Pursuing Ghosts, Part I - SCP Foundation

This place has the Freedom that eludes Life and Death: Freedom unclothed, shivering in the cold; Freedom untethered, slipping from your grasp; Freedom unbound, escaping your control.

Pursuing Ghosts, Part I

By Lt Flops

Published on 14 Feb 2023

This article is part of the forthcoming

Weaving Imperceptible Threads Continuity Hub.

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Lampyra, the Watcher
Wanderers' Library Author Page

Cave Story
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2021 Scavenger Hunt Contest

Talk of the Town
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The Foolish One
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F.A.Q.

.

13

THE LOST GLADE

Pursuing Ghosts

PART I

BUT FIRST

A Prologue: An Old, Familiar Dream

I ran away from home. I told myself that it wouldn’t be easy; that staying would be twice as tough.

Where am I now? I couldn’t say. I might call this place “Freedom”, and myself “Queen”. And what is Freedom if not a place? But those words taste bitter when I speak.

Freedom is a liminal territory that exists behind closed eyelids. Confined there, Freedom has far-reaching proportions. It can tip the scales marked Life and Death. Freedom sits at each extreme, filling in each a similar role. In Life, we can toil away. In Death, we can become bone, someday fossil, one day dust. Both these are Freedom. But they are a false Freedom; like pinching a grain of sand on a vast waste and hoping it might amount to an ocean. If you could hold the contents of every desiccated waste on Earth in the palm of your hand, even still, you would never match a single molecule of water.

I’m in an immense place, but I’m stuck here. This place has the Freedom that eludes Life and Death: Freedom unclothed, shivering in the cold; Freedom untethered, slipping from your grasp; Freedom unbound, escaping your control.

Freedom — freed.

I might never touch the Glade in my dream.

But with every destination, there is a journey.

Mine starts here.

✗

Monday, 22 April 2019

5:45 a.m.

East Selkirk

Manitoba, Canada

I stir in the all-encompassing shadows of pre-twilight. In a few groggy moments, my mental bearings come into focus: I’ve had the dream again. I shoot up, roll over, and swat at the vague impression of a drawer handle. The spiral-bound notebook with my dream journal lies in wait.

I pen the last dream’s events in half-conscious chicken-scratches. My phone gives just enough light to make out loose arcs of lettering. I hope future-me appreciates the scribbles.

Each entry inside this notebook has variations on the exact same dream. A dream I’ve dreamt four or five nights every week for the past year-and-a-half. It’s haunted me. During this ordeal, I’ve had the habit of flipping through pages and pinning down prevailing trends. There are false positives — when a drowsy mind fumbles the words that describe an experience, or simply misremembers — but everything else is much the same.

Except, I’m not interested in broad strokes. I’m looking for variations. The tidbits, the wrinkles.

…

My pen trails off the side of the page. I jolt back. A split-second later, a warning alarm blares in my hand like a stick of dynamite.

6:10 AM

I bolt up from bed and get busy getting ready.

Exam week. First of the week is at 8 o’clock sharp, and travel times are not in my favour.

Future Date Unknown

Location Unknown

There is, of course, a distinct difference between then and now.

Now, instead of an alarm, the shifting substructure of a gargantuan tunnel network rouses me awake. An eerie sound creeps through — subterranean rock vibrating all across these caves. Their echoes recede for many minutes.

Instead of chomping at the bit, hoping it will go away, I channel my focus inward. I take advantage of the headspace and write in my notebook. To play out the lonesome feeling; to get poetic. It’s a time-passer. One of few, considering I’ve long since shut my phone off to conserve battery. It’s not like I’ll get any signal.

The immensity of this place is what drives its eerie atmosphere. There’s surely no interior structure this huge on the planet. It must give the Large Hadron Collider a run for its money. And, what’s more, there’s surely nothing like this in bumfuck nowhere, Manitoba. But I could be wrong.

My first, best guess is that I’m inside a giant cave system. It makes too much sense. Geologists theorise that, during the last Ice Age, a massive glacier scraped across the entirety of Upper North America. Manitoba felt the biggest brunt. It’s the reason the Great Lakes formed; how Lakes Winnipeg and Winnipegosis came to be. It even explains why Manitoba seems shred to shit — like something pushed a moon-sized grater across the prairie, gouging holes in bedrock.

That leaves the important question: How to escape?

Navigating these tunnels becomes less an acute anxiety over time and more an insipid slog. Around every crook I imagine a Tolkien cave-troll bounding out and bellowing. Instead, my growling stomach interrupts the long silence. I spot the occasional jury-rigged stake lamp dotting the wall, each one a persistent dull orange; a shimmering orb; a possum’s eye in the dark. It’s the only sign that another human has passed through here. I can’t find any discernible power supply, but they light up the way, so I can’t complain.

I hop a finger-thick crevice. A constellation of fireflies pours out, their squat bodies flashing in short, violet bursts. They lead, and I follow.

Tuesday, 23 April

Midnight

East Selkirk

Manitoba, Canada

Thoughts buzz inside my skull. Eager bees scurry after the day’s pollen. Everything else keeps still.

A persistent recurring dream — and a lucid one, at that — seems all that glues my life together. It’s a source of regularity. Day has its constants: The monotony of studying; shovelling cooked sludge down my gullet; spring sprouting in the long shadow of winter; gender dysphoria.

In the night, everything gives way to the dream. That weird, wild thing.

You know, at first, I questioned whether it could even be something. If it was, so what? What I might rationalize as mere stress, I might just as easily be cured of after seeing a shrink, right? But I chose another option. I told myself that it was all in my head. That I’d be best served keeping it to myself. That no serious person would even take it straight-faced.

These dreams, and the stretches of time when I felt plagued, became compounded, and when they fattened up, became monstrous. In my dreams, there was no longer simply a Glade. It became luscious, tantalizing. But it also hid unseemly fringes. It held an agent of malice — a Tormentor at its very centre — lurking just beyond reach. As it drew near, I became convinced that I was being called to struggle against it. Not simply to defeat it, but to excise it. To become that Glade’s saviour. To claim its otherworldly verdancy — for myself.

As secrets often dance in their paradoxical rhythms, it became increasingly difficult to withstand two contradictory impulses:

No longer could I keep hiding this burden from others.

And yet.

I could no longer muster the strength to admit it.

How would I break free from its hold?

Future Date Unknown

Location Unknown

Day Three. I found some sort of outpost. It’s a squat, rectangular structure built from long rows of sheet metal. Copper pipes and insulated wires hang from hooks. I spot a dark entrance, look both ways, and tiptoe inside.

The foyer has its roof shorn off. The interior hall is one continuous path of grated floors that feeds a series of corrugated doors. I follow snaking pipes and wires to a large room at the back. The wiring leads into a wooden electrical box. I flick the switch. For a good few seconds, something buzzes to life.

Suddenly, the hall glows brighter than the surface of the sun.

Thankfully, it’s short-lived; a lone generator sputters in the centre of the room, hacking up a burst of black smoke. The hall settles on a faint wash of amber.

“Anyone there?” Not having spoken for a few days now, I can only stutter. “Hullo? Could someone tell me where I am?”

The only response is my own voice carrying back.

I head to the first closed door and nudge it with my boot. It swings open effortlessly. The floor is plywood covered by a mottled tarp. I spot boxes and desks, loose papers and odd machine parts, quill pens and inkstands. There are chairs — though, I think I’d get skewered to death if I ever sat down, because boy they’re in rough shape. Everything feels closer to 1919 than 2019.

The next room is much the same. The third room has a stepladder; the fourth, a wooden cabinet — not something you see everyday. I pull one of the handles…

It doesn’t budge. “Right. There’s nothing worth shit.” I squeeze the side of a desk and kick the cabinet.

My boot crashes clean through. The entire thing keels over and smashes to the floor, its contents splaying across the room, sounds of metal-on-metal reverberating underfoot. Whoever built this metal building also put together a cabinet with balsa wood.

I wince, then look over the fallen cabinet.

A single house centipede scurries into a hole in the wall.

My eyes land on a stack of papers typeset with scientific notation. There are equations and inscriptions and strange symbology that looks like a calculus textbook had a three-way with the I Ching and The Satanic Bible.

Crouching down, I meticulously flip through the contents of a shattered bottom drawer, salvaging whatever looks cool, and setting it aside.

The middle drawer has a survey of the local tunnel system: One vellum sheet per section, “subdivided according to the predominant strata therein”. Whatever. I scour several dozen plans, then skip to the back. The plans wedged in there need a closer look. There — the unmistakable cross-section of a… Spinal column? The specs show junctures along each row of ribs, a half-kilometre abreast, each arranged to face “the spaces between spaces”.

“… The fuck does that mean?”

I amble back towards the foyer with my flashlight handy and point it straight up.

Fifty metres above me, I discover precisely what those plans depict: The spinal column of a great Cosmic beast.

Me, the outpost, and everything else — inside it.

In my newfound frenzy I strip apart the entire cabinet. A hidden compartment reveals treasure: One massive tome containing the map legend. I find something halfway through called a Tangent List. The first page has countless rows, five columns apiece, each one listed in small print. Every column bears a different alphanumeric designation.

I skim by and the list goes on, and on. I keep flipping without regard.

“World descriptions?”

Again, I consult the cross-sections and swipe at sheets until I dredge up the cover page. An inky title reads:

The Hydra's Spine

An Abridged & Annotated Guide

The text goes on to describe something in Romanised Greek called a Theophage. This place, this so-called Hydra’s Spine, is the largest hyper-fauna — a supermassive organism of Cosmic proportions — ever discovered. It died millions of years ago and exists now as fossilized remains. Lucky me?

Theophage, on the other hand, is defined much later on. The index is upfront:

Theophage:

God-Eater.

Well, that’s enough exploring for one day!

Enough for one lifetime.

Wednesday, 24 April

Afternoon

Oleksa Estate, East Selkirk

Manitoba, Canada

I would come to experience a new phenomenon the very next day. Another I couldn’t rationalize — but one that might give off some hope.

While attending the University of Manitoba, I live in the rural municipality with my parents. Every crack of dawn, I take the first bus down south. There are few enough passengers on this long and singularly lonesome road that I kick back. I spend my time reading, studying, or — let’s be honest — sleeping. Every afternoon, I catch the same ride back. Then, it’s a quarter-hour trek home.

It’s far enough out of the way here that public transit is an honest miracle.

East Selkirk is no lively neighbourhood by any means. It was originally a small farming community. One farm provided a breadbasket of opportunity that would come to employ most of the townspeople. A great deal of time passed. Then, one day, the largest stakeholders came together, split things up, and pawned it all off — so it goes.

Oleksa Estate is one piece of land to come from the split. Built in the late ‘60s, it sprung from one of the larger Van Horne plots. After that, it changed hands at least a half-dozen times, before landing again in the lap of its founding family. Our neighbour Dale tells my dad it was a “contract-selling scheme.” I could never figure out how that works, but I feel silly asking. Since then, no-one really knows what happened. The last farm in town, now abandoned, unattended for close to a decade.

I use Oleksa’s rolling, overgrown fields now as a shortcut. It shaves a good five minutes off my trip. But whenever I cross the barn and its farmhouse, I get the whole Jeepers Creepers vibe, and keep well clear. Not even the stoners hang out here.

Today is different.

As I trudge past the barn, there is an almost alien phenomenon. A great light pours from the overlook window. As a consequence of an overcast few days, the mid-afternoon drear has dampened even the slightest sunny break. Yet a perfectly bisexual light shines in betrayal.

I stand transfixed for a long while. Awe gives way to something bordering apprehension. I shake myself loose.

I take a split-second to consider my next move. Then, I take off. I scamper up the long, gravel-filled drive, skip across waist-high weeds, and saunter through thick grass, my satchel bouncing all the while, eyes tracing the periphery.

Creeping as quickly as I can, I swing around and face a cracked-open barn door. It’s just wide enough to slip through.

I take off my bag, squeeze it to my chest, and side-step inside.

I spurn the horror movie cliché and keep my lips sealed.

It’s dark, which is entirely expected. I pull out my phone and switch on the torch. Predictably, the rays of light don’t travel far. I can make out dirt and straw-covered ground and little else. At the back wall, the shape of a heavily disfigured tractor sits amidst scattered debris.

I aim the torch upwards. It doesn’t reach.

The purple-blue light is nowhere to be seen. The overlook is far duller than expected. All other openings have long been boarded up.

… So, what did I see?

I pace the old barn, keeping track of anything out of the ordinary. This place must’ve seen four decades of active use. Why abandon something so dependable?

A different light from my own backscatters across the far wall. Someone is creeping up on me. I cup the torch with my fingers and prepare to turn.

Then I spin around right quick — what clueless horror protags never do when being followed by some psycho killer.

I expect an angered, grizzled old landlord; or even an ancient crypt-keeper! I expect to jump in fear. Maybe, at the barest level, I expect to become the next cold case.

Some mixture of relief and deflating excitement stirs inside my chest. It’s none of the above… But I don’t quite know what it is.

It’s… A neon blue housecat? It sits behind me and glances up as I glance down. Its glare makes me squint. I take a step back. What is that — some kind of radioactive chemical in its fur? I picture people in flamboyant green hazmat suits dumping highly illegal toxic waste off Highway 59, in the forest behind the barnyard.

I blink, and notice something else: I can see right through it.

It sports distinct fur patterns — spots and stripes — a pulsating, electric indigo. Its tail flicks about; the way cats act when expressing pent-up mischief. I crouch down, as close to the ground without touching. It gets up and walks towards me. It slaps its tail against my satchel. It rubs its side against my calves and knees. The feeling is unique — a soothing warmness that ebbs at the surface of contact and ripples outward.

“Uh. Hey there.”

By this point, it’s circled me twice over and made its way in front of me. It sits.

Then, the light cast from its entire shimmering body blinks. Off-and-on, off-and-on, flashing as though controlled via lightswitch.

I rub my eyes and stand, catching myself off-balance. These are surely the effects of some mild fever. It has to be a hallucination. Exam stress must be getting to me. Yeah, that’s it — my sleep hygiene is piss-poor, isn’t it? I should just get home, drop everything, and nap ‘til supper.

Or, just maybe, I’ve had a mental break.

I command a degree of will I didn’t know I had and avoid taking a picture. Either way, I do not want to find out which theory proves true.

“Hey, uh, look. I’ve gotta go — okay?”

I leave without another word. With my hand cupping the torch to focus its rays, I speed-walk to the door, and as I cross the threshold, glance back, crooking my head with sharp-edged curiosity.

The phantasmal feline sits there, back arched and head crooked up, watching me. It slowly blinks its eyes as I slowly turn my back.

A Prologue

The Lost Glade

Pt. II