Free The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten by Harrison Geillor Page B

for potential future guests, who mostly chose to give the place a pass after hearing about Cy’s warm and outgoing personality and the way he liked to stand in your doorway for three or four hours telling you about how the moon was a hollow spaceship full of alien biologists studying Earthlings like ants under a microscope and how he’d stopped wearing underwear entirely because underpants were an Illuminati conspiracy designed to lower the sperm counts of working-class men. Because of Cy’s assumption that some kind of attack—from space, or the government, or the depths of the earth on account of all the lava men down there—was imminent, he’d spent a lot of years going to gun shows, writing to fellas who put ads in the back of survivalist magazines, and acquiring various sorts of ordnance, which he kept in an old bomb shelter underneath one of the cabins which was eternally closed for renovation. Stevie Ray didn’t like knowing about that little treasure trove—his boss Harry would have been troubled, to say the least, at the quantities of explosives and such just inside the town limits—but it was sort of a comfort, what with the vampires and werewolves. Sure, silver bullets and wooden stakes were traditional, but a Saiga 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun with a ten-round magazine would take your head clean off whether you were man, beast, or some kind of beast-man. And then there were the rocket-propelled grenade launchers Cyrus had bought off a white supremacist militia who’d gone out of business recently. They’d get the job done, too, assuming the job was “utter obliteration.”
    “We could strike pre-emptively,” Edsel said. “Burst in on the Scullens en masse.”
    “Right,” Stevie Ray said. “And when Harry investigates, and traces it back to you and Cy and your buddies, you’d be okay spending the rest of your life in prison? Nobody believes in vampires, Edsel. And these ones haven’t even committed any crimes.”
    “Their existence is a crime against God and humanity.”
    “I thought you believed in redemption?” Stevie Ray said. “Isn’t that the difference between Catholics and Lutherans? Lutherans believe in predestination, and you don’t?”
    “That’s one of the differences,” Edsel said. “But there can be no redemption for the undead. You have to confess and repent and be absolved before you die—and they’re already dead. The fact that they’re still walking around… it’s a walking desecration. Besides, even if Argyle Scullen is telling the truth about subsisting on animals alone, he wasn’t always so scrupulous.”
    “He says he hasn’t killed a human being since the 1500s, Edsel,” Stevie Ray said. “And I know for sure he’s saved a whole lot of lives in the time since then. You’ve seen it yourself.”
    “There is no statute of limitations on murder,” Edsel said sternly. “In the eyes of man’s law, or God’s.”
    I wish I could have more reasonable people as allies, Stevie Ray thought, but he was limited to the sort of people who’d believe in vampire doctors and high schoolers and werewolf Ojibwe, which didn’t leave him with a whole lot of choices. “I’ll be in touch, okay?” Stevie Ray said. “Don’t do anything until you hear from me?”
    “I will wait,” Edsel said, in his implacable prophet-on-a-mountaintop voice. “God’s judgment is long, and God’s will is undeterred by the passage of time.”
    After Stevie Ray left, Edsel got on the phone. “Cy? Listen: The Omega Scenario is almost upon us. Be ready.” He listened for a while, made a face, and said, “Yes, that’s right. The aliens will be here soon. They’ve been experimenting on people, as we’ve discussed, making wolf-human hybrids and bat-human hybrids and—of course, we shouldn’t talk on the phone. Yes, that’s right, there’s no telling who’s listening. Yes, Cy. I know. I agree. Cy. Take yes for an answer.”
    Edsel hung up and sighed. It would be nice to find