Atlantean Nights

mist coats the days
obscuring mystery
night thins the soul’s wall
magic enters

you stop on the path to the river
snug in God’s cup
love brimming
pregnant with understanding

in the quickening maze
you find yourself
conscious that everything
is one

consciousness leaves you
filling what seemed empty
with love’s music

I’m at that stage now. The stage where you are scared to talk about the thing you are working on - what Hemingway called ‘putting your mouth on it’ - for fear of diluting the energy, which needs to be transferred directly onto the page, and not into anyone else’s ears. Hemingway added that discussing work in progress ‘takes off whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it or talk about it.’ He was right.

When one is at this stage of a book’s process, one has to be prepared to get up from bed at any hour (if a suitable idea should introduce itself inside your waking moments), settle down at your desk, and get it down onto paper. It might look like hell later on in the morning, when you wake up again, but at least you won’t have lost it. Same thing if you luck into an idea swimming in the pool, lazing in the sauna, or relaxing in the jacuzzi. Get up, fetch a piece of paper/kitchen towel/envelope/wallpaper sample or whatever, and write the thing down. If you don’t do so you will always regret it, because you will remember it as being smarter than it probably was. It will stay cleaved to your brain, convincing you that it was the single greatest idea you’ve ever had, and that you blew it away for another ten minutes in the pool. This is the literary equivalent of self-immolation. From there on there is only the slippery slope that eventually leads to Tom Lehrer’s ‘Massachusetts State Home for the bewildered’….

Nostradamus actually names and shames his first two Antichrists, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, with 47 quatrains in the case of Napoleon, and 30 in the case of Hitler. Nostradamus then goes on to give us 36 precursor quatrains detailing the birth, life, and long term effect of the Third Antichrist, who will be born, we are told, in 2035, in the Western part of Eastern Europe, following a conception which takes place just after the total eclipse of 20 March 2034. This allowed me the possibility, for the very first time, of constructing parallel birth charts for all three of the Antichrists, who between them notch up more than 100 out of Nostradamus’s grand total of 942 published quatrains. Interested readers will thus be able to compare, for the very first time, three great tyrants from a unique historical perspective – that of the world’s most famous prognosticator, whose books have only been outsold by the Bible.

Well, I can’t deny that it is a shock ending. I designed it as such. Nor can I deny that it would have been infinitely better if my publishers had somehow contrived for the ending to fall in the middle of a page, say, or with a To Be Continued sign tacked on at the end! At the moment the only sign that this book is part of a trilogy comes at the very beginning, in my Author’s Note. There is a very good reason for this, however, and I shall explain it, if I may.

From the very beginning of my work on The Nostradamus Prophecies, I had intended it to be the first of three books, with interlinked characters and plotlines, each book concentrating on different equations of main characters, and with different settings. A small character in one might become a larger character in a later book, etc. etc.. However my publishers, for obvious reasons, wanted to see how well the first book sold before offering for the second (which I had not, at that point, written). When the first book became a worldwide bestseller, with foreign rights sold in 36 countries, they bought the second, The Mayan Codex, which was by then virtually complete (we authors are risk-takers by nature, ha ha).

Publishing being what it is, though, and with bookshop chains shutting at an alarming rate, Corvus then quite reasonably decided to wait and see how the third book (The Third Antichrist) was shaping up, before agreeing to commit to that too. Despite my bestseller status, you see, I still don’t quite have the clout of a James Patterson or a Lee Child! This of course meant that the second book came out with no clear indication that there was a third to follow (because there might very well not have been).

All’s well that ends well, however, and Corvus are bringing out The Third Antichrist in December 2011, with the first two titles in the trilogy being reissued the following year (presumably with endings neatly triangulated in the centre of the page and large To Be Continued signs lighting up beneath it). In the interim, all I can do is apologise to readers of The Mayan Codex who found the bottom-of-the-page cliffhanger a little too rich for their blood, and hope and trust that they were sufficiently seduced by the book, and by the characters left hanging (or rather swimming), to proceed to the next one. No more shocks, I promise you. At least not unintentional ones.

My wife and I had been visiting Holland, and at the start of this week we were in Amsterdam. We always stay in a splendid little hotel called The Owl, situated down a one way street just behind The Marriott.  On Tuesday morning my wife was having a late breakfast - I had already finished and was sitting in the hotel garden talking to a friend. Suddenly my wife appeared and said “I think I’ve lost my handbag.” We did all the usual things - asking people if they’d taken it by mistake, looking under tables, checking our room. But it soon became apparent that the bag had been stolen, together with my wife’s passport, credit cards, mobile phone, etc. etc.  Peter, at the desk, then had the bright idea of checking the video footage of the lobby. True to form, we soon identified a non-guest hurrying past the front desk with my wife’s bag clutched under one arm. Peter then checked further back and found further video evidence of the same man entering the hotel forty-five minutes earlier and posing as a guest in the breakfast room - the miscreant had obviously been waiting for someone to leave their bag at the table for a few seconds while getting themselves a fourth cup of coffee from the buffet, and my wife - a renowned coffee addict, in the very best, and non-Dutch, sense of the word, needless to say - was the first to oblige.

Cue telephone calls to credit card shredders back in England, cue visits from the local police, cue visits to the local police station, cue fifty minute interviews with extremely sympathetic local policemen and policewomen, cue cups of tea from the Dutch police network’s private stock, cue calls to the very helpful British Consulate, cue visits to the photographer to get new passport photos for my wife. All this took maybe four hours. Clutching the photographs [my wife was looking pretty glum in them, as her ranch in Mexico had been burgled just the week before], we decided to walk through the park to get her replacement passport at the Consulate. On our way, knowing that the thief had fled in that direction, we went through the motions of looking in all the bushes, flower beds and litter bins in the vain hope that our robber may have dumped the bag in transit after rifling it for cash.

About three quarters of a mile from the hotel we decided to give up looking - it was more than four hours since the robbery, and we figured that the bagmen and bagladies of Amsterdam would have done their rounds by now and hoovered the thing up. “Let’s check in one last bin,” I said to my wife. We trudged across to a monstrous green bin situated near a Hot Dog stand. We looked in, feeling rather drained. “That’s my bag!!” shouted my wife. And there it was, Readers. Intact. Top of the heap. Passport and credit cards and little pink purse and lipsticks and compacts and sunglasses and reading glasses and whatever else women keep in their handbags all in situ. And not even a ketchup stain on it. We high-fived the half dozen or so kids sitting on a bench nearby, and scuttled back to our hotel to recount the good news to all our friends. Returning to our room, we found that the Owl Team [the hotel management and staff] had presented my wife with a lovely bouquet of flowers to cheer her up. Peter, the owner, said he hadn’t heard the like in all his years at the hotel. He was even more stunned when we told him that an Amsterdam taxi driver had given us a lift from the police station to our hotel FOR FREE. “This is impossible,” he cried. “The bag I can believe. The passport I can believe. The credit cards I can believe. The video evidence I can believe. But an Amsterdam taxi driver not charging for a fare? No. That? Never.”