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 dhampyr in the Pine Deep catastrophe, and who was one of the eighty-four people still unaccounted for.
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, Hellnight was understated, the prose a little dry. The book didn’t just chronicle the events of that one night, but instead presented a backstory that jumped decades and even centuries into the past. Newton’s book did not focus on white supremacists, psychedelic hallucenations, or mass hysteria.
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 Black Marsh Sentinel.
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 Hellnight sold out its modest first printing. The small publishing house that had bought the book—the forty-third Newton had approached—hammered out a second printing, this time putting one hundred thousand copies on the shelves, and in a little over ten days those shelves had been swept clean. By Christmas of that year, Hellnight was into its fifth printing and it showed no signs of slowing down. It leapt to the top of the nonfiction best-seller list and nothing seemed to be able to shift it until well into the spring. During this time some of the townspeople began coming out in support of the book—a few at first, and then more and more as the book’s fame and topic rekindled a whole new interest in the town. Suddenly everyone was talking about vampires. The Sci-Fi Channel was the first to do a special on the town and its haunted history, and soon every basic cable station with a van and a steadycam was producing their own. Reporters who had previously mocked Hellnight were rushing their own books to print.
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 dhampyr came into popular usage and even, in one of those pop-culture quirks, became the word to describe an up-and-coming executive who was likely to replace a well-seated CEO. A band called Missing 84 had a modest hit with a song called “Haunt Me” that was later covered by the blond gal from American Idol and it hit the number three spot on Billboard.
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 Oprah and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno; Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert got a lot of mileage out of the story. Newton’s scarred and grimly smiling face appeared on every magazine cover from Fortean Times to Newsweek. Fifteen movie companies courted him for the movie rights to the book. Newton hired a particularly predatory agent who negotiated an excruciating contract that left Newton with extraordinary artistic control over the project, and gave him a check that was so astounding that Newton had it copied and framed for his office. When the book finally went into paperback release, thickened by a new chapter on the reconstruction of the town, it started out as a bestseller and just simply stayed there. His second book, Ghost Road Blues, was a biography of the now legendary Bone Man. The film rights to that became the subject of a bidding war eventually won by Don Cheadle, who planned to direct and star in the picture.
When the Hellnight movie came out the following Halloween, two years after the massacre, it opened nationwide on 3,144 screens and had the twelfth biggest opening weekend in movie history. Newton was delighted that they got Jason Alexander to play him in the film. Jonatha found it absurd that Beyonce was signed to play her, the actress being nearly a foot shorter. The hunky young soap opera actor who played Brandon—local newspaper delivery boy and eventual slayer of the monster—parlayed his movie role into a three- picture deal that ultimately made him a big screen star. In later years he would generously tell E! that it was his role in Hellnight—The Movie that gave him his first good role. It would have amused Ferro and LaMastra, Newton mused, that their parts were played respectively by Denzel Washington and Owen Wilson who, though they did fine jobs in their roles, were as unlike the two cops as Beyonce was unlike Jonatha. It made a hell of a movie, though, with a great blues soundtrack by Mem Shannon and Eddie Clearwater—both of who had been in town that terrible night.
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 Hellnight hullabaloo to settle down. By then rebuilding of the town was well under way. Since the governor had declared the town a disaster area, a decision supported by the White House and FEMA, the surviving residents were able to obtain federal funds with which to rebuild and restart their lives. Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp did a Farm Aid concert there one year and that helped a lot as well. After an event that that seemed certain to destroy the town for good, Pine Deep began coming back. The notoriety of the book and movie helped enormously. Sarah Wolfe was elected mayor a year after her husband’s death and ran unopposed; and working with a team of investors and corporate donors, she rebuilt the town’s economy and partnered with Rachel Weinstock to acquire funding for the Saul Weinstock Memorial Wing of the Pinelands Hospital. Sarah did not, however, reopen the Haunted Hayride. It remains abandoned to this day.
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
