The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten

by Harrison Geillor

  The vampire, Stevie Ray thought, looked like a bear who’d just been mobbed and attacked by a whole bunch of salmon. He’d clearly thought they were ridiculous right up until the moment Eileen shot him in the face and Levitt took his head off.

  Stevie Ray hadn’t fired a shot or swung a blade, he’d been covering an avenue the vampire hadn’t tried to escape down, but he’d puked up his guts anyway. Oh, hell. Could you get DNA off puke? You couldn’t from crap, but from puke, sure, why not, had to be bits of throat and stomach lining in there, right? What if somebody found that body and found the vomit and did a test and placed him at the scene? Oh, lord, he’d have to go back out there and dump some bleach all over his own throw-up, it was the only way to be safe. He groaned. Covering up crime scenes wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he became a cop.

  He looked at the beer in his hand. It was his fifth. He wouldn’t be going back to the woods to clean up things tonight—he’d just get lost and freeze to death. He’d already confiscated the guns they’d used, and he planned to get rid of those tomorrow morning to make sure no ballistic evidence would be recovered, so he’d go back to the woods and deal with the puke after that.

  Inkfist was right. A dead body turning to dust would have been a lot easier.

  Mr. Levitt went with Stevie Ray. They took a can of kerosene and a bottle of bleach, and trudged through the snow, and when they got to the crime scene… they saw the remains had been disturbed. “Must be animals, right?” Stevie Ray said, desperately hoping.

  Levitt knelt and looked at the ground. “Not animals,” he said. “Look at those footprints. People. Hmm. Wait here.” He loped off through the woods—the fella was spry for someone on the far side of 70; heck, he was spry for someone 30 years younger. Stevie Ray went ahead and poured bleach over his vomit, just in case it wasn’t a lost cause. Say some hunters had found the corpse. They’d have to walk a while to get a signal on their cell phones, probably. And then it would take Harry a while to get out here to the woods. Not a real long while, though—he knew the woods pretty good, and took his job seriously. He’d be calling Stevie Ray to assist, probably, but of course, Stevie Ray was already at the crime scene, contaminating evidence. Maybe if they moved the body, when the hunters got back here with Harry, there’d be no body here, no physical evidence at all, and Harry’d just think they were drunk or—

  Mr. Levitt returned. “Got a look at him,” he said, not even breathing hard. He was holding a pair of binoculars. “They didn’t notice me though. It was one of the Ojibwe boys from the reservation, which could be a lucky break, if he’s one of the ones who knows about vampires, and hates them to pieces. But the other one…”

  “What?” Stevie Ray said.

  “Bonnie,” Levitt said grimly. “Harry’s daughter. You know. The vampire lover.”

  “Oh for damn,” Stevie Ray said, numbness washing over him. “The boy was probably Joachim Noir, Harry said she was spending a lot of time with him. He’s all right, Willy Noir was the one who told us there was a vampire to kill. I don’t think he’ll mind. But Bonnie… you’re right, she did love one, but what does that mean? What will she do?”

  “Let’s sanitize this crime scene,” Mr. Levitt said. “Should’ve done it last night, but we didn’t have the tools or the time or the energy. Make sure if she does decide to tell her daddy she found a body in the woods, there’s no body to find when Harry gets here. Then, who cares what she does?”

  “Makes sense,” Stevie Ray said. “But it makes me nervous. She’ll be curious, you know, and what if she starts making waves, asking questions, sniffing around…”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Mr. Levitt said, pulling on his gloves. “Problems like these have a way of working themselves out.”

  THE INEVITABILITY OF DEATH

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

  Joachim told his dad about the vampire we found, and he took the news stoically—I’m good at reading people, and Willy Noir was hard to read, and it’s not because of some “inscrutable Indian” bullshit either, since his son was an open book to me, and not even a book with lots of words in small type, but a big colorful picture book, practically a pop-up book. Willy loaded us up in his truck and drove us on a long and silent trip pretty much back where we’d come from, and then a tromp through the same old woods again, which was boring.

  But things got less boring, and not in a good way, when we reached the spot where we’d found Jimmy’s body, because Jimmy’s body wasn’t there anymore.

  “But—but—I swear, it was here,” Joachim said.

  Willy Noir nodded. “I believe you. I can smell there was something here. But I also smell… bleach?” They sniffed around—seeing two grown men wandering around the trees with their noses in the air, sucking wind through their nostrils, was pretty comical. Turns out the puddle of puke was now a puddle of bleach.

  “Whoever killed Jimmy came back and covered up their crime scene,” I said.

  Willy Noir nodded. “Which is all I was going to do, so—wonderful. Saved me the trouble.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “Dead wendigos superficially resemble dead humans. It’s enough to get the police involved and cause a lot of difficulty, and inquiries, and when a pathologist notices peculiarities in the corpse…. Wendigos are ferocious about keeping their secrets. How do you think they stay secret? Whenever it seems like they’re going to become public knowledge, they take steps—killing lawmen, burning down hospitals so autopsies can’t be performed, making it all look like an accident, some using their mind-powers to remove memories or implant false ones. I don’t care who killed the wendigo you call Jimmy—in a war, if someone else wants to attack your enemy, why complain?—but I was concerned they’d left evidence to be discovered. Apparently they realized their mistake and took steps to correct it. Fine with me.” Willy fixed me with a stare. “Is that all right with you, Bonnie? Or do I misunderstand you? Are you concerned for the so-called victim?”

  Actually, I didn’t know Jimmy at all, and if I’d happened upon him one day and he was on fire, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to kick sand over him. But acting like all vampires were mindless killing machines deserving of death was dumb, and, dare I say it, racist. Somehow it had never occurred to me that the member of an oppressed people could be a racist, but there it was. Nevertheless, I said, “The only good wendigo is a dead wendigo. Still. I wonder who might have killed him.”

  Willy shrugged. “There have always been humans who learned of the existence of wendigo, who were brave enough to do something about it. From Abraham van Helsing to Anita Blake.”

  Who were both fictional but I didn’t say that, either.

  “Anyway, that’s the only wendigo we’ve sensed in a while,” Willy Noir said. “So we’re all safe now.” And he trudged on back to his truck, and we trudged with him. I got Willy to drop me at home.

  If I’d realized that was the night I was going to die, I probably would have had them take me someplace else. Maybe Cafe Lo. I always liked ice cream. It would have been nice to have ice cream one last time.

  You can actually make a sort of sorbet out of blood, but it’s just not the same.

  Harry was out of town for the weekend at some kind of small-town law enforcement convention in the Twin Cities, and I was just puttering around the house, trying to keep myself occupied and keep up appearances. I’d spoken to Kelly and J on the phone a bit, doing the fake girl-talk thing. They both liked me even more once Edwin dumped me—the appearance of vulnerability is very appealing to the weak, I’ve found—and in the interests of building my unimpeachable public mask, I’d nurtured our relationships. When I wasn’t with Joachim, I was with them. I figured even if I wasn’t marrying Edwin, I’d need bridesmaids someday. (I didn’t expect them to be Kelly and J, really—college friends seemed more likely—but you could never be too careful. If I’d learned anything from the vampires and were-creatures of my acquaintance, it was that monsters have to be car
eful about appearing to be human.)

  After I hung up with them and microwaved a bag of popcorn, I thought about calling Joachim. I was thinking it might be time to give in to the tension between us and just have hairy were-beast love. It would probably be hot and messy and passionate and wild, I thought, while I’d expected sex with Edwin would have been a precise and (of course) rather cold affair. Both had their appeal, of course, and I spent some time on the couch painting my toenails and pondering the potential joys of were-vamp-human love triangles. I figured Joachim would come running if I rang him up, and why shouldn’t I? Edwin wasn’t watching, he was probably on to his next piece of hot mortal teenage ass by now, having lost all interest in me the moment I turned eighteen and ceased to be jailbait, Gretchen had probably been right—

  The old man was good. I have to give him that. I didn’t have the senses of a wendigo, but I was a long way from unobservant, and I didn’t hear him pick the lock on the back door and slip in and creep up on me in the living room at all. My preference out in the world is to sit with my back to walls, with my eyes on the entrance, but—dumb, I know—I’d come to feel safe and secure in Harry’s house over the months. Why not? My dad was a cop, and for a long time I’d had a vampire keeping an eye on the place, and it’s not like Lake Woebegotten is a hotbed of home invasion crime. So I was on the couch, which is in the middle of the living room, and so the old man got me, fair and square.

  I felt the needle slide into my neck, and managed to get halfway off the couch before slumping down against the cushions, still aware, but with my limbs numb and useless.

  “I can only assume vampires use some sort of paralytic venom,” Mr. Levitt said, stepping around the couch and gently placing a hypodermic needle on the coffee table. I wondered what he’d injected me with—I was paralyzed, but not numb. Clearly he had better serial killer pharmaceutical mojo than I did. “I mean, I can’t be sure, having never seen one work, but it seems likely. Draining all the blood out of somebody must take a while, right? I wish I’d seen how they feed. I don’t know if it’s messy or neat, though I suspect the popular image of two tiny puncture holes in the neck is less accurate than tearing out the throat and feeding from the artery.”

  I tried to say something—Why are you doing this, maybe—but could only manage a sort of grunted croak.

  He seemed to understand anyway. “Remember when we chatted at the Fall Formal? How I, well, you know, suggested murdering you? The more I thought about it, the better that idea sounded. Not so much because you’re a threat to me—any more than a newborn lion cub is an immediate threat to the patriarch of the pride—but you’re something of a loose end, aren’t you? I certainly hinted to you about the kind of person I am, which wasn’t too smart, but you know our kind, you and I, sometimes we can’t resist the urge to boast. And now seems like the perfect time to get rid of you. Your father’s out of town. Your vampire boyfriend isn’t keeping an eye on you anymore. So when you are found in a terrible state, here, well, certain people in the know will assume you were killed by a vampire, possibly even your departed boyfriend. Why, we may even need to bring your father into the Interfaith League of Vampire Slayers—I know, a silly name, but it makes them feel better, having an organization. He’d be a great addition, now that I think about it, and with the death of his daughter as a motive to drive him, oh, he’d become a scourge of the undead.”

  I gurgled.

  He nodded. “I’d be upset, too,” he said. “But this is what I do, and this is where we are, and this is how it’s going to be.” He grabbed me by my feet and yanked me off the couch, and I thudded to the floor, banging my head painfully on the hard wood. Not hard enough to knock me out, unfortunately. I could have done without consciously experiencing what came next. Mr. Levitt unfolded a knife bag like chefs use on those cooking reality shows and drew out a shining blade. “Messy, I think, around the throat,” he said, and I tried to scream, but I couldn’t, not even when what he was doing started to hurt.

  I don’t remember much of what happened after I blacked out from the pain, but here’s what I can reconstruct, based on what I heard later:

  Joachim had been lurking around my house. When I asked him why later, he got very sheepish and said having found one vampire in the woods made him worried there might be others lurking with a grudge against me, so he was out sniffing around in the general vicinity of my house, sort of on guard-bear duty. Personally, I think he was trying to work up the nerve to come in and try to seduce me—doubtless in an endearingly puppy-doggish way—but who knows? He says he smelled humans in the vicinity, but didn’t smell any vampires, so he didn’t worry about it, having no reason to expect humans to mean me any harm. He didn’t pay any particular attention to the human’s scent, either, which was good for me, as it turned out. Otherwise he would have torn Mr. Levitt apart, I’m sure, which would have been a shame.

  Anyway, he got a sudden whiff of blood, he says, and worried about me, so he rushed the door. Being still in human form, and thus possessed of no particularly superhuman strength, he settled for pounding wildly on the locked front door. The noise was enough to startle “the killer” as Joachim called him. I objected, at first, but he pointed out that I had been killed, so it was an accurate descriptor. Hard to argue with that.

  Mr. Levitt took off out the back, and Joachim finally decided to try the back door, but in such a way that their paths never crossed. Joachim rushed into the living room and found me on the floor, bleeding grievously all over the hardwood, breathing but just barely, with blood bubbling up out of my mouth. He held me in his arms and cradled me and, I imagine, wept manly tears of manly sadness, though he’s never told me so.

  Then things got interesting, and I wish I’d been there to see it: Edwin arrived. He burst through the back door, raced into the living room like a man made of lightning, knocked Joachim aside, and then bent over me. Joachim, in the presence of a wendigo, began to transform into his bear form, but before the transformation took hold completely, he growled, “Save her!” And then fled into the woods, I guess in case his basic vampire-killing instincts got the better of him.

  So my beloved Edwin gazed into my eyes, and knelt before me, and knew I was going to die, and that he was my only hope for any kind of survival, and he bowed his head to my ruined throat, and pressed his lips against my wound, and let my blood flow into him as his essence (or venom, or virus, or whatever it is) flowed back into me.

  And that, dear reader, is how I became a vampire.

  I have some memory of the transition—the way you remember fever dreams. Edwin took me to his family’s home, and put me down in his own room, where I sweated and writhed and howled and clawed at the air for nearly twenty-four hours. Argyle was on hand—the whole family came back when they realized Edwin was gone—but he couldn’t do much for me, at that point. They weren’t sure if I would make it, but on Sunday morning, I opened my eyes, and licked my lips, and croaked the word “Hungry.”

  Edwin fed me pig’s blood, by hand, from a turkey baster, until I had the strength to sit up in bed on my own on Sunday afternoon.

  Meanwhile, Joachim cleaned up the blood—he did a good job; Harry came back from the conference and didn’t notice anything amiss. Good thing Levitt hadn’t stabbed me on the couch. Getting blood out of cushions is hell. Joachim also did a sort of half-assed investigative job to find out who’d tried to kill me, but Mr. Levitt hadn’t exactly left much in the way of evidence, and Joachim didn’t know what he was looking for anyway. He didn’t come to visit me during my convalescence, and who can blame him? Dropping a were-bear in a nest of vampires is a dangerous idea. All the Scullens and the Scales stopped in to check on me, except for Rosemarie. Shockingly, she wasn’t thrilled at my transition to her kind, thinking she’d be stuck with me forever, now.

  Boy, was she wrong.

  “Edwin,” I croaked, once I’d finished slurping down a bellyful of blood (which tasted like savory miso soup, more than anything else—hot, salty, delicious
). “How? You were gone, you left me, why…?”

  “I never stopped watching you,” he murmured, touching my face gently. “Through the eyes of others. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry, and I really meant to make a clean break, but I knew how my heart was breaking, and if you were anything like me, I was afraid you might suffer, hurt yourself, or just allow yourself to be hurt by negligence. I was… both relieved, and perhaps a little stung, when you seemed to move on so quickly.”

  I laughed, but it was a rasping thing. “I was just trying to distract myself, Edwin. You left a hole in me when you left, and I did my best to fill it however I could.”

  “When I realized you were spending so much time with Joachim, I was… conflicted. Glad you had such a formidable protector with you, but jealous, too, of course, of your growing closeness to a sworn enemy of my kind. I watched you often through his eyes. And as the two of you grew closer, my jealousy grew. The way he looked at you… and the way I saw you looking back through his eyes… I knew I couldn’t live without you, no matter how dangerous it might be, for either of us. I returned two nights ago, staying in the empty house of my family. I was trying to decide how to approach you, what to say, what we could do—run away together, elope, get married in secret and live alone on a mountaintop, I couldn’t figure out the right way, the right words. But then when I saw you through Joachim’s eyes, bleeding, I raced from the woods, and found you on the point of death, and knew I had no choice but to turn you.” Tears welled in his eyes: they were little ruby droplets of diluted blood. “I’m so sorry, Bonnie. To take your life… I would never have done so, if there had been any alternative.” He buried his head in my (completely healed) neck. “Now you’ll never be able to have children.” He sobbed.