The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  My bra and panties, draped over the back of the snowmobile, were frozen solid, like I was the victim of a slumber-party hazing ritual. We said our farewells, and I pressed against Joachim as he fired up the snowmobile and drove us back to Marmon. I turned up the truck’s heater and we sat there, parked on the edge of the wilderness, for a while, talking, while the truck warmed up.

  “That was great, Bonnie,” Joachim said. “I can’t remember when I’ve had so much fun. I mean, it’s been… a pretty heavy fall for me. For you too, I know, but… I helped tear a monster apart. I’ve been having nightmares. And occasionally, sometimes when I want to, sometimes when I don’t, I turn into a giant monster who can smell better than I can see. You found out your boyfriend was a vampire, and had another vampire try to kill you, and…” He shook his head. “Our lives aren’t normal. Not even close. But hanging out with you these past weeks, they make me feel normal. Like I can have a life that’s not totally bizarre and horrible and monster-filled and unrecognizable.” He held my hands, and stared into my eyes, and I stared into his, and we almost kissed—but we didn’t, quite.

  Which, it turns out, was a good thing, since Edwin came back a few days later. But I’ll get to that.

  A SENSE OF DREAD

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  Joachim and I spent a lot of time together over the next few days, but none of it’s really worth reporting—we didn’t sleep together, and he didn’t teach me magical shamanic powers, so it was all just ordinary—until we went looking for the meadow.

  I’d decided that since even the fact of me swimming in my underwear with a horde of boys from the tribe of his sworn enemies wasn’t enough to get Edwin to come back, I should probably start resigning myself to his absence. But I was still dreaming about him, you see; still waking up in the middle of the night and reaching out for a cool unsleeping body that wasn’t there; still automatically glancing at the empty spot beside me in biology class; still gazing at the part of the cafeteria where the Scullens and the Scales had once sat, now populated by what passed for the stoner clique in Lake Woebegotten. I needed to get the taste of Edwin out of my mind, and I had the bright idea of overwriting powerful past experiences with new powerful experiences. I have no idea if that approach has any grounding in cognitive science or neuroscience or even behavioral science—I’ve read a bit about all of those, and they never mentioned my plan—but it seemed logical to me, and worth a try. My idea was, if I had new experiences that were similar to experiences with Edwin—either because they took place in the same location, or the music was the same, or whatever—then maybe the memories would cease to be so specific and evocative and maddening. So I’d dragged J and Kelly to that Irish restaurant in Bemidji for a “girl’s night out,” and watched Joachim play some of the other boys from the tribe in a pick-up hockey game—only in a place like Minnesota could you have pick-up hockey—out on the lake ice. I wasn’t sure if the technique was working, but at least when my thoughts strayed to hockey or Irish pubs I had some other memory to focus on instead of one starring Edwin.

  One of my strongest memories was that day in the meadow, when Edwin took off his shirt (mmmm) and revealed the secret of his mighty vampire smell-powers. So when Joachim came over one weekend I said I wanted to go walking, and, as always, the boy said he was up for anything… but he seemed hesitant. It took a bit of poking and prodding and prying, but I finally got him to tell me why: “We think there’s a wendigo—a vampire—somewhere in the area. Some of the guys have been turning, and they say they caught a whiff.”

  I stared at him, wide-eyed, thinking, Don’t ask, don’t ask, be strong, Bonnie, don’t ask, but Joachim understood and took pity on me. “Not Edwin. At least, they don’t think so. We know the smell of the Scullens and the Scales. This is someone else.”

  “So you think he could be out in the woods now?” Every nearby vampire was an opportunity to be turned into a vampire myself—there had to be one I could bribe or seduce or convince or trick into changing me.

  “It’s possible. Whoever it is, he hasn’t come onto the rez, so the elders aren’t inclined to launch a full-scale hunt. We don’t have a treaty with every random rogue wendigo, but there’s still some worry the Scullens and Scales only pretended to leave—that it’s a trick or treachery—” (I rolled my eyes.) “—so they don’t want to leave the rez undefended to pursue this vamp. They usually move on pretty quickly. He may have done so already—or maybe not. Are you sure you don’t want to take a walk in my territory? Might be safer.”

  “You saying you can’t protect me?” I batted my eyelashes. For a beastly hunter of the undead, Joachim was in many ways a babe in the woods—the most basic of flirtations turned him into putty.

  He smiled. “Oh, I’m not worried about that. But you already saw one vampire die—I wasn’t sure you’d want to risk the trauma of seeing another.”

  “I have a pretty strong stomach,” I said, trying not to laugh. I didn’t mind seeing dead vampires—or dead humans, or dogs, or whatever—any more than I minded seeing broken eggshells or rotting apples. Garbage is garbage. “Besides, what are the odds of us running into a vampire in the snowy woods?”

  “You do seem to attract them,” Joachim said.

  “I attract all sorts of supernatural guys,” I said, flipping my hair. “I just have the right look I guess. Or odor.”

  He smiled. “You do smell good, actually. I don’t want to eat you—”

  “Not necessarily what a modern girl wants to hear,” I deadpanned, and he blushed rather a lot, which was impressive, given that his skin is dark enough that blushing barely shows. (Edwin wasn’t a blusher, no matter what outrageous things I said, but that was just because of his general lack of blood—he was actually trivially easy to embarrass, and thus, to keep off balance, which had its uses.)

  “I don’t want to drink your blood, then, how about that? But, yeah, you smell great—just not like dinner.”

  Maybe I was evolved to be a predator, too, like vampires were, with an irresistible scent that attracted monsters. Maybe I was meant to be a monster-slayer. If so, whoever was in charge of handing out destinies had made a mistake in my case. Monsters were some of the only things I found interesting enough to care whether they lived or died. “You smell nice too,” I said. “Sort of… musky.”

  We were sitting on my bed, and he took my hand. “Bonnie, are you and me… I mean… I know we’re friends, but sometimes I think you want more, and sometimes I think I… what I mean is…”

  “I’m still getting over the break-up with Edwin,” I said. “But I like you, Joachim. You’ve been great about giving me space and time. I really appreciate that. But… I do need more time, at least. If not so much space.”

  “Take your time, I’m not going anywhere,” he said, and his grin was so big he looked like he could have swallowed the moon. You know, like that wolf, from Norse mythology, Fenrir.

  I guess that comparison would work better if he actually were a werewolf. Oh well. Going with the bear thing isn’t as, I don’t know, poetic. “His grin was so big he looked like he could swallow a whole beehive?” I don’t think so.

  Though I guess I’m more like a beehive than I am like the moon.

  We went walking in the snow, on high alert for vampires. At least, I was—Joachim didn’t seem to be paying attention to much of anything but me, and making sure I didn’t step into a hole lurking under the snow, though how he could tell where the holes were was beyond me. A were-bear thing, presumably. The forest trails were moderately snowy, with a crust of ice on top like nature’s crème brûlée, and the ground cover gave off a pleasing crunch under my boots with every step, like the snap of many small bones being broken all at once.

  It took us a while to find the meadow, and when we did, it didn’t look much like it had before. Those unseasonable wildflowers—had they grown under Rosemarie’s weather-witch influence, I wondered?—were either dead or buried under white, which amounted to the same thing. St
ill, there’s something nice about a pristine vast expanse of snow, something that makes me want to do damage or make a mark, so we ran through the meadow laughing and scooping up snowballs, which I aimed with deadly accuracy. Joachim never hit me, even once, I assume because he thinks you shouldn’t smash girls in the face with snowballs, though he knew enough to make it look like he was trying and failing when in reality he wasn’t really trying at all. Though come to think of it, just barely missing a girl’s head with a snowball is probably a trickier throw than merely hitting her.

  We messed up the snow good, gouging trails that looped around and over and back, until we’d worked our way to the far side of the meadow—and that’s when Joachim froze, and his nostrils flared visibly. “Wait,” he said. “Something’s here.”

  The vampire, I thought, and looked around, though I knew from Edwin’s time spying on me in my room that if a vampire didn’t want to be seen, you probably wouldn’t see him. Joachim sniffed again, frowned, and shook his head. “It’s a vampire, but… it smells like Gretchen did, after we were finished with her. Cold, and wrong, and rotten, but dead.”

  “Wait. There’s a dead vampire in the meadow? Like, dead dead?”

  “Like dead dead,” he confirmed, and walked toward the treeline, with his head held low, staring at the ground. “Look, here, the ground’s been disturbed.”

  He was right. In under the evergreen trees, the falling snow couldn’t magically carpet over all signs of human disturbance, and there were quite a few footprints and enough splotches of dirt to indicate that someone had dug a hole and then tried to cover it up with snow and pine needles. “Shame we didn’t bring a shovel,” I said.

  “Whatever it is, it’s not deep.” He hunted around until he found a thick branch, and poked it into the snow, gouging out hunks of soil, then tore off a needle-thick evergreen branch and used it as a broom to sweep away the cover.

  There, about a foot underground, was the dirt-encrusted headless body of some kind of dead dirty hippie.

  Joachim sniffed at the hole, then jerked his head back and wretched, like someone getting a face full of sour milk. I couldn’t smell anything—cold is the great preserver, and who knew if vampires even rotted like normal people did?—but I lacked Joachim’s finely-tuned senses.

  “Where’s the head?” I said.

  “If whoever killed him knew he was a vampire—and how could they not?—it’s buried separately. You want to keep the pieces apart. Let me see…” More sniffing, more walking, and deeper in the woods we found another patch of dug-up earth, and inside that…

  “It’s Jimmy,” I said. The dead vampire’s hair was only marginally dirtier from his time in a shallow grave, but only because it had been plenty dirty before. “He was with Gretchen and Queequeg, but he didn’t take part in the hunt for me. I wonder what he was doing back here?”

  “I’m less curious about that, and more curious about what killed him,” Joachim said, frowning.

  “Maybe one of your boys decided to do some unauthorized hunting?” I said.

  Joachim shook his head. “No, the only way we’re a match for a vampire is in our beast form, and then, we tear them apart. Anyway, we’d burn the remains, not do it like this. His head was severed by a tool of some kind, axe or shovel, I’m not sure, and I don’t want to get close enough to find out. There were stab wounds and bullet wounds on his body, too. Not our style.” Joachim wrinkled his nose. “Somebody threw up near here, too. I smell… used tuna hotdish. I could have done without smelling that.”

  I hadn’t noticed either gunshot wounds or vomit, but I hadn’t put my face as close to the corpse as he had. “So… a person killed him?” I said.

  Joachim nodded. “I think so. Another vampire wouldn’t have bothered with guns or knives either.”

  “But a human killing a vampire… isn’t that like a gazelle killing a lion?”

  “Pretty much,” Joachim said, thoughtfully. “But I wonder, if enough gazelles got together—do you think they could kick a lion to death?”

  “Hmm.” I was thinking about other humans who knew about vampires, locally, and I only had one name: Mr. Levitt. And if he really got his jollies murdering people, as he’d certainly implied, then was it possible he’d decided to level up and try to kill a vampire?

  And if so, how was it my problem? I didn’t care if Jimmy died, and the only vampires I did care about were long gone. If Mr. Levitt decided to start hunting were-bears, then we might have issues.

  SLAYERS DISSEMBLE

  NARRATOR

  Narrator here. This part I’m about to recount actually happened a day or so earlier than the bit Bonnie wrote about above, but I decided to put it here for, what do you call it, dramatic effect. I never much cared about that sort of thing before, but what with Bonnie’s interest in foreshadowing and so forth I thought I might as well give it a try myself. So here goes:

  “That was amazing.” Eileen sipped from a small glass of sherry, and her eyes were fixed and glassy, her hands trembling.

  “Not quite the word I would have used,” Stevie Ray said. His own hands, wrapped around a beer bottle he hadn’t even sipped from yet, were steady, but that was probably just because he’d gotten his adrenaline aftershocks out by puking behind a tree. “But I might go with ‘necessary.’” They were in the Backtrack Bar, where Stevie Ray worked as occasional bartender and bouncer, as if it ever got rowdy enough to need a bouncer. He had keys, and the owner Ace didn’t mind if he came in after hours, as long as he kept track of everything he drank and settled up the next day. The bar closed at 1 a.m., and at 1 a.m., Stevie Ray had been in the woods with the six other members of the Interfaith League of Vampire Slayers, doing what their name implied they should do. He was still amazed they’d all survived.

  “Didn’t look like any moon person I ever saw.” Cyrus, on his bar stool, squinted at the ceiling, as if he might see the moon through the ceiling.

  “Nonsense,” Father Edsel boomed from a couch in the corner. “Did you see him? Pale as moonlight! Eyes as black as the depthless depths of space!”

  He’d had brown eyes, as far as Stevie Ray could tell, but it wasn’t like that was the relevant part to object to, and he didn’t have the energy to combat Cy’s lunacy. Besides, when you were talking about killing vampires, how was that objectively any crazier than believing the moon was a hollow spaceship full of aliens spying on you?

  Well, mainly because the vampires were real, he supposed.

  “I wish he’d turned to dust,” former-Pastor Inkfist said gloomily.

  Mr. Levitt snorted. “Wouldn’t that be neat and clean? Would’ve spared us having to try to dig up that frozen ground. That grave was so shallow we might as well have just covered him over with some leaves.”

  “If he’d turned to dust,” Inkfist went on doggedly, staring at the glass of soda water between his hands, “then we’d know for sure he was a vampire, that’s all I mean.”

  “He has a point,” Dolph said, but Eileen suddenly snapped her head up, and the focus came back into her eyes, and she sniffed loudly.

  “The way he jumped around, bouncing from tree to tree like he was made of rubber, that looked like something ordinary and human to you?”

  “Could’ve been he was on drugs or something,” Inkfist said. “Cocaine gives you energy, doesn’t it?”

  “And the way he kept coming even when Cyrus unloaded on him with those automatic weapons? He didn’t even pause until a few bullets went into his skull.” Eileen sounded justifiably proud about that bit. She’d been the bait, playing little girl lost in the woods, but she’d had a big old .45 caliber handgun in her purse, and she’d put a bullet right in the middle of the vampire’s face while he was trying to figure out who was shooting him from the shadows.

  “PCP,” Dolph said. “Like in the movies, the angel dust, they say fellas on that, you can shoot them point-blank and they’ll just keep trying to get at you. And who told us he was a vampire?”

  “I told you,” Stevie
Ray said. “One of the elders at Pres du Lac. They know about this stuff. In their, you know. Culture.”

  “Heathens,” Edsel said, but without much heat, and Inkfist sighed heavily.

  “But see,” Dolph said, “what if it was just some fella the Indians—I’m sorry Native Americans—wanted killed for some reason?”

  “You people,” Mr. Levitt said. “Even if it was, how does it make sense for the tribe to dupe a group of people from the next town over to do their killing for them? It’s not exactly a clever plan. Anyway, he was a vampire. What about when we cut his head off, and he kept trying to bite us, and rolling his eyes, and even trying to talk for a good ten minutes?”

  “It’s like in the French Revolution,” Dolph said. “Isn’t it? They cut off somebody’s head, with a guillotine or such, and the eyes just keep on blinking and the mouth keeps moving, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” Mr. Levitt said flatly. “When you cut someone’s head off, there might be a twitch or two, but they don’t try to eat you. Not if they’re human. And you saw the fangs, they were as long as golf pencils—why are we even talking about this? We shot him and cut off his head and he didn’t bleed.”

  “I know you’re right,” Inkfist said. “I still wish he’d turned to dust though. Neater that way.”

  “No denying that.” Levitt took a gulp of rotgut whiskey like it was water. “Body disposal’s a right pain in the bottom. But I don’t imagine anybody will come looking for that fella. We were right up against the middle of nowhere anyhow. When the weather gets warmer we can go back and dig a better grave, if anything’s left of him.”

  Oh goodie, Stevie Ray thought. Still, it had been the right thing to do, hadn’t it? A couple of fisherman had disappeared the week before, nothing left but their rods and creels and ice saws and a few spots of blood on the frozen surface of the lake, and Harry’s investigation hadn’t turned up anything, of course. With the Scullens and Scales gone, Stevie Ray hadn’t immediately thought vampires, but when Willy Noir called to say they’d sensed a wendigo in the area, he hadn’t exactly been surprised. He’d hesitated before calling Edsel and his merry band, but not for long. How was he going to take on a vampire by himself? So they’d gone out on patrol, roaming the woods in pairs, in touch with each other via walkie-talkies and armed with some of the truly distressing ordnance from Cy’s bunker, and on the third night, their bait had drawn the hunter, except they were the hunters and the vampire was the prey, or whatever. They’d killed him. He’d seemed more stunned than frightened, right up until Levitt severed his head with a machete.