JOURNAL OF W. HILLS
SEPTEMBER 2010

A STORM IS COMING that affects you. All of you. The only reason you haven’t seen it coming is because nobody told you where to look.

Until now.

So now this book is in your hands, and you have no excuse to be ignorant, as we all have been. As I once was before my eyes were opened.

Maybe you live with a sense that you’re bound for greater things. Something more. Destiny, just over the horizon. And you’re right. Everyone feels it coming, but few know what it is.

But I do know that after what I’ve seen and done in the decade since that fateful day in 2001, my views are somewhat more flexible on what our world is designed for, and the laws upon which it operates.

Indeed, something is coming. And only you can decide, individually and collectively, if we will all survive it. As you read this book, you’ll learn the truth of it. It is a warning. It is also an invitation. This book is written for you. Since before you were born. And now it has found you.

You will see this is no ordinary book. Oh sure, books are safe, they’re made of paper or pixels, and when you close the cover or flick the off-switch you can go back to your own world. But sometimes a book is more, made of words written and Words spoken.

To these I add my own words, the words of an old man, a tired man, a man who has seen more than should be allowed. Mine are humble words for I am not strong in writing. My scribblings lack the power to conjure thoughts into solids, or to rip physical matter from one of the dimensions that clothe this world and yank it to another.

But I have seen such things done this past decade. So terrible to behold the man who became a boy, the boy who became a god. My friend, long a marvel, once living the dream, now fighting the nightmare.

This book goes out to all who would join him in the Hunt. I trust you will, as the fate of all rests on a razor’s edge.

For as our world hurtles through space to where our galaxy grinds its rim into the spokes of an intersecting galaxy (yes, look it up before the websites vanish altogether!), all of us—me, you and everyone you know, face a choice before we reach that junction at the 2012 winter solstice.

Either we choose to believe that we live in the fourth and final Age of Man and join the Longcoats and their inter-dimensional allies in the fight—our fight, against an enemy we’ve forgotten about in our so-called ‘modern world’ (but which our forebears knew only too well), or we are doomed, all of us, to see Earth Prime and all the dimensions that cohabit this structure abandoned as a failed experiment, and lost to the pillaging of others not of our kind.

I have used the unseized remnants of Raef’s not inconsiderable fortune to pay a writer and his team that are most likely to grasp the subject matter. Masters of a hundred worlds in their own right, they are sworn to confidentiality lest too much leak too soon. I leave it to them to make sense of all the moleskins, blogs, videos and stolen files that took more than a decade to assemble, and turn them into something easily digested. A writer’s pseudonym is thus applied that serves as both aspiration and invitation. “Nicholas”, meaning victory to the people, is my heartfelt aspiration. “Read” is my invitation to you. I pray you will read, and act, and that the outcome will be a victory for us all against the threat you will read of herein. “Nicholas Read”: never did a nom de plume have more intrinsic meaning for a book.

Some hand-drawn maps will be added from our notebooks; a mix of direct observation and the debriefing of others. To bring you deeper into the action, artists will paint some scenes as described by those who were there.

Conspiracy nuts will find validation in this book, but not even their musings have cracked the larger nut. The truth goes deeper than anyone could have guessed. None have come close to hitting bottom. But I have seen it. I know its depth and form.

While this story is already told across the Internet for those who know its clues, the time for being cryptic has passed and the time for enlisting help is now.

All these different source files, mountains of Wikileak documents, press clippings and arcane reference books would make dry reading for even the most ardent among us, therefore I have decided it should be written in narrative form, a manner most easily accessible to you as a reader. In doing so I risk convincing you that this is all a fantastic fiction. It is fact. You decide what you’ll do about it. Will you pass this off as mere entertainment, or will you put it to the test and join The Hunt? It is said that those who have ears will hear their inner voice calling. You will know what to do.

As for me, my fate is tied. A man hunted by day. A man haunted by night. Perhaps it is you who will bring the dawn.

W.H.