The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (14 page)

I decided I needed to see Edwin. I needed to find out what he was: if I was nuts, or if I was incredibly perceptive and living in a world that was weirder than most people supposed. After this trip to Bemidji, if I didn’t hear from him on Saturday, I’d find some pretext to go out to his house—Harry would know the way, and I could get it out of him with some kind of casual questioning, I was sure. If they lived in a castle with coffins for beds, that would tell me something, and if they had a basement full of human blood-slaves, that would tell me even more. And if they were just normal people who liked to keep to themselves, well—at least then I’d know.

When school ended, Kelly drove after me in her little red Honda so I could leave Marmon at home and drop off my books and crap. I took shotgun, and we picked up J, who was on her cell chattering at Ike for the first fifteen minutes in the car. I couldn’t imagine what two people like them could possibly have to talk about, and after listening to J’s side of the conversation for a quarter of an hour, I wasn’t enlightened at all: it was an endless series of “Oh gods” and “I knows” and “For reallys!” which she actually says, yes, for reallys. But finally some vestigial sense of social appropriateness sifted through J’s brain—or else she lost reception as we drove among the woods and fields and barns and lakes—and she snapped the phone shut and leaned forward between the front seats and started fiddling with the radio and turned on some kind of girl power pop and her and Kelly started singing along, and I thought: this is what it’s supposed to be like, isn’t it? This should be happiness. Me, with my girlfriends, singing and acting self-consciously raucous, going on a road trip, maybe later sneaking into a bar with our fake IDs (Kelly had a fake ID and she’d gotten one for J; she was a bad girl in a good girl’s life, which made her slightly more interesting than the baseline) and getting tipsy. Trying on clothes and gossiping.

I fake-smiled and hooted and hollered and inside I was thinking: please, please, please let there really be vampires. Let there be more to my world than
this
.

ENTER THE VAMPER

NARRATOR

G
unther Montcrief was taking his habitual pre-dawn piss when someone standing behind him cleared his throat.

“Just a damn minute,” Gunther muttered. “I’m draining my tank here, arright?”

“Oh, do take your time,” a polite voice said.

Gunther tucked his business away, zipped up his pants, and turned around, squinting in the dimness. Three figures stood by his fishing shack, one standing a little bit in front, the other two apparently looking off at nothing in particular. “You look like you’re posing for an album cover,” he grumbled. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“Where’s that ‘Minnesota nice’ I’ve heard about?” the one in front said. He stepped forward, and something about the way he moved, all fast and spidery, was weirdly familiar.

“Hey, I know you,” Gunther said. “I saw you chase down a deer and rip its throat out with your own teeth.”

For some reason, one of the others laughed—turned out it was a woman, well how about that, too dark to tell if she was anything nice to look at though.

“I think you’re mistaken,” the leader said. “I do not eat…”

“You don’t eat?” Gunther said.

The man sighed. “I wasn’t finished. I was pausing for dramatic effect. I do not eat—”

“So don’t eat, please yourself, though I always liked a little lunch myself, maybe a frito pie. I mostly drink these days, truth be told, nobody to cook for me and I was never much good at taking care of myself that way, but a little fish doesn’t go amiss, I was about to fry up some walleye for breakfast, you want some, oh, wait, you don’t eat, how about your friends?”

“I do not eat
deer
,” he said. He sounded like he wanted to
hiss
the words, but the lack of sibilants in the sentence made that pretty difficult.

“So what do you eat, then?” Gunther wandered toward his shack. If he was going to talk to weirdos in the woods he wanted a drink to fortify himself.

“We
drink
,” one of the backup singers—a guy—said.

“Well all right then,” Gunther said. “We’ve got something in common. I’ll pour us something, but I’ve only got two glasses, so the bunch of you will have to share.” He found a half-empty—no, why be a pessimist, a half-
full
—bottle under a blanket at the foot of the mound of blankets on a raised wooden platform he used for a bed. “Bourbon,” he said. “That’ll do, that’ll do.” While he was in the shack, just to be on the safe side, he picked up something else, and put it in his coat pocket. He stepped back out, and his visitors hadn’t moved. There was a touch more light in the sky now, and he could tell they were a young and pretty bunch, though dirty, carrying beat-up bags with them. “You backpackers then? A bunch of, whaddya call it, hippos? Peace, love, all that?”

“We are travelers,” the leader said. “Nomads, you might say. Hunters.”

“Why do you insist on playing with your food, Jimmy?” the man behind him said.

“Silence, Queequeg,” the leader said. “We’re going to be sporting. We’re going to give him the chance to
run
.”

Gunther squinted. “Eh? What’s that?”

“We are going to let you run,” Jimmy said. “You will have a brief head start. Then we will pursue you. And when we catch you, we will consume you. It’s very simple. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Oh,” Gunther said. “You’re crazy, then.” He drew the .22 target pistol from his pocket. He’d been a champion sharpshooter in his day, and even put bullets in a few living humans during one of the wars, and since he was well-lubricated with cheap whiskey his hands weren’t shaking a bit. A .22 wasn’t much gun, but it was pretty good for killing folks at close range, because the little bullet didn’t usually blow out the back of the head, but tended to bounce around inside a fella’s skull, doing all kinds of damage. Harry’d probably give him hell if he found out, there’d be no end of fuss and maybe even some jail time, but Gunther figured he could always just bury ’em somewhere, and nobody’d ever know.

He aimed and squeezed the trigger, pop pop pop, three shots to three foreheads, and they all fell down. Gunther sighed,
then
the shakes started, and he bent at the waist and threw up the entire contents of his stomach, which still smelled fairly alcoholic. Just because he’d killed before in wartime didn’t make it easy, and while he’d managed to think of them as just targets while he was doing the job, they sure looked like dead people now. He wiped his mouth and stepped forward to examine the bodies. “Well that’s a mess if ever I saw one.” He looked down at the leader—pretty enough to be a girl—and the neat hole in the center of his forehead. Pretty good shot, at that, and—

Something started coming out of the hole.
Worm
? Gunther thought. But how would a worm get in the body that fast, let alone come crawling
out
?

Not a worm. A bullet, deformed by its passage through the skull, pushed out of the wound, where it rolled down the forehead and fell on the ground. Jimmy groaned and opened his eyes, which were crossed and funny-looking, as the hole in his face closed up, healing seamlessly. Jimmy bared his teeth, and his canines were an inch and a half long and pointy.

“Well that’s not something you see every day,” Gunther said. “You’re, what’s the word, drink blood, hate garlic, right? Vampers. Bunch of damn vampers, pardon my French.” Jimmy started to get up, so Gunther shot him in the eye, which made him lay back down again. Now, what did you do with vampers? Sunlight, well, that wasn’t true, there was some sunshine coming down now and they weren’t burning to a crisp or anything at all, so that was disappointing. Wooden stakes? There was plenty of broken wood around the place, and he had a mallet somewhere, but he had no idea where, so something else might be better. The other two started to stir, so Gunther made them both cyclopses too, let’s see you grow back
eyes
in a hurry, nasty little things, no better than tapeworms or leeches or liver flukes. Cutting off their heads?

Wasn’t a darn thing in the world, excepting some insects, that kept going after you cut off its head, at least, not for long. Now all he needed was an axe, or maybe even a shovel would do, he was sure he had one or the other or both around the back of the shack. He found his good shovel—no sign of the axe, wasn’t that always the way, but you went to work with the tools you had, not the tools you wished you had—and walked back around the shack. The one called Queequeg and the girl were still there, but one-eyed Jimmy was nowhere to be seen.

“Well, hell,” Gunther said. “It was a nice long life I guess, and nobody lives forever.” He hurried over to Queequeg—funny name, and you’d think it would be some kind of ethnic, but he was just a white fella with dreadlocks—and put the shovel blade on his throat. He stomped down hard with a foot, and it reminded him of being in the war, digging latrines in the mud. The shovel cut into the neck nicely but didn’t sever the spinal cord, and there was no spurt of blood, but the fella’s eyes popped open and he reached up and grabbed the handle right where it joined the blade and wouldn’t let go, no matter how hard Gunther tugged.

“Kill you,” a ragged voice said behind him. “Eat you.”

“I thought I got to run?” Gunther leaned on the shovel all casual-like and looked at Jimmy, who was still one-eyed. Maybe if he shot him again… but, no, he’d used all six shots in the revolver and hadn’t reloaded, probably his kids were right and his brain
was
pickled in alcohol, imagine forgetting something like that at a time like this, not that he even knew where his ammunition was, buried in all the junk in the shack probably. “Or you only like playing games if you’re sure you’re going to win, is that it?”

“That’s it exactly,” Jimmy said. “Vile old man.”

Gunther spat at the vamper’s feet. “Go on, then. Just do me a favor and don’t turn me into one of you. I’d rather be dead than a human-shaped hookworm.” He gave the shovel another stomp, and Queequeg gurgled.

Jimmy leapt for him, and Gunther’s last thought was,
Drink up, vamper. I hope you like the taste of Hepatitis B.
Heh heh heh heh heh.

CHASING THE CLOUDS

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

T
he trip to Bemidji took I don’t know how long—not as long as the god-awful endless trip from the airport, anyway, though way longer than seemed reasonable just to get to some crappy mall, and it was Girl Power all the way. Fortunately I dropped a few little Santa Cruz tidbits here and there—beach parties, surfers attacked by sharks, thumbnail sketches of the picturesque freaks who panhandle or distress the tourists downtown—and before long they were happy to let me talk about me, mostly. Which is only right and proper, because I am fascinating, and they are dull. We’d left right after school, but it was almost dark by the time we hit Bemidji.

We got to the mall, which is called the Paul Bunyan Mall: a little clutch of low buildings and a parking lot, and I swear I counted
two
K-Marts, one at each end, but maybe that was a hallucination brought on by boredom and carsickness. Seriously, though—there are strip malls in Santa Cruz with more stores than this place has. Still, it’s miles beyond anything you could find in Lake Woebegotten, with chain stores that had recognizable names, even, and lots of clothing stores. We parked close to the main doors (there weren’t a lot of cars there) and I followed the giggling twosome of J and Kelly into the local temple of capitalism and what passed for local fashion.

You’ve never seen so many sequins or so much lace or so much pink in your life. J and Kelly tried on various horrible things, and I made encouraging noises, wondering if I could talk them into wearing truly eye-wrenchingly dreadful gowns by pure enthusiastic willpower alone. We gave a lot of thought to hair clips and purses and shoes, of course—I was, briefly, distracted by some of the shoes myself, I admit, I’m not made of
stone
—but after about 90 minutes of grueling shopping, with the two of them showing no signs of slowing down, I told them the flickering fluorescent lights were starting to give me a migraine, and I couldn’t take it anymore. It’s one of my basic techniques: cultivate the impression that you’re a delicate flower, easily wilted and distressed. People give you extra slack, and you can always surprise them later if you need to, by being… unexpectedly vigorous.

Being true girlfriends, they offered to cut their shopping short immediately, but I told them no, don’t be silly, I’d just go take a walk around for a while, I’d meet them at the pizza place we’d passed on the way in for dinner, how would that be? It took some convincing, but they agreed to let me wander off on my own, as long as I promised not to stray too far—there were, they said, probably “lots of drunk guys from the University” wandering around. I assured them I’d be fine.

I pulled up a map on my phone once I got out the door. Not surprisingly, there was a big-ass lake in town—Lake Bemidji, of course. Just far enough away for me to walk there and walk back in time, probably, and the whole way as flat as flat could be. There were a couple of cemeteries, too, and I considered walking up to one, strolling picturesquely among the gravestones, thinking long thoughts of blood and death and solitude and longing, but moping has never really been my style, and blood and death should be reserved for
happy
moments. I’m a fairly chirpy girl, as long as I get what I want.

I decided it would be more fun to look for one of those drunk college guys and see if I could get into—and out of—some trouble. I had a rather wicked little knife in my purse, a canister of pepper spray, and my own unflappable good nature. Edwin wasn’t the only one who could take off on hunting trips, after all. I’d been so good for so long—how could I be expected to keep that up?

For the longest time, I didn’t think I was going to get assaulted at all. I wandered toward the lake for a while, then cut over toward the University, and I barely passed another living human being. The air was brisk but not really cold, and walking kept me warm. Don’t get me wrong, I like walking okay, but what I’d really hoped for was a little stalking or an altercation and some kind of—well, some kind of ructions—that could lead me into a situation where I could plausibly claim self-defense. Is that so much to ask?