Here’s another ‘interview’ Lisa did with me after our recent visit to the Roman Baños de Hedionda near Casares in Spain. It was a thrilling experience, but it was also an interesting example of how when you write for a living every place you visit you find yourself turning into a story. Lisa has transcribed our chat and did the usual excellent tidying up and removal of my many fillers as I pause for thought!
Just before we dive in (sorry), I want to let you know that Amazon are running a 50% sale on all 11 Requiem Vampire Knight volumes on Kindle in July and August. So there’s never been a better time to dip your toe in the water (not sorry) of my best-selling dark vampire fantasy with artist Olivier Ledroit.
LISA: I’m still buzzing from our visit, it was so cool! And inspiring!
PAT: The baths were fantastic but I just couldn't get out of my head how they would make for a really good horror story!
To briefly describe them for our readers: they are sulphur- and iron-rich baths that are open to the public to swim in. They date back to Julius Caesar, who apparently was so impressed with the healing powers of the water (allegedly curing a herpetic disease) that he had a Roman sort of cupola built over them and it's still there to this day. So on a typically hot day in southern Spain, we swam in a deliciously cool gloom, in this supposedly foul-smelling sulphurous bath – but it only smelt faintly of rotten eggs. In fact we barely noticed it after a while.
Anyway it had three or four little tunnels leading off from the main area. And the whole thing with sulphur – or brimstone, as it used to be known – is that it’s very much associated with Hell. So as I’m there, happily soaking up the history (and the sulphur), I was imagining a scenario where maybe teenagers get in there at night…
LISA: They’re drunk and or stoned, of course.
PAT: Absolutely! And they’re swimming around in this place and one of them spots a light down at the far end of the tunnel and it's obviously a gateway to Hell…
I would seriously consider it as the opening to a Requiem story, as they often begin with a gateway to Hell. Certainly the story of Claudia Vampire Night set in Gippeswick (old name for Ipswich) has a Hellgate, and it would have really suited Requiem: a light in the distance, what is it? And obviously yeah you don't do the sensible thing and get the Hell out, somebody's gonna go for a dare and swim to the far end of this subterranean river… and not make it back.
It has lots of potential and in fact it ties in with the opening of Claudia, which is actually based on a real life setting, which probably also goes back Roman times, possibly even earlier.
I was really fascinated by this real life location in Ipswich and that's one of the things that inspired the whole saga of Claudia.
So you never really switch off as an author. I'm sure if I went to Disneyland I'd be thinking, what awful things can happen here? How can I convert this into a story?
LISA: You mentioned Claudia in a real life location in Ipswich, what is it specifically you're talking about?
PAT: Well I'm being a little nonspecific because it is quite close to reality and I don't wanna get too close to the flame there. But it's a setting in Ipswich which – even in conventional historical terms is quite a landmark. And from an esoteric point of view it has even more significance because mediaeval towns were built on certain cabbalistic principles and that definitely applies to this particular location. As I say I'm pretty certain it goes back to Roman times, like the sulphur baths at Hedionda, so you know, anything that's 2000 years old really lets your imagination run riot.