Day 714

Holes began to open up all over the countryside. They were small ones at first, littering the fields like acne until the fields began to sag. Through the small holes we caught glimpses of concrete blocks resembling stairs in some places and boxes in others.

At first we thought they were just old graves, perhaps an abandoned cemetery - it's not entirely unheard of for such things to be ploughed over or forgotten, especially for rural England. There have been entire villages found in the deepest depths of the forests, granted they were little more than stone floors and chimneys but they were still lost.

And so we thought to get a few vicars round the fields to reconsecrate the grounds as well as pestering local historical societies into checking if there was a mass grave about. It could have been the Plague for all we knew at the time but the sheer scale of the holes made even that seem a little unlikely.

It wasn't until one of the fields began to sag that we worried it was something far worse. After weeks of it being fenced off and investigated it finally collapsed altogether revealing a vast network of open staircases and small rooms all made from what appeared to be concrete. Careful excavation of the other fields showed they were all connected, running deeper underground than we were equipped to go and farther afield than we could have ever guessed.

Several groups from the local area volunteered their climbing experience to explore the new found subsystem. Out of the five groups that went down there only three have reported back. From our small base in Slaidburn (near the Ground Zero of the subsystem, conveniently quiet enough to escape mass media interaction) everything was monitored via walkie talkie and trackers on their gear.

Teams 1, 4 and 5 were tasked to head across the subsystem, keeping as close to the surface as possible to see how far out the tunnels went. Teams 2 and 3 went down and haven't been heard from just yet, their trackers went offline five days ago and we're still debating sending rescue teams down after them.

Team 1, also dubbed Team Alpha, found a rudimentary form of locomotive travel and followed the tracks all the way up to Nairn in Scotland, over 300 miles from Ground Zero. Teams 4 and 5 (Delta and Epsilon) reported finding no transport and returned to base having gone only 120 odd miles to Shrewsbury in Wales.

All three teams said there were signs of recent life down there, modern food wrappers and newspapers scattered near entrances to the surface but none of them ever saw any people or even any subterranean animals like moles or foxes who would surely have made some use out of the shelters found there.

One thing they all said they found that unsettled them deeply was lights coming from far below, farther down than they were assigned to go. It could have been teams 2 and 3 trying to signal for help for all we know, it could have been the inhabitants of the subsystem. All we know for sure is that the teams all reported different coloured lights following them (red, white and green respectively) from the furthest reaches to Ground Zero. They said the lights got closer and brighter over the distance so we reckon we'll be finding out who lives down there soon enough.