Leaves of Fire: Part Two of the Newirth Mythology, page 1
The Newirth Mythology, Part Two, Leaves of Fire is a work of fiction. Names,
characters, places and incidents are either used fictitiously, are products of the author’s
imagination, or are brought on by an ancient muse (or all three). Any resemblance to
actual events, persons, living or dead, gods, idols, immortals or other
is entirely coincidental.
~ Tunow plecom cer ~
Copyright © 2015 by Michael B. Koep. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States
of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without
written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
and reviews. For information contact:
Will Dreamly Arts LLC.
[email protected]
www.WillDreamlyArts.com
www.MichaelBKoep.com
FIRST EDITION
Designed by Will Dreamly Arts LLC.
Cover art, maps and text illustrations by Michael B. Koep
Back cover portrait by Brady Campbell
The Newirth Mythology, Part Two, Leaves of Fire
is also available in eBook, ePub and audio formats.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
(paperback edition)
ISBN# 978-0-9893935-4-6
(hardcover edition)
ISBN# 978-0-9893935-8-4
For Michael Scott
Synopsis
This is the second part of THE NEWIRTH MYTHOLOGY.
The first part, The Invasion of Heaven, tells of how Loche Newirth discovers that his mentor, criminal psychologist Marcus Rearden, is a murderer, and how Loche journals an imaginative and mythical story to capture him. It also tells of Loche’s terrifying and supernatural incident writing the tale, and how his words have altered very fabric of existence. Throughout his narrative, Loche begs the question, “This is really happening, isn’t it?”
In a desperate search to find Loche, Dr. Marcus Rearden is the first to discover and read the chronicle.
The journal portrays Loche, and painter Basil Fenn as brothers and artists with the ability, through their art, to open dangerous pathways between this life and the Hereafter. Basil’s paintings and Loche’s writings are of great interest to an ancient society of immortals called the Orathom Wis, whose mission is to guard the doors between this life and the next and prevent the crossing of divine spirits into our world. One of that order, William Greenhame, had been keeping a secret watch over the two and protecting them since they were children.
Another immortal, Albion Ravistelle, succeeds in abducting Loche, Loche’s family and Basil to Italy and proposes that by sharing Basil’s paintings with the world they could cure mental illness, and the darker elements of the human condition. The brothers discover that Albion’s intention is instead to contaminate and destroy the afterlife with human fallibility, sin and imperfection.
At the intimation of Loche, Basil takes his own life to stop the invasion of Heaven and protect the natural order of existence. His death begins a war between the Orathom Wis and Albion Ravistelle’s forces. The journal ends with Loche’s life falling further into the surreal when he learns that the immortal William Greenhame is his father. He also discovers that his wife, Helen, has betrayed him for the love of Albion Ravistelle.
Once Marcus Rearden completes reading the journal he tests the story’s validity by contacting a character within the narrative, the love of Loche Newirth, Julia Iris. When she joins Rearden on a journey to find Loche, she also reads the incredible events depicted in the journal. Convinced the afterlife exists, that an immortal order of men and women protect it, and the fate of mankind hangs in the balance, both Rearden and Julia are enmeshed in Loche’s snare. During the final confrontation between Rearden and Loche, Julia is mortally wounded, Rearden’s crime is exposed and he is arrested. Soon after, Loche meets the real life characters from out of his imagination: William Greenhame, Samuel Lifeson and Corey Thomas, and he is forced to come to terms with the anomalous and supernatural quality of his writing. The Invasion of Heaven concludes with the discovery that Julia Iris is an immortal.
This second part, Leaves of Fire, now tells of how Loche’s journal has inadvertently created lives, changed history and made myths and their characters, real.
And it grew both day and night.
Till it bore an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.
WILLIAM BLAKE
The Newirth Mythology
part two of three
Leaves of Fire
Fated
November 3, this year.
Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA
Questions. Questions. Questions. Who is this man with all of the questions? There, on the other side of the glass. He is not from around here. An accent? Italian? Weird. The man’s chocolate brown fedora sits upon the linoleum counter and the the red telephone is pressed to his ear. “Did you really work with murderers? With all that you’ve seen and heard from these monsters, do you have nightmares? Do you sleep? What about art? Do you like art, Dr. Rearden?”
Marcus Rearden answers. The visitor listens with focused and bedazzled interest. What was his name again? Each time Rearden is about to ask, another perfectly phrased question chants into his ear: “How have you managed your fame? Your successes? What is it like to be Dr. Marcus Rearden?”
What is it like to be Marcus Rearden?
The old psychologist stops the questions with an abrupt raising of his hand. “I am incarcerated you son of a bitch! That is what it is like to be me. And who in the hell are you again? What’s your name?”
The visitor stares.
“I see. I get it. You must be the resident shrink,” Marcus sneers. “You’re the poor bastard that was sent here to learn if I’m crazy as a shit house rat? The local jailor’s head doc, eh?”
“Not exactly,” the man answers. “In fact, I would prefer if you were, indeed, as you say, crazy.”
Rearden laughs and leans toward the glass, “Well crazy I’m not. And if there’s one thing that I can’t stand it’s some young, fifty-something shrink trying to analyze my mental state. Mine, of all people. Do you have any idea who I am?” Marcus waits for a response that does not come. “Listen, I know your job here is a piece of shit—here in this little town. Oh I’ve dealt with your pithy type on many occasions.” He settles back into the metal chair and relaxes a bit. “The thing I can’t seem to understand about your position is how you can stomach this level of our practice. How do you keep coming in to work each day? To the city jail house? How can that be an uplifting profession? Aren’t your usual customers meth users, and wife abusers? Backward baseball cap, tattooed, Blue Ribbon drinking drunk drivers that like to wrestle with each other? My god man, that must get terribly tedious. Bottom feeders, day in, day out. How do you keep going?”
The visitor grins.
Rearden feels a weird sensation, as if the grin is malevolent. During his career he had seen such twisted, leering smiles before. The psychologist narrows his eyes and he begins to scrutinize this person—this visitor suddenly seeming to be something more than a local correctional psychologist. Rearden keeps eye contact. His professional experience makes the subtle confrontation easy for him. What is it lurking behind that smile? That weird smile. Rearden knew weird. He knew to trust his gut when weird happened along.
“You impress me,” the visitor says finally, his grin fading, then reappearing in his eyes. “I was told that you were quite potent in your vocation. It is easy to see why you’ve found success. And so, too, how you have become what you have longed to cure.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“What if I were to tell you that I have found a way to rectify the horrors of the human condition. Fear. Pain. Crazy. What if I were to share that remedy with you?”
Rearden’s eyes widen. The words are familiar as if from out of Loche Newirth’s journal. He feels himself blanch—an anxious release of adrenaline. He marks his tone with apathy. “Let’s just say that I have a former colleague that would love to know of it.”
The weird grin appears again. “Ah, yes. I would very much like to know more about this colleague of yours. I presume you’re speaking of Dr. Loche Newirth?” Rearden’s eyes flit slightly at Loche’s naming. He knows the staring match has been won by his opponent.
“Dr. Rearden, I am Ravistelle. Albion Ravistelle. I am the Director of the European Mental Health League. I would very much like to learn more about your former student.”
And it comes to Marcus Rearden in a flash—the journal—as if he, himself, was standing before the artist Basil Fenn at the Uffizi—when Basil Fenn blew his brains out—the way the journal described the event. Rearden’s recent past screeches through his soul: the journal, Julia Iris and the treacherous drive through the snow to find Loche. Rearden sees his wife’s pale face—terror is frozen there. Vengeance. Yes. It was his former student, Loche Newirth that had caused it all—all this fear—this pain—this crazy. Rearden feels a grin ooze onto his face. He imagines the smile must look—weird. Fate has not forgotten me, Rearden thought. Vengeance is fated.
He brings his face near to the glass. The heat of his words fog on the pane, “What do you want to know?”
William of Leaves
the village of Ascott-under-Wychwood, England
Young William watched as his mother’s fingers transformed to long wisps of green stems. They grew from her hands like yarn flung from a loom. Tiny purple and gold flowers burst from the vines filling the hovel with a moist, sweet scent. The slender shoots weaved across the floor, along the walls and over the small bed where Simon the Thatcher, his wife Margaret and their two daughters lay in a deadly fever. Their faces were bloodless, thin and hollowed by days without food.
Geraldine of Leaves stood in the center of the small room, her arms outstretched and her face raised to the thatched ceiling. Her eyes were closed, and she chanted a soft, rhyming spell. William watched tendrils climb and tangle. The room became a forest glade with his mother as the axis.
She had told William that she learned how to do this when she was a little girl—William’s age, perhaps—six-summers. It was her mother that taught her about the one Mother. The Earth Mother was where all love, hope and healing came from. There was only one seedling—one seed that brought all green, and healing and goodness to the earth—and if it died, so too would its fruits and the works of its healing.
Both the seed and his mother were the same thing, at least that was how William understood it. And he loved it when she would begin to speak the words—words he found difficult to catch for they somehow sounded like water rushing over stones, or wind in the tall, bowing grass. And he loved it even more when she would use the Craft—when her fingers would grow and sprout like ivy. He felt the air tingle all around him—and a delightful chill ran along his skin as he watched her.
His little fingers pinched at a single thin stem spiraling around his foot, and he broke it off. It was not quite as long as his forearm. He coiled it and tucked it into his tunic.
It was when Simon the Thatcher stirred that Geraldine’s words fell away. The man labored his head from the pillow and saw his bed, and his seemingly dead family beside covered in moving vines and bursting flowers. He marveled. His heavy eyes blinked at the sight. “Have I gone?” he asked. Loose stones rattled in his lungs. “Am I in the grave, below the ground? Does the earth take me in?”
Geraldine began to chant again.
The man asked softly, “Geraldine? Is that you? What is happening, Geraldine?” Simon then lowered his head back and stared at the ceiling. “I am either dead or the sweating sickness is leaving me, for the pain departs. I feel—I feel the winter is passing.”
Geraldine’s voice silenced. Her arms dropped to her sides. The vines, the lush leaves and blossoms vanished. There was still sweetness in the air, like after a spring rain. William watched the sleeping family. One by one they opened their eyes. Simon sat up again, turned himself out of the blankets and placed his bare feet on the dirt floor. His face was coloring. He reached over and touched the foreheads of his wife and daughters. Joy and tears filled his eyes.
He looked up at Geraldine. She stood smiling at him. “I had the strangest dream,” he said to her. “I dreamt that the earth was pulling me to its bosom. Burying me, and at the same time, lifting me skyward. The room was a forest of roots and vines.”
“Fevers will make one see things, it is true,” Geraldine replied. “Sometimes the plants and herbs can bring a strange reverie—from out of darkness they seek light. That is the path to life. All we need is here, soil and seed, sun and rain—fire and smoke, laughter, pain. We do not die, we dream. We only dream.”
She lifted a small wood cup from a steaming pot of water. “Let this cool, then drink. Make sure each of you drink it until it is gone. Heed no more thoughts of the grave.”
Helen
Los Angeles, June 26, 1972
The Hyatt Continental House, Sunset Strip
I have arrived.
Helen Craven considered the statement with a giddy, champagne-buzzed smile. She was not yet too drunk to walk, luckily, and the quick fingernail scoop of blow whiffed with a droplet of 1966 Dom Perignon and a light cherry snuff that some giddy English woman had gracefully administered on the elevator ride up gave her feet the confidence she needed—as well as increasing her smile to climactic, euphoric proportions. She felt elegant. Everything was bright. Colors were lush. And the raging echoes of the band’s performance at the LA Forum were still singing in her ears—ringing as if the very air surrounding her chimed and tingled with joy, electric youth and godlike beauty.
Top floor.
“Here we are darling,” the man said. His name was Richard. He was English, too. A good looking guy, maybe ten or fifteen years older.
She had met Richard just a few hours ago, backstage with the band’s manager, dark eyed, goateed, Peter, a massive hulk of a man. At their introduction, she held out her hand, and Peter’s smile flashed. She noted something sinister. Something powerful. As it should be, she thought, for if he was indeed the caretaker of the gods she had witnessed on stage tonight, the man must have a mighty swing, with a power that could outweigh any hammer of heaven. And the man had weight, without a doubt. Helen Craven looked at how tiny her hand was in his—her bare, rail-thin braceleted arms reaching into Peter’s well-fed heft and meaty grasp. He, too, used the word, “Darling,” and nodded to Richard. Again, that smile laced with cherry powder.
Helen Craven, or as she was known on the Strip, Helen Storm, was not new to the reality and language behind such smiles. After all, she was fourteen. She wasn’t really, but for some reason, fourteen was a number Richard liked.
She’d had some backstage experiences. Seven that she could recall. But the last time she was at the Hyatt Continental on the Sunset Strip was with the drummer for Green Apple—a Blevel British band that was warming up for T-Rex a couple of months ago—his name was Terry, and he was beautiful. Glitter and silk and sex. Her first time. And Miss Storm learned quickly the code that came with the lifestyle—most of its elaborate constitution communicated with a simple smile.
And Helen Storm was ear to ear. Her thin ivory chiffon tightly crisscrossed over her heart and tiny breasts, her black hair dancing along pale shoulders, and the sparkling of glitter hazed eyes, she strode beside Richard like a sacrificial bride, arrayed for the hands of a god—a god that waited for her in the penthouse suite, room number 1400. He was a guitar player. She heard Richard call him Pagey. His real name was Jimmy.
“Now do us all a favor, will you, love?” Richard said quietly as they approached the door, “as I said before, he’s expecting someone else, and we can’t seem to find her just now, but we will, so until then, please spend a little time with Jim. And do enjoy yourself, yeah?” Helen nodded, suddenly nervous. She couldn’t think of what to say. She just smiled at him. “I knew you would be perfect for this. And have fun. Jim is truly a lovely man.” With that he knocked on the door, waited a moment and then opened it for her to enter.
The door shut behind her and she stood with her back pressed to it. The large room was lit with several candles. The windows were open and the soft hush of the Strip traffic wafted through the suite. Back in the dark, in the far corner, Helen could make out a seated form—silhouetted—a fedora on his head and his hand atop a long cane. She could not see an expression, but she imagined that his eyes sparked faintly like jewels in the shadows. Helen would never forget the sight, the moment, the high. I have arrived. Quietly, almost in harmony with her ringing thoughts, with a quality of calm and welcome came the man’s voice. Though it wasn’t exactly what Helen wanted to hear:
“Hello, Lori. What took you so long?”
Helen held her breath. Despite all of the smiles, and her incredible fortune (standing in Jimmy Page’s hotel suite, for God’s sake), she knew that her response to the question would either invite an extended stay, or a cold dismissal.
Richard had explained it plainly enough: “Jimmy has a fancy for a model named Lori and we’ve been working on arranging a meeting, but she is delayed. So until she arrives, please keep him occupied. You and she look alike, and that should appease him. Well, not really, alike. But you’re the same age, at least.” Alike enough from a distance or from across a candle lit room, Helen mused. She had seen pictures of Lori, and thought that she may have even met her once at the Rainbow. Either way, Helen believed herself to be much prettier and certainly luckier (again, she was standing in Jimmy Page’s hotel suite for God’s sake), and the model Lori was not. But none of that helped her come up with a response to Jim’s lingering question: what took you so long? Then she heard words coming out of her mouth:
