Day 818

The coffee shop was slowly filling up and with each new person coming in, the chances of them finding the dead man under the corner table increased. The baristas knew he was there and that he'd been there since before opening time but the second it hit 07:30 the public began clamouring at the doors for their morning cup of warmth, leaving the staff no time to deal with the corpse or even take a closer look at him.

One thing was certain, he hadn't long been dead. In fact Lorraine had just gotten to him when he breathed his last. He'd said something in German which none of the staff could understand. Something like "dubious niche align" she thought.

As a desperate attempt to stop the public from seeing the body they closed off that corner of the shop, putting cones around it and creating a fake huge spill while covering the table with several large napkin boxes, enough to distract from the man underneath and conceal him to public eyes.

Throughout the day they insisted on keeping the shop temperature as low as possible, trying to keep the stranger's body as fresh as possible for a bustling cafe in late July. It worked for the most part, the smell was put down to sweaty customers and whichever poor soul sat nearest the corner was blamed by all.

At the end of the day, when the last customer had reluctantly left, they were finally able to deal with the man who'd been dead since before they arrived that morning. The boxes of napkins were undisturbed, the spilled water would undoubtedly leave a mark that they'd be able to explain about as well as finding the body.

Finding the body that wasn't behind the boxes any more. The body that they'd all confirmed was absolutely, one hundred percent dead. The body that had been stinking up the corner all day and had left a lingering odour. He just wasn't there and there was nothing to indicate he'd ever been there aside from faint letters carved into the floor that spelled out "Buchelburg". A tiny German town that had been wiped out during the second world war.

Day 817

The carnival had hardly been open a week before it was deemed too unsafe and shut down for good. It had been built in the lower park grounds, just behind the old bandstand and music garden, where the old pond used to be. The owners filled it in with concrete and slapped a bunch of old circus-themed rides on top in the hopes that more people would visit the lower park as well as the upper grounds.

Nobody is quite sure exactly why they closed it off but it was commonly agreed that they'd botched the whole thing right from day one. For starters instead of emptying the pond and moving the fish to the lake in the upper grounds they'd just poured the concrete over until it looked vaguely smooth, covered it in a stone slab and poured concrete over that. Surprisingly it wasn't stable. Go figure.

They couldn't even afford to have the rides removed and they were too grotty to be sold for anything other than scrap at a fraction of their purchased cost. They covered what they could while they debated what to do with their failed project while the rest was left to rust for the next eight years when they turned it into a Halloween tour briefly. Five "incidents" and one fatality later they locked the gates for good.

For many years the only visitors to the lower park grounds were teens out to fix their boredom and scare one another. There's the odd accident but for the most part they were able to navigate it far better than any other age group. They avoided the old pond grounds as if it was just a game rather than a perpetually unset concrete trap that had been the cause of almost eight deaths to date.

Then, after a generation of rebellious trespassing, people stopped going there entirely. Not a single soul went near there and they never explained why. Not even their children went near, or their children's children for almost five further generations. By this point most of the old carnival was rust skeletons and vague shapes covered in mouldy cloth.

After almost sixty years later someone went in, alone and armed with nothing but their phone's light they looked around for traces of the park owner's grand carnival disaster. The first thing they noticed, aside from the metallic scent in the air from so many rusted rides, was the way the ground nearby rippled in the wind, moving far too fluidly for any kind of concrete. The flicker of a grey fish tail disturbed the near silence, sending tiny concrete droplets flying in all directions.

From there they carefully navigated around the old pond using a small branch from a nearby tree to trace the edge to the safety of the broken "amber brick road" which was now little more than orange flecks among moss and broken cobblestones. It took them towards a sheet-covered lump that, upon sheet removal, was an old statue of Frankenstein that had clearly been repainted a dozen or so times judging by the layers of paint that had peeled off. It's latest incarnation appeared to be Elvis.

The further in they went the stronger the scent of metal became. Passing by spinning cups (now plastic vaguely shaped like a bowl tilted over in a larger metal bowl) and by the Ferris wheel (long since fallen over, the chalk outline of the teen who'd been stuck underneath still visible) they headed for a ride they'd seen in an old newspaper clipping - the merry-go-round.

The paper said it was the only one in the world to be covered in velvet from top to bottom. This was probably what caused it to malfunction so often and eventually catch fire, killing a small child who was too scared to get down from the horse. Now all the horses were covered in cloth, the velvet was worn to nothing and the whole thing stank like a landfill.

As they lifted the corner of a sheet, hundreds of fat maggots dropped to the floor and the stench of decaying meat filled the air around them. Gagging as they stepped back, they forgot to let go of the sheet. As it fell they saw the rotting remains of someone about their age, body broken and bound to the old horse as if they were riding it. A quick runaround (followed by copious vomiting) showed that almost every horse had one of these riders.

Day 816

A continuation on Liminal Spaces and why they are to be avoided at night.

There have been brief mentions before regarding the thinning of reality in transitional spaces, namely the dimensional leaks that cause otherworldly entities to seep into our own normality. We call them monsters but within their own setting they are as regular as you and I among other humans.

These beings often seek to hide within the liminal spaces of out world, their presence waxing and waning, coming and going like the tide as the spaces become more or less used. The space in question today is a simple art gallery in a major city. You've probably been there and seen the painted faces of people long dead, wondering what they might have sounded like or how their patience allowed them to sit for so long to become this piece of history before you.

Galleries are a special kind of liminal space, one that is only liminal at certain times and is thus a temporally liminal space. For instance during the day it's a common meeting ground, exhibitional and educational space all rolled into one, however as night approaches and the fewer people are around, the thinner the walls between realities become.

Some museums play up on this and offer late night tours to small groups, playing up the altered atmosphere and calling it a haunting. While they were certainly followed by something non-human and, by our standards, non-living it wasn't a ghost. Though it's skin was translucent and it hovered four or so feet above the floor, it wasn't a ghost.

For this group of three journalists and their guide, the entire museum felt like it was full of whispered promises and threats. Faint giggles drifted through the air towards the group, far too high pitched to be any of them and far too high up to be an immediate threat.

The guides were usually trained in how to deal with the varying beings that came through to the gallery at night and were selected on a shift-to-shift basis depending on what beings had made themselves known at the time and who had the most experience in dealing with them. There was never any mention of low casualty rates. There would always be at least one casualty.

Tonight the being they were trying to avoid whilst simultaneously trying to sneak a glance at was jokingly referred to as "A Picasso" for its preference to hiding over the faces in the paintings. It would blend its entire form in bar its eyes and make it seem like the art had come to life. It knew that humans were often too curious to walk away.

As the crossed to Renaissance painters the giggles suddenly grew louder and they saw it as a cherub pretending to fire arrows at them. The guide flashed his torch as the Picasso and it leapt out of the room, clawed appendages slipping and skittering along the polished wooden floor.

Their aim was to get to the largest piece of art the museum displayed - coincidentally it was Picasso's "Guernica" and at 3.5 by 7.8 metres it was truly worth the danger. The cooler night air and constant threat of death made it seem so much more alive. The guide stood to face the group and began the lengthy explanation of the processes and ideas the artist had been trying to convey.

Behind him, the painting licked it lips.

Day 815

A new postman came to the door this morning and I knew he was a fresh one when he asked about number 58 that was meant to be right next door to me, at least it was on the SatNav thing he had plugged into his van. The regular ones don't ask about the other houses, they just leave the post beside the memorial down the road like they're supposed to. The others will get it when and if they can.

I do hate having to explain the whole story but this lad was just asking so many questions I felt he should be sat down and told what's what in a proper manner which is exactly what I did.

Beginning the story is always the hardest part, you have to know what events are important to it and what can be left behind. The truth of the story starts some eight hundred years ago when the wheat fields were first planted and harvested. The old ways said you had to leave every third bundle of the first day's harvest down by the river to appease the local spirits but some "modern man of science" reckoned he'd rather make profit of it.

From then on something wasn't right about the place, it had the kind of wind to it that makes you hear your name being whispered in your mother's voice when you think you're utterly alone. More recently as the village hit its peak population of 1,805 the field began to grow. Now at that point it was owned by the council who hired local labourers to harvest it and give every last bundle over for profit, much like the first owner himself.

Every night from then on a house vanished with all inside it, replaced by a fresh square of wheat regardless of the time of year. There was no possible explanation and the council's plans to continue to harvest these new squares was met instantly with outrage from the rest of the village. What if the people who'd been in those homes were changed into the very wheat they'd been selling? It was tantamount to murder in their eyes.

And so the field was abandoned as a council money-maker while it continued to grow each night. People soon moved out and left the place to the field and its ghosts. Oh there are so many of the,. They stand in the field each night and count every piece of wheat, tying ribbon to the third strand before moving on. On windy days the ribbons fly like little flags and it's almost beautiful.

Now at this point the young postman was looking at me like I'd grown another head that called his mam a right cow but sure enough as I took him out back to where the wheat fields were lurking on the edge of my own garden, every third one had ribbon on it.

He didn't seem to believe me but said he'd leave the post on the memorial regardless which was decent of him. Still I don't reckon I'll be seeing him again, not after tonight at least. It's my turn to count the wheat with everyone else and I can only hope I do a good job of it.

Day 814

There's this miniature model town place hidden away in the countryside just out of the city. It's in one of those overgrown turnoffs that nobody seems to take, with one of those faded old signposts that's barely legible yet somehow the business turns over enough profit to keep it running "for seventy years and more!" as it boasted.

It has the usual sights - mini London, mini Paris, mini coal town complete with real coal etcetera, etcetera. It was all outdated and fairly grimy, despite the caretaker living on the grounds. He'd always be prodding something around the site, fiddling with a tree or trying to unclog the Loch Ness so it flowed properly into the mock Thames.

He introduced himself simply as "Cal" and made sure everyone knew he didn't build the original place but every building there had a little piece of its creator inside it. It wasn't until the grand 100th year celebration that people found out just how literal this was.

As it generally happens, some small child was where they shouldn't have been doing something they were explicitly told not to when they broke a wall and bones came tumbling out. In this case it was a pair of legs and the blood soaked trousers they'd been propped up in.

With no prints and no suspect other than Cal, who hadn't been born at the estimated time of death, it was deemed inconclusive. The remains were cleared out, though some parts where still missing, found in none of the buildings and the place thrived from the infamy of the unsolved murder.

They never thought to check the soon-to-be-added models in the shed where the rest of the creator sat and continued his work.

Day 813

The girl who greeted her wore an old cheerleader style outfit - a mixture of grey and red that mingled with the blood from the multiple lacerations along her face and torso. While she smiled and acted like she was in perfect health she continued to bleed sluggishly. She said the town they were in was called Merishire and had a population of 105 ("106 now that you're here!").

She didn't know how she got here, wherever "here" was in relation to the highway she'd been driving down but it certainly wasn't the last place she remembered being. There'd been so many bright lights all around her, they'd just appeared out of nowhere. A carnival maybe or just heavy traffic passing her by? But they'd been flashing, car lights didn't flash like that unless it was an emergency and she felt fine.

The cheerleader knew she was bleeding, knew how bad her injuries looked but she said she felt no pain. Said the ones on her face matched the new girl's. As she looked down she saw that her arms were also bloodied, the right one jutted out at an unnatural angle and refused to bend. How had she not noticed this before? The cheerleader laughed and said they'd all been through that phase before, every last one of them. All one hundred and five.

Her name was Sarah or Deborah ("Something like that, it's been a while since I thought about it and we don't really use our names here.") and she'd been living in Merishire ever since she woke up, bleeding on the same street where the new girl was found. They were all found on that street, slumped in a bus stop that was never used.

There were no cars about anywhere, the new girl noted, not a single one on the roads or parked at any houses. Sarah ("Or was it Lorraine?") confirmed that there were no cars in all of Merishire, said they'd done their damage already and were of no further use as she took the new girl to a diner called Better Days, Brighter Days. Inside were several other girls, all bloodied and bleeding but otherwise perfectly happy to just be.

They greeted the new girl warmly, offering her a seat amongst them and asking how her trip there had been. The new girl replied she hadn't been heading for here, she was heading for... heading for somewhere. Definitely somewhere up north... probably. They all nodded sympathetically like they'd been in her exact position of not knowing a damn thing and becoming more and more worried by the minute.

She asked if there was a phone around so she could call her family who might be worried about her. This made the girls look at each other with worry and pity, they said without words who'd going to tell her the bad news here, because I don't want to. Sarah ("Someone called me Susie once, I think"), who was the most helpful so far, showed her to an old landline in the back of the kitchen and left her to it.

The new girl had dialled in her parent's number before she quite realised what she was doing, the familiar sounds of ringing were comforting amongst the rest of the confusion. A woman answered the phone, she wasn't sure if it was her mother. Come to think of it, what did her mother even sound like? The woman on the other end of the line didn't seem to be able to hear her either way, swearing and snarling out for her husband to come and take the line to "tell this joker they should know better".

The man who took the phone sounded more familiar, the way he yelled brought something back to her. Sounds of long, breathless gulps of drink, like he could never get enough and the smell of oil while he worked on a DAF 44 that he swore he'd get working in time for her prom. He couldn't hear her either and loudly hung up the phone.

She left the kitchen feeling a little shaken, jokingly saying their headset was bust because nobody seemed to be able to hear her, why couldn't they hear her, what was going on, she needed answers. A quieter girl whose hockey jumper clad body was crushed all along her left side stood up with heavy swaying and said simply "We're not with them any more, we've got to move on but we can't. you know that just as much as we do Jerrie and it's time you admitted it."

Was Jerrie her name?  It didn't sound right, didn't feel right, none of this felt right. It was like she was stuck somewhere she couldn't get out like her car.

Like her car. Like the truck that hit her car it all came flooding back, for now.

It was late and she was heading back to her parent's from a rugby tournament- her team had won and she was slightly tipsy with the remnants of their celebratory beer. She hadn't seen the lorry swerving about on the highway, heading right for her, until it was too late. Everything spun and hurt and went in and out of darkness as somebody cut her car door off, blue and red lights flashing everywhere until somebody said "we're losing her".

She found she was crying, looking around all the girls seemed to be in the same state. Scared, shocked and desperately trying to figure out why they were there and not somewhere else. She said something they'd all been thinking but never voiced.

"What if there's nowhere else for us?"

Day 812

Historians claimed that the town had been built into the rock due to the extreme heat of the local climate - it was easier than saying that all sources from the time claimed the mountain had just appeared overnight and left most of their homes in the absolute darkness of granite caves.

Even the time and date are exact across the entire spectrum of sources - from the diary of a clergyman to a local newspaper to a letter from one local to their cousin in Greece. It's clear that everyone was talking about it and was sharing the news yet painfully few sources outside of the town hold the same records. Either is was classed as nonsense or it wasn't a surprise, perhaps a regular occurrence - after all, there are so many cities built in and under "natural" mountains, aren't there?

This particular case is most notable for the homes that are built deep inside, as previously mentioned when the mountain allegedly just appeared overnight. The streets between houses have names carved along them, a mixture of traditional gravestones and modern graffiti. Some think these are the names of those who were outside when the mountain appeared, who lost limb and life to it. This goes hand-in-hand with the rumours that there are skeletons half buried in the stone down a certain alleyway.

Local superstition and rumour aside there is one other strange thing about the mountain village and that is inside the stone itself. Fossils, to be exact,  originating from a large crater on a completely different continent. The oldest maps of that area show that there was a hill there which was originally put down to artistic interpretation like the sea monsters on old oceanographic diagrams until the mountain was climbed.

Dozens of human skeletons were dotted about the top, all in varying states of being pulled into the stone or perhaps trying to escape it. That and the plant samples that had somehow survived, confirmed to be a mix of grass and local scrub bushes matching those around the crater make for a truly compelling case.

But still it brings back the question - why was the rest of the world unsurprised?

Day 811

You thought you'd be able to slip back into the mansion one last time before it was due to be demolished only to find it very much occupied, the inhabitants seemingly stuck in the 1920's. They were a family of maladjusted individuals who preyed on anyone they could, calling their victims "maladies" and promising them cures, remedial therapies and the sweet embrace of death all in the same breath.

This time, the second you close the front door behind you he greets you with a stiff smile before saying "Have you met mother's latest malady? I dare say this one might even last the day." and as he jerkily gestures towards the ornate glass doors leading to the greenhouse you hear the faint sounds of smooth jazz and sobbing coming from the morning room.

Politely excusing yourself comes as a second nature now, after evading them for so long and so often. They've given you the nickname of Sly Jay and had stopped trying to make a malady of you after you managed to accidentally fix their telephone while trying to get the attic lights to work (at the time, it was the safest place to hide, though the noises up there were a tad worrying).

They'd given you a set of clothing appropriate to the time-zone they emulated which became your disguise and protection against them while you tried to figure out how they'd managed to survive in the house for so long without any food deliveries and how their victims hadn't been mentioned in any news source.

Torn between wanting to help the latest "malady" and wanting to further cement yourself as a part of the group for protection by seeing who was crying in the morning room you instead chose to find out more from the man before you. His name was Matty, at least that's what the rest of the family called him, and he had a thing for strangulation. As you asked about the "malady" you noticed his hands twitching and grasping at air, a sure sign he hadn't had a "malady" of his own in a day or two, probably too distracted by the current one.

When he began to reach for his pockets, where he kept a tight coil of cheesewire, you asked about the person crying in the morning room. His sister, Moira, had apparently been ditched by her latest "suitor" - another victim of theirs who she'd probably beaten to death as she usually did. You offered to go speak to her, offer her comfort as a friend should (and evade becoming a "malady" once again). Matty accepted this with forced glee, the struggle between wanting to strangle you and wanting the best for his dearest little sister played over his face almost comically.

Facing him until the last second, all the while playing up your concern for Moira and shock at how callous her "suitor" must have been to leave her so suddenly, you backed into the morning room and quickly closed the door behind you.

Moira sat on the piano stool, dress still stained dark red from her "suitor" and eyes stained red from crying. Of all the siblings she was least likely to kill you, not after you'd introduced her to a "suitor" who'd lasted the longest. She liked to keep their heads, rather the skin from their heads, suspended in jars of brine along the shelves. The light filtering through the trees outside made it look like they were all squirming.

Through her stuttered crying you managed to make out that her "suitor" had asked to leave one too many times and of course she'd had no choice but to cut off his legs, crudely sewing the stumps together and bathing them in whiskey every hour or so. He'd finally succumbed to a nasty infection that morning and was still down in his room, waiting for Matty and their father to decide where to bury him and if he deserved a burial after the "brutal" way he'd treated her.

When she asked if you had any single friends it seemed to be a sign that you were getting in too far, becoming a little too friendly with them. You didn't want to be any more a part of this than you already had, sacrificing your safety, your sanity, your own friend for the sake of satisfying your curiosity. Times like this made you feel like you deserved to be next but that pesky self-preservation kicked in and you found yourself texting an old college buddy to meet you at the back door to the mansion. Thinking they were getting a hook-up they sent a reply within minutes and Moira's teary face shifted to her usual perky, predatory smile.

"Oh Sly Jay, you really are a sweet heart! I hope this fella's The One" she said, eyeing up the shelves around you both. There was still plenty of empty space, enough for tens of other "suitors" and who knows how many more you'd help her with before you joined them too. 

Day 810

They first found the virus in a horsefly and declared it a mutant, though its back was split in two by a newly formed mouth whose serrated teeth snapped at anything moving. It wasn't anything to worry about at all, just something odd that nature threw up that clearly won't survive outside of a lab, let alone long enough to breed.

When the bones of hundreds of wild animals were found scattered about the area with teeth-marks too small to be anything but other altered horseflies, they soon changed their tune and began to hunt for the swarm. In the meantime they tested the captive insect's genetics to find whatever alteration this was and found, instead, a virus that was adding new sections of DNA into the fly.

While exploring the possibilities of it spreading to other similar insects, they neglected the signs and news stories of similar corpses - all wild animals and all with the same style of incision along the spine. The cause of death was ruled as blood loss, no culprit named and no tests done until it was too late.

By the time one member of the horsefly's research team had found one of these corpses in their own back yard - their own cat, no less - and begun to put two and two together the virus had mutated beyond their recognition. They thought it was a new strain at first but the original template still existed within the cells, not dormant but in a constant state of progression, aggression and regression so as to hit as many animals as possible.

The human cases didn't come along until the final days of the viral takeover. It changed too fast for them to anticipate which species it would take next or begin to work on a cure for the original horsefly, let alone a human.

The first corpse was reported to the local police and found to be a former officer. It took twelve bullets to bring him down with the majority going to the head and upper torso. His head had been utterly decimated but the witness and shooter, his former partner, claimed that up until the point where his spine had split into that gaping mouth, he'd just been normal. Now bullet-ridden and still trying to get up, very much alive.

Other cases began to appear around that area. Firstly his partner who was exposed to the infected blood, then the precinct who had been in contact with him afterwards, then the hospital staff who checked him for any injuries, then his family and their friends and their friends' families and so forth until one shooting snowballed into a plague of mutated creatures who still answered to their names and still tried to go to work.

Day 809

The rivers haven't been safe since the graveyard got flooded. The bodies that were dug out to be moved to higher consecrated ground wore the same look of pure terror on their faces, regardless of their age and state of decomposition.

It was the strangest thing but of course the church took it to be a sign of something or other. Pastor Bessups said that it was a clear display of His will and that we must change our environmental stance, rejecting all modern pollutants and reverting to the more traditional lifestyle.

Pastor Kowalski said that He was definitely telling us that our community wasn't attending church enough. Though his congregation was mostly the village several miles down he felt that his opinion must be voiced to further save us from our sinful lives and save him from holding the record for smallest congregation.

Religion aside, the common folk didn't regard it as an act of God, they regarded it as an act of local malicious intent. The few among them who has "the gift" as they called it claimed to have seen the faces of their loved ones in the rivers nearby, their translucent arms reaching out and grasping at air.

At first this in itself seemed like little more than harmless superstition, just something the public told themselves to keep the fear at bay and push all blame to something too intangible to touch but real enough to make them feel better. In this case they claimed the river had claimed all the souls from the dead, leaving them to float in the purgatorial flow of the River Leam and all it lead to.

This would have been harmless but for the fact that whole coteries of tourists were found clogging local weirs, their water-logged faces all the same picture of terror as the church bodies. The police called it mass hysteria fuelled by local superstition and were clueless as to how it should be prevented.

Meanwhile the villagers kept clear of all natural water sources and wore heavy iron shoes so they'd be harder to drag under.

Day 808

Recently a village has been found in a previously undocumented island along the Western Isles of Scotland. It was only a few miles all around and barely in contact with society, the people preferring to trade locally with the other islands and stay clear of the mainland altogether.

We thought they were just another isolated community. We thought they were humans - we set them loose on the mainland thinking we were helping them branch out, utterly ignorant of what we were actually unleashing. We didn't listen to their trading partners in Barra and now nobody will forgive us for letting them come over.

They called it Cúis Chaillte and said they'd been there for several hundred years, though their accent was heavily tinged with something Scandinavian and their homes very rustic they were aware of some of the major events outside of their immediate circle. Small groups from the mainlands would work their way over via the main port of Barra and, according to the spokesperson, they never wanted to leave

While it was confirmed by a young family who claimed the more rural life was what they'd been missing in Edinburgh, something in the way they said it seemed a little forced. Their smiles too rigid, their manners outdated and overly formal for their age. It was put down to the influence of the community, our mistake there.

The signs were clear as day now that we look back to the first meetings - the awkward postures, apparent lack of any kind of medicine or doctor of any kind, far too few animals for a farming community of their size and "spare" cottages that looked freshly made. They had been expecting us, perhaps some of their kind had already decided to begin invading the mainland before we had any idea that they existed over there.

How could we have known that such violent deaths were so close by, all these years and nobody outside of Barra had any idea and they refuse to admit to anything for fear that their truce will be broken. I suppose as they're closest to Cúis Chaillte they're effectively on the front lines of a war we stand no chance in winning.

Things that seem like awkward humans, stuck in the past and barely adapting to modern society prowl the streets wearing the skins and bones of the least likely folk. The last ones we caught looked like two elderly women, sitting on a park bench in Inverness, knitting. Their monstrous interior was quickly revealed when they attacked a teen on a skateboard, vomiting the spawn down his screaming throat. Police closed in while they attempted to throw him into the nearby pond to properly incubate.

The whole process is grim, from the spawn passing, to incubation, to the spawn dissolving the meat and eventually growing to wrap their gelatinous flesh around the host's bones, eventually moulding themself to fit every crevice that was their host. From there they have a lifespan of anywhere between five and eight hundred years, constantly secreting a substance that effectively freezes the host's skin and bones in a near perfect condition.

While they only seem to eat as spawn, they're going on feeding frenzies all over Scotland, roaming in packs of new children in nurseries, businessmen in old fashioned suits, the elderly on trips to big cities and leaving behind a trail of empty skinsacks every time.

Day 807

The council thought that painting the towers bright pastels would make it harder for Clingers to attack - mottled grey being their natural skin colour which tended to blend in all too well with the rough concrete exteriors of the run down homes. It backfired spectacularly as such "clever" ideas often do.

On the bright side we found out many new things about the Clingers, on the down side it was mostly how quickly they can change their skin tone and how they delighted in the colour change rather than fearing it. They embraced a wide spectrum of colours and seemed to realise quite quickly how well they'd blend in elsewhere.

The first recorded sighting of a Clinger outside of their usual hunting grounds (ranging from three to forty three storeys high). To be specific, a local primary school whose cleaning staff were very much horrified to see full grown Clingers scuttling towards them at 30mph along the walls, their skin now vibrant red and white chequered and glistening like the rest of the plastic wallpaper.

From there it spiralled quickly so that all buildings closed and locked their doors if the weather looked even vaguely cloudy and the streetlights were all replaced with brighter LED bulbs that kept Clingers to the sides of roads and whatever roof was nearest to their intended prey.

On the bright side, the towers suddenly became a safer place to live, they weren't bothering to hunt high now that they realised all the food was at ground level.

Day 806

They say that when the famine came around every ten years the poorest would send their younger children out to the marshlands "in search of object/person/important thing" with only a small lantern and nowhere near enough oil to last them the trip but just enough to get them lost.

The marshlands were unstable during the day and by night they became death traps full of flammable gas pockets, pathways vanished by the tidal flow and water deep enough that three men could stand on each others shoulders and still be nowhere near the surface among many other dangers that meant the children never stood a chance.

It was said that the poorest children, the unbaptised or born out of wedlock (the most susceptible to death in older days filled with superstition and fervent religious belief) wouldn't die when they were sent out. These ones in particular were favoured the most by the more unusual creatures and mythologies of the area. Their misfortunes in life changed them to something more than human instead of the deaths that came swiftly to their socially declared betters.

In short, they became marsh-spirits whose tiny bodies were bent and conjoined to whatever should have ended them. The drowned ones became pale as fresh snow and just as cold, their little faces floating eerily among the weeds and fish deep below the murky marshwater, barely illuminated by sunlight.

The ones that curled up under trees, too desperate for warmth to notice the sinking ground often became bumps and sudden drops in the paths. They tried to catch other children out - it was like a game to them, a game of catch that ended up with more marsh children being born.

Most commonly, the ones who found other bodies and took the remnants of their oil, the ones who got to the heart of the marshlands before sunrise, their tiny shivering bodies barely visible save for the small light held so close to their faces that their cheeks became burnt. They became wanderers, floating above the paths, sometimes shaking so violently they appeared to be caught in seizures. They were the ones who chased children deeper into the marshes, down into the lakes and under the trees.

They were as much the creators of the marsh children as their parents before them.

Day 805

Eyes as big as my fist and perpetually bloodshot, countless serrated teeth - too many to fit into their mouth and forever sticking out at odd angles and pale green skin all loose and flabby, barely clinging to the muscles beneath. This was my friend Elliot, I've known them ever since they crawled out from under my bed asking if they could sleep next to me because they were scared of What Prowls Outside.

We'd spend the early mornings talking quietly, freezing when the sunrise was blocked by an unexpected dark shape and heavy breaths smothered the birdsong. Elliot told me that What Prowls Outside eats whatever living thing it can see and spits out their bones in pale slime, the same slime that was a town-wide phenomenon that was commonly called "star jelly"and didn't seem to have any identifiable source aside from frogspawn or bird vomit.

Elliot was my ally against What Prowls Outside, though at first they looked as much a monster as anything else that moved about outside followed by cut-off screams and loud, wet crunching sounds. Even though Elliot ate rotting meat that they dug out from the graveyard, always directly beneath the coffins through a series of elaborate tunnels.

He dug similar tunnels underneath the homes nearby which is how he got to me in my room. Said he'd tried some fresh meat next door and found it tasted bad and then What Prowls Outside came by and he sought comfort from the closest thing - me. They never found my neighbour's killer but said they'd been killed in their sleep and I have to wonder... if I hadn't woken up, if I had run away or screamed out would I have been next?

Elliot won't tell me. He looks left and says nothing but I know he always looks left when he plans to lie.

Day 804

Autumn approaches and the leaves begin to fall yet the trees never seem to grow bare.
It's been three years since the first leaves refused to drop.
Children are growing never knowing what bare branches are and why they are still drawn.

At first this didn't appear to have any significant negative affect on the country, just concern.
Though the falling leaves have been studied, the ones on the trees have not.
Somebody knows something about them and isn't saying a word.

They are keeping quiet so as to avoid the obvious panic that would com from the news.
After all, who wants to hear that the leaves are a disjointed creature that preys on mammalian meat?
Birds no longer nest in the trees, dogs no longer mark them and even humans subconsciously stay away.

People are either unable to see the countless skeletons ensnared among the branches or can't see them.
It's a bit puzzling really, especially as the bones glisten so brightly in the sunlight.
The remnants of digestive enzymes make them shine like diamonds.

Day 803

Three Useful Life Hacks For The Peculiar And Unusual

1) How to tell if a mausoleum is still occupied without trespassing.
    Items needed: 1 white sheet, a small table, three shots of strong liquor
    Conditions: must be done at 01:00, preferred lunar position - Apogee
    Firstly place the small table right in front of (or as close as possible to) the mausoleum entrance, then place the shots of liquor on the small table and loudly invite the beings inside to share a drink with you. Wait for exactly three strong gusts of wind to blow past you before spreading the sheet over the door, or holding it as close to the door as possible, preferably behind the small table.
    If the next five gusts twist the sheet to form anything remotely resembling a face then the mausoleum is occupied, if you find that the shots have been drained wile you were doing this test then vacate the premises immediately - the dead are too close to you and your safety will be at risk.

2) How to stop your household items from becoming possessed
    Items needed: 1 kilogram of sea salt, 65 grams of human skin flakes, PVA glue
    Conditions: must be done before the item is inside the house, preferred lunar position - perigee
    Combine the ingredients and spread finely onto the corners of the items in question (or in a rough equatorial line around the object if it lacks corners).
    The salt will prevent physical manifestations while the skin cells (being dead remnants of the living within the space) prevent spirits from reaching into the objects from beyond the living side of existence.

3) Prevent shadows from physically manifesting in the workplace after hours
    Items needed: a green candle, matching green thread, 37 gold coloured needles, a lighter
    Conditions: must be done alone and unseen by CCTV, preferred lunar position - perilune to the sun
    Light the green candle and place it to one side. Using the hand of someone who has worked in the building for over 6.5 years, gently stick the needles through their palm forming no religious or heretic pattern, don't try to draw in any deity just follow your instinct. Next take the green thread and thread every needle on their palm, taking care to not pull any needles out in the process.
    Once this is accomplished proceed to pour as much melted was as possible over the hand, focusing around the needles and thread. Once the palm and needles are completely covered in green wax they can then be removed from the volunteer's hand. Bury the object in the centre of the main room or split it into single-needle pieces and scatter them as much as possible, trying to maintain equidistance between them all for maximum effect.

Day 802

The house was perfectly normal from the outside. Its walls that shade of beige so chic and modern - a perfect balance of contrast to the otherwise typical English field-by-the-woods. Nobody in the neighbouring 19th century homes had seen the owners or family of the modern house in the thirty eight years it had been around for.

One particularly curious couple set up cameras along their fence, just little things to see if the family were nocturnal, if the house was even inhabited. For all they knew it had been abandoned since it was first finished, after all such a modern house must have been expensive to build.

Weeks went by without so much as a peep from the house over the field, nothing on the cameras nor any sign of a change in the otherwise deserted building. On the eighth week they saw something in the camera closest to the edge of the field, flickers of movement. People,or so it seemed and perhaps the owners  - new or long standing. Upon seeing the footage in the morning the couple decided to finally pay a visit to the house to greet their absent neighbours or at the least get some gossip to tell their friends next door.

The field was longer than it seemed and the house itself far larger up close. The glass wall showed the living room had been recently disturbed with an open suitcase on a table and clothes flung over the sofa. There were half empty plates on the table - three of them and not a single soul in sight.

When they tried knocking on the door they found it already wide open and three pairs of shoes hastily shoved into a corner nearby. They called out their hello's and is anybody home's as they trespassed further and further into the building, the air thick and stuffy from being undisturbed for too long.

They found the first person beside the suitcase, a child or rather half of a child. When they tried to turn the young girl over they found her torso was fused to the floor, skin gradually changing from brown to the glass-scattered concrete of the stone floor that ran throughout the building.

Deeper in they found one of the presumed parents, their face distorted in utter agony as he appeared to be trying to free himself from the hallway wall that had sucked him in. His hands grasped at nothing as they slowly withdrew, leaving the wall as plain and bare as any ordinary one.

As the couple left the hallway in favour of returning to the front door they heard the unmistakable sounds of a young child crying but it wasn't coming from the living room where the little girl was. It was coming from further inside, from the bathroom.

It was empty at first glance, the bathtub,sink and several buckets of water filled to the brim and the weeping coming from all directions but definitely inside the room somewhere. Peering into the bath they saw a face peering back, large and wide like the skin had been taken off and laid out to float about. Everything holding water in the room held skin which was turning more and more translucent by the second but the child's crying persisted. Though he managed no words the young boy was in just as much agony as the man in the hallway who had already gone, the girl in the living room too presumably.

The couple fled soon after this discovery, switching off their cameras and deleting the footage at the first opportunity. Their friends next door continued to wonder who lived in the home, blissfully unaware that the house held several families deep within its foundation, its walls and the water flowing from its pipes to the sewer and out to sea.

Day 801

They'd been sheltering in the remains of a helicopter for over an hour and their company hadn't left yet. They couldn't see the creature itself, they were impossible to see in direct sunlight, but they could see the depressions its feet left in the ground and they could hear its laboured breaths circling them still.

It was supposed to be simple recon - go to the church, scout for potential survivors and get back to base without alerting the creatures around the area but one of the newer members of the team (freshly picked up from a broken fridge inside the remains of a supermarket) broke the rules. You were supposed to carry iron with you at all times but they frantically declared they'd "forgotten" theirs after expressing interest in getting up close to a creature.

The rest of the crew debated between each other in a series of looks as to what they should do with their new-found liability. One was suggesting they knock him out and use him as a diversion so that the rest of them could escape, after all the chances of them getting past the creature when it had caught the scent of the unprotected man were slim-to-none.

Another was suggesting they shoot at the creature and try to frighten it off. though they couldn't see its full height and therefore couldn't accurately estimate if it was full grown or not, the footprints let them guess it to be between four and five hundred years of age - mid juvenile. Not an easy target but less likely to attack than a full fledged creature, at least they hoped so.

The unprotected man had his eye pressed to a hole in the helicopter's shell, desperately trying to glimpse the creature yet maintain an air of worry so the rest of the crew would believe their mistake to be genuine. Fear and excitement mingled inside him, leaving his body trembling faintly, unable to stop a smile from worming its way onto his face.

The sunlight that had been shielding the creature was briefly interrupted by just enough cloud to reveal the faint outline of it reared directly over the crew's hiding place, vestigial arms gently resting on the remains of the helicopter's blades as its long wiry legs began to poke through the open windows. Before the crew could fully comprehend their situation the creature had pierced the unprotected man through the base of his neck, its serrated calves digging into his spine as it whisked him up to its awaiting mouth.

The rest of the crew ran back to base, blessing and cursing the man's foolishness in the same breath.

Day 800

The saying around the small mining towns of the Midlands was "pit and people are one and the same". Outsiders took it to mean that the local traditions and culture was so centred around the mines that they become as much a part of everyday life as breathing. This wasn't the case.

Some folk from the deeper coal mines were smothered in the black dust from head to toe. No amount of scrubbing seemed to clear their skin or the faint black cloud that hovered about their exposed skin. Their heartbeats echoed the drills beneath, always far too fast to be human and audible from two feet away. It's what made them so easy for outsiders to avoid.

When the miners are at work they are truly in their element, their movements fluid and precise as if they already know every inch of rock before it's even been looked at let alone touched. They forget to keep up the human act if there are humans with them and they begin to move in ways humans shouldn't be able to. They scuttle across the rocks as if gravity was nothing more than a word.

They consider death by a collapsing tunnel pathetic. What kind of miner can't feel the way the rocks shift and begin to crumble? No true miner dies by the rocks they were drilled out from, that's what they'll tell you. Of course to keep up their human guise they will plead fear if they can still reach the outside world from their rocky prison. It doesn't stop their kin from tunnelling to them and strangling them to death to rid the community of false miners.

Day 799

The pier at Crimpton-Upon-Sea is themed, it has a 1920's aesthetic from the colour of the boards to the way the stalls are built to the way the staff speak. Everything about the pier is as charming, inclusive and delightful as we wish the 20's could have been. Everything except the beach beneath it.

The underside of the pier is blocked by a sturdy metal fence that allows absolutely no access from the beach. Still, there's a metal door in the rocky cliffs where the pier meets the mainland but no visible access point to it. Every day there is an employee, dressed like all the others, guarding the door. They never speak or move, only standing there with their arms crossed from midnight to the shift change the following midnight.

There are never repeated employees guarding the door under the pier, a group of inquisitive local youths have taken to documenting each different face for a blog of their own cleverly titled "Piers Watch". They try to note down the unusual things about the employees as well, the little things like how they never blink or how some of them stop breathing for most of their shift until someone asks if they're alright.

If anything worries a human it's seeing another human who is just different enough that you can tell that they aren't human at all. It gives reason to distrust the individual, after all we only know how other humans might behave and if they aren't human then who knows what they will do? In this case they are guarding something so important they risk outing themselves as Something Else every day.

There is always a new member of staff watching the door, how many of these beings are there?

Day 798

Cities built on water often find themselves slowly sinking into it. This may be by millimetres per year or per five years or per hour. Formerly dry courtyards become aquariums within a weeks and the lower areas become reefs before the concrete foundations can properly set.

Now the correct solution to this would be to build on higher ground, either uphill or on a raised platform but this city doesn't do that. This city builds homes on top of sunken homes until centuries later they are floating skyscrapers,mostly submerged but still very much inhabited.

The people are trapped in a loop of built on the roof, move into the new home, built a newer home on top and move in etcetera and so forth until they forget they can live outside of the loop. Humans in general often form habits that they can't or don't break for the rest of their lives, this is no different.

They no longer bury their dead, choosing instead to leave them to sit in the rooms they will abandon within months. You can't smell a corpse when it's five floors below you, feeding the fish that then feed you. Some consider it kinder to make a trapdoor in one room, leave it open when they move and let the bodies go down there, tie a rock to them and let them pile up deep down.

This stability doesn't always last, some towered homes were built originally on weak foundations, poor materials and the like. It only takes three generations to forget this but by then the damage is done. So many homes have been lost as they just tilted ever so gently in the night, tipping everyone into the cold ocean while they sleep and dragging them down in their heavy brick homes. They join the countless brick tombs all along the floor by the other towers, that is if they don't cause a chain reaction of collapse by hitting another tower on the way down.

Day 797

I haven't been to the beach for several years now, nobody in the area likes to mention what happened but they all know. It was on the local news for months - "9 YEAR OLD FALLS FROM CLIFF, FINDS MASS GRAVE" is a hard thing to run away from, especially when you can't get the smell of old bodies out of your hair. At least it feels that way sometimes.

I should probably start by saying that the mass grave was an old one, thankfully, but dating back to around the plague days, unthankfully. I was tested for all sorts when they took me to the hospital, even moved me to one in London "just for observations" though the only thing they found majorly wrong was the broken leg and fractured elbow from the landing. The cuts and bruises from the bone fragments never became infected so despite having to grow up with all my peers asking if I had the plague every time I was off ill, life was fairly uneventful.

They reckoned the mass grave had been exposed by me walking too close to the unstable cliff edge (read: being chased their by an older sibling who denies it to this day) and when the cliff collapsed, they all just spilled over with me. There's not a thing in the world that can make you forget hearing your parents screaming at you and opening your eyes to see an actual skeleton right next to you, all around and underneath you too. Apparently the thick clay soil kept them well preserved enough that they found dead plague bacterium in some of the bodies.

I got lucky then, after that a few fish in the area were found to carry the plague in a rare form of intestinal parasite. It all spiralled out from there to the molluscs, the birds, the seals that occasionally showed up that were coming in dead, pus-ridden lumps.

The beach has been declared plague-free for almost four years now but we reckon there's still something of it out there. you can hear it in the way the seagulls cry out, that deep guttural rattle instead of their natural high-pitched screeching. Not to mention the fact that all the fish have turned this weird shade of brown and their eyes are becoming unnaturally large for their size. I saw a photo someone took just last week of a Red Gurnard that had just one big blue eye and no mouth. Damned thing had somehow grown to two and a half feet in length when they're only meant to be forty centimetres.

I dare say my trip is leading to a lot worse than the grave and I don't plan on sticking around to see it.

Day 796

There's always something snuffling about the garden. Mum used to say it was hedgehogs but she'd say it so quietly, repeating it over and over again and closing her eyes sometimes. She had us convinced when we were kids but had never managed to convince herself.

Now that we're older we're allowed to know more about it. What is does and what it leaves behind but mostly what it leaves behind. I nearly filled an entire rubbish sack with the junk and rank smelling dirt it tossed all over the patio for whatever kind of reason. Mum still won't say what it is, only that it's "just hedgehogs as far as you and I are concerned now put more salt about the doorstep, there's a good lad."

When my parents left for the week it was just my sister and me to watch the house and take care of the mess that our resident "hedgehog" made. We decided to ask around and see who else had this visitor. As it turned out everyone in the neighbourhood did and followed pretty much the same steps that we always had of cleaning the mess and salting the doors and windows every morning and evening.

All but one and she said she was better off letting it rampage about the garden, said it brought her money and gold and beautiful flowers in return for letting it use her garden. She even let us see what it had done but the "flowers" she mentioned were old dolls that had been melted and reshaped into roughly flower-like shapes. We left soon after seeing that, I'll never forget how strained her smile was as she closed the door, like she knew it had gone too far but she was powerless to stop it.

We thought it best to keep cleaning and salting as always but also set up a camera to see just what was out there, seems everyone else was too scared too anyway. It took a couple of nights to get it to work, we only saw a darkish blob before we figured out how to get the night vision setting properly on.

The night we did, my sister and I sat upstairs in our room with the door locked, staring at her laptop screen and waiting for our "hedgehog" to make their usual appearance. Much to our surprise we did get a hedgehog. A perfectly normal hedgehog with no oddities or unusual appendages and a very hedgehog-like face that was nothing like a human's. It was just a small, average hedgehog that went about eating slugs, digging up the garden and staring deep into the camera but only when we turned our heads marginally away from it.

It did leave us a lovely bouquet of flowers in the morning though.

Day 795

They come here about seven minutes after the store closes so that they can restock everything. It's not that we don't restock it ourselves during the day, it's just that when they do it everything is done much faster and when you're an industrial-sized warehouse, timing is everything. They even throw in the odd sigil on an item or two to give the buyer good luck or a few extra years of life - it all depends on their mood.

That's why when the store closes we do everything we can to keep them in a good mood and prepare the warehouse for their arrival. We begin by sweeping the floors, making sure they're clear of any debris that might cause our stockers to trip or inconvenience them in any way. The last time they were inconvenienced three shelves fell, and for a store as big as ours that causes utter chaos. We had to evacuate everyone, dodge lawsuits that are still ongoing almost five years later and buy totally different shelving to refit the entire store.

Of course it took the stockers a few weeks to understand the new shelves, they looked so put out at first - it was almost adorable in a way. Well it would have been if they weren't about twelve feet tall with more arms than I'd dare to count (I swear they just sprout and drop them as they please). They don't talk to us other than to hand a clipboard to the store manager for them to sign, presumably to say that they'd delivered the goods but the manager refuses to discuss what he signs to anyone.

They always come in a lorry with our store logo on it, we assume that they work for us but the damage they can do to someone who gets in their way or too close to them makes us question who hired them and how. The merchandise is never charged to us, I should know, I've seen the books and there are no records of us having ordered anything in from the past twenty one years. They must be getting the stock from somewhere and someone is signing them off at that end too but the question is who signs for them.

Day 794

When thinking of spaces where reality seems thin we remember how the waiting feels in a train station. Seeing the clocks tick by as the board shows your train continually being delayed in its irritatingly orange letters, the bitter wind racing down the tracks faster than any train you've seen pull in and of course the small railroad café that sells barely caffeinated hot drinks and sausage sandwiches that always taste odd.

What about the people on the trains though? The way they stare out past the breath-fogged windows with such a scornful look as though you were dirt beneath their feet. You don't board their trains, walking quickly to the correct platform, their heads craning around each other to properly glare at you as you pass by them. Sometimes when you stay by their train (as you come to think of it, never seeing anyone board or leave), you notice that they never blink or cease their staring at anyone on the platform.

The thing that really makes the train station feel unreal is the sounds that it makes. That faint screeching as it approaches, a sound so dreadfully close to screams. The grinding and whirring as it comes to an eventual stop. The sighing hiss at the doors open, letting whoever or more commonly whatever is inside out into the otherwise uncaring, unseeing world.

Day 793

The neon signs hanging in bar windows and along the otherwise barren street all advertised a show that was set to begin at 22:56 in some place called "The Drowned Doubloon". There was no mention as to what kind of show it was but he, being a tourist, thought it was another city-specific attraction that he could write about to his friends back home.

Finding "The Drowned Doubloon" took him a good hour as it was tucked behind a housing estate near the Grande Museum of Bones. The sign outside was the same as all the neon ones he'd seen dotted about the city and,with minutes to spare, he ordered the oddest sounding drink on their board (lovingly named Churchyard Sweat) and sat down to wait for the show.

Their stage was small but deep, not much out front but the way they'd set up the lights and mirrors made it seem like he was gazing into a never ending corridor that was classically lit by many dim chandeliers. Despite the detailed and unique stage, the cosy atmosphere of the pub and the built-up area it was established in, it was practically empty. Even the streets leading up to it had been bustling as usual despite the late hour. He put it down to the fact that it was mid-week and the people in the area may have work or children to take up their remaining time, after all modern society ran 24/7.

As 22:56 came about, exactly as the minute rolled over, the show began. The rumbling of marching feet filled the pub's thick walls and dimly lit rooms until the floor and tables shook from the force of it. Slowly along the seemingly illusionary corridor came an army dressed in some kind of grey uniform with no insignia or weapons on display.

They wore some kind of mesh mask that blended in with their varying skin tones so perfectly it seemed at first glance like they all had no face. Slowly they stepped off the stage and gently took members of the audience back up with them, including our tourist. He thought it an interesting, albeit unusual, way to gain audience interaction and hoped he could sit back down to his beer soon.

The unmarked army turned sharply and took their audience members back along the corridor, not listening to them protesting or struggling in the steel grips of the soldiers. Our tourist began to realise that this show wasn't going the way he had hoped, especially when the temperature around him dropped dramatically as they seemed to step over an unseen threshold.

He glanced back, past another struggling civilian and saw that the pub behind them seemed so far away, a near speck in the distance yet they'd barely taken a dozen paces. To make matters stranger, everyone in the pub appeared to be leaving, the tables were being stacked against the walls and with a resolute click that echoed throughout the corridor, they turned off the lights.

The army continued to lead the civilians on, unphased by the attempts to escape and injure those in uniform. After a few minutes more of walking down the impossibly long hallway the soldiers let go of everyone's arms and kept walking forward, leaving their former captives to decide what to do from there. Predictably they all tried to head back to the pub, finding themselves unable to cross the threshold back and left staring at the unlit and empty rooms.

Our tourist was the first among them to suggest searching the walls for hidden passages to get back, after all what's a stage without a trapdoor? And so the small group set about crawling along the floor and walls in search of anything that could lead out or away from the direction that the soldiers went, possibly the only direction to go.

Eventually a middle aged woman found a loose stone and with some persuasion most of the wall fell away to reveal the same view of the empty pub but this time they were able to cross back through. Considering their misadventure over and done with they all bid each other a hasty goodbye and managed to climb out of the same open window into the cold night.

To him everything felt slightly off from then on, his friends and family were different in the smallest of ways. Like how they laughed or the piercings in their ears or the way they wore their hair. Little things that had made them so familiar to him were now utterly absent and in their place stood strangers who had known him, or possibly some version of him, all their lives.

Day 792

Inside the main library there sit hundreds of people of all ages, all entranced by one book and surrounded by piles of ones they have read. When their current book is finished they will turn to the nearest pile of the closest person and grab the first one they see, not caring for content or length, only that their minds are occupied and their hands full of the least lethal thing within those walls.

Inside the main library there sit hundreds of people of all ages, all desperately trying to ignore the whirling masses of fabric and bones that dance about them in the hopes that someone, somewhere will put down their book for a moment too long and allow their attentions to be drawn elsewhere. The ceiling of the library is covered in the remains of those unfortunate ones who didn't reach for new books fast enough.

Inside the main library there sit hundreds of people of all ages, all starving and barely resisting the urge to bite their own tongues just to get something to drink. They sometimes manage to sneak the odd page or two to eat, anything to keep them alive long enough to slowly slip towards the main doors that seemed to ordinary and inviting from the outside.

Day 791

There were weeds in the Garden City, insidious things that lead the Rot straight to the city centre and damn near killed us all. You see, everything here is connected by the deep foundation of intertwined roots. We cut and stitch every plant-like building together to promote coexistence, all for our motto of "Omnis ad unum" that left us all too vulnerable.

We didn't even realise how far spread it was until the houses started to collapse on themselves, spilling thick clouds of flies and  hazy grey pollen into the air. It choked us and sent two thirds of the city spiralling into a pit of fungal rot before the first weed was found.

It was embedded in a cracked garden wall near the outskirts of the city, looking harmless but for the trail of smoky grey pollen that spewed out from it at a steady pace. When it came to removing the weed most of the wall came down with it, the same damp, crumbly kind of rot that had been found all over the city but condensed into one small space.

From then on we tried to rebuild the Garden City but nothing would take to the grounds ruined by the Rot. Year after year we toiled trying to get even the smallest building to grow on top of the old as we'd done for hundreds of years, using the older buildings as compost for the roots of the new until now. They hardly grow, coming out as sickly sheds instead of homes and those that properly take are so uninhabitable on the inside that they may as well be used to kill convicts.

We are left with a handful of city that is slowly succumbing to the Rot just like everywhere else has. The air has a sour tang to it, the faint yet sickly scent of pus that comes from whatever animal wretch caught up in the gradually liquidising remains of our homes.

Day 790

Ghosts, as it turns out, have no perception of time. The reason I know this is because my great, great, great grandson visited me last night to ask about the time I saved a man from being hit by a newly remodelled tram only for me to have to tell him it hadn't happened at the time. He was clearly dead, the jagged line running from halfway across his neck that split his torso nearly in half was proof enough.

It gets wearying sometimes, seeing your descendants and ancestors and not quite knowing which they are until you stumble upon an old family photo and see their face staring grimly back at you when only yesterday they smiled and asked you for a slice of toast.

I know I'm not the only one who has this troublesome condition, as it is often referred to by those with doctorates in this, that and whatever. Others in forums online complain that their visitors speak in ancient tongues and seem so utterly furious and bewildered by absolutely everything, often breaking the object that confuses them.

I suppose in that respect I'm quite lucky that I have yet to be visited by anyone so far removed from the modern era and so ancesterous that our languages are alien to each other. You'd think that language is just as flexible in the spirit world as time is but it seems to be one of the Constants (a term that those like me use to describe the characteristics that stick between all the spirits as things they use to tie themselves to the living realm but not the timeline).

Day 789

There's an old woman who sits in the old townhouse and weeps.
She keeps asking for her Johnny but everyone knows he died back in 1943.
The police only found half his head but, bless her soul, she still reckons he's alive somewhere.

She says she finds his little footprints leading all around her garden where he used to play.
Of course nobody believes her, she's 99 years of age and only leaves her seat in the townhouse to sleep.
Even then people doubt that she actually does rest, most reckon she's just some lingering spirit.

It's daft but it's what small village minds are wont to do, make up stories to make the unusual bearable.
She's been called all sorts by the regulars from Old Mother Moany to Our Waterwheel and worse.
The townhouse owner keeps her well enough, no rent fee or anything out of pity for a woman who's just lost.

Nothing anyone says seems to phase her and they've long since stopped saying her Johnny's dead.
I talked to her once, you know, just to see what she was like and if she could be helped.
All she did was talk about him though, how good he was and how he'd be back to her soon.

She seemed dead certain that he was still alive and grown and just hiding from her.
Her Johnny was always one for playing games with his dear old mam.
But he'd be back, she said, she'd seen him in the corners of the mirrors, always running from her.

I'd call it nought but a fantasy if I hadn't heard whisperings of a fellow stalking the corn fields.
They were saying he lumbered like a dog or half-formed thing, not quite a man.
And his head was misshapen like it was missing some.

Day 788

There are three large drains at the back of my garden where the waste water from the flats runs down. It's always made the garden sound like there's a water feature nearby which was quite nice. You could spend hours sitting outside listening to it and pretending there was some large fountain beside you or an exotic waterfall.

It got clogged during the storms we had all last week, by my reckoning it's either that somebody flushed something they shouldn't have or somewhere along the line something's fallen in like a cat. I know I heard something scratching about down there and those damned things are always causing mischief in the area. It wouldn't be at all surprising that one of them had somehow managed to drown itself by falling down an open drain.

The council took almost three weeks to send their people down to have a look but by then the drains had flooded most of the garden with brown water that stank to high heavens. They went wading through it, ruining my plants even more than the putrid water had, and set about trying to remove the metal lid.

It took all four of them trying to pry it open before they managed to, bringing a half rotten human arm alongside it, fingers still clutching the handle inside the lid. The police took over from there as they dragged her out and the paramedics on scene pronounced her alive but barely, though her skin was mostly falling off and the flesh underneath was greying and bloated.

The news reported it the next day and over the week the full story emerged. She'd slipped and fallen into the river, getting washed downstream with the flood-tide. A current pulled her under and she'd eventually gotten caught up under the drain. The arm the workmen pulled off had been broken as she'd tumbled about under the water, she didn't feel a thing when they tore it off. She said she didn't feel much any more, not since everything had gone dark a few days ago.