The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  Joachim shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I think if a wendigo starts to eat you, they don’t stop eating until there’s nothing left. But, yeah, maybe like a vampire—I read a book about vampires once that said in some stories, you don’t have to get bitten to turn into a vampire, you can just be a really evil guy, and maybe you’ll come back to life as one. Werewolves, too, you don’t have to get bitten—there are tribes who have stories about witches who wear wolf skins.”

  “Does your, ah, tribe believe that?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Never heard any stories like that, at least. I think it’s Navajo, maybe? I don’t remember.”

  “I guess when you have wendigos you don’t need werewolves.”

  Joachim grinned. “Ah, but wait, there’s more. Lots of the Ojibwe—really all the Algonquin peoples—tell different stories about the wendigo. There’s even a Lake Windigo up on the Leech Lake reservation. But here on Pres du Lac we’ve got our own twist. Which is, we’re supposed to be the ones who defend the world from wendigo, or at least, defend this part of the world. I’m not real sure how we’re supposed to do that. Something about being empowered by the great spirits and embracing the primal power of the beasts of the earth, but I’ve never been real clear on what that means, exactly. There’s a really old dance, no one’s done it for years and years, but the elders here started doing it again a couple of years ago, they go around a fire backwards and play drums, it’s weird, not like any other tribal dances I’ve seen. It’s supposed to stop the wendigos, or hold them back, or remind people it’s not okay to eat other people—I’m not sure which.”

  I frowned. “Huh. Why’d they start doing it again? Did somebody see one?”

  Because of the dark skin and the fading light, it took me a moment to realize he was blushing, but he was definitely looking away. “It’s… really stupid. Beyond stupid. I shouldn’t even say anything.”

  I leaned in to him, letting one of my breasts brush his arm. “Oh, now you have to tell me.”

  He cleared his throat. “It’s, ah… do you know the Scullens? And the Scales?”

  “Dr. Scullen and his children?” I said, avoiding mention of Edwin’s name. Now this was interesting. “Sure, I’ve seen the kids around at school, I guess.”

  “They’re not welcome on the reservation,” Joachim said. “The elders say they—well, at least Argyle and his wife—they say they’ve been here, in Lake Woebegotten, before. And they made a treaty with the elders back then—like my great-great-grandfather.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  He hunched over. “God, it’s so embarrassing. The elders think Argyle is a wendigo, disguised as a human. That his whole family is, which doesn’t even make sense, because wendigos are supposed to be pretty much solitary. That they’ve lived for decades, maybe hundreds of years, and that they used to live here, and went away for a long time, and then came back. Well, Argyle and his wife came back, the rest of them are newer, I guess.”

  I stared at him. Edwin was clearly something, but I didn’t think he was a cannibal. “Whoa. I mean, I met Dr. Scullen at the hospital. He looked pretty human to me, and he didn’t take a bite out of my face or anything.”

  He held up his hands. “Of course not. The whole thing is ridiculous. People don’t live forever. Or turn into monsters. Look at that soccer team that crashed in the Andes, didn’t they end up eating each other? Nobody there turned into a monster. It’s dumb.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “But if your people are supposed to protect the world from the wendigos, what’s with making a treaty?”

  “Apparently Argyle is a reformed wendigo. Instead of eating people, he just drinks animal blood. Which, since a wendigo is by definition a monster that eats people, if you stop eating people, are you even still a wendigo?”

  “Drinking blood? That sounds more like—”

  “I know! I told my dad that drinking blood sounded like vampires more than wendigos, and he just told me our people don’t have any legends about vampires, we have legends about wendigos, so that’s what they are. Which doesn’t exactly clear things up.” He shook his head. “Are they scared of crosses and garlic or guys dancing backwards and drumming badly? Who knows. Anyway, they aren’t welcome here on the rez. Nobody here goes to the hospital where Dr. Scullen works if they can help it.”

  Edwin, a wendigo. Or, better yet… a vampire. Did I believe in those things? I didn’t believe in ghosts—dead people are just dead—but I found within myself the capacity to believe in monsters. And Edwin was certainly something, although an impossibly powerful legendary predator seemed more likely (and interesting) than rural teen superhero. This would require further investigation…

  “So anyway,” Joachim said, “how’s the truck running now?”

  “Marmon? Oh, good. Wait, did you work on him?”

  “I helped Dad fix the truck up before Harry bought it, yeah.”

  “It worked okay except for when the brakes failed and almost killed that guy—oh, wait, he’s off with J. Anyway, yeah, almost killed a classmate. Not so good. But otherwise, it’s great.”

  Joachim nodded, scowling. “Dad told me about that. Doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know where the fluid went—”

  “Maybe the Scullens stopped drinking blood and started drinking brake fluid,” I said with a grin, and Joachim laughed.

  Shame he was only fifteen. He looked sixteen or seventeen, at least. But if his people were the sworn enemies of the Scullens—crazy as that sounded, take it as a given—then maybe I could work out some sort of interesting love triangle situation, and push Edwin into my arms that way…

  “Hey, Bonnie,” Kelly said. “Looks like it’s going to start raining here in a minute, I think we’re packing up. Hey, Joachim, right?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at the sky. “You’re right, it’s going to piss down in a minute.”

  I hadn’t noticed, but the darkness wasn’t just a natural effect of dusk—thick clouds were gathering over the water. “Nice talking to you, Joachim. Next time Harry goes to visit your dad I’ll try to tag along, okay?”

  “That would be awesome!” He had a face like sunshine, so unlike Edwin’s eternal broodface, but appealing in a way. And I did wonder if he’d be cute naked. Seemed like a lot of the trouble I got into in life stemmed from wondering if certain boys would look cute naked. But I was good at getting out of trouble, too.

  I joined Kelly as we walked back up toward the spot where the cars were parked. “Do you mind if I ride with you?” she said, nodding toward the trees, where Ike and J emerged, hand-in-hand. “I think those two probably want to sit together on the way back. It’s about time they finally hooked up—it’s been like a sitcom or the first half of a romantic comedy with them, since about seventh grade. I don’t know what you said to J—” (Ha, I’d even gotten her best friend calling her that, hilarious) “—but it sure lit a fire under her.”

  “Judging by the dazed and happy look on Ike’s face, she lit up something under him, too,” I said dryly, and Kelly giggled. She chattered at me on the drive back into town, and I made the appropriate noises, but really, I was thinking: wendigo.

  No. That wasn’t even remotely romantic. That would be like falling in love with a ghoul or a guy who bites the heads off chickens.

  But: vampire. Sure, both were immortal beings who fed on the flesh (or blood) of the living, but for some reason, I couldn’t tell you why, vampires were just so much more sexy.

  LUNCH DATE

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  I spent far too much time on the internet that night. Harry actually had broadband, which surprised me, but apparently there was a little ISP that had an office not far from the police station, and Harry’d gotten a good deal. I can see why. He’s got various gaming consoles and tons of games, mostly first-person shooters, and apparently his major hobby is slaughtering computer-generated enemies with his friends online. The guy really could keep surprising me.
But I guess he doesn’t really get many chances to mow down perps with automatic weapons at his day job.

  I looked up wendigos (Wendigen? Wendigi?) first, and it was pretty much like Joachim had told me, once I filtered out the comic book characters, movies that used that name for monsters but meant something totally different than the Algonquin tradition, and some random book where “Wendigo” was the name of a magical car, of all things.

  The Google image search for wendigo was mostly pretty monstrous stuff, not a bit like Edwin, so I branched out and started searching on vampires, which was pretty much just inviting a giant river of crap to flow into my house. I’m not much of a reader, but if I was, apparently I’d have a hard time reading any novel written in the last fifty years that didn’t have a brooding sexy conflicted vampire in it—the shelves were just full of the stuff. If I were a vampire guy, I’d run as fast as I could from the dark-eye-shadow, wedding-dress-dyed-black, ankh-wearing brigade—it amazes me that Goth just won’t die, and worse, now those girls have websites with drippy fonts and way too much of their poetry and fanfic: ick. Some of them had a corset-and-piercings thing going on, and I know some guys like that, but mostly, just a universe of sad.

  Still, target audience aside, when it came to brooding sexy vampire guys: that was more like it. Edwin definitely rocked the paleness and wiriness and the impossible strength, but the fact that he walked around in the daytime seemed like a potential dealbreaker—at least until I did a little more research, getting past the bee-stung-lipped immortal-teen-heartthrob types. Turns out there were plenty of vampires in recent fiction and old legends both who had no trouble with the sun, either because they’d evolved that way (like Stephen King and Scott Snyder’s American Vampire) or because the whole sun thing was just bullshit—did you know even freaking Bram Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t hurt by sunshine? Sure, he slept in a coffin all day, but not because the sun would kill him or anything. He was just nocturnal, like, I don’t know, a sugar glider or a bushbaby or a ferret something. I know. Blew my mind. Then there were Arabian vampires, who hated the dark and traveled in sunlight. So the whole sun thing was obviously irrelevant: Edwin could lay out all day and get a killer tan and it wouldn’t mean he wasn’t a vampire.

  But the whole “Do they burn in the sunlight or don’t they?” thing was just the tip of the ridiculousness: there are more types of vampires in the world than there are shades of lipstick. Vampires who can only be killed by hammering a nail through their heads, vampires who turn into mice or sheep or horses, vampires who transform into werewolves when you kill them—what a bummer that must have been for the first fearless vampire hunter to run across one of those—vampires who can astrally project and cause eclipses, ones with stingers in their mouths instead of fangs, ones with obsessive compulsive disorder, ones who hopped around until you slapped a holy scroll onto their foreheads to neutralize them, purple-faced vampires, vampires who slept in plants, vampires who fell to Earth as meteors, modern vampires who weren’t undead at all but just stuck with some shitty virus like the world’s simultaneously worst and most awesome STD—

  Basically all sorts of things, and pretty much the only quality they all had in common was preying on human beings, usually sucking out blood, but occasionally life force or fat or tears or lymph or whatever. Some were dead, and some weren’t. Maybe Edwin was a vampire, with “vampire” defined as “really vague catchall term for things that are human-ish but also monster-ish.”

  Mostly I wanted to know three things:

  One: Was he a vampire?

  Two: Was he the kind of vampire who lives forever and has awesome superpowers?

  Three: Could he make me into an immortal with awesome superpowers?

  Because that… that would be good. Even if it required him drinking my blood or something, well, look: Blood drinking. Yucky but not a dealbreaker, I’d met plenty of guys who were into way freakier shit, after all.

  Hearing about someone else’s dreams is just about the most tedious thing in the world. Pay attention next time you start to tell somebody about the crazy thing that didn’t actually happen to you last night: their eyes glaze over, they make polite noises, or maybe they interrupt to tell you about the sound-and-light show that erupted in their head the night before, despite the obvious fact that you don’t give two craps in a bucket about such things. They only perk up a little if you say they appeared in the dream—that does seem to interest people, as they’re an essentially narcissistic species.

  My mom put great stock in dreams—she thought she had prophetic dreams, though she only actually seemed to remember those dreams after whatever event the dream supposedly foretold, but that’s cause-and-effect for you, I guess. She said it was a family gift, and that I was going to inherit it, maybe, and should always treat it with respect. She wanted me to keep a dream journal, and I did (I also kept a fake dream journal, which I showed her, with dreams carefully researched from reading her various woo-woo new age books on the subject, chock full of symbolism, but nothing too Freudian or kinky, of course). My actual dreams, at least the ones I remember, fall into two camps: wish fulfillment and anxiety. You know the kind: in one you’re flying, in the other you’re being chased through a swamp by something, only you’re not sure what. At least, that’s what the books say. Mine are more about murder and imprisonment, respectively, but a certain amount of personal detail is bound to creep in, it can’t be helped. So I don’t put much stock in dreams, and I don’t think anyone should have to endure listening to someone else’s dream, but that night, after my research and my speculations, I did have a dream, and if it wasn’t prophetic, it was certainly at least suggestive, even if it was just my subconscious (which is even smarter than my conscious, and that’s saying something) working a few things out. Here:

  I was down by the lake again, but this time, no one else was around, and the sky was filled with storm clouds the color of a bad bruise a week away from healing. I was wearing the sort of filmy white nightdress women wore on the covers of the cheesy romance novels my mom hid under her bed (where any normal person would keep their pornography, but maybe that’s the purpose they served for her). My feet were bare, and I stood in ankle-deep clear water, but it wasn’t cold: more like bathwater. I sensed someone watching me, and when I turned around, Edwin stepped out from the shadows among the trees. His clothes were in tatters, there was blood smeared on his chin, and even from fifty yards away, I could see his fangs, two white curved shards of bone. He stepped toward me, arms extended, eyes more black than blue.

  “Bonnie, you have to run.” Joachim stood at my side, tugging at my elbow, trying to get me to follow him to a boat bobbing on the surface of the lake behind us. I was confused. Dreams about boats on water were dreams of death, weren’t they, traditionally? But death was on the shore: Death was Edwin. Or perhaps it was something to do with the reluctance of vampires to cross running water? Except Lake Woebegotten wasn’t running water; it was just-sitting-there water. Joachim pulled on my arm more urgently, but I didn’t feel any fear at all, so I shook him off. Joachim made a low sound of distress and splashed away through the shallows, and I took a step toward Edwin, my blood-smeared Romeo. His jaw unhinged like a snake’s, chin dropping half a foot, and pointed teeth rose up from his lower jaw to meet the fangs pointed downward.

  Then a beast shambled between us. Shaggy, black, massive—but not a wolf, which I’d expected, somehow. Perhaps a bear, if bears were the size of Volkswagens, or maybe even a hairy ox, if those were carnivorous. The creature turned its back on me and faced Edwin, and Edwin hissed, a long snakelike tongue spilling out of his mouth—I confess, my first thought wasn’t disgust, but a vague speculation on sexual possibilities—as the beast roared at him.

  I didn’t like that, so I kicked the beast as hard as I could between its back legs. Despite being barefoot, I kicked hard, and the creature howled and bounded away, with shocking speed, into the trees.

  Edwin laughed, and his jaw reshaped itself enough for him to sp
eak. “I’ve never seen anyone kick a were-bear in the testicles before. I hope I’m not your next victim.”

  I didn’t speak—I couldn’t, I don’t think—but I thought, “I’d better be your next victim,” and then everything swirled around, the storm clouds dropping low and becoming purplish-green fog, then pulling back, and I…

  I was standing next to Edwin. My mouth felt crowded with needles and shards, but not in a painful way: in a deadly way. I wanted so very much to bite something, and there was a girl in front of us, standing in the water. At first, I thought she must be me, but no: I’m the only one who’s me, forever and always. This girl looked a bit like Kelly, a bit like J, a bit like my mother, a bit like Rosemarie, then like Pleasance, then like the pretty-but-formidable woman who worked at the diner—any woman, really, or Everywoman, dressed in that gothic romance nightgown I’d been wearing before. And she did scream, and run away, and try to free herself, and splash toward the boat, and Edwin and I ran toward her, hand-in-hand like lovers racing together to leap into the water on a summer day, only when we leapt, we didn’t land on water, but on flesh, and what filled our mouths was not water. Not water at all.

  I woke up soaked in sweat, incredibly thirsty, and hornier than I’d been since moving to this little town.

  So there’s that. I offer no interpretation.

  The next school day, at lunch, Ike and J were holding hands under the table (and possibly getting to third base in the process, the way he was blushing and she was giggling), and Kelly was glassy-eyed from smoking pot out behind the gym the period before, and the rest of the herd were mewling and babbling like always. I sneaked my usual secret glance at Edwin once I was seated. For some reason, he wasn’t sitting at his usual spot with his usual crowd, but at an empty table way in the far corner of the cafeteria.

  I looked a little longer than I should have, probably. Edwin was a shining star, except not really shining—more like a pale and luminous moon, an object as beautiful as it was distant, and I longed to escape the gravity of the shitty little decidedly non-celestial bodies at my table and enter his orbit instead—