I Didn't Forget Pt 9: The Wanderer's Library - SCP Foundation

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Present Day

I beat Theo back to the apartment. I’m quick about gathering my things, because I want to be gone before he gets here. I stuff a few outfits and toiletries into my suitcase and take an uber to my parents’ house. I consider taking the car for myself, but then Theo would probably come to my house to try and get it, giving him an excuse to see me.

I manage to leave the apartment before he arrives. On the way over, I text my mom to tell her I’m coming to stay for a while. She asks me what happened, and I say we’ll talk about it when I get there.

Soon enough, I’m in front of my childhood home. Other than my apartment with Theo, this is the only place I’ve ever lived. I rate and tip the uber driver, walk up to the door, and ring the bell. My mom answers immediately. She was waiting for me right next to the door. She’s a tall, red-headed woman, with a mousy face and Evan’s eyes. She glances at my suitcase as she opens the door. I see her concern.

“Hey,” I say. “I imagine it’s okay if I stay here for a while?”

“What happened?”

I want to tell her. I want to tell her the truth. Am I a hypocrite if I don’t? I’m leaving Theo because he wouldn’t tell me the truth. But this is different. Mom wouldn’t believe me if I tried to tell her, and even if she did, there’s nothing she could do to help me rescue Evan. “Theo and I had a fight. Bad enough that I don’t think we’ll recover from it.”

She looks at me sadly. “That’s a shame. Do you mind telling me what it was about?”

“I… Can I tell you later? Right now, I’d kind of like to get to bed.”

“Of course.” She steps back and motions for me to step inside. As soon as I do, she pulls me into a hug.

I hug her back. “It’s nice to see you too.” We’re still hugging when dad comes over to greet me as well. I don’t say much to him. I just let Mom repeat what I said. Eventually, the hug ends, and I head upstairs.

I walk down the upstairs hall, passing my childhood bedroom and entering the office room. I turn off the lights, and I take a seat in the rolling chair. I look up at the glowing, plastic stars that still cover the ceiling.

Six Years Ago

In the days following Evan’s kidnapping, I clung to hope that the people who’d taken him wouldn’t keep him forever. Maybe they only needed him for a few days. Maybe after that, they’d pretend to find him buried in the rubble.

There was a knock at my bedroom door. I sat up in my bed. My dad opened the door, and both of my parents entered the room. I could see on their faces that this wasn’t good news. Mom’s make-up was smudged by tears. “What is it?” I asked.

Mom walked over to the bed and sat down next to me. She took my hand. “Sweetie,” she said, “there’s been news about Evan.”

“Did they find him?” I asked, hoping I’d misinterpreted their faces.

She nodded. For a second, my heart flew. “His body,” Mom clarified. “They found his body.”

“What?”

“They’ve confirmed that one of the bodies in the pit matched Evan’s dental records,” Dad said. “They’re sure it’s him.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “That can’t be right. He has to be alive.” I knew he was alive. I’d seen him.

“He’s not, sweetie,” Mom said. “I’m sorry.”

“No. No, you don’t understand, I…” only, I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t tell her anything. I wanted to. I wanted to tell her what those bastards had done. I wanted to ease the incomprehensible sadness she felt. Let her know that her son was alive, right now. But I couldn’t. She wouldn’t believe me. Not over the big, official people with their medical examiners and dental records. The people who had done this to us.

Mom squeezed me. I squeezed her back. Dad sat down on the bed, and wrapped his arms around us both. “It’ll be okay,” I said.

“No, sweetie,” Mom said. “Not everything ends up okay.” She sobbed again, and I held her tighter.

Present Day

I’m in the alley where Theo said I’d find a way into “The Wanderer’s Library.” The sounds of the city surround me, honking horns and zooming cars reinforcing the fact that I am, indeed, downtown.

Theo said to look for the red brick. All of the bricks are reddish brown, but one of them is particularly vibrant. I crouch in front of it. As quietly as I can, I knock on the brick five times, then yodel. No one is watching me, which is good, because I look like an idiot.

The city’s sounds suddenly vanish. In an instant, I’m no longer kneeling on pavement, but hovering a few inches above dark hardwood flooring. I fall and smack my face into said flooring.

I scramble to my feet, holding my throbbing head as I look around.

I sure do seem to be in a library. The walls here are stories high, and completely covered by well-stocked bookshelves.

There’s a patch of brick wall in front of me, about the size of a door. The rest of this place is made of dark wood, from its bookshelves to the arched ceiling above. There is light around me, though I can’t see any source for it. I don’t see any people around, either.

I approach a bookshelf. The books are varied. Some look old, some new. Some are giant tomes; others are pamphlets so thin that I can barely see them. Out of curiosity, I take a random book off the shelf. It’s handwritten. I think it’s a journal, but it’s in a language I don’t recognize.

I keep scanning the walls as I walk down the hall.

Something moves in the corner of my eye. I look up. There’s something climbing on the shelves. “Holy shit!” I say, stumbling back. It looks like a white-furred monkey, around six feet tall, with eight arms sprouting from its back. It has two faces, one on the front of its head, one on the back. It stops and glances down at me with its read face.

What the fuck is this thing? What is it going to do?

Nothing, apparently. Soon enough, it looks away from me, and moves on.

Even with it gone, its strangeness has me frozen for a few more minutes. Theo didn’t say how weird this place would be.

I force myself to continue forward. As I do, I scan the shelves on either side of me. Most of the books have English titles, but some of them seem to be in other languages, some of which use scripts I’ve never seen before.

I can’t let myself get distracted by the mysteries of this place. I could spend a lifetime reading all these books, but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here on a mission.

After some walking, I come to a four-way intersection. At its center is a large statue of a tentacled monster. I look down each hall, trying to figure out which way to go. I should go straight. I should always go straight. So long as I only move in one direction, I can find my way back just by returning the way I came.

I keep walking for a long time. I wish I had brought some water. Theo didn’t say the library would be so big. I keep going, though. I need to find someone I can talk to. The next time I see one of the eight-armed monkeys, I try to get its attention, but, just like the last one, it just studies me for a moment, and then swings away. After half an hour or so, I encounter another creature, or rather, a piece of one. Crawling along the ceiling is a small section of what appears to be a giant centipede. Its head and tail are nowhere in sight, its body continuing off into the distance in both directions.

It’s about an hour before I see someone who looks like a person perusing one of the shelves. Most of their body is covered by a cloak, but they seem human-shaped, without any extra arms. I run up to them. They turn to look at me. I stop approaching as soon as I see their face. They have an insectoid face made of dark green exoskeleton. Red eyes bulge from either side of their head, and antennae rise from it. They stare at me. I try to form a greeting, but I can’t get the words out. In the end, they’re the first one to speak. “Can I help you?” they ask. Their voice is clicky and nasal.

“I…” I stammer.

“I take it you’re new here?” the bug asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

“I remember the feeling,” the bug says. “My name’s Ryan.” He holds out his pincer-like hand. After a moment of hesitation, I take it. “Welcome to the Wanderer’s Library. What brings you here?”

“I’m looking for the Serpent’s Hand,” I say.

“Back at the intersection you just came from, take a left. You’ll find a lounge. Ask around for the Serpent’s Hand there, and you’re sure to find a member.”

“Thanks,” I say. I look at him, at this creature that just talked to me. He’s not just a human with special powers, but a creature totally alien to the world I know. How many things like this exist? How many does that Foundation have in containment? How many wonderful things has the Foundation hidden from me—stolen from me—my entire life?

Six Years Ago

There was nothing I could do to stop them from planning a funeral for Evan. I tried to stay out of the process as much as I could, but Mom and Dad thought I would regret not being involved, so they insisted on having me around to weigh in on all the countless, important decisions that had to be made, like what color his casket should be, and what kinds of flowers it should have on it.

“Why do we need to bury him if there’s no body?” I asked.

“Because funerals are for the living,” Dad said. “Because he deserves to have his life celebrated.”

“Besides, the casket won’t be empty,” Mom added. “Some parts of him were recovered. That’s how he was identified. They will be inside the casket.”

Of course, that couldn’t actually be true. Evan was alive. There should be no remains to bury, right?

There was a visitation a few days before the funeral. It took place in a large room that looked a lot like a chapel, even though there would be nothing specifically Christian about any of the proceedings. Evan wouldn’t have wanted there to be. The casket lay at the end of the room. It was flanked by bouquets of blue and white flowers. Near the right wall, a montage of photographs of Evan played over a selection of his favorite songs. Mom and Dad had wanted to use a bunch of cliché funeral songs that Evan would have hated, and some of those made it in, but I talked them into also using a few songs he actually liked. Dad was sitting on the frontmost pew, watching the screen. His face was stoic, resolute, not empty of sadness, but not overcome by it, either.

Relatives from both sides of the family came from all around to view the closed casket. They spoke with each other. They comforted one another. I sat silently in a corner, away from all of them. Occasionally, one of them would glance sadly at me, but they mostly left me alone.

As I sat, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to sit there speculating about whether there were teeth in that dark wooden box. It was right there. I could just look inside. That was enough to lure me out of my corner. I approached the casket. As I reached it, Mom walked up beside me. She put her arm on my shoulder. “It’s hard to believe he’s in there,” she said, wiping a tear.

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

She looked down at me. “You should visit with the family while you’re here,” she said. “We,” she stammered, wiping another tear, “this is a time that we all need to be there for each other.”

I didn’t say anything. She was trying to comfort me. I wanted to let her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t allow myself to be comforted when this tragedy was still something I could undo. Something I had to undo.

It was me who eventually broke the silence. “Can I look inside?” I asked.

“No,” Mom said, gripping my shoulder tighter.

“Please?” I asked. I wanted to see. I wanted to see if there really were a few bits of human skeleton inside that casket. Because if there weren’t, if it was completely empty, that meant for sure that he was alive.

“No,” Mom said. “That won’t make any of us feel better.”

“Have you seen the teeth?” I asked her. “Do we know that they even bothered to put them in there?”

“Of course they did.”

“But have you checked?”

“Evan, stop it,” she snapped. As soon as she said it, she put her hand to her mouth, her face overcome with mortification.

Mom and Dad mixed our names up all the time. It usually didn’t bother me. I always used to find it flattering that they’d mistake me for Evan. Now, though, it wasn’t what anyone wanted to hear. “I’m so sorry,” Mom said.

“It’s okay.”

She walked away from the casket. I looked at it. I looked over my shoulder, back at my mom. She was sitting with a small cluster of female relatives, aunts and grandmothers, weeping and comforting one another.

I went back to my corner.

The next time I emerged from it, it was because I had to go to the bathroom. It took me a bit of exploration to find it, but I did. It was a small, white room, with two urinals and two stalls, one larger than the other. As I entered, I heard something in the larger stall. Sobbing. Absolutely uncontrolled sobbing.

I recognized the voice. “Dad?”

The crying stopped. “I’ll be out in a minute,” he said.

“No, it’s fine,” I hurried to assure him. I could see a sliver of him through the gap underneath the stall’s door. Dad wasn’t on the toilet. He was on the ground in the opposite corner.

After exiting the bathroom, I walked back over to the casket. Daisy was here, now, along with a few of Evan’s other friends from Spirituality Club. They were talking with my mom. I walked over to the coffin. I looked over my shoulder again. Realistically, there wasn’t going to be a time when I could do this without anyone seeing. I had to just accept that I was going to get in trouble.

I lifted the casket’s lid.

Inside a clear body bag, there were bones. Human teeth, and a few other fragments of skull, rib, arm, and leg. Worse, bits of dry flesh were still attached to them. Rotting flesh. But for the plastic, I probably would’ve been able to smell it.

The sight of all this startled me. Whose bones were those? Whose teeth? Whose skin? They weren’t Evan’s. Evan was alive. The sight of them made me reel back. I pulled my hand away from the lid, causing it to slam back down. The conversation behind me quieted. I looked over my shoulder, to see that everyone was looking at me. Mom stood and walked over to me. She took me firmly by the hand. “I told you not to do that,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She glared at me for a moment, but as she stared, her face softened. She took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “You’re forgiven.” She let go of my hand and walked back to the group of relatives she’d been standing with.

For a moment, I thought about joining her. I wondered if I’d been losing my mind about all of this. What if it had been a dream? Even if it hadn’t, what if they’d only needed him for a few days? What if those really were his bones in that coffin?

But no, that didn’t make any sense. I’d never confused a dream with reality before. They felt different. Those bones must have been fake. Or they were taken from someone else. Either way, they were a trick to make me think he had really died. My brother was alive, and he needed me to rescue him.

I wiped my tears and walked back over to my corner. Not long afterward, Daisy came over to it. “Hey,” she said, sitting next to me.

“Go away,” I said. “I’m not in the mood to talk right now.”

“Are you sure?”

I glared at her, too harshly. “Yes.” It startled her. Seeing that it startled her made my face soften. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, it’s okay.” She got up and left.

Present Day

Following Ryan’s instructions, it takes me less than an hour to find the lounge. I walk up to the first human I see. He’s small and unimposing, kinda cute, actually, dressed in jeans and a green t-shirt. He’s lying back on one of the couches, reading a thick yellowed tome with a non-english title. It looks Spanish, maybe. Or Latin. or Italian. He holds the book in both hands. His left hand is covered by a thick leather glove. He lowers the book as he realizes I’m approaching him.

“Hey,” I say. “I’m looking for the Serpent’s Hand. Do you know where I could find someone from it?”

“I’m from it,” he says. “My name is Sean. What leads you to be looking for us?”

I hesitate for a moment. Should I tell him everything? Should I be more careful than that? No. These are the people whose help I need. I’m going to have to trust them. “Jerry,” I say. I shake his ungloved hand, then I sit down, and tell him everything. I don’t hold anything back. Sean is attentive and understanding, and he doesn’t seem to mind that I’ve interrupted his reading. He gives me condolences for the loss of my brother. “Thank you,” I say, when I’m done, “for listening. Like I said, I want to rescue my brother. I don’t care how. I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I was told the Serpent’s Hand were the people I should talk to for help doing that.”

“We probably are,” Sean says. “Rescuing people from the Jailors is difficult, but no one is better practiced at it than us. I don’t want to make promises yet. I’ll need to share your story with some of my comrades. However, I think it’s likely that we’ll be able to help you.”

Joy explodes inside me. I have to fight to hold myself together, to keep from breaking down in tears of joy. “Thank you,” I say.

“No problem. It’s what we do. Besides, if you can undo mental control like you say you can, it won’t be hard for you to make it worthwhile for us.”

“Really? Am I actually that special?”

“Absolutely. Mind control is a powerful tool. If you can undo it with a simple conversation, it might be impossible to overstate how useful that is. There are hundreds of magical phenomena that affect the mind, some of which have no known cures. If you can cure them, you may be able to do an immense amount of good, for the general public and for the Hand.”

Well, how about that? In this paranormal world, I carry a privileged blessing. That’s such a strange thought. I’m so used to thinking of myself as a hapless child, hiding from an organization that rules the world. But maybe I’m not so hapless. I have power here.

I can’t wait to figure out how I’ll use it.

“Do you know exactly where the Jailors are holding your brother?” Sean asks.

“I assume you mean the Foundation?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve not heard anyone else call them that. ‘The Jailors.’” I guess it’s fitting, but, what’s up with that?”

“The Serpent’s Hand calls things what they are. The true name of a thing has power, even if you don’t use it to cast a spell. Simply refusing to play along with the Jailors’ self-righteous delusions can be a very meaningful gesture.”

“I see,” I say. “Well, back to your question, I don’t know where they’re keeping him. I’ve been told Site-17 has the most humans, but I don’t actually know if he’s there.”

“I see. Then our first step would be to figure out where he is.”

I think for a second. “It occurs to me,” I say, “is it possible that information on Evan’s location is somewhere in the library? If it’s supposed to have every book ever written, would that include the Foundation’s records of where he is?”

“The Jailors have ways of shielding their documents to prevent them from ending up in the Library,” Sean says. “Even if they didn’t, it’s unfortunately not possible to use the Library to obtain specific information like that. If Jailor documents recording your brother’s location were in the Library, there would also be countless similar records from other universes, where the Jailors might be keeping him somewhere different.”

“Other universes?”

Sean nods. “There’s an infinite multiverse, containing just about every variation on the planet Earth that you can imagine.”

“So, there’s more of me? And more of my brother?”

“Yes. You might meet some of them in the Library, someday.”

That means there are more Evans trapped by more SCP Foundations. Infinitely many. The implications of this are staggering, so much so that I decide I have no choice but to shelve the thought for the moment. Rescuing my own Evan is going to be difficult enough. I can think about further heroics once I’ve accomplished that.

“Back on topic,” Sean says, “the best way to get the Jailors’ records of where they’re keeping Evan is to steal them from the Jailors themselves.”

“How would we do that?”

“It’s not that different from taking anything else from them. We just have to break into one of their sites and steal the records from their database. The Jailors are careful with information, so not every site will contain the records we need, but we might be able to make an educated guess as to one that might.”

“How?”

“They’d keep records relevant to him at facilities that have dealt with him. In your case, I think we should start with the facility closest to where he was taken—which is likely to be where he was first processed after being kidnapped. Even if he hasn’t been back there since, it will contain records of where he was taken from there, and, hopefully, where he is now.”

“So, if I give you my address—”

“The town is enough. The closest Jailor site to New Wakefield is Site-272. That’s almost certainly where they initially took him, so the records we need should be there. Even if he was processed somewhere else, the Jailors probably see your brother as a very valuable resource. A resource like that isn’t worth anything if you don’t know where it is, so knowledge of his location will hopefully be findable at a lot of sites.”

The idea of my brother being a resource sickens me. Sean said my power could do immense good, but what could it do in the hands of people like them? “Alright then,” I say. “How soon can we find those records?”

“It might be longer than you would hope.”

“Why?”

“All of this is assuming more agents of the Hand agree to help you. You seem to hate the Jailors with admirable passion. Are you interested in becoming one of us?”

“Yes. You fight the people who took my brother.”

“And you’re willing to make a lifelong commitment to our cause?”

“Yes. Absolutely. These people, they took my brother because he was special. What he did at the Galaxy Plaza saved dozens of lives. It made him a hero. He should’ve been rewarded for that, but they punished him with a lifetime of imprisonment instead. I will gladly devote my life to fighting the people who did that.”

“Alright then. Welcome aboard.” Sean holds out his ungloved hand, and I take it. “You’re going to have to go through some training. We need to make sure you have the skills you need, and that you’re trustworthy and committed to our cause.”

“How long?”

“Months, to establish yourself and get trained up.”

Months? Only months. I was worried he’d say years. “That’s fine,” I say.

“Of course, you’ll be expected to join us on the mission yourself.”

I smile. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

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