The Key

The Key

INTRODUCTION

MEETING the
    MASTER of the KEY

I did not know it at the time, but on the night of June
6, 1998, one phase of my life was going to end and
another begin. At around two thirty in the morning, I had
a most extraordinary conversation, indeed a life-changing
conversation, with a man I have come to call the Master
of the Key.
It has now been more than a decade since the half hour
or so I spent with him, and I can say that his words, if
embraced with care and decision, are profoundly transformative.
He made no call for devotees, but rather gently
suggested that it would be of value to make use of his
ideas. Some are new. Those that have roots in what has
come before shed new light on the ancient human journey
toward meaning.
I was in a hotel room in Toronto, having just spent a
day touring for my book Confirmation. It was my last day of
a month-long tour and I was exhausted. I’d eaten a room
service dinner and gone to bed, and when there came a
knock at the door, I assumed that it was the waiter, returned
to get my tray.
Not realizing that it was already long after midnight, I
opened the door and let him in. He ignored the tray sitting
on the desk and began talking. For a moment, I was
confused, then I understood that this was not, in fact, the
waiter. My next thought was that somebody who wanted
to engage with me because of my book had found my
hotel room. A reliable rule of thumb is that no stranger
who calls or arrives after midnight is going to be somebody
you want to talk to, so I immediately began to try to
get him to leave.
He said something about mankind being in chains,
then he offered the arresting thought that, because of the
murder of a couple who had been killed in the Holocaust,
the person who would have cracked the mystery of gravity
was never born, as a result of which we remain trapped on
a dying planet.
Thus began the most extraordinary conversation I have
ever had in my life. Although I took notes as we spoke
together, it was another two years before I published our
exchange, and then I did so only privately. In part, this was
because I worried that I might have gotten parts of what
he’d said wrong and I hoped he would read the book and
come forward with corrections.
The reason for this was that, after that meeting, I had
not been able to find him again. I had no name or address,
only a description and the few things he’d said about himself
during the conversation. When he was right there
before me, leaning against the window frame, it had not
crossed my mind to ask him his name or address, or
request a card. I was busy jotting my notes and asking
questions.
The next morning, though, I realized that it was liable
to be difficult to find him. After I saw him out, I immediately
went to sleep, which seems odd in view of the
extraordinary nature of what had just happened, but at
the time it all seemed quite normal.

From The Key by Whitley Strieber.
Copyright (c) 2001, 2011 by Walker Collier, Inc.