Free The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by Harrison Geillor Page A

exorcism on a little kid who turned out to have a neurological disorder, and gotten a lot of bad publicity for the church. Edsel was loud, formidable, pigheaded, bombastic, and other such adjectives, but he had a quality that Stevie Ray needed, mainly: he believed in evil, and in demons, and in abominations before the Lord, and such things as that, which had made it easy for Stevie Ray to convince him the Scullens and the Scales were actually vampires. It had been harder to convince him not to sharpen up a bunch of wooden stakes and round up some of the dumber parishioners and arm them with pitchforks and torches, though. But Edsel wasn’t stupid , and he’d seen reason eventually, and agreed to just keep a watchful eye. But now, Stevie Ray was worried, so he sat down with the priest in his office and sipped a cup of bad coffee and talked for some time while Edsel scowled at him from under those hirsute caterpillar eyebrows.
    “So you think a war is brewing, then,” Edsel said finally, leaning forward across his great oak slab of a desk.
    Stevie Ray sighed and shifted on his uncomfortable chair. The furniture in here was really terrible, the seating equivalent of hair shirts. “I’m not sure it counts as a ‘war’ when it’s five or six fellas on one side and six on the other, maybe it’s better to call it a feud or something, but yeah, I think the tribal elders and the Scullens—and the Scales—could come to blows over this thing. I don’t think the boy, Edwin, meant to stray onto the reservation, he was probably just tracking a deer and didn’t realize he’d hit their territory—it’s not like there are signposts out there in the woods. But technically it’s a breach of their treaty, so…” Stevie Ray shrugged. “I’m just concerned, is all. I’m trying to make things peaceful, you know, but—”
    “I’m not opposed to the devil-worshipping heathens from Pres du Lac killing the bloodsucking undead fiends, and vice versa,” Edsel said thoughtfully. “In fact, if we could manipulate this into a full-on war of evil vs. evil…”
    Stevie Ray pressed the heels of his hands to his eyeballs. Talking to Edsel gave him a headache. “Father, please, the elders aren’t devil worshippers. They hate vampires—or wendigos, as they say—worse than anybody. All right, all right, worse than anybody except you . But what I worry about is collateral damage. The Scullens haven’t bothered anybody in the years they’ve been here, and in a year or two they’ll have to move on anyway, because people will start to notice they aren’t aging and wonder why the ‘kids’ haven’t gone off to college. I was really hoping to keep things nice and quiet until they left, knowing they won’t be back for at least a few generations, long after it’ll cease to be my problem. But if they start trying to kill each other over a breached treaty, the town could get caught up in the mess.”
    “I am a man of action, Stevie Ray. What action would you like me to take?”
    “Just be ready. Get your… people ready. So if something does happen, we can step in, at least to protect the townsfolk. Vampires are tough, I know that, but the tribal elders tell me guns will slow them down and blades will cut off their heads and fire will burn them.”
    “And fragmentation grenades will fragment them, I’m sure,” Edsel said. “So the Interfaith Vampire Slayers may finally see action, then? How wonderful.”
    Stevie Ray nodded. Edsel had access to truly startling quantities of weaponry, mostly because of his crazy friend Cyrus Bell, who was widely believed to be the single most insane person in town, outranking even Gothic Jim the Satanist and that odd fella on the outskirts who talked to himself all the time, called The Narrator by those locals who called him anything at all. Cyrus ran Cy’s Rustic Comfort Cabins and Bait Shop, which had been pretty popular before the internet came along and allowed past guests to provide warnings