Sir Clef entered the man’s cell; he had once been a trusted 
companion...before his burning. Now, he was one of the few 
imprisoned by Schips willingly, for his ability for harm was far too 
great. He sat in his cell, the walls flaking with ashes. 


“Sir Gerald,” said Clef, looking at his old companion. “Il needest thee, 
for by your power alone may | check the Giant Hagrid.” 


Gerald looked at him. “Il am no longer a Sir,” he said, mournfully and 
sadly. “l am only Gerald. But | will help thee, Clef.” 


Clef looked at him. “You'll always be a sir to me,” he said, bowing 
his head slightly to his cursed companion. 


“We go to recapture the chosen one?” he asked. 
“Yes,” said Clef. “My master commands it.” 


“Then so be it,” said Gerald, his words sounding very familiar to the 
ending of the last section. 


Clef stood on the beach at the Cliffs of Dover, staring through a 
magic portal. Suddenly, Harry, Dumbledore, and Hagrid strode 
through it, resplendent in their magical force and power. Harry 
looked at Clef imperiously, as everyone squared off against each 
other. It was so totally awesome looking. 


Then, they started fighting, each of them shouting “SO BE IT!” 
Threfor Threed stood across from Albus Dumbledore, both of the 
ancient powers hurling magics at each other. 


“STUPIFY!” shouted Threfor Threed, directing his demonic forces 
through his wand—made of demon horn and nightmare hair—at 
Dumbledore. 


“NEGATORY!” responded Dumbledore, deflecting the magic. “Why, 
Threfor Threed? You were among the best of us? Why did you turn 
evil?” 


“Because!” he shouted. “I loved you Albus! | loved you, and you only 
gave me spite in return!” 


“For the last time!” Dumbledore said. “I’m totally not gay!” 

“LIAR!” shouted Threfor Threed, hurling deadly power. 

“So be it,” said Dumbledore. 

Gerald looked up at the giant, a grim smile frowning across his face. 
“Please, Giant. | do not wish to do this!” 


Hagrid looked at him. “I canna let ya take the girl,” shouted Hagrid. 


“She’s ‘appy ‘ere wit’ us!” 


“Then you leave me no choice,” said Gerald, activating his hidden 
power. He suddenly burst into flames, for when Gerald had been 
burned years ago, he was infected with lycanthropy, turning him into 
a Werepyre. 


His arms extended, his body ablaze as he screamed. 
“So be it,” said Hagrid. 
Clef drew his black blade, pacing around Harry. The other two were 


checked by his companions, and he had to defeat Harry quickly. 
Clef charged the young man, swinging wildly. 


“No!” shouted Harry. “You cannot have her!” 
“But without her,” said Clef, “the apocalypse will happen!” 


“No!” said Harry, his wand reshaping into a blade of crimson and 
gold, the colors of his house. “I will not allow you to take her. 


“So be it,” said Clef. 
Harry and Clef fought for a while, their blades bouncing off each 


other, sparks of power flying between them. Suddenly, Harry saw an 
opening, diving in to cut Clef’s leg. 


“Ow!” said Clef, dropping his blade and falling. “Master! I’ve failed!” 


Harry raised his sword to strike the killing blow, but it was stopped— 
by along, silver blade. 


Harry looked over, his jaw quivering slightly. “D..d...Darkblade!” he 
shouted, jumping back. 


Darkblade stepped over Clef to guard him. “You tried, my servant,” 
he said, protecting Clef. “I will stop him now!” 


Then, Harry and Darkblade started fighting, their blades clashing. 


Darkblade was holding back, for he knew Harry only had his sister’s 
best intentions at heart, but he still defended himself. He blocked 
and parried, then, somehow, Harry’s blade sneaked by Darkblade’s, 
cutting his shoulder deeply. 


Darkblade merely looked at Harry, a single drop of blood falling to 
the earth from his arm cut, then glared, swinging his sword sharply 
and slicing the sword of Harry into two pieces. Harry looked at his 
sword, then to Darkblade. 


“| won't stop!” said Harry. “She’s my sister, and | must protect her!” 


“No,” said Darkblade. “She has a greater purpose, one Jack Bright 
kept her from. We must take her to America to protect her. You can 
come if you want.” 


Harry looked at Darkblade, knowing he was right. “So be it,” he said. 


The twisted, malformed creature appeared with a snap, echong 
through the heavily exploded landscape. With glee, he slunk over 
the shrapnel and holes, inhaling the scent of death and blood. The 
clinging flavor of rotting viscera clung to him, and a single string of 
saliva slipped from the crack of his mouth. 


He made his way to the middle of the battlefield, grinning wickedly, 
looking for his prize. He saw it there, glistening on the ground: the 
single drop of Darkblade’s blood. 


He opened up a pouch and poured a small pile of ashes on the 
blood, cackling as they smoked, then burned, then suddenly 
reformed into a tall, imperious man—a silver and ruby necklace 
around his neck. 


“Ahh,” said War-Lich Bright. “After all these years, I’m free! It’s time 
to conquer earth!” 


He looked down at his minion, who was supposed to be Yoric, if you 
didn’t guess that yet. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” he 
said, smirking as power ran through his body, his own forces 
amplified by the blood of the most powerful servant of good. 


And across the world, Darkblade suddenly turned, looking to the 
east, knowing that the apocalypse he was meant to stop had begun. 


“So be it,” he said, a single tear sliding down his impassive cheek. 


To Clean out a Night... 


... | fell in love. 

| heard about it 
(bit-by-bit, bit-by-bit) 
| heard about it 
(bit-by-bit, bit-by-bit) 
| heard about it, no 
(bit-by-bit, bit-by-bit) 


Bon Iver - "6661", 22, A Million 


This is my third exorcism. Charlie's hands are on the dials of the kit, 
steady, rippled with veins, unflinching. I'm opposite him across the 
table, tracing out the stencilled dotted lines on the baking paper, 
trying to concentrate - or not to concentrate - on the thing in the jar. 


The humming in the air is not from the apparatus but from my lips as 
| vocalise my control mantra. The content is less important than the 
intonation; syllables must be low, soft and clear; the sigil lines can 
only modulate the thing in the jar so much without the conscious 
direction of human will, best applied through extension of human 
voice. 


"Ur... aher ... evan," | chant, "Olibi ... thy name..." 


A wincing. The thing in the jar convulses, luminscent coral green 
tissue-paper flicker-flap unveiling, and a spark flies from the baking 
paper. "Fuck!", | go, and | try to refocus, to bring the pattern in - but 
then the mantra is already broken and my hands go on without me 
and the circuit is complete before it is complete - in a flash the thing 
in the jar dissolves prematurely into a million field lines, rippling and 
exploding into the leads like a spectral miscarriage. Immediately 
Charlie wrenches the dials down and yanks the wires from the jar. 
The energy in the jar dissipates into the room, and | smell the all- 


too-familiar tang of botched discharge - burnt metal and ash and 
lemons. 


Charlie hands me a fresh sheet of baking paper. "Again." 


The AAFM is an old model, salvaged from one of the earlier failed 
prototypes, its only saving grace being that it fits on the kitchen 
table. The full ones are the size of small fridges, suspended around 
head level from thin wires, self-discharging and self-cycling. For the 
training kit, each botched exorcism necessitates a manual discharge 
instead. So while | replace the sheet and wipe away the ash, Charlie 
busies himself with sparking the thaum capacitors, disconnecting 
them from their cigar-shaped plugs and tapping each sharply by the 
rear on the edge of the table. Each makes a sound like a dropped 
penny as the invisible energies escape (invisible to the naked eye, 
but with the goggles, there would have been the distinctively clear 
silver-aurora puff of neutral thaumic discharge). He lays them out in 
a row on the table when he's done, and one by one fits them back 
into the kit, click-click-click. Then he dabs the conductive gel onto 
the pads and sticks them back onto the jar, three on each side, with 
an extra squeeze to make sure the suction holds. 


Re-rendering the ghost is easier. Charlie flips two switches on the 
side of the kit corresponding to the training presets and the jar glows 
back to life from the pads inwards, shadow-flicker thaumic energies 
mimicking standard-issue Type-A ectoplasm to a tee. If | touched 
the jar now, | would feel an almost imperceptible coolness; they say 
your breath formed smoke in the heart of the house. Charlie places 
his hands back on the dials, tweaking the amperages and voltages 
and casperages ever so slightly, and the thing in the jar shifts into 
focus, a floating, swirling, neon-green hankerchief. Charlie arches 
his thick brows at me to continue. 


| take a deep breath, and put pencil to paper again. Like before, | 
follow the trace with my mind, taking in the edges of the energies, 
sensing the ineffable butterfly-stain pattern through my fingertips 
and breath and spine, visualising the thing in the jar in its full 
Technicolour ARI glory - but at the same time, not really visualising, 
in Same way one sees dim stars in the night sky, or the tip of one's 
nose. This time, something catches that hadn't before, and in the 
sweet sweet moment of clarity that follows (Charlie calls this "the 


flow") the sigil connects and connects at the same time doubling 
over loop-the-loop and shazam! The thing in the jar disappears into 
a perfect silent harmony under the destructive interference of the 
traced-and-tailored sigil. Success! 


Unfortunately, | seem to have lost the ability to move. The flow is 
done, spent through, but it sticks to me like seaweed, holding my 
nerves in place and | find myself frozen in a brief awkward catatonia. 
Help, | mouth. Charlie grins and carefully removes the pencil from 
my trembling hand. Thirty seconds later when I'm composed, he 
pats me on the cheek and hands me the pencil again. 


"Good job, Mol," he drawls. "Now, one more time." 


We share a drink on the rooftop. The moor stretches before us; the 
only landmarks here are the hills, and the hut, and the house. The 
view of the last has been blocked off behind us by a blue striped tarp 
draped between two of the comms antenna. Duct-taped onto the 
tarp is a laminated notice, handwritten in green marker: RULE #1. 


Below that: DO NOT SPEAK OF THE JOB. 


And then, in smaller caps: THE JOB IS DONE. SILENCE IS 
GOLDEN. 


Kenny Rogers wafts from the radio, his voice layered with static. 
We've got tonight, he coughs. Don't think about tomorrow. It's okay, 
because none of us are. 


I'm cross-legged on the floor with a shandygaff. The chairs are for 
the vets. Jo prefers to stand, gazing at the sunset; black hair 
cropped close, a face worn so smooth you can barely tell she's forty- 
five, she surveys the horizon through her horn-rimmed spectacles 
with bottle in hand. This is her land, her eminent domain: no one 
disturbs Mother Jo on the rooftop. Downstairs, she is all smiles and 
band-aids and apologetic chop-chop efficiency; up here, she is 
queen. 


Jorge is Colombian, and isn't drinking either. He only touches the 


proper stuff, the fire-water which lies snug in a smuggled crate at the 
bottom of the pantry. Anything less would be a travesty. Jorge's 
alcoholic habits are the stuff of myth, held with all the power of a 
haughty demigod - that is, sparingly, but in magnificent quantities. 
I've seen him down a quart of fire-water in a night. We kept him 
away from the sigils the next day, in case the sparks set his skin 
alight. That same man now lounges easily on the deckchair beside 
me with pink lemonade in his cup holder and my knitting needles in 
his hands, piecing together something with orange leaves around 
the edges. | think he fancied me, once, when | first arrived -though 
Jo and the rigours of the job soon took care of that. 


There's Rao, pensive in his armchair, dust already gathering on his 
beard. He looks to be a hundred, turning a thousand, but Jo swears 
he's only fifty-three. Woman's intuition, she claims. Rao drinks the 
same as Jo, but in sips so sparing and small you could hardly tell 
he's moved at all. He stares into the sun, fingers tightly gripped on 
the edge of his chair, and his mind is a million light years away. Jo 
tells me that behind the vacant gaze is implacability itself, that the 
man has the mind of a mountain, and | do not disbelieve her when | 
look into his eyes. Hell hath no fury to scathe him. Recreation fazes 
him not. But he's part of the family, and family means tradition, so 
he's here with us too - if only in form, and not in soul. 


And old Charlie Carrington, the legend, slouched like a lion in the 
silver chair behind us, the mage from Mississippi, cigarillo clamped 
hard between his teeth billowing smoke and dreams and more, the 
blue tarp framing his great shaggy gray mane from behind, a 
tapestry fit for a vagabond king. He says he was born with Rao in 
same batch as the ECRG's first mystics, made a whole man anew 
from sigils and psychotropics in the bowels of Site-20. At least 
there's much more of him left than Rao, and he's a better teacher to 
boot. In his head is every cantrip, pattern, chant and spell known to 
the Foundation's repertoire, and a few more beyond that. Most are 
of his own invention. Everything we know, we learnt from him. And - 
thanks be to God - he's here with us, still. 


The new guy, however, isn't here. Jorge figures that he's probably 
writing and rewriting his notes in his room. Jo simply rolls her eyes. | 
think he's new, and a stickler - and leagues above our pay grade 


too, going by the fresh new boots and hiking gear Jo found him in 
when he arrived, scowling at the mud on his knees. | think he'll settle 
in, given the time. 


Charlie reckons he's not here because Foundation protocol forbids 
him from drinking on the job. Technically, it forbids us too. But first 
day here, first thing you learn: you're one of us now. You're ECRG - 
you're the kooks and the cranks and the madmen, the twitchy 
witches with the toys. And out here, on the moor, with the nearest 
site a whole half-day and a world away by battered white National 
Parks van, you start to appreciate any company, any company at all, 
because the kooks and the cranks and the madmen are what you 
got. So it's the hut, now, not Provisional Site-2696, and, more 
importantly, it's also home. So balls to operational protocol, and it's 
drinks on the roof till sundown. 


Training again. The image is the key, Charlie says. Creating the 
image is one thing but the picturing of it - the holding of it in your 
head - that's where the magic happens. Magic, in its purest form, 
lines of field visible to Kirlian transistor coils and third eyes alike. 
That's all it boils down to: lines of field. In most cases, the baseline 
human has no need for the techniques of meditation and 
visualisation and channeling. But Charlie and Jo and Rao and Jorge 
and | do not work with most cases. Our case is the house on the 
moor - the house numbered SCP-2696 - our case is holding the lady 
within, and the lady within must never be let to leave. 


My image is the screen. One year ago to the day, Charlie showed 
me my first aetheric resonance image in a dusty theatre at the 
bottom of Site-88. It was salvaged technology, piano-sized beige 
plastic carapace and multicoloured wires and dials, and it had been 
set up with a jet-black dish blossoming from the top, pointing straight 
above.