I have an old history book, bound in ancient scratched leather with gold gilt covering the rough deckle pages. I keep it upstairs in one of the rooms along the hallway I do not often visit. But today I find myself in the hallway . . . treading softly. I am not sure how I got here, but then I never am. I stop before the room that holds the history book. The door has an unusual red crystal handle on it. Somewhere in my mind there is a warning about doors with red crystal handles, but just now I cannot remember what that warning is about. So I turn the pretty red handle and walk in.
The book is open and laying on a small table with a lamp, near an easy chair. It is all just as I left it the last time I was here. Of course, now I remember. I walk to the book and gently blow off the dust that has settled on the pages since my last visit. It is a large and heavy book, and it is getting heavier as the days go by. The newer gilt pages are added to the end, and they knit into the spine beautifully, as if they were always there. Which, of course, they always were. Time is just an illusion, after all.
But just now I am reading from the older pages, still handsome and gilt but not as brilliant and crisp as the new pages. The further back I go, the stranger the maps become. And it is not just because countries change their names or civilizations rise and fall, it is because the world which the maps represent has itself changed. The world in my history book does not look like the physical world of the new maps of today. Then it occurs to me that the world is the same as it has always been, but the maps are only as good as the men who make them.
I flip forward a bit through the old history book. The year is 1891 and three men are sitting in a closed room in London—William, Reginald, and Cecil. They are in the midst of forming a secret organization based on an old Jesuit model, the purpose of which is to extend British rule throughout the world, recovering the United States in the process. The organization has two circles. The inner circle is called The Society of the Elect, and the outer circle is called The Association of Helpers. The outer circle will never know of the existence of the inner circle.
The pages go on to say that the secret society’s goal was to gradually absorb the wealth of the world—for peaceful purposes, they said. They plunged Britain into the Boer War of 1899-1902, bringing the separate sections of South Africa under British control. But in their plans of world domination, they soon realized they had a problem, a big problem: Germany. It had gotten organized and very strong. So they took control of the press and created an alliance with Russia and France—no small feat since those countries were traditional rivals of Britain. But desperate times called for desperate measures . . .
When their friend, Edward, became Foreign Secretary, the alliance was sealed with France to the west of Germany and Russia to the east. The vice grip began to tighten, but they needed a kickoff to the Great War. Germany was blamed for the war between Russia and Japan (although it was the secret society that funded Japan) as well as many other skirmishes. Then the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in a conspiracy that even today’s modern world admits to, and the secret society got its war in June of 1914: World War I, the “war to end all wars.”
My eyes begin to glaze over. The Lusitania, an innocent passenger ocean liner, was sunk by a German torpedo. But not really. It was actually an auxiliary warship carrying weapons and ammunition, but the society managed to keep that a secret and it stayed a secret until 2014. The propaganda flew madly around the world, and suddenly (and in a very planned fashion) the United States joined the war in 1917.
I skip through the horrors of the war, unable to read about the atrocities, reading instead about how, after all that tremendous bloodshed, they carved up the world into new places with new borders in the name of peace. But the resultant economic depression for the “losers” caused by the war (among other secret influences) plunged the world into World War II, contrived by the same secret players and their heirs. And it did not stop there, for a new world was being planned. A new order, the inheritors of the secret society said.
I do not want to read anymore. The pages flip backward on their own, as always, because really I am not reading but being read to. A nursery rhyme from long before World War I appears on an old gilt page that has grown brown with time. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again . . .” Somehow I hear the music from my childhood as I read the words.
I take hold of the book and turn the pages of my own volition to the most recent, brilliant gilt pages. But oddly enough, I am faced with the same nursery rhyme. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put him back together again . . .” I sigh. Entering a room with a door that has a red crystal handle always carries risks. It is time to leave.
I walk back down the hallway with heavy feet, glad to be going downstairs again. Outside the strong old oak trees stare at the frivolous maples across the lane, still gaily bright green and not yet wearing their orange and red Fall frocks, caring little for time and what might happen. The bristly pines stand behind them and hedge them in. Soon Fall will come and the last great party of the year will be had. Everyone will be wearing their finest colors—reds and oranges, yellows and browns. But eventually they will all grow threadbare. Even the old oaks with their burgundy, leather-like leaves will succumb and grow ghost-like.
The pines will be left then, bristly and full of sharp needles as always, secretly plotting mastery of the forest. But the storms will come, as they always do, and the weak pines will crack and break in half. The maples will follow because they planned for beauty only and not strength. Only the old oaks, stubborn and hard and filled with scars, will remain to tell the story of the Winter. The spring will come and we will start again with the newcomers knowing nothing of the Old Order of Oaks, who stand guard to tell the tale of all the King’s horses and all the King’s men.
