in,” Olly added.
Nora looked at Victor. “Vicky, please? Can they stay for a little while?”
Victor snorted and shook his head. “Like I’m cold enough to send them home when they say they’re mystically connected to a killer.”
“But that’s officially a ‘yes?’” Nora asked.
Victor turned to Deirdre and Paul. “Deirdre, I know you’ve had a number of home improvements done, lately, but if you want to lay low here for a while, I promise there’s no safer place on the peninsula.”
“What about me?” Paul asked.
“You live in a houseboat with two deadbolt locks and a combat knife. You’d be a damned fool to turn down the invitation.”
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