The mix of cultural fanaticism and wrenchingly dark supernatural horror wrapped around a love story (a love quadrangle fuels the heart of the beast) proved a real challenge for me.
I wasn't trying to do anything special with it. It was simply the next novel I was ready to write. After years of daunting research, 800 manuscript pages, it turned out to be my poorest seller. Not a single bad review, but no one seemed to know where to place it. Consequently, it got lost.
But over the years it has stayed in print and slowly found a disparate audience. Romance readers dig it as a love story. History buffs get into the conspiracies and shifting subtexts. And horror fans enjoy the scary parts.
I think it's my best novel – not necessarily my favorite, but my best. I'm perhaps inordinately proud of the fact that it was reprinted in Japan... a confirmation of the accuracy of all my research.
Here are the opening scenes… day one of a two-decade saga…
Black Wind
(sample)
1926
THE YEAR OF THE TIGER
JULY
SAN FRANCISCO
A slithering sound awoke him.
Matsuo shot up to a crouch on the futon and strained to see through the room's inky blackness.
Not again! Please, not again!
Out of the darkness the voices began their whispering.
"Are you the one? The one who bears the seeds? Are you the one to die?"
And then he saw them, limned by the faint light from the hallway, wizened, near-naked forms with bare, glistening scalps, their faces dark blanks except for an occasional shining pair of eyes. All carried knives that gleamed in the darkness.
All except one. A tall, gaunt, hooded figure stood in the bedroom doorway. Its face too was entirely in shadow except for a pair of glowing eyes, burning softly as the creatures inched toward him along the floor.
Some crawled, some crept, some dragged themselves along, and one writhed along the floor with a knife blade clamped between his teeth in an obscene parody of a snake. They slithered closer, their voices rising.
"Yes! He's the one who bears the seeds! He dies! He dies now! Kill him!"
One reared up and thrust his dagger unerringly toward Matsuo's throat–
–and he woke up gasping, trembling, drenched with sweat.
The dream again. For a few months it had stopped, but now it was back.
Only a dream, he kept telling himself, but he could not escape the terror or stop his trembling. He did not want to be alone but he could not tell Nagata. He had described the dream to him once and had been told never to mention it again. It had been the first and only time he had ever seen the old samurai afraid.
Only one thing ever helped. Matsuo crept out of his room to the small Shinto shrine where Nagata kept his daisho – his pair of samurai swords. Daisho meant "Big-Little," a perfect name for the blades.
He placed his hand on the bigger sword, the katana, and felt his trembling cease and the terror fade. Now he felt safe. He did not know what it was about these swords, but they never failed to give him comfort. He lifted the katana – heavy, almost ten pounds – and carried it back to his room where he placed it on the futon and lay next it.
Sleep was slow in returning, but with his hand resting on the pearl inlay of the black enameled scabbard, he knew if he was patient it would come. And when it did, it would be peaceful.
* * *
My folks called me Frankie. The kids called me Spot.
On the morning of July 10, my sixteenth birthday, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at the source of my nickname. I'd done this countless times. I didn't see my ears, nose, mouth – none of which were remarkable. Nor did I see my blue eyes or sandy brown hair.
Only that awful purple mark.
It's known in my family as the Slater Stain. All Slater males carry it on their faces to varying degrees. The medical books call it a capillary hemangioma, which tells you nothing. Granma Slater always called it a "port wine stain," which pretty much captures the look of it. Imagine spilling a glass of burgundy onto a white linen tablecloth and letting it sit there overnight. That's a good picture of the Slater Stain.
My father and my uncles had little ones, barely visible at their hairlines. I had all the luck. Mine was as wide as my hand and it ran from my left upper eyelid, through my hairline, to the top of my scalp.
No words can convey the loathing I felt for that mark. I tried combing my hair over it, but my hair would never quite reach. I even went so far once as to borrow my mother's makeup powder to cover it, but the result was hideous. I would have peeled that purple skin right off my face if I hadn't known that the resulting scar would have left me even more disfigured.
I’d cried many times over that mark. And over the nickname it earned me. It kept me from being a regular chum, one of the boys, the only thing keeping me out of Mick McGarrigle's gang. He'd like me if not for that. And so would the girls.
And so I stood there, dreaming someone would come along and offer me a birthday wish. Anything I wanted: gold, jewels, power, fame. My heart's desire. I wouldn't have a moment's hesitation. I knew exactly what I'd wish for.
"Frankie!"
I recognized the voice: Matsuo, calling from outside. Matsuo never called me Spot.
I stuck my head out the bathroom window. I was on the second floor. Matsuo was standing on the grass over to the left below my bedroom window.
"Hello, below!"
"Want to come over?" he said, his amber Japanese face tilting up.
He was smiling, but his eyes looked a little hollow, like he hadn't been sleeping too well. He was dressed like me, in a short-sleeve shirt and knee-length pants.
I had few friends. In fact, to be honest, I had only one. And most likely I would not have been friends with Matsuo if he hadn't lived here on the grounds of my family home. I was that shy.
"I can't today. My father's taking me sailing." The new Lightning had arrived last week and Dad was going to start teaching me how to sail.
"Come out till he gets back."
"Back?" I had a sinking feeling. "Where'd he go?"
Matsuo shrugged. "I just saw him driving out."
I ran downstairs. Mom was in the dining room where everything was mahogany and crystal, talking to Oba-san. Mom's hair was twisted up in countless tight little curlers. Her face looked tight and pinched without her hair around it. She was sitting at the long table under the chandelier, smoking a cigarette in a little ivory holder and going over a list with Oba-san.
"Happy birthday, Master Frankie!" Oba-san said in her thickly accented English. She smiled and bowed.
I bowed back. "Arigato."
"Yes, darling," Mom said, wrapping an arm around my waist and giving me a quick hug. "Happy sixteenth."
"Arigato," I said again.
"Speak English, dear."
"I like speaking Japanese."
"You do Oba-san no service by speaking Japanese to her. She's in America now and wants to learn to speak English. Isn't that right, Oba-san?"
Oba-san said, "Yes, ma'am," to Mom but winked at me.
Oba-san was an ever-cheerful woman. The normally slimming effect of a kimono was lost on her portly frame. She was our cook as well as Matsuo's aunt. Her real name was Kimura, but Matsuo had called her Oba-san – oba being the Japanese word for "aunt" – as long as anyone could remember and that was now her name around our house.
"Where's Dad?"
"He had to meet with Commander Foster."
I felt a lump swelling in my throat. "But we were supposed to go sailing."
"Oh, darling, he didn't forget. It's just that there were some last minute problems with this new contract and he had to iron them out. I hate it when they bother him with business matters on the weekend but he had to go."
I hated it, too. Dad was always getting called away.
"Maybe this afternoon," I said.
"I'm afraid it will be too late then, dear. You know we've got all these p
eople coming for cocktails and dinner at five. There won't be time. But he'll make it up to you. You know that."
Trouble was, I didn't know any such thing.
"And as soon as he comes back, we'll have your birthday cake. Okay?"
"Okay." I didn't have much choice.
"Swell. Now you just go out and play for a while. I've got to plan tonight's menu with Oba-san."
I waved and ran outside, determined to hide my disappointment. I had been waiting all week for today: my birthday, sailing with my dad, just the two of us on the water with no phones and no telegrams.
I walked to the ocean edge of the yard and looked down to where the brand-new Lightning sat on rollers on the thin strip of beach fifty feet below. A sob was hiding somewhere within me. I didn't look for it. I had learned from Matsuo and Nagata that the face within is not the face for the world.
Matsuo came running up. "You're not going sailing at all?" he said when he stopped beside me.
He had a lean face and body, dark brown eyes, and short black hair. He was my age and almost as tall. Only in the past year had I begun to stretch past him in height, and only by half an inch at that. But while I clomped along, Matsuo moved like a cat. His mind was as agile as his body and he spoke English as well as any American. And why not? He may have been born in Japan, but he grew up here. He had been speaking English almost as long as I had.
I guess I still needed practice keeping my two faces separate. I shook my head, not yet ready to trust myself to speak.
"I think you made a good decision," Matsuo said, shading his eyes as he looked out over the Pacific. "It looks choppy. Too much wind to learn sailing. Wise to wait until tomorrow when it will be calmer."
I looked north past the deep brown stone of the Presidio to where the morning sun lit the fog flowing through the Golden Gate, then out to the misty Pacific, calm and gently rolling toward shore under an easterly breeze that couldn't have topped five knots.
I glanced at Matsuo and had to smile. This was the truest friend a fellow could ever have.
If you wish to read on: Black Wind
1941
THE KEEP
The book that will not die!
What is it about the Keep? First published in 1981, it’s never been out of print and, day in and day out, year after year, it remains the bestselling title on my backlist. Over its lifespan it has appeared as a trade hardcover, a signed limited collector’s edition, a mass market paperback, a trade paperback, and even a graphic novel.
Maybe it’s because The Keep is the linchpin of the Secret History. If the German Army hadn’t occupied the place and vandalized its inner structure, we would still be ignorant of the Secret History. But with the freeing of the One, the dominoes began to fall, making Nightworld inevitable.
Though I spent the 70s writing SF for John Campbell’s Analog and Doubleday’s science fiction line, I really wanted to write horror. By 1980 the K-man’s success had convinced publishers that horror would sell, even if your name wasn’t Blatty or Levin, so I decided to go for it. King had continued Richard Matheson’s trend of moving horror away from brooding castles and into the towns and schools and homes of working- and middleclass Americans. I wasn’t ready for that. I’d read too much classic horror to give up on the Gothic just yet.
I’d spent decades immersed in everything horror – the works of Machen, LeFanu, James, and Lovecraft – tons of Lovecraft. I’d also been reading Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, and while I enjoyed her Hotel Transylvania, I found the idea of a heroic vampire ridiculous. They’re parasites. But she did start me thinking about vampires. Like how much more interesting if the vampire only pretended to be an ally. (Hmmm…there’s a thought.)
At that time I lived near Lakewood, NJ, with its large Orthodox Jewish community. I’d see them in the stores all the time and, since vampires were on my mind, I started wondering: If these rabbi types ran into a true vampire, how would they react to its traditional fear of the crucifix? Wouldn’t that raise an awful lot of questions about their belief system?
Interesting situation. Even more interesting if the being was pretending to be a vampire to hide its true nature – something much worse.
The juices started flowing. What if it wasn’t the Christian cross it feared, but something that resembled one? But what?
The solution came to me at 3 a.m. one morning. I scribbled it down in the dark and the story cascaded together.
Besides horror, I was reading a lot of Robert Ludlum in those days. I loved the international scope of his breathlessly paced novels, so full of conspiracies, lies, and deception, where no one was who they seemed to be.
So for my first horror novel I ignored all the small-town, narrow-focus Carrie/Salem’s Lot/The Shining clones everyone else was writing, and set up a big canvas. I took one part vampire myth, one part HPL’s cosmic evil, sprinkled in some Nazi einsatzkommandos for human evil, added smidgen of Ludlum paranoia and misdirection, a Jewish scholar, and began to paint.
My agent had a movie deal before he’d even begun to send it to publishers. Unfortunately The Keep wound up in the clutches of Michael Mann who warped it into a film memorable for striking imagery, bad dialogue, and head-scratching incomprehensibility.
But the book is still here, just as I wrote it. Here are the opening scenes.
THE KEEP
(sample)
Prologue
WARSAW, POLAND
Monday, 28 April 1941
0815 hours
A year and a half ago another name had graced the door, a Polish name, and no doubt a title and the name of a department or bureau in the Polish government. But Poland no longer belonged to the Poles, and thick, heavy strokes of black paint had crudely obliterated the name. Erich Kaempffer paused outside the door and tried to remember the name. Not that he cared. Merely an exercise in memory. A mahogany plaque now covered the spot, but smears of black showed around its edges. It read:
SS-OBERFÜCHRER W. HOSSBACH
RSHA-DIVISION OF RACE AND RESETTLEMENT
Warsaw District
He paused to compose himself. What did Hossbach want of him? Why the early morning summons? He was angry with himself for letting this upset him, but no one in the SS, no matter how secure his position, even an officer rising as rapidly as he, could be summoned to report "immediately" to a superior's office without experiencing a spasm of apprehension.
Kaempffer took one last deep breath, masked his anxiety, and pushed through the door. The corporal who acted as General Hossbach's secretary snapped to attention. The man was new and Kaempffer could see that the soldier didn't recognize him. It was understandable – Kaempffer had been at Auschwitz for the past year.
"Sturmbannführer Kaempffer," was all he said, allowing the youngster to take it from there. The corporal pivoted and strode through to the inner office. He returned immediately.
"Oberführer Hossbach will see you now, Herr Major."
Kaempffer breezed past the corporal and stepped into Hossbach's office to find him sitting on the edge of his desk.
"Ah, Erich! Good morning!" Hossbach said with uncharacteristic joviality. "Coffee?"
"No thank you, Wilhelm." He had craved a cup until this very moment, but Hossbach's smile had immediately put him on guard. Now there was a knot where an empty stomach had been.
"Very well, then. But take off your coat and get comfortable.
The calendar said April, but it was still cold in Warsaw. Kaempffer wore his overlong SS greatcoat. He removed it and his officer's cap slowly and hung them on the wall rack with great care, forcing Hossbach to watch him and, perhaps, to dwell on their physical differences. Hossbach was portly, balding, in his early fifties. Kaempffer was a decade younger, with a tightly muscled frame and a full head of boyishly blond hair. And Erich Kaempffer was on his way up.
"Congratulations, by the way, on your promotion and on your new assignment. The Ploiesti position is quite a plum.”
"Yes." Kaempffer maintained a neutral tone. "I just ho
pe I can live up to Berlin's confidence in me.”
“I’m sure you will."
Kaempffer knew that Hossbach's good wishes were as hollow as the promises of resettlement he made to the Polish Jews. Hossbach had wanted Ploiesti for himself – every SS officer wanted it. The opportunities for advancement and for personal profit in being commandant of the major camp in Romania were enormous. In the relentless pursuit of position within the huge bureaucracy created by Heinrich Himmler, where one eye was always fixed on the vulnerable back of the man ahead of you, and the other eye ever watchful over your shoulder at the man behind you, a sincere wish for success was a fantasy.
In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Kaempffer scanned the walls and repressed a sneer as he noted more lightly colored squares and rectangles where degrees and citations had been hung by the previous occupant. Hossbach had not redecorated. Typical of the man to try to give the impression that he was much too busy with SS matters to bother with trifles such as having the walls painted. So obviously an act. Kaempffer did not need to put on a show of his devotion to the SS. His every waking hour was devoted to furthering his position in the organization.
He pretended to study the large map of Poland on the wall, its face studded with colored pins representing concentrations of undesirables. This had been a busy year for Hossbach's RSHA office; it was through here that Poland's Jewish population was being directed toward the "resettlement center" near the rail nexus of Auschwitz. Kaempffer imagined his own office-to-be in Ploiesti, with a map of Romania on the wall, studded with his own pins. Ploiesti…there could be no doubt that Hossbach's cheery manner boded ill. Something had gone wrong somewhere and Hossbach was going to make full use of his last few days as superior officer to rub Kaempffer's nose in it.
Scenes From the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) Page 3