Wolf Logic

by Masha du Toit

  “He never came back from the Annex, did he?” said Pote. “That must mean he tested positive.”

  Gia remembered that Ford was one of the three cadets who’d been taken away for testing yesterday. She’d been so absorbed in her own problems she’d not even noticed he was missing. Were the other two still there? Yes, there was Motsepe, cheerful as always, adding spoon after spoonful of sugar into her coffee and Van Niekerk, the tough-looking blond girl. They must have passed the test and received their certificates of purity.

  “Ford was a magical?” said Vetkoek in disbelief. “I mean that guy was about as thick as two planks, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with him.”

  Before they could continue the discussion, Cadet Mantjies called them to attention and they saw that a slim young woman with cropped blond hair was standing in the door, watching them expectantly.

  Cadet Lee.

  The cadet who’d started it all; she was the one who’d come to Gia’s school, spoken about being a changeling, a child whose seeming handicap had turned out to be a strong magical talent. The story had made Gia realise there might be something more to her brother than she’d thought. The sight of Lee nearly made Gia panic again, and she had to tell herself that while the cadet would certainly recognise her, there was nothing inherently dangerous in that.

  But she’s a telepath. All she has to do—

  Gia squashed that thought. She’d take care to stay away from the cadet, that was all. But she had to pay attention now. Cadet Mantjies was talking.

  “Guys,” he said “This morning, we’re taking you to the labs and the New Block, what we call the Zoo. Most of you have seen the Zoo already, when you were laaitjies, right?”

  There was a chorus of assent.

  “One of the things that the Youth Brigade does is to look after those exhibits and when you get more experienced you’ll start guiding the kids, telling them all about the magicals, that kind of thing.”

  He nodded to Cadet Lee.

  “This is Cadet Lee. She’s one of the very first Youth Brigade members; she’s been here longest of all of us. Some of you will have seen her when she came to speak at your schools, with Captain Witbooi. Well, that’s one thing she does, the school visits, but most of the time she’s working with Doctor Scubbe, the guy in charge of that whole section. The experimental stuff.” He grinned at the cadets. “The cool stuff! Once you get past the basic training, you can be like me and Lee here, working directly with the doctor. Weapons development. Chemistry. All that cool shit.”

  Cadet Jooste rolled her eyes, but said nothing.

  “The Doctor is in charge of the live exhibits in the zoo,” said Mantjies, ignoring Jooste, “which is where we are going this morning. Now just one thing. You’ve had the basic etiquette lecture and all that. Doctor Scubbe, he’s not an officer, but he’s not exactly a civilian either. As far as you guys are concerned, his rank is the same as Captain Witbooi’s. He won’t care whether you stand to attention when he walks into a room, or whether you call him by his first name, or whatever, but if any of the officers should see—” Mantjies drew a finger across his throat. “Tickets for you. So. Treat him as though he’s a captain and you’ll be fine. Okay?”

  “Yeah. Mind your manners,” said Cadet Jooste. “Better not get on the wrong side of Doctor Scubbe, or he’ll give you his full attention.”

  Cadet Govender laughed. “You’ll get to sit on the doctor’s chair—” She caught sight of Cadet Lee’s chilly expression and to Gia’s surprise, fell silent, although she’d clearly planned to say more.

  “Thank you, Cadet Mantjies. And good to meet you, the new recruits. I’ll take you to New Block now, if you’ll follow me,” said Cadet Lee.

  -oOo-

  There were some gasps and giggles as the cadets looked around at the New Block entrance hall. It was worth looking at. A life-size model of a werewolf stood on a plinth, its face frozen in a permanent snarl. Another creature hung from the ceiling, leathery wings spread out as though in flight. It had glittering eyes and a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth and Gia wondered what it was.

  Other creatures crouched on plinths near the wall. Gia recognised a blisterman and a gore-pie, but she wasn’t sure of any of the others. All were expertly mounted and looked very much alive.

  “Yes, they’re quite something.” Cadet Lee smiled at the recruits’ reaction. “This part of the display is all new, only been up since June last year.” She glanced at her watch. “We’ve got the place to ourselves until half past ten, when the first school group arrives. I’d like to take you through the creature show now then go in to the labs to meet Doctor Scubbe. Then we’ll come back here to join the kids and you’ll get a chance to see how a school group is guided through the display. You’ll be doing the guiding yourselves soon enough and seeing it from the visitors’ point of view is good experience.

  “When the kids arrive, they’re really excited, so one of your jobs is to make sure they don’t touch any of the models. Before you take them in there—” She gestured with her thumb at the door behind her. “You’ve got to drum it into them. No touching! They love it if you play up the danger a bit. Tell them they’ll get arrested, or stuffed and put on show as a warning to other children. Follow me.”

  Beyond the door was a corridor with large glass panels set into the walls on either side. The corridor itself was dim, but the spaces beyond the glass were brightly lit, a white, artificial light that brought back twinges of memory for Gia. The smell too, was as she remembered from that long-ago school trip, the sweet, chilly scent of surgical spirits.

  “So here we have a number of different displays,” said Cadet Lee. “On your left you’ll see a colony of felines. Mucklestings, pretties, fraidycats—ah yes, you see?”

  The display behind the glass had been made to look like a sitting room with a sofa, a fireplace, even a few small tables with doilies spread on them. A creature jumped down from a chair and came up to the glass, peering at them. At first glance it looked like an unusually large ginger tom cat, but Gia knew what to look for—two bony horn stubs on either side of its forehead, just in front of the ears. There would be a spur in the tail as well, but that would only be possible to see if one parted the fur.

  “This is Grumpy, one of our mucklestings,” said Lee. “He’s a bit of a show-off, as you can see.”

  The catlike creature was rubbing his head ostentatiously against the glass. Cadet Mayer, the pretty cadet with the honey-brown hair, put her hand out and laughed as the mucklesting reared up and butted at the glass. It wasn’t possible to hear him, but Gia was sure he was purring.

  “Yes, he’s a real lover boy,” said Cadet Lee. “The important thing here is that the children will want to tap on the glass. Don’t let them. Old Grumpy won’t mind, but it really stresses the fraidycats. They usually hang out under the sofa, or behind that large pot plant in the corner.”

  Now that Gia had a closer look she saw that several other felines were visible in the room. Some lay curled on the sofa, their eyes slitted towards the visitors. One sat on the mantelpiece among a collection of vases. Some were probably mucklestings, as Gia couldn’t see anything odd about them except for the tiny buds of their horns. Others were less likely to be confused with ordinary cats. They were striped like any grey tabby, but their bodies were reed thin and their legs were much too long, as was visible when one of them got up and stretched.

  “Don’t they fight?” asked Vetkoek.

  “The mucklestings sometimes have a scrap,” said Cadet Lee. “Especially at feeding time. But since we’ve removed their stings they can’t really do much harm. And as long as we don’t put two males together, they don’t really bother. All of them are neutered anyway, which does calm things down. Now, on your other side, we’ve got the Backyard Display.”

  The window she was pointing at was a little further down the corridor, so the cadets moved to see. This display was styled to look like a suburban backyard, complete with tipped-over rubbish bi
n. The back of the display was covered in corrugated metal as if it were a fence and there was even a bit of brick wall with a window visible near the top, to create the suggestion of a house behind the fence. Bottles and cans spilled out of the bin and bits of screwed-up newspaper and other rubbish lay scattered about.

  “These are the small, urban creatures,” said Cadet Lee. “The kiddies like to see how many of them they can spot. There’s all kinds in there: parktown prawns, wolfkewers, bonies, sniplisters, ratlings, blikkies, peppermen and some good old-fashioned rats too. Nothing magical about those, but many of the magical creatures live in a parasitic or symbiotic relationship with the rats and need them to survive.”

  Gia could see some of the inhabitants of the display, small shapes scuttling among the rubbish and leggy creatures clinging to the dried branches that hung over the fake fence. A rat was visible in the foreground, sitting up and nibbling at something. The sight of its bright black eyes and twitching whiskers gave her an unexpected pang—it looked so much like Poepie, her brother’s pet rat.

  “Ugh, look at its tail!” said Cadet van Niekerk. “Ugh, I hate rats.”

  Gia noticed a shape fixed near the top of the fence. For a moment, she forgot her resolve not to draw any attention to herself. “Isn’t that a haarskeerder nest?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” said Cadet Lee. “Well spotted. It’s empty, of course. Far too risky to put a live colony of haarskeerders in there. They can probably hypnotise you right through the glass.”

  Gia nodded. She was sure the cadet recognised her from their previous meeting, but Lee gave no sign of it. Nothing dangerous in her remembering me, she told herself, but she still felt exposed.

  Cadet Lee led them further down the corridor, then through a door into a large, white room. “Now we come to the parts that some of you may remember from your own school visit. These displays have not been changed for years.”

  It was true. As soon as Gia stepped through the door, the memories snapped into focus: the bright light glowing off the white walls and the slippery floor. A nearby shelf held some large glass jars and Gia looked at them, already knowing what she would see. Yes, there it was. Drifting in its jar was a little mermaid babe, its lacy gills spread out in the preserving fluid. Its face was hidden, but Gia could see the perfectly formed hands curled, one over the other, under its chin.

  Next to it was another jar, also with a floating creature inside, a dark clot of matted hair, one milky eye partly open, and its fanned, delicate ears identifying it as a trompoppie. Gia remembered the trompoppies on the roof of her home back in Walmer Estate. She’d heard them drumming the roof, late into the night...

  A rattle and a bang drew her attention back to Cadet Lee, who was pulling open a partition on one of the cages. “Like this,” she said and snapped the partition back into place. Gia blinked and wondered what the cadet had been saying, but the group was already moving on to the next display, a cage full of little fluttering rainbow creatures. This too, Gia remembered from her school trip. The snaartjies.

  She looked into the cage, fascinated. According to popular belief, no one snaartjie looked like another, and the display seemed to bear this out. They all had brightly coloured wings, but there the resemblance stopped. Some had slender antennae that ended in bobbing disks. Others seemed to have tiny tennis racquets sprouting out of their heads. There was a skinny one with enormous, glassy eyes like drops of coloured water. Next to it crouched a thing that had hardly any head at all, resembling nothing so much as a ball bearing with wings. The air was filled with their distinctive, soft murmur that reminded Gia of a summer afternoon.

  “As you can see,” said Cadet Lee, “they all stay toward the back of the cage. That’s because of the silver coating on the cage front. We use silver because they can fly through glass as if it were air. Normal galvanised wire just rusts and falls apart in a matter of days around these little monsters.”

  “How long do you keep them?” The question popped out before Gia even knew she was speaking.

  Again, Cadet Lee’s calm, grey eyes studied her. “We can’t keep them more than a week. Nobody’s figured out how to feed them, or even knows what they eat.”

  “So—do they get released then?”

  Cadet Lee smiled. “Not quite. We euthanise them. The patrols always bring in enough for us to keep the display well stocked.” She turned to the next display before Gia could react. “And here we have a pair of shoes.”

  The recruits crowded round. Gia moved to look as well and saw that the cadet’s words were accurate. The white display box was quite empty, except for a pair of shoes—old lady’s shoes: sensible, low heeled and dark brown.

  “It’s a shabaho, isn’t it?” said Pote, pushing up his glasses. “A mimic.”

  “That’s right.” Cadet Lee unhooked a pair of goggles from the top of the box. “Want to have a look?”

  The others laughed as Pote fitted the goggles over his glasses, but he ignored them. “What do I do? Oh! I can see it!” His eyebrows went up and he leaned forward until his nose nearly touched the glass. “Wow. What a weirdo.”

  “Let me look!” said Vetkoek.

  “Hey! Give me a chance!” someone else shouted.

  “Cadets. Please keep your voices down.” Cadet Lee spoke quietly, but the group calmed instantly. “You’ll all get a chance. Cadet, you may hand the lenses on to somebody else now.”

  Pote reluctantly removed the goggles and handed them to Vetkoek, who crammed them on and stared at the display. “Oh yuckity!”

  When Gia’s turn came, she first took a moment to look at the shoes without the goggles. They looked utterly normal, even to the scuffmarks on the toes. She put on the goggles and looked again. What she saw made her start back in surprise. The shoes were gone and in their place squatted a strange creature. It looked like a cross between a toad and a kewpie doll, a fat little manikin, legs crossed and arms folded. It stared at her with a most knowing and scornful expression, tiny black eyes glinting with malevolent intelligence. Gia hurriedly removed the goggles and handed them to her neighbour, Cadet Mayer.

  “The fascinating thing about the shabaho,” continued Cadet Lee, “is that everybody perceives them in slightly different ways. We all of us see him as a pair of shoes, but the shape and colour of those shoes will very likely be different for each of us. The theory is that the creature’s illusion somehow makes use of the viewer’s memory, of something they’ve seen before.”

  The group moved through the rest of the display. Most of the creatures were small, insect- or bird-like beings housed in silver wire cages. The largest was a boef, a pale, fishy thing that lived in a murky aquarium near the back. It had the unsettling habit of squashing its face against the glass, squooshing its long, fat lips into unpleasant shapes.

  “I think that’s enough for the moment,” said Cadet Lee, consulting her watch. “The doctor should be ready for you now.”

  -oOo-

  Lee led them through a door at the far side the room. It was immediately clear that this was not an area open to the public. The walls bore the marks of bumps and scrapes and the shelves were of unpainted wood. There were cages here too, but it was not so easy to see the occupants. Shapes moved inside them, bumping and scratching, or endlessly circling. The next room was brighter and had a sweet smell that reminded Gia of some of the puddings Mandy baked on cold winter days—a sweet, spicy scent that seemed quite out of place in the laboratory environment. Several senior cadets stood at workbenches, all of them in white coats, some wearing facemasks or goggles. An older man was watching one of the cadets pour a dribble of powder into a flask. The man wore the same white coat as the cadets, but his looked as if it had been slept in—wrinkled and distinctly grubby.

  “Just a minute, Lee,” he said without looking up. “Okay, that’s enough now. Don’t stir and take the temperature a minute from now. Right.” He wiped his hands on his trousers. “I’m Doctor Scubbe. Pleased to meet you all. Has Lee told you anything about
what we do here?” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked expectantly at the crowd of new recruits. “Komaan, people? Is that too much of a question? You.”

  He jutted his chin at Cadet Motsepe. “What do you know of this place? What do we do here?”

  Motsepe pushed out her bottom lip dubiously and shrugged. “You make...weapons? Chemical stuff?”

  “Ditsem. This is the modern wing of the Special Branch. This is where the real stuff happens. We make things that we can rely on, so that we can get rid of all the magical shit that we have to use at the moment—” He did not seem to notice the giggles at the obscenity. “Yes, the werewolves are useful—and so is old Lee here, with her telepathic tricks, but really, how can we fight magic with magic?” He cast a bright glance around the room, clearly not expecting an answer. “We need to get rid of it all! All that superstitious claptrap that’s been shackling us for years. The Old World stuff. So me and Lee here are going to take you on a little tour around the show. See what you think.”

  The group trailed after him into a passage lined with doors. He opened one of them. “Through here is our document room.”

  Gia caught a glimpse of shelves stuffed with papers and books of all sizes. Tables too, piled high with notebooks and folders. Everything looked old and worn, and many of the books were little more than bundles of paper held together with string.

  “These are all collected from helpful civilians,” said the doctor with a sharp grin. “People who’ve um—donated their research on magical phenomena to Special Branch. Most of it’s bunkum, of course, superstition and old-wives’ tales. But there’s useful stuff in among it all and one of our jobs is to go through them and record whatever we can use. You chaps do data capture, don’t you? Well, many of those lists and things you type up there come from this room.”

  He closed the door and moved on, tapping doors as he walked past them. “This is the stillroom, where we prepare some of the more volatile substances. This next one is a general store room, mostly chemicals. This is a weapons safe. And through here, my own area.”