'Don't tell anybody'

I dreamed the wife and I worked at some hundred-year-old industrial company, a family owned business that had weathered multiple world wars and all the rest of everything time threw at it. It was not clear in the dream what they made, but it was the "Schiller Company," and it had upwards of 80 employees working in a factory setting, a heavy timber mill building with high ceilings and catwalks far above.

Weirdly the "Schiller Company" was owned now for several decades by the Schiff family, the latest of whom were an aging husband and wife duo who had no heirs and seemed apt to sell the business. My Old Lady and I were doing some kind of paperwork on a day when nobody else was about when we decided to climb to the high catwalk area floating above the warehouse floor to poke around. We had never been up there; it was full of massive cobwebs and dust.

Against a brick wall of the place, high up, there was what looked like a Tetris piece loose in the wall, where the bricks were obviously weakened. The wife pushed against it and it popped out, and inside was an ancient ledger book. Inside were newspaper clippings detailing the origins of the "Schiller Company" and its subsequently acquisition by the Schiffs. But one section alarmed us: it contained headlines from December 20, 1895, and detailed some horrific, unexplained cataclysm that had decimated the company, killing most of its employees (the Schiffs swept in shortly theraeafter and rebooted the firm). What we knew, however, was that the current Schiffs were planning on selling the company again—on December 20 of this year, and we had a sinking feeling that some unknown horror was going to befall the company once again.

On the front of ledger book, by the by, was the stark message, in red crayon: "Don't tell anybody."