Addiction. It takes many forms and wears many faces,
like a demon walking among us. It takes over your life - crawling in and
changing you from the inside out. Breaking an addiction is hard, but oftentimes
not giving it up is much harder. That was a difficult lesson to learn for three
people: Joey Walker, Dolly McGregor, and Paul Ables. These three had never met one another, and
now, they never will, but each of them had two things in common. First was that they each had an addiction
they felt like they couldn’t shake, and the second was that they each had a run-in
with SCP-666. Joey Walker was at the end of his rope when
he encountered it. Everyone has bad days, but for Joey, every
day for the last fifteen years has been a bad day. He was pushing 40 with nothing to show for
it, except credit card debt, a scraggly beard, and a beat-up old Mustang. But booze had always been there for him. No matter how bad things got, he could always
count on a glass full of comfort at the end of the day. But to paraphrase a quote by Stephen King,
“Sometimes, when a man takes a drink, the drink takes the man.” And Joey Walker had been long since taken. He was a transient worker, doing jobs wherever
jobs needed doing, but he never expected that he would end up all the way to Tibet working
construction. Not that he was complaining - Sure, it was
cold, but there was plenty of Tibetan Chang to enjoy. It was a drink so good that legends even say
that Yetis would raid villages in the mountains to get a little taste. Joey had taken a liking to the Chang, and
it was what he had been drinking when he crashed his car up in the mountains, leaving him stranded
in the snow. Joey had survived the crash itself, but he
knew he wouldn’t last long in the cold. He needed shelter. That’s why he felt like he could hardly
believe his luck when he first saw the Yurt - a kind of traditional, Tibetan tent made
from animal skins. Joey had never seen anything quite like it,
but any refuge from the storm would do. He pushed forward through the snow and climbed
inside. But the inside of the Yurt was nothing like
the outside. In fact, it seemed like an exact replica of
his favorite sports bar back in Atlantic City. It was warm, there was all the old memorabilia
on the walls, and every screen was showing the Saints wiping the floor with the Colts
in the 2010 Superbowl. Joey didn’t even question it. He just smiled, and approached the bar. He even recognized the bartender - Malcolm,
a good old friend of his. Malcolm smiled back at him, but there was
something oddly menacing in his grin. “Welcome back,” he said. “I thought you’d hauled your sorry keister
off to Tibet. Guess you gave up on that too, just like everything
else. Well, except…” Malcolm pushed a glass of beer towards him
across the bar, and glared. Joey didn’t understand why Malcolm was being
so aggressive, but he didn’t question that, either. He grabbed the glass and drank up, guzzling
it down before slamming the empty glass down on the bar. Malcolm kept the drinks coming, round after
round after round, and Joey kept knocking them back. He didn’t notice when the TV screens turned
to static. He didn’t notice when the other patrons
at the bar began to jitter and twitch, turning, little by little, into something less than
human. He didn’t even notice when Malcolm’s face
started melting off his skull, as long as he kept pouring. Before he could even really understand what
was happening to him, Joey Walker was dead. His liver and kidneys had given out on him. His corpse would later be found, frozen on
the Tibetan mountainside, just thirty feet away from his crashed car. The coroner’s report would list his cause
of death as, “Accidental.” But this was no accident. He’d fallen victim to SCP-666, an anomalous
Yurt known to some as the Spirit House. The being he’d called Malcolm is known to
the Foundation as SCP-666-1, and Malcolm had failed its challenge. Sadly for our inebriated friend, the penalty
for failure is death. Next on our list of human tragedies comes
Dolly McGregor, a 62-year-old woman from Anaheim, California. Dolly was never averse to the drink, but she
knew how to enjoy her Mojitos in moderation. You rarely get to 62 if you don’t, and Dolly
could tell people with pride that she had two children, and six grandchildren, whom
she didn’t see nearly often enough for her liking. She also had over $100,000 in gambling debt
owed to a number of Casinos on the Vegas Strip. Ever since her husband, Albert, had passed
away several years prior, shooting craps, playing blackjack, and whiling away the hours
in front of the slot machines had been a welcome change from loneliness. But in Vegas, fortunes can change in an instant
- Dolly had gone from being on a hot winning streak to losing everything. The casinos extended her lines of credit until
she was gambling with money she’d never be able to pay back, but that didn’t stop
her. She’d been selling off everything, even
remortgaging the house that Albert had built with his own two hands to try and keep up
with her ballooning debts. Still, it wasn’t enough, but she couldn’t
stop, either. It wasn’t even that she felt good about
it anymore, it was just that she only ever felt normal among the flashing lights of slot
machines and the clatter of dice. She needed to get away; as far away as possible. She’d heard about people reaching spiritual
enlightenment in Tibet. They’d discovered God, or Gods, or sometimes
just a sense of inner peace. Whatever it was, she needed to find it and
to get this demon off her back. So she took the last of her savings and flew
off to Tibet to clear her head. She didn’t know if there were any casinos
in Lhasa, but if there were, her money would surely be no good there. It was exactly what she needed. But Tibet wasn’t the promised land she thought
it would be. Wherever Dolly went, there she was, with the
same vices and demons chasing her. The first night she spent in Lhasa, she used
the hotel wifi to download an online poker app on her phone. This culminated in another couple thousand
dollars lost, and a panic attack that caused Dolly to throw her phone into her toilet before
wandering off into the wilderness. She just needed to get away. But time and space got away from her, and
eventually, she was knee deep in the snow. Where had she come from? Where could she go? It quickly dawned on her that, if she didn’t
find some kind of shelter soon, she’d be done for. But all she could do was keep walking… That’s when she happened upon SCP-666. The Yurt was like an oasis on the barren mountainside. She didn’t expect comfort inside, but it
could at least provide her some shelter until the staff back at the hotel noticed she was
gone. Then they’d come and save her, right? Right? But when she passed through the yak-leather
flap into the Yurt, Dolly wasn’t in an ancient tent in the Tibetan wilderness, she was on
a casino floor. There was a big, beautiful roulette table
before her, attended to by a grinning, well-dressed croupier. They were flanked by an army of slot machines,
and all the pleasing, familiar sounds of cheerful gambling rang out through the air. She approached the table, and the croupier
shook his head in what seemed like disappointment. “Back again, eh, Dolly?” he said with
a sigh. “Of course, I should have expected it. After all, what else do you have in that empty
little life of yours, hmm? Without all this, you’d be nothing, right? Nothing at all. Since Albert died and the kids want nothing
to do with you, we’re all you’ve got. So, Dolly, what’ll it be - Red or black? Are you feeling lucky?” His words wounded Dolly, but that wouldn’t
stop her. She grabbed her chips, and put them all on
red. One last spin couldn’t hurt. What did she have to lose? She blinked, and she wasn’t sitting at the
table anymore. She was upright, but she wasn’t standing. Her wrists and ankles were bound to something
- to a wheel, a giant roulette wheel, like it was some medieval torture device. The croupier was standing across from her. Well, something that used to be a croupier. His face was flickering in and out; sometimes
it was human, sometimes it was a mess of eyes and teeth. More demons were sitting at all the slot machines
behind him, pulling levers made from human bones. “Good choice, Dolly,” the croupier said. “Red suits you.” He reached out and gave the wheel a spin. Dolly was lost in an overwhelming, pulsing
cascade of lights, colors, and sounds. The horrific, tinny noises of slot machines
and the laughter of the demonic croupier. She was lost in panic and terror as she just
kept spinning, and spinning, and spinning… When her body was eventually found, her muscles
were in the advanced stages of atrophy, as though she hadn’t been moving for years. Her brain was rotted, and the cause of death
was determined as sudden cardiac arrest after an extended period of sleep-deprivation and
malnutrition. Dolly’s family would never really know what
happened to her. The SCP Foundation had learned a lot about
SCP-666 after containing it in Site 73. Its anomalous effects namely, vivid, complex,
and potentially fatal hallucinatory experiences only affect those with some kind of addiction
or dependency. To anyone else entering the Yurt, it’s just
a normal tent. But any addicts who enter will fall under
its spell, and are generally transported back to the place they were when their addiction
was at its strongest. There, they’ll encounter SCP-666-1, an entity
that takes the form of a figure from the subject’s life - normally one heavily involved in facilitating
their addiction. Any kind of addiction seems to trigger it
- alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, food, self-destructive behavior, even video games. SCP-666 kills its victims with a twisted mockery
of the very thing they were dependent on in life. It was only with Paul Ables that the Foundation
started discovering the other side of the coin. By almost all accounts, Paul is a worse person
than anyone on this list. He got addicted to hard drugs early on in
life, and took up a life of violent crime to support his habit. He murdered two people during a liquor store
robbery, before being convicted and sentenced to death. He’d then been picked up as a D-Class by
the SCP Foundation, and selected as a test subject for SCP-666 due to his history of
drug abuse. The Foundation expected to be adding his body
to the incineration pile sometime soon. None of the researchers working on the case
predicted what actually ended up happening. Paul was forced to enter the Yurt. Not long after, he found himself standing
in a place he’d done everything to try to forget: The dark, graffiti-stained alley where
he’d been sold his first hit. This was the place. The place that destroyed his life. Every bad decision he’d ever made could
be traced back to here. And specifically to one man… Frank. Frank was his first dealer, and how here he
was, standing right across from him once more. Frank was grinning like a demon. “C’mon, Paulie,” he said. “You’re gutter trash. We both know what you’re going to do. Don’t you feel it? The itch? One more hit, Paulie, that’s all you need
to feel better. It’s time to take your medicine…” Frank - or this thing, pretending to be Frank
- was right. He did feel the itch. He did want it. Maybe he was no better than this. He began to reach out towards Frank, but then
he abruptly pulled his hand back. Frank’s eyes widened in genuine surprise,
as Paul replied, “I’m sorry. That’s not me anymore.” SCP-666-1 gave a smile, and said, “Maybe
it isn’t, Paulie, maybe it isn’t…” When Paul Ables was removed from the SCP-666
Yurt by one of the attending guards, the Foundation researchers discovered something amazing. Paul was very much alive, and more incredibly,
he didn’t feel the cravings anymore. His addiction was gone. And further tests showed that Paul wasn’t
a one-off event.In fact, anyone who denies the temptation of SCP-666 will see their addictions
miraculously disappear when they finally leave. After this it became clear to the Foundation
that SCP-666 isn’t just a way to punish addicts, it’s a kind of test. Those who want to change, who are willing
to truly confront their demons and resist the pull of temptation are rewarded with the
one thing they want most in life, freedom from their addiction. SCP-666 can be your doom or your salvation. And like most things in life, you get what
you give. Now check out “SCP-610 - The Flesh That
Hates” and “SCP-1730 - What Happened to Site-13?” for more anomalous places straight
out of your worst nightmares!
