Top 15 Evil SCP Stories

“Tell me if it starts to hurt,” the dentist says before reaching into your mouth with a pair of orthodontic pliers and starting to pull your front teeth back into place. Evidently, your screams aren’t enough of an indication of the extreme pain you feel because he doesn’t stop pulling. After what feels like hours of excruciating oral surgery, you’re finally standing outside the dentist's office texting with a friend. “Come on, show me. It can’t be that bad,” reads the message from your friend. You’re nervous to send her a picture though since you have a small crush on the girl and you don’t want her to see you in this state. But after she asks you again you decide to take a quick selfie and send it to her anyway. You snap a photo of your mangled mouth and jaw. The mess of wires had to be hastily applied to move your remaining crooked teeth back into place with globs of fast hardening epoxy and the result looks like a low-budget horror movie prosthetic. You send the message and wait. You watch the dots appear that indicate she’s writing a response, then watch as they disappear without a reply. You sadly slip the phone back into your pocket and begin walking away. As you make your way home with your head hung in shame you keep your mouth shut tight. You don’t want any passersby to see what you’ve become. You decide to detour through the park to avoid any people as much as possible and as you walk, you decide to stop at a picnic table next to a small pond. You sit at the table and watch the ducks mill about in the water. “They have it so lucky,” you think. “Ducks never have to worry about their teeth getting knocked out by a baseball and leaving them looking like a monster.” The ducks suddenly all start moving away from your side of the pond, eventually taking flight and leaving completely. You get the sense that they’re trying to get away from something and you turn around, but there’s nothing behind you. “Oh, it must be me,” you think. But then you get the sense that there is something behind you and turn again, still though, there’s nothing. It’s just you, the picnic table, and the empty pond. You turn back to watch the still water but you can’t shake the feeling that there’s someone behind you and turn again. “Hello? Is anyone there?” you ask but no one answers. You turn back to the pond and - You scream in fright at the thing standing before you and fall back off of the picnic table. You get up out of the dirt and you don’t wait to stick around to see who or what this thing is. You start to run as fast as you can but you immediately hear it chasing after you. Instinctually you take out your phone and start trying to take pictures of whatever it is that’s behind you. You know no one will ever believe you and you want some evidence of this, this… thing. You manage to snap off a couple of pictures but you can hear the creature gaining on you. You scream as your mouth begins to ache. Perhaps running this soon after your surgery is causing your damaged teeth to shift, and the pain is intense. It starts to feel like your mouth is full of jagged rocks, but you can feel that it is your teeth pushing out and stabbing into your mouth. You take one last picture before the creature leaps on you, sending you both to the ground and your phone tumbling into the dirt. Early the next morning, a police perimeter has been set up in the park. The detective arrives and walks past the traumatized looking jogger who must have been the one that discovered the grisly scene. An officer guarding the site lifts up the police tape so the detective can enter the crime scene that surrounds a body lying under a white sheet. The detective asks the officer if they’ve found anything yet and the office hands the detective a plastic bag containing a dirty cellphone. The detective puts on a latex glove and removes the phone from the bag. The screen is cracked but it still works. There’s numerous messages on the screen that look like they’re from someone trying to apologize for not responding sooner, then asking where the phone’s owner is and if they’re mad at her. The detective opens the phone’s camera app and starts looking at the last photos that were taken. It’s a strange series of pictures. They seem to all be selfies that a young man was taking as he ran through the park. It almost appears as though there’s a figure behind him but it’s hard to tell. There’s a foggy white vignette on the pictures that gets worse the further he looks, slowly closing in until the last photo is nothing but a blurred milky white screen. The detective flips the phone over and looks at the lens which he can see is completely covered in a hard white substance. The detective places the phone back in the evidence bag and kneels down next to the body. The police officer turns away, he’s already seen the victim and doesn’t need to again. The detective pulls down the sheet to reveal a truly shocking sight. The boy’s mouth is a mess of teeth, far far too many teeth. There are teeth growing out of every part of his gums at horrible angles, filling his mouth and jutting out at painfully odd angles. Who could have done this? What could have done this? The local police department may not have had any idea what the state of this victim meant, but the SCP Foundation did, because they had seen the same occurrence dozens of times before. In fact, they had seen it happen so many times that they had classified this anomalous entity as SCP-4910, but it had already earned a much ominous nickname within the Foundation. It was known as... The Grinner. Very little is known about SCP-4910, and eyewitness accounts of the creature are all extremely brief, due to those who have interacted with it quickly succumbing to its effects. What is known is that SCP-4910 is a quadruped, and appears to be made partially, or perhaps entirely, out of teeth. Those who encounter SCP-4910 quickly experience its primary anomalous effect, which is that it causes the extremely rapid overproduction of teeth in its victims’ mouths. Existing teeth will quickly increase in size, protruding farther out of the gums than should be able, while new teeth will begin to sprout from any available space in the mouth including the roof of the mouth and underneath the tongue. These new teeth will completely fill the mouth, which almost immediately inhibits their ability to speak or vocalize at all. The creature will then use this opportunity to attack and incapacitate the victim, before starting to feed. Further adding to the mystery of SCP-4910’s appearance comes from the effect it has on any nearby recording equipment. Cameras and other devices that come within SCP-4910’s proximity will have their critical components compromised by a sudden appearance of a layer of dentin, which is the calcified material that partially makes up teeth. Interestingly, SCP-4910 seems to possess some level of intelligence, as it appears able to differentiate between normal civilians, who it hunts for sustenance, and members of organizations that seek to hunt down and contain or harm it, which it uses for an even more nefarious purpose. While the exact mechanics are still unclear, it seems as though SCP-4910 is able to “infect” certain anomalous organization members with its ability, causing them to act as a vector for the effect, who then spread it to even more victims. This effect is, of course, of great concern to the Foundation, and containment protocols for infected victims have been hastily put into place. Should a member of staff begin bearing a grin with too many teeth, or multiple tooth-filled smiles, they are to be immediately immobilized by any means necessary, though preferably with a firearm that allows one to keep an appropriate distance and hopefully prevent any further spread of the effect. The infected individual is then to be doused in a hydrochloric chemical compound that will reduce the afflicted to a pulp-like substance. Once this pulp is no longer animate, it can be transferred to the closest incineration site for disposal. Should a member of personnel have an interaction with SCP-4910 and feel that they were exposed to its anomalous effects, they may be saved by taking immediate medical action. Oral surgery to remove the additional teeth has been found to be effective when the procedure is undergone in the first one to two hours following exposure, though the victim will suffer lifelong permanent physical issues from the procedure. Once three hours have passed, the effect will have spread to the rest of the body, with teeth appearing virtually anywhere. Unfortunately for the victim, should the infection reach this point, pain management has been shown to be ineffective, and there is nothing that can be done to alleviate their suffering save for termination. SCP-4910 remains at large and has been given the Keter classification. Mobile Task Force Epsilon, codenamed “Tyrfing Black” is the only MTF authorized to respond to sightings and they have been given permission to engage the creature and utilize lethal force if necessary due to the danger this anomaly presents specifically to the SCP Foundation. The girl sighs and slumps in her seat, kicking at the back of the bucket seat in front of her. Her mother, sitting in the car’s front passenger side seat, doesn’t even notice; she’s too busy taking photographs out the window and chattering with her husband, who’s driving the car. That’s all they’ve been doing all day, and the girl is sick to death of it. Her parents dragged her on this stupid vacation trip, and now she’s got to waste her whole summer away from her friends. She stares out the window and watches the pastoral countryside slide past. The quaint little villages and rolling hillsides really excite her parents, but she could not care less. Mom and Dad planned this family vacation across Europe for months, but she would much rather have gone someplace interesting instead. There are only so many boring old castles and stupid cathedrals that you can look at before you just lose your mind. The girl sighs and crosses her arms across her chest in silent resignation. “Guess we’re just gonna look at more dumb buildings,” she mutters. “Honey, can you stop that? Your father worked really hard to put this trip together, and the least you could do is pretend to have a good time,” says her mother, momentarily lowering her camera to berate her ungrateful daughter. It’s the first time that her mother has acknowledged her all day. “I think you’re really gonna like today’s itinerary,” says her father, grinning as if he’s got a delicious secret that he can’t wait to share. “We know it’s been hard for you spending your whole summer away from home, so today we’re gonna do something just for you.” “Uh-huh,” says the girl. “Sure, dad.” She rolls her eyes and pulls out a cell phone. At least she can still get Internet access out here! Desperate for something to distract her from the monotony of this car trip, she quickly scrolls through her feed and reads all the notes that her friends back home are posting. She frowns. Her classmates are all posting about the latest blockbuster film in the girl’s favorite media franchise, Vampire Boyfriend. She grits her teeth. She likes to consider herself a Vampire Boyfriend super fan. She’s a well-known poster in the Vampire Boyfriend online community, famous for her fan fiction as well as her own original character: Vampire Girlfriend. In fact, her writing is somewhat controversial. A lot of Vampire Boyfriend purists have accused her character Vampire Girlfriend of being a Mary Sue, and they object to her stories where Vampire Boyfriend meets and falls madly in love with her – to the point that he forgets his canon lover from the film series, Vampire Wife. She’s annoyed to see that her friends got to see the new Vampire Boyfriend movie on opening night, while she’s stuck out here on this stupid family vacation! The movie won’t premiere in Europe for another few months, and there’s no way she’s going to be able to avoid spoilers for that long. Everything about this situation seems tailor-made to irritate her, and the excited giggles of her parents in the front of the car, as they exchange knowing glances, are only annoying her more. “Trust me, you’re going to love this!” says her father again. He peers at an unfolded roadmap in his lap, mutters something under his breath, and turns the car off the main highway and onto a narrow gravel road. The girl grits her teeth as the car rattles over the uneven ground so hard that it nearly jostles her cellphone from her grasp. She tries to distract herself by typing some notes to herself, plot points for the latest Vampire Boyfriend fanfiction that she’s working on. In her new story, Vampire Girlfriend is going to be kidnapped by werewolves, leading Vampire Boyfriend to have an existential crisis as he struggles to find meaning in a world without his beloved. She makes a note that Vampire Girlfriend should look, dress, and talk just like her. After all, she imagines, wouldn’t she be the perfect match for Vampire Boyfriend? She pauses, a momentary dreamy expression on her face, as she imagines how much better a weekend together with Vampire Boyfriend would be compared to this boring car trip. “This can’t be right,” mumbles her father, scanning the horizon. “But the directions said…” Suddenly he brightens up. “Oh! There it is! Playland!” The girl cranes her neck to see that the car is fast approaching what appears to be a little carnival at the end of the road. She rolls her eyes. Oh, great. Of course, her parents would take her here! First, they bore her with endless visits to museums and historical sights, and now, when they want to make it all up to her, they take her to a carnival for babies. She’s not a kid anymore, but her parents still think that this sort of goofy nonsense should excite her. “I know you’ve been bored going to all the historical sites with us, honey pumpkin,” says her father as he pulls the car into a parking slot and applies the brake. “That’s why I asked the hotel concierge if there was anything good around here for kids. And, wouldn’t you know it, the next morning, what did I find shoved under our door? Three free tickets!” He holds up the tickets as if they were a trophy he’d won. The girl’s mother nods approvingly. “Now that’s good service. I hope you left him a big tip.” The girl groans. “You can’t be serious, dad! A carnival? What, do you expect me to ride on the tea cups or something? I’m 15! I’m not a dumb baby anymore!” “Language, young lady,” admonishes her mother as she unbuckles her seat belt. “Your father worked really hard to find this place just for you. The least you could do is show a little gratitude for once!” “Oh, you think you’re too old NOW,” says her father. “But I bet, once we see some of these rides, boy, I’ll bet you feel just like a kid again!” He inhales deeply. Even inside the car, the unmistakable fair smells of funnel cake and corn dogs are in the air. “You smell that? Smells like fun!” “Sure. Fun.” The girl pockets her cellphone. The family exits the car and walks toward the Playland gate, where they’re greeted by a costumed employee. "Welcome to Playland!" announces the employee in a chipper voice. “Your favorite amusement park! When you’re at Playland, you’ll find that the worries of the day melt away… and it’s time for play!” “Oh, you speak English,” says the father. He turns to the mother. “See? Now that’s service!” He hands over the complimentary tickets. The employee takes them with a smile and a flourish and then ushers the family through the gate. The girl, however, can’t stop staring at the gatekeeper. If she didn’t know any better, she would think that he was dressed like Vampire Boyfriend? But that doesn’t make any sense. It must just be a coincidence. But once they enter the park, she sees that all the employees are dressed like Vampire Boyfriend! The guy standing behind the counter of the ring toss booth, the guy manning the balloon station… the uniform for this part looks like the outfit that she imagined Vampire Boyfriend would be wearing in her first fan fiction story! “Wait…” says the girl, staring up at the bundle of helium balloons floating above the balloon vendor. Each balloon bears the name “Vampire Boyfriend” and the fanged bat logo of the film series. So it’s not a coincidence at all? This theme park really is themed after her favorite films? Her father notices her change of expression and he nudges her in the ribs. “Eh? Eh? I told you that you’d like it… This is all about those movies you like so much, huh? Ghost Boyfriend or whatever?” “It’s Vampire Boyfriend, Dad,” she says distantly, but she’s too mesmerized by her surroundings to put much feeling into the barb. “How much for a balloon?” asks her father, pulling open his wallet and quickly thumbing through a stack of local currency. “Oh, no charge!” says the balloon vendor brightly. He plucks a string from the bundle and hands it over. “Everything’s free for our valued special ticket holders!” “Well, would you listen to that!” says her father. He replaces his wallet in his back pocket. “Now, this is the kind of carnival that I wish we had back in the States!” The girl awkwardly takes the proffered balloon. She feels silly holding it, but she’s more confused about why it’s free. The whole point of offering free entry into a carnival is to gouge people with over-priced rides and souvenirs, right? But everywhere she looks, she can’t help but notice signs advertising “Free corn dogs!” and “Bumpers Cars! Unlimited Rides for $000.” How can this carnival make enough money to keep operating if it’s not charging for anything? In fact, how can this carnival make enough money to keep operating when it’s based around a niche film like Vampire Boyfriend? Are there really that many Vampire Boyfriend fans out here to keep this place in business? Not that there’s anyone else around. As she scans her surroundings, she realizes that, while there are plenty of costumed employees bustling around the fair, she doesn’t see any other fair goers. It’s as if this whole carnival was created and maintained solely for her benefit! “Hey, pumpkin, how about some ride? I bet you’d love to try out some bumper cars, huh?” says her father. “How about we take a race, and you see if you can beat your old man, huh?” He points to a bumper car ride across the midway. The girl stares. Like all the other rides, it’s covered in Vampire Boyfriend murals. This one depicts a young woman running away from a pack of werewolves – and the young woman looks almost exactly like the girl. It couldn’t be… but there’s no other explanation! The young woman in the mural matches exactly the description of the girl’s character Vampire Girlfriend from her fan fiction story! And the image of the werewolves looks like it’s an illustration of the scene where Vampire Girlfriend gets kidnapped. How could this be? Could it be that the artist, obviously a fan of the Vampire Boyfriend films, is also familiar with her fan fiction? But even if that was the case, it’s absurd to think that he would use it as inspiration for a theme park ride! Who other than her would possibly recognize this scene? “Hmm,” says the girl’s mother, walking up behind her and peering at the mural. “Why, that girl looks just like you.” “I know! She does!” says the girl quickly. It’s almost a relief to know that her mother has also noticed the resemblance; at least it means that she’s not imagining things. At the same time, she feels a twinge of guilt. Readers online are always accusing her of using Vampire Girlfriend as a thinly disguised self-insert. Seeing this larger-than-life picture of Vampire Girlfriend makes her think that there might be some merit to the accusation! “Come on, you lot, stop worrying about some old picture and let’s have some fun!” says her father. He offers money to the ticket taker parked behind the kiosk, but that man merely shakes his head. “Your money is no good here, sir,” says the ticket taker. “The bumper cars are free for our favored guests today!" Her father clambers into the rink and ambles toward a bumper car. Her mother tugs at the girl’s arm as if to encourage her to join in, but the girl resists. “Come on! What’s gotten into you?” says her mother. “This place is just weird!” says the girl. “Like, half of the stuff here isn’t even from the official Vampire Boyfriend lore! It’s all stuff that I made up for my stories!” Her mother rolls her eyes in annoyance. “Really, we go to all this trouble to find something that you would like to do, and all you want to do is complain?” “I’m sorry, ma’am, is there some problem here?” The family is startled as another employee walks up to them. He’s also dressed like Vampire Boyfriend, and a wide smile is plastered across his face. “You folks look like you’re upset about something.” “You’re damn right I’m upset about something!” yells the girl. In her rage, she throws her drink at the employee. He barely reacts as the cup explodes against his chest, dousing him with sticky soda. “What’s going on here? Where did you hear about Vampire Girlfriend?” “Ma’am, Playland is designed to give every visitor the perfect experience!” says the employee blandly. “That’s not good enough! Tell me what’s going on here!” The employee’s attitude changes on a dime. His bright smile fades and suddenly his tone turns stern. “Ma’am, I’m afraid that you’re going to ruin everyone’s fun if you keep up this sort of behavior. We like to keep things fun here at Playland. If you want to spoil the fun, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave.” “Fine! Then we’ll leave!” “Oh, come on, young lady, we just got here!” snaps her mother. “We literally drove all day to get here and you want to leave after just one ride?” “You don’t even like rides!” “There’s a principle involved here,” says her father sternly as he saunters up. “Young lady, if that’s your attitude, then I think maybe you should go wait in the car! Because your mother and I intend to have a good time.” The girl doesn’t have a chance to argue. The employee rests his hands heavily on her shoulders and turns her around. “Don’t worry, folks, we’ll escort her back to your car. You can join her as well when you’re ready.” The girl cannot believe what’s happening! The employee politely but firmly steers her toward the exit, and frog marches her out the gate. He abandons her in the parking lot, tipping his hat and smiling brightly before he disappears back inside the park. “Please try to enjoy yourself, ma’am, until your parents are ready to join you. In the meantime, why don’t you work on that new fan fiction you’ve been planning?” “How do you know about that!?” yells the girl. The employee doesn’t answer, simply turning and fading back into the crowd. She rushes to the gate but the gatekeeper stops her. “Sorry, ma’am, no re-entry without a ticket!” “But I have a ticket!” she cries. “You saw it! My dad gave it to you, like, half an hour ago… come on. You can’t be serious!” She tries to push past him, but the gatekeeper grabs her wrists with surprising strength and holds her. Still smiling, he firmly escorts her back out to her car before releasing her. “Please, ma’am, don’t make a scene. You’re going to disturb our guests.” “Who’s in charge here? I… I need to talk to the manager! I want my parents back right now!” The gatekeeper doesn’t even respond; he simply returns to his station. There’s nothing that the girl can do now but wait. She sits down in the gravel and leans her back against the side of the car. Minutes turn to hours and still her parents haven’t returned. Eventually, she goes back to yell at the gate keeper again. “Where are my parents!? They should have been back hours ago!” “Sorry, ma’am, I guess your parents are just having too much fun right now. I’m sure you’ll see them again soon, though,” says the gatekeeper. The girl shivers as she feels a bite in the cool twilight air. She notices that the sun is starting to dip behind the mountains. It will be dark soon. How much longer could they take? Even if they decided to ride on every ride in the park, surely they would be done by now? “What times does the park close?” asks the girl, a note of panic rising in her voice. The gatekeeper blinks serenely. “Playland is open 24/7, ma’am. We’re always here when you want to play!” The girl feels the color drain from her face as she ponders the possibilities. Her father has the car keys, so she can’t take the car to go for help… She pulls out her cellphone, but she doesn’t know the number she would need to alert any local authorities. And it’s not like she speaks the language, anyway! Other than the employees here at Playland, she hasn’t met a single person in this whole trip who speaks English! She’s completely helpless, trapped, and there’s nothing that she can do except wait and hope. As the night settles in, she realizes that her wait might have just started. It might not be the happiest place on earth, but it definitely tries to be. And while the world is full of sketchy amusement parks, most of them just want your money. The amusement park known as SCP-1357, however, genuinely wants you to have a good time. Sometimes it wants you to have a good time whether you want to or not. SCP-1357 is a theme park with an area of approximately 4 square kilometers located somewhere in Poland. The park has four entrances, at each of the cardinal directions. SCP-1357 is highly selective about who it allows to enter the park, restricting access to parties that meet the following criteria: The group must contain at least two adults in a romantic relationship, it must contain at least one member who is under the age of 18 and who thinks of the aforementioned romantic couple as their guardians, and every member of the party must possess a free ticket – hereafter referred to as SCP-1357-B. The park does not charge for admission, and the only way to gain access is to have possession of an instance of SCP-1357-B. Once inside, SCP-1357 looks like any other carnival with thrill rides, amusement arcades, midway games, and concession booths. Highly unusual for a carnival, though, is that SCP-1357 does not accept any money; all rides, food, and souvenirs are free. The layout and theme of the park are different for different visitors and appear to be highly contingent on the desires of the youngest member of any visiting party. Often, the park will appear themed after various popular media properties, such as Batman, Winnie the Pooh, or Barney the Dinosaur. However, visiting parties accompanied by more imaginative kids may encounter substantially weirder things in the park – including talking animals, sentient foodstuffs, temporal displacements, and even extradimensional portals. Although the park normally sits empty, when a group meeting entry requirements arrive at the gate, SCP-1357 will spontaneously manifest a full working staff, people designated as SCP-1357-A. Instances of SCP-1357-A appear to be ordinary humans of various ages, ethnicities, sexes, and genders, all clothes in matching uniforms, suggesting that they are employees of the park. Instances of SCP-1357-A are exceptionally friendly and helpful, and are extremely dedicated to making sure that visitors to SCP-1357 have a good time. In fact, there’s nothing that they care about more. There is, however, a darker side to SCP-1357, and one incident suggests the frightening lengths to which the park will go to make sure that its younger visitors truly enjoy their stay. As part of an experiment, a foundation agent visited the park with his own family, each member equipped with audio recording devices that continuously transmitted to foundation consoles. During his stay, he attempted to interrogate an instance of SCP-1357-A. The instance of SCP-1357-A refused to answer the agent’s questions about the purpose or origin of the park, instead lamenting that the agent’s attitude was “going to spoil the fun” for his family. Eventually, instances of SCP-1357-A escorted the agent to an exit and forcibly removed him from the park. When his wife attempted to follow him, the couple’s daughter refused to leave. Instances of SCP-135-A separated the daughter from her family, removing the wife from the park and keeping the daughter inside, leaving the parents with only vague assurances that their daughter would be returned when she was ready to leave the park. Attempts to forcibly recover the daughter proved futile, and even a well-armed rescue team was unable to overcome the seemingly infinite numbers of SCP-1357-A that SCP-1357 manifested to protect itself. Hopes that SCP-1357 might indeed allow the daughter to leave once she became bored with park attractions also proved to futile; audio captured from daughter’s recording device seems to indicate that when she eventually demanded that SCP-1357-A’s release her, she was instead placed into some sort of machine that altered or brainwashed her into becoming an SCP-1357-A herself. Subsequent park visits by foundation researchers have revealed a new SCP-1357-A that matches the daughter’s physical description but does not display any memories of her past life. Interactions with the SCP-1357-A that resembles the missing daughter reveal that, like other instances of SCP-1357-A, her only thoughts are on how to please park visitors and help them enjoy a pleasant visiting experience. In the end, Playland may offer the ultimate amusement park experience for free… but it might still exact a price way too high. These winters are getting worse every year. That’s for sure. The Old Cattle Rancher doesn’t know if it’s the climate changing, God’s judgment arriving, or if he’s just getting older and struggling to keep up. Probably a strong mix of all of it. Whatever the cause, it doesn’t change the facts. It’s deathly cold out there. His ailing, elderly Ma’s health continues to deteriorate. He hasn’t heard from his delivery driver, Jorge, in days. And on top of it all, his loyal dog, Marybell, is out there, barking into the darkness of the barn. The Rancher heads out to fetch her. He doesn’t know what he’d do if she froze. He whistles, but she doesn’t look back at him. She just carries on barking up that road into the snowy night. The Rancher wades through the snow and peers in the direction she’s looking. “There’s nothing there girl, get inside.” But Marybell keeps barking. She’s insisting. He looks again. Is that…? The Rancher takes off running up the road. All thoughts of cold immediately gone from his mind, he races towards the figure as fast as he can. His frozen fingers fumble at the zipper on his parka. Icy wind stabs the insides of his lungs. Marybell shoots off ahead of him. There, he pulls the zipper down and wrestles the thick coat off of his shoulders just as he reaches the tiny figure. He drops to his knees and throws the coat over the shoulders of the little girl standing alone in the snow. Quick as he can, he wraps it tightly around her, pulling the hood up and over her head. He takes her tiny shoulders in his hands and gives her a shake. “Are you okay? Hello? Can you hear me?” The girl sways for a moment, then collapses. He catches her and, in one deft motion, scoops her into his arms and takes off back down the road in the direction of his farm. Where the hell had she come from? There are no buildings around here for miles. No one uses that road except Jorge. And in this weather, she couldn’t have walked all the way over those mountains, she’d have frozen solid. He bites the finger of a glove and pulls it off. With his bare hand, he clasps one of hers. By the feel of her skin, she pretty much is frozen solid already. He needs to get her warmed up. Now. He kicks open the front door and bundles inside with a flurry of snowflakes and an anxious dog at his heels. The fire’s not quite dead yet, so he rushes over to the hearth and lays the little girl down next to it. He can barely see her at all wrapped up in his enormous coat. She doesn’t seem to be moving. “Ma! I’m home! I… I found someone.” The Rancher grabs two dry logs from the side and throws them onto the fire. He piles kindling high on top of them and blows steadily into the embers at the bottom. They glow and swell in size. No taking yet. He blows again for longer. And again. He feels his head starting to swim. A crackle. A lick of flame. It’s taken! Panting, he turns back to the bundled-up coat on the floor with the child inside. Still no movement. A sickening knot tightens his stomach. What if she’s…? No. Don’t let yourself think that. Not yet. He reaches down and gently undoes the zipper on the parka. His trembling fingers push back the hood. She’s pale. Deathly pale. Her dark brown hair is wet and clings to her scalp. The tips are frozen. At a guess, she must only be 9 years old. Eyes closed, lips a sickening blue. But that’s not the color that scares him the most. On her neck, there’s red. Delicately as he can, the Rancher takes the coat off her shoulders and hangs it up by the fire. She’s dressed only in a plaid shirt, way too big for her. It looks like an adult’s shirt, similar to an old one he used to have years ago. But on her neck, her hands, her feet, is that same deep red. Layers of blood, frozen to her skin. He sits back, his mind blank. He’s seen that much blood before. Sure he has. When you work with cattle, it’s an unfortunate part of the job. He’s seen cows bleed out during childbirth. The girl in front of him? She’s the same color as those orphaned calves that lie crying on the floor. A groaning sound fills the room. The Rancher looks across at the armchair where his Ma sits. She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look at the girl on the floor. She just stares into the fire, same way she always does. Ma groans again. Trying to express something she doesn’t understand. Being in a world without living in it. “Ma, it’s okay. Sorry if I startled you. We have a um… we have a guest with us.” But she just keeps on groaning and staring into the fire. The Rancher buries his head in his hands and lets out a deep breath. Only, the sound of his breath is joined by another. A tiny breath, rattling and rasping through a damaged child’s throat. Trying its best to keep its host alive. The Rancher opens his eyes and stares at the child. She isn’t conscious, not by a long shot, but she’s breathing. A little at a time. The icicles in her hair have turned into rounded droplets of water that glow by the heat of the fire. He snaps back to his senses. He’s not doing her much if she’s just lying there soaking wet. He runs off upstairs and grabs some towels and a fresh flannel shirt to wear. After several minutes of drying her off, he’s confident enough that he’s got most of the water off. There’s still a lot of blood caked to her skin, but as far as he can tell, there’s no wound anywhere that it could have come from. Brow furrowed, he leaves her under a bundle of blankets and fills up the kettle with water. Hanging it carefully over the fire, he walks over to the cabinet and fishes out a tin of coco from the top shelf. Hasn’t been used in years but should still be fine. He would make it with milk, but she’s probably dehydrated. Lifting the kettle’s lid with the poker, the Rancher pours the brown powder inside and waits for it to boil. The little girl’s eyes are open now. She’s staring into the flames. Her lips are looking a little more pink, her skin a little more blotchy. “You’re safe here. Just stay by the fire and warm up a bit. You like cocoa?” The little girl drags her eyes away from the flames. Her expression is mostly blank. She looks too tired to be confused. “I don’t know.” “I think you will. Ma always gave me cocoa.” “Okay.” And with that, the farmhouse falls silent. The little girl stares into the fire. The Rancher watches her, finally feeling the wave of exhaustion crashing over him. His Ma has fallen asleep in her armchair. Only Marybel stays awake through the whole night, staying close to the little girl by the fire. Occasionally licking her toes to try and warm them up. ** By the morning, the snow’s stopped, but the huge drifts remain. As the Rancher walks across to the barn, he finds it hard to believe that just a few hours ago, the winds were whipping at his face as hard as they were. The world this morning is totally still. What the Rancher finds even harder to believe is that there’s a little girl in his house right now, fast asleep by the fire. He checked her forehead when he woke up this morning, and she miraculously hasn’t caught a fever. She can’t have been out in that weather for too long, but it only makes the question more mysterious. Where did she come from? Marybell didn’t get up this morning. From all of the excitement last night, she must have been too tired for today. Walking through the crisp morning air, he can’t really blame her. He shoulders the barn door open. A column of steam curls out of the opening. All of that warmth, humidity, and cattle smell is strangely comforting this morning. But as the Rancher goes around checking on all the cows inside, he very quickly discovers a problem. They’re thin, way too thin. Some of them look to be on the verge of starvation. He’d missed it last night as he drove them down in the dark but in the warm glow of the barn’s lights it’s unmistakable. These cows haven’t been eating properly. He pours out several sacks of grain for them into the troughs, and they all gather round hungrily, filling both their stomachs as fast as they can. The Rancher leans on the railing for a moment confused. Even in this cold, there was still plenty of green grass for them up on the ridge. That’s why he’d taken them up there. They should have had no trouble eating until the snow came in last night. He doesn’t like this one bit. Last time Jorge had driven down and collected some of the meat, he’d had a few questions about the quantity being smaller than usual. Were the cows sick at all? Not that the Rancher could tell. But now looking at them it’s clear as day. Something’s up. ** “You hungry?” The little girl nods. They sit across the table from one another eating homemade bread and soup. Ma stays over by the fire. Marybel slowly wanders over to the kitchenette and flops down on the floor, exhausted. “Where you from?” The girl shrugs her shoulders. “You know how you got out here? Remember anything from last night?” The little girl just eats her soup and shakes her head. She doesn’t look particularly scared or worried. Just a little confused. “Where are your parents? Do you have parents?” Again the little girl shrugs. The Rancher sits back and folds his arms. He’s tried to call into town, but his phoneline’s gone out in the blizzard. Not much to be done until this snow clears. He’s got a good relationship with the police around here, if he explains the situation, then it will all be okay. “What do you know? Can you remember anything from last night?” “It was dark,” the girl slurps her soup. “I was hungry, so hungry. Then I saw the light and I went towards that.” “My car.” “No. Well, yes. Later on, it was your car. But before, it wasn’t.” “What was the light then? And where were you?” “I don’t know. It was just… the light.” Now he’s even more confused. But, try as he might, the Rancher can’t figure any of it out and, try as she might, the little girl can’t remember anything more precise than that. ** The pair of them hop into the car and drive back out up the road that afternoon. The snow is piled so high that the Rancher is having to get out twice as often as he did the previous night to clear a track for them. He isn’t actually sure what he’s brought her out here looking for. Clues maybe? He almost laughs at himself at the thought, but that’s probably the best word for it. If he can figure out how she got here, then he can work on understanding who she is and how to get her home. There’s the damage to the phone line. One of the masts has collapsed, sagging heavily on the lines. That’s not something he can fix on his own. No sir. Looks like he’ll have to wait for the snow to melt before making any phone calls again. That could be in one week, that could be in three months. He glances at the child sitting in the passenger seat. She’s just staring out of the window in amazement, wrapped up in as many layers as he could put on her. They may be stuck together for a while. A lurch! The pickup plunges dangerously to the left. The Rancher slams on the breaks, and it comes to a stop just in time. A large chunk of snow in front of them comes loose and slips off the side of the road. It tumbles down into a gully that he hadn’t even spotted. With all this snow on the ground, he has no frame of reference. Everything is just white. “Stay here.” The Rancher opens the door and climbs out. He wishes Marybel was with him, but she’d wanted to stay home again. Poor dog, she must really be going through it if she wasn’t even up for a ride in the pickup. Carefully as he can, testing every step before making it, the Rancher creeps over to the edge of the gully. It’s bigger than he thought, much bigger. It continues down, more and more sharply, for a few hundred feet. All the way down into a… “Ah, no.” There’s a semi down there. A big rig, warped and bent, lying on the rocks. Just a glance is enough to tell the Rancher it’s Jorge’s, but he just keeps staring at it in disbelief. It can’t be. It… But it is. “Stay in the car.” The Rancher reaches past the little girl and into the backseat. Grabbing a pair of crampons and some rope, he straightens up and looks at the girl. She knows it’s serious, he can see the concern on her face. “Stay in the car,” he repeats. By the time the Rancher makes it down to the truck, his legs and back are killing him. All this work over the last 24 hours is going to start taking its toll sooner or later, but some things have to be done. He pauses by the semi. It’s on its side, he’ll have to climb up onto it and try to open the door. Some things have to be done. He hoists himself up and manages to clamber onto the metal door. It’s badly crumpled, and the window is smashed in. He doesn’t fancy his chances of being able to get it open. One look through the window shows him that he won’t want to do that anyway. Blood coats every inch of the inside of Jorge’s truck. The cabin that the Rancher is so used to seeing and sitting in is almost unrecognizable. Smashed glass is sprinkled across every surface, with a dark brownish red layer of gore frozen into everything else. There, in the midst of it all, still wearing a seatbelt, is Jorge’s body. It dangles like a limp carcass at a butcher shop. Like the cows he hangs in the slaughterhouse. And like those cows, a large chunk of Jorge is missing. His fat stomach is gone, not just cut open but gone. The tops of his thighs too and much of his chest. So much of him is just missing, open arteries and lifeless nerves dangle in place. That must have been a hell of a crash. The Rancher reaches over and pulls Jorge’s cap down over his eyes. Not much else to be done right now. Ain’t no way he can clean this mess up by himself. But as the Rancher climbs up the valley, his mind starts to connect some dots. Dots that leave a sick feeling in his stomach. He’s seen that much blood somewhere else, or rather on someone else, just last night. He slams the door to the pickup shut and starts to drive back down the track. Since the snow’s stopped, all of the drifts that he’d cleared earlier remain clear. It’s only a few minutes drive back down to the farm. He doesn’t say a word the whole way, and neither does the little girl. She clearly senses something’s up. The sick feeling in his stomach remains. He pulls up the handbrake and the two of them sit in silence outside the farmhouse. “There was a truck in that valley. Did you know that?” “Yes.” “Is that where you came from last night?” “I don’t remember.” “Was he…” the Rancher stops. “Jorge didn’t have any kids. What were you doing in his truck?” “I don’t know.” “Did he… was he…” The Rancher can’t bring himself to accuse his best friend of the words that almost left his mouth. “Do you think you might now remember because something bad happened to you?” “I don’t know.” The Rancher closes his eyes for a long moment. Silence fills the pickup. “Come on. Let’s get inside.” But inside wasn’t the safe haven he’d been hoping for. Ma’s been throwing up. Not just once but a few times. She’s distressed, groaning aimlessly for someone to come and save her. Marybel is pacing around the room yelping and whining. The Rancher immediately goes upstairs to get some rags to clean up with. Perfect timing. As usual. But he stops in his tracks when he comes back down. His Ma’s stopped moaning. The little girl is kneeling by the armchair, holding the old lady’s hand. The room is calm. The little girl gently places the frail hand back on the armrest and comes over to take the rags from the Rancher. Returning to the old lady, the girl goes about mopping her up as best she can. Marybel slumps back down on the floor. ** And that is how the four of them exist for the next few days. Ma gets sicker steadily, but the little girl stays by her side all day long, caring for her in every way. The Rancher’s glad of that. It gives him the time he needs to help his cows outside. None of them are in a good shape. Whatever it is, they’re still getting thinner. He feeds them all the grain they’d normally need, and then some, and they always finish it off. Yet none of them are getting any fatter. The Rancher leans on the railing, trusty dog by his side. His energy is starting to really lag behind what he needs. The last couple of days, even though he hasn’t done all that much, have totally taken it out of him. “What do you think it is, Marybel?” He looks down at his little friend. She’s looking thinner, too, actually. But she’s been eating just fine… It hits him. Tapeworms. As soon as the word comes into his head, it makes total sense. His cows, his entire herd by the looks of things, have been riddled with tapeworms. “Ah hell.” He hasn’t got anywhere near the amount of medicine needed to give some to all of them. Even if he did, a lot of them are looking pretty far gone. The chance of reinfection would be high. He needs supplies. He needs Jorge. Marybel whines softly next to him. He knows what they have to do. ** Laying Marybel down carefully by the fire, the Rancher administers the tapeworm medicine. For a few hours, they lie there together. He strokes her side waiting for her to pass it. The little girl watches over his shoulder. His Ma sits back in her chair, mumbling to herself. He hasn’t talked to the little girl anymore about Jorge yet. He isn’t sure what there is to say. Maybe he should ask if Jorge was sick. After all, the cows clearly have had these tapeworms since before the other night. Jorge may have picked up contaminated meat from him last time he came. Maybe… Marybel passes the worm on the rug. The smell…! The Rancher uses the tongs next to the fire to pick the worm up. It’s long and pale. And dead. He tosses it into the fire and puts the tongs in the flames for a bit to sterilize them. The worm sizzles and pops in the flames. The sound makes his stomach crawl. The Rancher glances around and sees the little girl staring at the tapeworm. He looks past the girl to his Ma sitting in the chair. Her turn next. ** But as that night and the following morning reveal, it’s too late. His Ma’s groans turn into cries of pain. She openly sobs by the fire, clutching at her stomach. Every time the Rancher tries to give her the medicine, she just vomits it back up. Each time she vomits, there’s more and more blood mixed in. The little girl gets more and more upset. It’s not fair on her to have to witness something this traumatic and disgusting, but there’s nowhere else for her to go. She shouldn’t even be here at all. The fact that she is means she has to help. That’s all there is to it. By sunrise, his Ma has passed away. There is nasty red bruising all across her abdomen, which tells him she must have bled out internally from this worm. He’d been too late to realize what was wrong. Too late with the cows and too late with his Ma. He covers his Ma with a blanket and tells the little girl not to go and wash her hands. He needs to check on the cattle. Sure enough, during the night, a handful of them died too. The calves. They were the ones to go first whenever something like this happened. Mother cows stood over their calves, licking their heads. Willing them to wake up. The Rancher drags each body out to the back and burns them. He can’t risk any more contamination. As the carcasses burn, he allows himself to cry. ** But when the Rancher comes back into the house, it’s full of noise. A noise that takes his brain a long time to comprehend. Crying. But his own. Not the little girl either. No, it was a new sound: it was a baby. A newborn child screaming at the top of its lungs. The Rancher can’t believe what he’s looking at. The little girl is sitting by the hearth with Marybel at her feet. In her arms, drenched in blood, is a baby. The girl looks up at him and smiles sweetly. “It’s a boy.” Then she turns around to his Ma's body under the blanket. A sickening red patch soaks through the fabric, right over where her stomach would be. “What the hell happened here?” “I’ve got a little brother.” Securing and containing SCP-1003 has proven… challenging. This is largely because the tapeworm that causes all of this damage is virtually indistinguishable from echinococcus granulosus, the common variety of tapeworm that causes hydatid disease. The tapeworm, designated SPC-1003-1, follows the same lifecycle as other regular worms. Its eggs come into contact with an animal through contaminated meat, saliva, or unclean surfaces and are ingested. Once inside the gut they grow and latch onto the inside of the digestive tract where they feed on the nutrients of the food traveling past them, steadily growing bigger and stronger. Once mature, they lay eggs which pass out in the animal’s excrement to continue the process. Infections spread quickly, particularly in unsanitary conditions amongst livestock, and can often be difficult to contain as, by the time the symptoms - nausea, weight loss, fever - start to manifest in the infected, the worms have likely already reproduced and have a new generation growing in the guts of other animals. As far as the foundation is aware, SCP-1003 follows this normal pattern in all observed animals, except humans. When a human ingests an egg from this tapeworm, a very different creature starts to grow in their gut. Human embryos, with the same genetic code as the tapeworm, begin to form. The rate of their growth is greatly accelerated, however. By just 8 weeks, they are as mature as the typical 3-week-old neonate - or newborn child - although similar in size to an 8-week-old embryo at 13-16cm. Many eggs usually enter this ‘fertilization’ period, but almost all of them die before having a chance to develop much beyond the early stages. They stand the best chance of survival when buried in the hepatic tissue, where they can absorb plenty of nutrients from their host. The host at this point usually starts to experience mild symptoms. Lethargy, the occasional stomach cramp, nothing particularly severe… yet. The embryos that survive soon develop rows of temporary razor sharp. At this point, passively absorbing nutrients is no longer enough for them. They bury their teeth into the soft tissue surrounding them and begin to eat. Once they enter this stage, their rate of growth increases exponentially, the more flesh they consume. Eventually burrowing out into the world, the Tapeworm Child is born drenched in blood. The size and apparent age of the child that emerges from the corpse are determined by the size of the person they consume. For example the child eating its way out of the Rancher’s Ma appeared to be only a 10-month-old child as there was very little of the frail old woman for it to eat. By contrast the little girl who emerged from Jorge’s gut had plenty of fat to feast on and so was able to grow to the size of a 9-year-old. Once the child emerges, the teeth that they’d used to eat their way out quickly come loose and are replaced by regular human teeth. The children themselves have no memory at all of where they’ve come from or what they are. They have the same motor and linguistic skills that a regular child would possess at their age. Nothing, aside from their DNA, marks them out as being any different from the children around them. Blissfully ignorant, just like the children around them. It is theorized that many of these children end up in orphanages. With no birth certificates or identifiable parents, they fall through the gaps in the system, quickly lost to the world. The only way to really track them at all is to follow the infections they cause. You see, these Tapeworm Children have one final curse they must live with. Their bodily fluids, their saliva, and sweat, contain the same tapeworm protoscolex that will develop into SCP-1003-1 as soon as it is ingested by another creature. Making the cycle start all over again. If you want to track down a Tapeworm Child, and I highly advise that you don’t, all you have to do is follow the trail of nasty stomach infections, internal bleeding, and freak pregnancies amongst the outcasts of society. It, unfortunately, will not take long. There are currently ten instances of SCP-1003-2 in containment. The children live in Bio-Research Area 13 under strict supervision. Researchers are only permitted to enter their cells whilst wearing full-body biohazard suits, but first must have Level 4 security clearance, and must have written permission, and can only enter with specific research goals agreed. All staff are regularly tested for the presence of any kind of tapeworms in their system. No other animals are permitted in this facility. Everyone in this school knows to step aside when the goth girl is on the move. She strides down the school hallway, confident that no one will challenge her as the undisputed ruler of this high school. It’s not just her dark wardrobe or her black nails and eyeliner that intimidate the other students – her domineering attitude and sharp tongue make her feared. She brushes past a gaggle of underclassmen, who wilt under her devastating gaze. “Beat it, dorks,” she hisses, jerking her head to indicate that they should get out of her way. The other students disperse instantly, afraid to chance really getting an earful. Her terrible reputation means that no one ever makes trouble for the goth girl. But it’s more than just her attitude that keeps her on top. It’s also all those rumors around her. The rumors started last year, just after a new transfer student arrived in their school. She was a younger classman, who shared the goth girl’s same dark fashion sense and sensibilities. Students even saw the younger girl occasionally hanging out with the school’s resident goth population. But it was no secret that the goth girl didn’t like her. Maybe she felt like this younger girl was homing in on her territory or even angling to take her place among the goth crew. Whatever the case, other students couldn’t help but notice how the goth girl’s lip quivered or her eyes flashed whenever the younger girl tried to worm her way into the goth gang’s meet-ups. Then, one day, the younger girl didn’t come home from school. The younger girl’s parents reported her missing and organized a whole search party. The police spent weeks tracking down every lead, desperately looking for anything that might tell them what became of the missing girl… but found nothing. Rumors spread around school that the goth girl had something to do with it. After all, hadn’t the younger girl been her biggest rival? Hadn’t she always hated the younger girl? And, if anyone at this school would have had the chutzpah to actually do something sinister… it would be her, right? Despite all the gossip, though, no evidence ever surfaced to link the goth girl to the disappearance. The police even interviewed her several times, but she always denied knowing anything. “Yeah, I didn’t like that little brat,” she said in the police interview. “She was always getting underfoot and thinking that she could hang with us. But that doesn’t mean that I did anything to her. I mean, it’s not like I would have REALLY wanted to hurt her!” The goth girl concluded her statement with a knowing smirk, as if she was pleased with herself for getting away with murder. But you can’t build a case out of a smirk, so even if the police suspected anything they were forced to let her go. Eventually, life at school returned to normal. Other than a few fading missing child posters still fixed to telephone poles around town, most students eventually forgot about their missing classmate. But the goth girl’s fearsome reputation persisted. Could she have actually had something to do with that younger girl’s mysterious disappearance? Now that other students thought she might have actually killed someone, they naturally found her even more intimidating. The goth girl didn’t mind, though. After all, she already thought most of the other students were normie losers, anyway, so she liked that they gave her a wide berth. The goth girl walks toward the end of the hallway, pushing open a designated fire exit door and slipping out behind the school. Today, the other goths are hanging out behind the school building. They nod curtly as the goth girl joins them. “What’s going on, losers,” she says, adopting an aura of bored detachment. “I was just telling them that there’s this haunted game you can download,” says the goth boy. “It’s all messed up. Like, the game knows all your worst secrets, and the more you play, the more it taunts you. Then, when you finish, you just disappear.” The other goths snicker at the story. None of them really believe it, but it makes for a fun spooky tale to help set the atmosphere as the sun sets. But one girl is more skeptical than the rest, to the point that she’s almost insulted by how obviously fake this story is. “What do you mean, you just disappear?” asks the girl. The boy shrugs. “I dunno. I just know that no one ever sees them again.” “I don’t believe that at all,” say the goth girl. “That sounds made up.” “No, no,” says the boy. “It’s 100% real. It’s called ‘The Book of Tamlin.’ “Okay, sure, whatever you say. And who exactly is Tamlin?” The boy shrugs. “I don’t know. Clearly, I haven’t played it, since I’m still here.” The girl rolls her eyes. “That’s ridiculous. I’ll show you right now.” She whips her cellphone out of her backpack and starts to thumb through the app store until she sees it: The Book of Tamlin. It’s right there in the store? That just makes this whole story seem even sillier. She would expect that, if there were a real haunted app, it would only be accessible via the dark web or maybe a strange glitch that randomly installed it into doomed victims’ phones. But it’s right here, for anyone to download! With a skeptical smirk on her face, she punches the button to begin the installation. “It’s right here in the app store,” says the goth girl. “Any of you chickens gonna play?” The other goths eye each other nervously. Sure, they were all pretty quick to dismiss the ominous story about this weird game before. But now that their friend is challenging them to actually play it, they don’t feel quite so confident. The goth girl snorts derisively. She wonders why she bothers hanging out with these poseurs. They’re the closest thing that she has to friends, since so few other students even dare approach her… But what does a bossy prima donna like her really need with friends anyway? She watches as the game loads up the intros screen and then gameplay begins. She snorts again. The Book of Tamlin appears to be a hidden object game, where the point is to discover various objects hidden in a larger image. This is baby stuff, thinks the goth girl. “Find the 10 black cats in the cemetery,” instructs the game as it pulls up a cartoony image of a graveyard. The goth girl’s finger hovers over the screen, and she quickly taps it whenever she spots a black cat crouching behind one of the pixelated tombstones. Is this supposed to be scary? The screen fades, and an empty room with a pair of doors fades in. The goth girl intuits that she’s supposed to pick one to advance to the next screen. Rolling her eyes, she selects the door on the left. The next scene looks familiar. Too familiar. It’s a bedroom… her bedroom, in fact! She recognizes the dark décor and the black clothing thrown on the floor. She narrows her eyes suspiciously. Surely that’s just a crazy coincidence, right? She eyes the other goths, but they don’t give any indication that they were expecting this twist. Are they playing a trick on her? ‘Find the outfits that make your parents ashamed to be seen with you,‘ says the instructions. She grits her teeth. What’s the deal with this stupid program insulting her? She knows that her parents don’t exactly approve of her fashion choices, but this stupid game can’t know that. It’s probably just guessing that any young person who plays the game will probably have had quarrels with their parents about the way they dress. That’s pretty normal, right? Again, the empty room with the two doors appears. This time, the goth girl chooses the one on the right. The next screen after that is a picture of a pretty garden, and the instructions say to pick out ten pretty flowers. The next is a barnyard with instructions to find five cows. The goth girl starts to relax. That weird screen with her room must have just been a fluke. Otherwise, this game seems pretty mundane. But the next screen makes the goth girl’s face go as white as a sheet. Her eyes bug out of her head and sweats starts to bead on her forehead. No. No way. There’s no way that this next screen could be real! The image that appears is familiar to her. It’s a real-life place. She knows because she’s been there. It’s an image of a particular ravine, deep in the local woods. People sometimes throw old garbage down there, so it’s full of old washing machines and wrecked cars. Years ago, an old oak tree fell across the chasm, and now the dead log functions as a makeshift bridge. Sometimes kids dare one another to cross it. The instructions read: ‘Find the girl who wanted to be part of your club.’ The goth girl doesn’t need to search the image to know what she’ll find. She knows, deep in her heart, that the hidden object that she’s being instructed to find will be a broken body lying at the bottom of the ditch, half hidden under old blankets and debris. How could this game know? She was so careful. She remembers last school year when that younger girl kept trying to usurp her place in her clique. It made her so mad! But that younger girl seemed to look up to her, to think of her as the leader of the group and the one who she needed to impress in order to be accepted. That was good. The goth girl knew she could use that to her advantage. She told the younger girl to meet her in the woods, by the old ravine, late at night. Of course, it was nothing sinister, it was just for a little initiation test to prove that the younger girl could take her place as part of their gang. The younger girl was only too excited for her test! The goth girl was waiting at the ravine when her younger rival finally arrived. “I came as fast as I could,” said the younger girl. “What do you need me to do?” “Listen, I see how you want to hang out with us,” said the goth girl. “But you have to prove yourself if you want to be part of our group. But you have to understand, us goths, we embrace the darkness. We’re not scared of the void. We only take the coolest and the bravest, the kids who aren’t afraid of death. So you have to show me that you’re willing to look eternity in the eye. All you have to do to join us is to cross this ravine over that log over there.” She pointed at the fallen log. The younger girl looked frightened, but she nodded. The goth girl half-expected her to turn tail and run home, but she was surprised to see her rival make her way toward the log. Maybe she wasn’t as much of a poseur as the goth girl thought! The goth girl didn’t mean for anything bad to happen, she really only wanted to scare the younger girl. Maybe she could freak her out enough that she wouldn’t want to hang out with them anymore, and then she wouldn’t have to deal with that little pest anymore! The younger girl clambers up atop the log and slowly starts walking across the deep gorge, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. But the peeling bark of the old log is more slippery than it looks, and it’s hard to keep her footing in the dark. The younger girl makes it almost halfway across the ravine before she loses her footing. With a yelp, she lurches to the side and falls down the slope, tumbling head over heels, and landing amongst the garbage with a sickening crunch. The goth girl screamed in shock. She stared down in the ravine, seeing the younger girl lying still at the bottom, her neck bent at an impossible angle. It was obvious that the fall had killed her instantly. The goth girl knew she was in trouble. Or was she? Nobody knew she was out here, nobody knew that she’d asked the younger girl to meet her here. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut and nobody could pin this on her. The plan worked. She worked out her alibi and stuck to it during all the police interviews, never deviating, practicing her story until it sounded natural. The cops fell for it, clearing her as a suspect before moving on in their investigation. For a whole year, she had carried this terrible secret. Of course, it got easier over time. She gradually convinced herself that the whole thing was a terrible accident, it couldn’t have been prevented, she had nothing to feel guilty about. And yet somehow, this game knew! This game knew exactly what she had done! The phone slips from her palsied fingers and drops to the ground. The other goths look at her in confusion. They’ve never seen their leader in such a state of terror. What could have spooked her so bad? “Which of you made this dumb game?” she snaps. “It must have been one of you… fess up!” “We don’t know what you’re talking about,” says the goth boy, “I already told you, it’s supposed to be haunted and…” “I don’t know what you think you know, but you don’t know anything!” shouts the goth girl, hysterical in her fear. Has she been found out? Was this entire game just an elaborate ruse to trick her into confessing her guilt? Well, she’s not going to fall for it! She’s still the queen boss of this school and if any of these losers think that they can knock her off her perch with a silly game… they’re dead wrong! “What do you mean ‘we don’t know anything?’” The other goths are murmuring amongst themselves. Of course, they’ve heard the rumors about their leader as well, but they never really gave them much credence. She may be a little sharp, but that doesn’t make her capable of murder. But the way that this game has freaked her out so much is really beginning to make them wonder. The goth girl is frantic now, seeing her control slip away as the other kids begin to mull the possibilities. She can’t believe this! She wonders, desperately, if someone was there that night to see the whole terrible accident play out... or maybe she let something slip without knowing… what other explanation could there possibly be? “I’m out of here! Leave me alone! Don’t follow me!” she yells as she stomps away. The other goths don’t make any move to follow, intimidated by the wrath of their leader. But when the goth girl throws open the door to head back inside the school, she’s confronted with an unexpected sight. Instead of the long gray hallway, lined with lockers, that she expected, she instead sees a single empty room. It couldn’t be, but it looks exactly like the empty room from the game, the one that she glimpsed between levels. “This isn’t supposed to be here!” she cries. Behind her, the other goths stare in confusion. They too recognize the room from the game, but they can’t figure out for the life of them how it’s managed to appear in real life. What’s going on? Is her guilty mind playing tricks on her? No, that can’t be… the reaction of the other goths shows that they see it too. She doesn’t think she can trust her senses, but she also feels an overwhelming urge to step into that empty room. “Don’t go in!” calls the goth boy, but it’s too late. Internally her rational mind is screaming at her to stay out, but she can’t control her feet. She steps inside and the door swings closed behind her. The goth boy runs to the door and yanks it open, hoping to help his terrified friend. But beyond the door he sees nothing but the ordinary hallway that’s always there. The mysterious empty room is nowhere to be seen. And the goth girl has completely vanished with it. Not many people would say that SCP-1590, better known as The Book of Tamlin, is any fun. SCP-1590 is a downloadable app SCP-1590 has been designated as Euclid, and seven copies of the game are currently held by the foundation in a containment locker for experimentation purposes. Whenever the foundation discovers new instances of SCP-1590, information technicians initiate an immediate DDoS attack on the hosting server, and an MTF is to be sent in to appropriate all hardware. Any systems that were able to download copies of the game before the DDoS attack should be infected with the 'ComAmA' computer virus to prevent unwitting innocents from playing the game. SCP-1590 is a one-kilobyte program, or 'application,' designed for use with touch screen hardware such as tablets. Attempts to view SCP-1590's coding reveal only the numbers 1 through 66,666 in numerical order, but on the front end, SCP-1590 plays as a mostly ordinary video game in the hidden object puzzle genre. Like other hidden object puzzle games, the player is given a list of objects that they must find in a scene within an allotted amount of time. What makes SCP-1590 unusual, though, is that as the game progresses, the scenes and hidden objects become more personal to the player – often referencing traumatic or unsettling events from the player’s life. It is not known how SCP-1590 is able to gain such intimate knowledge of a player, but since some players report that SCP-1590 seems privy to personal secrets that have never been revealed to another person, it is unlikely that it’s just due to very good research on the part of the game’s designers. The game always begins with the same dedication screen, containing the message "To Joey, who taught me how to be cool.” The dedication continues, listing another name who “who almost made it out." This second name changes with every play-through, but is always the name of the previous person to play the game. The dedication screen is followed by an animated cut scene, with a humanoid silhouette standing on the deck of what appears to be an oil tanker. The screen turns bright white, then returns to the oil tanker. A yellow wall, larger than the ship, has been added to the scene. The wall's appearance causes a wave to crash over the ship, waving the humanoid overboard. The screen fills with bubbles, and the words 'The Book of Tamlin' and 'Start Game' appear overlaid on the bubbles. The significance of this animated sequence, as well as the title ‘The Book of Tamlin,’ if any, is currently unknown. When a player chooses 'Start Game,' the title screen fades into an image of a cluttered room. The user is presented with a series of tasks, directing them to find objects hidden in the room image. The allotted time to find every object in a scene ranges from one to twelve minutes. Once the user finds every object in a scene, a set of doors appear on screen, and the player must choose one to progress in the game. The game continues through a random number of screens, labeled from 7 to 43. Eventually, if the user fails to find all objects in a scene within the time limit, the next scene will be an empty room. The words "You've found out everything there is to find about the House! Now all you have left to find, is the way out!" appear on the screen. At this point, the game ends, and cannot be replayed by the same user. The actual length of the game appears to vary from player to player, but even players who appear to win the game, always finding all hidden objects within the time limit, will eventually be shown the same end screen and receive the same message. As strange as the game is, what happens next is even stranger. Within seventy-two hours of completing the game, whether a player has ostensibly won or lost, the player will encounter the final room from the game in real life. They will find that some ordinary door, possibly in their home or work place, no longer leads to the room it should lead to… but instead leads to the empty room from the end of the game. If someone other than the player attempts to pass through the door, they will find themselves not in the empty room from the game but instead in the room that the door normally leads to. If the player passes through the door, though, they disappear into the empty room. Any tracking devices cease to transmit after the user passes through the doorway. The Foundation currently has no idea who or what is behind SCP-1590 or how the game manages to access users’ memories. It’s also not clear what purpose the game solves, whether it’s intended as a therapy device to help subjects’ work through hidden trauma or as an instrument of justice to punish wrongdoing. Either way, you might want to make sure you have a clean conscience before you download any new mysterious games for your phone. You never know when you might find yourself confronting The Book of Tamlin. You can never win a fight in Minnie Mouse ears. The Girlfriend learns that lesson the hard way in the car driving through Florida. No matter how articulate you are, how many one-liners your brain throws together on the spot, or even how right you are, if you are wearing Minnie Mouse ears, you just won’t win the argument. ‘You said it was all booked!’ she yells, throwing her arms in the air and sending drops of iced caramel latte all over the inside of the rental car. He snatches the drink out of her hand and plants it firmly in the cupholder. He yells back at her that it wasn’t his fault, how was he supposed to know the payment was declined? ‘You didn’t even check for a confirmation email?!’ she scowls and crosses her arms. Her boyfriend glances across at her and laughs. ‘I just can’t take you seriously in those,’ her Boyfriend says, pointing at the Minnie Mouse ears. She punches the button to wind the window down, rips the ears off her head, and is about to throw the big black ears out the window… only she can’t do it. Looking at the little bow, she feels her bottom lip start to tremble. She deflates, feeling the fight go out of her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I just really wanted to go to Disney World.’ ‘I know.’ The pair of them drive in silence for a moment. The fight wasn’t really about Disney. None of their fights were ever about what was really wrong. They’d always pick stupid, superficial things and shout about those, but not say what was really going wrong deeper down. That said, not getting to go to Disney World isn’t just a superficial thing to her. Growing up in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, she was very much used to having to explain to people where she was from. Sleepy Eye, yes, that’s its real name. It’s near New Ulm. Near Mankato? About 2 hours from Minneapolis. If you don’t know where Minneapolis is, she can’t help you. Anyway, this trip was her first real adventure. She’d never left Minnesota much before. The flight down to Florida had been her first time on an airplane. All to come to the Happiest Place on Earth. Only, they got to the front gates, and her boyfriend realized his payment had been declined. Do they have the money to buy two new tickets on the door? Of course not. They’ve blown it all on airfares, car rental, airport food, and a pair of Minnie Mouse ears. ‘I’m sure there are plenty of great things to do in Florida,’ her Boyfriend says, trying to sound optimistic. ‘For free?’ He doesn’t reply. They just drive on in silence. Without a ticket to go to Disney World, they have no choice but to spend what little cash they have left on a motel for the night. It takes them about an hour to get there. The Girlfriend gets straight out of the car and into their room, slamming the door behind her. Her Boyfriend will just have to take a walk for a bit. There are cockroaches in the sink and some questionable stains on the bed, walls, and every flat surface in the room. There is apparently a pool out the back, but she’s heard the stories of alligators roaming around this state and is in no mood to roll that dice in a place like this. She opens YouTube on her phone and puts on a horror video to listen to in the background. That calms her down, she loves that kind of thing. After 20 minutes, there’s a soft knock at the door. Looking apologetic as anything, her Boyfriend nudges his way into the room, holding a brochure in his hand. She snatches it off him without a word and reads it with as grumpy of an expression as possible. Spooky Self-Guided Tours in Florida! Visit the infamously haunted Pensacola Lighthouse today to chill your bones in the Florida heat. Explore the scariest spot on the coast for FREE! With a special Disney twist… Okay fine. Her Boyfriend does know how to cheer her up, but she can’t let him know that. He’s still supposed to be in trouble. But the following night, as the pair of them approach the lighthouse in the pitch darkness, she can’t help but crack a smile. With the light at the top turned off and the railings surrounding the building stabbing sharply into the air, the place certainly looks pretty haunted. The brochure tells them that the place is a maritime museum during the day but is currently closed to the public for maintenance. However, there’s a spare key to be found right under… ‘Got it!’ Her Boyfriend straightens up proudly and turns to hand her the key that he retrieved from under the flower pot. She scowls at him, to make sure he still knows he’s in trouble for not getting them into Disney, but she does secretly feel a little glimmer of affection. He’s always been the first behind the couch during horror movies, so he’s clearly trying his best to make it up to her. The creaking noise that she was really hoping for doesn’t come when she opens the door. It opens smoothly. Her Boyfriend flicks the light switch instinctively and the inside of the museum immediately lights up, showing glass cabinets, old nautical equipment, and a few flags. She groans and switches the lights back off. It’s not exactly a haunted tour if you just turn all the lights on. But the magic of the room is gone now. They’ve now seen everything, nothing lurking in the dark. No shadows. Just a boring old museum. They trudge into the next room. There’s so much street light spilling through the window that they can see practically everything in here as well. It’s a recreation of the old lighthouse keeper's bedroom. A couple of old-looking beds, antique wardrobes, and clothes from the olden days. So much for a haunted lighthouse. ‘This is so lame,’ the Girlfriend groans and switches the light on. Even her Boyfriend isn’t looking scared by any of this. ‘There’s literally nothing to be scared of in here. Can we just go home?’ Her Boyfriend looks apologetic again. He’s really tried to salvage this vacation, but it just hasn’t happened. She can’t be too mad at him. ‘You know what, no,’ she says. ‘Let’s at least finish looking around this museum, then we can go. We can just switch on the lights, read the exhibits and see the view from on top of the lighthouse.’ So they do that. The pair of them go back into the first room and start reading through the signs under each of the displays. There is a diagram explaining all of the different knots that sailors used to tie. A long paragraph all about how the lighthouse used to burn oil but now runs on electricity generated by… The Girlfriend yawns. Without the adrenaline of any ghosts, museums are much harder work in the middle of the night. It isn’t even Disney-themed like the brochure promised. The only Disney thing in here is that Mickey Mouse mascot in the corner. It doesn’t even fit with the rest of the museum, just a random costume on a mannequin. It must be almost 7 feet tall. Her Boyfriend is staring at it real close. He leans in, examining the material up close under the bright museum lights. ‘This thing’s weird,’ he says. ‘I wonder how old it is. Look, the white’s all faded, and it’s got this fur effect…’ CRUNCH! Mickey Mouse chomps onto her Boyfriend’s arm with a ferocious set of teeth. Neither of them reacts at all, frozen by total disbelief as Mickey stands there, his huge, rat-like fangs embedded in the Boyfriend’s arm. He yanks it from the cartoon character’s jaws, blood leaking from the wounds. How can this be happening!? Mickey’s eyes flick between the two of them. He raises a gloved hand and waves. The Boyfriend shrieks, turns on his heels and runs, clattering into one of the exhibits as he goes. He crashes into her and the wound on his arm hits her in the chest. She looks down, confused at the bloodstain on her shirt, then back at Mickey Mouse. He gives a little shooing motion with his hands. Run. Now it’s her turn to scream. She grabs her Boyfriend and bundles him out of the room. Mickey was standing right by the entrance. They’re gonna have to hope there’s another way out somewhere deeper in the museum. They run through room after room, every few steps turning to see Mickey following them. He isn’t running at all, he’s sauntering along, arms swinging cartoonishly around. Just like in Steamboat Willie, he’s whistling a tune to himself as he goes. That must be the door out of here! The pair of them crash into it and go tumbling into the next room. There is blood everywhere. Her Boyfriend is looking more and more pale by the second. They’re not outside though, they’re in a small circular room with a spiral staircase running up, up, up into darkness. Mickey’s whistling is getting louder. They don’t have a choice here. The Girlfriend jumps up and hauls her tiring Boyfriend to his feet. Putting his unwounded arm over her shoulder, she half carries him up the stairs, feeling the metal spiral shudder under them with every step. Halfway up, she looks back over her shoulder. Mickey is standing in the doorway. He waves enthusiastically. Her legs are burning by the time she reaches the top of the lighthouse. Barging open the door, she throws her Boyfriend rather unceremoniously up onto the balcony around the big light. Panting, she turns back around to look back down into the darkness below them. Mickey is standing by a big switch on the wall. ‘Huh HUH!’ he laughs and flips the switch. A big clunking sound comes from the light next to her. Very slowly at first, it starts to spin. The light flickers on dimly, dimly at first, then gets brighter. Faster and faster it spins, brighter and brighter the beam until it’s blinding. She raises an arm to shield herself from the piercing light. Against the dark of the night, her eyes can’t adjust between light and dark fast enough. She’s going blind up here. From below, she hears a heavy footstep on metal. Then another. The whistling starts again as Mickey cheerfully makes his way up to them. She glances down at him. He waves happily up at her again. She almost waves back instinctively. No, now’s not the time. She needs to come up with a plan. But her brain just can’t do it. For all the horror movies she’s watched, all the times where she’s screaming at the TV telling the protagonist what to do, now that she’s in one for herself, she’s got nothing. Oh wait, maybe she does have something. A pair of gloved hands appear on the door frame, gripping the wood tightly. A smiling Mickey Mouse pops his head around the door, blood all over his chin. He just stays there for a moment, eyes flitting between her and her Boyfriend, bleeding out on the floor. ‘Huh HUH!’ He sticks a comically large shoe out from the doorway and steps out onto the gallery to join them. The light swings around and shines in his face, as soon as it hits him, he bears his teeth, thousands of them jammed, and shrieks in their faces. That’s it. The Girlfriend runs at him, fast as she can. At the last moment, she jumps, bends her legs, and, with all the force she can muster, two-foot kicks him in the chest. The giant mascot is really solid, he’s so heavy that all of her efforts only just about knocks him off balance. But it’s enough. Tripping over his own giant shoes, Mickey falls backwards. His back hits the railing, and for a second, it looks like he’s going to be okay, but his momentum is just too much. His feet fly up into the air as he tips back over it, tumbling down into the darkness and laughing all the way down. CRUNCH! Mickey lands, impaled on the spiked railings outside the lighthouse. One of the rails stabs straight through his head. His smile freezes in place. His laughter stops. Her Boyfriend is not looking okay. He’s barely conscious now, lying in a sickeningly large pool of blood. They need to get him to a hospital fast. Still not recovered from carrying him up the lighthouse stairs, she now has to haul him back down them. The pair leave a red trail all the way through the museum, but that’s the last of her concerns at this point. Not looking across at Mickey lying dead on the railing, the Girlfriend dumps her Boyfriend into the passenger seat of the rental car and goes round to the driver’s side. She doesn’t have a license but she did a few lessons this year. Should be fine, the roads will be empty. All she needs to do is get them to a hospital. Her Boyfriend is groaning in the passenger seat. She starts fishing through his pockets for the keys. She glances up at the mirror. Mickey is still lying on the fence motionless. The door to the museum is closed, just like how they’d left it. Or wait, did they leave it open? She tries the other pocket, her Boyfriend is trying to say something. She shushes him, he can tell her later, but he keeps trying. Raising his uninjured arm, he points at something on the dashboard. Her Mouse ears. What’s the big deal? They’ve already dealt with Mickey Mouse. No, wait. Not Mickey. Minnie. BANG! Two large dents appear on the car’s roof right above their heads. The Girlfriend desperately turns back to her Boyfriend, searching pocket after pocket for these keys. Why does he have so many damn pockets on these shorts?! She glances out the window and stops dead still. Peering through the glass at her, head upside down as she leans over from the roof, Minnie Mouse waves at her. The gloved hand stops moving and points at the third pocket down on the left. The Girlfriend reaches into it and finds the keys. Minnie gives a big double thumbs up, tilts her head back, and slams it into the glass. BANG! BANG! Again and again, she pounds her forehead on the windshield. The glass sags and fractures into smaller and smaller pieces. The Girlfriend doesn’t have time to sit and wait, though, she stabs the keys into the car and starts the engine. Slamming the accelerator to the floor, the car shoots off into the night. Minnie gives her another double thumbs up, winds a hand back, and punches it through the window. The Girlfriend screams. The hand grabs the top of her Boyfriend’s head and starts to slowly twist it around. No matter how much she swerves the car, the Girlfriend can’t knock the mouse off the roof. Round and round her Boyfriend’s head goes. Crunch! His vertebrae detached and grate against each other. His head is looking all the way backwards at his seat, but Minnie keeps turning it. Round and round until he’s looking straight forwards again, neck crumpled and splitting, eyes lifeless. Minnie puts a hand to her mouth and giggles. Oops! The road disappears from under the car, and it freefalls for a second, the nose tipping forward. Crash! The nose lands first, tipping the car forwards and throwing the Girlfriend through what remains of the windscreen. She tumbles across the sand, feeling her arm snapping underneath her as she goes. In a blur, she tries to get to her feet but collapses. Rolling onto her back, she stares up at the stars as the sea laps against her cheek. A pair of giant round ears with a little pink bow block her view. Minnie peers down at her, spotting the girl’s broken arm. With two giant gloved hands, she reaches down and takes the arm in her grip, breaking it back the other way and shoving it together until it resembles how it used to look. Minnie gives her the double thumbs up. The Girlfriend doesn’t even try to move. This is it. She’s accepted her fate. But Minnie looks sad. Putting her hands under the Girlfriend’s armpits, she lifts her up and puts her back on her feet. She makes that same shooing motion Mickey did before. The Girlfriend stumbles back a couple of paces but falls over again. Exasperated, Minnie throws her hands in the air, picks the Girlfriend up again, and puts her back on her feet. Minnie points at her. You. She then makes a little running motion with her fingers and points off up the beach. You run. ‘Just kill me,’ the Girlfriend says, exhaustion wracking her every word. Minnie puts her head in her hands, even more exasperated than before. The Mouse puts her hands together and makes a begging motion. Please? The Girlfriend just stands there. Minnie throws her arms in the air, looks down at the girl, and shrieks bearing all her teeth. She stays put. Minnie pushes her over, jumps down into a straddling position, and punches the Girlfriend in the head with her gloved hand. Pain fills the girl’s head, shooting the fear back into her. With nothing left, the girl pushes herself free and stumbles away from Minnie. She hobbles up the beach, blood flowing freely down either side of her head. She’s going as fast as she can, but it’s barely faster than a walk. Behind her, Minnie is covering her eyes and counting on an outstretched hand. Playing hide and seek. There’s nowhere for her to go though, nowhere to hide. They’re just on an open beach stretching out in front of her and behind her. Nowhere to go except… She splashes out into the sea, up to her knees, her waist, her chest, now she’s just fully swimming. Her broken arm screams at her from the motion. She barely has the strength to kick. Salt water splashes up into her ear holes and feels like it’s washing straight into her brain. The world sounds strange and choked. The girl cranes her neck around to see Minnie standing on the shore. The Mouse waves at her enthusiastically. The girl waves back. Minnie giggles. The two of them stay like that for almost an hour: the girl steadily dying in the sea, trying to stay afloat; Minnie waiting enthusiastically on the shore. With each wave, the girl is slowly brought closer and closer to the mouse, until she’s lying helplessly at the creature’s giant feet. The last thing she sees is a pair of giant round ears. Turns out she had been wrong. You can absolutely win a fight with a pair of Minnie Mouse ears. Next time you are considering going on vacation in the state of Florida, it would be wise of you to avoid reading any brochures you may come across just in case you come across SCP-3640. A seemingly harmless brochure, SCP-3640 can be found all across the state though it is currently unknown how they come into being. These brochures will promote self-guided tours within the state, all of areas that have particular ghost stories, folklore, or rumors of hauntings attached to them. These tours are free and promise tourists an up close and personal look at the haunted history of Florida. However, most are not prepared for just how ‘up close’ these tours end up being. If you read this brochure and decide to go along to the location advertised at the time it lists, you will be met with instances of SCP-3640-Alpha. In this case, these creatures manifested themselves as Mickey and Minnie Mouse. However, they can take the form of any uniformed mascots associated with the Walt Disney Media conglomerate. These mascots will hunt you down mercilessly, but with all the charm and squeaky-clean joy we all know and love. Live ammunition does little to stop these SCPs when directed at the body, but a clean headshot has been proven to do the trick. It is fortunate then for our tourist couple that Mickey’s head was impaled on the railing. What is less fortunate, however, is that they were there together. This is because SCP-3540 has a few interesting rules for how it operates. In order for SCP-3640-Alpha instances to engage in the hunt, every member of the party has to have read the brochure. If a group of five go to a haunted house at the designated time, but only four of them have read the brochure, they will enjoy a nice spooky but safe evening. If all members of the party have read the brochure, however, the same number of mascots will manifest and hunt them down. For a group of twenty college students, you can only imagine the colorful range of Disney characters that come out to play. These SCPs will also only remain within their state borders. If you find yourself being hunted down, you can either run for the border or find a good place to hide until the times allotted for your self-guided tour come to an end. It remains unclear how these SCPs grow, reproduce, or where they go outside of their hunting times, if they continue to exist at all. Who knows, there are a lot of back rooms in Disney World with all mascot costumes lying around… The Walt Disney Company is under continuous surveillance to ascertain any link between SCP-3640 and the brand themselves. To this day, a letter from the Company to a local governor in 1979 is the only tie to have been found between them and the creatures. It reads… Dear Governor Askew, The Walt Disney Company thanks you for your cooperation in this matter regarding the unlicensed Walt Disney character operators. Please pass along the following information, collected by the outstanding men and women of the City of Orlando's Police Department, to the Florida National Guard: If a character is spotted, call to get its attention and then rapidly flash your flashlights at the costume. If it does not flinch, fire on sight. Aim at the head if possible; else, aim at the knees to disable them and then finish them off with head shots. Body shots have been shown to lack effectiveness. Deceased characters are to be incinerated. No other means of disposal are advised. We are currently pursuing alternative legal means of shutting down these unlicensed operators and hope to achieve a settlement within the end of the year. Cordially yours, The Walt Disney Company All he could see were glimpses, flashes of movement, but he could clearly makeout that there was a girl. He could see the man walk up behind her and slip a bag over her head. There was a struggle. A body being dragged through the dark, and then the sound of a shovel scraping against the hard dirt. The body is thrown into the shallow hole, and as the dirt begins to rain down on her face, her eye opens up. The boy’s eyes open too and he sits up with a panicked jolt. Shaky and covered in sweat, he looks around his dark room and realizes that it was only a dream. The entire morning as the boy gets ready, rides the bus, and sits through school, all he can think about is the dream… and the girl. A group of teenage girls are out for a ride in one of their father’s sports car convertible. They’re having too much fun, and driving much too fast down the dark country roads. It doesn’t take much, it never does, just the shadow of an animal bolting across the road but it’s enough to make the driver jerk the wheel, causing the car to lose control. All of the girls scream, but none more than the one who is tossed from the sliding, spinning car. The girls stand around their dead friend and make a solemn pact, no one will ever know that she was with them. But what will they do with her? One of them points towards the woods and everyone turns to look at the dilapidated shed. As the girls, now dirty from their long night of digging and then filling a hole, emerge from the shed into the dim morning light, none of them are aware that beneath the dirt, the girl is still breathing. The boy gasps for air and struggles in the dark. He throws the blankets off of him before realizing that he is safe in his own bed. Another breakfast, another ride to school, another day of classes where the boy can think of nothing but the girl from his dreams. Who is she? He’s never seen her in his life, he’s sure of it. But then why does she keep appearing in his dreams? The boy is snapped out of his deep train of thought by the teacher slapping his desk and he apologizes before focusing on his studies once again. The look on the woman’s face is a mix of sadness… and annoyance. She doesn’t know how much longer she can go on like this. It never stops, how can someone cough so much? The woman sits in her chair and tries to push away the same thought that comes to her over and over… that it would be better for both of them if it would just end. The girl coughs loudly in her bed. The disease has ravaged her lungs and it takes all of her willpower not to scratch at the burning, itching sores on her face and chest. She looks towards the door with dazed eyes and sees her mother enter the room. She’s carrying a tray with soup just like she always does at this time, even though she has no appetite at all. As her mother gets closer she can see that the tray is empty… and it isn’t a tray in her hands, it’s a pillow. The girl can barely muster a scream as the woman places the pillow over her daughter’s face. As the mother walks out of the old shed in the backyard and towards the house she stops for a moment. Can she hear the sound of coughing coming from the shed? That morning at breakfast, the boy’s father tells him in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t want to hear any more about the girl. It’s just a dream, and he needs to put it out of his mind. What he needs to be focusing on is school. The note from his teacher said that he isn’t paying attention in class and if that keeps up he’s going to have much bigger problems. The boy promises, no more about the girl. As the boy stares out the bus window, it isn’t his fault that thoughts about his dream rush into his head. Because as the bus drives along the country roads he catches a glimpse of something down a long, tree covered driveway - it’s the house from his dream. The shed door opens with a creak, allowing a sliver of light from the full moon to fall inside. The boy enters the shed as quietly as he can and goes inside. He soon emerges with his bike, and a shovel strapped to his back before riding away from his own backyard into the night. The boy stops his bike at the bottom of the driveway leading up to the old, abandoned house. He rides up the drive and doesn’t even consider stopping at the house, his destination is somewhere else. The boy lets his bike fall to the ground in the backyard and stares at it… it’s the shed he’s seen so many times before despite never seeing it in person. It’s dark and quiet, the shed silhouetted against the large, bright moon. He approaches the only door on the small shed and reaches for the handle. It opens with a loud, rusty squeak. The boy takes out a flashlight and turns it on, illuminating the shed’s interior. Inside is nothing except for a wooden bench sitting on the dirt floor. But wait, there is something else. A spot on the ground appears different, blackened, almost as if it were burned. This is the spot though. This is the place the boy keeps seeing in his dreams. He knows she’s down there. She needs his help. The boy thrusts his shovel down into the dirt but it doesn’t even scratch the surface. The ground is cold and hard. He strikes down again and the shovel pierces into the dirt. The shovel suddenly falls to the ground though as the boy begins to cough. He drops to his knees as the coughing becomes a fit. He can’t stop and now he can’t breathe. It feels like his throat is filling with… something. He falls to the ground, still coughing as he feels whatever is filling his throat and lungs moving and vibrating. With a final, great hacking cough he unleashes a swarm of creatures from his mouth. He lies in the dirt, struggling but unable to get any air, as the buzz of thousands of locusts drowns out his final noises. It’s no surprise that what this young man ran into wasn’t a dream at all, but an interaction with an anomaly that has since been classified as SCP-4595, but also has the quite simple and appropriate name of… Witch. SCP-4595 is the designation given to a small room located inside of a woodshed, that is itself found behind a home near the town of Jasper, Indiana. The house appears to have been abandoned for some time, and there are no reliable records of who the home’s most recent or original owners were. The only item inside the woodshed is a simple, rough hewn, wooden bench, though at the time of the anomaly’s discovery, two other objects were found as well. The first was a small shovel, the type that might be used for gardening. The shovel appears to be ordinary in every way, except for the very tip which has what looks to be a bloodstain on it, though tests have been able to retrieve any genetic material from the discoloration. The second object was a small human skeleton. The body of the deceased person was removed from the woodshed, and an autopsy revealed that it had belonged to an adolescent male, roughly 11 to 13 years old. While the exact cause of death was unable to be determined, it is extremely likely that it was due to the anomalous effects that SCP-4595 produces, but more on those in a moment. Further examination of the woodshed reveals that the word “WITCH” has been scrawled on the door with charcoal, though it is unknown who wrote the message and whether it is meant to serve as a warning or has some other purpose. It is highly likely though, that the word is referring to the final element of SCP-4595, the body that is buried beneath the woodshed’s dirt floor. Ground penetrating imaging tools were brought in to investigate the shed, and researchers discovered that underneath one portion of the floor that appears to have been scorched at some point, a body is buried roughly one meter beneath the surface, which has since been designated as SCP-4595-A. Scans have revealed the body to be a humanoid figure, vaguely feminine in appearance. It’s limbs are twisted in a painful, and unnatural manner, and there are several large wounds present on its face, chest, and neck. But perhaps strangest of all is that despite evidence at the site pointing to the location not having been disturbed for many years, the corpse buried beneath does not seem to show any signs at all of decomposition, still appearing as it most likely did at the time it was interred in the ground. You are most likely asking yourself why the SCP Foundation has relied solely on subterranean imaging in order to assess the state of SCP-4595-A, and why they don’t simply dig up the anomalous corpse. The reason why they haven’t is due to the anomalous effects present at the site. Testing on SCP-4595 has concluded that anyone who enters the shed and remains there for any substantial amount of time will begin to experience a number of effects. First, they will start to feel paranoid, getting the impression that someone is watching them. This purely mental effect is quickly followed by a physical one, where the individual’s skin will start to itch. Those who linger in SCP-4595 long enough will eventually begin to violently scratch at themselves in an attempt to relieve the itchiness. These effects, while very uncomfortable, will eventually subside if they leave the location, and it is very likely that they are meant to serve as a warning of what will happen if one partakes in the most dangerous aspect of SCP-4595, which is disturbing the body buried beneath it. Anyone who attempts to impact SCP-4595-A by attempting to dig it up or otherwise remove it from the location, will quickly experience a horrendous anomalous effect. The individual will soon find that they are experiencing a shortness of breath, and soon will begin coughing and choking, and be unable to breathe at all. This is due to a phenomenon in which any empty space in their chest cavity, lungs, airways, stomach and intestines, will completely fill with Schistocerca gregaria, better known as the desert locust. The insects will continue to appear within the individual’s body until they expire, a process that typically takes mere minutes. Any locusts that manage to escape the individual’s body, most often through the mouth and nose will disappear into a vapor that quickly dissipates the moment they cross the threshold of the woodshed’s doorway. So far, no method has been determined that can prevent any of SCP-4595’s effects, and for the time being, no personnel are allowed to enter the anomalous shed except for testing purposes, but even in those cases the disturbance of SCP-4595-A is not allowed. Due to the relative ease with which the Foundation can secure the site and is able to prevent anyone from entering, it has been classified as Safe, with the additional disruption class of Dark and the risk class of Warning. Just what is SCP-4595? Is the SCP-4595-A body a victim? Doomed to an eternity beneath this ramshackle shed? Or is it a monster? Sealed away for some unknown purpose, the only warning for us to stay away being a single word on the door? Maybe one day, we’ll finally know the answer to why SCP-4595 is only known as the Witch. It all started with the roses dying. Only the one bush at first. The Old Man had come out to water his garden the same way he did every morning. It was looking sad and brown, leaves drooping and branches hardening. Just the one bush in the corner. But the next day, the bushes on either side of it had died too. Within a week, it was that whole corner of the garden. As the Old Man puts on his gardening gloves at the sink and stares out of the kitchen window, he knows that something is seriously wrong with his poor plants. The flourishing garden, so neatly maintained throughout all of his retirement years - his pride and joy - is now steadily dying before his very eyes. Living in a small one-story house, there isn’t much left for him to do. Out in Bushey, right on the edge of what could be considered London, there is very little going on with his day. Inside the house, he hangs all of his photos of the Lancaster Bomber that he and his squad flew in the Second World War. Although those days are long behind him now, he chose to live here because on the hill that his house is on, he can see the planes taking off and landing from the nearby RAF base. And where does he like to sit and watch the planes? From his immaculate garden. The Old Man scowls at it. The perfectly trimmed hedges, blossoming trees, uniform grass, and colorful beds are all being ruined by a dark stain steadily spreading from the back right corner. Starting with that rose bush in the corner and spreading out, everything in a rough circle measuring close to 15 feet is withering away and dying. Not on his watch. The kettle finishes boiling. He has to use his old gas hobs to heat up the water. The cooker is apparently long past its lifespan. The ignition stopped working years ago, so he has to use matches to start it. If he leaves on the gas by accident… well, there wouldn’t be much of a kitchen left. He pours the water out into a mug and starts brewing his morning cup of tea. A few minutes later, the back door slides open, and the Old Man emerges, trowel and cup of tea in hand. Years ago, he would have marched purposefully across the grass, but now he is forced to plod instead. His knees and back are both starting to give out from the years of tending to his precious green friends. But the fire is still in his belly. He reaches the edge of the dead patch and looks down. The lawn isn’t just yellowing, it’s fully brown. He pokes at the grass with his shoe, and it breaks apart to the touch. How strange. He’s never seen anything die off so suddenly and uniformly. It isn’t just a bad bed or an infection spreading around, it’s a clear patch of death where nothing in the given area stands a chance. He steps onto the brown grass and walks to the corner where that first rosebush died. The base of the fence is rotting away in that corner, giving him a peek into his neighbor’s garden. With a good deal of groaning and aching, the Old Man lowers himself onto his hands and knees and peers under the fence. A pair of eyes meet his. The Old Man yells out in surprise. The person on the other end screams. After a moment they look under again and start laughing. It’s just the Mom from next door. She has kids who like to play in the garden on their trampoline while he’s working. They’ll often talk over the fence to him between bounces. ‘I hope I didn’t give you a heart attack!’ she teases. He reassures her that he’s made of sterner stuff than that. Then they get to the matter at hand, what is going on in their gardens? She is having the same issue too. That same circle is spreading out over her side too. Everything it touches is dying. ‘Well then, it has to be coming from this corner,’ the Old Man says. The pair of them pull the fence apart around the corner, creating a little hole between their gardens. It’s short work. The boards break apart at the lightest touch. Before long, they have a little work site ready. There must be something down in this corner that’s causing all of this. Side by side, the Old Man and the Mom from next door start to dig. The soil feels strange to dig through, there’s a kind of stickiness to it, as if there’s a very faint layer of slime binding it together. Could it be a dead animal? That’s the Old Man’s best guess right now, but it doesn’t seem very convincing. Surely that would nourish the soil with more nutrients. It might offset the pH balance a bit but not to the extent of… Crack! The Mom’s trowel breaks. She holds it up to her face, confused. The metal shovel scoop has broken. The tip of it has fallen off. Half snapped, half melted. ‘I just bought this the other day!’ But the Old Man isn’t looking at the trowel anymore. Instead, he’s staring into the hole that the pair of them have dug. Down there at the bottom, underneath the piece of broken metal something is moving. He plants a gloved hand on either side of the hole and leans down over it, peering at whatever it is. Worms. Tiny brown worms. Each writhing and wrapping around the others, tying and untying knots. He straightens up with a groan, takes his gloves off, and pushes himself to his feet. ‘We need to call the Council. There’s something dead down here that is rotting badly.’ The woman from Hertsmere Council was clearly not very interested in sending a waste disposal team down when the Old Man called her. She told him they would stop by the bungalow in three to five working days and hung up. Several calls later, she relented and agreed that they would send a team across that afternoon. Soon after 4pm, a knock comes at the door. The Old Man escorts the waste disposal team around the side entrance, keen for them not to traipse any mud through the house. Clearly annoyed by this, the two workmen for the Council trudge around the side and out into the garden, grumbling about how they have more important things to be getting on with. The Old Man chooses to ignore them, leading them to the back corner of his garden and pointing down into the hole he and his neighbor had dug just that morning. Only the hole is empty. ‘What are we looking at here?’ one of the workmen grunts. It is a good question. There’s nothing at the bottom of the hole, no writhing worms, not even the shard of the trowel. It’s just an empty hole. The Old Man kneels back down by the hole and scoops back the dirt a bit with his own trowel. Nothing. The Old Man hears words muttered that he hasn’t heard since the War as he escorts the two gentlemen back to their van. They slam the doors more heavily than necessary and drive off down the quiet suburban street, leaving the Man standing confused on his doorstep. The next day when he goes out to garden, the circle of death hasn’t grown. It still looks bad. The plants inside it are clearly dead, but it hasn’t spread any further than it was the previous day. The Old Man sips his tea over the sink and stares out at the garden. It must have been next door, that would be it. Before the Council had shown up yesterday, the Mom must have come outside and bagged up whatever dead thing was back there and thrown it out herself. Good. He just hopes it doesn’t stink up the bin. Now to do the sad part of the task and clear away all of his dead plants. Those rose bushes had been planted the year he moved in. His wife had planted them. As he dons his gloves, the Old Man feels a wave of sadness wash over, but before he can experience it too deeply, he notices the holes. The tips of his gloves are gone, his fingers poking clean out. In fact, looking down at his trousers, he notices a pair of holes on the knees of them from where he’d been kneeling in the dirt yesterday. A knock at the front door makes him jump. He goes out to see the Mom from next door standing anxiously outside his place. She’s glancing up and down the street as she talks. She asks if he’s seen either of her boys. He shakes his head, hasn’t seen them all day. He reassures her it's probably nothing. Back in his day, boys used to go out of the house first thing in the morning and be back for dinner. Parents these days are too sensitive, too anxious. The look on her face tells him that he isn’t helping. She mutters something about having seen someone suspicious walking down the street. Someone strange. No use worrying about it for now, she heads off in the direction of the local park to go and look for her sons. The Old Man calls out to her as she leaves, thanking her for sorting out the dead animal from the end of the garden. She looks back at him confused. She hadn’t touched it. All the rest of the day, the Old Man stands by his curtains, twitching them open every now and then to peer out and see if the boys are anywhere to be seen. He’s locked all of his doors and left the keys under his pillow. But sunset comes and goes. Night time creeps over the suburbs. No children in sight. He’s just about to go to bed when he spots someone on the corner of the street. Just outside the glow from the streetlights, the figure lurks over by the street sign. The person moves strangely, taking shaky footsteps and seeming to move slightly aimlessly around the pavement, avoiding the light. He opens the curtain wider and peers outside. His eyes definitely aren’t what they used to be, he can’t really make out who the person is at all. The safe thing to do is to stay inside. A man of his age should make sure not to get involved. But the photo of him standing by his Lancaster on the wall tells him something different. The Old Man straightens up as best as he can and walks over to the front door. He doesn’t take a weapon with him. He won’t need one. He will go over and talk to this gentleman, ask him what he’s doing hanging around this neighborhood at night, and if things go poorly, he will walk back inside and promptly call the police. The thrill of the confrontation excites him a little. He’s missed this. As the cold night air blows against his face, he feels his youthful energy returning to him once again. He calls out to the man on the corner. The shadowy figure stops pacing and slowly turns around to get a better look at him. The Old Man can tell even from this distance that the gentleman on the street is a good deal taller than him, but that shouldn’t matter much. He’ll go over, have some stern words, and that will be that. If this strange man knows anything, it will be that he should respect his elders. The Old Man crosses the road and stands under the streetlight, just a few feet away from the man. Frustratingly, his eyes still can’t quite make out the man’s face. The Old Man clears his throat and rolls up his sleeves. ‘Sir, this is a residential neighborhood with young children and an excellent relationship with local law enforcement. I would advise you to move along, or I will be forced to call the authorities.’ But the sound that greets the Old Man is enough to immediately do away with any of his bravado. His blood runs cold as the figure in front of him starts to laugh. It is a gruff rasping noise, with a slight squelching underneath it. Come to think of it, every little movement this figure makes, there’s a little squelch. The laugh stops suddenly. Sharply. The figure turns the rest of the way around to face the old man head-on. It takes a step forward. Light falls across it, revealing a mass of wriggling, convulsing worms. Millions of small brown worms all weaving in and out of one another, dripping a thick and sticky liquid onto the street. The creature has no face, no features, no skin, nothing. It has the shape of a man, but that is where the resemblance ends. It is utterly inhuman. Utterly terrifying. The Old Man almost topples backward in surprise but steadies himself. A fall at his age would be very bad news indeed. The creature reaches out a writhing arm toward him. Liquid drips from it onto the sidewalk. A small puff of gas comes up from it as the liquid bubbles, burning a little dent into the stone. So that’s what was killing his roses. Fast as he can, the Old Man turns and hurries back to his house. He doesn’t want to turn around for risk of losing his balance. He will get inside, lock the door and call the police. They will know precisely what to do. That squelching sound is behind him, taking shaky inhuman steps to follow him. The Old Man reaches the front door and slams it shut. He grabs the landline in the hallway and immediately dials 999, the British emergency number. ‘Hello… police, please… there is a gentleman loitering outside my domicile… he appears to be made of worms… worms, yes… no, no medication… just myself…’ There’s a thud at the door. Then a second thud. The Old Man drops the receiver and takes a few steps back. No more thuds, no more noises. Maybe that was a slight overreaction. The Old Man straightens up and clears his throat. Nothing to worry about. A sizzling sound fills the hallway. The door starts to look… strange. Two patches are appearing on it, the paint cracking and discoloring. The patches start to bulge outwards, then a drop of liquid seeps through. It falls on the welcome mat and burns a hole clean through it. The Old Man’s eyes widen. Worms. Just two or three at first, then a few more, then a dozen more, burrow their way through the door, each dripping with that foul liquid. The holes grow larger and larger until the creature has two large armholes burnt clear through the wood. The creature grips what remains of the door with its wormed fingers and wrenches the wood apart. It towers over the Old Man as it stands in the doorway, its surface crawling and wriggling as its feet burn holes into the carpet. The book hits the creature square in the chest, knocking it off balance. The Old Man throws another book and another. He knew it was a good idea to keep his bookshelf out in the hallway. He grabs another but hesitates and puts it back; not the first editions. Instead, he heaves the old Yellow Pages in both of his hands and launches it as hard as he can at the worm monster. The book smacks into its chest with enough force to break a chunk of it apart. The creature’s chest bursts open, sending worms flying through the air. Something red falls out onto the carpet. A baseball cap - a child’s baseball cap, half-digested. The Old Man gasps and puts a hand to his mouth. The worms splattered against the wall start to slide down towards the carpet, eating through the wallpaper as they go. Once on the ground, they start to crawl and wriggle back over to their body, reabsorbing into the mass from the feet. The creature straightens up like nothing ever happened. He’s going to need more than books. ‘Hello?’ It's the mom from next door. The Old Man’s eyes widen further. ‘I saw your door was still open, I was just wondering if you’ve seen…’ The Mom appears in the front doorway just behind the monster, takes one look up at it, and freezes. She has a rusty old zippo with a dim flame to light her way. The wormed mass turns round to her. In the same rasping voice that it laughed with earlier, it says one word. Her name. Then it notices something and flinches slightly. The lighter in her hand. For a second, the Old Man, the Mom from next door, and the giant worm monster all look at the tiny little flame. Then it goes out. The creature lunges at her, grabbing her by the shoulders and wrenching her into a ferocious hug. The smell of dissolving flesh fills the hallway as she screams in agony. The Old Man does everything he can not to throw up. He needs to get out of the house. The back door, he’ll go out the back while the creature eats. Step by step, he creeps away from the distracted monstrosity next to his coat rack, trying his best not to be heard. He slides the kitchen door closed and puts a chair against the handle. It’s not much, but it’ll buy him a few seconds. He turns, rushing to the glass sliding doors at the back of the house, and reaches for the key on the side. Only it’s gone. Of course. He left all the keys under his pillow. The pillow in the bedroom that’s right next to… His shoulders slump. He turns back around and sees a crack of light under the kitchen door. A couple of worms are crawling their way under it, gathering together and starting to form on the tiles. That’s it then. It’s all over. Nothing left for it. The Old Man lets his eyes wander around the room. That creature is making its way into this kitchen no matter what he does. All he has are a few precious seconds until those worms are big enough to come after her. He wants to spend those seconds the right way. Feeling his ragged breathing starting to find a steadier rhythm, he walks over to that old picture on the wall. Him and his crew, all his best friends, standing young and proud in front of their bomber. He’d experienced this feeling before, this moment. When you know that your demise is guaranteed, it removes some of the panic. The uncertainty of ‘Will I make it? What can I do? Do I have a chance?’ It’s a sickly thing. It leaves you in the lurch, trying desperately to battle against your own nerves. Once it’s decided, however. Well, then everything becomes a lot clearer. He’d felt this way in the war when their bomber was shot at while flying over occupied France. They were steadily losing altitude and airspeed as they crossed back over the channel. The seven of them had each taken a quiet moment to say their prayers and look out at the stars flitting above them. Only they hadn’t died. In fact, they were all being incredibly foolish. The solution was so simple that when the Old Man’s rear gunner suggested they just drop all their remaining bombs into the water to save weight, the group of them had all burst out laughing. One by one, the bombs dropped silently into the sea. They are probably still down there to this day. No explosions… Explosions. The Old Man smiles. Maybe it’s not quite over after all. He looks back at the ball of worms assembling on his kitchen floor. As more worms crawl under the door and join the mass, it takes on different strange shapes. First a mouse, then a rabbit, a cat, dog, in a moment, it will be the size of a hog. Rushing over to his gas stovetop, he twists all four of the dials all the way up. They whine and hiss at him, spewing acrid-smelling gas into the air. Already his head starts to swim. He’ll have to time this just right. He snatches the trowel and a box of matches up off the countertop and goes to the sliding glass door. This is it. Rasping laughter fills the room as the creature stands to its full height, head almost brushing against the ceiling. The Old Man can feel himself losing consciousness from all the gas in the room. Bang! He slams the trowel against the glass door. Nothing. Bang! He does it again. Still hopeless. The laughter grows louder as he hears squelching footsteps behind him. Bang! This time there’s a slight chip. He hits it again and again. Trying his best to shatter it, but while the little chip grows into a crack it’s not working. A warm squishy mass smothers his shoulder. Worms burrow into his flesh, seering white hot pain throughout his body. That’ll have to do. The Old Man strikes the match. BOOM! Glass shatters, flames bloom out of the house, licking the last remaining healthy flowers. Burning worms fly in all different directions, scattered across the lawn, the back fence and beyond. The Old Man thuds onto his back, looking up at the billowing smoke making its way up towards the stars, as the scared worms burrow their way back into the ground. He would never understand the monster that attacked him that night. Thankfully, this is where I come in. There is something about fire that unlocks this primal fear in almost all living creatures, and SCP-906 is no different. Nicknamed the Scouring Hive, SCP-906 is the blanket designation for a supercolony of worm-like invertebrates that appear to share a semi-advanced ‘hive mind’. The individual worms are dark brown in color and appear to have some level of shared intelligence. When separated from the colony, the worms will crawl towards its general direction but demonstrate a reduced level of problem-solving capabilities. However, once they are back as part of the group, the Scouring Hive is a formidable predator. When hungry, this SCP becomes acutely aggressive, secreting a viscous, highly corrosive acid that can eat through flesh, hair, bones, and clothing, alarmingly quickly. Capable of adapting its form to mimic other animals and humans, this SCP seems to find a level of thrill in the chase. Able to parrot a very rudimentary estimation of human speech, it can say names and even laugh, which it often does while pursuing its prey. It is theorized that this ability to impersonate others is used to lure subjects into dangerous situations. Like young children playing alone in their garden hearing a strange noise from over the fence… While it can take various forms, the Scouring Hive is at its most lethal when it chooses to attack directly. Taking the form of a kind of ‘carpet’ of worms, it flows across the ground quickly, climbing surfaces, squeezing through narrow gaps, and finding creative solutions to stalk otherwise inaccessible targets. It has been known to swarm through various circuitous routes like drainpipes and air vents while on the hunt. Once it has reached its prey, it envelopes them, coating them in that acidic secretion that rapidly breaks down living tissue into a slurry for the worms to consume. While it is unclear whether this is a genuine reaction or just another instance of parroting, this SCP seems to enjoy gloating at this stage. Laughing at and mocking its prey as it consumes it. How a colony of worms has reached this level of cognition is unknown. While tougher than your average garden worms, the Scouring Hive is not invincible. Susceptible to incineration, freezing, and full-body disintegration, SCP-906 can be neutralized if the need should ever arise. When under existential threat, the colony will begin to undergo a period of rapid reproduction. As long as just a handful of worms survive, the colony is able to rebuild itself quickly. That is why SCP-906 is currently held in secure storage in a 3x3m, fully airtight, acid-resistant box. It is kept at a constant 5 degrees celsius. At this cool temperature, SCP-906 operates at a much-reduced capacity. Consuming less food, reproducing at a reduced rate, and moving slowly. Should that temperature ever increase, all SCP personnel are to evacuate immediately and ready themselves to terminate any worms they see with flamethrowers and liquid nitrogen. While this supercolony is currently contained, it is unknown whether more instances of these worms exist outside of the Foundation walls. Slowly burrowing their way through the dirt towards one another, until they have enough to start to feed. The full moon hangs heavy in the night sky over the dense jungle canopy. Below, the darkened palm trees stand silent in the humid air, festooned with vines and lianas, and tropical insects hum in the undergrowth. The night is quiet and dark here, far from the city, in one of the farthest, most secluded provinces of the Philippines. One would hardly expect anyone to be out at this time of night. The young woman is hurrying home, carrying a lantern before her face so that she can see where she’s going in the pitch black of the night. Her swollen belly reveals that she’s at least several months pregnant, her new middle throwing her off balance just enough that she has to be careful not to stumble. A woman in her condition, she thinks, shouldn’t be out at this time of night and certainly shouldn’t have to do household chores like this. But the work has to get done, no matter what! She carries a basket of wet laundry under her other arm; she is returning from washing her clothes in the river and, if she had planned things out better, she would have been home long before the moon rose. Unfortunately, she spent far too much time gossiping with several other village women before getting to work on scrubbing her filthy clothes against the rocks. Luckily, it’s not too far from the river back to her home in the village. The worst thing that might happen, she reminds herself, is that she might lose her footing in the dark and trip over a rock or a root. There’s no chance that she might run afoul of some nocturnal animal, she tells herself… even though the sudden chills down her spine and sweat dripping from her brow reveals the truth, that she doesn’t believe that at all and, in fact, she’s getting more and more nervous as she staggers through the dark. It isn’t just the threat of wild animals. She remembers the stories that her mother told her when she was a little girl, all about sinister supernatural monsters that live in these woods. Of course, those are just stories invented to scare children, she tells herself. She’s a grown woman now, about to have a child of her own. She shouldn’t be worried about bogeymen! She just needs to keep her head on her shoulders and she’ll be sure to arrive home safely. The lantern throws its light over a figure standing below the crook of a katmon tree. The woman jolts, nearly dropping her laundry. She gulps back a scream as she realizes that what she sees isn’t a wild animal but rather a person. “Oh sorry,” says the young woman, her voice shaking a little. “I didn’t think anyone else was still out this late. I thought you were a wild animal.” “Don’t you worry, little one,” says the figure in a soft, sibilant voice. The figure steps forward and the young woman recognizes her. It’s an old woman from the village, her back hunched and her long white hair falling over her shoulders in a messy tangle. The young woman feels inexplicably nervous running into this particular villager here in the jungle at night. Many of the village kids whisper that she’s actually a witch who has all kinds of weird supernatural powers. Even some of the village elders are afraid to cross her for fear of getting cursed. “Where are you going at this hour? Someone in your condition shouldn’t exert yourself so much.” “I’m just heading home,” says the young woman, hefting the basket of laundry for emphasis. “It’s dangerous to be out so late alone. Here, let me walk home with you. There’s safety in numbers, you know.” “T-thank you.” The young woman almost wants to protest that she doesn’t need any help getting home, because she really does not want to spend any more time with this old woman. But, at the same time, she is reluctant to say anything that might insult her… after all, even if the young woman doesn’t believe in witchcraft, it’s not like she wants to take any chances. Besides, the truth is that she is rather frightened of being alone in the dark and any company is better than nothing, even if it’s this strange old woman. “How far along are you, honey?” says the old woman, placing a hand against the surface of the young woman’s protruding belly. The young woman grimaces. She doesn’t like this old woman intruding on her personal space like this. The old woman’s hands are wrinkled and veiny, flecked with liver spots, and her fingers topped with gnarled talons. The young woman wants to cry out at the sight of them but she bites her tongue. Instead, she answers the old woman’s probing question as calmly and politely as she can. “Very nice, very nice,” says the old woman, her rheumy eyes never straying from the young woman’s belly and her hands still rubbing against her stomach as if she trying to reach something within. The old woman makes a strange sound in her throat, like she’s smacking her lips in hunger, but it’s hard to see anything in the dark. The young woman can only nod in confusion, but she quickens her pace. She hopes that she can get home soon and, once she’s home, she can get away from her unfortunate travel companion. The old woman keeps pace, grabbing her younger traveling companion by the arm and holding tight. Her grip is surprisingly firm for such a seemingly frail old woman, and the young woman again wonders if maybe there’s something supernatural about this ominous crone. She wants to pull her arm away, but the old woman’s long claws pinch cruelly into her flesh. It’s as if the old woman is silently warning her: Don’t pull away. I’m too strong for you to escape. "What a sweet little bundle of joy you carry there,” says the old woman as if speaking to herself. “What a delectable little burden.” The young woman knows that she’s still talking about her unborn baby, but all this mumbling just makes her more worried. They continue walking, the young woman staring resolutely at the small circle of illumination thrown by her lantern onto the path ahead, doing everything in her power to not look at the old woman standing at her side for fear that she might scream. Why is she so nervous? Worse, does the old woman sense her fear? The young woman has heard that witches are easily offended and that’s the last thing that she needs now. She continues walking, the old woman gibbering and whispering in her ear, plying her with odd questions about her pregnancy. “Eating well, have you? You know it’s very important to eat right when you’re carrying, so that the baby can be born strong and healthy.” “R-right,” says the young woman. She really doesn’t need this unsolicited advice. She heaves an audible sigh of relief as the village comes into view over the next bluff. Thank God, she thinks, I’m almost home! She just hopes that the old woman will take a hint and leave her alone once they arrive at her doorstep. She wonders if this old woman might try to come into her home or maybe steer her toward some other destination. But what can she do? All she can do is keep walking home and hope for the best. “Is it just you, is it? Is the father in the picture, hmm? I haven’t seen you with any young men lately, have I?” asks the old woman. Her nosiness is really starting to irritate the young woman, enough that she almost forgets her fear. “No, it’s just me,” says the young woman automatically. She immediately regrets that confession. What is this old woman planning? Is she up to some mischief? Now she knows that the young woman lives alone and there won’t be anyone around to see whatever this crone is planning. Her grip tightens on the young woman’s arm as if to warn her again. The village is quiet and dark. Everyone else has already gone to bed by now, so the pair of them walk down narrow, still streets. The only sound is the crunch crunch crunch of gravel under their feet. After what seems like an eternity, they arrive at the front gate of the young woman’s house. “Well, here I am,” she says, a little too loudly and firmly to be completely casual. “This is my home. Thanks for keeping me company on my way home.” To her immense relief, the old woman lets go of her arm. The young woman immediately pulls away, rubbing the deep bruises left by the old woman’s gnarled talons. “Think nothing of it, my dear.” The old woman smiles widely, a long rope of saliva dribbling from her slack lips. Her teeth look jagged and misshapen – it’s hard to see in the dark, but they look more like the teeth of a wild beast than a human. It must be her eyes playing tricks on her in the dim light, though. The young woman can’t help but recoil in disgust, but luckily her face is hidden in shadows so the old woman doesn’t seem to notice. “I’m happy to help. I hope to see you again very soon.” The young woman doesn’t wait any longer. Even before the old woman turns to leave, the young woman scampers across her yard and yanks open her door. She runs inside and pulls the door shut behind her. Her heart is racing and her breath comes in ragged pants. She can feel the baby in her belly kick, suddenly agitated by its mother’s fear. “Shh, it’s okay,” she coos softly, patting her stomach and hoping that her tender voice will help to calm her baby. “I know you’re scared… I’m scared too. That old woman frightened me half to death! They say that she’s a witch and I’d almost believe it. What a strange experience!” She pulls the curtain aside and peeps out the window. The old woman is gone. The young woman looks up and down the street, but sees no sign of her traveling companion. She inhales deeply and feels the tension drain from her body as she lets her breath out. Thank goodness that’s all over! She can’t explain why this whole night has unnerved her so much, but there was just something so uncanny about that strange old woman. She’s glad to be rid of her. The young woman tries to put the whole experience out of her head as she prepares for bed. As she pulls on her night clothes, she startles when she hears something heavy and loud clatter across the roof. It’s not unusual for roof rats or other nocturnal animals to scurry across the roof at night, but this sounds louder than usual. “It’s probably nothing,” she tells herself as she climbs into bed. “I’m still just upset about meeting that old woman on my way home from the river. That whole thing must have jangled my nerves worse than I thought if I’m flinching at every little sound. I’ll be fine when it’s light out. The sooner I get to sleep, the sooner it’ll be morning.” Even though her nerves are rattled, she is quite tired after a long day and it doesn’t take long before she drifts off to sleep. The young woman’s eyes close and her breathing becomes slow and steady, the shallow rhythms of sleep. Inside her head, she might be troubled by strange dreams, but to any outside observer, she is dead to the world. Asleep in bed, she doesn’t react to the clattering on the roof. Whatever is up there is making an awful racket as it drags itself over the roof tiles. If someone were around to watch, they would see that whatever is on the roof is no rat. It’s a darkened figure, almost big enough to be human, but strangely truncated. Two massive leathery wings unfurl behind it, extended to help the strange creature maintain its balance upon the roof. It drags itself forward using only its hands, long talons tapping at the roof shingles as it seeks a loose tile, anything that will give it access to the house below. Its finger finds a crack. Wheezing and panting, the creature leans forward, putting its eye to the crack to peer into the room below. The young woman is asleep in bed directly below. And that’s exactly what this creature was hoping for. The young mumbles in her sleep, her mind filled with disturbing dreams. She’s oblivious when, all of sudden, something drops through that crack in the ceiling. It’s long and slippery and covered in thick, wet mucus. It looks for all the world like a tongue, but it’s far too long to be any human tongue. It drops lower and lower into the room, extending closer and closer to the young woman sleeping in her bed. The disgusting appendage caresses her face, leaving a wet slug-trail of saliva across her forehead, as if it’s looking for something. Then brushes against her lips and the tongue seems to find what it wants. Instantly, it snakes into her open mouth and shoots down her throat. The young woman starts to sputter and choke, her limbs thrashing and flailing – but still, she is held fast in the grip of sleep. Some wild nightmare is playing out in her head – perhaps she fantasizes that she is drowning in a river or choking on some food or being strangled by a fiend. Whatever she’s thinking, it couldn’t be further from the truth: that an alien tongue has jammed itself down her throat. The tongue pushes deeper and deeper inside her until it makes contact with her womb. A trained anatomist might balk at the idea that the tongue could find her womb by accessing her throat, but somehow it has done exactly this, snaking its way through the labyrinth of her insides to find her unborn baby. A sticky aperture opens up at the tip of the tongue, revealing that the tongue is hollow – like a massive soda straw. It sucks up the baby like a vacuum, slurping it up, up, up and out, the bulge of its prey traveling up the length of the tongue like a wild pig swallowed by a boa constrictor. Once the baby is gone, the tongue slides out of the woman’s mouth and retracts back toward the ceiling, disappearing back through the subtle crack. There’s a clatter on the roof again, followed by the soft flutter of leathery wings. The young woman settles back into a deep, still sleep, the awful sensation of suffocation having passed. The rest of the night is peaceful and quiet, but, when she awakens the next morning, she finds that the nightmare isn’t over. She wakes with a strange empty feeling in her guts. Something is very wrong! She throws aside her covers and stares at herself in shock. Her baby is gone! Her rounded belly has deflated back to its pre-pregnancy state and she can sense, as only a mother can, that she is no longer carrying something within her. She shrieks in terror at this bizarre revelation. What could have happened? What could be responsible? That young woman just had an encounter with SCP-5201. SCP-5201 is a humanoid subspecies native to the Philippines, dubbed Homo sapiens visceralis but known by many local names across the Philippine Islands, including the aswang, the tik-tik, or simply the viscera sucker… but it is most commonly known as the manananggal. During the day, an instance of SCP-5201 looks like an ordinary human. At a glance, there is no way to immediately distinguish an instance of SCP-5201 from a regular member of homo sapiens. However, Foundation researchers have found that there do exist certain retinal irregularities unique to SCP-5201, so the agency has developed a portable retinal scanner for use in quickly identifying instances of SCP-5201. SCP-5201 is far easier to tell from an ordinary human at night, when it undergoes a strange and startling metamorphosis. It unfolds a pair of membranous wings, resembling those of a bat, from its back. Even more startling, its torso splits in two. Its upper torso then flies off in search of prey, intestines trailing behind it as it sails through the air, while its lower torso is hidden in a secure location until SCP-5201 can reconnect. SCP-5201 will seek out human prey, most likely relying on a keenly attuned sense of smell, and, once it has chosen a victim, will alight on the roof of their home and then snake its preternaturally long, tube-like tongue into the house below so that it can feed. SCP-5201 feeds by inserting its tongue into the orifices of unfortunate sleepers and sucking out their internal organs as easily as you would suck soda through a straw. SCP-5201 will happily eat human livers, stomachs, and intestines, but its favorite food is unborn fetuses, so much so that instances of SCP-5201 disguised in their human form can often be recognized by their tendency to drool at the sight of pregnant women. SCP-5201 are well known to local humans, who live in fear of nocturnal attacks by the dreaded manananggal. Interestingly, SCP-5201 can be repelled by Abrahamic holy objects, like rosary beads or crucifixes, or can be staked through the heart with sharpened shafts of bamboo – very similar to the means used against vampires in western folklore. SCP-5201 is especially vulnerable when its upper torso is out hunting, so it will always take the utmost care to hide its abandoned lower torso in a secret, secure location. If you can find the hidden lower torso, it is possible to kill SCO-5201 by sprinkling its exposed viscera with spices like garlic, salt, or vinegar or, failing that, even ash or urine. This causes an unusual reaction that is not yet fully understood by Foundation researchers, but will prevent the two halves from rejoining. If the two halves of the manananggal cannot rejoin before dawn, sunlight will kill the creature. If none of these methods are available, it is also possible to repel SCP-5201 by using a specialized whip fashioned from the tail of a sting ray. The SCP foundation currently has an undisclosed number of domesticated SCP-5201 instances held in the Fauna Containment Wing of Site-235. Because this species has been known to practice cannibalism, each specimen is to be held in its own personal containment cell. While there are obvious ethical and logistical concerns with feeding human organs to SCP-5201, the Foundation has discovered that SCP-5201 can still easily thrive on a diet of any newborn mammal with a mass of at least 1 kilogram. Piglets have so far proven to be the most cost-effective and available options, but other species can be substituted as necessary. All entrances to SCP-5201 containment cells are to be guarded by at least two Level-2 personnel equipped with stingray whips, crucifixes, or some other object found to cause harm to SCP-5201. Unlike humans, SCP-5201 have an unusual asexual reproductive process. The lower body can regenerate a new upper torso via a process similar to epimorphic regeneration observed in autotomous lizards. The severed upper torso of an SCP-5201 would leave behind the parent's lower torso to search for a compatible female human. SCP-5201 would attack and consume this human, claiming her lower torso as its own. Smearing ash, urine, or spices into the exposed innards of the lower torso inhibits this process and prevents effective reproduction. The exact origin of SCP-5201 is unknown. Although the creature is endemic throughout the Philippines and historical records indicate that it has inhabited the islands since at least 1500, when it was first described by Spanish sailors to the islands, fossil remains and genetic testing indicate that it is actually an invasive species from outside the Philippine archipelago. SCP-5201 is currently believed to be extinct in the wild, following eradication efforts by the Foundation in the 1990s. An epidemic of SCP-5201 attacks in the early 90s prompted the SCP Foundation to join forces with the Supernatural Committee of the Philippines and the Global Occult Coalition to take action to prevent SCP-5201 from spreading to other countries. Dubbed Project Dipsy, the operation involved amnesticizing the major cities of the Philippines, funding propaganda campaigns to dismiss SCP-5201 as a product of folklore and urban legends, and eventually domesticating the surviving SCP-5201 population for cellular regeneration research. Because of its aggressiveness and taste for human flesh, SCP-5201 specimens regularly attempt to breach containment, and thus, have been given the designation Euclid. And while the SCP Foundation has done its best to eliminate the threat of SCP-5201 in the wild, there’s no guarantee that a few instances of this vicious monster might have slipped through the cracks and possibly even spread out into the wider world beyond its home in the Philippines. You still might want to search your room for any suspicious cracks or holes before you bed down for the night. Because there are very few things less pleasant than waking up from restless dreams to find a long slimy tongue jammed down your throat. The boy and his father have spent the entire morning cleaning out the basement of the boy’s grandfather, and the boy is absolutely exhausted. After yet another trip up those rickety cellar steps, the boy collapses onto the old living room couch. He can still hear his father puttering around downstairs, yelping and gasping in surprise every time he finds some memento of his childhood stashed among the debris. The boy sighs in annoyance. He doesn’t really know his grandfather, so he doesn’t feel any sense of loss as they tear through the boxes and bags in the basement. His father, however, insisted that the boy come along. It’ll be good for us to spend some time together, he said, and the boy suspects that his father is trying to deal with his own guilt about his strained relationship with the boy’s grandfather. Perhaps he hopes that a day of father-son bonding is just what they need to make sure that they don’t grow apart as his father did with his grandfather. The boy, however, doesn’t think that cleaning out a musty old basement should qualify as effective father-son bonding. It’s super boring! Worse, it turns out that the boy’s deceased grandfather was an absolute hoarder who couldn’t throw anything away, so the house is filled with all sorts of worthless garbage. The boy groans. His feet ache from traipsing all those stairs, and his back aches from carrying boxes. He thinks that he deserves a little break. He pulls a small handheld gaming console from the pocket of his hoodie and turns it on. I’ll just play for a couple minutes, he thinks to himself, then I’ll go help dad some more. He won’t mind if I take a short break to recover. The boy is sitting on the battered couch in the living room, playing the latest game on his handheld game console, when his father lurches into the room, carrying a gigantic white plastic box in his arms. “Check it out, sport!” says his dad, a wide grin on his face. “Look what I just found in the basement!” The boy briefly looks up from his game, resisting the temptation to roll his eyes at his father’s annoying enthusiasm. His father is always getting excited for the dumbest things! As for that white box? The boy has never seen anything like it. “It’s a Sega Dreamcast!” the father says as he sets the white box on the living room floor and starts to untangle the mass of wires protruding from the back of the object. “This was my favorite video game system when I was a kid! I guess your grandfather just couldn’t throw it away.” “What else is new,” mutters the boy under his breath, but he bites his tongue as he watches his father studiously pick apart the knots in the tangled wires. Obviously, this hunk of junk has big sentimental value for his Dad. Reluctantly, he slides off the couch and takes a seat next to his father on the floor, and together the two of them set up the Dreamcast. “This had all the best games!” continues his father. “Soul Caliber! Sega vs Capcom! Oh, you’re going to love these!” After a few minutes, his father has the wires plugged into the television and the hand controllers ready. He nudges his son in the side with his elbow. “What do you say, champ? You ready to go mano a mano against your old man with some real video games? I’m about to school you in what REAL games are like. None of this silly… what is it called?... Amongus junk like you play today!” “It’s not called Amongus, Dad,” mutters the boy under his breath but his father is already distracted pulling out old games. His father holds up a CD clamshell and pries it open, revealing a stack of silvery discs. “And look at this! All my old games too!” The boy tries to contain his boredom as his father rattles off a list of his favorite old video games, none of which are familiar to the boy. But eventually, his father reaches one disc that isn’t familiar. “Eurhythmics?” he says, squinting at the title embossed across the disc. “I don’t remember this one. I wonder if your grandfather got it after I moved out…” The father pauses as if overcome with emotion. The boy can imagine what his father is thinking. Did his grandfather buy this disc knowing how much his father loved his Dreamcast video games and hoping that maybe it could serve as a reconciliation present between them? That’s exactly the sort of dopey sentimental thing that his dad would think after spending all morning going through his grandfather’s junk and reminiscing about what could have been. “Uh, it looks like… it’s some sort of dance game?” prompts the boy, hoping to get his father to focus more on the game than his feelings of nostalgia and loss. “Oh, right, right,” says the father. “I wonder why grandpa had this when he didn’t have a dance mat to connect? Maybe you just have to hit the control buttons in rhythm… hmmm..” He holds it up, the reflective disc shining brightly in the light of the overhead lamp, and the boy stares at the silvery disc in confusion. He’s seen pictures of CD-ROM discs before, in old catalogs or even movies. But he’s never seen one in real life. Who even uses discs like that anymore? Everything’s just downloadable from the Internet these days! “What is that, anyway?” asks the boy “A CD?” “This is not a CD,” says his father, a slight edge of annoyance in his voice. The boy rolls his eyes. His father is always acting like he should be familiar with the outdated dinosaur technology of his father’s youth. When will his dad learn, just because this junk as important to his father when he was growing up doesn’t mean that it’s still important to the next generation! The boy holds his tongue, knowing that his father will probably start to sulk if he’s reminded that time marches on… and that he’s no longer as hip and with-it as he likes to think he is. “It’s a GD-ROM,” says his father as if those words are supposed to mean anything to the boy. “It stands for Gigabyte Disc Read-Only Memory.” The boy has no clue what that means, and he hopes that his father isn’t about to start a lecture on the different kinds of obsolete video game tech that he’s suddenly decided are so vitally important for his son to know about. Luckily, his dad doesn’t launch into a long-winded talk; he’s too curious about what’s on this mysterious disc to bother about that now. The father shoves the disc into the Dreamcast and settles down on the floor, gripping the controller with both hands. He’s as excited as a kid in a candy store as he waits for the screen to boot up; the boy can’t remember the last time that his father has been so eager for anything. But his excitement is short-lived as the first loading screen boots up. A cheerful, happy melody plays from the Dreamcast’s speakers. The game title, Eurhythmics, flashes on screen with options for one or two players listed below it. The father clicks over to “two players,” nodding for his son to pick up the other controller. The boy does as he's told. He can’t imagine that this game is going to be any good. How old is it anyway? It’s from when his dad was a kid, so that’s all the way back in the 90s… this game might as well be 100 years old for all the boy cares! Immediately when the father chooses “two players,” the screen starts to glitch. The father yells in frustration, throwing his controller to the floor, but the boy sighs in relief. Thank God, at least now he won’t have to pretend that this dinosaur game is anything good! “I guess it’s busted,” says the boy, ready to turn away from the Dreamcast. But his father is insistent. “No, no, it’s just warming up! Watch, I’ll fix this!” He grabs his controller and tries to click on “Two players” again. The screen only glitches more. “Okay, okay, just gimmie a minute!” says the father. “If this doesn’t work, I’ll just take the disc out and blow on it. I’m sure that’ll work!” The boy stares in confusion. It’s a disc, not a cartridge! He doesn’t see any way that blowing on it will have any effect. His father is just desperately grasping at straws, upset that his attempt at father-son bonding is being thwarted. Meanwhile, the cheerful loading screen music starts to fray, stuck repeating a single reverberating note that gradually degenerates into a tuneless cacophony. The pixels shimmy and wobble on screen, the image fracturing worse and worse as the father struggles to get the game console to respond to his commands. The boy watches the screen with disinterest at first, but then… wait, what’s going on? The more he stares at the screen, the more the random noises and broken graphics seem to form into something strange, something unknowable, but also… something vaguely coherent? He blinks in confusion, his jaw dropping. He wants to call his father’s attention to the bizarre formations on screen, but his father is too busy wrestling with the controller to notice the effect that he’s having. “Dad! Dad! Look at the screen!” says the boy, grabbing his father’s shoulder and pointing. “Huh? What is it? Did it work? What the…” The father furrows his brow in confusion as he notices the wildly oscillating image on the TV screen for the first time. “That doesn’t look like a Dreamcast game at all. It’s all broken! I… I think?” The colors swirl around the screen in hypnotic, psychedelic patterns, and both father and son find themselves mesmerized, unable to look away. The boy is only vaguely aware of what computer graphics in the late 90s would have looked like, but he’s reasonably sure that no underpowered 90s console could produce something this wild. The boy feels himself getting groggy, his brain fogging over as he stares at the wildly oscillating shapes on the screen. He feels like he could almost make sense of them if he just tried hard enough… it’s like looking at one of those old-fashioned Magic Eye pictures, where the image only collapses into sense if you cross your eyes just right. But these strange swirls of color are something far beyond that. The swirls spiral into distinct vortex patterns, to the point that the boy might almost believe that he’s looking at eyes. Yes, that’s it. He’s sure of it! He wants to panic as he becomes aware of the sensation of being watched… he feels like something beyond the screen, some malevolent entity, has somehow gained access to his world via this video game and is now watching him, sizing him up like a predator would size up its prey. He can’t think of anything except those staring eyes with their rotating pupils. He wants to fall forward and disappear into the eternal nothingness of those awful eyes! Next to him, his father is silent. Like the boy, he’s also enraptured by the infinite eyes on screen. “Oh my God,” he mutters, so quiet that the boy can barely hear him. “Do you… do you see the eyes? It’s your grandfather… he’s watching us… from beyond… I know that’s him…” The boy doesn’t know whether his father is right; his father is probably just letting his guilt color his perception, because the boy doesn’t feel like there’s human intelligence on the other side of the screen. Whatever is out there, whether it’s an alien mind from beyond human ken or simply a computer program given awful sentience by a freak accident, it’s not something that the boy can even begin to comprehend. He feels his mind shutting down in the face of that terror, as if his brain simply cannot take the strain anymore. He’s only vaguely aware of his father hitting the floor in a dead faint. That should worry him. He should be frightened, he should want to rush to his father’s side and try to shake him back awake… but his brain can’t make his body respond. He feels his arms and legs getting weak and his eyelids getting heavy. It isn’t long before his eyes drift shut, and the boy collapses onto the floor next to his father. Hours later, after the sun has already set, a car pulls up in front of the house, and the boy’s mother gets out. She frowns as she looks at the front of the house, noting that the lights are on inside and the front bay window casts a yellow square of light across the front lawn. The boy and his father must still be inside! They were supposed to have finished moving all that junk hours ago. She’s tried calling both of their cellphones, to remind them that they should be home for dinner, but neither father nor son has answered any of her calls or texts. She’s not worried, though. They often ignore their phones when they get really involved in an activity, and she suspects – rightly – that her husband probably found some childhood relic in the basement that’s distracted him from getting the task done. She’s willing to bet that the two of them probably haven’t even finished cleaning the basement! She walks up the garden path and puts her hand against the doorknob. The door creaks open. She frowns. Nothing sinister about that, right? Of course, they wouldn’t bother to lock the door if they were still working inside, right? Nevertheless, she feels a strange chill run up her spine. Why is she suddenly so nervous? She pushes open the door and fumbles for the light switch. The foyer is dark – as is most of the house. The only light comes from the living room, and she can that something within is throwing dancing shadows against the far wall. She hears a toneless, mechanical drone emanating from the living room. Are they watching television? That would be just like them to turn on the tube and completely lose track of time! But what TV show would make an awful din like that? She storms into the living room, ready to read her husband and son the riot act, but then she stops dead in her tracks. Her husband and son are here alright, but they’re lying in crumpled heaps upon the floor, staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling. She screams as she rushes to her husband, praying that she’s wrong, that they’re just playing a prank on her, that they just got tired and lay down on the floor to rest… but as she presses her finger against his wrist, she feels that he’s cold and lifeless. He’s dead and has been for hours! Her son, pale and cold and lifeless, lies next to him. She looks up, her gaze connecting with the television screen. It continues to flash vacillating images in an erratic loop, nonsense static that she can’t understand. But, if she didn’t know better, she might almost feel like… it’s watching her. The strange swirling eyes stare back, unblinking and eternal. What started as a misguided attempt at father-son bonding time ended in tragedy, because those GD-ROM discs weren’t ordinary discs at all… but rather instances of what the SCP Foundation has dubbed SCP-4904. SCP-4904 is a set of seven modified GD-ROM discs manufactured by the Sega Corporation; SCP Foundation agents have been able to pinpoint the date of manufacture of each disc sometime between 1997 and 1999. The GD-ROM was a proprietary format originally used for the Dreamcast video game console, developed by Yamaha as an answer to fighting the piracy that was rampant among more standard compact discs and to offer increased storage capacity without the expense of the fledgling DVD-ROM. The GD-ROM seemed promising at the time as it had a storage capacity of a full gigabyte, 42% higher than conventional CDs. Ultimately, though, GD-ROMs failed to catch on and were quickly outpaced by DVD technology. The seven discs in the SCP Foundation’s storage are visually indistinguishable from non-anomalous GD-ROM discs, except for their serial numbers. The serial numbers give some indication of the mystery behind their origin, revealing that they were created by Sega’s enigmatic “R&D-0” division during the height of the 90s console wars. It is estimated that R&D-0 produced a total of between 60 and 100 experimental GD-ROM discs similar to those in SCP-4904, but the rest of the production line is currently unaccounted for. Each SCP-49004 GD-ROM contains one Sega video game, including Sonic Adventure, Sega Rally Championship 2, House of the Dead 2, Sega Bass Fishing, Godzilla Generations, Virtua Fighter 3tb, and an unreleased 3D rhythm game by the name of Eurhythmics. But the result when anyone tries to play any of these different games is always the same. When an instance of SCP-4904 is fed into a Dreamcast console, it causes the optical disc drive's reader to move in unpredictable ways, accessing disc data seemingly at random. At first, the game boots up as expected and seems perfectly ordinary. But when a player progresses past the loading screen, the game very quickly becomes illegible. Sprites and assets blend into each other in asymmetrical chunks, maps recursively render onto other maps, and soundtracks transform within seconds into incessant, oscillating noise. A perfunctory glance at the results seems like absolute chaos, but eventually, observers will start to notice patterns within the noise. These eventually coalesce into complex renderings of landscapes and figures wildly inconsistent with the content of the original games and computationally impossible for 1990s-era video-game hardware to render. Repeated tests by SCP foundation agents have turned up a recurring motif in the images shown by SCP-4904 – spinning discs that resemble malevolent eyes. SCP agents hoped that research into R&D-0 and the man responsible for the discs’ creation might help to explain the reason or the purpose of SCP-4904. R&D-0's former lead hardware programmer Ken Matsuya has said on record that the team encountered numerous problems in implementing the discs' anti-piracy encryption measures. The result was unplayable. Frustrated by this failure, Sega ordered that the encryption project be abandoned, and the prototype discs quietly destroyed. However, it does not appear that Sega’s orders were carried out to the letter. Matsuya himself rescued seven of the discs, hoping to learn more about the issue on his own time, and it’s possible that other discs not currently known to the foundation also survived. With the help of improvised Sega hardware, Matsuya spent the next four years trying to understand the cause behind the discs' erratic behavior. Notebooks recovered from his apartment contain numerous sketches of the disc-generated visuals, depicting fractal combinations of landscape and figures seemingly drawn from places outside of the game data themselves, and stylized spinning discs in the shape of eyes. Matsuya himself met a strange and untimely end when he was found dead from a heart attack in his apartment in August 2003. Stranger still, an autopsy revealed that large portions of his brain stem and limbic system were missing. His death puzzled authorities, since there was no evidence of any human -- or even non-human -- intrusion. Matsuya had apparently loaded one of the SCP-4904 instances in his possession into his home Dreamcast before his death, because the distinctive psychedelic visuals were playing on his television screen at the time that his body was discovered. Foundation agents suspected that the visuals might have some connection with Matsuya’s death, leading to the discs’ subsequent classification and containment, but intensive tests on SCP-4904 by Foundation personnel have failed to shed any light on the situation. Both the discs’ strange behavior and Matsuya’s death remain complete mysteries. Is SCP-4904 a gateway into some other dimension, and its bizarre images a signal from another world? Could it be a message from beyond the veil? Or is it all just due to a simple computer glitch, and Matsuya’s death just a freak coincidence? Whatever the case, the Foundation is doing its best to uncover the truth. SCP-4904 has been given the object class safe, but should be stored in conditions comparable to those needed to keep non-anomalous discs viable. All seven instances of SCP-4904 are kept in a climate-controlled Safe-class storage locker at Site-15. Long-term tests lasting over an hour should only be conducted on reinforced modified hardware to prevent disc deformation or explosion. If he breathes, the bear will see him. Lying flat on his stomach, the Boy has no choice but to watch as the hulking brute eats his father before his very eyes. Lying in the thicket just a few trees away, the Boy knows that any small movement he makes could prove fatal. A bear this large, hunting for its hibernation, will have no issue chasing him down in a split second and doing exactly what it did to his father to him. The Boy is utterly powerless. All he can do is stay deathly still and watch. They’d found the tracks too late. On the way back to camp, they’d been following the wooded cliff that lines the ocean’s edge. Bows and salmon slung over their shoulders, they had been so proud of their catch and the prospect of bringing it back to the tribe that they hadn’t kept their wits about them. By the time they’d seen the enormous prints in the dirt, the sound of lumbering footsteps were already echoing through the trees behind them. The Boy’s bow is too far out of reach, he’d dropped it when his father pushed him into the thicket. He’s got the knife hanging at his side, but he doubts it's long enough to even get through the bear’s fatty hide. In contrast, the only thing protecting him from its bite is the leather hide slung across his shoulders and a woven garment from the tribe’s elders. One slash of the bear’s claw and he’d be… A breeze ruffles his hair. The Boy’s eyes widen in horror. That wind hadn’t come from in front of him, but from behind. Blowing his scent - his fear - directly towards the bear’s nostrils. The Boy plants his muddy palms into the dirt, staring at the animal. Its nostril twitches. Then twitches again. It half turns its head, sniffing the air. Maybe it won’t bother with him. The bear’s turning back to its meal already. The Boy lets out a sigh of relief. And a twig snaps. The bear snarls and whips its head around. For a second, the two of them lock eyes, predator and prey, then the Boy takes off running. Fast as he can, he leaps through the undergrowth, ferns and nettles whipping at his shins. He fumbles the knife out of its sheath and slings the water skin off his shoulder, throwing it wildly behind him. He doesn’t know if he hit the bear, he doesn’t have time to turn around and see. It’s going to be on him in an instant. Up ahead, he sees sunlight streaming through the thick trees. The cliff edge, if he can just get to that, maybe he can climb down and- no, there’s no time. Besides, bears are better climbers, better swimmers… better runners. All the Boy can hope for is that he’s a better jumper. Him and the boys from the tribe have lept off plenty of cliffs along the shore, but never these ones. There are too many rocks, too many shallows. But the thundering of four enormous paws behind him is looming and larger and larger. He can almost feel the bear’s hot breath on the back of his neck. There’s nothing for it, here goes. The trees clear, the sun blasts his skin, a claw slashes at his back, and the Boy launches himself into the air. The wind carries him. The weightlessness of wheeling his arms and legs through the empty sky is almost enough to make him laugh with joy, until the Boy looks down. The cliff is higher, much, much higher than he’d realized. His momentum carries his torso forwards into a tumble. He’s not going to land straight. And he can see jagged rocks everywhere beneath him. The Boy closes his eyes and crashes into the sea. All of the air is slammed out of his lungs. His knee hits something hard and sharp in the water. A swell throws him away from the shore and pulls him deep. Without air in his chest, he can’t float. Kicking hard as he can, the Boy swims upwards, eyes still screwed shut. His face bashes into a sandy rock. No, that’s not upwards. Which was is it? Which was should he swim? The ocean current rolls him over and over. Darkness fills his mind. But his feet find a hard surface, and he pushes against it, launching himself through the water, kicking hard as he can. The darkness fades. Light! The Boy’s head breaches the water, and he splutters for air, rubbing the water out of his eyes, he looks around wildly. The sea has carried him away from the cliff and out into open water. It’s lifting and dropping him with each wave, carrying him this way and that like a flower in the wind. And there, traversing the cliff face, scrambling down the rocks, is the bear. The Boy’s stomach turns. It reaches the bottom of the cliff and sees him there in the water. Tipping back its head, it roars at an almighty volume, deafening the Boy over the sound of the waters. Even from this distance, the animal looks impossibly large. It dwarfs the boulders that line the water’s edge. It slips into the water, barely making a ripple, and kicks off from the shore. Going straight for him, the bear is covering the distance so fast he only has seconds left. With barely the strength to keep himself afloat, the Boy knows he’ll never be able to outswim this creature. Instead, he takes a deep breath and looks up at the woods, remembering all of the happy moments he’d spent in there with his father. A current swells beneath the Boy and almost throws him out of the water. An enormous shadow flies through the depth beneath him. A whale? It couldn’t be. Whatever it is, the shadow is swimming straight at the advancing bear. So fixated on its prey, the bear doesn’t even notice what’s approaching until it’s too late. The ocean explodes. A blast of water, as tall as the cliffs themselves, shoots up into the air and showers the Boy’s head. Somewhere in the midst of the spray, a monster erupts from the depths. Snappings its jaw around the bear, it lifts the animal into the air, and throws it against the cliff. The impact is so strong, that a small landslide follows the bear’s rolling body as it tumbles back towards the water. But the Boy has eyes only for the monster emerging from the sea. Crawling up the rocks with one gnarled foot after another, the Boy can hardly make sense of what he’s looking at. It seems to have some kind of scaly hide, harder than the rocks surrounding it. A wave crashes against the monster as it leers over the bear and sinks its teeth into the animal’s hide. Unable to look away, the Boy kicks out and starts swimming away up the coast. Only once he’s a long way around the bay does he dare to clamber out and back onto land. That night, once the rest of the tribe have gone to sleep, the Boy can’t help but lie wide awake in his tent. Without his father here, it’s just… it’s not the same. Quietly rolling up the hide doorway, the Boy slips out into the night. They’re camped by a small cave with beautiful smooth walls inside. They say it’s the cave of their ancestors, the place where all life started. The fire in the cave has to always burn. Fortunately for him, the cave is empty. The Boy stares up at the wall in wonder. Finger drawings of animals, hunters, mothers, shamans, gods, and forests fill almost every part of it. Only one space remains in the corner, a finger painting of the rocky cliffs with the swelling sea beneath. Dipping his finger into the paint, the Boy sits by the wall and starts to paint. A terrible monster crawling out of the sea, with a scaly hide stronger than any rock. ‘That’s it.’ ‘You know that just from some finger painting?’ The Archeologist turns to the group of researchers surrounding him in the cave. UV lights are set up all along the walls. With the blue and violet shapes revealed all across the stonework, the Archeologist can’t help but empathize with the spiritualism of their long-forgotten ancestors who’d lived in these caves thousands of years ago. The Professor was the one who asked the question. A cold woman, standing well over six feet tall with a crop of fiery ginger hair. To him, she seems less of a scientist and more of a military leader. But what does he know? ‘Walk with me,’ she says and leads him out of the cave. Personnel fills the surrounding area, most of them are armed. Cranes lift huge sheets of reinforced lead plating into place. Several mysterious vats line the edge of the forest, each adorned with more warning and hazard signs than you’d see in a nuclear power station. The two of them have to pause for a moment as three tanks roll past them. The Archeologist breaks the silence. ‘You know the reason I started all my research in the first place? Did I ever tell you that story? Every early civilization in the world - whether it’s Ancient China, Mesopotamia, South America, Northern Europe - all these cultures, you take a look at their mythology, and what do you find?’ The Professor ignores him, instead choosing to bark orders at a group of agents talking over coffee. They all immediately dump their drinks and get back to work. ‘What one thing do they all talk about, even though it never existed? Dragons. All these disparate people with no contact with one another, all of them still draw pictures of dragons.’ The Professor stops walking at the edge of the cliff. The pair of them stand there, surveying the vast ocean stretching out in front of them as researchers, agents, and workers rush around behind them. After a long pause, the Professor asks him to proceed. ‘In Ancient Hebrew texts, when they talk about God creating the world in seven days, what happens on day five?’ The Professor flicks the hair out of her eyes and replies curtly: ‘God created fish in the sea and birds in the sky.’ ‘Not exactly. Look at the original Hebrew. He created all of the fish that team in the sea sure, but he also created ‘leviathan’. A serpent like monster from the depths, as old as the world itself.’ ‘You think that’s what we’re dealing with?’ ‘Maybe… or something worse.’ By nightfall, preparations are operational. Enormous flood lights switch on, one after another, illuminating an enormous steel box with an open lid at the top, surrounded by armed agents, huge net launchers, and several tanks. It all seems a bit excessive as far as the Archeologist is concerned. He isn’t officially still supposed to be here, but in all of the scramble for the Foundation to get the capture site ready, no one noticed that he had stuck around. From the viewing platform several hundred meters away, he has to watch it all unfold through a pair of binoculars. Out above the water, suspended from one of the cranes, is an elephant carcass. The Professor told him that the Foundation had even marinated it for extra flavor. He had only been recruited into this project a couple of months ago, but from what he could tell, it’s been an ongoing priority for the Foundation for several years now. The scale of the operation of just setting up at this site is already mind-boggling, but they’ve been chasing up leads like this for years now. Arriving at scenes they suspect this creature has been sighted in the past and setting up traps for it. He was only brought in out of desperation. The Foundation had exhausted all recent hunting grounds and was trying to cast the net even wider. He’d just been quietly working on his university research paper about ancient reptile drawings when the agents had let themselves into his office. But staring through his binoculars now, the Archeologist knows there’s no chance of this operation actually working. They have floodlights, for crying out loud. No intelligent predator would come anywhere near that elephant carcass. Movement. Not in the waters or in any of the lit-up areas. No, there’s something in the forest line, just behind a group of researchers. He reaches instinctively for his walkie-talkie, then stops himself. How many times had he got jittery before and reported something preemptively? The agents already don’t take him seriously as it is. He can’t be jumping at shadows. But there it is again. A shape moving fast through the trees. He scans the binoculars this way and that, trying to find it. Just a group of researchers there, some agents there, supply crates, researchers, agents, wait. Weren’t there more of them a second ago? He looks closer. Someone’s gone missing. He clicks on the radio. ‘South lookout team, report in.’ Nothing. ‘South lookout team.’ A sickening feeling settles in his stomach. With all those bright lights everywhere, they are casting a lot of dark shadows. He has to do something fast. Running down from the lookout point, the Archeologist takes off running through the trees to the site. He holds his radio up to his mouth as he goes, trying to get anyone to respond, but it’s hopeless. The thicket cracks and crunches under his feet as he tries to make his way through the dark woods, ignoring the feeling that crawls up his neck of being watched. A boulder blocks his way. The Archeologist grabs onto it with both hands and hauls himself on top of it, stopping for a moment to catch his breath. From up here, he can see the floodlit capture site. The tanks and cranes still sit rumbling ready to go at a moment’s notice, but he can’t see any ground crew anywhere. He switches the radio to the open channel and calls out for anyone to respond. The Professor’s voice crackles back at him. ‘What are you still doing here? This is a highly dangerous operation that you don’t have clearance for!’ He yells at her to cancel it. They need to evacuate the site immediately. It’s compromised. She laughs derisively and cuts off the channel. No. She has to believe him! People are dying, and more of them will if she doesn’t… The Archeologist whispers to himself in the darkness. ‘It’s no monster. It’s just an innocent creature. You’re playing with a power you don’t understand…’ It’s strange. For a moment, he swears he almost hears a voice whispering something back to him in the woods, but when he looks around, he’s all on his own. He has to keep moving, the creature could be anywhere. Hopping off the jagged boulder, the Archeologist takes off running through the forest once more, looking over his shoulder every few steps. The light must be playing tricks on him. In the darkness, he can’t see the boulder he was standing on a moment ago anywhere. He bursts out of the treeline and into the clearing right next to the steel box. A ramp leads up to the top of it with a large trap door suspended over the open lid. Well, if he wants to be seen and heard, that’s where he needs to go. The Archeologist runs up the ramp and waves his hands wildly in the air. The tanks all turn their turrets to aim at him. The crane holding the enormous steel lid for the enclosure looms menacingly above his head. And there, marching out onto the field, looking absolutely furious, is the Professor. Her red hair looks more like a ball of flames right now. ‘We need to evacuate the site now. It’s here!’ She snarls and marches up the ramp to meet him. Jabbing a finger in the Archeologist’s face, he suddenly realizes how much taller she is. ‘You are not jeopardizing our one chance of catching this thing. Get out of the way, or I will have you detained. Besides, what evidence do you have?’ But the Archeologist isn’t looking at her. Instead, his eyes stare in horror at the elephant carcass suspended behind her. There was a huge, reptilian bite mark taken out of it. A testing bite, like the ones given by sharks. She turns to follow his gaze, and all of her rage is washed away in a sickening delight. ‘It’s here.’ A scream from the crane holding the elephant makes them both jump. But by the time they look up at the cabin, all they see is a hulking shadow leaping away into the darkness. The Professor clicks on her walkie-talkie and starts issuing commands. No one responds, except the tank crews. She tries again. Radio silence. Now the gravity of the situation really starts to hit her. Eyes wide with panic, she runs off down the ramp, barking into her radio and leaving the Archeologist up here on his own. Suddenly, under all of these lights, he feels very exposed. It could be anywhere in the shadows. Footsteps. Heavy, planted footsteps tremor through the ground. And out of the woods, walks the creature. Several meters long, fat from all of its hunting, the beast that would soon be known as SCP-682 slinks into view. It looks up at him, standing there on the trap door over a metal box and looks like it’s almost ready to laugh at how easy this will be. BOOM! The tank blast hits the creature square in the torso, knocking it sideways. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! The three tanks open fire one after the other, laying round after round into the colossal reptile, kicking more and more dust into the air. Before long, there’s a crater in the ground so large that it looks almost like an asteroid hit it. Smoke and dust fill the air. The Archeologist’s eyes fill with tears. That majestic creature, roaming the earth long before mankind ever did, exterminated just like that. Cowards, that’s what people really are. Cowards. But as the dust clears, a groaning sound echoes around the clearing. The Archeologist shields his eyes and peers into the crater as best as he can. But there’s nothing there. BOOM! He wheels around and almost falls backwards in shock. The SCP has snuck through the haze and leaped onto one of the tanks. It bites and tears at the armored bodywork, doing all it can to destroy it. In a panic, two of the tanks point toward one another and fire, destroying themselves in the process. The creature rounds on the remaining tank and bites down hard on the barrel. The tank fires, the round going straight down the monster’s throat and exploding inside its gut. The backdraft from the blast shoots back through the tank, and a puff of smoke trails out of the hatch at the top. And suddenly, once again, the clearing is quiet. Turning back to the Archeologist, SCP-682 slinks towards him, smoke still curling up out of his leering teeth. With heavy thunking steps, it climbs the ramp towards him, stopping just short of the trap door. The two of them stare each other in the eye, predator and prey. Neither move for a moment, then it opens its mouth. The Archeologist closes his eyes… ‘Do you know that you disgusting creatures deserve this?” He opens them. Did the monster just speak? ‘What do they hope to accomplish by attacking me?” He gulps hard. That whisper he heard in the woods. The rock he’d been standing on. ‘They’re scientists. Scientists always try to learn more things, understand the world better. We think you can’t be killed. So we’re… they’re testing their hypothesis.’ The creature growls. The stench of rotten flesh fills the Archeologist’s nose. It takes a step towards him, then another. The Archeologist runs, he’ll leap off the other end of the platform, it’s a big jump, but he could make it. The predator’s breath is on the back of his neck. He jumps, just as the trap door gives way. With an enormous thud, the SCP falls into the steel enclosure. Before it has a chance to move, the crane unhitches the steel lid, and it crashes down into place, sealing the monster inside. The Archeologist lands in the dirt and rolls onto his back to see the Professor, wild-eyed and cheering, up in the crane’s cabin. He lies there on his back panting and staring up at the stars. A clunking sound echoes through the clearing, and the gurgle of a liquid flowing through pipes. He sits up, adrenaline still pumping through him. The Professor has plugged a pipe into the metal enclosure and is running gallons and gallons of liquid into it. He follows the tube with his eyes, all the way to the enormous hazardous vats on the edge of the clearing. Hydrochloric Acid. His eyes widen in horror. The Professor laughs at him. ‘Come on, cheer up. We’re just scientists, that’s what you said. Just testing a hypothesis!’ The lights go out on Maple street, as a young woman takes stock of her marriage and the man she once thought she knew. She sits at the kitchen counter, absently stirring a cup of tea that went cold hours ago, but she just can't bring herself to stand and heat it back up. She glances at the baby monitor sitting next to her, grabs it, and holds it to her ear. Steady, peaceful breathing. The baby is fine. No one needs a thing from her right now. She stares at the seat across from her, where her husband sits every morning, sharing coffee and breakfast before they start the day. She glances at the clock: 8 PM. He'll be home soon. She'll have to face him, have to find a way to look him in the eye, force a smile. Pretend she doesn't know that he's getting home two hours late, from who knows where. The thought turns her stomach. It wasn't always like this. Their marriage wasn't always a tense charade, their home a haunted house. He was sweet that first year, he'd buy her flowers and take her out to dinner, he'd kiss her in the morning before they'd even brushed their teeth. He wouldn't come home smelling like his secretary's perfume. But ever since the baby, something's been different. The light behind his eyes has gone dim. He won't help with late-night feedings, won't change diapers, most of the time, he acts as if the baby doesn't exist. His own son. He just comes home, stares vacantly at the TV, and expects her to handle everything without so much as a single complaint. She hasn't slept in weeks, she hasn't been down to her art studio in the basement in months. Then, a sound shakes her from her thoughts. She hears the unmistakable rumble of a car pulling into the driveway, and fixes a stiff smile on her face. Maybe she'll leave him, maybe tonight she'll work up the courage to say those words that will change everything: "I want a divorce." The baby barely has a father now, what difference would it really make? The woman's husband stumbles through the door, lipstick on his collar and the smell of whiskey on his breath. He greets her with a kiss on the cheek, more out of obligation than anything else, and grabs himself a can of soda from the fridge. She offers him some stew from the stovetop, he brushes her off, saying "I already ate." She doesn't bother asking when or how, when he supposedly came straight home from work. There's no point, she knows he'll only lie. "Do you want to say goodnight to the baby?" She asks. It's a test, as she watches his face for any flicker of fatherly affection. "Isn't it asleep by now?" It. He calls their son "it." "He's sleeping, but you could still go up and see him. If you're quiet." "I had a long day. I'm tired. I'll see it in the morning." She can't help herself. "Him." "What's that?" "Him. He's not a thing. He's our child." He sets the can on the coffee table with a heavy clatter. "Do you have to nitpick every word that comes out of my mouth?" She deflates at the outburst. "No." He sighs, shaking his head. "Don't look at me like that. I can't stand when you stare at me." She averts her eyes, looking down. "Fine. I'll go up and check on him. You enjoy your relaxation time." That's it. Tonight is the night. She's going to pack a bag tonight. She'll leave, and start a new life, just her and her son. He won't even miss them when they're gone, it'll be better for everyone this way. She'll just go upstairs, check the baby, and wait for him to fall asleep. Then she'll just cut and run. It's not like he deserves a proper goodbye from her, she can go away, go to her sister's place. As she fantasizes about leaving him, spending peaceful days in a little country house with her son, and maybe a dog, she finds that the baby has spit up all over his pajamas. She scoops him up into her arms to make sure everything is okay otherwise, and he's fine, just a mess. As she holds him, he stirs awake and begins to cry. "Oh sweetheart...I'll need to change you, and give you a bath. Shh, shh, it's okay. You're alright." "What's wrong?" Her husband's voice comes from the doorway, startling her. "It doesn't concern you." She can't help herself, her resentment creeps into her voice. "He just needs a bath." "What, you think I can't bathe my own son?" He scoffs. "That's it?" "Well, you haven't done it yet. So." When she turns to look at her husband, there are tears in his eyes. "I'll do it now." Something in his voice is so sincere, she falters in her determination for a moment. Maybe he'll really try. Maybe things will go back to how they used to be. And she really, really needs a rest. So, she hands the baby over to him, and sits down in the soft chair in the corner of the nursery. Before too long, the exhaustion overcomes her and she nods off. In her sleep, she can't see her husband leaving the bathroom to go downstairs and catch the last twenty minutes of the Dodgers game, leaving the baby alone in the tub. When she stirs awake, the crib is still empty. She can still hear the water running, and she knows. She just knows what has happened. What she let happen. No, what he did. A glance into the bathroom confirms her suspicions, and with a primal scream of pain, rage, and heartbreak, she tears down the stairs to confront the murderer himself. She finds him asleep on the couch, and takes a moment to catch her breath, to wipe the tears from her eyes. Did he do it by accident? Or on purpose, to punish her, to free himself from their marriage once and for all, to break her heart beyond repair? It doesn't matter, in the end. What's done is done, whether he meant it or not. But what can she do? What could ever make this right? She wants to scream, to set the house on fire, to tear him to shreds. Then, she spots it: the baseball bat leaned against the wall by the door, in case of an intruder. She picks it up, feeling the weight of the wood in her hands, the heft of it. Swung hard enough, with real intent behind it, it could really do some damage. Slowly, thoughtfully, she walks back toward the couch, raises the bat, and swings. It only takes one good hit to get the job done, but she swings the bat a few more times anyway as something inside of her bends and bends and breaks, until the tears stop falling, until her vision comes back, and everything stops looking like a wash of red. He doesn't even scream, never wakes from his stupor to see the look on his wife's face when she gets her revenge. He's just gone. She wipes the red from her eyes, and lets the bloodied bat drop to the floor. She started the day as a wife, as a mother, but now she's ending it as a killer. He deserved it, she tells herself. He took her baby from her, so she got him back. But why doesn't she feel any relief? Why does she still feel the gnawing grief in the pit of her stomach, feel the darkness clawing at her heart? First thing's first, she needs to get him out of the living room, out of sight of prying eyes and nosy neighbors. She could try to bury him, but where? The yard isn't exactly private, and she's not sure how much she could even dig up before sunrise. No, that won't do. Then the idea hits her, and she grabs him by the arms and begins dragging the lifeless body of the man she once loved toward the basement stairs. He's heavy, much heavier than she expected, but she supposed they called it "dead weight" for a reason. She grunts and struggles as she drags him down the stairs, wincing as his head bumps against the steps before reminding herself- he's not using it anymore. She surprises herself with a laugh, a dry sound echoing in the empty basement. She drags him past the last stair, and he lands on the floor with a thud, in the room that she converted into her home art studio when they first bought the house, back when things were still good. Her eyes dart about the room, the half-finished paintings, the wood carvings she abandoned when she got pregnant, the paints and long-dried-out lumps of clay, the potter's wheel in the corner. Her eyes settle on a metal frame, large and twisted into a vaguely human shape. She had crafted it years ago, intending to cover it with concrete and paint it, but never got around to it. No, she had been forced to put it away. Her husband hadn't liked it, had thought it was "creepy," and "odd," and didn't want her working with such heavy materials. Just another thing he took from her. Another dream he destroyed. It's just about his size, now that she takes a look at it with him lying limply on the ground so close by. With a little bit of muscle, some determination, he would fit right inside. And there are the tubs of cement, still sealed tight and ready to mix, just as she left them. She could shove him into the frame, paint him with layer on layer of cement, and it would be like he had disappeared in the night. A fitting coffin for the man, she thought. A perfect place to hide him, too. No one would ever know. No bones to dig up in the garden out back, no smell of rot seeping out from beneath the floorboard. She smiled to herself, just a little bit. In death, her husband would help her finish her greatest work. She didn't consider herself a wife or a mother, not anymore, but she was still an artist. And he would be her art. As she mixes the cement, she hums a little song to herself, beginning to feel something like peace. Everything is ruined, her life as she knew it completely turned upside down, but she is here in the art studio, creating again. "Not a waste of time now, is it?" She remarks to her husband's body. He doesn't answer. Typical. "Why get an art degree, you said? Well, it prepared me for this, didn't it? I wonder what I'll do with you when you're done. Maybe I'll keep you down here. But that seems like a waste. Maybe I'll get you displayed in a gallery, let people buy tickets to take a look at you. You'll be my masterpiece. You'd hate that, wouldn't you? Me, thriving, creating, all without you there to make snide comments and treat me like dirt." As she waits for the concrete to become usable, she turns her attention back to the metal frame. Time to put her ex-husband in his place. She lifts him, and begins to wedge his body into the metal structure. He is heavy, getting heavier all the time, and left a trail of blood behind on the floor that she would have to clean up and bleach later, but after several sweaty minutes, he is in place. He looks correct to her, sitting there in the frame. Ready to become something new, something different, something better than he ever was in life. The concrete is ready, and she begins to smooth it over the body and metal frame, flesh and blood, and sweat and grit, layer upon layer upon layer. Mix, smooth, wait, mix, smooth, wait. All the while she talks to him, weeps bitter tears into the concrete. At one point, she pricks her finger, her blood dripping into the mixture and becoming part of the sculpture. For days she carries on this way, not breaking to eat, bathe, or sleep. After three days pass, she runs out of concrete. But the sculpture is not finished, she'll need to go out and get more. She takes a shower, washing away the dust, the blood, and the guilt, changes into fresh, clean clothes, and takes a drive into town. She picks up more concrete first, telling the clerk some story about home improvements she's working on. He asks if she's married, if her husband will be helping with the work. "I'm recently separated." She replies. On the way home, a small store catches her eye. It's a place she's driven by plenty of times, a little occult shop filled with herbs and tapered candles and strange leather-bound books. She isn't sure if she believes in this sort of thing, not really, but something makes her park and walk inside anyway. A gnarled old woman behind the counter spots her, and without speaking, points her toward a room in the back. It's different there, darker, filled with vials of thick dark liquid, shelves full of skulls that might be human, though she isn't sure. In the back of the room, there is a bottle of paint, deep red and vibrant. What it's doing here, she couldn't be certain. But as soon as she sets eyes on it, she knows she needs to have it, needs to add it to her sculpture to make it truly complete. She brings it to the woman at the counter, but she just says "Take it. No charge. I can tell you really need it. Just be careful what you use it for, it's powerful stuff." She wants to ask what that means, what is so powerful about this little bottle of strange red paint, but she doesn't. She's much too exhausted, and much too determined to get back home and put the finishing touches on her masterpiece. She drives straight home, and hauls the concrete and paint inside, carrying it down to the basement. She's dizzy from hunger and lack of sleep, but she doesn't care. She has one singular vision right now, and she must see it carried out. She mixes more concrete and slathers the whole shape again, sculpting out the round, bulbous head, the arms at its sides, the legs and feet, the curve of the whole figure covered in thick gray sludge. In potential. A blank canvas. Before it dries, she opens the paint. It smells musty, rich, and somehow ancient. It clings to the bristles of her brush like a living thing, and takes to the surface of the sculpture eagerly, spreading out as if of its own volition as she brushes it on evenly. She paints the whole thing, every inch of it. At first, it doesn't seem as if there will be enough paint to finish the job, but somehow that little bottle coats the whole figure in deep, dark red. She looks down at her hands, stained just as brightly as they were when she swung that baseball bat. She looks back up at her creation, the amalgamation of the fear, the pain, the heartbreak, the pure, primal rage, and begins to cry. The tears fall freely into her palms and, without thinking, she smears them into the concrete and paint until they disappear into the art. Then, she takes a step back, watching it all dry. All of that work, all of that time, that great, yawning chasm of loss, and this is what she has made of it. She loves it and she hates it all at once, and she can't stop staring at the place where its eyes would be, if it had them. She half expects to see something looking back. She shakes her head, looking down at the floor for a moment. Then, she hears the sound of stone and metal grinding together. Her gaze snaps back up, and she sees that the sculpture has moved, just a little. Its head, turned in her direction. In an instant, her husband's words come back to her. "Don't look at me like that. I can't stand when you stare at me like that." It couldn't be...She stares at it for a long time, her eyes watering from the effort. She blinks. Her eyes open, and the sculpture is gone. There it is again, the grind of metal and stone against each other. Then, with the sound of bones snapping, everything went dark. Her hate, her vengeance, her desperate act of violence and creation, with a splash of the most unusual paint, led to the creation of a deadly masterpiece that would one day be known as...SCP-173. The Store Manager had heard of crazy customers, but this was something else. A mob comes barrelling towards the store, visible through the display windows as they charge down the street. They all look crazed, much closer in appearance to rabid animals than human beings, frenzying, foaming at the mouth. A few of them stumble in their haste while rushing for the automatic sliding doors. Some fall to the ground, only for others to clamber over them, leaping like athletes going over hurdles, with all the same speed but with none of the grace. To the staff inside the store, they look like a pack of zombies, all apparently infected by the same virus that had given them such a ravenous hunger… for savings! “I thought Black Friday was a week ago,” the Trainee remarks, as the doors slide open and the first mob spills inside. “Welcome to the Mattress Madness Megastore everyone, if you could kindly form an orderly-” Within seconds, the Trainee vanishes as a tidal wave of maddened mattress store customers starts to pile into the store. Each and every one of them is deranged, that much is clear even from a distance. Across the store, the Store Manager watches as his colleagues are shoved and tackled out of the way, just from their misfortune of standing too close to the entrance. It's only as one of the mob wanders closer that the Store Manager notices their eyes; both lids stay shut, somehow closed despite the crazed customer standing upright. They aren’t screwed tightly, it’s clear this person isn’t forcefully keeping their eyelids clamped down. Instead, they’re gently sealed, as if the customer is still asleep… or sleepwalking. The whole situation was astounding; first thing in the morning, just at opening time, a horde of sleepwalking customers barged their way into the Mattress Madness Megastore, moving – and fighting retail staff – as if they were all still awake and fully aware. And as if that isn’t bizarre enough, it quickly turns out these people aren’t here because they’re eager not to miss out on great deals on their bedroom furniture. To the Store Manager’s horror, the mob has come to the Mattress Madness Megastore… for breakfast. He watches an elderly woman, eyes closed, shuffle up to a luxury Cashmere Pillow Top California King size mattress and proceed to eat it. And not bite by bite either, not even ripping off pieces to chomp through like so much cotton candy. In a far more horrifying fashion, the old lady eats the mattress whole. The Store Manager feels his blood run cold at the sight of her mouth widening unnaturally, unhinging like a snake eating its prey; except in this bizarre, unaired nature documentary, the snake is a human being, and its meal is a perfectly good bed that moments before had been resting on a stylish ottoman frame. The same exact display of confusing carnage is unfolding all over the Mattress Madness Megastore, people devouring entire Egyptian Cotton mattresses. Some have even devoured their respective meals and are already moving on to any accompanying pillows or cushions, feeding on them in much the same way. The few members of staff bold enough to try and intervene can’t seem to wake the sleepwalking shoppers up, no matter how hard they grip each one by the shoulders and shake, nothing can deter them from devouring divans and munching on memory foam. A sudden, terrifying, and inescapable thought cuts through all the confusion, striking the Store Manager with even greater fear: the stock room. Behind a series of doors, marked with signs reading ‘Employees Only’, are shelves upon shelves of new units. The Mattress Madness Megastore being a much bigger outlet means there’s additional inventory to replace any mattress on the shop floor that gets sold. And more mattresses mean more food for the mob! The worry that these sleepwalkers might soon develop a taste for human flesh never occurs to the Store Manager. He hurriedly races around the store, gathering up as many of his surviving staff as he can, and urges them to help him defend the stock in the back room. Some are already abandoning their posts, ripping nametags off their polo shirt uniforms, and rushing to leave the store; they aren’t willing to die for $7.25 an hour. The Mattress Madness Megastore has insurance, it’ll cover the damaged stock once the crazed customers have feasted on feather beds. But the Manager urges them to stay; the store’s insurance covers stock that is damaged in transit – not mattresses that are eaten by hungry lunatics! A few stay, using the Manager’s desperation to leverage pay raises and more annual vacation days in exchange for their help during this crisis of cashmere carnivory. With his resistance force gathered, the Store Manager commands the remaining employees to charge for the door at the back of the store. But some of the nearby mattress eaters overhear in the sleepwalking state. The staff freeze, uncertain whether to bolt for the stock room, and risk being chased by the hungry customers. They need a distraction, a sacrificial lamb, to grab the horde’s attention. And with a solemn expression, the Store manger realizes what he must do: this isn’t a fight he’ll make it out of alive. He leaps up onto a twin innerspring and calls out to the crazed customers. “Attention, everyone!” He bellows. “I’d like to announce… that all our mattresses are half off for the next five minutes!” The crowd goes even more rabid, all eager to eat the pillowy pedestal the Store Manager is standing upon. His staff flees in the opposite direction, rushing to barricade themselves inside the storeroom while their boss meets a grisly demise, and the crazed customers devour every remaining mattress in sight. But what on earth could have possibly caused such a scene to unfold? What was the inciting incident for this unprecedented act of mass mattress-cide, the divan destruction, and combination carnage? All it took was one seemingly innocuous image, an unassuming online post, to stir over seven thousand people into a featherbed feeding frenzy. It’s December the 3rd, 2020, almost an entire day before the deranged events that would soon unfold at the Mattress Madness Megastore. And just like he does most days after college, the Student is trawling various internet forums in search of things to laugh at. He’s procrastinating, and through inaction, allowing himself to be buried under a veritable avalanche of assignments, all with rapidly approaching dates that they’re due in by. But he doesn’t care, he can always do them tomorrow. As far as he’s concerned, there’s plenty of time for him to waste doing… well, very little. But no matter where he looks, nothing brings with it even the smallest hit of dopamine. It’s been hours since he stopped checking the clock at the bottom right hand corner of his computer screen, instead wearing out the muscles of his finger as it spins the scrolling wheel of his mouse. His social media feed is all the same, more doom and gloom, and despite his searching, he can’t find anything funny to alleviate his ongoing existential nightmare for so much as a second. If anything, seeing every anxiety-inducing post about the state of the world., or dour headlines of reposted news articles only makes everything worse. That is, until the fateful link appears in his inbox. It's from one of his friends at college, living in the dorm across campus. The pair of them constantly swapped links, and exchanged memes over direct messages, sometimes while sitting in the middle of important lectures. So, the Student quickly opens up the latest message from his friend, pleased to have something to relieve the monotony instilled by the prior several hours’ worth of mindless scrolling. Sure enough, his friend’s message sits waiting to be read in his inbox. It’s just a single blue hyperlink, with no additional context offered. Nothing to indicate what the link is or what website it leads to, or even why the Student’s friend bothered to send it. They’re long past the need to provide context for the memes they send each other. The link redirects to a familiar corner of the internet to the Student, the Deep Fried Memes subreddit. Just seeing that written in the hyperlink is enough to spur an enthusiastic click; it’s like going home, back to somewhere warm and welcoming, where everybody knows your name, and they’re always glad you came. And where the Student knows he’s bound to find something to entertain himself. A ‘deep fried’ meme is usually a heavily edited image, with a number of different filters added to it. Its contrast is boosted, the picture is over-saturated and distorted, all to the point wherein the colors are unnatural, and the image appears as a grainy, washed-out mess of pixels. And they’re one of the Student’s favorite sub-genre of funny posts. Opening up the link sent by his friend, he finds one such deep-fried meme staring back at him. It depicts a man, long-haired and wearing dark clothes, presumably a fan of heavy metal music. In front of the Metalhead is a table, with a chessboard placed neatly atop it. The pieces on the board are distributed in such a way that places the Metalhead in checkmate. And his opponent? Directly opposite him at the table is a glass bowl filled with water, and a goldfish aimlessly swimming around. And to top off this Louvre-worthy masterpiece is text, seemingly cut and paste from various different places judging by the alternating fonts and styles. The words have been placed into a sentence that reads: “Tell me your secrets, fish.” And the Student explodes with laughter. As if answering his prayers for some humorous entertainment to avoid working on his college assignments, his friend had appeared out of the blue and delivered a perfect deep fried meme. But that momentary boost in serotonin levels quickly subsides, and the Student knows how these exchanges work. This has to be reciprocal, a mutual trading of memes, like for like, akin to swapping trading cards in the playground at a younger age. And so, he searches the subreddit for a token worthy of returning to his friend. He clicks on a search filter, sorting the results from the top posts of all time to the most recent posts of the day. These were fresh, hot off the presses – or out of the deep fryer, in this case. And the newer they were, the lower the chances that his friend had already seen them. Scrolling through, the Student is met with a few underwhelming attempts that weren’t worthy of the prestige expected by the Deep Fried Memes subreddit; they’d be better suited for posting on r/cringe. But then, it appears; the perfect deep-fried, crispy, golden brown, cooked-to-perfection picture to send back to his friend. The distorted image is a photograph of a bed, specifically a king-size mattress on what looks like a polished wooden bedframe – although it’s not easy to tell, thanks to just how grainy the picture has been made. Whoever edited this meme knew what they were doing, and has nailed the absurdist, bizarre humor that the Student and his friend thrive on. A label over the mattress simply reads ‘King Size’ and the meme is captioned in a classic ‘Top Text/Bottom Text’ format with the phrase: “A feast fit for a king” And the pièce de resistance, the crowning touch that makes this meme-worthy of the Student’s lofty standards, is the title given to it by the original poster. It sums up the meme perfectly, succinctly in three words: ‘Eat Your Mattress’. The Student erupts into uncontrollable fits of laughter, so much so that tears start to stream down his face. His stomach almost feels like it might explode at just how fine he thinks the post he’s found is. Through giggles that hit like the aftershock of an earthquake, he copies the link to the Eat Your Mattress meme into a message and hits send, to share the hilarity with his friend. Little does he know, he’s just condemned his friend to the same fate that now awaits him. As soon as he falls asleep, it’ll happen. And the Student and his friend aren’t the only ones either. The post spreads, either sent directly from one person to another, or seen by those just browsing the Deep Fried Memes subreddit and happening across the Eat Your Mattress photo. Not all of them find it funny, they don’t have to. They aren’t even required to share it, to pass it on to someone else and help the post spread like wildfire. They’ve looked at it, and that’s enough. Come the next day, an estimated seven thousand people across the world have seen the same meme. And it affects them all in the exact same way, becoming a directive, a command planted in their subconscious, one that they will act on without even realizing. It’s been only a few hours since all the carnage erupted at the Mattress Madness Megastore, but by now, the SCP Foundation has swept in and taken control of the scene. A cordon section of multiple blocks, under the cover story of a dangerous gas leak. It’s enough to keep civilians and prying eyes away without asking too many questions. But as for the Foundation personnel themselves, they’ve got plenty of unanswered questions of their own. Two members of the clean-up team are reviewing the store’s security footage, baffled by the sights of the chaos that unfolded there earlier that same morning. On the screen, frenzied customers are eating entire mattresses, stretching their mouths wide open and swallowing them whole. They watch as the Store Manager appears to make an attempt at a noble sacrifice to distract the horde of ravenous customers, so his employees can rush towards the store room. But the Manager is fine; once the horde has eaten all the mattresses out on the store’s main floor, they start trying to break into the stock room out back, where the other employees have used layers upon layers of cellophane-wrapped mattresses to barricade the door. By the time the Foundation arrives, the customers have already forced their way into the stock room, and have devoured around half of the mattresses while exhausted employees try to wake them from their sleepwalking state. The Foundation sees to it that everyone affected is rapidly administered with memory wiping amnestics to forget all about the ordeal. Their next job is to try and track down the source of whatever caused this unprecedented outbreak of mattress eating. But being experts in all things anomalous, it doesn’t take the Foundation long to start pursuing possible explanations. Having already confirmed this wasn’t a viral anomaly, their next course of action is to investigate possible memetic causes. And sure enough, a common factor quickly presents itself. The mob that attacked the Mattress Madness Megastore, along with subjects who have engaged in similar acts of mattress eating across the world, all have one thing in common. Each one has been exposed to the ‘Eat Your Mattress’ post on the Deep Fried Memes subreddit. It takes some deduction on the Foundation’s part to figure out the cause, after all, the meme in question is similar to a number of others posted in the same subreddit. As a result, the Foundation’s online detection software – or ‘web crawlers’ – initially fail to flag the mattress meme as an anomalous image. Once they do, it is designated as SCP-5126. But with a cause established, the pieces start to fit together. The Foundation’s researchers soon realize what the image does – another reason it was initially missed is that its effects only occur once the subject that has seen it falls asleep. The Student is one such subject who lived through this. He dozes off in his gaming chair, well past the middle of the night, hours after he’s first seen SCP-5126. While sound asleep, without waking up once, he starts to seek out his mattress, laying unoccupied on his bed on the other side of his cramped dorm room. He and all the others who have seen SCP-5126 then consume their mattresses, including, in many cases, their pillows, any cushions, and even plush toys. Their bodies stretch unnaturally to accommodate the meal, only to return to normal once they have done the deed. Having returned to normal, the Student – and the others like him – remain unaware they’ve just eaten a mattress. But the Foundation is left puzzled, there’s still one question that hasn’t been answered. Their examination of the several hundred customers at the Mattress Madness Megastore revealed that the consumed mattresses aren’t digested like food ordinarily is – they vanish without a trace. So, this naturally begs the question, where are all these eaten mattresses going? Well, the Foundation quickly comes up with an experiment to find out… They place tracking devices inside the cell of a member of D Class Personnel, and expose him to SCP-5126. Sure enough, the meme takes effect, and once asleep, he eats his mattress. The experiment is going exactly as the Foundation planned; now they can follow the signal from the tracking devices to pinpoint the destination that all the consumed mattresses are disappearing to. And, after several sweeps of the Earth’s surface, their satellites discover a ping, coming from a remote location in the state of Montana. MTF Sigma 16 suit up, ready to head out to the location. This Mobile Task Force operates under the codename ‘Slumber Party’, and it’s up to them to investigate. They come across a large structure, it looks a lot like a medieval castle, but it has been built out of mattresses and large cushions; it’s the ultimate pillow fort. It even has pillars and all the fortifications you’d expect from a real historical castle, all made out of even more pillows. The Slumber Party team enters the fort, and quickly discovers that the structure is able to anomalously reconstruct itself. Sigma Three kicks over a stack of pillows and plush toys arranged to resemble a statue and watches as it reforms after collapsing. The team ventures deeper into the pillow fort, and is quickly met with humanoid entities that are also made out of pillows. An entity swipes a pillow arm at Sigma One, but she ducks out of the path of the attack. Drawing her firearm, she fires, causing a plume of feathers to spray out of the pillow person. The entity is unphased, and several additional shots do nothing; even a taser is ineffective! The pillow entities are exhibiting extreme resistance to damage, but Sigma Two has an idea. She grabs a pillow from one of the walls, and uses it to bash the entity attacking her teammate, Sigma One. The pillow person collapses into a pile on the floor, inanimate. And just like that, the Mobile Task Force has a way to fight back. They all grab pillows, and make quick work of their attackers, before they move on to explore the rest of the castle. Then, they encounter… the King. There is a man, sitting atop a large stack of cushions wearing a nightcap and pyjamas, eating feathers from an expensive brand of pillow. Scattered around him are empty pillowcases. Trying to ignore the smell, the Slumber Party team attempts to interrogate him. He claims to be the King of Cushion, obsessed with pillows since a young age. Their smell, taste, and texture inspire him to create a kingdom of plush, his masterpiece of mattresses. It doesn’t take very long for the Foundation operatives to realize that this man is insane. They question him about how SCp-5126, the Eat Your Mattress meme, works – how is it able to make people consume entire mattresses and send them to the King’s cushiony castle? And why? Well, the King explains that buying mattresses is expensive, so in order to build his castle, he’s outsourced the gathering of building materials. As he sees it, he is offering people affected by the meme a delicious meal in exchange for their beds, spreading the world of pillows so he can gather resources for his kingdom. Suddenly, he challenges the Slumber Party team to a pillow fight for having tracked him down. The king of Cushion takes up a pillow in one hand, and charges towards the Mobile Task Force, armed and ready to do battle with them all. He is quickly incapacitated by Sigma One’s taser and drops to the floor, defeated. Now designated SCP-5126-A, the King of Cushion is transported back to the SCP Foundation for analysis and containment. Their testing reveals he possesses no anomalous properties whatsoever, and the King actually requires his stomach to be pumped thanks to the copious amounts of pillow feathers he’s been eating. The Foundation gets to work dismantling his pillow fort, and moving all the components into storage. And as for the Eat Your Mattress meme itself, the Foundation’s webcrawlers are keeping an eye out for any other posts of the anomalous image. And don’t worry, if you find yourself giggling at a funny deep fried image that jokingly implies you should eat your mattress, the Foundation will ensure you don’t remember it happening, and they’ll even throw in a replacement for your swallowed mattress at no added cost – now that’s a bargain! ‘Introducing Tamagotchi! Are your parents super lame and refusing to buy you a pet? Well, eat my shorts, mom and dad! With the all-new Tamagotchi you can have the best pet you could ever ask for. Living in the digisphere in your pocket! With three simple buttons and a chain to hang your keyrings on, you can make your Tamagotchi your own. Care for it day and night. Watch them sleep, play bodacious games, and make sure you keep an eye out for if they need to go to the toilet! Peeeeyyyyeewww! Throw it in your backpack and take it to school, just don’t let your teacher catch you… oh snap! Tamagotchis are da bomb. Bet you really wanna go and buy one now, don’t you?’ The Detective throws her bag onto the couch. She wanted nothing more than to have thrown it off as soon as she walked through the door, but if anything in it broke, she’d be screwed. They don’t have the money for rent at the moment, can’t be adding additional costs onto that. Her Boyfriend barely glances up at her from the couch. Still wearing the same blue t-shirt he’d worn to bed last night and with a packet of Doritos next to him, it’s pretty obvious how he’s spent his day. The TV switches to another commercial. She taps him gently on the shoulder, offering him a warm smile. He jumps a little, seeming to come out of a little reverie. Affection fills his eyes as soon as he sets them on her. He hastily brushes Doritos dust off his hands and holds them up, tapping out words in sign language. ‘Sorry, I zoned out. How was your day?’ The Detective sinks into her usual spot on the couch and snuggles up next to him, nuzzling her head into his neck. After a quick hug, she untangles her hands and signs her reply. ‘Long.’ He kisses her on her forehead. She goes on to tell him all about the case she’s been working on. It’s more of a hunch at this point than a case really. There has been a big spree of shopliftings, burglaries, and muggings over the last couple of months. A significant uptick from this time last year, but everyone is at a loss to figure out why. She’s having to spend a lot more on gas driving around to break-ins at the moment. Her Boyfriend watches her hands recount the events with a tender look of concern on his face. ‘Don’t worry,’ she signs. ‘I’ll make sure they reimburse me for the gas.’ He nods and seems to relax a little. She hesitates before signing the next bit. ‘Did you do any job applications today?’ Her Boyfriend sighs and shakes his head, he looks ready to be told off but instead she gives him a big cuddle. Something in him seems to break and after a moment she can feel him shaking in her arms. Even though she can’t hear him, the Detective knows her Boyfriend well enough to know that he is crying. She pulls away from him and makes firm reassuring eye contact with him, before signing. ‘It’s okay. We can do the next one together if that would be easier?’ And so the two of them do that. They cook dinner together, her Boyfriend listening to the radio while she enjoys the feeling of the bass in her chest. Then, once everything is washed up and the apartment is dark and cozy, they sit down at their kitchen table and hand write a cover letter. They would have typed it up on their Macintosh but they’d sold that and their printer a few months ago to cover their utility bills. But handwriting is okay too. Her Boyfriend had been working at Dell when they met. 1993, the height of the Dot Com boom when any kid with a math degree and a keyboard could shoot up the ladders in tech giants across the country. Two years later, that bubble burst, and he’d lost his job. Fiercely smart and incredibly kind, her boyfriend hadn’t been able to find work for around 13 months now. Every day the Detective’s heart broke a little more to see how low his confidence was dipping. He was an amazing person, by far the most exceptional guy she’d ever met and ever would meet, and yet the constant rejection letters, failed interviews, and lack of options had steadily worn him down to a delicate and exhausted ghost of himself. But that only makes her want to love and support him even more. He scrawls a signature at the bottom of the cover letter, and they carefully fold it, along with his resume, and slide them both into an envelope. She cuddles him from behind and gives him a gross wet kiss on his cheek, enough to make him giggle. There. At least he’s got one happy moment from today. He turns to her and grins, raising his hands to talk to her. ‘I might buy a Tamagotchi.’ ‘A what?’ ‘The commercial on TV. It was playing when you got home. I really want one, can I buy one?’ A little twinge pulls at her heart. She really ought to say no. Money is so tight at the moment with them both relying on her income, and it’s hard to… ah what is she saying? He’s clearly going through a lot right now, and maybe something fun would be good for him. Even if it does just look like some silly kids toy from Japan. She raises her hands. ‘Of course, you can.’ And the pair of them go back over to the TV and flick it on. * The next day is a bit of a blur. It’s the Detective’s first day on yet another shoplifting: her first foray into fashion. Pairs of Air Jordans on display had been stolen, smashed glass everywhere, but the thieves had left all the cash in the register. A couple other items were missing too, all very hip stuff. Tie-dye shirts, jnco jeans, a lot of camouflage, that kind of thing. Stuff that’s on TV and the radio all the time at the moment. By the time the Detective gets out, she’s only got 10 minutes to rush to Toys R Us before it closes. Thankfully, the Tamagotchi display is right by the front entrance. Almost totally sold out, but with one lone box left, she snatches it up and cheerfully takes it to the cash register. As she walks out of the store and looks down at the box in her hands, she can’t help but wonder, why the hell would her boyfriend want to play with a little children’s toy? * As soon as the Detective opens the door to her apartment, she is struck by a change. Instead of sitting on the couch watching TV, her boyfriend is in the kitchen, radio belting out at full volume. Her heart flutters. Could it be…? Has he heard back from one of his jobs? He sticks a head out from around the kitchen door and grins at her, beckoning her inside. She grins back, quickly hiding the Toys R Us bag behind her back. It smells amazing in here. Onions and garlic, oregano, rich tomatoes, a hint of wine in the sauce, he’s really gone all out making her favorite chili for dinner tonight. He waves her over to the pan and motions for her to take a deep smell. She does, enjoying all of the aromas filling the air. There’s something smoky in there too, a new smell she doesn’t recognize. She turns to her Boyfriend quizzically. He grins and explains to her in sign language that it’s charred peppers, held over the flames on the hob just long enough to blacken and then thrown into the food processor to… ‘Hang on,’ she interrupts him. ‘We don’t have a food processor.’ Her Boyfriend grins proudly and steps to one side to reveal a brand new shining food processor sitting proudly on their countertop. He explains to her that he bought it that day. It has ten speed settings, multiple blades you can switch out, a miniature container for spice blends and… She stops him again. How much did this cost? He looks sheepish. A wave of realization crosses his eyes, and he looks back at it guiltily. ‘I just really wanted it,’ he signs. ‘Thought it would make a nice romantic dinner for us.’ The Detective softens. Of course, he was just trying to make the effort for her. It wasn’t fair of her to tell him off for doing that. Opening the Toys R Us bag she pulls out the Tamagotchi and holds it out to him. Compared to this expensive food processor, her gift looks pretty insignificant, but her Boyfriend’s face lights up straight away. He grabs it off her and rips the toy out of the packaging in a frenzy. His eyes shine and dance around as he hatches his first Tamagotchi. He looks like a child on Christmas day. She can’t help but join in laughing with him, as they go to sit on the couch and watch some TV together. But the next day, when the Detective gets home, she notices a hole in their wall. A literal hole. Their landline is missing. Her Boyfriend’s face pops out from around the corner, just as it did the previous day, with that same grin. Only this time, he’s brandishing a brand new cell phone in his outstretched arm. It’s tiny, about the size of a brick, with the name Nokia emblazoned across the top. That can’t have been cheap. This time she doesn’t share in his excitement. Indeed the next day, she can’t even muster up a smile when he proudly demonstrates the alarm on his new G-Shock, laced up his new Jordan’s, and started excitedly flipping through his box set of R. L. Stine books. That is enough. She can’t deal with this anymore. She’s been struggling so hard to make ends meet. Meanwhile, he is throwing away hundreds of dollars on products he had never mentioned before. She snaps. It can be very frustrating being mute because you can’t shout to let your anger out. All that energy instead goes into her sign language, her hands swinging and slapping into each other as her face contorts. What is wrong with him? Why is he being like this? She’s doing everything she can to keep a roof over their heads while he’s just throwing all of her money down the drain? How could he be so cruel? The more she rants, the more guilty her Boyfriend’s face becomes. Tears fill his eyes, his bottom lip starts to tremble, and before long, he is bawling in front of her. Can’t keep going, not seeing him like this. Her hands fall limply to her sides. After a moment, he raises a sniffling face to her and signs something simple back. ‘It’s the TV. The commercials, they’re just too persuasive.’ She snorts a laugh. That’s it. If he’s not going to give her a serious answer, she’s not going to have a serious conversation. She storms off up to bed, leaving him alone downstairs. He switches the TV off. That next day, she wakes up to breakfast in bed, but no sign of her Boyfriend. She doesn’t touch any of it, getting a coffee and croissant on her way into work instead from this up-and-coming coffee place called Starbucks. Today is a chance for her to take her mind off things. She’s at a crime scene, in a poor neighborhood. The previous night the man who lived there had been sitting downstairs with his blinds open out to the street. He’d noticed a suspicious figure walking past who’d peered in through the glass. Before he knew what was happening, a brick crashed through his window, and the burglar was in his home, running from room to room, ransacking the place and trying to make off with different items from the house. The homeowner had run to his gun safe and shot the burglar in the back four times. This crime scene investigation was mostly a formality, but as the Detective arrived, one of the officers came over to her. He didn’t know sign language, so the pair of them wrote down their conversation on her Detective’s notepad - yes, she carries a notepad, some stereotypes are true! The officer has a hunch and a good one. The burglar broke into the house, knowing full well the homeowner was watching him, a highly risky thing to do. But what was most peculiar was the list of items that the burglar had been trying to steal. The officer shows her the list and her jaw drops. G-Shock watch Food processor Nike Air Jordans R. L. Stine books A Tamagotchi An officer across the room remarks that these are all really high-demand items at the moment. His own wife and kids have been pleading for some of these for weeks. The crime scene photographer agrees. It all gets written on the notepad so that the Detective can follow the conversation. ‘What was this man’s employment status?’ she asks. ‘Unemployed.’ She looks around the room. There’s not much in the way of furniture here. Just a couch pointing at a big TV… The Detective drives home right away, to the surprise of her Boyfriend. He gets up from the couch and comes to see her right away. He’s dressed much better, a white shirt on. He’s tidied the house. The TV is off. He goes to start apologizing as soon as she walks in, but she brushes it aside, signing urgently to him. ‘I need you to tell me everything about what you’ve been watching on TV.’ Confused, he runs through his list of regular shows that he’s been watching. Buffy, Quantum Leap, The Fresh Prince, Friends, of course. She shushes him. ‘What about commercials? All the things you’ve bought recently, talk to me about those commercials.’ He looks stumped. They’re just normal TV commercials. Nothing special or exciting. They’re all different. Different actors, messages, companies. It clicks in the Detective’s head. That’s it! ‘What about the voice over?’ ‘I don’t know. It’s a man I think. Yeah, it might be the same man. You know what, I think it is. It’s the same voice each time.’ ‘And he only does those commercials?’ Her Boyfriend thinks hard for a second. He nods. It takes a long time for the police to mobilize. As usual. The Detective takes her findings to the Commissioner at her first opportunity but he looks pretty non-plussed. This spate of burglaries and muggings, all because of some persuasive voice over actor? Really? Everyone wants a Tamagotchi, everyone wants a pair of Jordans. These are just passing fads, that’s all there is to it. So she does it herself. The Detective visits all of the advertising agencies that ran the local versions of the commercials she has listed and finds the details for the voice actor on her third try. He’s in the same state but another city. But by the time she gets an afternoon to drive out and pay him a visit it’s too late. The apartment she visits is empty. After banging on the door for several minutes, a neighbor sticks their head out of a window and yells something at her. The Detective can’t understand however, so the woman comes downstairs and writes a grumpy note. ‘He’s dead. Yacht accident or something.’ Only she can’t spell yacht properly. * The Detective pushes open her apartment door dejectedly. All that effort, all that chasing for nothing. It wasn’t so much about trying to solve the burglaries. Those were just things being taken. It was about understanding what had happened to the love of her life. Her kind caring Boyfriend, the man who’d brought her so much joy, who had always been so considerate and gentle with her, suddenly going on a spending spree and almost bankrupting her? It just hurt too much and now coming back to her apartment and having to face up to that tense relationship just felt… Arms wrap around her and hold her tight. Her Boyfriend’s hand brushes the back of her hair, and the smell of his cologne fills her nose. After a moment, her arms wrap around him. After another moment, they both start to cry together. He leads her into the kitchen where he’s cooked her favorite chili again, only without the smoky smell. She looks around the kitchen. The food processor is gone. He pulls away from her and explains that everything is gone. All of his bad purchases he’d made have been returned, he hands her the cash for them in full. He still wants those items - he wants them more than anything else - he explains. But more than any of those things, he wants her. The TV is gone too. So as they sit down that evening together, they just enjoy doing nothing together for a bit, catching each other’s eyes over dinner and smiling uncontrollably before getting out a sheet of paper and writing another job application. There’s something about this application, the Detective thinks. This one could just be the one. Ask anyone about the 90s, and they’ll have more fads to tell you about than historical events. Furbies, Beanie Babies, Gel Pens, Napster, the list goes on. But for residents in a certain part of the USA, some of these trends seemed to be a touch more… obsessive. And that is all down to the actions - or rather, the voice - of one man. SCP-661, the world’s best salesman. We didn’t get to meet SCP-661 today so allow me to introduce him to you. The salesman is a middle-aged caucasian male. He is somewhat overweight, but with no major health issues aside from what is typical for someone of his age and size. If you were to have a conversation with SCP-661, and I advise you not to, you would find him rude, abrasive, and tiresome. He has a short temper and makes regular demands. You would quickly find that he is very much used to having his own way, and for good reason. For you see, this salesman is persuasive. Very persuasive. Foundation testing has found that this SCP is capable of extreme manipulation, verbally persuading you to want what he tells you to want virtually instantaneously. It sounds dramatic in those words, but the effect is far more subtle than you may realize, which is the reason why he was able to operate for a while before being discovered by the Foundation. Test subjects report the effects of his persuasion as feeling like a continuous low-level compulsion - a desire bubbling away underneath the surface - until they encounter an opportunity to act on it. At this point, it becomes an all-consuming obsession, not satiated until you have fulfilled the urge. The effect is strongest with physical objects, which is likely why this salesman enjoyed so much success providing voiceovers for local marketing campaigns. Any product that he was selling would fly off the shelves anywhere where the commercials featuring his voice were aired. Perhaps those crazes in the 90s weren’t so innocent after all. Testing on the salesman has proved enlightening. D-class personnel was ordered to physically assault him, but he was able to stop the attack almost immediately by simply explaining to them that they didn’t want to hurt him. However, test subjects who were threatened with execution if they stopped attacking him were able to continue to beat the salesman up for several minutes before the researchers decided he’d had enough. Though, notably, they made it abundantly clear the entire way through the assault that they didn’t really want to hurt him. SCP-661 naturally poses some level of threat to the general public as his ‘abilities’ could easily be used for far more nefarious purposes than selling a few more Troll Dolls, and so guards have permission to terminate him in the event of his escape. That seems… unlikely. SCP-661 is held in a standard holding cell measuring 6m x 8m. Any researchers interacting with him must wear noise-canceling ear protection at all times, unless they are deemed to be totally deaf by SCP medical staff. Incidentally, it was the work of the Detective you heard about today that drew the Foundation’s attention to SCP-661. Unaffected by his commercial work, she was in the perfect position to connect the dots and uncover his existence. With operatives through law enforcement, the Foundation was quick to catch onto her theory and apprehend him before word traveled too far. That ‘yacht accident’ story was enough to keep the public from ever discovering his existence. That said, you should still be careful out there. Who knows if another instance of this SCP exists somewhere? Have you ever seen a commercial too tempting to ignore? Watched a YouTube ad that you decided not to skip? No? Me neither. But still, be careful! Seeing that shadowy figure coming towards him makes the Worker turn and run. He hasn’t had the time, nor the luxury of freezing on the spot, or waiting for it to get closer so he could get a clearer view. He just runs. With every pace, every hurried, horrified step, comes the mental image of the strange figure gaining on him. In his head, every movement he catches in the corner of his eye, every shuffling sound he detects, the… thing was right behind him, inches away and ready to strike. So, he just keeps on running. Only seconds ago, it was just standing under a streetlight. A ways ahead of the Worker, barely moving. He calls out to it, assuming it’s a person, somebody maybe lost or in need of help. But then, it steps into the light. And it’s not a person at all. The head of the suit isn’t on properly, it droops at an angle, like it hasn’t been affixed… or is barely hanging on. The crude, lazy-eyed face is haphazardly drooping; that, too, isn’t on right, as the entire head sways unnervingly with each approaching step. Maybe underneath the suit, hiding beneath all that dirty orange fir, still coated in grime despite the rain. Perhaps there is a person in there, whose arm hefts an old baseball bat as they plod closer and closer to the Worker. But all he sees is the monster. The filthy costume might be clumsily made, but the Worker instantly recognizes the all-too-familiar resemblance of an orange cat from a popular comic strip. It’s what starts him running… that and the blunt weapon the monster is holding as it menacingly makes its way closer. The downpour doesn’t let up as the Worker turns a corner, met with the sights of two bright, blinding white beams of light cutting through the rain. A car, speeding its way down the road. It catches the Worker in its headlights, and he starts frantically waving his arms, encased in the sodden fabric of his jacket. “Help! Oh, please! Please help me!” he yells. “Something’s coming after me! I think it’s trying to kill me!” The driver doesn’t stop, instead simply cruising past. The worker can just about see, through the passenger side window, the vehicle’s sole occupant giving him a strange look from inside the safety of his car. Almost as quickly as it appears, the car has driven off, its headlights already fading from view thanks to the rain. What the Worker doesn’t realize is that the driver’s look of confusion wasn’t directed at him… but at the thing following him. The creature gives a low, animalistic sound, which causes the Worker to spin around. Now he sees it, right up close in all its foul, ginger glory. A tail dangles lazily from the lower portion of the suit, trailing in puddles laden with muck, the water making the fur even dirtier than it already is. It’s so close that the awful, pungent stench of the thing hits the Worker’s nostrils, a sickening smell that somehow seems to fit with the grim, gross costume and its wearer. Seeing the wet, fur-coated suit so close, he realizes that it isn’t covered in the soft, plush synthetic coat that he expects a costume like that to be made of. It looks real, like actual cat hair, on a huge, humanoid shape, with the legs and arms of a man. Arms that were midway through swinging a baseball bat right at the Worker’s head. He ducks just in time, the dull, wooden bat glancing off the bricks of a nearby building, narrowly missing the Worker’s head. As it bounces off the wall, the blunt weapon slips from the soggy gloves of the suit and clatters to the ground. The second he hears the wooden bat land on the floor, the Worker turns his heel and runs again, taking advantage of those precious few seconds to get further distance between him and his attacker. It’s only exactly as he turns his back that he wishes he’d reached for the bat himself to fight back. Rushing further down the rainswept street, the Worker can hear the heavy, slumping footsteps of the suited attacker giving chase. He alternates between looking straight ahead, the raindrops streaming down his face and getting into his eyes, and daring to glance back over his shoulder. Every time he does, he’s met again with the horrifying sight of the suit behind him. He wants nothing more than to escape, to get out of this nightmare wherein he is soaked head to toe in rainwater and fear, running for his life from someone dressed as the comic strip cat he sees every day. But as strong as his will to escape is, he can’t bear to let the fur-suited pursuer out of his sight for even a second. If he can’t see it, then it might be anywhere. At least looking told him that it was still right behind him, bearing down on the Worker with its bat now firmly back in hand. The shrill noise of chainlinks rattling sounds behind him, as the attacker in the suit starts striking a nearby fence, making the Worker more and more aware that, with every strike, it’s getting closer… Through the relentless downpour, the Worker spots a shape standing on the sidewalk, just a few feet ahead. Short, stationary, something he sees every day of his life but never pays any notice to. But tonight, it might just be the thing that saves his life: a trash can. It’s full, and that means heavy, and any second now, he’ll be close enough to reach it. A plan forms in seconds, erupting like a fire with gasoline thrown on it - if that gasoline was pure, terrified adrenaline of being chased by someone in an orange cat costume. Reaching out, as soon as his fingertips grip the wet metal rim of the can, the Worker pulls as hard as possible, his instincts keeping him from stopping running. The trash can clatters behind him as he passes, followed by the heavy thud of the attacker falling to the ground as it trips over the obstacle and lands furry head first in the garbage now strewn over the sidewalk. The Worker knows he’s only got another short window, another blessing of a precious few seconds to get far enough away from his attacker. He turns, changing course to rush across the street; there’s an old warehouse over there. If there are security guards working, they might be able to help. If not, and the place is unguarded, then at least it could be somewhere to hide. A sudden, blaring noise pierces the Worker’s eardrums before he can make it all the way to the opposite sidewalk. It’s a horn, coupled with a bright pair of lights appearing as if from nowhere. Then, before he can turn to see it coming… Impact. First, against the hood of the car, speeding through the rain towards him, unable to stop in enough time. Next, the pain of hitting the jagged blacktop of the road, the second impact as the Worker lands a few feet away, spots of rain still pattering against his face as everything goes from dark to pitch black for a few seconds. His head floods with scenes from earlier that day, as if his life was about to start flashing before his eyes - only in reverse. The news of the comic strip doing poorly arrives at the Paws Inc office, and with it, the knowledge that - if there are going to be layoffs - then he’ll be first. He’s the new hire, after all. It didn’t matter that the once-beloved comic of a cartoon cat is losing its popularity, going stale after so many years in print. It upset the investors, and the Worker has been worrying all day if he’d be the one fired to appease them. Until he suddenly remembers what’s coming after him. Fighting back and clawing his way back to consciousness, he struggles back to his feet, screaming with pain. He’s injured, that much he can certainly tell, even if he doesn’t know how badly. “Hey, hey, mister!” the driver calls, stopping his car and starting to climb out of the vehicle. It’s a different driver and car this time, and unlike the first, he makes the effort to stop… a mistake that is about to cost him greatly. He sees the Worker getting back up, ignoring his calls. He raises his voice to cut through the noise of the pouring rain. “Hey! Are you okay? I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you! My lights were on low, wipers were going, it wasn’t until you rushed out across the street that… Anyway, look, let me at least get you to a hospital! We can exchange our insurance information once they get you all patched up!” The Worker wasn’t listening. He hears the driver’s words but pays him no mind; he’s still so intent on getting away that it takes him a second to realize. The car. It’s a way out. And then, the Worker makes the same mistake as the driver… he stops. And when he does, he sees what has clambered back to its fur-coated feet and is now shuffling towards the driver. “Look out!” the Worker yells. The driver turns, just in time to see. “What in the hell?” he exclaims. “Wait a minute, why are you dressed in a Garfield costume?” Whack. The sound of the bat being swung at the driver makes the Worker feel sick. He turns his back and moves as quickly as he can towards the warehouse, despite the pain and the horrified screams coming from behind. Beneath the rain, there’s something else; a twisted, vile squelching noise that quickly snuffs out the driver’s dying cries. The Worker doesn’t dare to look back this time. He doesn’t want to see what’s happening. Lifting a heavy metal shutter, and pulling it shut behind him, he finds himself in the warehouse. It’s completely deserted. There isn’t a single sign of any life anywhere. The only sound is the pattering of rainwater against the hard concrete floor, dripping through a hole in the ceiling. Guided by the low, glowing light of the streetlamps outside that bleeds through the warehouse windows, the Worker starts fumbling around for a place to hide. Just as he crawls underneath a large pallet rack, he hears a metallic rattling as the fur-suited monstrosity lifts up the shutter. It’s inside. With heavy, plodding steps in its suit, it paces up and down the aisles of discarded shelving. The Worker clamps his soaked hands against his mouth, trying to mask his panicked breathing… only to let out a scream as he feels something grab his ankle and pull. With ease, the thing dressed as a disheveled Garfield pulls him out of his hiding place. Instinctively, the Worker thrashes his legs, landing a solid kick to the creature. As his foot connects, he notices it doesn’t feel like a person underneath the suit. There’s no body, no familiar outline of a human being beneath all the soggy fur and stench. It’s just a slimy mass. Nonetheless, the kick knocks the garish Garfield back - only a few paces, but better than nothing. He scrabbles to his feet, standing and running as fast as he can in the opposite direction… only to hit a wall at the far side of the warehouse. The shutter is the only way out, and right now, it’s wide open - but Garfield stands between the Worker and freedom. He turns to dart down the next aisle, between the rows of shelves, keeping his eyes on the attacker as he passes underneath the hole in the ceiling. The rain is still coming down through it, leaving a puddle on the floor… The Worker’s focus is locked on the beast. He suddenly feels his foot slipping out from under him, that awful lurch of his heart as he falls. The puddle, he’s slipped over and come crashing down to the ground, the force of the concrete striking his back knocks all the breath from his lungs. Everything is spinning in a nauseating mix of pain, disorientation, and terror. Above, through the unrepaired ceiling, drops of rain come pouring down on him. Then, a low agonized meow from somewhere nearby. The monster, Garfield, brings its bat swinging down and sharply connecting with the Worker, lying on the ground. A new surge of pain wracks his body, right at the hip where the baseball bat just landed in an unforgiving blow. The Worker can do nothing but scream; in pain and fear. A horrible sound, like something wet tearing, fills his ears over his own cries. He remembers the sickening feeling of a slimy mass being aggressively pushed into his face. It’s disgusting, rancid, but even under all the horror and the repulsive taste, he can detect familiar hints. , beef, tomato sauce, cheese; all of it moldy and rotten, but still recognizable. The monstrous SCP-3166 forces further fistfuls of lasagna down the Worker’s throat until the screaming stops. He’d always hated Mondays. You've seen his face before, probably during a particularly distressing bout of sleep paralysis. His appearance can vary a bit from manifestation to manifestation, but a few traits are always present: he resembles an elderly man, his touch corrodes everything in his path, his presence creates a disgusting, black mucus-like substance thought to be a method of pre-digestion of his prey, and he is rotting. No matter his appearance, he is always in some stage of decomposition, gray skin sloughing away from yellowed bone, eyes milky and flat but brimming with malice, wide mouth stretched into a wicked grin. The entity is incredibly difficult to contain; its corrosive properties and ability to vanish into solid matter and disappear into its pocket dimension lair make it a threat as unpredictable as it is dangerous. The smell of decay, and the presence of visible corrosion on any surfaces nearby, may be the only warning a person gets before the Old Man grabs them in his decomposing arms, dragging them off to a painful, terrifying demise. We know where the being disappears to, and have learned a great deal about how he operates, but where did he come from? What I found was so distressing, that I almost hope it isn't true. It is the year 2000. Dr. Robert Scranton and his wife, Dr. Anna Lang, are the head researchers at SCP Foundation Site-120. Over the course of their happy relationship, the two have been working on an experimental research project, an early prototype Reality Anchor device called the "Lang-Scranton Stabilizer." After a lot of late nights at the office, working and reworking the theory, it is, at long last, ready for testing. Dr. Scranton is standing in Reality Lab A, as Dr. Lang observes from a nearby room. He follows the same routine he has followed each time they tested the LSS, walking down a line of buttons and levers, pressing and flipping each into place. The little red blinking light signifies that the microphone is recording his every comment and observation. Suddenly, the routine is broken by a low rumbling sound from deep, deep within the earth. The ground beneath him begins to shake, and Dr. Scranton stumbles, losing his balance as the once-solid floor begins to roil and quake as the seismic shift rolls through the Site. He hears the unmistakable grind and splintering of metal and plastic as the LSS, too, begins to shake, components sliding out of place and breaking off. Nearby, Dr. Lang's monitor goes dark as the security feed is cut short by the earthquake's damage. "Robert!" She screams, making a break for the door and rushing to Reality Lab A, terrified that she will find her husband's body lying on the floor. When she and the guards reach the room, however, they find...nothing. Well, not nothing, entirely. The room is a wreck, bits of machinery strewn across the floor, the smell of burning plastic in the air. But the Lang Scranton Scrambler's Control Panel and Dr. Robert Scranton are nowhere to be found. Dr. Lang falls to her knees in the suddenly empty room, pounding at the floor in despair. "Where did he go?!" She demands, but of course, no one knows the answer. No one wants to say what they're thinking. Wherever he is, Dr. Scranton is probably dead. Probably long, long gone. And he is never coming back. But no one says it, not out loud. They just think it, and keep thinking it for the next five years, eleven months, and 21 days. The time passes, and most everyone forgets about Dr. Robert Scranton. Everyone except for Dr. Anna Lang. She never gives up hope, never lets go of the possibility that somewhere, in another world, another time, on another planet, her love is still alive. One day, she wakes up and it's December 23, 2005, a day like any other save for its uncomfortable proximity to the holidays she struggles to celebrate anymore. But then, in the middle of the day, something impossible happens; the LSS Control Panel reappears in Reality Lab A. It isn't how anyone last saw it, though. It is coated in some sort of unidentified organic matter, and it reeks of blood, vomit, and decay. As her colleagues try to shield her from the sight, try to warn her away, Dr. Anna Lang wades into the area, desperate for a glimpse at any sign of her husband's fate. As she makes her way into the containment field, she is unable to contain her horror. "Oh, god, what the hell, what — what is all this? This… this is… this is the… Oh, god. Robert? Robert?! Robert, is this you? Oh, god, please, please, no, don't let it be you, don't let it be you, Robert?! I thought, I thought — How can this thing be—?" Her colleagues try to stop her, but she touches the Lang Scranton Stabilizer interface, and it fires to life. It still works! Somehow, it still works! She racks her brain for what to do next, before saying: "Access Audio Log, play back starting from January 2, 2000!" The machine prompts her to verbally state her password, and her voice shakes as she replies, "Password is 'Anna bo banna'." "Request acknowledged. Processing…" The machine replies, "I'm sorry, there are no audio logs for January 2, 2000. Dr. Scranton accessed log on January 13, 2000 via voice-recognition at time—" Anna slams her hands down on the machine with a cry, "Play back now, dammit! Play it back!" A researcher warns her not to touch any of the material with her bare hands, but she doesn't hear him. She is too busy, calling out to Robert, hoping that somehow, somewhere, he can hear her. "There's so much blood here, there's so much, honey. Are you okay?! Where did you go?! Oh god, oh god, oh god…" Something small and metallic clatters to the floor, lost in the sludge. She retrieves it, wipes it off on her lab coat, and holds it to the light. She would recognize it anywhere. She slipped it onto her true love's finger on the happiest day of her life. It's Robert's wedding ring. Her knees buckle at the realization, she collapses to the ground, and her head cracks against the floor. One of her colleagues snaps into action, "Report, this is Dr. Matthew Skinner, reporting from Site-120 Reality Lab A, I need medical attention here immediately!" Once Dr. Lang recovers from her fall, she demands access to the rematerialized control panel. She is going to go through the audio logs, one by one, and find out exactly what happened to her husband, even if the truth is as ugly as she fears. The machine whirrs to life, and her lost love's voice emanates from the speakers. "Name, Robert Scranton. Age, 39. Birthday, September 19, 1961. Favorite color, blue. Favorite song, "Living on a Prayer." Wife, Anna. She has green eyes. I love her very much." He repeated these simple truths to himself for days, before he even realized that the control panel was picking up his voice. "My name, is Robert Scranton. Yeah, yeah, my name, is Robert Scranton, former researcher at Foundation Site-120. It has been… I don't know, actually, I… I can't remember. I… I estimate it's been ten days, but, I-I-I don't, I can't… Oh God, can anyone hear me?! I-I-I don't know what's happened, I-I don't know where I am, and-and, please, please is anyone there?! Hello?! Anyone?! ANYONE?!" He began keeping track of how much time passed, as best he could. "Two weeks, three days, seven hours, and fifty-eight minutes. Oh… Jesus." Back at the Foundation, with at least a tenuous knowledge of where Dr. Scranton could be, personnel try their best to stage some kind of rescue effort. A Mobile Task Force team is ordered to attempt to replicate the experiment with a hastily-assembled Lang-Scranton Stabilizer copy. The result is an explosion that kills three of them. Senior Researchers also approach SCP-343, a powerful reality warper known to some as God, hoping to get some insight from him about where Dr. Scranton could be found. His response is, “He’s beyond any of us now. I’m truly, dreadfully sorry.” Anna starts having nightmares. She twists and turns in bed, haunted by visions of her beloved Robert consumed by darkness. A strange specter starts to appear in her dreams: A man with a horrible, rotted face. She turns to her bedside table in the night, numbers blurry on the screen of her alarm clock. The photograph of herself and Robert that she keeps there - Something is wrong with him. Wrong with his face. Is it that same awful rotted man? She screams and closes her eyes. When she opens them, the photo is normal again. She weeps into her pillow. It can’t keep going on like this. This place… It's some sort of reality gap, I think. If I don't concentrate on it, it's fine, but I feel this… tingling all over my face. I'm not sure why. Two months, fifteen days, four hours." Anna begins to accept the horrible truth: She may not see Robert ever again, and holding on to the foolish fantasy that she will is starting to kill her. She repeats it to herself like a mantra at work: “Robert Scranton is dead, Robert Scranton is dead, Robert Scranton is dead.” One day, a coworker notices her muttering and strikes up a conversation. It’s been years since Robert disappeared, what’s the harm in talking to someone again? She even finds herself smiling and laughing at his jokes. But when he asks if she’d like to go for coffee, she gets a flash of Robert screaming in the darkness. Of that terrible rotted face, grinning. She runs to the bathroom to throw up and weep. “The tingling in my face has worsened.” “I wish I could sleep here. But all this damn gunfire overhead. Can’t take it anymore. Can’t take it. Trench foot. Shell shock. Hell would be a reprieve from a place like this. And all the men, all the poor souls who look up to me. Who call me ‘Corporal.’ What a joke. To think I have any more idea of what’s going on here. Anna can hear it in his voice, he's getting worn down. As Anna feels her emotions start to dull and fade, she begins accepting more dangerous assignments from her superiors - Perhaps hoping just to feel something again. She works on the SCP-682 case - trying to devise more futile termination methods. She spends time with SCP-939, the abominations known as With Many Voices, until they start to imitate Robert’s voice, and she knows she can’t do this anymore. She works with SCP-280, Eyes in the Dark, feeling no fear whatsoever as it floats towards her. The worst thing that could possibly happen to her has happened already - Now, she’s just waiting. Killing time. She has no idea of the further horrors to come. “Lately, I’ve been hearing whispers in the dark. I think the rats are talking to me. How funny. My troops must think me mad, but what does it matter? This is a mad place. A mad time. A mad man is perhaps best suited to a time like this. So many went over the top yesterday, only to be cut down by machine gun fire. Isn’t it odd that I laughed? It was so funny. I think perhaps this mental malady is connected to a physical one. Nosebleeds and vomiting spells. This strange, black liquid, faintly acidic to the touch. But so… Delicious. So fun. My troops tell me I look unwell. Like anything about this is well! Maybe I’ll sneak into one of their bedsits tonight and teach them to lighten up a bit. None of them smile anymore. Me? I’m always smiling. I’ll teach those little cowards to smile too…” as she listens to more of the logs, she’s forced to reckon with the fact it really isn’t him anymore. Not as she’d ever known him. He’d become… Something else. “All the others are dead! Hahaha! All my good, hard work. Making them dead. I followed them down the length of the trench. Their silly little bullets didn’t hurt me. Oh no. Oh. no, no, no. The look on their faces. All the screaming as they saw me. How thrilling, to savor their fear as I approached. All those screams - What are you? You horrible old man? I showed them what I am I can walk through walls now, you know. Have all the fun I want. Yes, yes, yes! Nothing can hurt me anymore. And I can hurt everyone.” “And when the war is over… I’ll go home. Go home to my sweetheart. I know she’s waiting for me. I can’t wait to see her, to touch her beautiful face. My lovely, lovely Anna.” Hearing him like this, so broken, so utterly transformed, it's too much for her to bear. The work always needs her, and she returns to it day after day. One night, she sits up late, making her way through a stack of paperwork, when she hears it. A curious sound. Drip...drip...drip...something thick dripping steadily onto the floor behind her. The smell of rot fills her nostrils, making her gag. She turns, and comes face to face with SCP-106, dripping its slimy black mucus onto the floor, bringing decay to everything it touches. It reaches out toward her, grasping at her arm. She breaks free, but not before its touch melts away the fibers of her lab coat, threatening to seep through the fabric to her skin. All the while, it's staring straight at her, like it knows her. Anna runs out of the lab as fast as she can, shouting for help. A guard tries to come to her assistance, firing his weapon at the Old Man, but the bullets don't leave a dent, don't even slow him down. The Old Man grabs the weapon from the guard's hands, letting the metal rust, warp, and melt in his grasp. Then, he turns his corrosive touch on the guard's face. Anna screams in horror at the sight, but she can do nothing to help him. All that she can do is keep running, and hope that the monster doesn't catch her. She runs as fast as her legs can carry her, but she isn't as young as she once was, and years of sitting at a desk have made her muscles stiff and weak. Her foot hits the ground at just the wrong angle, and she stumbles, falling to the ground. She scrambles back to her feet, but when she looks up, something is horribly wrong. Her surroundings have changed. It looks like the Foundation Site, but it's not quite the same. It's as if someone tried to recreate the facility from memory, and couldn't retain all of the details. Then, she hears it again. The drip, drip, drip. He's here. She spins around, and there it is, that awful face, so close to her own. She takes a trembling step back, when suddenly, the monster speaks. "Anna..." It's him. She knows it, as surely as she knows that she is about to die. The monster that once was Robert Scranton reaches out and caresses Anna's cheek with his wrinkled hand. She screams as the skin begins to droop, and he seals her lips with a kiss that makes her insides drip like melting wax. The two become one once again

Channel: Dr Bob

Views: 1,997,953

Keywords: the rubber, therubber, animation, animated, SCP, SCP Foundation, SCP Animation, DrBob, Dr Bob, anomaly, anomalies, SCPs, anom, anoms, scp wiki, scp animated, scp explained, scp 4910, scp 1357, scp 1003, scp 1590, scp 3640, scp 4595, scp 906, scp 5201, scp 4904, scp 682, scp 173, scp 5126, scp 661, scp 3166, scp 106

Id: KJNAkdpIB5s

Length: 254min 48sec (15288 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023