Day 699

It used to be a church 'bout a hundred or so years ago and now it's just dust, stones and a market down in the crypts. It used to be a place where you could buy all sorts of unusual things from taxidermied animals whose eyes literally followed you around the room to front door mats that would make unwanted people turn around and forget why they were even there in the first place.

Saint Bartholomew the Apostle's Church Market is the official name but to us all it's just San Bart - the place we go to buy things we don't really need but will inevitably prove to be insanely useful at some point or other. At least until an earthquake caused one of the walls to crack and open, revealing a much larger section of the crypt that had already been set up as a market.

The tables were coated in thick layers of dust, the vendors all skeletons, propped up in their stiff clothes, calcified in some places from water gently dripping down from grey stalactites taller than streetlights. Some stalls were almost exact mirrors of the ones we'd grown up with, right down to that crystal necklace that one guy always wears or the colourful jacket she's never seen without.

Of course they cordoned off the stalls but left a path for people to walk through (for a price). The walk took around twenty minutes and wove its way in and out of about fifty different set-ups, some with signs about the "history behind the remains" but those were all made up by the same person that sells stories. You know, the one next to the strange tea and bead seller.

They never quite got round to making paths for the entire crypt, you know. It's so much bigger than they realised and there's things living in there that they don't want to think about, much less put flimsy rope around to try and keep them contained.

Whatever they are they've left no survivors as of yet. anyone who ducks under the ropes and out into the barely lit cavern can be found later on, from a distance, as little more than small puddles of remains. Little chunks of hair here, half a hand there, most a boot with the foot half dragged out and chewed on. Not that it seems to stop people heading out there, on the contrary is seems to make the whole thing more appealing knowing someone died less than a foot from the ropes you're standing behind.

It took almost a year before the mirrored crypt was named San Lucy from the Saint Lucia, patron of the blind. Partially to keep the religious-themed names going, what with it being in a church and all but mainly because only blind men and fools go there.