The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  Lord. Having my tubes tied supernaturally didn’t bother me at all, but I whispered in his ear: “That’s a shame, Edwin, but it’s all right, because I still have you, forever, and always.”

  “And always, and forever,” he murmured back.

  I took to vampirism beautifully. By Sunday night I was walking around, and it’s funny—I didn’t feel stronger, exactly. I felt like I always had. But everything else in the world seemed… thinner? Less dense? Less real? Like the things that had seemed so solid and immovable when I was alive were now just so many cobwebs, to be brushed away by the merest motion of my hand. I could sense the presence of the other vampires in the house, in a way that has no analogue to my other senses—I didn’t smell them, I could just… tell where they were, how close, in which direction they were moving and with how much velocity.

  I sat with the family until late in the night, and they told me things I needed to know about myself and my kind, changes I could expect, drawbacks and advantages… things you mortal readers don’t need to know. Oh, how I love having secrets, and becoming a vampire opened me up to a whole new class of secrets. When I continued to say I had no idea who’d attacked me—“I was on the couch, and I realized someone was behind me, and after that, I don’t remember anything”—they vowed they would find out who was responsible and see them brought to justice… and since I wasn’t actually dead and had no intention of letting Harry know I’d been attacked, I got the impression it wouldn’t be mortal justice.

  I told them I’d be grateful for anything they could do. But I had plans of my own, and they didn’t have anything to do with justice. Justice is cold, remote, and abstract. I was more interested in bloody, immediate, gratifying revenge.

  Pleasance and Ellen began excitedly talking about wedding plans—no reason I shouldn’t marry Edwin now, they reasoned, since I was fully one of them. I could finish out the school year, of course, and graduate, but why not a summer wedding? Rosemarie sulked her way through the whole evening, not even looking at me, and that’s when I started to have my idea, and to plan my plans.

  I sat by Edwin, holding his hand—which no longer felt cold, to me; it felt exactly the same temperature as my own flesh, a reminder that everything in life is entirely relative—and smiled and nodded and talked faux-excitedly about ceremonies and flowers and dresses right along with them. I didn’t really care about the wedding. I had the two things I’d wanted all along: the power of a vampire, and the devotion of my beloved Edwin.

  But… it’s a strange thing, and I hate to admit it… Edwin was somehow less alluring, now that I was a vampire. His inhuman beauty no longer seemed quite so inhuman, and indeed, his hair was a trifle greasy, his teeth not particularly even and straight, his blue eyes rather less dazzling. I realized that, since I was no longer in the category of prey, he was no longer the perfectly attractive predator, designed to lure me into his clutches. Don’t misunderstand—he was still very beautiful—but that mysterious quality that made my breath pause and my heart stutter when he looked at me was gone. And for his part, his smiles seemed a bit weaker, a bit more perfunctory, and while gazing into my eyes he sometimes seemed to be thinking about something other than how absolutely wonderful I was. I can only assume it’s because I lost my delicious smell when I turned.

  But our love was more than just mere physical reactions, of course, it was a deeper love, an eternal love, and I didn’t doubt for even a moment that it would survive certain minor and inevitable moments of disenchantment.

  Love was for later, though. I had murdering to do.

  ME, VAMPIRE

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  The depressing thing was the normalcy I had to fake. Now that I was an immortal vampire I just didn’t care—I wanted to eat half the world and watch the other half squirm. But Edwin explained that it would be best if I pretended to be what I’d always been (by which he meant, pretended to be what I’d always already pretended to be—a normal girl) until graduation. Then we could announce our plans to get married. If I dropped out of school or just ran away, Harry and my mom would freak and/or mobilize a manhunt, but if I played the true love card after graduation, my parents would be a lot less inclined to squawk, especially when Argyle offered to pay for my college education as a wedding present. (At first I’d thought: College? As if. But then I thought: edible coeds. And it seemed like a pretty good idea.)

  So I kept having dinner with Harry most nights; kept going to biology class, even though I knew things about biology that were utterly alien to mortal knowledge; kept going to the cafeteria at lunch, even though I don’t eat… chicken fingers; and kept talking to my friends J and Kelly, even though all I could think about was the pulse of life in their necks.

  I’d never been an unpopular girl at school, but I was suddenly boy-nip, and in the days following my transformation I had to give Ike a stern talking-to in order to send him back to J’s banal bed where he belonged. Kelly even got a little flirtatious, and I had sympathy for her inevitable lesbian college roommate, who’d be the subject of Kelly’s experimentation and subsequent heartbreak when she went back home and married a typical male pig farmer or shopkeeper. (Okay, so I didn’t really feel sorry for hypothetical future lesbo roommate; I just thought it was funny.)

  Joachim called once to see how I was doing and to tell me he had no idea who’d attacked me, but it was awkward and weird and he didn’t suggest hanging out, and neither did I. I understood—I’d become one of them. A wendigo. I was still Bonnie, sure, but I was also something else, and he couldn’t see me the same way anymore. Oh well. You can’t become immortal without breaking a few hearts. (Willy Noir didn’t drop by to play Xbox with Dad anymore, either, but either Dad wasn’t too broken up about it or he was just being manly and not showing it.)

  Ah, but I know what you’re wondering: What about Principal Levitt, my would-be murderer? How did he take the return of my vampire family and my own obvious-to-him transformation? I like to think he sat up every night with a shotgun in his lap waiting for me to come murder him. As if I’d be so direct. He didn’t come to school, that’s for sure—health problems, everyone said, and the assistant principal took over as acting principal—but he didn’t leave town. He should have. Not that leaving town would have saved him, but at least he would have had the pleasure of annoying me slightly before getting what he deserved.

  I began laying the groundwork for my plan with lots of long sighs in Edwin’s presence. “What’s wrong, darling?” he finally asked.

  “It’s Rosemarie,” I said. “There’s still all this tension between us. She’s my family now, and I just want the two of us to be friends—or, at least, not enemies.”

  Edwin was quiet for a while, then said, “Perhaps Hermet and I could sit down with you and Rosemarie—”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Forcing her to play nice, to pretend? It wouldn’t mean anything, and would just make her resent me more. No, I’ll just have to wait, and be nice, and hope she realizes I’m not so bad, really. If we talk when other people are watching, she’ll just lie to make you and her husband happy. I want to talk to her honestly—promise me, Edwin, that if she ever does come to talk to me, you won’t watch through her eyes?”

  “I respect your privacy,” he said, and I believed him, even if he did have a history of being a vampiric Peeping Tom.

  “Maybe someday she’ll come see me,” I said wistfully, “and we can talk things over, girl to girl, but it wouldn’t work if we tried to force it…”

  I knew, of course, that Edwin would try to force it. He just wants me to be happy. He’s wonderful, really. Not too good for me, of course, but almost good enough. He could be powerfully persuasive, and Rosemarie cared for him deeply—that was, ironically, why she’d tried to kill me at least once and probably twice, because she thought I was bad for him—so I wasn’t surprised when, two days later, I heard a voice from my bedroom window.

  “Bonnie,” Rosemarie said, climbing through the wind
ow in a swirl of fog. She wore a sort of ninja woodsman outfit, with leather pants and a tight black top that showed off her arm muscles and her boobs. Like dressing in black could do anything to hide her in shadows when she had that radiant blonde hair. Still, the girl knew how to make an entrance, I had to give her that.

  I’d wondered why Edwin hadn’t come over to pass the night with me in secret, and now I knew.

  “I think we should talk,” Rosemarie said. “Privately.” She seemed bored, but then, she always did.

  “Is Edwin watching us, do you think?” I said.

  “I made him promise to give us our privacy,” she said. “So you and I could talk… honestly.”

  I glanced around. “My dad is downstairs. Do you mind if we go for a walk, talk outside? No reason for, you know, a mortal to overhear our business.”

  She shrugged. I could tell she didn’t even begin to give a crap. She dropped back out the window, and after a moment, I followed. I hadn’t done a lot of jumping out of second-story windows, but I’d done enough to know I liked it. Remember when you were a kid at the playground, perched up high on a jungle gym or hanging at the apex of the swing’s arc, and you make the decision to jump? That delicious moment of weightless freedom, right before gravity gets a hold on you and pulls you down? I feel weightless like that so much more often now. As if I’m beyond even the reach of the laws of the natural world.

  I landed on my feet in a catlike crouch. Rosemarie was already leaning against a tree, looking like the world’s most jaded Norwegian supermodel. I gave her my best smile—it would have made a mortal melt and offer their throat to me, I knew that, but she just rolled her eyes.

  I thought about what Mr. Levitt had said. About how two tigers can’t share the same territory. Which, okay, is dumb: how do they get together and make little tiger babies then? But it works as a metaphor for, what, serial killers? And maybe also for bitchy vampire women. Pleasance was a harmless flake (for a blood-drinking apex predator), and Emily was the closest thing to a warm and cozy earth-mother in all of vampire-dom, but Rosemarie had almost certainly sabotaged my brakes and had definitely tried to smash my head in with a hockey puck and arranged to draw my blood at the birthday party. She was, well… dangerously close to being a lot like me. And, thus, a threat.

  “Listen,” she said, walking along the lane just ahead of me, following the winding, snowy path into the woods. (Also awesome about being a vampire: fuck snow. Nothing’s colder than I am.) “I never liked you, okay? You probably noticed that. I thought you were all wrong for Edwin. Just a soppy live girl, tempting him with an admittedly pleasant smell. He’s prone to these fits of romanticism, putting women on a pedestal, and—”

  I’d never heard so many words out of Rosemarie. Her voice was surprisingly nasally and unappealing, which was odd, because it had seemed like smooth cold glass when I heard it as a real live girl.

  Anyway, I didn’t listen, really. When we passed the tree I’d had in mind, I pulled one of Harry’s handguns (he has, like, four, and rifles, too) from where it was hidden in the waistband of my pajama pants. For a cop, Harry was a surprisingly deep sleeper, and anyway, gunshots weren’t exactly uncommon out here, so I didn’t worry too much about being overheard. I was tempted to get off some pithy one-liner before firing, but Rosemarie has vampire reflexes—sure, I do, too, but she’s also got a whole lot more practice using them. So I passed up the chance for a zinger and just shot her in the back of the head.

  She fell forward like a toppled statue, face into the dirt, not even trying to catch herself. I knew I only had moments before the wound would heal and she’d leap up and start trying to kill me in a rather more direct fashion than she’d used previously, but I was prepared: I’d put Harry’s second-best wood axe behind a particular tree, and I picked it up and chop, chop, chop, off went Rosemarie’s head. Didn’t even take forty whacks.

  Even decapitation won’t necessarily kill a vampire—or so I’d learned in my little “Know your limitations!” orientation course at the Scullen home after I got turned. You have to keep the parts separated, and, ideally, burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes. I put the axe down and picked up her torso. Nice thing about cutting off a vampire’s head: no bloody mess. I would indeed burn her body… but I had other plans for her head, once I dug out the bullet and threw it away to foil any future ballistics.

  Killing Rosemarie was, of course, a worthy goal in and of itself. But I’m a big believer in working smarter, not harder.

  “No,” I said thoughtfully the next day. “No, she never came over. Are you sure she was coming here?”

  Edwin paced up and down in my bedroom, chewing on a ragged thumbnail. Nervous Edwin was not cute. I preferred languid, in-control Edwin, but I was beginning to realize a lot of his coolness had been a result of me viewing him through the eyes of enthralled prey. “Yes, at least, I think so. She told me she was going to come see you and make peace. She told Hermet the same thing.”

  “Maybe she decided to take a long walk and think it over?”

  “It’s possible, but I’m worried.”

  “I wonder…” I said slowly. “I wonder if whoever killed Jimmy… but, no, it can’t be.”

  Edwin’s head snapped up. “Jimmy? What about him?”

  I frowned. “You didn’t know? I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I guess vampires don’t have, whatever, a newsletter. He was killed, his body was in the woods, all shot up and stabbed and… Well. Then later his body disappeared.”

  “Start at the beginning,” he said, in that peremptory voice that I’d once found so hot.

  So I told him about taking a walk with Joachim, finding the body, how the corpse disappeared, and all that. He looked increasingly troubled. “Vampire hunters,” he murmured. “You should have told me earlier, Bonnie.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I just didn’t think about it, I mean, with all that’s happened, being attacked…” I widened my eyes. “You don’t think whoever killed Jimmy was the one who attacked me, do you? That they knew I, ah, consorted with vampires?”

  “I don’t know,” he said grimly. “But I intend to find out.”

  After Edwin left to powwow with his family, I puttered around the house until Dad got home. His face was as pale as mine… almost. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  He just shook his head, then sat down at the table and held his head in his hands.

  “Dad? What is it?”

  “I shouldn’t say…” He murmured. “I just… I just got back from the Scullen house, talking to Edwin’s family, but Edwin wasn’t there—”

  “He left a few minutes ago,” I said. “What did you have to go see them about?” Like I didn’t know.

  “It’s Rosemarie Scale,” he said. “Bonnie, I’m afraid she’s been killed.”

  I made the appropriate noises of shock and horror. Harry didn’t want to give me details, but I drew them out of him. Someone had left an anonymous note at police headquarters. It was a strange note: the writer claimed to be a burglar, said he’d broken into Mr. Levitt’s house in order to steal whatever he could get, and he’d looked in the chest freezer out in the garage because sometimes people hide valuables in there, you know, but instead of a bundle of cash or a cache of gold, he’d found a human head. The burglar was obviously unwilling to come forward publicly, as he’d been there during the commission of a crime, but he thought somebody should know. Harry had been willing to write it off as a joke, but thought he should investigate. He didn’t have cause to get a warrant, so he just asked Mr. Levitt if he could look in his freezer, and the old man said knock yourself out, and… there was a head, in a plastic bag, on top of some frozen venison steaks, next to some frozen walleye filets.

  Right where I put it. Before I wrote that anonymous note. Breaking and entering is so trivial when you’re a vampire, and I’d been good at picking locks when I was alive. Screw cat burglars: bat burglar all the way.

  “I have to say, he looked stunned,” Harry said, drinki
ng his fifth cup of coffee. “Makes me wonder if he was even in his right mind when he did it.”

  “If he did it,” I said. “What if someone just, you know, put the head there?”

  “Well, a head in a freezer is pretty damning, but it’s still just circumstantial evidence,” Harry said. “But we got a search warrant, of course, and brought in some crime scene techs from the state police, and we noticed some disturbed earth in the basement, and got to digging, and… Heck, Bonnie, you don’t need to hear all this.”

  “You found more bodies?” I said, putting all the appropriate horror in my voice. I hadn’t counted on this part—I didn’t need Mr. Levitt getting convicted in a court of law, that was hardly necessary, I just needed him to look guilty—but I’d wondered if he had incriminating evidence of his actual crimes in his house.

  “Graves,” he said. “Drifters, it looks like. Hikers. Runaways. Some of them old, real old. When I think that he was a school teacher, and then school superintendent, and even your principal, I just… How can evil like that hide in plain sight for so long, Bonnie? I just don’t understand it.” The distress in his voice was so profound, like he’d realized the world was a dark and rotten place.