Alexander came back from the beach one morning holding the mask, and his face was the color of ash.
Jason was sitting by the fire, splitting fruit for breakfast. He looked up and saw the white shape in Alexander's hands, and for a moment he didn't understand what he was seeing. Then he glanced at the ledge at the back of the cave, where the mask had lain for well over a year, and found it empty.
He hadn't noticed. He had stopped looking at it a long time ago.
"Where did you find that?" he asked.
"On the beach." Alexander's voice was very tight. "Right at the waterline, below the cave. Sitting there on the sand, face up, as if someone had put it there."
"Why was it on the beach?"
Alexander didn't answer. He was staring at Jason with an expression Jason had never seen on him before, something between anger and pleading.
"You swam out for it," he said. "Didn't you?"
Jason put down the knife. "What?"
"Last night. You went out and got it." Alexander took a step closer. "Tell me you did. Please. Just tell me you did."
"Alexander, I don't know what you're talking about. Why would it be in the water?"
For a long moment, Alexander said nothing. Then his shoulders dropped, and he looked down at the mask in his hands as if he were ashamed of it.
"Because I threw it there," he said quietly.
* * *
He told it haltingly, sitting on the stone bench by the fire with the mask on his knees.
He had never liked it. He had tried to ignore it, at least, but ever since the mausoleum he had caught himself looking at it every night, lying awake with his eyes on the ledge in the dark. He kept seeing the empty pedestal it had come from, and the room full of empty niches beyond. He kept thinking about the old story, the black shore and the silent sea and the someone who waited there for the drowned. And more than once, half asleep, he had been sure that the mask was looking back at him.
So yesterday evening, while Jason was down at the lagoon, he had taken it from the ledge and climbed out onto the point of rock at the end of the beach, and thrown it as hard and as far as he could into the deep water beyond the reef. He had watched it sink. He had felt, walking back to the cave, lighter than he had in weeks.
And this morning he had gone down to the beach to wash, and there it was.
"You told me," Alexander said. "When you woke up. You said you'd thrown it into the sea once and it came back. I thought—" He stopped. "I thought you were confused. I thought you'd been alone too long and imagined it, or that you'd gone out and fetched it and forgotten. It was easier to believe that than the other thing."
"And now?"
"And now I'm asking you to tell me you swam out and got it, so I don't have to believe the other thing."
Jason looked at him, and then at the mask, lying white and spotless on Alexander's knees. There wasn't a grain of sand on it. There wasn't a drop of water. It had spent a night at the bottom of the sea, and it looked exactly as it had the day he first lifted it from the pedestal.
"Alexander," he said, "the water beyond the point is full of coral. The same coral that took my eye, and the same coral that went through my side on the night I pulled you out of it. You want me to have swum out over it, alone, at night, with one eye, for a thing I tried to get rid of myself?" He shook his head. "That would be the stupidest idea I've ever had. And I once jumped into the sea to fight a shark."
Alexander let out a breath that was almost a laugh.
"When you put it that way," he said.
"I didn't go and get it. It came back. That's what it does." Jason looked at the mask. "I don't know why. I've stopped asking."
Alexander was quiet for a long time. The fire crackled between them. Then he rubbed his face with both hands, hard, and when he took them away, he looked more like himself.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have accused you. I just..." He trailed off, and looked down at the mask again. "I can't sleep with it in here, Jason. I've tried. I can't."
Jason understood that better than Alexander knew. He had slept beside it for years, and for years it had been one more silent thing in the cave that knew more than he did.
"The sea doesn't want it," Alexander said slowly. He was turning the mask over in his hands, frowning. "It keeps giving it back. But the sea isn't the only place you can put something." He looked up. "Let's see if the earth will keep it."
Jason thought about it for a long moment.
"Maybe," he said. "It's worth trying."
"I'll do it," Alexander said at once. "I'll dig the hole. You won't have to go anywhere near it."
"Do it alone."
Alexander blinked. "What?"
"Do it alone," Jason said again. "Don't tell me where." He looked at the empty ledge at the back of the cave, and then away. "I've carried that thing around for long enough. If it's going somewhere, I don't want to know where. That way, if I ever want it back, I can't go and get it."
Alexander held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded, slowly, as if he understood more than Jason had said.
* * *
He walked a long way before he found the place.
He didn't choose it for any reason he could have explained. He simply walked, the mask wrapped in a strip of old sailcloth under his arm, away from the cave and the beach and every path Jason ever took, until he came to a spot where the ground felt right. He knelt there, took out the knife, and began to dig.
It was slow work. The ground was hard, full of roots and stones, and he had only the knife and his hands. The sun climbed and grew hot on the back of his neck. His fingers bled where the stones scraped them. He kept going.
And as he dug, he thought.
He thought about the night he had first held the mask, on the white beach in the storm, and the rain beading on it and sliding off without leaving a trace. He thought about laying it over Jason's face in the cave, and waiting for something to happen, and nothing happening, except that the blood had stopped. For five days, Jason's wound had not closed and not worsened, as if time had simply stopped around him.
And he thought about Jason's arm.
The black lines had begun on the third morning and climbed a little higher every day. Alexander had watched them cross the wrist and the elbow and creep toward the shoulder, and he had sat beside Jason with a knife in his hand, too frightened to cut, while they spread. Then Jason had woken, and the mask had slipped from his face, and the lines had stopped. They hadn't moved since. They lay across Jason's skin now like cracks in glass, fine and dark and utterly still.
He had never asked Jason about them. Jason never seemed to look at them, and Alexander had learned that there were a lot of things on this island that Jason had simply stopped looking at.
But he wondered.
He wondered whether the mask had saved Jason's life, or whether it had done something else to him, something Alexander didn't understand. He wondered whether the lines were a scar or a mark. He wondered what the mausoleum was, and who had made it, and who the empty niches had been meant for. And he wondered, most of all, why the sea kept giving the mask back to the one person on this island who least wanted it.
He didn't say any of it out loud. There was no one to say it to, and he wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answers.
When the hole was deep enough, he laid the wrapped mask in the bottom of it. For a moment he knelt there, looking down at the bundle of old sailcloth in the dirt.
"Stay," he told it quietly.
Then he filled the hole in, and packed the earth down hard with his palms, and scattered leaves and stones over it until nobody walking past would ever guess that anything was there.
* * *
He came back to the cave late in the afternoon, his hands and knees black with dirt and his fingers bleeding.
Jason looked up from the fire. He didn't ask where Alexander had been, and Alexander didn't tell him. He simply went to the cistern and washed his hands, and sat down by the fire, and after a while Jason pushed a piece of fruit across the stone toward him.
The next morning, Jason went down to the beach at dawn.
He told himself he was only checking the fish traps. He walked along the waterline below the cave, slowly, looking at the wet sand where the waves had drawn back, and at the tangles of seaweed, and at the foam.
There was nothing there.
He went back the next morning, and the one after that. Alexander went too, sometimes, though neither of them mentioned why. Each time, the sand was bare. The sea came in and went out and left only shells and weed behind, and nothing white, and nothing smooth.
On the seventh morning, Jason stood at the waterline for a long time with his arms folded, and understood that the earth was going to keep it.
He had expected to feel relief. He did, a little. But when he walked back up to the cave and saw the empty ledge at the back of it, bare stone where the mask had lain for so long, he felt something else as well, something that took him a moment to recognize.
It felt, strangely, like something missing.