That Academy

When an object starts being "more than an object," somebody always comes to deal with it.

The one who came that night was a woman. Thirty-odd, a dark brown headscarf wrapped to the jaw, a navy long coat, an unmarked metal case in her left hand, her right hand empty. The staff-only door she pushed open had been pushed open by the student on duty a few minutes before, and behind the frame then was a freshly laid wall; when she pushed it, behind the frame was a long corridor that is on none of the museum's floor plans.

She did not say much. We know you heard it. No report tonight, no log, and do not tell your parents either. Tomorrow morning there will be a letter in your mailbox; decide once you have read it. At the door she turned and added one more line—that phrase you heard, do not search for it online.

The letter came the next day. A heavy beige envelope, the recipient's name brushed horizontally, no postmark, no sender, the flap folded in and pressed with a wax seal of the broken ring. The sheet inside was not reed, not cotton-and-linen fiber, not bark, not silk, not parchment; the fibers ran in no regular direction, and light passing through at an angle carried a little blue-green sheen.

Five lines on the sheet, the first set of rules this Academy gives anyone:

Don't report it. Don't write it in the internship log. Don't tell your parents. Don't search for it online. Keep records only in the paper notebook you carry.

Contact after that goes the same road: the mailbox, heavy paper, a wax seal, a single letter for a signature.

The one who handles the contact is called Professor Sekhet by the academic world; inside the Academy his title is Containment Coordinator No. 12. What that number means, he did not explain.

Nobody can find this Academy in any public record. What it takes in is enough to rewrite history, and it also takes in the very few people who can hear those things speak. As for how it "deals with" them, and the secret it actually means to keep—it will not tell you at the first meeting.