"We were wondering when you would arrive, Mr. Hemlock. The First Touch is always disorienting. Please, come forward. We have much to discuss."
Every word the woman spoke was calm, measured, and devoid of emotion.
If she had yelled or threatened, it would have been easier. But her tranquility was a weapon in itself, a weapon that stripped Arthur of all his defenses.
He took slow, hesitant steps, feeling the massive black door behind him like the maw of a tomb that had just been sealed. The stone floor beneath his feet was cold and hard, and the silence in the hall pressed against his ears, a dense silence that had weight and a scent.
He stood before the black stone desk, which was more like an altar in an unknown temple. Now he could see the woman more clearly.
She was in her late fifties, her face etched with fine lines around her eyes that suggested she had laughed without ever smiling. Her eyes were gray, sharp, holding the gaze of someone who had seen enough of the world's strangeness that nothing could surprise her anymore.
"How... how do you know my name?" Arthur finally managed to ask, his voice sounding weak and fragile in the solemn silence.
The woman gestured with her slender fingers to the wooden box whose corner was peeking out of his coat pocket. "The object you carry, Mr. Hemlock, is not just old junk. It is registered with us.
When an object like this awakens a person with latent sensitivity, it sends a... let's say, a ripple through the fabric that we monitor.
A ripple that carries the imprint of the person who touched it. Your name, your age, your location... all became data available to us the moment of your 'First Touch.'"
Each sentence intensified Arthur's feeling of being completely exposed, like an insect pinned under a magnifying glass. His detective mind desperately clung to threads of logic. "This is madness.
What are you talking about? A secret organization? Espionage? Are you responsible for this? Did you deliberately put that box in my path?"
The woman smiled slightly, but it didn't reach her eyes. "So many questions. This is expected. My name is Ilara Vance, and I am the Registrar here at 'The Archive of the Threshold.' As for your questions, let's take them one by one.
First, this is not madness. It is simply a larger reality than the one you are accustomed to. Second, we are not an espionage organization in the sense you understand.
We are... librarians. We collect, we catalogue, and we contain. As for our responsibility, it's more complex. That box was not supposed to be there.
It was 'lost' from our collection. Its appearance in your path was a coincidence, an anomaly that we are now obligated to manage."
"Manage?" Arthur retorted with bitter sarcasm. "Manage what? My hallucinations? That man you sent to my door last night... was he part of this 'management'?"
"Ziad was tasked with ensuring your safe arrival and delivering the invitation," Ilara said calmly, pointing to the white card Arthur still held in a tight grip. "He could have been more... persuasive.
But we prefer new individuals to come of their own free will. It makes the acclimatization process easier."
Arthur felt a slight dizziness. The names, the terminology, the calm certainty in her voice... everything was designed to make him feel lost.
He leaned slightly against the edge of the stone desk, feeling its coldness seep into his palm. "I want real answers, Ms. Vance. Not riddles. What happened to me in that park? What did I see?"
Ilara nodded, as if she had been waiting for this exact question. "To understand what happened to you, you must first understand the nature of the reality you live in.
Imagine, Mr. Hemlock, that the reality you perceive with your five senses is just a thin layer, a transparent membrane stretched over a vast and deep ocean. We call this membrane 'The Veil.' It is an evolutionary defense mechanism.
Our minds have evolved to ignore the ocean beneath, because constantly perceiving its depth, its movement, and all the beings that swim within it would drive any mind to madness."
Arthur almost stopped breathing. She was talking about it with a scientific coldness, as if she were explaining a physics theory.
Ilara continued: "Sometimes, certain events with immense emotional or energetic force
a violent death, a powerful ritual, a moment of absolute despair or love happen in such a way that they carve an imprint into The Veil itself. Like a fingerprint on wet glass.
These imprints are absorbed by the physical objects present at the location of the event. Those objects, like the box you found, become 'Resonant Objects.
'They are no longer just wood and metal; they have become tuning forks, vibrating at the frequency of that ancient event."
Arthur closed his eyes, and saw the little girl's scream again. The smell of wax and ozone.
"And you, Mr. Hemlock," Ilara completed, her voice penetrating the fog of his memory, "were born with an innate sensitivity to this frequency.
Like a radio that has been turned off your entire life. The resonant object acted as a violent on-switch. The 'First Touch' didn't just open a door to the ocean for you; it shattered the door.
And what you felt wasn't a hallucination, it was a 'memory echo.'You directly experienced the complete sensory imprint of the event that was branded onto that box."
Arthur opened his eyes. His heart was now beating slowly and steadily, not from fear, but from the chilling coldness of a terrifying understanding.
"So... ghosts are real? Magic is real? Is that what you're telling me?"
"These are just primitive labels for natural phenomena you don't yet understand," Ilara corrected gently. "Is electricity magic? To a medieval man, yes.
To you, it's just science. Here at the Archive, we deal with the science of what lies beyond The Veil. We dissect the ghost, so to speak, and catalogue its bones."
A long silence ensued. Arthur, a detective who had built his career on measurable, physical facts, was facing a new reality that challenged everything he believed.
But he couldn't deny what he had felt.
He couldn't deny the coldness of the paper, the seal on the man's hand, or the card's appearance from nowhere.
"Why me?" he finally asked, the question that bothered him more than anything else. "Why that specific box?"
"The echo you experienced is particularly strong," Ilara said, her tone changing slightly, becoming more serious. "It was forged in a moment of intense pain and betrayal.
The box contains a watch that stopped at the moment of death, and the paper is... an incomplete ritualistic prescription that was part of the event.
You have stumbled into a metaphysical crime scene, Mr. Hemlock."
"And now what?" Arthur asked, feeling a trap slowly closing around him. "Are you going to make me 'forget' all this?"
Ilara looked at him directly. "You have two choices. And I'll be frank, neither is pleasant. The first choice: we can try to 'sever' your connection.
It is a precise and painful psychological process, in which we use certain tools and rituals to isolate your sensitivity and close the door that was forcibly opened.
But it carries risks. You may lose parts of your memory, not just the memory of this event, but personal memories.
The process may leave you in a state of permanent apathy. In the worst cases, your mind could be permanently damaged. It is something like a psychic amputation."
Arthur felt the cold seep into his spine. "And the second choice?"
"The second choice," Ilara said, "is that you learn. That you stay here, under our protection and supervision. We will teach you how to understand what you see, and how to control it.
How to distinguish between a simple memory echo and a genuine presence from beyond The Veil. How to protect your mind from the echoes that will now be drawn to you like moths to a new flame.
In return, you will work with us. You will help us investigate other anomalies, and retrieve lost objects. You will become a detective, but for a completely different kind of case."
It was an impossible offer. Either he risked the destruction of his mind, or he surrendered his life to this mysterious organization. It was a perfect trap, because it made the only viable choice seem like his own.
"I... I need to think," Arthur said, feeling exhaustion wash over his body.
"Of course," Ilara said. "But to make an informed decision, there is one more thing you must see. Something that will help you understand the nature of the danger you now face."
She got up from behind the desk for the first time. She was taller than she appeared sitting, and she moved with a silent grace. She led him away from the reception area, to the side of one of the towering shelves filled with boxes.
Her fingers moved quickly over the small brass numbers, then stopped at a specific box. She pulled it from the shelf.
It was identical to the other boxes, but Arthur felt a shiver run through his body as he approached it.
She returned to the desk and placed the new box in front of Arthur.
"Every memory echo, every resonant object, has a source. It has an anchor in the physical world. The echo you experienced... this is its source."
With her slender fingers, she opened the lid of the box.
Inside there was nothing terrifying or bloody. There was no weapon or skull. All that was there, resting on a pillow of dark velvet, was a little girl's shoe.
A worn brown leather shoe, with scratches on the front, and one frayed shoelace. It was something ordinary and unbearably tragic.
Arthur stared at the shoe, feeling a faint wave of the same cold headache, and smelling a very faint scent of burning wax.
"Her name was Lily," Ilara Vance said in a quiet and decisive voice, her gray eyes fixed on Arthur's face, watching every reaction. "And the thing that left that echo... the thing that caused her death... is still searching for the rest of her parts."
She leaned forward slightly, lowering her voice to a whisper that was almost inaudible, but it echoed in Arthur's head like a scream.
"And now that you have touched her echo, it will feel your presence too. It will begin to search for you. So, what is your choice, Mr. Hemlock? Will you face it alone, or with us?"