I can't tell you what any one person said when I suggested the ritual, but the general message was something along the lines of "Have you lost your friggin' mind??"
After the shouting had died down a bit I started making my case.
"First off, as far as I can tell," I said. "This looks like the work of a very old, very dangerous wendigo. And the fun thing about wendigos is that they don't have a lot of weaknesses. There are some native secrets that can deal with them, but most of those have been lost and the only one I know requires the horn of a white buffalo and about a month of preparation. So far, the only weakness Mr. Ash has is the fact that his false forms are easier to kill. Aside from exploiting that weakness, all we can do is keep shooting, slashing, and hitting him until the sheer physical and metaphysical trauma is more than he can recover from. Secondly, we are all here because Straub decided each of us knew our stuff. In fact, I'd bet we'd already have been killed or driven out if not for the fact that everyone here is a professional. An expert. Together, I think we can handle what I'm proposing. And third, I'm here because my expertise is in monsters and folklore, and it is my expert opinion that this is the best way to deal with our dear friend, Mr. Ash. Oh, and there's one more thing." I smiled. "So far every mask we've gone after--except it's presence within the town itself--has been one that it chose to send after us. It knew the risks and it chose to go in anyway. But can imagine how it would terrify Mr. Ash to be dropped into a fight of our choosing? Can you imagine that thing being not just hurt, but scared?"
If I had been dealing with a bunch of perfectly logical people, the appeal to my own expertise would have been what brought it home. As it is, I'm pretty sure what really hooked the others was that last point. To be fair, it's probably hard to take a scrawny twenty-one year old seriously when he starts go off about his "expertise."
"There's still the issue of collateral damage," said Michelle. "If you call up every mask Mr. Ash has then some of them are going to go off killing locals."
"I'm not so sure about that," said Yosef. "Mr. Ash has been here for a long time, probably longer than this town even existed. Everyone here has been living with him for as long as they can remember, and when the sun goes down again I think they just won't find a reason to go outside. And I can tell you right now that he can't enter a home without an invitation." Then he glanced at me and added, "You were planning on doing this after sunset, yes?"
I nodded.
"The ritual itself will take a while," I said. "But I'd prefer for the little mini-Ashes to start popping up after dark. I'm not sure I could make them all manifest during daylight hours anyway."
There was still some chatter after that, but for the most part the argument was won. Soon we were all busy with preparations. I lent Yosef my stash of drugs designed specifically for paranormal uses (the poor dude had been running on Advil, marajuana, and some minor league amphetamines) and he went off to meditate, Michelle got all her weaponry ready and did whatever passes for relaxation when you're a monster hunter about to go on the biggest hunt of your career, and Roland went to a Denny's in Tahoe for breakfast. Meanwhile, I was working the first draft of the ritual. It took eleven drafts before I was ready to go.
I put it together using a couple using a ceremony from one of the few books of genuine wizardry I happen to have together with an Egyptian rite I had come across during my time at the Belmonte estate and bits and pieces of over a dozen other ceremonies and spells. What I came up with in the end started with eating some peyote and going through a mediation exercise to get in touch with the arcane world. Then I called up a spirit of dreams I'm on good terms with to assist in the ritual. Finally, I got to work on ruining Mr. Ash's day. I had to call up each of his masks one by one, extract a name from them, bind them, and then cast them away from me. It was then that I found out whether the forms of his victims were actual shades or just images. Some of the dead faces were just illusions, but many more were real genuine shades who were trapped in his grip so that he could continue to feed on them and to occasionally use them as sock puppets. That was creepy and so incredibly wrong, but it wasn't as weird as when I called up the living people who regularly acted as his masks. Like I said, this is a really nasty place, and there are plenty of people who have prospered off of the evil in this town. Those people, the ones who worked hand-in-hand with Mr. Ash even if they never consciously knew it, they became just as much a part of him as the nightmares he pulled out of the minds of those he terrorized. Tonight could get tricky.
But I'm not going to worry about that now. Now I'm going to get a good meal, call Cynthia (or anyone really who isn't in the middle of all this), and take a nap. I think I might get a good two hours in before the sun sets and everything goes to hell.
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