Bad Moon Rising (56 page)

But not all of these stories ended well. Four stock boys, three checkers, and half a dozen customers had tried hiding in the walk-in refrigerator of a ShopSmart, and though they survived the night, they were trapped in the cold darkness and found two days too late. Several people had apparently fled into the woods but were killed by smoke inhalation. Three teenage girls were found locked in an old 1950s bomb shelter that was sealed by a combination lock they apparently couldn’t open, and they never turned on the air filtration system.

There were other stories of survival and disaster, and with each day the tallies of both living and dead rose. When the official counts were finally checked and rechecked a dozen times, the survivors numbered 6,532. The death toll stood at a staggering 11,641, making it one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. Nearly two-thirds of all the people in town for the festival had died—a mix of residents, tourists, entertainers, and reporters.

Somewhere, no one ever discovered where, there were eighty-four people missing, among them Lois Wingate, the mother of the boy rescued in the forest. No trace of them was ever found by the authorities; no remains were ever discovered.

Over time the hundreds of forensics investigators from dozens of local, state, federal, and military agencies put together a clear picture of what happened. Blood tests showed that a large number of the survivors had ingested dangerously high doses of LSD, haloperidol, PCP, and other hallucinogens. Bags of tainted candy corn and other treats were found in the pockets of many of these people. They found even larger quantities of these drugs in the town’s water supply, in beer kegs, even in locally bottled well water. Autopsies revealed that a number of the victims died from massive overdoses of these drugs, particularly among the children; another group had lapsed into comas. It didn’t help matters much that haloperidol was known for disrupting memories, so some survivors had no recall of anything happening.

They found weapons caches, and background checks allowed the authorities to tie the weapons to over a dozen militant groups ranging from the Aryan Brotherhood to Al Qaeda. They found anti-Semitic literature that espoused a violent call to arms to stop the ‘Jewish takeover of America.’ They even found Internet downloads of schematics for making a low-yield dirty bomb—this in the garage of a Syrian doctor who was killed at the hospital. In short they found absolute proof of a hotbed of terrorism right there in Small Town, America. Homeland jumped on this and released it to the press in an attempt to counter the wild stories of vampires and monsters. It was a far more reasonable explanation for the witness reports, and for the most part it worked.

Vic Wingate would have been pleased. Setting up that smokescreen had taken years to plan and implement.

Depending on who was looking at the evidence, and how much of the evidence he was looking at, it either made perfect sense or no sense at all. That, too, would have been fine with Vic. He had left good leads to follow and some that were obvious red herrings. He wanted misdirection and that’s exactly what he got. Except in transcripts of eyewitness reports—which were always privately discredited by physicians and psychologists—the word “vampire” never made it into any official report. If it did, it was on an eyes-only level, and at that level no one was particularly chatty.

Even so, Homeland’s press blackout did little good, so eventually the story got out. Reporters descended on Pine Deep like an invading army, and once entrenched they could not be budged for weeks.
Nightline
began nightly reports from Pine Deep that went on for forty-six days. Every detail of information released by the authorities was minutely picked over and endlessly debated by experts in fields ranging from pharmacology to international politics. Every person in town was interviewed over and over again. Every avenue of investigation was explored with unflagging enthusiasm.

No army of terrorists was ever discovered, though some of the less credible terrorist organizations tried to take credit for the catastrophe. That at least gave the current administration someone to shoot at.

When the press found out that the body of Ruger, the infamous Cape May Killer, was discovered at the scene of the Dark Hollow slaughter, that hyped things up again. Just what his involvement had been was never determined, and the coroner’s report was sealed by order of Homeland Security.

The official story, given to a prime-time audience by the president, was that a small domestic terrorist cell had been formed by Vic Wingate, Karl Ruger, and Kenneth Boyd. Drug money financed the cell and it received support of various kinds from other terrorist organizations around the world. Wingate and Ruger had known ties to white supremacist organizations, so overall this was seen as “terrorism from within,” a sound-bite-friendly phrase that got great coverage. The president saw this as a clear sign that America “must increase its vigilance within our own borders” and “never back down even in the face of great personal harm” and “that every citizen must join with him in responding appropriately.” It was not the worst lie of that administration, but it was close. When another U.S. carrier battle group was dispatched to the Middle East as part of the appropriate response, even the president’s usual critics applauded the action. At the time.

The government breathed a sigh of relief that the Official Story had been successfully swallowed because of the collective gullibility of the people. But the investigators in the government were still deeply afraid because they knew they were lying; they really had no idea what had happened in Pine Deep and they were terrified that it would happen again.

Only a handful of people knew the full and complete story, and one of them wrote it down and waited for just the right moment to spring it on the world.

(3)

One year later, on the anniversary of the Pine Deep Massacre, Willard Fowler Newton published his first book. It was called
Hellnight: The Truth behind the Destruction of Pine Deep
; and it told the true story of what had happened in the town from an insider’s point of view. He wisely changed many of the names. 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 fiancée, 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 Beyoncé 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 Beyoncé 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.