Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) (4 page)

"I don't know...”

"You must.  I need someone who'll play the game with me.  It's much more entertaining when you have someone to share the fun with." 

Ernst straightened up and lifted his glass. 

"A toast!" He clinked his glass against Karl's.  "By the way, do you know where glass clinking originated?  Back in the old days, when poisoning a rival was a fad among the upper classes, it became the practice to allow your companion to pour some of his drink into your cup, and vice versa.  That way, if one of the drinks were poisoned, you'd both suffer."

"How charming."

"Quite.  Inevitably the pouring would be accompanied by the clink of one container against another.  Hence, the modern custom."  Once again he clinked his absinthe against Karl's schnapps.  "Trust me, Karl.  Inflation can be very entertaining – and profitable as well.  I expect the mark to lose fully half its value in the next six weeks.  So don't delay."

He raised his glass.  "To inflation!" he cried and drained the absinthe.

Karl sipped his schnapps in silence. 

Ernst rose from his seat.  "I expect to see you dollar rich and mark poor when I return."

"Where are you going?"

"A little trip I take every so often.  I like to swing up through Saxony and Thuringia to see what the local Bolsheviks are up to – I have a membership in the German Communist Party, you know.  I subscribe to
Rote Fahne
, listen to speeches by the Zentrale, and go to rallies.  It's very entertaining.  But after I tire of that – Marxist rhetoric can be
so
boring – I head south to Munich to see what the other end of the political spectrum is doing.  I'm also a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party down there and subscribe to their
Volkischer Beobachter
."

"Never heard of them.  How can they call themselves 'National' if they're not nationally known?"

"Just as they can call themselves Socialists when they are stridently fascist.  Although frankly I, for one, have difficulty discerning much difference between either end of the spectrum – they are distinguishable only by their paraphernalia and their rhetoric.  The National Socialists – the call themselves Nazis – are a power in Munich and other parts of Bavaria, but no one pays too much attention to them up here.  I must take you down there sometime to listen to one of their leaders.  Herr Hitler is quite a personality.  I'm sure our friend Freud would love to get him on the couch."

"Hitler?  Never heard of him, either."

"You really should hear him speak sometime.  Very entertaining."

“Aryans and Absinthe” can be found in
Aftershock & Others

1926-1945

Blac
k Wind

Nagata’s sword connects
Black Wind
to the Secret History.  It’s a special sword, the mysterious Gaijin Masamune (its secrets will be revealed in
By the Sword
); it plays a small part in
BW
but will come to play a huge part in the run-up to
Nightworld
. 

Black Wind
has been called my "lost" novel.  It's an orphan – a World War II revisionist historical family saga horror romance.  (Try saying that three times quickly.)

After finishing
The Touch
in 1985, the next story in line went back to WWII, but instead of Europe, where I’d set
The Keep
, this time I’d travel into the Pacific Theater.  I’d been reading a few books that recounted how nicely the Pearl Harbor attack played into Roosevelt’s desire to go to war against the Axis, hinting that Pearl had been set up for attack. In
Black Wind
I play with that theory, warping Twentieth Century history to my own dramatic ends – not changing events to an alternate history, but controlling their subtexts over a twenty-year  period  through four  point-of-view  characters, three of  them Japanese.

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 throa
t
–

–
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."