Day 762

We thought we'd been around the world and seen it in its entirety. We thought the photos and videos that came from space were of our little world and that they were real but they were missing so much. Of course everyone's heard of the odd patch here and there on those internet maps that are blurred out and those areas of the ocean that are the exact squares copied and pasted to look like nothing's there but sea and sky.

What if I said there were far more things out there than we are allowed to be aware of? And if those things could cure any illness, delay death by hundreds of years and allow us to exist in the inhospitable areas of the world without impeding us. And if those things are guarded so heavily their existence on this lonely page wouldn't mean a thing to anyone other than a few minutes spent reading.

For example near the small island of Hirta near Scotland there exists a cave under the sea with a metal door right at the very base, around four hundred and fifty metres below the surface. It looks newly fitted and has done for about a hundred and seventy years or so. The corridors behind it are paved in small stone eyes that blink periodically out of time with each other and range in size from a millimetre to nineteen feet in height.

Nobody has been able to make it to the end of the first passage before, not without coming back with an extra set of eyes embedded into their skin somewhere. Though the are easy enough to remove they seem to grow back in mere minutes, always a different colour to the hosts eyes too.

Another place lies in the heart of the Australian outback, where only a handful of outsiders have been able to get to alive and return in such conditions that they are able to tell the tale once again. Surrounded by a carefully crafted wall of saltbush and littered with the remains of whatever creatures had tried to get in without asking first.

The people inside only seem to be visible around noon, any other time and they blend right into the sand. They say that their children have all left to go to the big cities but never say which ones. Nobody inside is under the age of forty six and everyone has a child who lives in The City, You Know The One. It Has Great Roads And Plenty Of Job Opportunities. Their Children Write Often And Say Such Wonderful Things.

The third place is somewhere within Prague, down some alley somewhere by a shop that sells mediocre coffee at an unusually low price for the area. A neighbourhood exists within a church whose elaborate exterior blends in perfectly with its surroundings to the point where nobody knows exactly where it is but they all think they do when you ask them. The inside is split into small houses with large walkways between them and several layers of basement reaching deep, deep down and extending so far out that one of the walls borders the catacombs.

People move into this church, lovely normal little people, and they never seem to leave. They mill about the place looking interested in the world but they never go beyond a certain point. Their excuses are that they just popped out for a bit of fresh air, they always pop out for a bit of fresh air. The air inside is stifling and suffocatingly thin from all the people crammed into there but they can't lave, they have to squeeze past that one person to get to their friend or family member and then they'll discuss moving out some time soon maybe. They'll say the same story with a different name every time.