Crow and Val were downplayed in the story and their later actions ascribed to townsfolk who had died—a literary license that created new heroes for the public. Mike Sweeney was not mentioned at all, and his role in the story was given to Brandon Strauss, who would forever be remembered as the
The book was not a sensationalized piece of writing, not like the dozen or so terrorist-themed books punched out by tabloid writers for the hungry paperback crowd. If anything,
Newton told a monster story.
The immediate result was a media outcry and a universal panning of the book by every critic in the country. Within a day of the first reviews Newton was fired from the
Newton took the backlash stoically. He no longer cared what his editor thought, and he didn’t give a damn what the critics wrote or said. In the first two weeks
The government very vocally denied that any of the events in Newton’s book happened and saying so publicly was tantamount to issuing a mandate for conspiracy theorists to shout “cover-up!” This was further fueled when fragments of video footage from the first few moments of the massacre began appearing on the Internet; officials again denied their authenticity, but the story persisted.
There were some odd cultural side effects of this new notoriety. The word
Did the public actually believe the story? Did they truly believe in vampires? Psychologists and sociologists went head to head over that for months. The consensus was that people believed what they wanted to believe, and vampires, it seemed, were what they wanted to believe. It was like the UFO craze of the eighties and nineties. Still, the sales of garlic rose steadily all through that year and well into the next, and in some rural areas, never quite dropped back to normal.
Newton and his fiancee, Dr. Jonatha Corbiel, a noted folklorist from the University of Pennsylvania, were regulars on
When the
As the books and the film became famous, newspapers tried every wheedling trick in their repertoire to try and discover the true of identities of craft store owner “Jessie Hawkins,” and local farmer “Mary Perkins.” None of them ever succeeded. The town hall had burned down, more than half the townsfolk were dead, and none of the residents interviewed after the release of the book seemed to have a clue as to who these people really were, or had been. It was often speculated that they were just ciphers, characters blended from several sources to give the book a point of focus. After a long time, the newspapers gave up and went in search of fresher news.
Malcolm Crow and Val Guthrie were happy with the fiction and wanted no part of the celebrity.
BK and Billy Christmas didn’t spend much time with Crow after that night. They buried a lot of their friends after the massacre and after the funerals they drifted. And on one drunken evening when BK and Billy were together down in Philly, staring into their beers, Billy said, “I’m good if we never talk about that shit again.”
BK nodded. “Works for me.” Nor did they, though it privately haunted each of them because it made the world fit wrong.
The surviving celebrities stopped returning Crow’s calls when he kept trying to apologize. Val figured that Crow had upped everyone’s therapy bills by several hundred percent. Acting in horror films is one thing, living one is a bit different; eventually Crow let it go.
In took four years for the whole
Pine Deep, even in its half-rebuilt state, became the place to visit. Souvenirs such as bricks from the dynamited buildings became hot novelty items; authentic Pine Deep garlic oil was a top seller. The bottom line was that the town itself was coming back bit by bit, brick by brick, life by life.
By then Newton was comfortably wealthy and living in a restored New Orleans antebellum mansion with his wife and their baby girl, whose name was Valerie. The house was set back into the lush countryside in St. Martinville, not too many miles from where Jonatha had grown up. The estate had a wall and a security gate and there was always a guard on patrol. Always.
On a spring morning five years after the burning of Pine Deep, a Lexus with Pennsylvania plates passed through the gates and drove the winding quarter-mile to the house. Newton and Jonatha saw the car coming and were there with smiles and hugs as the passengers got out. Then all had a lazy picnic under the pecan trees.
There were seven of them. Newton and Jonatha sat in cane chairs the servants had brought down for them, and little Valerie tottered around behind twins with black hair and blue eyes. The twins, a boy and a girl, were four-and-a-half years old, and their names were Henry and Faith. Their mother sprawled in a lounge chair and she