"The Dijon Directive"

I was born in uptown Manhattan, a place bordering on Harlem, next to Central Park and across from a Greek church that had onion domes. We lived in a very large and spacious apartment which my dad used for his various collections and eccentric hobbies....

Dad was a collector of antiquities and documents, ancient coins and other collectibles.. I grew up living between the sarcophagus of an Egyptian princess and my father’s collection of Jivarro shrunken heads that he had obtained through one of his obscure dealings with other traders of antiquities. In this climate, I remember one incident that has caused me to think back about the nature of its occurrence and whether I should have paid more attention to what it was telling me at the time.

After my father passed away, I was already past the age of maturity. I gave away to institutions and to collectors most of his treasures but managed to keep but a few and a four drawer archive of documents, notes and evidentiary material that would describe some of the mysteries of my father’s and grand-father’s lives which involved Kings and princes and voyages of discovery.

Grand papa was the most mysterious of all having been born in London in 1840 and having been involved with Edward Prince of Wales in a variety of mutual occurrences and ventures. It turned out that he had left behind a pregnant actress who gave birth to what was to become a leading Shakespearean actor of his day. In his rush to shed his past, he journeyed to the Hudson Bay Company where he took up trading furs in the frozen north; only later to marry a Transylvanian transplant, who was inordinately rich from her trading family to settle in Ontario..

Nor was my own dad a slouch in the philosophy of squeezing as many lives into one as possible. Having grown up in Montreal and living the life of a squire, in his boredom he joined the War to End All Wars at the beginning, served four years with the Black Watch, saw all his friends die before his eyes, worked as a cowboy, lumberjack, applied for the Mounties, flew as a pilot with the first Canadian air group, crashed, became an aide to the Governor of New York, served as a Male Nurse, collected antiquities and did a hundred other things while trying to teach me Shakespeare’s plays and the works of Johnny Burns whom he had developed a passion for when living in Northern Scotland.

His sisters were equally restless becoming among the first business women of their age to beat men at their own calling and to become successful at raising money from the very rich after careers that would have made Horatio Alger doubt his own rapid rise. This is the kind of enriched climate I came from but my family were all harsh taskmasters who thought there was nobody including their children who could compete with their hold on the world.


It all ended of course with my dad’s untimely passing caused by who knows? A dagger through the heart, being tossed from a speeding train, or just some commonplace rebellion of the body to the abuse of so many war wounds… Whatever the reason, it caused me to think about my future and my career.

After things quieted down, I returned to an examination of his papers. It was then that I discovered an ancient document that I first found difficult to read and comprehend so I kept putting it off and returning to it.

I will give you the long and short of it as I remembered it. The document was apparently out of a book of prophecies; it was hard to date without carbon dating it, but it was hand lettered and the paper on which it was made was rougher to the feel and heavy like the kind of parchments used by the monks when transcribing documents in their high abbeys.

The words, by themselves, didn’t mean much at first and required more discipline than I thought I was capable of but eventually some of it did seem to come through and provoked my interest to learn more…

It had to do with prophecies and warnings about the dangers of what would happen in the future. It warned that a dangerous leader would emerge some 1,500 years after the manuscript had been written who would seem benevolent but actually represented the rise of some deep, dark Evil from the Middle Earth. This Evil personified would gain its influence after some disastrous accident. And this country’s great rights would be squandered never to be regained. But that would not be enough, the leader elected by false machines would rule through aggression and lies and great Wars of conquest!

This would be a man who talked about vanquishing the “enemy” through Crusades and a coming of Armegeddon which would return Christians to peaceful lives after the death and destruction of the heathen.

But three events would show that this Evil was the Devil Incarnate.

First, there would be a storm around the world that would kill hundreds of thousands; then a great storm that would destroy one of the major cities of this land; and then finally, the melting of the polar ice and rising tides would wash away coastal cities.

This is yet to come; but all signs point to it.

According to this document, all of these are signals of a destructive end that has the power to wipe out all mankind…

Excuse me, there is someone at the door who wants to speak to me. I will have to return to my story later.

To be continued…

Les Aaron