Beetle Juice (2 page)

“Why?”

“Look behind you.”

Wetzel turned around and looked at the stairs. There were several mice. “That's nothing. Every house has mice.”

“There aren't ordinary. I can read enough of their little minds to know.”

Now he saw that the mice were sitting up on their haunches, staring at the two people with uncanny focus. “What are they?”

“Were-mice. Like were-wolves only smaller.”

“Were-wolves,” he echoed. They were wolves that changed form, just as grown people did. The ability was less common in other animals, but did occur. “But they're not dangerous.”

“These are. They change into poisonous snakes, and they don't like us.”

“We're in trouble,” he breathed.

“I wish I'd picked that up from the adult minds. But they weren't thinking about this place. It's only conscious thoughts that can be read. The rest is an indecipherable tangle.” She had adult vocabulary, too.

Wetzel looked around. He saw a loose stone in a corner. He ran to pick it up. “I'll try to fight them off while you escape.”

Willa stood nervously close beside him, watching the mice. “You're brave,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek. He really liked that, this time, but kept his eyes on the mice.

Now the first one changed. It became a full-sized cobra. Were conversions weren't limited to the size of the original creatures; they could be larger or smaller. What didn't change was the mind: they would be no smarter than mice. But in this situation, mice were plenty smart enough. They probably preyed on larger creatures, when they had the chance. As they did now.

The cobra slithered toward him. Wetzel held his stone, ready to try to bash it on the head when it struck, but he was not at all sure he would be fast enough.

Then he got a notion. Why wait helplessly for it to attack? Why play its game? Better to make it play
his
game.

Except for one thing. “Are they telepathic?”

“Not that I know of. They're
animals.”

“Good. Then I can surprise them. You pick up the candle and use it to stop any snake from approaching you; they'll be fearful of fire.”

“Good idea,” she agreed, picking up the candle and holding it defensively before her.

Wetzel dived for the snake, and bashed his rock down. On its tail.

The cobra whipped around, striking at him. But Wetzel was already backing away. He had indeed surprised it, and had made the first score.

The snake, injured, did not attack. It transformed back into the mouse. With a bashed tail. It fled.

“You're so brave,” Willa repeated.

“I'm not brave! I'm scared.”

“That's what bravery is. To be scared, but to do it anyway.”

It did not require human intelligence to realize that the prey was fighting back. Three more mice transformed, becoming a copperhead, a cottonmouth, and a rattlesnake. The third one slithered forward.

“I can't get around those,” Willa said.

“Maybe you can, if you leap over them when I bash one.”

Wetzel oriented on the rattlesnake. He was terrified, but that lent him strength and agility. He could bash its tail. It might bite him, but at least he could make it hurt.

The rattlesnake, seeing his attention on it, stopped. But now the two others advanced, from either side. He turned to face the cottonmouth. It halted, and the rattlesnake resumed its advance.

“They're corralling you,” Willa said. “That must be the way they hunt.”

“I'll go after the rattler. You jump and run up the stairs.”

“I'll try.” Then, after a pause, “I think I love you.”

Wetzel might have made a smart retort, if he had been able to think of one. If he wasn't remembering that second kiss on the cheek. If he wasn't so distracted by the need to handle the snakes. “Go!” he said, and dived for the rattler, swinging the stone.

Then something else happened. Three larger rodents came scrambling down the stairs. Each oriented on a snake. In moments they had the snakes by the neck and were shaking them to death.

“Mongooses!” Willa said, amazed.

In moments the mongooses transformed to human beings: two men and a woman, members of the village. “Come with us,” the woman said severely. Then she paused, looking at Willa. “Put on your clothing.”

Wetzel knew the two of them were in serious trouble. They had forgotten to keep their thoughts low; they must have been mentally screaming loudly enough to be heard far away, and the adults had responded.

He dropped the stone. Meekly, Willa dressed, and they went with the woman. The adult said not another word, but her disapproval was like an icy cloud. She merely marched them back to their dorms and let Willa go into hers.

All she said as Wetzel went to his dorm was “Say nothing to anyone.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Then he was inside, and he hadn't even been missed. He returned to his bed and lay there, shaking. What would happen to him tomorrow?

Finally he slept. What a day it had been!

As it turned out, nothing happened. No one said a word to him. The routine was completely ordinary.

Except for one thing: when they had the common play period with the girls, Willa was not there. She was simply gone. No adult said anything about her absence; it was as if she had ceased to exist. The other children looked a bit nervous, but did not inquire. Neither did Wetzel.

That was the way of it. Wetzel suffered no apparent consequence for his misdeed. It was as if it hadn't happened. Maybe this was the payback for his silence: he would receive no open rebuke as long as he kept his mouth shut.

Willa had paid the price for both of them. Maybe because of her precocious telepathy, an ability that children weren't supposed to have. Maybe because she had undressed most of the way in his presence. Those were the only things he could think of that she had done that he had not. He hated the fact that she was gone, just when he was starting to like her.

He was sure adults were monitoring him telepathically; sometimes he felt the faint traces of their presence, just as Willa had told him. Immediately he thought about chocolate cake. He knew it was all right as long as he was not thinking about the adventure of the night. He trained himself to think of other things. He wasn't sure why, since the adults knew all about the visit to the haunted house, but concluded that if he didn't want to be abruptly disappeared the way Willa had, this was his best course.

However, whatever he managed not to think of, he made sure to stay out of mischief. Maybe he was on probation, and the next offense would get him wiped out. It occurred to him that this could be a very efficient way to make an unruly child behave. Maybe other children had transgressed, and been similarly cautioned, and so no one else knew. It was certainly effective. He was now a good child, perfectly behaved, and he would stay that way.

Then he felt the first touch of telepathy. Not the feather touch of an adult checking his mind; this was his own precocious awareness of the minds of those around him. Their likes and dislikes, their prides and shames, their hopes and fears. All of them very like his own, but
not
his own.

Wetzel froze, mentally. He could not afford this! Discovery would surely banish him, as it had Willa. But what could he do?

He could hide, as he had been doing. Only now he had to make it more effective mentally. Chocolate cake would not be enough; that was merely a noise cover. He needed a place to hide illicit information. He needed his mind to be as innocent and well behaved as his body. But where?

Maybe the haunted house. He was now satisfied that it wasn't haunted, indeed that there were no supernatural spooks, as Willa had believed. But it was forbidden, for good reason: the were-mice lurked there. He would never dare go there again. So it was an ideal hiding place, not physically, but mentally. A place of fear where his thoughts should not go.

He worked on it as quickly as he could, picturing the decrepit house, the dust, the stone cellar, the were-mice, evoking the fear. Here was his storage place for whatever he could not afford to have known. Only he could enter here; fear was a barrier to all others.

Well, not exactly. The adults were not afraid of the were-mice; they could handle them. It was children who were in danger. But if an adult checked Wetzel's mind and felt the fear there, that person would know that this was a memory Wetzel was trying to hide from himself, and would not explore it further. If Wetzel had figured it out correctly.

He worked on his mental refuge, shoring up the fear. Then he did a mental exercise he would never even have thought of before this need arose: he dragged his secrets there. He stacked them in the stone cellar to be guarded by the poisonous snakes. Who would ever find them there?

The biggest secret was hard to drag. That was his dawning telepathy. He couldn't stop it from happening, but he could bury it, keeping it out of his conscious awareness. Then when he went to hide in the cellar himself, he could review what had come in.

The most immediate things were the impressions other children had of him. One boy thought he was too goody-goody. Well, he was, now, deliberately, so the assessment didn't bother him. And there was a vital key: it was not so much the information, but how he felt about it that counted. If he did not react emotionally it was largely invisible.

A girl thought he was cute. That would have been interesting, except that Willa had liked him and almost shown him her secret place, and been severely punished. That made him extremely wary of girls who might have anything similar in mind. So it was easy not to react, which was what counted.

Mostly, the other children found him indifferent, nothing special. Just like themselves. That was exactly how he wanted to be viewed. It was a form of anonymity.

Day by day he perfected his hiding place. The advantage of having it mental was that he could access it at any time, and feed new secrets into it before an adult could snoop. It became almost automatic. On the surface he was the same as he had been. Only down inside the scary cellar of the haunted house was his new status displayed. That was his storm shelter, his one safe place.

It helped that no one was really trying to spy on him. The feather touches were routine, checking him as one of many children, satisfied to find what they expected: a boy who really liked chocolate cake and had little ambition for anything else. His official identity.

Meanwhile the schooling was rigorous. They had to learn every nuance of the language, and master the written form too. They studied the history of their species, which was like none other known: telepathic weres with divergent forms. Wetzel's favorite teacher, Weava, was a were-deer, quite pretty in both her forms. “When you come of age, each of you will discover your own alternate form,” she explained. “No one knows ahead of time what it may be, and we don't know what determines it. So we try to educate you about all types of animals, large and small, so that when it happens you will at least know something about your kind. Questions?”

Wetzel had one. “What about were-animals? How are they different from us?” Because he had encountered the were-mice, even if he never spoke of them.

“That is an excellent question, Wetzel,” Weava said. Her spot favor made him feel good. “The were ability extends widely, and many animals do have it too. But they are more limited. For example, were-mice can transform to snakes, nothing else. Humans can transform into virtually any kind of animal, and retain human intelligence in those other forms.”

“What do snakes transform to?” a girl asked.

“Birds. And birds transform to other reptiles.”

It was an interesting lesson. Wetzel, like the other children, wondered what his alternate form would be. A tiger? An eagle? A crocodile? He hoped it wouldn't be a mouse.

Part of education turned out to be the arts. The children were encouraged to draw, paint, sculpt, sing, dance, or act. Different ones had different talents. Wetzel's turned out to be drama: he could play a role convincingly, once he learned it. He enjoyed being in plays.

Two years later another boy developed precocious telepathy. Wetzel could tell, because the child was reveling in it, peeking into girls' minds to see their secrets, trying to see what they saw in the mirror when they undressed and washed. He discovered that he could make them focus on such things when he spoke of them: “What's in your panties?” They told him to go wash out his mouth with soap, but their minds showed their naked bodies. He also cheated at guessing games by reading the answers in the other minds.

It was becoming clear to Wetzel why the adults did not want children to have telepathy. It was too easy to abuse, when most lacked it. Wetzel had not abused it, mainly because he had been too busy hiding it.

Within a day that boy was gone. No one spoke of him thereafter.

They grew and learned, until it seemed there was nothing more to learn. But there was, as they were drilled in discipline. They had to fathom right and wrong, and do what was right, regardless of their preferences. It was one big bore, but they had no choice. No one protested, because no one wanted to disappear.

At last their group reached the magic age of eighteen, the official age of maturity. They knew there would be drastic changes, because they were about to become adults. Already their bodies were developing, especially the girls, who formed breasts and wider hips.

Now they were addressed in a special class, apart from the younger ones. “Soon you will be achieving the art of telepathy,” Weava the were-deer said. “It normally happens at the time of puberty. Then a year or so after puberty comes your first transformation. That is when you will discover your alternate form.”

This was interesting, though familiar. It got more so.

“You, the class of you, have been suppressed, so that none of these changes occurs prematurely. Now that suppression has been released, and you will be discovering the formidable assets and liabilities of the adult state. This month we will guide you to the realization of your inherent telepathic ability.”