Out of Salem

by Hal Schrieve

  It was there on the edge of her vision at first, moving subtly in and out of bushes. It was very large, though, and even the most shadowy and quiet of shapes is eventually seen if it is very, very large. Within a few minutes, Aysel realized that there was not just one other wolf—there were two. One was large and black and scruffy, like Aysel except with more hair. The other was sleek and brown-red.

  As Aysel shook with the pain of the transformation, her eyes watering, they watched her for a second, and she looked back. The wolves were huge, and their eyes glowed deep soft colors in the darkness between the trees. Both of them slid in and out of the shadows around Aysel as she finished her transformation and curled up on the floor of the forest, waiting for the pain of the change to subside.

  Aysel had never seen another wolf on a full-moon night before. She had always been alone. She had never met other werewolves in their wolf form, she realized—and in fact, Aysel suddenly thought, in the conscious part of her mind which still formed words, I haven’t met any other werewolves at all, except when my mother is with me— like at that support group. Sometimes Aysel had doubted the existence of other werewolves, just because she didn’t see any of them around.

  She looked around for the wolves. They were gone.

  Aysel was conscious in a way that she hadn’t felt on a full-moon night in a long time—she had a goal. She needed to find the other wolves. She wanted to be with them, not alone. It occurred to her faintly that they would be safer together, though by this time she couldn’t remember what it was they would be safe from. The memory of the existence of police was distant, inconsequential, lost. Smells and the forest and the night were real. Aysel’s heart beat very fast.

  As she began to follow the scent trail left by the two wolves as they brushed against trees and left pawprints in mud, Aysel felt more aware of herself in her wolf body than she ever had before in her life. She was on the edge of something, pushing hard, hoping somehow to remain aware and not lose herself in the drive for sensation. There was a mission here. Aysel the wolf had never had a mission before, and it was exciting. The scent in the mud got stronger. Aysel was filled with a longing, a pining scream. She wanted to cry out. She wanted closeness, and other soft pelts against her own, and she wanted speed, and the things were wrapped up together in the way the wolf could not untangle. She had to run with the other wolves. She felt the worms move in the leaves beneath her feet as she paced quickly through banks of brambles, following in the wake of larger paws.

  The wolves did not want to lose her; it was not long before they let themselves be found.

  She came to the edge of the river and looked up. The large black wolf was watching Aysel from just a few yards away, where it stood looking down on her from on top of a fallen tree. Greens and browns all became black in the night, but they were different kinds of black. In the dark Aysel could make out the wolf’s eyes, the tapetum lucidum reflecting moonlight back at her. The second wolf, its red fur shadowy rust in the dark, stood a ways farther up the hill. Aysel couldn’t see its face, but she could hear its breathing and smell the blood in the fur around its mouth and the musky smell of its body and breath. Aysel drew near, and the wolves turned and raced off into the darkness. She followed them, feeling warm and happy that they had stopped and waited. They wanted her around. The air was cold and she could hear the owls and bats overhead. In the back of her mind, Aysel the witch, the human, was concerned, but as a wolf she was braver than when she was a girl. She wanted to be with other wolves. She wanted their protection and their affection.

  The wind rushed against Aysel’s eyes. The moon hung high and large in the sky, swollen and heavy behind the clouds. Aysel could smell the frost in the thick misty air. Eventually the wolves let her catch up. She smelled them. The other wolves took Aysel’s ears in their mouths and smelled her and leapt into her, jostling her. Then they ran together, their feet sometimes dipping into the prints made by the wolf ahead of them.

  There was a deer, in the night, and they all saw it from a distance. The creature bolted, unwise, and they pursued her. The wolves were very hungry, after all. They ran and were like dogs tearing through the underbrush, nothing stately or graceful or too overtly magical about it. Branches broke in their wake. The wolves were not delicate things, and they were new to the forest and still carried with them a frightening human scent. The deer realized soon that she was being pursued. She ran; it might have been that the deer knew then that she was not going to escape. From the long mouth came a cry of warning to any other creatures who might be nearby. Then the deer paused for a second to try to look behind her, and her leg caught in brambles, and she fell. The deer had fur which was sleek in the day. Her fur was dark in the night because the moon was still behind the clouds. Her breath fogged the air. She scrambled to her feet, but it was too late at that point.

  The black wolf leapt first, mounting the doe from behind and bringing her down. The red wolf tore into her belly. Aysel leapt into the fray at the scent of iron and salt and bit hard on her neck, which killed her so she stopped feeling the pain. Aysel fell back once the deer was dead and allowed the other wolves to eat, their noses dipping into the steaming body and coming up red. As they finished they watched her.

  Far away, distantly, there was the sound of a police siren. Aysel barely registered it.

  The black wolf ran into the night, out of the forest and into the surrounding fields; the red wolf stayed and with Aysel finished the deer, and Aysel and the red wolf took a long time eating. Their bodies were huge and needed nourishment. They sizzled with heat and magic and ran together in the dark.

  The impressions of the latter part of the night ran into one. There was the scream of an owl, the magic crackling like flame inside Aysel’s head—and what was that, oh, what was that noise? She was so tired.

  The morning came, and was cold.

  Aysel woke up human in the woods, her hair tangled in ferns, her body covered in crusted blood and dirt. Her eyes were half stuck shut. She tasted the iron and salt of blood in her mouth as she tried to wet her dry tongue. Alarmed, she clawed at her face and hair and hugged herself, looking around. Sticks cut into her thighs as she sat up. There was blood everywhere, and that panicked her for a second.

  Who had she killed? Flashes of wolves’ teeth bared themselves in her memory. After a few moments, though, she noticed the feathers. Aysel was relieved. That meant it was just a bird. On Aysel’s wrist and above her eye were scratches from the dead bird’s talons, scabbed over and dry under her fingers. They would heal in a week, but Aysel had read somewhere that when scars healed it wasn’t really the same as normal tissue. Aysel thought she remembered the article saying that if you stopped eating vitamin C, then the collagen would break down and your scars would eventually reopen. If that ever happened to me, Aysel thought, I would be nothing more than a series of open scars. A net of open wounds inefficiently enclosing the organs inside, like an envelope that’s been opened and inexpertly resealed.

  The morning air was cold on her skin and she got goose bumps all over her back. Aysel stood up and saw the dead barn owl lying on the ground a ways off, its heart and organs torn out and its head at an odd angle. It was messy and red. She felt a pang of guilt, but it evaporated as the cold wind blew against her. Who cared about barn owls, anyway? Aysel realized she had no idea where she was in the woods. She remembered, vaguely, running far and fast, after the other wolves. Her duffel bag must be over a mile away. She felt at her nazar necklace and sat down, drawing her hair around her, hugging herself, breathing hard. How was she going to get home without her clothes? The moon still rattled around in her head, shaking her body from the inside out, the echo of the supermoon.

  “Hell,” Aysel said. “Hell, hell, hell.” She tried to stand up, but then she couldn’t figure out how to do that without getting very cold, so she sat down and screwed her eyes shut and began to rock back and forth. She was not sure how long she stayed like that, panicking very quietly, hoping that someone would co
me and fix it for her. Nobody did, and she began to stand up again. Nervous energy radiated off her in sweaty waves. She took a few short steps, feeling the cold mist against her bare skin and shaking, her cut feet getting cut more by jagged branches.

  Suddenly Aysel felt a heavy warmth envelop her from behind. She couldn’t see anything. It was soft. Aysel pawed at the thing covering her. She realized after a moment that it was a very large flannel sheet; she pulled it off her head, fluffing her hair, and looked around. There was a noise coming from somewhere. Someone was laughing, long and high. Aysel shivered and whirled around, clutching the sheet to herself, looking for the voice. Aysel had to push a lot of hair out of her eyes and squint before she saw who it was. Eventually her eyes focused enough to pick out the shape of the girl standing near the base of a tree a couple of yards away.

  “I figured you might be needing that. It sucks to walk home naked,” the girl said, and laughed. “Sorry I didn’t find you sooner. I just woke up myself.”

  “Aah!” Aysel hugged the flannel sheet around her, terrified. She stood up shakily and stumbled backward, tripping over her own feet. She felt her hair warming and crackling with panicked magic. A few sparks shot in all directions, flakes of dried blood frying against her scalp. She tried to get up, but her knees were weak and wobbly. Run away, she thought, I have to run away. There was a sizzling as Aysel hastened back toward a clump of dark trees. She looked down to see that her foot had burned a hole in the layers of leaves that cover the ground, leaving a blackened footprint.

  “Whoa there,” the girl said, rushing over and standing in Aysel’s path. “Hold it, friend.” She was wearing about three sweaters and a pair of pants patterned with hunting camouflage— prints of leaves and sticks in earth tones. Her feet were bare. She had a brown face covered in freckles. There were deep rings under her eyes. Aysel could see that one of her teeth was missing as she laughed. “No need to set the forest on fire. You met me last night, remember? When we were wolves. It was a hell of a moon. I’m still sore all over.”

  Aysel’s mind went blank for a minute, but slowly her memories began to come into focus a little. She wasn’t used to trying to remember things from full-moon nights. Usually she tried to forget. Faintly, she recalled the red wolf, the way its eyes were the same as this girl’s eyes. “Oh,” she said weakly.

  “I’m Elaine,” the other werewolf said. She extended a hand. Her reddish hair was very long and curly, curlier than Aysel’s, but in a different, less frizzy way, the ringlets tight and tangled loosely. She didn’t look as if she had combed her hair in a long time. Her complexion was several shades darker than Aysel’s, and her outstretched hand was much browner than her face.

  “Aysel,” Aysel said, extending a hand while clutching at the sheet with the other. Elaine shook the hand lightly and then, loudly, laughed again. It was not a mean laugh.

  “Hell of a moon,” she said again. “Whenever the moon comes out like that I feel like I switched into a totally different universe where everything is made of like streetlamps and lightbulbs and sparklers. You just feel it all over your whole ass. You should put on some real clothes before Chad gets back,” she added. “You don’t want him seeing you naked.” She paused. “I hope he hasn’t gone far. Kind of scared about that. Especially after Tim got it.”

  Aysel laughed weakly. “Is Chad the other wolf?”

  “He’s my travel buddy, yeah, you know,” Elaine said. She talked very loudly, like she was trying to get your attention from across a street, only Aysel was very close to her and they were in a forest with no sound but the birds.

  “Where is he?” Aysel looked around, hugging the sheet to her, trying to make sure it was bundled to hide her body.

  “He’s out someplace—I’m not sure exactly. He was probably hunting on his own. He took off last night, remember? But he knows where our camp is. He should be back soon, probably.”

  Aysel squinted at Elaine. “Your camp?”

  “Yeah, our camp,” Elaine said.

  “Your camp out here? In the woods?”

  “Later we’re moving in with some friends, but we couldn’t until the moon was past. I hate this town already. It’s a pit of fascist scum and then, just like, boring shit. There’s not anything to do even, unless you want to watch all the people driving to Portland stop and eat at Subway or ride the carousel by the freeway.”

  “I live here,” Aysel said.

  “You’ll know all about it, then,” Elaine said. She turned and began to walk away, and Aysel followed, as she had the night before, dragging the sheet in the dirt behind her. “It kind of reminds me of like, those little dirt towns in the Rust Belt, except no mines or anything and probably less drugs.”

  The camp was not much. There was one tent, a battered two-person with holes in a patched tarp roof. In the trees around the tent there hung bags, presumably containing food. On a stump near the tent sat a huge water jug, a kettle, and two small mugs. The ground on the campsite had been cleared away roughly and a trench dug around the tent for irrigation. The black earth was swollen with moisture and Aysel wondered how you were supposed to sleep in the tent without getting wet.

  “Oh, also I think I found your glasses. I found your duffel, too, but it’s all wet. I can dry stuff out and give it to you later.”

  Elaine pulled out a pair of glasses which were definitely Aysel’s, then dug through a bag and threw Aysel a baggy black sweatshirt and pants, which were damp and smelled intensely of wolf-musk. She put them on quickly behind a tree.

  “Much better, right?” Elaine asked Aysel when she was done dressing. Aysel agreed that it was more pleasant to be in the woods on an early morning in March when one was wearing clothes. She tried to comb her hair with her fingers.

  The trees were light and their tops hidden in the morning mist. Aysel began to wonder about the campsite. It’s not permitted to camp on this land, she thought. Elaine was building a fire. She had firewood and lighter fluid and everything. There was a pit with ashes in it and old bits of charcoal that Elaine poked at as she set the fire alight. She had been here awhile.

  “Make sure nobody sees the smoke,” Aysel said. “We’re not even supposed to be in this forest. I don’t know who owns it.”

  “I’m camping out here,” Elaine said. “I can’t cook without a fire, and it’s March.”

  “I just said, make sure nobody sees the smoke,” Aysel said anxiously. “I come here every month, I need it to stay safe. You mean you don’t hide it when you make fires out here?”

  “What else are we supposed to do? Smoke is smoke. It goes up when you have a fire.” Elaine shrugged and pushed her hair out of her face.

  Aysel gestured with her hand and thought of the incantation for invisibility, and the smoke became invisible. It was still there—the smell would tell anyone that—but it was entirely hidden from view. If Aysel was good at one kind of spell, it was illusions. She had been using invisibility for years.

  “Hey, that’s a neat trick. How did you do that?” Elaine looked at Aysel, apparently impressed.

  “It’s an invisibility charm. It’s not sustainable for a long time, but smoke is just little particles of things, so you only need to make it invisible until it disperses.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “I don’t know, you just think the incantation.”

  “What’s the incantation?” Elaine asked.

  “It’s just . . . you know, a standard Latin incantation.” Elaine stared at her blankly. “Just like, invisibilia, and you think it and think about what you want to happen.” Aysel tried to figure out how to explain. “Do you know any illusion spells?”

  “I know how to make it look like I have makeup on when I don’t,” Elaine said, grinning, the hole between those teeth a distracting void. She scrunched up her face. Suddenly her lips were pink and her eyes larger and lined with thick lashes. It was startling and slightly unnerving.

  Aysel laughed aloud with surprise. “Okay, well, you think about the basic
incantation for that—did you learn it with a Latin base?”

  “I didn’t learn an incantation, a woman on a bus in Minnesota showed me how. You just scrunch up your face and think about models in magazines.” Elaine scowled again and pulled the corners of her mouth down. Her lips got redder and her forehead seemed to shrink.

  “Stop that, ugh,” Aysel said.

  “Well, excuse me,” Elaine said. Her face relaxed and all at once appeared unwashed and normal again.

  “I’ve just never learned a spell that way. I learned the invisibility spell in school. For things bigger than smoke you start out by chanting the incantation—non videbo vos, et videre non possumus, et latitant—”

  “Oh jeez, I don’t want to know anymore,” Elaine said. “Fancy Latin shit makes my brain go numb.”

  “Didn’t your school teach magic?” Aysel asked. Elaine couldn’t have gone to a nonmagical school. The last of those closed in the 1980s, when the Reagan administration was concerned that dangerous and uncontrollable new kinds of magic would spring up unless every student learned the basics of Latin spellcasting.

  Elaine laughed loudly. “I didn’t go to school after I turned twelve.”

  “Oh,” Aysel said. She scowled at the fire. She hoped that she hadn’t been rude, though she imagined she had been. “Why?”

  “I decided I wanted to be a beautician,” Elaine said with an absolutely solemn face.

  Aysel couldn’t tell if she was serious or not, so she said nothing.

  Elaine smiled at Aysel and poked the fire with a long stick. It shot up an array of sparks. “What do you think, dummy? They kicked me out. I became a giant wolf one day and the whole town knew and everyone at my house said no way, don’t want that one back. Happens to everyone eventually, you know? I was eleven. ”

  “Oh,” Aysel said.

  “Do you go to school? Like, still?” Elaine asked.

  “Yeah,” Aysel said.

  She turned to Aysel with an expression of some shock. “Like, a normal school?”