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They played the monster mashup.

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2021

January 2
Leipzig: Free State of Saxony, Federal Republic of Germany

"They're coming, Philip."
"I know," he panted.
Amelia didn't ask him what he knew, probably because she knew. She knew his insecurities well enough to guess what Doug was saying, and of course she also knew that two very angry terrorists had likely just debarked their helicopter and given chase. This was no time for rhetorical questions.
She also might not have asked because they were both entirely occupied with running very fast, their tire treaded boots barely gripping the snow-slick tarmac. She might further not have asked because her attention was fixed on her phone.
"What… you got…?" he wheezed. He was older than she was.
"Maps." She kept it terse; she was obviously also out of breath. She was younger than him, but they were both pretty sedentary.
"How? No… SIM card."
"Don't need. Maps onboard. Storage." They reached the alleyway she'd come down in; her parachute was hanging from a fire escape.
"Where are we?" If she was looking at a map, she might know.
She pointed at a rusty dumpster beneath the fire escape. It was labelled "MULLMEISTER: Stadt Leipzig."
"Dutch?" he ventured.
"Racist," Doug purred.
They rounded another corner, and Amelia stopped to lean against a brick wall. "German." The breath required to form the word practically deflated her, and she bent over double. She handed him the phone. "Leipzig."
The on-board map showed a Foundation safehouse in the middle of what looked to be an industrial park. "Are we anywhere near this?" He actually slapped his forehead; his hand came away wet. "Don't know. No SIM card. No signal."
"Don't need," she said again. She pointed at the opposite wall. Phil saw it immediately, amidst the graffiti in big balloon letters and the accumulated grime:

It might as well have been written in English. The field codes had been drilled into him over two decades ago, when his occasionally leaving the confines of Site-43 had still been technically plausible.
Safe place for two. North.
That was oddly specific, but he couldn't complain. "Huh," he said instead. It also kind of reminded him of Doug's face, but then again he had chronic frequency illusion.
"Got lucky," she agreed.
"She got lucky without you, Philip."
He whistled. "I'll say. Do… you think they knew? That we were this close?"
She shook her head, her beige hair hanging around her face like an old mop. "Secret entrance. Emergency only."
He took her by the shoulder, once again noticing the damage to her jumpsuit and the scrapes and scratches beneath. Probably hit the dumpster when she cut off the chute. He tried not to focus on it. "Secret entrance to what?"
She turned her head and grinned. "Site-54."
He tried to grin back, but the memory of the helicopter and what he had don't think about it you don't have time. He forced something like a smile, and she saw right through it; the look on her face was probably the look he'd had on his when he considered her superficial injuries.
She straightened. "Please tell me they didn't get your password."
He flicked the glass of his watch with one fingernail. Doug didn't react. "Nope."
She planted a kiss on his cheek, and they both started running again.
North.

Site-54: Leipzig, Free State of Saxony, Federal Republic of Germany

Deep below the streets of Leipzig, a great many things were about to go wrong. One of them had to be first.
The security alarm should have gone off before the tendrils of quivering scar tissue began creeping 'round the edges of the door, probing the air in the corridor beyond, a tongue in search of something to taste… but the security alarm had already been subsumed by the containment-chamber sized mound of throbbing gore and gristle, so it didn't. The door shouldn't have opened when the thing forced its bulk against it, but its safety lock had been released remotely, so it did.
The containment breach should have lasted far longer, and had far more disastrous results, but there was an autocannon mounted on the corridor ceiling. First it pelted the creature with a single shot, for range-finding; the bullet stretched a line of scabrous skin to near the breaking point, its momentum finally arrested by sheer organic elasticity.
The next several hundred rounds dragged the hateful flesh down the corridor and against the far wall, where it became a living geyser of blood and bile — then sloughed to the floor, emitting a low-pitched burble like a flattened whoopee cushion.
It was quite dead.

In retrospect, stopping to catch their breaths and some exposition had been a mistake. As they broke out of the warren of fences, brick walls and concrete and into the considerably more open industrial park, Phil felt pretty good about their escape; as they peeled hand-in-hand across another cover-free parking lot, however, and he heard the tinny reverberations of a fallen garbage can behind them, he felt that death was imminent.
"Don't turn around," Doug suggested. If he'd had a scrap of breath left in him, Phil would've spent his last moments on Earth belting out "Der Kommissar" in response.
Maybe they wouldn't shoot. Maybe their need for revenge would be outweighed by their need for what he was carrying in his head. Maybe…
There was a scream. Phil put his watch to his face; Doug was gone. Phil turned around; the helicopter pilot was standing in the exit to the alley, clawing at his eyes. His gun was on the ground. The agent with the chiselled jaw had stopped, for the moment, to help him.
"You did that." Phil jumped in the midst of his run, a guilty little hop; Doug was back on the watch, his scar-eyes fluting with what could have been pleasure. "That was you."
"There," Amelia gasped, and she put on the afterburners. Phil searched frantically for whatever the gasp could be referencing, spotting only a tumbledown self-storage facility and a decrepit radio tower. She was headed for the former, so quickly that he knew if she stopped he'd slingshot past her and pull them both down to the tarmac.
They shot beneath the facility's sign. There was something… something about…
Storage Concepts PLC. That couldn't… that had to be a coincidence, didn't it?
For some reason, it made him feel better.
Amelia seemed to know precisely where she was going. They hit the door to the front office together; her arms struck the crossbar, and his struck the glass. The glass cracked, and the door flew open so violently that it popped its spring and slammed into the wall. The glass shattered, but they were long gone. They vaulted across the foyer floor, only skidding to a halt when Amelia grabbed the edge of a doorframe and swung them through with what remained of their momentum.
They both tumbled to the concrete floor, adding a few new bumps and bruises to their growing collection. Phil kicked the open door closed, sat up and rubbed the back of his head.
"Short of breath?" Doug asked. "Chest pain?"
"Fuck off," Phil muttered. He tried to stand up, but couldn't quite make it.
"Is he saying you're out of shape?" Amelia did manage to stand up, but immediately crouched down again.
Phil narrowed his eyes. "Why would he—?"
She waved it off. "No time. Come on."
They helped each other to their feet, then took in the vast warehouse. It was packed wall-to-wall with multifarious modes of transportation: Phil recognized a Volkswagen Beetle, a collection of go-karts, a few small utility vehicles which reminded him of the ones they used back at 43 to navigate the subway for maintenance, and a few deployment trucks in various stages of disrepair. No SCP logos, but his mechanic's sense was tingling. Those were MTF transports.
"Supposed to be at least six guards here," Amelia muttered. She wended her way through the fenders and bumpers, heading for one of two large garage doors with a card reader between them.
"You know a lot about this place." Phil bumped one knee on a golf cart panel, and only barely suppressed a curse.
"She has secrets."
"I know all about 54." She unclipped her security badge and tapped the card reader. A panel popped open, and she started fiddling with it. "Did my tech training here before they sent me to 19. More subsystems at this one Site than in the whole of Armenia. It's like…" She laughed. "It's like an urban virus. It keeps expanding. There's so many anomalous structures in Leipzig, above and below ground, I'm surprised they don't just declare it all one huge Nexus and be done with it." She swung the panel closed again. "For example, the alien abduction warehouse."
He became suddenly conscious of a cold draft. "The what?"
One of the doors slid upward, and the lights beyond flickered on. "I'll explain later. You don't wanna be the guy who finds out the hard way."

It was happening, but not how she'd imagined.
This was quite remarkable. Imogen Tarrow, Director of Site-54, had imagined a wide variety of ways in which the Foundation's most secure and protected facility might become an uncontained disaster, but this death of a thousand cuts wasn't one of them.
It had started with a corpse in a freezer. The freezer had unfrozen, and the flesh fungus which fed upon and lived within it had escaped into a hail of well-placed bullets. Then the bulkheads sealing off the former maintenance tunnels from the trackway to SCP-2856 had inexplicably opened, and their occupant had escaped. Then a new security guard, green as fucking grass, had been lured into a storage facility and after a lengthy conversation with an anomalous loudspeaker had been rapidly dissassembled into a pool of human vomit. Then the squid—
She tried not to think about the squid.
"What's it at now." She couldn't even raise her voice up enough to make it sound like a question.
"Nine different breaches." Her new security chief — so new that she didn't even know his goddamn name — shook his head in disgust. "One after the other. We're handling it, mostly, but I don't know for how long. We only ever planned on mitigation." This was a dirty truth, one which the long-term staff had long since learned not to speak out loud. "Every time one resolves, either because we recontain or neutralize or because the skip escapes completely, the next one starts."
Tarrow massaged her temples. "I don't suppose we could find a way to extend one of these situations indefinitely."
He smiled sympathetically. "Don't think that would help. Anyway, news from 2856. Unidentified insurgents broke in and captured one of the guards; the remainder followed procedure, abandoned the warehouse and sealed it behind them. It's possible the attackers used the guard's pass to get into the tunnels."
Tarrow shrugged. "The lower entrances are still locked tight?"
He shrugged back at her. "Did it personally, with a very secure password… but then, we thought the tunnels were locked tight too." His sympathetic smile turned feral. "Maybe the tunnel monster will get them."
"Maybe." Tarrow sighed. "What else?"
"I've got people heading to 54-C and 54-09 now. We've had repor—"
A muted explosion from one of the observation terminals cut him off. The technician seated in front of it turned to face Tarrow. "Secure transmission for you, sir."
Tarrow nodded, walking over to peer at the screen. "Pipe it in."
A woman's voice came over the intercom. She was out of breath. "Sorry for the short notice, but I guess your long-range comms are out."
The screen showed the cafeteria in Residential Block 54-C. There was a hole in the wall. A man in a labcoat was sitting on the floor, petting god dammit a frankly adorable Atlantic cranch squid. Perhaps a dozen individuals in labcoats or off-duty clothes were scrambling over tables and chairs, glistening patches of iridescent material evident on their exposed skin. They were chasing a woman in gleaming combat armour who was alternating between the most improbable acts of gymnastics that Tarrow had ever witnessed and plugging each researcher with what she very much hoped was a tranquilizer gun. As the last body fell to the floor, the woman kicked off the wall and landed neatly in front of the man with the squid.
He offered it to her, smiling placidly.
She kicked it through the hole in the wall.
"MTF Tav-Triple-Six reporting for duty, Director. Where do you want me?"

There was something wrong with the tunnels.
The fact that they felt more like a cave — "A bear cave," Doug helpfully supplied — was part of it, to be sure. The gently-sloping underpass beyond the door had been climate-controlled, well-lit and clean. It has also promised, according to Amelia, the long way around. They couldn't afford that, so they took the first access corridor they came across. The access corridor had also been climate-controlled, well-lit and clean, a simple whitewashed concrete affair with a jaunty red strip down one side and a soothing blue strip down the other. Maybe twenty minutes later they'd entered into the clammy, filthy, poorly-lit warrens Phil was now thinking of as "the tunnels," retroactively upgrading the previous spaces they'd been trekking through.
But he was a maintenance worker at a Site which had been built before his parents had been born. He was used to tunnels. It was the loss of the climate control which really bothered him, as well as the loss of the lights. It was hot, hellishly hot — they had both unzipped their jumpsuits, and tied the top halves around their waists (Amelia expertly, Phil amateurishly), and they only occasionally encountered any working sources of illumination. They had acquired a pair of long black flashlights from a supply box at the end of the concrete channel; Amelia was shining hers forward, seeking the path to the Site, while Phil was shining his backward, and walking backward, taking some mild comfort from the frequency at which their asses collided.
"Nobody's following us," she assured him for what had to be the dozenth time.
"She doesn't know that," Doug discouraged him.
"What happened to the guards?" Phil had expected their voices to echo through the endless passage, but all sound was oddly flattened except for the steady drip, drip, drip of water and what sounded like a rushing stream not far ahead. "You said there were six guards."
"Breach procedures. If the Site was compromised, they probably took one of those MTF vans." Amelia projected confidence; Phil didn't wish he knew her less well, but it would have been comforting not to be able to tell that this was merely projection. "Getting reinforcements from the nearest outpost."
That didn't comfort him much. "You're saying there might already be insurgents in here." He backed into her again, and felt her shrug.
"Could be."
Phil suddenly wished he was taking the lead. He had half a mind to suggest it.
"Coward," the other half of his mind rasped from his wristwatch. "Letting her walk into danger. Who knows what lies ahead? You certainly don't."
Phil had just opened his mouth to suggest they trade places when the distant roar became not so distant, and he turned around to see that they'd entered into a much larger space. A sewer tunnel, and a big one; it looked like something built for—
"Runoff," Amelia shouted. "Lots of rivers in Leipzig."
The source of the rushing water was obvious now: a vast flood pouring down the surface, tumbling straight down through a metal grating just beside them. Phil caught sight of his own face reflected in the water, and then immediately Doug's full-body reflection superseded it.
"Boo," said Doug.
The sight of his doppelganger's entire emaciated form standing just inches away was fascinating. Doug in the downpour was almost three-dimensional, and Phil felt that he could reach out and touch—
There was a mournful shout from the darkness ahead, and both Phil and Amelia turned to face it. Their flashlights illuminated—
"What?" Phil shouted.
"Oh g—" Amelia began.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" screamed the humanoid monster made of cardboard boxes which stood quaking at the confluence of their wobbling flashlight beams.
"What?" Phil whispered.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" It pointed at them with one boxy appendage — no, it pointed between them, past them, at the falling water — screamed "MONSTER!" and ran away.
Phil turned to stare at Amelia. Her mouth was agape, and he suddenly realized that his was, too.
"Did you hear that, Philip?" Doug asked, shimmering in the shower. "It called you a monster."

ETTRA Command: Area-09, Great Basin Desert, Nevada, United States of America

"Right. Right. RIGHT. Hold. There it is. Right there." Dr. Dan ███████ picked out the target with his laser pointer. "That's what's doing it. Drench that, and tell them not to hit the tower."
Several of the technicians in the still-under-construction operations centre frowned at him. Only the senior on duty, Nate Frewer, spoke up. "If that's a cognito: why are we looking at it, and why isn't it screwing with our heads?"
"Biology," Dan snapped. "You did mark the target, right?"
Frewer nodded. "Yes, I marked the target. They're on their way. Now please explain."
Dan waggled the pointer, circling the strange symbol painted on the side of Site-54's communications building. "That right there is a variation on the Sauber-Sieger Mesofractal. We haven't used anything that archaic for decades, because it only works in close proximity, not over transmission. Auras, or some shit, I dunno. I'm no memeticist. The point is, it's put a whammy on them so they think their comms are down. Which they are not."
"That's ridiculous," Frewer sighed. They both watched as a sudden burst of fluid fell from the sky, smacking into the sigil and washing it down the sides of the factory wall. Not a drop struck the tower.
"Handshaking with 54 now," a tech across the room shouted out. "Getting a sitrep."
Dan pumped both fists in the air. The Foundation's attempt at replicating SCP-3533, "Metaphysiclean," had apparently been a smashing success. "Update on A-9?"
Director Sophia Light took off her headset and shrugged at him. "Tarrow is directing Adams. Thompson is getting ready. The second team is in transit, but at this rate it'll all be over before they see any action."
Dan nodded. "I'm sure they'll get their time to shine. Next problem!"
"Sitrep's in," Frewer reported. "Site security and Adams have everything under control except an outbreak of 6528-1 in the ventilation system. SRAs and filters aren't handling it."
Dan rapped his forehead with the knuckles of both hands. "6528-1. Reality-collapsing vines? That's bad." He snapped his fingers, again with both hands. "54 still has one of those old Scrantons, right? The long-range kind? The 3001 kind?"
Frewer blinked. "The kind that killed the guy they're named after because he switched it on? Yes."
Dan blew a raspberry. "I'm not suggesting they switch it on and start an earthquake." He paused. "Do we have anything that starts earthquakes?" He paused again. "Go on! Make the call." He pointed at another tech, whose hand was raised. "Yes? Next?"
Frewer sighed, and starting speaking into his mic. Hope there's no other disasters scheduled for today.

They were now moving through what looked like a movie sewer, one of those far-too-big-to-be-real deals with the damp cobble walls and the central sluice full of… well, in this case it simply looked like water. "Melted snow," Amelia suggested. "It's so damn hot down here, the snow up above is melting."
Phil wanted to know what was up with that, of course, but he had a more pressing concern. "Did you know there was a monster in here?"
She shook her head, wet strands of hair slapping and sticking to her cheeks.
"Besides you?" Doug asked.
"Do you know what that thing is, though?"
She nodded. "It's the tunnel monster. 3663. But these are the wrong tunnels."
Phil tried to work that out. "It's supposed to be in a tunnel? Not in a chamber?"
"The old maintenance tunnels at 54 are its chamber. Don't make that face; we've got an immortal reality-bending toxician living in a chasm under 43."
"Point," he admitted. "But how would this thing have gotten… out…"
A body drifted past, bobbing in the slow current. It looked like a case of terminal frostbite, but the colour of the splinters sticking out of the skin was…
"Wood pulp. Christ, it's in a bad mood today." She suddenly looked very unhappy. "Oh, I don't like this."
Phil pointed back at the corpse. "Tunnel monster did that?"
"Not… intentionally. It's just what happens when it's around, when it's… agitated." She paused. "Did that look like an MTF guy to you?"
He didn't look back. "You think it was one of ours, or one of theirs? They're dressed the same."
She shivered. "Might've been lying in wait up ahead. Might've been coming from the Site to help us. Who fucking knows."
He wished one of them did.

Agent Andrea Adams crept through the liminal space which had once been the North Wing of Site-54. She hadn't really understood that term, "liminal space," before this moment. She wouldn't have said the hallway had positive vibes, if it were still occupied by researchers and agents and janitors; the track lighting was partially blocked by ceiling pipes, casting an eerie grey-green glow rather than providing proper illumination, the walls and doorframes were too solid and institutional, blue steel and brushed beige concrete, and the floor was like a dull strip of linoleum carpet between two runners of inexplicable wire mesh. There were no windows, because this was far underground. It would be an ugly, oppressive place under normal circumstances, but at least it was familiar. "Foundation Brutalism" was an architectural style with which she had much experience.
And that was the problem. Everything she knew about hallways like this told her that they were danger-adjacent but relatively safe, moment-by-moment. The containment breach alarms were clearly visible, and they weren't active. The office doors were all closed, the mail dropboxes were all empty, there was no blood on the floor or walls. Everything was fine.
Everything was not fine. The firing range in Containment Area 54-01 had started firing back — she still hadn't heard an intelligible explanation for that — and the guards had been forced to flee into what was now Containment Area-54-09. Two MTFs in riot gear had been dispatched to rescue them, but it wouldn't be enough; unless Adams did something about 4856, and soon, every one of them would be disembowelled in this space between spaces.
She could see the contradictions now. Dust on the floor. A peculiar rattle in the air ducts. Some of the lights flickered. Not another human soul was visible. As she passed through the open double doors connecting this hall to another just like it, she finally spotted a true incongruity: a belt buckle gleaming on the floor.
She bent to pick it up. It was covered in deep scratches and gouges, as if something very sharp had been scrabbling at the soft human tissues typically surrounding such a device.
Like a wild animal had torn it off while attempting to—
Something hard struck her from behind, and she stumbled forward into the arms of a labcoated researcher who hadn't been there just moments prior. She looked up into his face — its face, a stretched-out skein of flesh tattooed with the Foundation's containment sigil. She lost her breath in a whoof as the creature struck her in the gut, lifting her up over its head one-handed. The other arm hung uselessly at its side. She kicked madly, shattering the light fixture above them, then swung her rifle down and opened fire.
The creature disappeared, and the small but powerful shell punched a hole in the floor and kept going. She barely avoided falling into it, instead striking — and cracking — the linoleum. She cursed. Don't shoot at it. World ends if it dies. This wasn't precisely how it had been explained to her, but her instincts needed simpler handholds.
Something heavy — a foot — came down on the small of her back. She pressed both hands and both feet into the floor, and pushed back with all the force her suit could muster. She heard a satisfying crack as the entity struck the overhead pipes, then felt the weight vanish as she tumbled back down.
This time she stuck the landing, and the instant she did, she spun on one leg and swept the labcoated thing's metal-braced legs out from under it. There was another loud crack, and it threw its arms — both of its arms— in the air, and vanished…
…then kicked her in the face from the other side. She fell on her back…
…and five different versions of SCP-4856 loomed over her, claws extended, the filthy gashes in their throats fluttering with anticipation.
Time travel pisses me off.
A dark bruise was blooming in the centre of one entity's tattoo; one had shards of glass sticking out of its skin; one was favouring its left leg. None of their arms were broken. She felt the impacts on her chest as each of them dove for her organs, tearing at the nigh-impenetrable surface of her suit. She felt each stab and jab keenly, but only for an instant. She'd be feeling it much worse later.
Feeling it later…
She rolled over, scattering the entities, and swung her rifle around again. This time she heard a satisfying crunch as it impacted the arm of one of the unwounded figures. They all vanished in tandem.
For that single moment, she was alone in the empty hallway. As absurd as it felt, as unlikely as it was to work, she threw down the gun, leapt into the air, and kicked with both legs at the same time as she struck out with both fists.
One entity appeared, and grabbed her left leg.
One appeared and grabbed her right leg.
One grabbed her left hand.
One took a solid punch right in the middle of what should have been its face, bellowed with pain and rage, and disappeared. She twisted around, wrenching another one's arm out of its socket — there you are, she grinned — and had an instant to enjoy the small victories before the first two flung her through the nearest wall.
"Clear and secure," Tarrow's voice rang through the ringing in her ears. "Disengage."
Adams laughed, rising from the rubble just in time to have her helmeted head slammed through the glass of the office door. "Might take a while."
She'd be paying for it tomorrow, when the drugs wore off, but she wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to piss off a time traveller.

It wasn't a very pleasant walk after they left the corpse behind. The thought of Amelia's body, or his body, filling up with shredded cardboard… the thought of not being able to do a thing about it, a pointless and unavoidable death… It was enough to, if not erase, certainly take Phil's mind off the incident with the helicopter for the time being.
Amelia hadn't intended them to dodge into the maintenance tunnels because of their eponymous resident, but the cat was already out of the containment chamber and it was a quicker route. The walk got even less pleasant when they moved out of the wet tunnels and into the dry ones, however. The general trend was downward, via grimy staircases with rusted railings and, occasionally, rusted ladders with questionable rungs. The heat was worse; they were both sweating so much now that their bodies were almost completely free of the detritus they'd collected along the way.
The lights were working here, however, and Amelia confirmed that they were now in the maintenance tunnels.
"Which means we're nearly at th—"
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"
The box beast came bursting out behind them, scraping cardboard dust and tape and twine off on the bricks. It was waving both arms over its head, and Phil reacted in two different ways simultaneously: he stepped in front of Amelia, and he raised his own arms up defensively.
The watch was facing away from him, which was lucky. Amelia noticed, and closed her eyes — which were facing Phil — which was luckier. Deprived of an acceptable vantage point, Doug let loose a scream at one hundred and nineteen decibels.
Phil and Amelia sank to the floor. She clutched both ears with her hands; he clutched one ear with one hand, and pressed the other ear to his shoulder. He knew he had to keep the mirror monster between him and the tunnel monster. He hoped his blood wasn't about to turn to cardboard. He could still barely hear the low-pitched roar over the high-pitched squeal.
And then he couldn't hear the roar at all.
And then he realized it had stopped.
And then he turned the watch back around, and Doug's face appeared over the dial. The screech abated.
"I am not a toy," the mirror monster remarked.
"I'm the tunnel monster?" the tunnel monster squealed.

The world had apparently decided not to end today.
No less than seventeen anomalies had breached containment — the single worst "accident" an active facility had suffered in this neck of the woods for years and years — and yet there had only been a handful of casualties. Most of them would haunt Tarrow's nightmares for weeks to come, of course, because that was the nature of deaths at Site-54.
Haunting her waking hours, on the other hand, was a simple question: what had happened?
"It could've been worse," the security chief remarked from his console. "Much worse." Tarrow hadn't even seen him putting down his headset; he'd spent the last half hour coordinating cleanup teams. "Every object either back in containment or at least accounted for. Your people did a fantastic job."
She smiled at him. "Our people, you mean. That was a real trial by fire. I'm amazed you kept your cool."
He smiled back at her. "Well, I wasn't in any danger. I was causing it, after all." He pressed a button on the console, and a low tone filled the room. The fillings in Tarrow's teeth vibrated as all her staff fainted on the spot, some of them slumping in their chairs, some sliding to the floor, one striking her head on a desk and bleeding into the clean white tiles.
Tarrow's head pounded, but she kept her feet. Memetic conditioning. Directorial privilege. Didn't help me see past the bullshit, though, did it? "I knew… I knew…"
"Don't blame yourself. We're very good at altering perception. You, on the other hand, have been working on altering conceptions. I'll have to take a good long look at that Conceptual Restabilizer, once I collect the second password." He cocked his head to one side, quizzically. "Wonder if the heat or the tunnel monster got to them before my men did. We really were hoping to avoid unnecessary bloodshed."
"Who are you?" Tarrow spat.
The man continued to smile. "Someone who wants to see you succeed. Someone who needs to know that you have what it takes." He patted her on the shoulder as she ground her teeth together. "It was a solid showing, between your people, Alpha-9 and ETTRA. Everything locked up tight, just the way we like it." He stretched, and cracked his knuckles.
"Who's 'we'?" Tarrow growled, jaw clenched.
"That's for me to know, and for you," he said, and then a disembodied hand appeared at waist level, grabbed the grip of his service weapon, wrenched it to the side and fired a slug straight through his left thigh. He fell to the ground, screaming bloody murder, and Tarrow kicked him in the face before slapping the kill switch on the comms console.
Oh, she thought, as her mind finally cleared. That's what all the pictures were for.
The hand flashed her a thumbs up, then disappeared.
Tarrow took a moment to collect herself, then picked up the headset. "Security to ops," she grunted. She worked her jaw open again, changed the channel, and spoke more clearly: "My compliments to Agent Thompson."

"I'm the tunnel monster." The childlike voice was indignant. "I am."
"Right," said Phil, standing up slowly. "I'm Phil. This is Amelia."
Amelia waved. "I'm Amelia. Hi… tunnel monster."
It waved its boxes at Phil's watch. "This is my tunnel. He can't have it."
Phil glanced down at Doug. "He doesn't want your tunnel. Nobody wants…" He closed his eyes. This was not diplomacy.
The monster didn't seem to pick up on it. "What is he? What did he do?"
Phil raised the watch to his face, and forced himself to consider the devil he knew. "He's… well, he's a mirror monster."
"Why?"
Phil lowered the watch again. "Uh?"
"Why is he a mirror monster? Why did you… what did he do?"
Amelia stepped up beside Phil. "What?"
"Why did you do that to him? What did he do? What did he do to you to make you do that to him? Why?"
Phil blinked. It was hard to wrap his head around how far the narrative had twisted from reality. "I didn't… I didn't do anything to him. He does stuff to me! Every goddamn day."
"Until the end," Doug droned cheerfully.
"What does he do?"
"Well, he…" Phil's eyes rolled back as he considered. "He kinda… holds my negative thoughts? And feelings? About… well, mostly about myself, I guess?" Stating the naked truth felt awkward here, sweating halfway-nude in the dark.
The cardboard creature shuddered with what Phil was horrified to recognize as horror. "That's mean! Why would you do that to him?!"
He felt irrationally ill-used by this line of questioning. "I didn't do that to him! I don't! He takes what I'm worried about, and he beats me up with it! Every day! All day." He was waving his arms, and Doug, in the air now.
"You put all that bad stuff inside him! You made him bad! It's not his fault!"
"It's not ANYBODY's fault!"
"IT'S ALWAYS SOMEBODY'S FAULT!" The tunnel monster turned away and put its fist into the wall. A horrible crumpling sound ensued, and the tunnel monster no longer had a fist. "IT'S ALWAYS SOMEBODY'S FAULT!" It kicked the wall, and nearly fell over as the limb in question collapsed. "It was my fault." It pushed past them and disappeared down the corridor, trailing pieces of white cardboard shaped like bone fragments in its wake.
Without hesitation, together, they followed. "What was your fault?" Phil asked.
It didn't answer. It pressed on, moving into a catwalked space with a cavernous emptiness beneath and above. The catwalk quaked with its passage, though it didn't look like it could possibly weigh very much.
"Nothing," Amelia answered instead. "Nothing was his fault."
The monster stopped. "I did something bad," it whispered. "And I was sorry. But it was too late." It turned back to face them. "What did you do?"
Phil stepped onto the catwalk, and was met with a rush of hot air from below. "I didn't… well." He thought about the helicopter. He tried not to think about the helicopter.
He looked down.
They were standing in a deactivated geothermal vent. They had active ones at 43, so he understood that much. The sports car sitting at the bottom, glowing white-hot, he didn't quite know what to make of.
"Christ," Amelia muttered. She'd followed his eyeline. "The hell is that."
"Pontiac Firebird," Phil replied. "Jim Rockford drove one."
She looked away, blinking rapidly. "You're so old."
He smiled, his eyes watering in the glare from the anomalous car. "I'm guessing this is a skip from 54? Does that mean somebody is breac—"
The catwalk swayed from side to side as the tunnel monster approached. Phil looked up, and wiped the tears from his eyes. "Oh, sh—"
"Don't cry." The tunnel monster punched him in the face. "Don't be afraid." It scraped its shattered fist across his nose. "You're a monster. Monsters don't cry."
"I'm not a monster," he whispered, rubbing his nose.
"Of course you are." Amelia and Doug said it at the same time; the difference was that Amelia pulled him into an embrace, pressed her head into his chest and scratched affectionately at the back of his scalp.
"We all are," she whispered alone.

Niko Derichs wasn't sure where precisely the day had gone wrong.
He had picked up the couple at the hotel, as instructed. He had taken them to the chopper, as instructed. They had flown to the designated dropoff point, and that had gone mostly according to their instructions; Wahner had been a complete and total bitch about everything, as was her custom, and she'd gone apeshit on the woman. He still didn't know what she'd been thinking; if she'd inadvertently injured Deering, she would've gotten an eyeful of… well, an eyeful of what had left Schäfer a gibbering wreck in the storage facility's parking lot.
You left him there.
Well, of course he had. He didn't like abandoning his remaining partner, particularly not after what had happened to the other one, but it wasn't like he had any choice. He had to get that password back.
"Speaking of passwords," he muttered. The door in front of him was absurdly well-secured, and his admittedly limited electrical tampering knowledge hadn't gotten him anywhere with it. He'd checked around the perimeter of the building, finding only a single vehicle entrance which had clearly been welded shut from the outside; that puzzled him greatly, but it didn't really matter.
He didn't know else what was in there, but the only thing he cared about was that there was simply no way for his quarry to have escaped—
There was a loud click from the door.
He plucked his weapon off the service counter, placed one hand on the door handle and threw it open. He couldn't immediately see any cowering janitors, but he knew they had to be there.
He stepped inside.
There had been only one sliding door on the exterior, but there was a pair in here, and a keypad between them. What was behind Door Number Two? Another garage? Not important. Torosyan and Deering couldn't have gotten through. This wasn't an SCP safehouse, it was a random place of business. He tried to remember the name he'd seen on the sign… Something Concepts PLC. SCPLC. He felt like it should mean something. It didn't mean anything.
So, they were still in here. Whether they were hiding in the back of the army transports, or under one of the Gators, he knew now that he would find them. Then he could attend to Schäfer, and then—
And then the door swung shut behind him, a small motor buzzing in the frame. There was another loud click.
"Whatever," he muttered. He had a gun, and he had steel-toed boots. The door was no problem.
He spent the next nineteen minutes pulling up seat cushions, searching compartments, looking beneath undercarriages and alternately cooing, cajoling, and cursing at Torosyan and Deering to come out of their hiding places already. He didn't see how they could've made it through that locked door; he couldn't see any connection between Storage Concepts PLC that was it and the SCP Foundation.
On the stroke of the twentieth minute, just as he decided to try ramming the second door down with a truck, he couldn't see at all. The lights had gone out.
He spent the rest of his life screaming.

Phil and Amelia stood on the catwalk in silence, holding each other, commingling their sweat and tears.
Then she asked: "You can teleport, right?"
Phil looked up at her. "Uh… no?"
The tunnel monster looked down at them both. "Yes?"

Over/

The Time After Time Password

Out of Character


slurppp

Read my other works here!

It pleaded with her.
How could it make her understand? What words were there in the vast, yet limited English language that could properly communicate how it was? How it felt? The pure ecstasy of near-omniscience, a mind powerful enough to know that everything will be okay and a thousand different reasons as to why. And the warmth, the warmth. Praise be Sol in all of her glory, the provider of life, of fire, of all things good in this beautiful world. She was a goddess, and she was extending her powers to those who did not appreciate, to those who did not deserve. And yet, she smiled.
So brightly, she did. Golden grin. Bask in the warmth, bask in the Sun's light.
To let go of mortal perils was to let go of everything bad in the world. To truly free oneself from the shackles of reality, to transcend mortality and become one with nature itself. Why couldn't she just understand? For a world where no one harbored evil intent, for a world without anomalies, where everything and everyone was understood perfectly, it was true paradise.
It knocked on the door once more. It pleaded. In return for his efforts, she screamed at him. A shrill, ugly sound intoned with the heavy drags of despair. The way her voice cracked, the rawness in her words, it conveyed to it her limits. Why would she continue to suffer like this? Weren't they bound by love, an eternal promise of devotion? Despite everything, there was so much that it didn't understand about her. And of course, she didn't understand it. She didn't understand anything.
If only she would come out, then. Greet Sol in her majesty so that they would finally understand each other. Perfect minds in harmony, wouldn't that be ideal? She should realize this. Wasn't she always the logical type? That's how she got on-board with the Foundation in the first place. The Foundation, which kneeled in death underneath the glory of Sol. There would be no more shadows. No more hiding. Just the blanket of purity. It was better for everyone this way.
Even during the dark dredges of the night, when Sol and her rays laid to rest, her power remained. But of course! She would extend her arms of flame to the corners of the universe if needed, because she loved them. She loved humanity; even when they would spit on her offerings, even when they would curse her boundless love, even with their numerous sins against nature, she would love them. And so, warmth remained.
It knocked on the door. There was no answer.
It moaned and pressed its body against the door, a half-meter thick gate of solid steel. Frantic cries arose from it, pleading and desperate.
There was no answer.
Why did she not join it?
Was the company of death preferable to an eternity of bliss and prosperity?
Of warmth?
The mortal mind truly was a frail thing, wasn't it? Its memories were fractured and smudged, nothing more than faint memories of memories, an adult trying to remember their third birthday. It supposed that it too, would have once preferred desolate emptiness to assimilation. Back when it was unwise, back when its knowledge was a thimble of water compared to the vast ocean of flames available to it now.
It shuddered, misshapen mass of amalgamated flesh trembling as it knocked on the door once more. Dull thuds rang out in protest, filling the barren silence with its heavy cries. It pleaded.
"Won't you join me? Sweetheart, please. It's warm. The Sun, it's beautiful. Please."
Heaving once more, it made another attempt in breaking the barrier between it and its love. However, this time, the door opened without protest. On the other side, her.
It rejoiced, mouths contorting into joyful smiles as it lumbered in to embrace her. At last, she had seen the truth in its words! The pleads and cries it offered, she had accepted! Now, now, it could finally be complete. They would be complete. And the world, and Sol, they would all be one step closer to peace.
She stood there, staring at him with a look of tired resignation. And yet, was there something deeper in her eyes? A glint of… No, no. She was close, so very close, close enough that it could taste her. Elegant and smooth and sweet and lovely and oh so beautiful, almost like the Sun herself. And yet, they were not together. Not yet. It still didn't understand. She still didn't understand.
She took several steps closer to it. It lurched forward. It opened a mouth to greet her.
There was no time to react as she tossed something at it. An almost insignificantly small red pill that went into its mouth. There was no conscious attempt to spit it out, to swallow, to crush it with its molars. There was no attempt of anything of the sort; it simply ingested the pill. There was a sense of tartness, deeper and richer than anything it had tasted before that spread itself through its mass. It felt denser, more real, somehow. A prickling of want touched its mind. But there was guilt too; a child stealing cookies from the jar, knowing that they will get caught.
But caught by who? By what? And why?
Something inside of it began to stir, a foreboding sort of rumbling that make it grow uneasy. What had it consumed? Why was-
She backpedaled, retreating deeper into the confines of their chamber. It made a low, grumbling noise and started after her. So she had second thoughts then? It supposed that was somewhat reasonable; perhaps she didn't appreciate its newly made form. Perhaps, perhaps, she couldn't see through the thin surface layer of its subjective monstrosity and look, really look at the beauty blessed upon it.
Only… Was it beautiful?
Something was wrong. The taste wouldn't leave.
Voices of dissonance rang out from within him, mere mutterings that it could barely recognize. It was unsettling. A thin veil of doubt draped itself over its eyes, and all at once, that unfamiliar sensation of uncertainty returned. That hated, dreadful feeling of not knowing what to do, what was happening, that feeling of vague terror.
A steel gate closed down in front of it, severing the short distance between it and her. Through a plexiglass window, she stared. Why did the air press down on it? Why did the abject look of anxiety on her face bring it such dread?
Such feelings were behind it. In Sol's bask of light, there was only comfort. Joy. Warmth.
Wasn't that why it requiesced its mortal form in the first place? Shed the pale, tearing skin. Become whole. Become warm again. Become something greater.
Yes, it had once been a singular organism, hadn't it? A part of the on-site 'Mobile Task Force', a guard to the researchers who knew so much yet so little. That was how they acted; scrambling around with their ideas of containment and anomalies, wasting so much precious time and effort on complicating things that did not matter. Ideas of budgets, of ethics, of the greater good, everything… Just a willful distraction.
No one could understand what the real world was like, not until they accepted her. The Sun, and all of her blessings.
It He used to be so miserable. Confused and lost in a melting world, she was all he had left. They loved each other. But the voices ended up being too much. It was too much effort trying to keep up a façade of bravado. He loved her and hated himself for what he was planning to do. God, he didn't even bother to leave a note, did he? Not a single word.
But he was just tired. Hopeless. After over a year of living on canned rations and drinking water that tasted gritty even after being filtered, with no word from any survivors and pure static from the handheld radio… He decided that maybe, he should listen. They sounded so gratified. Even human, if you could ignore the faux sense of content dripping from their voices.
He would have told her, were it not for the fact that she would have held on to him as he dragged himself outside. She wouldn't listen to his pleas, wouldn't acknowledge the fact that he wasn't strong enough for all of this. That despite the training and the heart-felt promises made in pools of tears, that he couldn't go on living like this.
It was painful. He could remember now, all of the humanities and doubts he thought he abandoned in favour for peace and wellbeing. For a bit, it was an eternity of agonizing pain, the sheer burn of his skin as they melted his form. The unbearable heat of internalized flames licking at his organs, burning him from the inside out. But they helped. The Somethings, the grossly disformed masses of skin, blood, and flesh. They enveloped him and sang their thanks, and then… It was all okay again.
He.
He felt sick. The voices grew louder. From the other side of the gate, she was saying something. He couldn't quite understand what she was saying, but her tone gave him pause. It made it, him…
Her voice made him feel afraid.
The Sun's grace vanished. Sol vanished. They grew cold, separate. There was nothing left except for that tartness. Only now, it had grown sweet.
He started to scream.


FIRST: When Situations Degenerate
After a quick and pleasant jaunt through the Library, Alliott and Iris stepped sideways through a wall into an air-conditioned server room, lit only by the soft blue glow of blinking LEDs.
"OK, watch your step. There shouldn't be anything on the floor but you never FUCK SHIT DAMN stubbed my toe, it's fine, watch out for the pile of guns."
"Alliott, why is there a pile of guns on the floor of your server room?"
"Because I ran out of space in the gun room. Oh, here's the door."
"Gotta say, your lair isn't all that impressive." It really wasn't; the hallway outside was bare, a concrete floor and cinderblock walls, exposed pipes hiding the ceiling. "I was expecting, like, sexy cyberpunk opium den. Not industrial parking garage utility tunnel."
"Ok, first of all, I don't have a 'lair', I'm not a supervillain. Second of all…" They stepped into an elevator, and accelerated upwards. "Hold on, I timed that dramatic pause poorly. Here we go. Second of all…"
The elevator opened onto a sexy cyberpunk opium den. Psychedelic tapestries and band posters competed for wall space with flatscreen monitors and weapon racks. The lighting was dim and seductive, a soft golden glow from an apple-shaped ceiling lamp. A low table on ornately-carved legs sat in the center of the room, covered in dismantled cybernetics, takeout containers both empty and half-empty, assorted drug paraphernalia, videogame controllers, tarot cards, knives, many-sided dice, cheap science fiction paperbacks, loose ammunition, and other ephemera of a terminally interesting life. Around it were a handful of comfortable couches, a couple of which were occupied.
"Hey, Alliott, I didn't know you were a triplet."
"I'm not, she's—wait, triplet?"
Both of the occupants of the room were, as far as Iris could tell, basically copies of Alliott. One of them was almost exactly identical, except both her hands were flesh and she had a cool geometric face tattoo; the other was wearing the kind of elaborate rune-embroidered black robes that went out of style with top hats and laudanum.
"Oh, goddess. Iris, this is Alex." The normal-looking Alliott waved. "And this, unfortunately, is Aleison."
"The Scarlet Woman greets you, Dark Lady. How—" Aleison cut herself off suddenly, and raised an eyebrow at something behind Iris; when Iris looked back, Alliott was staring at the ceiling and trying very hard to look innocent.
"Dark lady? What do you mean, dark lady?"
"Ah, my apologies, you look like… A friend of mine." Aleison frowned. "Perhaps 'friend' is not the right word. Business partner, maybe. But you are the spitting image of her." She gave a meaningful look to Alliott, who was still avoiding eye contact.
"Hmm." Iris glared at each of them in turn. There was an awkward silence, eventually broken by Alex.
"Oh, hey, you probably want to dump your stuff somewhere. Guest room is down the hall, yeah? Second door on the right." She also gave out some meaningful looks. They all had the exact same expressions. Kind of creepy after a while. "Take some time for yourself. Take a nap, I'm sure you've had a hard day."
Iris could tell when she was being gotten rid of, but decided not to kick up a fuss. The guest room was weirdly minimalist compared to the rest of the lair, IKEA furniture and bare walls. She leaned her bike in a corner, chucked her bags on the bed, and immediately snuck back out into the hallway to eavesdrop.
Someone had put some music on, probably Alliott given that it was that Discordian acid house band from the '90s she was always trying to get people into, but Iris could still hear snatches of the conversation. Either Alex or Alliott was saying something, clearly agitated: "… the enemy! Maybe … universe, but … motherfucker … your lair?"
"Discordia's tits!" Now that was definitely Alliott. "… a kid! Not the same … just a second-rate thaumaturge!" Wow. Rude. "… her out, when … kidnapped!"
Aleison, unlike the others, was British, with the kind of accent you can only get out of a hideously-expensive boarding school education. "… friends, per se … biblically, on occasion … mutual carnal satisfaction …" What the fuck. "… certain private club … devotees of Sappho—"
"Don't need to … fucked her alternate … you always … too much information!" Alex again, probably. She had a kind of low-key valley-girl uptalk thing that Alliott didn't.
"Oh, please … my personal preferences …" At that point, the track ended, and Aleison practically shouted into the sudden silence. "She fucked me. And believe me, my world's Iris is an excellent lover."
"What the fuck." Iris couldn't help it. She heard three identical gasps from the living room, and stepped out. "What the actual fuck, guys." None of them would make eye contact.
"Um." Alliott looked up sheepishly. "Sorry?"
"That's it? You're talking behind my back about, what, fucking alternate universe versions of…" She trailed off, staring at the three identical faces before her. "Oh! Huh."
"Well. I suppose we owe you an explanation." Aleison finally looked up, and winked. "And, by the by, it was you who fucked me, not—"
"NOT the time." Alliott pushed herself to her feet. "Alright. I am going to make some coffee, and then we are going to explain shit."
"Yeah. Good. Ok." Iris sat down on the couch across from Aleison with a sigh. "Hey, can I pack a bowl?"
"Yeah. Weed's in the skull."
There were at least seven different skulls on the coffee table, both human and inhuman. "Uh. Which one?"
"All of 'em."

"Are you sure we should be here? I have heard stories about the… What do they call them? Campus cops?" Alphonse Cartier looked around nervously from under his bucket hat, checking every bush and tree for the secret police. The Deer quad was surprisingly empty for a Friday night; all the good parties must be off-campus. "They disappear people, Skitter! Bodies never found! Eddie, you know him, Edouard Saint-Clair, he went to a rave here once, vanished for six weeks! Turned up in Maine, nearly catatonic, hasn't been right since!"
Skitter Marshall knew Eddie well; the man was a scumbag even by his standards, and he had no sympathy for him. He sighed. "Alphonse, I think as long as you don't try to roofie anyone, you'll be fine. Relax." He rolled up his sleeve and checked his watch. "My contact should be here any minute, and he's a student. A very important student. We'll be under his protection."
"Yes, well, I don't know this guy. How did you get in touch with him, anyway?"
"His father is in business with my father. He's an… Import-export specialist."
"You mean a smuggler?"
"I mean a psychopomp. Ah, that must be him."
Sulfrous smoke had begun to rise from a patch of lawn. The grass withered, and burst into black flames that gave off an eldritch unlight; Alphonse had to avert his eyes, then plug his ears as a cacophony of pleading souls cried out for release from their torment. (Skitter, he noticed, was just fine. Typical.) When the noise abated, a pentagram of charred grass smoldered on the lawn; and in it stood a man, corpse-pale and crimson-eyed, face coated in the blood of a fresh kill. "The son of the serpent greets thee, servants of Mammon." His voice was an ice-cold nail hammered into their eardrums, a hooked claw scraping down the blackboard of their souls. "What dost thou require of Mordecai Diabolus, Prince of Hell and also President of the Deer Student Body?"
Skitter blinked a few times, then tapped his cheek. "You've, uh. Got something. Here. And here. Sort of all over actually." On a second look, what Alphonse had thought to be blood was actually lipstick. Quite a lot of lipstick. "Do you want to, uh, get cleaned up and try again? Because that was pretty good, but the smooch marks kind of ruined it."
Mordecai rubbed his cheek and checked his hand, then sighed. "Nah. Moment's gone. So. You're looking for Iris Black."
"… How did you know?" Skitter sounded surprised. "I didn't…"
"I have my ways." You haven't heard smug until you've heard it from an antichrist. Alphonse could almost see the condescension dripping from his smirk. "And, as it happens, I know where she's going to be. Follow me." Mordecai set off across the quad at a brisk walk; Marshall and Carter followed, half-jogging to keep up with his stride.

"Alright, so." Iris gestured vaguely with the pipe, which was predictably apple-shaped. "You're all the same person but you're from other universes. And there's like one of you in every universe. Multiverse. Whatever. And I'm in a lot of them and mostly I'm in charge of the evil rich guy club for evil rich guys, but I'm not in here, but the dude in the shitty suit and the french guy want me to be so they're trying to kidnap me for nefarious purposes." She hit the pipe again. She wasn't high enough for this.
"Yeah. That's about it." Alliot shared some more significant glances with her doubles. Iris was getting really tired of those. "Well, ok, one other thing. As much as I would love to give succor-"
"I 'ardly know 'er." Alex help her hand up for a high-five; the others left her hanging. "Oh, come on, really? It was great. You guys just don't appreciate comedy."
"As much as I would like to give assistance to a fellow derbyist in need, I, uh… Can't do much." Alliot gave Iris a sheepish grin. "I have like, so many irons in the fire. And MCD are not good people to piss off. You can stay here for like, a few days, and I can give you some spending money. More if you're OK with counterfeit. But, uh…"
"No, no, I get it," Iris said, "I can figure something out. Should probably get out of ThreePorts, they'll be looking for me there. Uh, where are we now, by the way?"
"Eurtec. Which I cannot recommend staying in. Dreadful place," Aleison sneered, "Full of Germans. And the French."
"And they love their bureaucracy, so unless you have EU citizenship, you'll need to get a job. Which, again, I would love to provide, but…" Alliot shrugged and trailed off.
"Irons, fire, et cetera, I get you. And I've got British citizenship. But… Brexit. So it wouldn't be a super long term solution anyway."
"You know where they'd never look for you?" Alex stroked her chin thoughtfully. "Fuckin'. Middle America. Move to like, Cleveland. Cut your hair and change your name. Work at a Starbucks. They'd never find you."
"… Huh." Iris frowned. "Well, it would suck. But it would probably work. Not Cleveland, fuck Ohio. And Chicago's got too much going on magic-wise. Maybe Milwaukee. Or Minneapolis. I'll need a car, though."
"Yeah," Alliot said, nodding, "I can get you a car."
"And a driver's license. And like, a crash course in driving, I've lived in Portlands my whole life, it's never come up."
Alliot sighed. "I can do that too."

"Alright. This is where she comes to smoke." Mordecai gestured to a stump, tucked away in a grove of ancient pines. He had led them down into the Deer Canyon, a forested ravine that cut through the center of campus, and along a series of twisty trails. Alphonse was thoroughly lost, but Skitter looked pretty confident, so he decided to stop worrying. (It didn't work.) "She should be here in, oh, five minutes or so, and you can get the drop on her then. I expect the bitcoins in my account by morning. Ta ta!" With a cheery wave, Mordecai went back the way he came; Alphonse and Skitter settled in for a short lurk.
Five minutes passed. Then ten, fifteen, twenty. It started to rain. At twenty-five, Alphonse turned to Skitter to suggest they leave. He wasn't there. "Uh. Skitter?" He looked around, panic rising. "Skitter this is not very funny. You know I have an anxiety disorder." He walked toward the exit, still frantically searching for his companion; but the path wasn't there any more. Just a close-packed wall of trees. "Skitter?" Someone tapped him on the shoulder. "Oh, thank god, I…" There was nobody there when he turned. Just a tree branch. But there hadn't been a tree there before. "Skitter this isn't funny any more, where did you go?"
He heard a faint whisper over the wind and the rain, and strained his ears. It came again. "Down… Here…" Skitter's voice, choked and muffled. Alphonse looked down, and saw Skitter's face, half-buried in the wet soil, a root wrapped around his neck.
The trees grabbed Alphonse before he could scream.
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January 18th, 2008
Helmand Province, Afghanistan
Noon
The Iranian agents die before they even know they are under attack.
There are four of them, dressed in the drab browns and greys appropriate for camouflage in the mountains of southern Afghanistan, all hiking in a single file line. Their disguises are good — it takes her several seconds to spot the concealed weapons that mark them as combatants, and almost fifteen seconds to spot the occult tattoo on the wrist of the leader that betrays his allegiance to the Organization for the Reclamation of Islamic Artifacts, rather than the Taliban.
Staff Sergeant Ulyssa van Kann of the United States Army, 23rd Paranatural Operations Group, watches the four men through her scope for a full minute before deciding to end their lives. It takes significantly less time for her to do so.
Gorgons see the world differently. Their eyes are covered by a polarized nictitating membrane, which ruins the sight of rainbows and protects the world from their stony gaze. It is only when they unblink, retracting the membrane, that they can view the world in full color — petrifying whatever creatures they happen to look at.
For a full gorgon, unblinking is effortless, easier even than blinking. But Van Kann is a half-gorgon, a mutt, the unintended — but not unwanted — result of her mother doing a dangerous amount of AUM with a sculptor from Backdoor Soho at an Erisian gallery-club. She still has the petrifying gaze of her sisters, but it's weaker, needing more time to take effect, and the muscles of her nictitating membranes are atrophied, requiring a greater effort to unblink, one which is painful to maintain for more than half-a-minute. But unlike her mother and sisters, she looks human. There are no snakes in her hair, no scales on her face, and no fork in her tongue. As long as she wears sunglasses, she can walk in the Unveiled world untroubled.
None of this matters to the man in her scope, although soon nothing at all will matter to him. He stumbles as his feet become heavy, then topples forwards. His outstretched arm shatters when it hits the ground.
She moves the scope onto the second man, who has stopped and is staring at his petrified comrade in surprise. He is too confused to scream before his vocal cords harden into marble.
The third man is slightly faster on the uptake. He's also a wizard, or the beneficiary of one. As Van Kann brings her sights to bear on him, he activates a glamour, vanishing from view. There's a muffled crack as her suppressed rifle fires, and then a bullet rips through his neck before he can move, killing him and his invisibility cloak in an instant. The spray of blood from his neck crystalizes into a sprinkle of sparkling rubies.
The fourth man tries to sign something with his hands — probably an exploit, for all the good it would do him. Van Kann never has a chance to learn what his intentions are, because her cursed vision catches the man mid-gesture, with his thumb upraised in an ironic sign of approval.
And then the battle is over. It takes Van Kann fifteen minutes to pack up her gear and hike down to where the men were, intending to scavenge their remains. When she gets there, she finds on the first statue's face a complicated expression of surprise, confusion, and belated terror, one which is very familiar to her. She smirks slightly as she surveys the self-memorialized battle.
"Too easy."
"I agree." The voice whispers in her ear, and a gun is pressed against her back. "Don't move."

Kandahar Airfield
9 Hours Earlier
"Sergeant, thank you for coming on such short notice."
Van Kann nods. She doesn't bother to ask the man his name, knowing he won't give it. He's a spook, possibly in more than one sense, and probably doesn't even have a name any more.
The man's eyes roll back in his head as he becomes a conduit for a psychic back at the Pentagram. He begins speaking in a different, more detached voice.
"During the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, they left hidden caches of paraweaponry across the country. Most of these were recovered by Coalition forces following the initial invasion. The former KGB Division of Special Circumstances, the paracriminal syndicate Scarlet Hammer, has been working with the Taliban to recover the remaining caches in areas outside of Coalition control. Fifteen hours ago, we received intelligence indicating that they had uncovered a major cache in the Helmand Province."
He spreads a map across the table. It is covered in Enochian and other esoteric symbols describing the paratactical situation — leylines, known Ways, elevated ARad sources, ghoul nests, and the like. It is also written in blood.
"The cache is located in the mountains east of the town of Garmsir, here." He points to a spot on the map. "The area is controlled by Taliban forces. Remote observation shows that Scarlet Hammer remains in the area, likely negotiating an exit strategy with their local partners. Forecasting suggests that they will depart the country within seventy-two hours, with the majority of the paraweaponry, which will be sold to Samothracian militants who will use it to attack Athens. This is an unacceptable outcome."
He places an engineering sketch on the table, labelled in Russian. It depicts a device that looks like a telescope mounted to a rifle stock.
"The paraweaponry contained in the cache is a stockpile of first-generation Soviet look-to-kill devices, which have a thaumoptical package that directly copies the design of a biological gorgon. Which is why—"
"You're sending me in alone."
"Correct. Our narcoprophets project that this will have the highest chance of success."
Van Kann nods again, knowing that the man would say that regardless of the actual odds. It changes nothing. "Mission parameters?"
"You will be inserted into the target area via Ghost Hawk. You will recover or destroy the look-to-kill devices. You will maintain radio silence until reaching the extraction point, here." He points at another spot on the map.
"Opposition?"
"No more than a dozen members of Scarlet Hammer, armed with Class 2C paraweaponry — chiefly plasma projectors and harmonic grenades — and supported by an unknown number of Taliban with conventional armaments. The wild card, so to speak, is the ORIA — there is a significant chance that they will launch their own operation to recover the cache. If they do, you must deal with them first, or risk a complete mission failure." He draws a line across the map. "If you follow this route, you will almost certainly encounter their agents, should they deploy."
"Strength?"
"Unknown. Their thaumaturges are actively blocking our divination attempts. Based on prior encounters, we expect them to field a team of four to six operatives, supporting one or two paranatural assets. Plan accordingly."
Van Kann nods a third and final time. When it's clear she has no further questions, the psychic releases their mental grip on the man, and his eyes snap back into place. Hand shaking ever-so-slightly, he dabs a drop of blood from his nose.
"Good luck, Sergeant."

Helmand Province
15 Minutes Past Noon
"Turn around. Slowly." The words are English, but the voice is lightly inflected with a Persian accent. It is also clearly feminine.
Van Kann allows herself a small, grim smile. She focuses, unblinking her eyes to see the world with her full, deadly vision, and turns around as instructed to see—
Nothing.
Not quite nothing. There is a gun floating in front of her, about four feet off the ground. But the woman holding the gun is invisible, and thus immune to her gaze.
Van Kann frowns. The asset is a djinn then, not the wizard she killed earlier. Unfortunate, but maybe not unsalvageable.
"What's wrong?" The voice taunts. "Having performance problems?"
"I could ask you the same thing," Van Kann retorts, keeping her tone deliberately scornful. "The power to remake the cosmos at your fingertips, and you're holding me at gunpoint. Why is that, I wonder?"
The barrel of the gun wavers, but the djinn doesn't respond.
Van Kann continues speaking in a softer, more reconciliatory tone. "I'll admit it, you've got the upper hand here. But suppose you kill me. Then what? What do you expect to accomplish without a handler?"
"I'm still invisible—"
"Oh, sure, and maybe you'll be able to kill a few people that way. But do you think the Russians don't have ARad imagers? They'll find you eventually, kill you, and then we'll have both failed our missions. Neither of us wants that."
The barrel drops slightly. "Why do you care?"
"We both want those Soviet LTKs. You can't get them by yourself, and if you kill me, I can't get them. If you don't kill me, I can help you get them. Seems like a better outcome to me."
"You mean, you can betray me as soon as I drop my guard."
"Don't drop your guard then." Van Kann shrugs. "Your choice, but if you're going to kill me, can you get it over with already?"
The djinn doesn't speak, but Van Kann knows the other woman is going to fold. Without her handler, she is essentially powerless — the djinn may be a reality bender capable of effortlessly altering the world around her in any way she can imagine, but she is leashed by a powerful geas, one of the greatest secrets of Islamic thaumaturgy. Unless given a command by a human handler, her only power is the invisibility imposed by the binding laid upon her.
This djinn's handler, and his comrades, are all going to be archeological finds that will puzzle and delight future historians of Afghan sculpture.
The djinn lowers the gun. "I will kill you as soon as you are no longer useful."
"Promises, promises."
"Fuck you."
Van Kann smirks.
The djinn kicks a cloud of sand at her. "You know where the cache is? Start walking."
Van Kann does, but slowly. "I'm going to assume there's more to giving you commands than just saying 'I wish you would stop holding me hostage.'"
"You would be correct." The djinn's voice takes on a more neutral tone as she launches into a lecture. "Each of us is bound with a unique symbolic language of command. Mine is based on hand gestures."
"So if I make the right gestures, you'll be able to use your powers in that manner — but you don't have to, do you?"
"Correct, it's a permission, not a requirement." The djinn stops walking, although it takes Van Kann several steps to realize it and come to a stop herself. "How did you know that?"
Van Kann shrugs. "If it worked the other way, it would be too dangerous to use you in the field — secret language or not." She starts walking again, then stops after three steps. "How exactly do you intend to teach me this gesture-based language?"
There is a long, dangerous silence.
"Do you," the djinn says slowly, "Have any gloves?"
Van Kann nods, then unslings the pack from her back. Moving carefully, acutely aware of the gun still trained on her, she removes a pair of gloves from one of the side pockets. She tosses them to the djinn, who catches them out of the air with one hand. She has to let the gun dangle from her shoulder strap while she puts them on, and Van Kann watches it with catlike intensity.
The djinn waggles her fingers experimentally, then laughs. "Goodness, it is weird being able to see my fingers."
"So are you naked all the time, or are your clothes invisible too?"
She raises one of her disembodied gloved hands and flips Van Kann off.
"Which hand signal is that?"
"It means I can still decide to kill you, American."
"All that with just one sign?" Van Kann pauses for a moment. "It's Van Kann. Staff Sergeant Ulyssa van Kann, of the US Army."
The djinn hesitates, then says in a softer tone, "You may call me Vida."
"Just Vida?"
"Just Vida. My true name was sacrificed in the binding." She sounds wistful, and Van Kann recalls that few djinn are created voluntarily.
"Just Vida then. What do I need to know?"
Vida holds up a raised pinky. "This. Every command has to start with this. It basically means 'you', or 'djinn', or 'attention'. That will be followed by one or more gestures to denote a target, followed by a gesture for a verb, and then this sign—" She clenches her hand into a fist. "—to complete the command. It means 'end' or 'execute'."
Van Kann nods and pays rapt attention as the djinn walks her through several basic gestures while they continue walking.
"Technically, you can chain multiple targets and verbs together, but I wouldn't worry about that." She leaves unspoken the reason: that they won't be working together long enough for it to matter.
"Do you have to actually see the signs?" Van Kann asks.
"I have to be aware that you're signing," Vida explains. "But as long as I am, I don't actually need to see the signs to know what they are. It's part of the memetic awareness of the geas."
Vida starts drilling her on the signs they've run through, and Van Kann does her best to perform them accurately. The symbol for (Weapon (Held by (Enemy (Indicated)))), a particularly complicated multi-part gesture, gives her some trouble though, and eventually Vida stops her in frustration.
"Like this." The djinn reaches over and grabs her hands. Vida's grip is hesitant at first, but tightens once it's clear Van Kann isn't going to pull away. She guides the half-gorgon's fingers through the proper motions, once slowly, then again faster. Her hands linger for longer than they need to, but quickly pull away when Van Kann starts to repeat the sign unaided. She does it perfectly, and Vida offers her a thumbs up. "You're lucky you're a quick study. If you weren't, I might be rethinking this plan."
"I've always had clever fingers," Van Kann says.
Vida coughs quickly and clears her throat. "So, what exactly was your army's plan for you? Obviously, you're a formidable soldier, but how did you intend to keep Scarlet Hammer from using the look-to-kill weapons against you?"
Van Kann looks over at the djinn in surprise. "Gorgons don't affect gorgons. The LTKs are close enough that I'm immune."
"But what about the mirrored shield of Perseus?"
"What about it?" Van Kann shrugs. "It's a myth, and a Greek one at that. Herodotus basically invented lying. Anyways, you're one to talk. Aren't you supposed to sound like Robin Williams?"
Vida harrumphs. "I never liked that movie."
"Why? Is genie a slur or something?"
"No. I mean, I guess. But that's not why." She kicks a rock out of the way. "The princess has a choice and the djinn gets release."
"And you don't."
"The power of the djinn runs in my bloodline. My ancestors have served Sultans and Caliphs for centuries. This was my lot before I was born." Vida waves her hands sadly, conveying resigned acceptance.
"It doesn't have to be."
The djinn snorts. "What's the alternative? To defect, to join your military? I would just be trading a familiar master for a foreign one. Can you honestly tell me that would be better? Can you truly say that you had a choice?"
Van Kann hesitates, then shakes her head. "No. Not a good one." She looks down at her feet so that Vida won't see her face. "I can walk in the human world, but I'm not part of it, and I never will be. My options were the military, or selling life-size lawn ornaments. At least this way, I get to travel to exotic locales and meet interesting people. Even if most of them are trying to kill me."
She looks over in the direction of the djinn, and for a brief moment she is certain that she's making eye contact. Then Vida coughs, and the moment is gone.
"I wish we had met under different circumstances," Vida says.
Van Kann nods. "But djinn don't get to make their own wishes, do they?"
"No. Nor do gorgons, apparently."
They continue walking in silence for several minutes after that, until Vida regains interest in teaching Van Kann the sign language. She's giving Van Kann far more vocabulary than she'll actually need, but it's something to do during the hike. When they both focus on that, ignoring the fact that they are still enemies, they can even pretend to be something more than allies of convenience.

Evening
They reach the Scarlet Hammer encampment just before sundown.
The spies-turned-gangsters and their insurgent allies have setup camp around an old Soviet bunker from the last Afghan War. Faded and flickering wards written in sinister and otherworldly scripts, chiefly Cyrillic, are scrawled across the single steel door, betraying its paranatural purpose. The tents pitched in a loose semi-circle around the bunker suggest they've been there for a while. The trucks loaded with crates bearing the logo of the Division of Special Circumstances suggest that they won't be there much longer.
Although they're dressed in similar garb, Van Kann can easily tell the two groups apart through her binoculars. The Russians are more relaxed and better armed, lounging around the camp in groups of two and three, while the Taliban are only carrying Kalashnikovs, and are huddled together in a worried cluster near one of the trucks. Van Kann watches with disinterest as the apparent leaders of the two groups argue, the subject of their discussion only evidenced by the wild gesticulations they occasionally make towards the trucks, the bunker, and each other.
Van Kann hums pensively. "Tough nut. I could probably get a third before they wise up and drop out of sight — maybe half if I start with the Taliban, they're clumped up in a nice soft group, but they're not the ones to worry about. Then it would come down to whether one of them can get a bead on me with a plasma projector before I can look at him. Call it a toss-up."
"Then it seems you got lucky in encountering me," Vida says. The djinn has shed her gloves and ditched the battle rifle, so that Van Kann can only guess at where she is based on her faint footprints in the sand and the direction of her voice.
"So it seems." Van Kann lowers the binoculars and stows them back in her pack. "I could just ask you to kill them all from here, but that's so unfair that I would actually feel bad about it. For a little bit. Maybe."
"It would be rather boring."
"And it would be boring," Van Kann agrees. She turns to where she thinks the djinn is and offers a sinful smile. "How about we have a little bit of fun? Give them the ghost of a fighting chance, just to make things interesting."
Vida clicks her tongue. "What did you have in mind?"
Van Kann signals to Vida: (You (Djinn)) (Weapons (All (Area))) (Disrupt) (Execute command).
The djinn laughs, and then, with a snap of her fingers, temporarily rewrites the laws of reality within a half-mile radius so that gunpowder won't ignite and plasma won't conduct.
The ensuing slaughter doesn't even count as a battle.
Van Kann slides down the slope, raising a plume of dust and drawing the attention of every man in the camp. One of them, a sentry, manages to raise his arm to point at her and open his mouth to shout an alarm before he is trapped in that pose forever.
There's a chorus of dismayed curses as each of the men discovers that their weapons don't work, and then death is among them.
The half-gorgon stalks through the camp with the deadly indifference of her forebear Medusa, stoning men with every sweep of her gaze. Behind her, Vida darts around unseen, snapping the necks of any who manage to evade the lethal notice of her comrade. Three members of Scarlet Hammer come charging out of the bunker, and are petrified before they finish taking three steps. One of the Taliban, a minor magician of a religious mind, attempts to say a warding prayer that could even be effective, only to be silenced by an invisible kick to the groin. Another man tries to throw his useless plasma projector at Van Kann; she dodges it easily, and the man is a statue before the gun hits the ground.
In less than twenty seconds, the duo kill more than twenty men.
The last Russian is smart enough to have figured out what's happening, and to know that he only has one chance. He waits to ambush Van Kann from behind, leaping out around the corner of the bunker with a knife as she walks past. It slices through the air, aimed directly at the half-gorgon's spine, leaving no time for her to turn around.
Vida catches the man's arm, stopping the knife an inch from Van Kann's neck.
At the djinn's shouted warning, she spins around and locks eyes with the Russian. The final thing he will ever see is a pair of eyes the color of emeralds, and just as cold.
Silence falls as the last of his flesh turns to stone. With all enemies neutralized, all that remains is to complete the mission objective.
Van Kann looks at the knife, then at the space where Vida last was.
There's still one more thing to do before either woman can finish her mission.
The knife starts to wriggle free of the statue's grip, seemingly of its own accord.
Van Kann dives forwards, tackling the djinn just as she liberates the blade.
They roll through the dirt, wrestling for control of the knife. Van Kann ends up on top, straddling Vida, and thrusts her left arm against the djinn's throat, pushing her head deep into the sand. The djinn drops the knife and grabs at the arm the half-gorgon is pressing against her windpipe, struggling for breath. Van Kann scoops up the weapon with her free hand and raises it triumphantly, preparing to bring it down for the killing blow.
The setting sun glints off the tip of the blade as it descends…
… into the sand next to Vida's head.
Breathing heavily, Van Kann stares at where she thinks the djinn's eyes are. She shifts her grip, so that her bare wrist is resting on Vida's neck and its surprisingly warm skin, releasing some of the pressure. As the djinn gasps for air, her invisible and definitely-naked body rises and falls beneath Van Kann. They stay like that, transfixed in silence broken only by the sound of their panting, for an eternity.
Quick as a snake, Van Kann leans down and kisses the other woman, directly on the lips.
The kiss lasts for only an instant before Van Kann withdraws. Pushing herself off the djinn, she stands and turns towards the trucks loaded with the crates of look-to-kills. She glances at Vida, then signs: (You (Djinn)) (That (Indicated)) (Destroy) (Execute command).
For a long moment, nothing happens. Then the trucks implode into a tangled mass of warped metal and splintered wood.
Van Kann nods, satisfied. "Thank you, Vida. And goodbye."
"Ulyssa! Wait!" The longing in the djinn's voice is unmistakable.
Van Kann looks back at the djinn and smiles. "As you wish."


This October's NIGHTMAREFEST has brought ghosts and ghouls galore to haunt the halls of this supernatural site. To commemorate this feast of frights, we present to you an assemblage of apparitions in image and text, inspired by the chilling works of many authors.

A Nightmare Dreary
By, Impperatrix

Come one, come all, shouts the dread circus' ringleader
Autumn falls, salute the night, the witch and the demon
The time had come, the veil falls, tear apart the cedar
They celebrate the darkest times, the terror is their reason
Behold the nightmares that arrive quickly galloping
Chosen by them to appease their need for goosebumps
In three they come, as the three wayward sisters in gathering
The trinity come as muses for them that have their minds vacant
The Townhouse, the haunted house, the house for a poltergeist
A closed apartment, an old cottage, the building that was left unfinished
Empty, old, forgotten, forsaken, abandoned to insects and mice
The imagery of bricks and cement, which ghouls are sheltering in it?
The Bureaucrat, the slave of rules, papers, pencil, pen, and administration
Seeking to put in order a world drowning in true and pure entropy
Is it the rightful horror? Is the realm around it the unfeigned aberration?
Or maybe both king and kingdom bring the atrocities in complete syntropy
The Graveyard Shift comes at last, but indeed not at least
The gravedigger roams around the necropolis, lonely at his job
Tombs and sepulchers until the horizon, a scenario without bliss
And from the six feet under they can hear the dead, their cry and their sob
Autumn falls, salute the night, the witch and the demon
Come the monster, feast the reaper, hex the hag, and cry the dead
They celebrate the darkest times, the terror is their reason
A Nightmare Dreary, the three muses for those who love the dread

Townhouse
By, LORDXVNV

In a townhouse old and quaking, lantern raised and fingers shaking,
Here I wander, there I tarry; Every door might cause my death.
Shrieking wailing makes me fearful; lamp-cast shadows flicker awful
As I wander and I ponder, I see a room with chairs of flesh.
As I wander and I ponder past that room with chairs of flesh,
Every door might cause my death.
Pushing forth I see a specter of a banquet table's nectar
Tempting plates with steaks and sweetmeats. But drawing closer, putrefaction.
Scratching from the wooden floorboards urges me to keep on forwards.
Termites rising in my footsteps, worries urge a counteraction.
Termites rising, cause for action, worries urge my plan for action,
Close behind me, putrefaction.
Panic strikes; I can't stay resting. Lamplight ebbs; my fear is cresting.
Demons that I've tried to hide from come now to extract their tithe.
Secrets hidden, secrets failed, revealed now by a tattletale.
Needles pin me; I can't hide. Upon those needles now I writhe.
Like a puppet, needles pin me, on those needles now I writhe,
To my demons must I tithe.

The Bureaucrat
By, DrGooday

In this here tower of ivory gray, I hold the pen and yet I have no say.
I sign the form, I sign once more. I hear the footsteps approaching.
I pray to God they pass me by, ignore me for the storm brewing in their sky,
The smell of rot, a dreadful silence filled with fraught. Can they hear the beating of my heart?
That dreaded crowd I hear their laugh I cannot bear that awful baff, the click of their gun.
And now they sit there and laugh, as those they've killed are never sought.
And now I shun the killer, I lock that door; I focus on my work forevermore.
I do my best to that killer's face as I huddle closer to my dark wood desk.
Those greedy salesmen at the top of it all, I pray for the day that they fall.
My prayers cut short as they approach my holy fort. A knocking at my door.
Knocking harder, ever louder, enough to turn the wood into powder, do not let them in.
Quiet now I say, as my body leaves my mind. I know that the beast remains.
My heart beats now, faster yet faster. I can hear them breathing through the plaster.
My sweat is cold now, dripping to the floor, I release a silent cry.
I lean down over my desk, I turn my mind to these awful tests,
The paper slashes through my flesh, the smell of gore now fresh, their interest now renewed.
A silent cry the fear shining through my eyes, I've signed their contract with my blood.
I fall silent as they turn the handle open…

Graveyard Shift
By, LAN 2D

To a grave; plundered and unearthed,
I walk unwilling, through dark.
Yet, pigeon footed, I traverse.
The light behind me, now afar.
The tomb looms, illuminated;
A ghoul, a fiend, I discover.
This way comes, something wicked,
Something else, something other.
I can't remember her jade eyes,
Cold snaps my feet asunder.
It's time to go, sweet dreams, goodbye;
Alive, yet buried six feet under.
The horn sounds and the dead pass by,
Time marches on through fog.
Almost midnight now, a cry
Speeds along the track. Tick tock.
But when the mind fails and falters,
The sparrow finds perverse belief:
A forgotten dead beneath the altar,
hidden with avarice and conceit.
The wheel of life halts in the ground
With but dry remains leftover.
Face down in the soil, a muffled sound;
The damp dirt has no flavour.
Something's out there, held on a string,
Quietly, beyond the trees.
A moonlit brown, never changing,
Where viscous skies seem to breathe.
To avoid the night it hides,
Silent, a taunting monster.
Behold! I screech in fright,
Fading, the frost melts faster.
I walk along endless hallways,
Through a thousand thousand doors.
Forevermore, her eyes ablaze
Yet a meaningless allure.
Above, a buzzing pale white light,
A shift, a crunch, then a shout,
Try to run, with all my might-
It's too late — the power's out!

Images assembled by DodoDevil

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Poets:

Name: Elf-rib
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.486316

Name: De slaap van de rede brengt monsters voort
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.42735

Name: Skelet met harnas, allegorie op de dood
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.597235

Name: Uil uitgedost als pelgrim
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.37637

Name: Twee mannen en een monster in een werkkamer
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.199314

Name: Figuur in de vorm van een walvis
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.445428

Name: Menselijk oog met een afwijking
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.195117

Townhouse:

Name: Hoge huis te Zoelmond, in de Betuwe
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.245923

Name: Stadsgezicht
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5458

Name: Huizen aan een gracht
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.304734

Name: Boereninterieur
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9650

Name: Zonsverduistering, gezien vanaf de maan
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.600284

Name: Jongen op een bank deinst terug voor een geestverschijning
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.652841

Name: Ik kijk van bovenaf op de vage vormen van een menselijke figuur
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.42215

Name: Still Life with a Tall Beer Glass
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6366

Name: GOC Symbol
License: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Source Link: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2744

Name: Vinger die is genezen van een geïnfecteerde wond (osteomyelitis)
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.601991

Bureaucrat

Name: Vanitas stilleven
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5422

Name: Portret van een onbekende vrouw achter een schrijftafel
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.673553

Name: Monster met vluchtende mensen
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.199308

Name: Monster met schaal
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.199429

Name: Kiemcel II
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.561832

Name: Anatomische studie van het hoofd, de neus en de tong
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.339371

Name: Fotoreproductie van een prent naar een schilderij,
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.615829

Name: Portret van Willem Frederik baron van Roëll
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.99611

Name: M1911A1
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0
Source Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M1911A1.png

Name: A B Blair Chicago Daily News newsroom
License: Public Domain
Source Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_B_Blair_Chicago_Daily_News_newsroom.jpg

Name: Schrijvende hand
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.308061

Name: Studieblad met schelpen
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.247474

Graveyard

Name: Begraafplaats op het binnenhof van de kathedraal van Canterbury
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.350152

Name: Dode duif
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.145007

Name: Begraafplaats, Bath, Pennsylvania, Verenigde Staten
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.449187

Name: Een man wordt eenzaam in een nachtelijk landschap

L'homme fut solitaire dans un paysage de nuit

License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.42202

Name: Huis bij avond
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.202438

Name: Fotoreproductie van een prent van een schilderij, voorstellende de Aanbidding der wijzen
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.616277

Name: Catacombe
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.213352

Name: Doodgraver
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.143920

Name: Reproductie van een schilderij van Hamlet en de doodgravers
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.710488

Name: Menselijke schedel op een stok
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.623525

Name: Oliver Cromwell bij de doodskist van Karel I, koning van Engeland
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.122331

Name: Watch
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.19080

Name: Vrouw van Richard Roland Holst in bed met afgewend gezicht
License: Public Domain
Source Link: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.297845