"The world keeps turning. SCP-166 does not know his name."
She's a doe, Clef recognizes as he trains the crosshairs on her, a roe deer. A pretty, dainty animal with fur still dark and patchy from the winter. As if feeling him on her, she lifts her head to look at him. Dark, curious eyes at the end of a thin neck. She's seen him. She will bolt any second now.
He lets go of his breath.
A shot rings out across the small clearing. Behind him, Kondraki whistles through his teeth. Clef turns to look at him, finds something warm and appreciative in his eyes.
"I knew you were a good shot," Kondraki says, "But I don't think I've seen you in action before. Damn."
Clef smiles, letting himself bask in the praise for a moment.
"Scared?"
Kondraki laughs. "Terrified."
They approach the prone body. A thin trickle of blood is running down from her mouth into the grass, and it occurs to Clef that he has not hunted a living creature before. Killed, yes, he'd lost track, in fact, of how many he had killed. There was a difference between the two, though: Killing didn't sustain you.
His old rifle is heavy in his hands. A good weight, he decides.
They had found them in the wrong parts of cities and small nowhere towns. Most of them weren't even twenty. All of them were men. It's was a draft more than it was a recruitment drive, of anyone desperate to get away from wherever it was he was from, of anyone with nowhere to go back to. They were instructed to bring their own gear, so Francis had bought a rifle from a pawnshop and dressed in his grandfather's old army jacket.
The GOC, Clef will find out much later, has things like strike teams, and special operatives, and contract thaumaturges. They are not any of that. This is the point.
There's eight of them in the squad car, a banged-up Land Rover with a tarp over the back. They sleep in motorway hotels when they can afford it, they sleep in the car when they can't, piled on top of each other like a prisoner transport. They lock their guns up in a trunk under the passenger's seat when they don't need them, but Agent Ukulele keeps a knife tucked into his belt during the nights he lays between them, stinking of sweat. He does not sleep, those nights, not much. Their warmth is unbearable to him. Pigs in a pen, he thinks.
His first kill is a boy near Durham. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. He's not the first one he sees die, but he's the first he pulls the trigger for.
He's walking along a dirt path through the fields, a radiant and dangerous thing that might have been on his way home or might have been on his way to find whatever threads make up the universe and pull at them. Ukulele shoots him once, from a deer stand at the edge of the woods, and a second and third time, when he doesn't hit the ground right away. It's risky, riskier than the approaches he will take to this sort of thing in the future, but they do not have the funds for something more elaborate, and Ukulele has not yet learned to be frightened of that which doesn't appear frightening at a glance.
They put the body in a trash bag and put the trash bag in the car. There are hands on Ukulele's shoulders, his back, his head, their touch firm but fleeting, like he is being given a blessing. He is not sure whether they are meant to praise, soothe, or assert dominance.
He spends his first paycheck on a coat that fits him and an M16 rifle. They do not make things any easier.
They take the doe back to the safehouse in the trunk of Kondraki's old Škoda. Kondraki hoists her up over his shoulder, carries her inside, into the bathroom, where he hangs her up by her hind legs and places a plastic tub on the floor beneath her. He slices off her udder, opens up her stomach, takes out her bladder, her womb, her intestines. He handles the organs carefully, so they do not leak, but it lends his touch a strange gentleness, one that Clef doesn't quite know what to do with.
He watches silently, sitting cross-legged on the closed toilet lid. The knife glides easily through flesh and sinew. It, like the rifle, had been Agent Ukulele's once. It looks good in Kondraki's hands, looks good being put to use.
With a weary sigh, Kondraki stands, turning on the tap.
"You're not half bad at this," says Clef.
It had been Kondraki who had suggested it, going hunting. He'd phrased it as a dare, a challenge — 'Betcha won't hit anything, anyway' — but Clef recognized it for what it was: An excuse as much as an offer, to take the weekend off, to get away from it all, if just for two days.
"Thanks," says Kondraki. The blood from his hands circles the drain, dull pink against the porcelain. "My Dad taught me."
The room is dark with a low ceiling and it smells like beer, drunk and sweated back out. Bodies writhe under LED headlights. Some of them are naked, some wrapped in leather, shiny in the light shifting from blue to green to orange. It's hard to tell where one ends and another begins— a single organism breathing and twisting and caressing itself in what brings to mind a Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell. Ukulele's coat feels heavy on him, too warm, and he would take it off if that didn't mean giving up his last line of defense against all of it.
It's 1984, Birmingham, and in three years this place will have closed down. The newspapers will be running pictures of Princess Diana shaking the hands of men too thin and sallow for their hospital robes, and she'll look perfect, like Francis' girlfriend, like Francis' unborn daughter. And another three years later the thin and sallow men will be dead, and Francis' girlfriend will be dead and his daughter might as well be. Diana will be alive, still, but another seven years later she'll be dead too, and only Ukulele, spiteful creature that he is, will survive it all.
That night, in Birmingham, a man asks him to dance, navy blue handkerchief tucked into the back of his jeans. Like a dog, he seems to smell his fear, and despite this, because of it maybe, Ukulele takes him up on his offer. The man leads him to the dance floor, puts broad hands on his waist, thick fingers through his belt loops. And then, for a few minutes, Ukulele is one with the great and terrible mass, feels his breathing and heartbeat and everything that is human about him synchronize with it. He might have even died with it, when it would, so very soon from now.
Then the man asks, in a voice too low and soaked in spit and alcohol, if Ukulele wants to come home with him. Ukulele stares at him, wide-eyed and silent, and then he pulls his coat closed around him like a bathrobe and stumbles away, out of the bar and into the cold October night.
Venison is tough if not cooked properly, Kondraki tells him, because deer are all skin and bones and muscle. And so he slices the doe into thin strips, drenches her in vinegar and rosemary and garlic and honey. The vinegar is important, he says, because it dissolves muscle fibers, makes the meat soft and tender. It smells delicious when he sears her flesh in the pan, and it occurs to Clef that he can't remember the last time he has eaten something home-cooked. A part of him envies the ease with which Kondraki fills the room with warmth and smell and noise, with which he makes the space his own.
"I could get used to this," he jokes. "You, cooking for me. Who taught you that? Your Mom?"
Kondraki smiles half-heartedly. "As a matter of fact, she did."
Meridiana Wojciechoski's mother does not have hooves on her feet and starlight in her eyes, not when Francis first meets her. She is small, but still taller than him. She has freckles and blonde hair and the kind of body that is soft, that can bear children. When they are nine years old, she takes him behind the hawthorn bush in his mother's garden, and in a voice low with conspiracy, like she is telling him a terrible secret, she asks him if he is ever going to hurt her.
He tells her no, never, and she breaks off a twig to prick their thumbs on, their blood bright against the small white flowers. They press their hands together and his blood flows into her body and hers flows into his.
They are accomplices, from then on.
Much later, she builds a home for him, and he comes back to it and washes the blood off his hands and spends his money on eggs and milk and a radio and television set. He puts a child into her because she wants him to and he watches, confused like he can't quite remember how it got there, as she becomes more and more swollen with it each time he returns.
He lies awake, trying to find something comforting in the warmth of her body next to his.
Her growing the antlers is a horrifying, painful affair. The crown of her head distends, something wanting out from inside of it, until there is a sickening crack and blood runs down her forehead from the new holes in her skull. She looks at him with eyes red from pained tears, as he, a veteran agent at this point, assesses her — Threat entity, reality warper, Type Black? — and before he knows it, she has become something that he is meant to kill. More reassuringly, she has perhaps been it all along.
Little Meridiana, seven pounds light and wrapped in a clean kitchen towel, has soft spots on the sides of her head, so that when her own antlers grow in, it won't hurt as much. As Francis holds her the first time, wildflowers poking through the floorboards, moss growing out of the electrical socket, it occurs to him with much the same clarity as it had for her mother that he will have to kill her, too.
And for a moment, what he feels is relief.
Stags, Kondraki tells him in a tone that indicates that he finds this funny, can kill themselves during their rut. They are so territorial, he says, so horny, that they neglect to feed for long enough that it starves all the little living things in their gut that help them break down their food. Without them, the stag starves too, inevitably. Even with his stomach full.
Dumb animals, he calls them. Clef snorts and shakes his head.
He does not kill Francis' daughter in the end. Perhaps because he is too much of a coward for it, or not enough of one. Perhaps because she is a small and pitiful thing and he cannot bring himself to believe that anything would be gained from her death. Perhaps because a part of him has been looking for an out for years now, and while chimpanzees ate their young, somewhere in the painful process of becoming something other than an animal, that had been left behind.
Instead, he makes sure that Meridiana is cared for and out of the way, that she has a number and containment procedures and a small space in the world where she is safe from it and it is safe from her. He feels guilty about it in the way that he feels guilty about the blood on his hands, some of which is her mother's. She becomes, for all intents and purposes, a glossy picture of Princess Diana, taped to the bedroom wall of somebody who hadn't made peace with her death.
Until, all at once, he is confronted with the horrifying truth of her personhood: She has taken a lover, and that lover is a woman, and the kind where you could tell what she was, at that. SCP-105 has short hair and broad shoulders and scars that she had let him see. In too many ways, she looks like him when he had been a soldier, because she is one, because he has a part in shaping her into one. He finds out because SCP-105 has to file a form with him about it, because between her and Meridiana, she is the one he knows better.
He tells himself that he wants her away from Meridiana because she is somehow dangerous, unstable, that she put thoughts into her head that someone like her ought not to have. Let it be a woman, he thinks, but let it be one that is beautiful and soft and quiet, like Meridiana herself. Let them love each other and let them both, together, be a testament to how there is still good in the world. He could make his peace with that.
Then, quite suddenly, it occurs to him that that is the kind of opinion a father might have, except that Meridiana does not belong to him in that nebulous and unassailable way that daughters belonged to their fathers. He is the last person on earth who could stake that kind of claim to her.
He is disgusted with himself for a long time. The world keeps turning. SCP-166 does not know his name.
Kondraki lets him take the bedroom and makes his own bed on the couch. Clef considers protesting, but between letting Kondraki do him a favor and offering up a favor of his own, he is not sure which is more demeaning, and something in him is too old, too tired to care.
When he can't sleep, he creeps back into the living room and stands over Kondraki in the dark, like a murderer. Kondraki is a big, warm animal that breathes and twitches in its sleep. Clef is reminded of a dog, not for the first time. For all his arrogance, Kondraki had a way of looking at him sometimes, eyes dumb with affection. Subtlety was not his strong suit, in this or any other matter.
Clef wonders if he would let him, if he asked to touch him, the way the man in Birmingham had wanted to. He thinks of his hands on the doe's insides.
Kondraki frowns and mumbles something in his sleep. Clef stares at him and tries to hunger, but only finds himself starving.
The world keeps turning. SCP-166 grows from a child who does not know his name into a woman who does not know his name, and Clef watches her from a distance he deems safe. Eventually, she leaves Site-19 behind, not so much of her own volition but because she is to be a dangerous and volatile object somewhere else, though somewhere with warmer air to breathe. Still, as he signs off on her transfer to Site-17 — Kondraki's site, before he'd died, the way people tended to in this line of work — he can't help but feel a touch of sentimentality.
She leaves, and he stays, and he curates a space for himself that smells like coffee and cigarettes. He does his best to bear his own company.
Her letter reaches him opened and read, sealed in plastic like a piece of evidence. It has already been recorded somewhere for posterity — a decades-late reply in what was now, suddenly, a dialogue, monitored closely as if there was something she could tell him that would make any difference at all.
She is courteous and articulate, and she takes pains not to scare him, like he is some wild animal. It should feel patronizing, but more than anything, he is thankful to her. He knows that she has every right to tear him limb from limb, and that she knows it too, and chooses not to. She does not say who told her, so he guesses it was Iris and lets himself indulge in the vindication that she can not be trusted. As he reads, his flat at Site-19 seems to shrink around him, becoming what he took pains to pretend it wasn't, usually: an unbearably small pocket of air embedded hundreds of feet within the frozen ground. Despite her best efforts, despite his own, he is terrified.
He breathes. He waits for the fear to pass.
It doesn't, but he gets it most of the way there, conditions he can operate under. He sits down at his desk and unfolds the narrow pair of reading glasses that help him compensate for his waning eyesight. Gingerly, he goes over each of her questions again, and finds them less threatening in the yellow glow of his old piano light.
Then, very meticulously, knowing it is all he can do, he gives each one the best answer he can. He wishes her well. He tells her to give Iris his best.
Finally, he signs the bottom of the page — two scratches and an inverted number three, the symbol etched well into his muscle memories after years of having it for a name — and leaning back in his chair, feels something old and tired find a corner to curl up and fall asleep in. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes.
He puts his letter in an envelope, addressed to one Tilda David Moose, Director of Site-17, and hopes for the best. He folds hers neatly, along the lines her fingers have already welded into the paper, and places it in the topmost drawer of his desk.
When the sun goes out, a few years later, it is still there.
