SCP-8980-EX, in situ.
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Info
Without Refuge
Author: MontagueETC
⚠️ Content Warning: Body horror, prolonged isolation, severe psychological trauma, hallucinations.
SCP-8980-EX, in situ.
It came, at first, from the very edge of your hearing. Quiet, steady footsteps on the ceiling, resonating through meters of insulation and stone. Starting and stopping at irregular intervals, but always metronomic in their pacing.
Other sounds followed: The rumble of subterranean traffic. The clatter of an invisible keyboard. Indistinct voices from behind the walls, or inside your own chest. Sometimes you’d hear the door to your cell open and turn to see it was still firmly shut. Pencils scratching. Muffled music.
Once, only once, you heard a voice you didn’t recognize whisper a name you did not know.
"Lillian? Is that you?"
You didn't know how to process the sight of Morgan McPharrell. He appeared years older than the version of your memories, because he was. His hairline had receded by several centimeters and long furrows were beginning to press into the dark skin of his face.
Morgan had the visage of a man that smiled frequently and easily — but he wasn't smiling now. Now, he was looking at you like the charred ruin of his childhood home. He was looking at you like a portrait of a tragedy he had failed to prevent. He could not quite believe what he was seeing. In this, you were alike.
"Lillian," he whispered. "Can you hear me?"
Faltering in your throat, the word barely stumbled past the curb of your unbrushed teeth. "Lillian? Is that my name?"
When Morgan began to weep, you did not know why. Later, he’d murmur, “I’m going to get you out of here, Lillian. I promise I’m going to get you out.”
And all you could think was, ”Get me out? Where would I go?”
The most frightening thing in your apartment was the doors. There were six in total, five interior and one exterior: bathroom-bedroom-bedroom-closet-office-entranceway. You'd counted. After a decade inside a single room, there was something terrifying in the idea of a threshold, that tipping point between spaces. A door might hide anything behind it. A door might close and never open again.
The worst was the office's door. Even while shut, you could feel the radioactive presence of the machines inside, heavy and malignant. It was the power inside of you, that animating force which made computers into things that were alive and intelligent and hateful. Just to be near the digital slid cold needles of fear beneath your skin, pushing you to the brink of panic. Whenever you had cause to pass the office threshold, open or closed, it took all your willpower to keep from running like the Devil himself was on your heels.
Whenever you slept, rare though it was, you dreamed of labor. On this night, a cadaver was splayed on a table in your cell, its ribcage pried open with thick metal clamps. In the dream, you were drawing strange organs out of its chest like some ghoulish stage magician, dutifully recording each object's measurements on bloodstained graph paper before carefully placing it on an adjacent tray.
The cadaver was completely bare, save for a pair of grungy earmuffs that had been left around its throat. The inside of its left forearm was sickly yellow and freckled with track marks. You reached into its torso and found, in order of recovery:
- A clotted knot of veins, like tangled wires.
- Lungs like masses of netted metal.
- A heart like battered silicon.
- Intestines like lengths of thick cable.
- Fragments of bones like keys on a…
Keys?
You realized, abruptly, that your hands had been moving without your permission. You had taken the dead woman's organs and assembled them into an old desktop. As if waiting for your recognition, it hummed to life, CRT monitor flickering into terrible movement. You recognized what was on the screen.
"Trust me, it'll be over before you even realize it…"
When you woke, you did not scream and your sheets were soaked through with sweat. Your bedroom was awash in the gloom of the night cycle. Dr. Byrnes was standing in a shadowed corner, his face lined with characteristic judgement. This did not surprise you; he often appeared after particularly bad nightmares. You knew this Byrnes was not real, because he was not speaking — the genuine article had always loved the sound of his own voice. Keeping track of what was and wasn't real had always been important to you, though by now you struggled to recall the reason.
You slipped out of your sodden bed, eyes determinedly averted from the not-Byrnes, and padded into Morgan's room to watch him sleep. It was a habit that had ingrained itself early on in your cohabitation. You often found yourself with the sudden conviction that Morgan had abandoned you, had been taken away, had simply ceased to function like a broken doll. After an eternity in isolation, the thought of losing your sole companion was intolerable. On nights when you could not sleep, you'd sit on the floor of his bedroom and watch the slow rise and fall of his chest, cradled by the simple certainty of his presence.
Hours passed. When the morning cycle began to draw pale fingers of light along the walls, you rose to depart — and turned to find the slack, dead face of the amnesthesiologist only centimeters away from your own.
You screamed.