Out of Salem

by Hal Schrieve

  “Thank you for what you did,” they said.

  “What are friends for,” Tommy said, not making eye contact, but sort of smiling.

  10

  Aysel was eager to tell Z about what had happened. When she saw Z at lunch, she ran over to them at once and panted a hello. They were looking better already, Aysel thought. After only one dose of the potion, they looked much more whole than they had a few days before—the bags under their eyes were gone, and they looked less mottled and green and more like a pretty body lying in a casket. Their face was still pale and sickly-looking, and their skin still looked loose and weird, but it was all relative. Aysel, who hadn’t been sure if the spell would improve Z’s condition or just stop them from deteriorating, was glad that it seemed to be doing the former. Her friend’s face was less emaciated and flaky, and it looked as if the cartilage in their nose, which had been rapidly vanishing, had partially regenerated.

  Everything was going so well, Aysel thought. She could barely wait until they were safely out of the way in the hallway by the bathrooms to tell Z about Elaine.

  “Z, there are other werewolves in the forest. I met them last night,” Aysel hissed excitedly in a stage whisper.

  “Oh no,” Z said.

  “Actually I think I have a movie date with one of them this weekend. A friend date. She’s nice, her name’s Elaine.”

  “Aysel.”

  “She wanted to go to the movies with me. I don’t think her friend Chad’s going. She lent me this,” Aysel added, gesturing to the clothes she had on. “I couldn’t find my duffel bag.”

  “Aysel,” Z said, interrupting Aysel’s enthusiastic, somewhat frantic exposition.

  “What?”

  “You haven’t heard the news today yet, have you?”

  Aysel frowned, a cold terror spreading in her legs and back and stomach. “No. I came straight to school from the forest this morning. I didn’t get home. Why? What’s happened?”

  “It was on the news this morning,” Z said. They pulled a crumpled newspaper from the pocket of their jeans and handed it to Aysel. “It was at the grocery store—the Cash and Carry, I think. I mean, that’s not that far . . . It was really close to where you were. Wolves attacked him and bit his leg and his hand. The police came and shot the werewolves.” Z’s dry tongue came out of their mouth and traced their chapped lip. “If you saw other werewolves out there . . . Do you think they might know the werewolves who got shot?” Z asked.

  “I don’t know.” Aysel paused. “They said they had friends in town.”

  They stared at each other. Aysel ran a few fingers through her hair, feeling for pine needles she was sure were still there. Z crossed their arms and looked down at the ground.

  “This was covered on national news. It’s not just a local issue anymore. It’s Salem, Oregon’s Werewolf Problem.” Z flattened the newspaper with their hand. “It’s crazy. I don’t even know what’s going on. It’s so mysterious.”

  “I hope Elaine is okay,” Aysel said.

  “Me too.”

  Aysel almost forgot to ask how the potion had gone. “How did last night go for you?”

  “Tommy helped,” Z said. “He did the—the thing you did. Said the words. So now I have two casters. Which is probably why it worked so good. I feel better.”

  “Tommy?”

  “Shh,” Z said. “Yeah.”

  Aysel felt like she was losing track of everything that was happening.

  Azra was home already when Aysel walked in the front door. The kitchen smelled like tobacco. Azra looked up with a panicked expression. Aysel froze in the doorway, feeling the beam of her mother’s gaze as if it were a searchlight.

  “How are you?” Aysel asked to avoid her mother asking first.

  “How was the moon?”

  Aysel looked at Azra. “Fine,” she said. She decided not to mention Elaine. “I got lost and was late to school but there were no police where I was.”

  “Aysel,” Azra said, her voice low, “have you heard—”

  “I’ve heard about the deaths,” Aysel said. “Some werewolves attacked some guy named Hardeback and got shot.”

  Azra nodded slowly. “What do you know about it?”

  “Mom, I wasn’t there!” Aysel said.

  Azra walked quickly over and wrapped her arms around Aysel. “I know! Oh, oh. Aysel, I didn’t mean that. I meant what have you heard about the case? Do you know the whole story?” She pulled her head back and looked in Aysel’s eyes, her mouth drawing into a line.

  “Oh. I don’t . . . they attacked him and he was a part of the Werewolf Commission, right? Z told me. I haven’t seen any news coverage, just heard what people said.”

  Azra sighed. She let go of Aysel and walked over to the counter. She picked up a packet of cigarettes contemplatively, then put it down again. She had been trying to stop smoking in the house. “Hardeback—the man the werewolves supposedly attacked— had a gun on him when they found him and the werewolves,” she said. “They only mentioned it once all day, but I’ve been watching the news since seven this morning almost constantly. I kept going to the break room at work. They said it very fast, so nobody noticed.”

  “What does that mean?” Aysel asked.

  “It means he was out there to kill werewolves,” Azra said. Her voice was high, reedy, hushed. Aysel had only seen her like this a few times. Her nose was somehow narrower than usual, the skin stretched across her face in tight lines.

  “Oh,” Aysel said. Then: “Are you sure?”

  “In the forest, you can hear a werewolf moving from a ways off. Believe me, I know. There is no reason he would have stayed if he had not planned a confrontation.” Azra put her hands up to her temples. “Aysel, think about what I thought when I saw that, heard that he had a gun. Think about what I was thinking.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Aysel said. She felt awful suddenly.

  “If one man was out with a gun to kill werewolves, there were probably many men out to kill them. And after what happened last night I feel there aren’t many people on our side. Do you have any idea how dangerous it is to be wandering outside in this kind of environment? There are police cars all up and down the street near my office—”

  “Nobody knows, though!” Aysel interrupted in spite of the fierce and terrified gleam in Azra’s eyes. “Nobody knows I’m a werewolf.”

  “Tell me where you are going next time you go out when I am going to work,” Azra said. “That way I’ll feel better, like I’ll know where to look if something happens. Someone might try to hurt you, and that scares me.”

  “Okay.”

  “And for now, I’m going to drive you to and from school. No buses. If you want to go to Z’s house, or somewhere else, I will drive you there. I need to know where you are.”

  “Okay,” Aysel said. Then she realized this meant she probably wouldn’t get to see Elaine again anytime soon. She felt the tears—all stopped up until now in the back of her eyes—spill over. How dumb, she thought, but a sob ripped from her throat.

  “Oh, honey,” Azra said. A hand touched Aysel’s arm. Aysel wondered if she should tell her mother about Elaine. She decided against it. It wasn’t worth the explanation. She closed her eyes and went into the bathroom to wash her face. When she came out, Azra was watching television, leaning forward, her eyes red-rimmed.

  At lunch on Wednesday, Charley Salt and two of his friends were sitting at a blue Formica-topped table in the cafeteria with a clipboard in front of them. A large red poster hung on the edge of the table. A line of students were queued up and slowly approaching Charley and his friends. One by one, they went up and wrote something on the clipboard. Aysel squinted to see what was on the poster, but she couldn’t quite make it out. As Z and Tommy moved through the cafeteria and out the other side toward the doors that led outside, Aysel went over to the line to investigate.

  “What’s this line for?” she asked one of the girls who was waiting.

  “It’s something Charley’s c
ome up with,” the girl said. She had pink plastic glasses. Aysel vaguely remembered her from Spanish class. “The Youth Vigilante Squad. You sign a pledge to report any suspicious magical activity to the school or an adult. It’s in response to the attacks and the stolen books at the university.”

  “Oh,” Aysel said, feeling the prickle of terror already creeping up her arms like a fever.

  Another girl turned to look over her shoulder. “Charley’s also organizing a rally for this Thursday. Tomorrow, I mean. There’s a bunch of people going to protest the lack of action over the werewolf attacks, so he’s getting some people from the school to go.”

  “How thrilling,” Aysel said.

  “You should go, Aysel,” the girl said. Aysel was surprised that she knew her name. “Even if you hate Charley, it’s a good cause to be active about. It’s something everyone can get behind.”

  “Not me,” Aysel said. “I don’t like crowds.” She walked off and joined Z and Tommy outside. Tommy was performing a purification spell. Z was sitting on the ground watching him.

  “Tommy, why do you do that?” Aysel asked. “It’s really not necessary.”

  Tommy said nothing and finished the rite, then put the stone and candles back into his bag.

  “What was the line about, Aysel?” Z asked.

  “Something Charley’s done,” Aysel said. “Apparently there’s like, an anti-werewolf rally happening tomorrow, and Charley is recruiting the Youth Fascist contingent.”

  “That sounds terrifying,” Z said.

  “We should go.”

  “Why?”

  “It’d be funny. It’s bound to be a bunch of stupid people.” Aysel smiled. Z looked at her worriedly. “I mean, like, it’d be ironic,” she added.

  “I know.” Z still looked concerned.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. Tommy seemed to be eating only raw vegetables, cut up into little bitesized pieces. Aysel had brought leftover rice and lentils in a plastic container. She had taped it shut because that particular Tupperware always seemed to spill in her bag, and now she spent a while peeling the tape off. She had kept the food hot magically all morning, and Tommy looked over at Aysel’s food hungrily when the scent reached him. Aysel ignored him and watched Z. Z looked even better than the day before; they seemed more interested in food than a few days ago, too.

  “How do you feel, Z?” Aysel asked when Z’s mouth wasn’t full.

  “Surprisingly not dead,” Z said. “I’m hungry.”

  “We did good with the spell, then,” Aysel said proudly. “Not bad for two teenage shoplifters.”

  “Three,” Z said, nodding at Tommy.

  “Right,” Aysel said.

  Mr. Holmes announced that the class would be skipping forward in their history books significantly once more. This time, of course, it was obvious why he was doing it.

  “The werewolf civil rights movement will give you all background on werewolves,” he said to Aysel’s class. There was a nervous twitch to the way he handled himself now. “I think we can all agree that this is pretty valuable information, considering how werewolf-prone our town seems right now. So turn to Chapter Twenty-Eight and we’ll look at how that started, and where it went wrong. This week we’ll be just reading out of these chapters, so I’m counting on you to stay on top of your research projects outside of class.”

  Aysel’s paranoia was through the roof. She pulled her hair back in a ponytail then undid it again out of nerves. Mr. Holmes spoke of the Werewolf Riots of the 1920s and then moved onto how the 1960s had ushered in a new generation of furious radical werewolves which the government had, he said, rightfully put down. He studied the class with a grim eye during this lecture. At the end of it, Abigail Garcia raised her hand.

  “Yes, Abigail?” Mr. Holmes asked, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning back against the blackboard.

  “I’m sorry,” Abigail said. “I was wondering if you knew— are there more werewolves than there used to be?” The class around her looked at one another nervously.

  “Yes,” Mr. Holmes said. He looked seriously at Abigail. Aysel sensed that he felt a connection with her and imagined that he was protecting her. “It is true. It isn’t something that is widely acknowledged, but lycanthropy has been on the rise for over a century. Nearly tripled in occurrence.”

  “Why doesn’t anyone do anything?” a boy asked in the back of the class, without raising his hand. Aysel did not know his name. “Why don’t we kill them all with silver bullets?”

  “Now, hold on,” Mr. Holmes said. He raised a long-fingered hand and smiled with an odd little twitch of the mouth. “What needs to be remembered, of course, is that werewolves are not monsters to begin with. No,” he said as the eyebrows of the class went up, “it is like any other mental illness. They are just sick, and in need of care. Their magical energy is concentrated and ferocious. It is hard to control. Too much magic in one person can drive anyone to extremes.”

  “Extremes like killing people,” the boy said. Aysel thought his name was John, but it might have been Arthur.

  “It’s true that many werewolves become psychotic without treatment,” Mr. Holmes agreed. “This psychotic tendency is why werewolves can be found at the core of all kind of extremist political movements. They lack the ability to think rationally.”

  Ginger Lewis giggled and made a small howling noise. The students around her giggled in response, though their voices were strained. Aysel could tell they were afraid. She felt her scalp start to prickle, and before she could think about what she was doing, she raised her hand.

  “Mr. Holmes,” she said loudly, “I don’t think that what you’re saying is true.”

  Mr. Holmes paused and looked at her with an expression of vague surprise, immediately followed by a cold look of suspicion.

  “After all,” Aysel continued, “Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway were werewolves. And they wrote some of the best novels of the twentieth century. And they critiqued the war. And later, people knew the war had been bad.”

  “They also both killed themselves,” Mr. Holmes said shortly, and somebody behind Aysel snickered. Aysel felt as if her lungs had shrunk. She slouched down in her seat.

  “I still don’t agree with you,” she said, but quietly. She did not want to attract too much more attention.

  “Werewolves left untreated suffer instability their whole lives, even if they are artistic or creative,” Mr. Holmes continued. “Obviously, I think we all can agree that this doesn’t mean that we should kill them. That may have been a practical solution in the past, when there was no treatment and they threatened communities, but with the rise of electroshock, lithium treatments and other anti-psychotics, there have been many cases of werewolves making complete recovery and becoming ordinary, if nonmagical. The issue we are seeing in our society is that many more people than in the past are, for unexplained reasons, suffering from lycanthropy, and often they are not getting treatment in time. Left alone too long, werewolves become dangerous, sometimes killers. Or, as Aysel has reminded us,” Mr. Holmes added, as an afterthought, “they redirect their harmful urges within.”

  Aysel looked around at her classmates to gauge their reaction to this speech. They did not look as sedate as usual. Ginger was leaning forward in her seat, rapt, and did not appear to be doodling. Most of the students were studying the photographs in the textbook with deep interest. Aysel looked down at one from the 1960s. It was in black and white, and depicted werewolves with signs being beaten back by armed police. The signs once had slogans on them, but the slogans had been censored out into blurred gray areas. Aysel wondered what they had said.

  Mr. Holmes ended the class by asking them all to write a paper on werewolves using primary sources from science magazines. Aysel could have predicted this, but Mr. Holmes now made her more nervous than ever during history class. His panic and jumpiness had been replaced with a terrifying look of grim resolve, which left little lines around his mouth and eyes.

  �
�It looks as though he is about to condemn someone to being drawn and quartered,” Aysel told Z when they met up with Aysel in the halls between classes and began to walk together.

  “It’s really unnerving,” Z agreed. “He gave the same speech in my class.” They paused and looked over across the hallway. “Hi, Tommy.”

  Tommy raised his head from where he was pulling books out of his locker. He saw Z and gave them a timid little smile. He closed his bag and walked toward Z and Aysel. Aysel wasn’t sure what to think of Tommy; mostly she resented that she couldn’t talk about being a werewolf with Z at school when he was hovering.

  “It’s like people think there’s a war on,” Aysel said carefully to Z, nodding to Tommy to show him she saw him. “I feel like Mr. Holmes wants everyone to walk around with bats or guns.”

  “Well, he’s swallowed a lot of bullshit about it,” Tommy said. “He’s just saying what he thinks he has to say. It’s amazing what people can make themselves believe. Mr. Holmes is shaken up because of the whole Archie Pagan thing.”

  “They don’t even know that was a werewolf. Everyone just assumes,” Aysel said. “It could be the dumb dipshit was just jogging near a bear den.”

  “Archie Pagan was Tommy’s therapist,” Z said in a sort of warning tone to Aysel.

  “It’s okay,” Tommy said quickly. “He wasn’t a great guy. I just feel bad that he died.”

  “What does that mean, he was your therapist?” Aysel asked. She looked over at Tommy, squinting. “Just regular therapy? Did you know anyone who went there because of werewolf stuff? Electroshock?”

  Tommy swallowed audibly and frowned. “He was pretty confidential,” he said. “He didn’t talk about patients with other patients. But I knew he was doing electroshock for werewolves. He had a back room for it and everything. I think everyone who went to him probably knew.”

  “You aren’t a werewolf, though,” Aysel said very quietly. “I know it can have something to do with fey ancestry sometimes. Don’t worry if you are, I won’t tell.”