This non-sequitur left Keagan somewhat nonplussed; he sat down 
on the bottom bunk and for want of anything else to do started 
pulling his prison shirt off, then stopped, leaving it half inside-out 
around his neck and head. He sat in this undignified posture for a 
few minutes—nothing was making an impact, everything seemed 
like some half-waking hallucination. The lurid walls heightened this 
impression—he was content to sit quietly, now that everything had 
ended, just waiting for the next thing to come along. He sat for about 
half an hour, realising that he was shaking slightly. 


Why didn't you just lie? The solicitor's question burned in front of his 
mind—such a simple thing. Because—because | didn't, couldn't, 
chose not to? Keagan tried and failed to reach for words that 
summed up the simplicity of how he had seen the situation that had 
led him here, concluded it was better to kill two men than do 
something distantly and wordlessly impossible for him. 


The voice that he at first took as some continuation of his inner 
dialogue had been speaking for a few seconds before he realised it 


was external, and he looked around. Still the same blank yellow 
walls, the same empty chair. 


"Right now," it was saying, in a curious, whining tone, a low keening, 
"you're regretting everything. Or maybe just one thing. You think 
there was one thing you could have done different, then everything 
would have changed. You haven't realised it yet. Don't worry, there's 
still time, for now." 


Keagan blinked, wondering if in his reverie he had entered a state of 
change blindness. Sometimes, when he had become so invested in 
a Car, So involved in the problem of its corroded engine parts or 
atrophied wiring that he had forgotten to eat or drink and the air had 
become stagnant with his effort, he would fail to perceive people 
moving around him and even talking to him until something clicked 
and he could recognise faces and voices again. Surely someone 
could not have entered the room without him noticing? But the voice 
continued: 


"I'm here to help you get there, dear, to realise it's not something 
you did. It's so hard to give that up, because it makes you a victim. 
You'll trace that one moment you think ended it all back to first 
cause, and you'll think, it didn't originate in me at all! But you're 
wrong. Not that it's over—no, you're right to think that. You're here, 
with me, and it's over. But the game was over a long time ago, you 
just didn't realise it." 


In an instant of clarity, Keagan perceived that the drone was coming 
from above him. As he sat there, it seemed to build, becoming more 
solid, worrying at his nerves until he could no longer stand the idea 
of its owner hanging over his head, and, grunting, he got up. At that 
moment, a long, pale arm swung down from the bunk above, 
clutching at him with long, untrimmed nails. It seized his shoulder, 
grabbing a hunk of fabric. Keagan tore himself away, swatting at the 
arm, and collapsed into the chair, facing the bunk bed. The arm 
retreated into the heap of fabric under which, he now realised, the 
speaker had lain silently since Keagan had entered the cell. 


At the end of the bunk, the fabric shifted and a face emerged, 
reclined so its large, pale blue-yellow eyes met Keagan's at a ninety- 
degree angle. Its chalky flesh was surrounded by long, lank blond 


hair. It regarded him for a long moment then suddenly cracked into a 
smile crazed in its intensity—a set of long, slightly yellowed teeth 
were exposed by this action, drawn back to the quick. 


"Over," it repeated. "You didn't notice when you died, did you? 
Somewhere along the way, you died and you just didn't realise it." 


Keagan bared his own teeth back at the apparition, which had 
levered itself into a crouch on the top bunk, the threadbare blankets 
still piled on top of it, but the tone of voice of whom he could only 
assume was the Creepy Bastard was like something scraping on 
your soul. 


"You didn't think you would go to heaven, did you? Not deep down. 
You died a long time ago, it's just taken this long to fall all the way 
down here, with me, in hell. It's over, but there's no rest. No rest in 
hell. Every night you'll lie awake, wondering what I'm going to take 
from you next." Creepy Bastard slid his fingernails over the metal 
bar at the edge of the bunk, still fixing Keagan with that lidless stare. 
"So, tell me my dear, what do you think was the moment it all went 
wrong?" 


Keagan realised he was in shock; something that again eluded 
conscious description had passed over him and frozen him solid. He 
understood, of course, that he was speaking to a human being, a 
human being who had probably used this little pantomime on every 
person he was bunked with in an attempt to compensate for a lack 
of any physical threat, that he was likely not even dealing with an 
insane person, for Her Majesty's Prisons are not in the habit of 
allowing the genuinely disturbed with the merely sociopathic in 
general population. But something he had said had struck home, like 
an amateur archer who through sheer chance has managed to nail 
the dead centre of a target in the dark. 


He felt his eyes prick, and in an instant his self-preservation instincts 
had taken over. He stood up, spine straightening convulsively, and 
walked back over to the bed. He reached out and grabbed a pale 
hand, and was not at all surprised to find almost no resistance there 
as he twisted it painfully. 


"I'd say the moment | bludgeoned two men to death with a wrench. 


How does that work for you? Just a suggestion, if you don't want me 
to break both your arms, don't fucking touch me again." 


The sides of Creepy Bastard's lipless mouth tightened into a citric 
slash. Keagan waited until those unblinking eyes screwed up in pain 
then let go, sitting down on the lower bunk again. 


"And don't snore if you know what's good for you," said Keagan, 
exhaling heavily. Reality had reasserted itself, and whatever it was 
about Creepy Bastard's spiel that had so spooked him had passed. 
A few more minutes went by before Creepy Bastard ventured a 
response. 


"You didn't let me finish," he said from above, voice quite different 
now; a resentful kid deprived of his favourite toy. "It's not just some 
moment that brought you here, or even anything you did. It's you. It's 
always been you. You'll learn. What you did flows out of what you 
are." 


"Don't talk bullshit. You don't know anything about me," snapped 
Keagan, and was surprised at the depth of feeling in his voice. 


That seemed to conclude the discussion: determined to demonstrate 
to his companion that he would not be terrorised, Keagan reclined 
and resolutely closed his eyes—and a short time later heard the call 
for lights out, followed by the sound of Creepy Bastard tentatively 
climbing down to turn off the desk lamp before returning to his 
perch. The world became fuzzier and retreated. 


Keagan had expected to dream of judges, courtrooms and endless 
recriminations, or else of gleaming eyes and sharp nails in the 
darkness, but instead he found himself reliving a road trip he had 
taken with Lauren six months back; he had commandeered a 
caravan he was meant to be servicing and had taken her up to the 
Lake District. In his dream they drove to the top of a hill overlooking 
a small village and they ate fish and chips wrapped in slightly wet 
newspaper, the salt and vinegar pungent in his nostrils. 


He began to feel anxious as in the dream he apparently intended to 
propose to her but had forgotten the ring. He wracked his brains 
trying to think where he might have left it—but of course found the 


sequence of events that had led him to the hill (which by this point 
had metamorphosed into a very scenic old church, and threatened 
to become an actual wedding ceremony) muddled and confused in 
his mind. 


There was a sudden thumping and knocking, which in the dream he 
thought must surely be his best man Ron Kingsley (except he hadn't 
so much as spoken to Ron since secondary school) at the car 
window (hadn't it been a caravan?) with the ring, but when he turned 
there was no Ron and no car, and instead he was standing alone, 
somewhere unfamiliar. 


He stood in a great empty warehouse space with peeling, oxidised 
sheet metal walls—at its centre was a steel cube, suspended within 
the greater space with metal cables connecting the external corners 
of the cube to the interior corners of the warehouse. He approached, 
and realised with a sick horror that the banging was coming from 
inside the cube, that there was something trapped inside battering 
its way out, throwing itself again and again against its walls— 


And then he was lying in his bed, in HMP Wormwood Scrubs, 
listening to some idiot further down the ward playing a nocturnal 
waltz on the pipes with a detached toilet seat, just to keep everyone 
in good spirits. An outraged roar by another lifer roused from sleep, 
the rumble of a guard telling the idiot to explain his grievances or 
else stop keeping everyone else awake. The noise petered out, and 
there was peace again. 


In the first days of Keagan's incarceration at HMP Wormwood 
Scrubs he was content to stay in his cell, emerging only for 
mealtimes, when he went out of his way not to engage with anyone 
—he would stay standing until he saw a pocket of mostly white- 
collar inmates emerging, then took the last free seat at the table. 
Usually they didn't say a word and neither did he. In this way he kept 
himself out of the macho games at lifer tables, where something as 
small as a pot of yoghurt, the mistaken taking of which by one 
inmate would be interpreted by another as an attempt to exact 
tribute, would become the flashpoint for a brawl. When the meal was 
done Keagan would get up straight away and return to his cell as 
quickly as possible, where he would lie or sit on his bed, catatonic. 


He justified himself thusly—his life as he knew it was over; he had a 
long time in prison ahead of him. What did it matter, then, if he spent 
a day—or a week, or a month—simply letting time pass? Creepy 
Bastard would pad up and down from his bunk and spent time at the 
table, producing immensely detailed sketches apparently from 
memory; country landscapes, cathedrals, town streets. After 
finishing one of these works, he would hold it up to the narrow 
window that led onto the yard and admire it for a few seconds in the 
natural light, eyes appearing for a moment more watery than normal. 
Then he would fold it up small and hide it between the bunkbed's leg 
and the wall before dashing out a calculatingly disturbed scrawl on a 
new sheet of paper—stick figures murdering each other, 
cannibalising each other's limbs, which he would stick up on the wall 
using the small roll of Blu-Tack allotted for this purpose. 


"Is that what you used to do?" asked Keagan one day, watching as 
Creepy Bastard completed a fabulously intricate pencil drawing of 
the Thames skyline before preparing to hide it forever. Creepy 
Bastard swivelled his head in his direction, seeming for the first time 
to realise he had been observed in his art. "Were you an artist?” 


"Do you think it matters?" answered Creepy Bastard, fixing him 
again with his reptile stare. "We're in stasis. Whatever you do now, 
dear, there's no-one to see, no-one for it to matter to." He started to 
fold the piece up; as far as Keagan could see once he had thus 
packed away his pieces he never looked at them again. 


"You could send them out," said Keagan. "Must be some magazine 
or something that would pay good money for them. Painted from 
memory by a lifer; that's the sort of thing they go in for, isn't it?" 


Creepy Bastard paused, and Keagan could see his pale hands 
trembling. Then, with a sudden snarl, he began pulling the sketch 
into pieces, hissing as he threw the scraps around the cell. "It 
doesn't matter! Whatever you do, it just makes things worse." He 
went over to the sink and wiped his face, glaring at Keagan over his 
shoulder. "You've only just arrived, dear. You'll learn. Better not to 
live anymore. Stay dead." He grabbed another sheet of paper and 
roughly scratched into it the shape of a stick figure man cutting off 
his own head with a kukri knife, his alibi. 


Keagan saw the abject fear in his cellmate's eyes—fear of change, 
fear of even the slightest deviation from his self-imposed 
monsterhood being seen as weakness—and realised that his own 
semi-comfortable exile from prison life could stretch into years 
unless he made some resolution. According, he went to the guard in 
charge of the work and education programmes and asked him if 
there was anything available. Wormwood Scrubs houses almost 
1,500 prisoners, over 60% of whom have nothing to do but gaze at 
blank walls, and all of whom are desperate for something to relieve 
the long years of their confinement. What opportunities for study and 
productive existence are offered disappear in a heartbeat, leaving 
the bulk of the population of Her Majesty's prisons to amuse 
themselves with little contraband intrigues, the politics of prison 
cliques, and fights. 


By chance, or perhaps because to most who asked it seemed worse 
in its dusty obscurity than the simple oblivion of their cell, there was 
one position open when Keagan asked, and he accepted it almost 
without asking what it entailed—the position of assistant at the HMP 
Wormwood Scrubs prison library. Keagan signed the slip of paper, 
committing himself to 20 hours a week in janitorial duties, and was 
further advised that if he executed his duties to the satisfaction of 
the Librarian—himself a trustee lifer—he could expect to be granted 
restricted area privileges allowing him to spend his free time in the 
library as well. 


He had expected HMP Wormwood Scrubs' library to be something 
like an ancient castle—solid oak shelves stacked with crumbling 
parchments. Instead, he found a modern, prefab area laid out 
identically to the prison shop—plastic and metal shelving designed 
to have no detachable parts, and stacked with a somewhat limited 
installment of books, mostly law books, cheap Jeffrey Archer 
thrillers, biopics and fantasy novels. 


The librarian—a stocky older man who spent most of his time 
huddled in the corner with a Tom Clancy novel—aid out the 
principle responsibilities that Keagan would be expected to fulfil; 
chiefly that all loans were documented and passed onto prison staff 
if not returned promptly, that shelves were kept in alphabetical order, 
and that the floor is kept swept. Having passed on the torch of this 


are instantly converted into Irish cream upon contact with the 
vomitus, resulting in structural failure and containment breach. Test 
aborted; remainder of vomitus incinerated. SCP-682 subsequently 
manifests no further signs of intoxication. 


Item: SCP-507 


Tissue Test Record: 
N/A 


Termination Test Record: 

SCP-507 was physically attached to SCP-682's left forelimb with 
nylon zip ties while SCP-682 was inactive due to physical 
destruction incurred during an unrelated containment breach. 
Attending personnel continued to spray SCP-682's body, with the 
exception of the limb to which SCP-507 was attached, with 
hydrochloric acid provided via high-pressure hoses. After 7 hours 
and 52 minutes, SCP-507's anomalous properties activated and it 
and SCP-682 both disappeared. 


SCP-507 remanifested in an unpopulated area adjacent to Site, 
approximately 8,000 kilometers away, 63 hours later, attached to an 
entity possessing large fangs and a pair of vestigial wings but 
otherwise identical to SCP-682, by nylon zip ties of a different color 
than the ones applied by containment personnel at the beginning of 
the test. A handwritten note was found pinned to SCP-507's chest, 
reading as follows; 


Dear Universe 5802-Sigma-Blue-Romeo;