(Connected to SCP-001-B)
The cameras didn't catch much. Static, chittering, the silhouettes of limbs that slipped just beyond the frame. What survived cleanest was the audio — and I keep thinking we would have been better off without it.
They were five men, experienced, diesel-scented veterans of underground sweeps. At first their voices were steady. Professional. Confident.
Then the noise started.
A faint clicking, like teeth on glass. A scratching that seemed to come from every crack at once. Flashlights swung; beams tore across damp stone and showed nothing that stayed in sight. The feed rocked as boots scuffed, breaths fogged, radios picked up distant echoes.
One of them swore. Another guessed rats.
Then something answered.
It wasn't a roar. It wasn't a vocalization we've catalogued before. It was a chorus — high, layered tones that rose and fell like the deliberate breathing of a thing with too many mouths. The microphones strained; the waveform folded under it.
They opened fire. For a heartbeat the frames cleared. Muzzle flashes painted the corridor in stuttering light. I remember thinking, idiotically, that maybe this would be like the others: bullets, shouts, bodies hauled out on stretchers.
I was wrong.
The images that followed are what keep me from sleeping. A tide of things — not insects in the way you know them, not bugs you can swear you've seen before. Too large, their shapes a mockery of arthropod geometry. Chitin that shone like wet coal, mandibles that flicked with practiced cruelty. They moved not as individuals but as a single purpose, each limb a note in the same machine-made chorus.
They poured over the floor, up the walls, across the ceiling — a living flood. They weren't mindless; their motion was precise, executed as if following a conductor's score. They flowed between boots and armor, into sleeves and helmets with the ease of tidewater into a pier.
The feed is full of the last things you don't want to hear. Screams that cut off mid-phrase. Ragged radio chatter: "They're—" "Inside my suit—" "Cut them off, block the—" Then a long, wet scream and the sound of someone trying to claw their own helmet loose.
Operative ███: "They're inside my suit! They're— AHHHHHH!"
Operative ███: "Block the tunnel! BLOCK IT—"
Then the audio skittered, sank into static. The last clear layer of sound before corruption returned was that chittering — not the frantic noise of feeding, but a cold, organized clicking. There was no frenzy in it. There was obedience.
The Foundation sealed the entrance within the hour. Cleanup teams went in with flamethrowers and crushers and prayers. They reported finding nothing. No bodies. No blood. No webbing, no nests—no trace of the five men except for their empty, scuffed boots at the threshold.
We archived the feed. We labeled the file and put it behind the usual redactions. Officially: structural collapse, equipment malfunction, unknown particulate interference. Clinically tidy.
But in the review room, late, with the lights low and the coffee gone cold, I still hear it. A soft, rhythmic click under the room's hum. A feeling like something on the other side of the wall is listening back — not hunting, not angry, but attentive and patient.
We sealed a hole in the stone, we filled it with concrete, we stamped the date into the log. The silence after is worse than the noise before. Because noise tells you where the thing is. Silence tells you it has learned to wait.
— Unfiled ReportSource: Reconnaissance Feed ███ / Operative Logs (partially corrupted)Recovered by: Review Desk, Site-██ (classified)