The Good Captain Pt. 3: The Cyclical Child - SCP Foundation

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Around the room were scattered a variety of crayons, toys, and other such things as general mess. The child sat in the middle amid it all, doing something for some reason, which was about as much as he knew. There, in the room that was in fact nowhere and at no specific when, he had set about… making something. It may or may not have been with his own hands, if he even had hands. Maybe they were his own, or someone else’s. Perhaps hands were involved in no way, being a rather arbitrary object to be involved in anything.

There he sat, cross-legged on the floor, thinking as he always did, about nothing substantial. His thoughts were valueless and dull, those that children normally thought, exacerbated by the fact that he had been in this room literally forever since a few years ago. There was nothing exciting here: the toys and clothes which littered the room, the utensils, the necessities normally found in a child’s room, the empty space and the bodies. There were a number of bodies, that much could be certainly ascertained, but it was by no means definite. This was, in fact, the place where all the bodies of those who ever lived here piled up, and the exact amount of people who lived here was not yet determined. But that was boring, possibly the most boring thing in the room.

The crayons might capture more interest. Oh, there were so many colours: red ones and pink ones and orange ones and white ones and black ones and a few that didn’t reflect visible light, not to mention the one or two that object or abstract-coloured ones. The necessary tools of such a craftsman as this man- well, I do say man. Man is perhaps inappropriate, despite his age. He was and always will be a child, as grown as he may be, until the next one came to continue the cycle. That’s why he was here. To continue this recurring little function of the world’s, this little nuance formed from a slight fracture of reality.

The child, or god if you refuse to hold sanctity in such a position, was certainly a curiosity. For one, he was, among being here, still a young boy at some point elsewhere, in addition to being one of the remains about him. This was another of those places which held little respect for physical convention.

The name was perhaps the most important part of the whole affair, unless one chose to draw a distinction between it and the children it was given to. Always repeating, always the same, the name was certainly significant. So strange, then, that this boy should forget it. The note was nice, but it should have been purely supplementary, not necessary at all. Oh well. It’s not as if that was the most glaring error.

As the boy drew out the words, he did so with satisfaction, that which he’d felt when the gifts had arrived at his door. Indeed, as the fanciful vision of that puerile joy skipped merrily on his mind, he was allowed, for a little while, to recall that wonderful time, a time which he could revisit now only vicariously. He knew, as the boy held the toy, that he’d feel that splendorous feeling he could vaguely recall. He thought of this in rather simpler terms of course.

And so it continued. Eric set about, indefectibly, working on the next project. All to accomplish absolutely nothing. No-one cared about him, really.