Curse of the Were-wiener

by Ursula Vernon

  ITCHING AND SCRATCHING

  “You look terrible,” Danny said to Wendell at lunch the next day.

  “Thanks. I feel terrible.” Wendell itched irritably under his shirt.

  “Your eyes are all red and you were scratching all through class—”

  “Thank you, yes, I was there!” The iguana hunched over his lunch, glaring at his sandwich.

  “Looks like you’re not the only one,” said Danny, glancing around the lunchroom.

  Wendell dragged himself from his personal misery to peer across the cafeteria.

  It looked like a mass outbreak of lizard pox. Every table had somebody itching furiously. One of the little skink girls was sitting in a pile of shed scales and looked ready to cry.

  “This is bad,” said Wendell.

  “Yeah, this is worse than the time Christiana Vanderpool got scale lice and infected the whole fourth grade,” said Danny, slightly awe-struck.

  “No,” said Wendell, “you don’t understand. Look.” He pointed at Big Eddy, who had actual tufts of hair sticking out from under his shirt, and was digging at his scalp like he was mining for gold.

  “Ha! Big Eddy’s growing hair!” whispered Danny.

  “That means Big Eddy’s going to be a were-wiener!” hissed Wendell. “All these kids are going to be were-wieners!”

  “Oh no,” said Danny. “That means the alpha wurst will be able to control them!”

  “They’ll all be minions!” Wendell put a hand over his mouth. “We’ll . . . all . . . be minions . . . ”

  “But you can’t breathe fire!” Wendell said, scratching hopelessly. “Not reliably, anyway.”

  Danny sighed. Wendell was right. His one spectacular fire-breathing episode had been underwater, at a giant squid. Other than a few really vigorous sneezes, he hadn’t managed so much as a spark since. “I can do it if I have to,” he said, hoping it was true.

  Class had never lasted so long, or seemed so pointless. Danny fidgeted restlessly in his chair. Wendell scratched. Nobody noticed, because half the class was scratching too.

  This is useless! Danny wanted to yell as Mr. Snaug droned on about something—the stratosphere or adding fractions or something. Don’t you see the class has lycanthro—lycatrop—lyka—werewolfism!?

  The only thing that kept him from leaping onto his chair and shouting that out loud—other than the fact that he couldn’t pronounce the word, even inside his head—was that if he did, he’d probably get after-school detention. And tonight of all nights, he couldn’t afford to be late, or have his mom get wind of any trouble. She’d agreed to let him spend the night at Wendell’s, but if he came home with notes about yelling gibberish in class, she might reconsider.

  He sank lower in his seat and fidgeted.

  He tried to settle himself down—Mr. Snaug was giving him that tired look that came before the yelling—by thinking about the supplies they’d need in the sewer. Rope. He had rope, even if it was mostly knots. Flashlight. He had a flashlight. He might need new batteries, but that was fine, there were dozens of remote-controlled toys strewn about the floor of his room. Weapons?

  What kind of weapons did you use on a potato salad, anyway?

  Danny supposed he could find something in the way of a giant spoon, but his mom would get suspicious if he was rummaging around in the kitchen drawers. She’d stopped believing his claims that whatever he was doing was completely and totally harmless, after the incident with the exploding melon-baller.

  Maybe Tabasco sauce would be enough . . .

  Besides, the potato salad should remember them. They’d set it free, sort of! Surely it would be grateful.

  If it wasn’t, they were going to be stuck in the sewer system with an angry salad, and that didn’t really bear thinking about.

  He chewed on a claw and looked hopefully at the clock.

  Less than a minute left.

  “Homework for tonight,” said Mr. Snaug. “Read the rest of chapter ten, which goes into greater detail about what we’ve been discussing.”

  Whatever that was, Danny thought.

  “There will be a quiz—”

  The bell rang.

  “—so don’t forget . . . ”

  Mr. Snaug probably had more to say, but Danny lunged for the door and was gone.

  SLEEPOVER

  “Now, you’re sure you’ll be okay, boys?”

  “We’re fine, Mom,” said Wendell wearily.

  “You don’t need any more snacks?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “You’ve both got enough hot cocoa?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “And you’ll remember to brush your teeth?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “All right, then.” She planted a kiss on top of Wendell’s head, which he bore stoically, and waved to Danny. “Good night, boys!”

  Years of nighttime misadventure had taught Danny that Wendell’s house was the best place to sneak out of. While Wendell’s mom fretted over everything, checked on them every fifteen minutes, and insisted on fluffing Wendell’s pillows and checking his sheets,1 she also went to sleep by nine, and she slept like a log.

  Danny’s mother, on the other hand, was good about leaving them alone, but she stayed up until well after midnight and tended to notice the sort of thumping noises that come from—to choose an example completely and totally at random—a small dragon and an iguana climbing out the second-story window, down a tree, and going over the back fence. Living with Danny had really sharpened her hearing.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Danny, after Wendell’s mom had finally left.

  “Itchy,” said Wendell. “Other than that, I think I’m okay.” Both boys threw on their clothes.

  Danny grinned and dug into his backpack. “Bungee cords . . . check,” he muttered. “Matches . . . check. Flashlight . . . check. Cookies . . . check.”

  He had expected some commentary on this packing list from Wendell, but when he looked up, Wendell was staring out the window with an oddly distant expression.

  “Wendell?”

  “The moon,” said Wendell dreamily. “The moon is . . . full.”

  Dreamy is not a normal state for iguanas. Danny stared at his friend in concern.

  Were Wendell’s teeth longer? Was the hair spreading? He always had bad posture, but was that a slouch or a hunch?

  “I can almost hear it . . . ”

  Danny looked wildly around the room for something to snap Wendell out of his dreamy state. Unfortunately, Wendell was a compulsive neatnik, and the room was unnaturally clean. (In Danny’s room, there would have been a dozen items in easy reach, suitable for braining lycanthropic best friends—softball bats, Ping-Pong paddles, plastic swords, rubber chickens. The only problem would be picking just one.)

  He briefly considered grabbing the goldfish bowl and dumping the contents over Wendell’s head, but Wendell would never forgive him if anything happened to Mister Fins. He’d had the goldfish since he was five.

  “So . . . beautiful . . . ” breathed Wendell.

  Danny yanked a book off the bookcase—one of the comic collections of Empire of Feathers, softcover but with definite heft—and smacked Wendell across the back of the head with it.

  “R ight,” said Danny briskly, “we’ve got to take out that alpha were-wurst. We clearly don’t have much time.”

  “I’m allowed to think things are pretty!” snapped Wendell. “It doesn’t mean anything!”

  Danny gave him a look. “ . . . I’ll get my flashlight,” muttered Wendell. Wendell’s bedroom window did not have a convenient climbing tree, the way Danny’s did, but it did overlook the attached garage. You just had to step out the window and you could walk around on the roof. From there, it was a short trip down to the rain gutter, which was nailed to the side of the house by slats that were almost as good as a ladder.

  Danny went first, dropping into Wendell’s mother’s azaleas, and then waited impatiently while Wendell came down, one step at a time, his eyes squeez
ed tight.

  They hurried around the side of the house and into the front yard. Danny scurried from shadow to shadow, hiding behind shrubs and hedges. Wendell plodded down the sidewalk in plain sight.

  “There’s nobody watching,” said the iguana as Danny dove behind a garbage can.

  “There might be ninjas!”

  “We haven’t seen ninjas around here for months.”

  They reached the storm drain at the end of the street without being attacked by ninjas, or spotted by grown-ups, and peered down into it. Danny turned on his flashlight and played the beam across the opening.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Here we are.”

  A car turned down at the end of the street, and both iguana and dragon ducked quickly behind a juniper hedge. The headlights washed across their hiding place, turning the black foliage briefly green, then the car crawled past. When the sound of the engine had faded, they slunk out onto the street.

  “We’d better hurry,” said Danny.

  Wendell exhaled. He wanted to say, Are you sure? Or maybe Do we have to?

  But it was Danny, and Danny was always sure, even when he was completely wrong. Wendell scratched at his back. The hair was definitely spreading. A few tufts between scales had grown into a patch as big as his palm. And the moon—he almost looked up at it, then hastily jerked his eyes back to the curb. Looking at the moon was bad. Looking at the moon made the whole world go kind of shivery and silver. His teeth felt strangely cold in his mouth, and when he ran his tongue delicately over them, they seemed larger than they had been.

  “Hold my backpack,” said Danny, and slid, belly down and feetfirst, into the dark mouth of the drains.

  He vanished. Wendell cringed.

  A second later, Danny called up. “It’s fine. Throw me the packs.”

  This is it, Wendell thought, tossing the bags and putting his glasses in his shirt pocket. The hole became a dark blur. It didn’t really help.

  “Come on!” hissed Danny.

  There was open air under his feet and his tail, and the crumbling concrete lip of the drain scraped the back of his head. He dangled from his claw-tips for a second, unsure how far he was going to fall. Maybe he’d fall forever. Maybe the drains opened into a bottomless shaft, and the sewers poured into it, and he’d fall so far down that the earth’s heart would open up beneath him—

  “It’s like six inches,” said Danny, right beside him.

  Wendell sighed and let go.

  DOWN, DOWN, DOWN

  The storm drain had a wide metal grate instead of a proper floor, and it was slick with dead leaves, old plastic bags, used gum wrappers, and other things that Danny didn’t care to identify. The dragon swung the light briefly over the gunkcovered grate, and then to either side of it. A low corridor, made of a giant circular pipe, vanished into darkness.

  “Which way do we go?” whispered Wendell.

  “I’m not sure.”

  Danny turned the light to the wall, and found writing.

  “Who do you think labeled these?” he asked.

  “Sewage workers, I guess,” said Wendell. He pushed his glasses up on his snout. “Main outflow gets us closer to the main sewer, I think. Where do you suppose the potato salad went?”

  Danny frowned, trying to think like a potato salad. This did not come easily.

  “I think it’d probably want to be where it could pick up more gunk,” he said finally. “Kind of . . . grow a little. Let’s try the main outflow.”

  The pipes weren’t wide enough for two, so they walked single file, with Danny in front. Lots of gaps appeared overhead. They passed under a manhole cover, a little round cement room with metal ladder rungs bolted into the wall. The room was covered in graffiti, most of it words that would have shocked Wendell’s mother.

  They had been walking for about ten minutes when the floor dropped into a series of steep concrete steps, each one with a deep rim. A thick layer of unidentifiable goop had formed in the resulting catch pools and squelched under their feet.

  “Ugghhh ...”

  “I’ve seen worse,” said Danny, hopping down to the next pool with a sound that was more slurp than splash.

  The pipe opened up into a much larger chamber. The bottom of the room had a kind of walkway to one side, running along a deep, foamy canal of murky water. Pipes oozed wastewater. The air was warm and humid, like the indoor pool at the YRCA.2

  The smell was incredible.

  Danny and Wendell stopped in unspoken agreement to try to get used to the stink. It was like old gym socks and hot garbage. Going into a stall in the boys’ bathroom after Big Eddy had used it was like swimming in lilacs and fresh-baked bread by comparison.

  Eventually they gave up. It wasn’t so much getting used to it as just surrendering to it. Once Danny’s eyes stopped watering and Wendell had finished cleaning his glasses every few seconds, they climbed the rest of the way down the staircase and onto the concrete walk.

  “It’s just like the sewer level in Dark Summons!” said Danny enthusiastically. “I played that like forty times!”

  “Did you ever beat it?” asked Wendell.

  “No. The last boss fight is like impossible. He throws flaming goats at you. I mean, c’mon! Flaming goats? That’s just brutal.”

  Wendell knew that it was irrational, but he would have felt better if Danny had actually won the game, flaming goats notwithstanding.

  “I guess this is the main outflow,” said the iguana, changing the subject. “But where do we go now?”

  “Let’s follow the walkway,” said Danny. He may not have beaten the game, but he did know that paths usually went somewhere.

  They followed the walkway. Stuff roiled in the water next to them, some of it recognizable, most of it not.

  A hundred feet down, the walkway turned a corner, where a second massive chamber crossed the first. Danny and Wendell stopped at the corner, gazing helplessly across the massive outflow.

  Since the notion of swimming did not appeal to anyone, they followed the walkway around the corner.

  “I think I see a light up ahead,” said Danny.

  “A light? Down here?” Wendell wrung his tail in his hands. “I don’t like it. What would make a light down here?”

  “I don’t know, but there is one.” Danny switched off his flashlight, plunging them into sudden blackness. Wendell let out a little shriek, sending echoes scurrying through the tunnels like frightened mice.

  But after a few seconds, Wendell did see something—a watery, wavery light, far off in the distance. “I guess—sort of—how could you tell?”

  “Dragons have excellent eyesight.”

  They kept walking. The light got brighter, and then the walkway dead-ended in a iron-railed landing at an intersection of pipes. The light shone down through a hole overhead, casting a shifting circle on the water.

  It was the moon. A full moon.

  A shiver suddenly racked Danny, all his scales rubbing together.

  This was it. This was the dream he’d had. The things he’d thought were trees weren’t trees at all—they were the dark marks of water dripping down the walls, spreading out to form patterns like branches and tree roots. The moon was there, overhead, and reflected like a blob of mercury on the shifting, scummy water.

  And Wendell—

  “Do you hear it?” asked the iguana behind him, in a voice that didn’t sound like Wendell at all.

  “Hear what?” asked Danny, turning around with a sense of dread.

  “The moon . . . ” whispered the iguana. “I can hear it . . . singing . . . ”

  Behind his thick glasses, Wendell’s eyes were glowing red.

  “Wendell?”

  A noise came from his friend that does not come from the throat of any reptile. It took Danny a moment to realize that Wendell was growling.

  Danny considered. His friend was turning into one of the were-wurst’s minions. If they were in a horror movie or a video game, this would be the moment where Dann
y was forced to slay his friend to save himself, or become a minion as well.

  On the other hand, it was Wendell.

  The iguana took a step forward, growling.

  “Wendell!”

  Wendell opened his mouth, revealing a wall of sharp teeth. He normally had eighty of them, but they weren’t usually an inch long. The inside of his mouth looked like an ivory bear trap.

  Danny weighed the options, leaned down, and splashed a handful of sewer water directly into Wendell’s face.

  “I . . . oh . . . jeez . . . ” Wendell twisted his tail in his hands. “Sorry.”

  Danny sighed. The red was gone from Wendell’s eyes, and that was the important thing. “It’s fine. Just try not to do it again. Let’s get you cured.”

  YOUR POTATOSHIP

  Unfortunately, this was easier said than done. The walkway had ended, and the only option was to backtrack. And then . . . possibly . . . to swim.

  Danny was really hoping it wouldn’t come to that. Getting Wendell into the water would be nearly impossible, and he wasn’t too keen on the idea himself. The water smelled so bad that even calling it “water” was optimistic.

  It was indeed a rat. It was large and sleek and longer than Danny’s arm. It studied the pair thoughtfully, not as if they were menacing, but as if they were interesting birds that had wandered onto the rat’s lawn.

  “Maybe it can help us,” said Danny.

  Wendell looked at him as if his eyes were glowing red. “It’s a rat.”

  “Rats are very intelligent,” said Danny. He waved to the rat.

  The rat did not wave back, but it did sit up on its hind legs expectantly.