The Grail Quest (The Avalon Book 1) Read online

  Rita my editor hadn’t been pleased. Especially when I informed her that I was thinking of writing a different kind of book, one that featured a decidedly lower body count. Now, the book idea had been brewing since the dreams began plaguing me. No surprise there. Any writer who suddenly starts dreaming of Christ, King Arthur and the Holy Grail is bound to start thinking about plot, structure, and theme.

  Yeah, I was thinking about writing a King Arthur novel.

  “King Arthur?” said Rita. I noted the mild hysteria in her voice.

  “But not just any King Arthur book,” I said. “A spiritual King Arthur book.”

  “Spiritual?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “A sort of spiritual adventure.”

  “What, exactly, do you mean by spiritual adventure?” she asked. She enunciated each word slowly and carefully.

  “You know, something in the tradition of The Alchemist or The Celestine Prophecy.”

  “Those books were flukes.”

  “The authors would beg to differ.”

  “I mean publishing flukes. It’s like hitting the lottery.”

  “I’m not looking to hit the lottery,” I said. “I’m looking to write something that heals, rather than hurts.”

  Rita snorted. I didn’t blame her. This was a lot to absorb, especially coming from a guy who’s last book featured a machete-killing high school teacher and his cult of honor student followers.

  “Your audience will never go for it,” she said. “They want murder mysteries, James. They want a thriller. They don’t want God on Harley, or whatever the hell you’re thinking of writing about.”

  “The Holy Grail.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Deep breaths, Rita.”

  “Will you at least consider putting some sort of murder mystery in it?” she asked, nearly pleading.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Please, James. One corpse.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus....”

  “Keep breathing, Rita.”

  And it had gone on like that for some time: her begging for bodies and hyperventilating and me holding my ground. She finally hung up when I promised to at least add some blood.

  But before she hung up she asked, “Any chance King Arthur can be a vampire?”

  “No.”

  “Damn.”

  Now in the hotel room, I finished my email to Rita by telling her that the plane had miraculously pulled out of its dive and that, after this near-death experience, I had had a vision of me writing historical romance novels. I typed a winkie face and could almost see her fainting. Poor thing.

  I dashed off a few more emails, snapped shut my laptop and took a brief nap.

  Big surprise, I dreamed of Christ hanging from the cross, a bloody goblet, and, just to mix things up a little, a surging underground river. I woke up and checked the time on my cell phone. I had been asleep for just under twenty minutes.

  A lot of dreaming for just twenty minutes.

  Surprisingly rested, I pocketed the hotel room key and headed down to the dining room for some dinner.

  A surging river?

  Lord help me.

  Chapter Four

  The dining room was small but elegant.

  I was seated next to a window that looked out upon the western gardens. A young waiter dressed smartly in a long-sleeved shirt and apron gave me a leather-bound menu. He asked if I wanted a drink and, despite making a concerted effort not to drink lately, I decided that a locally brewed ale couldn’t hurt.

  Just one, I reminded myself.

  I don’t drink for a number of reasons but top on the list is that I tend to get belligerent when I consume alcohol. I think everyone is a jerk and everyone needs to be put in their place. Except I’m really not a fighter and I tend to get my ass kicked by just about everyone.

  Anyway, the waiter returned with a frothing mug of brown ale (think Newcastle). Some of the froth bubbled over his hairy knuckles, but he didn’t seem to mind, although I did. The hairy knuckles, that is. I next ordered a broccoli quiche. He asked if I wanted chicken with that, and I said no. He wanted to be sure he’d heard me right and I mentioned that I was a vegetarian. He looked at me strangely, nodded uncomfortably, smiled weakly, and headed off, absently sucking his knuckles.

  I sipped my foaming beer, no doubt sporting an equally foaming mustache. Attractive. A man with a wife a few tables away belched loudly. Asshole. Someone should teach him some manners.

  Down boy.

  As this was mid-June, the late evening sun still had a lot of warmth left in it. The gardens beyond the window were immaculate and perfect with flowers and plants that I should know the names of but didn’t. Still, I appreciated their beauty.

  The reality of my situation struck me again: Here I was in England, alone, because of a dream. A dream.

  A persistent dream, granted. Still, a dream.

  I must be crazy, right?

  Right?

  And just as I was doubting my sanity—heck, just as I was wondering if I was actually dreaming this whole damn trip—a strikingly beautiful woman was shown to the table next to mine.

  Oh?

  As she sat, she removed a Kindle ebook reader and a writing journal from her oversized purse. She set the Kindle off to one side, opened the journal and unhooked a plastic, leopard-print pen.

  Well, well, well....

  Was she a writer? Could I possibly be so lucky?

  As I watched her, drinking my beer and doing my best to ignore the too-loud man behind me, I decided that she had a most perfect nose. It was small, but not too small. Straight, but not too straight. Upturned, but not too upturned. She also had lovely, rounded cheekbones that reflected the dining room light. Her black hair was ruler straight, just the way I liked it, and she wore a snug, sleeveless sweater that took my breath away with each breath she herself took. Oh, and she had a cute little mole on her left forearm.

  God, I needed to get a life.

  As the sky beyond darkened, the dining room filled with patrons. Overflowing beer mugs streamed out of the bar area. There was much clanking of glass and laughter. Too much laughter. Someone on my left was irritating the crap out of me. Seriously, did she have to laugh so loudly? Sweet Jesus, she sounded like a rabid hyena.

  Easy James.

  And all the while, the woman with the perfect nose and leopard-print pen wrote away. I ached to see what she was writing. I also ached to punch the douche bag waving to someone across the dining room.

  She can see you, asshole. We can all see you. Sheesh.

  I was getting hot. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I was halfway done with the beer and already I itched to do something about the guy belching. He’d let loose with another nauseating burp that even had some warble in it. Where the hell did he think he was, anyway? Seriously, someone needed to teach that s.o.b. a lesson....

  I continued sipping from my beer. The trapezoid muscles along my neck and shoulders felt tight. I was going to blow a gasket any minute now.

  I pushed my beer aside.

  Enough, I thought.

  I virtually inhaled the glass of water sitting on my table...and nearly wretched. It was lukewarm. Where the hell was the ice?

  It was about that time my quiche arrived. I dove in. I needed to take the edge off the alcohol, which I had consumed on an empty stomach. I didn’t come all the way to England only to get thrown out again.

  And why did you come?

  But I ignored my own question and dove into the quiche. As I ate, I noticed the beautiful, black-haired woman was still writing, and furiously. She turned a page, smoothed it out, and started anew at the top of the next. The pink tip of her tongue stuck out the corner of her mouth as she wrote. I thought it looked adorable.

  When she finished the third page, I finished my quiche.

  Synchronicity at its best.

  She finally set her pen down just as the alcohol all but left my system and I was once again at peace
with the world. The laughing, the waving, the clanking and the belching had little effect on me. That had been close. I had been moments away from getting into someone’s face.

  Anyway, the woman next reached inside her oversized handbag and extracted a small, plastic container. She uncapped the container and brought it to her lips and inhaled deeply from it. She held her breath for a few seconds, then exhaled. She replaced the cap and returned the container to her purse.

  Medicine? Did she have asthma? I didn’t know, but I did know one thing: I wanted to talk to her.

  Then go talk with her, I thought. Ask her about her writing. Mention you’re a writer, too. Couldn’t be easier. Heck, just say something to her, anything.

  But at the prospect of talking to her, complete with the many potentially humiliating outcomes, I broke out in a cold sweat. Talking to random women just wasn’t my thing. Especially gorgeous random woman.

  I took a deep breath, then reached over and finished off the last of the beer, hoping it was just enough alcohol to give me liquid courage but not so much that I might dive across someone’s table at the smallest sneeze.

  You can do this, James.

  But I just sat there with the setting sun. I couldn’t do it. She was too pretty. She was too perfect. I was far from perfect. I was so damned flawed.

  I pushed aside my beer mug in shame and decided to pack it in for the night. Defeated, I left some pounds on the dining table, hoping it was enough, and as I walked past her, I couldn’t help but glance down at her open notebook.

  And nearly tripped.

  Covering the page was a single word repeated over and over. A word I was quite familiar with. After all, it was my name.

  James.

  And it was written perhaps a hundred times. Perhaps many hundreds of times. In fact, she was writing it again now, over and over, her hand flowing quickly across the page, the pen a blur:

  James. James. James. James...

  I made a small, squeaky noise. A noise I couldn’t control. The woman’s head snapped up and I was moving so quickly that I nearly slammed into another waiter. I apologized, embarrassed. And as I left the dining room, my face red, I was certain her eyes followed me all the way out.

  Or was that just wishful thinking?

  Chapter Five

  I went straight to my room, where I proceeded to spend the next ten minutes burning off my nervous energy by pacing in front of the flatscreen TV.

  On the way up to my room I had convinced myself that she had been writing my name over and over. Now in my room, I realized how insane that sounded.

  Surely she hadn’t been writing my name, right? I mean, how egotistical can one person be?

  I expanded my pacing to include a trip to the bathroom. But now I was back again, hitting the small section of space in front of the TV hard, the wooden floorboards squeaking rhythmically.

  Obviously, it had been another James. Another very lucky James. Perhaps a long lost lover. Perhaps a war hero who had died on some distant battlefield. Or perhaps he worked in a local Starbucks, a James who whipped up one hell of a good vanilla latte.

  Or perhaps it had been you.

  Yeah, right.

  I occasionally looked out the open window. The sky beyond was much darker now. In the far distance, I could still see the dark silhouette of St. Michael’s Tower high upon Glastonbury Tor. The sky beyond it was purplish-black.

  I sat down at the edge of my bed, and ran my fingers through my thick, unkempt hair. Next I drummed my fingers on the bedspread. My drumming fingers didn’t make any noise. I quit drumming.

  An electric energy continued pouring through me. I still felt ashamed for not saying anything to her. A part of me felt that I had missed an opportunity, that I was supposed to talk to her. In fact, that same part of me was telling me to run back down to the dining room and finish what I had barely started. To talk to her, to at least introduce myself.

  That part of me I didn’t like. That part of me was apparently a glutton for punishment, because guys like me didn’t introduce themselves to girls like her. Guys like me admired from afar and watched the real men go to work, using their charm and wits to make her laugh and playfully slap his arm.

  I sighed and went back to pacing.

  I was tired from the long flight, but not tired enough to sleep, apparently. The woman had energized me. Heck, she had freaked me out, too.

  She had been writing James...over and over and over....

  So, after about ten or fifteen more minutes of this, I found my wrinkled jacket in one of the suitcases and left my room. I headed downstairs and out into the cool dusk.

  * * *

  I hit the streets, walking with my head down and my hands deep in my coat pocket. My breath misted before me. The fog that had partially covered nearby Glastonbury Tor had now settled over the town. I like fog. I like rain, too. Maybe I was English in a past life.

  I passed a bum sitting up against a lamp post. A big guy with a shaggy beard and even shaggier hair. His boots and clothing were worn and dirty, made dirtier by sitting on a muddy sidewalk in the now lightly falling rain.

  He turned his mangy head toward me, face and eyes hidden in shadows. He held out a dirty and callused hand. It was a big hand with split nails.

  I have a philosophy when it comes to the homeless: Give them a hand, there’s enough for everyone.

  Yeah, I know, bums might spend my money on even more booze and/or drugs. Sure, they might. Then again, they might also spend it on a hot dinner. So I always give them the benefit of the doubt. And, honestly, did I really care if they did buy cigarettes and whiskey? Hell, if anyone out there truly needed a smoke and a drink, it was someone living on the streets, sitting in the rain, cold and alone and perhaps miserable.

  And so I stopped and dug out my wallet, removed a few bills and placed them squarely in the man’s outstretched hand.

  “God bless you, brother,” he said.

  “Same to you.”

  And, yeah, he sounded drunk as hell.

  Oh, well.

  * * *

  Legend has it that after rescuing Guinevere from the clutches of evil, King Arthur and his noble knights established a mighty fortress high upon Glastonbury Tor. Legend also has it that the local Glastonbury Abbey is comprised mostly from the ruins of this once-mighty fortress. That is, of course, if King Arthur had ever lived at all. There are plenty of scholars who seriously cast doubt on this. These scholars are spoilsports and probably tell their kids there’s no Santa, too. The main problem with King Arthur was that had he lived, it would have been during Britain’s Dark Ages. That is, before written records. So when it comes to King Arthur, you get lots of “as legend has it” and “as the story goes”. There’s just nothing written, and there’s very little proof.

  Ah, but there is some proof.

  And it’s all here in Glastonbury.

  Anyway, Glastonbury Abbey is not only the oldest abbey in all of England, but also the legendary final resting place of one King Arthur Pendragon, where his tomb supposedly lies beneath the high altar. I say supposedly because the tomb is now empty. But folks around here aren’t surprised that the tomb is empty. After all, there’s a story around here that King Arthur will return one day to usher in a new age of enlightenment for all mankind.

  I could hardly wait.

  Here’s another cool legend: it is said that the nearby Glastonbury Tor is not only home to the Faery King but also to Gwyn ap Nudd, who happens to be Lord of the Underworld. This tor—which is just a fancy English word for hill—is magically hollow inside, and was once known as Annwyn. The Annwyn part is historical fact. The magically hollow inside, not so much.

  So to recap, Glastonbury Tor was once called Annwyn.

  Annwyn, many believe, is an ancient form of Avalon.

  The story continues. There is some evidence to suggest that Glastonbury Tor, or Annwyn, or Avalon, once rose high above an inlet sea. Indeed, that it was surrounded by the inlet sea. The legendary isle of Aval
on, where young Arthur pulled Excalibur from the enchanted stone, and where the good wizard Merlin gave counsel to the young king and taught him the ways of faery and magic, and where, in a nearby empty grass field, sits the possible remains of a once mighty fortress.

  Camelot.

  The fortress part is historical fact. That it might have been Camelot is heatedly debated.

  More legends. More stories. Glastonbury has a stranglehold on some of Western civilization’s greatest legends and mythos. Anyway, further legends contend that hidden within the magically hollow Tor is one of the most sought after treasures in the world:

  The Holy Grail.

  Anyway, I’m not making this stuff up. It’s all over the internet, filling dozens, if not hundreds, of books.

  Myself, I was beginning to believe there might be something to all this. Of course, I was hardly an objective observer, since I’ve been obsessively dreaming of the Holy Grail and King Arthur for the past few months.

  And if there wasn’t already enough mystery and fantasy attached to the place, a few months ago workers from a nearby quarry unearthed a very strange object from deep within the stone. An object that was curiously embedded in nearly a ton of granite.

  The hilt of a very old sword.

  The sword and stone are currently on display here in Glastonbury, where tourists can try their hand at removing the sword from the stone. No one has been successful, of course, although many have tried. And, yeah, many believe it’s a sham. Me being one of them.

  Of course it’s a sham, right?

  Then again, what’s five pounds in exchange for the rare chance at being the next great King of England?

  To top it all off, Glastonbury is also a hotbed for New Agers and the modern spiritualists. Like Sedona in Arizona, Glastonbury is a mecca for the New Movement, as some have come to call it, claiming that here upon the grassy tor strange energies and powerful forces are at work. A veritable vortex of psychic energy. Heck, the place is even popular among UFOlogists, with many reporting strange lights hovering over the Tor.