The Keepers of the Library Read Free Page B

called the Isle of Wight). The boy grew up to be some kind of a savant who had a preoccupation of writing down lists of birth dates and death dates for people from all over the world, people he never met. Some monks in an abbey took him in and realized that what he was able to do was miraculous. They created a secret order to take care of him and recruited women to give birth to his children and his children’s children. Over the centuries, thousands of these savants produced a giant underground library of books, over seven hundred thousand of them, with the birth and death dates of everyone who was going to live through February 9, 2027
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    No one knows how they did it. Some people say they must have had some kindof psychic connection to the universe or to God. I guess we’ll never know. But in the thirteenth century, something happened. All of a sudden, when they were working on their parchment pages for February 9, 2027, they stopped writing names. Instead, they wrote
Finis Dierum
which is Latin for End of Days. Then all of them killed themselves
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    After that, the Library was sealed up by the monks, and no one knew it existed until British archaeologists found it 1947. Winston Churchill gave the Library to the Americans who realized it could be very valuable. The US government set up Area 51 to hold the Library and spent a lot of time and money figuring out how to mine the data for political and military purposes. For example, if you knew that fifty thousand people with Pakistani names were going to die on one particular day you could do some serious planning on an American response to the crisis. For fifty years, no one outside the government knew about the Library until my dad found out
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    Mark Shackleton had his own ideas what to do with the data. He wanted to make money off it and invented the Doomsday Killer as part of his scheme. My dad discovered the truth about the existence of the Library and shut Shackleton down. He got a hold of a copy of the database for all the births and deaths of everyone in the United States through 2027. If your death wasn’t recorded in the database, you were considered BTH, Beyond the Horizon. He checked out himself, my mom and me, and some of ourrelatives. We were all BTH. He hid the database in Los Angeles as an insurance policy
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    For a while, my dad kept the secret of Area 51 because of an agreement he made with the government. I don’t think he was too happy about that, but he wanted to protect me and the rest of the family—I was born in 2010—and besides, he always believed that if people knew the dates of their deaths, that could seriously mess with their minds and create a bad situation. He and I never talked about it, but in the movie his character really agonizes over the decision to keep quiet. I think that part was accurate. But when I was only an infant, he was contacted by some men who had retired from Area 51. They were part of a group called the 2027 Club, who were trying to figure out what was going to happen in 2027
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    One of the books from the Library of Vectis dated 1527 wound up at an auction house in London. They wanted my dad to help them get ahold of the book. It was the only book missing from the Area 51 Library, and they thought it might hold some answers about 2027. They were right. There was a sonnet hidden inside written by a very young William Shakespeare. My dad went to England, and in an old house called Cantwell Hall, he followed clues in the sonnet and found out about the End of Days stuff and the savants committing suicide. He also found out that knowledge of the Library of Vectis had an influence on some famous historical figures like John Calvin and Nostradamus, not to mention William Shakespeare
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    There were security people at Area 51, government agents who were called the watchers, who were sent to stop my dad, and they got close. They tried to poison our whole family with carbon monoxide. I almost died, but they killed both my grandparents,