SCP-6393 - SCP Foundation

SCP-6393

Item#: 6393

Level3

Containment Class:

keter

Secondary Class:

{$secondary-class}

Disruption Class:

vlam

Risk Class:

caution

link to memo

SCP-6393-1

Special Containment Procedures: Foundation agents embedded in law enforcement agencies are to conceal photographic or video evidence of SCP-6393 events. Reports of SCP-6393 are to be explained as mundane disappearances.

Description: SCP-6393 is a phenomenon that has the chance to occur when any door within an occupied domicile is opened. When this occurs, the door, rather than leading to its usual designation, will lead to an extradimensional space. This space is designated SCP-6393-1.

The point of entry always lies inside the living room of a two-storey stucco¹ country house surrounded by an alpine environment whose appearance is conserved across appearances. During any occurrence of SCP-6393, a single adult female will enter SCP-6393-1, after which the anomaly and entrant will demanifest.

No efforts to obstruct entry into SCP-6393 have ever been undertaken, whether by the Foundation or unaffiliated parties. This is presumably a secondary anomalous effect of SCP-6393. SCP-6393 events occur once every 65 days.

Addendum 6393.1: Exploration Log 6393-1

- LEVEL 4 CLASSIFIED -

- ACCESS GRANTED

Transcript of Blackbox Signal Retherford-390

Synopsis: On the 5th of December, 2022, an SCP-6393 event occurred in the city of Lyon, France. A nearby Foundation facility later recovered a somatic recording of the event from the Blackbox² recordings of Agent Evelyn Sophia Retherford, an off-duty member of Mobile Task Force Epsilon-71 (“Cyhyraeth”)³

(Begin transcript)

Retherford is in her home, lying asleep. It is some time past midnight. From an adjoining room, a baby begins wailing. After several seconds she awakens and registers the sound. She stands up, sways, and moves to her bedroom door, turning the knob. It opens into SCP-6393-1.

The baby continues to cry. Retherford absentmindedly steps forward, past the threshold of the doorway.

Retherford: Is someone there? … Wait, this isn’t-

Retherford turns around. The entrance to the anomaly has been replaced with a door frame mounted on top of a flat plaster wall. Her heart rate elevates. She scratches at the wall with her fingernails. The plaster gouges and leaks a mucusy yellow fluid. It is warm and smells like egg whites.

She attempts to use her phone to call her contacts, but there is no cell reception.

Retherford pinches herself on the arm several times. Then, she slaps herself. After several seconds, she shivers and turns to examine the rest of the room.

The room in which Retherford is standing resembles a lounge. Her surroundings are dirty but not dilapidated. Dust has settled on every surface. The house has not been occupied for some time, but there is evidence of previous, albeit transient, habitation: shattered furniture, disorganised piles of dry foliage, footprints made of dustings of snow, and markings carved into the walls.

White light is spilling through thin slit windows, covered by silk drapes. The window panes have shattered, and wind is coming in through them. The floorboards are covered in powdered snow. In her work clothes,⁴ Retherford is severely underdressed.

From upstairs, a distressed infant is heard again. A woman begins singing and the baby stops crying.

Retherford: (Whispering) Save yourself first, Sophia. Don’t become a casualty.

Retherford pulls her shirt across her body and moves to one of the windows. It is nighttime outside, and light snow is falling on a meadow. Deciduous, alpine trees are scattered in the distance. Over the horizon, there are mountains. In one window, she briefly spots a quadrupedal silhouette in the snow. It moves away before she can identify its shape.

In time, she explores the first floor of the house. There are taps, incandescent light bulbs, and stoves, but the house is not connected to any sort of plumbing system or electrical network. Its cooking appliances are designed to be powered by wood or charcoal.

In the kitchen, Retherford pries open several drawers. Most are frozen shut. One yields a steak knife which she uses to break open the rest. There are a small number of friction matches in an overhead cupboard. The staircase to the second floor has collapsed, preventing access.

Thirty minutes have elapsed. Retherford is losing sensation in her extremities. She wraps herself in blankets, but their preexisting temperature only makes her colder. Ultimately, she uses her hands to pry up some of the loose floorboards in the kitchen. Underneath the boards is a layer of lukewarm gristle, binding them to the foundations of the building. She snaps the boards into pieces and arranges them in a pile in the kitchen, the only room on the first floor whose windows and doors are intact.

Retherford attempts to create a fire by pressing a lit matchstick against the planks. It doesn’t take; she rips a silk curtain down, which bleeds thin red grease, and sets off all but one of her remaining matches to set it alight. The fire catches; it emits a greasy smoke. Retherford begins to warm her hands over the flame.

(Irrelevant footage abridged)

(Continue transcript)

Retherford is now on the second floor of the house, having reached it by pushing a wardrobe up to the collapsed section of the stairs. Her hands are raw from overexposure to fire, but her core body temperature is very low. Her heartbeat is slow.

She is looking principally for additional clothing and secondarily for the source of the sound that she heard earlier. The fire that she lit earlier is still alight. She only has a single match left, so relighting the fire repeatedly is not an option.

From nearby, a woman is singing. An infant’s cooing is audible through the walls.

Retherford wields a steak knife. She inhales and opens a door which leads to the source of the noise. It is a child’s bedroom. In the middle of the room, there is a woman wearing a sweater and a thick coat holding a three month old⁵ child swaddled in a scarf. A wastebasket full of cold, settled ash lies in front of her. There are patches of exposed underfelt and resin throughout the room where the carpet has been ripped up.

The unidentified woman is severely emaciated: her forearms and legs are bonded by ice to the chair that she is sitting in, her eyes are closed, and her lips are blue. The two sections of a firestarter lie on the ground, covered in several large cuts and a greater number of shallow, repetitive abrasions.

The woman holds the baby up to her bosom. The skin on her chest has been gnawed away, and the muscle beneath is pockmarked with indistinct bite marks. The baby gums on a loose scrap of visceral fat.

Woman: (In French) Come on, darling. It doesn’t hurt. Be strong for me. (Singing) Alouette, gentille alouette, alouette, je te plumerai.⁶

Retherford: Ma’am, can you understand me?

Retherford approaches the woman, who smiles and starts to take off her coat, using the limited dexterity of her palm to offer it to her. Retherford reaches out to accept it, before falteringly withdrawing her hand.

Retherford: I can’t. Listen, I have a fire, a… flame, incendia, ignis, flamma, downstairs. I’ll bring you something to drink, and-… ah, and a warm blanket.

The woman lifts her child and presents it to Retherford, who steps back.

Woman: (In English) I’m all dry.

Retherford carefully picks up the baby. Its skin is warm, but her hands feel like they're getting colder.

The woman’s arms lower, and she sags until her head is resting on her chest. Her mouth hangs open; there is a shrivelled, dark blister or bubo on the inside of her cheek. Retherford puts the infant down and grabs the woman’s wrist with one hand. She places her other hand beneath the woman’s nose, feeling for a pulse and a breath.

Retherford: No no no no no, don’t give up. You’re going to be fine, I’m a paramedic, I came to help. Hold on-

Retherford runs downstairs. She picks up a pile of blankets which had been sitting by the fire and brings them upstairs to drape around the woman. The woman’s wounds reopen in the heat, and ooze a dense clot of blood. The air turns sour and acidic with organic particulates.

Retherford: Hey, hey, can you hear me?

The woman’s eyes fall open. They are milky and full of cataracts. Retherford checks for a pulse again. The woman is dead. She cusses indistinctly.

She looks at the child, and then at the woman’s clothes. She laughs awkwardly before looting the woman for her overgarments.

Retherford: We are less than even.

(Irrelevant footage abridged)

(Continue transcript)

Retherford tears off a piece of wallpaper. As before, a yellow slime dribbles out of the hole. She scoops it up with a spoon and places it into a saucepan alongside a small amount of flesh, which she has scraped off of the undersides of some floorboards. She places it over a fire and heats it until it begins to boil. The slurry blackens and deposits a layer of dark sediment at the bottom of the pan. She tries to consume some but it tastes overwhelmingly of ammonia, sulphur, and urine. She gags and sprays it across the floor.

The infant nehs. Retherford looks toward it, lying in a cot next to the fire, while she cleans her vomit off the ground with a torn-off curtain.

Retherford: I know, I know, I’m starving too. (Whispering) God, how long has it been?

The infant shrieks. Reluctantly, Retherford stands up and approaches it. The infant is clutching its groin.

Retherford: Do you need to go potty? C’mere.

Retherford holds the child at arm’s length above the pot of burnt slurry and allows it to relieve itself. She wipes it down with a piece of fabric.

Retherford: (Hacks) Jesus… I’d have left your mother’s clothes behind if I’d known that I’d have to take care of you.

The infant draws its hands toward its chest and squeezes its eyes shut. It emits a single squeal.

Retherford: (Winces) Okay. It’s okay, baby. I didn’t mean it.

Retherford wraps the baby in cloth and holds it close to her chest. It latches onto her jacket and squeals several more times, before eventually falling asleep.

Retherford: (Whispering) You know, it’d be a lot easier for us to get along if I knew your name.

Retherford gently lays the baby down in its cot and goes upstairs. She reenters the room where she found the woman and the infant. The woman’s body has become rigid with frost. She picks up the corpse in a bridal carry and takes it downstairs, to place it by the fire. She strips it of its remaining clothing. The woman’s emaciated body emits a putrid odour. A viscous brown fluid leaches through her frostbitten skin. Retherford swoons and pinches her nose.

Retherford: Fuck. You didn’t deserve this.

Retherford grabs a shovel and drags the woman outside. When she opens the door, the wind nearly causes her to lose her footing. She walks into the middle of a snowstorm, as her hair freezes to her neck. She moves the body to a point about fifty metres from the house, under a coniferous tree, where she begins to excavate a ditch. Several minutes pass in silence.

Retherford: You’d never know it from my accent but I used to live in Dawson City, right up in Yukon. Used to- (pants) we used to find dead cats and dogs in the streets, after a snowstorm. (Coughs) Literally harder than rocks. It- it was grim. Yeah, p-people would just… leave their pets outside, or- or forget to bring them in. Some of the other kids, they’d poke them with sticks. You could snap a whole limb off. The city council would send garbage men to pick the bodies up, and they’d burn them in a big smokestack outside town. That didn’t sit right with me. I’d always try to give them a proper burial.

Her shovel reaches the soil underneath the snow. She smooths her hair. It crackles.

Retherford: (Inhales sharply) I’ll take care of your kid. Sixty-five days. Assuming we don’t freeze or starve by then, we escape. (Whispering) Christ, you’re only my age. Don’t haunt me, alright? I don’t want to see you in my dreams.

Retherford finishes digging the hole. She takes a moment to rest, leaning on the shovel. She places one foot on the woman’s body.

Retherford: … Sayonara, lady. (Laughs anxiously) What am I saying?

Retherford pushes the body into the ditch and covers it in a thin layer of snow.

Retherford: (Sighs) It’s getting hard to tell days apart.

As she lifts her head to prepare to head back to the house, a lean grey wolf limps out of the snowstorm and latches onto the dead woman’s shoulder, before rapidly backpedalling and dragging her out of the grave. Retherford scrambles to grab the woman’s legs and pulls on them. The woman’s flesh gouges under her fingers.

One of the cadaver’s legs pops out of its socket, and Retherford falls backwards into the snow. The wolf jumps on top of her. There is an indistinct scramble, followed by an intense burning sensation in the side of her head. A weight presses down on her chest, preventing her from breathing. She scrambles for something in the snow and picks up her shovel by the neck, and stabs the wolf with the corner of the blade. It sinks an inch into its flank, between two ribs, and the animal yelps. It rapidly retreats, dragging the woman’s corpse into the snowstorm with it.

Retherford lies in the snow, gasping, fading in and out of consciousness. The blood on her cheek crystallises, forming a crescent over the left side of her head. Hailstones lodge and settle inside the wound. Footage quality degrades.⁷

Retherford: Sorry, couldn’t… save you.

Retherford lies still and closes her eyes, falling unconscious. An indeterminate amount of time passes. She wakes up to hear the baby crying from within the house.

Retherford: Oh yeah. That’s right. (Softly) Come on. Get up, you dumb bitch. Get up.

Retherford slowly sits up and gets on her feet. The fluid in her joints has partially frozen. When she bends her knees and fingers, they click and grind.

Retherford: I’m coming, baby.

Retherford places one hand over her injury. The surface of her glove sticks to her face as the blood and tears between the two objects freezes. She braces the shovel underneath her spare shoulder and limps toward the house.

She reaches the door and tries the handle. Her fingers are too numb to turn it, so she uses the shovel to pry it open. The aged wood splinters easily. The inside of the house is wet. Blood is seeping from between the floorboards, and small growths of viscera are creeping up the walls. The flesh is warm, pulsating, and bleeding. The air reeks of vanilla. The baby is wailing.

Retherford stumbles into the room with the fire and collapses next to the baby’s cot. The shovel falls with her. The tip is slick and red, and a tiny strip of muscle is hanging from the cutting edge. She dabs her finger in the blood and puts it in her mouth. It is delectable. Her consciousness slips but the baby's screaming keeps her awake.

She hurriedly gets on her feet and cooks the muscle over the flames, using the blade of the shovel as a container. The room is filled with the aroma of meat. Her mouth is full of cold saliva. The baby is screaming. She places a hand over her right ear while her head swims.

Retherford limps over to the cot, purees the morsel between her hands, and feeds the baby the meat. She lets it lick the animal oil and fat off of her palms, alongside some of her blood. The baby coos and reaches toward her hand. It tugs on her index finger insistently.

Retherford: (Smiles) Shouldn’t have made you worry.

She reaches out and strokes the baby’s cheek, then falls asleep over the cot.

(Irrelevant footage abridged)

(Continue transcript)

Retherford sits in front of a mirror, wrapping her head in linens. A pile of soiled bandages lies on the ground by her knee.

The wolf attack left her deaf in one ear, and one of her eye’s corneas cracked in the cold, leaving its vision blurred. A semilunar ring of puncture wounds curves down the left side of her head. They are rimmed with congealed, jellyish blood. She winces as she pulls a needle through the largest opening and sews it shut. She presses a handful of snow to her skin to numb the pain.

Since the attack, she and the baby have had nothing to eat. The hunger pangs have become incessant. She peels back her lip. She has found a spherical nodule on the inside of her right cheek. It resembles a fleshy mole and tastes like vanilla.

Her extremities are frostbitten. The pinky and ring fingers on her left hand are papery and swollen, and weep putrescent humours when squeezed. The skin exhibits a moist, purplish-black colouration and her nails are green, indicating the onset of deep-tissue gangrene. Her fingers have been in excruciating pain for several days. Against her better judgement, she has kept them cold so as not to exacerbate the pain. Now they are unsalvageable.

She finishes covering her facial wounds. She clutches her most severely frostbitten digits at their bases and pulls the others back so that they are beneath her palm. She picks up a steak knife, previously suspended over the fire. The metal blade is incandescent. She inhales and exhales several times.

Retherford suspends the knife over the second knuckles of each finger and presses down upon it with her entire body weight. The blade snaps the small bones within, and cleanly severs the fingers, leaving them attached to her hand by strings of dead skin. The process is surprisingly painless, and bloodless. She quickly wraps the stumps in cloth and stows the severed appendages in an ornate cigarette case. The initial lack of sensation in her fingers gives way to a dull, granular ache.

The baby moans in its sleep. Retherford wakes it up by gently patting its cheek.

Retherford: Morning, sunshine. Or whatever passes for it here.

She feeds it a bowl of warm meltwater.

Retherford: I’ll be away for a little bit. Don’t die on me while I’m gone. I made your mother a promise.

She kisses the baby on the forehead.

With the cigarette case in hand, Retherford walks outside. It is a clear day. She places them on the ground a few dozen metres from the house, in an area with a few faint canine footprints, and retreats to a snowbank dug a little distance farther.

After some time, the ‘wolf’ which attacked her a week prior appears. It is visibly malnourished. Now with a better vantage point, she realises that it is not a wolf, but a domestic husky. It leans down to investigate the cigarette case. Seeing the two fingers inside, it grips them between its teeth.

Retherford rises from her hiding place and charges the dog with a knife. She tackles the animal and tries to stab it in the neck but misses, striking it in the shoulder instead. It wails and shakes her off, before ripping at her old injuries with its teeth. She bats its head aside and regains her footing, while the dog retreats and runs in a westerly direction.

Retherford: No… no, you’re not doing this! Come back!

Retherford gives chase, wading through waist-high snow. Neither party is moving very quickly. She rapidly loses all feeling in her legs. She sucks the blood off of her knife.

Time passes. Snow begins to fall. Retherford’s fingers have frozen around the handle of the knife. She breathes heavily, causing her core body temperature to plummet. A sudden feeling of warmth overtakes her. In a delirium, she pulls on the collar of her jacket to allow some air to circulate beneath it. Footage quality degrades significantly.

Her vision smears. She hears the baby crying in the distance.

Time passes. The dog’s laboured breathing is now audible. Its gait has become noticeably uneven. Retherford is walking, no longer running. A cliff looms into view. The bones of a few house cats, small dogs, and many humans are scattered in the snow.

The dog turns around and barks twice, weakly. Retherford grits her teeth and raises her knife above her head.

Retherford: C-come on, old girl. I’ll make this quick.

The dog unexpectedly pounces and knocks Retherford down. She offers her arm to it and fends it off, stabbing it multiple times in the throat and chest while it bites down on her left wrist. She shoves the dog away; its teeth leave lacerations in her arm. Neither of them do much more than peripheral damage to one another; they are too malnourished and cold.

Staggering, Retherford gets up and blinks blood out of her eyes. The dog stays on the ground and whines, as it bleeds into the snow. Retherford pulls its throat open with her bare hands until the dog stops making noise.

She tries to pick the animal up. It is utterly too heavy for her to move. She tries to break off its limbs, or cut them off. She can barely puncture its skin. When she tries to cut through the bone of its leg, the knife falls out of her hand. She can’t close her fingers around the handle.

Retherford screams and kicks the dog’s body until she breaks down into a coughing fit. She hears yapping from the cliff. There is a hole in the cliff, leading into a shallow cave. Inside, she finds the half-devoured body of the woman that she buried, the bones of a fully clothed mountaineer, a shattered dogsled, and six puppies. Five of them are dead and frozen stiff in a clump. The last is alive and taking shelter among its siblings.

Retherford picks the puppy up. It is hairless and pink and about the size of a field mouse. She throws a few handfuls of snow and soil over its siblings.

The baby’s crying is audible. She feels an intense pressure on her skull, which forces her to her knees. Blood runs down the interior of her thigh. She is menstruating out of cycle. She holds up the puppy.

Retherford: (Laughs feverishly) I-I-I have it, baby. I’m coming home.

Retherford walks back to the house, with the puppy cupped between her hands. She watches it die of hypothermia: first complaining, then pleading, then not moving at all. There is no feeling in any part of her body. She cannot feel her heartbeat.

She hears the baby wailing before she catches sight of the house. The windows are dark. She quickens her pace and rattles on the door. It has frozen shut, so she smashes a window and clumsily climbs through. She cuts herself on the glass and lands in a centimetre-deep pool of blood. The walls are covered in pink stripes of inedible flesh, and a vascularised yellow-red membrane adheres to the ceiling.

She clambers onto her feet, dropping the puppy onto the ground. The baby is shrieking. Her ears are ringing, and the pain in her head causes her vision to swim. She vomits amniotic fluid⁸ of an unclear origin.⁹

Retherford: I shouldn’t have gone. I shouldn’t have gone. I-I-I-I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry…

Retherford enters the kitchen, where her fire was situated. It has gone out. All that remains of it is charcoal and ash.

Retherford: No. No, no, no, I- I wasn’t gone for that long! It’s only been hours… it’s only been hours!

She kicks the fire across the room, scattering it across the floor and soaking it in blood. She grabs the baby and holds it tight to her shoulder. It continues to cry.

Retherford: I’m sorry baby, I shouldn’t have gotten mad. I shouldn’t have left you all alone! I- I’m so sorry. Please baby, stay with me. Stay with me. I can fix this. I can fix this.

Retherford grabs her matchbox and the baby and scrambles upstairs. In the study, she rips pages out of books and curtains off the walls, even though they are caked in grainy pink meat and gristle. The house’s walls are full of muscles, rhythmically pulsating. Everything is moist and red.

She sits down and carefully constructs a pyramid of kindling, placing each part of it exactly. She strikes her last match and holds it to the fabric, and to the paper. The flame burns for a second and then suffocates. She sits still for several seconds before trying to strike the match again. And again, until it is a square stub of wood, and she has ripped up her fingernails in the course of trying to relight it.

An interminable amount of time passes. The baby continues to cry. Retherford sits in place and buries her head in her hands.

Retherford: Come on, come on, come on. Why didn’t you just die in the snow? Why did you run?! Why did you have to have a kid?! (Crying hysterically) I fought so hard! Doesn’t that mean anything?! It’s not my fault, none of this was my fault! I-I shouldn’t even be here, I should be at home. I was going to turn twenty-four, I was going to- to escape! I would have lived. I should have lived! I wanted to- I just wanted to help somebody. I wanted to save someone. I… I promised…

She swaddles the baby while she curls up on the floor.

(Irrelevant footage abridged)

(Continue transcript)

It is morning. She walks out of the house. The baby is in her hands. It is crying. The corners of her eyes hurt. The snow turns bloody as she gets further from the house, as sweet menstrual blood blossoms beneath the surface.

Retherford: It’s okay. It’s okay, baby.

She comforts the baby, shushing it unsuccessfully while she lays it down in the snow.

Retherford: Momma loves you.

She takes a few steps forward, away from the house. She folds her arms over her body and coughs a few times. The node in her mouth splits partially and ejects a bubbly white foam into the space above her tongue. She spits it into her hand. A few minuscule, translucent orbs are suspended in the solution, resembling fuzzy specks of snow; ovarian follicles.¹⁰ She wipes it off on her pant leg.

Retherford: (Singing, whispering) Alouette, gentille alouette, alouette, je te plumerai…

Trees and rocks pass her by. There are frozen animals in the ice, and the headlamps of cars ahead of her, hidden in the mist. She is fourteen and walking along a snowy riverbank, where the surface has frozen and turned black. She chews on toffee and apple slices from a paper bag.

The sky is beautiful today. She is so warm. She sits down by the river to watch white foxes playing on the ice. Something jabs the underside of her knee. A knot of red fabric; the corner of a muslin square. Retherford closes her eyes.

(Massive footage corruption past this point)

(Continue transcript)

Retherford opens her eyes, and stands up, dislodging a large amount of snow from her body. It is nighttime. Barely conscious, she treks back toward the house and drags her fingers across the bandages on her face. The wound underneath is old and brittle. It has healed but left abscesses in her muscle which prevent her from closing her blind eye.

She sees the house. The baby is wailing, from inside.

Retherford: What…?

She enters the building. The walls are layered thick with endometrial tissue, luscious and well vascularised. The air is sickly sweet with the smell of milk and vanilla estrogen. On the floor, there is grainy menstrual blood all the way up to her ankles.

The baby is waiting for her in the kitchen, in its crib.

Retherford: I left us to die. How are you here?

The baby screams. The walls flex. Retherford bursts out laughing and crying.

Retherford: What are you?

She chokes and vomits a cupful of amniotic fluid, which runs down her shirt. Her uterine muscles clench painfully. Her entire body is burning up. Blood is churning in her abdomen. She clutches her mouth. The spherical bud on the inside of her cheek is splitting open.

Retherford: Please stop… I don’t want to be here anymore… just let me give up.

The bud bursts. A muscular cord unravels from within and exits her mouth, attaching to the baby’s navel. She tries to pull away, but the cord retracts and forcefully pulls her toward the crib. She grabs her knife and tries to cut it, only for the handle to start bleeding. The implement crumbles into a pile of rust and viscera.

Sobbing, Retherford picks the baby up and strokes its head. It stops crying and smiles contentedly.

Retherford: I’ll be good. There there. Mommy will be good to you. Mommy’s here now, you don’t need to cry. Please don’t hurt mommy anymore.

(Irrelevant footage abridged)

(Continue transcript)

Retherford sings to the baby, and toys with its chin. There are tears all over her face. Her heart is beating rapidly.

A warmth spreads out from her chest. She reaches into her shirt for a moment, and then pulls her hand out. It is wet with milk.

Retherford laughs.

(End of transcript)

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