Another beer found its way from fridge to hand, and thenceforth from 
hand to floor. He would clean up another time; today he had more 
important things to worry about. Calvin Paris, for one. The man was 
dangerous. He wasn't like the others - he didn't submit, didn't tow 
the line, wasn't so scared that he literally crumbled in his presence, 
like the others. And his daughter worked for the CIA. He took his 
cellphone from his pocket, pressed the power button, and navigated 
to Contacts. 


Contact: Calvin, Paris. 

Sexual Orientation: Homosexual. 

Offspring: Carol Paris (field agent for secret organisation). Susan 
Paris, died aged seven weeks. Fay Paris, artist, recreational drugs 
taker 

Medical Conditions: None 


And so on. He was slightly irritated with himself for having gone so 
far; but the phone had given him secrets, and they begged to be 
taken advantage of. They sat latent in his phone’s memory, waiting 
to be used against his common man. Sitting patiently, wanting to be 
used. 


And used them he had. In the early days, when he was still figuring 
it out, the phone had divulged to him all his friends’ indiscretions and 
paraphilias, their hidden faces and their forbidden desires. Jonny 
Branch, well-known heavy drinker and secret rapist. Jennifer Wade, 
stereotypical whore with a heart of gold and kleptomaniac. Vance 
Fielding, plumber and white supremacist responsible for the 
firebombing of sixteen black-owned properties. The list went on. At 
first, he thought it was a joke. But then he casually mentioned the 
arson attacks to Fielding, and his face became a shade of white that 
even the most hardened Aryan racist would have approved of. 


The plumber had mumbled something about keeping quiet, got up 
from the table, and come back two minutes later with one thousand 
dollars, give or take. 


“This is a gesture of my friendship,” he said. 


Harold Maine accepted the gesture calmly, without comment, but his 
mind was racing. He had always disliked the man, his ugly bug eyes 
and gangly crane fly limbs, but suddenly he had reason to warm to 
him. What's yours is mine, he thought. 


And to how many others would that apply? Could he do this with al/ 
his contacts? Jesus Christ, he was sitting on a fucking fortune just 
waiting to be made from the misfortune of his friends. 


He was that misfortune, incarnate. And yet... Calvin Paris. He 
wasn't one of Maine's friends or acquaintances, they weren't even 
aware of each other's existence a few weeks earlier. But one 
contact had led to another, and another, and another, until his 
network had spread beyond the initial morass of losers and lowlifes 
that he used to call his own. Nowadays, he knew people in high 
places (at least relatively), and their secrets hung in front of him like 
autumn fruit. It made for easy blackmailing and easy money. 


Calvin Paris was meant to be Maine's meal ticket should everything 
else go awry. That was a mistake. He had friends of his own. 
Friends Harold Maine didn't know and couldn't control. And his 
daughter, of course. Who the fuck works for a secret organisation? 
He would have to start being careful. He had the uncomfortable 
feeling that life was becoming less simple by the day. 


There was a knock on the door as if to prove his point. Vexed, he 
plucked the little spider from its latest web and crushed its legs. It fell 
to the floor, tried to wriggle miserably, and died. “Goodbye, Vance," 
he said. He rubbed his fingers to get rid of the bits. Then looking 
back at the web, beautiful and vacant, “Yet again, what's yours is 
mine." 


He took the scrappy photo of Marge Reynaud from the table and let 
it drop onto the spider's tiny corpse. He didn't need it any more. He'd 
propped it up with an old beer can, upright against the whisky 
tumbler he'd used to imprison the helpless arachnid, so it could see 
her face in its rest periods when Maine's attention was elsewhere. 
And he would come back - no matter what day of the week - and 
find the spider pressed flat against the glass, as close as it could get 


to the picture. And in that way, Harold Maine knew that Vance, lover 
and soulmate of Marge Reynaud, was still there, wishing and 
wanting and despairing as he looked at her likeness through all eight 
eyes. 


Another knock. He listened intently. Not aggressive, not loud. 
Apologetic, almost. The knock of a scared man, hoping not to 
disturb an angry god. He walked over to the door, looked into the 
hallway through the peephole, and grunted. He unlatched the chain, 
unsecured the three locks, and with a sigh greeted the unbidden 
visitor through the iron grille. 


“What the fuck do you want?” He asked. 
The visitor hesitated. 
“You're three days early. What the fuck do you want?” 


The man at the door steeled himself, and drew closer. “I have CB 
infiltration... indistinction... information," he said. "The woman and 
CV the CV crank. Crab. There woman and the crab..." 


Harold Maine unlocked the metal grille. It swung open quietly. The 
corridor smelt of damp. 


“You'd better come in,” he said. 


With a curious sense of dread, guilt and relief, Geoff Mansani 
followed Harold Maine into his apartment, and the grille and the door 
closed silently behind him. 


Next 


Wednesday - 1 


lt started January 5th, about nine in the morning. 


Mrs. Foster was explaining factoring polynomials to us, and | was 
exhausted. | wanted desperately to go back to bed and sleep. Too 
soon after Christmas break to start thinking about math. | glanced 
out our window—the fog was still kind of like trying to look through a 
glass of milk. The sun hadn't burned it all away yet. 


Just before | was going to look away, the windows exploded ina 
spray of glass. | heard Mrs. Foster scream, but it was cut short. She 
had fallen. One by one my classmates did the same. | felt my 
sleepiness intensify a hundredfold, and | fought it, standing up, but it 
was too much. The air shimmered, and | didn't dream. 


As far as | know, | was the second to wake. The first to wake was 
the quiet boy, Cyrus, who sat behind me in the last row. | stood up 
and looked over the others. He was by the broken window, clearing 
away the glass, and for a moment | saw his palms, cut up by his 
efforts. 


| stepped over still-sleeping classmates. "What happened?" 
He shrugged. 

"Here," he said. "Look outside." 

| did. 

"| don't see anything." 

"| don't either." 

He picked up a large shard of glass from the ground. 


"Watch." 


He dropped it outside. | watched the glass shard fall. It kept going, 
and going, turning into a pinprick before vanishing altogether. 


The other kids began to stir. Mrs. Foster was the last to rise. 


"Mrs. F," | said. | stopped there, not knowing what to say. She 
stepped gingerly over the glass and looked out the window. She 
didn't speak—just looked out there, her grip tightening on the jagged 
glass still stuck to the window frame. 


| left the classroom, feeling hollow and as though | had blinders at 
the sides of my eyes, at the same time, lucid, every sound and 
breath and footstep amplified, every fiber of the carpet and every 
scratch on the walls magnified. | passed by them, and ran down the 
hall and the stairs and the other hall until | reached the front doors of 
the school. They seemed enormous, and | so small, | pulled them 
open; my hands seemed so far away from me. 


Below me was a sheer drop, like a cliff. The bottom of it was lost in 
the dense fog. 


"| think I'm dreaming," | said. 
"| think I'm dreaming," | said again. 


"| think I'm DREAMING," | said, shouting the last word. My voice 
dissolved into the air, having nothing to bounce off of, and | didn't 
wake up. 


| returned to my classroom. Cyrus was sitting by the door reading 
his Bible. The others were sort of mixed in their reactions—some 
girls cried in the corner, some boys simply looked numb, some other 
boys dropped things from the window to watch them fall. 


"Find anything?" said Cyrus. 
"Come look," | said, gesturing down the hall. 


By now a few kids had begun to cluster around the door. | elbowed 
my way to the front. 


"I'm having a dream," said a girl next to me matter-of-factly. "Watch, 


I'm going to fly.” 


She leaped from the door, ignoring the screams coming from her 
classmates. That was the last | saw of her. 


Continued in part two >> 


Wednesday - 2 


<< Back to part one 


| hid in the boiler room when the panic started. | would sleep a little, 
and wake up whenever someone tried opening the door. I'd hold it 
shut until they gave up, and | would go back to sleep, and it would 
start again. | would occasionally leave to take a piss but | don't know 
how long | was in there. | only left because | really wanted some 
food. 


The other half of the school was gone, cut cleanly as if a giant 
kitchen knife had chopped it off. With it went half the girls’ locker 
room, one of the science labs, the back wall of the gym, most of the 
sophomores and seniors, and a sizable chunk of the library. | only 
noticed because | checked the library for anyone | knew, and a lot of 
it had just gone. It was empty save for one of the library assistants, 
curled up next to a bookshelf. | left. 


Passing through the senior hall on the way to the cafeteria was the 
longest run I'd ever taken. It didn't start as a run, just a quick walk. | 
stopped when | heard screaming coming from one of the 
classrooms. | peeked inside—it one of the senior English classes, 
and Miss Ladia was trying to control them. | watched a group of 
seniors advance on her as one mass, and | watched them violate 
her, | watched as they took turns and | watched redness pool around 
them all. They noticed me next. 


| ran, | heard them behind me, and | swear | ran for hours, tearing 
through air as thick as water, filled with their jeers and grasps at my 
arms, only wrenched out of their grip by the grace of adrenaline. 
Every time | blinked the cafeteria door seemed farther away and the 
mob nipping at my back seemed closer, and | screamed at them, 
"no, no"; they didn't understand me, they were no longer human. | 
crashed through the door and slammed it shut. | was hardly a match 
for one senior, let alone two or three or ten, they forced the door 
open and knocked me to the floor. Indistinct faces filled my vision 


here. 
<End Log> 


Footnotes 

1. Australian slang for pickup or utility vehicle. 

2. Referring to SCP-992's anomalous properties 

3. Dr. Boyd had been using a pseudonym for this interview, and it is 
unknown how SCP-992 obtained his name. 


« SCP-991 | SCP-992 | SCP-993 » 


until something snagged my wrist. 


"Come on," said my captor, practically dragging me into the kitchen. 
| screamed at him too before realizing who it was. 


When I'd caught my breath, | looked over the place. | recognized the 
cafeteria workers, all lying on the ground with great red wounds in 
their stomachs, and | recognized Cyrus, locking the door. 


"What's going on?" | said, my gaze fixed on the kitchen workers. 
"Did you...did you do that?" 


He sat down on the floor, massaging his forehead. "No. | just took 
the keys —" he nodded in the direction of the door, indicating the 
mob, "—before they could. They'd try to take the food." 


"Food," | murmured. "Is there any left?" 
"Yeah, take what you want..." 


| stepped over the kitchen workers towards the big industrial fridge. 
There wasn't much variety in school food, and | suspect it will be 
that way until the end of humanity, but | was so thirsty I'd take 
anything drinkable | could get. 


"So," said Cyrus, raising his voice a bit over the ruckus in the 
cafeteria, "where were you hiding? It's been almost three days since 
| last saw you." 


"The boiler room," | said after settling down with a carton of 
chocolate milk, one of those packaged burritos, and a cookie. "It's 
really cramped and kind of musty but no one ever looked in there..." 


We were silent for a while. Cyrus looked absolutely exhausted, like 
he'd been up all night guarding our only food. He had a switchblade 
in one hand and a couple keys in the other. 


"Where are all the teachers?" | said. 


He shrugged. "Some of them are dead. Some of them just 
disappeared." He paused, looking at the ceiling in thought. "I did see 
one of them jump. That one freshman science teacher." 


| knew immediately who "that one" was—the one who kept a boa 
constrictor in a tank in his classroom. While Mr. Darrick was beyond 
help, | wondered if the snake was okay. 


"| think | watched Miss Ladia die," | said. My voice turned hollow as | 
realized what had happened. "Those guys that were chasing me, 
they did it. | should have done something." 


More silence. | guess it was the closest thing to a funeral the dead 
would have. 


"You're called Wednesday, right?" 


| nodded, and was about to ask if I'd gotten his name right when 
something slammed hard into the kitchen door. 


Continued in part three >> 


Wednesday - 3 


<< Back to part two 


| almost screamed at the sudden thud. Cyrus threw open the little 
kitchen window and pushed me into the cupboard below the sink. 


"What are you d—?" 


"Shh," he said, shutting the cupboard. | heard some shuffling and 
another cupboard closing. 


It was a long while before the thudding gave way to a horrible 
splintering sound like several femurs snapping, followed shortly by 
shouting and innumerable footsteps. | could see the feet of the 
monsters through the tiny gap between the cupboard's doors, and | 
held my breath, afraid it would give away my hiding place. 


| heard them tear open the pantry, talking amongst themselves. 


"That girl must have gutted these guys," said one of them 
disbelievingly, probably referring to the dead kitchen workers. He 
snickered. "Bitch." 


"And then jumped, maybe," said another. The fridge door opened, 
the pantry, one of them turned on the sink presumably for a drink of 
water. Most of them left—as far as | could tell, there were a few 
lingering, picking through the room for whatever food they could find. 


The first cupboard opened, then the second. Almost the third, where 
Cyrus hid. | rattled the doors of my cupboard gently. Whoever it was 
out there paused and was still, no rustling of clothes against skin or 
the thump of sneakers on tiles. They slowly opened the cupboard 
right next to mine, and presumably seeing nothing, straightened up 
and left. 


Cyrus opened my cupboard. "They broke the door," he whispered. 


"Is that what that noise was?" 
"Yeah. Come on. It's not safe here." 


Was it really safe anywhere? | wanted to say. We stepped over the 
remains of the door. The handle looked as if it had been bashed with 
something, and someone must have elected to use something 
heavy to just break the whole door open like balsa wood. | made a 
mental note to stay away from anyone carrying heavy things in case 
they would break me like balsa wood too. 


The cafeteria was empty, and the hallway was no different, but we 
took a detour towards the lab on the second floor just in case. 


Almost half of the lab had been torn away during the sleep. To my 
relief, the biology class's pet snake, Rob, was intact and sleeping in 
his tank, though it was a little too close to the edge for comfort. | 
pulled him out and draped him around my shoulders. He squirmed a 
little, but soon settled down and went back to sleep, his head 
somewhere in the vicinity of my jacket's hood. | observed the fog at 
the edge of the lab—I assumed the nothingness looped. | felt like if | 
jumped, I'd fall forever, occasionally seeing the school fly past me 
while tumbling through the air at terminal velocity, the bottom of the 
cliffs sort of dissolving into the fog at some point before the school 
appeared again. That was stupid, of course, we were still on Earth. If 
we weren't, we wouldn't be able to breathe.