Day 849

The quakes had taken out a great deal of the old prison-turned-museum, dragging half of it down the hill and exposing the remaining half right down to the foundations. Everyone was too preoccupied trying to survive, rebuild and recuperate to bother with a museum that hadn't caused any damage to the rest of the town to properly explore the remains.

When the council finally found the resources to allocate a team to evaluate the level of damage and salvage what they could, they found that there was a whole new section underneath the foundations. Hundreds of cells were crammed beneath the concrete with at least eight skeletons inside each one, all in uniform and all reaching upwards with their manacled hands.

It wasn't made public until they had some kind of basis behind it, some reason for these people to have been given such a slow death. What they died of was easy to determine, among the bones there were only three complete skeletons that showed no signs of teeth marks. In other words they ate their way to survival until they eventually succumbed to either starvation or asphyxiation.

It's hard to say what was kinder, to die quicker and know that your body will be eaten or to slowly black out with a full stomach.

Day 848

While it's true that over fifty American submarines, though missing, are still considered to be on patrol it goes without saying that their crew members are also considered to be at duty. Their whereabouts unknown and their deviations from their original orders unspoken of among the general public.

They called it Project Methuselah, a way to make humans live longer within extreme conditions - the ocean being their main focus. With a crew of a hundred on average, multiplied by roughly fifty, they had a decent enough sample size in nearly identical circumstances.

The primary method of intake for the "super serum"( as it was colloquially known) had to be something that would survive in the depths of the oceans. If the project was successful enough then the crews would move outside of containment and begin to build beyond all human capabilities of the time.

They chose for it to be an implant that could synthesise the serum from the subject's own blood and release it at a steady pace. It was practically perfect on paper and on mice but when it was put into practice with the crews of over fifty submarines, things went awry very fast.

In most cases the implants caused a kind of toxic shock within the subject's body as their antibodies began to target their blood cells at an alarmingly fast rate. This happened with the majority of subjects, almost seven in ten to be precise. The pre-planned solution was to terminate the crews once they had achieved a 100% fatality rate.

Thus the fate of most missing submarines is solved, though not every crew suffered the extreme reactions. Almost twenty crews are still out there, unaging and unfeeding, having outgrown these functions after the first week of the synthesised serum flowing through them like the sea water that now filled their lungs so easily.

Their mission has become simpler as the years have progressed, from fighting in the war to building a shelter to forming a society at the heart of the ocean to just living each day in relative peace. They are able to study the sea like no others before them and will continue to do so until their implants wear out.

It isn't known what will happen to them by then - it could be hundreds of years from now or mere weeks. They might continue to thrive with the serum still self generating as a natural part of their new bodies. They might drown instead. By that point will they even be recognisable as humans?

Day 847

In the town hall there is a section that only a select few members of staff have access to. Consisting of two hallways and eight rooms, the public had no idea it even existed, let alone dictated the majority of changes and regulations for their humble area. The hallways aren't unusual, nothing to write home about compared to the rooms.

The room we focus on today was a mess of signs, all written in the same handwriting and all featuring conflicting messages. The council used this room as a way of seeing how the decisions made in other rooms would fare among public opinions.

It was all a part of their process - see if one room wanted to make a decision, check another for the fine details, check the one beside it to see if there would be a death toll involved, check the room of signs to see the collective opinions of the decision etcetera etcetera until a decision was made and a new rule either implemented or removed.

While this process was lengthy and tedious it held far better results than the council simply using their own initiative. It had even helped to prevent an incident involving the deaths of seventy five people due to one room demanding they reverse the roads. That day the room of signs was full of screams, written in exactly seventy five different styles of handwriting.

Some days the room of signs was utterly blank, the public as uncaring and lifeless as the corpses they would one day become. On other days it was a mixture of "yes", "no" and "god who put these idiots in charge and where can we find them because they need a boot to the face pronto".

Lately every sign has had the same thing on it in the same writing style, scrawled again and again and again. Ever since the room of new laws decided that a housing estate should be built on top of a field lovingly named Hag's Nest. All the writing says is "don't dare wake her".

Day 846

The stench of decay had been lingering around the fields for several days with no signs of leaving, if anything it was getting worse. It wasn't until a missing persons case placed their person within range of the fields that the authorities were given reason to take the smell seriously.

It took police dogs all of five hours to find the body, or rather a shrivelled sack of human with an exceptionally caved in stomach. It wasn't their missing person, it was someone else who would have to be taken to the morgue to be properly identified and processed to find their cause of death.

As the forensics team tried to separate the body from the ground  (the recent heatwave having damn near fused it to the cracked dirt) the stomach collapsed entirely, sending up a cloud of dust, flies and the stench of fresh pus. It sent the team back retching and gagging, hoping that when they turned back it wouldn't look as bad as it smelled.

After composing themselves once more they saw that the body had died over some kind of tunnel - quite a large one at that. It would have been all to easy to dismiss is for a badger's tunnel or a fox den but for the fact that when they took a closer look they saw a string of lights descending down and curving gradually to the left, seeming to spiral down out of view.

Day 845

It felt like he had been pacing the room for hours, still staring back at the wall, its words and trying to figure out what to do. The wall still said "I'm behind you" but it never said how far and so he had little choice but to retrace his steps to find the person behind his current predicament.

Back once again through the monochromatic house that was beginning to feel more homely than his own flat, more familiar and almost comforting in its unchanging details, as unsettling as they were at first. Like the way that small black hand-prints had followed him all along the corridor as he'd first entered, seemingly chasing him into the kitchen wherein the fridge opened by itself to reveal a pulsating interior that screamed his name as he screamed back at it in horror.

Good times.

Now he was working his way back to there. Firstly along the upper hallway, checking into every door and finding the same bloodstained sheets folded neatly (they were all in a pile of dripping rags but he'd been there for so long that he'd gotten bored and made his own order within the mess). From there he hugged the wall as he headed down the broken staircase, avoiding the especially wobbly planks that had sent him tumbling during the first few hours.

Through the dining room, whose plates glistened with freshly hatched maggots writhing over some unidentifiable food source, and finally into the kitchen. The hand-prints moved about the walls in a way he'd never seen before, making gentle plap sounds as if the unseen child was lightly slapping the walls to get his attention.

As soon as he took a step the hand-prints began to scurry back, the fingers arching out of the wall and wriggling along. He chased after them, not wanting to think about who or what they were fleeing from, only knowing that he should do the same.

They stopped at the front door, retreating to one solitary hand that pointed back to the way he'd come,
Back to whatever he'd been running from, the unseen danger that made the unseen children run.
It was still behind him.

Day 844

The beach is one of those places where people are either hyper-observant or blissfully unaware. For many these two distinct states become the thin line that stops them from heading towards the strange black shapes that hover just on top of the waves or the reason they wake up thirty miles down the beach in someone else's clothes and holding a handful of scales.

Our beach is always a cause for concern in some way or other, its become a trend for the papers to write about A Brand New Danger every Sunday (and Wednesdays too during the tourist season) in the hopes that at least the local populace will avoid the worst of whatever the calamity is.

Last week it was that the seagulls were vomiting up large globs of tar that burnt any skin it came into contact with. I wisely took my umbrella everywhere while my nana decided she'd had enough of the papers ordering her about and is currently still being treated for the burns she got as a result. Those gulls have great aim, I'll give them that. They managed to nail the same spot several times in a row within the span of five minutes.

They still do this but now the papers are warning us about "colossal ruins that are due to be washed ashore" which honestly didn't make sense until the photos began to appear online. So far we've had a tree stump that's about thirty feet high by twenty something feet across, stained pitch black. It crumbled to the touch, revealing countless deep sea fish trapped inside, very much alive, their stomachs all full of the same red worms.

I wonder what will wash up tomorrow. 

Day 843

To disassociate with yourself is to see and feel your body as a thing that isn't you. I do this from time to time involuntarily and it always worries me that one day I'll get stuck somewhere not quite outside of myself to be considered projecting but definitely not able to control my body.

It's like I stop being me and start watching a recording of my body just existing as a meat sack with a shaky autopilot. Occasionally it'll happen while I'm doing something like getting dressed or making a cup of tea and I'll continue to do the rest of the activity until I reach the point where muscle memory stops and I'm left standing still like a robot come to the end of its command chain.

Every now and then though, usually during an evening episode, I'll find my hands moving and clenching while I can't control them. They twist and the bones creak but I never feel a thing until the episode ends and I'm left with painful sprains and bruises all over wherever they've decided to grip.

I keep meaning to try and be near a mirror when an episode strikes to that I can see if my hands are being moved by something. It certainly seems like someone wants to move my arms while I'm away and I wonder what would happen if they managed to kick me out of myself. Would I be a better person?

Day 842

They say some artists give their souls to their work when they die and these trapped pieces of humanity are what give these works the ability to captivate an audience. In most galleries you could walk past a thousand paintings and never find one that makes you stop and stare but some specialise in the works of the deceased and use their soul-bound work to make their money.

One gallery in particular, not overly well known but consistently visited throughout the year, doesn't just prefer the works of the dead - they offer a brush to anyone on death's row and wait for the inevitable. It's quite clever, taking advantage of the oncoming death to make themselves a free piece of art that they could sell for millions to the right eyes.

There's something about a painting made in the room where the artist died that gives it a whole new depth. Literally in some cases, as the painter's soul relives their final moments, gradually warping the canvas from one scene to another and back again. This shifting of realities gave way to several stories of people trapped in paintings, moving about from day to day as if they were alive. Few realise that they once were, or even still believe they are.

I remember a painting my uncle finished the day before he died in his studio. Heart attack in the early morning while everyone else was asleep - we never heard a peep from him and didn't find his body until late afternoon, having believed he'd been working all the while.

He was hunched over on his side, right next to a painting of his cousin's fishing boat sailing past a tropical waterfall. We didn't notice it changing for several days, too busy with grief to see him waving at us from the boat or notice that there was water leaking over the frame and the scent of the sea perfumed the entire house, so strongly did he want to be alive again.

Of all the memories of my uncle, the one I'll never forget is when he came to visit me the night after I took that painting to my home. He was sat at the end of my bed, drenched in water and smiling down at me. I felt the ocean waves behind him gently spray my face as he slowly got up and climbed back into the frame. He's there right now, cheerful as ever and sailing right towards me.

Day 841

The drone was controlled by a young boy who sat in his grandparent's back garden trying to see what was in the fenced off building past the forest. While the camera wasn't fantastic and while he didn't check how far the camera could go before it lost signal, he continued to send it onwards to find him answers.

The flight over the forest was fairly dull to him, though he did get to swoop down on an unsuspecting passerby as he reached a clearing. They tried to take a swipe at the drone but he managed to fly it out of harms way just in time, cheering to himself from the comfort of his fenced in hideout.

As he reached the edge of the forest, the unnamed building drawing closer by the second, he felt nervous for the first time. He wondered what he would see and if it would even be interesting. What if his older sister was right and it was just an empty old factory? Either way, he wanted to find out.

He flew the drone into the first open window he saw on the third floor, seeing nothing but a corridor and broken doors on either end. Aiming the drone left he decided to make it loop around, maybe finding interesting documents or something cool along the way.

He hadn't been expecting to find a small campfire with what looked to be a rat slowly roasting over it.
He certainly hadn't expected something to fly out at the drone and knock it to the ground.

As he held his breath, wondering what to do next, the drone began to move as it was picked up.

Day 840

The city's creed and only warning is carved on the town hall in simple words: "At the sound of the trumpet the dead will rise." and rise they did. Now this didn't happen too often, maybe once or twice a month. Enough to keep the locals constantly listening for the all too familiar roar of the ancient and unseen horn welcoming the dead back to life briefly.

Over the years the city dwellers had come to categorise the dead, create a set of rules and memorised them. It meant the thin line between surviving or joining the dead grew a little thicker, meant they would live to hear the next call if they chose to remain in the city still. Some took the call as a challenge, a way of proving to themselves that they deserved to live, others saw it as punishment while most feared it as a sign that their end was fast coming.

You can't avoid death forever, but you can at least try.

The rules were simple enough: find a group that you KNOW are alive and stick with them. If you have doubts about any of them, any reason to suspect they might have died since you last saw them then head to the police station instead. Never go to the hospital, never get in an ambulance or any kind of vehicle - they will always be dead. Always. And they will want you to join them. Always.

The trumpet's effects didn't last for long, usually eight or nine hours at most. The end was signalled by the sky lighting up in something akin to the aurora borealis flowing all around the dead to drag them back to whatever state of afterlife they had been in (as the living who survived a conversation with the dead often found they experienced it utterly differently each time they were returned from the call).

In terms of categorising the dead the main ones you watched out for were Movers. As the name suggests they were the most mobile, not always the most vocal but the clingiest creatures imaginable. Once a Mover had a grip on you they were impossible to remove until they were returned. If you weren't dragged back with them it was considered a miracle and a sign you should leave the city immediately.

Aside from Movers you also had Screamers, Burners, Drowners, Downers, Shooters, Youths and Kin.

Fairly self explanatory really.

Screamers were like an Irish banshee only formerly human and fairly translucent, hard to see them until you were almost on top of them then BAM they shriek and your eardrums burst like squeezing overcooked peas. Apart from that the whole unhinging jaw on a regular human thing looks unbelievably disturbing. Nightmares guaranteed.

Burners are said to be people who died in some way involving fire, be in a car crash, arson prank gone wrong or even the odd witch trial victim. they're a little similar to Movers in that they like to share their warmth, always calling out about how cold they are. Never offer them a blanket or any sign of open arms. Just run but not for water.

Never head for large bodies of water like ponds, pools or bathtubs, don't meet the Drowners. They'll only try to take you with them and they don't even mean it maliciously. They're just really lonely and forget that the living need to breathe.

Downers, on the other hand, know what they're doing. They're out to spread their pain and convince you to join the Downer legions, as it were. Their arsonal is as varied as the entirety of human suffering put into a person can possibly be, that is to say if you meet one you have about an eighty percent chance of joining them. Best option is to run away laughing.

Remember to duck occasionally too, Shooters love moving targets but their aim is awful. they're generally riddled with smoking bullet holes and trail gore behind them like a long skirt. If they are left long enough they'll often end up shooting themselves some more or the other dead. Makes for an interesting quarrel for sure.

Youths and Kin are often in the same boat in that they can be any of the other types in addition. The only differences really are that Youths are harder to run from in general - something about their little faces stained and their chubby little cheeks incites pity and compassion wherever they go. And then they strike, of course. Kin work on a similar basis but they are always someone you knew. Makes it harder to run from them I suppose, all those tears obscure your vision and the next thing you know you've walked right into a Screamer.

Any inhabitant of the city will tell you all this - some even hand out free pamphlets at their shops. Some don't, even going so far as to lie and say it's all a tourist gimmick. More ignorant people running about only makes it easier for the veterans to survive another night, wouldn't you agree?

Day 839

You could tell the shop was run by an old Catholic couple by the Biblical verses written all over every wall in red paint. They had a mixture of the traditional "love thy neighbour", "for God so loved the world he gave his only son" and "The Lord is my shepherd" which they claimed kept them safe.

When I used to work there I never noticed anything out of the ordinary about them, they were just very worried and a tad superstitious. The rest of the staff weren't allowed to wash the walls no matter what got spilled on them, just in case they wiped away any paint.

What few people realise is how the verses change the further into the shop you get and just how violent they are when you reach the store room. The owners spared no surface back there, covering every inch in red painted verses, the kind most people will deny are even in the Bible to begin with.

The one that stood out most to me, the largest one on the main wall as you headed into the store room was from Deuteronomy 13:15, according to the paint. It read "Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly" and whenever the owners came into the room they'd clutch their rosary beads fiercely, like someone was trying to take them away.

We couldn't quite make sense of their behaviour, chalking it down to some odd religious thing and leaving them be, at least until the old man pulled me aside one night at the end of my shift to whisper in a trembling voice "Do you think He will forgive me, a sinner?". You could tell he was talking about God by the terrified emphasis on he.

I repeated a quote I'd seen near the donated book section about God being forgiving and made the mistake of asking what he could have done to be so afraid. He took me up to the roof, to where the old water tank was and handed me the key for it, his pale hands shaking as he muttered how it wasn't his fault and he just found the children there.

Day 838

He brought his bike to a gradual stop, the engine purring as he swung his leg over to get a better look at the remnants of the city. From his vantage point on the old overpass he could see the dregs of society wading through the slurry that was gradually submersing what used to be London around a hundred or so years ago, before the Dog Days.

It was estimated that out of the global population only 36% would be affected by the contagion, the chosen method of reducing the overcrowding without having to spend resources on health, education or any other long term family aiding programs. Unexpectedly, but unsurprisingly, the contagion wasn't just effective, it was too effective, ending the lives of over five billion humans worldwide before developing a mutation somewhere around Kansas.

As far as mutations go these weren't as bad as they could have been. Even he hadn't managed to escape the contagion, though his family fled civilisation generations ago, back when the mutations became unbearably visible and everyone feared they'd lost their humanity. The identity crisis brought on by this had split humanity into factions of varying self acceptance and self loathing with some groups going so far as to try and enhance their mutations, further distancing themselves from people who were soon becoming less kin and more distant cousin.

Those who looked at the mutations through rational eyes saw them as an opportunity to study the adaptability of the human body and how readily DNA accepted these new commands and lines of genetic code, numbing pain while gradually (or rapidly, depending on the sub strain of the contagion) morphing the body into something more suited to a specific environment.

His mutation made his lungs almost twice the size of the non-mutant (now dubbed original) human body. He had no trouble breathing while his bike hurtled along at over 100mph, though the rest of him had yet to adapt alongside his lungs leaving him unable to move properly when on his own two feet. It made him a vulnerable target if he stood still, luckily in modern London standing still was for the dead or soon-to-be-dead. Frequent headaches and the constant struggle of not-enough-or-too-much air aside, he got off lightly in the grand scheme of the accidental genetic lottery.

Others were less fortunate, he could see them in the half drowned streets below, writhing in agony as their bodies continued to change far faster than they could produce enough adrenaline to counteract the pain. Sometimes a passerby would take mercy and kill them, usually holding them under and letting them go quietly (unless they had gills or other external air filters, then slitting the throat was kindest).

He knew he wasn't any different from them but he still refused to go any closer to the lower levels, some part of him worrying that he might catch their strain and adapt beyond his body's own capabilities. It was the worst way to go, you know. To be killed by your body trying its best to help you survive.

Day 837

When one of the basement walls collapsed during heavy rainfall they found the remains of an old church that had been utterly forgotten since a landslide in the area buried a good deal of the 16th century town that had been Creech Haycombe (the current town being New Haycombe).

Through the collapsed wall they found they were in the main church hall, the old roof still stable enough to have kept the interior like a time capsule, complete with mouldy Bibles and open doors leading to several mausoleums that must have belonged to the richer families around that time.

Strangely though, each and every coffin was open and empty. The lids were neatly placed to the left of every box with no trace of the former occupants. The lack of dust in humanish shape suggested they were recently moved yet they were the first people to have explored the church, at least they thought so.

Choosing to explore further and pretend the empty coffins were just body snatchers and nothing reanimated was following them, bones gently clacking against the old stone floors, they headed for the main doors. They'd hoped to see some ornate carvings or anything interesting, they weren't expecting the front doors to be wide open.

They certainly weren't expecting to find a street beyond that with sparsely lit homes and figures shuffling about in the gloom, utterly unaware of the newcomers.

Day 836

They're burning things in the allotments again, I can see the smoke from my flat on the hilltop. No matter how many letters I write to the council or how many times I complain to the allotment owners nothing is done to stop them. Absolutely nothing. Drives me mad.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for a bit of tidying up and some of those allotments can only be saved by burning everything and starting from scratch. It's just that when the wind blows my way all I can hear is the screams of who and whatever they're burning - not to mention the smell ranges from pleasant barbecue to singed hair and plastic. It's so off-putting!

At least when I do burnings in my garden I'm considerate enough to use a small underground chamber that my husband Jerry dug out himself. He's good like that, makes sure we can keep up the standard rituals without causing unnecessary hassle for anyone else, unlike the allotment owners.

They'll have their turn soon enough.

Day 835

What came out of the farmer's fields first thing in the morning fog appeared to be a herd of horses. It was like they'd been ushered in by the bad weather and ushered out as it began to clear. This happened every morning the mists came, which wasn't all too often in summer but as autumn rolled in, so too did the mists and with it the horses.

They were silent, always so silent and so still. They never tossed their heads or interacted with each other as a regular herd does. They made no move to back away or greet anyone who dared to approach them and when the mists went they backed away into the woods, weaving between the densely packed trees until they seemed to vanish entirely.

We didn't understand what they were at first, the never eating horses whose gazes didn't stray from the human onlookers the entire time they were there. When they were touched they felt cool, perhaps too cool for a living creature but this was attributed to the chill of the fog at the time.

People came from all over the nearby town to see the odd herd who hid in the forest as soon as they got the chance. So many touched them, always to gentle and timid, but it never ended well for them. It wasn't blamed on the horses until we understood them a little more. When we tried to feed them.

They didn't eat no hay, didn't drink no water and refused to open their mouths for even the juiciest apple or freshest oats. Then the farm owner's missus cut her finger while trying to peel an apple, thinking the fresh fruit might entice them only for the whole herd to snap their heads towards her.

An old woman who'd lived near the fields on her won for years began to come outside to tell us about a local legend, creatures who could only feed on what was freely sacrificed. We understood then, just what they wanted and why they'd been so patient and by god we were foolish enough to give it to them.

It started with small cuts, then someone offered their smallest finger and it snowballed. It became a mania to give a part of yourself to the horses and hope they gave you something in return. And they did. They gave a quicker death to anyone who'd given them something before the year was over. Anyone else who'd seen them and given nothing suffered an agonising death from an internal bleed so severe that the police thought the first few cases were from car crashes.

I hear the horses will be coming back tomorrow morning, the same day they first appeared out of the mists after four hundred years of hiding. I'm planning to give them my right hand as thanks for sparing me when so many others perished.

Day 834

When I was a child I'd go with my nana once a year to visit grandad's grave. He'd died a year or so before I was born and, to cheer herself up on the otherwise dreary visits to her late husband, nana would take me along with her. It became our Thing, our little activity together reading kid's books to his tombstone and telling him about our year so far. As I got older we'd share family gossip with him too.

It may not have been everyone's idea of an perfect childhood but it was something just for nana and I. The only thing that upset me was a set of twin graves with realistic bed shaped headstones. They belonged to twins who had died aged four and a half, according to the writing and we're now peacefully laid to sleep forever. It frightened me, the thought that death was just sleeping and never being able to wake up. I guess before that I never quite knew what death was or why grandad was under a stone in the ground.

It was only made worse when I asked nana why they used such realistic beds - it looked like you could just skip between the sheets and nap! She said that if I tried I'd turn to stone and that it had happened all over the world already. Countless children had been turned to sleeping statues by trying to nap on bed shaped graves.

Of course I looked this up and found too many examples of "sleeping child" gravestones with beds that bore a striking resemblance to the twins in grandad's graveyard (as I'd thought of it at the time). I kept well away from the twin beds after that, never telling nana why I wanted to walk to see grandad a different way, the longer way around the outskirts of the grounds by the woods. She never questioned it though she protested at her old bones having to go further.

I kept to that route for years, never thinking to go back near the twin graves until a couple of days ago when my niece went missing. It was a daft, childish part of me that said "remember that one time when she saw a statue of a bed at the museum and asked if she could nap on it? Remember that she also sees grandad with nana? Remember nana doesn't know why you prefer the long route even though she'd rather take the shortcut?"

She was there when I arrived, tucked up under the marble blanket like a little angel made of stone. She was made of stone, her features were perfectly realistic, down to the last hair, in a way that couldn't have been just marble. There was something about the faint colour to her skin, too dark to be marble and yet when I touched her face she was as cold and solid as the rest of the gravestone.

I was so preoccupied by her that it took me a good whole to realise that the other twin bed had a sleeper in its sheets too. A girl about my niece's age, about her build but she was wearing a hijab while my niece had her hair in the usual plaits. After checking the local police station's missing persons board I found the other girl. She went missing the same day as my niece. A twin case that nobody will ever solve. 

Day 833

Our city is right next to the sea- nearly every morning we wake up to a landscape smothered in sea-mist. My mother always said to be careful when walking in mist, said there was something about the mists that could change a man's perception. I used to think she meant that cars seemed so far away until they were suddenly right by you or how people become shapeless voices.

My friends used to use the mist as an excuse to run about and scare whoever they could and of course I joined them every time I could. When my mum found out she looked at me like I was a 5'6 spider made out of bees or something equally terrifying. She told me in a quiet voice to never to that again.

It scared me, you know. I'd never heard her sound so scared and angry at the same time. It really made me wonder what the mist was doing to my friends and I when we were out. The following morning I planned to experiment and see if the mist had a physical or psychological affect on us.

My friends were game enough to be my guinea pigs and so from that day onwards any time the mist came they'd take a photo of themselves before and after going out as well as write down what they did that day. It didn't take too long before the results became clear to all of us.

The photos showed that over the course of a month, after eighteen ventures out to scare anyone in their path, their skin was three shades lighter at least, their mouths and their eyes were measurably bigger too, their teeth flatter and wider. The strangest thing was that they were proud of their changes and thought they were evolving into better humans.

If anything my experiment did everything I thought it wouldn't. It showed the mists were changing them, made them see their changes and want to further them by any means possible which now meant that they were staying out in the harbour eagerly waiting for the mist to come and "aid their evolution".

I hadn't seen them in almost four months, they'd skipped school entirely and their families weren't talking about it. The teachers and local council didn't seem to care in the slightest while the rest of my classmates would catch themselves staring at the empty seats and wondering what they were becoming and how long it would be before we all became that something else.

Day 832

They went into the first house they found in the remains of the town just to see what they could loot. It was common knowledge that a colossal landslide had buried the majority of the area during the night which meant one thing for the group - all their belongings would still be inside. Of course they weren't the first to consider looting the place but they were the first to record their trip.

With one person as designated to film everything the five of them set off, climbing over steep rubble-strewn hills and crawling into the first clear window they saw. The air inside was hard to breathe, they all remarked on it as they put on their dust masks and headed for the other rooms. The master bedroom yielded a few broken necklaces and dirty shoes that could easily be cleaned and sold on.

The remainder of their day was spent moving from house to house, picking everything clean and coming away at the end with several rucksacks full of stolen belongings. They were disappointed that they never got to see a body and wondered if the local authorities had come by already to take them away for proper burials.

When they had finished with every house that they could go to without stepping too far into the less stable areas of the town, they headed back to review their footage and start cleaning their newly acquired possessions. They expected the footage to be creepy, perhaps creepy enough for them to put it online and make a little money from it. They didn't expect to be followed home.

It started in the first house with the faint sounds of several people coughing violently. The conferred among themselves and agreed that none of they had coughed in that house, not inside it at least. It continued in the second house with shadows in unusual places, almost like the home owners were still there in a sense, hunched over and coughing from all the dust.

When the footage got to the third house a chill went through the group as a child's voice called out for their mama. A small shadowy figure scuttled about between them, tugging their clothes and always asking for their mama. They never felt the tugging or heard the child, never saw anything out of the ordinary yet the camera showed the child following them for the rest of the trip.

Even when they were filming the journey home, high on endorphins and thrilled with their stolen goods, the child sat in the middle seat on someone's lap throughout the entire ride. They were little more than a crumpled mess of shadows, crying for their mama. The footage ended when they got to the living room, the child no longer in tow, shown to be heading upstairs and calling "mama" still.

Quietly they sent the designated camera person to the stairway, with headphones plugged into the camera to see if they could head the child still or if it was an elaborate prank of some sort. Judging by the shrieks from the hallway the child was still with them and they had no idea how to get it to go home.

Day 831

When the fifth day came and went he began to wonder if anyone was still looking for him. He'd been hiding in the thick bushes on a roundabout between three fairly isolated villages and he hadn't seen a car since day two. At first he out it down to the bank holiday weekend but then, if even the bankers were on holiday wouldn't there be more traffic, even out here in nearly nowhere?

His 13 year old self refused to entertain the idea that there might simply be nobody there, that the warning yelled at him by drunk Dave behind Aldi might be true and the creatures he described to anyone who'd listen might be real. Then again, the boy did remember seeing some unusual looking birds on day two that hovered like kestrels but seemed to have four pairs of wings. Maybe they were just moving their wings fast though. There's no way drunk Dave could be right.

When the sixth day came the boy finished his last can of tuna that he'd nicked from the kitchen and turned his phone on. There were over thirty texts from his parents and friends and almost thirty missed calls, only five voice mail messaged though. They were from his parents and his best mate Luke.

Message received August 8th at 23:40 from contact "Luke".
                  Hey, so uhh your mum called and said you weren't back yet. I told her you were at mine for the night so get your ass over here before she comes to get you tomorrow or asks me anything, alright?


Message received August 9th at 14:32 from contact "Mum"
                  Where the hell are you? That Luke you hang about with lied to my face and said you were with him but his mum says you've not been over in a week! Your dad's out looking for you and for your own sake you'd better get back home or so help me you'll be grounded until you're fifty!


Message received August 9th at 14:48 from contact "Mum"
                  Jamie? Look, I know you're upset with me and you don't want to talk right now but this is urgent. Get inside the nearest house, I don't care that I've always told you "Stranger Danger" just do it and don't look up. Text me the address and we'll come get you just stay indoors. We love you!


Message received August 9th at 15:01 from contact "Dad"
                  Oi Jaymo, pick up your damn phone and tell us where you are. It's not safe to be outside, I hope you've been keeping up with the news. They're bloody everywhere. We're holding up at Sherly's house along Maythorne Avenue, remember the place? Call me back so we know you're safe. Your mum's phone's dead from trying to ring you.


Message received August 9th at 15:20 from contact "Dad"
                  James Montgomery Clark, if you don't pick up the phone right now and let us know you're safe I'm going to break public curfew and come get you mysu- the message cut to garbled screams and glass breaking before settling into a series of wet crunches and then utter silence.

End of all messages. To repeat messages please press 1, to delete message please press 2.

Without thinking he pressed 2 and began to run for home - no, Sherly's place. As he ran (completely ignoring his parent's warnings to get inside as soon as possible) he tried to call everyone back but found his phone had no signal. He tried again when he was inside the village without any luck before he began to look around at the carnage he'd managed to escape. By the time he got to Sherly's blood had soaked right through his shoes.

He was left with nothing but silence and the knowledge that he'd deleted his parent's final words.

Day 830

You can only see them in running water, their hazy bodies moving to and fro as if they were reflections. They walk among us unseen for the most part, choosing to hide themselves as much as possible but when the signs are there everyone finds reasons to avoid whatever street or shop they move into.

I saw my first one in a garden centre off a small junction on the A14. Since then I've heard how unusual my encounter was- apparently they don't usually try to get your attention but this one did. I was three and a half at the time and barely over two feet tall. Every fountain was eye level to me and that's where I saw them. Just the one genderless pair of hands beckoning me to come closer to the edge of the pond before they pointed down at the dark blue water.

They look fairly human, all things considered. It seems that one had gone to the centre with their family too, though all I saw of the others were enormous legs that were far taller than the pond was long. I never saw their faces, only the face of the smaller one - a child like me who wanted to trade my doll for a pouch of marbles.

When my parents found me I no longer had my doll, the damp pouch felt heavy in my pocket as they dragged me out to the car. They insisted nothing was wrong but it was "getting late" which is their way of avoiding the reflected people. I never told them about my new marbles or the fact that ever since then the same reflected child has been following me, waving at me with the doll.

The child is the reason I still carry those marbles with me in their pouch and I can proudly say that twenty years later every marble is still there. Whenever the reflected people start to gather in an area I need to go through, be it a street or a park or a building, I make sure to hold the pouch so that it's visible to them and they let me through with no problem.

Not everybody is so lucky, with some found drowned in whatever surface the reflected people were in. Others are only declared as victims by the fact that their shoes and bags are found unattended and soaking wet, sometimes with remnants of the missing person hastily stuffed inside. Usually fingers, toes and teeth. They never seem to like eating those.

Day 829

You know that cliche "toss a hoop over the bottle and win a goldfish" roaming carnival kiosk that gets portrayed in the backgrounds of so many movies? We had one come to our town and it turns out they must have watched the same movies or gotten the idea from somewhere else because they had a little kiosk offering "magical" tadpoles if you won.

Out of every aquatic or even semi-aquatic creature they could have gotten cheap enough, that was easy to maintain or restock in between settlements, they chose tadpoles. Coincidentally near the field where they'd set up there was a (admittedly rather grimy and rubbish filled) pond where frogs were known to lay their eggs. It didn't take a genius to work out where they'd gotten the spawn from, or so I thought.

Out of luck or some previously unknown skill, I managed to win a "magical" tadpole of my very own which I ended up dumping in with my sister's pet fish. I had no idea how to take care of a tadpole other than leaving it in water so I did what any ten year old would do. I hoped my parents would know and sort it out while I watched it turn into a common frog so I could dump it at the pond where it was probably born. Mission accomplished and such.

Except it didn't grow legs, it grew a fish tail and it didn't grow a froggy looking head, it grew hair and something a lot more human looking. My sister was obsessed with her new pet mermaid, or whatever it actually was as it didn't seem to be getting any bigger than twenty-something centimetres. After somehow persuading our parents to buy a bigger tank for her pet (and them not caring or pretending that it wasn't real), she'd spend most of her free hours trying to teach it to speak and it would mimic her mouth movements with worrying accuracy.

Trouble only came when it decided it had enough of being in the tank and managed to flop across the room,down the hallway and into the other fish tank. I found it in there quite happily squishing the poor little fish against the glass while seemingly talking to it. I must have made a noise because the next thing I know it shoved the fish into its mouth,jumped out of the tank and squirmed its way past me back to its own aquarium like it was nothing.

I couldn't tell my parents as they denied that the mermaid was anything other than an exotic fish while my sister had lost interest in her little fish as soon as the mermaid developed a face. The best thing I thought of at that time was calling the nearest aquarium and asking if they were interested in a "weird small shark my uncle brought back from Tijuana because it's too big for the tank now" and somehow they believed little ten year old me. I didn't question it, I just wanted the little monster out of the house in case it got any ideas about eating the rest of us in our sleep.

I made sure that when they came it would be when my sister was out at her friend's place and my parents would be driving her there leaving me and the mermaid alone. I told my parents I would be at our neighbour's house while they were gone to cover my back because, of course, my sister would be absolutely devastated at the loss of her mermaid.

The aquarium sent two "trained marine handlers" who seemed friendly enough until they saw the mermaid playing with the spine of the fish (as it had been doing with increasing frequency at the time). I played the dumb kid and maintained that it was a weird shark from Tijuana while they tried to figure out how to handle it, or if they could handle it. It took them a while to figure out that they could just grab the mermaid by the end of the tail and the scruff of the neck to slip it into a large, padded, glass transporter tank.

When it was time for me to be collected from the neighbour's place (that I'd slipped into the second the aquarium guys left) I played dumb kid again and was unbelievably upset that my sister's fish was gone. She bawled her eyes out and demanded we try to find it, even printing out "lost fish" posters to stick all around the area. My parents seemed quite relieved to have the thing gone and while they never questioned me about it, they gave me a fair few treats for no apparent reason.

After my sister had begun to get over the loss of her mermaid our parents thought it would be a great idea to take us to the local aquarium who said they had a mermaid themselves. She was furious about it and said their mermaid would never be as special or amazing as hers because hers used to talk. On the drive there I realised this aquarium was the same one that took her mermaid in the first place and spent the rest of the drive preparing myself for her reaction.

There was no way I could have fully prepared myself for the way she reacted, trying to break the glass and screeching out at everyone that the aquarium had stolen her pet while the staff only said that they'd rescued it from a home in another state entirely.

While this was going on the mermaid, now almost five feet in length, remained right at the front of the (admittedly enormous and well suited) tank, webbed hands pressed against the glass. Our eyes met, brown to black, and it mouthed out something that still keeps me up, worrying that I might wake up to find it right next to me.

It mouthed "You're my next fish."

Day 828

The house had been reopened as a museum dedicated to the artist who had lived there in the early 1800's. Her name was plastered all over the surrounding city as their main attraction, little known as she was in the art world. Her claim to fame was a portrait of the Earl of Mulgrave dated 1812 that hung in London's National Portrait gallery, utterly dwarfed by the surrounding paintings of bigger and bolder members of that era of society.

It was a fairly small house for its time, every available surface painted in a pink so pale it was practically white, as was her way of working with colour. That aside it was also surprisingly minimalist for the time - nothing ostentatious, no gold drenched surfaces or gilded anything, just the barest of rooms. It reminded visitors of being inside an egg, hollow yet overwhelmingly cramped.

In the uppermost floor there was a hallway no more than twenty-six centimetres across, leading the historians to believe the artist herself had hidden something of immense value down there away from a society that went through a distinct phase of large skirts and distinctive silhouettes that would never have fitted through the walkway in any decent manner of dress.

It was roped off most days, save for the week when several slimmer members of the National Trust attempted to navigate it for the sake of curiosity and historical knowledge. As the hallway progressed it shrunk and shrunk until it was no wider than eighteen centimetres, leaving all but one person behind to wallow in their frustration and unsated intrigue.

The young historian found themself feeling lost in the sharp turns and claustrophobic pastel walls that felt impossibly tall as they continued deeper into the unexplored uppermost rooms of the house. They slipped into the first open door they found, having bypassed three locked ones already, and had to retrain themself from gagging as the stench of decayed meat and dead foliage met their senses.

The artist had owned several cats and two bears, allegedly, well allegedly no more as they inched closer to the pile of matted fur and bones that had been suspended from the ceiling by a thick chain. From the size it had been little more than a cub which was certainly news for the historical society, something that would surely bring the artist's name right into public light, albeit in a negative light.

After making copious notes and taking as many photos as they could, they left to carry on down the hallway and away from the, still potent, stench. The next door opened into a room that had previously only been seen from satellite images and by the company that cleaned all the glass of the house, including this greenhouse styled studio. Cloth-wrapped canvases were stacked high all around, making it either the ultimate treasure trove for any aspiring art historian or simply a storage room. Still the old canvases could potentially be sold, which was of some comfort.

As they began to delicately unwrap the closest canvas they caught a movement from the corner of the room as a piece of low hanging cloth fluttered in a room that hadn't felt the wind for almost two hundred years. Something felt too... off about it and so they backed out and headed back to their group, not looking behind them and trying to ignore the sounds of faint snuffling breath, hoping it was just their imagination.

Turn after turn for what felt like hours, they squeezed their way back to safety as hot air puffed inches away from the back of their neck all the way. Rounding the final corner they caught their colleagues eyes and saw them widen in sheer terror as they began to scream at the young historian to move quickly, just run, for the love of God get out, what the hell is that thing, why aren't you going faster dammit??

Gasping in relief they fell out into the wide room, staggering away from the narrow hallway and turning back just in time to make out a looming tower of black matted fur, hunched over with bulbous milky grey eyes staring out over a gaping maw filled with rotting yellow teeth. It made no attempt to move further, panting for a few minutes almost in contemplation before slowly and deliberately backing away down the hall, eyes staring out unseeingly into the terrified faces that couldn't help but stare back. They had found her second bear.

Day 827

Those dreams about falling happen when a soul tries to leave your body. Contrary to popular belief we don't have souls, at least the souls aren't us, they are separate entities that form alongside our own consciousness and eventually leave us. It isn't known exactly where they go to or why they all go there but it's somewhere underneath the North Pole.

Now not everybody has a soul inside them, some are lucky enough to be skipped by this parasite entirely and never have to experience the little voice in your mind that tells you to do the unreasonable like run in front of a bus or lean too far out of a window.

Souls don't always appreciate having to remain inside of us until we reach our eventual end and large clusters of them prefer to speed up the process, so to speak. There's something waiting for them beneath the North Pole and they are eager to get to it as soon as they have enough consciousness to understand what it is.

Day 826

The worst thing about the Dead is that the majority of them don't know they are dead to begin with. They will spend years wondering why everyone is so sad to see them, completely forgetting how or when the passed away in favour of coming back and being an absolute nuisance.

Take, for instance, a small bar by the name of "The Rusty Buckle", informally known as Rusty's Place. Crammed between an alley and a convenience store, its patrons were all local people from the nearby houses. Emphasising the "were" as a fire on New Year's Eve ended their lives quite dramatically. Liquor is far too flammable and when spilled over most surfaces, all it can take it one single dropped cigarette to send an entire building up in flames.

Of course this is going on thirty years ago and now the only signs that a fire had ever taken place is the smoky haze that lingers around the ceiling. This is known as the bar is still open and, while it doesn't serve physical drinks, it serves the experience of dining with the Dead.

Apparently this isn't common.

Every person in the bar who is holding a drink is unknowingly Dead and no matter who shows or tells them otherwise they refuse to move on. They're simply too busy having fun and drinking away the rest of time until they feel like doing something else. If anyone in the bar does move on it's cause for celebration all around and then they are immediately purged from the patron's collective memory so that they can continue to drink and laugh until they move on. And so it cycles around.

One of these days Rusty's Place might close for good but until then, pull up a chair and talk to the Dead.

Day 825

The first day the cameras began to record the ocean floor 12,000 feet below sea level, all they saw was sand and the bones of enormous fish. The footage, while blurry and mostly grey, showed that there were clearly teeth marks all along the bones. For example the skull of a blue whale was found to be covered in regular indentations approximately forty centimetres in width - three times larger than a Megolodon's. It gave them reason to believe that something was down there, down deeper than anything they'd encountered before and larger than anything they'd encountered before.

The fourth day the cameras found one of the teeth of the "mega predator" that the media had been raving about. It was slightly smaller than the marks they'd recorded from the whale and almost ninety centimetres in length, wickedly curved with sharp serrated edges along both sides. The team began to work on adapting the camera droid to bring the tooth back, not quite aware of its weight but too excited to care about the practicalities.

The fourteenth day marked their seventh attempt at tooth extraction and ever since the discovery the world's eyes had been obsessed with finding out more about the "mega predator". What else did it eat? Was it even still alive? How could something with such large teeth find enough food to sustain it or did it binge and fast to conserve energy so deep down? How could it catch and eat a whale without anybody noticing?

These people forget just how large the ocean is, after all it covers about 70% of the planet's surface. Plenty of unusual creatures, or even average creatures that are simply larger than their kin, will have slipped through the global radar of the world's marine biologists and oceanologists. It's easier for us to map out the moon than it is to get a camera down to the depths of the sea, especially when the aim is to bring back a tooth that could potentially weigh more than the camera droid.

The thirtieth day was celebrated for the most part with hundreds of major news outlets reviewing the thirty days of footage and research so far, mostly focusing on the tooth and artistic renditions of the creature it belonged to. Even the research team was so distracted they didn't notice what the footage from their cameras was showing them.

One single eye, milky pale green and unblinking. It stared directly into the camera, following it along for the six minutes that the droid took to get from one side of its eye to the other. By the time the team went back to the camera screens all they was was pitch blackness and some strange rock formation that looked like a cross between a fish and a volcanic deposit.

For the next nine months it was all the camera droids could see along one side of the trench they were in while the other side was a completely different type of rock altogether. It never occurred to anybody that the walls were moving at a regular rhythm, instead calling it heat ripples and underwater currents. They thought the gills were a large clump of some new deep sea kelp while never spotting the fins at all. Even when the "wall" tapered off to a clear tail they claimed it was just a rock formation.

Was it genuine ignorance or the cold fear of realisation that it took them nine months to get from the tip to the tail of this unknown behemoth that was very much awake?

Day 824

The houses were built in the late 1800's over a series of hills, all connected with wooden walkways and all lavishly decorated. It was expected that hundreds of people would move into the area creating more jobs and boosting the economy. This, unfortunately, didn't come to pass.

Officially the reason is that the homes were too remote and the transport to the nearby business areas wasn't developed enough for the amount of people they were planning to attract. If you ask the neighbouring towns about it they'll tell you about a plot to create cheap meat that was covered up as fast as it had been uncovered in the first place.

Finding this believable is a task in itself, what with similar tales being made into media fodder but apparently if you go up to the houses (not the one made into a tourist museum but the one past the fenced off walkway that's been covered in graffiti) and get in through one of four broken windows you'll see the all the signs clear as day.

The locals talk about blood stains in the kitchens and desperate pleas for help hastily scratched inside of cupboards, under stairs and loose floorboards - plenty of testament to the brief but gory occupation the people contended with. They don't mention which meat company was behind it all in the first place which is odd, given their vehement displays of disgust to begin with.

Its enough to make one wonder if the new housing estate will always have "For Sale" signs up and when the local butchers gets their deliveries, even when the roads flooded out for almost a month.

Day 823

As the old saying claims, history does nothing but repeat itself. Wars are fought over the same clashing ideologies, leaders are elected and dismissed for the same scandals, monsters live and live and never die in a thousand different movies.

In East Casterborough (just south of Toxlow-Upon-Sea) they take this literally. Back in the old civil war days when the Roundheads fought the Cavaliers both armies had wrought havoc upon the little village. It was a crucial place for the two armies to seize, each wanting to use it's prime position at the heart of the great forest to launch stealth attacks against the opposing team from any and all sides of the woods.

What it actually lead to was a brutal massacre of both the soldiers sent in and the townsfolk trying to get out. The records from that time only say that the place was lost to both sides, not saying who had the upper hand (if either side did at any point) but repeatedly saying that there were wild beasts about the lands that the locals hadn't warned them about. They said that the bodies had all been dragged up in the trees and it had rained their blood for months.

Surely if the wildlife was that hazardous nobody would dare to live right at the core of it? Not unless they were a part of it or had some deal with it, a symbiotic means to ensure their own survival that had somehow failed them during the battle. Or maybe something even deeper than that, something uncontrollable that caused the townsfolk to vanish and leave behind nothing but unidentifiable bodies hanging from branches like autumn leaves just waiting to drop.

The present residents of East Casterborough are all unusually close, as such small village communities are. Everybody knows everybody else, knows their family and their whereabouts at all hours of the day to an uncanny extent. Ask anyone where someone is and they can tell you how many inches they are from the nearest pub, what clothes they're wearing and, of course, who they are with.

It's been suspected that they all have small trackers of radio earpieces with them but the general area consensus is that they aren't human and that they're all a part of some hive mind. The same hive mind that turned them all into unspeakable demonic entities to slaughter the invading armies, as they apparently have done ever since their ancestors came over from Norway on their longboats.

While similar tales have come from equally isolated Norwegian communities, where armies have been reduced to corpses in trees by locals who were nowhere to be found after the battles, no community is willing to compare their blood to the other. Whether this is for personal reasons or another part of an unspoken pact between them, nobody can say for sure. But the similarities are there and the trees around them echo with the rattles of ancient armour against bark.

Day 822

She had gotten into the habit of carrying her camera wherever she went and taking a photo whenever she heard an unusual sound. For years most of her photos were of trees or random parts of the sky, even the occasional bird made an appearance if it had sounded particularly odd that day. At the end of each day she printed her photos and recorded the noise she'd heard on the back of them,placing them into the latest of her countless albums.

She was glad for the normality, glad she'd gotten into the habit and even more glad that she had physical proof that life wasn't as messed up as it had been when she was first given reason to start this project of hers. She'd only been eight at the time, received her first camera for her birthday from her aunt and proceeded to carry it with her wherever she went.

Taking photos where she heard unusual sounds only began when she went to stay with her grandparents in the city for the first time since they'd moved house. Their new home was much larger, giving her enough room to wheel herself around without risking damage to furniture or walls. She had her space downstairs, her room and en suite while her grandparents stayed in the two room upstairs.

The wide space, while practical, made her feel nervous and unprotected. She was too used to carefully manoeuvring around the antique furniture instead of free wheeling through several feet of hard tiled floor. Her only wish at that point was that they'd out a stairlift in so she could sit on the balcony from time to time and watch the sunset with her grandparents - she could hardly risk them carrying her up!

Now the new house hadn't settled properly, as her grandmother said. It creaked and groaned and ticked in a way that sounded a little too much like laughter and long nails running along stone. At first she took one photo when the noises got to their worst near her room, crawling to the door and sticking her camera around the edge before darting back into bed as fast as she could.

Now her first camera was an old film based one with no image viewer, she never knew what she'd taken a photo of until the roll came back from the printer. When the images were developed she could see someone in every night picture. Every moment the noises had been at their worst there was a young boy dressed in torn grey pyjamas bent at an odd angle. In some frames it looked like he was trying to peer around the camera to see her with what little face he had left.

Her nightly photos soon became "any odd noise means I take a picture" became a habit that she kept with her, never showing the photos to anyone and never stopping no matter where she was or who she was with. When she went missing at the age of thirty three the albums were finally shown to her family. The boy was in every photo, peering over or around the lens and over the course of twenty five years he went from crouching nearby to casually sitting around her flat, trailing his intestines behind him like a car on string.

Day 821

It was one of those old Tudor style homes with an original facade dating back to the late 1500's. Done in darkly stained oak with white daubed paint to cover the wooden frame, it looked like an old English fairytale brought to life. On bright summer days you could easily picture fairies and the like fluttering about the extensive front garden.

The only thing to spoil the image was the thick iron fence all around the house and garden grounds. Though it was once painted bright white the paint was now little more than dots and splotches along poles that time and weather had warped to look more like tree branches than a border.

Someone had been keeping the house and gardens in perfect condition all the years it had stood for without being seen by a single living soul. There were no records anywhere of a caretaker or owner having ever been in charge of the property, only an official document somewhere in the council offices that stated the property wasn't open to the public and must remain undisturbed indefinitely.

The order was originally written in the late 1800's by a local lord who had been keen to ensure the house was in peak condition without having disclosed the source of the upkeep. Of course there were rumours of late night joggers (who are a naturally suspicious and eagle-eyed lot to begin with) who claimed to have seen eyes as big as their torso up in the apple trees inside the fence and hundreds of arms where branches should be but these are the kind of people who just so happen to stumble upon corpses regardless of their location.

The occasional trespasser is caught by the police before they can even enter the house and when confronted they always tell the same story. They saw candlelight through the windows and went to investigate - they were only making sure someone wasn't about to burn the old place down, honest!

When they got right up to the window where they'd seen the light coming from they saw a horribly broken and bent looking arm clutching an old candlestick close to a large bulbous head. If they made any sort of noise they'd say that the head snapped around revealing a face with no nose or mouth, only a pair of enormous baby blue eyes, all bloodshot and dry. The eyes would narrow and the thing would begin to crawl towards the window, dragging itself by countless stick thin arms with too many joints but the police would pull them away and out of the gate by the time the creature had begun to open the front door.

If they made no noise and continued to observe it they would see how it lovingly dusted each shelf, humming quietly as it moved small wooden figures about to clean them. Of course the police would grab them and haul them away eventually but they would always try to look back, each one of them seeing that large bulbous head peering out of the partially open front door looking utterly furious.

The one occasion where the creature was seen in its entirely occurred when a trespasser delayed the police removing them by faking a (very realistic) seizure. While it delayed them it meant that by the time they'd pulled the convulsing teenager to through the gate and locked it the creature was literally right behind them. It politely tapped its eight knuckled fingers along the bars impatiently, several dozen sets of arms crossed and torso indiscernible from the mass of limbs it possessed, looking the very picture of unamused and annoyed.

Day 820

As the are mere seconds into their journey the train's tannoy announces "We will soon be approaching Barking Stop. Passengers are to be made aware to mind the gap as it is larger than most station gaps. Please be advised tha-". And anything else he might have said was cut off by a wave of static as the train continued to peacefully rattle along to its destination.

Aside from the louder-than-normal screeches as the carriages hit rust on the tracks the journey was fairly standard for the Hammersmith & City Line. The passengers stood and sat in their usual weary malaise that was half anticipation of arriving at their stop and half unease at the crowd amassed in each carriage, all apparently wanting to get off at Barking.

The tension between passengers only increased as more tried to squeeze on at East Ham, barely leaving room to breathe. Nobody spoke, not even the clusters of youths who arrived together and stopped smiling or making eye contact with each other the second the train pulled away from their station. The air felt unbearably thick and several older people had fainted or were in the process of fainting. Nobody moved to help them - they were all thinking about their next stop.

When the train pulled into Barking, as announced over the tannoy, everyone who was conscious turned their attention to the doors on both sides. As they slid open the people closest peered out into the dark void of the underground. The platforms on either side were barely visible through the gloom as the gap was about twelve feet on either side.

It wasn't really known why there were to many tracks at this stop when only three lines ran to it (and one of those was only in use a handful of days per month) yet it seemed that twenty could happily fit side-by-side with reasonable gaps between each.

One by one the passengers began to hop down and race to the platforms of their choice, much in the way that rats leave a sinking ship in drips and droves. After about an hour the only ones left were those who were still to terrified of the sheer darkness between them and the platform exits and those who had succumbed to the heat and lack of air caused by the crowds.

These people never last much longer than an hour. Exactly 75 minutes after the train stops it powers down completely. Sensible passengers run as soon as the doors open and don't look back until they are on board another train or are on the surface while the slower ones who try to make it to the platforms after the lights shut off are rarely seen or heard from again save for their names scrawled along the passages in dark red graffiti. Always dripping as if it was freshly sprayed.

Day 819

The country has long since lost its Old World names, replacing them instead with whatever words fit the people there. A long standing tradition dictates that they should be called by their officially documented names but no-one cares to follow that. Nowadays they call a place by whatever's most likely to kill you.

Take, for instance, Snaresbrook. One of the largest riverside settlements in the eastern countryside. You've probably guessed by now that they gained their name by trapping the river. While they use a lot of snares, their victims generally drown before any local can get to them. Lord above knows what they've tethered the snares to deep down in the murky river, but it works a treat for them and drags whatever unfortunate creature down until they bob up dead and bloated.

Another fun place to walk past (from quite a distance) is DogBite. Now this town doesn't have man actual dogs there and the name is a shortened version of Dogged Biters (dogged meaning grim persistence) in reference to the way the children like to latch onto strange adults in large swarms, hanging off them until they stop moving. Some say that the children aren;t even human and that their saliva causes madness but this can't be proven - who has a working lab these days?

As for myself, I live in a large-ish series of villages,collectively called Blodberth, from blood-breath. Unlike the other settlements we don't use unmanned traps or send children to bring food back in for us. We keep it quiet and personal, just between us and our prey. The preferred method is where we hide ourselves in the grass, in the bricks and dirt and rubble, making it look like there's nothing but empty houses ripe for raiders. Outsiders always fall for it and the second their backs are to enough of us we come along and slit their throats. If they watch their backs carefully enough we don't get to them quite as directly, having to pierce their backs with long slim needles and let their lungs slowly fill with blood until the collapse into helpless the writhing worms that humanity is full of.