The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  Hmm. Not exactly the name and phone number I’d been hoping for. Ten years of hellish service didn’t sound fun, and going that route hadn’t worked out well for Gretchen, but I’m all about contingency plans. Now that I knew I could become a vampire, there was no way I wasn’t going to at least try, whatever it took. “What happened to Queequeg and—Jimmy, was it?”

  “Jimmy isn’t a bad sort. For a man-eater, that is. He seemed intrigued by our lifestyle, and took no part in Gretchen’s revenge hunt. We sent him up to Canada, where there’s another group of vampires like us, way out in Newfoundland—it’s easier to be a vegetarian there, as there are scarcely any people. He says he’ll give our lifestyle a try. And Queequeg, well. Hermet was quite cross about Gretchen eluding us, and I’m afraid he took it out on Queequeg.”

  “Wow. Is he dead?”

  “Indubitably. I’ll spare you the gory details.”

  I like the gory details, but I didn’t say so. “So we’re safe now?”

  “Yes,” Edwin said. “Safe, and together, which is all I want, ever. Oh, Bonnie: I have a surprise for you. This Saturday night, I’m taking you somewhere.”

  “Where? Our long-awaited trip to the mythical palatial Twin Cities?”

  “It would hardly be a surprise if I told you, now would it?”

  I might have tried to pry it out of him, but I got the sense he was chafing a bit at his utter lack of control—the fact that he hadn’t saved me, that I’d been forced to (gasp! horror!) save myself—and wanted to assert some manly prerogative, so I smiled like a good little girlfriend and said, “I can’t wait to find out!”

  Going back to school after Gretchen’s dismemberment and so on was fairly surreal. I kept expecting to see bears come trundling through the parking lot, or to be scooped up and rushed through the halls at 70 miles per hour on foot. Mundane life was both disappointing and kind of a relief. I like excitement, but mostly only when I’m somehow directing that excitement. Edwin wasn’t the only one who liked being in control sometimes. Aren’t you impressed by my level of self-awareness?

  I hung out with J and Kelly and Ike and the others more than usual—Edwin missed a day or two of school because of excessive sunniness. They were all atwitter about going to the Fall Formal. School dances are so lame, and I’d seen their dresses during our trip to Bemidji, so I knew it wasn’t going to be a fashion extravaganza.

  Then Saturday afternoon came, and when I got out of the shower, what should I find stretched out on my bed but… a formal gown. Not an ugly sequined mess, at least, but a very elegant, white, long dress with delicate beading and a low neckline. It was a little bit too close to the wedding dress end of the continuum for my taste, but pretty. “What in the heck?” I murmured, having picked up the not-quite-swearing mannerism from my dad and just about everyone else in this town.

  “Do you like it?” Edwin stepped out of my closet, dressed in an elegant black tuxedo. He looked like the lead in a historical drama, the one all the ladies would desperately want to marry. “Pleasance helped me pick it out.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “I just hope this isn’t your way of proposing?”

  “If I were biologically capable of blushing, I would do so now,” he said, smiling. “But, no, Bonnie—when I propose marriage to you, it will be far more direct than laying a dress out on your bed.”

  When you propose, I thought. Well, well. Wasn’t that an interesting choice of words.

  “For now,” he said, “I would be delighted beyond reason if you would agree to accompany me to the social event of the season—the Lake Woebegotten High Fall Formal.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Depends. Did you get me a corsage?”

  “I did.”

  “Will we be going somewhere fabulous for dinner first?”

  “Insofar as the dining establishments of Lake Woebegotten will allow.”

  “Is there a limousine?”

  “Of course there is.”

  “Will there be booze?”

  “I brought a flask just for you, as I, myself, do not partake, and of course, the punch will almost certainly be spiked at some point.”

  “Sounds like the closest thing to fun I’ve heard about yet in this town,” I said. “Then I agree.”

  “I’ll pick you up at six,” he said, and kissed my cheek, and disappeared out the window. It’s not every day you see a guy in a full tuxedo leap right out of a second-story window. Life sure is hard to predict sometimes.

  I feel like I’ve built up certain expectations here: including my being kind of a catty bitch. Well, and why not? Most people don’t deserve my notice at all, so in a way, they’re lucky to even get my mockery. So part of me is tempted to give you an avalanche of snark: about the cheesy high-school-gym party atmosphere; about the girls and their ugly dresses; about the ridiculous “family restaurant” where we had our oh-so-fancy dinner, because nothing goes better with ball gowns than paper napkins; about the lousy band and the hideous dancing by the chaperones, almost all teachers from the school. And if I did that, it would all be true.

  But it’s not the important truth. Because every day of life is full of petty stupidities and abominable crassness, and those are commonplace, and thus unworthy of notice and mention (unless they’re especially funny stupidities).

  But it’s not every night you get to dance with your true love, the most beautiful and enthralling being on Earth, just days after consigning his horrible ex-girlfriend to a miserable and violent death. On a night like that, the moonlight seems like a spotlight from heaven shining down on you. On a night like that, every song that plays is your song (even when it’s, say, “Open Arms” by Journey or “Cold as Ice” by Foreigner.)

  On a night like that, when you kiss that boy, and he holds you in his arms, it’s possible to feel like the world doesn’t deserve to be burned to ashes, the soil sowed with salt, and the survivors hunted down like vermin.

  So, yes: the dance was a beautiful dance, and life was a beautiful life, and I don’t have a bad thing to say about it, because nothing bad was bad enough to even slightly diminish the good.

  At least, not until I went outside.

  I’m going to tell you about my conversation with Mr. Levitt, and in some detail, because it turns out, even though I thought he was just a sadistic bastard, the things he said to me in the parking lot were also actually foreshadowing, and since this journal is just as much a work of literature as the diary of some Dutch girl in an attic, or those people Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin from that Jewel song, or some crazy reclusive millionaire from a million years ago, I might as well have some literary stuff in here too.

  Edwin was the most attentive date ever, but he got to talking to his quasi-sisters—they came to the dance with Hermet and Garnett in, like, a gesture of solidarity or something—and my only options were to talk to Kelly about her drunk date or flee into the open air, so I chose the latter. I stepped out of the gym, pulling a shawl around my bare arms, because the reason they call it Fall in Minnesota is because that’s what the temperature does: brrr.

  “Why, if it isn’t Miss Grayduck.” This dry old reptile voice came rasping from the shadows by the side of the gym, and I jumped a little, because it’s tough to get the drop on me; I usually know when somebody’s there, it’s called situational awareness and I totally rock at it. Pretty much the only people who didn’t ping my “somebody’s there” sensors were vampires and were-bears, and I was pretty sure this wasn’t either of those. More like an unwrapped mummy or a ghoul or something, going on how old he looked.

  “Principal Levitt,” I said, smiling.

  He stepped forward, holding a cigarette in his hands. Funny, I hadn’t seen the glow of the cigarette in the deep shadow—had he been hiding it, like behind his back or something? So I wouldn’t see him, or…? That seemed like… well, something I might do, if I were stalking someone, and if I smoked, which I don’t, because, ew.

  “Don’t tell,” he said, smiling through yellowing old teeth. “
Smoking is my only vice.” He wore a somber black suit he’d probably worn to the funerals of everybody he’d ever known (because he was so old they must all be dead already).

  “It’ll be our secret,” I said. Coming outside to get away from Kelly’s blather had seemed smart, but what if I’d walked into the midst of another blather-anche? Old guys could be boring like nobody else.

  “Mmm. I bet you have a lot of secrets.”

  I thought about that. “I get kind of a gay vibe off you,” I said finally, “so I’m going to assume you weren’t, like, trying to flirt with me.”

  “Ha.” He coughed. “Gay? Not exactly. Not anything, anymore, not at my age, but even in my youth my orientation was probably best described as… ha… ‘opportunistic.’”

  “Okay then. This just got pretty creepy. I’m going back inside.”

  “Do you think she screamed?” Levitt said thoughtfully.

  I should have gone inside. But I said, “Who?”

  “That girl. When her car went over the cliff.” He made a long low whistling sound, like a bomb dropping in a cartoon, then said, “Splash. Boom.”

  “What do you want?” I said, crossing my arms.

  “Just for you to know that someone knows what you are, little bird.” He flicked the cigarette away. “Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t care that you sent some girl to her death—I made some calls, I know some people out west, did you think they didn’t even suspect you? They just couldn’t prove anything about the car wreck. Or prove that you drove that other girl to kill herself. But I don’t want you to be too complacent.”

  “There’s nothing to prove,” I said lightly. Then I paused. “What, are you hoping to blackmail me? You want me to fuck you?”

  “I’d sooner stick my todger in an ice machine,” he said.

  I took a breath. “Okay. Here’s what happened. I came out to the parking lot. You came on to me, said some really inappropriate things, and I just tried to laugh it off, because you’re the principal—you’re in a position of power over me. Then you touched me, and I pushed you away, and then you tried to grab my tit, and that’s when I screamed for help. See? This is me screaming.” I opened my mouth to demonstrate, but he held up one finger.

  “This is what happened,” he said softly. “They found you cut to pieces in the woods. Pieces here, pieces there. An anonymous tip to your grieving father, the chief of police, said a pale young man was witnessed fleeing the scene. The police searched your boyfriend Edwin’s locker at school, and what do you know? The murder weapon was in there. Along with your bloody panties. His life got… unpleasant.” He gave me a smile, like he’d just told me a joke, and my scream died in my throat. “Here’s the thing, duckling,” he said. “What you want to be? Always in control, always a step ahead? That’s what I really am. And what I have been, for longer than your daddy’s been alive. And I’ve never been caught. Never had to run away from home to live with relatives to avoid the heat, neither.” He lit another cigarette. A thousand years old or not, his hands didn’t shake a bit. “Now, people like us, we don’t get along with each other so well. Product of our intense narcissism, I guess. And this town is only so big, you see? You can’t have two tigers hunting in the same territory. Sure, our approaches are different—you kill classmates with social media, while I, ah, prefer a more direct approach, with transients and travelers. But still: we’re both tigers. So know I’ll be watching you. When you graduate next May, you go. Leave town. Stay with Mom for the summer, then go to college. But you don’t stay here, or life gets bad for you.”

  “If you really know what I am,” I said, “you know you shouldn’t threaten me.”

  “What, you’ll sic your boyfriend on me? His family doesn’t eat my kind anymore, which is the only reason I tolerate that bunch of man-eaters in my hunting range—they don’t count as murderers anymore. So what’s your pretty boy Edwin going to do, drain all the blood out of my pet dog?”

  I stared at him. He knew. He knew about the Scullens and the Scales. Was this the human Edwin had talked about, the one who did favors for them? If so, maybe I could have Edwin punish him—but no. Not without telling Edwin about this conversation, and risking Levitt revealing things I wanted to keep secret.

  As if reading my mind, the old man smirked. “Besides, I can tell the pretty boy things you don’t want him to know. He’s trying hard not to be a monster. Think he’ll want to shack up with a girl who is a monster forevermore?” He paused. “Not that I expect him or the rest of his kin to live forever. Winter’s coming, Bonnie Grayduck. It’s going to be an icy one. You’d best bundle up, or you might get caught in the cold yourself.”

  After he was gone, back into the gym, I stood for a while longer in the dark, trying to figure it out. Why threaten me? Why say those things, if he didn’t want me to do anything? Why… fuck with me?

  But then I knew.

  He did it just to fuck with me. Exactly the way I would have. Purely for his own amusement. Hadn’t Edwin said Mr. Levitt was one of the only people, other than me, whose eyes he couldn’t hijack?

  Because he was like me. “Ew,” I said.

  Like I’d ever let myself get to be that old.

  SLAYERS ATREMBLE

  NARRATOR

  That night, after the dance, things got a little bit tense at the third ever meeting of the Interfaith Legion of Vampire Hunters, held in the Catholic reception hall and presided over by Stevie Ray in theory but by whoever felt like shouting the loudest—that was to say, Father Edsel—in practice.

  Still, when one bit of news came out, Stevie Ray got pretty loud: “You talked to her? You told her you knew? Why… why would you do that?”

  Mr. Levitt sat tilted way back in a plastic chair, a cowboy hat pulled down low, hiding his eyes. “Don’t know,” he said after a moment. “I thought it would be…”

  “Funny?” Stevie Ray said, outraged.

  “For her own good,” Levitt said mildly. “Willy Noir tried to warn her off, you said, but that didn’t work, so I thought, okay, maybe her beloved and respected high school principal might be able to convince her of the error of her ways.” He shook his head sadly. “That girl is pretty well steeped in depravity, though, I must say. Necrophilia or what have you I guess. I hate to see mental illness in one so young. Or maybe it’s just a lifestyle thing, like those what do you call ’em, gothics? The ones who wear black and too much eye makeup and silver jewelry, you know the ones? They have their own day at Disneyland?”

  “I don’t think Bonnie Grayduck is a goth,” Stevie Ray said, massaging his temples. “I think she’s just… enthralled, or whatever. Vampires can be very charming, you all know that.”

  “Vampires?” Cy said. “I thought they were moon people? From the moon?”

  “They’re probably space vampires, Cy,” Father Edsel said, rather kindly, patting their insane weapons specialist gently on the shoulder.

  “Ohhhh,” Cy said. “I gotcha. That makes sense.”

  “I still think it must just be a disease,” the former Pastor Inkfist said nervously, chewing his nails. “The Scullens, the Scales, that girl who, um, met her demise on the reservation, what if they’re just sick? They could have, ah, porphyric hemophilia maybe? Or even a psychological condition, there’s one called, um, ‘wendigo psychosis,’ actually, and its sufferers—”

  “They’re demons!” Edsel shouted. “Demons in the skins of men!”

  Stevie Ray groaned. This was his crack team? His contingency plan in the event of all-out war between the were-whatevers at the rez and the vampires in the woods? He glanced over at Mr. Levitt, who rolled his eyes as if to say, “Can you believe these guys?”

  Levitt was a weird case. Edsel had recruited Inkfist to the cause—said another man of God, even a lapsed one, would be good for them, and he’d even said some high-minded stuff about how fighting literal actual no-fooling supernatural evil might help clarify Inkfist’s mind, and lead him back into the light of God, which would’ve been kind of heartwarming
if Stevie Ray had actually believed in God. And Inkfist, who’d taken some convincing before he believed, had spilled his guts to Mr. Levitt, who’d always seemed pretty mild-mannered, but who took the news of deadly bloodsucking monsters in their midst with amazing equanimity.

  “I still say we should just go out to their house and stake them all while they’re sleeping,” Eileen Munson said, not looking up from her knitting. She was a middle-aged brunette, and you could still see the homecoming queen she’d once been. She was the only woman in the group, and Stevie Ray had been hesitant to involve her at all, but she was the mayor’s wife—and, everyone said, the one who made most of the decisions, with her husband Brett pretty much just a hand puppet who happened to hold elected office and own a car dealership—so they’d decided to let her in on it. She hadn’t believed them until she saw one of the tribal elders transform right in front of her, and even then, she’d just squinted, nodded, and said, “Proof of were-bears doesn’t necessarily mean proof of vampires—not any more than it means proof of unicorns, leprechauns, or Democrats with two working brain cells to rub together—but I’ll go ahead and take that part on faith.” She was a hard-ass, no doubt, and if there was a need for anything really dramatic—evacuation, maybe, based on a false claim about gas leaks or radon poisoning or an imminent deadly meteor shower—she’d be the one who could organize it and mobilize the town through her husband’s influence and her iron-fisted leadership of the Lutheran Women’s Circle.

  “I don’t think we need to go that far,” Dolph said. He was a big man, broad across the shoulders, a pillar of the community, owner of the local grocery store, big and bluff and always with a “Hey howya doing” for everybody, but in Stevie Ray’s professional estimation, he didn’t have the guts God gave a pocket gopher, and he had the soul of a cowardly mouse. Eileen had brought him in, for who knows what reason. Sometimes Stevie Ray felt like he was running a pyramid scheme—or a multi-level marketing business—where every person he told about the vampires told two other people, and so on down the chain. At least Bernie Madoff got rich off his pyramid, Stevie Ray thought glumly, and had some good times before they put his wrinkled white ass away.