Link to article: Maybe Sprout Wings.
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[[include :scp-wiki:theme:classic]] [[>]] [[module Rate]] [[/>]] A song comes across the morning air. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. It is Saint John and Paul's day, and the adults have all gone to church, leaving the children alone in their homes. When the music comes flitting through the gap between their doors and the floors beneath, they bound outside and look amongst themselves for the source. Edward emerges as well, but he feels uneasy, sees a certain wrongness hovering above the houses and the mass of small bodies in the street, and thinks about going back inside and waiting for his parents to return. However, something keeps him from following through: a burning curiosity, a //need// to know where the music is coming from. He remembers a conversation he once had with a lifelong smoker who told him that cigarettes are insidious because they rewire your brain, because they turn you into a being that needs nicotine as much as it needs food and water. Where did he meet a lifelong smoker? He cannot remember. They begin moving, though he cannot say why. He looks around at the others, hoping to find some kind of hidden answer or secret knowledge on their faces, but the language of their expressions is incomprehensible to him. He gives up on that and tries to focus on the music instead. It is a strange tune: It sports a jubilant surface, but there is something sinister behind it, like the forced smile of a man who would stab you in the coronary artery if he thought he could get away with it. He wonders if they are heading towards it; he cannot tell because it seems less like it is coming from somewhere in particular and more like it is emerging out of everything around them, out of the grass and weeds, out of the front steps and doors, out of the chimneys and second-floor windows. As they shamble down the street, more children emerge from nowhere that he can see and join their ranks. It seems, after a time, to be an impossibly large crowd for a village of this size, but more keep arriving in threes and fours, and nobody says anything to anyone, but everyone seems to just //know// what their purpose is and where they are going, so he finds no help in the new arrivals, and he could not possibly turn back now, so he presses on with the music burrowing into his mind, and he notices for the first time that they are moving toward the outskirts of the village, but he cannot see very far, so he does not know if the source of the music waits for them ahead, but it seems to somehow be growing even louder now, and he covers his ears when they start to hurt, but it does not quiet the sound at all, and none of the others show signs of noticing it, and panic courses through him, and he thinks that he has to get back home before something terrible happens, but the force of the crowd pushes him onward, and his struggling proves useless, but the crowd suddenly comes to a stop, and he begins to grow taller and taller (or is everything around him shrinking?), and he rises above the others, and they all look up at him with their unreadable expressions, and he eventually towers over the entire village, and he can see that the village has no end — it stretches on and on forever in every direction, identical houses arranged in a grid the size of the universe — and he can see that the crowd of children also has no end, and he can see that they are not heading toward anything at all, and it is all wrong, and he wakes up, and consciousness creeps back into him slowly. Once he remembers that he is Ed, that he is a university professor, and that he is in the bedroom on the second floor of his house, he turns over and tries to go back to sleep, but the usually quick-fading nightmare dread will not leave him, and he eventually gets up. He rubs his eyes and waits for them to adjust to the dark, but his vision does not improve quickly enough for his mounting anxiety, so he pulls his phone out from under his pillow, taps it with his thumb, squints as he reads the time on the too-bright lock screen (3:30 AM, four hours until he has to be awake), stands up, and makes his way to the light switch next to the door. He grips it with his forefinger and thumb as if to flip it on, but his nerves give him pause. He imagines that some kind of monster is lurking in the dark corners of his room, that it waits patiently for him to turn the lights on and reveal its hunched form, that it will rip his throat out with fang or claw when he does. He decides against flipping the switch and heads out into the hallway. After some fumbling, he finds the door to the bathroom, grips the knob tight, pushes it open as carefully as he can, winces when it creaks a little despite his best efforts, moves from stiff carpet to cool tile, shuts the door behind him, and hesitates for a moment before turning on the fluorescent fixture above the sink. He looks around, confirms that he is alone in the room, and examines his face in the mirror: His eyes are bloodshot, and he needs a shave, but he looks okay overall. He turns on the cold water, leans forward until his head hangs all the way over the basin, and splashes his face with his hands. He works quickly, fearing what might appear behind him while his eyes are closed. Despite his lingering fear, when he lifts his head and opens his eyes, he remains alone in the bathroom, droplets caught in his too-long beard. He reaches out to wipe a hole in the fogged-up mirror with the sleeve of his pajama shirt, realizes, and shoots out of the room like a bullet. He is too panicked to turn the lights off or shut the door. He stumbles back into the hall, the walls feeling taller and closer than before, and bounds down the stairs to the living room, briefly worrying that all this racket is going to wake up his wife before remembering that they have been separated for months. Across the room, his study waits for him, the door slightly ajar. He feels its pull, but he decides to check the front first. He strides hurriedly to the foyer on his left, walks up to the front door, stands on his toes, and peers through the semicircular glass window above the knob. In the dark, his visage is not reflected back at him, and he can see into his front yard. The streetlamps seem a little dimmer than usual, but he can still make out the street and the silhouettes of the oak trees in front of it. He also thinks that he can make out something else among the trees: hazy, indistinct figures forming and unforming, moving between the still branches, seeming to get slowly closer to the house. He steps away from the door and crouches below the window. He feels eyes lingering just out of sight in the darkness, staring through him, watching his every move with keen interest. He thinks that he catches one of them in the corner of his own eye, darts a glance in its direction, finds nothing there, shakes his head furiously, and slinks away from the door, newfound purpose burning in the back of his skull. As he strides back through the living room and into the kitchen, sweat begins to trickle down his forehead, but he makes no motion to wipe it off. No longer impeded by the dark, he glides to the cabinet above the toaster, throws the door open to reveal a neatly-arranged grid of identical coffee mugs, brushes them aside to expose the tiny orange pill bottle in the back, seizes it with his left hand, rips the cap off with his right, dumps an amount of pills that would make his wife cry out in terror into his palm, crams them into his mouth, somehow manages to force them down without water, takes a sharp breath, steels himself, and makes off for the study. Out of habit, he stops to check his phone's answering machine on the way, sees that he has a missed call, and hits play before continuing on: "Ed, it's Mark. I know you're on leave right now, and you probably don't wanna be bothered, but if you'd be alright with it, I'd really like to get your opinion on..." The voice fades out of his ears as he leaves the kitchen and heads toward the study. Even through the closed door, he can hear a buzzing inside, reminiscent of the low hum of the fluorescent light fixtures in the building where he lectures. He wraps his hand around the handle and pauses. Suddenly, he is getting the strong feeling that he has forgotten something, and he racks his brain for anything that might be escaping him. It reminds him of being a kid, of being in high school and getting no sleep, of straining to remember everything he needed to pack in the morning, of forgetting something and feeling panic surge through him on the bus. Behind him, he hears the answering machine announce the end of the message, and he shoves the door open after a sharp inhale. He cannot say what exactly he expects to see in the study, but he feels a certain surprise when he finds that the little room is exactly as he remembers. There is the fluffy cat bed in the corner (covered in hair, though the cat has not been in the house for some time), the oak shelf crammed full of books on old European folklore, the pair of rectangular glass windows on the west wall, the open set of curtains on the edges of the windows — he crouches low to the ground, makes his way over to them, and pulls them closed, making sure to avoid looking into the backyard in the process — the framed photos of him and his wife on the opposite wall, the cushy chair in front of the desk, the large (and definitely outdated) map of the world hanging above the desk, and the desk itself, an old mahogany thing with pens, papers, and excess books scattered haphazardly on its surface. He sits down, grabs a pen at random, flicks on a desk lamp to his left, and gets to work. He strains to remember where he left off. Beginning the work is always difficult for him: He has to sink into it slowly, let it overtake him, slide away from everything else. He decides to start with a hefty stack of unstapled papers because it is the thing closest to him. He glances at the paper on the top of the stack, and a memory returns to him. This is the latest puzzle piece he has been trying to fit into that greater whole. He just needs to find his place, and he can get started properly... He thumbs through different theories: drowning in the river Weser, landslide, epidemic, emigration. At last, he comes to his current focus, a paper on the outbreaks of dancing mania that would sometimes happen in Europe at the time. It may be a bizarre thing to imagine for most, but he has learned to imagine stranger. He finds the last thing he annotated, an account of an incident in 1237 where a large group of children in Germany traveled twelve miles between towns on foot, jumping and dancing the whole way. He has underlined the year in black ink; other years fill the margins of the page, their connection to the text impossible to divine for anyone other than him, though he remembers immediately when he glances at them. He hunches forward in the chair to resume reading, pauses, reconsiders his situation, pushes the chair out, stands up, and begins rearranging all the loose sheets on his desk. He has far less time than he would like. He is in the process of organizing, of shaping months of readings and annotatings into a series of neat stacks (they are roughly in the order he read them in, but he forgets the time frames for some and has to guess based on content), when he begins to hear music in the distance. It gradually increases in volume, becoming more familiar to him as it does. He curses under his breath and begins moving faster. When he is most of the way through arranging, he throws a glance over his shoulder at the curtains, sees that they are open a crack, and speeds up even more. The music soon grows loud enough that he is sure the neighbors can hear it for miles around, but he does not so much as wince. When a dull rap rings out, as if someone is knocking on the window, he barely reacts. When it happens again, louder and sharper, he briefly looks up from his desk, throws open a drawer, pulls out a pocket knife, and flicks it open. It shimmers in the light of the desk lamp. He finishes arranging the papers into something resembling an order, moves the stacks (seven in total, roughly one for every major path he has had time to explore) to the middle of the desk, pulls an index card out of the still-open drawer, grabs a black pen (his wife preferred blue), shakes it violently, and begins scribbling. As he does so, he throws glance after glance behind him at the door, which he now also hears being knocked on. When he gets everything he can onto the card, he tosses it onto the desk (barely coherent, but he has no time), swipes the knife off the desk, turns off the light, and turns to face the door, knife brandished. The music deafening in his ear, he marches to the door as slowly and evenly as he can manage, resists the urge to look through the crack in the curtains, extends a hand toward the handle, stops, and does something no one has ever seen him do: make the sign of the cross. He takes a deep breath and opens the door. [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box]] [[include :scp-wiki:component:license-box-end]]