“Hold your hats, boys,” said the man in the costume. “Here I go again.”
“Eka!” Fearing thundered. “Dva tri chatur! Pancha! Shassapta! Ashta nava dasha ekadasha!”
He paused. There was always the danger that at this moment some scholar in this university town might recognize that the invocation, though perfect Sanskrit, consisted solely of the numbers from one to eleven. But no one stirred, and he launched forth in more apposite Latin: “Per vota nostra ipse nunc surgat nobis dicatus Baal Zebub!”
“Baal Zebub!” the congregation chorused.
“Cue,” said the electrician, and pulled a switch.
The lights flickered and went out. Lightning played across the sanctuary. Suddenly out of the darkness came a sharp bark, a yelp of pain, and a long-drawn howl of triumph.
A blue light now began to glow dimly. In its faint reflection, the electrician was amazed to see his costumed friend at his side, nursing his bleeding hand.
“What the hell—” the electrician whispered.
“Hanged if I know. I go out there on cue, all ready to make my terrifying appearance, and what happens? Great big hell of a dog up and nips my hand. Why didn’t they tell me they’d switched the script?”
In the glow of the blue light the congregation reverently contemplated the plump little man with the fringe of beard and the splendid gray wolf that stood beside him. “Hail, O Lower Lord!” resounded the chorus, drowning out one spinster’s murmur of “But my dear, I swear he was much handsomer last year.”
“Colleagues!” said Ozymandias the Great, and there was utter silence, a dread hush awaiting the momentous words of the Lower Lord. Ozymandias took one step forward, placed his tongue carefully between his lips, uttered the ripest, juiciest raspberry of his career, and vanished, wolf and all.
Wolfe Wolf opened his eyes and shut them again hastily. He had never expected the quiet and sedate Berkeley Inn to install centrifugal rooms. It wasn’t fair. He lay in darkness, waiting for the whirling to stop and trying to reconstruct the past night.
He remembered the bar all right, and the zombies. And the bartender. Very sympathetic chap that, up until he suddenly changed into a little man with a fringe of beard. That was where things began getting strange. There was something about a cigarette and an Irish tenor and a werewolf. Fantastic idea, that. Any fool knows—
Wolf sat up suddenly. He was the werewolf. He threw back the bedclothes and stared down at his legs. Then he sighed relief. They were long legs. They were hairy enough. They were brown from much tennis. But they were indisputably human.
He got up, resolutely stifling his qualms, and began to pick up the clothing that was scattered nonchalantly about the floor. A crew of gnomes was excavating his skull, but he hoped they might go away if he didn’t pay too much attention to them. One thing was certain: he was going to be good from now on. Gloria or no Gloria, heartbreak or no heartbreak, drowning your sorrows wasn’t good enough. If you felt like this and could imagine you’d been a werewolf—
But why should he have imagined it in such detail? So many fragmentary memories seemed to come back as he dressed. Going up Strawberry Canyon with the fringed beard, finding a desolate and isolated spot for magic, learning the words—
Hell, he could even remember the words. The word that changed you and the one that changed you back.
Had he made up those words, too, in his drunken imaginings? And had he made up what he could only barely recall—the wonderful, magical freedom of changing, the single, sharp pang of alteration and then the boundless happiness of being lithe and fleet and free?
He surveyed himself in the mirror. Save for the unwonted wrinkles in his conservative single-breasted gray suit, he looked exactly what he was: a quiet academician; a little better built, a little more impulsive, a little more romantic than most, perhaps, but still just that—Professor Wolf.
The rest was nonsense. But there was, that impulsive side of him suggested, only one way of proving the fact. And that was to say The Word.
“All right,” said Wolfe Wolf to his reflection. “I’ll show you.” And he said it.
The pang was sharper and stronger than he’d remembered.
Alcohol numbs you to pain. It tore him for a moment with an anguish like the descriptions of childbirth. Then it was gone, and he flexed his limbs in happy amazement. But he was not a lithe, fleet, free beast. He was a helplessly trapped wolf, irrevocably entangled in a conservative single-breasted gray suit.
He tried to rise and walk, but the long sleeves and legs tripped him over flat on his muzzle. He kicked with his paws, trying to tear his way out, and then stopped. Werewolf or no werewolf, he was likewise still Professor Wolf, and this suit had cost thirty-five dollars. There must be some cheaper way of securing freedom than tearing the suit to shreds.
He used several good, round Low German expletives. This was a complication that wasn’t in any of the werewolf legends he’d ever read. There, people just—boom!—became wolves or—bang!—became men again. When they were men, they wore clothes; when they were wolves, they wore fur. Just like Hyperman becoming Bark Lent again on top of the Empire State Building and finding his street clothes right there. Most misleading. He began to remember now how Ozymandias the Great had made him strip before teaching him the words—
The words! That was it. All he had to do was say the word that changed you back—Absarka!—and he’d be a man again, comfortably fitted inside his suit. Then he could strip and play what games he wished. You see? Reason solves all. “Absarka!” he said.
Or thought he said. He went through all the proper mental processes for saying Absarka! but all that came out of his muzzle was a sort of clicking whine. And he was still a conservatively dressed and helpless wolf.
This was worse than the clothes problem. If he could be released only by saying Absarka! and if, being a wolf, he could say nothing, why, there he was. Indefinitely. He could go find Ozzy and ask—but how could a wolf wrapped up in a gray suit get safely out of a hotel and set out hunting for an unknown address?
He was trapped. He was lost. He was—“Absarka!”
Professor Wolfe Wolf stood up in his grievously rumpled gray suit and beamed on the beard-fringed face of Ozymandias the Great.
“You see, colleague,” the little magician explained, “I figured you’d want to try it again as soon as you got up, and I knew darned well you’d have your troubles. Thought I’d come over and straighten things out for you.”