The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  “They say if a tiger tastes the flesh of a human, it becomes a man-eater,” Edwin said. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but Argyle says our kind are similar. It’s like being an alcoholic. Nothing compares to human blood—they say pig blood is closest, but it’s close the way saccharine is close to sugar. Not quite right. There’s an aftertaste. To taste human blood is to crave it more, and to risk losing control, so we avoid it.”

  So much for my fantasies of Edwin and I as a continent-crossing team, me luring victims and helping to dispatch them for his supper. And here I’d been looking forward to doing my part to put dinner on the table.

  “Okay then.” I took a bite of my burger—not rare enough, nobody makes them rare enough, but juicy enough to dribble down my chin. “So what do I have to worry about?”

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Bonnie, you don’t understand. I’ve become attracted to your personality, and certainly your beautiful looks, but the first thing that drew me to you was your smell. Humans have flavors. Vintages. Bouquets. Most of them are neither offensive nor inoffensive to me, but occasionally, one smells especially good.”

  “So I’m like fresh baked cookies and you’re in overeaters anonymous, huh?”

  “Indelicate, but apt. I greatly fear I might lose control around you, Bonnie.”

  “So drink up.” I took a sip of my soda. “I don’t mind. If it’s consensual, where’s the harm? Turn me into one of you—we can be together forever.”

  His eyes widened. “You… want to be with me?”

  “You’re the hottest guy I’ve ever met,” I said, honestly—see, I can be honest sometimes. “And you have the whole awesome superpower thing going for you. Of course I do.”

  “You’re young, Bonnie. Forever is a very long time. You don’t know what you’re asking.”

  “So how old are you, then, grandpa?”

  He smiled. “Biologically? Around seventeen.”

  “And in calendar time?”

  “Well. Argyle turned me… a long time ago.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Enough with the vague. When?”

  Another sigh. Clearly he was not happy giving up his mysteries—or maybe he just knew he was all cute and broody when he sighed. “1906.”

  “Ah. And you were only seventeen, just like I am, when you got changed, so why hesitate to do for me what Argyle did for you?”

  “You don’t understand. It was just after the great San Francisco earthquake. Argyle was there, working in what passed for a hospital in those days. After the earthquake, and the fire, he found me, trapped under rubble, my whole family dead, my own injuries grievous. I would not have survived, and he made the decision to give me a semblance of life, rather than letting me die entirely.”

  I considered. “Whereas I’m all young and healthy.”

  “Yes.”

  “And not in need of such desperate measures.”

  “Correct.”

  I considered. Suicide attempt? Would cutting my wrists prompt him to turn me in order to save my life? Then he’d think I was crazy and might let me bleed out. I could maybe fake an accident… but what if he didn’t come and turn me into a vampire? I’d be dead, and while being a vampire would be vastly preferable to being alive, being alive was vastly preferable to being a banquet for worms. “Fair enough,” I said, though it wasn’t; I was just tabling the discussion. I’d bring it up again. I’d work it in. Maybe next time I’d ask him after screwing his brains out or sucking him off (assuming vampires could, you know, function sexually—that was a topic for another time). I find guys are in a more responsive and accommodating frame of mind after they’ve just gotten off. “If you don’t mind me asking, if you’re more than a hundred years old or whatever, why do you go to high school?”

  He laughed. “I suppose it might seem… untoward. But I look young, Bonnie. Where else should I spend my time?”

  “Why spend time with humans at all? No offense, but, well, I like this hamburger, but that doesn’t mean I want to go hang out with a bunch of cows.”

  “Bonnie.” He reached across the table, and touched me with his cold, cold hand. He basically had no circulation. Not promising for the prospect of him getting erections. His face was so earnest I wanted to laugh. “You must never think I believe your kind to be cattle. I consider myself a human, or at least kin to humans. I was human. I like to still be among humans, to be in their company, to remind me of what I once was. Of course, there’s a certain degree of standoffishness—it’s dangerous for us to get too close to humans, because we’re so strong, it’s easy to hurt them accidentally. You don’t know how many times the coach has begged Hermet to sign up for the football team, and my brother loves such sports, but he’d kill everyone else on the field, quite by accident. But being in the company of humans is essential to retain our own humanity.” His perfect lips quirked in a half smile. “Plus, have you ever spent a century with the same six people? It gets a bit tiresome. Being out in the world helps ease that as well.”

  “Okay then. I’m going to help you get in touch with your humanity. And since you’re impossibly ancient, I’m going to do this the old-fashioned way: Edwin Scullen, will you be my steady?”

  He laughed, and it was a wonderful laugh. I usually hate it when other people laugh—they’re a source of amusement for me, so they shouldn’t be amused—but Edwin was different. “It’s not traditional for the woman to ask that. Bonnie, do you really want to be close to me? Knowing I will never age, that I can never be entirely like a human boyfriend would be?”

  “Are you telling me this doesn’t feel epic to you, Edwin?” I said. “That you don’t feel like someone in a storybook? Have you ever felt this way about anyone before?”

  He shook his head. “No, Bonnie. Never. Not vampire, not human, no one. Since the moment I met you, there has only been you.”

  “You could have fooled me. You seemed to hate my guts at first.”

  “Ah. That. Well.” He took my hands. “I was afraid of the intensity of my feelings. Afraid of what I might do. That’s why I missed that week of school—I left town, went back to Canada. We have some friends, another clan, who are—vegetarians, as you say. I planned to stay away forever, but I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and I decided I would be strong. So I returned… and was besotted with you all over again.” He sighed. “Do I dare to be with you, Bonnie? Despite the risks?”

  “I’m a big girl,” I said. “I say, yes. Let’s do it. Let’s be together. Or at least try. I think we owe it to these feelings to try.”

  “You are extraordinary,” he murmured. “I can’t believe you aren’t… afraid of me.”

  “You’ve never given me reason to fear you,” I said. “Are you planning to?”

  “Never.”

  I figured as much. I just hoped I could avoid giving him reason to fear me. Because though I saw Edwin partly as a means to an end—my ticket to superpowers and immortality and becoming an apex predator—I also had feelings for him. I don’t know if it’s what other people mean when they say “love” (I don’t know how most people, being the stupid wastes of flesh they are, can possibly be capable of love or worthy of being loved), but I felt something profound. He was interesting like nobody else has ever been interesting, and so pretty I didn’t think I’d ever get tired of looking at him.

  Edwin paid the check—I assumed he was rich, because of the sports car, and because how do you not get rich when you’re part of a clan of vampires?—and we went out to his car. He drove me back to Lake Woebegotten, and he drove very damn fast. “Aren’t you worried about crashing and killing me?” I said. “I’m just a fragile mortal weakling, you know.”

  He laughed. “I always drive this fast. My reflexes are phenomenal. You have nothing to worry about.”

  “Um, except for the laws of physics. It doesn’t matter how fast your reflexes are, really. They’re limited by how responsive the car is. And given the physical limitations of, you know, brakes and steering wheels, your superhuman po
wers won’t be a lot of good if a deer runs out in front of us. You see what I mean?”

  “Hmm. You make a good point.” He slowed down. “I don’t usually have people in the car with me. I mean—people. If I get in a car accident, well. I’ll miss the car, but it wouldn’t inconvenience me too much.”

  “Turn me into a vampire,” I said, “and you can drive as fast as you want.”

  “I’m not sure the drawbacks of turning you into an undead, blood-drinking creature of the night are worth shaving a few minutes off the drive to Bemidji,” he said.

  He got me back to Harry’s house, and we sat in the driveway, looking at each other. After a moment I said, “Are you going to kiss me?”

  “I… want to. I haven’t kissed anyone in… well. It’s been some time. But I’m afraid, Bonnie, being so close to you, the scent of you, it’s overpowering…”

  “Okay,” I said, leaning in quick and pecking his cheek. “We’ll give you some time to get desensitized or acclimated or whatever, but there’d better be vampire-human make-out sessions in our future, all right?”

  Before he could respond, I scooted out of the car and went inside. Harry was on the couch, still in his uniform, playing some kind of Xbox game where he ran around with an assault rifle slaughtering zombies. “Hey, hon,” he said, glancing at the clock on the wall. “You’re home early.”

  “Oh?” I’d assumed it was late, past midnight, but that was just because time with Edwin had a tendency to stretch—it was barely nine. “Guess it doesn’t take that long to hit every store in the mall in Bemidji.”

  “True enough.” He yawned. “You eat?”

  “I did.”

  “You have fun?”

  “I did. Dresses were acquired. Mission accomplished.”

  “Good, good.”

  “I’m going up to my room to study a bit, then I guess I’ll go to bed. Good night, Dad.”

  He mumbled a response, and I went upstairs to my room and called J—I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten to do that.

  “You’re alive!” she said.

  “I am. Everything’s fine.”

  “So?” Her voice was excited. “How did it go? With Edwin?”

  “Good. It was… practically a date.”

  “Wow! Maybe we should have gotten you a dress, too—you guys should come to the dance with us!”

  “I’m not sure he’s the dancing type,” I said. I yawned artificially. “J, can we talk more tomorrow? I’m pretty tired.”

  She let me go after only five more minutes of attempting to pry, and promised to let Kelly know I’d made it home safe.

  I stretched out on my bed and did a mental inventory. In a world full of uncertainty, I had three absolutely solid touchstones:

  First, Edwin was a vampire.

  Second, he loved me—or at least thought my blood smelled delicious, which, for a vampire, was probably the next best thing.

  And third, I would get him to turn me into a vampire too, no matter how much scheming, manipulation, or treachery it required.

  MEADOW LARKS

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  I won’t bore you with talk of how happy we were in the next week, being publicly a couple, spending every waking moment together, holding hands at school, eating lunch together (not with my crowd or his—I got the feeling I wasn’t welcome with his, and I didn’t want to bore him with mine), being the subject of gossip, not even having to fake the giggling girl talk with J and Kelly and the others, and with Edwin sneaking into my room every night (and steadfastly refusing to sleep with me, much to my dismay—more about that later), Harry completely oblivious to his arrivals and departures. Being able to leap up to a second-story window has its advantages.

  But Happiness in a story is boring: almost as bad as listening to someone else’s dream. You want “blood and ructions,” as my old granny used to say—actually that’s how she characterized every entertainment in the world other than the Bible, though from the little I’ve read the Bible has enough blood and ructions to match a hundred action movies. Still, I should cover a few things, some snippets of that happy time before the hockey game and the evil vampires trying to kill me (a few weeks before I would have considered that a tautology: saying “evil vampire” should be like saying “big whale” or “little microbe,” absolutely redundant, but that just goes to show, you never know as much as you think you do, even when you’re me). So:

  Edwin liked to play this game when we were in my bed together, not having sex, and no, it wasn’t a game that involved dry humping. It was called Questions, but it wasn’t the same as the Questions game from that movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It was pretty simple. He got to ask three questions, and I got to ask three questions, and follow-up questions or requests for clarification counted against your total—but only if they were actually phrased as questions, so you could make leading statements and try to tease out more information. My kind of game, really, as it turned ordinary conversation into something you could win, by getting more out of your opponent than he got out of you. Edwin asked me questions like, “What’s your favorite ice cream” and “What’s your favorite color” and “If you were a verb, which verb would you be?” (I didn’t say “murder,” I think I said, “sparkle.”)

  My questions were more like this: “So how does this whole vampire thing work—I mean, like, physically?”

  He stirred beside me on the mattress. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Your heart doesn’t beat, I can tell when I press my ear to your chest, and you only breathe when you remember to, so how does that work? Come on—your dad’s a doctor, surely he’s spent some time exploring this problem.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I see. Hmm. Well, you must understand—Argyle is interested in the question, but it’s not as if vampires stand still to be dissected.”

  “Vivisected,” I murmured. “When you cut them open when they’re still alive, it’s vivisection—but, wait, if you vampires are technically dead, I guess it is dissection, never mind.”

  He smiled in the dark: I could see his teeth gleam in the moonbeams through the window. “Quite. Well, Argyle has theories, but precious few opportunities to test them. Our blood doesn’t circulate under normal circumstances, and so it doesn’t circulate oxygen, and so our brains shouldn’t work, but—they do. He thinks the oxygen in the blood we drink replenishes us, somehow—and, yes, I know, drinking blood should just fill our stomachs with blood, not affect the blood in our veins or brains, which doesn’t circulate anyway. My mother—well, Argyle’s wife—Ellen has a rather more mystical view: we take in life force, and that force sustains us.”

  “Huh. So it’s woo-woo shit.”

  “Was that a question?”

  I sighed. “No. I’m just surprised at Argyle. I thought he was more of a scientific vampire.”

  “Understand, Argyle was born six hundred years ago. He was shaped by the worldviews of the time—he still, deep down, believes in demons, and magic, and gods, and all manner of such things. And our very existence is a powerful argument in favor of that worldview. There’s also the matter of… our powers.”

  That perked me up, but I could tell he wanted to go on, so I didn’t waste a question, just waited.

  In a moment he said, “Some of us have… abilities. They develop after we turn. Not all of us, but some. Pleasance has the power of psychometry—she can hold an object and discover things, psychically, about its history, and about its owner. That power even works in the present, assuming the affinity between object and owner is strong enough. If she picked up my favorite sweatshirt, say, at home, and held it in her hands, and concentrated, she would receive a vision of where I am now, here, in bed with you—she calls it sympathetic magic.”

  “Wow,” I murmured. Mental note: never let Pleasance get her hands on anything of mine.

  “Yes. Garnett can make people forget they’ve seen him. It’s not invisibility, exactly, but… well, you just don’t notice him, and if
you do, you soon forget you did, if that’s what he wants. There are other powers. My own, well…”

  I could sense he was trying to pull a question out of me, but I stayed quiet.

  “I can see through the eyes of others.”

  “Ha!” I said. “So you were spying on me. That’s how you knew that guy who talked to me outside the bar in Bemidji was staring at my boobs the whole time—you looked through his eyes! And here I thought you were just following me around.”

  “It’s true. Argyle thinks the powers we have are… enhancements of the powers we had in life. I was always good at seeing things from someone else’s point of view—and so I can literally see things from their point of view, now. Only humans—or things that used to be human—alas, not animals. I can’t control them either, it’s completely passive, but anyone within, oh, a hundred miles, I can dip into their senses and see through their eyes, as if they were cameras. I was keeping an eye on you as best I could when you were in Bemidji, but I lost sight of you when you were alone, so I jumped from person to person for a while until a barfly caught sight of you.”

  My very own super-stalker. It should have been creepy, but mostly it was cute. It did have certain troubling aspects, though. If he could see me all the time… But apparently he couldn’t, so I decided to waste a question. “Why not just look through my eyes?”

  “Ah, there, you see. It’s not just your delectable smell or your powerful personality that fascinate me, Bonnie. For some reason—I can’t see through your eyes. You are largely a mystery to me, you see—what you do when you’re alone is utterly unknown to me, and that is wonderful. When you can so easily satisfy your curiosity as I can, finding someone who resists such casual prying is wonderful.”

  “Oh, too bad,” I said, but I was really thinking: Thank the nonexistent god. It would mean, if I ever killed anyone else again, I’d need to make sure they didn’t get a look at me, just to be on the safe side. But it should be okay. Edwin’s attention couldn’t be everywhere at all times. He could only see through one set of eyes at a time. “I was thinking I’d spend a lot more time staring at myself in the mirror after I took a shower, maybe fondling my breasts, give you a little show, but since you can’t see through me—you’ll have to use your imagination.”