The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (12 page)

Three: Could he make
me
into an immortal with awesome superpowers?

Because that… that would be good. Even if it required him drinking my blood or something, well, look: Blood drinking. Yucky but not a dealbreaker, I’d met plenty of guys who were into way freakier shit, after all.

Hearing about someone else’s dreams is just about the most tedious thing in the world. Pay attention next time you start to tell somebody about the crazy thing that didn’t actually happen to you last night: their eyes glaze over, they make polite noises, or maybe they interrupt to tell you about the sound-and-light show that erupted in their head the night before, despite the obvious fact that you don’t give two craps in a bucket about such things. They only perk up a little if you say they appeared in the dream—that does seem to interest people, as they’re an essentially narcissistic species.

My mom put great stock in dreams—she thought she had prophetic dreams, though she only actually seemed to remember those dreams
after
whatever event the dream supposedly foretold, but that’s cause-and-effect for you, I guess. She said it was a family gift, and that I was going to inherit it, maybe, and should always treat it with respect. She wanted me to keep a dream journal, and I did (I also kept a fake dream journal, which I showed
her
, with dreams carefully researched from reading her various woo-woo new age books on the subject, chock full of symbolism, but nothing too Freudian or kinky, of course). My actual dreams, at least the ones I remember, fall into two camps: wish fulfillment and anxiety. You know the kind: in one you’re flying, in the other you’re being chased through a swamp by something, only you’re not sure what. At least, that’s what the books say. Mine are more about murder and imprisonment, respectively, but a certain amount of personal detail is bound to creep in, it can’t be helped. So I don’t put much stock in dreams, and I don’t think anyone should have to endure listening to someone else’s dream, but that night, after my research and my speculations, I did have a dream, and if it wasn’t prophetic, it was certainly at least
suggestive
, even if it was just my subconscious (which is even smarter than my conscious, and that’s saying something) working a few things out. Here:

I was down by the lake again, but this time, no one else was around, and the sky was filled with storm clouds the color of a bad bruise a week away from healing. I was wearing the sort of filmy white nightdress women wore on the covers of the cheesy romance novels my mom hid under her bed (where any normal person would keep their pornography, but maybe that’s the purpose they served for her). My feet were bare, and I stood in ankle-deep clear water, but it wasn’t cold: more like bathwater. I sensed someone watching me, and when I turned around, Edwin stepped out from the shadows among the trees. His clothes were in tatters, there was blood smeared on his chin, and even from fifty yards away, I could see his fangs, two white curved shards of bone. He stepped toward me, arms extended, eyes more black than blue.

“Bonnie, you have to run.” Joachim stood at my side, tugging at my elbow, trying to get me to follow him to a boat bobbing on the surface of the lake behind us. I was confused. Dreams about boats on water were dreams of death, weren’t they, traditionally? But death was on the shore: Death was Edwin. Or perhaps it was something to do with the reluctance of vampires to cross running water? Except Lake Woebegotten wasn’t running water; it was just-sitting-there water. Joachim pulled on my arm more urgently, but I didn’t feel any fear at all, so I shook him off. Joachim made a low sound of distress and splashed away through the shallows, and I took a step toward Edwin, my blood-smeared Romeo. His jaw unhinged like a snake’s, chin dropping half a foot, and pointed teeth rose up from his lower jaw to meet the fangs pointed downward.

Then a beast shambled between us. Shaggy, black, massive—but not a wolf, which I’d expected, somehow. Perhaps a bear, if bears were the size of Volkswagens, or maybe even a hairy ox, if those were carnivorous. The creature turned its back on me and faced Edwin, and Edwin hissed, a long snakelike tongue spilling out of his mouth—I confess, my first thought wasn’t disgust, but a vague speculation on sexual possibilities—as the beast roared at him.

I didn’t like that, so I kicked the beast as hard as I could between its back legs. Despite being barefoot, I kicked hard, and the creature howled and bounded away, with shocking speed, into the trees.

Edwin laughed, and his jaw reshaped itself enough for him to speak. “I’ve never seen anyone kick a were-bear in the testicles before. I hope I’m not your next victim.”

I didn’t speak—I couldn’t, I don’t think—but I
thought
, “I’d better be
your
next victim,” and then everything swirled around, the storm clouds dropping low and becoming purplish-green fog, then pulling back, and I…

I was standing next to Edwin. My mouth felt crowded with needles and shards, but not in a painful way: in a deadly way. I wanted so very much to
bite
something, and there was a girl in front of us, standing in the water. At first, I thought she must be me, but no: I’m the only one who’s me, forever and always. This girl looked a bit like Kelly, a bit like J, a bit like my mother, a bit like Rosemarie, then like Pleasance, then like the pretty-but-formidable woman who worked at the diner—any woman, really, or Everywoman, dressed in that gothic romance nightgown I’d been wearing before. And she
did
scream, and run away, and try to free herself, and splash toward the boat, and Edwin and I ran toward her, hand-in-hand like lovers racing together to leap into the water on a summer day, only when we leapt, we didn’t land on water, but on flesh, and what filled our mouths was not water. Not water at all.

I woke up soaked in sweat, incredibly thirsty, and hornier than I’d been since moving to this little town.

So there’s that. I offer no interpretation.

The next school day, at lunch, Ike and J were holding hands under the table (and possibly getting to third base in the process, the way he was blushing and she was giggling), and Kelly was glassy-eyed from smoking pot out behind the gym the period before, and the rest of the herd were mewling and babbling like always. I sneaked my usual secret glance at Edwin once I was seated. For some reason, he wasn’t sitting at his usual spot with his usual crowd, but at an empty table way in the far corner of the cafeteria.

I looked a little longer than I should have, probably. Edwin was a shining star, except not really shining—more like a pale and luminous moon, an object as beautiful as it was distant, and I longed to escape the gravity of the shitty little decidedly non-celestial bodies at my table and enter his orbit instead—

He caught my eye. Gave me a crooked smile. And then beckoned me over.

“Whoa,” Kelly said, in a spacey-wastey voice. “Edwin Scullen is totally vibing you.”

J looked up. “He is. Does he want you to go over there?” She beamed at me. “You should go see what he wants!” In her own haze of happiness, she wanted me to be happy, too—and didn’t notice Ike’s glare. Oh, dear. Mr. chubby cheeks was happy to take advantage of J’s warmth, but maybe he was still holding a torch for me, too.

“Guess I should,” I said. “He probably just forgot his biology homework or something.”

I picked up my bag and lunch tray and walked over, putting my food down and sitting across from him. He looked at me with those deep dark blue eyes and a crooked smile like everything in the world was a joke and he was the only one who got it. I regarded him coolly for a while, and eventually, he started to squirm, and said, “What?”

“What, what? You’re the one who crooked your little finger at me, after ignoring me for weeks.”

He sighed. “I’m sorry about that. Or maybe I’m sorry about
this
. I… tried to stay away from you. For your own good.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Oh? I’m a big girl, Edwin.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but there are some things…”

“Like what? You’re a serial killer? A meth dealer?”

“I could be either of those,” he said seriously. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Maybe if you’d talk to me occasionally, I’d learn. So you’ve decided to throw caution to the wind and spend time with me?”

“I decided that the flame can’t be blamed for all the moths it burns. If the moth can’t control itself, maybe it deserves to catch fire.”

Not a bad line—a little pretentious and a lot cliché, and you could tell he’d planned it out beforehand, but still, not bad—and I laughed. “I think you overestimate your attractiveness, Edwin. I’m not saying I don’t like you—the whole man of mystery thing has a certain appeal—but I’m no moth, and you’re no flame.”

“Who said you were supposed to be the moth?” he said softly. He shook himself and gave me a fairly dazzling smile, considering he was a pretty broody guy. “Would you be interested in going on a trip to the Cities with me in the near future?”

Interesting. “Road trip? What for?”

“I confess that I sometimes find Lake Woebegotten to be… a trifle provincial. Going to a real city reminds me that there’s more in the world than fields and pigs and bodies of water. I don’t presume to know your mind, but since you come from California, it seems safe to assume you might feel similarly?”

“There are plenty of fields in California too. Agriculture out the wazoo. But, yeah, I’m more a city mouse than a country mouse.”

He laughed. “You are anything but a mouse, Bonnie Grayduck. I’ve never met a less mousy person.”

“You sure know how to flatter a girl, Edwin. ‘You’re not a rodent at all!’ What a sweet-talker. No wonder the girls are all crazy for you.”

Edwin’s smile was still genuine, which meant he could take teasing, which was promising, because even when I like people, I can’t resist getting a
few
little jibes in, just to keep myself entertained and my edge maintained. “I don’t care about
all
the girls,” he said softly. “Just one, really.”

I leaned back in my chair. “Hmm. Is this all some playing-hard-to-get fake-out? Because I can respect that. Act all mysterious to lure a girl in, then get what you want before she realizes you’re just another guy? Except if you’re a player, you’re one who hasn’t played in the two years you’ve been living here. I asked around. Which makes me think maybe you really
are
mysterious, and I think mysteries are interesting. And besides… I saw you shove my truck out of the way. Which tells me you’re something special.”

He rolled his eyes. “This again. So what am I then?”

“Probably some kind of vampire,” I said, and took a bite out of my grilled cheese, looking right into his face. His expression was priceless—widened eyes, lips parted, rapid blinking, then a quick return to his superior smirk.

“You don’t look much like the goth girl type. You’re into vampires?”

“I’m into remarkable things and extraordinary people, Edwin. Which one are you? A person, or a thing? Because I’m interested either way.”

A buzzer sounded, indicating the end of lunch period. “We should get to biology,” he said.

“The study of life,” I said. “What could be more interesting?”

In biology class, we finally got the chance to dissect something. On every lab table there were two scalpels and a metal tray containing the fetus of a pig.

“It’s a little piggly-wigglykins!” I said. “How cute!”

“Cute?” Edwin wrinkled his nose and prodded the pig with the eraser end of his pencil. The smell of formaldehyde wasn’t strong, but it was there, giving a certain mortuary sort of undercurrent to the experience. Our specimen was just a bit over six inches long, with a head small enough to hold in the palm of my hand. I’d done a few dissections in my time—out in the field, you might say, with certain stray animals I’d found in the hills above Santa Cruz—but I’d never cut up a pig before. They say pigs and humans are really similar in some ways—or is that just the taste? Human flesh is called “long pig” sometimes, right, because we taste like pork chops? If Edwin were a flesh-eating wendigo in disguise, he’d know.

Up at the front of the room, Mr. Whatever was talking about how the pigs were generously donated by some local pig farmer, and how they were all harvested from dead mothers and how their deaths would further our understanding of science and blah blah blah. We had worksheets telling us all the stuff we had to do: determining the pig’s sex, identifying the parts of the oral cavity, tying the pig’s legs pretty much spread-eagled before cutting open the body cavity—wow, kinky. Edwin had a look of distaste on his face, but I guess when you’re an inhuman monster who preys on humankind, a dead pig must seem fairly bush league.

I got an idea. I picked up my scalpel, caught Edwin’s eye, and sliced into the ball of my thumb with the blade. The thing wasn’t as sharp as I would’ve liked—shoddy stuff for the high school kids, surprise surprise—and so it stung a bit, but nothing too painful. I sucked in my breath as a bead of blood formed on the tip of my thumb. Then I looked at Edwin.

His eyes were fixed on my thumb, and they were no longer dark blue: they were black. His jaw was clenched, lips pressed tightly together, and he’d stopped breathing completely—not like he was holding his breath, but like he’d simply forgotten the need to pretend to be breathing. “Oh, no,” I said. “Sir, I cut my thumb.”

“Do you need to go to the nurse?” Mr. Whatever asked, rushing over with the first-aid kit.

“Oh, no, it’s just a teensy scratch.” I lowered my voice and said, into Mr. Whatever’s ear, “But Edwin here looks faint—I think he must have trouble with the sight of blood. Maybe
he’d
better go.”

Edwin was still staring at my thumb as Mr. Whatever dabbed on a squirt of antibiotic ointment and handed me a band-aid to wrap around the wound. Mr. Whatever considered him, then nodded. “Some people are like that. Funny, his dad being a doctor and all, he sees blood all the time, but I guess you never can tell. Scullen, go see the nurse, make sure you’re okay, sit out the class if you need to.”

“I’d really better go with him,” I said. “What if he faints in the hallway?”