Archer Row's New Nightmare - SCP Foundation

One.

The Entity falls in perpetual stillness, slowly spinning in the vast emptiness of the Outside. The last thing he can remember is a victim, a trap, and a sharp pain in the eye.

Two.

Through the pinholes in his mask, he can see nothing but gray, but he can feel what was out there.

Nothing.

Everything.

Between the space-between-spaces lurks every concept, thought, and dream both capable and incapable of being felt, perceived, believed. The Entity is sinking through the morass of everything and nothing, caustic and anathema to anything real and actualized.

He can feel the nothingness worrying on him. A dog on a bone. the concept of acid eating his cellular bonds and the thought of antimatter annihilating his brainpan. The very archetypal concepts used to create him are slowly loosed from his form. The Entity can’t fight back against these implacable forces, and so settles down. If not happy, just content to observe the violence on his own body, his flesh warping beyond recognition. Just like…

Home.

The mask puckers where the mouth should be, and something oozes from it into the Outside. A flower of blood, a pinwheel of autumnal leaves. The smell of acrid bonfire smoke. Festive malice and murder. The conceptual parasite tears itself from the Entity and oscillates away into the void, diffusing back into Nothing. The Entity doesn’t care about its departure, as other concepts quickly fill the hole it leaves.

The Entity prepares himself for a long eternity of dissolution, of floating forever in the space beyond the spheres. But everything wrenches in stasis, as if a pipe has been thrown into the gears of the universe. The creature blinks, as surprised as a killing machine can be. The un-space the Entity occupies thins, warps, and finally gives. What passes for the Entity’s entrails twist and spin as he is sucked into… somewhere else, disturbing its quietude. The gray slowly dissolves and colorizes as cold concrete meets the Entity’s back, splattering its form against floor and walls.

It slowly congeals back together into a roughly animalian mass, its body sloughing cloth and waxy skin from the damage sustained “backstage.” It looks at its surroundings, noting their… off-quality. The walls crease like paper, and a deep, rattling breath finds air that tastes of typewriter ribbons. The Entity had fallen through reality, and landed in a story.

Down the echoing halls of inkjet and laser print, footsteps can be heard clicking against smooth tile. A dinner bell. A plea for release.

The Entity quivers and twitches, its newly reformed gelatinous mass roughening with delight, its ink-bound heart pulsing in time to the footsteps. How could it ever think of rest with prey like this? How could it think of sleeping like corpses or quiet dusty tombs, unable to move, to scream, to rage? It rises to its full height, hooks unconsciously manifesting in its grasp. It begins the hunt again.

“Doctor Semetsky to the Wardroom, Doctor Semetsky to the Wardroom,” a cool, feminine voice echoed over the loudspeakers of Site-76.

Doctor Semetsky was perusing the library, running his fingers against the hardcover spines of the Prime collection. The dark leather backs were embossed with silver Foundation seals and numbered, one through one hundred. New volumes added when the need arose, but the collection was just about complete.

In his short tenure at the Foundation, the volumes had grown to become his most prized achievement. Site-76-Prime was a completely fictive version of the physical Site-76, staffed by a lean crew of bespoke characters and descended personnel, suckered onto the underside of reality like a tick on a deer.

The collection collated and contained Prime itself in legible and editable form. Compact hyper-text description in gold-laden ink allowed the Site to be represented in prose, in manifestos and blueprints, personnel logs and intake forms, detailing every nook and cranny and carefully placed cracked tile for texture. The informational density of the books was so great that the shelves had to be reinforced with steel so they wouldn't break and spill the Site all over the floor.

The hard work hadn't gone to waste, and was quickly becoming a central draw to the real Site-76. Now, the collection was utilized for metafictional research, interlayer POI surveillance, and (at least theoretically) containment of narrativic anomalies, as well as a host of other possible uses that were sure to pencil out in committee. Plus, Prime also functioned as a green way to dispose of hazardous waste.

“Doctor Semetsky to the Wardroom, Doctor Semetsky to the Wardroom.”

G-d, fine. Semetsky rose from his alcove and walked down the aisle, trailing his fingers across the collection. He had almost made it to the end of the row when he stopped. There was one more book than usual. Paperback, not hardcover. Red binding, a black {101} on its thin spine. Semetsky hesitated, withdrew the book from the shelf, and began flipping through it. Blank, blinding white pages twirled by. His frown deepened.

Finally, in the first few pages was text, glistening as if freshly written. Semetsky’s eyes flickered over the words, fingers curled like talons as his face paled. He snapped the book shut and set off to the Wardroom a brisk pace. The last words from the strange tome read themselves in his mind, unscrolling as they were carved into the page as Semetsky read it. The killer stalks within a fictional facility, but its bloodlust is all-too-real…

…the yearning to kill makes its claws tremble and legs knock. The Entity is a greasy shadow, flitting between patches of darkness from flickering ceiling lights as it grows ever-closer to its target.

“Can’t believe how run-down everything looks. Wasn’t this place built just a couple months ago?”

Noncommittal grunt. “Written, not built. Maybe they were running low on toner when they made this wing.”

The harsh beam from a flashlight cuts through the darkness, revealing open maintenance hatches and sketch-y drop-ceiling panels. “Maybe. Man, I really shouldn’t have signed up for this gig. Only got two years ‘til retirement.”

The other guard blinks. “How? You’re, like, thirty-two.”

Too late. His fate is already sealed.

“Was just a joke, Go-” His retort is cut off by choking and spluttered gagging.

“Ernie?” The flashlight pans, revealing the glint of steel. A bloody hook emerges from Ernie’s mouth, wagging like a stiff tongue as it rips through the rest of his skull with a meaty shrik. Freddy doesn’t have time to scream or shoot as the Entity falls upon him too, suffocating and absorbing him within its fleshy mass.

Tongues of sinew barbed with dagger-teeth flense the skin from flesh and flesh from bone as it cracks open his skull to feed. Masticated fear and brain-matter tastes of heaven to the starving creature, making its eyes roll in ecstasy and body pulse with delight. Its grating screech of joy echoes down the corridor, lost within the turning pages.

"I want eyes on the ground in there, cram them in the Xerox feet first if you have to. I need someone to tell me what the hell is going on, and who the hell's problem it- oh, glad you could make it, Semetsky.”

Semetsky opened the door to Assistant Director Saunders looming over the Wardroom like a colossus of cholesterol and coffee, his voice a reedy wind of complaints and cigarettes.

Semetsky tossed the book onto the table, the slim paperback gliding across the table's slick surface and coming to a stop in front of Tenenbaum’s camera. The webcam whirred and clicked as it focused on the red cover, and the bulky computer sitting at the head of the table — containing the soul of a one-hundred-year-old criminal-slash-author-slash-metafictional-wizard — emitted a robotic groan. “Shit.”

“Did you know about this?”

UIU Agent Valarie Dell leaned forwards in their chair. They were here in advisory capacity only, part of a tit-for-tat between Analytics and the Portland Field Office. “Thaum just notified us right before you came in. Something's breached WHITE HOUSE. Good thing I was on-site, huh?”

“Right. How do things look on the ground, Thaum?”

Another laptop was open to the side of Tenenbaum, hosting a blank .odt file, linked sympathetically to a copy in WHITE HOUSE, the Project INKBLOT designation for Site-76-Prime.

Words rattled off the screen. {From what reports I've gathered, strange, is one way I can put it. Maintenance reports the blueprints of the facility are in flux and make no sense, critical systems are breaking down even with failsafes in place, and personnel are acting unusual. Tampered, is another way to put it. I'm locked down in my office. Safe, for now. Can't say the same for the rest of the staff.}

Tenenbaum’s camera swiveled back to Semetsky. “Any theories on this?”

Semetsky shrugged, drumming his fingers on the armrests. “Intrafictional pollution? Structural damage from the informational density of the site? The WHITE HOUSE is the first of its kind, so it's not like we have precedent for this. It was built fairly rapidly, so the insulation between something and nothing is… thin, to say the least. That, or intentional sabotage.”

{The potential literary dissolution of Prime is not a price I’m willing to pay. I would be going down on this ship involuntarily tied to the mast if that was the case.} Thaum was another fictionalized character shanghaied into the project, though he didn’t have enough literary weight to actualize like Semetsky. So he was stuck in the WHITE HOUSE, along with whatever else was down there.

Robert Saunders, INKBLOT Project Lead, and also the only mundane individual in the room, planted his hands on the table. “So nothing concrete, is what you’re weaseling out of saying.”

Semetsky bit his tongue. “I’m willing to bet that book is anomalous, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Saunders raised both his hands in celebration. "This is why we hire guys like you, for your cutting skills of observation."

Tenenbaum’s harsh monotone cut through the banter, the camera focused on the pages Dell turned for him. “And I’m willing to take that bet, Yuri. If I had to hazard a guess — which I do — I don’t think this book is prophetic, necessarily, and I can say for certain it's nothing like 140 or anything of that kind. It’s a recording, an analogue footprint of our trespasser.” The red light on the camera blinked rapidly, Tenenbaum’s form of fidgeting, pacing. Can be hard to stir the creative juices when you have been stuck inside a computer for fifteen years. “Nothing’s really happened in Prime before. Nothing note-worthy, written-word-worthy. This is the first story to take place inside, so it makes sense for a record to manifest.”

The camera’s shutter whirred half-closed as new words etched themselves upon the page. “I just wish the record wasn’t so grisly.”

The Entity skitters through the vents, ribs splayed out like a dozen spider legs. This is new, unfamiliar. It was so limited before, both in form and method. This changed body is strange, inhuman, wrong… but ever so right. A world of possibilities now lay open before it like a vivisected corpse, ripe for the consumption. No more Halloween trips, suburban stabbings or slow stalkings, it’s free to kill however it pleases. And it definitely pleases.

A banging on the pipes. “Why the hell is nothing working anymore?”

Crackling of a radio. “Same here, Tina. Though you should finish up quick. They’re ordering an evac of the site.”

“Evac, why? It’s not like anything else could go possibly wrong with this piece of crap.”

There we go.

A tap in the vents. Regular, rhythmic. Probably a fan with a screw loose. Tina takes another step up her ladder and reaches for the vent cover. “Just give me a minute, almost done heeeRR-” Her voice trails off into a piercing scream as something grabs her arm, wrapping and tightening in a vise grip that tears at her skin. The hooked barbs pull her up and up and force her through the gap, bones cracking, organs pulping, until there is nothing but a tipped ladder and a vent dripping blood.

The radio lies uselessly on the ground, sputtering and emitting static. “Tina? Tina!”

But no one was alive that could hear their cries, and the Entity had already moved on.

The INKBLOT Working Group was hunched over the table, a few scrawled-upon whiteboards covered in pet theories and strategies discussed and discarded. INKBLOT was the blanket designation for the metafictional projects undertaken at Site-76, under the watchful eye of Analytics and O5-3. Of all of them, from weapons procurement to threat prediction to narrativic forensics, the WHITE HOUSE was key — it was the linchpin, cornerstone, and crowning jewel of INKBLOT. The product of thousands of man-hours of research and conceptualization, millions of computational hours of compilation and actualization, and billions of theoretical dollars at stake. Nothing could happen to it, for the sake of both their personnel and their funding.

"Why wouldn't the cordon work? The Prime Collection is editable! Just isolate the thing in the containment wing when it gets close, erase anything nearby until we can think of something permanent."

Semetsky rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, lifting his glasses off the bridge of his nose. "The Site a house of cards right now, and you want to chuck a rock at it? From what Thaum and this book are saying, Prime is shaking in its foundation from the equivalent of an interfictional meteor impact and this-" Semetsky waved a hand. "hokey Stephen King character overwriting key functionality. It wouldn't work."

Agent Dell leaned back in their chair, an exhale of nicotine-laced smoke adding to the cloud of doom and gloom that hovered above the gathering. “Less King, more Clive Barker. But besides that, why don’t we just take the bastard behind the barn? Simpler than your plan, Tenenbaum.”

The cyborg criminal mastermind glared at Dell, its single robotic eye conveying a dismal world of disdain. “We aren’t sending in E-17, damn it. This blasted thing is a rogue element. It’s a coin flip whether they’ll get it or if it mulches them like a wood-chipper.”

Saunders quaffed a third water bottle, the edges of his mouth running wet. “If you’ve suddenly grown so attached to E-17, why don’t you write a script to help them out down there?”

One of the many reasons Semetsky hadn’t signed off on upgrading Tenenbaum’s setup beyond the camera and vocoder was to prevent him from strangling Saunders with any provided prosthetics. Of course, Tenenbaum’s feelings were shared with most of the staff, but Semetsky was still thankful for his forward thinking as he noted Tenebaum’s CPU temp skyrocketing to triple digits.

Tenenbaum’s TTS spoke in a purposefully slowed voice, as if he was talking to the nearly-deaf or definitely-stupid. “My. Scripts. Would. Be. Useless. Down. There. Like Yuri said, this B-movie freak thrives on its own hack narrative. I can't force it to break character and take a fall. That would be like trying to divert the tides, or getting a good cup of coffee from the Site cafeteria. Impossible.”

Saunders paused as he searched for a witty retort, and found none in good time. “You don’t drink coffee.”

“I’ve heard reviews.”

The rattling of keys pressed by no one, and Thaum’s text document updates. {E-17 has prepared for a scenario such as this, that was the purpose of BLUE SUEDE in the first place. If nothing else, the few of us that remain down here would appreciate the morale boost of the sight of an MTF.} The cursor paused. {But, Mr. Tenenbaum is right. The threat profile of the anomaly backspace backspace backspace … we should play it safe.}

Semetsky. “How is the evacuation going, Thaum?”

{Slowly. We are trying to account for all of our personnel before we prepare to ascend. We don’t want to miss anyone… more than we are already.}

The camera swiveled to each man in turn. “So that’s Dell and Saunders in favor, Thaum and I against. Yuri?”

Semetsky hung his head, lacing his fingers together.

Mobile Task Force Epsilon-17, “Editor’s Choice.” Book-diving, book-burning bibliophiles with a knack for metafictional operations and a tendency towards stale quips. The latter is probably an adopted quirk for branding purposes, or maybe the job just self-selects for those kinds of people.

Now, though, they’re quiet. Focused. They step outside of the descent room still shaking off the Xerox, silhouettes hyper-real as their bodies slowly adjust to the new norm and their ink finishes drying. E-17 enters Prime with their safeties off, flashlights on. All other personnel had already been moved to the loom-shuttles, so it was open season on anything left.

Through hand gesture and head nod they communicate, slowly sweeping corridor after corridor, the only sounds made from the squeaking of combat boot on polished linoleum. Dust motes play in the beams of their barrel-mounted flashlights as they cut through the darkness. Prime’s lights are spotty, despite no issues reported in electrical before the call for evacuation.

The Entity creeps along the corners of their vision, skittering away when they cock their heads, and moving closer when they look away. Their boots step in puddles of thick, gummy saliva, but the trail just leads them in circles. It’s following them, waiting for them to slip up, make just one mistake, one slip of the tongue.

“Maybe we’re alon-”

“Shh.”

“Zip it.”

A claw twitches. Close.

The squad sticks together, patrolling the depths of the facility, keenly aware of its tenuous, creaking grip on reality. Windows that lead to endless black, hallways to rooms that haven’t been written, floor plans that make no damn sense. The unstructured narrative of the damned thing is conflicting with the neat, ruler-straight organization of the facility, and its more than the Site can take. The MTF has to double back more than once, facing stairwells that lead to nowhere and corridors that descend into paper walls and sucking, ink-pooled floors. They’re getting itchy, frustrated. With no target in sight and a long night ahead, it’s very easy for one to give in to their baser instincts.

The younger recruit, "Scuz", feels it the most. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, biting his tongue to keep himself from talking. Sweat soaks the straps of his helmet as he tries to focus, to distract himself. But the words come up his throat unbidden, unstoppable. “Heh, maybe it’s more afraid of us than we are of it.”

“God fucking dammit, Scuz.”

The Entity licks its chops and slinks forward, eyes locked on Scuz’s boot-heel.

“Contact!”

But it’s too late for the rookie, as soldiers turn and rifles pivot, the Entity darts across the narrow gap, piercing Scuz’s Achilles with sharpened-bone claws. The rookie screams and reflexively fires his weapon as he goes down, chipping the walls and cracking tile.

“On your six, Trash!”

“It’s not going down like this!”

It is.

Once the firefight begins, the cliches flow, dooming the squad one rusted quip at a time. The few flickering lights are splattered with blood, bathing the massacre in a scarlet haze. The Entity savors the carnage, cutting through the MTF like a living blade, teeth puncturing kevlar like tissue paper and claws slashing plate like rags.

Hell is unleashed through the barrel of a gun tenfold, spraying lead and saltpeter into the Entity’s flanks from all angles. Words are peeled from the page, derendering the walls to wireframe mesh and derealized wood pulp as the very story itself is turned against the antagonist. The phrases' sharpened edges flash lightless black as they swarm the monster in their pictures-worth. Prepositions and adverbs shriek through the air like splintered tenor while clunky jargon and proper nouns clatter on the ground with a vibrating baritone, words given life through tactical combat prose. But the thing doesn’t avoid the attacks, it revels in them. The bullets sink into its flesh like rocks in mud, the letters pass through its flesh like vapor or turn on their trajectory to revolve around its dense metafictional bulk, caught in its narrativistic pull. All unsuccessful in slowing the massacre by even a second.

First Scuz, then Trash, then Spider and Tarman, no cavity left unopened and no entrails unexposed. Ink mixes with viscera in pooling around the survivors’ ankles, dimming flashlights searching vainly for the Entity’s wake in the illogically deepening liquid. A spiny fin cuts across the surface, and another squad-mate goes down. One after another, they add their body fluids to the pool until it’s waist-deep, breast-deep, neck-deep. Colonel is the last one swimming, spluttering as the concoction stains her mouth a greasy red. She's out of ammo and she had dropped her cyanide capsule somewhere in the muck.

She feels a claw brushing her foot as her head grazes the ceiling tiles. “God, please."

The Colonel claws at the ceiling, choking through an evocation that tears through the paper and ink and thrusts her hand up the fiction, trying to realize herself through will alone. She scrabbles for purchase, and finds a solid surface to pull up, leveraging her shoulder and head clear through to the other side, briefly catching the eyes of a group of blinking researchers, her dripping scarlet ink staining their perfect white coats as she desperately attempts to hold on, her hastily defictionalized flesh sloughing like melted wax and spilling onto the table. She tries to pull up further but she's stuck she's stuck she can't get out the book is too small she can't fit through she can't fit up she looks at a researcher with thick glasses and thin hair and a kind face and she screams.

“I don’t want to die.”

But she is dragged back under, back into the book, back under the ink and can see the small square of white light above fading into darkness until she too fades, the last of the squad erased from the page. The lights spark and finally go dark, and the Entity’s inhuman, scratching laugh bubbles from beneath the morass, a serenade to violence and no one.

“G-d damn it all.” Semetsky slammed his hand on the table, staring at the pages of {53} and {101}, his hand coming away red from the droplets of blood and ink on the table. The full stop at the end of the chapter punctuated the erasure of the MTF from the Prime personnel list, which had grown frighteningly short in the interim.

The frozen silence of the table hardened and crystallized as the rest of the Working Group stared at Semetsky with surprise at his outburst, usually known for his laconic demeanor. Semetsky bit his tongue as a sickening lump in his stomach grew and lodged in his throat.

“Arguing won’t help us much anymore, certainly not with this much at stake here.” Semetsky ran a hand through his thinning hair, taking a breath. “We can’t afford to lose more people.”

Saunders’ chair creaked. His look of shock falling off his face like water as he stubbed out his cigarette and leaned forwards, uncharacteristically somber. “What do you suggest, then?”

Semetsky looked over to Tenenbaum. “Damn simplicity, what do you need for your plan? Need anyone to help with the script?”

Tenenbaum was silent. Then, “It’ll be close. Too close, even. But I could probably do it with your help, and maybe the help of some high-impact weaponry. This won’t be as easy as forcing your son to smoke a pack, that’s for sure.”

Dell stared at a chunk of steaming wax, curling in on itself on the table. "In Prime, it might just be enough for Semetsky's arc to reassert itself…" they turned to Tenenbaum. "Bait?"

Saunders raised his hands. “Woah, woah. We can’t just send a scientist down there! You, maybe, but Semetsky is integral to our work here. I’ll refuse out-of-hand.”

Semetsky grimaced, curling his hand into a fist on the table. “It’s not your decision, and I’ll go anyways. I’m a fictional character, remember? Disposable. Just raise another copy when you get the chance. This is what I signed up for when I joined the Foundation, when we all joined the Foundation. To die in the darkness, et cetera. And I will. I am willing, if need be. And it is needed now.”

Thaum's cursor blinked. {It’s his martyr complex again, I’m afraid.}

“It’s not a complex!” Semetsky almost shouted, deafening in the quiet. He sighed and gritted his teeth, staring at the pages of the damned book.

Yuri Semetsky was something of a stock character in modern Russian literature. A joke character. No matter what narrative he was in, what his personality or his backstory or job, he died as a gag in the background. All for a laugh. A self-referential, snobby laugh for those keen-eyed easter-egg-hunters plugged into the zeitgeist. Navel-gazing chuckleheads too busy comparing the sizes of each other's shibboleths to care about real stuff, like good prose and girlfriends and jobs.

Idiots.

But regardless of how much he disliked them, that's who he was. A one-dimensional sight gag. This narrative had run on for far too long. He was getting antsy. He wasn't supposed to have made it this far, gotten this old. He wasn't supposed to survive. Semetsky forcefully lowered his voice. “I guess I’m just written this way.”

The webcam slowly jigged vertically, indicating its assent to a question no one asked. “I’ll be with him every step of the way. I’ll stop him from doing anything stupid if it need be, Saunders. We need someone like him to draw the damn thing in, follow the first steps of my script and lock it in. It'd be too wary otherwise.”

Agent Dell also nodded, pursing their lips. “Semetsky’s, ah, proclivities should be enough to at least mark him a target, narratively speaking. We might be able to grab him before anything bad happens. But if not…" they shrugged. "He’d make a good Trojan Horse, if anything else.”

Saunders puffed out his cheeks, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Fine, fine. Need access to BLUE MOON for this one, Tenenbaum?”

“Which one?”

“Hrm. Take HARVEST. Prototype, but should get the job done.” Saunders made a sickly grin. “Hey, it always does in stories like these.”

Full, but never satisfied. The Entity’s stomach is engorged with meat, flesh overflowing its throat and limbs protruding from its mouths. But it can always make room for more. If it can find more.

The Entity drags its bloated mass up and down the halls, blood-shot eyes flicking to all four corners, looking for more marines, more scientists, more victims. But there are none. The facility is empty, the Entity’s labored, gurgling breaths doing little to fill the space.

Click, click. Click, click.

Finally! Footsteps. Dress shoes on tile, not combat boots or sneakers. Refined. Tasty. The Entity crams its bulk into a disused room, waiting for the victim to pass. Its dark form casts a shadow over the door’s window, its lolling eye reflecting in the tempered glass.

A tall, lean man turns the corner and walks into view. Scientist, thick glasses. Sweat beads on his brow as he clutches a gun in his hands, his finger off the trigger as he walks down the corridor. Alone. Vulnerable.

As he passes by the Entity, it quietly opens the door and slinks behind him, a large, fleshy shadow ready to devour him whole. The scientist picks up his pace as he moves to the containment cells, refusing to look behind him.

The radio on his lapel squawks. “What do you see?”

A shaking hand squeezes the transceiver. “No sign of it anywhere. I think it’s gone.”

Semetsky starts to run before he finishes his practiced remark, and from the screeching behind him it sounds like the Entity is matching pace, claws begging for purchase on the blood-slicked tile.

He had read the sleek, scarlet tome, and from the text's descriptions he had imagined the killer more like a smaller, agile flesh-leopard or something. But as he runs down the flickering hallway, he risks a glance behind him, and Semetsky realizes he drastically underestimated its size and overestimated his imagination.

Every aspect of it looks wrong. What little is left of its skin hangs in shreds around distended, glistening muscle and exposed bone. Its frame was human at one point, but something kept adding joints, organs, heads, and refused to stop as its binding thematic concepts fell apart. Its bulk fills the hallway with clasping limbs and grasping jaws, with sharpened bones and metal hooks filling the gaps where it didn’t look threatening enough. A child’s scribble of a monster, brought to life in full, chittering glory.

Semetsky feels an even-fingered hand brush against his trousers, and that is all the motivation he needs to keep charging forward, the stitch in his side feeling much less painful than the gleaming steel hooks and gnashing yellow teeth look to be.

He skids into a corner as the corridor branches to the containment section, the Entity snapping at his heels. He dodges as the creature slams into the wall and leaves a greasy stain where he just was, and keeps on running to one cell in particular.

Semetsky fumbles the keycard in his hands and slaps it on the scanner at the end of the hallway. “C’mon, c’mon,” he whispers as the door cycles open and the sticky skittering gets louder and ever closer.

The door opens almost painfully slow, and Semetsky squeezes into the gap as it widens. He is almost inside when he screams, a lancing bolt of cold-hot pain shooting through his leg stuck on the other side of the door. The doctor looks down to see a forest of spines and twisted fingernails from an inhuman hand drilling into the meat of his thigh.

He falls to the ground, clammy hands against cold linoleum as the Entity muscles the door open, seven jaws salivating and ten eyes leering at its captured prey.

Semetsky wets his lips, grimacing from the pain. He fumbles with his pocket and pulled out a pen-knife, slashing at the monster. Even with its jerky, animalistic movements, one of Semetsky's wild swings hit their mark, stabbing deep into one of the creature's many eyes. The monster opens its rib-jaws and bellows a blood-curdling screech and squeezes its hands tighter around Semetsky, tugging the scientist into its bony maw.

Semetsky lays his head on the ground, breathing rapidly and seeing stars. “I don’t know how my day could get any worse… we just finished paying off the house.”

Its bloodshot eyes loll, its jagged jaws drool. Up to the knee.

“I was going to go back and see the kids.”

A tone not unlike nails on chalkboard emits from the Entity as it cackles in orgiastic joy. The familiar quips wind themselves around the archetype, joining its heady aura of cliches and stereotype that had made it so unstoppable. The narrative energy builds up like water behind a leaky dam, looking for a narratively-satisfying way out. Semetsky’s waist is now between the sabre-teeth of the monster, and barbed tongues begin to lick the flesh from his legs.

Through the pain and the screams, Semetsky sees a faintly familiar figure, holding a glowing, neon-tube-lined object. The suited figure aims the weapon directly at the Entity’s central forehead. Semetsky clenches his teeth, and forces himself not to look down.

“Today… is my daughter’s birthday.”

The final straw. The narrative weight is too much, and the backlash freezes the Entity. Flickering, black chains of inky text and crunchy html and magnetic VHS strips materialize around its limbs and bring it crashing to the ground. The force snaps the slasher’s ribs shut, pinning and piercing Semetsky’s torso. For him, the world wobbles and goes gray, then finally black. Semetsky breathes his last with a smile and dissolves into shreds of skin and sodden yellowed pages. A phrase written in Cyrillic is printed onto the pages: Autumn Visits by Sergey Lukyanenko.

The armed figure steps forward, Tenenbaum’s voice booming over the Site intercom. “You really are one ugly mother-hubber, aren’t you?”

The monster thrashes and strains against its fetters. It hadn’t noticed the build up of the cliches that sustained it, and now they took their toll. There would be no dramatic escape for the Entity, no final stinger. The story only pointed one way, guided by a godly, authorial hand.

“Oh no, oh no you don’t. Nowhere to go, pal.”

The Entity twitches, its binds constricting and tightening, forcing it to shrink and twist — coughing and retching — into a roughly humanoid shape. It extends a pseudopod into the remains of Semetsky, filling out the skin and tattered flesh until a fascimile of Yuri spits back at Tenenbaum, a guttural, inhuman voice pushing itself free from his shredded lips. "Kill me. I always find a way to come back."

Tenenbaum squats on his haunches, servos whining. It wasn't Tenenbaum, not really. The real Tenenbaum was stuck in a Viceroy microcomputer, still inside the Wardroom and under the watchful eye of the rest of the Working Group. The besuited android before the Entity dangled on thick coaxial cables like a man-sized puppet. The cables extended up and up, into the z- and w-axis, between the pages, projected down from the almighty word-processor, the author's self-insert. A deus ex machina. "You don't get it, you're too thick in the head to understand. You're my ticket out of this hellhole, y'see. Can't have you making a mess of the place, yet."

The Entity spits. "Kill…"

"Not if I put you somewhere nice and safe until I need you. A big guy like you could do a whole lot of damage pointed in the right direction.”

“Escape…”

The puppet tilts its head, the intercom emitting a chuckle. “Take it from an writer. There's no escaping your own story, pal.”

Screaming in a pool of ink and pages and entrails, the Entity can do nothing but writhe as Tenenbaum pulls the trigger on the glowing weapon. The various tubes on the Forceful Narrative Descender glow blue, while bassy voices from the Outside chant excerpts from Chauncer, de Cervantes, the Bible.

The environment blurs and shifts as the Entity’s body warps and folds in on himself, tearing open the page of Prime to reveal the nothing-/everythingness of Backstage. Small creatures, living concepts, infovorous parasites, billowed like smoke out of the pinhole, attracted to the informational density of Prime and the Entity. Scenting a story, they sucker onto him, peeling away his pages and inner concepts and self. The Tenenbaum-puppet reaches into those pages and pulls out each death, one by one. For Frank, Tina, Scuz, all the way to Yuri, each blood-stained sheet shriveling and turning to ash as they are wrenched from the Entity's wretched guts, retconned and noncanon.

Even as a faceless robot, the Entity can hear Tenenbaum grin before the puppet is yanked out of the fiction, the script about to reach the credits. "Hope you remember me the next time around."

Finally, the ripping sound of flipping pages dominates all, and the Entity is pulled back to the beginning.

“The Inkblot Murders, eh?”

Shrugging emoticon. “Learned that from Penelope, heh. But anyways, it’s just a short story, doesn’t really need a catchy name. Just punchy enough to stick. Glad you’re still with the living.”

Semetsky looked down at himself, his spotless lab-coat and shining shoes, no worse for wear. Unfortunately. “Yes. Of course. Would you have it any other way?”

“Of course not. Any luck with Interferometry on where the Entity came from?”

“Apparently a GOI cell in Portlands was dealing with a similar murderer last year to the day, a slasher whose victims resuscitated at the end of its spree. We’re looking into it, but we are inclined to believe that it is either the same entity or distinctly related.”

The vocoder somehow emitted a snort. “Everyone’s got a gimmick now.”

Semetsky couldn’t help but silently agree. “Also, about the book. Was the cover art really necessary?”

Tenenbaum didn’t blink. Couldn’t, really. “It is very necessary for the binding, Yuri. The more complete the book, the more it will hold against any shenanigans. We could go further, but I don't think Saunders would approve of a publishing of it, heh.”

Semetsky gingerly held {101} in his hands, which had been remade with a new look and metafictional wards on the inside cover. The front cover depicted a red-eyed shadow savaging a wide-eyed soldier, dragging him into a giant inkwell stenciled with the phrase 'The Inkblot Murders, by Archer Row'. “Bit grisly.”

“Oh, the MTF had a sense of humor about the whole incident. Tarman did the art himself with his ‘magic fingers’ trick after they cleared him. It'll be a fun read for them, I’m sure.”

“Most likely."

“How are you all holding up?”

Semetsky stopped himself from touching his waist, where the rib-teeth had savaged him. He forced a smile. “E-17? They’re fine, I’m sure. Honestly it felt much like a dream, very much divorced from reality. Saunders is pushing for your book to become a training sim, actually. 'Descend and get a taste of combat against an unstoppable enemy,' or some such nonsense.'”

“Always working an angle, isn’t he. Can't tell who's more of a blood-sucker, him or the Thing pastiche in there.”

Semetsky dropped the smile, thinking about the creature. “So, it’s in containment now? Is it in Prime, or…”

“Who the hell knows. That book is a part of Prime now, and Prime is a part of that book. It happened, but it didn't happen. But it also didn't not happen. Best not to think about it too hard, recursive logic and all that jazz.”

“Sure, but I don’t think Saunders would take kindly to a wishy-washy statement like that. And mentioning things Saunders would take poorly…”

“My dialogue?”

“Yes.”

The webcam held Semetsky’s gaze. “A good narrative needs good dialogue. I thought it was a strong ending, and I’m not changing it. To hell with Saunders, he’ll never read it anyways. You know he only reads nonfiction.”

Semetsky paused, opened his mouth, and thought better of it. “Sure, alright.”

He patted the computer’s casing, and stood to leave Tenenbaum’s room. "That was a good job, Richard."

The computer chittered. "Save the compliments for the after-party, Yuri. Have a good Halloween."

The researcher's smile became genuine for a moment. "You too, Richard."

Semetsky left the cell, the Faraday cage buzzed as the door sealed behind him. He carried the book to the library, and nestled the paperback into the Prime Collection. Next to the containment units would be thematically appropriate.

Semetsky hardly had time to appreciate the collection before his pager buzzed, and his attention was needed elsewhere. So he didn't notice a slight shift in the stacks as the paperback swelled, pages darkening with liquid ink. The book fell sideways in the shelf, and ink began to leak onto the shelf, dripping and pooling upon the floor. The ink was the color of blood, a dark and rich maroon.

Within the pool there began a ripple, an inner eddy and current that started slowly, but churned and picked up speed and whipped the ink into a boiling froth. From the bubbles and foam emerged a bloody claw, thrusting itself out of the pool with a triumphant screech.