Aftershock & Others

by F. Paul Wilson

  “He sounds like a sicko.”

  “I think he was. Because if I wouldn’t do it when he wanted me to, he’d get mad and then he’d get drunk, and then he’d hurt me.”

  “Not another one.”

  “Yeah. Can you believe it? I swear I got the absolute worst luck. He was into drugs too. Always snorting something or popping one pill or another, always trying to get me to do drugs with him. I mean, I drink some, as you know—”

  “Yeah, you sure can put those margaritas away.”

  “I like the salt, but drugs is just something I’m not into. And he’d get mad at me for sayin’ no—called me Nancy Reagan, can you believe it?—and hurt me something terrible.”

  “Well, at least you dumped him.”

  “Actually, he sort of dumped himself.”

  “Found himself someone else, huh?”

  “Not exactly. He took some ’ludes and got real drunk one night and fell asleep in bed with a cigarette. He was so drunk and downered he got burned over most of his body before he finally woke up.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Jesus didn’t have nothin’ to do with it—except maybe with him survivin’. Third degree burns over ninety percent of Tommy Lee’s body, the doctors at the burn center said. They say it’s a miracle he’s still alive. If you can call what he’s doing livin’.”

  “But what—?”

  “Oh, there ain’t much left to him. He’s like a livin’ lump of scar tissue. Looks like he melted. Can’t walk no more. Can barely talk. Can’t move but two or three fingers on his left hand, and them just a teensie-weensie bit. Some folks that knew him say it serves him right. And that’s just what I say. In fact I do say it—right to his face—a couple of times a week when I visit him at the nursing home.”

  “You…visit him?”

  “Sure. He can’t feed himself and the nurses there are glad for any help they can get. So I come every so often and spoon-feed him. Oh, does he hate it!”

  “I’ll bet he does, especially after the way he treated you.”

  “Oh, that’s not it. I make sure he hates it. You see, I put things in his food and make him eat it. Just yesterday I stuck a live cockroach into a big spoonful of his mashed potatoes. Forced it into his mouth and made him chew. Crunch-crunch, wiggle-wiggle, crunch-crunch. You should have seen the tears—just like a big baby. And then I—

  “Hey. What’s happened to you here? You’ve gone all soft on me. What’s the matter with—?

  “Hey, where’re you goin’? We was just starting to have some fun…Hey, don’t leave…Hey, Bob, what’d I do wrong?…What’d I say?…Bob! Come back and—

  “Well! Can you believe that? I swear…sometimes I just don’t understand men.”

  1992

  To paraphrase one of my favorite authors: “It was the worst of times, it was the best of times.”

  Early in February I broke off from The Ingraham to write “The Lord’s Work.” Greenberg and Gorman wanted a vampire story for their upcoming Dracula: Prince of Darkness anthology and I couldn’t resist returning to my “Midnight Mass” scenario. That story had starred a priest amid a vampire takeover, so I figured I’d look at the same situation from the point of view of a nun named Carole who goes a little nuts and becomes a sort of terrorist against the vampires. To fulfill the promise of the anthology’s title, I dropped Dracula into one scene in such a way that I could pluck him out later and no one would miss him. “The Lord’s Work” later became part of the Midnight Mass novel.

  Later in the month I edited the Freak Show galleys during a tour of Ireland to gather info for Virgin (which I’ll get to later).

  In April I finished the first draft of The Ingraham and was extremely pleased. I put it aside to let it ferment before starting a revision, and went to work on another vampire story.

  Richard Chizmar of Cemetery Dance was putting together an anthology called Shivers. I’d had such a good time with Sister Carole in “The Lord’s Work” that I wanted to revisit her and explore what in particular had pushed her over the edge. Audio was part of the deal so I skewed much of the creepiness toward the auditory. “Good Friday” was the result, but the anthology never happened. I took back the story and stored it away. I felt it was special and decided to wait for the right spot.

  (Since both are part of Midnight Mass, I see no point in reprinting them here.)

  In April Jove published the Reprisal paperback (with a cover even worse than Reborn’s). A month later NEL released the first edition of Nightworld in En gland. So…the entire Adversary Cycle was in print overseas but not at home.

  Susan Allison decided to pass on Sibs.

  I know most of you who’ve read Sibs are thinking, What? But the pass had nothing to do with Sibs, and a lot to do with Reborn: A poor sell-through had returns pouring in. I blame the cover. I know that sounds self-serving, but truthfully I would not buy—I doubt I’d even pick up—a book with that cover. If you don’t own a copy I’m sure you can find an image online. Take a look and see if you don’t agree.

  I sold Sibs to Tor for a fraction of my usual advance.

  I sensed my career entering the doldrums. Big returns on one title mean a lower advance order on the next, virtually guaranteeing lower sales, which mean a lower advance order on the title after that. And so it goes. You get the picture: a downward spiral.

  The Ingraham would change all that, but not until the fall. At the moment, relief was on the way from an entirely unexpected quarter.

  On July 10 I got a call from Bob Siegal, an executive for USA Network, saying they were launching the SciFi Channel soon. Marty Greenberg had given him my name (the SciFi Channel was Manhattan-based and they were looking for a writer in the northeast) and could I design a world 150 years in the future? His plan was to insert daily newscasts from that future between the regular programs. I said I’d be delighted.

  Then he said he needed it all completed and set to go in six weeks.

  I was revising The Ingraham then, trying to get it ready for the upcoming Frankfurt Book Fair, and knew I couldn’t deliver. Matt Costello and I had shot the bull a few times at various NECons (a small annual Rhode Island convention for writers and readers) and I’d been impressed with how bright and quick and versatile he was. I’d also gathered that he had a work ethic similar to mine (which is, simply, sit down and do it). Plus he lived only an hour outside the city. So I gave his name to Bob Siegal.

  Matt called me back and asked if I was sure I didn’t want it. I reconsidered and suggested we split the work. We worked our butts off—meetings, conference calls, faxing and modeming files back and forth (this was cutting edge in 1992). We delivered a future scenario detailing the sociopolitical-economic-technological status of the entire globe and near space for the year 2142 that, quite frankly, blew them away.

  Faster Than Light Newsfeed was born.

  The channel handed our “bible”—crammed with story arcs—to a fellow named Russ Firestone who adapted thirty-to-sixty-second spots that would play one per day, five days a week and repeat on weekends. We laid out the arcs in narrative form and in a flow sheet that showed what was happening when and where throughout the year on a month-by-month and week-by-week basis. Every so often we’d get calls to provide fillers for the feeds.

  On September 24 an FTL Newsfeed—our scenario, our characters, our format—launched the SciFi Channel. Matt and I watched from the launch party at Madison Square Garden.

  I was having fun, but this wasn’t doing anything for my prose career. The near-simultaneous release of Reprisal and Freak Show, the two ugliest paperbacks of the year, both with my name emblazoned across their covers, didn’t improve my outlook.

  A bright spot was the Borderlands Press limited edition of Freak Show, a beautiful example of book craft. Phil Parks did a brilliant sideshow poster for the cover, plus the interior art. For this edition I went back and wrote Phil into my backstory as an artist who was hanging around, sketching the freaks. Phil’s artwork was given the look of page
s torn from a sketchpad. This integration of art and story makes the hardcover unique.

  In October Baen Books published The LaNague Chronicles, an omnibus of the three core novels of my LaNague Federation future history, with all the segments divided into chronological order. One thick book.

  It was about then that I handed in the final manuscript of The Ingraham just in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair. But with a twist: The name on the title page was “Colin Andrews.” I instructed my agent to sell it under that name.

  You’re asking the same question he did: Why?

  Well, as you’ve seen, my career as a horror writer was looking a little shaky. Though The Ingraham was a departure from my usual fare, with my name attached the reaction would be, “Oh, another Wilson horror novel. How did the last one sell?” I wanted The Ingraham to arrive without baggage and be judged on its own merits.

  The choice of “Colin Andrews” was simple: I was sick of my books being shelved where no one with a bad back ever sees them. This way I’d be closer to eye level.

  It worked.

  On October 9, just before the opening of the fair, Milan publisher Sperling & Kupfer made a fifty-million-lire preemptive bid for Italian rights to The Ingraham. After picking myself off the floor and doing the currency conversion, I realized I wasn’t Trump rich, but it was still the largest foreign rights advance of my career to that time.

  And that was only the beginning. The Sperling & Kupfer deal started a buzz at the fair that had other foreign publishers lining up for the hot novel by this new author, Colin Andrews. By the time the fair was over it had been sold into twenty-four languages.

  I knew none of this. I was visiting friends in Florida and not checking my voice mail (and only gearheads were using e-mail back then). When I finally did check I found repeated messages from my agent asking me to call him right away. He told me about Frankfurt and how the buzz from the fair had set US publishers to salivating for The Ingraham. Putnam had just dropped out of the bidding after William Morrow and Random House both offered $750,000. (On a side note, Susan Allison, my editor at Putnam for a decade, read a few chapters and thought the style seemed awfully familiar. She was the first to suss out Colin Andrews’s secret identity.) My agent wanted to know what I wanted to do.

  When I awoke the next morning in the coronary care unit—

  Only kidding. Naturally I was in shock—delighted, joyous shock—but when I recovered I told my agent to let them fight it out. The bidding stopped with both companies tied at $900,000. I had to choose. I chose Morrow. A week later they threw a little party for me. They knew who I was by then and said they wanted to publish the book under my name so they could have a real live author to send around and promote it.

  I know you’ve heard that old saying: Man makes plans and God laughs. If that’s true, God must have been cracking up.

  1993

  An eventful year that would send ripples through my career for the rest of the decade.

  About the time of the 1992 Frankfurt Fair, I began a novel called Virgin—like The Ingraham, a genre hop, except no such genre existed.

  My career is a paradigm of genre hopping. I started in SF, hopped to horror, then into medical thrillers, now I was hopping into…what? It’s not deliberate: I simply write the next book. In this case the next book was what could only be called a religious thriller.

  After reading Tom Monteleone’s inventive Blood of the Lamb (about a man cloned from the blood of Jesus Christ), I got to wondering about what would happen if someone discovered the body of the Virgin Mary. By tradition, she was assumed body and soul into heaven. But it’s also been suggested the Assumption was a cover to prevent people from digging up her remains for religious relics.

  I couldn’t get it out of my head. And once I decided who had been saddled with the responsibility for guarding those remains, I had to write it.

  When I finished it in March I found myself in a quandary. My new novel had nothing in common with the book Morrow was planning to put on the best-seller list under my byline. (Stop laughing, God.) People who bought and liked The Ingraham (by now Morrow had decided to call it The Select) were going to be flummoxed by Virgin.

  The solution: Go the pseudonym route again.

  But I couldn’t use Colin Andrews because many of the foreign publishers were using that on their editions. (Oh, what a web we weave…) Then it hit me: My wife, Mary, raised in a strict Irish Catholic household, had been my source for all things Virgin Mary during the writing of the book. Why not sell it under her maiden name?

  And so Virgin went out under the byline of Mary Elizabeth Murphy. The dedication read: To my husband, without whom this book would not have been possible. Somehow it managed to pick up a great blurb (“A bold thriller with a message for us all.”) from F. Paul Wilson. Hey, I figured I’d get only one chance in my life to blurb my own novel and dedicate it to myself, so I took it.

  Susan Allison bought it and released it as a paperback original. Borderlands Press recently published it as a limited-edition hardcover under my name.

  None of this was occurring in a vacuum. Matt Costello and I were still feeding FTL Newsfeed’s jones for new material. To speed things along we joined an Internet service called GEnie which allowed us to send word-processing files back and forth attached to email via 2400-baud modems. We were wired, dood.

  But of the two of us, Matt was the more wired. He’d designed and scripted an interactive CD-ROM called The Seventh Guest. It sold a zillion copies and suddenly everyone in the interactive field wanted Matt. He couldn’t handle the queries so he called me and said something to the effect of: We work so well together on FTL, why not partner up on this interactive stuff? Ever ready to try something new, I said yes. I didn’t know a damn thing about interactive media, but I knew storytelling; I was sure I could learn the rest.

  The rest of the year seemed spent on the road or in the air. To London to promote the Nightworld paperback and hardcover of Sister Night (NEL’s title for Sibs). To Frankfurt for a reception where I met many of my foreign publishers. To Paris to meet with my French agent and my two French publishers. To Minnesota for the World Fantasy Convention, and to the White House for my twenty-fifth Georgetown reunion. (Yes, Bill Clinton was a classmate.)

  At the World Fantasy Convention Marty Greenberg talked me into doing what I’d sworn I’d never do again: edit an anthology. He called it Diagnosis: Terminal. It would be all short medical thrillers and he’d do all the contact work. I’d simply have to read and choose. I said yes.

  In November Headline published the first world edition of The Ingraham in En gland. They called it The Foundation. The byline was strange: “F. Paul Wilson writing as COLIN ANDREWS.” (Go figure.)

  Of all the year’s trips, the one that was going to have the most far-reaching effect on my writing life came toward the end of the year. Just a short hop into Manhattan where, in the cocktail lounge of the Righa Royale, Matt Costello and I pitched our concept for an interactive CD-ROM called DNA Wars to Linda Rich of Media Vision.

  See, back then there were video games and interactive CD-ROMs. Space Invaders and Tetris were video games played on game consoles, like PlayStation. Interactive CD-ROMs were games too, but more cerebral and with better graphics—like The Seventh Guest and Myst—and played on computers. Nowadays they’re all called video games.

  In 1993 interactive media was hot, it was the future, and everyone in publishing and software development wanted in. Alliances were being formed willy-nilly, crazy amounts of money were being thrown about.

  As designer and scripter of The Seventh Guest, Matt was considered a go-to guy for interactivity. He pulled me aboard and we rode the interactive ground-swell. The most fascinating years of my writing career lay just ahead.

  “ARYANS AND ABSINTHE”

  Early in the summer of 1993 Douglas E. Winter called to tell me about his idea for an anthology that would consist of a novella for every decade of the century, each story centering on some apocalyptic
event. He said pick a decade. I picked the 1920s—Weimar Germany, specifically. The arts were flourishing but the economic chaos and runaway inflation of the times were so surreal, so devastating to everyone’s day-to-day life that people—Jew and gentile alike—were looking for a savior. A foppish little guy named Hitler came to prominence presenting himself as that savior.

  I did extensive research for “Aryans and Absinthe.” Charles Bracelen Flood’s remarkable Hitler: The Path to Power (Houghton Mifflin, 1989) was a major source. I wanted to get the details right so I could make you feel you were there. I finished in August and was pretty high on it. I thought I’d captured the tenor and tempo of the times, felt I’d conveyed an apocalyptic experience.

  But I’d have to wait four years before seeing it in print. The anthology, Revelations, wouldn’t appear until 1997.

  Aryans and Absinthe

  Today it takes 40,000 marks to buy a single US dollar.

  —Volkischer Beobachter, May 4, 1923

  Ernst Drexler found the strangest things entertaining. That was how he always phrased it: entertaining. Even inflation could be entertaining, he said.

  Karl Stehr remembered seeing Ernst around the Berlin art venues for months before he actually met him. He stood out in that perennially scruffy crowd with his neatly pressed suit and vest, starched collar and tie, soft hat either on his head or under his arm, and his distinctive silver-headed cane wrapped in black rhinoceros hide. His black hair swept back sleek as linoleum from his high forehead; the bright blue eyes that framed his aquiline nose were never still, always darting about under his dark eyebrows; thin lips, a strong chin, and tanned skin, even in winter, completed the picture. Karl guessed Ernst to be in his mid-thirties, but his mien was that of someone older.