Out of Salem

by Hal Schrieve

  “I hate this,” Aysel said.

  “Thank god I never registered you. Your father wanted me to.” Azra mentioned this bitterly from time to time. It was why Aysel’s parents had separated.

  “Do you think they’ll have investigators in the woods by the winery?” Aysel asked. Her mind was racing.

  “If you can keep it in your mind that you have to stay far from town, you should be all right . . .”

  Aysel’s heart sank. “I’ll try,” she said. Azra, for all the reading she had done, had never seemed to grasp the idea that it was very hard to remember anything once the transformation happened. Aysel knew she would forget everything except sensation until 6:19 the next morning, when the moon set.

  “I should fix your nose before you go, yavrum,” Azra said, her voice high and fast. She was trying to make the evening routine again, and think of mundane things.

  She walked over to Aysel, and laid both her hands on her daughter’s temples. “Acıyı bırak, iyileş.”

  The mild throbbing in Aysel’s head receded until it was only a slight fogginess. She felt her nose shift back into place and snap to its normal shape. Electricity crackled off her eyelashes.

  “Why do you never use Latin spells?”

  “It doesn’t work as well. Your Anneanne used this spell, so I know it best. You should know Turkish too, and Arabic. If you were around your uncles in Seattle more, you would have picked it right up. It’s a shame.”

  “Lots of things are a shame,” Aysel said. “Good riddance to Dad and everyone else. They treated you like shit.”

  “Language,” Azra said. “How did you break your nose, anyway?”

  “I got hit with a ball in gym class. Charley Salt kicked it at me.”

  “That boy again. You should tell someone,” Azra said.

  At eight in the evening, Aysel put her rain jacket on, pulling it over her shoulders carelessly, not bothering with the hood. They got into the little blue car Azra drove to work and pulled out into the dark rain, exiting the neighborhood and driving out of town. Azra had a chain of nazar beads that swung from the mirror, casting shadows on the dashboard. The nearest national park was forty miles away, and anyway Azra had always worried that Aysel would get lost in such a large forest, so instead they always went to a mile-wide forest about ten miles out of town. It was probably owned by a logging company—Azra wasn’t sure—but there were never many people in the forest, so as long as Aysel stayed out of the fields where people might see her, she would be all right. The trees were black as pitch in the night and the space between them only visible when the headlights of the car shone on them. Azra pulled the car up along the edge of the road. The headlights shone into the gaps in the trees. They had not spoken on the ride there; now Azra kissed Aysel on the forehead. The inside windows of the car were steaming up and the defroster was turned up all the way so that Azra would be able to see the road. It was raining more than ever now.

  “Don’t forget, stay clear of anyplace exposed, where someone might see you,” she said.

  “Okay,” Aysel said. She scowled, to hide her misery. She thought of the police again.

  “Give me your glasses, you’ll lose them again.”

  “I found them last month. It just took a while,” Aysel said, taking off her glasses and handing them to her mother.

  Her mother handed her a flashlight and a duffel bag, and Aysel got out of the car. “Good night,” Azra said. “Remember where to catch the bus home in the morning. Don’t get too far from the road or you’ll never make it to school on time.”

  Aysel set out into the woods, the ferns scratching at her ankles. She heard the car drive away into the night. Her hair was drenched with rain. The path she had cut through the ferns last night was still there, but spiders had strung webs across the gap which clung wetly to Aysel’s cheeks as she stomped into the dark. She kept walking away from the road, her flashlight glowing a dim yellow against the deep blue of the nighttime forest. Time passed. Rain ran down her face and cooled her hot skin.

  At nine, the moon rose. Aysel felt it in her blood. There was lightning flashing in her heart. At first, it was wonderful, like it always was. She felt warm. She took her coat off and removed her rain boots, and stood barefoot on the pine needles, looking up at the sky. One usually couldn’t see the moon behind the clouds in Salem, but always felt its pull when it rose. It took a few minutes, but soon Aysel felt she was starting to change.

  The lightning buzzed through her veins, searing her flesh like ants. Her legs felt like they were being pricked by thousands of moving pins, sticking her flesh again and again. The pinpricks moved up her thighs and belly, reaching toward her head. It stung—magic, and energy, and electricity. Aysel shook as the moon shone on her face, and rose and fell with tremors that consumed her and let her forget everything. Aysel felt her bones begin to stretch, and the hair on her legs got longer and denser, itching as it accumulated against the inside of her jeans. Hastily, she pulled off her pants and sweatshirt with hands that were getting large and clumsy, shoving them into the duffel bag and zipping it shut so the rain could not make it too damp in the night. She would pick up the duffel bag tomorrow morning, when she turned back. Aysel hoped that the wolf would decide to go somewhere and sleep a little.

  Aysel felt herself begin to cry, her newly large eyes sending streaks of salt water over a face which was rapidly changing form. All the emotion that built up inside her when she was human required a lot of effort to conceal, and during the transformation holding back tears or swallowing roars took more energy than she had to spare. Her skull rattled with the noise of the forest around her, and her nose suddenly could smell the birds sleeping in the bushes fifteen feet away. The world shuddered and shifted as her eyes changed, and jolted with the coldness of winter into her. Thoughts anchored in her mind began to fly away, as they did every time. She lost the memory of the homework she had to do, and of the gossip from earlier in the day. As her hands grew claws, Aysel momentarily forgot her own name.

  The wolf rose and loped away from the place Aysel had stood. It was calm. The wolf ’s thoughts were tighter and simpler than Aysel’s. Run, the wolf thought, and ran, at a pace which should have broken branches, with faint joy. The wolf ’s size and weight seemed to have no bearing on the sound she made as she traveled; the only noise that someone, standing a few feet from her path, could have heard was the deep breathing and the noise of displaced air and rainwater. The wolf was larger than a bear and could easily have taken down a horse, and her large black eyes and long black nose and tall black ears saw and smelled and heard almost every moving thing around her. The flush of sensation excited her, and she let herself be overtaken by the scents of animal tracks not yet washed away by the rain and by the noise and scent of smaller nocturnal beasts. The night air was cold and sweet. At the crest of the first hill, the wolf stopped and let out a great, throaty howl.

  There was a deer close by, and the wolf smelled it. Aysel hadn’t eaten dinner, and even if she had it would not have been enough for the wolf. The deer were not yet asleep and moved through the misty night in small groups. There were at least six. The flicker of Aysel left in the back of the wolf ’s mind worried about waking up with a stomach of full of raw venison, but that was tomorrow, and tonight the wolf was excited by the scent of the deer scat and the sound of soft moving creatures ahead. The black branches of the trees were wet and cold; the pine needles underfoot were damp and moved faintly with beetles and worms. The black wolf saw a flash of white through the trees: the deer were unconscious of her presence. Their tails reflected light as they bobbed along ahead of her slowly through the low trees and salal.

  In the distance, Aysel heard the howling of other wolves. She followed the noise but could not find them. They were in the hills, traveling away from her. Eventually the noises faded into the night. Aysel forgot them by the time she woke up in the ferns the next morning.

  In the morning, Aysel never remembered much. She didn’t really try.r />
  She heard on the news they’d killed Timothy Morris in the night.

  3

  When Z got home from school they found Mrs. Dunnigan sitting on one of her small, heavily pillowed chairs. She was watching television and drinking tea, her lap well covered with her cats. They meowed at Z as they entered, shaking off their hood. The apartment was dry and hot inside. Z could see on the oven clock that something was baking. Waves of yellow light seemed to fill the apartment.

  “What time did you get back from the bookshop?” Z asked.

  “I left at noon today. It gives the younger cashier something to do. Besides, my knee was bothering me again,” Mrs. Dunnigan said. “And I got a little woozy. I’ve been making pies,” she added, more brightly.

  “You know, I don’t think I can eat now,” Z said.

  “Nonsense. The undead can eat anything. It becomes incorporated into your essence. That’s how you keep going.”

  Z looked at Mrs. Dunnigan in surprise. She was still watching television. “Really? Is that true?” The prospect of still eating—of even possibly having to eat—was slightly terrifying in its inconvenience. Z felt that death ought to be a kind of static state. Maintenance should not be required. The one benefit of their condition seemed to be its permanence.

  “Biological matter similar to your own is ideal, naturally, since that’s less transfigurative work, but you can certainly manage pie.” Mrs. Dunnigan cackled in a very traditional way. She took a long slurp of tea and set down the cup and saucer on the windowsill. Her third-fattest cat, Isadora, noticed, and began to stealthily approach the abandoned dish.

  “I tried to eat the sandwich you made me for lunch today, and I didn’t taste anything. It got stuck in my throat. My taste buds don’t work anymore.”

  “I’m sure with a good wizard we’ll get your taste back in a while. I hear Mr. Weber at your school is a seventh son of a seventh son. We’ll get him to help.”

  “The chemistry teacher?”

  “He’s supposed to be very good. He helped sort out that golem last spring.”

  “That was because the city asked him to,” Z said. They had read about it in the papers, when it happened. It was national news for a little while, since golems were so rare on the West Coast and usually the military had to be brought in to dismantle them. Mr. Weber had received an award for his ingenuity and heroism. Z was not clear on exactly what spells were involved, but everyone at Lower Salem Integrated School had talked for weeks about how the chemistry teacher had managed to trap the golem within a circle before undoing the original life-binding spell by climbing up its body and reaching into its mouth himself to pull out the shem as it tried to crush him in its hands. This was probably rumor. Mr. Weber had taken three weeks’ vacation afterwards. “I doubt he’d be very interested. He’d be breaking the law,” Z added, the last part with some uncertainty as they were not completely certain about what the law did and did not say about zombies. “Anyway,” they continued, sitting down on a cushion across from Mrs. Dunnigan in order to force the old woman to look at them rather than the television, “does this mean that I can starve to death like anyone else?”

  “I’m not going to let you do that,” Mrs. Dunnigan said, very seriously in an even tone. She got up and moved into the kitchen.

  On the television screen, the news was playing a story about a werewolf on the loose. The man’s face appeared onscreen, looking startled, his teeth white and eyes cheerful and large. Z remembered the photo from a Wanted ad they had seen in the newspaper a few months ago. The news said that the man was an arsonist and wanted for murder. The police thought he’d killed someone near Salem who had been out jogging late at night.

  “He should know better than to jog about like that when it’s a full moon,” Mrs. Dunnigan said to Isadora and Angelina as she scooped two slices of what seemed to be apple pie onto mismatched plates and put one into a bowl for the cats.

  “What, you think it’s the werewolf?”

  “Of course it’s a werewolf.” Her glasses slid down her large nose as she sat down and she pushed them back up with a buttery finger. It left a smear of grease on her sand-colored skin. “Eat your pie.”

  Z compliantly took a bite of their pie. It was still hard to get anything down their throat. It felt like trying to swallow a marble or a stone. “My throat is dry.”

  Mrs. Dunnigan took a moment to finish chewing, looking at Z contemplatively. Marceline the cat had crept up onto her lap by this point and she patted the large gray feline’s head absently. “I’ll get you some milk or something.” She stood up, her chair creaking, and waddled into the kitchen. “Oof, I hurt all over. I think I have a cold or the flu coming on.” She touched her clammy forehead with a hand and swayed for a moment. “We both have to work hard to stay alive, don’t we?”

  Early in the morning, after lying staring at the ceiling for five hours, Z heard three cats trying to get out the door. They got up to let them outside, flicking on the dim yellow light in the front hall. Mrs. Dunnigan had hung a mirror in the hall for some reason, so when you were moving in the dark it always appeared that there was another person next to you. It creeped Z out.

  As they waited for the cats to come back in, they looked over at the clock. It was six. Almost time to get up anyway, Z thought, and turned on the television.

  “Late last night, police cornered Timothy Morris at his campsite and, after Timothy threatened the police by baring his teeth, he was shot. After resuming human form he was taken to Salem Hospital, where he died of his wounds.” The reporter who said this tried and failed to look concerned. “Police who searched the site report that the tent had evidence inside it of a conspiracy of werewolf terrorism. Police advise the public to stay calm, as there is no indication that there are any plans for attacks in the area, and werewolves are usually not dangerous except at the full moon.”

  A cat outside meowed. Z turned the television off. Something in their stomach felt unsettled.

  Bethany was growing increasingly distant. Their lockers were next to each other so they exchanged words with Bethany, but the conversations were brief and Bethany seemed guarded. They would stand next to each other long enough for Bethany to grab a jacket, or get her books, but then they would part. Z greeted Bethany in the hallway and Bethany did not reply. So much for friends supporting one in one’s time of loss, Z thought grimly.

  Mr. Holmes continued to drop hints about the undead. By the end of their second week back, Z noticed graffiti in the bathroom that said, Susan Chilworth Is a Zombie. Underneath, someone else had written, in blue, To the Incineration Station.

  Z tried to eat lunch, but often ended up going to the restroom to spit everything out again. The food was too dry to swallow, or too tough to chew, or too difficult to keep from vomiting. Several times they had thrown up in the toilet. They imagined their sinews coming unraveled as no sustenance strengthened them, imagined their face sunken and rotten and gray, covered in spots where blood had pooled beneath the skin.

  What made it worse was that that week, Mrs. Dunnigan also got sick properly. She had been coughing a little for a while, but then was struck low by a flu. She came home in the afternoon on Tuesday and said that someone had thrown a rock at the window of the shop, because the bookstore had a poster about a werewolf support group and a section on werewolf rights. Mrs. Dunnigan had put up a board over the broken window and put a Closed sign on the shop door. When she got home she went straight to bed. It was probably partly psychological, she told Z, but Z gave her a thermometer and the thermometer said Mrs. Dunnigan also had a fever. She stayed in bed for two days straight drinking orange juice and tea. Z had to figure out how to change the cat litter. Z stopped eating without Mrs. Dunnigan feeding them. When she finally got out of bed and announced it was time to go back to work, the apartment looked as if it had been home to two corpses, not one, for several days.

  Z began to wonder what would happen if Mrs. Dunnigan died. Which she was bound to do, Z thought, at some point.
What would happen to them if they started really decaying then, with no legal custodian? They remembered the policeman saying that a zombie without a custodian could be legally incinerated.

  They decided to ask Mr. Weber for help.

  Mr. Weber’s classroom was used for both biology and chemistry courses. Z, who was taking environmental science, didn’t see him much. Mr. Weber, who was more enthusiastic than many other teachers, had gone to great lengths to personalize the space. The room was ringed with tanks containing living amphibians and fish, who watched anyone who entered through the glass panes of their watery prisons. The filters in the tanks burbled constantly. The windows were partially obscured and shaded green with interesting potted plants Mr. Weber had brought from home. Tendrils of one enterprising vine plant had begun to grow along the ceiling.

  Z had waited fifteen minutes after the last bell before entering the classroom, as they did not want to talk to the other students or be jostled by anyone else as they exited. Z had not taken a class with Mr. Weber since the previous year, but his room was mostly the same. He sat marking a student’s test with a red pen and chewing pink bubble gum, blowing small sticky bubbles as he scratched corrections onto the paper. He looked the same as Z remembered from when he taught eighth-grade biology, though he was maybe a little heavier. His light yellow shirt contrasted with his deep brown skin and the empty whiteness of the room behind him. The room was mostly empty. There was a fat girl hunched in the corner, working on something and tapping on a calculator. She did not look up as Z approached Mr. Weber. Her dark hair formed a veil around her paper, hiding it from view.

  “Mr. Weber?” Z said.

  Mr. Weber glanced up from the paper, snapped his gum, and tapped the tip of the pen on the desk. “Susan? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  Z shifted awkwardly in their shoes. Z didn’t like being called Susan, and somehow it felt worse coming from Mr. Weber than from other teachers. Z cleared their throat. “I’m going by Z now.”