He remembers the day when he had to hastily inscribe the 
confirmation of the poor men’s deaths, as limbs started launching 
themselves from the glass, plastering an especially persistent widow 
with salt water and sending the cleaning crews barging through his 
aisles. He remembers the disgusted look on the director’s face, as 


he showed him the revised plaque, the floor still wet with salt water, 
blood, and lye. 


S.C.P. 2167-L: The Cat’s Cradle - Deactivated following 
investigatory test 2167-L, 1932. All personnel involved 
deceased. 


The old man stares, his eyes just barely making out the shape of a 
twisted splintered of burnt wood that stands behind the dark shape 
of the plaque. He cannot see the tiny bits of fur or hair or the stains 
of blood that marked the wood, but he knows all too well that they 
are there. The old man remembers them all, each and every last 
one. One hundred and twenty three paces to his right lies a larger- 
than-most inscribed circlet of metal, one of the last that he ever 
carved out. 


S.C.P. 2902-L: Litelli’s Last Suit - Destroyed following 
military-applications test 2902-L-1, 1941. Item properties 
confirmed. All personnel involved deceased from direct 
exposure’ related illness 194 . 


The old man still doesn’t understand why they had him put the blank 
bit at the end of that plaque, what they were so sure would happen. 
He remembers the way they carried in the little bit of burnt fabric, the 
strange box they held it in and the strange suits they wore. He had 
asked them why they wore such strange clothes, what they were 
protecting themselves from. He remembers their answer, how he 
needn't worry and that it was merely a precaution. He looks, or 
pretends to look, and imagines he can just barely make out the tiny 
crack in the box that showed up one day after a woman had been 
there, watching it for hours. He remembers her tears. He remembers 
the tears of the director, when they had closed the big vault door at 
the end of the room for the very last time. 


Outside the dark room stands the dark beams of a hastily plastered 
wall and in front of it the bright light of a hallway. People walk past, 
lit by bright fluorescent lighting that makes the shadows under their 
eyes jump and wander. A few of them, but not many, turn and look 
at the small plaque that hangs on the wall. 


Frank Digliani Memorial SCP Archival Wing 


1860-1941 
Dedicated 1978 
May He Rest In Peace 


The old man in the dark room remembers it all, alone, as the rest of 
the world slowly forgets. 


SCP-833: Charity Worms 


Item #: SCP-833 
Object Class: Euclid 


Special Containment Procedures: SCP-833 is to be contained in 
Site 21 following standard Class 2 bio-hazard procedures. As a 
precautionary measure, Site 21 does not have a cafeteria, and all 
personnel located at Site 21 are to eat only the meals delivered from 
Site 19. Employees of Level 1 or higher may request additional or 
alternative rations via the facilities director. 


All on-site personnel are instructed to report severe nausea, 
diarrhea, or muscle pain to site medical staff immediately. In the 
event of confirmed infestation, the victim will be treated with an 
aggressive course of anthelmintic drugs. Civilian outbreaks of 
SCP-833 are to be treated similarly, but the civilians are to be 
quarantined for the duration of treatment. Should the drug regimen 
prove ineffective, termination of infected personnel and civilians is 
authorized. 


Description: SCP-833 is a parasitic nematode of the genus 
Trichinella only capable of infesting humans. Infestation by SCP-833 
has symptoms similar to a mild case of trichinosis, often including 
initial intestinal distress followed by muscle pain and fever about a 
week after infection. Symptoms fade after about three weeks. In 
many cases, infestation is asymptomatic. As with all varieties of 
trichinosis, the disease is spread by the consumption of tainted 
meat. SCP-833 is highly heat resistant, but responds favorably to 
standard vermicides, especially albendazole. 


What sets SCP-833 apart from more mundane members of 
Trichinella is that in all infections, a small proportion of the worms 
colonize the central nervous system. Surprisingly, in almost all 
cases this does not damage the nervous system. The remaining 
larvae encyst themselves throughout the hypodermis. 


Dust in the Wind 


| close my eyes. 
I've always been good at holding myself together. 


It would be wrong to say | felt like a bird in a gilded cage. A bird just 
sits there on its perch, chittering a melancholy song and pining for 
the blue sky beyond the golden bars, oblivious to the fact that it 
would likely be eaten by a cat within a matter of hours. No, | was 
more of a dog in an iron crate. | fumed and seethed and barked and 
threw myself against the walls confining me with all my might, and 
whenever | made enough noise | would get thrown a steak to quiet 
me down. 


| remember standing there in my office, looking down at the people 
in the city below me. There were so many of them. They looked so 
tiny, too. Like living grains of sand on a beach, carefree and without 
a clue that the tide was about to come in. Back then | thought myself 
an important person—cr at least that | was living a marginally more 
consequential existence than the tiny people beneath me. | enjoyed 
the comforts of an extravagant home, a full wardrobe, and every 
other perk and luxury one would expect of a young man from Wall 
Street. 


| didn't expect it to last forever, but | never would have guessed it 
would end as suddenly as it did. 1929 changed everything in the 
twinkling of an eye. 


| had told myself years ago that | would rather die than go back. But 
in reality | did not want to die, and since it was becoming 
increasingly clear that | could very well perish in my present 
situation, | decided to set my dignity aside and go to back to the one 
place | knew I'd find help. It would be humiliating, certainly. But I've 
always been good at holding myself together, at least on the 
outside. | scraped together what little | had left and made the 


dreaded journey back to Kansas. 
And thus the dog returned to his cage, tail between his legs. 


| didn't send a letter to inform them of my arrival. | knew that they'd 
be expecting me as soon as their daily paper arrived. Sure enough, 
there was an extra place set at the dinner table for me when | 
walked in the door. 


Mom was the only one who hugged me. Ted, my brother, shook my 
hand and smiled like we'd just met at a church picnic. Uncle Lem 
said, "right on time!" and laughed, but not in a cruel way. Aunt 
Margie commented on how thin | was and how lucky it was that | 
didn't die in the riots and thank the shining Lord in heaven nobody 
slit my throat and stole the clothes off my back. 


Dad didn't say anything, and | was grateful for that. 


From that day forward, | was an employee (I had stopped being a 
son a long time ago). To prove myself, | worked almost twice as 
much land as anyone else, yet the taunts of "city boy" and "Mr. 
Fancypants with his edgey kayshun" persisted in full force. 
Everyone, everyone seemed to delight in watching me work the 
fields, pushing myself until my hands were blistered and bloodied. 


In New York, the world had seemed to go to Hell in a hand basket. 
In Kansas, however, things were looking brighter than ever. 


"Wheat is golden for a reason," Uncle Lem would say. Ted and | 
would walk past a lush patch of growing crop and he would never 
fail to elbow me and ask me which greens were worth more now. | 
swallowed my pride and endured every humiliation. | just kept on 
existing, tarred and feathered, beaten and bloodied, caged and 
enraged, calm and collected. I've always been good at holding 
myself together. 


Nobody seemed worried when the price of wheat first dropped. They 
were annoyed and inconvenienced by it, but it'// pass, they said, and 
before you know it things will be back to normal; yessirree, 
everything's going to be blue skies and golden wheat from now til 
Christ comes back. 


| was skeptical. | had a feeling something coming. I'd seen it before. 
And | was half right: | had anticipated the dropping numbers, but the 
dust came as a surprise. 


After the first storm, people couldn't stop talking about how it was 
the storm of the century. 'Never in all my year have | seen anything 
like it!’ 'l thought it was the end of days, | tell you!’ ‘It'll take me all 
day to clean the car!’ 'Kids, help me sweep the dirt out of the barn!’ 
Everybody jabbered on about the great big dust storm and how glad 
they were it was over. 


A week and a half later, the next storm came. 


And then the next one. And then the following one was even bigger, 
and the one after that made the one before look minuscule in 
comparison. Within a matter of months, the dust storms had become 
such a part of our day-to-day lives, we were habitually setting the 
table with the cups and plates upside-down. 


It's a bad season, everyone said. We'll take a hit, to be sure, but 
we'll just have to tough it out until ol' mother nature's sniffles go 
away. 


You'd see the storms coming over the horizons like rain clouds, and 
within minutes your property would be covered in a thick brown haze 
that made the world look like a tinted photograph. We closed the 
windows, but some dust would always, a/ways get on our nice 
curtains, and Mom never failed to wash them all spotless just in time 
for the next storm to dirty them again. 


The dust surrounded you, got into every inch of your house, every 
corner, every drawer. You woke up each morning and shook the 
dust off your sheets. You knocked your shoes against the floor 
before putting them on. If you were a kid, you could draw on literally 
any available surface. If you were a woman, your entire existence 
became a blur of scrubbing, sweeping, and praying that the attic 
didn't start raining down dirt into the porridge. Actually, everyone 
prayed the dust didn't get into our food, because if it did we had to 
eat it anyway. We got by from week to week by telling ourselves this 
storm will be the last one and it can't stay like this forever. 


Then people started dying. 


It started as suicides. The papers were full of stories of people going 
broke, losing their farms. Losing hope. One headline told us of an 
elderly couple who ended their lives together after losing everything 
they'd worked for. One morning | woke up to Mom and Aunt Margie 
wailing over the death of a friend. Gunshot to the head. She just 
didn't want to deal with the dust anymore. 


It wasn't long before the cattle started getting sick. You could see 
the dust in their noses and ears and mouths. Sometimes they'd eat 
a mouthful from their trough and get more dust than they did food. 
Then the people started getting sick. Same thing. They called it ‘dust 
pneumonia.’ It got so bad that if a child so much as cleared their 
throat, their mother's heart would skip a beat. Cathie, Ted's wife, 
made their daughter Grace wear a get-up with goggles and a mask. 
Grace said it was harder to breath with the mask on, but Cathie 
insisted that anything was better than dust pneumonia. 


One day | noticed Grace sitting by the front steps while Cathie was 
inside cleaning like her life depended on it. Mother and daughter 
were only a couple of yards away, and yet Cathie never noticed 
Grace sobbing her little eyes out beneath her dusty goggles, nor did 
she notice me pick her up and tell her everything would be okay. It 
was out of character for me, but | told her a couple of jokes. | took 
some of my savings and told her to get in my car. Told her I'd take 
her to a picture show, and | did. | needed something to get my mind 
off the living nightmare my life had become, and | figured that if this 
kid's own mother couldn't bother to hear her crying, then Grace 
probably needed some cheering up too. 


It had been years since I'd seen a picture show. It was Grace's first 
one. King Kong was the title. We loved it so much we ended up 
watching it twice. Grace asked me afterward how they made the 
monkey move. | didn't know, so | just told her they used a real one. 
She knew | was lying, but she smiled. 


| realized something on the car ride home from the theater that day. 
| realized | didn't feel angry at the world anymore. Before the dust, 
I'd felt alone in my misery. After the dust, | felt like everyone else 
was just as miserable as | was, and I'll be honest, | took some petty 


joy in that. But besides that, | had gotten so complacent and 
comfortable in being bitter that'd I'd forgotten what it felt like to just 
let go of my cares and relax until that day. There | was, driving back 
to the farm with my mind full of Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot and fifty- 
foot monkeys, and Grace was there to share it with me. | still felt 
trapped, but | didn't feel alone anymore. 


We went to the picture show at least a dozen times after that. We 
had to space it out, of course, since money was tight, and | know | 
spent more than | could afford, but it was the only thing that made 
life bearable during that time. There was a nice girl named Phyllis 
who took our tickets. | started flirting with her after the third or fourth 
show we saw. | think she was interested in me. | don't now if Cathie 
ever found out about our little excursions, but if she did, she didn't 
say anything. Grace told me one day that she was going to grow up 
to be a famous movie actor one day, and if you'd have laid eyes on 
that girl you would have believed it. 


March 14, 1934. The sky was finally blue again. For the first time in 
recent memory, there was no wind at all. Everyone gave thanks to 
Jesus and celebrated with picnics and parties. We had hardly 
anything left at that point, but everyone still put forward what few 
resources they had for the sake of the occasion. It felt like ages 
since I'd seen everyone so happy. Even Dad didn't look at me with 
quite as much bitterness as he usually did. 


Our neighbor Cecil baked an enormous chocolate cake and nearly 
gave us all heart attacks when he said he'd share it with our family. 
It was a terrific day, really. That's why | don't think what happened 
later was a punishment. If someone does something wrong, you 
don't make them happy before you punish them. That blue sky and 
giant cake was an apology, | think. Some kind of note from God or 
whoever to say, you don't deserve what you're about to get, and I'm 
SO, SO sorry. 


It was still 3:00 in the afternoon when we saw it coming. At first we 
thought it was another dust storm, but it soon became clear there 
was something different about this one. This was coming much 
quicker. The dust clouds were so huge they looked as though the 
mountains themselves were running toward you. It extended 
infinitely to the left and went on forever to the right. Nobody said 


anything. We knew what to do. We all ran inside the house, 
gathered together in a circle, and covered ourselves with blankets 
and clothes and anything else we could get our hands on. 


The storm carried on all night. You could feel and hear the house 
rattling on its foundation. Cathie started crying, and when Ted told 
her to shut up | just about knocked his head off. Besides that, 
nobody said anything until the storm quit the next morning. It was 
dead quiet when we opened the door. It was dark. Not as dark as 
night, but dark. Brown, too. We were used to the air being dusty, but 
this felt like the air was dust. We had the women stay inside while 
we went to inspect the damage to the property.