| don't Know what this place is. It's just darkness, an 
oblivion, an absence. It's like dreaming. | am quite afraid. 
It feels like a dream- hell, for all | Know, it probably is a 
dream, although | can't seem to wake up. | have these 
images, this long stream of dreaming images passing 
through my face. But even as I'm moving through some 
dream-world, or building a wall, I'm still in the dark. | can 
feel it. Or at least, | can feel its presence. In the back of 
my mind. In the dark behind the eyes. 


I'm scared. | can't wake up. 
9th June 2008. 


Nothing has changed. | was dreaming just now about a 
corridor, and as | went down it, it wasn't there. A strange 
thing. | don't know what it means. 


| keep hearing voices. | think there might be others here. 
| thought they were just part of the dream at first, but | 
don't think they're mine at all. It's hard to explain... it's 
like there are other dreamers, and | can hear their 
dreams. It's becoming easier to tell. 


I'm sorry, diary. | should write more in you, but there's 
not much to write except the perpetual onslaught of 
dreams. Well, you're a dream too, | suppose. But you're 
there to keep me from going mad, not to help me. 


17th June 2008. 


There are others. I'm sure of this now. They're all around 
me! | can hear some very clearly. Some keep coming in. 
Some are quieter, some more indistinct. | don't think it's 
a distance thing- this place doesn't seem to have things 
like distance. Some of them just seem more... | don't 
know. Not quite as there as the others. Absent-minded, | 
suppose. 


| kept dreaming about that corridor. Making it bigger. 
Looks more like a hotel now. 


24th June 2008. 


| can't stop thinking about Auntie. | hope that she's not 
worrying. Actually, | hope that she is worrying. It'd be 
very odd if she wasn't worrying. Quite apart from being 
out of character, it'd mean she didn't care. | wouldn't like 
that. Don't think she would, either. 


There are others here. They have their own dreams, 
which sometimes keep crossing over with mine. And 
they steal them. Someone stole my corridor dream. The 
images were just ripped and crossed over and twisted 
and eventually left me. | could hear, see, something 
them elsewhere, in someone else's head, but they 
weren't mine any more. | dreamt something else instead- 
a factory that kept repeating. 


lt must be weird back there. Either I'm gone, or I'mina 
coma, or something like that. They'll be shedding tears, 
they'll be talking about how tragic it all is, maybe making 
frantic appeals on the TV. | hope it gets somewhere. | 
hope someone knows what this place is. 


| think... if | just reach out... shall report back, diary. 
19th July 2008. 
| forgot about you, diary. Sorry. It's been a hectic month. 


So it turns out that there are lots of other people here. | 
just didn't know how to talk to them. Rose says that it's 
that way with a lot of new people. That's why they stole 
my dream; trying to get me to talk, make themselves 
known. Ai-Fan was very apologetic about that. 


There are lots of children here, all disappeared. They all 
tripped, or went down the wrong alleyway, or somehow 
ended up in a shadow without anybody watching. And 


then they found themselves here, dreaming away. Same 
darkness, same images in their head, same aimless 
movement in the void. 


Apparently, everyone is normal at first, thinking properly. 
Then, slowly, they start to be... less. Like they're fading. 
Their dreams start fading, their minds start unravelling. 
Eventually, they're little more than a bundle of memories. 
It can take years, it can take decades, it can take 
centuries, but eventually they're all gone, faded away 
into the dark. 


dark. 
Dark. 


Sometimes those memories and personalities get picked 
up. By others, like Rose or Ai-Fan. Sometimes it messes 
your head up, making you forget who you are. In a way, 
Rose said, it's like you're not one person, you're many. 


There's something that bothers me about all this, though. 
Nobody here tries to get out. It's like they're- we're- all so 
busy dreaming, that we can't really think about getting 
out. There's just our minds and the Dark. Dreaming. 


Dreaming for what? 

Anyway, it's good to be around people again. I'd 
forgotten what it was like. Rose disappeared 5 years 
ago, apparently. Under an apple tree in Texas. She was 
lying in the breeze, thinking about the vastness of the 


world, feeling the wind between her fingers. Her parents 
were down the hill. She- 


No, wait. It wasn't five years, it was fifty. 
| wasn't talking to her at all, was |? 
24th December 2008. 


So here we are, months later. Those of us who are alive 


and celebrate Christmas dreamt of festive nightmares, 
and swapped them with each other. Ai-Fan joined in too, 
despite it not being her creed. Nick created this 
wonderful Christmas tree, which we all passed through 
our minds and gasped at. It was gold, silver, wonderful. 
Some of those who were fraying seemed to momentarily 
bounce back, to have more of a mind again. It was nice. 


| used some of Rose's memories of her hometown to 
make a nice little vision for us all- of a town that had 
Christmas all year. They'd decorate their homes and 
tanks and talk about the Christmas spirit. It was nice, 
nicer than some of the dreams I'd had recently. For a 
moment, even in the dark, it felt like family. Felt like 
home. Like | was really holding my spoon, and it wasn't 
just a twisted candle in the dark. 


But, then again, what's the dark for but the lighting of 
candles? 


29th March 2009. 
You are. You were. You will be. 


There's a girl here, who binds us all together. She's 
called Gulya, and she's one of the oldest ones here. She 
was the same age as me when she was taken. It's sad, 
that- we're stuck down here, in perpetual childhood or 
perpetual adolescence, dreaming for a power we can't 
think about or know about. 


Gulya was pretty, but that doesn't really matter any more. 
All | can see is her mind, her sparkling mind. It has a kind 
of vaguely flourescent glow- I'm not sure how to describe 
it. Like a constant spark of an idea. She's had lots of 
ideas. It was her who first worked out how we could 
communicate with each other, how we could send and 
steal dreams from one another. 


| like her. | like her a lot. | don't want to be writing all this 
down. Actually, I'm not writing it down, I'm dreaming it 


down, but still. Nyah. Go away. 
26th October 2009. 


Gulya and | keep talking. She and Ai-Fan and Nick and 
‘Abbas and | all have a little cadre together, but Gulya 
has a bigger responsibility. She keeps everyone sane. 
There are hundreds, thousands of minds that eventually 
make their way here. It's hard to talk about distance 
here, as | said earlier- it kind-of exists, but not really. It's 
like a feeling, more than a physical space. Like 
everything here, | suppose. 


Anyway. I'm being what Auntie calls "tiresomely 
pretentious" again. Gulya is the mother to thousands. 
She teaches them how to dream, tries to keep them 
together, takes their memories when they can't hold 
themselves together any more. She encourages their 
dreams, makes them bigger and bolder. The other day, 
there was a fraying boy dreaming of a set of gears, and 
he didn't know what to do with them. So she took them, 
and made them a grand machine, with workings 
impossible and greater than anything he could have 
done. He was so happy, his fraying seemed to stop, or 
even reverse, fora moment. That was nice. 


| think Gulya likes me. My dreams are the brightest, after 
all, despite what Nick insists. They're so much 
clevererer. Wait, one too many "er's there. 


19th June 2010. 


| don't really need this diary any more; the conversation 
of the thousands of us stuck down here is usually 
enough. As is Gulya. Keeps me sane. The only thing is, | 
absorbed a memory and a dream today. It was from 
someone barely alive in the first place, someone not yet 
born. They'd been cut out, you see, but in their last 
heartbeat they were stolen. 


They're dreaming, dreaming, dreaming of the cold and 


the rage they felt in that instant. They'd been floating 
through here for a few weeks, batting to and fro, picking 
up scattered images and memories of the faded. There 
wasn't much of them left, really, and they had pretty 
much all unravelled. | picked up the dream, tidied it a bit, 
let it fly. It was a strange one, an amalgam of many 
minds, but the end was understandable. There was this 
song, this line that was stuck in my head and kept 
playing back: 


"There's an abortion under the floorboards, and another 
in the sink." 


17th April 2012. 


| hear from the newcomers that things are changing up 
there. Politics, society, technology- it's all moving on. 
Maybe | wouldn't recognise it, even if | could percieve it. 


Ai-Fan is beginning to fade. It's sad. | wish there was 
something | can do. Sometimes we can keep people 
afloat, for a while, but sooner or later the Dark claims 
them all. It's a shame. Ai-Fan is my friend. Gulya is doing 
what she can for her, but Gulya's beginning to fray 
herself, | think. She's been here for so long, it's a wonder 
she's not gone already. | don't know what to do. | love 
them all. | don't want them to fall to the Dark. 


We have a theory about what it does now, you see. 
There was a boy, a young fisherman's son named 
Benoy. He fell into the sea, and he saw an eel, and he 
saw a darkness behind its eyes. He saw it lunging, but in 
its shadow before it could bite, he woke up here. 


Gulya said she knew about the eel. It's an old legend 
around here, an old dream, one that had been circling 
the Dark since time immemorial. 


If the eel's in the world, then it means that a dream of it 
has leaked out. Maybe a lot of dreams have leaked out. 
Maybe that christmas town | dreamt up really existed, or 


that hotel corridor. Maybe Gulya's machine, too. 


We think that's what the Dark is. It's like a radio tower, a 
transmitter for dreams. The dreams are made real. 
That's what the Dark does. 


But we still don't know what it is, or why. 
26th June 2012. 


| never knew, back on earth, the joy of swimming in 
another's mind. Gulya and | come perilously close to 
being one and not two, on occasion. Is this love? | think 
this is love. She sees me more clearly than anyone else, 
or so she claims. At time, she swears she can see me, 
see properly, a physical version of me hovering above 
her. She says it's nice. Not sure if | believe her, though. 


Still, there are some things | can't really talk about. Like 
Ai-Fan. The centre of her had come unravelled, so | took 
what was left of her memories. She was my friend, and 
she had a hard life- grey communist corridors, a nursery 
of abandoned children. There were some odd dreams, 
there, too- of a man who'd lived for centuries to protect 
his little village. China sounds interesting. | wish I'd been 
there, when | was alive. So many worlds crawling on the 
spinning sphere. 


There was another dream, of a painting that depicted the 
wars of the world- or part of the world. | wondered how 
Ai-Fan had dreamt that one up. Strange girl. 


29th November 2012. 


Gulya was born on the open steppe, in the 16th century. 
She grew up riding, shooting, throwing herself through 
the air with hooves beneath and the eternal heaven 
above. She played in open fields, she danced beneath 
the sky, she moved like a wild thing in a wild world. 


Then one day, she fell down, and in an instant when 


appearance of blood-shot eyes, tears of blood, and a constant low- 
intensity nosebleed in affected subjects. Regions prone to sweating 
such as toes or armpits will be covered near-perpetually in crusts of 
dried blood, and affected subjects have reported considerable 
discomfort during urination. 


Subjects have been known to suffer panic attacks after exposure. It 
is believed these are reactions to the effects of the object, and not 
caused by the object itself. This includes panic attacks where 
subjects will attempt to remove the excess blood, in some cases 
leading to severe bodily harm and dehydration. 


SCP-942-2 is a small bubble gum dispenser for home use of a 
model produced by [REDACTED]. SCP-942-2 is unremarkable in all 
respects other than its apparently infinite supply of SCP-942-1. 
Preliminary testing has shown that the dispenser can be damaged 
normally and is primarily composed of an unremarkable plastic. Due 
to the ease of containment, destructive testing has been halted to 
avoid negating the anomalous effects. Research into how the 
dispenser refills its supply of SCP-942-2 is ongoing. The words “Try 
something different today! Sweet and candy-red!” are engraved on 
the underside. 


Footnotes 
1. Currently Dr. lan Blunt 


« SCP-941 | SCP-942 | SCP-943 » 


nobody was looking, was stolen away. She came to a 
place of darkness when her life had barely begun, a 
place of dreams, a place where humans were not made 
of flesh and blood but of wood and wire and wax, little 
constructs unravelling like wool. She was scared, but she 
was very brave. 


Little Gulya worked out a way to talk. She realised how 
the dreams could be used. She worked out how to send 
thoughts, to transmit emotion, to articulate words. She 
bound all the minds in her little part of the dark to her, 
like a mother. She was like a mother to so many, 
keeping the fraying whole, making their minds last as 
long as possible. And she survived, and nobody knew 
why. 


But | knew. | was only 14 when | was taken, all those 
years ago. My mind has grown up down here, and my 
emotions with them. | fell in love with Gulya, and she with 
me, and | saw all the dark twisting and mellow happiness 
of her heart, her oh-so-human heart. She was buoyed by 
the love that she was given, the bonds she forged, the 
memories she collected. She remained herself because 
she leant into being with others, many others. 


Little Gulya of the Kazakh Uls. She was so far from 
home, so removed from time. She'd lived far longer than 
she was meant to. She was quick and bright. | know why 
she died. It was because that whole time, despite all the 
memories she had maintained and all the brightness she 
had attained, she was still herself. She couldn't change, 
she wasn't in a state of flux. Gulya was an "I". She hada 
notion of the self, which held her together, but slowly 
died in the blackness of the night. 


Today | dreamt of a man who could never die, but 
poisoned all around him. 


| am in mourning. | wear this black around me like a 
funeral suit. And yet, in the midst of the dark, an idea 
occurs. A monstrous one. And one that, if it works, would 


avenge my lost love's death. 
1st January 2013. 
So. | proposed the following idea to the others: 


We are fairly sure that the things we dream are made 
real, but we can't control what we dream. We all enter 
this world in a state of collapse and flux, dying 
perpetually until we finally unravel and become little 
more than a ball of stray thoughts. We cannot survive 
alone. The more we interact and meld with the others 
around here, the longer we last, but we can't last forever 
as long as we hold onto a state of being. A state of 
knowing that we're a self. Otherwise, we fray into tiny 
strands, picked up as stray thoughts by the others still 
left alive. 


So, | came up with an idea. The only way we can survive 
is to become one. We must all sacrifice our individual 
natures, and merge. One being, one child made of many, 
a mind of madness strung together by nerve and wire. 
Because we're stronger together. 


Some objected. Some said that this happens anyway, 
when we slowly fade. We are all lost, we are all sprung 
apart, scattered among the new children, who are 
scattered in their turn- why hasten the process? Why not 
cling on as long as possible?