Of the making of many books….
She sat in the stillness of the monastery before the Abbot’s glowing computer screen and began to type.
“I have been travelling for most of the day across the frozen landscape of the North Island of the Japanese archipelago making my way to the city of Hokkaido to visit the Zen Monastery of Ichibate Yakushi where I arrived late this afternoon. I am writing this after an eventful and fulfilling day that may indicate a change in my fortunes, but more of that later. It had been obvious to me that the longer I stayed in the theatre of the school house outside Quebec, the harder it would be to get out of there so I decided to set out and make contact with any other survivors. This was not an easy thing to do and I have wondered since leaving the flaming collection of buildings whether I would have been better staying there, but I am now certain that it was the right decision.
The buildings catching fire was by no means intentional, an accident involving an attempt on my part to light the remaining camping gas to melt some snow and combine it with the final packet of high protein nutrient-full soup (a truly disgusting concoction but one that I knew would sustain me for the first few hours in the extreme cold of the outside world). The gas had lit immediately and I had melted snow, made soup and swallowed the revolting brew, putting the uneaten remains in a high insulation thermos flask for latter consumption. I was already leaving the space in which I had spent the last 10 days with my rucksack heavy with notebooks, laptop and dead batteries and as much thermal padding as I could wear without being unable to walk, when I remembered that I had left the stove on a low flame.
Some echoed memory of energy saving or perhaps a momentary thought that I might be able to take it with me had caused me to return to the table where it sat still burning gently. My hands were enclosed in heavy thermal mittens and, foolishly, I had attempted to turn the stove off with a clumsy and impossible grip. Instead of achieving this I had knocked it onto the floor, where the flame, rather than being extinguished, had ignited the sleeping bag in which a few minutes earlier I had been cocooned. The fire had rapidly caught hold of the material – its main property being one of insulation and not one of fire retardant. Within seconds the table and the shelf full of books above it had also caught as the conflagration rapidly spread to the whole library, the wooden ceilings, walls and roof until the building was ablaze. Fortunately some survival intelligence told me that this was not worth messing with and as I was staggering back from the flaming table I caught sight of the Illyrium on its chain hanging from the chair where I had been sitting as I drank the soup and where I had left it. I grabbed it from the encroaching fire with my left mitten, stuffed it in my pocket and with the roar of the flames and the acrid smoke of thousands of burning books pursuing me I made my escape, stumbling from the building and across the frozen snow to the end of what had once been the school driveway.
A case of out of the fire and into the ice. If I had not returned to turn off the camping gas stove the Illyrium would still be lying there under the charred and blackened remains of what had once been a rich and varied library and I would not be sitting here typing these words."
She paused to take a couple of savoured spoonfuls of the warm & delicious miso and seaweed stew that the abbot had left on the desk as she was typing. She had thanked him in halting Japanese without pausing from her work.
“Though I had some idea during the time I had passed in the school of how quickly the intense cold was encroaching, it was not until I was out in the reality of the frozen world that the full depth of what was happening had become apparent. Fortunately there was no wind to contend with and, for the moment at least, the snow had stopped. My first thought was that the temperature was now too low for more to fall. The deep drifts that covered the driveway and the road in front of the school glistened with ice and haw frost reflecting the oranges and reds of the burning building I had just left. A column of black smoke ascended into the clear blue of the sky framed by the surrounding mountains dazzling white with their covering of irridescent snow. I now had no choice but to begin walking, as my temporary home and refuge had been destroyed by the fire of my own making. I had decided before leaving the school that I would head South and in spite of the presence of the sun by which I could probably navigate, I reached into my pocket for the small compass that I had brought with me but instead my hand had closed on the Illyrium. I pulled it out, held it for a moment then opened my glove to gaze at its shape resting in my palm”
Quickly reading back through what she had already written. Another mouthful of soup to nourish her and then on.
"Somehow the chain was no longer attached to it and I was about to reach back in my pocket to find it when I noticed that the Illyrium was glowing faintly. At first I assumed it was reflecting the heat and light from the blazing buildings but the colours were wrong. It shone with dark greens and azures. I had of course seen it suffused with many colours, felt its extraordinary variety of shapes and forms and experienced its range of energies and manifestations but for the last year it had behaved as if it were completely dead. A rather attractive and inanimate piece of what appeared to be light copper or burnished silver on a chain round my neck. This was the first sign of life since the opening days of those events that had swept all of us up in their cold embrace. Now it was pulsing with energy, faintly but surely.
How it had come to fall off my neck and almost be consumed by the fire I did not know but perhaps that sudden heat had activated it. I should grasp the moment and use its power to get me out of this place. I glanced up at the sky, which a few minutes before had been clear, to see that from the North a host of clouds were fast approaching, covering the sun and turning the radiant early morning into a semblance of evening. As they thickened overhead it became obvious that my assumption about the lack of snow due to the intense cold was not altogether correct. True what was beginning to fall from the gathering mass of dark cumulonimbus storm heads was not snow but a weather phenomenon that I had never experienced before. Great shards and sheets of ice were crashing all around me and with the clouds had arrived a fierce wind, whipping the ice fragments across the face of the frozen tundra that covered the landscape. The wind and the ice were rapidly putting out the remains of the fire as if some ice goddess had summoned them to deal with this upstart sign of heat and life in her kingdom.
I knew that if I did not get out of here fast I would be smashed to pieces by the falling ice or picked up and hurled against the frozen snow by the force of the gathering storm. At the entrance to what had been the driveway into the school where it met the road that lead down the hill into the village of Les Valléries was a stone built bus shelter where some of the pupils, teachers and parents would have waited for their transport home when the school day was over. Events that could almost have occurred in another universe. A small space had been left by the giant snowdrift that covered it and I was able, with some difficulty, to crawl into it. Inside the snow had been packed against the walls by the wind, sculpted into tortured shapes with occasional gaps where the stone was still visible. An eerie light illuminated the interior. Dim, cold and pale but enough for me to see the Illyrium in front of me still glowing but already beginning to fade. I removed my mittens, feeling the biting cold on my fingers, and grasped it firmly in both hands, crouching down in the hollow left at the back of the shelter and focused my intent on a single question. “Where to go now?”
The image was clear. An area of perfectly raked gravel surrounded by willow trees. A grey snow filled sky and behind the trees a low building with a wooden bridge over a frozen pond. A single word. A location. Hokkaido. Outside I could hear the ice smashing into what was left of the smouldering buildings and beginning to shake the bus shelter as chunks of it collided with the walls. Once more I focused my intent. I held the Illyrium tightly and pressed it through my heavy clothing against my heart. My whole body shook as I absorbed its energy and then travelled out into the bright vortex opening before me.
Now nourished with brown rice, dried fish strips and simple vegetables in a thick miso broth with the recent words and advice from the Sensi still running through my mind it is difficult to believe that the events of the past 10 days had been nothing but a cold nightmare from which I had recently awoken in the safety and sanctuary of this monastery until, in the fading light of evening, I look across the top of the flat screen on which these words are recorded through the narrow window into the Zen garden and see that heavy snow has started to fall again. But I have no choice and must continue with this record of those interconnected events in which I too have played a part”
She stops for a moment to drink a mouthful of the now almost cold green tea from the simple brown mug with no handle that the Abbot had left with the soup.
Close up of her piercing blue eyes following the flow of text.
Pan across to screen to reveal words being typed.
"Every military history of the 1st World War devotes at least a paragraph if not a whole chapter to the Angel of Mons alongside other supernatural and psychic battle phenomena. One event of this kind, an occurrence that might seem to fit the category of “inexplicable spiritual or occult manifestations in trench warfare early twentieth Century” but has never been mentioned in any account of this conflict is that known in the small Southern Sicilian village of Donnalucatta as 'Il Cowboy del Apocalyps' ..........
Dissolve through screen to red.