If it can't, the visitor may find their career taking an unexpectedly backward path. Curiosity can be deflected, or controlled. There are government inspectors and suchlike to deal with. Visitors - and the Academy does receive visitors, once in a while - are occasionally a nuisance. Tell me, have you seen the gargoyles on the western turret? Like so much of our quaint Academy lore, he will say, its origins are rather uncertain. The headmaster smiles helpfully, just as headmasters before him have smiled helpfully at the same question. Visitors - and the Academy does receive visitors, once in a while - occasionally ask about it. "Second by Second, We Get Closer" he whispers. Age has turned it the colour of oxtail soup, but the Founder's devilishly handsome face can still be seen. He turns to face the portrait of the Founder. He stands at the squint of his study, peering down as unobserved as watching death upon the pupils, as they file through the Great Hall. Nobody feels this more acutely than the headmaster. A new term! Friends and enemies to make and meet again, work to be done, and above all, the possibility that it will fall to this generation, in this term, to complete the greatest work of them all. Yet the silence is alive with excitement and fear and anticipation. The Academy absorbs them all like a sponge, in near silence. Some eye their chauffeurs knowingly, and shiver for different reasons.Īlready the girls are flowing through the gates, where prefects and tutors are conducting them to their quarters. Some shiver in the sudden chill of the mountain air. Chauffeurs hurry to assist their charges, decorous young ladies representing all the teenage years, all the daughters of glacially beautiful mothers and rich remote fathers. The black cars thread the ribbon thin roads to the Academy's gates, and pull up on the cold pink gravel before them. High on its crag beyond the tree line, the Academy seems to have grown from the rock itself. Now they answer a call that seems older than time itself - a new term begins! ![]() ![]() They carry with them the rumour of dissolute summers in distant seaside resorts. Dark and shining as newly hatched beetles, they glide through the pine forest roads into the mountains. Second by Second, We Get Closer Ian Sherred
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