The Only Constant
You ever think about chopping someone's head off?
— Dr. Brenda Corbin, 2003
This was a dream.
In dreams, there is no logical connection between events. Dreams proceed like early drafts: disarticulated scenes, locational leaps, tonal shifts and broken logic smoothed over by a hazy filter of nonsense-legitimizing disorientation until finally the dreamer awakes, and the inconsistencies pile up like cars on a Canadian highway in December.
Harold Blank was about to wake up.
No dream could long sustain this level of structural instability. He had walked through the door of his dorm room at Site-43, been struck with a sudden wave of anxious nausea… and now the burgundy plaster walls were cracked, the deep blue carpet was all torn up as though gophers had gotten in under it, his furniture was either gone or smashed to thin pine matchsticks, the air was close and warm, and everything was bathed in dull red emergency lighting from a corridor which just moments prior had been bright and clear of mischief.
There was a gun on the carpet, nestled in one of the ruts which scored clean down to the thick metal plating beneath. He'd flung it from his hip in the shock of discovery, a shock he had already forgotten. He had forgotten, in fact, every inch of this sudden onset hallucination when the apparition of his old research partner had followed him through the door and demanded to know what he was doing.
As though he were the one who was supposed to be comatose in Health and Pathology.
"Harry?" Melissa Bradbury's red-rimmed eyes were wells of concern. "What's the matter with—"
The word which would have completed the accusation disappeared along with the remainder of her breath as he fell on her, wrapped his arms around her distressed leather jacket so tightly he could clap each hand to his opposite elbow, and burrowed his face into the crook of her jaw and shoulder. He squeezed her delicate frame, so close… she was thinner than he remembered, but that tracked, since she'd been eating through a tube for nearly a year now, but how is she walking around, and he inhaled the saffron of her shampoo and the particular scent of her skin, and it was her, it was her, against all probability it was really truly her. She was real. He embraced her with such ferocity that it had to be putting serious strain on the electromagnetic fields of their atoms. If he could have pulled her as close as he wanted to, they would have obliterated all of Ipperwash Park above in a thermonuclear blast. His heart felt primed to explode already. In an instant, everything had changed. Nothing else mattered.
"You out of your mind?" She cautiously returned the embrace.
"I think I am." It came out as a sob. "Or you're inside it." He was afraid to let her go. He was afraid to see her face again. He was afraid he'd been somehow mistaken.
"Harry." She massaged the back of his hooded sweater. "What happened? You hit your head?"
His face was wet, and he was slowly suffocating in a mass of his own hair as he breathed in wracking, irregular bursts. Her hair was light and wispy, like spiderwebs in silver light, crackling with static electricity. He pressed his cheek against hers, and…
He had entirely too much hair, altogether too much beard. He couldn't even feel her skin on his. Nothing mattered but her, but she wasn't the only thing which was strange, and against his will he began to remember the remainder.
The gun. Melissa had been holding one as well. He'd felt her bird-thin bones shift before she hugged him back, and realized she must have pocketed it in—
The jacket. It was his, but she was wearing it. He'd had it since he was sixteen. His parents had bought it for him. He kept it in the closet in—
The dorm. This dorm, his dorm, now in ruins.
They were in danger.
She was in danger.
With more effort than anything had taken him in a year's worth of months, he released his life preserver grip and drew back. His arms found her shoulders, and remained there as he oriented her face into the centre of his vision. It really was her: argent hair, half-lidded eyes of steel blue, grey eyebrows swept into interrogative points, semi-rimless eyeglasses oh my god she's wearing her glasses, and a nose more likely to have come from a surgical catalogue than the luck of genetic draw. She looked bone tired, and deeply anxious, and he would have bent down and kissed her for the very first time if he hadn't instead immediately filled the courses of his tear-streaks with a fresh hot stream of inelegant weeping.
"Hey." She reached up to grip the crook of each arm. "Hey, come on. Keep it together. It's been a rough couple days, but you got this. You got me. We'll fix it, like you said."
"I don't know what you're talking about." He stepped back, and their hands slid down each other's sleeves 'til the fingers caught and linked. "Melissa, I—"
"Harry, we haven't got a lot of time." Her hair bounced about in a sudden puff of recycled air, as though their underground base was now subject to sea breezes. "Do you remember what we came here for?"
He shook his shaggy head, then reached up — with only one hand, fingertips sliding across hers with electric reluctance — to test the length of his own hair. It was twice as long as it ought to have been. Maybe I was in a coma. Maybe I still am. "There's no explaining dreams, you just gotta run with it. What matters is we're here, right now. I don't know how long it'll last."
Her eyes widened. "Harry, this isn't a dream."
She gripped his hand tightly, then pulled him out into the nightmare.
Everything was smashed and on fire. The three dorms across from his had lost, respectively, the door, half the door, and the entire exterior wall. The corridor was a curated portfolio of creative destruction. The emergency light runners between the white floor tiles and kick moulding were flickering at random, the fixtures in the ceiling — where there still was a ceiling — were either dead or raining sparks, and a fire sprinkler was gently misting the rubble-strewn hall. There were deep gashes in every visible surface, and great big chunks of missing superstructure. Where it wasn't missing, it was implausibly translocated. For a moment he thought he was looking at an unsuspected trove of asbestos insulation where the hallway ended to their immediate left, before he realized he was actually seeing bare cavern rock. An entire janitor's closet was simply gone, with no sign it had ever been there. The air was still cycling, as he already knew, but the fans didn't sound healthy — which was to say, he could actually hear the fans — and what was meant to be a steady stream of regulated oxygen-nitrogen was instead coming at them in humid bursts and gasps, perpetually buffeting Melissa's weightless locks. More subtly than the visual and tactile chaos, the hooting alarm which should have accompanied the breach lighting was conspicuous by its absence.
"Maybe," he said, very quietly.
"Maybe what?" She had the gun out again, but was still holding his hand.
"Maybe I did hit my head."
"Are we… under attack?" He glanced at the space she was no longer occupying, then spun in sudden panic to find her framed in the doorway once more. She'd silently crept back in to retrieve his gun it's not my fucking gun from where he'd dropped it. He'd never once known her to be stealthy, it required more presence of mind and focus on the world at hand than he'd thought her capable of.
"We're gonna be, we stay out here much longer." She walked back into the corridor and jammed the weapon into the black leather holster he was only now noticing on his belt, and returned the grimace he gave her. "Please say you didn't drag me halfway through no man's land just to dump your gun on the carpet."
He was operating at an ever-increasing deficit in this conversation. Each new sentence featured several new enigmas crying out for explication. "Drag…? Melissa, I left you comatose in H&P."
The look she gave him now implied, quite clearly, that he might be the one requiring hospitalization. "Harry, I haven't been in H&P since the explosion."
He leaned on a cracked wall tile for support. His stomach was bottoming out. "You have been there since the explosion, or thereabouts. September 18th, 2002."
She slapped him.
"H&P exploded back months ago!" She reached up to seize his shoulders as he blinked away the shock of sudden tears. "You and I have been living in the safe zone ever since. Don't you remember?"
The slap had provided a sharp jolt of clarity. Either Melissa was actually conked out in a hospital bed, or she had never been hospitalized at all. That meant either he was hallucinating her now, or he'd hallucinated the entire past year. Either way, the problem was all in his head. "I don't know what's going on," he told her in a slow and even tone. "There's something wrong with me."
Her eyes were big as houses now. "We came here because you said you needed to find something. Something to help with… all this." She gestured with her gun at the residential battlefield. "And I lose you, instead?"
He removed her hands from his shoulders, and placed them over his heart. "You'll never lose me. And I'm not going to lose you again. But something happened when I walked through that door, and I don't know up from down anymore." A laugh battered its way out from deep inside him, and she recoiled — looking in every direction, even the bedrock dead-end, as though expecting immediate reprisal from all quarters. "I can't believe you're okay. I've waited every day for a year to see you again."
She extricated herself, swung the door carefully shut, and examined it suspiciously. She knelt to inspect the seal between wooden rail and metal frame. "Must've been memetic," she muttered. "A trap, in case you came back here. Del Olmo."
He frowned. She was talking about the Site's former chief memeticist, who had died in the cataclysm of September 8, 2002, and mysteriously returned to life just hours ago in its unexpected anniversary reprise. Bernabé Del Olmo was now E-Class personnel, under heavy scrutiny to determine the extent to which he'd been compromised. He was unlikely to be sabotaging people's doors. "How would… how could he—"
"You'll never know," a cheerful voice rang down the hall. "You're all out of t—"
Melissa twisted in place, still crouched, and pulled the trigger. At the same moment Harry's eyes registered the fact that Agent Ana Mukami, another recent refugee from the land of the dead, had strolled into view from behind a twisted mass of wires and girders hanging from the hall's drop ceiling, Mukami's chest registered the impact. The bullet struck her left of centre, passing through her bright purple tank top just above the heart, and exited her back with a spurt of dark red blood which splashed the wreckage behind her. She crumpled in a heap without so much as a gasp of pain.
"You… killed her?" Harry's mouth stayed hanging open long after the impossible words were out.
"If we're lucky. But there'll be more where that came from." Melissa pulled the door open again, and set her jaw. "Time for a detour."
All personnel employed at Site-43 have dedicated dormitories, whether they choose to occupy them or not. Most of the Chairs and Chiefs do use theirs; they've got enough important work to deal with without the added chore of a subway commute, even if the Inter-Sectional Subway System from the residential village of Grand Bend does lack the distracting sights and smells of its public counterparts.
As elsewhere, rank hath its privileges. Where provisional employees have to share a room, each Section head gets a small complex to call their very own, most of them situated on the edges of Habitation and Sustenance near the borders of their individual demesnes. The typical arrangement is a bedroom, kitchen, washroom, walk-in closet, study, and quarters for a personal assistant. There's also almost always some means of accessing the Site's second skin of wraparound access corridors, allowing the boss to come and go between their places of repose and business without their underlings being any the wiser. (The preceding sentence is classified at Security Clearance Level 3, and does not appear in the general access edition of this text. Kindly don't spread it around, as we don't need the hoi polloi knowing about our secret naptime/craptime/shit-hits-the-fantime escape tunnels.)
— Dr. Harold Blank, Lines in a Muddle: A Cultural History of Site-43
"Where are we going?"
Melissa had produced a heavy security flashlight from her belt, and was shining it across the ruined living room. His hideous brown floral print couch was the only piece of furniture still keeping its general shape, so far as it had ever been able to — though the cushions had all been torn to fluffy ribbons — and for some reason this produced a second question from his lips. "Where's my cat?"
"Where we're going." The door to his bedroom was ajar, and she pulled him towards it. He'd had that dream before, though the decor had been markedly different. "Where pretty much everybody is, except… well, you know."
"Yeah," he agreed. "Yeah, I don't. I don't know."
She swung through the doorway like a TV cop, weapon raised. By the way her shoulders relaxed beneath the jacket folds, he knew the coast was clear. "If we don't get out of here fast, and not by the way we came, you'll sure find out."
He followed her into the bedroom, which unsurprisingly was in no better state of repair. "You're looking for the tunnel to A&R." There was a massive square of bedrock between Harry's dorm and his fiefdom of Archives and Revision, and only one direct way through it.
"Yeah." She trotted across the deep-grooved floor — somebody let a tiger loose in here? — to check the ensuite washroom for intruders. She saw something, judging by the look on her face when she ducked back out, but she obviously didn't think it worth explaining to him, and closed the door against it. "Wouldn't be my first choice, but if Mukami was in the halls, the halls aren't safe. She might not know about the tunnels, if we're lucky." She chewed the inside of her cheek. "That'd be a nice change."
"I've only seen one nice change so far." He forced himself not to focus on it, because it threatened to consume all his processing power, but as the topic of Ana Mukami was only marginally less raw he tried to take stock of his surroundings instead. The bed was a jumble of ripped fabric, exposed strings and dented wood. There were a few photograph frames on the mulched carpet, photographs missing, glass broken, but most of his personal effects were absent. "How long ago did I move out?"
"Told you already. Months." The door to the study was closed, and Melissa tapped its faux-bronze lever with the muzzle of her gun. "After it started." Apparently satisfied there was no fire behind the door, or electric trap attached to its hardware, she slammed the lever down and kicked the bottom rail.
He caught her shoulder before she plunged through. She was tensed up like a cat, stymied mid-pounce. "What if there's more memetic bullshit?"
"Then I guess we're fucked." She slid from his grip and again performed a sweep of the space beyond. She'd never once demonstrated this sort of spatial sense; seeing her move like a trained S&C agent hammered home the fact that, just as this was not the bedroom he knew, this was in several important respects not truly his Melissa Bradbury.
He was nevertheless intent on keeping her.
He followed her into the study. The faux wood flooring was only patchily visible for all the scattered papers, dumped out of desk drawers which themselves had been dumped every which where and then apparently pulped by stamping feet, as though someone had suspected the cheap particle board of concealing valuable secrets. The desk itself was just a haphazard stack of disarticulated panels. "How much of the Site is like this?"
She ran one finger along the teak wainscotting on the north wall, wincing. "All of it. Memory coming back at all?"
He took a deep breath. "Melissa, the problem is, my memory's already all there — and it might not be heavy on happy, but it's absolutely bankrupt for horse-shit."
She cocked her head to one side, disentangling his extraneous verbiage before allowing one half-smile in response. "Do you at least remember how to find the damn door?" She rapped the wall experimentally. "That ought to be a universal constant, fantasy-proof, right?"
"Right. Maybe?" He stood beside her, cleared his throat, and intoned: "Blank mu twenty-two hyo Québec… fuck."
Nothing happened.
She pursed her lips. "The last word of your password is 'fuck'?"
"The last word of my password was set this morning. My this morning, when none of this," and again he gestured at the remains of someone else's bad day, in what was rapidly becoming a general shorthand for shit-being-fucked, "had happened. If I'm that far out of sync with reality, the word I know isn't gonna be the word it wants."
She shook her head, blinking slowly. She was obviously having as much difficulty grasping his situation as he was. "The permissions system is locked, Harry. Mukami has Operations Control. She can't get at the most sensitive systems — she's in a lockout war with Eileen, and Eileen's still winning — but she can block updates via the Director's terminal. Your password, I'm saying, hasn't changed since the eighteenth of September. 2002."
September 18. The day he'd meant to ask Melissa to have dinner with him. The day she'd asked him to have dinner with her.
The day she'd been assaulted by a mirror monster which manifested on the left lens of the eyeglasses she was presently wearing, unmarred by the atomic level degradation the real (?) ones had sported since that date.
He certainly remembered his password for September 18. He remembered everything about September 18, up to a very precise moment in time.
"Blank mu twenty-two hyo Québec possibility," he stated with firm conviction.
Nothing happened again.
She crossed her arms. "Guess you weren't as optimistic as you remember."
He very carefully removed the handgun from its holster. It was heavy, and the grip was cold. He kept his finger so far off the trigger that it looked like he was pointing at something. "Manual release it is, then."
She raised both hands in protest. "Okay, first of all — you shoot that thing off, in the open air, against metal, and they're on top of us in seconds flat."
"First of all back at you, dear…" They both smiled in spite of everything at this inadvertent resumption of The Dear Game, and he wondered whether it was so far distant a memory for her as it was for him. "…I don't even know who they are, beyond the fact that you're comfortable… shooting them."
The smiles died slow deaths as he attempted to continue, frog now lodged firmly in his throat. After the passage of a polite moment, she continued for him. "Second of all, you can't just shoot these locks out. They're sheathed in steel."
"Bet you're a lot of fun at movies." He didn't know where that had come from. He hoped his subconscious was working on thornier problems than how to cajole Melissa into a theatre date.
Nothing like a loud noise in the real world to reset the internal monologue, he thought as he walked to the east end of the room and pressed the end of the gun to the cracked drywall. The flashlight beam followed him uncertainly. He pulled his hood up over his ears, knowing it wouldn't help much. He adjusted his firing position slightly, targeting by memory the precise point Chief Delfina Ibanez of Security and Containment had stipulated, then closed his eyes.
Then opened his eyes. Del had also stipulated that anyone caught closing their eyes before firing a gun in her Site would be experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime activity, then several more in immediate sequence. "Ideally," she had said, "when you shoot at something, you want to be looking at it. It's like driving: look where you want to go. Imagine you're the bullet."
His imagination was too overwhelmed to take on additional assignments right now, but the point was nevertheless well-taken. He gritted his teeth, rocked the gun back and forth to ensure the barrel was flush with the wall, then squeezed the trigger with his eyes wide open.
Ibanez had also explained the difference between a trigger pull and a trigger squeeze, which was subtle but apparently important. He'd refused to internalize it.
In spite of the overpreparation, he still winced and shied away from the loud report. The gun leapt back, taking his hand and forearm with it — he'd remembered to keep his elbow crooked, so as not to dislocate his shoulder — and the powder singed the paper wall black as the bullet bored on through.
There was an electric spark from deep within, illuminating the sudden dark around him as Melissa brought the flashlight around on…
…a partition on the north wall sucking dramatically back, then sliding aside. The lights within did not snap on, because he'd just shot out the local transformer.
"What," she said.
"Emergency measure." He pulled the hood down again. It hadn't helped much. "Door opens if the power fails, because the power only fails in a complete clusterfuck."
They were facing north, and the space behind the wall stretched away to the east. Melissa stepped into the tunnel, gun and flashlight arms crossed dramatically. Harry recognized the pose as belonging to Gillian Anderson from The X-Files, which they'd watched together for six straight years in her dorm room on a decent TV (which he'd bought for the purpose, but pretended to have wheedled from the quartermaster's office).
They'd run out of X-Files just a few months before running out of everything else. It was comforting to think that whatever the disjuncture between their worlds might be, it didn't stretch back that far.
"Hey." He walked to the shiny metal frame, which bore no signs of the degradation common to all exposed surfaces in the dorm proper, and watched her leather back push slowly into the gloom ahead. There was no light visible, save for the one she brought with her; that didn't bother him, since he knew the path took a sharp southerly turn before ending at his office in A&R. "Hey, why don't you let me take point? This is my secret passage, after all." He didn't feel brave, precisely, so much as the sight of her walking straight into potential danger gave him an uncontrollable rush of anxiety.
She glanced over her shoulder, and scoffed. "That was the first thing you've remembered correctly, dear. I'm not letting you lead."
It wasn't a long tunnel. Twenty-nine metres east to the dogleg, another seven south to the back wall of his office. They nevertheless took it painfully slow, turning what should have been a journey of ninety seconds into an agonizing eternity, perhaps even five minutes. After the overstimulation of his trashed apartment, Harry found the guileless simplicity of the escape route had the approximate effect of a sensory deprivation tank. What few details he could see, he fixed on voraciously. There were potlights in niches along the left-hand wall, and a hand railing on the right. He'd once had a powerful image of himself, bullet lodged against one rib, limping along with a trail of blood to mark his passage, leaning on that rail for dear life as he fled from who knew what. It just seemed, to him, like the kind of thing which would happen to someone working in an underground lab for a shadowy global conspiracy when they did the kind of work which could justify an exorbitantly expensive hidden passage. He hoped never to be shot — he was legendarily shooting-averse, and neither the abrupt fate of Agent Mukami nor his own act of improvisational electronics just moments prior were sitting all that well with him — but he still wasn't sure this fantasy compared unfavourably to what was actually happening.
Except that she was here, here with him, less than an arm's length away. He felt he could take a bullet to the ribs, if it meant extending that impossible companionship just a bit further. It was all he could do not to extend his arms again.
"Can we talk?" he whispered, against the back of her neck.
She shivered, probably because he'd just blown on her skin, and plucked something out of her jacket pocket. She stopped moving — he collided with her, and she gave him a look of implicit doubt in the purity of his intentions — and clapped a small black box to the northern wall. She squeezed, and one side of the box depressed inward. There was a nearly subaudible click, then a momentary flash of green from a tiny LED. She nodded. "Seal's still good, we're soundproof in here."
S&C gets all the fun toys. Which didn't explain why Melissa had one, but then, she was now apparently full of irregular security-related surprises. Like, for awkward starters…
"Why did you have to shoot Mukami?" He would have preferred to take a run up to this question, but his preferences were far too picky for this new and exciting milieu.
She started walking again, still at a toddler's pace. "Because she was talking, and I can't knock someone out at a distance."
He nodded, not that she could see it, nearly conking their skulls together. "Okay. Why is talking a problem?"
She sighed. "Do you… okay, sorry. I'm being obtuse. You've got movie amnesia, right? You don't know jack about what's going on? That's the baseline I'm working to."
"Yeah." It was chest-tighteningly frightful to hear it spelled out, even in such casual terms.
"Okay, I'll try to jog your memory. Do these names have anything in common: Gwilherm, Mukami, Ambrogi, Markey, Radcliffe, Del Olmo and Wirth?"
His relief at encountering a second thing he recognized, after the episode with the transformer, was powerful. "They all died in the 2002 breach."
She spun, nearly falling over from the sudden shift in momentum, and she really did fall over when he plowed right into her — or she would have, if he hadn't caught her with one hand before catching himself on the guard rail with the other. The flashlight shone up between them, like they were telling ghost stories at a campfire. He looked down, past his glowing chin, at her saucer-wide eyes.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," he said, then gently reoriented them both into free-standing positions before reluctantly letting go.
She adjusted the jacket, flushing brilliantly even in the dim and indirect light. "Nobody died in 2002, Harry."
He nodded. "That's exactly how I wouldn't describe it, yeah." He stopped nodding. "Nobody died… hmm."
"What?"
"…nothing." He could have explained to her that the seven personnel she'd just named had all been killed during a tragic accident within Acroamatic Abatement Facility AAF-D on 8 September 2002, then come mysteriously back to life just in time to not die during an aborted reprise of the same accident in the same facility on the same day, 2003. He could further have explained the brainwave he'd just had, when he realized that 'Nobody died in 2002' had been the story those refugees from the afterlife had spun when interviewed. They had gone on with their lives, built relationships, changed jobs, and otherwise engaged in the sort of dynamism of which the dead were generally deprived. The domino effect which had, in the real world, resulted in the deaths of five more Site-43 personnel, the temporary suspension of the Site Director and his temporary replacement's permanent disfiguring, and a business trip to Austria which had culminated in the discovery of double agents with anomalous talents within the Foundation's hierarchy… none of that had taken place, wherever the ghosts had been living.
In brief and unfriendly conversation with the resurrected Dr. Reuben Wirth, Harry had inferred a few more salient details about this alternate course of reality. Without the breach, Janitorial and Maintenance Technician Philip Deering had never been saddled with an emotionally predative mirror monster. Without the mirror monster, Melissa Bradbury had never been stricken comatose. And without the coma, a long-standing tension had finally been broken, and she and Harry had apparently been married.
He could have explained that to her. He was not physiologically incapable of speaking the words. But a lot of the facts of that fantasy didn't line up particularly well with what he was seeing in front of him, and some of them he preferred to leave unexploded for as long as possible. And what she had to say to him was much more relevant to the here-and-now, as the here-and-now was threatening to kill them both, so there was no time to waste on relaying the contents of reality's earlier drafts. That was what he told himself, and he told himself to pretend to believe it.
She was watching him, because in the absence of anything else to look at, of course she was. They always looked directly at each other when they spoke, which had been a source of some commentary from their colleagues. "Nothing," she repeated, and he nodded in confirmation. "Alright. Well, in the real world, as opposed to wherever you've been living, what they've got in common is being magic and insane."
Even the janitors at the SCP Foundation were conceptually aware of the existence of magic, and the technically sophisticated practice thereof known as thaumaturgy. Harry certainly was, so this information was not particularly difficult to parse. It wasn't what made him gasp.
His own train of thought did that.
She glanced over her shoulder, wincing as she did so as though expecting another Mukami to advance towards them from beyond the distant dogleg. "What?"
He wasn't at all sure how to respond, or whether he even should. For the second time in as many years, he had allowed an all-consuming concern for Melissa Bradbury to erase from his mind the existence of his significant other. And it wasn't even the same significant other; in 2002 he'd been at the tail end of a dissatisfying romance with the Chief of Identity and Technocryptography, Eileen Veiksaar. In 2003 he was in the early stages of a thoroughly satisfying one with Udo Okorie, researcher in Applied Occultism and outrageously competent thaumaturge.
In 2002, his first response to a breach scenario had been to find Melissa instead of Eileen. The more things change…
He realized a verbal response was expected, so he stammered one out. "Just remembering." He raised a hand to forestall the hope glimmering in her eyes. "Nothing about this. Would you… happen to know where Udo Okorie is?"
She furrowed her brow. "Okorie? Not Eileen? Okorie?" She shook her head. "Dunno. She went up to AAF-A, and never came back. Nobody comes back from there anymore. Nobody even goes."
Don't think about that. He was perversely relieved to find that once he'd remembered Udo, she wasn't so easy to forget. "Because of… insane magic, you were saying."
"Yeah." Melissa rocked back on her heels, clearly eager to get going again. "And we don't have time to get into the weeds about it, because they're out there right now, and they're probably looking for us, and they're not alone. If you see one of them, or anyone you don't know… or anyone you do know, but they look wrong… you run, and you don't look back. That clear?"
"No," he agreed. "But it's simple enough."
They took the next few steps in silence, rounding the corner to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The caged red bulb mounted over the door to Harry's office was powered by a transformer on the A&R end, and was therefore still glowing dully in the dark. They had run out of space for exposition.
Harry never spent much time in his office. Academic work made him bored and lonely, primarily because he enjoyed and was good at it, and his brain was set up to prevent him from doing the things he enjoyed and was good at. He had an excellent secondary setup in the main workroom of A&R, four L-shaped desks arranged in a square configuration so he could roll across the copper tiles on his wheely chair and hack away at four or more different projects whilst trading quips and gripes with his fellow archivists. Still, he had come to the SCP Foundation straight from one of the largest grad schools in Canada, so possessing an office in the first place had been a novelty which never really wore off. At Falconer University he'd never even had a desk; the most the School of History had been willing to spring for was a mail slot, nine inches by eleven inches by not even enough inches to squeeze a textbook into. Five years of this had formed a psychic scar which had never healed, and spending at least a few minutes each day sitting in his spacious office and enjoying the simple fact of its existence was one hell of a balm.
He had done the two things which all academics did to their offices: he had filled it with items tangentially related to the work he did, scattered about helter-skelter in an arrangement only he could decode (though not without effort), and he had over-filled it with items which had no business being in an office at all. Conversation-starters. He had a cheap glass case filled with half-constructed plastic ship models, a shelf featuring all fourteen of Pink Floyd's studio albums on CD, and a cardboard box of plastic sticks swathed in long strips of paper which, when flicked, extended out several feet before snapping back into place again. He bought them in bulk from a fair in September each year, and wore them out on the back of William Wettle's scalp whenever struck by the mood to strike. Various other pieces of bric-a-brac acquired from friends or family cluttered the remaining shelves and floorspace and deskspace, much of it originating with Melissa Bradbury. One of their many reciprocal running gags was to purchase the stupidest, most impractical thing they could find in a shop or at a garage sale, and then present it to the other as a gift. Harry's favourite was a boxed copy of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600. He had been delighted to find, on opening the box, that it was packed with nothing but soil. He'd both comprehended and appreciated the gag, especially after Melissa clarified that she'd used actual dump soil from an actual dump. He'd left the thing in a decontamination bed for a week before sealing it up again, framing it, and displaying it proudly on the wall beside all four of his university degrees.
All of that, every single bit, furniture inclusive, was gone now.
Also gone, the entire west wall.
It wasn't a clean break. It wasn't as though someone from Janitorial and Maintenance had come in with their tools to remove the plaster, take up the tiles and disconnect the modular partitions from the Site's internal skin. Every wall and floor and ceiling at Site-43 was divisible by one square metre, and all of it could be assembled, disassembled and reassembled at any time with minimal wastage. What had happened here, however, was… messier, and much more difficult to comprehend. The copper tile floor was streaked with heterogeneous dust — white, grey, black and red — apparently scooped out of the wall indiscriminately, so that where it met its neighbours to the north and south there were rough and ragged edges still visible. This exposed his private washroom to view, and there the dust was uniformly off-white, likely representing the porcelain tiles and fixtures which were no longer in any other sense present. The washroom's southern wall was also severely damaged, evidencing a similar though incomplete process of demolition: ragged gashes in grouped bands, five each, cleanly cutting through each material indiscriminately as though their individual levels of ductility presented no serious issue. As though someone had gone to town with a plasma torch, only without the resultant burning. Most of the bands were horizontal, but enough space had also been carved from ceiling to floor to admit human passage.
He wondered at the significance of that five-band pattern, and the tiger hypothesis again reared its fuzzy head as—
Melissa pulled him back through the now-unconcealed partition, then peeked outside herself. He'd only been able to squeeze ahead because she'd taken a moment to twist the butt of her flashlight tighter; the look she gave him suggested she would look unkindly on future attempts to press past her. He raised his pistol, tapped it with one forefinger, then raised an eyebrow at her. Translation: I have a gun.
She tapped his forehead, twice, then raised him both eyebrows. Translation: You have amnesia.
He couldn't argue with that, not without recourse to something more complex than Bradbury-Blank Sign Language. Melissa scanned the office, its closed door, the newly open-plan washroom and its makeshift exit, then glanced up at him again. Her pupils were dilated, and her mouth was twitching. Nevertheless, she nodded.
Harry had spent more time with Melissa Bradbury over the years than he'd spent with anyone else, unless lying unconscious next to Eileen Veiksaar counted. He knew she didn't scare easily, because she didn't even notice easily, and he knew enough about the sort of thing which could scare her to have an immediate fear reaction of his own when he saw it happening.
Guns held at the ready — he awkwardly, she with practiced ease — they emerged from the tunnel. Harry immediately noticed a stillness in the air. The recycling system should have been drawing breath from the northern salt mines, drying them out and keeping what the archivists called the Salt Mines to the south comfortably un-close. But where the vents had been rattling in Habitation and Sustenance, a tomblike silence prevailed within Archives and Revision.
Melissa waded through the thick dust to press against the bathroom half-wall, raising her weapon until the barrel rested against her nose and forehead. She puffed out her chipmunk cheeks, then took a tentative step into unknown territory. Every instinct, some unheard-from since September of 2002 when his research partner had last been in active circulation, cried out at him to do something. Before something was done to her. Again.
But then she looked over her shoulder at him, and smiled grimly.
He picked his way across the only recognizable scrap of furniture left in the office, his desktop, which was flush with the floor. Melissa's passage had pushed enough dust off its slick and polished surface to make it visible, and tracking across it was like walking on black ice. She stepped to the left, granting him a wide-open view of his primary workspace over the past five years.
The space she had apparently deemed devoid of threats or troubling peculiarities.
They were standing at the edge of a wide, open workroom which had once been filled with the usual shared office crap — though of a fancier sort, with faux-oak cubicles, faux-oak worktables, Harry's faux-oak island of seniority, and a water cooler which actually, legitimately cooled its water. Some of that stuff was still present, though most of it was shoved up against the walls and all of it was irreparably damaged. The water cooler was still where it was supposed to be; cartoonishly, its dry bottle now contained a single male dress shoe. The remaining desks featured similar tableaus of disorder. One was covered in bloody rags which might once have been someone's entire outfit, another was caved in by a massive chunk of granite which had definitely not come from the ceiling (though the ceiling had fallen in at six or seven different points, that wasn't one of them), and as they moved with catlike tread across the chipped tiles Harry saw that there was actually nothing funny about the shoe in the cooler, because of what was still inside the shoe.
None of these details really sank in for some time, however, the splintered dividers and crushed desks and fallen ceiling tiles and bedrock boulders lost in the sickly glow of the room's enormous centrepiece. The thing's construction, if indeed it had been constructed rather than grown, had involved knocking a hole in the ceiling and repurposing a lot of the material to be found in the salt mines, both inert and biological. It was something like a Jell-O mold, quivering in the inconstant airstream, reaching from a wide base on the floor where Harry's workstation had once been (and occupying its entire five square metre footprint) to some invisible point above the three-metre ceiling. It was bright pink, and sparkled beneath the fluorescents and the beam of Melissa's flashlight as though someone had thought to sugar-coat the immense confection. On each cardinal compass point it featured what looked like — but was not — a sculpture of a human being with arms outstretched in a gesture of desperate supplication. The figures were also pink, but they were also red, gristly and glistening, and one of them was missing its head, which was how Harry knew they weren't really sculptures.
The whole arrangement smelled like Pepto-Bismol.
He stared at the visible spinal column on the decorative cadaver before him, and the angry hand-made slashes across the candied corpse pile which had reduced it in places to little more than bubbly rubble, and finally at the foot in the shoe in the water cooler…
…and for a moment he almost reached out to touch the headless, skinless, nameless victim…
…and he looked back at Melissa, feeling a part of him flatten out and die in the space between them now. She looked concerned, but concerned for him, not about the flayed chimera in the room. She'd known it was here. She'd known that things like this existed now, she'd seen them before, seen enough of them or seen this one enough that seeing it now was no more striking an experience than finding a broken plate in the kitchen trash.
She looked away.
Beyond the glistening indency of the translucent layer cake, there was nothing in the Salt Mines worth examining further. As he headed back across the room, he saw her considering their options: the hallway leading north to the private offices, or the door in the same wall which opened into the main lounge, or the man-shaped hole leading into the women's washroom. He realized with a pang of guilt that she'd already checked that out, while he was busy boggling at… the thing he was already trying to put behind him, both literally and figuratively.
He had a sneaking suspicion she'd take the least-likely way forward. As usual — though not, today, as always — she did not disappoint him.
They didn't spend long in the washroom, which was no longer segregated. The wall which had once divided the women from the men was gone, big soggy chunks of it lying in the toilets and sinks. There was another man-shaped hole punched through the far end, as though Wile E. Coyote had gone through on a tear. Harry wondered if they'd knocked down the intervening partition in the same burst of speed, then come back later to finish the job.
One of the toilets was gurgling softly, and Melissa regarded it with what felt to Harry like entirely unwarranted suspicion. She hung back after he'd headed into the lounge, head in the crack of the door, as though contemplating action.
What action, he couldn't imagine.
The floor of the lounge was coated in fully one foot of dust. The entertainment centre, the couches, the chairs, the cabinets and counters and refrigerator and microwave, everything was either gone or invisible beneath the surface of the grainy grey wading pool. Everything, he was willing to bet after what he'd seen in the Salt Mines, was the dust. It was colourless and entirely homogeneous, as though whoever was atomizing everything had refined their technique with his office before moving on to the main event. He had the uncomfortable feeling he was progressing through an artist's portfolio, witnessing the increasing sophistication of their art.
He remembered standing behind one of the missing couches a year prior, eulogizing Rueben Wirth, shoring up his staff's morale and group cohesion with a few carefully-chosen, affectedly careless words. He could picture their faces, looking for the leadership which did not come easily to him. How many of them were still alive? He was almost glad the time was wrong to ask.
He saw the method in Melissa's madness when, after confirming that the lounge was empty of threats, she led him towards a break in the north wall on the same alignment as the ones in the washrooms. They were taking the hallway course, they were just taking it… parallel. Off the beaten path, in a manner not normally possible indoors.
The senior archivists numbered eight at any given time, and their offices were clustered in a perfect square. The archivist whose workspace now sported a free extra entrance was a grouchy old fart named Yu Ong, the oldest historian still on duty, who hardly ever came into A&R these days at all. Ong preferred to work in his quarters, having no need for cameraderie and no use for a desk. Harry crossed the hall from his own quarters to check in on the old man occasionally, often finding him on the floor of his living room, up to his elbows in files. Biometric readings beamed by wifi to the security staff were the only proof that Ong was even alive, most days. Seniority, and a proven track record, operated much the same at Site-43 as at any respectable research university. Eccentricities could be tolerated, so long as they were accompanied by results.
Ong's desk was still here, badly damaged and rammed so hard into the northern wall that both had partially given way. His bookshelves had been roughly victimized by the mysterious traveller's passage, their remains hanging from brackets hanging from half-unscrewed screws in the plaster. The contents of each sequential space were proving progressively less ghoulish, so Harry had high hopes for the free space in the centre of the block.
This last, accessible only via narrow doors in the back walls of each office on the cardinal compass points, was a second lounge. They called it the VIP, which was a laugh; it was a claustrophobic five-by-five space which had once featured only a small conference table and chairs, so the bigwigs could engage in straight dope. It had been removed before Harry had even started at the Site.
The more recent bigwigs had replaced it with two couches, a TV, and a minibar. One of the couches was gone now, as were the minibar and TV, though there was no sign of what had happened to them. The second couch was still present, and it was also occupied.
Harry clamped both hands over his mouth and staggered back into Ong's office. He almost bolted back out the hole in the wall, then into the washrooms, then past the macabre marmalade monolith along their violent predecessor's beeline path; he imagined smacking into a terminal wall and burrowing straight through, as that impossible vandal had done, pounding bedrock to smithereens in a desperate flight from this chamber of chambers of…
He vomited. It splattered over the dusty black surface of Veasna Chey's Nintendo 64, which he hadn't even noticed on the floor beside Ong's pulped workstation. It belonged in the VIP, the only unmolested object he'd seen in this strange new world so far, and he'd just sprayed it with what looked like and probably was half a pound of half-digested emergency rations. He hadn't eaten emergency rations since the annual disaster training back in January…
Melissa gently pulled back his hair, then knelt beside him to dab at his mouth. The edges of her handkerchief seemed rough and unfinished. When she was done, she dropped it over the filthy game console like a burial shroud or body bag. He recognized the green tint of the faded fabric, and the corner of the Site-43 black-and-rainbow facility insignia, and knew it for what it was: a scrap of t-shirt. Lillian Lillihammer had one just like it.
Oh god, Li, where are you…
"Hey," Melissa whispered. She was inches away from him, and he was suddenly afraid she could smell the bile on his breath. He moaned in response, and looked away.
"Hey." She leaned in awkwardly over his folded knees and held him, head over his shoulder — not as had once been her habit, from behind, backseat driving his research and composition and even compulsive email-checking, but from the front. He had the presence of mind to wonder if she would have preferred to rest her forehead against his, but was similarly vomit-avoidant.
He reached around her back, feeling the familiar roughness of the aging leather, and they crouched together in the doorway like that until he felt his fight-or-flight instinct reasserting itself over the sudden onset nausea. They had to keep moving. There was nothing else for it.
He blew on her ear. She shuddered, and pulled away with a sad smile before pulling him to his feet with a strength he was surprised she possessed, physically. It was hard not to think of her as the woman who'd slept through what had been one of the worst years of his life, in large part because she'd been sleeping through it.
He tried to focus on the fact of her, the impossible fact of Melissa Bradbury, as they passed back into the VIP. He tried not to look at the gutted couch frame containing Birgitta Dahl, Senior Archivist, PhD in history with a speciality in Middle Eastern studies and classics, owner of two golden retrievers which she paid a full-time trainer to take care of while she beavered away underground, an entire top-secret subway ride away from her bungalow in Grand Bend, owner of every Michael Bolton album on long-playing record, owner of an apparently inexhaustible supply of thick woolen sweaters.
It was the sweater which made her body identifiable, even though she had been folded in half at the waist — backward — and someone had pushed their spread-fingered hand through her chest and out her back and through the cushions of the couch and several inches into the floor, steel sheath be damned.
Ignaz Achterberg's office was unoccopied, but the walls, which should have been smooth white plaster, were instead rough red and brown. They moved through that space with as much speed as they could muster without disturbing anything or making too much noise; the signals Harry's brain was receiving from his nose suggested that yes, some amateur painter had here indulged their muse with decidedly crude materials, using what was now a discarded pile of priceless papers and black-bound books as makeshift brushes. Melissa used another handkerchief to open the hallway door, and he could hardly blame her. When she discarded this one behind Achterberg's neatly-bisected desk, his suspicions were confirmed: the handkerchiefs were actually just ragged squares of cloth, cut from articles of clothing with a pair of scissors. This one was black, and he recognized it instantly as belonging to his Pink Floyd Animals t-shirt. The floating pig over Battersea Power Station was clearly visible in one corner.
She smiled at him apologetically, but didn't say anything. Neither of them wanted to draw breath after where they'd just been, and anyway they were supposed to be practicing stealth.
Once again Melissa took the corner like a trained police officer. There was a glassed-in security station to the north, standing sentry in the middle of a three-way junction. The lights were off, and the glass was cracked. The corridor turned northeast back the way they would have come if they'd taken the straight and narrow path, looping around the office block before ending at the Salt Mines. A hairpin turn to the northwest provided access to the more humble offices occupied by what Harry liked to call 'the great untenured', his junior archivists. He hoped they weren't going that way, and not only because there was a distant flickering light in the far north; he knew there was nothing back there but the Site's main library, and then the endless salt caves where the Foundation's single largest repository of documents sat in static dehumidity. Not the most promising place to eke out a living. Man cannot live on salt alone…
The flickering, he suddenly realized, was probably fire. The junior offices were directly opposite the A&R library. His library.
His library was probably on fire.
Melissa must have seen the look of horror spreading across his features, because she took his hand again and shook her head. They weren't going that way. The books would have to fend for themselves. The remaining paths were a brief stretch to the south, which dead-ended in a janitor's closet —door ajar — and another hairpin around the security station to the west. Melissa eyed the closet nervously, then pointed hesitantly at the final option.
Two things occurred to him in this moment. One, Melissa wasn't comfortable in A&R. She didn't consider any of it safe, and the evidence he'd seen so far backed up that assumption with force. She was encountering each obstacle with the general sense that it might be here, and how it might look, but she was making pathfinding decisions on the fly. This wasn't the way she had come — the way they had come, before his sudden bout of doublethink — and he guessed that they were now taking the long way 'round to shake off any pursuit. It gave him only small comfort to know that one of seven potential pursuers had been dealt with.
The second thing which occurred to him was that she was leading him deeper and deeper into a facility which had no rear exit, and was apparently not the origin of their trip. A&R didn't have its own dedicated subway stop, and all the entrances from the rest of the Site — save for the various circulation systems, which offered very tight and dubious crawls to nowhere special — were already far to their south, and they were moving away from them. This relative isolation was an intentional design feature, preserving the unique atmospheric conditions of the document repository.
If there was any way out of this maze, therefore, he certainly didn't know about it, and if anyone did, it should have been him.
They had just slipped around the last corner of the darkened checkpoint when a snivelling cry echoed out from the road untravelled. The two of them crowded against the wall and peered back northward through the spiderwebbed security fishtank, just in time to see a grey haired man in a buttoned-up labcoat stumble backward into view. It was Achterberg himself, the secondmost senior archivist and one of the men who'd supervised Harry's dissertation back at Falconer. Everyone called him Iggy. Harry almost called him Iggy out loud, when Melissa stuck one hand over his mouth and fiercely shook her head.
Achterberg staggered into the checkpoint, striking the window with the back of his head. It cracked further, but still did not shatter; it was bulletproof, after all, and even rated highly against ballistic thaumaturgy. Achterberg's skull wasn't equivalently glassproof, and he left an untidy smear of blood behind him as he struggled to stay upright. He seemed dazed and panicked, casting about for somewhere to run. He spun to stare into the security station, the most obvious source of succour, and that was when he and Harry made distant and refracted eye contact.
Harry had never seen a look of abject terror like that on anyone's face, not ever, and to his astonishment the look became worse as a single clap rang out behind the old man.
Then another.
Then another. Someone was clapping their hands, very slowly, each strike an exclamation of its own. Clap. Clap. Clap. Achterberg broke eye contact and jolted in place, first toward the junior offices, then toward Harry and Melissa, apparently unable to settle on the safest escape route. Harry put his hands on the glass, aware as he did so that Melissa was tugging frantically on the hem of his sweatshirt.
Achterberg finally responded to Harry's silent plea and dashed briefly in their direction, before stopping dead in place again as the mysterious figure swaggered into view.
He strode through the floor tiles, through them, kicking them out of his path like they were only so much snow. They distintegrated as they met the tips of his steel-toed workboots. He threw back his head and laughed in childish glee, then darted forward to grab Achterberg's shoulders, digging deep bloody divots into them as though he were only so much snow, then laughed in the other man's face, swung both hands out wide, and brought them back together in a seventh and final clap which obliterated the archivist's head in a spray of blood and bone and mucous and teeth and cartilege and skin which exploded away from his shattered spine with such force that some of it spattered the tiles leading in their direction.
It was the Deputy Chief of Janitorial and Maintenance, Romolo Ambrogi. There was no mistaking it. Ambrogi wasn't wearing his J&M baseball cap, but he still had on the orange vest and black undershirt, and he still had his thick black beard — thicker than Harry remembered, even. The technician laughed, then clapped again, lower down, compressing the shoulders of Achterberg's still-standing corpse as the signals keeping him upright died out in the absence of central control. The old man's arms flapped up with the blow, as though in protest of this absurd and revolting fate, then fell off as the whole thing oozed to the tiles.
And in that moment Harold Blank understood that this really wasn't a dream, wasn't even a nightmare, and he wasn't about to wake up.
