The highway wound it's way out of the city under the blue-grey- 
purple stormy evening sky. The rolling cloud formations were larger 
than any mountain, dwarfing the land below like weird waves seen 
from the seabed. Night was falling. Frank felt like his eyeballs were 
on the verge of popping. He stumbled and instantly Curly was upon 
him, hauling him to his feet and shoving him along. 


"This way, Fatso!" 


Frank was not fat. On the contrary, aside from a little feminine 
softness about the hips he was skinny as a rail. Young too, long 


brown hair flopping across his face. Along the edges of his mouth 
there were little smile-like scars, the remnants of a childhood 
accident he could not remember. He had known Curly since then, 
when Curly insinuated himself amongst the family. He was a chubby 
boy so Curly had started calling him Fatso. Since then he had 
always known Curly's torment. He worked as a hand at the house, 
but in recent years he had taken a special liking to torturing Frank. 


The winding road turned off into a grand interstate buzzing with cars 
but Curly and Frank did not walk there, turning off down a little dirty 
rut that swarmed and turned through the ancient pines. Off this road 
was the path that Frank feared. In his dreams he had imagined 
walking down that path when it turned dark and watching it endina 
strange vast building with a terrible image of three arrows pointing 
inwards. 


"Move it Fatso! Come on! Do ye want to be saved or no?" Curly was 
practically frothing at the mouth now with hatred and righteous fury. 
"Move it Fatso!" 


Frank's body began to heat up, and he felt for an odd moment like 
his feet began to fly. They seemed to him to stop working and to 
start floating limply above the rotten leaves and muddy wet clay. 
Curly began to slap him on the back again and again, sending 
waves of pain as roiling as the cloud cover up Frank's body. The 
four pairs of feet crunched pine needles. 


Frank saw Draven ahead, briefly. A phantom made of dying nerve 
cells. He remembered meeting Draven at the little railroad diner and 
how handsome he had seemed. Soon they had opened a stationary 
shop on Elmhurst and 2nd. The courting was brief and furious and 
for a little while all the world seemed incredible and new and 
beautiful but soon word began to spread and one day a group of 
people from the local Baptist church had thrown a brick through the 
window. Mr. Kondraki, Draven's father, who spent most of the day 
cooking in the little restaurant where they had met, seemed 
accepting if uncaring at first. 


Curly did not. 


He had starting convincing Frank's parents to start going to the 


Baptist church, a tall tower-like structure in the middle of a field. 
Nobody would talk about what went on in there but word had it there 
was a preacher from Georgia who both loved and hated those 
inside. Someone of firey sermons who never showed his face no 
made any sort of judgement down on anyone. 


Frank's parents and Curly were too scared of the preacher to talk 
with Frank about him. 


And it was Curly who quickly caught word and thrown the brick. 
Curly, who since the day he said he came up from city of Tidder to 
find work, didn't understand Frank. Any time Frank's parents sent 
him out to the fields to help the hands Curly would rave and rant and 
roll his eyes and scream about the devil child who was so 
incomprehensible to normal man. And his own fat belly would jiggle 
in his jeans as he ranted. "Get that Fatso away from me! | don't want 
to see his face!" 


"Why not?" Sulper would say. Sulper often spoke on behalf of the 
other hands. 


"He's something of the age. Something the preacher says is bad 
and good. The preacher hates us and | hate this Fatso!" said Curly. 


"Suit yourself," said Sulper. 


The churchgoers started spreading the word to the Methodist church 
and the Presbyterian church and somehow to the Catholic church 
and small synagogue and then it felt like the whole entirety of the 
town was throwing bricks in the windows. 


On the muddy road, pain-Draven waved sadly. Frank began to 
scream a roar of pain. His bones felt like they had started to crack. "I 
am sick of your horror, Curly. | am sick of you." he muttered. Curly 
did not hear. The path seemed to stretch. Ahead was the dirt path, 
barely visible in the dead undergrowth that seemed to stretch into 
darkness. 


Draven moved away after the constant abuse. It ended simply and 
without much drama, in Frank's memory. Mr. Kondraki just had a 
new restaurant to open in another place and soon all that was left of 


Draven was a Draven shaped hole of desire and longing and grief. It 
was perhaps this hole that Frank had just seen. Frank married little 
Sadie Louis from up the road and they had little kids and Dr. Glass 
the pediatrician said they were perfectly healthy, and sometimes he 
and Sadie of them took little trips out to watch the sunset. 


Curly drove them away. Curly was the one who spread rumours that 
even Sulper believed, about Frank's infidelity, his encounters with 
other men. Now Sadie was gone and only Curly was left. Just hours 
earlier he had appeared Frank with the offer of a drink. Seemingly 
friendly and changed, in the most superficial way. 


Frank took it even knowing. He was waiting for it, expecting it, 
hungering for it. He accepted what was happening to him with a 
bloated, sprawling resignation 


He drank up the way his muscles contracted without his control now. 
He deserved it. He did not deserve Curly. Before he even knew it he 
was already on that dirt path. He could not control where his mind 
went anymore than his body could. Curly has fashioned a little 
switch out of an oak branch and stopped Frank in his path. With 
almost gentle, paternal motions he lifted off Frank's ragged shirt and 
seemed to begin to caress his smooth back. Then he brought the 
switch down. 


"Onwards we go to the Kingdom of God, Fatso! Onwards y'alls 
gonna git. Git, little Fatso! Git you little homo shit! Yah!" Curly 
bellowed. 


He began to strike Frank's back over and over and over again, 
leaving red lumps and tearing skin away. The rain washed the blood 
off and it mixed with the mud staining Frank's jean legs. The woods 
loomed darker and darker and the ancient pines began to roar with 
fire as the skies arced with lightning and far away the booms of 
thunder were like the death-knells of gods. 


Frank began to weep and cry and Curly's hot onion breath began to 
hiccup with laughter. They struggled on in the mud, the mad 
coachman pushing his tired workhorse to pastures unknown. 


The woods opened up. Here there was no terrible building with three 


arrows but only the wide Susquehanna River, reaching all the way 
down to Harrisburg and beyond. At this point it was lazy and shallow 
but destroyed by the driving sheets of rain that soaked the two men 
to the bones. 


Frank couldn't see, couldn't breathe. He began to gasp and choke, 
his eyes bulging out of their sockets. He started to run, madly. 
Crazily bouncing along, choking and drooling before he splashed 
into the water. Curly threw his switch aside and began to limp 
towards the gasping body. His cheap waistcoat bought for the 
occasion was ruined, his red umbrella-cane painfully pristine. His 
step suggested not a care in the world, his face no longer contorted 
with contempt and anger, but curiously blank. 


He waded out after Frank and caught the dying man whom he 
himself had poisoned. He held him like a baby as Frank stared up at 
him in fear. "I'm here to save yer soul from yerself. That's why | 
hated ye. | don't hate ye, Frank. Just what ye are now. I'm not yer 
maker, merely a reader of faces. | didn't create ye cause | don't look 
like no Christ changing stones into fishes or what have you. I'm 
merely a man who likes the old days when men were men and they 
followed the good books." 


Frank stared up in terror. Without warning, Curly grabbed the back 
of his head and plunged him deep into the raging water. 
Underneath, Frank could feel Draven slipping away. Draining from 
history on the current's banks. Instead he felt a deep all consuming 
love for his wife who was gone. Sadie. How could he have 
abandoned Sadie? 


How could he have abandoned Draven? He found he was changed 
and began to cry, at which point he found he could breathe. "I'm 
baptizing ye, Fatso! I'm fixing ye right up!" Curly said over the roar of 
rain. He plunged Frank in again, and when he brought him up Frank 
found himself emptier. He felt like less and less of a person. Less 
and less like Frank Talloran and more like some empty thing. 


Curly dipped him again and again and felt his love for Draven dying, 
his personality fading, his memories blurring and becoming 
horrifically indistinct. He had visions of his memoirs reduced to a 
paragraph on a page. A doctorate and the first letter of his name. A 


Well, at least we know it works on animals. -Dr. 


For more information on SCP-978 please see the SCP-978 
Extended Test Logs 


« SCP-977 | SCP-978 | SCP-979 » 


nothingness, an unreality. Frank began to sob when he wasn't 
gasping for air. 


The pain was leaving his body. His bones began to mend. Curly 
grew serene then, and dipped Frank in the river. The baptism 
continued on and on and Frank felt his mind slipping away then. Felt 
him changing. On the last dip he felt the memory of his parents 
fading. With a muted shock, he found he could no longer remember 
the feeling of sitting on his mother's lap. He could no longer his 
father's scratchy kisses. Something broke inside him. 


He saw a fisherman on the other bank. A teenager, handsome but 
neither male nor female at this distance. Stocky, tall and standing 

proud. Frank's mind was too far gone to discern the expression on 
his face from this side of the river but he swore the fisherman was 
looking right at him. Right through him. 


He wriggled out of Curly's grasp and let himself be dragged out by a 
sudden current. A sudden whoosh of roaring water and a looming 
algal mass and everything began to grow black. He had no sense of 
who he was or if he was. What he was. There was a spreading pain, 
like underwater someone had dribbled a liquid pain down his head. 
He blacked out. 


He woke up again. 


James Talloran was dying. 


The World Forgetting, By the World Forgot 


Dark. Light switch, non-functioning. One door, one window. 
Concrete walls. Head pounding, but no visible wounds. Left arm ina 
cast, likely broken. Applied by someone with little prior experience, 
judging by the stabbing pains in his shoulder and elbow. Desk, chair, 
laptop computer. Note. Short message, blurry. Signed “Lloyd”. Shit. 


Lloyd staggers to his feet while he waits for his vision to clear. He 
slumps on the chair, trying his best to ignore the insistent throbbing 
in his left temple. The laptop is open: it's presumably his, but he 
doesn't recognise the brand. The dim screen, he notices, is the only 
thing illuminating his surroundings. His dirt-encrusted, grime- 
covered, dilapidated surroundings. Still shaking off the effects of 
unconsciousness Lloyd peers through the window. The sky outside 
is darkened, but there's still a thin sliver of daylight around the 
horizon. Probably either morning or evening. He looks at his watch 
and is only mildly surprised by the blank white circle that stares back 
at him. He sighs. 


What was he doing? The note, right. He picks it up, squinting hard to 
decipher the strange black squiggles. It seems to be a list. Item one: 
Pills. He looks to the desk: A white tube, cardboard, with three pills 
inside. He swallows one, and turns back to the note. Item two: drink. 
Lloyd isn't thirsty, but he drains the glass next to him anyway. The 
fluid is a clear blue and burns as he swallows it. Disgusting. Tastes 
like battery acid. Clearly medicinal. Item three: Alphabet. Ah, now 
we're getting properly cryptic. It wouldn't be a proper blackout/ 
memory-loss drama without a poorly worded message from his 
previous self. He puts his dignity aside and loudly recites the 
alphabet, turning to the laptop in embarrassment when nothing 
happens. 


The display is damaged slightly, with masking tape over the top right 
corner. Bodge job. Typical shoddy work from his prior iteration. 
Lloyd reaches for the mouse and sighs for the second time, 


despairing his own lacklustre attitude to DIY. He clicks the first tab 
he sees, bringing up a heavily censored document. Foundation, 
definitely. Formatting suggests the first 1000-block. He scans the 
text. America is mentioned, and also Doctor Hughes. John 
Marachek is referenced too, whoever he is. Lloyd vaguely 
remembers a site director called Marachek, a small bald man with a 
brightly coloured tie. A quick search yields over 673 results for 
“Marachek” across multiple sites and countless anomalies. No 
useful info other than the fact that he probably works in the North- 
West. Most likely either site 34, 19, or 46, unless he's been recently 
transferred. Not impossible. All in all, about 400 different possible 
scips, disregarding the Safes. A third sigh is probably in order, but 
Lloyd doesn't want to exert himself too much. He's got a lot left to 
deduce, after all. He shudders involuntarily and feels the room come 
into focus around him. He can almost feel the strange liquid 
fermenting in his stomach. He slides gracelessly off his chair, and 
falls to the floor, his gaze falling on the yellowing post-it taped to the 
wall. 


The word Alphabet is still there, as cryptic and unyielding as it was 
before. He must have been off his face when he wrote this. Then 
again, if he's been taking this stuff regularly, it's surprising he even 
managed to write a note at all. Then, with all the perception of a 
drunkard, Lloyd notices a series of numbers scrawled in the margin, 
with an arrow following from “alphabet”. Starting at 26, and counting 
down in ones and twos. The last entry is 18. He recites the alphabet 
again, taking care to count off the letters on his fingers as he goes. 
Sixteen letters in, he reaches Z. The alphabet's getting shorter then, 
somehow. Or he's getting dumber. He gropes for a pencil, striking 
through the last item and scrawling 16 below it. What's going to 
happen when it reaches zero? He reasons that it's better not to 
speculate, and looks carefully at the note, peering through the haze 
for anything he may have missed. 


There's a circle in the bottom right corner, with a diagonal line 
through it and a three above it, slightly to the right. No wonder he 
didn't see it earlier, it's been almost entirely covered with dirt and 
dust. He grins despite himself. A clue. Fighting through the 
numbness that's gripping his brain, Lloyd tries his best to think 
clearly. The circle is weirdly drawn, with a thicker line at the bottom. 


Is that important? He doesn't know, but he makes a mental note of it 
anyway. The number three. Thrice, triple, 3 times one. Three, three 
what? Three is prime, he knows that. Three sides to a triangle. 
Circle-Line-Triangle? No, that's not it. He turns over the post-it. The 
word IMPORTANT and a couple of short paragraphs. Looks like he 
had occasional periods of lucidity. Hooray for drugs. He shifts his 
weight and prepares to read. 


“It got out. We don't know how, or why it waited this long. 
If you can still move, we've got a chance. The drugs 
should help; we got enough for a couple of years. Stay 
strong.” 


For the first time, Lloyd sees a mattress in the corner of the room, 
with a single tattered blanket. There is a framed photograph next to 
it, though he can't make out what it's of. A woman, possibly, but 
certainly not one he recognises.