Bewere the Night

EXTRA CREDIT by Seth Cadin

Rubber wolf masks were on back order that year. Jedward found one hanging on a railing where the team used to race, and when he cut it down he was careful, like maybe the swaying made it alive. He almost chucked it in the cruncher on his way back to the dorms.

“Perspicacity,” Karolin dictated up her own sleeve. From under the bunker’s tall awning he heard her phone dial. He’d just listen a moment. Another moment. One more. She was talking about lunch, what she ate, and he felt strongly that he needed to know.

Then she said: “No, I left it at the chem lab,” and Jedward knew what she meant. She had one too, because that year everydid. And the gloves with the funny claws. When they were left in the sun too long, the ersatz fur stitched on over the wrists would turn from black to rusted brown.

“Hey, Kay.” He shook an ant off his sleeve and extended his knuckles, which she brushed lightly with her own.

“Jeddy. You got one? Is it real?”

He turned the inside out to show her the label: Herkimer, genuine. “Found it,” he said. “Know whose?”

He’d thought she might, but she had nothing to say. Her lip gloss smelled like the candles on his grandmother’s mantle. She shook her head and sent a spray of light flying from the colorful glass-beaded tips of her many braids.

“I should turn it in … ” he said hopefully.

“Give it here.” She snatched it, her expression shifting from vacant to canny, though in the critical moment she snapped her gum.

“There’s this bird you should hear—” What was he saying now, any old thing apparently.

She wasn’t listening, not to him or any pointless birds. Shut up, he told himself, and went on, “It’s just that it’s really interesting because it can do all these—and it only sings at night, well morning really, but early, like thirteen hundred.”

“A bird that sings in the morning,” she repeated, absently, but still with clear enough disdain. “Can I have this or what?” She lifted the mask and shook it a little like a dead scalp. “Sure. I just found it anyway. I don’t care.” His arches flexed and he heeled off, squeezing his eyes shut against the reflected sprites from her braids dancing on the brick wall.

Extra credit meant extra access—clean and simple. Go over the blue line into the purple, and you could float there forever. One plus up over average got you an hour. That got you another plus, and so on. Jedward knew everyin the labs very well, because the faces never changed. The masks did, of course; mostly wolves now, a few bats from last season, one unicorn with a saggy fabric horn. They dangled from fingertips or swung cheerfully from belt-loops, and their owners fiddled with them as the big glowing clock chucked through its daylight cycle.

After an hour at his station, he felt a padded hand grip the back of his neck. Plastic claws chattered over his skin, but he forced himself not to jump. Instead, he reached up swiftly to grip the glove, yanking it off and slapping it on the table. “Just sit and try not to be annoying.”

Danny’s bright evil grin, absent two bottom teeth, swung into view. His mask was wadded up and shoved into his front shirt pocket, which was at least two times too small for it, so bulging out like a shoplifted corsage. His fiercely combed-out puff of hair was now bleached out to red, striking against his deep brown skin. Jedward thought he looked like a clown. It was better than the horns from two seasons ago, anyway. The pointy ends always ended up tangled in branches when they’d gone hiking.

“Found a Herkimer,” he said as they passed components and chemicals between them, tweaking each other’s work. Danny was quick with sums and nimble-fingered, but he had no patience for plans, so Jedward set the pace and the tasks. “Kay Mendez took it, I mean I let her have it.” He felt his face swell and blemish as he heard the suggestive way this came out of it. “I mean—”

“Yeah Jeddy, I know what you mean,” Danny snorted at him. He jammed a wire against a Nano Pylon and soldered it without looking, too distracted by his own amusement.

Jedward wondered how far into Danny’s brain he could get before they pulled him off, if he were to, for example, grab the hot soldering iron and shove it directly into his best friend’s right eye. “It’s not that funny, jerkface.” Once he’d said it, he knew it would just make Danny worse.

But the red puff descended as Danny signaled his line-crossing with a quick nod. They’d never talked about it, but Jedward supposed it was obvious anyway. His loneliness felt like a hood, a sack on his head that everyone could see.

With deadly psychic accuracy, Danny changed the subject to an even worse one. “Are you going or what?”

Jedward stared into a beaker and tried to pretend he hadn’t heard the question, but this time Danny wasn’t going to fade on it. After a few hard elbows in the ribs he relented. “I still don’t know, I’ll just go if I do, or not, otherwise.”

“Yeah obviously.” Danny was almost done with his first board, somehow, though he never seemed to pay attention or care about his work. “You’ll go or you won’t, that is the question. What are you gonna do, start walking and see if you end up there?” Now he was the one who sounded irritable; Jedward knew he was personally offended by the very idea of indecision. “Just go. You’re being stupid.”

“So I’m stupid.” Jedward sped up, fingers agile as he wove copper wires through leather pegs, and then stopped. “It’s all stupid. You’re stupid. I’m going home.” He stood and kicked his chair back, though not so hard it would jostle someone else’s station. “You finish that, you’re better at it anyway.”

That would help a little, make up for lashing out. Danny was relatively free inside himself, but he still had feelings.

There would be a label check at the doors. Wildhaus didn’t throw chintzy parties. Sometimes a loser with a cruddy knock-off would crash in and flail around like a loon, pretending to be on the level, hoping nowould summon the door guardians. More often, the maskless would creep in and clutter up the walls, hoping—for what exactly Jedward couldn’t ken. To find a lost one like he had, maybe, but they’d never give it away. Of course, Danny’s mask was always the best, the freshest pressing, and he always treated it like an old dirty sock, tossing it around and cramming it wherever.

Jedward wondered, lying under his thin, felty wool blanket, whether Karolin would even speak to him if not for the aura of Danny that followed him like a bodyguard. But she would, of course she would. She was a nice girl. She had a lot of growing up to do, that was all.

He crossed his arms in the dark privacy of his own bunk. Look out for yourself for once, he told the magic circle of Danny in his mind, and vanished it in a poof of smooth tan smoke. I’m smarter than you think. I know how to beat the Herks.

“Sure buddy, I’ll go to the party,” he said out loud, feeling good again at last. From the bunk above he heard Danny’s head lift from his pillow and then drop again.

They always started at noon. Even the freshest faces couldn’t peel off in time for moonup without some time to soak. Anyway there were streamers to hang, tall translucent towers of rapidly crystallizing sugar to press and mold into fantastic shapes, all the party details. It was a colorful year. Jedward was glad about that. Last season had been monochrome, which made his eyes feel like they were full of static. Danny had looked sharp in his checkered linen suit, though, that was true.

Eyes were all that was left by three. Soaked in, the masks began to ripple, and tiny silver-blue bubbles appeared at the edges where some skin was still left showing, spreading out over the backs of their heads and down their necks. A rubberized hand feels like a suede bag full of sausages and sticks. Jedward, creeping in from the gallery, was careful to keep a few feet of clearance all around him as two-legged, half-melted wolf-people snittered and worbled through the arches and into the den.

In the foyer there would be a messy hill of jeans and windbreakers looming up under a hanging rack of blouses and ties, with no one bothering to guard it. Jedward stepped through the spaces in the crowd and went there. As soon as he was alone, he touched his own face to reassure himself it was still real.

He had the new formulation in his bag. With nothing much else to do at night he’d always been up in the purple. He stripped out of his old jeans and pilly sweater and buried them, digging out a much nicer set before striding out confidently toward the wallflowers and poseurs he knew he would find leeching around the back gate.

“You guys looking for some fresh masks?” He smiled at them like Danny, like the whole world could just come right up and sit in his lap.

He sold out in less than fifteen minutes. Looping around front, he listened to his own boots crunching on the gravel and thought about the kids back there. Somehad to look out for them, even if they were desperate and annoying, that much was clear. You could do anything to them, or with them, for that matter. Anycould.

He saw Karolin and Danny when he was still out of earshot. They were hanging around the front arch, smoking through their masks and avoiding eye contact.

“It kind of sucks in there,” he said by way of greeting as he reached them. “Why don’t we just go out to the woods?”

Kay’s mask distorted as she rolled her eyes beneath it, briefly giving her the appearance of a blanked-out zombie-wolfgirl. The plastic teeth already looked more like bone. It wasn’t even the one he’d given her. “Jeddy, there are bugs in the woods,” she said, barely patient with his foolishness. “And Tynesha brought those rum balls. And it’s almost time anyway. We’d never make it out there. Your birdy girlfriend can wait, just come inside.”

“Actually it’s a juvenile male,” he heard himself saying, and wished he wasn’t. “Looking for a mate by showing off his repertoire.”

“You always want to go,” Kay told him, stubbing out her smoke and yanking open the Wildhaus door. “You always want to be somewhere else.”

“It’s not my fault most places suck,” he said to the door as it swung shut with awkward slowness.

“Maybe it is.” Danny sounded serious, but he smiled. “If you’re the common denominator.” He leaned on the wall and lit a second brown cigarette from the first. “You notice she said that while leaving.”

“I like that she’s not fake,” Jedward said, because it was what he always said in his mind when practicing for this inevitable conversation. “She says whatever she’s thinking and does whatever she feels like.”

“Yeah, you know who does that? Assholes.” Danny’s anger, always flittering around his head, dive-bombed into the discussion again. “You just like it because you’re all scrunched up on yourself. You go around like nothing means anything, like you’ll wake up any time now. And it makes everythink you think you’re better than them.”

Danny loomed up so close suddenly that Jedward was sure he was finally mad enough to actually hit him, and then for a second it seemed like maybe he was going to do something even weirder, but instead he fell back and sulked on the wall again. Nothing, Jedward realized. He just felt nothing at all.

“Something’s going to happen, Danford,” was what his mouth said this time. “You have to come and see.”

The woods were cool and the color of glowing scallions. Fresh green leaves filtered the moonlight into tinted planes and striated beams, so every gap in the canopy became a projector and every flat surface an empty movie screen. Back at Wildhaus, the plastic wolf-people were probably gathering under the big skylight, waiting for the peak, the final hit that would take them over the edge. Into nowhere. Nothing. Another party. Another night nowould remember, except who had the Herks to make it in. One plus up got you an hour. Everykept running in the same direction and noever moved.

Not tonight. They could hear it coming from two miles off—a rumble, a rustle that gained bass until it became a steady throb. Danny grabbed his hand and stood too close, and Jedward could see the silvery-blue ripples starting to pulse and shine along the seams of his mask—where they would be, anyhow, if he weren’t fully soaked now. Along the edges and between the lines, and the light was entirely unnatural, especially here, and then the wolf face stared back at him without Danny inside it.

But Jedward knew he was there, cheery and managerial, pulling the mental levers from inside. The paw on his arm felt warm again, articulated and alive, and the claws were real enough to lightly tear his shirt where they touched it. The legs were basically the same, though bright red fur now ran down Danny’s chest and belly and thighs. It wasn’t quite thick enough to hide his genitals when he was standing, so with a very unwolflike gesture he plucked a few leaves and soft green stems from the bushes around them and wrapped them around his waist. They’d have loincloths on in Wildhaus, though some of them not for very long.

Jedward offered his arm again once his friend was covered, then on an impulse threw the arm up around Danny’s fuzzy shoulders, feeling the new muscles tensing. Standing side by side, facing the road, they listened.

The rumble died away into a heavy quietness. Then a howl rang out, far off, and another answered it. Shrieks followed, coming closer as the Wildhaus partiers fled stupidly towards the woods, because that was what they always did before if the cops crashed in. Faster and stronger now, they reached the edge of the trees in just a few minutes, and Jedward hugged Danny closer as they heard crashing and stumbling all around them. Then another howl, this one taken up almost instantly by a pack that was clearly now unified and on the move. Jedward had sold two or three of his new masks to some of the stragglers, to hand out to their friends, so he figured the real wolves would well outnumber the plastic ones, since there were always more people outside than in.

Finally they saw one, and Jedward felt floaty with pride. It was beautiful, seamless and soft, flowing as it ran like a soft bead of black mercury with fur and white jaws. Nearby they heard plastic wolf-people trying to force unfamiliar, stiffened limbs to climb trees, and another shriek as someone fell from one. The black wolf that had just run by them pounced, but the Herks were thick and tough especially now, and its jaws could only pull away long gooey strands of furry morphic rubber, many of which snapped back onto the owner in warped crisscrosses and ugly lumps.

Danny, watching this, made the noise which Jedward recognized as a human laugh coming out of a mask-warped mouth. “Right,” he said, muffled but clear enough, uncannily. He sounded relieved, as if he’d been a little worried his friend might have finally snapped. “Okay, it’s funny. But these are good, really good. You can’t even see that they’re masks.”

“That’s because they aren’t anymore,” Jedward said, tightening his arm on Danny’s shoulders in his excitement. “The masks are gone once triggered. One-use.”

Danny’s mask stared at him as the futile chaos of growls and shrieks and scampering around them in the dark woods continued. “Do you realize,” he said finally, “how stupid rich we’re going to be?”

“No.” Jedward didn’t mind; he knew this was how it would go. He’d been there too at first. Danny would come around, though. He would get it, and maybe Kay would too. Once she tried one, and maybe went on a run with him. Then she’d understand that he didn’t think he was better than anybody. He just wanted things to be fair.

“No? Why? You … we made it, right?”

“Yeah,” Jedward said. “But it’s really one-use. One time. After that, it just happens on its own. Every full moon. For anythat wants to.”

Two more wolves ran by them, heads up with pleasure at the chase. They ignored Danny, who was funny and always remembered names. The masked who’d managed to get into trees were clinging and whimpering above, and Jedward knew some of them would wait there until morning rather than risk ruining their genuine Herks, not yet understanding that they were worthless now.

“I don’t know, buddy, if you want us to make a living you might want to change the formula,” Danny said slowly, doing math in his head and finding the brick wall at the end of the figures. “I don’t think it’ll work.”

Jedward took a flashlight and a rope ladder from his bag and began sweeping it through the trees, looking for Karolin’s beads shining in the white beam. She might be really scared, and if he helped her down, she might be really pleased.

“It’s already working,” he said.