It seems like it’s been forever, I’ll tell you that much. I
wrote The Marsburg Diary, or at least
I started writing it, over a year ago. It started off as a Stoker-esque
historical horror piece, but through the constructive criticism of my friends,
it became far more. Harvey Marsburg was born. He took on the traits of a couple
of people I’ve met in my travels, at least in regard to the amount of Dr.
Pepper he consumes (one of my LAV school instructors practically survived on
the stuff; a 2-liter of it was always with him like it was part of his uniform
of the day). I think ol’ Harv is what makes the series great. He’s like a fifty
year old male version of Airel: a little eccentric and proud of it, with the
occasional amusing bits of inner dialogue.
But Harvey’s also a little bit of my own personal fantasy
doppelganger, too. He’s British, and I’m borderline obsessed with British
culture. I’ve been digging for tasty bits of slang to use, and I fairly
splattered the second installment in the Airel Saga Diary Books with a liberal
amount of it.
Some of the criticism I got about The Marsburg Diary was that it was pretty meaty. You know, all that
Victorian English stuff (which I love, and tried to make as authentic as
possible). So to wit, the second book has lots more of Harvey. I had to
integrate new characters and new diary lines, so the flashback diary bits are
more of a seasoning than the main course. You’ll see a little bit more of
William Marsburg’s personal thoughts, but the main event is Herr Wagner’s diary
entries, which feature a little more of the infamous Mr. Rotheram. And I
promise, in this book we finally get to the bottom of that haunting line, “I
have always hated Falkenhayn.” Taking my cues from Goethe’s Faust, I really quite enjoyed writing
the quintessentially evil Falkenhayn, and hope you enjoy reading him.
Want an excerpt? I knew you did:
Deep in the wood,
somewhere in Illinois~
I probably needed a change of underwear.
Have you ever woken up to the
sunrise after sleeping on a forest floor? Let me put it to you this way: it’s
not like an advert for yoghurt and granola on telly, where the sun is gentle
and there are woodland fairies to caress one’s cheeks. It’s bleeding awful. I
felt like bugs were crawling all over me, I itched profusely, and I had managed
to injure my neck and head with what I had decided to use for a pillow the
night previous— a rounded stone. I was as stiff as grandmother’s knickers (whom
I never met, God rest her soul).
It’s funny about getting older— when
I was young, I was superman. Getting hurt was a rare thing that usually required
me to do something really stupid. But now that I’m nearing fifty, all I have to
do is wake up. I will try to rise to a sitting position and I’ll have sustained
an injury.
Cautiously, then, I raised myself
from the dirt. Gradually. Sloooowly. Never mind being nearly fifty. I felt
dead.
“What happened?” I asked no one. I
was half expecting an answer though, and looked around to confirm my solitude.
I was greeted by none but the lone piercing sun in the east. I raised a hand to
my brow to shield my eyes, the back of my hand brushing against a twig that had
stuck itself to my forehead in the night— which scared me. After dancing around
in fear for a moment, though, I finally calmed myself enough to gather my
things, tend to the morning necessities, and begin walking.
Where? Out.
What else could I do?
My car was dead. I had shot it.
And though my bestial enemy was
dead too, or at least I assumed so, I also assumed there were no others like
him chasing me round the wilderness. If there were, I reasoned, I wouldn’t have
awakened at all. At any rate, I was an expatriate Englishman stuck within one
of the islanded wilds of rural Midwestern America, stranded without a car,
carrying only my backpack. My life had been whittled to that and its random
plebian contents, with an especial consideration for those three books inside.
I checked my Ruger revolver. Empty
still, of course. Anything else would have been uninteresting, after all. I
shoved it back into my waistband at the small of my back.
I trudged on.
It wasn’t long before the wood
began to thin out and brighten up. Trees gave way to scrub and brambles, which
I tried to skirt around as best I could, moving toward some kind of exit.
Nature doesn’t clearly mark these things.
Offhand I wondered what in the
world I was going to do now. I was out in the middle of Illinois, somewhere
south of Champaign, about an hour’s drive. That put me at least a hundred miles
from my home in Chatham. The last road sign I remembered seeing was one for
Tuscola, another anonymous American village utterly surrounded by corn. I knew
at least that my wanderings had taken me off the beaten track and that I was
far from help, far from home. Being on foot just made it worse.
I finally found a clear path to
the edge of the wood, which was itself clearly defined: a gently curving
razor’s edge, to one side of which there was unruly nature— brush and forest— and
on the other side tall corn in perfect rows, towering at least two feet over my
head, tassels waving in the early morning breeze.
That was the first time I felt what
I call “the slip.” Like something just wasn’t quite right.
Some part of my brain was asking urgently why there should
be a corn field ready for harvest in the middle of May. It was like gazing at
an Escher; something was definitely not lining up here…
The Wagner Diary is
now available for Kindle. Nook users have to wait until tomorrow. Or the next
day. Or the next day.
