The Slice of the Wire - SCP Foundation

A forest floor would be the same as a wall, wouldn't it? A pine cone, at distance, as sharp as a nail?

Dr David Krupin got up, splashed water in his face, stared into the mirror to judge how swollen his eyes were, and got ready for work. His apartment was somewhat stark, though not excessively so; a couple of paintings hung on the walls, but the details weren't quite right. A table was too close to the window, the bed wedged too far into the corner.

Krupin would sometimes read or check his phone while eating breakfast, but other times he would simply stare into space. He would chew his cereal while looking at one specific point in the kitchen, at the top of a cabinet, where the wood met the plaster of the wall. He would think about a lot of things, but most often he would recall a memory from when he was very young. He was at school, crosslegged in the classroom, looking at a fence outside. It was metal, composed of little squares, an inch or two each in length. One day, he remembered the way it would shake when you ran against it, waving slightly to each side, up and down the line.

After showering, dressing, eating breakfast and packing his things, he would get in his car and head to work. He always enjoyed the moment of stepping out of the building. The flats were slightly apart from the rest of the town, a little way up the side of the valley. Pine trees surrounded them; a little winding road took you down to the world. Sometimes, he would stop for a moment, listening to the rustle of wind within leaves; but then he'd remember that other people were in the building, looking out, and he'd open the door to his car and drive away.

Krupin did not work at Site-17, but as part of his broader responsibilities, he had been granted permission to act as the ritualist in a summoning attempt for SCP-7356. He was a paraornithologist, a scholar of anomalous birds, and while 7356 was not a bird, it seemed to move in the same circles. So he'd applied for a permit, and had been accepted, and so had made the long journey by plane away from the pines and the valley.

He did not like Site-17. It seemed a serious, snide place, full of long-suppressed emotion. The cruelty underpinning the Foundation vibrated more heavily there, like a taut, suspended wire. But he had remained polite, smiling, reserved throughout; and he had been granted permission to hold the skull, to place it on the wall, to witness the attendant's confused face as he told her that they were participating in a ritual.

Then, when it was done, after he had made his notes on arm length, behavioural tics and head tilt, after the creature had vanished yet again, he had thanked the staff, collected his things, and left. The plane ride home had been chilly; it was just a little Cessna, battered and shoved by the wind. It was snowing lightly outside.

His own place of work, Site-856, was warmer. Sometimes, in winter, when he was worn out from work, he would look out of the window. The yellow of the inside light, when compared to the wind and darkened skies outside - nothing felt warmer. Nothing felt cosier than knowing that he would not have to step out there for a few more minutes.

Krupin enjoyed working at Site-856. He was well-liked by his colleagues. His work was engaging to him. You didn't get into academia for the money - although the Foundation made sure to pay their staff well - but for a fascination with one's subject deep enough that you were willing to tolerate the career's indignities. You wanted to delve into it, uncover new knowledge, be the person who did not simply learn what was passed down but who'd push that veil back still further. That his work would remain largely unknown to the outside world didn't bother him; it would exist somewhere, in some vault, ready and waiting.

He and his assistants had a quick, easy rapport. He was punctual and friendly. He was quite good at small talk, in a slightly affected way, someone who sees it as an amusing pastime more than something to be either engaged in or despised. He gave the impression of a man with a rich, full life. And despite living alone, despite his neat manners, you could argue that this wasn't entirely wrong. He'd get home and read, or watch an art film, and generally enjoy the silence.

Sometimes, on grey or snowy nights, he would stare into the pine trees. A man could get lost in those trees. It seemed like a nice idea, sometimes; to be removed, piece by piece, and become more and more the bark and leaves, snow and wood. To be a little less oneself than before, with all the burdens that entailed.

He'd smile at the thought, and go to sleep.

But since the ritual, his sleep was a little different. The presence of the bird was not unusual - after all, he saw and dealt with birds every day, in cages or containment zones, in colours mundane and abnormal, in previously unknown shapes. They would spit at him, or bite, or shift through one plane to another. SCP-7356 had not, at first, left so great an impression on him, fascinating though it was. He expected birds in his dreams. They were his old friends.

No, what was unusual was the hallway. It did not so much seem like the hallway the ritual had taken place in, despite the identical colouring and carpeting. Was it a bit too… small? Or was it that the bird, placed into it, altered his perception of its proportions? It glided through it in such a way that he couldn't resist tilting his head, like he was a camera, like he was creating a Dutch angle. The bird seemed not to glide, now, but to slide, casting itself along a smooth, polished surface. But it was not touching the ground.

He woke up a little after four. He frowned.

"But it's not a bird. You really shouldn't keep calling it that. It's a humanoid with skin and a mouth." His assistant, Martha, was idly chatting with him during lunch. The canteen's bulbs were not as warm as in the office - white, staring things, a cold kind of light that kept the workers moving, not wanting to linger.

"Just because you use the skull to summon it, just because of the bird dreams everyone gets - it's still a humanoid. We still cannot be certain of the relation between birds and the figure. Maybe it is a bird in some way. Maybe it's the bird's prey. We simply don't know."

Martha chattered on, stirring her soup. Krupin didn't answer her. He alternated between regarding her, the movement of her mouth, the tenor of her voice, and his own meal, into which he'd stirred a little olive oil. It made patterns on the surface, teetering and splitting, forming into strands and bubbles.

After work, while driving home, a car passed by without its headlights on. It came out of nowhere; he had to swerve to miss it, screeching the car around a tricky bend. He swore, smashing the horn, but the other car careened past, pitch black, invisible in the night.

Why had he become an ornithologist?

He had a story on hand for that question. When he was young, he'd lived near the coast, and he'd seen the sand martins come and go, nipping into the sea and darting back with fish for their young. He'd say that the combination of all these factors - the swift movements, the lives contained in their cliffside holes, the completeness of their existence laid out before him - had enchanted him, and he'd resolved to study these strange creatures and their ways.

The truth was something he kept to himself, out of some vague sense that it was taboo. He'd been walking in the woods and had found a dead bird - a sparrow - lying on the ground. Its wing had been twisted unnaturally, half covered in mud. He'd taken a stick and lifted the wing, and in that moment had seen its splayed structure - its bones and feathers more spread out than a human could ever see in motion. Its structure that allowed it to lift up, into flight, into endless motions upon motions, a living machine, strung up on a wire nobody else could see but it. It was, in its own way, perfect.

And a bird's expression was always silent. It might sing, might cry, might cry many times in panic, but it could not emote, change its features, like a human could. It moved through the air, cutting across it, slicing it, from food to mating to sleep to death. It constructed elaborate, intricate nests.

And then there were the crows. They would twitch at him, tilting their heads. They'd use their beak and claws to lever chips from polystyrene boxes. It was a cliché to speak of the intelligence of corvids, but it was hard to move on from that intense, fickle gaze, clicking around in his head like old machinery.

That night, he did not dream of the bird, but of cattle. He dreamt of his teeth, biting into their sides, of their surprised, moaning coos as the blood, wet and warm, spilt out. His teeth were so tiny, so multiplicitous. His gaze upon them did nothing to him, nothing.

The next morning, he was late for the first time in years. Martha looked at him askance, but he seemed fine, and laughed off her questioning at lunch. He was fine. He asked for extra gravy on his beef at the canteen.

As he went home, he took a different road, stopping in a layby. It was snowing. He got out, crunching underfoot, and stood at the edge of the pine trees. The smell was refreshing; the wet, cold flakes felt crisp against his skin. He stared into the forest for a long time, his eyes searching, as if looking for something, someone. A pair of eyes that weren't there.

And then he got back into his car and went home.

It is not known where the REAO-6124-A organism lived. All that remains is a skull. The knowledge the skull gives us is plentiful, but it does not tell us everything, or even most things.

The next day, Dr David Krupin did not turn up for work. He did not call in sick. In an ordinary workplace, this would simply be a cause for alarm, but for the Foundation it was a more serious matter. People went missing in this job. Entire sites went missing. People defected, or were kidnapped. No break-ins or unexplained exits had been recorded around his apartment, but the Foundation checked anyway. They crowded around a dull, concrete apartment block. Parts of it were chipped off. A couple lived in one of the flats, spending all their time staring from their window; the rest were empty.

Dr Krupin's apartment stank. He owned no furniture besides a bed, a table and a chair. Bowls of cereal were strewn across the floor, half smashed, the milk congealing on the carpet. Two pictures were on the walls, one in the bedroom and one in the kitchen. One was a child's drawing of a sparrow's wing, the other a beautiful watercolour of sand martins in flight over a sunny beach.

The kitchen - if it could be called such - was empty. Other than the table and chair, a single segment of a cabinet had been nailed to the wall. It was falling away, not touching the wall except at a single point where it hung loose, scratching the plaster. The bathroom contained a shower and a basin, both filthy and unwashed. The drain was blocked. The wardrobe, though, contained several sets of immaculately clean clothes, hung up on hangers, neat and ready.

The other rooms contained nothing but spools of fencing; metal, composed of little squares, an inch or two each in length. A smartphone lay on his bed; a single book, a guide to the fish of the Norfolk coastline, was half-opened on the floor.

In the forest, Krupin had climbed a tree. He watched, as he ascended, how his arms grew and twisted, his hands disappearing. He looked down to see his skin coated and hidden beneath black feathers. He looked at his legs, twisting into talons. He looked at his body, smoothing out, altering itself.

He remembered, suddenly, how the bird in his dreams had a broken beak. It had been smashed, like it had been dashed against a wall, a nail. He wasn't sure which.

A forest floor would be the same as a wall, wouldn't it? A pine cone, at distance, as sharp as a nail?

He reached the top of the tree. From here, he had a view over the whole valley. In the distance, grey and box-like, was Site-856. The valley stretched down on either side, obscuring the world, its walls rising on each side like a corridor. It was snowing again. Had it ever not been? Had the world ever been covered in anything but a blank, singular colour?

He took one foot off the tree, letting it hover over the edge. He licked his lips, enjoying the moment, suspending himself in time.