⚠️ content warning ↑
Word Count: 8,789
ITEM #: SCP-TBD
CLASS: Safe?
CONPROCS: Buy notebook to keep track of this shit. Write up a proper file once you get a handle on it.
DESCRIPTION: SCP-TBD is the collective haunting of Site-17.
Far below the earth and the Colorado night, Dr. Kondraki stalked the halls of Site-17 like a wandering spirit. His skin was pale, his mouth sullen, his clothes unkempt. Sleeplessness draped over him like a funeral shroud. Kondraki's eyes, rimmed with deep shadows, had a particular sheen to them, not really seeing whatever was set before them. Sometimes the air appeared to warp around him, as if he were passing through a heat haze, or underwater.
It wasn't the falling asleep that eluded Kondraki. His dreams weren't an issue, either. It was the space between that troubled him. That period when one is drifting from waking to sleeping, when thoughts begin to come apart like lumps of papier-mâché in tepid water — it all felt too familiar. He couldn't bear it, the sweating through the mattress, heart screaming, waiting for the bullet. So he walked Site-17's sprawl, fueled by an unconscionable amount of coffee, and thought himself a revenant.
Kondraki walked, and he sought ghosts.
TO-DO
Locate and catalogue all ghosts on-site
Meeting with Dr. C on 19/4 11am
Buy action figures from that show Draven likes
Get site map - obtain clearance/draw my own?
Parent-teacher conference 4/6 7pm
doodle in the corner of the page, just to establish that drawings are also part of these notes — a simple eye, maybe?
Once his nightly haunting was finished with, Kondraki returned to his apartment and blacked out on the couch for a couple hours. It wasn't restful, but it was enough to smooth away the epileptic smears of light and color that were beginning to linger in his path.
Kondraki woke leadenly, couch piping indented into his hirsute cheek, clumsily levering himself onto his feet and into the shower. Afterwards, he pulled his long brown hair into a ponytail, and threw on his usual workplace ensemble: a simple flannel with the Foundation-standard lab coat layered over, jeans, sturdy hiking boots, frameless rectangular glasses, ballcap, and a cheap Kodak down one pocket.
As a rule, Kondraki always kept a camera on his person. Whenever anyone asked why, he'd say he was a bit of a shutterbug — which was true, but really it was more of a habit from his anart days. Smarter to keep quiet about that, especially now that his Are We Cool Yet history was considered need-to-know information. Only site security and upper management were in the loop.
Draven woke with considerably greater composure than his bedraggled father, which was to be expected. Kids his age were all little Energizer bunnies. Next was breakfast — cereal and toast for Draven, coffee and a granola bar for Kondraki — then they were off down the intrasite subway for class.
Site-17's preschool was more or less like the one Kondraki attended as a child, only half a kilometer underground and all the colorful posters were plastered with a Foundation mascot's smiling face. There were still windows, but they were illusory things, looking out onto simulated vistas. The morning sun crept over a fictitious mountain ridge, washing the classroom in artificial gold.
When they arrived, Draven expressed only a moment's reluctance to part before dashing in to greet two of his friends, the daughter of an anart historian and a boy with glowing bones. The preschool's student body was mostly the children of other Foundation employees, but here and there Kondraki saw stranger youths, those with anomalies deemed mild enough to allow exposure to others their age. (A boy with a chrysanthemum growing out of his left eye socket. A girl with skin the color and texture of terracotta.) To look upon this motley brood, already chattering and playing as any group of kids would, it became easy to imagine a world without the Veil. Kondraki killed the thought and turned away, pivoting towards the day's labors. He had a meeting to attend.
Weird sketchy drawing that relates to the ghosts in some way, but has no Kondraki text to provide context.
IDEAS:
Layout of some intersecting hallways, with a few points circled, labeled with random symbols.
surreal monster drawing
Kondraki found the door to Dr. Clef's office at the end of a long hallway adjoining a hive of cubicles, as though even the facility preferred him at arm's length. Like most other doors in Site-17, it was solid metal, sturdy enough to survive a bomb blast, and sealed with an electronic lock. A musical symbol was taped over the nameplate.
From his left, a woman's voice. Kondraki turned; there was another office here, door ajar, and he hadn't even noticed. He really was exhausted. I need to sleep tonight, he thought grimly, no matter what it takes. Melatonin tablets, elephant tranquilizers, heavy drinking, grievous head trauma, whatever.
"Are you looking for the bathroom?" repeated the voice. "It's at the end of the other hallway, you can't miss it."
"No, uh." He stepped into adjacent office's doorframe. "I'm here for a meeting with Dr. Clef. He's next door, right?"
The other office was about as big as the shoebox he'd been working out of, and nearly every inch of it swamped in stacks of paperwork, the desk shoved into a far corner to make room. It was undecorated, save for a mug shaped like Garfield's head on the desk, and a motivational poster depicting a kitten dangling by its paws from a clothesline. A woman in a suit peered up at him from behind the desk.
"He is," said the woman. "I'm his personal assistant."
Kondraki smirked. "Does that make you Dr. Treble, or Researcher Bass?"
"I'm not a scientist," she replied stiffly, tapping at her laptop a couple times. She probably already knew that joke. "Are you Dr. Kondraki?"
"Yeah. Listen." Kondraki maneuvered into the assistant's office, taking care not to kick over any of the paper stacks. He lowered his voice, "I've heard that Dr. Clef has… sort of a reputation. Is any of it true?"
Reputation, in this context, was an understatement. The chair of Theology & Ontology, a businesslike woman with smooth skin and very old eyes, had warned Kondraki that Clef was known to be difficult to work with. Several of his former colleagues, after sharing a workspace with him for an extended period, had requested transfer to other sites. Another had given up a promising career in theoretical physics to work in the circus.
The chair had also told him that, without Clef, his pet project would have negligible chances with Foundation management. Not only were Clef's fields of expertise perfect for Procedure TZARA, but his sway among the upper staff was, apparently, quite considerable. Considerable enough that even a risky project from an ex-anartist with SCP classification might still receive Foundation sanction. This "Dr. Clef" was a vital resource, and Kondraki was in dire need of further intel.
The assistant's expression went deliberately neutral, like she was trying not to wince. "He's… a complicated man."
"That bad, huh?"
"You have no idea."
BANG.
The door to Dr. Clef's office slammed open with terrific force. Out he came.
Alto Clef was was at least a foot shorter than Kondraki, heavy-set, with tousled blonde hair and a beard to match beneath a wide-brimmed hat. Under his open lab coat, he was wearing a patterned shirt so eye-searingly garish that it was most likely a low-grade cognitohazard. Multiple things were strapped to his body: a military watch on one wrist, the outline of a shoulder holster underneath his left arm and a neon green fanny pack around his waist, which hung over his crotch like a mall cop's sword of Damocles.
Clef's socks-and-crocs-clad feet slapped against the tile floor as he stepped into the hall. He had one hand slung in his knee-length khaki shorts, and was using the other to hold an open manila folder.
"Adams," he spoke with a heavy southern drawl. "Have you filed that—" He glanced up, pausing. "Shit, you the art freak? Con-lackey? You're fuckin' early."
A muscle pulsed in Kondraki's jaw. "Excuse me? My name is—"
"You're excused," Dr. Clef interrupted, looking back to the folder. "In fact, you can excuse yourself right out of this wing. Not interested helping some Are We Cool Yet fruitcake design his next rape sculpture or pretend shark or whatever-the-fuck."
Cold rage swelled up from somewhere beneath Kondraki's sternum. "I beg your fucking pardon?" For a fraction of an instant, space around him contracted like fabric, wingtips feathering behind his ears.
Very quietly, Adams mumbled, "Oh god, not more of this."
Kondraki strode into the hall, knocking over a small pile of papers, barely noticing. He growled, "I don't know who you think I am, but—"
"I know exactly who you are," Clef interrupted, snapping his folder closed. "You made your living selling anomalous tools to pretentious, mass-murdering shitheads, and, what— now you wanna build your own toys? Take a Foundation budget for a spin?" He tilted his hat to glare up at Kondraki. "If it were up to me, you people'd all be shot. I only agreed to this stupid meeting to tell you, this ain't happening. None of your psycho art projects are going to be happening, I'll make goddamn sure of it."
For a single, red, moment, Kondraki knew what it would feel like to beat Alto Clef's stupid, spiteful face in. He towered over Clef like a furious tidal wave, fingernails biting little crescents into his palms. With the moderated tone of someone that was silently counting backwards from ten, he said, "That's not your call to make."
"Sure it is." Clef cocked his head to one side. "It's why you came looking for me."
Kondraki ground his teeth. He'd had a strategy, coming into this, to prey on Clef's ego, to draw his interest with promises of ground-breaking discoveries and career advancement. Kondraki discarded all of that and said, "You don't get it. The call's already been made." He smiled with an angry confidence he didn't feel. "Just a few days ago, one of those O5 Council representatives came to my office. Do you want to know what he told me?"
"What, a factotum?" Clef was incredulous. "Bullshit."
"It's true," Kondraki lied. "An O5 got hold of my proposal somehow, said something about staying on the cutting edge of ontokinetics. So long as I get them results, they won't give a damn about my history."
"Bullshit," Clef repeated. Movement behind his eyes. Uncertainty?
"Face it: this is happening whether or not you're on board." Kondraki folded his arms, looming over Clef. "You really want to prove I'm up to some shit? Sign on and catch me in the act yourself, motherfucker. Who else is going to do it?"
They held one another's glare for a long moment, before Clef's features split into an awful grin that seemed wider than his face. Kondraki couldn't tell if it was an expression of amusement, or an animalistic baring of teeth. Either way, it had a decidedly predatory quality.
"Alright," Clef said. "Alright. Sure. Put it like that, guess I got no choice but to give your little art show a shot, huh?" His smile widened impossibly further. "You audacious son of a bitch. Why don't you show me your lab, give me the whole presentation. See if I can't find a good reason to put you down."
Overhead, the kitten poster leered down at Kondraki like an evil star.
Hang in there, baby!
PHENOMENON 1 - PHANTOM DOOR
There's a door in a hallway near my office that wasn't there before. At least, I don't remember it being there before I got shot.
It doesn't look like any of the other doors — sturdy wood with flaky sky-blue paint and a silver knob. No label. Wouldn't budge when I tried opening it. Going to knock next.
drawing of door
Nothing happened. Pretty sure there's a room back there though, it would've sounded different if it was flat against a wall
Will give it a knock whenever I pass by it, see if I get any different results.
Kondraki's first spectres were architectural. He'd would look and see a door, unlabeled and unadorned. Sometimes lacking even any visible means of ingress, more of a recessed slab of iron than an entrance. He'd look again and see a bare expanse of wall.
These two states of reality layered over one another. He'd see a locked gate, a grime-streaked hallway, an empty room. He'd look. There it was. There it wasn't.
Kondraki wandered the labyrinth that was Site-17, a modern Theseus without silk to guide him, and in his mind's eye, a map was beginning to grow. A three-dimensional structure like the knotted roots of a tree, extending in all directions and lit from the inside. A map of ghosts.
PHENOMENON 8 - WALL MOUTH
Ragged circular hole in the far wall of my usual cafeteria. Roughly 2m diameter. Black marker drawing of an open mouth around it with, no coloration.
Regretting taking Rights' invitation to have lunches with her, it's been putting me the fuck off my appetite. What's so depressing about eating alone in my office anyway? Christ that was a pathetic sentence. No wonder why that woman treats me like a sopping wet alley cat.
Too dark inside to make out what's inside of it. Flashlight is no help.
drawing of wall mouth
Know I shouldn't put my hand in there, but really curious about it. Got drunker than usual. There wasn't anything inside, but my hand came out sort of moist. Fucking gross.
After he convinced Dr. Clef on board, it didn't take long to start regretting it. The guy was lazy, selfish, crude, and cruel. He had the fashion sensibilities of a migraine aura. His distended grin reminded Kondraki of the colony of feral Cheshires that roamed the streets around his long-abandoned Esterberg apartment. A nicotine-stained enamel landscape with nothing behind it, only there to fill the space.
Space was a somewhat problematic subject in matters of SCP-7586-B. Each instance was a snarl in the fabric of reality, a victim of poisonous anart, an exquisite corpse that had never quite died. Procedure TZARA was intended to be a reversal, a combination of sights, sounds, and smells that would turn back the flow of their perpetual unmaking. A complex memetic trigger for ontokinetic reconstruction.
TZARA meetings were sporadic, arranged around Clef's allegedly hectic schedule. They mainly consisted of discussions (heated arguments) over which smells/sights/sounds were best suited to the task, and how such sensations would be transmitted to the dash-B's in containment. On the third of such sessions, Clef showed up to Kondraki's blast zone of a laboratory forty-one minutes late and wearing a Stetson indoors, like a complete asshole.
By way of greeting, Clef asked, "Mind if I smoke in here?" Without waiting for an answer he rummaged a cigarette out of his fanny pack and started flicking at it with a battered old lighter. By the time he got a thimble of flame going, Kondraki was out of his seat to pluck the cigarette out of Clef's hand.
"Yeah, I mind," snapped Kondraki. Five seconds in and he was already on his last nerve. "It's dangerous."
"Jesus, you sound like my wife." Clef swung away to sit heavily in a nearby chair, now flicking at the lighter with idle irritation. "Our underground ventilation is next level shit. You'll be fine."
"Smoke has a very distinct scent," replied Kondraki, biting back an appended you idiot. "It'll cling to the equipment. TZARA might not work if we have extra stimuli muddling everything up."
Distantly, he heard footsteps from the hallway, muffled by the closed door. Their pattern was irregular, a staccato one-two-three step, like you'd hear from a person with a cane. But that wasn't quite it — each footfall sounded the same as the other. Kondraki was too pissed off at Clef to consciously notice any of this, but he'd later piece it together in retrospect.
"Smoke won't muddle it," said Clef.
"How's that?"
"Just won't." Clef started going through his fanny pack again. The most infuriating thing was, he was probably right. In matters of ontokinetics or memetics, Clef rarely explained his reasoning but was nearly always correct. Kondraki wasn't sure if he acted obtuse on purpose, or was genuinely unable to clarify.
It was possible that Clef was a genius — geniuses were a disturbingly common animal in Foundation environments, after all. Many a genius understood their chosen field so intuitively that they struggled to explain their processes to others. Perhaps, Kondraki thought, Clef was of this intellectual subspecies. He'd always resented them.
"People's lives are on the line." Kondraki took another unlit cigarette out of Clef's hands obstinately. "I'm not taking that risk."
"Yeah, I'm sure that really keeps you up at night. People's lives." Clef gave him a wry look and leaned back in the office chair, unoiled hinges squawking beneath his weight. "What's your Cool Yet cell's body count, triple digits?"
As they passed by the lab door, it became apparent that the footsteps weren't footsteps. They sounded more like the tread of a museum curator Kondraki had once met in Three Portlands, who was an intelligent goat. It was the tread of hooves, a neat ca-click ca-click ca-click that dragged blunt nails across the back of his mind.
"Fuck off." Kondraki's veins were humming. "You don't know anything about me."
Clef gestured placatingly. "Look, Kondraki, I get it. You're fresh out of containment, and now you got something to prove, yeah? You wanna do something that'll make all the eggheads in upper management pop big ol' science boners. I get it." He pointed at Kondraki with yet another cigarette. "So don't pretend it's anything other than that."
Translation: Don't pretend you're not just as much of a shithead as I am. Just because you got the height advantage, doesn't mean you're in any position to look down on me.
Kondraki grabbed the third cigarette, scowling. "No smoking in the lab. End of discussion."
The pattern of irregular hoofsteps almost seemed to take on shape as they drifted away, a kind of meaningless Morse code tapped into scuffed tile.
Clef smiled blandly. "Whatever you say, boss."
PHENOMENON 23 - INVISIBLE HOOVES
Hearing footsteps/hoof sounds behind doors and around corners. Never within direct line of sight.
Based on perception? First mobile manifestation of the anomaly?
Horses????
If occurrences aren't completely random, keep an eye on wherever they appear frequently.
As Kondraki searched, the scope of Site-17's haunting gradually became apparent. First, he came upon art ghosts. Strange scrawlings on the walls, sketches of open mouths and half-monsters. Barely coherent warnings, threats, treatises. Then the ghosts of objects, peculiar artifacts in public places. A lit standing lamp in the middle of a cafeteria. A dollhouse in place of one of the toilets in the bathroom by his lab. A noose woven of knotted phone cords, which dangled inside a utility closet whose door was always halfway open. And beyond that, things he had no names for. Shadows that sank too deeply, pooling beneath stairwells and behind filled crates. Empty space where a person should've been, or people where there ought to have been only empty space. Inexplicable signals. Discolored injuries. All of it unnoticed by the site's populace.
Kondraki started carrying his little notebook wherever he went, scribbling away as he walked. An unseen archive, pages rumpled by unsteady hands and stained through with fever-sweat. Look now, and see its next subject: the outline of a body.
It was like something out of a crime procedural, drawn with a long strip of fuchsia-colored masking tape instead of chalk. A body-shape in an unused corner at a junction of three hallways, positioned such that it appeared to be sitting upright, the intersection of the floor and wall cutting a horizontal line across its waist. An Foundation ID card was fixed to the wall with it, positioned over its heart.
When he'd taken the card, the tape began to loosen, as if the former had been compelling it to stick. It peeled away in a single, elongated motion, sliding down into some crack or gap Kondraki couldn't quite see, and fell out of sight. Leaving him with the ID:
Researcher Griffin Hayes
Applied Antimemetics Section
PHANTOM DOOR TESTING
MAY 8, 2005
3 knocks — no results
MAY 9
2 knocks — no results
MAY 10
5 knocks — no results
MAY 11
3 knocks — no results
MAY 12
0 knocks (forgot) — no results
MAY 13
8 knocks — no results
It was lunchtime in the TZARA lab. Through a mouthful of processed sandwich meat, Clef remarked, "Noticed you chatting with Adams a while this morning. You into her?"
Kondraki shook his head. "I just had some questions about the paperwork."
"That right?" Clef smirked. His breath reeked of cigarettes. "Not trying to shove your W-2 in her income bracket?"
Kondraki frowned into his Coca-Cola. "No." Distantly a sound: ca-click ca-click. His eyes flicked up to the lab's door, deliberately left ajar.
"Damn shame. The uptight ones are always freaks. There's this one lab tech from Eschatology that acts a real prude, but the other night she showed me this trick she can do with her tongue—"
"Please don't tell me about your sex life while I'm eating," Kondraki interjected, pained. "Or, at all. Aren't you married?"
Ca-click ca-click ca-click.
Clef scoffed, spraying little chewed bits of ham onto the page he was reviewing. "No I ain't. You expecting someone?"
"Hm?"
"The door. You call the pizza guy or something?"
Ca-click ca-click.
"No, I'm… averting my eyes. You're disgusting when you eat."
"Pussy. Who told you I was married?"
"You did. Last week."
Ca-click.
"No I didn't."
"Yes you did."
Ca-click.
Through the gap in the door, moving at a faster pace than its footfalls implied, Kondraki glimpsed it. Not hooves or feet, but three rounded lengths of wood like the legs of a stool, traipsing along. The lengths converged into a lumpy mass of ceramic tiles, from which the shape of a piecemeal torso extended, gone before Kondraki could take any of it in.
"Okay, maybe I did lie about being married," Clef conceded. He was staring at Kondraki in a blank, sort of challenging way. "So what?"
"So, are you some kind of pathological liar?"
Ca-click ca-click.
"Dunno." Clef took another big bite of his sandwich. "Are you?"
Ca-click.
drawing of the previously mentioned wooden legs, maybe? not sure what would be fitting here
The labyrinth of Site-17 reached far in all directions beneath Fremont County, and in a number of places long fingers of it pierced the surface, shiny columns of elevator shaft leading up into the backrooms of various front organizations. One of these fronts, a grey splatter of warehouses known as Storage City PLC, was only five minutes away from a public park.
The park was humble, little more than a tree-speckled stretch of browning grass and a rusty swing set. Some sparsely forested hills expanded out to the west, and much farther beyond, the great carapace of the Southern Rockies reclined across the horizon like a sleeping colossus. It was a nice view — or it would've been. Along that line of sight, at an indeterminate position between the hills and the mountains, an awful structure jutted from the earth.
It was a sarcophagus. No other word could describe it. It rose like a skyscraper, megalithic, appearing at once naturally formed and artificially made, pockmarked at uneven intervals with ragged stab holes. As the rising sun began to shine upon it, it did not cast a shadow.
This too, was a ghost. A spectral monument to a calamity that never happened.
It was early June, and an unseasonable morning chill had settled over the park like a wafer-thin crust of frost, ready to crack at a moment's notice. Masked by that chill, the dry scent of dead grass lingered, carrying with it the weight of summer. Draven was playing with a girl from his preschool class, Ophelia, and they were chasing each other around, shrieking with delight in some inscrutable child-game. Ophelia Rights was faster than Draven by a fair amount; her pigtails streaked across the warming sky, pink-stockinged legs pistoning away.
A short distance away, Kondraki slumped over a shaded picnic table, relishing the coolness of the metal grating on his cheek. His foot tapped a restless beat against one of the table legs. Like all the other ghosts, he could see the sarcophagus, could hold the shape of it in his head, but his thoughts still could not touch it. His mind reflexively flinched away like a hand from a hot stove. The presence of it existed only as an itch, a sourceless, ceaseless anxiety.
"I've hit my limit, Agatha," he groaned. "This is it. You're going to have to take me out behind the stable and euthanize me like a lame horse."
"Tragic, but it has to be done," chirped Agatha, and reached across the table to pat him on the head. "I'll deliver your eulogy at the glue factory."
"Mm." Kondraki glanced up from his half-prone position. "I've told you about TZARA, right?"
"Yeah. Makes me wish I'd gotten a doctorate in memetics instead of xenobiology," Agatha said wistfully. "Bending reality with weird colors sounds fucked."
"You don't want that," Kondraki sighed. "Memetics doesn't have enough dissections."
"Would've made getting my anart history masters a hell of a lot easier, though. Lots of overlapping credits." Agatha twisted a finger thoughtlessly through her overgrowth of dark curls. "Is TZARA not working out?"
"Things are going great, actually. I think we're almost there." Kondraki pushed himself back to an upright position, scrubbing a hand beneath his Columbia University cap. "But Christ, the cost. Ever heard of a guy named Dr. Clef?"
"Of course I have." Agatha Rights regarded Kondraki with some frank amusement. "Everyone at Site-17 has. I heard he once convinced a new researcher that he was the Devil and gave him a nervous breakdown, he's a local legend. Did you not?"
Kondraki made a dismissive gesture. "You know I don't care about gossip."
"This is why you need more friends, 'Draki." She tried to pat him on the head again and he swatted her away like an irritable cat. "You miss out on all the obvious stuff."
"I have friends," Kondraki said defensively. He'd made two since joining the Foundation four years prior, too busy with work, his infant son, and recovering from grievous brain trauma to think much of it. The first had been Agatha. The second wasn't anybody's business. "I'm working on it. Not the point. This man is a waking nightmare, is what I'm trying to say. Yesterday, he contrived a reason to put the world's shittiest rendition of Smoke on the Water into our audio outputs. On kazoo."
Agatha's mouth twitched. "Really."
"We had to go over it nearly fifty times to align it properly. It took over two hours."
"Wow, that—" She coughed to hide a bright bubble of laughter. "That tracks. With what they say about him."
"Do they say why he doesn't have a photo on his ID card?" Kondraki asked, more to the unfeeling universe than Agatha herself. "Or why he has a personal assistant, when he's just a high-level researcher? I mean, what's there to assist with? Who the fuck is this guy?"
"Beats me," Agatha shrugged. "Does it matter? You sound a little obsessed, dude."
Kondraki glared. "I am not obsessed with my asshole coworker. I'm… concerned. I have reasonable concerns about my working environment."
Agatha gave him an indulgent look. "Of course you do, hon'," she said. Kondraki sighed and slumped back over the table. Somewhere else, beyond the metal grating jutting against his chin, their children screamed with incoherent joy.
Into the table, he said, "Do you think I can get his assistant to give me his SCiPnet password?"
AUGUST 2
4 knocks — no results
AUGUST 3
9 knocks — no results
AUGUST 4
3 knocks — no results
AUGUST 5
5 knocks — no results
AUGUST 6
2 knocks — no results
AUGUST 7
incoherent scribble
As he neared the date of its inaugural activation, Kondraki found himself thinking less about TZARA and more about ghosts. This was a problem he'd always had. Once he solved a problem, he lost interest in it — and by early July, TZARA was well and truly solved.
Understand, Kondraki knew his "ghosts" weren't really apparitions of the dead. He'd only ever called them that as a sort of private joke with himself. He knew, even before he found that ID card, what an antimeme was.
It was like this: Kondraki's spectres only started appearing after he got his skull blown in like a dumbass and butterflies started living inside. The way he saw it, insect hive minds probably processed information differently than human brains. Information that was incompatible with a human's mind might still fit inside an insect's, and vice-versa. To a soul stretched across both, processing information in both ways, an antimeme might be at be at once real and unreal, there and not. A ghost.
Such a discovery was staggering. Stifling. Suffocating. He wasn't sure where to begin. Had the world always been like this, just beyond his range of vision, or was Site-17 unusually dense with antimemes? Were there just as many in other Foundation sites? Who else was immune? How might he replicate these effects? What would their practical applications be?
His curiosity was insatiable. Questions bred like rabbits, and they had a way of leading him down circuitous warrens of thought. About a week before TZARA went off, one of such came upon him:
Where, he thought, are the limits of my perception? How many antimemes can neither of my brains touch? How many of them are inside Site-17 right now?
That night, Kondraki began coursing the site's corridors with a nervy prey-animal agitation. The sensation of being watched lanced out of every vacant space and unclaimed angle. The irregular rattle of ventilation became the rasp of cold breath on his neck. And there, in the blur of his peripheral vision… was something stalking him through the halls? Did the Foundation's labyrinth have a minotaur of its own?
This place was maybe starting to get to him. He desperately needed to get some air.
unsteady drawing of minotaur down a hallway
The tension in Kondraki's chest began to unknot when he stepped out of the elevator and saw an obsidian shard of sky through a window. He was standing in an unlit living room, inside what was less a Foundation front and more of a covert employee side entrance, a dingy cabin on some unmapped rural side road down Fremont County's deepest ass crack. Nobody actually lived here. Even with shit visibility, the ruse was not especially convincing.
Fumbling to the front door, banging his shin on a side table, Kondraki pushed out into the waiting night. A bare incandescent fixture cast a little puddle of yellowing light down the cabin's slatted walls and dry grasses grasping possessively at its base. In the outstretched gloom, he could make out some scattered pinyon pines and evergreen junipers, threaded through with a clay ribbon of road. The air was cool, smelling faintly of resin, dust, and… smoke?
He turned. Standing barely a meter away was Alto Clef. He was staring into the dark without intensity, the burning ember of a cigarette at his lips.
"Hey," said Clef, barely giving Kondraki a passing glance. "Want to bum a smoke?" The evenness of his greeting, the simple mundanity of the offer — completely at odds with essentially every interaction they'd had prior — struck Kondraki blindside.
"Sure," replied Kondraki, just managing to keep a questioning lilt out of his tone. He shifted uncomfortably in place. Something was off, here.
The thing you needed to know about Clef was that he did not sit well in the mind. Kondraki thought of it as a kind of social dazzle camouflage; when you saw Clef, you couldn't get a proper sense of person you were looking at. Shape and distance became impossible to measure. To Kondraki, Dr. Clef was a disturbing smile, a wide-brimmed hat, a garish shirt, a gun. Those things held, and all else was silhouette. But Clef's camouflage had become broken, somehow, incomplete. His head was uncovered and his coghaz button-up of the day was obscured by a half-zippered raincoat with rolled-up sleeves, even though it hadn't rained for over two weeks. And something else, some ineffable quality had left him.
Clef bowed over the cigarette, flicking his lighter. Beneath the incandescent bulb, the pale skin of his neck took on a sickly, almost cadaverous hue, becoming less alive than the thick rope of old scar tissue that wrapped around it. His head rose. When viewed in profile, a crescent-shaped scar under his right eye looked a little like a closed eyelid. Both scars had been practically invisible before, beneath conscious notice.
Kondraki took the lit cigarette from Clef wordlessly, and held it loosely between two fingers without bringing it to his mouth. He'd smoked plenty of times before, but rarely tobacco — and if Clef's preferred brand tasted half as foul as it smelled, it would leave him a sputtering wreck. They stood there for a while, watching the night pass.
Eventually, Kondraki said, "Adams said you wouldn't be back until Tuesday."
"Bad intel," replied Clef. He wasn't talking with much of his usual drawl. "We thought… someone was opening up bubble realities in a Louisiana swamp. Thought something was under the…" He trailed off, started up again. "But it wasn't anything like that. Nobody fell through, this time."
This time? Fell through? Kondraki stared. Clef's expression was like glass; it was rigid, transparent. There was nothing there. The expression of a corpse that hadn't yet stopped breathing, a living dead man.
Kondraki was beginning to suspect that he wasn't supposed to see this, that he'd unwittingly walked in on something private. Clef turned, looking him head-on for the first time since he arrived. His eyes, Kondraki realized, were heterochromatic: one was green on the edge of hazel, the other was hazel on the edge of green.
"Doctor… Kondraki," said Clef. Something recognizable wavered in his expression, and his accent was drawing back in like the tide. "When did you get here?"
Kondraki dropped the cigarette and snuffed it out beneath his heel. "I was just leaving," he said, and made a hasty retreat, feeling Clef's mismatched eyes on him all the way to the elevator. Once he was inside, lowering back into the underworld, he leaned against its rear wall heavily.
"Yeah," Kondraki muttered. "This place is definitely starting to get to me."
PHENOMENON HOWEVER MANY THERE ARE NOW - ALTO CLEF
Clef is cloaked in some kind of antimemetic camouflage or glamour that keeps you from getting a grasp on his appearance. I would've noticed that gnarly throat scar otherwise, its looks like someone tried to cut his head off.
drawing of alto clef symbol?
Finally got ahold of some photos of him — his face is completely obscured in all of them, replaced by animal heads or random objects. Unclear if this is part of the anomaly, or if the glamour doesn't affect recorded media, and this is an additional thing to compensate.
Not sure if he's part of SCP-TBD yet, (possible that his antimemetic qualities & Site-17 employment aren't related) but either way there's clearly something wrong with this guy. Now that TZARA's finished, I might never need to find out what.
Site-17 was as old as the Foundation itself, and nearly as secretive. Many of its rooms and corridors had been forgotten, either knowingly or through mundane mismanagement. Walled off with concrete and red tape, they festered beneath its skin like an untreated infection.
The air always seemed colder, in these closed-off spaces. Silence settled poorly in the stomach. Rust and mold sank deeper than external dimensions ought to have allowed. Yes, the dead did unquietly linger in Site-17, below and between, but our modern Theseus never found them. He never thought to look. He didn't want to. Kondraki scoured the labyrinth for its minotaurs, its cryptic beasts and colorless secrets, but never for poor Ariadne, moldering under the floorboards. A man can kill his thoughts as easily as any antimeme, after all.
But you already knew that, didn't you?
AUGUST 7, 2005
I knocked on the Door on my way back from lunch and finally got a result.
It was a creak, a slight creak behind the door. It was quiet, but I heard it. I knocked again and said, "Hello?" Brought my ear close to the door. There was a sort of — wind sound. An exhalation. "Anyone in there?" I said. It was silent for a long moment. Then something spoke, low muttering. It seemed both far away from the door and very close. I pressed my ear up against the wood.
The voice — I think it was an elderly woman's voice — said a word that might have been "cat" or "crack." It said a word that could've been "twenty" or "empty." It said something that was either "coughed" or "lost." I don't recall what it said after that point, but it carried on like that for a while, all these mumbled nonsense words melting into one another.
A sharp knock came from the other side of the door. It wasn't loud, but I was listening so intently that I startled backward and fell flat on my ass. Another two knocks. As I scrambled to my feet, I realized abruptly that the door had changed color — that it had been changing color this whole time. From sky blue it had darkened, gradually, over months, into the color of a bruise. I hadn't consciously noticed until now.
Three more knocks. But these ones weren't wooden, they were metallic sounds, originating from an office door further down the hall. Another trio of knocks from the supply closet behind me. Suddenly, all of the doors in the hall were knocking, a furious iron cacophony.
I was frozen in place. My ears rung. The size of it was overwhelming — not the volume, but the pressure that seemed to be behind it. I felt as though the hall had become a deep-sea submarine, all the immense frigid weight of the ocean crushing around it. Then, just as quickly as it started, the knocking stopped, leaving me in suffocating silence. And one by one, each of the doors began to groan open.
I ran. What else was there to do?
I'm holed up in my office now, door locked and barricaded with the filing cabinet. It's been knocking steadily for most of the past hour.
The landline is dead and I'm way too far underground for my cell to be of any use. Not that I think calling would do me much good — I tried waving and yelling at the security camera for help but nothing's happened. Functionally invisible right now.
I don't know what to
Deafening silence. Kondraki looked up from the notebook. The door to his office did not burst open; the filing cabinet was not hurled to the ground. It simply opened without resistance, the heavy cabinet gently shifting aside with barely a whisper.
The thing that stood in the threshold was a jumble of random garbage in the approximate shape of a body. Empty bottles, frayed shoelaces, paper streamers, scraps of plastic netting. An old sock was embedded halfway up its singular arm, rusting car parts jutting from its shoulder like spines. Its head was a blank prism that jutted out from the top of its torso.
The trash-thing did not lunge; it entered the office without urgency. Completely silent, save for the irregular ca-click of its three wooden legs. Panicked, Kondraki hurled a stapler at its head and made to duck around it, throwing himself towards the open hallway. It did not grab for him, then — it merely reached out because he happened to be there. As he twisted to avoid it, its segmented fingers brushed his left cheek almost tenderly.
From that single point of contact, Kondraki's body crumbled into itself like a child's sandcastle. His left side fell away bloodlessly, shattering into a profusion of yet more garbage, and his momentum slung him hard into the opposite side of the hall. Kondraki groaned into the floor as electric butterflies strobed deliriously around him. Gauzy numbness coated his skin. With tremendous difficulty, he heaved himself onto his back, propping himself up on his remaining arm.
The trash-thing closed in slowly, without malice. It had no need to rush. For a moment, Kondraki tried to go for the Kodak, his final resort, but he'd lost it along with his left leg. The camera was gone, and soon, so would he. This avatar of forgotten and discarded things was going to unmake Kondraki, dissolving his body into takeout receipts and pencil shavings, soda cans and film canisters. He would become the refuse of his life, and come apart until not even his memory remained. Illusory light fuzzed and flickered out. The trash-thing's arm extended towards him, almost beckoning—
And exploded from the elbow down. Thunder rolled. The trash-thing jerked back slightly, filthy chunks of torso and head bursting off of it in miniature fireworks displays.
A terrible voice bellowed, "Over here, dumpster-face!"
Alto Clef strode down the hall like a conquering legionnaire, pistol raised like a sword. He fired once, twice, three more times into the trash-thing's torso, making a crater of its chest, and it staggered but didn't fall, pieces of it already shivering up its body to jostle back into place. Clef stepped over Kondraki and plunged his fist into the crater, and the trash-thing screamed without sound, scrabbling at Clef's arm with its half-formed hand. It clawed at Clef but its rubbishing touch couldn't break him as it had Kondraki, and Clef reared back as he tore something from its chest, a ghostly, oozing perforation in space. He crushed it in his fist, null vapor spurting through the gaps of his fingers, and there was a sound like a thousand breaths being let go at once, a tremendous outrushing from the lungs of the earth. The trash-thing collapsed, fell backwards, came apart, and each piece of it, without changing its natural trajectory, fell into some gap or crack that Kondraki couldn't see and slipped out of sight.
Sensation returned in a hot flush and Kondraki gasped, sucking down air he suddenly desperately needed. Had he stopped breathing for a moment there? His arm gave out from under him — he had two arms again, with a pair of legs to match, the Kodak again pressed against his left thigh — and he flopped onto his back, panting. Clef stood over him like a headstone.
Kondraki wheezed, "What… what are you?"
"I'm a living reality anchor," Clef told him, and slid his gun back into its concealed holster. "Nice to fucking meet you. Get up."
Kondraki forced himself to his feet, muscles trembling from exertion they had never experienced. He regarded Clef warily. "I'm surprised you didn't leave me to die," he said.
Clef's mismatched eyes narrowed. "Believe me, I was real fuckin' tempted," he growled. "And I would've if your Rainbow Brite-ass butterflies weren't such a cross-contamination risk. What the hell were you thinking?"
Kondraki just blinked at him. It was possible that the near-death experience was messing with his head a little, because he'd completely lost the thread. With an inarticulate sound of anger, Clef grabbed Kondraki by the elbow and pulled him back into his shoebox office, practically shoving him into his desk. Once they were inside, Kondraki said, "So you can see them, antimemes? How'd you even know I was in trouble?"
"No shit I can see them," Clef snapped. "That's the goddamn problem. They're antimemes! They don't like being seen, or heard, or thought about! And the Site-17 infestation especially don't like being investigated! What, you thought it was a coincidence that so many of 'em popped up after you started looking? No wonder it was spreading so fast, an obsessive like you feeding it."
"Infestation?" Kondraki echoed questioningly. "I thought I was just getting better at finding them. Who told you that?"
"Who do you think, Sherlock? Applied Antimemetics. They sent me the breach notice. Christ, who even taught you about antimemes anyways?"
"That's none of your…" Kondraki trailed off. "I… don't remember."
"Alright," sighed Clef, pinching the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. "That one was a gimmie, dunno why I asked." He opened his eyes. "Where've you been keeping your research notes? We got a few chores to do if we wanna end this breach."
"Here." With some reluctance, Kondraki took the notebook from the desk and passed it to Clef. "What first?"
"First," said Clef. "I am getting you a goddamn antimemetics primer, because this is just pathetic."
Kondraki bristled, but didn't rise to the insult. His ignorance had almost gotten him killed, and they both knew it. "And second?"
Clef held up the notebook and grinned. "Know any good campfire songs?"
do you think it would be possible to copy a previous notebook page and make it look it's burning, or is that out of scope?
In a dusty little clearing not five minutes away from the fake cabin, Clef smoked and watched Kondraki's notebook burn. It was not going quickly — something about the information within had turned it into a more potent and enduring fuel source. Colorless flames licked at its sides as, one by one, each page blackened and curled, dissolving into a kind of sooty radiance, smoke that melted seamlessly into sunlight.
A few feet further back, Kondraki sat on a large rock and flipped through Applied Antimemetics' Countercognitive Handbook. He wasn't sure if Clef had chosen this particular spot because of their midnight run-in, or if this was just a place where he liked to smoke. In the days immediately following their impromptu rendezvous, Clef had never given any indication that he'd even remembered the incident. His antimemetic glamour, likewise, had smoothed back into place as though nothing had happened, though it couldn't do much to anyone that had seen beneath it. The thick rope of fibrous tissue around Clef's throat winked in and out of existence as Kondraki's attentions wandered.
Eventually, he looked up from the handbook and asked, "So, are you a member of Applied Antimemetics or something?"
Clef watched the fire fixedly. "Nah, that ain't my bag. I'm just immune to most of that stuff, like you. Sometimes they get in touch when they raise an alarm other people got to hear."
Kondraki nodded. "And, this 'infestation' that breached. Have they established an SCP designation or—"
Clef wheeled on Kondraki furiously. "What the fuck did I just tell you," he hissed, "about not investigating this thing? Don't ask questions about it, don't look for it, don't even think about it. The notebook was the core of the breach, but these things won't quiet down for good until you cut that shit out."
Kondraki chewed his lip. "That's not really an option, 'not thinking.' We should just amnesticize me."
Clef rolled his eyes. "I'd've wiped you already if I thought it would work on your weird-ass mutant brain. Can't you just think about something else?"
"It's not that easy. I can get…" Kondraki dog-eared a page. "…fixated, on projects. Major tunnel vision. It's hard to let go, even when I want to. Usually it lasts until the project reaches its natural conclusion, or when something more interesting comes along."
Turning back to the fire, Clef sneered, "Is that why you joined Are We Cool Yet? Couldn't let go?"
Kondraki sighed and closed the handbook. Obligation tugged at him — after Clef saved his life, he couldn't help but feel like he owed the other man some degree of explanation. "Look. AWCY isn't what you think it is. Yeah, the movement has its murderous bastards, but those are mostly the Critic's circle. The majority are just… amateur artists, for the most part. Harmless. More likely to get themselves killed with their work than anyone else."
"Riiiiight." Clef looked unconvinced. "Gonna feed me a line about how you never worked with the Critic's people too?"
"No, I did. A couple of times, actually." Kondraki looked down at the book in his hands. It had a magenta canvas cover, and lettering that had been stamped in with surprising force. "I won't make excuses for it. The pay was good and I loved the work, so it was easy to overlook what I was enabling. I might've kept working with them, but there was an… incident in Three Portlands, back in '96." Kondraki stroked his fingers over the handbook's rough surface. "I couldn't keep my eyes closed after that." When he glanced back up, he found that Clef was looking at him strangely, head cocked. "Didn't think I actually had history with the Critic, did you?"
"Didn't expect you'd own up to it," Clef admitted, mouth crooked. "…You're not what I expected you'd be. Haven't been." His own little concession. Of course, in the wider context of their working relationship, that meant, maybe I don't think you deserve the firing squad, anymore. Maybe I've become ambivalent with the idea of mixing rat poison into your coffee.
Kondraki shrugged. "Neither have you. Most researchers I know aren't such a good shot." He paused. "And none of them wear glamours to work, either."
Translation: I've got your number, you son of a bitch.
Clef gave him a baffled look. "Glamour? What kind of fruity— Oh. That." His expression turned wry. "Your butterflies can see through that too, huh?"
"No," Kondraki replied honestly. He stretched, relishing the chorus of popping joints. "I'm just perceptive, I guess. You should try it."
"I'll put it on my to-do list, jackass."
Clef took a long drag on his cigarette, and they lapsed back into silence — not companionable, exactly. Less fraught with mutual antipathy, certainly. It felt like the beginning of a truce.
Eventually, Clef blew out a long plume of noxious smoke and said, "Listen. I know neither of us are filled with collegial-fuckin'-affection by the thought of having to work together again, but—"
"Collegial! That's a big word for you."
"Shut up. If you really need a new project to keep your mind off this antimeme shit, I got a skip on the docket that's your wheelhouse all over."
"Anything I'd be familiar with?"
"Pretty sure I'd have to shoot ya if you were. It's something from the ASCI days, an old Foundation ghost story come back to haunt us. Code name, 'Project Veselka.' Something funny?"
The thing is, if Clef had pitched collaboration even a day prior, Kondraki would've slammed the door in his face. But circumstances had changed. He couldn't help but look at Clef — who tore living paradoxes apart with his bare hands, whose portrait was as much as mystery as his name, who sometimes seemed more a phantom than any antimeme Kondraki had ever found — with new eyes. In that moment, to him, Clef wasn't giving him a historical mystery to solve or a chance to end an antimemetic curse. He was being given an opportunity to figure out what, or who, Alto Clef really was.
He'd never been any good at letting go his obsessions.
Kondraki covered his mouth. "Nothing, it's nothing. Your phrasing was just… oddly appropriate, is all." He settled his chin into the crook of his hand and said, "Go on. Tell me a ghost story, Dr. Clef."
As Clef began to speak, Kondraki's notebook, the record of his impotent labors, continued to burn beneath a translucent flame. Kondraki's labors burned, then rose as hazing brilliance, as smoke, as an ashen wraith. His wasted efforts became true waste, and they breathed their last across a pale and aching sky.
ITEM #: SCP-TBD
CLASS: Safe? Null
CONPROCS: Buy notebook to keep track of this shit. Write up a proper file once you get a handle on it. Stop thinking about it.
DESCRIPTION: SCP-TBD is the collective haunting of Site-17. someone else's problem.
maybe some kind of simple drawing to serve as a wordless coda? or a drawing of a camera, as sort of a hook for the Project Veselka thing?
