I wanted to help Lucas. I did. For all his assurances that he wouldn't try anything again, I knew that if he didn't fix the broken thing inside him he would. I wished I knew how to help him. Obviously he'd placed all his hope in Nameless, in somehow being able to join everything he was excluded from if he could just change his shape.
It hadn't worked. I'd told him as much. Not any more than coming to Low Ferry had kept me safe from my own heart.
It was almost as if all his maskmaking was to compensate for something, some missing part of him. Some invisible mask everyone else had, a protective shield that we're born with but he seemed to have missed. Lucas turned a very wise, very clever, but very naked face to the world. It was too easy to hurt someone so unprotected.
My hand still felt strange under the bandage, a pinprick tingle that wasn't the throbbing pain from the bite but was becoming impossible to ignore. I flexed my fingers a few times, leaned back from the bookshelf, and looked down at my palm. The bandages were tight and pale against my skin, wrapped awkwardly around the base of my thumb and extending up past my knuckles.
If I could make Lucas a mask, an invisible mask he could always wear – if I could give him the means to protect himself instead of protecting him...that would be a fine thing. Even just a symbol would be something.
I walked out into the dark shop and reached for a piece of paper on the desk, then stopped. I wasn't an artist, and paper masks are children's toys anyway. I looked up, casting around the shop, and the Dottore mask hanging over the fireplace seemed to leer knowingly at me. I ignored him and went to my workbench, where my bookbinding tools lay – scissors and glue, clean waxed thread, needles, punches, sharp scalpels and dull bone paper-folders. There was nothing there that would help. I was a book-binder, not a maskmaker.
But I had my hands and they weren't unskilled. If Lucas could make a mask in his desperation to be loved, I could make one in desperation to save him. Without his book (which I had never believed in) and without his tools (which wouldn't be of any use in my hands) I could make him something. One thing, even if I didn't believe. For Lucas, because I loved him.
I clenched my left hand as tightly as I could, which made the lacerations under the bandages throb and pull away painfully from the sterile cotton. But I could feel something hard and solid in my palm, something forming to the shape of my fingers. When I opened my hand again it rested there like a weight even though I couldn't see anything.
I picked it up in my right hand – invisible, but for a strange shimmer of light across it from the streetlamp through the window. I pressed my hands together and it flattened, slowly, stubbornly. When I ran my thumb over it, shaping it, it seemed to smooth and stretch.
I don't remember much about that night, except that I worked through it, exhausted, still filthy from the mud and the hospital and the train ride back to Low Ferry. My left hand was almost useless in the bandage and I do remember eventually finding scissors at the workbench and slicing the cotton off, unwrapping it from the bite and drawing fresh blood when the scabs pulled away. The blood dripped onto the mask I couldn't see, spattering briefly or smearing under my fingers and then disappearing as well.
I wanted it perfect. I wanted to make it beautiful, even if it couldn't be seen.
I know it sounds insane. I know that. It sounds as if I had some kind of breakdown, and perhaps I did, but I know what I felt, too. There was something real under my hands, something solid. It had weight, it had a smooth texture like glass, and it fought me every step of the way – sprung back when I tried to press it out, closed over when I tried to mold holes in it for eyes. It may have been shaped under my hands but it was slow going, and my shoulders and wrists were aching in earnest around the time the sun was coming up. My fingertips were already raw and bruised.
I began to cry in frustration, like a child who can't make a painting look the way they want it. I let it drop to the counter, resting one hand on the smooth curved surface as I sat down and rubbed my face with the other. Static crackled in the air, shocked me where my fingertips touched my skin – it would be a dry day outside, cold and sunny and brutal.
I set it on the workbench, exhausted, and found my hands bloody, grit under the fingernails, the sharp crescent of the bite still oozing a little. There was nothing to be done, and I couldn't be seen like this. I climbed the stairs slowly, turned on the shower, and scrubbed my hands clean while the water warmed up.
Under the hot water, my muscles began to relax and then to shake; it was all I could do to dry myself off and crawl into bed, and that was the last I knew for hours.
***
I woke to Jacob's voice, calling my name in the shop below. I flailed out of bed and dragged the blanket with me as I walked to the stairs.
"Down in five minutes!" I called.
"I can wait!" he shouted back. I pulled some clothing on with numb, exhausted fingers, and then looked down at my hand again. The scabs had held but seemed grotesque and misshapen, and I wrapped a dishtowel around my palm as I hurried down the stairs.
"Sorry," I said, as I reached the bottom. "Just cleaning my – "
Jacob was standing at the counter, paging through a book, but all my senses focused on the workbench, and the slight shimmer in the air where the mask lay. I looked nervously at him, but he didn't appear bothered. Didn't even see it – not that there was anything to see. But to me it seemed – better than it had earlier. It didn't seem as imperfect as I'd thought it was. We have no objectivity when we're tired.
" – hand," I finished weakly, holding it up.
"Carmen said you'd hurt yourself," Jacob said, frowning in concern as he set the book down. "Anything serious?"
"No, just – just a dog bite," I lied, tucking the towel-wrapped hand behind my back and coming forward. "I – ran into a nasty stray on my way to The Pines."
"Town folk were worried when your lights weren't on this morning. Isn't like you to disappear," he said. "Thought I'd come over and see."
"Long night." I rummaged in the shelves behind the counter and finally came up with an old elastic bandage and some cotton wadding I normally used for wiping up paste when I was bookbinding. "I told the boy to tell people I got bitten, but he only told Charles."
"Ah," Jacob said. "Which boy?"
"You know, the one Lucas tutors," I said. He gave me a vague nod that told me he didn't have much of an idea who I was talking about. "Did you need something?"