The supernatural work of Marshall, Carter and Dark—a cabal of black market auctioneers—is a fitting mirror for our current reality of capitalism and resource exploitation, where the rich and powerful reign supreme. MC&D controls ungodly amounts of money because of its iron grip on the political elite, who remain captivated by the group’s specialty: buying and selling strange phenomena. They deal in vinyl records that place listeners into a telepathic coma, a collection of walking sticks with thaumatological properties, SpongeBob Squarepants wristwatches that alter limbs and bones, and a group of people who all claim to be the former Prime Minister of Australia, Harold Holt, who vanished in 1967.
Of course, Marshall, Carter and Dark isn’t real. It’s just one canonic element of the SCP Foundation—a collaborative online fiction project whose name stands for Secure, Contain, Protect. Taking a page from the Victorian appetite to collect and classify, the Foundation’s mission is to secure, contain, and protect special (and sometimes dangerous) objects, as well as to document events and persons of interest.