Disturbing things had been happening on the
fifth floor of the Rose Heights apartment building in Albany, New York. Residents had reported strange noises over
the last few days. Screaming in the night, pained muttering,
soft weeping. Scratching and scuttling in the walls. And worst of all, what seemed like an infestation
of bugs unlike anything the unfortunate occupants of Rose Heights had ever seen before. They weren’t abnormal in size or shape - they
looked an awful lot like the common earwig, around two and a half centimeters long with
large, curved pincers on the back. But the color wasn’t right - unlike the
usual dark brown, these earwigs were a silvery, almost translucent gray. When people spotted them crawling across their
walls or hiding in the carpet, they seemed to shimmer in the light. Eventually the building’s landlady, Donna
Tompkins, was called in to do something about the infestation. She spoke to each of the residents about their
experience - they reported the strange noises, the mysterious bugs, and even a funny smell
they’d sometimes catch in the hall. A smell like someone had thrown up. And every single person that Donna spoke to
couldn’t help but remark that the smell was particularly strong outside the apartment
of a certain resident, Bill Parham. Stranger still was the fact that Bill hadn’t
been seen in days. Donna knocked on his door, but received no
answer. She called him on his cell phone and could
hear the phone ringing inside the apartment, but it just went to voicemail. When she checked the security footage of the
lobby, she saw that Bill hadn’t left the building in the last few days either. Donna called the police, worried that Bill
might be sick or even dead inside his apartment. It was strange, given that he was only in
his thirties and didn’t seem to have any health conditions, but stranger things had
happened. Much stranger things were about to happen,
too. Two police officers arrived not long after. They called through the door one more time,
and when they got no response, Donna gave them the key to head inside. The apartment was a wreck. All the furniture was covered in dust. Filthy dishes were piled high in the sink
and on the draining board. The smell of rot was thick in the air. There were empty boxes of painkillers, all
the pills popped from their silvery foil, laying on the ground. But worst of all were the bugs. The apartment was crawling with them, and
they were on every surface. Those silvery gray earwigs. Neither of the officers liked bugs, and it
seemed that the deeper they got into the apartment, the more bugs there were. Some even seemed to be crawling towards them
- pointing their pincers at them as though they were defending their territory. This looked to be a textbook case of what
happens when a resident keels over and dies, but there was just one problem. Where was the body? Bill Parham had seemingly dropped off the
face of the earth, and now, a colony of mysterious bugs had started squatting in his apartment
in his absence. Then came that smell again. That truly awful smell, like bile and blood. It was even stronger now and it seemed like
it was coming from a nearby closet. The two officers, acting on pure instinct,
drew their weapons and approached the closet with caution. Even if they weren’t consciously aware of
it, they knew they were going to find something awful inside. Something evil. Something dangerous. When they threw open the closet door, they
couldn’t help but scream. They’d found the nest. It was a huge, round hive, like the biggest
beehive you’ve ever seen, melded to the lower corner of the closet. The unnatural earwigs were crawling into,
out of, and around it. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands of them. And the second they registered the presence
of the two officers, intruders into their nest, they began to swarm. In sheer panic, both raised their guns and
opened fire into the closet, but it didn’t do them any good. Their bullets just pierced and splintered
the hive, causing even more enraged insects to spill out and begin crawling over the two
cops. They fled from the apartment, screaming in
pain from the gnashing pincers of the insects crawling all over their skin. They never did find the corpse of Bill Parham. But that’s because Bill Parham wasn’t
dead. At least, not until mere moments ago, when
the bullets from the cops’ guns had torn through his bones and perforated his organs. He died not long after, and if he could still
speak close to the end, he would have thanked them both for the mercy. Because the monstrosity that they’d just
encountered in the closet wasn’t just a nest of mysterious insects in Bill Parham’s
apartment. It was Bill himself. This is the fate worse than death in store
for anyone supremely unlucky enough to fall victim to SCP-439, better known by the nickname
for their unique nests, The Bone Hive. And while these nasty little critters may
be small, they’re filled with enough pure nightmare fuel to send you running into 682’s
containment chamber for a little comfort. Let’s go through the whole nightmarish process,
and tell you exactly what happened to poor Bill Parham. First discovered by the SCP Foundation in
mainland China, SCP-439 specimens largely get by on the fact they’re not much to look
at. Unless you’re an entomologist, when you
see a strange insect, you probably just accept the fact it’s a perfectly normal breed you’ve
just never encountered before. Nobody is hammering down the doors of their
local news station to alert the press about the gray earwig they saw crawling out of a
crack in their bathroom wall. But if Bill Parham had done just that, it
would have saved his life. The Foundation would have immediately flagged
the incident as an SCP-439 infestation, and dispatched a mobile task force to deal with
it. Instead, when Bill saw the earwig for the
first time, he was getting ready for work and didn’t have the time to stop and deal
with it. He made a mental note to buy some bug killer
on the way home, but quickly forgot. The insect didn’t forget him, though. In fact, it thought he would be a perfect
candidate for the SCP-439 process. The Foundation has tested extensively with
the one SCP-439 sample they’ve been able to successfully catch and contain. In all these tests, they found that 439 specimens
rejected hosts from any species other than humans. They’re an extraordinarily specific parasite. It’s also only one particular type of SCP-439
specimen that you actually need to worry about: The Queens. Despite their superficial similarities, SCP-439
behave nothing like non-anomalous earwigs. Normal earwigs are not social creatures, they’re
solitary scavengers and they don’t keep nests as permanent habitats. The same can definitely not be said for SCP-439. They have complex social structures, much
like that of bees, ants, and termites, with queens, scouts, workers, and warriors. If you happen to encounter a worker or warrior,
you may get a painful pinch from their pincers if you get too close. But if you end up on the wrong side of one
of the queens, then you have a much, much worse fate in store for you. And it just so happened that the SCP-439 specimen
that appeared in Bill Parham’s bathroom that morning was visiting royalty. This 439 queen had selected her target, and
now, it was time to move to the next part of the process: Initial infiltration. When Bill returned home from work, he was
delighted to find that the gray earwig was nowhere to be seen - but that didn’t mean
it was gone. It was still there, lurking, it just didn’t
want to be seen. After all, the real fun would happen after
Bill went to bed. Once SCP-439 detects that its potential host
has fallen into a deep sleep, it will crawl onto the person’s body, and into their mouth,
which is exactly what it did to Bill. It feels like little more than a tickle in
your throat, and you will have no idea that the tiny creature crawling down your windpipe
and into the soft, warm tissue of your lungs spells your doom. Very few people wake up during this process. But even if they did, there’s virtually
nothing they could do. When Bill woke up, he was suffering from mild
chest pains and shortness of breath, a symptom not uncommon in a number of respiratory ailments. He had no idea that the SCP-439 Queen was
already inside him. He got up and went about his day, trying to
ignore the pain as it gradually grew worse and worse, feeling almost like something was
moving inside his chest. He spent the whole day having to stop to let
out a deep, hacking cough, but coughing didn’t expel or change anything. He looked and felt so terrible that his boss
let him go home early, hoping that Bill would be able to sleep off whatever illness he thought
he had picked up. But over the next couple days, his condition
only worsened. The pain grew so excruciating he could barely
move, and he was popping painkillers like tic tacs, to no effect. He started running a dangerously high fever,
his body trying in vain to fight back against its lethal intruder. He felt worse than he ever had in his life,
but little did poor Bill know, the most terrible parts of the process were yet to come. Through anomalous means, an SCP-439 infection
is able to induce Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, in its victims, which
is typically a genetic disease that presents itself before the victim turns ten years old. The condition is infamous for its primary
symptom: Turning muscle and other soft tissue into bone, slowly but surely paralyzing the
victim and putting them in a state of unspeakable pain. This bone transformation process is known
as “Ossification”, and Bill was about to experience it first hand. His pain increased as his mobility decreased,
with more of his flesh becoming solid lumps of bone underneath the skin. Soon enough, all he knew was pain. It’d become so agonizing that he was delirious
with it, he was drunk on pain. Even perceiving sunlight felt like being stabbed
in the eyes. That’s why, like all the other victims of
SCP-439, he decided to conceal himself in a warm, dark place where no light could get
to him. In Bill’s case, of course, that place was
his closet. He was hurting so bad that all he could do
was curl up into the fetal position and weep as his muscles turned to bone and his body
began to compact and shrink. He didn’t even look like a human anymore
- he was more like a ball, covered in a bone shell and filled with warm organs. That’s when the queen started laying eggs
among his organs. It wasn’t long before there was a new brood
of around 30,000 specimens living inside Bill’s body. He was still very much alive, but there wasn't
anything he could do about his situation. His muscles had long since turned to bone,
and they had eaten large portions of his brain, leaving mainly the parts needed to keep his
organs just barely functioning. After all, the colony still needs central
heating. SCP-439 colonies have developed a perfect
parasitic relationship with the human body. They even use the stomach inside the hive
to predigest food into a liquid slurry that’s easier for them to consume. The only loser in this situation is someone
like Bill, who is forced to become the new home for the world’s most nightmarish freeloaders. Eventually, when the colony becomes too big,
a queen departs to start a new one, and the process repeats itself once more. It’s enough to make you want to sleep with
your mouth closed for the rest of your life. Oh, and we haven’t even told you the worst
part yet. Foundation scientists have conducted tests
on some victims of SCP-439, and found that while the creatures do consume large parts
of the brain, the parts they leave are capable of consciousness. That’s right, their victims remain aware
of what’s happening to them the whole time, even when they hardly seem human at all anymore. What actually finally kills the victims of
SCP-439 isn’t the bodily trauma. It’s the starvation that sets in when the
colony inevitably moves on. Did we just hear you cough? You might want to go get that checked out… Now go watch “SCP-001 - When Day Breaks”
and “SCP-823 - Carnival of Horrors” for more terrifying SCPs that’ll chill you to
the bone!
