//: A Tale from the Shadow Web
Red | 1/16/26
Contrary to the beliefs of the 99.999% of human beings who have never been under the influence of Class W mnestics, the shadow web is not just another name for the deep web or the dark web. Rather, it is a colloquial phrase used by members of the SCP Foundation to describe a part of the internet that is seen but not perceived, heard but not comprehended, and known but not understood. The name is derived from the term ‘shadow biosphere’, a hypothetical ecosystem that could, through chemical and molecular processes that are radically different from those of known life, exist on Earth completely undetected.
Times have changed. Resources are scarce, infighting is rife, and secrets are hard to hide. Just one overlooked MP4 file could spiral into a broken masquerade in a matter of hours, but expunging all conclusive proof of the anomalous down to its last digital crumb is no longer a logistically feasible option. Furthermore, the mainstream internet has become the SCP Foundation’s first and most valuable line of intel on anomalies that have yet to be documented and that, now more than ever, is a treasure that must be preserved. So, what better solution is there than to arrange for every mainstream web browser to embed their links with a string of anti-memes? What better solution than to hide everything in plain sight? The following transcription is just one of the many thousands of accounts from ordinary people who not only encountered the anomalous, but recorded it.
“Is it on? Point it at me.” A blur of pale shapes superimposes itself on a pitch-black canvas at the prompting of a hushed, shaky voice. The lens of the camera takes nearly half a minute to fully adjust, the subject of the recording continuing to speak and gesture ambiguously as their features begin to sharpen and take on definition, “I might go to prison for this, but this is… we have to document it.”
The watery fog of an unfocused lens fully parts to reveal a disheveled young woman squatting near the edge of a rectangular pit in a field of browning grass. Her entire outfit — a damp white tanktop, a baggy pair of rolled-up jean shorts, and a weathered set of brown leather boots — is caked from head to toe in grey soil. Her pale skin is a vertical pattern of grime and wet streaks, and her dirty blonde hair clings to the sides of her face in a mop of greasy strands. To her right is a shovel, its blade embedded halfway into the ground and its handle gripped tightly in one of her white-knuckled hands. To her back is a mountain of dirt with a peak that’s out of frame. Scattered around her in every conceivable angle and direction are dozens of bones. The woman leans awkwardly on her shovel, using it as a sort of crutch and letting out one raspy exhale before continuing, “I am with the… remains of our great-great-grandfather. Cornelius Bodfel the Second.”
The woman pauses again, the lids of her eyes fluttering shut as her chest heaves arrhythmically. The vacuum of silence that follows is immediately filled by the tinnitus-ringing of thousands of chirping crickets.
“That can’t be him, Charlene! That’s not-” The new voice, in close proximity to the camera’s microphone in addition to having already been raised to begin with, drowns out everything from the droning of the crickets to the wave-like cycles of the woman’s ragged breathing.
Charlene’s response is immediate, her eyes snapping open and what little color that remained in her face draining completely. She mimes a zipping motion with two fingers to her lips, her head angling in the direction of someone just out of frame as she hisses through clenched teeth, “Quiet, Louis!”
Louis sighs audibly after being cut off, the tip of his thumb pressing on the top left corner of the camera’s lens for a half-second as he adjusts its position before finishing his sentence in a low, grumbling whisper, “...that’s not human.”
Charlene’s eyes flicker down towards something pale and spherical in the grass beneath her feet at that comment, her lips pursing and her head bobbing ever so slightly. Her gaze darts back to the camera at brief, random intervals as she proceeds into a quiet monologue, “Our grandmother was… strange. We’d always catch her talking to herself in a language that nobody could understand. She kept paintings in her house, too; all these old paintings of the same deformed man holding a creepy-looking staff. She said she got them from her father, who she never told us anything about. Just that he was an evil man. A stupid man, too.”
Charlene releases her grip on the shovel, which remains firmly rooted in place as she transitions from squatting to kneeling, resting her hands on both of her knees and tilting her head to face the pale object now directly across from her. The camera pans shakily downward to keep her in the focal point of the shot as she continues, “She was one hundred and two when she died. A couple days before then, she told us where to find this place. Her grandfather’s grave. That it had all the answers. That, in her words, maybe we could carry on the legacy that his son — her father — tried to extinguish.”
Charlene’s last syllable stretches into a sigh as she gently wraps both of her hands around the object in the grass, lifting it to her face for a moment before pivoting it around and thrusting it into plain view, to which Louis lets out a sharp breath that borders on a gasp. The object in question is the top half of a skull. Its cranium is elongated and misshapen into something vaguely reminiscent of a classical grey alien, its jaw is a cornucopia of crooked teeth and serrated bone spurs, and in the place of its grafted-over eye sockets are hundreds of pinholes spanning the entire width of its forehead.
“I don’t… I don’t think anything could have prepared me for this.” Charlene’s voice takes on a hollow tone, her face completely obscured by the gnarled skull, which she tilts down at a forty-five degree angle to reveal a portion of the cranium that’s been caved in. Stuffed into and jutting partially out of the cavernous hole is a sheet of yellow parchment that’s been secured into a roll by a length of twine, “Louis?”
Louis’ response to Charlene’s prompt comes out as little more than a choked noise, but he nonetheless proceeds to splay four of his fingers over the camera’s lens and pluck away the parchment with the thumb and index finger of his free hand. The lens is then completely eclipsed by darkness for several seconds, over the course of which the rustling of the parchment and a long series of curses from Louis can be heard. A few moments later, Louis’ hand falls away to reveal the parchment, which is now laying open and face-up on the grass with its top and bottom halves slightly curled. The tips of Charlene's soil-coated boots — along with the skull, which has been set down to her left — are also visible in the shot, as are the parchment’s contents.
Your unwillingness to act has jeopardized us for the last time. You call me a fool, but who else but a fool would parrot the flesh as the progenitor of all things and yet refuse to embrace its basest desires? Who else but a fool would parrot our duty to shepherd the flesh and yet hold us to a code of arbitrary restraints? Who else but a fool would parrot the teachings of a man who willed his flesh to godhood and yet expect Ikunaan to just be handed to you? It's fitting that you should call us Adytum's Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it. Your visions of the day the Nälkä are once again united under one crimson flag will not be wrought through complacency. That is why, as I take on the mantle of Karcist Sulkisk, we will henceforth be known as Adytum’s Wake. Sweet dreams, Father. That’s all you were ever good for.
For the second ever time since the recording began, the white noise of all the crickets' collective chirps is all that can be heard. Neither Louis nor Charlene appear to move a muscle for one and a half minutes until the parchment, skull, and Charlene's boots rapidly ascend out of frame at the hiss of Louis cursing under his breath, "Charlene, my battery's dying."
"I still don't know what to make of this, Louis. Was this some kind of cult? A secret society, maybe? After everything our grandmother told us and what we did today, this — whatever it is — I don't think there's any going back. What do we do?" The only thing visible in the shot now is a patch of trampled grass, but Charlene’s voice still echoes with the same hollowness that it had when she presented the parchment to the camera for the first time.
"We can't go to the police — we can't go to anyone. We still haven't cleaned out our grandma's attic; there's a lot of books up there. A couple maps, too. Might be a good place to start. And I'll send our video over to Dez on Parawatch and see if she can't dig anything up. Come on. Let's just take that paper and go before somebody sees us out here." Immediately following Louis’ brisk and matter-of-fact retort, the soft clicking of a button can be heard as the black canvas returns to swallow everything whole.