Two Two Two Two Two - SCP Foundation

Two Two Two Two Two

William Butler Yeats Fonds: Assorted Poetry (Unpublished), Archives and Revision Section High-Yield Data Storage, Site-43.

The Half-Men

One day I dreamed (though I did not sleep)

That a half-man called on my shaded bower

And upon me laid such a heavy load

That it taxes me every waking hour:

Liberty is a transitory state.

One night awake (for I do not dream)

I was called upon by his other half

He oppressed my heart with a freedom-cry

Which within me rings as an epitaph:

Stasis is slavery.

Now my days and nights are no longer mine

As their burdens flow from my fountain-pen

For they haunt me still (though they are not here)

And I wish no longer to know half-men.

— February 22, 1898

The Concordance

Corrupted soil a harvest yields

Where the tyrant tends his fields

Blackened earth he tills and then

He plants his seeds of salt again

And yet…

She sings successive serenades

To feel the fear the falcon tastes

While by the shores the asses bray

And loose their courage on the spray

And yet…

In iron mail the hand contracts

And marrow breaks upon the racks

Which turn to tunes of homely things:

Famine, poverty and kings

And yet…

The deluge overtops the banks

To cries of overwhelming thanks

While surges beat the dikes to dust

And we are drowned, all of us

And yet…

The workings wend and wind along

The sickly nourishing the strong

Who plant their heels upon the prone

And press their teeth into the stone

And yet…

The shepherds all have gone to ground

Their herds are loose and stormward bound

In righteous lack of common sense

They break like water on the fence

And then…

It ends in fire, wind and rain

A flattening of the earthly plane

Our fingers in the eyes of God

And two black silhouettes applaud

Again…

— February 22, 1918

22222

I take no comfort from the setting sun

That distant fire in a fathomless sea

As I stand on the plain, knapping flint

And my skin cracks in the cosmic heat

For I do not know by whose hand it moves

And I do not believe it will always be so.

I am afraid of the rising moon

A light in the black which affords no warmth

I shiver alone at the cave-mouth

And I shy from that baleful judgement

To await the dawn, when the frost is dispelled

But not the doubt.

Never the doubt.

They are two, and one, and the same

Indifferent eyes among hostile stars

I do not know what they want from me.

I am talking around the point

While we circle the drain

And the format collapses

Under the weight of the missing words

And the metaphors fail;

They are nothing like the sun

They are nothing like the moon

Their orbits are not arcs, but gyres

They are not distant orbs, but men who walk the Earth

I am no Palaeolithic oaf, wordlessly cursing the inexorable tides

But for all my decades of familiarity

The long black course of hateful visitation

I cannot call this thing what I know it to be

I cannot speak the name of my unease

But I must try:

I fear our collective vexation

This thousand-year cycle of abuse and indulgence

Will end with the breaking of an arc

When both sink past the horizon

And only one comes 'round again.

— February 22, 1938

2022

22 February

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

"We're living in Yeats' nightmare," Harold Blank sighed.

They peered through the observation glass at the old man lying prone on the simple cot. He was breathing low, so low that he seemed almost still.

"How long has he been like this?"

Harry glanced at Thilo Zwist. The old thaumaturge seemed just moments away from tapping the glass, as though they were watching a reptile basking in a vivarium and not an eldritch horror in human form lying comatose in containment.

"January of last year," Harry responded. "Our former Chief of Security shot him. We don't really know why."

Zwist shook his head. "Of course you know why. You've had these two locked up for a generation. You know everything there is to know about them."

"We know more than there is to know about them," Lillian Lillihammer corrected him. "We blew almost twenty years on alternate timeline shenanigans thanks to the other one."

"So you say," Zwist nodded. "But I'll note those timeline reports have yet to be declassified."

"I'm working on it," Harry muttered.

"So tell me," Zwist pressed. "Who is this man? I am somewhat acquainted with his double, of course; the master of the giftschreiber, the source, at a remove, of my modest abilities—"

"And my soon-to-be not-so-modest ones," Lillihammer interjected.

"—but I did not know there was another. Who is he?"

Harry squirmed. "It's a long story."

"Then you had better start telling it, and soon." Zwist turned back to the glass, and pressed one palm against it. The figure on the cot stirred in his endless sleep. "The end of the world poses something of a tight timeframe."

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