“Wow,” Jonatha said again.
“We’ve been pretty candid with you, Jonatha,” Val said. “Now it’s your turn. You seem remarkably calm after hearing the story we’ve just told. Frankly, I expected you to laugh in our faces and storm out. But here you are.”
“Here I am.”
“So what does that mean?” Crow asked.
“It means, Crow,” Jonatha said, “that it’s a good thing Newton here didn’t contact my thesis advisor first. Or the department chair.”
“Why’s that?” Newton asked.
“Because neither of those gentlemen believes in vampires.”
“And you do?”
Jonatha paused. “Yes,” she said. “I do.” She shook her head. “Before you ask, though…no, it doesn’t mean that I’ve ever met a vampire. I’m not Van Helsing’s illegitimate daughter. I have never in my life encountered the supernatural. Not once.”
“So…why?”
She shrugged. “Not everyone gets into folklore because of an academic drive. Some of us—quite a lot of us, actually—pursue folklore because we do believe in some kind of larger world. I’m from Louisiana…from the real backwoods Louisiana. Before starting college I had a Cajun accent so thick you couldn’t cut it with a knife, but thanks to some undergraduate theater classes I learned to get rid of that. Where I grew up everyone believes in something, even those who swear up and down that they don’t. My grandmother and mother were as much vodoun as Catholic. In Louisiana we have plenty of legends of the loup-garou. I believed those stories as a kid, and still believe some of them.”
“Some?”
“Sure, most of these stories are fake, or tall tales whose origins got lost over time and drifted into pop culture and folklore.”
Val said, “What’s a loup-garou?”
“It’s French for werewolf,” Crow explained.
“Right,” Jonatha agreed, “and it’s because of that part of your story that I’m here. You see, after Newton here contacted me and I started reading up on Pine Deep’s history, I saw the name of the last known victim of the Massacre. Or, at least the person most of your town believes was the last victim.” She paused. “Ubel Griswold is why I’m here.”
Crow winced at the name.
“I’m not following this,” Newton admitted.
“Ubel Griswold is a fake name. It’s one of several false identities used by the most famous werewolf in European history.”
“Peeter Stubbe,” Crow and Newton both said together.
“Bonus points to you for knowing that. Most of the pop-culture books on werewolves mention Peeter Stubbe, though often the accounts are missing many details that can, however, be found in the scholarly literature, among which is Stubbe’s probable birthplace.”
“I thought he was German,” Crow said.
She shook her head. “No, and that’s part of the problem. He started using the name Peeter Stubbe when he moved to Germany, but he had already committed a series of murders in several countries before that. The earliest accounts of Stubbe’s crimes date back to fourteenth century, and that and other historical details suggest that Serbia, or possibly what is now know as Belarus, is where he was born.”
“I’m sorry,” Val said, “but isn’t this all rather beside the point?”
“Oh, no, Val…it’s not. It’s the reason I believe so much of your story.”
“Then you’ll have to explain, because I haven’t read many of these books.”
“Okay, the short version is that there are hundreds of different werewolf and vampire legends. They occur in every country, and except in the case of folklore following population migrations, these creatures are all different. The Japanese vampire and the Chilean vampire bear almost no similarities. You with me? Well, the werewolf legends of Belarus and Serbia are different from those of Germany, and if Stubbe was born in one of those countries, and if he was actually a werewolf, then he would have very likely possessed the qualities of the Vlkodlak of Serbia or the Mjertovjec of Belarus. Those are the dominant species of werewolflike creature from those nations. Now, the thing is that even though most of the qualities of those two monsters are different, they share one really dreadful thing in common.”
“And what is that?” Val asked. Tension etched lines in her face.
“In both countries, when either a Vlkodlak or a Mjertovjec werewolf dies and is not properly buried, it comes back to life…as a vampire.”
Val’s face lost all color and she gripped Crow’s hand with desperate force.
“Holy mother of God,” Crow whispered.
“That,” Jonatha said, “is why I believe you.”
Chapter 21
1
Crow said nothing as he drove. He just put a Solomon Burke disk in and headed north. The sunny morning had given way to a thin cloud cover that was starting to thicken as they drove. Val used her cell to fill Weinstock in on what they’d learned.
“She said that the psychic vampire is the root of the word nosferatu. It’s funny, after all those Dracula movies I thought that nosferatu meant ‘undead.’ I guess we can’t trust any of what’s in fiction.”
“So what does it mean?” Weinstock asked.
“Jonatha said that at least a third of the world’s folkloric vampires were bodiless and invisible spirits who spread disease. The Romanian word nosferatu actually translates as ‘plague carrier,’ which she thinks might explain our blight.”
“Swell.”
“The main thing is, if Griswold was one of the werewolf species from Belarus or Serbia, and if he was killed, as Crow suspects, by the Bone Man somewhere in Dark Hollow, then it’s likely he’s the one who somehow turned Boyd and the others into vampires.”
She told him the rest of it and then made arrangements to meet later on. For the next ten minutes of the drive north, Val stared out at the cars passing in the other direction, her fingers tracing the outline of the small silver cross she wore around her neck. Crow knew that she must be in hell. If Griswold’s spirit was lingering in town, then Mark and Connie might also be caught in the polluted etheric tidewaters of Pine Deep.
“Whatever it takes,” he said, giving her thigh a reassuring squeeze, “we’ll take care of Mark—”
“I want to go back to the farm,” Val interrupted. “Now. On the way back to town.”
Crow nodded. “Okay. Any particular reason?”
“Dad’s guns.”
He studied her face for a moment and then looked at the dark clouds building in the direction they were headed. “Works for me,” he said.
2
Newton used his credit card to pay for Jonatha’s room at the Harvestman Inn and trailed behind her as she opened her door and went in. Like all of the rooms at Pine Deep’s premier hotel, it was spacious, accented in autumn colors, and very expensive. The numbers on the bill caused Newton real pain.
“I’ll be back to pick you up at six,” he said, fidgeting in the doorway.
Jonatha turned around and sat down on the edge of the big queen bed that dominated the room. They had barely spoken a word since she dropped her bomb at the restaurant, and now she sat there and chewed her lip, giving him a long and thoughtful look.
“Tell me something, Newton.”
“Call me Newt. Everyone does.”
“Okay. Tell me…what are you and the others going to do now? With everything that’s happening, I mean?”
“I don’t know. I think Crow will want to go down to Dark Hollow again, to Griswold’s house.”
“Why? If he’s a ghost, or some kind of psychic vampire spirit, then what do you think you’ll be able to accomplish? You can’t shoot him and you can’t dig him up and run him out of town on a rail.”
“I don’t know what we can do. Spray garlic over his house, or set it on fire.”
“Was he buried there? At the house, I mean?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Sure. What good would burning his house down do for us if he’s buried on the other side of town?”
Newton frowned. “Well…we told you what happened to us. The bugs and all. Something’s there. Crow saw that the doors were all locked from the inside. He figures Boyd was using it as a hideout. Maybe Griswold’s buried in the cellar or bricked up in a wall or something.”
“That would be very convenient, and if this was an Edgar Allan Poe story I’d even say likely…but something tells me it’s not going to be that easy.”
He gave her a tired smile. “This is Pine Deep…nothing here is ever easy.”
3
He wanted to do one thousand cuts and then go back inside and work the store, but he lost count somewhere in the three hundreds and that was forty minutes ago. The sword handle was starting to slip in his sweaty palms and Mike’s shoulders ached as he raised the wooden blade over his head and brought it down, over and over again. He strived for the rhythm that Crow always had when he used the bokken, the hardwood training sword, but knew that his blows were clumsier, rougher, driven more by rage than art. Each time the dull edge whacked the leather wrapping of the striking post the shock through his wrists and up his arms; the ache that had started early on had blossomed into burning bands of pain that tore across his chest with each blow. Lactic acid coursed through him; his blood was a hellish cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins, and pure hate.
His eyes had long ago turned from blue to red and black flowers seemed to bloom in his vision as he hit and hit and hit.
One blow was for Vic.
The next was for his father.
The next for Vic; the one after that for his father. Over and over again, as the minutes shattered into fragments under the blows, Mike’s face twitched and snarled as he struck. A hundred blows back his nose had started to bleed, and although Mike was aware of that on some level, he just didn’t give a shit. The rage felt good. The violence—however much a sham—felt good.