The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  After the funeral—presided over by counselor Inkfist, who I guess used to be a reverend, and wanted to be one again? So weird—I got Mom and Dwayne on a plane back to the west coast and out of my hair. Harry had left the house to me, which was nice of him, I guess. Though I was marrying into a family of robber-baron-rich vampires, so I didn’t worry much about keeping a roof over my head.

  About a week after the last of the dirt got thrown over Harry, Edwin and I had a little wedding ceremony in the icy back yard of the Scullen house. It was the new year, just—Christmas was not much of an event that year, as you can imagine—and it seemed like a time for new beginnings. Argyle presided (I guess he used to be a priest in the 1400s or something, which explains so much about his silly morality), and nobody commented on the fact that I was wearing black. They probably though I was still mourning for Harry, but, really, I just thought, as a vampire bride, black was the way to go.

  Most of the ceremony was in Latin or whatever, except for some bits about how this time of happiness was a welcome relief from the recent darkness and so on and so forth, and at the end Argyle said, “You may kiss the bride,” and Edwin pressed his cold lips to my cold lips, and I took his hands in mine, and I knew I’d finally arrived at the place I was always going. Tonight, on our honeymoon, we would finally make love—I guess there’s something to be said for abstinence, because the delayed gratification thing does get you pretty hot and bothered, or as hot as a pair of animated corpses can get—and the tingle I felt at the thought of Edwin’s naked body against mine almost made me feel alive again. And I decided I was alive—I am alive—in every way that matters.

  And that’s it, dear reader.

  This is the part where I start living happily ever after. Forever.

  ALWAYS DARKEST

  NARRATOR

  That’s the end of Bonnie’s journal. Not a bad ending, really, as far as these things go. She left some things out of the story, though, or didn’t spell them out, and then there were the things that happened after the wedding, so I guess I’ll mention a couple of those, if only to give you a fuller picture.

  That time Bonnie got bored at Edwin’s house while his family was mourning Rosemarie’s death, and she went for a walk… well, she ended up at my house, a little cottage on the edge of town. I don’t think she picked me for any particular reason, except I’m way out on the edge of town, nobody around, and she figured she could get away with it.

  I heard a knock at my door and levered myself up from the chair where I was reading a history of the prairie, with some yodeling on an NPR radio program as background music. “Now, I wasn’t expecting any visitors,” I said—narrating my life, you know, like I used to do before I took up writing—“but it’s never a bad time to be neighborly, so long as it’s not too early in the morning or too late at night or too close to a major holiday, so I was happy enough to see which of the good people of Lake Woebegotten had come over to borrow a cup of sugar or a gallon of diesel fuel or a shovelful of fertilizer.” I opened the door and said, “Who should I find on my doorstep but one of the prettiest girls in the county, Harry Cusack’s girl Bonnie who just moved here from the West Coast. I asked her how she was settling in, and she said—” I paused, because I liked to let people supply their own dialogue, when it seemed appropriate.

  Bonnie really was pretty, though it’s hard to tell how much was just being young and how much was true bone-deep beauty, and of course, by that time, she was also a vampire, which has beneficial side effects for your complexion and so forth. But I like to think I could see something in her eyes, which weren’t brown at all in that moment, but black. I’m tempted to say the black of empty space, but the problem with Bonnie isn’t her emptiness, because she’s not empty; she’s full. The problem is what she’s full of. So not the black of empty space at all; the black of deep space, where dwell terrible things with terrible designs. Her smile was bright and hard and glittering. “I’m wondering if you can help me,” she said. “You see, I’m simply starving.”

  I nodded. “Now, my mother didn’t raise me to be inhospitable, so if someone comes by, even if they’re not hungry, I know enough to offer them a little lunch, and I was pretty sure I had some lemon bars and cookies and most of a cake and of course the fixins for several sandwiches and a fresh pot of coffee and a dab of that macaroni-hamburger hotdish I’d had for supper the night before and—”

  “I was thinking of something… fresher,” Bonnie said, and opened her mouth, fangs sliding down out of her gums. Her eyes turned red as warning lights and she shoved me into my house, a straight-armed push that sent me flying into the old-timey radio I’d inherited from my own father (along with everything else I had, from the roof over my head to the money in my bank account to the books on my shelves). The radio collapsed, and the yodeling cut off abruptly, and all the breath got slammed out of me in the process, and for the first time in my waking life, I was left absolutely speechless.

  “You’ll have to forgive me.” Bonnie kicked my door shut behind her and stalked toward me, her body moving sinuously, like a snake, or maybe more like the body of a snake filled entirely by squirming maggots. Drool built up in her mouth and overspilled her pouty lips and ran down her chin, and her beauty was entirely gone: being on the point of death had given me some clarity, and she didn’t look like anything alluring at all anymore, but just a waxy-faced corpse walking. “It’s my first time,” she said, leaning down to me, twisting my head to the side, tearing off my red bow tie, and exposing my throat. “I wish I could say I’d be gentle. But gentle isn’t really my thing.”

  I don’t remember too much of what happened next—my throat torn away, certainly, and her guzzling my blood, and then getting dragged by my feet at high speed out into the woods, where she pitched me down a hill and into the deep snow. I don’t even think she knew who I was, though she’d seen me around—people in town knew me, like I said way at the beginning of this, I guess you might say I was considered a local eccentric, less crazed than Gothic Jim and less deranged than Cyrus Bell, but still noteworthy because of my habit of constant Narration. I know her eating me was nothing personal. (I know it, like I know everything, now.) I also know I was her first victim (though not her last), and that’s probably why she messed up the way she did. Because I didn’t die. Maybe the snow preserved me or something, who can say, but I lay out there in the cold for a day and a night with hardly any blood in me and lots of her venomous saliva coursing through my veins and then I rose up and my mind opened and I knew I’d become a vampire. My special power is that omnicognizance I’ve been telling you about. My mother always said I was a little know-it-all. Just goes to show.

  Bonnie doesn’t know I’m out here. She thinks she never had children and never will—but here I am, a child of a sort, wouldn’t be here in this way without her. She thinks I’m dead, just one of the disappeared—one of the several she’s eaten, you see—and that my body hasn’t been discovered yet, is all. I’ve been living on what I can find out in the woods, and haven’t taken any human victims myself, because it’s hard to eat somebody when you know so much about them—it’s the reason farmers don’t give names to the animals they’re planning to eat. But I’m here, living in the woods, sitting up in trees, watching everything, the whole world like a bunch of ongoing reality shows, though I admit, I keep it on the Bonnie channel, mostly. She made me what I am today. She interests me. That girl wouldn’t have any trouble eating a pig she’d raised, even if she’d named it Wilbur or Babe.

  It’s been a steamy show since the wedding, too. Oh, their wedding night was nothing much to speak of, two dead people rubbing their dead parts together like a couple of auto-necrophiliacs. When you’re both cold it’s hard to have a spark, maybe, though Pleasance and Garnett seemed to manage, and even Argyle and Ellen have a deep love between them even if their hearts only beat a little, right after they’ve eaten. But Bonnie had gotten what she wanted from Edwin, and the bloom was off the rose. Not that Edwin realized it. H
e’d never been inside a girl before, and as far as he knew, that was as good as it got, and if there’s one thing Bonnie’s good at, it’s faking whatever she needs to fake.

  No, the real heat is between Bonnie and Joachim. They’ve been meeting in secret at Harry’s house, and they’ve got some wild stuff going on. I never watched pornography or anything like that, but they do things I’d be hard pressed even to put names to. Sometimes Joachim turns into a bear and they don’t even slow down. It sure is different. Joachim is full of self-loathing, what with fornicating with a wendigo, and Bonnie whispers that she loves him, though really she just loves his heat—body heat’s one of those things you don’t realize you’ll miss until it’s gone, believe you me. She knows she’s in constant danger that her husband will find out—he still can’t see through her eyes, but if he decides to peek out through Joachim’s peepers at the right moment, he’ll get an eyeful and that’s for sure—but for Bonnie, the possibility of getting caught and maybe starting a titanic battle of supernatural menfolk is part of the appeal, part of what makes it hot, and Joachim, well. Even before Bonnie could manipulate people supernaturally, he never stood a chance. He’s a nice trusting boy, and the fact that he can turn into a vampire-eating monster hasn’t changed that.

  I tell you, I’d rather Bonnie be with weak, sentimental Edwin than with Joachim, because Joachim’s a good fella who’s getting ruined by her influence. I’m definitely Team Necrophilia rather than Team Zoophilia, if you want to know the truth.

  Joachim’s dad Willy Noir’s getting suspicious—heck, he’s been suspicious, he’s just getting more suspicious, about lots of things, including his good friend Harry’s suicide—and though I can’t see the future it wouldn’t surprise me if things got ugly between the Scullens and the elders (and the youngers), if the treaty broke down and some kind of a war broke out. Bonnie has that effect on people. She’s trouble walking, a lie on two legs, a disaster in a black lace dress. She’s pretty formidable, too, even more so now that she’s a vampire, and it’s troubling to think what kind of more or less dreadful things she might accomplish, given forever to accomplish it. She doesn’t show any inclination to move away from this town, at least not until she graduates high school, which probably isn’t good for this town, and that bothers me, because I’ve lived in Lake Woebegotten my whole life, and there are good people here, every single one of them better than most, and they don’t deserve whatever bad trouble she’s going to bring down on them. And I don’t deserve to have to know about it all in intimate detail when it finally happens, either. I understand, now, with my new perspective, that I’m an odd, cranky old fella and have been for a long time, but deep down I’m not a bad guy, and I’ve always thought, if you can do some good, you should.

  Still. Bonnie. Well, you read all this here, I figure, if you’ve made it this far. You know what she’s like. Makes you wonder if anybody could even stop her.

  Maybe if somebody knew her every move. Knew when she was alone. Knew when she let her guard down. Knew when she was tired, or careless, or vulnerable. If somebody could watch and wait for just exactly the exact right moment to strike. Maybe a fella like that could do something to stop her before she wrecks anybody else’s life. Or unlife.

  And maybe it wasn’t such a smart idea of hers, making an enemy out of somebody like me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Harrison Geillor was born in a small three-room farm house in central MN, sometime in the middle of the twentieth century. He attended one of Minnesota’s prestigious institutions of higher learning, where he obtained a degree in English. Like English majors everywhere, he went on to work in a variety of jobs that had nothing to do with books or literature. At some point in his life he decided that the best way to appreciate Minnesota was to appreciate it from afar. He splits his time between Santa Cruz and San Francisco, only returning to Minnesota for smelt fishing, and the occasional family reunion.