Agent Carla Mendoza was one of the best field
agents that Site 41 had ever seen. She was professional, cool under pressure,
and when the situation demanded it, she could be a straight-up badass. During a Chaos Insurgency raid on the Site,
she’d single handedly killed four different insurgents - the last one with her bare hands. During containment breaches, she’d always
be the first one charging into the fray, her Foundation standard-issue Beretta drawn and
ready to fire. Agent Mendoza was so devoted to the job that
she took up the Site Director’s offer to start living onsite, so she could always be
there to help if an emergency situation unfolded. After all, when it all hits the fan, you want
someone as utterly unshakeable as Agent Mendoza on your side. The job had thrown the worst of the worst
at her, and she’d never even flinched. So surely, nothing could scare Agent Mendoza,
right? Right? After a long day of kicking ass, taking names,
and filling in the properly mandated amount of SCP Foundation debriefing paperwork, Agent
Mendoza retired to her Site 41 quarters. She felt exhausted and sweaty, so before heading
to bed to watch some wonderful SCP Explained videos on her phone, she decided to take a
quick shower. The last thing she expected was for this particular
shower to become...well, let’s say “Hitchcockian.” The water was running, hot and clean, filling
the air with steam. Agent Mendoza was lathering up her hair when
she first heard the noise: Heavy, wheezing breaths coming from just behind the shower
curtain. The second she heard it, Agent Mendoza felt
a kind of brutal, crushing anxiety that she’d never experienced before. Like a hand was reaching into her chest, and
squeezing her heart. The self-defense training that’d been encoded
into her muscle memory over years of working at the Foundation kicked into effect. In a blind panic, she struck out at the shower
curtain, causing it to sway outwards - and land directly on the face of Mendoza’s wheezing
voyeur. Who or whatever it was, it was standing right
there, less than a meter away from the shower. That wheezing carved into Mendoza’s ears
like a butcher’s knife. What an awful, monstrous sound. And despite the fact that the shower curtain
obscured its face, she could still somehow see it, the way a defenseless animal can sense
an approaching predator without ever locking eyes on it - and just somehow know that it’s
too late for them to escape now. Every training session, every achievement,
every piece of battle-hardening experience - it all evaporated in the presence of that
thing. Mendoza was so terrified, she might as well
have been a child. The monster just stood there beyond the curtain,
its raw, fleshy face parted into a freakishly wide, yellow-toothed grin. She didn’t know how, but on some deep, primal
level, she was aware that if this thing got its hands on her, something horrific beyond
description would happen to her. She was too terrified to even move a muscle
in its presence. She remained like that, standing in the shower
and sobbing quietly, for the next three solid hours until the creature finally disappeared. When her colleagues found her, she’d experienced
moderate scalding wounds from the hot water of the shower. It took another several hours for Agent Mendoza
to compose herself enough to share her story. A couple of days later, Tim Ellis, a junior-level
filing clerk, was found trapped in a Site 41 supply closet. He’d urinated in his Foundation-issue slacks,
and was in a state of borderline catatonia. When his superiors asked him why he’d been
spending two hours in a supply closet on company time, he reported that it was because a monster
had appeared outside the door when he was searching for a replacement stapler. Despite never actually opening the door to
see what was outside or call for help - Mr. Ellis said that he felt as though he would
have had a heart attack if he actually opened that accursed door - he was able to provide
a clear description of the monster. He said it was tall and emaciated, with reddish-brown
skin that made it seem almost burnt or rotten. While it stood there and waited beyond the
supply closet door, it let out the most awful wheezing noise, like an old, rusty Iron Lung. But the image that Ellis seemed most fixated
on was the monster’s face, or lack thereof: Just a huge, grinning mouth that covered up
its entire head, stocked with an arsenal of massive, yellow teeth. Ellis was visibly shivering as he talked about
it. Two incidents are an unpleasant coincidence,
but three are a bonafide pattern, and it didn’t take long for more sightings of this strange
new anomaly - dubbed SCP-303, or The Doorman - to pop up across the site. It earned that name by always appearing behind
some kind of doorway, or at least a movable divider, in the case of Agent Mendoza’s
shower curtain. Whenever it appeared outside a doorway, nearby
Foundation personnel would report being struck with a sudden paralyzing terror that made
engaging with the creature impossible. Attempts to call for help were also often
stifled, as the very presence of the Doorman causes disruptions to electrical equipment. Whenever The Doorman manifests in your proximity,
it’s safe to say that it’ll be commanding your absolute, undivided attention. This was a particularly frightening case for
the SCP Foundation because it was one of the few anomalies bringing the fight directly
to them. Most sentient anomalous beings would do anything
to avoid getting captured by the SCP Foundation and contained in one of their high-security
sites, full of experienced researchers and state-of-the-art equipment designed specifically
to neutralize their effects. The Doorman, however, just seemed to take
this as a challenge, turning even the most hardcore personnel on the site into gibbering
wrecks with its mere presence. But The Doorman was just getting started. Agent Henderson had a frightening encounter
in the break room. He was pulling a long shift, and just wanted
to grab some coffee creamer from the cabinet. However, as he approached the cabinet, he
heard the telltale wheezing, and that terrible, overwhelming terror set in once more. The Doorman was sitting inside the cabinet
in the fetal position, he just knew it. Could this thing really just appear anywhere
it pleased, and keep people in or out until it decided to dematerialize and torment somebody
else? When the creature finally dematerialized and
the cabinet was examined, the coffee creamer was found to be missing, leaving Agent Henderson
distraught. This was the first recorded instance of The
Doorman stealing a physical item, but it would be far from the last. Henderson wondered whether the creature that’d
just humiliated him was sitting somewhere else now, sipping from a warm cup of joe with
its big, freakish mouth and laughing at him. But a few incidents after this, things would
become considerably more serious: The Doorman was about to take its first life. Well, it isn’t really that simple, if you
want to get into the semantics of the thing. When the body of Dr. Barker was found inside
the 2nd-floor storage room after a spree of SCP-303 incidents, the question was naturally
posed as to whether The Doorman had gotten more dangerous and finally directly attacked
one of its victims. Not quite. There had only been one way in and out of
the storage room: A secured decompression chamber, and the Doorman had appeared inside
this chamber while Dr. Barker was in the storage room, effectively trapping him inside with
the sheer terror it causes in its victims. He was trapped in the room for a grand total
of five days, at which point he finally died of dehydration, and the Doorman demanifested
shortly afterward. The staff of Site 41 scaled up their countermeasure
efforts, hoping to discover more about and perhaps even trap and contain the infamous
Doorman. Dr. Burroughs, Researcher Matthews, four members
of security personnel, and four D-Class operatives formed a kind of strike team, ready for quick
dispatches whenever The Doorman happened to manifest. It wasn’t long before the creature appeared
in a room on the first floor, but the team quickly intercepted its location, ready and
eager to gather more data on the mysterious being that’d been terrorizing all of them
for weeks. Dr. Burroughs ordered one of the D-Classes
to open the door and look inside, but the D-Class refused out of fear. The doctor told him that if he didn’t open
the door, he’d be transferred to SCP-682 duty. The D-Class frantically shook his head and
said, “I’d rather take my chances with the reptile than go in there.” The doctor was getting frustrated. He told the D-Class that if he didn’t open
the door immediately, he’d be terminated right there on the spot. The D-Class still refused, saying that he’d
take death over what the Doorman would do to him if he stepped inside. Without hesitation, Dr. Burroughs ordered
one of the security officers to shoot the D-Class then and there. The shot was fired. The D-Class was terminated. Dr. Burroughs then ordered a female D-Class
who’d just witnessed this callous execution to open the door, or the same abrupt death
would befall her. She still refused, then began to describe
the awful things she believed The Doorman would do to her if she went inside. Researcher Matthews was visibly shaken by
the descriptions. Dr. Burroughs decided not to terminate this
D-Class immediately. He instead wanted to see just how much pressure
the Doorman’s anomalous fear-based resistance mechanisms could take. Another D-Class was given a combat knife and
also given the order to cut the female D-Class with it every time she refused an order to
go inside. After two hours of repeated asking from Dr.
Burroughs, the female D-Class dropped dead from blood loss. At no point did she ever attempt to open the
door. It seemed that, in all cases for those in
the thrall of the Doorman’s anomalous effects, death is a truly preferable alternative to
ever facing it head-on. It’s worth mentioning that these tests were
conducted back in the 1970s, before the formation of the Foundation’s Ethics Committee, which
explains why their methods feel a little needlessly cruel. Since then, The Doorman has fully commandeered
the second-floor storage room, the same one where it caused Dr. Barker’s death. It only ever leaves the room to steal more
items from around the site. These items have included a cryotube, three
sets of standard Foundation surgical equipment, two D-Class research cadavers, one gasoline-powered
generator, a variety of chemicals from the chemical storage areas, and of course, poor
Agent Henderson’s can of powdered coffee creamer. The reason for the Doorman taking an interest
in these particular items remains unknown, but we can only assume that nothing good can
come of it. And there you have it, folks, the strange,
frightening, and eerily inconclusive tale of The Doorman. All we can really say is that we’re awfully
glad he’s fixated on bothering Site 41, because who knows what would happen if he
widened his net to the rest of us? Thankfully, we won’t need to think about
that. Oh, that’s odd. Can you hear that? I thought I was imagining it. Though come to think of it, I can’t help
but feel a little uneasy right now. Do you ever get that feeling you’re being
watched? Wait...The door, there’s something behind
the door. Can you feel it? Can you feel its red flesh and rotten teeth
pressing up against it, breathing, waiting? Can you feel it staring at you without eyes? Looking deep into your very soul? No? Well, that’s good. But just stay cautious, okay? After all, life has many doors, and you never
know who or what will be waiting for you behind the next one... Now go check out “The Deadliest Game - SCP-1918
- Tik Tak Tow” and “SCP-1861 - The Crew of the HMS Wintersheimer” for more genuinely
frightening anomalies that’ll keep you up at night!
