The Goffard Theater is silent, save for the
occasional shifting of your fellow Foundation researcher. The two of you are alone, and you’ve been
tasked with transcribing the performances of SCP-6373. You read the file, understood the briefing,
and you even told yourself that you’re prepared to witness whatever obscene show is about
to commence, but you’ve never experienced SCP-6373 firsthand. This is your first time, filling in for another
researcher who got herself injured during one of the performances. You hope it wasn’t anything serious. The lights flash, pointing to the main stage. The smell of rot is almost overwhelming now. You swear you see a family of rats scurry
under your front row seats. The curtains fly open, revealing… nothing. You expect someone to come out from behind
the curtain, but the stage is barren. Suddenly, a loud, creaking noise is heard
from above, and four broken, poorly painted, and utterly deranged looking puppets drop
from the ceiling. Their strings are slightly visible, and their
movements fluctuate between quick, jerky motions and slow, weighty ones. The one with the long nose starts talking
in a high-pitched, lofty voice, asking the desolate audience if they’re ready for the
show. You start to wonder when things are going
to kick in and really cement this anomaly’s status as a terrifying SCP object. For the first five minutes, the show isn’t
too bad. The puppets sing and dance a bit creepy, but
they’re not doing anything wrong. At least, that’s what you think until the
long-nosed one brandishes a baseball bat and savagely smashes the smaller, round one to
a pulp, splattering guts and insides all over the theater. And it only gets worse from there. Welcome to the Goffard Theater, the home of
SCP-6373, codenamed by those researching it as “Stage Blight”. SCP-6373 refers to a collection of four papier-mâché
puppets, each standing around one meter in height and complete with attached strings. These puppets constantly emit a rotting, disgusting
stench. Though the Foundation has come to the conclusion
that this smell is entirely non-anomalous. SCP-6373 gain their anomalous properties at
around 6 PM each day, as long as they’re positioned inside the Goffard Theater, a building
located in the city of Reading, Pennsylvania, which is where the Foundation has chosen to
contain the four objects. If SCP-6373 aren’t inside the Goffard Theater,
they instead start decomposing, rotting and breaking down into a stinky, smelly mess of
puppet-materials. So, what happens when SCP-6373 take on their
anomalous properties? The puppets gain sentience, mobility, and
limited intelligence, though attempts to communicate with SCP-6373 outside of their performances
have failed. Sorry, no puppet interview logs for today. They then proceed to the main stage of the
Goffard Theater, and put on a puppet show! Wow, a whole performance, isn’t that sweet? Not really, SCP-6373’s performances are
notoriously brutal, unpredictable, and terrifying. So much so that the Foundation has offered
counseling services to the poor personnel forced to watch them. That’s right, there must be at least one
observing personnel in the Goffard Theater to witness SCP-6373’s performance, or else
the puppets drop to the floor and start decomposing again. Following their performance, the puppets lose
all sentience until 6 PM on the next day, when the process repeats. But let’s talk about SCP-6373 themselves. These puppets have a lot of character. You have Pierre, SCP-6373-1, the main character
of the performances, who just loves to verbally and physically abuse his fellow wooden companions. Glouton, SCP-6373-2, is a large, disembodied
head with a gaping mouth, who speaks only in single-word statements and deep, guttural
moans. SCP-6373-3 is a tiny, grey, round ball known
as “Ame”, who remains entirely silent throughout the performances, despite being
the puppet abused by the others the most frequently. The puppet, SCP-6373-4, Jacque, is a long-necked
clown who serves as the group’s comedic relief. But before we delve into the horrific performances
put on by these entities, let’s talk about the Goffard Theater. The theater was opened in 1860 by french immigrant
Timothee Goffard for the purposes of putting on stage plays, musical performances, and
in-house puppet shows that featured SCP-6373. The puppets were designed by Goffard himself,
and were massively profitable and popular with Reading’s children. While it’s not known if SCP-6373 possessed
their anomalous properties during the original run of performances, the Foundation doesn’t
believe they did, and they were otherwise ordinary puppets, controlled by puppeteers. Unfortunately, the Goffard Theater was not
built to last. In 1884, it closed its doors after a legal
battle between Goffard and his wife, Cynthia raged through the courts. Cynthia was accused of stealing money from
the theater, to which she defended herself, saying that Timothee was not only unfaithful
in their marriage, but also physically and verbally abusive to her. The lawsuit ended in a divorce, and an ominously
worded letter written to Cynthia by Timothee. “… I write to you in poor health, and
all joy sapped from my life. May misfortune follow you until the end of
your days. I will not construct again that which I had
spent two decades of my life working towards. I can only thank God’s grace that the building
has remained vacant, as I could not bear to see it owned by another man. I want to perform again, and see the children
smile. My happiness was so linked to theirs.” A week later, Timothee Goffard disappeared
entirely. Four months later, Cynthia Goffard supposedly
died of natural causes. In 1887, Foundation precursor organization,
the American Secure Containment Initiative, or ASCI for short, discovered SCP-6373 inside
the theater and documented its anomalous properties shortly after. SCP-6373 had a captive audience, and containment
persisted long after the ASCI had assimilated into the SCP Foundation. And now we can get to the part you’ve all
been waiting for, the performances themselves. The Foundation has kept a log of all of SCP-6373’s
performances, but here are some of the most notable ones. SCP-6373’s first performance, in 1887, involved
lighting fixtures around the theater collectively powering on several minutes before the show,
as well as a slight piano accompaniment, originating from an unknown source. The contents of the show were simple. Pierre rescued a princess, a costumed Jacque,
from a dragon, played by Glouton. Researchers noted several moments when one
of the puppets had difficulty maintaining posture and moving, often taking multiple
attempts to lift limbs. These moments increased in frequency over
time. In 1895, the puppets performed a show about
a bank robbery gone wrong. Pierre decided that Ame was the one who alerted
the police about their crime, and spent the rest of the performance berating and abusing
the small puppet, specifically for “betraying its trust and breaking the bond they had shared
after years of working together”, as Pierre put it. The puppets use Ame as a soccer-ball, but
their game quickly devolves into a contest of trying to see who can kick it the hardest. Ame is noted to be silently crying throughout
all of this. In 1916, the puppets put on a World War I
period piece, taking place on a farm owned by husband Pierre and his wife, Ame. Pierre, upset that his crops were destroyed
by the ongoing war, asks Ame for support, but the puppet remains silent, even as Pierre’s
cries grow louder and more frantic. Pierre then shifts the blame of the crop’s
destruction from the war to Ame itself. He states that Ame will never be “let out”
of the house again. Sounds of war and human suffering were heard
throughout. In 1922, the puppets repeated their first
performance, about the princess and the castle. Except this time, the puppets sounded a lot
angrier in their dialogue delivery, and their movements are described as frantic bursts
in between moments where they do nothing but hang limp. Pierre yells at Glouton for an apparently
poor performance as the Princess, and when the puppet pretends to play dead, Pierre specifically
states that’s “not what being dead feels like”. In 1938, the puppets attempted to perform
a comedy routine, but quickly found out that their slow, unsynchronized movements were
causing problems with the pacing and effectiveness of their act. Pierre became frustrated, and brandished a
prop fire hose, which he sprayed at the fellow puppets, causing them to scream as their paint
ran off and chipped. The screams heard throughout the theater were
notably feminine. In 1952, Pierre performed a piano duet with
Jacque, who was unable to sit still or keep quiet during the act. The annoyed Pierre proceeded to savagely slam
Jacque’s head into the piano until it was dented, and his jaw was detached completely. The Jacque puppet began leaking a disgusting
yellow fluid from its mouth. Pierre fetched Ame and forced the tiny puppet
to sit in the fluid, all while Jacque writhed in pain. While the damage sustained by the puppets
during each performance was healed and restored by the next day through anomalous means, Jacque’s
jaw was never fixed, and he continued to seep fluid for the duration of the anomaly’s
containment. 1958’s performance was only two minutes
in length, and featured Pierre attempting to teach an art class. Glouton’s canvas displayed the words “OPEN
INSIDE”, which for some reason angered Pierre enough to end the performance entirely and
lead the puppets offstage. For the next 24 hours, an unidentified male
voice screamed and swore from behind the stage’s curtain, throwing objects and punching walls. The source was not discerned, and no SCP-6373
instances could be found within the theater until the next day at 6 PM, when they reemerged
from the back and performed as usual. This 1963 performance was particularly bizarre. Pierre took the stage by himself, and proceeded
to deliver a eulogy for Timothee Goffard in the voice of an unidentified woman. Strangely, the Foundation discovered that
a funeral service was not held for Goffard. In 1971, the puppet’s performances became
a lot more lifeless. Their voices became monotone and their movements
were slower. Oftentimes, a puppet would have to hit itself
in order to restore fluid motion to its limbs. This would continue in all future performances. In 1973, SCP-6373 performed a sitcom skit,
in which Pierre and his two “sons”, played by Jacque and Glouton, took turns beating
and breaking Ame. This trend of physical abuse towards Ame would
increase in frequency as time went on, like in this four hour 1976 performance that consisted
of the silhouettes of the puppets from behind the stage torturing the poor thing, all while
Ame silently took it. All the while, Pierre told Ame that it was
the sole reason the puppets were in their current situation, and why they were unable
to move forward. In 1979, the Goffard Theater’s structural
integrity was observed to be failing. Masses of rats, termites, and fungi were discovered
throughout the building. Similarly, the performances themselves became
even more disturbing. One involved the puppets reenacting the life
story of Timothee Goffard, but refused to acknowledge or mention his wife Cynthia. Instead, they claimed he died alone and miserable,
without ever experiencing love. The performance ended with Pierre smashing
its head against the floor and knocking it off, unleashing a swarm of blow fly larvae
that Foundation was unable to remove from the theater. In 1983, the puppets performed a skit in which
they held a funeral for Ame. After exploring a variety of possible afterlifes
from various religions, the puppets were understandably confused about which one was “correct”,
and how they could achieve salvation. Then, Jacque had an epiphany, exclaiming:
“I know the answer! We're all dead! This is the only afterlife there is!”. The puppets then went limp, and stayed that
way for a week. By 1984, the puppets put almost zero effort
into their performances. One involved them openly fantasizing about
injuring the audience members, and ended with the puppets picking a poor Foundation researcher
from the audience as a “volunteer” and snapping her arm, all while laughing. Another had the puppets stating the full names,
birthdays, and death dates of every patron of the Goffard theater from its opening to
the present, and this included the Foundation researchers watching. SCP-6373’s movements were awkward and slow,
their speech slurred. It was clear that the puppets were on their
last limb. In 1985, every performance had degenerated
to a frenzy of self-harm carried out by the puppet, devoid of any stage lighting and accompanied
by a noisey, barely harmonious musical accompaniment. Feminine screams and male laughter is heard
throughout. But things got even worse throughout the year,
as performances further degraded to periods of sitting or standing still and incoherent
rambling while facing the audience. The performances were entirely indecipherable,
and all dialogue consisted of grunting, moaning, screaming, and weeping. On June 6th, 1985, SCP-6373 put on another
performance. The puppets stood side by side for 18 minutes
before bowing and falling to the ground. No lights or music was heard. Following this performance, the puppets began
to decay, shedding their papier-mache exteriors. When this was complete, the insides of the
puppets were revealed to be composed of human remains and organs. Pierre contained a brain, Jacque a heart,
Glouton a mass of skin and tissue, and Ame was empty. All of this material had been cut cleanly
and sourced from a single individual. When the Foundation unrolled the skin tissue
contained inside the Glouton puppet, there was no doubt about which individual it resembled
- Cynthia Cordier, the wife of Timothee Goffard. The object was reclassified as neutralized,
and no further performances or anomalous activity relating to SCP-6373 was ever observed. Now go check out “SCP-701 - The Hanged King's
Tragedy” and “SCP-5049 - Demon Dan's Discount Homunculus Depot” for more SCPs that blur
the line between entertainment and terror!
