THE SECRET LIBRARY

It was growing inside him, he could feel the pulse of a new story waiting to be born. The vision, like lightning striking the earth, sparked a deep yearning in him.

The black book lay open, waiting, ready for his pen to scratch out the words that lit his mind on fire. But he held them, allowing the flames to burn steadily, to warm his fingers, to ready his mind.

He had walked a long path and given up much to find the empty pages of this book. The trail was steep, cut into the side of the valley, a fissure between mountains formed by centuries of winter winds and the snow melt that now flowed outside in the tiny creek.

The book was waiting for him on the desk when he arrived. The desk inside the cave that was now his retreat.

Rough cut timber sealed the opening of the cave and formed the legs and surface of the desk where he sat, waiting.

A fire warmed the rock walls of this secret library, and the stories of those who came before him filled bookshelves all around.

Knowledge of the cave first came to him from a stranger. He was cloaked in a black overcoat, waiting in line at the bistro he frequented.

A short stout man with a round pointy nose and bushy black eyebrows. His eyes, dark like charcoal burning with a cool blue heat burned an impression into his mind, a memory returning now as he sat waiting before empty pages, pages ready for the stroke of his pen.

No words were spoken between himself and the man cloaked in black. But knowledge and information pass freely between minds that open to one another and he opened his like a flower to the sun of this stranger's dark presence.

It was sudden and took him by surprise, the opening of his mind to this man’s happened so naturally it was as if they were old friends meeting for a warm drink on that blustery fall day in Brooklyn.

The flow of understanding, information and vision that passed between the two filled him, and he realized, as he sat within the cavern, that he had unconsciously emptied himself in anticipation for that meeting.

Writer's block, he surmised, was a gift that held deeper treasures than what one uncovers when forcing pen to page.

The seeds of creation waited in the stillness of that hard rock wall within his mind, a wall that drove him from his apartment in search of inspiration and into the waiting presence of the one cloaked in black.

The upload complete the stranger smiled and with a careful stride left the bistro and disappeared into the chaos of the city outside.

Still standing in line, the sound of his name pulled him back to the moment and his coffee, warm and ready.

A tingling in his fingers drove him to the only open table. As tendrils of steam rose from his open cup words flowed onto the paper.

Words flowed and formed into visions, visions that became a map to this mountain retreat.

Then his phone rang. His agent calling with an unexpected offer. A client was in need of a ghost writer, willing to pay handsomely for a month of work.

He held the sum in his mind, the potential it offered, the freedom. The opportunity pulled against the mystical map he had just transcribed.

$35,000 in a month! This was the breakthrough he had been hoping for.

He glanced again at his notebook, the memory of the round man’s dark presence was fading, but the mystery waiting to be revealed within the words that flowed in his wake was too great.

The money, no matter how large a sum was hallow, empty, lifeless, compared to the fire burning on the pages before him.

Now he inhabited the space that had pulled him like a moth to the flame. A flame that burned again in his fingers as he lifted his pen to begin.

What flowed in that moment is waiting on the shelves that line the walls of the secret library.

A black book once empty, now full, resting beside a myriad of others containing tales woven in time by men and women who burrowed into the earth with knowledge given by a stranger cloaked in black

A stranger whose dark coal eyes burn with a blue heat that warms the soul and sets this pen on fire.