The light beating down on Keagan faded gradually, from bright white 


to a dimmer yellow. The buzzing, however, rose in his ears, the 
feeling that something was trying to snatch him away intensifying. 


"For the record the subject is stable at 840 lumens," noted Dr 
Barker. "Technician Grant, reduce the lighting by a further 30%." 


The dim yellow of the light was progressively replaced now by a 
twilight blue. Cancer and Ronny's faces seemed to float in the 
darkness, eyes and mouths distorted by shadow. Keagan rubbed his 
eyes—a darkness was forming, behind the eyes, behind everything. 
The sensation of being grabbed grew still further—it felt like a dozen 
hands were slashing out through the darkness, grabbing at his 
shoulders, his torso, trying to get a good grip, but somehow slipping 
away, something still stopping them. 


"Subject still stable at 350 lumens. 554-2, please turn around and 
move away from the observation deck." 


Cancer's lip twisted up. For a moment he didn't move. Then he said 
"I'm sorry too," and turned away. 


"Subject stable at 350 lumens with a single observer. D-7780, 
please maintain observation of the subject while we prepare the 
second part of this experiment. Technician Grant, please prepare 
the graduated mechanical removal." 


After a couple of seconds, Keagan's eyes adjusted to the dark and 
he saw the researchers scurrying about, wheeling around cameras 
and monitors on stands. He turned his attention back to Ronny. The 
skinny killer was smirking, cradling the ruin of his left hand with the 
tattooed right one, still hidden in his sleeve as though it were 
shameful to him. Ronny's chest began to rise and fall in a series of 
sharp exhalations. Keagan wondered for a moment if he was having 
some kind of panic attack until he realised he was chuckling under 
his breath, the movement becoming more and more pronounced 
until it became audible. Oh no, he thought. You stupid bastard. 
You're going to do something, aren't you? 


"D-7780? D-7780, what are you doing? Stop that. Maintain 
unbroken observation of the subject. That's all | want you to do. Just 
... Stop that, now." 


Ronny was laughing his ass off now, sinking down until his hands 
were on his knees. He fixed Keagan with one last stare. 


"Fuck you," he said, and turned around. At that moment, Keagan felt 
the hands finally catch hold, latching onto fabric, hair, flesh. He was 
being pulled away. 


"Lights!" screamed Dr Barker from somewhere very far away. "Turn 
the fucking lights on! Turn the—” 


The static rose around Keagan and drowned him in the darkness. 


He tumbled through an icy void, wind howling in his face. He could 
feel something coming, something cold and sharp and hungry. He 
looked towards it and could almost imagine seeing it—black knives 
rushing through the night. Then it was as if two hands had closed 
around him and shut out the cold. The dark was now the dark of the 
womb, and Keagan felt himself curl up in it, tucking his legs up 
under him. He felt a great thrumming pass through the presence that 
held him and realised he had heard it before, from outside. In here 
the chant it was slower, deeper, comprehensible, syllables 
permeating the dark. 


OM MANE PEMI HUNG OM MANE PEMI HUNG OM MANE PEMI 
HUNG 


Just for a moment the chant faltered, a curdled wave of pain 
washing over Keagan as the entity cried out. Great ragged holes 
appeared in the hands, the cold rushing in and piercing Keagan, his 
chest and abdomen lighting up with agony. But whatever wielded 
those knives in the dark had been slowed by its passage through the 
substance of those hands—forced to expend more of its rage and 
hate than it could justify burrowing through them, and even as 
Keagan felt its blades cutting into his flesh they crumbled to night- 
black ash, falling away into the dark. 


And on the edge of the great vibration, like the froth of a wave hitting 
the rocks, he heard the voice. 


A gift, it said. From a prisoner to a prisoner. 


Intermission 


Elsewhere: 


Sam Deloitte rose and put on a dressing-gown, went through to the 
kitchen of her flat and put the kettle on, curling up on a beanbag 
chair with the mail and her laptop. She had two hearings to cover 
today, but they were both in the afternoon, and neither was 
particularly challenging—a drink driving case involving the son of a 
local Labour councillor, and a mugging of a 72-year-old woman, to 
which the accused was expected to plead guilty. She went through 
the slightly damp, dog-eared envelopes that had been stuffed her 
letterbox. 


Circular. Circular. ‘This is not a circular’, which in British advertising 
parlance means ‘This is a circular’. An electricity bill and, in the 
same batch of mail, a demand for payment. Sam had phoned up 
British Gas three times in the last week and eventually secured an 
agreement from one Rajay in Customer Services that she would be 
able to pay over 14 months rather than 12. This had clearly not been 
passed onto any other part of the organisation. Then something that 
caught her eye; an envelope with 'FOICOMMONS' stamped in the 
top right corner. She tore it open excitedly and discovered within a 
response to one of her Freedom of Information Act requests. This is 
what it said: 


Dear Ms Deloitte 


Thank you for your request for information dated 25th 
July 2011, received by us on 27th July 2011, and is 
copied below. 


You asked for information in relation to contact between 
the SCP Foundation Group and Members of Parliament. 
The response is given below. 


The House does not hold the information you are 
seeking. 


You may, if dissatisfied with the treatment of your 


request, ask the House of Commons to conduct an 
internal review of this decision. Requests for internal 
review should be addressed to... 


Sam sighed heavily. Of course, it wouldn't be that easy. 


Elsewhere: 


The man in the cell had returned from his shower. He had fifteen 
minutes to make himself presentable and report for work. His 
cellmate was probably still at breakfast—he spent as little time in the 
cell as he could, for the man hadn't quite given up his protective 
shield, the mannerisms and affectations designed to deflect 
aggression. In the library, however, he was learning to leave it 
behind—after a few false starts staring through gaps on the shelves 
at browsers he suspected were likely to abscond without signing a 
book out. He had even managed a few civil words with Don Dacyk, 
between pages of The Sum Of All Fears. 


The heat of summer was already beginning to drop away, a faint 
and distant chill entering these dog days. B block had seen an influx 
of new faces, some of which had quickly disappeared as suddenly 
as they had arrived. It had become an easy pattern, if you knew 
what to look for; men receiving unexpected visits and returning 
excited, skeptical, puzzled by an offer made. A few days later they 
would be gone, and the guards would affect nonchalant ignorance 
when anyone asked after them. The man in the cell could no longer 
remember exactly who had drawn his attention to the 
disappearances. They came and went, but he remained. And yet he 
had changed, was changing. 


For a moment, he stood still at the centre of the cell, then, without 
knowing exactly what had led to the decision, turned and eased the 
bunk bed away from the wall, feeling the cracks at the bottom of the 
wall behind the legs. He withdrew a couple of the drawings, paper 
hardened and cracking as he unfolded them. He held them up to the 
light and for a second saw the world behind them again—the river, 
the skyline, the remembered tiny people making their way through 
the landscape. He blinked his watery eyes in the bright sunlight 
filtering through the bars and smiled. 


Elsewhere: 


Timothy McGage was halfway between his 134th and 136t" pullup 
when the doorbell rang. He lowered himself slowly to the floor and 
roughly towelled off the sweat rolling down his face and shoulders. 
He was glad of the interruption—he had found himself exercising 
obsessively, spending hour after hour driving away thought through 
physical exercise. He relished the notion of someone to talk to—not 
that he could ever talk about what was pushing him away from 
friends, his fiancé, his family. 


The money had arrived in his bank account, just as he had been told 
it would, but suddenly there seemed nothing to spend it on. All 
desire, or drive, all ambition seemed to have vanished. Indeed, he 
felt nauseous every time he logged onto internet banking and saw it 
sitting there in his current account, under the heading ‘Prison 
Officers Association Annual Raffle—Cash Prize’. He had begun 
looking over his shoulder at night, sure he had seen the same car 
before or that someone was following him. 


Tugging at his damp white wife-beater to allow air to circulate, he 
approached the door, the atrium lined with modern art pieces he had 
once thought were the height of sophistication but which he could 
now barely bring himself to look at. There was a shadow on the 
other side of the door, and he opened it. 


"Sorry," he said, "| was just in the middle of my workout. Why don't 
you—” 


He trailed off when he registered the face of the man at the door. 


"You're here," he said. He took a step back, face suddenly grey and 
jaw slack. "Why are you here? Jesus Christ." 


The man at the door's arm moved—a blur of motion, barely 
perceptible, before it stopped with a shudder that seemed to shake 
the world. He was suddenly holding something—dark brown, about 
the size of a clenched fist. 


Pain in McGage's chest, unlike anything he had ever felt. He 


attempt to terminate 682. With the use of SCP-2722's reality 
bending ability, the ship is teleported to the - star system in 
the Andromeda Galaxy in the Local Group. SCP-2722's subatomic- 
destruction sphere is immediately fired at SCP-682, seemingly 
annihilating the subject, but it was shown to adapt and regenerate 
overtime. SCP-682 adapts its size in order to match SCP-2722's 
own, and suddenly attacks the ship at velocities too fast for 
SCP-2722's radars to detect, throwing the ship off the bounds of the 
star system and across the galaxy in seconds, with SCP-682 
following quickly after. However, the forcefield around SCP-2722 
withstands the attack. The wielders are instructed to try and fire 
2722's grand wave motion cannon at the subject, which is 
immediately accomplished by the ship. The beam hits 682's shell 
and dashes past the galaxy, violently impacting against the 
constellation of Cassiopeia and reducing it to atomic bonds. 


The remnants of SCP-682's body are instructed to be collected by 
OTF 7 ("Rama Repairmen") as the ship uses the ability of reality 
bending to return to the Earth. The termination is deemed a failure, 
as SCP-682 regenerated from the blast approximately [DATA 
REDACTED] hours later inside its cell. 


Item: SCP-939- and SCP-939- 


Tissue Test Record: 
Not attacked by SCP-939- nor SCP-939- 


Termination Test Record: 

SCP-939- and SCP-939- both entered the containment cell for 
SCP-682. SCP-939- and SCP-939- were seemingly distressed 
and refused to attack SCP-682, while repeating a call for help. 
SCP-682 then attacked the two, devouring them after roughly and 
brutally mutilating the bodies of both subjects. 


Notes: SCP-939 and SCP-682 don't match well. | guess we will not 
be using them anytime soon. Don't release the beasts again. 


Item: SCP-012 


staggered back, falling heavily against the wall and dislodging a 
singularly repulsive pottery piece. Already the air in his lungs 
seemed anoxic, his vision blurring around the edges. 


He looked at the thing in the man's hand. 


"You've relied on it for so long," the man said, a faint smile playing 
around his lips, "but you've never even seen its true colour until now. 
What insight | give you." 


It still pulsed, faintly, between the man's fingers—trying to stem the 
sudden vacuum. If it could, McGage realised, it would push 
oxygenated blood all the way around the universe for him. 


"I'm sorry," McGage tried to say to his heart, but what came out of 
his blue lips was a hiss. / let you down, didn't I? 


"No loose ends," said the man at the door happily, unceremoniously 
dropping the thing he was holding onto the corpse of Timothy 
McGage before closing the door carefully with his eloow. He wiped 
his hand on the immaculately trimmed lawn of the bungalow and 
walked down the street, humming to himself. It was turning into a 
beautiful day. 


Chapter Eight: "Mr Brightside" 


He awakened to a sucking, smothering blackness, and he spent a 
moment lying there, suffocating in it until he realised this was real, 
that he was lying on soil and dirt and there was something over his 
face, choking him. He tried to reach up, but his hands were bound to 
his sides by something clinging and plastic. The thing over his face 
billowed in and out as he sucked at it, and eventually, though a 
supreme effort of inhalation, he got it into his mouth and chewed on 
it until he felt it soften and tear, and he breathed cool, revitalising air 
through the rent. After a minute more, his eyes began to detect a 
faint light permeating the black plastic over his face. 


He thought carefully about his position then arched his back, 
stretching the plastic around his arms. Further extension was cut 
short by the painful collision of his ribcage with what seemed to be a 


low metal ceiling. Instead, he lay down and used the extra slack 
near his hands to search over the ground. Soon he found what he 
was looking for—a sharp-edged stone—and, holding it through the 
plastic, began worrying at the material held taut between his wrists 
until it gave way, freeing his arms. He turned onto his side and, 
clawing at the stuff with his hands, began to push with each foot in 
turn, until the plastic began crinkling up and he wriggled out of it like 
a newly pupated insect. He was lying in a crawlspace, under a great, 
rusting metal tank, which made occasional clanking and whirring 
noises, like someone fiddling with a gearbox. The sun was shining 
through on either side, illuminating an expanse of green grass that 
stretched into the distance. He took great, gulping breaths, lying on 
his back with his arms and legs stretched to the extent that the 
space under the machine would allow. 


Soon the desire to leave this cramped place became overwhelming 
—but it still struggled against the fear he had, that somehow, the 
universe outside was an illusion, or else a radical misinterpretation 
by his oxygen-starved brain of some space more in keeping with the 
world he had come to know. He entertained then for a little while a 
notion that the thing above him was the suspended chassis of a 
Renault Clio, that he had somehow fallen asleep in the inspection pit 
and had a dream; the longest and strangest he had ever 
experienced, with murder, prison, clandestine organisations and 
logic-defying experiments. Wasn't it more plausible than the notion 
he was where his senses still stubbornly insisted on reporting he 
was? It would surely be OK if he stayed here a little while longer. 


He couldn't pin down exactly what caused him to move—some play 
of the light on the grass, the distant susurration of water on rock he 
heard that brought back in one flash a holiday he had taken once 
with his family on the south coast, the cry of the birds... Once his 
body had taken that decision he scrabbled out of the space under 
the rusting tank like a man possessed, making little whimpering 
noises as he dragged himself out of that dark space into the light.