"Here we are." Guillard stopped before one of the cages of books in 
the back. Dozens of children's books were behind it, several of 
which were Uncle Zadok books. 


Tristan frowned at some of the titles. ""Ueremy the Corgi in 
Adventures in Capitalism? Is that a Wondertainment book?" 


"Yeah. No-brainer as to why that's there." He looked at the padlock 
and chain that sealed the cage, and reached into his belt, taking out 
a bobby pin and screwdriver. 


"Seriously?" Tristan asked. 


"It's as good of a makeshift lockpick as one can make." Guillard 
screwed up his face and fiddled with the lock, before with a soft 
click, the padlock fell open. He opened the cage, and waved his light 
over the books. "Okay... do you see the Halloween one?" 


"Yeah, right here." Tristan pulled it out and put his camera up to his 
eye. "Look away. I'm going to photograph the pages, send it to my 


phone, and then send it to Melbourne in memetics." 
"| thought he was in Florida." 


"He came back for this shitshow. We need all hands on deck." 
Tristan opened the book— 


And watched it slam shut around his hand. He winced as his finger 
was pinched between all twenty pages of the children's book, and 
then watched it hover in the air. 


Hands manifested around the book, and then arms, and then a face. 
A stern-looking man with spectacles and a distinct lack of hair 
scowled at Tristan. "Young man. Are you allowed to be down here?" 


"Holy shit." Malcolm's jaw dropped. 


"I-I'm going to just take it to the checkout desk—" Tristan tried taking 
the book back. 


The librarian's specter hissed, revealing rows of needle-like teeth. 
"Only librarians are allowed in the restricted section! Are you a 
librarian?" 


"Well, no, but—" 
"OUT!" 


The cages of restricted books began to shake, with dozens of hands 
appearing from within, clutching at the bars. Screaming filled the 
restricted wing as the metal shook. "GET OUT OF MY LIBRARY!" 


Bailey rolled his eyes. "You're the least-threatening thing I've seen 
all week." Tristan backed away, bringing up his glowstick and a 
pocket knife in a cross-like shape. "In the name of the Trinity, the 
Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, | invoke the Archangel Micheal to 
banish thee." 


Guillard saw where he was going with this; Standard Exorcism 
Prayer #23. He held up his screwdriver and flashlight in much the 
same manner, and continued, "Purify our souls, O Lord, use us as 
your agents to drive evil away." 


The specter hissed and recoiled from the pair of them, its form 
starting to waver and fade away. Even so, the volume of the 
screaming from the cages grew. 


The two chanted in unison, "Banish the evil within and without, in 
body and soul, so that | may work in your name." 


Bailey picked it up from there. "Banish from me all diabolic 
infestations, possessions, malefice, all restless souls, all hexes and 
unholy blights." 


Guillard continued, "Banish from me all vices. All my lusts, glutonies, 
greeds, envies, prides, and wraths. All things that may make me 
stray from thee, O Lord." 


The spirit began to fold in on itself. The hands in the cages started 
reaching for Tristan, grabbing at his coat. 


The prayer finished, abridged, recited by the two of them. "I 
command and bid all the power who molest me to leave me forever. 
| consign them to an everlasting hell, where they will be bound by 
Saint Micheal the Archangel, our guardian angels Saint Gabriel and 
Raphael, and to be forever crushed beneath the heel of the 
Heavenly Mother." 


With an bright flash of light and an eldritch shriek, the spirit was 
sucked into a rift in the world, and dragged down to Hell, leaving the 
book behind. Tristan caught it in his hands, and shook his head. 
"God, that's a mouthful to say." 


"Wish the Initiative would let us borrow some of their prayer books," 
Malcolm admitted, turning away. "Snap your photos?" 


"Doing so." Tristan took a photograph of every page, his filters 
eliminating any memetic hazards on them. He shut it, and sent the 
photos off to Melbourne in memetics. Starting for the door, he turned 
and looked back at his colleague, frowning. "Mal?" 


"Yeah?" 


"We didn't..." the Bailey Triplet's eyes grew wide, and he palmed his 
face." We didn't say 'amen'’, did we?" 


"Shit." 


An invisible force slammed Tristan and Malcolm against opposite 
ends of the room. Malcolm looked at the children's book as it fell 
open for maybe two seconds, and felt something dig into his mind. 


"FUCK. ING. GREAT!" Tristan yelled, ducking under a wall of force 
that crushed the metal cage above him. "WE CREATED A 
FUCKING POLTERGEIST!"" 


"You didn't say Amen!" Guillard winced and held his torso. "Shit, that 
stings." 


"Either one of us could have said it!" Tristan yelled back. He hada 
backup plan; in a room full of anomalous books, there had to be at 
least one book that could get rid of a ghost. "Look on your side for 
—" the cage behind him crumpled. "Shit! The Bionomicon or 
Totenkulten"" 


Guillard ran past the shelves, looking into them. "Uh, shit, there's—" 
His head pulsed as the meme implanted in him began to take hold. 

"SHIT! Uh, um." He grabbed a pair of bolt cutters off of his belt and 

cut through some chains, finding the first relevant book and tossing 

it to Bailey like a frisbee. 


The poltergeist knocked the book into Tristan with such force that he 
fell over, and he frowned at the title. "Dr. Wondertainment's™ 
Bionomicon for Kids With Special Anti-Spook Spells?! 
SERIOUSLY?!" He tore it open, and came upon a relevant-looking 
passage. "To dispel a poltergeist—" 


Tristan was slammed against the wall again, and read aloud, "R- 
recite the following." He looked up, and panted, "Corpus somnus. 
Spectra quietus. Corpus somnus. Spectra quietus." 


The wind began to pick up around Tristan, and he felt the air being 
sucked out of his lungs. Even so, he kept on muttering, "Corpus 
somnus, spectra quietus. Corpus somnus, spectrus quietus, corpus 
somnus, spectra quietus, corpus somnus spectra—" 


With an ear-shattering shriek, the room became quiet, and Tristan 


the sine-wave tones produced are anomalously free of 
distortion. Even considering the nature of the cylinder 
grooves, such tones are exact to a degree theoretically 
impossible given the nature of the phonograph. 
Recordings of the tones show no deviations from a 
purely sinusoidal waveform other than those attributable 
to the recording equipment; when digital recorders are 
directly connected to SCP-814-1, the resultant tones are 
sinusoidal to within the quantization error of the 
equipment used.2 The cylinders can be played 
individually or in groups, the latter producing various 
dyad, triad or tetrad octave harmonies. 


Humans exposed to the tones produced when 
SCP-814-2 is played via SCP-814-1 describe subtle but 
pervasive feelings of harmony, correctness and well- 
being. This experience is moderately addictive; as such, 
human experimentation with SCP-814 is to be limited. 
Subjects exposed to playback of SCP-814-2 via any 
other cylinder phonograph report no such experiences. 


Significant effects: SCP-814-1 


Use of SCP-814-1 to play any audio source other than 
SCP-814-2 results in massive distortions of local 
spacetime. 


These properties were discovered during Recovery Test 
Series A. During these tests, human subjects that had 
been exposed to the output of the SCP-814-1/2 
combination became insistent on trying new audio 
cylinders. A subsequent transient effect — initially 
thought to be a monitoring glitch, but now thought to 
have been caused by vigorous removal of audio 
cylinders while SCP-814-1 was still engaged — resulted 
in the deaths of all personnel within the test chamber. 


After extensive experimentation3, the following general 
theory of the object's operation has been proposed: 


* Slot 1 affects x, defined as the spatial axis 


could breathe again. He took one look at Malcolm and bolted for the 
door. He was followed closely by Guillard. 


The inside of Malcolm's car was soaked. 


They had to sprint through the thunderstorm, for fear of whatever 
was in there following them out. Now, they were listening to Pink 
Floyd at full blast over the radio. "Can you turn that down?" Bailey 
sighed. 


"I-" Guillard rubbed his head with one hand, the other barely staying 
on the steering wheel. "| got whammied. | looked at the book, and I-| 
feel like I'm going to give in if I— | need to be overstimulated!" 


"Hold on." Tristan pulled out his phone. "Helen, show all available 
visual countermemes in sequence." He put the phone on the 
dashboard, and pulled on the emergency brake, making the car 
screech to a halt as the phone displayed dozens of images within 
milliseconds of one another. 


The phone rang as Guillard stared at the screen, pulling at his hair. 
Tristan tapped it and answered. "You're on speaker." 


Ryan Melbourne spoke from the other end. "| managed to analyze 
what you sent. Every page of that book had the same meme on it; 
three-part geographical pointer." 


"In non-memespeak?" Tristan asked. "Guillard got hit by it pretty 
bad." 


"Two components, normally: implants a location relative to where 
you are, and compels you to go there. This one has a third— it's a 
sonambulism meme." 


"Sleepwalking?" Tristan looked at Guillard as he unbuckled his seat 
belt. "Wait, Mal, where are you going?" 


"You need Countermeme #291!" Ryan barked. "It's auditory, so 
blare it as loud as you can through your phone!" 


Tristan plugged his phone into the car as Guillard started to get out, 


and shouted at the screen, "Helen, broadcast Auditory 
Countermeme 291!" 


The opening chords of Queen's Another One Bites The Dust echoed 
through main street, played on every audio system the car had 
available— the horns, the car alarm, the speakers, even the 
windshield wipers thrumming back and forth. 


Guillard stopped in his tracks, and fainted, face-down in the rain. 
Tristan dragged him back into the car and sighed, finding that he 
had a pulse. "Ryan? Can you get Sigma-10 out here?" 


"Yeah." The memeticist sounded relieved. "Just... stay there, 
Bailey." 


Tristan looked out of the windows of the car, shutting the door and 
placing Malcolm upright in the seat. Out of the windshield, towards 
the north, he could see a red siren light shining through the rain. He 
thought it was Site-87, and that an alarm had gone off; but then he 
realized that Site-87 was to the east. 


Eventually, the light stopped blinking, and Tristan was left cold, with 
an unconscious man next to him. 


«Chapter 6| Black Autumn Hub | Chapter 8» 


...But You Can Never Leave 


Cassandra Pike woke up in a hotel room, her head throbbing. She 
sat up and surveyed the room; it had two beds and a pull-out couch, 
all with purple sheets on them. The lighting was a dull shade of 
yellow, and a flat-screen TV was up against the opposite wall. 
Above the TV was a triangular mirror. 


She didn't recognize her surroundings, but she did recognize those 
with her. Dr. Juliette Hobb, a thirty-something well-built woman was 
on the pull-out, and on the other bed was Frederick Engelhardt, a 
man in his sixties with grey hair, wrinkles indicating his face spent 
most of its time scowling. 


"Fred?" Cassandra hissed. "Jules? You there?" 


"Mnnn..." Hobb was the first to rouse, yawning. "Uh. Cass? Where 
are we?" 


"| don't know," she swallowed. "But | don't like it." She rose from her 
bed, and looked at the desk, searching the drawer. Her heart sank 
when she saw the stationery within; an eye enclosed in a purple 
triangle, with the words 'The Pyramid Inn’ printed beneath it. "Oh, 
fuck." 


Fred jerked awake. "W-where are we? What the hell?" 


"We're in the Pyramid Inn." Cassandra replied. "Anyone have a 
watch?" 


Fred pulled out his iPhone, and frowned. "1/1/1969. That..." he 
rubbed his face. "That's impossible. iPhones can't be set to that 
date." 


"We got whammied," Jules swallowed. "Bad." 


"Let's recap," Fred looked at Juliette. "You dragged us out to 


Equinox Ridge..." 


October 24th 


Wisconsin was not known for its mountainous features, but every 
now and then, a cliff did stick out of the ground. Before this particular 
cliff was a rotted sign proclaiming "EQUINOX CAMPGROUNDS", 
which Juliette Hobb nearly ran over in her haste to make her way 
past it. 


"Christ, Jules!" Pike rubbed at her shoulder, where the seatbelt was 
scraping at her skin. "What's gotten into you?" 


"The name, Isimeria?” Juliette threw her phone back to Cassandra. 
"It's Greek. | recognize it from Krys's birthday party last month. It 
means Equinox." 


"Okay, so?" Engelhardt frowned. "It's an odd name, but it can't have 
much association with..." He looked out the window at the cliff as 
they passed it. "That eyesore." 


"It's Sloth's Pit, Fred." Juliette turned onto the road that led up the 
ridge. "There is no such thing as a coincidence within city limits." 


"This thing's been around for literally eons! It didn't pop out of the 
ground during the sixties!" Engelhardt protested. 


"I... gotta agree with Fred here," Cassandra frowned. "It's a huge 
stretch, Jules." 


"Just... humor me on this, okay?" She turned up the road, and soon, 
they were at the summit of the cliff. She killed the engine, and 
alighted from the vehicle, looking towards the horizon. 


Cassandra looked with her, towards the ever-present twilight, 
frowning. "We're up here. What did you think was going to happen?" 


"Just... look for something? Some kind of clue?" Juliette sighed. "I... 
one of us nearly got their leg torn off. We need to find something 
that might help." 


Fred put a hand over his eyes to shield from a non-existent glare 
and looked into the distance, towards the north. He frowned, and 
tapped Cassandra on the shoulder. "What do you see over there?" 


"Huh?" Pike squinted in the distance, barely making out the specter 
of a Ferris wheel, about two miles off. "What the hell?" 


"Is that the fairgrounds?" Juliette took out her phone and started 
zooming in as far as her camera would go. "Dammit. Resolution on 
this sucks. But..." she took a picture and presented it to them. "What 
do you see there?" 


"Looks like something criss-crossing the wheel's spokes." 
Engelhardt adjusted his glasses. "Ivy, maybe? It looks organic." 


"Hold on." Cassandra got low on the ground and started digging a 
pit in it, scoring the earth around it with various arcane symbols. 


"What are you doing?" Engelhardt titled his head. 


"I've attended a few cross-disciplinary seminars Sinclair has held. 
She taught us how to scry, so maybe | can get a better view of it 
from here?" 


"Not everyone can do magic, Cass," Jules pointed out. "And... well, 
no offense, but don't you need some... willpower for that?" 


The parazoologist looked at her colleague, brow quirking. "Sorry, 
what are you saying?" 


"I'm just..." Jules coughed. "You're not exactly the most sound out of 
all of us." 


"What she's trying to say is that you scored the lowest out of the 
entire department on every mental anomaly resistance test." 


"FRED! Jules gaped. 


"| get it, | get it." Cassie sighed. "I'm not the most... well. But I've 
been learning. And coping. And getting therapy." She knelt by the 
circle, and focused, breathing some Will into the circle. It wasn't 
much, but it was enough. 


The water in the pool shimmered, and brought forth an image of the 
fairgrounds; it flickered, as if viewed through a satellite TV 
connection in a storm. Still, she could make out a large, orange 
mass among the fairgrounds. 


"Holy shit, you got it to work." Juliette knelt by her, and looked in the 
pool. "What's that orange thing?" 


"It looks like a pum—" Cassie was interrupted by a hand reaching 
forth from the scrying pool and grabbing Juliette by the neck, 
strangling her and trying to drag her in. Juliette Hobb screamed.