Lawrence, for his part, dealt with it as he always had. That is to say, 
remained totally unaware of the avoidance. The same way a man 
blind from birth cannot mourn the memory of color, Corporal 
Lawrence couldn't bemoan a lack of company. He was quiet, as he 
had nobody to talk to, and still, as he had nothing to do for long 
stretches of time. The enemy trench, less than a mile away, had 
gone silent for several days, letting boredom and nervousness sink 
in even more than normal...coupled with the unease that seemed to 
radiate off of Lawrence like heat waves. 


The worst part was that there was no distinct reason to dislike the 
corporal. He was a plain man, average height, average build, bland 
of voice and action. Nobody could recall him raising his voice in joy 
or anger. He did have the occasional odd mannerisms, however. He 
tended to stare a beat or two longer than was acceptable at people. 
He rarely slept as well, and bunkmates said he would mumble in his 
sleep almost constantly. The content of those nocturnal ramblings, 
when they could be understood, were often odd, and potentially 
unsettling. One private moved to another barracks when he heard 
the name of his daughter pass Corporal Lawrence's lips, followed by 
a bubbling, muffled giggle. 


It was strongly theorized that he was sent over the trench by his 
commanders more out of a desire to have him away than for his 
minimal combat skill. He and fourteen of his fellows were sent 
across the nightmarishly scarred waste of the no-man's-land 
between the trenches, to reconnoiter the enemy trench, and secure 
it if possible. Many seemed to hope that Lawrence would have the 
opportunity to prove his devotion to his country by making the 
ultimate sacrifice for it. 


It was while he was gone, that three-day gap as the men held their 
breath, waiting for a surprise volley of shells, that someone started 
asking questions. Where as before, it was almost taboo to speak of 
Corporal Lawrence, since the departure of both him and his “aura”, 
rumor seemed to descend with the passion of the denied. Nobody 
remembered him ever talking of home. No sweet-smelling letters 
came, no soggy, dirt-streaked letters left. He mentioned his dreams 
often, and griped sometimes with the men over missed foods or 
pleasures, but never with any real passion. 


Questions started to float among even the higher levels of the 
command. Nobody was able to actually find his station orders. He'd 
come in with a squad of reinforcements transferred from France... 
but there was no paperwork. The rest of the reinforcement squad 
had never seen the man before he'd been lumped in with them the 
night before the trip, along with the snips and scraps of other squads 
decimated by the Germans. Whispers filtered among the grunts of 
the corporal being a curse. Nearly every man who'd shared a 
bunkhouse with him had gotten trenchfoot, and the rooms he 
haunted always seemed to smell more musty and sickly-sweet, even 
for the trench. 


The men sent over the no-man's-land with Corporal Lawrence heard 
and cared for none of this. Just another man among many, all with 
death certificates awaiting a stamp that could fall at any moment. 
They moved fast and low, from crater to crater, slipping over slick 
mud and barbed wire, the only thing that seemed to grow in that 
blasted waste. Charging the last spurt and into the trench, they were 
greeted not with the harsh bark of German orders and rifles...but a 
dense, close silence. Preparing for ambush, the men started to filter 


out into the tunnels and halls of the trench. 


The men, already nervous, were not calmed by their investigation. 
The trenches stank of mold, sweat, and a thin undertaste of rotten 
fruit. A vile, cloying slime seemed to have pooled in every divot and 
crack, sticky as glue and itchy on the flesh. In a world where rats 
and insects would try to snatch food from your mouth even as you 
ate, they saw nothing alive, not so much as a fly. An armory lay in 
chaos, munitions spilled on the ground, rifles tossed like pick up 
sticks. A mess hall had been reduced to ruins, the tables and chairs 
piled in the center of the room, charred and twisted, the rations 
seemingly stamped into the dirt by many feet. And still, nothing, alive 
or dead, was found by the increasingly anxious solders. 


Private Dixon found the first body, and managed to cry out before 
vomiting. 


They knew it had been a man only because nothing else of that size 
could have been there. It lay on the floor of a barracks. The entire 
floor. The flesh of it had been...smeared, somehow, spread like 
butter over the rough dirt floor. Bones, already looking pitted and 
rotten, stuck out at random angles, like dead trees in a still swamp. 
The skull rested on one of the highest bunks, facing the doorway, 
ten gleaming white fingertip bones crammed into the cracked eye 
sockets. As one man went to examine it, he found the back of the 
skull had been crushed open, the rotting, sagging sponge of a 
tongue stuffed into the otherwise dry cavity. 


More remains were found, each seemingly more unsettling and 
strange than the last. A ring of hands in a sandbagged watchpost, 
ten of them, fingers interlaced like a basket, the wrists ragged and 
broken. Two men in a tunnel, skin leathery and thin as mummies, 
eye sockets staring and empty, mouths locked impossibly wide, their 
clothes mere rags under an oily black scum. The latrine sent even 
the hardiest back, gagging and shivering. Overflowing with 
excrement and offal, gobbets of meat bobbed and oozed in the foul 
sludge... the whole surface dotted with what looked like thousands 
of clean, slick eyeballs, nerves and tendons fanning out like goldfish 
tails. 


Corporal Lawrence was the first to find the hole, the other men 


loudly debating the better part of valor and their rapid withdrawal 
from the nightmare trench. It was small, in a section of fresh digging, 
the start of a new arm of trenches projecting closer to the enemy 
lines. No more than four feet across, it seemed to be the accidental 
uncovering of a natural chamber, the empty blackness of it defying 
investigation. Private Dixon, recovered and blessedly numb from his 
previous ordeals, saw the corporal prod the edge with his boot, then 
crouch to peer in...then suddenly slide in head-first before the 
private could so much as utter a shout of question. 


The private was a good soldier, and rushed to the perceived distress 
of his fellow. When questioned later, he could provide little 
illumination as to what happened over the two minutes Corporal 
Lawrence spent in the hole. He could see nothing, the light of a 
torch seemingly gobbled up a few feet into that dense blackness. 
There were sounds...the rustle of movement over loose stone or 
rubble. An odd liquid shifting, a dry rustle that made him think of the 
insect husks he'd used to collect in the summer. As he shouted for 
aid, there was a sudden upwelling of a repulsive stench, like a 
reptile house gone sour and old, and his fellow soldiers found him 
retching helplessly beside the hole when they came around the turn. 


It was as they rushed to Private Dixon's aid that the hand emerged 
from the hole. They stopped and raised rifles as one body, roaring 
for the owner of that pale, trembling hand to identify himself. As they 
watched, another hand joined the first, followed by the pale, 
shivering head of Corporal Lawrence. He was streaked and 
smeared with a tarry black ooze, hacking and coughing thinly as he 
hauled his body up beside that of the gasping private. As they 
moved to help the men, the corporal vomited up a heavy stream of 
the same repulsive slime that coated his body in smears and globs, 
his curled, shuddering body voiding more of it into his saturated, 
fouled pants. They were hesitant to touch him, finally doing so after 
the seemingly endless river of grime stopped pouring from him. He 
was insensible, eyes rolling and wide, body as limp as a boned fish. 


The men quit the trench with all speed. Half-dragging the corporal, 
they ran with no thought to cover or death, only escape. They 
crossed in record time, falling into their home trench like so much 


cordwood, gasping and shivering, one man known to have 
bludgeoned a German to death with a brick curled on the floor ina 
sobbing heap. The commanders moved quickly, isolating the men 
and trying to calm the most lucid for a report. What spilled out would 
have been immediately dismissed as lies and hallucination were it 
not for the earnest, pleading stares of those reporting. Command 
calmed them with explanations of battle fatigue and strange gas 
weapon tests...and shared silent, focused stares as the cowed men 
were ushered out. 


Corporal Lawrence had little to report. Of his time in the hole, he 
could (or would) say little. He stated that he had slipped, and fallen 
into what may have been some long-blocked underground pool, or 
perhaps a buried latrine. Of the sounds and smells reported by the 
private, he had nothing to say, only that he had struggled a short 
time, then managed to get back out just as the men arrived. Truly, 
he seemed none the worse for wear. In fact, he seemed in better 
spirits than many had remembered ever seeing him, favoring the 
commanders with a wide, giddy smile as he was dismissed with a 
warning not to discuss the events. 


The corporal proved a changed man over the next few days. He was 
more talkative, but quickly had men wishing for his old, unsettling 
silence. He rambled about the joys of close spaces, of creation and 
destruction that seemed to spring up all around them. About human 
pleasures missed, the dimensions and ages of which made some 
men threaten Corporal Lawrence with a quiet and ignoble death... 
which only seemed to stretch the near-constant smile on his face 
even wider. Private Dixon, one of the corporal's bunkmates, 
whispered to a friend that he had woken once to find the corporal 
standing over him in the night, his eyes as bright and flat as silver 
dollars. They found the private the next day snarled in the barbed 
wire, his intestines spread nearly ten feet around him in every 
direction. 


Not one man from that trench survived the great war, although few 
died in battle. A wave of sickness took the trench a few days after 
Private Dixon's death. A strange wasting sickness, it seemed to eat 
the flesh like acid, men waking to find previously healthy flesh eaten 


down to the bone, oozing and blackened. A sergeant was found in a 
latrine, beset by a living carpet of rats. They refused to quit the body 
even when shot, and attacked several men before the body was 
recovered. Relief finally came, the bulk of the men being sent to 
various hospitals, many wasting away before they ever reached a 
bed. 


Corporal Lawrence was remanded to a French mental ward, 
transferred after several complaints from the hospital proper where 
he was first sent. It seemed his behavior hinted at a growing mental 
imbalance, culminating with an attempted sexual assault of a nurse, 
which ended with the loss of three fingers from her right hand, and 
the vision in her right eye. The corporal would rant quietly to the 
other patients, whispers about endless halls, pursuits in the dark, 
flesh laid out like pages of a book. It was dismissed as so much war 
fatigue, even as his behavior grew less violent and more unsettling. 


He vanished several times from the ward, only to appear several 
hours later, as if nothing had happened. When pressed, he would 
begin to sing “My Bonnie Lies Over The Sea” in an endless 
monotone until the doctors left exasperated. Others on the ward 
clamored to be transferred from the whispering madman. A stale, 
musty foulness seemed to sit in the air wherever he stayed, and 
incidents of infection and the strange, consuming sickness that had 
beset his home trench seemed to follow him like a cloud. Numerous 
attempts were made to transfer the man, only to be met with 
bureaucratic confusion. No records were found of the man. No entry 
papers, commendations or incidents, not even a birth certificate. 
Through it all he sat, for hours on end, cross-legged on his bed, 
occasionally humming tunelessly, or rambling off the names of his 
ward-mates between short, bubbling giggles. 


Corporal Lawrence and eighteen men vanished one November 
night, between a five minute nurse rotation at three in the morning. 
The room reeked of rust, oil, mold, and sweet rot. Thick, black 
swaths of crumbling ooze coated the beds and several of the walls, 
wide patches of it smearing and eating into the floor. Of the men, 
there was no sign, at first. As they searched, one nurse shifted a 
bed aside, only to shriek and nearly trip across one of the sunken, 
reeking depressions on the floor. In a tight, perfect spiral were what 


appeared to be hundreds of teeth, resting neatly on the floor. After 
counting, they accounted for the total of all the teeth of every living 
soul in that ward...but one. 


The corporal was never found, nor were the men. The incident was 
swallowed by the constant barrage of horrors from the front, and 
forgotten with ease. Stories of a cursed trench wandered across the 
front lines, often squelched for being bad luck. Still they came... 
stories of strange deaths, of disappearing men, found days later, 
alive, but broken and twisted beyond comprehension. Stories of a 
strange, dark figure stalking the bomb-riddled towns of Europe. 


This may be the only known image of Corporal Lawrence ever 
recorded, taken several days after his return from the hole in the 
German trench. 


Them 


Let's see what an official report would look like: 

Item #: ... Should they become a number? 

Object Class: ... Very Beautiful. 

Special Containment Procedures: Should they be contained? 
Description: 


Context: as a field agent, | travel a lot. When | have time, | go places 
where people dance, because I've always loved dancing. And | note 
down as much as possible in my travel diary, to reminisce 
afterwards. 


Occurrence 1 

France, Strasbourg, night-club 'Le Chalet’, June 15th, 2006 

I'd been having fun for a while when this guy invited me for a waltz. 
Best waltz ever. Perfect all the way: clockwise, counterclockwise, 
whirl, stop, start, fast, slow. | felt like the Queen of the Night. 

The guy never spoke to me - but then we were too busy being good. 
He was much taller than me, so | didn't have a good look at his face. 
| only remember he was serious, focused. Dressed in black. Black 
hair. 


Some time later, the DJ played a set of rock 'n rolls. After dancing 
one with a not-so-competent partner and fuming about it, | was 
sitting another out; | spotted my waltz champion and rushed to invite 
him. He said nothing, didn't smile, just followed me. 

Total disaster. I'm good at rock and so was he - but there are about 
as many styles of dancing it as there are dancers; our styles were 
simply incompatible. 

| kept apologizing. He said nothing. Looked more and more pissed 
off. Left before the song ended and disappeared. 

Was torn between 'How rude!’ and 'Yeah, feel that way too.’ 


from the same angle. SCP-096 is not present in the photograph. 


Subject: SCP-105 
Photographed Activity: Testing denied by O5- 
Photo Result: Testing denied by O5- 


Subject: SCP-106 

Photographed Activity: SCP-106 emerging from a wall. 

Photo Result: SCP-106 roaming a wheat field. Appears to be 
approaching a old farm house, while a woman, appearing to be in 
mid-sixties, welcomes 106. 


Subject: SCP-140 

Photographed Activity: At rest in its vault.