The Ashland Grail Cycle

(click for larger pic­ture, suit­able for a desktop)

The Mys­tery of Things is the first book in a planned series of Catholic, mythopoeic (Grail) and Shakespeare-themed thrillers called The Ash­land Grail Cycle.

The Mys­tery of Things is set in Mil­wau­kee, on the shores of Lake Michi­gan, but the series will move to Ash­land, Ore­gon, home of the Ore­gon Shake­speare Fes­ti­val, with the sec­ond book of the series, All the World’s a Stage. (No pub­li­ca­tion date has been set yet for this book.)

Along with the lead char­ac­ters from The Mys­tery of Things, addi­tional series char­ac­ters will be intro­duced, and a new vil­lain, far more dan­ger­ous in his ambi­tions than the “Dragon” of The Mys­tery of Things. Two later books in the series will take the char­ac­ters and their chil­dren into the near future, and two oth­ers will pro­vide his­tor­i­cal back­story. (One of these his­tor­i­cal nov­els is set in Napoleonic-era Geneva and the other in Nazi-occupied Vienna.) All of the sto­ries are con­nected by a mys­te­ri­ous myrtle­wood cup, or “grail”. The grail played a key role in the cli­max of The Mys­tery of Things, and was intro­duced in James Ireton’s “vision” in Chap­ter Five:

Fol­low­ing the Woman up dark glassy steps, I entered the obsid­ian Tower through a low arch­way, so low I had to stoop. We climbed a nar­row stair­case that wound up and around inside, its walls carved in a con­fus­ing mot­ley of pat­terns and sym­bols, seem­ingly bor­rowed from a thou­sand cul­tures and ages of men. At the top, open to the air by means of unpaned, diamond-shaped win­dows, was a plat­form on which was mounted a fab­u­lous altar chis­eled from the trunk of an ancient cedar. A chal­ice, carved of myrtle­wood in an elab­o­rate knot-and-key pat­tern, whether Celtic or Mid­dle East­ern or Meso-American or Anglo-Saxon, I could not tell, sat atop the altar and was filled to the rim with what could have been blood, but which I assumed, I don’t know why, was con­se­crated wine. Directly behind the chal­ice, thrust into the altar blade-first, was a star-bright sword with a lumi­nous disc of sil­ver gleam­ing at the cross­piece, like a full moon ris­ing over the waters. It was some sec­onds before I real­ized it was a Host in a sword-shaped mon­strance, shin­ing forth in rainbow-rays of divine power. A flock of per­haps a half dozen brown-winged birds with white breasts and black bands around their throats flew mer­rily in and out the win­dows and around the altar, singing with an excited, high-pitched kee-kee-kee, and finally gath­er­ing in a hush on one of the rafters above.

“Emmanuel!” the Woman cried out in an exul­tant voice. “Ver­bum Dei, qui tol­lit pec­cata mundi!” She bowed low before the Body and Blood, and I did the same.

As I lay pros­trate on the stone floor beside her, a great light began to radi­ate from the Body and Blood, a light that pierced my trou­bled heart with a killing heat. Gasp­ing in pain, one hand over my burn­ing heart, I looked up to see that the Host at the sword’s cross­piece was grow­ing brighter and brighter, until it resem­bled no longer the moon but a blaz­ing sun. The resplen­dent light did not appear to trou­ble the Woman, how­ever. Her body seemed at once to absorb and reflect it, mak­ing her grow in stature and power.

The Woman pointed at the altar and said in a resound­ing voice, “Take the sword. It is for you.”

“And the chal­ice?” I said rather stu­pidly, push­ing myself to my knees but as yet unable to stand. I pointed at the myrtle­wood cup, once again fas­ci­nated by the hyp­motic pat­terns of its pecu­liar knotwork.

“The Grail is for your son,” the Woman replied, “and your son’s sons.”

And, as the image on this page sug­gests, Mount Shasta, one of the great vol­canic moun­tains of the Cas­cade range about an hour’s drive south of Ash­land, over the bor­der in Cal­i­for­nia, will play a sign­f­i­cant role in the series.