The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (11 page)

“Now you have to tell me. What’s a wendigo? Sounds like some kind of recreational vehicle old people would drive around the country in.”

He laughed, and sat down on a fallen log. I joined him. “Basically, they’re cannibals. Or man-eaters, anyway, I guess since they aren’t technically human, you can’t call them cannibals. Unless they ate another wendigo…”

“Anthropophagous,” I said to derail his tangent, and he looked at me blankly. “It means they eat people,” I said. “Fun word, huh?”

“I’ll have to remember that one, though I don’t think I could spell it.” Another toothy grin. “Okay, so here’s how the legend goes, at least the way I heard it: there’s a monster that lives in the woods and comes out especially in the winter. He, or it, or they, there are probably more than one—they roam around the woods, and anyone they find, they eat. The wendigos live forever, and they’re strong, and almost impossible to kill, and have other sorts of powers, like maybe they can change their shape, or something—people say different things. Sometimes they just look like people, you know, only they’re always very thin because no matter how much they eat, they can’t ever get full—the hunger never goes away. Their skin is pale like snow or gray like death, and their lips are shredded and bloody because they chew at their own mouths when they get hungry enough. Other times, they look like monsters, or giants, much bigger than people, because every time they eat someone, they grow larger, and that’s why they’re always hungry—as soon as they get a full belly, they grow in size, so they’re starving again. Who knows.”

“Wow,” I said. “Like an abominable snowman with a taste for human flesh.”

“But that’s not all.” Despite his protests, Joachim was warming to the subject. Well, why not? Who doesn’t love a good monster movie? “See,” he said, “they’re not
just
monsters—some of them are people who turned into monsters. Sometimes in the old days, during hard winters, people would run out of food, and get pretty desperate. The really desperate people might even resort to cannibalism. Eating other people is taboo, and the, I don’t know, say the gods, they punish you for that, by transforming you into a wendigo. It’s a curse.”

“Huh. So, like, does the bite of a wendigo turn you into one of them? Like a werewolf or a vampire?”

Joachim shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I think if a wendigo starts to eat you, they don’t stop eating until there’s nothing left. But, yeah, maybe like a vampire—I read a book about vampires once that said in some stories, you don’t have to get bitten to turn into a vampire, you can just be a really evil guy, and maybe you’ll come back to life as one. Werewolves, too, you don’t have to get bitten—there are tribes who have stories about witches who wear wolf skins.”

“Does your, ah, tribe believe that?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. Never heard any stories like that, at least. I think it’s Navajo, maybe? I don’t remember.”

“I guess when you have wendigos you don’t need werewolves.”

Joachim grinned. “Ah, but wait, there’s more. Lots of the Ojibwe—really all the Algonquin peoples—tell different stories about the wendigo. There’s even a Lake Windigo up on the Leech Lake reservation. But here on Pres du Lac we’ve got our own twist. Which is, we’re supposed to be the ones who defend the world from wendigo, or at least, defend this part of the world. I’m not real sure how we’re supposed to
do
that. Something about being empowered by the great spirits and embracing the primal power of the beasts of the earth, but I’ve never been real clear on what that means, exactly. There’s a really old dance, no one’s done it for years and years, but the elders here started doing it again a couple of years ago, they go around a fire backwards and play drums, it’s weird, not like any other tribal dances I’ve seen. It’s supposed to stop the wendigos, or hold them back, or remind people it’s not okay to eat other people—I’m not sure which.”

I frowned. “Huh. Why’d they start doing it again? Did somebody see one?”

Because of the dark skin and the fading light, it took me a moment to realize he was blushing, but he was definitely looking away. “It’s… really stupid. Beyond stupid. I shouldn’t even say anything.”

I leaned in to him, letting one of my breasts brush his arm. “Oh, now you
have
to tell me.”

He cleared his throat. “It’s, ah… do you know the Scullens? And the Scales?”

“Dr. Scullen and his children?” I said, avoiding mention of Edwin’s name. Now
this
was interesting. “Sure, I’ve seen the kids around at school, I guess.”

“They’re not welcome on the reservation,” Joachim said. “The elders say they—well, at least Argyle and his wife—they say they’ve been here, in Lake Woebegotten, before. And they made a treaty with the elders back
then—
like my great-great-grandfather.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

He hunched over. “God, it’s so embarrassing. The elders think Argyle is a wendigo, disguised as a human. That his whole family is, which doesn’t even make sense, because wendigos are supposed to be pretty much solitary. That they’ve lived for decades, maybe hundreds of years, and that they used to live here, and went away for a long time, and then came back. Well, Argyle and his wife came back, the rest of them are newer, I guess.”

I stared at him. Edwin was clearly
something
, but I didn’t think he was a
cannibal
. “Whoa. I mean, I met Dr. Scullen at the hospital. He looked pretty human to me, and he didn’t take a bite out of my face or anything.”

He held up his hands. “Of course not. The whole thing is ridiculous. People don’t live forever. Or turn into monsters. Look at that soccer team that crashed in the Andes, didn’t they end up eating each other? Nobody there turned into a monster. It’s dumb.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “But if your people are supposed to protect the world from the wendigos, what’s with making a treaty?”

“Apparently Argyle is a reformed wendigo. Instead of eating people, he just drinks animal blood. Which, since a wendigo is by definition a monster that eats people, if you stop eating people, are you even still a wendigo?”

“Drinking blood? That sounds more like—”

“I know! I told my dad that drinking blood sounded like vampires more than wendigos, and he just told me our people don’t have any legends about vampires, we have legends about wendigos, so that’s what they are. Which doesn’t exactly clear things up.” He shook his head. “Are they scared of crosses and garlic or guys dancing backwards and drumming badly? Who knows. Anyway, they aren’t welcome here on the rez. Nobody here goes to the hospital where Dr. Scullen works if they can help it.”

Edwin, a wendigo. Or, better yet… a vampire. Did I believe in those things? I didn’t believe in ghosts—dead people are just dead—but I found within myself the capacity to believe in monsters. And Edwin was certainly
something
, although an impossibly powerful legendary predator seemed more likely (and interesting) than rural teen superhero. This would require further investigation…

“So anyway,” Joachim said, “how’s the truck running now?”

“Marmon? Oh, good. Wait, did you work on him?”

“I helped Dad fix the truck up before Harry bought it, yeah.”

“It worked okay except for when the brakes failed and almost killed that guy—oh, wait, he’s off with J. Anyway, yeah, almost killed a classmate. Not so good. But otherwise, it’s great.”

Joachim nodded, scowling. “Dad told me about that. Doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know where the fluid
went
—”

“Maybe the Scullens stopped drinking blood and started drinking brake fluid,” I said with a grin, and Joachim laughed.

Shame he was only fifteen. He looked sixteen or seventeen, at least. But if his people were the sworn enemies of the Scullens—crazy as that sounded, take it as a given—then maybe I could work out some sort of interesting love triangle situation, and push Edwin into my arms
that
way…

“Hey, Bonnie,” Kelly said. “Looks like it’s going to start raining here in a minute, I think we’re packing up. Hey, Joachim, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking at the sky. “You’re right, it’s going to piss down in a minute.”

I hadn’t noticed, but the darkness wasn’t just a natural effect of dusk—thick clouds were gathering over the water. “Nice talking to you, Joachim. Next time Harry goes to visit your dad I’ll try to tag along, okay?”

“That would be awesome!” He had a face like sunshine, so unlike Edwin’s eternal broodface, but appealing in a way. And I did wonder if he’d be cute naked. Seemed like a lot of the trouble I got into in life stemmed from wondering if certain boys would look cute naked. But I was good at getting out of trouble, too.

I joined Kelly as we walked back up toward the spot where the cars were parked. “Do you mind if I ride with you?” she said, nodding toward the trees, where Ike and J emerged, hand-in-hand. “I think those two probably want to sit together on the way back. It’s about time they finally hooked up—it’s been like a sitcom or the first half of a romantic comedy with them, since about seventh grade. I don’t know what you said to J—” (Ha, I’d even gotten her best friend calling her that, hilarious) “—but it sure lit a fire under her.”

“Judging by the dazed and happy look on Ike’s face, she lit up something under
him
, too,” I said dryly, and Kelly giggled. She chattered at me on the drive back into town, and I made the appropriate noises, but really, I was thinking: wendigo.

No. That wasn’t even remotely romantic. That would be like falling in love with a ghoul or a guy who bites the heads off chickens.

But:
vampire
. Sure, both were immortal beings who fed on the flesh (or blood) of the living, but for some reason, I couldn’t tell you why, vampires were just so much more
sexy
.

LUNCH DATE

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

I
spent far too much time on the internet that night. Harry actually had broadband, which surprised me, but apparently there was a little ISP that had an office not far from the police station, and Harry’d gotten a good deal. I can see why. He’s got various gaming consoles and tons of games, mostly first-person shooters, and apparently his major hobby is slaughtering computer-generated enemies with his friends online. The guy really could keep surprising me. But I guess he doesn’t really get many chances to mow down perps with automatic weapons at his day job.

I looked up wendigos (Wendigen? Wendigi?) first, and it was pretty much like Joachim had told me, once I filtered out the comic book characters, movies that used that name for monsters but meant something totally different than the Algonquin tradition, and some random book where “Wendigo” was the name of a magical car, of all things.

The Google image search for wendigo was mostly pretty monstrous stuff, not a bit like Edwin, so I branched out and started searching on vampires, which was pretty much just inviting a giant river of crap to flow into my house. I’m not much of a reader, but if I was, apparently I’d have a hard time reading any novel written in the last fifty years that
didn’t
have a brooding sexy conflicted vampire in it—the shelves were just full of the stuff. If I were a vampire guy, I’d run as fast as I could from the dark-eye-shadow, wedding-dress-dyed-black, ankh-wearing brigade—it amazes me that Goth
just won’t die
, and worse, now those girls have websites with drippy fonts and way too much of their poetry and fanfic: ick. Some of them had a corset-and-piercings thing going on, and I know some guys like that, but mostly, just a universe of sad.

Still, target audience aside, when it came to brooding sexy vampire guys: that was more like it. Edwin definitely rocked the paleness and wiriness and the impossible strength, but the fact that he walked around in the daytime seemed like a potential dealbreaker—at least until I did a little more research, getting past the bee-stung-lipped immortal-teen-heartthrob types. Turns out there were plenty of vampires in recent fiction and old legends both who had no trouble with the sun, either because they’d evolved that way (like Stephen King and Scott Snyder’s
American Vampire
) or because the whole sun thing was just bullshit—did you know even freaking Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
wasn’t hurt by sunshine? Sure, he slept in a coffin all day, but not because the sun would kill him or anything. He was just
nocturnal
, like, I don’t know, a sugar glider or a bushbaby or a ferret something. I know. Blew my mind. Then there were Arabian vampires, who hated the dark and traveled in sunlight. So the whole sun thing was obviously irrelevant: Edwin could lay out all day and get a killer tan and it wouldn’t mean he wasn’t a vampire.

But the whole “Do they burn in the sunlight or don’t they?” thing was just the tip of the ridiculousness: there are more types of vampires in the world than there are shades of lipstick. Vampires who can only be killed by hammering a nail through their heads, vampires who turn into mice or sheep or horses, vampires who transform into werewolves when you kill them—what a bummer
that
must have been for the first fearless vampire hunter to run across one of those—vampires who can astrally project and cause eclipses, ones with stingers in their mouths instead of fangs, ones with obsessive compulsive disorder, ones who hopped around until you slapped a holy scroll onto their foreheads to neutralize them, purple-faced vampires, vampires who slept in
plants
, vampires who fell to Earth as meteors, modern vampires who weren’t undead at all but just stuck with some shitty virus like the world’s simultaneously worst and most awesome STD—

Basically all sorts of things, and pretty much the only quality they all had in common was preying on human beings, usually sucking out blood, but occasionally life force or fat or tears or lymph or whatever. Some were dead, and some weren’t. Maybe Edwin
was
a vampire, with “vampire” defined as “really vague catchall term for things that are human-ish but also monster-ish.”

Mostly I wanted to know three things:

One: Was he a vampire?

Two: Was he the kind of vampire who lives forever and has awesome superpowers?