They Have No Use For Your Song - SCP Foundation

I’d been sat in the bathroom for half an hour now. The toilet seat was cold. I wasn’t exactly feeling the call of nature, but.. I needed a minute or thirty to myself. God, had it really been a year since I’d last visited home? Since I'd last seen any of my extended family?

I hadn’t even planned on coming back. I was just about to let my parents know I’d be working in Bismarck over the winter break, hoping to save up for a post-graduation holiday, when they’d come up to visit. Stern faces looking across from me at the coffee shop. None of the cheer that they were known for. Lots of discussions about ‘coming of age’ and ‘being old enough to know.’

My mother’s side of the family is strange. My dad is ‘American’, in the sense that he doesn’t really care about his heritage. He takes more pride in the local baseball team than he does in which European country his great great forebears came from. My mother’s family, though, take a great deal of pride in their heritage. Polish, having come over in ‘37. Just before everything went to shit over there. A lot of people assume I’m Jewish, when I tell them that. We’re not, though. My grandparents are oddly cagey about where exactly they came from, but that never stopped them from bringing Poland to North Dakota. The biggest night of the year in the community was Koliada. After Christmas. Kids were never allowed to celebrate, in our town. Not with the adults. We always spent it at Grandmother’s house, away from the community centre. I was allowed there any other day of the year, playing basketball or attending Boy Scouts, or… regardless, it wasn’t the location that was the problem. I barely thought about it as a kid, happy to hang out with my cooler sixteen year old cousins for the evening. But then they turned eighteen, and then it was just me and grandmother.

She was an eerie woman, in a kind way. Often found her looking out of the window, wistfully. Not up at the sky. No. Down at the dirt. Like she was waiting for someone to burst from the ground. But then she’d spot me watching, without turning her head, even if I’d been really sneaky. And she’d pick me up in her arms and spin me a tale about the old country.

I hadn’t spoken to her since I left. There had been something in her eyes that day. I’d slinked home after being lost in the woods for days on end. I’d been babbling about the slithering red thing that I’d seen slinking through the corridor at the community centre. Come to think of it, that had been the day after Koliada. The shock had seen me move off to college earlier. Had made me spend most of my time in Bismarck, rarely visiting. They’d told me that I’d imagined it, but… I’d known what I’d seen.

My feet were numb now. I stood up, wincing as blood rushed back into my legs and my skin prickled and writhed with restored sensations. Ow. What was I doing? It was stupid to just stew in my anxiety. In the bathroom of all places. It’s nothing, probably. Maybe the adults just don’t want their kids to see them all drunk and foolish. Worst case scenario, my family were all swingers and I just could leave and never talk to them again. Haha.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. The part of me that doesn’t almost have a college degree, that isn’t aware of reason and science, the animal inside. It’s screaming at me to run. To sprint through the cold woods and never look back.

I push that part of me down. I’m an adult. I can handle an awkward speech about manhood. I’m related to half these people anyway.

I stepped into the community hall for the first time in years. It’s been reorganised. A tall pole, made out of some white wood stained red with paint, has been erected in the centre of the room. Thick brown and red fabric strips hang from it. A May pole in winter. Odd. But not, like, terrifying.

The hall had filled up whilst I was having my episode in the bathroom. Everyone was here now. I caught a few glances, exchanged some polite nods and greetings with old neighbours. A few conversations had clearly changed gears as I entered. People smiling oddly. Laughing at fake jok- No! Stop letting your anxiety control you. I pace myself, and resist the urge to run back to the toilet. A chair, that’ll steady my nerves. I find one next to the food table, cloth-covered trays of dishes with names I can’t even hope to pronounce.

I’d had traditional Polish food before, but this smells different. The smell was persuasive. It forces its way inside me, through my nose and mouth. It was disturbingly similar to things I’ve smelled before. In hunting season, when my granddad would cure meats in his shed. Sweat, bile and rot. I spring to my feet, scanning for another chair crossing the room as subtly as I can before sitting down. Deep breaths, in and out, and within a few minutes I can open my eyes without feeling the need to vomit. I look away from the table. God, was I having a fucking panic attack over odd smelling food at an ethnic festival? I was acting like a Lovecraft protagonist right now! Oh God! Stew! What horror! I hoped no-one had noticed.

They seem excited. Jumpy. It reminded me of the crowd at a concert, after the start time has passed but before the band has come on. Those ten or so minutes of the unknown before the night begins. The curtains on the stage are drawn, and on it I can see several of the younger men and women from the village. Three or so years younger than me, around eighteen. They’re all dressed in oddly revealing outfits. A low chant began to fill the hall, coming from all around me. I didn’t actually speak Polish. But I recognised Polish.

This wasn’t Polish.

The young folks proceeded to the pole, gripping the fabric in hand and beginning to dance around it. Twisting and turning, their forms almost morphing with the cadence. Like fluid in a sac of skin. All around, people from the crowd began to step up, swapping places with them and taking part. They all knew the dance, somehow. Knew it perfectly.

A man I didn’t know, clad in an expensive suit, looked at me oddly from the seat next to mine. He placed a hand on my knee.

“Aren’t you going to join them, son?”

What?

“Uh, sorry, I- I haven’t learned the dance.”

“Ah. Apologies, I misunderstood. Thought you were a fledgling.”

He stood up, discarding his thick coat like it wasn’t worth more than a month of my rent, and I lost him in the gathering throng. Streaks of white, brown and red, flowing through each other. I thought about slipping out. Then I saw her. Kathy.

I hadn’t spoken to her in years. She was one of the few people I’d tried to stay in contact with after leaving. I had hoped that- that we could. Well. She hadn’t gone to college, as we’d planned. She’d stayed behind. She’d been part of the reason I’d even agreed to come back. I watched her dance, anxiety playing in my stomach as the possibilities of what I might say to her whirled through my mind. Before I could pluck up the courage, the chanting -where was that coming from?- rose to a final din, and cut out. Then, another sound replaced it.

The sound of wet slopping. The man from before held his arms to the ceiling, enraptured. A pleasured look on his face. All the while, his entrails dropped from his open stomach, his skin tearing like wet paper. I sat, shock paralysing me. People -oh god- others started to mimic the motion. Shifting, changing. Dying - no, not dying. They were laughing. Singing, singing that same chant. Monsters. I looked to Kathy, looked to find and save her, and then I laid eyes on her in the middle of the beasts.

Seams appeared on her fingernails and crawled their way up her arms, as if carved by an invisible blade. Crimson started to drip from them, and I had to suppress the urge to scream, but fell silent as her flesh began to split along those seams, unfurling into sheets, so thin as to be translucent. The pale white was interlaced with threads of deep red veins and capillaries, forming a familiar pattern. Lace - I realised with a start. She turns -oh god she sees me watching- I’m about to run, but then she smiles. Knowing. The same smile I knew for years. Throughout the good times and bad. I feel somewhat eased. Somehow, it’s still her.

The others, I notice, have finished a similar transfiguration. I almost jumped out of my skin when a heavy hand was placed on my shoulder, a small shriek escaping involuntarily. Standing next to me was a distorted humanoid. Their skin had peeled away from their face, exposing the muscle and sinew beneath, but I recognised the structure, the clothing that bulged and rippled as unseen changes occurred. My old neighbour, Mr Kamiński. He jerked away at my distress, clearly concerned to have disturbed me.

All around me, members of the community, friends, acquaintances and strangers stood and joined the new dance. It was rhythmic, as people joined arms, their ligaments literally intertwining as people -monsters- spun and laughed and moved. I almost collapsed. I felt both at home, but also so, so far away. Some deep part of me knew that this was natural, that this was the way things were always meant to be, and it scared me more than the monsters around me. It was sensation and revulsion and curiosity all at once, paralysing me in place but leaving me fully conscious, like someone unable to stop themselves from picking at a crusty scab. Then, the music reached a crescendo, and the chanting escalated into a resounding chorus, before coming to a sudden halt. All eyes turned to me, a room of monstrosities that I knew and loved. Like that, the feeling broke, and my legs stopped betraying me, carrying me from the nightmare out into the cold night. I start to run before stopping, a woozy feeling hitting me as I almost collapse.

I saw my grandfather -monster?- in a terse conversation with a suited woman. Even from this distance, I could make out the scars across her face, the evidence of a hard life. My main concern at that moment, barely coherent, was that she was going to turn into something. Some abomination in human skin. But… she seemed normal. For now. Then, my grandfather noticed me watching, and gestured at me to come over. Unthinking, I followed his instruction, and as I approached he gripped me by the shoulders, casting a gaze from my feet up to my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was the same look he gave to the strips of pork he bought from the local butcher.

“Grandson.” His voice was steady, but with a tremor of tension running through it, like a ligament pulled taut. “There is someone you must meet. This is Agent Plee.” She nodded, extending a calloused hand in greeting, shaking mine in a vice grip. “What she is about to tell you is very important, so make sure you pay close attention.” He turns back to her and nods. “Good evening, Agent.”

I watched him turn and walk back to the house. Stepping inside, as the door opened, I could hear my mother’s voice. I couldn’t make out her words, but the concern steeped into her tone was clear. But, if that was my mother’s voice, why then, was it so distorted? So in rhythm with the chants coming from inside? “Walk with me.” Plee’s voice was surprisingly reedy for a woman as stockily built as she was. She took me down the road, out into the snow-encrusted woods. Lighting a cigarette, she indulged in a deep drag, staring back at the farmhouse as she exhaled.

“So. I bet that was a lot for you.”

I could barely stammer out a response before she carried on.

“Who- what are you? What was that? What happened, what is happening to them?"

"Nothing is happening to them. That's normal to them. That will be normal for you. Your family is what we call anomalous. Specifically, members of an anomalous ethnic religious group. We call them Sarkics. Or Nalka. I can never keep up.”

She took another drag.

"Me, though? I work for an organisation. We’re called the Foundation. Members of your community may refer to us as the Jailors. We handle things that don’t fit into what you would, until tonight, define as the normal world. We secure them, take them away from those who would misuse them.”

Her eyes weren’t focused on me. She was remembering something.

“We contain them, lock them away so they can’t hurt anybody or reveal their existence to the wider world. And we protect them from a world that can’t, that won’t understand them. That will destroy them given half the chance.”

She’d clearly given this speech before. Many, many times. That much was clear. This was a lecture, not a conversation.

“Luckily for you, your grandmother is smart. You don’t get as old as she does in our world without being a bit canny, but she’s a cut above. She’s gotten your community into the third category, mainly by not getting anyone involved until they’re old enough. Kids are reckless. Liable to do silly things. This is the arrangement we have with her, with you, now. However, there are a few ground rules to this arrangement that you need to be aware of.”

I raised my hand to ask a question, as if I hadn’t been out of high school for two and a half years at this point, but she dismissed me with a wave of her cigarette, loose ash staining the snow beneath my feet.

“Rule 1: You tell anyone about this, or anything else I’ve told you, and we will know. Don’t ask how. You don’t want to find out. We will find you, and whoever it is you told, be it a friend, partner, or a random drunk on the train at night. They get out lucky. Little green pill, and it’s like it never happened.”

She flashed a plastic medicine bottle from her pocket. Countless little green pills rattled inside.

“You and your family get sent to the inside of a containment cell until either you die or the sun explodes. Can never know with your lot.”

“Rule 2: If you meet a special someone from outside of the community and want to bring them in, you run it by us, and I will have a little chat with them, similar to the one we are having now. That chat either ends happily for you or with a little green pill for them.”

She takes another long drag of her cigarette. Even this far out, I could hear the strangely haunting melodies filtering through the forest, rhythmic chanting matching the frenetic beat of my own pulse.

“Rule 3: You see anything, and I mean anything, that is out of the ordinary, except for your own family's practices, you call this number.”

She handed me a white business card for Sunshine Coast Products. It feels used.

“You call this, ask for the spring ‘08 catalogue. You will get redirected, and then you tell them what you saw, and then you forget you ever saw it. Simple, right? If you give us a helpful tip, it helps build goodwill between my organisation and your family. Makes us more likely to forgive any future fuck-ups.”

“Your grandmother can fill you in on the rest. If you’re smart, you’ll listen to her.”

She finished her cigarette, putting out the stub on a tree before flicking it through the air.

“Tell your granddad I left, and that he’s all clear for his annual check.” She turned to leave, then looked back at me. “With any luck, we won’t meet again.” With that, she was gone, snow crunching under her heavy boots as she headed back towards the main road.

I called after her.

"Those pills. If I don't want any of this? If I just want to leave? Can I…?

She stopped, not even turning to look at me.

"If that's what you want. But I think you should talk to her first. Get the full picture."

I stood there, flummoxed, clutching a white business card in my hand. Despite the cold, I felt the card start to become damp with my sweat. Then, remembering how important it was, I anxiously dried it on my jacket sleeve, and then placed it carefully into my wallet.

It hit all at once. The world was spinning, as if for just a moment I was disconnected from the tether of gravity and force. I stumbled backwards into a tree, bark scratching against my back as I sank to the floor. There was a rising tension in my stomach, something ripping its way out of me. The sensation filled me with mortal terror, my mind flashing back to my family, my friends, -skin tearing and sinew parting, flesh giving way to will itself, blood dripping onto laminate flooring- and my body squeezed and pushed it out.

I don't want to be like that. Please.

Yellow and brown stained the white snow, as the smell of half digested alcohol and bread pervaded my nostrils. My throat and nose stung with bile, and the phlegm dangling from my lips mixed with the tears streaming down my face. I collapsed forward, away from the vomit, and lay there until I couldn’t feel the stinging on my lips as they went numb. There were no thoughts running through my mind.

Minutes passed.

I thought about leaving, about running as fast as I could to the nearest bus station and never looking back.

Then I got up, wiped the rest of the sick off my face, and started trudging back to the hall. I saw a figure standing in the doorway, outlined by the light flooding out onto the snow.

Grandmother.

Time for a talk.