Turning and Turning - SCP Foundation

Turning and Turning

2016

22 February

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

There were fewer women in the Mobile Task Forces than there were in Site security, which suited Ibanez fine. She got along with men much better, once the ground rules had been established.

Her time doing ridealongs with Van Rompay had helped a great deal in that regard. She'd only had to punch one person in the balls since taking the old soldier's job, and she was pretty sure the recipient understood that he'd had it coming.

Most Mobile Task Forces are stationed at a single facility. Nu-7 ("Hammer Down"), a battalion tasked almost excusively with regaining control over lost or rogue facilities, deploys out of Armed Bio-Containment Area-14. Alpha-1 ("Red Right Hand") are the bodyguards of the O5 Council, and therefore operate primarily at Site-01, though squadrons can be found wherever the Overseers roam. Some MTFs leapfrog from station to station, going where they're needed most, and very few are explicitly tied to the organizational hierarchy of the place where they hang their helmets. As it so often is, Site-43 is an exception to this rule.

The majority of the Mobile Task Forces operating out of Site-43 are stationed there long-term, and rarely travel far from their point of origin. This is due to the facility's role as a hub of Foundation authority in Canada and the northernmost United States; relying on units stationed southward presents all manner of difficulties, from the sheer logistics of flying up to Lake Huron to the awkwardness of black helicopters crossing the American border. Deviation from the standard name-and-numbering rules is used to indicate this peculiarity: most forces tied to Site-43 are numbered to indicate as much, with a solid proportion of the range between Alpha- and Omega-43 already covered.

This long-term residency arrangement, coupled with the fact that most of the MTFs operate out of Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-A's upper levels and are therefore isolated from the rest of the Site's staff, has made the agents and researchers under Chief Ibanez's command particularly tight-knit. Contrary to Foundation policy for fraternization between researchers, of which Site-43 has always been in flagrant violation, this is generally considered to be a good thing. Morale is morale.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

That was all well and good, but the fact remained that Ibanez was not yet properly a member of the family whose matriarch she now was. It had been a patriarchy before, which was a problem, and it had operated according to a discipline specific to Van Rompay's personal style, which was another.

As Chief of Security and Containment, she'd been able to flit between only three nerve centres and hang out with the staff on-duty, getting to know them and observing their work. The MTFs had no dedicated central socializing space, because each of them had their own unique tasks, personnel makeup and equipment, and so she found herself spending most of each shift wandering from room to room, spending a few minutes max with each agent, then moving on. She was going to be a cipher to most of them for months, and there really wasn't anything she could do about it but put in the work.

The other Survivors were her friends, but there were some things best kept among colleagues, and she felt that the rougher kinds of socialization fell firmly into that category. So when her body and brain started to ache from too many days spent solely on filling the old man's big combat boots, it was natural, if not precisely admirable, that she'd call on her former associates to fill the need.

Which was how she found out that Howard Yancy's wife had been in an automobile accident, and he was out of the facility on indefinite leave.

Ordinarily, she would have gone on down the list of potential drinking buddies until she found someone available.

The problem was that somehow, in between Breaches and survival training and executing hapless thaumaturges and chasing gift and geistschreiber and shifting career paths, she'd never actually extended that list beyond a single item.

24 February

No doubt he'd heard it a thousand times before, but never from her, so she had plausible deniability. Imrich had his own office now — probably had for years — and he'd left the door open, so Udo walked in brazenly and declared: "I'll bet you knew I was coming."

"No." He didn't look up from his desk. This wasn't anything new, and didn't necessarily signify anything.

"No?"

"No." He stopped scribbling in his notepad; she saw a stack of them behind him on the squat filing cabinet, and realized with dull surprise that all of them were used. He finally looked up. "What do you want?"

She got right into it. Imrich hated preambles. "Du was talking about how predictive thaumaturgy doesn't work right anymore. I was wondering if he was talking about you."

He didn't sigh, but his eyes did. "I didn't know you were coming because I don't spend my time predicting what you'll do. I've got more important things to waste my time with."

"So, it hasn't affected you?" she nudged.

"Of course it's affected me. It's affected me since F-D blew up for the first time. I've been accounting for it, but." His jaw jutted out, and he seethed for a moment.

She didn't like to pry, but she didn't see a choice. "Yes?"

"But it's like suddenly I need glasses, and I don't have any. Relatable?"

"Not particularly." She tilted down the lenses of her enormous round spectacles. "I don't need glasses."

He looked legitimately surprised, which was a true rarity. "Really?"

"Really."

"I didn't know that."

"Good." She pushed them back up the bridge of her nose. "It's a stupid affectation. Thanks for not considering that possibility." She moved to take the door in one hand, "Can we talk? We don't really talk anymore."

"Why not?"

"Why not, as in yes, or why not, as in—"

"Not why not as in why don't we talk anymore. We don't talk anymore because we stopped being friends, and it was too pointless and embarrassing to start again, and you've only needed my help on the seldomest of occasions since then. And that's still the case, so let's not talk about that. You want to talk about 5243."

She took her time closing the door, to process all of that. "Mostly I wanted to talk about you. I know it drives Reynders up the window, having to see all that alternate reality stuff. Is it the same with you?"

"No." The way he poured it all out, she was sure her question had accorded precisely with his most keen frustrations. "With me it's like I used to have the world's most accurate roadmap, written in a language I don't read but can cross-translate, and now it's like someone printed a whole other map on top of that one, in the same ink, at a slight angle, and it's almost fucking impossible to tell which is which. And that's happened three times now. And also the world is falling apart, a little bit, so actually even the baseline map underneath is a little bit wrong in all the wrong places. So all in all it's going just fantastic." He picked up the notepad and flung it into the trashbin, which fell over. There were other notepads in there, she saw.

"I'm sorry."

She knew so many people who liked to make eye contact. "Scuttlebutt is you're the only one with no reason to be. Everyone else has fucked up the conprocs, but you don't even really do anything, so how can you?"

She was an old hand at not taking offence at Imrich's bluntness. In a way, it had prepared her for friendship with Lillian Lillihammer. "I meant I was sorry you're dealing with that. But…" It was like a light going on in the back of her head. "You've given me an idea."

"What?"

"I wonder if you could use your Talent to map my actions during 5243, and get a little more evidence of what exactly is happening. The security feeds are unreadable. My memories are irretrievable. But maybe…?"

"No." And there it was again.

"No?"

"No. I'm still working on Wettle's replications. We're trying to map the fractures, predict where they'll happen next. That's more important." He pulled a fresh notepad out of a box on the fake windowsill.

"Is it? Because from where I'm standing, 5243 is the cause of all of this, and the more we know about why and how it happens, the closer we'll get to stopping these fractures from even existing."

"In other words," he said, still with his back to her, "it all comes down to you, and how important you are."

"I never said I was important," she said.

"No," he shook his head, "you never do."

"But Du and Reynders said that the Breach is definitely what's causing this. Every little hint about how it works could be invaluable."

"I suppose."

"Will you at least think about it?"

He spun back around, notepad in hand. "Sure. I'll think about it. At least when I'm just using my god-given brain, instead of this infernal nonsense," and to her amazement he threw the new pad across the room, too, "I can only see one path forward, and one path back."

"That," she sighed, "sounds nice."

And she bent down to pick it up for him.

29 February

"I'm surprised you're doing this remotely," said the voice on the phone that Ngo had once been able to put a face to.

"It's what you asked for."

"Yeah," Bradbury agreed, "but I didn't think you'd allow it."

"Why not?"

The shrug was inaudible, but implied. "I don't know. You've got your therapeutic environment all set up. I thought you might insist I go there. Or you might insist on coming here."

"Melissa, you've barely left that house in thirteen years. That's your comfort environment. You feel safe there. That's a pretty serious requirement of trauma therapy. Would you feel safe here? At 43?"

"I want to." A pause. "But I wouldn't."

"Well, there we go then. Now. Which of the treatment methods we discussed seemed most promising to you?"

"I don't think I can choose just one."

"That's alright!" Ngo tried to keep her tone upbeat. She was glad that Bradbury had reached out. She knew the silver-haired physicist had been doing contract work from her home in Grand Bend for years now, but she'd never been able to get a solid read on her mental state. Sure, they did their annual calls for psych reviews, and her phone and all her socials were bugged and scrutinized, but still. Nothing beat face-to-face contact, and she was very much hoping to build up to that. "I can help. Given what you've told me about these intrusive thoughts, maybe Cognitive Processing Therapy might be a good place to start."

"That's… not what I meant."

Ngo frowned. "What did you mean, then?"

"I meant I don't want to choose just one."

It was an absurd thing to do, but Ngo did it anyway. She took the device off the side of her head, and turned to stare at it.

She could still hear Bradbury's tinny voice on the other end. "Because I am sick to death of my comfort environment, Dr. Ngo."

1 March

More than a decade on, and the saloon's atmosphere still hadn't recovered from the death of David Markey. The lazy old tech had never much cared for Ambrogi's moonshine, and had gotten his fix in loud, sloppy fashion with the rest of the hard cases who didn't mind the optics of drinking during the day. Ibanez hadn't liked the man very much, but she'd liked the ambience he provided just fine.

Sitting at the bar with Udo Okorie almost felt respectable, which was not at all the vibe that she was looking for.

No respectable establishment would have entertained Udo's taste for girly cocktails, but the saloon was a serve-yourself model, so she sat there primly sipping at a Piña Colada while Ibanez pounded back bottle after bottle of the Site's private reserve. Forsythe had often marvelled that someone so small could metabolize so much alcohol. Udo was visibly admiring it now.

Or was that fear? Works for me, either way.

There was nobody else in the room, and it was particularly well-soundproofed for fairly obvious reasons, so there was no reason for them not to talk shop. Udo was doing most of the talking, while Ibanez grunted agreement or dissent.

"Lillian remembered something interesting today," the thaumaturge remarked.

Ibanez grunted through her beer.

"She first met Wheeler, Marion Wheeler, at Site…" Udo furrowed her brow for a second. "Site-41, where Antimemetics is based — I think. She was there on Del Olmo's trail, after he dropped clean out of the record. She was tracking down anybody who might be able to give her a new perspective on why he'd disappeared."

Ibanez wiped the foam from her lip. "You say Lillian remembered this, today? I didn't think Lillian could forget things."

Udo nodded. "Yeah, but that's not the same as thinking about everything at once, right? She'd go nuts." She smirked. "Nutser. She can still dismiss thoughts she doesn't want to have right now."

"Ought to teach that to Phil Deering," Ibanez remarked. "Or Harry."

Udo nodded. "So, because it was tied up with Antimemetics, it was harder for her to focus on it. Didn't occur to her to bring it up until today, because I was telling her we were gonna have this little meeting," and she playfully nudged Ibanez's ribs with her shoe, "and she'd just gotten off the phone telling Wheeler some random thing she didn't feel like telling me."

Ibanez took another pull, and wiped the residue away again. "What's the short version of why this matters?"

"Wheeler told her Del Olmo was tracking down a global cult, and that Antimemetics had an interest. He was doing spot treatments. Busting people, getting them contained, amnesticized, whatever."

"Secret agent shit."

"Apparently. Now, you'd think this was the giftschreiber, right? It wasn't."

"Not the new guys, either?"

"No. Neither side. Wheeler said it was unrelated to any of that. Del Olmo was handling a global memetic crisis, but not the one we're handling. Lillian says that's how she got saddled with whatever her thing with Antimem is about."

Ibanez tried to take another gulp, but the bottle was almost empty. All she got were a few bitter dregs. "Ngh. Okay. What's that information get us?"

"I think it cuts down on the number of angles we need to pursue. If Del Olmo was working on something unrelated to the cryptomancers, that just leaves Zlatá and Deering to figure out. And if he was talking to them, too…"

"…then they might all have gotten whacked because of the same weird thing, which isn't the main weird thing we're all working on. Which means…" Ibanez grinned.

"What's it mean? I didn't get an extra step out of that."

"It means this thing you and I have been investigating together never had anything to do with the others anyway, so we can cut them out again and do it our way." She slid off the stool. "Wanna play darts?"

Udo put down her glass. It was empty. When she took to her feet, she was more than a little wobbly. "For fun, or divination?"

Ibanez snorted. "Fun. This isn't Twin Peaks."

"That's good." Udo placed a hand on Ibanez's shoulder to steady herself. "Agent Cooper never figured out a goddamn thing with that shit, and even more people died."

Ibanez knocked on the stool's wooden legs before they staggered off to the board together.

12 March

Grand Bend: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

It wasn't a fair comparison.

From a strictly physical point of view, Morwen Couch was not unattractive. She was fit, sharp-featured and more than a little impish in demeanour; in some ways she reminded Udo of Lillian, though that was a secret she would take to her grave, particularly if she shared it with the memeticist. Couch looked not the slightest bit ridiculous in her casual shirt and slacks, blending into the Tim Hortons atmosphere far more effectively than did Udo herself.

But seeing the Chief Superintendent of OSAT out of uniform nevertheless reminded her powerfully of those candid shots of Hitler in his short pants and knee-high socks.

"So," said Udo. "What are we going to talk about?"

"How sad it is that you're wasting your talents?" Couch sipped at her mocha latte. "Or rather, that they're being wasted for you? It was my understanding that you're some kind of wizard-woman. Why would they send you on a diplomacy mission?"

Udo stirred her tea, and smiled. "Do you think you're being clever? Framing it that way?" She leaned in. "You want to know why they only sent a researcher to talk with you. You think you're so much more important than that."

The other woman's face split apart in a wide grin. "I like you! You don't take any shit. Like the short one." Couch idly rotated the sleeve on her cardboard cup, in tune with Udo's spoon. "But seriously, I would think they could find something more entertaining for you to get up to. I certainly could."

Udo laughed. "Wow. Yeah, consider me flattered and intrigued. I can't wait to hear the amazing pitch you give me, about how I should come work for your hobbled X-Files unit as opposed to the world-renowned research and containment initiative that fucking raised me."

Couch lifted both hands in a gesture of surrender, which of course meant that she hadn't really cared if the implied offer made an impact. "Fair play. It was worth a try. You want to get down to business, that's fine by me. Are you familiar with the Québec insomnia case?"

"Yeah." She certainly was. It had begun when the Foundation had decommissioned SCP-5281, at the behest of OSAT and the Global Occult Coalition. She'd read a heavily redacted version of the file — the real one was rated at Clearance Level 4, meaning only the Director and a few of his senior Chairs and Chiefs could get the entire story — and it had struck her as a situation with no good possible outcome. 5281 had been a French-Canadian phantasm known as Bonhomme Sept-Heures, the Seven O'Clock Gentleman, with the unsettling abilities to teleport anywhere within the Province of Québec, induce sleep with a fine red powder, and consume more than his own body weight in victims in a single night, if he so chose. And he chose quite whimsically.

Only in terms of the quantity of his meals, however. The quality was firmly fixed.

Bonhomme Sept-Heures had exclusively eaten children.

They'd tried containing him. They'd tried reasoning with him. They'd tried disabling him. Nothing worked. And so, finally, they'd turned to their final option. The Decommissioning Department had executed him via lethal injection in April of 1996.

At which point, children across Québec had begun exhibiting signs of chronic insomnia.

It soon became clear that the gentleman cannibal had performed some sort of soporific function in addition to his irregular feeding patterns, which had gone unnoticed by either the Foundation or OSAT. As this new difficulty was anomalous in nature, and too close scrutiny by agencies outside the Veil risked exposing the whole sordid story — in which absolutely nobody came off very well — the Foundation had stepped in to ameliorate. Medical treatments with paranatural origins were administered to the affected children, and fatalities were kept to a minimum. The most effective treatment of all involved the use of the red dust 5281 had used to sedate his victims; the same red dust which Udo used in all her thaumaturgic rites, having found it a uniquely comfortable fit.

If this was what Couch wanted to talk about, well, that explained why Udo had been sent to listen. She wasn't about to tell the Chief Superintendent any of that, of course, so she left it at that brief affirmation.

"Bad business," Couch remarked. "None of us covered ourselves in glory. Of course, it was before my time. And yours." She pretended to look concerned. It was an unnatural look on her arch features. "Well, the business with the boogeyman was. The children, not so much. It's been getting worse every year, despite all that bizarre red medicine your people have been passing along. I thought you might learn something from the fellow's vestments, but apparently you didn't get anything valuable from that trade. Teach me to be generous with my resources, I suppose."

That was a laugh. Couch had traded 5281's clothes, granted to OSAT as a reward for its participation in the debacle, for a comatose loup-garou in Site-43's possession. The tradeoff had been handled so poorly, thanks to the bungling of Edwin Falkirk (and, though nobody said as much in public, Karen Elstrom), that a handful of Site personnel had been killed. And the threadbare Victorian attire had produced, after weeks of careful study, not a single appreciable benefit.

Udo didn't say anything about that, either, offering not even a lukewarm defence. She simply nodded.

Couch continued. "Fact is, the Prime Minister's pissed. He's taking this out on me and mine. You lot gave OSAT the mandate for handling the crisis on the ground, and we fought you for that right. Well, it's proving a right pain in our asses now, and we've reached the limits of what we can do. Your people, on the other hand… well." Couch took another sip, watching Udo closely over the rim. She spent a moment savouring the coffee before concluding. "That worldwide reach you were just bragging about. All those big brains. All those wonderful things you've got in containment. Surely you can think of a way to help us poor government employees out?"

Udo frowned. "You're passing the insomnia case back to us?"

The cop shook her head. "No. I'm asking for your assistance. On behalf of the good little boys and girls of Canada's secondmost populous province. I'm always hearing about how the Foundation tries so hard to help the whole of mankind. This seems a great opportunity to put your money where your mouths are."

Udo's tea was cold. She'd spent twenty minutes stirring it, waiting for Couch to arrive. There was no point trying to drink it now. She stood up. "Send us whatever files you've got, and I'll see what I can do. For the children. Not for you."

"Obviously," Couch grinned. "Oh, and say hello to Karen for me, would you? Assuming she hasn't taken the honourable way out already. I know how those tight-laced types can get."

14 March

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Couch's files on 5281 turned out to be nothing very special, which didn't surprise Udo one bit. She'd seen OSAT's database entry on the werewolf they'd procured from Falkirk, back in 2003, and it had been full of misconceptions and ill-conceived speculation. She read what she could of the file again; Harry was working with the Records and Archives Information Security Administration and Project CLIO to determine how much of the full file could be declassified for her eyes; he was also collating as much textual material on Bonhomme Sept-Heures as existed in his prodigious databases. While she waited, Udo decided to seek out an expert consultation on the matter.

When it came to myth figures, she had an inside woman.

Or at least, she'd thought she did. Brenda Corbin refused to take her calls. She left three messages on the woman's phone, and tried contacting her through the Site's direct messaging system; no dice. The messages didn't go undelivered, they simply went unanswered.

Possibly, just possibly, that might have had something to do with the fact that Udo had only begrudgingly assisted Corbin in her research on the Victims and their manifestations of something larger. She probably should have been more cooperative, though she hadn't known enough to be very much more forthcoming.

She was halfway to TheoTelo to knock on Corbin's office door, hat in hand — literally, she was holding the dead skip's long-since-sanitized tophat — when she ran into someone with parallel qualifications and a much more welcoming attitude.

"Is that from 5281?" Anastasios Mataxas called out, as Udo paused on the threshold to Corbin's pentagrammatic workspace.

Udo turned to face the old man. "Yeah. I'm working on the case again."

"Still the sand? Or something else?"

"Something else. The insomnia. It's not getting better."

Mataxas clicked his tongue. "That is distressing. It's been nearly two decades! If it hasn't gotten any better yet, it might never. A worthy cause for study. What approach were you planning to take?"

It occurred to Udo that though the Chair of Research and Experimentation was no expert in cryptids or French-Canadian myth figures, he knew an awful lot about things that went bump in the night. He was the Site's foremost expert in spectremetry, the rational study of ghosts. Perhaps this qualified? "I hadn't given it much thought, yet. Still collecting research materials. Doing consultations. I don't suppose you've got the time…?"

The old man smiled brilliantly. "I always have time for consultations, Dr. Okorie. Collaboration is the soul of science, and souls of all kinds are my business. What sort of colleague would I be if I passed up the chance to talk shop, on such an important issue?"

"Yeah," Udo smiled, feeling empty in the vicinity of her stomach. "What kind. Uh. Do you think there might be a spiritual angle to this?"

Mataxas cocked his head back in a comical gesture of consideration. "As I recall, initial research dismissed the possibility that our child-eating fiend was a construct of the public imaginary. He scoffed at the concept himself, I believe. But this connection to the minds and bodies of the people of Québec, that is interesting. Very interesting. He parasitized that entire population for centuries. They thought of him often. They suffer in his absence. A… dare I say it, a collective haunting?" His gaze snapped back to her like lightning grounding itself. "Yes, I think I might be able to find an angle here, Dr. Okorie. I believe I shall be very grateful to have interrupted your pilgrimage to the land of the lay pastors."

It had taken zero effort to prise the tophat out of Trevor Bremmel's possession. The cantankerous engineer had been more than happy to lose what was by no means one of his prize possessions, nor one of Arms and Equipment's star finds. When she came back with Mataxas in tow and asked to sign out the spectre's walking cloak and suit as well, Bremmel had foisted the entire tub on them and signed away authority in perpetuity.

"Riddance to rubbish," he snarled, then went back to berating his daughter. He was trying something radical in the way of research assistants, and by the look on Joanna's already no longer fresh face, it wasn't working out well for either of them.

Under the tenure of Anastasios Mataxas, ghost hunter extraordinaire, the Research and Experimentation Section has acquired a few pieces of state-of-the-art spectremetry kit. There's no dedicated workspace to store them in, as a formal Section for the purposes of plumbing the afterlife has never been authorized by the Chairs and Chiefs, but there are small and scattered mini-labs across the facility's western front which feature strange and spooky bits of tech wherever the space can be spared. In this way, rather appropriately, the spectre of Spectrometry and Spectremetry now haunts the body of Site-43 in metatextual commentary on the ghosts and goblins it would, were it to manifest fully, concretize the study of.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

The extent to which Harry didn't care about the Mataxas dream of an S&S Section could even be glimpsed in his prose; the singular paragraph on the subject in Lines in a Muddle actually ended in a preposition, and had since its unaltered first draft. Standing in one of those far-flung and spooky science closets, Udo had to agree that it seemed unlikely that the study of the unquiet dead would ever be one of the Site's flagship concerns.

The Keter Range EMF Reader, unlike the portable Safe and Euclid versions, was a huge and heavy piece of machinery resembling a hollowed-out photocopier. Mataxas dropped the riding cloak in first, and closed the lid. "Polly!" he called out.

His daughter, Polyxeni Mataxas, emerged from the connected monitoring room. If the partition between the two spaces had been removed, the whole thing would have been the size of a comfortably spacious personal washroom. "Hey, dad. Hey, Dr. Okorie."

Udo waved. She liked Polly. Everyone called her Pollyanna, after the optimistic heroine of a book nobody had heard of until Harry had relentlessly made it a thing.

"My daughter will operate the machinery," Anastasios explained, "while we wait in the monitoring room."

"Why's that?" Udo asked. "Is it like a dentist's x-ray, or something?"

The old man laughed. "Nothing so dangerous. No, it's just that your thaumic signature might interfere with the reading, and I'm such a true believer, my brainwaves might do the same. To get a clean look, we'll have to take ourselves out of range."

Udo frowned good-naturedly. "Don't believe in ghosts, Polly?"

The other woman could have been her photo negative, except that the long, curly hair was rich brown on both. Polly grinned. "I'm a scientific believer. Late-season Scully. No Mulders allowed in here."

Udo got the reference; Harry had showed her a few episodes of The X-Files during their latest and final attempt to make a go of it. That Udo hadn't cared for the show had probably been one of the final coffin nails.

"If you'll escort me, madameoiselle," Mataxas said, and he gestured at the open door.

Polly rolled her eyes.

Udo reached up and took his arm, and they walked into the monitoring room like a pair of promenading Victorians. It seemed appropriate to the occasion, and to its theme.

15 March

"Extraordinary."

Mataxas walked around the extent of the drum, tapping the displays on each of the five devices he'd attached around its circumference. Udo knew that the sand within was now cris-crossed with spectral lasers that would not diffract in silica, forming a five-pointed star. She couldn't very well complain about the cliché, as a witch wearing a wizard hood and sleeves.

"What's extraordinary?"

High-Yield Storage at Site-43 comes in many forms. The most impressive are the series of over one hundred massive metal drums, constructed of various materials and in various sizes, to contain anomalous matter not yet scheduled for acroamatic abatement. Some of it is merely undergoing further study before destruction, vacuum-tubed to the labs above in AAF-B, -C and -D or Applied Occultism, then sucked back down through gratings in the exam room floors. Some is stored indefinitely, because it has a practical use; the best example is the five square metre cistern on the fourth sublevel of AAF-D, unaffected by the cataclysm of 2002, which contains the vim harenae used by Dr. Udo Okorie to enable her acts of micamancy. It was once the soporofic sand SCP-5281 used to sedate his victims, before an out-of-control act of thaumaturgic prodigism turned the entire vat merely magical, instead of malefic. This was no setback to the study of the stuff itself, as four more vats retaining their French-Canadian spectral savour remain.

Reports that these subterranean vaults of esoteric leavings are haunted are both totally unproven, and really quite likely.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

Mataxas pointed at the vat, one of the ones she hadn't denatured, a gigantic quantity of supernatural sand produced by the Bonhomme's skeleton before she'd accidentally crushed it into bone meal during one of her other experiments. "Euclid spectremetry is maximal. This stuff is radiating Wolpert Particles at a rate beyond the range of our devices. If I filled the KR-EMF with it, the thing would either blow up or start speaking in tongues. In brevi, doctor, this sand is haunted."

She felt a little sick, and wasn't immediately sure why. "Haunted by what?"

"Its source, one would imagine. The Gentleman himself."

"But he's dead," she said, and immediately regretted it.

He smiled sympathetically at her. "Quite so. Quite so."

17 March

"That's very interesting." Harold Blank always made a point of calling anything Mataxas described 'very interesting', or 'intriguing', or even 'fascinating', after Leonard Nimoy. Mataxas preferred the latter, as it reminded him of In Search Of… and Rod Serling. He'd been a fan.

"It's hooey," Bremmel chuffed.

They were sitting in the Chairs and Chiefs boardroom. All the Chairs and Chiefs were there. Full meetings weren't the norm, but they were a requirement for proposals of this nature.

"Dr. Mataxas has proven his points to my satisfaction," McInnis remarked, keeping his eyes trained on Bremmel. The antagonistic engineer simply grunted.

"But is that enough?" Michael Nass could barely restrain his distaste. "Because I know where the resources are going to come from, if we do this. Don't think I don't."

The ASC raised a hand in warning. "Budgetary concerns are no reason to stymie scientific innovation. If a need is shown here, and the ability to fill that need is demonstrated, and general agreement reached by this body, the new Section will be funded. No-one is suggesting we undermine TheoTelo, either in jurisdiction or financial support."

"You say that now," the theologian sighed.

"It sounds like your readings pass muster for scientific note," Lillian yawned. "Sorry. They're really boring though. Don't care about ghosts."

"They care about you," Stacey Laiken smiled. "Rather a lot, I'm given to understand."

"Low blow. But whatever. That's two good experiments, connected to an ongoing project that might end up being something important. Super cool. Not enough to justify an entire Section, though. I'd need to see at least a few more practical applications, with more obvious and vital benefits — sorry, didn't mean to be punny, there — before I signed off on this."

Mataxas could see that she knew she'd made a mistake when she saw the smile this produced on his own face. "Funny you should ask. A couple, you say?"

12 February

"It waxes and wanes," Mataxas nodded as he scanned the room for a second time. "But the readings are no less powerful than they were in 2002. I might even say they're stronger now than they were back then, though that might be an artifact of how primitive my earlier equipment was."

Nascimbeni hadn't moved from the doorway after opening it up for them. Rozálie Astrauskas was standing in the middle of the bathroom, squinting at something in the corner where the sink cabinets met the wall. She glanced at the Chief, than at Mataxas, and said "I'm surprised you've been able to improve it at all, with no budget."

Mataxas shrugged, and offered a smile. "That's the beauty of doing a job you love, young woman. You can explore the entire possibility field most effectively: the things your employer cares about while you're on the clock, and the things that intrigue you personally while you're not. Though obviously I wouldn't mind expanding this field to a permanent fixture, rather than these ad hoc explorations."

Nascimbeni looked away, and crossed his arms.

"You should've called me in here earlier," Rozálie murmured. The second-floor washroom in AAF-D had suffered few ill effects when everything downstairs had been rent asunder; the only sign it had ever been connected to the disaster was the horrible, terrible, no-good feeling everyone got as soon as they entered. Nascimbeni had refused to take a single step further, and Mataxas had to keep returning to the door to show the old tech what he'd found so far.

"Well, all matters connected with 5243 are heavily classified." Mataxas saw her attention kept flicking back to the same spot on the wall. "I've been allowed to do my annual readings, which I feel have been quite conclusive, but it took a lot of badgering to wangle a consult."

"You'll be glad you did," she smiled. She pointed at the junction that had so enraptured her. "Because the moment I started my auramancy reading, I saw it."

"Saw what?" Nascimbeni took a step back.

"The aura."

Mataxas moved to stand beside her. "In the corner, there?"

She shook her head. "No, that's just the emitter for the vigour band. The epicentre." She made a gesture that took in the entire room: toilet stalls, sinks, floor, walls and ceiling all together. "Emotion and psychic bands radiate off that, and there's some really interesting fractalization in the Hume spirals. Yeah." She smiled, and then shivered, and then smiled even wider. "Yeah, I'd say you've got five, maybe as high as ten percent saturation here."

Nascimbeni stared at her. "Ten percent saturation of what?"

"Of a human being's aura, of course. This bathroom is totally haunted."

17 March

Mataxas dealt copies of his report to each of his peers like they were playing cards. They soared over the polished table to land in front of each set of eyes, curious or incurious alike. "It hasn't got the same virtuosity of Dr. Astrauskas' personal touch — there's no technological replacement for a good thaumaturge, whatever they might think at Site-36 — but the device we've constructed gives readings with more than acceptable resolution to function as a first responder tool."

"First responder," said Blank, staring at the blobs of colour on the page in front of him. "For hauntings?"

"That's right." Mataxas shuffled out a new dataset, this one nothing but charts and tables, and beamed at them all in turn. It took a while. There were a lot of Chairs and Chiefs, though he'd always felt there was room for at least one more. "And as a bonus, the devices turn up signatures that map to what Dr. Astrauskas calls the 'identity gradient', a personal and non-replicable indentifier for all sapient beings. Every being, living or dead, we've tested it on has returned a different result. With one set of exceptions."

The ASC looked up. "What set would that be?"

"The set including the parahominid strings buried in Ipperwash Park, the Cladrastis lutea planted above it, the cultured droplets recovered from that tree-being's sodden uniform, the AAF-D second sublevel water closet, the grouting recovered from its monitoring room, biological remains recovered from that same room — apologies, Chief Nascimbeni — and the set of compressed human xeroxes presently kept in cold storage. In summation, friends, we have proven that the victims of SCP-5243 now share a single identity matrix, and also properly identified Researcher Wirth's remains some fourteen years after the fact." He favoured Nascimbeni with a sympathetic smile (the Chief of J&M looked stricken, as he always did when the fate of his nephew was mentioned), then widened it for the rest of them. "And as the showman said, friends, that's not all!"

15 February

"Somatic imaging is on."

Polly inclined her head to acknowledge her father's statement, and spoke in her softest tones: "Can you hear me, Dr. Astrauskas?"

Rozálie stared at the focus object swinging like a pendulum in front of her, and reached up to touch the leads attached to her temples, one by one. "I can hear you."

Polly kept the rhythm steady. "You're standing in a hallway. You're at Area-21. You're talking to an old friend. Who are you talking to?"

"Udo." Rozálie smiled, a mixture of melancholy and embarrassment and something a little spicier. "Udo Okorie."

"That's right," Polly cooed. "That's good. But there's someone else there. Can you see them?"

Rozálie frowned. "She's moving fast. She's going somewhere. She's up to something."

"How can you tell?"

"Because she isn't who she says she is."

"How do you know that?"

"Because…" Rozálie gasped. "I can see it. I can see who she is. I've never met her, but she's wearing someone I know, like a disguise. I can see every gradient! I don't understand them all."

"Focus in on the one you don't understand. Focus, Rozálie. This is very important." Polly looked up at her father.

His face was a rictus of joy.

"I'm focusing," Rozálie whispered.

"Oh, you brilliant thing," Anastasios Mataxas crowed as he saw the results. "You certainly are."

17 March

"One final handout, class, with my apologies." This time Mataxas passed a thick sheaf in both directions, and let the Chairs and Chiefs help themselves. "This is a report authored after the events I've just recounted, with myself as the primary author, Drs. Astrauskas, Sýkora and Wettle as secondaries, and a great deal of assistance from Junior Researcher Polyxeni Mataxas."

"Showing… what?" Bremmel flipped through the pages dismissively. "Can I get a woo translation, please?"

Laiken gasped.

"Something the matter, Stacey?" Mataxas asked, giddiness creeping into his voice.

"Are you serious about this?"

"Dead," he said, and he saw Blank suppressing a laugh.

"What's the Coles Notes version?" Elstrom asked. She looked completely out of her depth, as did almost everyone in the Practical Sections.

Laiken tapped the paper, less for emphasis, Mataxas thought, than to prove to herself that she was actually holding it in her hands. "They claim that they can detect residual emissions from passively antimemetic entities. Reliably and accurately, this time."

"As in geistschreiber?" Lillian demanded. She looked down at the paper in surprise. "Well, that's not nothing. Wait. Sýkora…?"

"What's Imrich contributing?" Harry asked. "Stace?"

Laiken's mouth was wide open, She looked up again at the rest of them, shock written in every line. "They can detect the emissions, and they can get readings from the emissions, and the readings are… math."

"Math," Nass repeated. "So…?

"So Imrich Sýkora, whose talent is mathemagical pathing prediction, can use those readings to get a tenuous trace on the actions of whoever's emissions have been detected." Laiken set the paper down, and began blinking rapidly. "Anastasios, your ghost hunting tech will allow them to hunt the f—" She swallowed the incredible thing, by her standards, she'd been about to say. "Hunt the giftschreiber. Oh my god."

Ibanez raised a hand. "Can we call the vote right now? Because I'm absolutely voting yes."

Mataxas looked around the room as the ASC prepared the ballots. Most of the occupants were in shock. Many of them were smiling, many of them at him. Even the ones who didn't care looked impressed.

Harold Blank met his eyes.

Mataxas waggled his eyebrows.

Blank began to smile.

There's no dedicated workspace to store them in, as a formal Section for the purposes of plumbing the afterlife has never been authorized by the Chairs and Chiefs, but there are small and scattered mini-labs across the facility's western front which feature strange and spooky bits of tech wherever the space can be spared. In this way, rather appropriately, the spectre of Spectrometry and Spectremetry now haunts the body of Site-43 in metatextual commentary on the ghosts and goblins it would, were it to manifest fully, concretize the study of.

The Spectrometry and Spectremetry Section of Site-43 is the latest addition to the org charts, and as yet has acquired no fully new facilities. The fabbers in J&M are already churning out panels at time of writing, however, so expansion into the Mishepeshu caves to relieve the pressure on the existing R&E plant is likely in the offing. For now, the nascent Section will need to make do with a solid chunk of space carved out of the field-agnostic facilities in the centre-east of the academic sprawl, opposite its more dogmatic rivals in Theology and Teleology. The permanent large-scale spectremetry devices already constructed, on the back of a raft of high-profile experimental successes, is truly staggering; these include […]

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

"You sure made the old man happy," Zaman smiled at her. "Not bad for a few days' work."

Udo smiled back at the Chief of Hiring and Regulation. His office was festooned with personal trinkets: miniature airplanes, reproduction medals, pastel watercolours ranging from childhood crudeness to the practised hand of an adult. It was a sunny setting for her victory lap, and she was feeling magnanimous. "I was late to the party. He was just looking for a few more easy wins to make it a slam-dunk."

"All to the good, in my opinion. Been a long time since we saw a whole new science sprout up in here. Probably something Reynders invented, last time."

Udo nodded. "I don't think this one is very new, but the attention it's getting is." She folded her hands in her lap to indicate a shift in seriousness of their conversation. "Chief Zaman, I have a request to make."

"On behalf of ApplOcc, or S&S? You still posted under Laiken?"

"Yes, of course. I'm still a thaumaturge. I won't be hunting many ghosts. But there's one I do need to get on the trail of, and unfortunately… you and I have him as a mutual acquaintance, in a sense." She kept talking as she saw his face fall. "Post-mortem, in my case. Pre-mortem in yours."

"Sept-Heures," he croaked. His eyes were suddenly watering. "You're talking about Sept-Heures."

Everyone else who eschewed the number called the entity Bonhomme. That Zaman did not carried some sort of import, and Udo suspected she knew what it was. "That's right. He's dead, but I don't believe he's fully gone. Not the essence of him. As a few of those experiments suggest."

Zaman nodded. He plucked a tissue out of the box on his desk, and blew his nose. He shook his head. "Sorry. Weird feelings. Really weird. Not… not the best period of my life, you know? Not my crowning achievement as a, I don't know. As a human being, really."

She nodded sympathetically. "No judgement here. We've all done things we regret. But I need to know more about him, about the… about Sept Heures."

He took a deep breath, and straightened in his chair. "You want to interview me?"

"If you think you know something I can use, sure." She wanted to reach out and take his trembling hands, still clutching the tissue on the desktop, but it wouldn't have been appropriate. "But for starters, I just need your approval so I can look at the tapes."

He blinked, confused, but only for a moment. "The tapes…? The tapes. The interview footage. Yeah. Well, yeah. Of course." He sniffled. "Get me the forms."

She reached into her satchel, drew them out, and placed them on the desk. This time her smile was apologetic. "Eager to get started," she explained.

Zaman reached for his pen. "I hope that sustains you, through what you're about to see."

19 March

Harry hefted the second massive banker's box up onto the counter. "Why can't you have tables in here at normal height?" he grunted. "It's not like this place needs to be a lab."

Wettle glared across the Replication Studies main workspace, which was formatted and outfitted like the science classroom at a large North American high school. "If anything in science needs a lab, I need a lab. Is that all the stuff I asked for?"

Harry shook his head. "No. There's two more carts."

"Why?" Wettle whined. He pushed away from his microscope and sat there, hands hanging at his sides even though he was in a chair. "It should all have fit in one box."

"Because you asked for a box's worth of stuff that's contained in seven boxes." Harry pushed the cart he'd used to bring in the boxes back toward the double doors. "We're not mixing and matching contents for your pleasure."

"Well, you should. I'm doing important work."

"That's a switch."

Something in Wettle snapped. "More important work than you are."

Harry shrugged. He was a (an?) historian. He was used to hearing this from pretty much everyone. He was also used to ignoring Wettle. "You just keep telling yourself that, bud." He opened the door with his elbow, and began backing out with the cart.

"It's true!" Wettle shouted. He stood up, knocking over the microscope and smashing its slide. He barely noticed. "When I crack this, it's going to be the scientific discovery of a lifetime! Everybody says so."

"Everybody's saying so because they need you kept busy." Harry paused at the threshold for a moment, frowning. There were dark bags under his eyes. "Don't you get it? They're just letting you do whatever the fuck, because it doesn't matter. They're only keeping you around for September the eighth."

And with a strange look on his face, like he'd just eaten something sour, Harry left.

20 March

The SCP-5281-D session fonds were comprised of twenty archival boxes full of VHS tapes, and a substantial binder of transcripts. After a moment's hesitation, Udo settled on the tapes. She didn't want to miss any nuance. How bad could it be?

<Specialist Zaman and SCP-5281 are seated on opposite sides of a steel table in the middle of its containment chamber.>

Specialist Zaman: Why do you hate children?

SCP-5281: Hate…? What ever could I have said to give you such a distorted impression? I don't hate children. Far from it.

Specialist Zaman: You eat them.

SCP-5281: Well yes. Of course. But I fail to see the connection. Do you hate chicken, Noor?

She hated herself for laughing, but she did laugh. Not long, not hard, but suddenly and with great surprise. She hadn't expected the hateful thing — or rather, the thing without hate — to be charming. No wonder the reports were redacted.

Specialist Zaman: They had mothers, 5281. Mothers who loved them.

SCP-5281: The same could be said for pigs. Cows. All manner of live stock.

It was the blackest of black comedies, but it was also real. She struggled to reconcile these facts.

Specialist Zaman: Human beings aren't cattle. They're sapient.

SCP-5281: Yes, you've designed the categories to privilege the things that define you. To privilege yourselves. What if I told you I've done the same? Placed myself at a higher stage on the hierarchy? Would it make my place in the food chain more acceptable to you, that I had defined you as inferior?

She watched as time and time again, Noor Zaman, as talented a negotiator and interviewer as any she'd known, failed to gain any discursive ground with his chatty subject. Failed to get a rise. The crag-faced old man had an answer for every accusation, and when Zaman claimed a point of moral order, the most he ever got in return was a confused shrug. It was mesmerizingly awful.

Specialist Zaman: The agony you've caused…

SCP-5281: Are we back on the parents again? Noor, do you know what gives beauty its lustre? Makes joy even possible? The knowledge that nothing is permanent. Everything fades. I am entropy, and that is a gift to the world. Everything positive a parent might experience is heightened by the fact of my existence. Without me, they would have little cause to cherish each moment they have with their little darlings. Can you fault me for that?

She realized suddenly why all of this felt so familiar. It had been bothering her more and more, and she'd almost wondered: was there something sinister in her connection to the sandman's private reserve? Did she have some unknown, unsuspected affiliation with this reprehensible creature?

But no. That wasn't it.

It was merely that arguing with one force of nature sounded much like arguing with any other.

SCP-5281: Do you tell the bacteria not to breed, Noor? The stars in the sky not to wheel? Do you command that a babe shall not cry, and expect it to honour you? No.

Specialist Zaman: Don't talk to me about babies.

SCP-5281: And why not? When I bid them calm, they calm. By the shadows beneath your eyes, I can see you lack this power.

Specialist Zaman: Do you never learn? Can't you see where this is going? How it has to end?

SCP-5281: Can't you?

She realized at this moment that what she'd taken for a quirk of the lighting in the most recent tape, or a VHS artifact, was actually nasty bruising across the skip's face. Was it possible that Zaman…

No. No, of course it wasn't possible.

Then again, 'not my crowning achievement'…

SCP-5281: I would like to receive visitors. Could you arrange that?

Specialist Zaman: Oh, yeah, sure. I'll get right on it. Who do you want to see first? The tooth fairy?

SCP-5281: Have I ever taken such a tone with you? Given cause for personal offence? I feel I'm owed more respect than this.

Specialist Zaman: Do you.

SCP-5281: Yes.

Specialist Zaman: Well gosh, please accept my apologies.

SCP-5281: Gladly.

Specialist Zaman: Now, what guests would you like to grace with your august presence, 5281?

SCP-5281: I was thinking I might like to speak with some children.

Udo, and Zaman on the screen, recoiled together in the same instant.

Specialist Zaman: No.

SCP-5281: The things you've said intrigue me, Noor. You've reached me, to an extent. I've so enjoyed our talks, you and I, conversing as equals. Perhaps I might be edified, instructed in the alleged error of my ways, by meeting—

Specialist Zaman: I said, no.

SCP-5281: But why?

Specialist Zaman: Why? Because you'll eat them!

SCP-5281: On my honour, I will not.

Specialist Zaman: The honour of a pedophage.

SCP-5281: What is a man, if his word is not his bond?

Specialist Zaman: You're no man.

SCP-5281: Have I ever lied to you?

Specialist Zaman: Get thee behind me, Moloch.

SCP-5281: Moloch? An interesting comparison. Moloch demands sacrifice. Impels you to perform the act of violence yourself. I offer no such imposition. I leave your hands clean.

<Silence on recording.>

SCP-5281: Do you not see it that way?

<Silence on recording.>

SCP-5281: Well, I tried. You can't say I didn't. I really thought you believed all those things you told me, about anguish and love and the foreshortening of life's possibilities. But I can see now you lack the strength of those convictions. Perhaps they were never really yours. Were you reading from a script?

Specialist Zaman: Any child I place in front of you will die. If not right away, then later. You'll mark them as prey. It would be like setting you a buffet.

SCP-5281: If you must believe that, I will not attempt to dissuade you. I only thought you might be pleased to think you had done all you could, before my next incursion into Lower Canada. My mistake.

<Silence on recording.>

SCP-5281: I can sense your conscience is clear.

Now Udo knew for certain why she'd needed to seek permission to watch these videos. They were cognitohazardous, and not in any anomalous sense. They simply did a number on your mind, playing your preconceptions and logical processes against each other in perverse fashion. She wondered if it was even safe to keep watching. It had to have been hours already.

She kept watching.

<Specialist Zaman and SCP-5281 are seated on opposite sides of a chess table in the middle of its containment chamber. They are playing together.>

SCP-5281: Why do you agree to these games?

Specialist Zaman: I guess I'm all out of questions.

SCP-5281: And moral outrage?

Specialist Zaman: The lectures and pleading never did any good.

SCP-5281: Then why keep showing up at all?

Specialist Zaman: I don't know. Maybe because it means, for the length of a match, you aren't out there ruining people's lives. Ending them.

SCP-5281: Mm. I don't think so. No, that isn't it.

Specialist Zaman: What, then?

SCP-5281: Perhaps my honesty refreshes you.

Specialist Zaman: You may rest assured, I am anything but refreshed.

SCP-5281: Then I think I know your secret.

Specialist Zaman: Do tell.

SCP-5281: You are a man who would talk to the wind.

Specialist Zaman: You're not a natural force. You're anything but. You're a horror from out of the collective unconscious.

SCP-5281: Humans are no less natural than the beasts who crawl. And no better. But you do dream that you might be more. Might ascend. Might hold conversations with the universe. More than just a soliloquy. A give-and-take.

Specialist Zaman: You do flatter yourself.

SCP-5281: You've always known I'm something special, Noor. There's no shame in admitting it.

She rubbed her eyes, and glanced at the clock. Christ, it's been six hours.

There was only one more tape.

She didn't want to drag this out over more than one day. She wanted to be able, when it was over, to blot out the whole affair as a single terrible evening.

She slipped in the final tape, and pressed play.

Specialist Zaman: It's been decided.

SCP-5281: I understand.

Specialist Zaman: No argument? No defence? Not even recriminations, protestations of innocence?

SCP-5281: What would it avail me? I am what I am. I make no pretense. I am honest. It is more, so much more, than your Foundation can claim.

Specialist Zaman: I expect you'll be leaving us soon.

SCP-5281: Pourquoi?

Specialist Zaman: Surely you won't just let us kill you. You can teleport.

SCP-5281: I leave only to feed. And I'm not particularly hungry.

Specialist Zaman: Do you want to die?

SCP-5281: Not that I'm aware of. Do you want to kill me?

Specialist Zaman: Yes. Yes, I think I do.

SCP-5281: I am touched by your hesitation. I know you could have stopped this, Noor, and I respect that you chose not to. You and I will finally have something in common.

<Silence on recording.>

SCP-5281: We will both have taken a life.

<Silence on recording.>

SCP-5281: Thank you, Noor.

Specialist Zaman: For what?

SCP-5281: For being such a good friend.

21 March

McInnis glanced over the reports, seeming to grace each page with at least a modicum of interest. If he was simply pretending, as everyone else did, well. He was much more convincing than them. "This looks excellent, Dr. Wettle. Thank you."

Wettle's chest would normally have puffed out with pride at this affirmation, but the breath got caught somewhere beneath his ribs this time, and he sighed it back out instead. "Okay. Good. Thanks."

McInnis cocked his head to one side. "Something the matter?"

"No." Wettle reached down to organize the papers back into a single pile. Naturally this only disorganized them further. "No, it's good. I'm good. Alllll good."

McInnis reached out and neatly formatted the reports into a monolithic block. "William, you can tell me. I won't judge. Perhaps I can help."

The Director almost never called him William. Virtually nobody besides his mother did. He grimaced. "Am I useless?"

McInnis tapped the papers. "I have objective evidence to the contrary."

"That's not what I mean. Am I… are you just keeping me here because of the Breach? Because I have to be here for it anyway, so you're just… stringing me along?" It wasn't the right phrasing to convey the meaning he wanted, but no amount of searching for words ever helped, so he left it at that instead of stammering out a clarification. McInnis wouldn't care.

The other man's eyes crinkled at the corners. He looked very kind. "I can promise you, with complete and total honesty, that this is not the case. I don't know where you got that idea from, but it is wildly incorrect. You were chosen for your post for a variety of reasons, and while I'm not at liberty to divulge them all at this time, you may consider yourself assured that your presence at Site-43 in the long-term is one of the most important elements of our ongoing projects of research, containment, and protection."

This time the swelling did come, and Wettle felt suddenly three inches taller. "Thanks, sir. Thank you. Thanks." He picked up the papers, and didn't even drop them. "Thank you."

"Of course. Next week?"

"Yeah. Next week!" Wettle fairly pranced to the door. He didn't care how ridiculous it looked. He didn't even know what was happening next week. Who cared? Not him.

He'd never even dared to dream that the answer to his question might be something so perfect.

He finally knew something Harold Blank didn't.

22 March

"We have to tell her," Ibanez insisted.

"I appreciate that this is your position." McInnis sat primly in one of the bullpen chairs, like he was just another attentive guard on duty, only perhaps a little posh. Pensak was leaning on the wall next to the water cooler, in the spot that had once been hers. She was sitting on one of the desks, cross-legged, to compensate for the height difference.

"Back me up here, Roger," she sighed. "For fuck's sake. Udo's cleared to know all kinds of crazy shit. She's been through hell and back with us, meaning you and me, Allan, three times already. And we know it's going to happen again. Are you concerned with how well that's going to go? Do you think she's not stable enough to handle the whole of reality crashing down?"

Pensak, not having been given an opening to respond to her exhortation, simply stood there with his foot up on the beige stucco, and watched them argue.

"Of course I have no such concerns," McInnis said. "But it's Dr. Ngo's opinion, and though my own expertise on the matter is more limited, I certainly concur, that it would merely reopen old wounds to allow Dr. Okorie to retain her memories of September the eighth each year. She has largely put Dr. Deering behind her. I can see no benefit to dredging up the past."

"The past dredges itself up! It keeps coming back! It's not settled."

"Again, without going into specifics, Dr. Ngo does not concur."

"You're treating her like a child." Ibanez regretted taking a seat, even if it put her eyes at Pensak's chest level instead of his belly button, because of how her position interacted with that statement. "She deserves to get over this herself. You can't just erase people's trauma."

"We do it every day," Pensak rumbled.

"Oh, now you talk," she almost hissed at him.

He blinked at her. slowly. "Sorry, was there a break in that rant where I could have said something?"

"Delfina." McInnis leaned forward, hands on one knee. "Dr. Deering's resurrection is one of the most closely-guarded secrets pertaining to SCP-5243. We don't understand it."

"You haven't tried to understand it. You need to ask him!"

He shook his head. "Out of the question. It would engender possible multiversal instability to allow him to survive even a few hours past the occurrence of the Breach. I'm already very concerned that we took so long to act the first time."

She scoffed. "He was dead within an hour. You decided to murder him, or rather, make me murder him, within an hour."

"Yes," the Director agreed. "It should have been done immediately. But these matters are complex, and I could not get hold of our temporal experts that quickly. Dr. Deering must die in the six minutes constituting the Breach, each year, or very soon thereafter. There is no room for debate on this topic. What would it benefit Dr. Okorie to know that her former lover is still alive for those six minutes, six and change at the most?"

"I don't have an answer for that. But if you give me more than six minutes, I'm sure I'll think of something. And you can keep the fucking change."

Pensak snorted.

"Consider Dr. Laiken," McInnis sighed. "Did you think it strange how quickly that nascent relationship collapsed?"

"They're back together again."

"Yes, but… you understand why Dr. Okorie involved herself with Dr. Blank in the first place, do you not?"

She didn't feel she could answer that question without betraying her friend. She didn't say anything.

"I believe that recidivism proves my point. There is nothing shameful in allowing a close relationship to colour your outlook on life. We all heal at different rates, and perhaps Dr. Okorie heals most slowly of all, just as she ages almost imperceptibly." There was something in McInnis' eyes as he said that, something Pensak wouldn't recognize. Ibanez did. "I concur with her psychologist, and even if I did not, the orders from Overwatch are clear. Only a minimum necessary number of personnel are cleared to know that Dr. Deering rejoins us briefly each year, on the anniversary of his death. I am afraid there is nothing further to discuss on the matter."

"Great." Ibanez slid off the desk, and stalked for the door. "Thanks for the help, Rog."

Pensak's voice was almost sleepily louche. "Don't know what you expected, honestly. It's not your job anymore, and I'm fine with the annual target practice."

25 March

Ville de Montréal: Québec, Canada

Benoit Gauthier had once been fat.

Udo could see it in the way his skin hung loose around his jowls, and under his neck. She could see it in the strange way he walked, like he was used to carrying around a lot more weight. He was walking now, to the refrigerator. "Get you anything?

She shook her head, and smiled. "No, sir, thank you."

The retired Chief Superintendent of OSAT, Couch's immediate precedessor, made a small but expressive sound of humour. "Nobody's called me 'sir' in ages. Not my grandkids, even. Never anybody from the Foundation."

She was glad he'd said that. She didn't want to give him the honourific, and now she had a reason to drop it. "I'm sorry to barge in on you like this. Where did your family go?"

He returned from the kitchen with a bottle of beer, and twisted off the cap with rough, calloused hands. He put the cap in his pocket, and the whole neck of the bottle down his throat, and when he was done, half the bottle was already gone. Meaning its contents. She'd had her doubts until she saw the neck come back out. "Sent them away. I don't get to do that every often, since this isn't my house. But I tell them it's government work, and they scatter. It's funny."

"Funny?"

He sat down gingerly in his recliner. He had to be pushing eighty. "If they knew anything about where I worked, they'd know not to respect it. Nobody ever did. Least of all your people." He frowned, as though remembering something unpleasant. "Then again… I say 'OSAT', and they head for the hills. Just like all the ghosts and ghoulies used to do." He winked at her. "Obviously they were afraid of us."

"Obviously," she smiled. She hadn't expected him to have a sense of humour about OSAT's low success rate. She very much doubted Morwen Couch did. "Chief Superintendent—"

"Only one of those at a time, and it's Morrie Couch right now. Call me Benny."

"Benny." He did look like more of a Benny than a Benoit. He had the faintest trace of a Québecois accent, though. "I came to talk to you about one of your cases. Something you worked on with the Foundation."

"Doesn't fit very many bills."

"And the GOC."

He sucked in his teeth. They looked real. "And that can be only one. Bonhomme Sept-Heures." It was a subtle change, but the way his bearing shifted, the way his expression closed off, the way his eyes unfocused, now she wondered if he was more like ninety years old.

"That's right."

"Bad business." That was the same term Couch had used. "Still gives me nightmares."

"I've seen footage of him," Udo agreed. "I understand."

"Not what I mean." Gauthier pulled down the rest of his bottle, and placed it on a coaster on the coffee table. "I'm a cop. I've seen worse, if you can believe it. Even in Montréal."

She nodded gravely. Cops always expected this. They loved to tell you they'd seen unspecified horrors, though typically as a prelude to calling the present one worse than all the rest. At least, that was how it went on television.

"No," he continued, keeping eye contact with her, "what bothers me is what we did. What we did to those children."

"You couldn't have known."

"Couldn't we?" He shook his head. "I don't know. I think we saw what we thought was the right course of action, and we took it without looking too closely. We had a destination in mind, and one path seemed to get us there fast. Preconceptions. The worst thing you can bring to any investigation."

"Well." She felt hot in the sweater she was wearing; somehow she'd expected Gauthier's home to be some greasy dive, and that he would greet her in a stained tank top and shorts, so she'd opted for clothes she could take off again when she got back to the car. But instead she'd found a middle-aged man in relatively good hygeine, in a middle-class home well-kept by its occupants. Preconceptions indeed. But she wasn't going to take the sweater off. In her experience, that was a good way to stop all the eye contact. "I'm fact-finding right now, because the insomnia is still a problem, and I'd like to see if there's a way to correct that."

He raised his eyebrows and lowered his lids in the universal expression for I am not impressed. "Since when are you folks in the problem correction business? Children dying doesn't faze you. At one time we had a dossier on what we were convinced was a Foundation-run child sacrifice ring."

'Get thee behind me, Moloch'.

"I can't speak to that." She was grateful that this was mostly true. "But I assure you, I want to get to the bottom of this. I want to know why it's still happening, if there's something out there hurting these children, or, I don't know, something missing from the environment that we can restore. It's our blunder, Benny. The Foundation's, and OSAT's. It's up to us to make it right."

He shrugged. "What do you think I can tell you, to help?"

"You examined the files we released to you. You were in contact with the GOC. You were involved in the Bonhomme's initial capture. You know as much about him as anyone else alive, I think. At least outside of Site-43. Can you think of any reason why his influence hasn't faded?"

Gauthier closed his eyes, and sank back into the cushions. From the way the recliner practically consumed him, this was probably something he'd done thousands of times before. "Mm," he said. "You know, I spent an entire career chasing phantoms, and like I said, I didn't catch many. But you learn something from the chase, even if it never pans out. You follow in their wake…" He winced, for some reason, before continuing. "You catch a glimpse, a whiff, a flutter. You see the evidence they leave behind. The things they cause to happen. This one, he wasn't any ghost. He was a beast that walked like a man. But there was something in his eyes."

"You met him?"

"I was there when they put the needle in." Gauthier's haunted eyes snapped open. "He didn't understand. Didn't understand why we were doing this. From his perspective, he was just… living his life. Following his instincts. I know for a fact that he didn't need to be in that room on the day that he died. He could have vanished into thin air. But he didn't."

"Why? Why do you think that is?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. But after all those years on the ghost trail, even though they amounted to nothing much…" His mouth twisted into a bitter line. "The one thing I can tell you for certain, is that these things want to be chased. They want to be followed. They want you to understand them. But they want you to work for it, Dr. Okorie. They expected you to sacrifice for it. He could have told us what would happen when he died. He could have warned us what we were doing to those children. And I'm convinced, absolutely convinced," and he pounded the arm of his chair for emphasis, the tendons and knuckles on his hand standing out in white contrast under his ruddy skin, "that he could have done something to stop it. But he didn't. Because…" He relaxed, and seemed to shrink a little. Bones in an old bag of pink flesh, with only the eyes still angry and young. "Because the perverted old son of a bitch didn't think we'd earned it."

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Ngo always allowed her patients to choose where they wanted to sit. In roughly equal proportion, they chose the chair or the fold-back couch.

McInnis was the only one who ever chose to stand. The closest to it was Elstrom, who posed in the chair like she was having her picture taken.

"I suspect that's essentially it," the Director told her with a closed-mouth smile. They'd only been talking for twenty minutes, and he'd managed to turn the conversation back to her and the things she was working on for well over half that time. "There really isn't that much to say, particularly when we're running on a streak of successes between each Breach."

Ngo smiled up at him from behind her desk. She couldn't ever tell if he meant what he was saying. Perhaps he always did. Perhaps never, though it seemed less likely. "Well, I still think it's worthwhile that we keep the appointments monthly. Gives me more data to work with, and lets us track the progression of everyone's mental health across the calendar year. There are bound to be peaks and troughs, but the general trends are what matters the most."

He nodded amiably. His hands were in his pockets, and he was making eye contact; it was reminiscent of a stereotypical 'friendly boss' giving directives, which was not at all the usual vibe of a psych consult. "If you think it's best, I defer to your good judgement. I take it you'll be seeing the other Survivors soon?" He raised a hand to forestall her reply. "No, of course you can't tell me that. Confidentiality. I understand."

She had been about to tell him the answer was yes, actually. Confidentiality was entirely subordinate to security clearance levels, and anyway she'd had an… unusual relationship with the concept, for a long while now. But she didn't argue. "I appreciate your understanding, sir, as always."

He nodded again. "As I said, I trust your judgement. If you feel you need the information, we will continue to provide it. And I've no doubt you will put it to good use."

She felt something catch in her throat, "I… appreciate that, as well, sir. I'm sorry if this feels a little…" She struggled to find the word. "Obtrusive? Invasive? Anything like that."

"Nonsense." He didn't wave the apology away, but his tone served much the same purpose. "Your ethics are beyond reproach. Whatever you feel you must do, you have my full confidence and support. Had I any reason to worry about your sense of the fitness of things, I would not have you as one of this facility's top psychologists."

She couldn't articulate a response to this. She stared at him. He smiled again, nodded for the third time, and took his leave.

She was an hour late for her next appointment, and if it had been McInnis who walked in and sat down on the couch, rather than Harry, she still wouldn't have been able to come up with an answer that felt correct.

28 March

Mataxas suggested all manner of ways he might mediate her communion with technology, but Udo had refused them all. She knew precisely what she needed to do.

She had the techs open one of the still-active vats of sleeping dust — all of them in hexmat suits — and provide her with a ladder.

When the airflow to the tank was sufficient to sustain human life, she climbed up, stepped over the edge, and dropped down into the embrace of a self which was not her own, but not nearly as unfamiliar as she would have liked.

She fell into dreams in an instant.

They were standing in a desert.

They were standing in the desert. Not the one with the moons, or the black cloud. A desert she knew in her bones was her own.

"Good evening, child," said the Bonhomme.

He was a tall man with an awkward, pockmarked face and irises so dark they were almost black. His spectre wore the hat, the suit, the cloak and riding boots. They were apparently irreducible elements of his identity.

Well. They would see how irreducible he was, in the end.

"Monsieur,' she said.

"Have you come to set me free?" His voice was soft, gentle, deep and bassy. His expression would not have looked out of place in a casket.

"No." She looked down at herself. She was wearing her ApplOcc robes, and her satchel was at her side. That was good; she hadn't really wanted to confront him naked. "I've come for answers."

"I have never given satisfaction in that way. I suspect you will be disappointed."

"Maybe you were never asked the right questions."

He inclined his head. Other than that, it was only his mouth that moved. "I will help you if I can. But there may be a price."

"We can haggle if I find you've got anything to offer." She drew herself up to her full height, such as it was, and asked: "What did you do to the children of Quebec?"

She had the sense that he almost smiled. "Besides the obvious?"

"Yes." She fought a wave of nausea. She won, because this body wasn't real.

"I offered them relief."

"From a problem you caused."

He shook his head. "No. I was called to them, and performed my duty. I brought them into the embrace of Nox. And when I found them astray from the gates of slumber…" Finally, his mouth split in a rictus that did his cadaverous features no favours. "Then I extracted my fee for this service."

She approached him. His cloak whipped in a sudden wind, and he looked at the emptiness in the direction from which it had come with dull surprise. "They're dying because of you. Don't try to dodge responsibility."

"Responsibility?" He loomed over her, even taller than before, as though growing in the face of her cold rage. "Child, I did not take my own life. It was taken from me."

"You could have warned them."

"They believed they knew best. Who was I to gainsay?"

"How did you do it?" They stood nearly toe to toe. He stank of grave soil. "Worm your way into their brains? Was it habit-forming, your sleep dust?"

He regarded her with the purest look of pity she had ever seen."I have encountered anger before, little one. My friend was very cross with me. He thought me a threat to his child. It is a very powerful instinct, to protect. I never understood it, but I respected it. And the policeman, he was angry too. Angry that he was powerless to stop me. A failure. But this anger, yours, is different, and now I see why. Yours is the anger of fear. You fear your affinity with my mortal remains. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You have done great things with what I left behind. And you fear to think you might owe it all to me." And now he was more than a man; black and billowing, he was a vast, dark stormcloud.

But she was the desert.

"What are you?" she demanded. "Really?"

"Just a man," the beast lied, "with a hunger, and the means to feed."

"It can't be only that." She was the wind that lashed him. "What are you to me?"

"It goes the other way." She no longed sounded so certain. "You are my legacy."

"I don't accept that. Your dust is a tool. My tool. I've shaped it to my own needs." She was shaping it now. It ran through her sand like veins. "What do you think would happen if I abated it all? Would it erase you from this prison?"

"I don't know." He was a grinning death's head. He was a featureless, unknowable force of nature. "Perhaps you should try, if you feel that's the right thing to do."

"I've never known a living creature so blasé about its own life."

"I have died before." His voice was thunder.

"And you were no more concerned than you are now." Her voice was the wind.

"I had died before that, too."

The moment crystallized. They were man and woman, standing in the wastes, a city on the horizon, and the sky was grey.

"What do you mean?" she asked him, and he told her:

"I do not know."

"What's the first thing you remember?"

"The sands."

"Your sand? Or these sands?" She stamped her feet, and thrilled at the sensation on her skin as it rippled. "A desert?"

"A desert," he agreed. "This desert. Vast and black." And so it was. "I was called forth."

"By who?" she demanded.

"If I did not know better, I might have said by you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Those burning eyes. I would know them anywhere."

She could see them reflected in the hollow pools at the back of his sunken sockets. "I didn't create you."

"But you have seen the desert."

"Are you corrupting me?" She raised her hands, and the earth rose up behind her. "Making me see what you want me to see?"

"I am a prisoner." He looked up at the towering wave she was posed to send crashing down over him. "Nothing else. Once I was more. Once, I was… so much more. But I was broken, and then again, and now I am but a shadow on the sand."

"There has to be more to it than that."

"There is not."

"I don't believe you!" She was trembling. He was casting no shadow. She had blotted out the sun, wherever it hid in the tattered fabric of the sky. "What did you do to the children?!"

"I existed," he whispered. "Everything bends around everything else. Nothing moves without stirring its neighbour. That is the lesson of the dunes. My advent formed a niche in my mirror image, and I filled it. Now it is empty, and things fall into the gap."

"You're saying…" She hesitated, and the glint in his eye said he knew it. "You're saying they can't sleep because… you need to put them to sleep, and that's not something you caused, but reality bending around the fact of you? Accounting for your existence?"

"That sounds right." He nodded.

"You don't know?"

He shrugged. "I never gave it much thought. I never gave anything much thought." He sneered. "That's what you people are for."

"You know what?" She lowered her arms, and the sand came crashing back down. Behind her. "You're right."

And she turned over her hands, and she reached out.

But not to touch him.

He looked down at himself, as though he could feel her probing the space within. Could sense that she knew the shape of what was inside. That she had taken it for herself. That she had owned it.

That she owned it still.

She suspected he knew and could sense these things, because for the first time — perhaps the very first time, if the tapes were anything to go by — Bonhomme Sept-Heures looked sad.

"Will you tell Noor something for me?" he asked.

She was ready. "No."

"Tell him I'm sorry."

She paused. "Are you?"

"Not in the slightest." The beast smiled, gently. "But it might ease his mind to hear."

With a flick of her wrist, she compacted his skeleton into a handful of pulverized white meal. The remainder of him melted around it, and was carried away by the gale. Her gale.

"And give my regards to my children," he whispered with the teeth of the wind.

And he was gone.

Harry was going to have to update Lines in a Muddle again.

On the bright side, now she had five vats of vim harenae.

And they were absolutely, definitively hers.

The offices in TheoTelo didn't have windows, but they did have peepholes in the doors. Udo was quite sure the flowers were the reason Corbin finally answered her knocking.

"I'm sorry I've been avoiding you," said Udo as the door swung open. She thrust the bouquet of begonias into the other woman's chest.

Corbin took them with good grace. "I'm not sorry I've been avoiding you back."

Udo nodded. "That's fair."

"Yeah." Corbin headed into her office. Udo didn't know where to look first in the assault of colour that hit her as she followed, so she settled on the other woman's bald pate. Though the theologian liked to experiment with her appearance, this particular look felt targeted to Udo. "But I'm not sorry you've been avoiding me, either. You were right."

"About what?" Udo again tried to focus on a single element of her surroundings, and found it impossible. Corbin's office was packed with things. Bright things. Knitted rugs, arthouse movie posters, lewd sculptures, a photograph of Jesus turned upside-down…

A photograph?

Corbin plucked a large canine skull off a bookshelf, placed it on her desk — her wicker desk, Udo saw — and stuck the flowers into the left eyesocket at a rakish angle. "They were fobbing me off. Is that how that expression works? They were giving me access to just you, as a way of keeping me happy without opening up the files. You know less than Lillihammer or McInnis. Probably less than Ibanez. If they'd given me Nascimbeni or Wettle I'd have figured it out sooner, but you were just informed enough to be plausible." She sat down in her rattan chair, and gestured for Udo to take one of the dark oak barstools opposite. "Plus, it's a matter of record that I'm easy when it comes to witches."

Udo sat down. "It is?"

Corbin snatched up a cigarette from between the number and function rows of her keyboard, and the twirling began. "That story doesn't come free. Point is, you were never going to give me what I wanted. Probably nobody is. I wasn't hired to see miracles, I was hired to identify them at a distance. It's time I made peace with that. Wouldn't have happened if you'd given me the time of day, strung me along."

Udo wasn't sure what to say. "I'm… glad?"

"It was still a bitch thing to do, though." The other woman was smiling now.

"Yeah." Udo nodded. "Sorry." She smiled back, tentatively. "I might be able to make it up to you now, just a little."

Corbin leaned back. The rattan creaked. "Do tell."

"So, 5281-D. You know?"

"Black caped black hat sallow Québec kiddie-eater."

Udo stared at her, open-mouthed. "Holy shit."

"Been holding on to that for ages. Isn't it horrible?"

It really was. "It really is."

"What about him?"

"I killed him. Deader than he already was. Wiped him out."

Corbin didn't look impressed. "You think telling me a cool thing I never got to see is now even less possible to see is going to cheer me up?"

"I think finding out what he was, and what that represents, might. But I don't know how off-base I am. I need an expert consult."

The other woman spread her arms wide. "Well, let's hear it."

"I spoke to him in dream space. He told me his earliest memory was being called into existence in a big black desert, and then being broken. Splintered."

"Into what?"

"He didn't know. He did know that a niche opened up to fit his new form, and he filled that niche."

Corbin was nodding. "Hmm."

"What do you know about gods of sleep, or the night?"

"Oh," the theologian yawned. "Only everything,"

12 April

Wettle drummed his fat fingers on the table. He'd been doing it for hours. Harry wished Lillian was here; she'd have dropped a heavy book on them already, and somehow gotten away with it. "We could… get him a really good friend, right? Somebody who hangs around him all day, every day. Maybe the monster needs time to take a shine to somebody."

"That wouldn't help," Harry sighed. "Because we wouldn't know if it worked until Phil dies, at which point whatever we're doing has to work."

They were sitting on opposite ends of a long lab counter. Harry had his notes in front of him. Wettle's notes were in one of the sinks; he hadn't put them there on purpose.

"We could do it anyway," Wettle suggested. "As a backup. You get enough backups, one of them is bound to work, and you don't need to know which one before it happens."

Harry shook his head. "Ngo's basically already tried this. They've been making people go on dates with Phil. Never any chemistry, so he's still single."

Wettle stared at him. "They're setting him up with dates? Without telling him?"

"Yeah."

"Is that a service that's just, like… available to anybody, or…?"

"Point is, getting someone to follow Phil around is a non-starter."

Wettle grunted. "Don't hear you coming up with any great ideas."

"Mm." Harry resisted the urge to pick up his phone and try a more fruitful consult. It wouldn't end well. "Maybe we could loop Imrich Sykora in on the thing." The thing in question, Project SARGENT, was a longstanding initiative to prepare for the worst in the event of Phil Deering's death. Nobody know what was going to happen when his mirror monster was untethered. Would it disappear? Would it latch onto someone new? Would it stay in the last reflective space it jumped into before being deprived of its constant companion, and issue that ear-splitting screech it made whenever they were separated, forever? It was a serious problem, and so far no serious solution had been proposed. Everyone outside of senior staff who participated in the brainstorming sessions was amnesticized afterward, ostensibly because it was a high security issue, but really because the official story was that multiple solutions had already been found, and they were just looking for backups now. It wouldn't do to have everyone thinking there was no game plan.

Alone of the Project SARGENT staff, Harry and Wettle got to keep their sinking feeling that there would still have been no progress made when the issue went critical. Not that it seemed to bother Wettle any. He was probably used to getting pulled down.

Wettle waited for Harry to finish his musing — they knew each other well enough by now to recognize muse-faces — before saying "I don't know who that is."

"Who?"

"Skikora. Stickora. Nicholas Picholas. Whatever it was you just said."

"Imrich Sykora? You do too know him. Thaumaturge. Pretty boy."

"Oh!" Wettle reached for his notes, accidentally striking the faucet and pouring water all over them instead. Harry had been waiting for that particular gun to fire since this session's first act. "Shit! Fuck. Okay." The water off, Wettle retrieved his sodden papers and began waving them around, spraying droplets everywhere and losing sheet by sheet by sheet. "Yeah. Sykora's busy. With a different thing. Very important thing that he and I are doing."

"Uh huh," said Harry.

"Why don't you ask Bradbury? She does consults all the time."

Harry stared at him.

"What?"

"Why don't I ask Dr. Bradbury to help us solve this problem?"

"Yeah!"

"This problem we have with SCP-5056?"

Wettle beamed, as though he'd made an excellent suggestion that was now being praised. "Right!"

"SCP-5056," and Harry took a moment to steady his hands and voice, "which put Melissa in a coma for a year, and forced her to retire from active duty?"

To his surprise, Wettle was still nodding. "Yeah. That's what I meant. You think I forgot, or something? Okorie got over her shit by killing that kid eater thing. Why wouldn't it work for Bradbury?"

For the first time ever, Harry couldn't think of a snarky thing to say in response.

14 April

Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport: Ville de Montréal, Québec, Canada

Udo had vacation time banked up, as did most of her colleagues, but she didn't even need to use it. As soon as she declared her intention to visit Québec — even though she hadn't told anyone her reasons — in the Site's scheduling system, she found the trip flagged as research-related. She didn't question it. Some combination of Elstrom, the ASC, and McInnis would have had to confirm that detail, so it hadn't been done whimsically. They just knew.

It was nice to think that someone was paying attention. Probably that was a nice thing.

She decided to start with Montréal, because that was the only part of the province where she could reasonably expect to speak English most of the time and actually accomplish anything. Not that she was entirely certain what she expected to accomplish. She carried two suitcases, one full of her regular clothes and toiletries, the other containing what would have looked to any customs officials who cared to inspect like a vintage costume for a fancy dress party.

She'd put it on once already, in a containment chamber rather than her dormitory, so that it would feel more scientific than personal. She'd been wholly unable to find a way to teleport. Thus, the plane ride.

By the time she'd flagged down a taxi, she already felt ridiculous. By the time she'd checked into her room at the Holiday Inn, she was wondering what the hell she'd been thinking.

When she woke up in the middle of the night, she knew she'd been right.

1 May

OSAT Station 11: Montréal, Québec, Canada

Ibanez was not surprised to find that Raynard Watts, first Chief Superintendent of OSAT, had looked like a serial killer's soul embodied in an underfed ferret.

At least, it was probably a photo of Watts sitting on Couch's desk, facing out towards her visitor. Glowering from under his too-large hat, judging the representative of the Foundation he had so perfectly, if ineffectually, despised.

"I'm so popular these days," Couch grinned at her. "First Okorie, now you. I'm flattered by all the attention, really I am."

"This isn't a follow-up." Ibanez shifted on the stool she'd been provided with. It was a short stool. She wondered whether this was standard practice, to lower anyone meeting with Couch to below her stature, or if it was intended to accentuate Ibanez's own lack of verticality. It didn't matter. She knew fully well, whether the other woman showed it or not, that she knew where the power in the room presently resided. "But since you mention it: the thing with the insomnia is pretty well handled, now."

Couch raised an eyebrow. "That so? Do tell."

"I think you'll find we never agreed to tell you anything." Ibanez smiled her closest approximation of sweetness. "But hey, you might be able to squeeze a few details out of me, if you don't mind sharing some outdated, useless intel."

The mountie stood up, tugging down the short sleeves of her blue officer's shirt and stretching as she turned to face the window. The blinds were pulled, but she didn't seem to notice. "I'm supposed to buy your version of what is and is not useless, huh?"

Ibanez shrugged, though Couch wasn't looking at her. "Judge for yourself. I want to know what you know about Elizabeth Crocker."

The other woman turned to face her, a predatory gleam in her eye. "Oh, you know, I'm supposed to be very embarrassed about that. Diplomatic incident. Brought a few of our men down into your home, shot it up a bit. Terrible black mark on the taskforce."

"Is that pride I hear?"

Couch laughed, and leaned in, palms on the desk. "Damn right it is. We might have been cheating, bringing in a ringer, but we penetrated to the inner sanctum. How many other agencies can say the same?"

"Not many," Ibanez agreed. "Learn anything interesting from that impressive feat?"

"Yes, actually." With her shit-eating grin, Couch's expression was essentially inscrutable. In this aspect only, she might have fit in well at 43. "That ringer of ours? Crocker? She was terrible at what she did."

"Which is what?"

"Mind control." Couch leaned back again, and adjusted the tuck of her shirt into her black dress pants. "She used mind control to convince everyone she was part of OSAT, even though women weren't allowed in the RCMP back then, and she used mind control to get the escort she used to invade your Site. Only the moment she was out of the building, this building, Station 11, everyone she'd spoken to knew she was bogus. And I hear it didn't take much to shake the officers out of their trance, though of course you'd know more about that than I would."

Ibanez did know, but she hadn't thought it particularly noteworthy, because it had been Thilo Zwist doing the trance-shaking. The immortal Austrian had chased Crocker out of the Site, and restored to her rent-a-cops what passed for their minds in the process. "Hmm. Do you have anything… else…?"

She suddenly realized that this was not, as it had appeared at first blush, nothing. The various means of mind control employed in the first deadline had also failed to make a serious impression on the mounties, who'd been camped out in AAF-D; Falkirk, as acting Director, had used them as his muscle in the corridors beyond the protective range of the telekill sheathe protecting the Site staff from Wirth's grey matter poking and Mukami's discursive prodding. Corroboration is the soul of evidence, she thought.

"Seems to me like that's plenty." Couch sat down again. "But maybe I'll think of something else, while you tell me Dr. Okorie's story of triumph."

Couch reluctantly agreed not to attempt Udo's capture.

Ibanez hadn't intended to insist upon it. She doubted the Dudley Do-Wrongs would have stood an even chance.

5 May

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

Weeks of study had produced one very interesting fact about the ongoing replication crisis, and Imrich Sykora's predictive thaumaturgy.

The less interesting facts were things he'd already known: if he did the same calculations enough times, the result he got the most often was the correct one; if he did them only once, they were always wrong; and over time, the number of interations he needed to go through for the discrepancies to shake themselves out was increasing, though at a fairly slow rate.

The interesting fact was that when he used his Talent to predict whether Wettle's other replication studies would succeed or fail, he experienced his formerly accustomed success rate of one hundred percent.

"What does that mean?" Wettle openly pondered. Most of his thoughts came straight out of his mouth.

Imrich waited a while for a better explanation to suggest itself. He very much hoped that it would.

It didn't.

"I think," he sighed, with great resignation, "it means only one thing in the universe is certain right now."

"Please let it be death," said Wettle. "I fucked up my taxes again this year."

7 May

Harry found Udo in the containment cell where her annual drama played out. He had no idea what she was doing there, and he didn't ask, and she didn't offer to explain when she saw him outside the rotating door. She cycled it through, and came out. "Hey?"

Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-D, and certain rooms in Applied Occultism and the first sublevel chambers of Security and Containment, experience a total reversion to the 2002 configuration every time SCP-5243 recurs. After the six minutes of chaos have passed, the reversion does not itself revert; what has been broken stays broken, what has been lost remains lost. It has therefore been deemed a waste of resources to fix the facilities which are no longer in frequent use. Of the affected spaces, only the containment cell in ApplOcc receives an annual visit from Janitorial and Maintenance, and that only to scrape scoring off the walls and disconnected pipes. These relics act as both promise and reminder that three hundred and sixty-five days later, with a margin of error of one day depending on the year, 2002 will come again with a vengeance.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

It used to be that whenever she was looking into something in this room, she had a blasted, confused look on her face. At some point while they'd been dating, it had disappeared. It was back now, worse than ever, and he knew the demise of their relationship had nothing to do with why. Like everyone else, he wondered what fresh hell had unleashed itself each September that it should require Udo to be amnesticized when her six annual minutes of fame were up.

He didn't think this would help, but perhaps it would at least provide a distraction.

He held out the book he was holding in his hands. "Took a lot of arguing, and a few months of vetting by like five different departments, but I finally got 91 to release this to my custody. I was wondering if you could take a look at it."

She took the heavy leather volume, and read the title on its spine. "The Book of the Turning Gyre," she said. Her orange eyes met his, a question in them.

He answered. "Written by a giftschreiber. Outlines their theory of history, their methods of altering societal progress. I've done papers on it. But it's never been looked at by a thaumaturge before. I thought you might be able to bring a fresh perspective."

She shrugged. "Okay."

He nodded. "Okay."

She glanced back at the containment cell.

He waved at it. "Didn't mean to interrupt."

She frowned, and looked like she wanted to say something.

He wanted to say something, too.

But for the first time, they both realized that what they wanted to say today would only make more problems for tomorrow, problems they'd already solved.

So she went back into the cell, and he headed back out to the hall.

It was, in a sense, progress.

12 May

Sunset Cove, Pensacola: Florida, United States of America

Ibanez had been to the retirement home in Sunset Cove a few times, but she'd managed to avoid ever visiting a bog standard old folks' home until now. She wasn't particularly glad of the experience.

The decor was unappealingly faux-cheerful, and the lighting was bad. There were elderly people everywhere, wherever they'd last been abandoned by their minders or their family members. She didn't see any orderlies beating or berating anyone, as they did in the movies, but it wasn't like the staff she saw seemed terribly thrilled to be there, either. Maybe it was worse in the States.

She remembered Zevala, as she often did when confronted with the realities of family in North America. She remembered that other than old man Lobo, who'd simply been too ornery, every oldster lived with and was taken care of by their offspring.

She remembered her grandfather.

The man in front of her was not flattered by the comparison. He had the same old man's barrel chest, but there was a harshness to his features and a grim set to his jaw that her grandfather had never had.

Then again, her grandfather had never been a cop.

"Don't remember much," the ancient mountie grunted. He tried to reorient himself in his wheelchair, but his arms wouldn't bear the weight, so he stayed sat at an odd angle. He grunted again. "That's your folks' doin', I reckon."

"I reckon," she agreed.

His cataracts flashed. "Sassy little thing, aren't you?" He chuckled wetly. "But yeah. Yeah, you took the memory. I try to tell them sometimes, you know?" He waved a withered hand at the reception desk. "Tell them how you took my memories. Think they care?"

"Don't reckon."

He rolled his eyes. "Dunno why I'd bother talking to you. No respect."

"Nobody else is visiting you. You're bored and lonely. Give me something useful, and I might stay for a game of chess."

Another gleam, this one mercenary. "Checkers?"

"Same difference to me."

He grunted for a third time. "Somethin' useful. Useful, you say. You know, you weren't so good with the memory-scrapes back then. Things slipped through. Little things. Impressions."

"What impressed you the most?"

He gave her a toothless grin. "How she had to keep puttin' her fingers in my brain, and swishin' around. Never took proper. Had to keep tryin'. An' she said somethin' about it once. Think it was in an elevator. Long elevator. That ring a bell?"

She made a noncommital half-nod.

"Sure it does. Means somethin' to you. She says in the elevator… what does she say." He closed his eyes. "She says 'You're only good as an insult. But I want 'em insulted. Gimme a pair of anarchists, and I could give 'em a whole lot more than mud in their eyes'. That was it, more or less."

"Huh."

"But I reckon she was all talk and no walk, that one."

"Why do you say that?" she asked, not necessarily expecting an answer more deep than sexism in response.

"Because we didn't wanna go down there with her — heard enough tell of what was in that charnel house to want to stay away — and she did somethin' to make us go, but it didn't hardly take."

"Didn't hardly take," Ibanez repeated.

"Nope. She had to keep doin' what she was doin'." The old man's chest puffed up. "Takes more'n a pretty face to sway the men in red, I don't mind sayin', and her face weren't all that pretty anyhow." A plaintive tone crept into the affable hostility. "What's all that worth to you?"

She could use the time to think about it anyway. The evidence had been corroborated. But what was it evidence of? "At least one game. I'll be red."

"The hell you will," the old mountie snarled.

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

The Director of the Decommissioning Department looked like an SCP object, which was a nice bit of irony. His eyes were crystal, and he was wearing a complex rebreather. It was the result of having had a misunderstanding with an anomalous medical system, and it gave him an otherworldly, menacing appearance.

But underneath it, he was just an average guy.

There was probably something metaphorically pertinent about that, too.

"So." Calvin Bold stroked his mask as though it were a goatee. "You decommissioned 5281… again."

Udo nodded, but it was more of a diagonal shaking of the head. "I think of it as an acroamatic abatement, really."

Bold nodded. "That's good. I like that. That means you're not in trouble. Except now you're going to leap to that every time you don't want to call the DeD before you neutralize an anomaly."

She wondered who'd called Bold's department the DeD. Probably whoever had named the D-class department 'HARMA'. "Only we won't," she told him, "because that's not something we do here anyway."

"Director." Noor Zaman was sitting on her side of the boardroom table. "The DeD already authorized this decommissioning. It's just that it wasn't carried out correctly in the first place. Double jeopardy."

Bold made a sound like Darth Vader grunting. Possibly it was just a grunt. "Double jeopardy is actually the thing where you can't be punished twice for the same crime. Totally the opposite of what you meant." He paused. "But I take your meaning. We really screwed that one up, didn't we?"

"We did," Zaman agreed.

"At this point, I think we can say that the primary anomaly here was the insomnia cases in Québec." Bold looked back and forth between them. "Where are we on that? Did banishing the boogeyman help all those kids get back to sleep?"

Udo shook her head. "No, sir. I did."

"What?"

"When I neutralized the Bonhomme, it was basically a more elaborate version of the abatement I performed around the turn of the century. The one that created my vim harenae."

"I'm not familiar with that term. You mean the dust you sourced from 5281's corpse?"

"Yes, sir. Ever since I did that, I've had a tremendously improved affinity with my Talent. I can do things now I never dreamed of before. It's become clear to me that I somehow internalized the power that was in that sand. The power that came from him."

Bold managed to look startled even with half of his face covered. "You're saying you took a part of the anomaly into you? Into your body?"

Zaman looked ill.

"That's right." She looked him right in the glass eyes. "I don't know why, but I always had an affinity for him, and the things he left behind. I still do."

"What does that mean?"

"It meant that I could commune with his spirit. It meant that I could destroy him. And it means—"

"Hold up," Zaman interrupted. "Are you about to say that when you killed him for the second time, you took even more of his power?"

"That's what I believed at the time, yes." Udo felt her heart racing to beat the band. "And I now have experimental proof that this is the case."

"Meaning…?" Zaman still looked stricken.

"Meaning that I went to Québec, and could almost immediately sense the location of the affected children. The ones who are experiencing some sort of withdrawal from the spiritual service the Bonhomme used to provide."

"Like, a homing instinct?" Bold asked.

"Pretty much," she agreed.

"And what did you do with this instinct? Please don't tell me you…" Bold shook his head. "I actually don't know what I don't want you to tell me you did. So just…" He spread his hands in defeat. "Tell me, I guess."

"What do you think, sir?" She could almost tell herself she was enjoying this. "I put on my Halloween costume, engaged in a little B&E, and blew some sand into some tired faces."

"You did what," Zaman asked flatly.

Bold didn't look all that surprised. But then, his means of expressing that particular emotion were obviously limited. In any case, he asked the only question that mattered. "And did it work?"

She smiled at him in response.

"So, they're cured?"

"I don't know about cured. For now, I believe I've addressed all of the active cases. They might need more spot treatments later. It might be a gradual weaning. Or it might end up needing to be a long-term solution." She smiled, a little nervously. "So I might need a little more vacation than was already scheduled, in the interim."

"Well." Bold glanced at Zaman, then back at her. "I suspect that can be handled without too much difficulty."

"Yeah," Zaman said. He sounded stunned.

"I understand your thaumaturgy already paints a little outside the known lines," Bold continued. "But this seems like a whole new paradigm."

She nodded. "I've been fundamentally changed by an SCP object. There's really no getting around that." She'd known she was going to have to say this eventually, but it made her heart sink to do it anyway.

Bold, however, contrived to look amused. "Oh," he said. "You get used to it."

Bold told her he would smooth things out with the DeD, and also make sure his colleagues in the Integration Program ensured she'd be able to retain her position and station despite her new anomalous augmentation. "Least I could do," he told her, "for the woman who corrected one of my worst mistakes."

From the Site-43 point of view, it did also require a note on her HR file.

Zaman made very much the same comment when he filled it out for her. By the time she left his office, she felt almost certain the crying man had been about to try and hug her.

Relief at the end of a long road was a strange drug.

She was looking forward to trying it out someday.

18 May

In addition to its posts at three corners of the third sublevel, Security and Containment has the entire first floor all to itself. This is where the containment chambers for Site-43's inventory of animate SCP objects and Nexus critters is kept, whether pending evaluation or serving out their non-negotiable life sentences in the name of the Foundation's protection initiative. There are considerably fewer of them now than once there were, and more empty chambers than the facility's designers ever expected. Once it was projected that space for a new row of rooms would need to be excavated by the mid-2020s; now so many chambers have been mothballed that there's been talk of turning them into extra dormitory space for the upstairs agents. This depopulation does not reflect a new policy of catch and release, but rather the practical reality of life after SCP-5243. With the annual drop in containment integrity, it is no longer safe to keep dangerous creatures locked up on the shores of Lake Huron.

These anomalies are simply being remanded to the care of other facilities, rather than achieving their freedom. In this they are luckier than the personnel who have left Site-43's employ in the wake of the Breach that Keeps On Breaching, some of whom return annually for a ghoulish display, some of whom have gone where no force pantomime can touch them, and some of whom have simply decided to stay away.

— Blank, Lines in a Muddle

He sent the excerpt, and waited.

The response came a few minutes later.

M_Bradbury

Haven't you written this bit up before?

He frowned. He hadn't been sure how the amendments would be received, but he hadn't been prepared for precisely this response.

H_Blank

Probably?

H_Blank

I've drafted most of the thing a few times over.

H_Blank

You know that.

The next messages didn't come until an hour later, when he'd given up on writing and texting and had settled in to enjoy a TV dinner while scrolling through Memory Alpha on his desktop.

M_Bradbury

Sounds like you need to commit.

M_Bradbury

Or maybe just learn to let things go.

Repent at Leisure

The Breach Goes On: Deadlined

Stop the Clock