Agent Chardonneret

Dr.Trebuchet didn’t sleep, but she did dream.
It seemed like an oxymoron, on the surface, but it was true. She was the owl of her Site, nocturnal and fluttering about at night in search of food and a stretch of her wings. Or, more often than not, in search of the most leaded coffee that the facility had to offer. It wasn’t that she needed coffee to stay awake, her insomnia took care of that, but she deserved to at least feel awake, too. Besides, when she got too tired, she started writing in French, and her poor Quebecois lab assistant would have to try to translate her notes the next day.
The coffee and the insomnia and everything else combined to make her drifts into the land of unconsciousness brief and infrequent. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t dream.
She called it napping. Her brief slips into dreamland, where she hardly closed her eyes for thirty seconds, but she still managed to make it deep into REM.
Whenever this happened, she was reminded of yet another contributor to her infrequent sleep:
The nightmares.
She didn’t know if she could really call them nightmares, considering that they were the everpresent fixtures of her sleep cycle. She couldn’t remember the last time that she had slept a full night without being attacked in her sleep by creatures of her own imagination.
She knew this. She knew this full well, and she was more than familiar with the spectors that came about when her eyes were closed.
Then, why was she so afraid?
The phenomenon of fear should’ve been far from her at this point, but it still lingered. She couldn’t exactly imagine someone who wouldn’t be afraid if they were in her shoes, though.
The Black Shuck stood at the end of the hallway. It was a sickening creature to look at. She had used to be a dog person, but not since being placed as the caretaker for this horrid creature.
It stood with its head high, and its ears pricked. Its shaggy fur looked to be matted and damp, with small sparkles of dew shining on its edges. Its maw was slightly ajar, showing ropes of saliva and yellowed teeth that seemed to shine. The claws sprouting from its enormous paws dug into the tile floor below.
She was used to all that, though. If it was merely that fur and those teeth and those claws, then this creature would not haunt her in the witching hours.
It was those eyes.
Those eyes were what stabbed her heart with a stake of fright, freezing her blood into ice. Though, by all means, they were too hot to freeze anything.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to call them eyes. They were eye sockets, really. A fire burned far too bright within them.
She knew that fire. She knew it so well. She had tried to hide it away, behind layers of rubber and plastic and walls.
But it always got through to her.
It drove her mad, eating away at her mind no matter how hard she tried to douse it. She had tried alcohol, but everyone knew that alcohol only made flames burn stronger. Caffeine energized it. Meditation let it burrow into her mind. Nothing drove it away.
It was after her first breakdown that she was directed to the office of the infamous Dr.Glass. He spoke with a deceptively kind tone, and gave her the strongest sleeping agents that were allowed for use on humans. A bad case of insomnia, he said. That’s all.
She took the pills.
They only brought her to that awful hallway, letting her see once more those eyes. They seemed to call to her. They were horrid, she knew. But something about them made her want to know more. To understand. There was something in that flame that begged to be explored, to be understood, to be unveiled.
She had ordered an experiment to be performed on the beast. It was half out of desperation, and half out of unceasing curiosity. She knew that the first experiment performed on the creature had gone horribly wrong, but she would do better. She knew what she was doing. She would save her fracturing psyche, without harming others.
It was simple. Replace rubber with glass. Synthetic with natural. Oblique with clear. Pull back the curtain, find out what was underneath. Discover. Know. Discover. Know. Know. Know. She had to know. She had to!
She had watched the incident from a monitor, just outside of SCP-023’s containment cell. The D-class entered. The dog was approached.
She saw the glass run from its eyes. She saw the fire. She saw everything, but now, she saw it in real life. No unconsciousness protected her, now.
The creature looked at the security camera, and she made eye contact with it. It was only for a moment, but it felt like a century. They stared at each other. Predator at prey, prisoner at warden. Except, in that moment, she didn’t know which was which.
She was not blamed for the incident. She was only doing her job. They told her to move on.
But she couldn’t. Her incident report had included everything that it needed to, but not the one thing that they needed to understand.
She left out that she had seen the eyes, too.
The next night, she had taken the pills. When she awoke in dreamland, she could’ve sworn that the dog smiled at her.
It was smiling at her now, too. The edges of its lips curled up, and there was a sparkle to the flame in its eyes.
Last week, it had been three meters away from her, she estimated. Now, it was only two and a half. It never moved, but it was always getting closer.
She had checked her calender before going to sleep, tonight.
It had been three-hundred days since the incident. She had sixty five left. She hoped she would be able to use them well.
SCP-023 shook its head.