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rating: +88+–x close Info X SCP-4779: The Hour of the Wolf Author: Tufto. More of Tufto's work can be found here.
Image: The image is an original work by the author.
rating: +88+–x SCP-4779.
Item #: SCP-4779 Object Class: Euclid Special Containment Procedures: SCP-4779 has been cordoned off to public access.
Site 248 has been established near SCP-4779 in order to study the documents recovered from it. Officers with the Unreality Division and the Department of Extra- Universal Affairs are permitted access to the transcripts of these documents upon request.
Description: SCP-4779 is a beach in Norfolk, England. During the night or cloudy weather, glass bottles randomly manifest beneath the surface of the sea and are deposited onto SCP-4779. Each of these bottles contains a small paper or parchment note.
These notes can take various forms. The most common types are handwritten pages from letters or diaries, unknown forms of SCP documentation, extracts from novels and plays. No particular consistency has been detected across these documents, but some events and people appear multiple times. Events, history and people are referenced that differ strongly from baseline reality.
The following is a collection of six documents recovered from SCP-4779.
• +Document 1 walking together in the garden. Ma'bad is very obviously ill-at-ease; Sarah is playful, teasing, enjoying her companion's awkwardness.
SARAH: You must tell me more about Cairo. You are always so reticent!
MA'BAD: Only because I fear that the sensibilities of a Frankish- ah, an "English" lady would be scandalised by our way of living.
SARAH: Frankish! I have been given many subtle insults in my day, but never one quite as impertinent as "Frankish". We are at war with the French, you know.
MA'BAD: My apologies. To us, you are all Franks, just as we are all Saracens.
SARAH: I always assumed that was due to similarities amongst you.
MA'BAD: Oh, no, my lady; only the perception of similarity. You think us barbarous, but I assure you that we possess as many subtleties and nuances as you do; but as they are framed differently, as our emotions are expressed differently, you fail to see them, only percieving what is different and never what is similar.
SARAH: And what is similar?
They have arrived at the Well, and seat themselves upon its rim.
MA'BAD: We both have the same God, we both possess rules of chivalry, if differing in specifics; we both have systems of law and gentlemanly conduct.
Perhaps the only difference is that we took different paths in history. Or perhaps the distinctions between us matter little, that we are not discrete entities- why, what is that now?
The edges of the sky appear to peel backwards on themselves, folding everything towards the pair. The approaching bulk of Obermeyer Hall appears to block out the sun.
SARAH: Oh, not again.
MA'BAD: This kind of thing is, ah, common in England?
SARAH: Do me a kindness, Ma'bad; look into the well, and tell me what you see.
Ma'bad stares into the well.
MA'BAD: Why, I seem to see myself, staring back. I'm in some kind of hedge maze, I think- SARAH: Shit.
Sarah jumps into the well. Ma'bad looks up, remembering his mother, the sands by the oasis cities, the looks on the faces of the English lords who don't know what to make of him. The marble descends upon him and he jumps into the well, falling into his own reflection just as it walks down another pathway.
+Document 2 and I awoke. The trench was deserted. I could see lights from zeppelins overhead, scouring for any hints of the Occultists. Great sirens boomed from them, like some inevitable force. I groaned, dragged myself up, and saw that nobody had even bothered to garrison it. The march had continued on for miles, whooping with glee and bloodlust.
I looked over at the enemy lines, and the screaming began. Cogs upon cogs upon wheels upon gears, the collected detritus of nineteen dimensions, rose up in catastrophic certainty. We had never considered that idea the Church's inability to reassemble its god was because the parts had been scattered across all of time and space. But they'd done it, and now it stood before me.
A jaw the size of the Holdbrine Marsh, fingers larger than comprehension.
Eyes burning with blue fire.
A human should not have been able to see all of it, but it forced me to percieve this shambling thing beyond the mind's capacity. I collapsed, whimpering, hoping I wouldn't be seen; but how could I be seen? This was not a thing that would care about one more flesh-born under the zeppelin spotlights. This was a thing that bent the world around it. Coal factories formed its limbs, each staffed with a hundred workers who had lived and died a hundred lifetimes worshipping a metal knuckle on one of its dozen fingers on its dozen arms. The brain was formed by a mass of clockwork monkeys typing away, furiously, a simulation of reality and intelligence.
What had we become? What had we wrought? I saw it swing its hammer and watched, frozen, as it cut through the borderlines and felled a hundred dimensions. I saw, in that moment, a beach +Document 3 CHAPTER THREE: A Clockwork Mirror The candles had burnt low, but Johannes was too comfortable to care. Mary, John and Olivia were all lounging similarly, scribbling on paper or reading books. The wind howled outside but the fire, though burnt low, kept them warm.
"An idea", murmured Olivia. The others lazily swung their heads towards her.
Oliver was the oldest in terms of age but the newest member of their little coterie, an inveterate sporter of turtlenecks and thick-rimmed glasses. She looked the part for a pretentious writer better than the rest of them.
"What if there was a beach- say, the beach just down from here. Let's say that one day, all these messages in bottles started appearing on it. Hundreds of them, all up and down the beach." Mary groaned. "More magical realism? You're going to have to read some other stuff some time, you know." "Just bear with me. The messages in these bottles all come from other worlds, other universes, but they don't make sense. It's like fragments from alien worlds- alien in the sense of unknowable, I mean. Like how people in Persia or China or Indochina or whatever, they all have different ways of thinking about things, and did have different ways in the past." "OK", said Johannes, rolling his eyes. He'd heard stories like this before, and didn't think much of them. "What then? What would happen? It's a nice premise but I don't know where you're going with it." "Say- say there was a lighthouse keeper. In this lighthouse, instead of us.
The only thing he thinks about is picking up the bottles and reading them, I don't know why. But he becomes obsessed with this idea, this singular idea, about the paths that keep branching off. Every reality as another path taken or untaken, a divergence from or reorientation to some ultimate goal, Whiggish or Marxist or whatever." John scratched his chin. "But then, why a beach? What's that about? The detritus of the universe washes up on a beach? A nice metaphor but Jo's right, it has to go somewhere more than that." "I don't think it does. It's the kind of place an observer would live; all the detritus of forever coming through, and he's just- just there, watching, waiting. I have a contact in the SCP Foundation who told me about +Document 4 through the gate. It was night, another cold night that was just too late, but I had promises to keep. I needed shelter somewhere.
I rapped the knocker. I prayed Alfred was right, as I saw lights switched on and heard the creak of footsteps. Finally, the locks were snapped back and a very confused Lord Obermeyer was standing before me.
I forestalled his questions with a wave. "Ma'bad ibn Omar. Helios' man. I formally ask the Ninth Legate for Sanctuary according to the Protocols of the Four Winters." Obermeyer blinked, smiled, and pulled me into a hug. "I never thought to meet another survivor of the trenches. Please, follow me." His house was small but elegant; the kind belonging to a man who has lost his money but not his taste, or his breeding. He seemed born to the place.
His books, neatly arranged but put back hurriedly, the kind of demented feng shui that comes with a harried and feverish mind. He held the lantern aloft and we moved through a dim hallway, a candlelit dining room, and then to a door. Obermeyer unlocked it, smiled, and gestured for me to go first.
And all at once I was sprawling on the ground. It was a sheer drop, some ten feet, which the dark had hidden. I was surrounded by hedgerows- no, a hedge maze. I looked up, and Obermeyer stared back, seeming to come from a long way below. His eyes were black, and pitying.
"Ma'bad al-Juhani believed that humans had complete free will, but Ibn Omar was a proponent of the orthodox view. I think, of your two namesakes, the latter had the better idea: that while we have free will, the results of our choices are already known and written. When I close my eyes, all I see is an ultimate purpose leading to a single goal, Mekhane. If you are truly a follower of ours, you will discern which path leads to that ultimate end and which are false paths, routes to other endings." He smiled. "If you fail, I am sure you had your reasons for the choices you made." He closed the door on my interminable cursing, and the lights went out.
I spent several minutes trying to climb the wall; several more trying to break through the hedgerows. I eventually gave up; surely I could pass this test.
After a few impossible, Escher-like turns, I arrived in an octagonal clearing, a fountain flowing in the middle. The stars shone above, as they had done over the trenches. I thought of Johns, screaming as he saw Mekhane's glory. I wish I could have been less strong, less certain in my faith. His life seems to be happier, now.
I began to step into one of the paths, but all I could see was a well in a garden, folding over itself endlessly. The second was the Four Winters, over and over again, my friend screaming. A dimly-lit lighthouse coterie, a hundred pieces of paper gathered on a beach, a man staring at me from a snow- covered fireplace.
Which was the true path? I started down one, and found myself in another crossroads, each path leading to another truth. Snow that was beaten, snow that overcame. Mekhane's collapse or triumph. I didn't know these futures, these universes. I wondered if the maze had been built around them, or if they'd been made for the maze.
I looked up, but the stars had no answer. I'd seen through the Lens of Avicenna and the Blue Glass of the Nordic Prince, to the infinities beyond them, but I was still only human. The night sky still held that old mystery, that old fear. Was I walking down these paths? Were they even paths, or were they simply parts in a painting?
I kept wandering, not knowing where I went, not knowing from whence I came.
+Document 5 Object #: SCP-████ Item Level: Ma'rifa Neutralised Secure Confinement Protocols: SCP-████ has been terminated. The means and methods by which this occurred are unknown. For discussion of the fallout, please see the documentation for SCP-4779.
Summary: SCP-████ refers to a series of events of the 812th Occult War, which occured from 9819 to 9821. Specifically, SCP-████ refers to the events which has resulted in the continual manifestation of SCP-4779 documents from varied points in time, space, and dimensional locations on a beach in Dimension 173-C.
What exactly constitutes SCP-████ remains unknown. The primary theories currently being proposed include: A sudden and violent collision of two mirror universes in the gardens of Obermeyer Hall, Northumbria.
The activation of Mekhane's Hammer in the Battle of Four Winters.
The plundering of SCP-2000 during the Pirate's Eleven Brigade.
A potential event known as the Hedgerow Fracture, at Lord Obermeyer's winter residence.
The opening of a portal in the Library of Babel onto Martin Fierro's Bar.
The transcendental union with the divine achieved by the Sufi sheikh al-Qasim al-Mu'tazila in the 93rd dimension.
A 1980 performance by the band Tyrannosaurus Flex A dark and stormy night in New York city. The skyscrapers oppress you, staring down from overhead, the distant sirens beating in the distance seeming to make everything somehow more silent, more still. Your footsteps rattle on the pavements, and you beg, pray, for the return of colour, but it won't come. Your name is Murph- Russell's Teapot just coming to the boil.
Snowfall.
The 2036 Broadway re-run of Cats and the Orange Jellicoe incident it caused.
There's so much. You sit and stare at the page, as these words and concepts pour out of you. Maybe it's all true. Maybe none of it is. The thousand ways your life could have gone replicated with their own cast of characters. You sit on the beach, and watch the bottles come in, gathering their notes, and wondering about how when you read them they're just stale, sterile words from places that no longer were, or never were. These voices rendered by souls crying out in righteousness or pain and you sit there, in your little room in Site 248, wondering when it'll be over. I hope that you find some pe- -ace. I really do. It was a converted lighthouse, wasn't it? You and Mary and John, working the night away, swapping stories of camraderie and anomalies you've faced, of Scarlet Kings and the author's death. You love it here. You hope they never stop, that your friends will never be transferred away or leave. You feel that perfect isolation, on these grey and windswept beaches, with friends who you can talk to and drink with • • • • • • • • • • • • • and have a real conversation with. You are young and hungry, and though you hope it'll never end you know that you'll have something rare if it does- memories that at the end of your time you can look back on and feel happy.
A breakdown of reality caused by SCP-3999.
The events of the Fifth Occult War.
But Mary and John- who were they? It's only ever been you. Nobody else. It's only ever been night-time at Site 248. You look out over the beach and remember that there's never been anything more; just the beaches, the bottles, dim electric lamps dying forever, your purpose.
You are a researcher. You've never been anything else, but one simple mistake in a trivial experiment and you're out here on the beach.
Picking up the pebbles dead worlds have left behind. Well, you're glad.
You might not be making any memories but you don't need to. You like the solitude, insofar as you can like anything. You glide over the waters, performing your duty. It gives you meaning. You are happy. You have always been here and always will, a thing of lymph and blood and flesh.
You look into the waters and a face of clockwork stares back at you. Is this your face? Does it matter? Do you even exist, or are you simply a function, an inevitability of the path you took among the hedgerows, not even a machine but a process for the gathering and analysis of these documents, tick tick tick, onwards and onwards and- The momentary collapse of Site 248 and consensus in what is colloquially referred to as "The Hour of the Wolf".
+Document 6 Snow.
The snow bit at my ankles, but I made it home. I knew my duty, and I didn't look at it. I screwed my eyes shut and stopped listening to it as it bit into my soul.
Imagine a world where the snow takes you, and wipes you, and alters time so that you never were. Where we're all entranced by its oblivion. Another world that's dying all around. All possibilities for what was, will be, for what people are or are not, just slip away.
If you leave enough universes running for long enough, every single possibility will happen. Even a universe where a series of gibberish words and phrases can constitute a valid SCF document. In the particular culture and context of the time, it makes sense.
I hear the snow calling to me. It wants nothing. It wants to be nothing. Maybe it's a kind of Pattern Screamer, maybe it's one of the Foundation's experiments, maybe it's something else. It would be so easy, wouldn't it? To fall into it. To allow the snowfall to scrub me clean, to remove my choices, my agency.
• • • • I looked into the fire. I went to the knife drawer, sliced deep into my palm, and opened the door. I smeared as much of it as I could all over. It's stopped blowing so hard around here, now, but I only have so much blood to give.
A long time ago, I stood in a garden, and stared down a well into a maze of hedgerows. I fell into the well, and the young coquettish girl became a hardened man of the wild snow, the product of a thousand thousand paths made long before. I trudged through into this cabin, and spilt my blood, and now I look at the fire and think about stepping through it into a room of bohemian artists. But still I think of the sky falling in.
I want to wash up on a beach in Norfolk, and feel the shingle on my skin. I want to die and live again, and do it all again in another place, time, with new laws and new things to do. I want each world to die and for me to exist again.
But I can't. We only have one path, and we must follow it into the night. We cannot obliterate the self, but only follow our lanterns.
We don't even see it most of the time, but occasionally, just occasionally, we feel the hour when the wolves are abroad and singing on the high moors. It's just one image, like any other, but it makes you feel something you don't even have words for. And one day I'll find them, and put them in a bottle, and send them out to see so that someone can understand this dying, this dread reality.
The sky is falling in, and I feel fine.
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