The Origin of Solomon Kane
A treatment by Stephen Block
based on the character by Robert E. Howard

Part I
The Wrong Victim

copywrite April 2007
by Stephen Block

Solomon Kane is the bastard son of an English nobleman, a Cavalier, in Devon, England, in the late 16th century.  He is his father’s only son, and so had the upbringing, skills, and attitudes of a young nobleman.   A relaxed, jovial individual, he has little interest in either politics or religion, and is primarily devoted to wine, women, and song, the theater, hunting, riding, sailing, and swordsmanship.  The only thing he is sensitive about is his status as a bastard son.  He hasn’t a mean bone in his body, except that he regards women as pleasure objects, and sees nothing wrong with this.  He has great success with women, based on his good looks, social position, and prowess with a rapier.  Although a duelist of deadly skill, he is so easy-going in nature that he is usually content to merely draw first blood, unless he feels himself insulted regarding his legitimacy.  We see him in some duels; his talent so far exceeds the normal level that he usually defeats opponents with negligent ease.  Such is his skill, and his success at swordplay, that he has become known as “Devon’s King of Swords”.                           

One evening, on his way to a tavern, he hears a woman’s voice coming from an alleyway.  She is talking, not screaming, but he hears a note of desperate fear in her voice.  Drawing his sword, he enters the ally to investigate, and finds a girl, wearing a dark gray dress with a spotless white collar, backed against a wall by a gang of thugs.  She is not screaming, but instead is actually trying to talk them out of attacking her, beseeching them to consider the safety of their own souls.  But the logic of her words is belied by the desperate speed of her speech and the fear in her voice.  Solomon attacks the thugs, quickly dispatching or wounding several of them.  The rest run away.

Solomon helps the girl from the ally back onto the street, speaking gently to her to calm her.  He learns that she is a Puritan, and her name is Faith Higgins.  She has the sort of sweet beauty that prompts a man to think of nothing but protecting her from harm, and the drab gown tries, but fails, to hide the sleek trimness of her figure.  There is a mutual attraction, and they arrange to meet again under less stressful circumstances.  Over the next few weeks Solomon courts her, quoting romantic poetry and trying to present her with costly gifts of jewelry, which she refuses to accept.  Mistress  Faith, on the other hand, expresses her interest in Solomon by trying to convert him to Puritanism.  She gives him a bible, printed in English.  He listens to her with half an ear while plotting her seduction.  As for the bible, he takes it home and sticks it in a bookshelf.

Finally, there comes a time when he steals a kiss.  She is stunned, and does not resist him.  Indeed, she even responds a little bit.  Mistaking this response for acquiescence, out of habit he follows up by groping her.  She responds to this with a resounding slap, followed by an impassioned lecture on Sin and Salvation.  Solomon is dumbfounded, and actually allows himself to be lectured, although much of it goes over his head.  At the end of her lecture, she tearfully says that she must stop seeing him.

Meanwhile, while all this has been going on, there were, at the same time, rumors flying of vampires and werewolves in England, including Devonshire.  Gossip imparts some of the better-known factoids about vampires and werewolves.  Solomon and Faith paid little attention to this, being occupied with more immediate concerns.

Solomon tries to re-establish contact with Faith; he sends her notes, but her responses are non-committal and mostly impersonal; not hostile, but mainly concentrating on religion.  In one note, she encloses a silver crucifix, on a fine silver chain, which she had formerly worn around her own neck, as a remembrance, and in hope that it may move him to seek his own salvation.  Distraught, he takes the crucifix home to his townhouse, and drops it in a bureau drawer in his bedroom.

Suddenly, she stops answering his notes.  He goes to her home, and finds that she has been missing for several days.  He does some detective work, and surmises that she has been kidnaped by a vampire. 

With more detective work, he tracks down the vampire, Neville Lesangre, who in his human identity, is a Cavalier himself.  Impatient, and without bothering to equip himself for hunting vampire, Solomon confronts him, and demands to know what happened to Faith.  Lesangre replies “she’s not here.”  Solomon attacks Lesangre, and they duel with rapiers.  Lesangre taunts Solomon, bragging of 200 years of fencing experience, implying that Solomon is hopelessly outclassed.

“Fool!  Put away your rapier!  I have been plying swords for 200 years!”

“You may have 200 years of experience with the sword, but I am Solomon Kane, Devon’s King of Swords.  Prepare to die!”

Lesangre laughs arrogantly and counterattacks.  Solomon does not fence with his usual easy negligence, but with fierce determination and blinding speed, and he beats Lesangre, skewering him in the ribs with his rapier.  Lesangre grimaces slightly, as if at a mild case of heartburn, then grins at Solomon, displaying his fangs, and tells him that only silver can harm a vampire, and only a wooden stake through the heart can kill one.  He then walks up Solomon’s blade and grabs him by his long hair.  Solomon is no weakling, but the supernaturally strong vampire overpowers him easily, and bites him on the neck.  He then withdraws Solomon’s rapier from his torso, and before the wound can heal, forces Solomon’s face against the wound, contaminating Solomon’s mouth with vampire blood.  Lesangre informs the shocked and horrified Solomon that in three days, Solomon will turn into a vampire, and become Lesangre’s slave for all eternity.  Lesangre morphs into a bat and flies out the window.

Solomon, in shock and already semi-delirious, stumbles home and falls into bed.  After an indefinite period of bizarre, hideous dreams (some featuring Solomon, as a vampire, biting Faith Higgins on the neck), Solomon awakens in his bed, pale and sweating.  He climbs shakily out of bed, lurches to his washstand, and looks at himself in the mirror.  His image in the mirror is misty and indistinct.  The furnishings of the room are partially visible through his image.  He stares at the mirror for a moment.  “It’s true!  I’m turning into a vampire!”  He turns from the mirror and, muttering to himself, hurriedly searches through the furniture.  Finally, he opens a drawer, and a yellow-white glow emanates therefrom.  He reaches into the drawer, then leaps back with a curse, shaking a burned hand (bearing a charred cross-shaped mark).  He locates a pair of black leather gloves, pulls them on, and returns to the original drawer.  He again reaches in, and pulls out the silver crucifix that Faith had given him weeks ago.  It is radiant with a lambent yellow-white light.  Solomon, squinting against the glare, can barely look at it.  He carries it back to the mirror, and stands there, the glowing crucifix held in the palm of his gloved hand, staring at his image.  Conflicting emotions play across his face, revulsion, hope, fear, determination, as he nerves himself for the action he intends.  Finally he makes the choice.  A snarl of ferocious determination on his face, he claps the crucifix against his forehead.  A sizzling hiss is heard.  With a throat-ripping shriek of mortal agony, he collapses to the floor.  He gasps in a huge lungfull of air, and sobs in agony and despair (this cure is not easy).  Finally the sobbing ceases, and he climbs unsteadily back to his feet and looks in the mirror.  His image is rock-solid, but the crucifix, no longer glowing, is stuck to his forehead.  He reaches up and tugs at the crucifix.  It comes off his forehead with a sucking, popping sound, leaving a red, cross-shaped mark which disappears as he watches, fading away to nothing.  He rubs his fingers across his forehead, hardly able to believe that there is no pain. 
Now begins a week of intense work for Solomon.  He goes to an apothecary to get a supply of “muriatic acid”, then he purchases a large amount of silver from a silversmith.  He sets up an acid bath and immerses his sword blade in it for several hours.  He commissions a blacksmith to make a long, narrow iron box.   He melts the silver in the iron box on his stove.  At the last minute, he throws Faith’s silver crucifix, that saved him from vampirism, into the bath of molten silver, then immerses his etched, pitted blade in the molten silver.  Meanwhile, he carves several large wooden daggers.  While all this is going on, he spends every spare moment reading the Bible that Faith had sent him, and researching vampire lore.

Finally, he remounts the silver-plated blade in its rapier hilt, and sets out to hunt vampire.  He finds Lesangre again; the arrogant Lesangre is angry.  “Kane, what took you so long?  You were supposed to come back on the 4th day.  I thought you were dead!”  Then he looks at Solomon more closely.  “What have you done to yourself?  You’re still human!  You fool!  You have given up immortal life.”

“I may have given up immortal life, but hopefully I have saved my immortal soul.”

They fight.  Lesangre almost immediately notices the change in Solomon’s sword.  Fear passes over his face as he retreats from the concentrated lethality of Solomon’s attack.  His superior strength can make no headway against the iron strength of Solomon’s wrist.  He backs up against a wall and can retreat no farther, and Solomon literally pins him to the wall with his silvered sword.  Lesangre groans and writhes with pain.

Solomon grits out the question “Where is Faith Higgins?  By the crucifix that is part of this sword, I command you to tell me the truth!” as he twists his sword in Lesangre’s vitals.

“I don’t know! The werewolf Rexor took her.  Now release me!”

“Spawn of Hell!  I release you from this world!”  And he pulls one of his carved wooden knives from its scabbard and plunges it into the vampire’s heart. 

Leaving the wooden knife impaled in Lesangre’s heart, he pulls out the rapier and uses it to saw off the vampire’s head.  Leaving the headless body behind, he puts the head in a bag, takes it home, and burns it.

Now begins another spate of detective work as he tracks down the werewolf Rexor.  He finally locates an abandoned building that Rexor was reported to frequent.  Clad in a black cloak, he enters the building and begins searching.  Suddenly a growl is heard and a pale, furred figure leaps out at him from a dark corner.  There is a flash of reflected light as Solomon whips out his sword, and the creature impales itself on it.  The creature, a pale-furred wolf, collapses to the floor.  As Solomon watches, the dying wolf morphs into Faith Higgins.  As Solomon drops to his knees next to her, she speaks his name.  Solomon babbles “Faith!  It’s all right.  I’ll pull out the sword and you can heal.” 

“No Solomon.  You don’t understand.  I’m not a vampire.  Werewolves cannot heal from wounds made with silver.  A fatal wound made with silver is fatal indeed.”  She stares into a distance where Solomon’s eyes cannot follow.  “I see the hideous gates of Hell.  They gape wide for me.  Oh, Solomon - it’s horrible!  Save me!”

Solomon sobs “What can I do?”

“I have not yet killed a human being.  I can still be saved.  If the werewolf who corrupted me is slain before I kill a human, I can be redeemed from Hell.”

“I will kill him.  I swear it.”

She dies, and Solomon, weeping, gently eases the rapier from her body.

Part II
Silver Vengeance

This is basically the story of Solomon’s search for Rexor the werewolf, and how he eventually found him and killed him, thus redeeming Faith’s soul from Hades.