Day 910

What they don't tell you about Frankenstein's creature is how the pus oozed between the stitches whenever he moved, puddling at his feet wherever he stood or sat. He was covered from head to toe in yellow rivulets that had already soaked through his clothes and shoes, leaving damp footprints wherever he went. With every blink he tried to clear his eyes of the constant stream of discharge from the sewn up gash across his forehead. It almost looked like he was crying.

What they don't tell you about vampires is just how inhuman they look when they don't have a steady food source, how their skin hangs in great drooping folds and how they have no stomach, only a mess of intestines that diffuse blood into their body at an unparalleled rate. Their skin changes colour, from a healthy complexion to wax in a matter of bloodless days at such a rate it can be seen with the naked eye. Most have gone without blood for years at a time to maintain the illusion of humanity, consuming our food and watching with silent horror as particles of their meals begin to visibly clot their skin.

What they don't tell you about werewolves is that they can get stuck in their full moon form, something too distinctly human to be a wolf but at the same time still not recognisable as a human. Their minds flashing from either end of the spectrum, human one hour and animal the next - altogether incapable of surviving beyond a day, too conflicted to do much more than scream and howl at the sun rises. It's an unspoken rule among their communities to kill them out of mercy, rather than leave them in a constant state of mental fluctuation that their full moon form can't handle. Better they die quickly rather than drag it out until they overheat and pant themselves to slow asphyxiation.

Day 909

They left the building when the frost began to seep through the double glazing, the blankets covering the double glazing and the carpeted wooden planks covering that. At least it had brought them enough time to use their knowledge to improve a second shelter in a smaller building with far less windows and heated door frames.

It took less than three weeks for the entire colony to move out, with the last few barely managing to close the door behind them and seal the frost away for however much longer they'd manage. So far they'd lasted almost eight generations without seeing the sun, too far underground for anything but the occasional stray animal to visit them.

Their only contact from the outside world was from the rations truck that drove from shelter to shelter along the old mine tunnels, never deviating and never turning off lest the engine freeze up. That would be the death of them all for sure - that one smallish truck was their lifeline and though they knew that depending all of their lives on one thing they had few options and many lifetimes of supplies, thanks to the collapse of shelters 53 through 88.

Any shelter beyond 88 had been cut off from the food supply for almost four years now, the efforts to break through the rubble were all unsuccessful at best and lethal in mot cases. They were all presumed dead or worse, scuttling about on the frozen surface like the rest of the unlucky ones, limbs little more than blackened frostbitten nubs with long dark pink icicles protruding from wherever they'd bled most. their faces were much the same, a mess of blackened skin and thick reddish-pink ice (or sludge, depending on how fresh they were) covering whatever facial features may have survived.

Back in their old shelter they could sometimes hear the faint ticky-ticky noises of the unlucky ones as they walked over the roof, trying to find a way inside and failing. At least now, without the colony there to maintain the place, they might have a better chance. Nobody quite knew what happened to the unlucky if they thawed so there was the possibility that they weren't the savage abominations that they looked to be at first glance. They might be perfectly civil but you'd have a hard time finding someone willing to even be on the same floor as them, let alone speak to them.

The new shelter had thicker doors and made them feel safer about the fact that they were only a few metres from their old one and could still be reached by anything strong enough to break down the front door (which, for some of the frost-changed creatures, would be painfully easy). While they had explored some of the new shelter, the former colony having abandoned it to go and attempt survival on the surface and failed to come back after eight years, there were still many floors they hadn't touched.

Two teams were formed from a mixture of quite strong and average people so that the weakest wouldn't be sacrificed and the strongest could defend the majority and ensure maximum survival potential. Team one went up, to the top three floors that were barely given a cursory glance for life before being declared liveable, and team two went down to the basement level to check for surplus supplies.

Neither team made it back to the "safe" floors, not a single one of them. Death was the likeliest option but they had never made a sound, not so much as a little peep for help and the stench of decaying flesh was nowhere to be found. The remainder of the colony chose to join one of the lower numbered shelters and bulk up their watch team instead of staying somewhere that swallowed people with no sound.

After this, shelter 19 was crossed off the growing list of active habitats and more names crossed off the survivor's list.

Day 908

Few people went far out in the lake without a boat. The water had an ink quality to it, the kind that makes your skin crawl just thinking about what could be down there. Of course your brain helpfully points out that it's rural England and the chances of anything bigger than your average four foot cod are slim to none.

Still, deeper down in your thoughts lurks the little phrase "but what if" which is a curse of a phrase if ever there was one. It's the kind of phrase that slithers about your thoughts and makes you wonder just how bad things can really be, if you weren't so naive as to believe they could be anything but the worst to begin with.

This little phrase now asks you "but what if there are bigger things down there and what if they can see you standing by the shore?" to which you could easily laugh off as fish don't care about people, only food. They're just simple little beasties leading simple little lives. But what if they can see you and what if they're follow you whenever you walk your dog by the water? Would you necessarily be able to see them under the murky surface and would you really care if some daft little stickleback was tailing you?

These thoughts cling to the corners of your mind,as intrusive little things often do, keeping you wary of seemingly innocent objects, people and places like the clown statue at the end of the pier or your grandmother's false teeth. The same thoughts that have kept people from swimming in the lake for as long as anybody cared to remember.

When the corpse of something prehistoric washed up on the shoreline, stomach full of human remains, everyone's worst fears were confirmed. All those suicides from the tall bridge miles upstream and their bodies all ended up in the belly of something that looked like an octopus, a bag of needles and a box of glass eyes all had a baby that grew to almost 10 metres long.

So many of the bodies looked fresh, barely digested to the point where they cold be mistaken for merely sleeping, yet there was no obvious sign of death on the creature. The lake was closed to the public for a few days after that while the authorities did their thing of wandering up and down the shore, debating this and that until they declared that the lake was safe again.

The growing missing persons list contests that but that's another story altogether.

Day 907

It had been sighted all across the midlands, leaving behind it a trail of corpses and a dark cloud of coal smoke that lingered for weeks afterwards. From the outside it was utterly normal at a glance, aside from the lack of name or number to lend it to a particular company or area. The interior, however was another matter entirely.

You couldn't tell from the outside, the windows were covered by a sticker of a normal carriage, a decoy that continued to fool whomever mistook the train for their intended one as it pulled innocently into stations at random. As the unsuspecting people stepped inside they would see blindingly bright lights and what appeared to be regular chairs on unusual metal flooring. When the train set off the lights would begin to flicker, everything about the carriages would begin to flicker and gradually fade to a grim reality.

Where brightly coloured seats should be were instead small cages, stuffed to the brim with something pale and writhing, its bulky frame squished in so tightly it was impossible to tell what it actually was. The pale metal flooring around them was stained red, freshly spilled red that glistened in the now feeble lighting.

At this point most people would be trying to find the emergency brakes and staying clear of whatever they'd been sitting on. Not everyone would make it that far though, some people have the strange tendency to fall asleep as soon as they're on a train being lulled by its rocking and whirring. Their bodies are found closest to their station, large bite marks all over their bodies but bearing a peaceful sleeping expression. The venom is merciful enough to paralyse as it begins to break the body down. Sometimes all that's left of them is their shoes.

The train spits out the dead like grape seeds, all it wants is their memories and the strongest ones are formed from the strongest emotions. It can't make people fall in love or feel joy as they naturally would so it adapts and feeds from whatever it can get easiest - fear. It warps and distorts reality itself to take what it needs, throwing the rest away like an unwanted sweet wrapper.

Nobody can pinpoint where it began, after all traintrack suicides happen around 300 times per year, what's a few extra on the side? Though it isn't known where it came from, its path is painfully clear - the channel tunnel. It brings a harsh choice for the government, one that could risk millions of lives either way. Do they block the tracks, dismantle them and keep the train stranded in England or do they let it go abroad, break the way back and pray no more turn up?

Day 906

Every night at 7:45PM the park wardens were meant to close the gates for both car parks, switch the electric fences on and leave any new information about the forest and its inhabitants pinned to the multitude of notice boards scattered about the premises. For years they'd done this like clockwork, always on time and always armed, just in case.

The wardens were considered local heroes, risking their lives every single day so that the public might live near the forest, enjoying their cheaper housing with minimal potential issues. Through years of constant vigilance there was bound to be a slip-up somewhere, after all the wardens are only as human as the rest of their community (which was to say mostly, with a little forest thrown in a few generations ago that nobody talks about).

Of the two car parks, one is used far more than the other due to its close proximity to the information centre, while the other remains in the area right beside a housing estate who have long since learned to fear the forest rather than stroll its whimsically typical paths. This was the car park that they forgot to lock one night, the night everything found it could Get Out.

Now the average outsider might wonder what could possibly be that bad inside a small town forest - what would put an entire community in the hospital within the span of eight minutes? These are the kinds of people who either don't live near natural areas or have been too well protected to know anything about the creatures within them.

This doesn't mean hedgehogs, deer, foxes or even badgers. This means shambling amalgamations, centuries old but with the speed and rage of their youthful counterparts, leading whole civilisations right in plain sight and ready to strike when the defences are down. Wardens are the thin, mortal barrier between us and death whenever we are near the woods.

The night they forgot and everything Got Out was brutal but brief, a test of what the forest creatures could do before they waited their chance to strike again with finality rather than curiosity, Limbs were lost and scars were gained in equal measure, homes destroyed but no lives taken. They came to see how fragile the not-wardens were and now they know.

After untold centuries of being kept ignorant they know how they can best kill us, know how easily we bleed and what weapons they will use. The wardens have begun doubling their numbers and posting updates every hour on the forest creature's patrols, their whispered threats and desperate pleas for public donation to upgrade the defences.

Day 905

The return trip had been longer than Crew 6 had expected with the sudden appearance of a colossal dust storm forcing them to halt and latch the shuttle to the nearest and largest rock. It had taken almost four days for the storm to pass, heading eastwards and hopefully bypassing the transporter that was needed to take them from the surface to Sky Base Theta.

As soon as their signal returned, protocol advised that they contact their main base and report any casualties or vehicular damage, just in case either were made worse by use of the standard transporter. Theta gave them the all-clear to take the shuttle up, no further questions asked. It was an unusual thing for them to do, what with their reputation for being sticklers for the corporation's multitude of rules. Crew 6 were too tired at that point to care much, thankful that they would soon be bathed and ready to rest in a proper bed.

Another unusual occurrence began once the transporter was on its clunky way up to the Sky Base, communications didn't cease. It was well known that there was the slight risk of short-circuiting the radio board if the shuttle wasn't stationary while sending or receiving messages, something to do with the system trying too hard to engage with the main base without a fixed location.

They would be well aware of this but they insisted on keeping the lines open and beginning the debrief before they could even assess the state of Crew 6, both physically and mentally. Dust storms were draining in all ways with the continuous threat of a local creature that was fond of using these storms as hunting ground mistaking the dull grey ship for the carapace of their preferred insectoid prey. Native fauna aside, there was also the life support to worry about and the filters potentially becoming clogged with debris hurled around at speeds of 500 km/h on average.

The debrief seemed to focus on the strange rock formations they'd been sent to investigate with the hopes that they would turn out to be a more developed sentient life form, one willing to trade at least. Crew 6 confirmed that they'd gone as far inside the rock formations as they'd been able to, both in the shuttle and on foot until they hit dead ends. It seemed like whatever had lived there left a long time before humans had set foot on the planet.

Sky Base Theta was dissatisfied with these results, insisting that the crew return as soon as possible and ready to excavate around the area in case the inhabitants had burrowed beneath their homes. The Comms. team wasn't supposed to advise on future missions, they were barely allowed any say in determining medical care or post-mission shuttle repairs yet it sounded like they were on speaker to the entire Comms. department who all had an opinion regarding their mission and next steps they should take.

Crew 6 muted them briefly and after a brief discussion they ended the call, switching their communications system off for the remainder of the lift. They agreed to claim it off as storm damage frying the already strained circuits and head out for their allotted post-mission absence. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, though it was mostly to stop them worrying at the oddness of call.

Even when they docked the shuttle (having to do so manually as their communications system was "down from storm damage") there was something not right about the docking bay. There was nobody there, not even the core crew of androids who ran the bay during shift changes. In fact, as Crew 6 wandered the base in a protective huddle they didn't spot a single living life-form, organic or otherwise.

They did notice unusual heat readings coming from the Comms. department, specifically the broadcasting room. The decision was made to turn one of their suit's communicators back online. Immediately they were bombarded with the sounds of well over a dozen voices asking them to confirm their location and report the crew's status. With a tense nod from the crew leader they nervously read out the closest sector number, hallway junction and room.

Then they waited for what felt like half an hour, twelve minutes in actuality, not noticing as the temperature around them began to rise until they all began to sweat in their suits. Comms. was frantically asking them to repeat their location, saying they sent a medic team down and the given location was empty. The crew advised they would head to the main medical bay, now feeling the drop in temperature as the medic team chimed in to advise they would meet the crew there.

Now knowing they were definitely not alone, though accompanied by life claiming to be crew, they made a new plan and headed for the broadcasting room. They theorised that if they weren't expected then maybe they would be able to see what was calling itself the staff of Sky Base Theta.

Day 904

There's a house down by the old Roman wall that's covered in blue doors of all shades and sizes. My uncle says that each door leads you to a different room, even though the windows just show the brickwork behind it. He says that's just to keep the ignorant masses out.

I didn't believe him until I walked past that house ans saw somebody walking into one of the doors. I waited around for a while but he didn't come out. When I told my uncle and he demanded to know which door the man had gone through and took me over to the house so I could show him.

As soon as I'd pointed out the door he became furious, screamed that it was his door and flung it open, stormed inside and slammed it closed behind him. I put my ear against it and heard the sounds of people arguing - one voice clearly my uncle's, another man's and a woman who was trying to get them to stop.

There was a loud crash, like glass thrown against a wall, a couple of thuds and then absolute silence. I turned the handle, the door opened smoothly and quietly to reveal a bloody scene. Inside the room had once been some kind of bar/billiards combo but the balls were all embedded in the heads of my uncle and the man who I'd seen go into the room before him.

The floor was coated with glass shards and the bar was void of all drinks. The billiard table bore a large dent along one side, like somebodies head had been thrown against it - their fight had been brutal but short. Even the ceiling - even the walls had blood speckled along them from the sheer intensity of the blows.

I never did find the woman who'd been begging them to stop but I found traces that she'd been there. A broken stiletto stuck in the bar top, a purse and all its contents spilled in a corner, the words "not again" scribbled under the bar in red lipstick. She'd been there for sure but was somehow nowhere to be found in a room with no exits but the door I walked in and no way she could have gotten out without me seeing.

I never considered that there might have been a room behind the mirrored wall of the bar, let alone consider that she'd be behind there watching my every move and making notes about me. At least, not until I went back years later when the police tape was gone and the case closed. She hadn't hidden as well this time, I saw her slip into her hiding spot, billiard balls clenched tightly in her fist.

Day 903

Autumn is welcomed across England as the leaves finally begin to turn and summer souls are laid to rest until the seasons shift once more. For now though, there are things occurring in the world that can only happen around this time, when the barriers between the living and the dead are at their thinnest and we use celebrations as an excuse to appease them, keeping them in their realm for another year at most.

As is commonplace for England, the smallest villages have their own unique celebrations and customs. For example in Hither Pipage they cut down exactly thirty six birch trees and have them thinly sliced so that they can all be slotted together to form a symbolic hut where, for the month of October, they all bring a single flower each day to slide between the wood. At the end of it the hut resembles an enormous bouquet and is then burnt so that the dead receive the flowers in the afterlife.

Not everywhere is so quaint though, using the prime example of Old Replade and their "flayed minikins",as they are locally known. A flayed minikin is a kind of straw doll with a strip of the maker's flesh sewn along the front like an apron. Traditionally the flayed skin is only taken once every twenty years and those under the age of eighteen are allowed to substitute their skin for pigskin.

The minikins are then strung over a series of communal back garden bonfires and left to smoke until all the leaves from the village square's thousand year old oak tree are gone. It's meant to ensure a warm and forgiving winter, you see.

Though they aren't the only ones who practice old traditions in the hopes of an easier life, they are one of the few who use their own skin to do so. Others like Water Pollton use crows wings as a necklace until they get the year's first snow or the spring's first buds, whichever comes first. Nowadays of course, its harder for them to catch and kill their own crows, the buggers know which places are safest for them and have all but moved out of the area completely.

Ordering in taxidermied wings is fast becoming their only option, that or the alternative of infant toes. The principle connecting the two is that both birds and babies aren't seen to be capable of thinking bad thoughts and are thus the best things to use to attract good things to your life.

And so England welcomes autumn in the usual way - with oddities, rituals and a little bit of blood just for luck.

Day 902

I'd been planning this with my friends for about three months. They wanted to celebrate graduating from university and I needed someone to take my place at the swimming centre's quarterly overnight stay. As far as the public knows they do it as a dare, like initiation for the newcomers but its a blatant lie.

I'd feel guilty about doing this to the people I've known for five years but at the same time I've seen how willingly they step on and over other people to get what they want. They've done it to me before to get into the lecturer's work experience programme, offered to cook dinner for the first time in months and then suddenly disappear while I was eating. Surprise surprise, I got food poisoning and they got to the sign up sheet.

It's what sealed my decision really, what made me bring the overnight stay to their attention and plan my escape while they took my place like a rat in a snake tank. The night we'd agreed on came sooner than I'd expected, time just flies when you're planning the "accidental" deaths of your alleged friends while also finding evidence to pin the whole thing to a group suicide pact.

During my training with the swim centre I'd witnessed an overnight stay so I'd know what to expect when it was my turn. I saw two people go in, a fellow trainee and an experienced employee. My boss said I could opt to either have a staff member or whoever from the public come in with me but somebody had to remain in the pool by 3AM. This time it was the trainee.

After four hours of fighting and trying to outwit the staff veteran he ended up barely floating in the deep pool, ready to accept the same fate that I was going to let my "friends" go through on their own. It'd be just like the food poisoning incident, I'd slip out to use the toilets and wait in the bar, behind thick glass until they were gone.

It didn't quite go to plan on the actual night though. It seems that there's way more than one poolkeeper like I was told. There must have been eight at my last count, before I curled up beside the mini fridge and prayed they had no idea I was still inside the building.

By 5AM, when the sounds of screams and splashing had faded to satisfied gurgles and belches I thought I was safe. Then I heard the faint but unmistakable sound of the poolside door opening and closing, followed by wet footsteps quietly pittering their way towards the front of the building.

I didn't peer around the corner I just hid inside the nearest cupboard and peered through the keyhole to see one of my friends had survived. Well, they hadn't died just yet. Their torso was covered in deep bite marks and blood was pouring from them at a steady pace. They swayed where they stood, seemingly staring into space until I realised they were staring through the glass and into the pool.

I don't know how long we remained there like that,me hiding and them staring at the poolkeepers but eventually the cleaners came in for their post-poolkeeper cleanup and called for the manager immediately. That was when I came out of the cupboard. We agreed on a story and when the manager came in he seconded our idea, dragging the dazed survivor into the staff showers to be "dealt" with.

Apparently the poolkeepers have more reach than I thought. Every now and then while I'm on duty, wherever I am I'll see a glimpse of them or hear their gurgling mixed with the bubbling Jacuzzi. They've even left notes in my work locker on damp paper. They're so happy that I came to work for them and that I brought them so many things to eat.

The manager's signed me up for the next overnight stay, offered to triple my pay if I can get a group like past time. I don't want to disappoint them - I can't disappoint them. They're counting on me.

Day 901

There wasn't a metal rail leading up the hill and into the forest last time she came this way. There certainly weren't leaf covered stairs next to the rail. They looked steady enough to walk on and tempting enough that she began to walk up them before her mind could quite catch up with what her feet were doing.

Twigs snapped and leaves crunched underneath her as she continued to climb deeper into the woods, grabbing the rail the whole time as if she feared she'd be lost entirely without it. After a couple of sharp turns in the staircase she spied the corner of an old thatched roof on her left, covered in a patchy layer of grey moss.

As she suspected the staircase lead her right to the front door that looked as though it had been broken down once or twice and roughly shoved back where it was meant to be. That and all the windows dripping with condensation made her feel uneasy about the place so she chose to head down a smaller path to the right of the door to see if there was anybody inside.

This time she took care to tread as quietly as possible, not noticing how the shadows shifted behind her. or how eyes as large as her head peered out from the thick foliage surrounding the derelict home. It had lived there a lot longer than the neighbouring humans and was none too pleased that yet another had found their way into its home.

While it stalked her silently she carried on glancing into any window she saw, peeping in from the corners, head low in case someone was still inside. The pathway she was on lead to an overgrown garden that had once centred around an ornate fountain with dozens of little fairy statues all over, playing where jets of water must have come out only now they were all missing their heads and hands.

Heading to the far edge of the garden she saw that this house must have had a wonderful view before the owner left and the plants had taken over. she could even see her own home not too far from there, her mother was in the back garden taking in the washing.She decided to give her mother a call, spur of the moment decision, forgetting where she was and that she was trespassing.

Oh, the look on her mother's face when she finally managed to see her daughter between the trees up the hill! She even remembered the former owner's name - Mrs Thompkins who'd been taken off to a care home by the authorities when a concerned neighbour told the police that she'd been screaming at the trees and telling them to leave her alone. What a foolish woman! Must have been her old mind going.

She wasn't sure when her mother's voice trailed off into silence, all she seemed to remember was the agonising pain coming from the clawed hand sticking out of her stomach. As her vision faded around the edges, getting hazier and hazier by the second, she heard her mother shriek through her phone and wondered what all the fuss was about.

Day 900

The museum's latest installation was a mix of performance and sculpture bound together in for form of two gigantic plastic balls set neatly on the floor, one connected to a large metal block with no windows and seemingly no doors. This was where the performers rested during closing hours, they weren't meant to leave for the entire two months that the show was on, all their supplies sitting neatly inside the cube, according to the leaflets.

It was called "Rubber and Glue" after the catchphrase, meaning that whatever the people outside did would be copied by the actors and amplified so that a lasting impression was left behind after the show was gone. It certainly left something behind and it was a lot more physical than a mere impression, though it dented the floor too.

During the show there had been a few incidents, as with any interactive show. It began when one of the performers collapsed and refused medical help, instead they retreated to the metal cube and weren't seen for the remainder of the show. Every now and then a performer would break character and try to signal for help but the security guards had been told that the actors must be in character at all times and they would move people away from the artwork until character was resumed.

They didn't know he'd died until they released the actors after the two months, finding his rotting body in his bunk, surrounded by paper flowers. His name was never released, the artist refused and claimed it would have ruined the artwork's intent to be full of nameless mirror beings.

This only made it more sought after, spreading it from gallery to gallery followed by protesters and the inspired masses alike. Performers began to sign up for it as a challenge, a test of endurance and skill. Having to stay constantly in character without losing yourself entirely soon became the next big thing.

Of course this was only one out the multitude of things to go wrong with the show, not to mention after the show. It seemed that with every gallery it left there was something wrong about that area. Not that there was much physically wrong with the space it had once been on but there was something in the air that made it harder to breathe when you passed through that space, like you were breathing nothing but the same stale air as thirty other people.

In some smaller galleries that feeling spread, everyone inside felt like they were being stared at by unseen eyes, even the staff felt it. Ceilings were inspected, health checks carried out, asbestos stories made their rounds in the news but nothing concrete was found. Only the lingering feelings left behind by too many souls crammed in too little space with too little air.

Day 899

"You've always sat there, why change it now?" he said, frustration mingling with the confusion in his tone. He did not want this to change, did not want her to change even for a moment in case All Eyes fell upon her and noticed that she'd always been there.

She opened her mouth as if to sigh and every window gently shook in the breeze that wasn't there. Her crackled wallpaper skin creaked as she shifted, it was a dangerous move. There had been too many close calls as of late and she was the cause of them all. At times he was tempted to forgo his family's promise and leave her behind in favour of a safer house.

It wasn't his fault All Eyes wanted her dead, they'd been after the mostly-departed ever since the first ones came back from beyond the grave. There were just so few of them left now, every one a living history book that had to be protected whether they wanted to be or not. After all, how can we know where we are going if we don't know where we're from?

That's how they sold it to you, a house with one of the mostly-departed hiding out inside like a scowling rug just waiting for you to forget to lock the door so they can bolt into the great wide world and be torn to shreds by All Eyes before they could say "Oops."

He'd seen it happen before to the people who'd lived across the street, they'd thrown their guy out after they caught him eating their Sunday clothes again. She had tried to peer through the curtains to see how he was dying but they'd convinced her to sit still and quiet enough that All Eyes wouldn't know she was there.

It had been too risky to work in the first place, keeping the mostly-dead so close together and hope that neither would be spotted. Unless they planned for this, using it as a way to get rid of the irritating and potentially dangerous, leaving behind docile little textbooks that will happily talk about every minute aspect of their past life.

She wasn't like that, never had been either. Right from the day his family had moved in she'd told them in no uncertain tones that she didn't want to be there but she'd keep herself quiet and still until the children were fully grown. Some sense of right and wrong had come back with her at least.

And now in the present when he and his sisters were all adults, him inheriting the house and her while his sisters lived their own lives, she was growing fed up. It had started with twitching, complaining about her old bones aching and now she wanted to move to another chair, one closer to the front door.

If he said yes she'd be in prime position to make a dash to the front door and be seen by All Eyes in a split second. If he said no she'd keep trying and twitching and fidgeting until he caved and he knew he would cave. He was just as tired of this as she was and he knew All Eyes wouldn't harm him. It didn't like fresh meat.

Day 898

When the plague began the government sealed off the city and blocked all communication coming in or out. They destroyed the roads, detonated the land around it to create a three mile deep trench around the outskirts and "worked on the cure" for the next thirty eight years.

Every now and then they'd release some minor breakthrough like "Scientists predict a cure in as little as eight years" or "Scientists advise plague might not be fatal to children" while providing the bare minimum of proof to back this up. It soon became clear that these were blatant lies to placate anyone who knew somebody in the city. Keep them happy and more importantly, keep them outside.

Of course people still tried to get past the trench and into or out of the city, videos popped up occasionally showing somebody throwing themselves into the trench from the city-side. After a few years the bottom was littered with bodies and the surrounding area stank of decay. The government's solution of course was to dig deeper and, after a further half-mile, bury the bodies to prevent anything from eating them, not that any animals went down there. Even the crows stayed away.

Thirty eight years after the city was quarantined a team of four friends, Kate, Lee, Moira and Nadia. All self-proclaimed urban explorers who'd made it their mission to get into the city and see who, if anyone, had survived the plague. They were even prepared to stay in the city if one or all of them became infected. It was their reasoning that the world needed to know what was going on and so they decided to live-stream the entire trip.

To get over the trench they hired a powered hang glider and used it to cross the trench with thick rope attached for the others to climb across, something they'd practised once on a trip to the Alps. Like the last time it went reasonably well, nobody got stuck for too long and the rope held out all the while, even when Lea decided to stop mid-way to film the fresh bodies lining the bottom of the trench.

As a safety precaution they cut the rope when they'd all crossed, having stored more in the hang glider for the trip back, and covered the aforementioned glider in a sheets that were lying around, having untied them from the rope that they were used for. Glancing down the trench they could see someone with the rest of the rope in their hands still, the knots having given way at some point during the attempted escape.

Their next challenge was the barricade made of shipping containers stacked six or seven high to block the outskirts. It hadn't stopped anyone, judging by the multitude of corpses below. If anything it seemed to have made people more determined to escape. There were countless ropes, holes and planks about the place that meant people came this far out regularly, though none could be seen presently.

The team having donned their dust-masks picked the closest one and began the ascend into the city's outer limits, trying not to gag as the stench of decaying meat grew stronger the further they climbed,as if the trench hadn't smelled bad enough. Once they'd reached the top they stopped for a break and to talk to their viewers who numbered around 200,000 and were all eager for the women to get down into the city.

From the top of the shipping containers they could see that the city was full of bodies, strewn everywhere haphazardly and not a single moving being in site. Still they remained cautious, asking their viewers to be an extra set of eyes for them as they aimed their cameras to cover their blind spots. Once they'd determined the safest route down they continued their journey, already filled with dread.

None of them had ever seen a corpse up close, let alone smelled one that had been left out in the summer heat for well over a month. It showed that people had been living up until recently, and that there were possibly still survivors to be found and interviewed.

As they picked their way through crashed cars and wrecked shops they found themselves at the city centre, by the fountain that was a major tourist attraction back before the plague had struck. They considered stopping there for further questions and viewer interaction but it felt too exposed, too much like the surrounding buildings were watching them.

Their audience informed them they were being followed by a small group of people which spurred the women into heading back the way they came, out to somewhere far more open than narrow city streets. After all, if  they were going to be confronted they wanted to have plenty of space to get away.

It turned out that the group who'd followed them were children and the viewers helpfully brought up the news article stating that children were less likely to get the plague. Judging by the open sores and bulging tumours all over their painfully thin bodies, this wasn't the case but the women theorised that perhaps children just lasted longer?

The children said otherwise, saying they knew that they'd probably be dead by the end of the week but there were still plenty of "lower stage" people who were alive and had a longer lifespan. As they spoke, the team's hearts broke for their loss and for all the pain they were in as the viewer count neared 700,000.

Vowing to come back the next day the women gave the children the snacks they'd brought with them and headed back for the glider. They didn't see or hear as three of the children collapsed behind them but the viewers wrote paragraphs mourning them.

Declaring that they felt fine, no signs or symptoms like the children had described, they gave themselves the all-clear to climb up and out of the city. The glider was exactly where they'd left it though the sheets had been tied into what seemed like a new rope at first but glancing down it was a noose for a young man.

Thoroughly spooked at this point they tried to get back as quickly as possible, tying the rope and climbing across the trench so fast that Moira got ropeburn. They didn't even think twice about the possibility that the infected man might have touched their rope.

As they signed off of the live-stream and went home Moira found that the children were wrong about the incubation period of the plague. It wasn't one week, it was one day. She wondered what would spread faster, their video stream or the disease they'd brought back. She wondered if she'd livelong enough to find out.

Day 897

The year was 1805. It was always 1805 and had been stuck between 11:36AM and 12:02AM on July 22nd in the year of Our Lord 1805 for so long that nobody had any real idea what the date would have been by now. Most weren't inclined to care much, either repeating their 26 minutes or doing exactly as they pleased while the clocks snapped back to 11:36AM endlessly.

This was only happening because somebody was supposed to have died then and somehow they didn't and continue to live.  She had been wandering the length and breadth of England ever since her father had collapsed on the shore, telling her that the source of the reset was here somewhere and it was now up to her to find them. She promised to honour his last wish, leaving his body where he lay, knowing that he'd be back in his boat when she killed the source and let time flick back to the original 12:02AM, July 22nd, 1805.

When things like this happen life has a tendency to try and "fix" the situation any way it can. Repeated lightning strikes are always what happens first, the primary sign that the person in question shouldn't be alive right now. Aside from stories of lightning strikes she kept her ears peeled for the other things her father had told her about - the anomalies that followed the source.

She would know when she found them by the way they watched their backs at all times, hopelessly paranoid that death would be on them in an instant if they weren't paying attention constantly and if she found them they'd be right. They'd be gone before they could beg for one more minute after the possible centuries they'd wasted running from the inevitable and freezing everyone else inside a loop.

Everyone but her. Everyone she knew probably had no idea she'd even gone missing, not even her father would know now. He'd be trying to pull in his nets while she hunted down the source. Perhaps she was another one of the world's fail-safes against death-breakers. She could live with that, the source would not.

Day 896

I know where I'm going to die. It will be in my own home.
I know who will do it. He lives next door and drives his Nan's Ford to church twice a week.
I know how he'll kill me. He's been practising his knots and sharpening the kitchen knives too.

I just don't know when he'll do it.

That's the worst part of this, of knowing every other detail right up to the way his upper lip twitches when he finds he can't lift me onto the chair so he can kick it out from under my feet. It's not that I want to die, I just want to know when so I can get my life in order enough that it'll be easier on everyone instead of leaving them with debts and no last will and testament.

Even if I do prepare all of this it'll just mean that I'll be waiting with nothing else to do but watch him until he makes the final move. Sure I could move and avoid this whole thing but I know this would just happen in whatever new place I go to with whatever new neighbour I have, no matter how many miles it is between my house and theirs.

I've been through this with several homes before, you see. From single house in the countryside to high security apartment in the middle of a city. Every time I have the dreams showing me how I'll die and by whom. It's always the same method and always a neighbour.

Out of all the neighbours I've had, this one I don't mind killing me. It'd be enough to get him off the streets where he's done worse than plain murder. I just need to know when before I take matters into my own hands, invite him over and ask him to just end me already.

Maybe that's what I need to do though.

Day 895

When the first colonies were established on the moon they built them around the remnants of the first astronauts. Little cluster-bases were based around the "major" sites as though they were park statues, those empty lunar rovers and descent stage pods all so shiny still, though they were little more than relics to the modern world.

Each base was named after whatever descent stage pod was within its range (the multitude of Apollo's and Luna's were somewhat confusing but at least somewhat distinguishable) and armed with a crew of thirty each to begin the testing phase of the colonies. Should they prove habitable then swathes of the wealthy were eagerly awaiting their latest New Thing to hold over their social circle.

The daily logs they recorded showed progress was being made in leaps and bounds in terms of improvements to the building structures, gravity simulators, food production and general necessities for long-term survival on an otherwise uninhabitable ball of nothing.

It wasn't long at all before the crews began to report that people from the other bases were dressing up in old astronaut suits and stealing their equipment. Later that month the incoming logs reported that they'd tagged fifty individuals who were non-crew and all wearing the old suits. Without oxygen tanks or external oxygen supplying tubes.

From what the earth team could gather every base was planning to meet up at Base Apollo 15 to count and identify themselves as well as ganging up on whoever was inside the old suits. They were all fed up, scared and generally annoyed with the petty thefts from faceless people who refused to name themselves. They figured if they were all in an oxygen rich base then they can safely de-helmet one of the old suits and see who's behind the mischief,at least one of the persons.

Earth team tried to respond back to the news, asking for images of the suits to prove that somehow they'd been adapted to perhaps produce oxygen from the moon's atmosphere or so they could try to use image editing software to get a glimpse at whoever is behind the helmets. They received no response for almost three months.

When a response did come back it was a hastily written log full of spelling mistakes and ending with a photo that would circle the internet for centuries to come. It marked the beginning of an event known globally as "Homecoming Day".

The log read:

16/10/2254     22:36      Log number: 354      Crew member: Doctor Hilda Friis

We met with the suits. We met ith the bloody suits and we tried so hard to find out who they were but the damn things weren;t tlking. They just atared at us from behins those stupid helmets until Doctor Saito grabbed the release catch on the nearest one and popped it off. That thing wasn't even vaguely human it had so many eyes and no skin. Some kind of mucus membrane, bioluminescent like a cuttlefish. possible genetic ancestors?
The rest of the crew fled, we're trying to get bacl to earth but the suits have taken so much from the shuttles. We never realised they were using our access codes. How didthey learn the access codes and what are they trying to build? If you ge tthis do NOT trust any incoming shuttles from the moon bases. we are not on them.I repeat we are NOT ON THEM.

End of Log number: 354

The image attached was of the young doctor, seemingly hiding under a desk, her pocket camera set to automatically go every 10 seconds and upload it to the colony database to be transmitted to Earth when possible. It was like a movie depicting how she died as beings in old fashioned astronaut suits lifted up the metal desk and brought it down violently on Doctor Friis until all that was left of her was a muddle of viscera and heavily stained clothing.

The final few images showed the suited beings picking up the pocket camera, staring into it - their inhuman shape barely visible behind the thick tinted glass - and taking it when them to what could only be described as a spaceship built from the odds and ends of several colonies worth of detritus and  technology.

The pocket camera lost signal as they left orbit, the final image clearly showing earth in their sights.

Day 894

Though they had long since come to the conclusion that the sea levels were in fact not rising and remained the same depth throughout their fifty year study, they instead found that the land was sinking and somehow not affecting the water levels. At all.

It baffled scientists on a global scale, causing mass debriefings and proposed studies that all focused on the continents and what was causing them to gradually descend into the sea. One proposed study involved digging to the very depths of the earth's crust, past the Lithosphere-Asthenosphere Boundary (or LAB) until they hit the mantle where the tectonic plates rest on ever flowing molten rock.

This plan was liked, it sounded complicated enough that the general public believed it and simple enough that the scientific community reckoned they could do it. They had no idea what they would find but their theorising began, possibility after possibility tumbling out and onto paper. Their names would always be remembered but not as heroes, as heralds.

It hadn't been done before, the extreme temperatures made it nearly impossible and yet a material was developed that could withstand the heat, the pressure and the distance the drill would have to travel before it hit the target point. They had chosen a shallower area of the crust to make it a little easier on themselves though they were criticised for not drilling in one of the continents that was sinking the fastest but in this scenario criticism was bound to happen regardless of destination.

To do what hasn't been done before in all of history is truly exciting, especially when the discovery has the potential to save civilisation as they knew it. With every mile the drill travelled the livestream's viewers tripled and quadrupled in number, with the majority of the world looking on in curiosity and fear as the machine ploughed deeper than  humanity had ever done before.

They weren't expecting to hit a cavern instead of the LAB and yet the footage, data and weight put onto the slow-release cord all agreed that the machine was plummeting down towards what appeared to be a foot as large as Madagascar. The brief minutes of feed gave the barest glimpse as the rest of the creature that was definitely breathing and trying to sit up.

Day 893

Modern media likes to focus on death as it happens, the near-immediate crime scene and the ghost centuries later but rarely the moments in between when the gore is gone but the stains are stuck and the ghosts are barely formed half ideas not fully aware that they are aware.

Take for instance the house of a triple homicide - the usual father murders family and claims he went off the rails when he really had a mistress in another country and wanted a clean break, never thought he'd get caught. The works. While the bodies have been taken and the forensic clean-up crew has done their best there are still traces of death.

The couch cushions wouldn't come clean so the covers were removed leaving little white squares, faintly pink along one corner. It'll stink of bleach for months and when the next owners buy a new couch Terry Junior will poke anyone who tries to sit next to him, even though they can't see him.

There's a pale patch on the hardwood floor by the bay windows where they scrubbed too hard at the blood stain, removing the varnish too. That's where Mummy will stand to watch new people coming in, blocking the light somehow and casting a vague shadow.

All that's left of baby Chanelle is a faint grey ring around the sink where she drowned. It's such a small detail that the clean-up crew didn't bother to do more than a cursory sweep over with their bleach mix to remove any bacteria built up from the three weeks that the little body had been there. Sometimes when the next owners are cleaning their dishes they'll see a baby's face appear in the water or feel the air grow thick and harder to breathe. This will fade when they get a new sink.

Terry Junior and Mummy will always be with the house, seething silently as their murderer lives in a comfortable cell awaiting the eventual release into the arms of his mistress. He'll probably kill her too now that he has a taste for it. He's one of those people who gets hooked easily.

Day 892

The car had been empty for days, judging by the amount of autumn leaves stuck beneath the window wipers. It was a small car clearly designed for the city but now halfway up a steep road in the Lake District with no civilisation around for miles. Even then it was a village of almost a hundred called Narrow Clevecote.

The whereabouts of the owners were unknown for well over a month but the locals of Clevecote (as always) had their suspicions. Tales floated about of strange footprints in the caves and stranger noises from the woods. Any mentions of the lake were, without fail, followed by a sharp shudder as fear crawled down the backs of people who'd never seen anything unusual but knew enough to close their eyes when it was nearby.

Search parties from the owner's city and the local authorities (who had no choice) spread out around the area where the car was found in the hopes that the missing persons had just gotten distracted by a sunset or wandered too far into the woods and gotten lost. So many people have wandered into those woods and gotten "lost", these ones are no different.

Their bodies were never found, as usual and eventually they would be forgotten. At least they were meant to be, instead yearly gatherings of their friends and family searched the woods for them. Sometimes they all came back, other times one or two would be absent while the rest bore deep scratches and a haunted look about their faces which would remain there until the next time they came. If they came.

The search party grew fewer and fewer every year until it was down to a grandmother and her husband. They had all seen what was deep in the woods and at this point they knew the missing were dead. All they wanted was to bring back the bones to they could be put to rest.

Remembering from the past few years they avoided the first few threats in their way (the whispering trees, the shambling deerskin, the bloated infant), heading deep into the woods and to the mass grave guarded by something they never found a name for. The people of Clevecote still denied that anything was in the woods but "regular, ordinary wood-things" which wasn't to say the creatures in the woods weren't natural, just hopefully unique to the area.

When they reached the clearing of the mass grave they saw the thing that guarded it sitting hunched over one side, mouth obnoxiously full of whatever poor soul it had just found. The elderly couple signed to each other their plan, knowing that their silent hand gestures wouldn't give their position away as the thing had very narrow vision.

As they were arguing about how they'd know whose bones were whose ("Damn you Ethel, we can't just grab anyone and bury them!" "Well what else can we do George? Yell their names and wait for a response!") they were interrupted by a man's scream as he ran past them and straight toward the creature, giving away their position.

The creature bore down on him faster than they'd ever seen it before. It had been very well fed these past few years and as it raised itself up, viscera clinging to its thick green fur as it met their gaze, chewing thoughtfully. With deliberate slowness it began to crawl towards them and in their old age they knew they had no chance of escape.

The people of Narrow Clevecote reported their car to the authorities a week later, just as they'd done with the car on the road all those years ago. As usual the police claimed they'd done a search and found no bodies or evidence of foul play and given the late autumn chill they could only assume that the old couple had gone for a hike and succumbed to a sudden frost, their bodies dragged off by local wildlife.

Day 891

My parents used to give me a lot of rules when I was a kid, like every other day they'd tell me something had to change or don't do this activity for some arbitrary reason. Mostly they just said "Because I'm your parent and you live in my house! Now promise me you won't put any white bags out on Tuesdays and Thursdays!" and I was expected to just go along with it like they did.

For the most part I did obey their bizarre rules, at least to some extent. There were some that were just not possible for me at that age and time, like when they sat me down and told me to not talk to anybody with green eyes for the rest of the month when my green-eyed teacher would give detentions for lack of participation. I wasn't about to get a detention when they had no way of telling if I was talking to anyone with whatever coloured eyes.

The following evening I was confronted by my parents who somehow knew the eye colour of everyone in my school, giving me a list of people I can and can't talk to based purely on that. I tried to show it to my teacher and claim that was my excuse for not participating but I got a detention anyway and my parents were never called in to explain the list.

It took me several years to realise that I wasn't the only kid being forced to follow the ridiculous rules when my friend Terri wore all beige for three weeks, just like me. I'd never seen her follow the same rules as me so it was almost a relief until she told me she knew why the rules changed so often.

She gave this whole spiel about creatures that only adults could see (something about their brain development and eye level that vaguely made sense at the time) and they made the rules that were passed down to us. They were fussy creatures who'd kill anyone they felt like unless their demands were met, not by the adults but by us children - their hostages in this situation.

Terri had proof of this from when she secretly took off the chicken wire bracelet (last week's rule that I had also followed) for the night and woke up missing all of the toes on her left foot. She'd never felt a thing, just found them gone and only smooth skin left behind. I knew for a fact she once had all ten toes, she loved to wear her glittery jelly sandals all year round but when she took off her trainer, sure enough they were gone.

Ever since then I kept to the rules until I moved out at the age of nineteen. The rules were occasionally texted to me until I turned thirty eight which is apparently when I was no longer a child to these creatures. Coincidentally it's when I first began to see them too. Right around my daughter's second birthday. They gave me my first rule to be enforced as an adult or they'd skin her and frame me for it.

I wonder what they threatened my parents with.

Day 890

The snow came in thicker and faster than any weather channel had predicted, going from zero to sixty inches in just two days. I swear it was more than that but to be honest I was preoccupied at the time and the snow was the least of my worries really. The main concern was making the last of the week's food last until the roads were clear enough to drive on.

The first day wasn't so bad, I'll admit. I heard a few weird noises about the place but at the time I reckoned it could have been the local kids out playing. A brief glance out the window, just to make sure they weren't causing any mischief, showed that the snow in my front yard was utterly untouched, so was the snow as far as I could see.

It became a pattern over the week of hear a noise, rush to a window and find nothing, hear only the wind making the branches scratch my house. I almost felt comforted by this towards the fifth day until I caught a glimpse of my neighbours all doing the same thing. Making eye contact was a mistake, from the distance and the faint haze of still-falling snow they all looked like corpses.

They looked scared as well and it was like we were all seeing the exact same thing. I didn't know until all the snow had melted that this was indeed what happened only they never heard the scratches and claimed that they only heard the noises when they saw me near the windows. One joked that the noises must have liked me.

I didn't see the funny side to it, especially not when I saw the scratches by the latches of every window on my house. I definitely don't remember seeing anybody outside, nothing disturbing the snow until the plows came by to set us all free. Even after everyone went outside to the store for the first time in just over a week the noises still came until the snow was utterly gone and I could clearly see the large footprints circling my house in the damp dirt left behind.

Day 889

The stage was still being set for the Victorian period drama of the century, at least that's what it advertised itself as. The truth was that nobody had any real idea of what was supposed to go where, the managers where nowhere to be found at any given time and only a core few staff members had been there from day one.

If you ask the newer members they'll say they're quitting to go elsewhere, there have been family problems, they're just too exhausted by the constant commute etcetera. The core members will tell you that the whole thing seems suspicious but their pay has been gradually increasing so they feel it's worthwhile to keep coming in and studying the script to gain further hints at where things need to be.

There's been no sign or show that actors will be hired at any point so the staff have adapted to using newer members as stand-ins to figure out where a person would naturally move to interact with the mentioned objects as well as where other objects would look aesthetically pleasing and period-correct (which the emails from management emphasised above all else).

Nearly nine months later the show was due to begin with no actors in sight, no posters handed out save for the three on the noticeboard on the street out front. Everyone had been handed the same notice that they wouldn't be needed on the night of the show and their duties were "taken care of", but by whom it never said.

The night before the show, all current staff were hand delivered tickets by a woman dressed in full Victorian mourning garb with a thick veil obscuring her face. She introduced herself by the lead protagonist's name and said they simply must come see the first show for good luck.

The following evening at 18:15 sharp the majority were there, all wearing their crew shirts as the tickets had specified. They were greeted out front by people they'd never seen before (actors, they presumed) dressed in similar old fashioned uniforms who bade them to their seats and made no noise when they walked across the hardwood flooring.

The stage was exactly as the crew had left it, now operated by utter strangers though this gave them all a stronger sense of camaraderie than they'd experienced during the set-up. They exchanged worried looks and mutterings about the specifics of the equipment and how it liked to be handled until the hoarse voices of their fellow theatre-goers shushed them harshly.

At 18:45 the curtains raise as the narrator missed his cue to walk onstage, instead lingering in the wings and running from corner to corner, ducking under the furniture and scurrying about like a cockroach fleeing an incoming boot. The fear in his voice was almost too real but the crew whispered to each other about his dedication and character interpretation.

They began to smile as the narrator continued to fling and hide about the stage until his speech was over and he ran full pelt across the stage with a drawn out shriek that ended with a quiet groan and a loud thump. It set the mood for the rest of the play as the protagonist walked on in the same mourning garb she'd worn to give the crew their tickets.

Anything human about they play ended there as she violently tore off her veil and collapsed into a pile of maggots that began to devour each other until one enormous, white thing writhed about the stage, coughing up smaller maggots and eating them again and again in a sickening cycle instead of the scripted weeping and soliloquising about her late husband killing their son in a murder-suicide pact with her estranged sister.

Then the only other character - the Doctor  - came on stage, at least his stick thin and hideously long legs did. The rest of him was hunched over by the ceiling though the shadowy outline of his chattering mandibles could be seen, as could the viscous grey saliva that dripped steadily down upon the writhing protagonist.

The first few drops didn't phase the creature but after a few moments of tense silence it began howling and trying to attack the doctor who leapt and swooped upon it with such a fury that his garbled chitters could almost form words. It sounded like he was saying a mixture of "stand still",  "leave your carapace" and "the stage is wrong, there's nothing where everything is" (though it was hard to say which was worse to hear - a death threat or a critique).

There was no interval, no break between this strangely hypnotising battle of monsters for two hours until it concluded with the doctor's mandibles snapping the morning protagonist cleanly in half to reveal two human children who broke the fourth wall. They announced themselves as the writer, the creators of the play and the creatures, that they were the creatures and they were finally free from "the flesh cell" that had held them all these years.

After thanking everyone for coming they bowed and fled the stage leaving the crew to realise their fragile position as the only humans there. All around them the rest of the audience complained of hunger pangs. The sounds of chittering grew, the sounds of screaming rose and fell and then all was silent.

Outside the theatre the signs peeled off and crumbled to ash when they hit the floor.

Day 888

The bricks on the house were as broken and crooked as the old owner's back had been when they found him. The papers said he'd fallen down the stairs and through the old floorboards, breaking his back on the way down and cracking his head on the concrete below. The small puddle of blood indicated that he'd been dead long before he fell. The bloating of his corpse suggested at least four days prior to the fall.

So the question the papers proposed was thus - was he pushed or had he died at the top of the stairs and gradually toppled down, the weight gained from the post-mortem gas buildup making him heavy enough to break the wooden flooring before his eventual resting place in the concrete foundations of the house? There wasn't much of an answer given by the police who dubbed it an accidental death, no suspects or witnesses or anything to suggest foul play.

It was left a small conspiracy column in the local papers, made into a "Who dunnit?" with weekly responses that slowly became wilder and less realistic as time went on. Nobody bothered to go into the house and check, unwilling to cause unwanted attention from the police and the resulting paperwork that took literal years to complete.

In their fervent attempts to study the house while trying to appear uncaring in case the police were observing in hiding, it was discovered that the house was changing in ways a house shouldn't be able to. The formerly deep grey roof tiles became a soft honey-yellow, the upper windows stained themselves baby blue and the deep red bricks became a gentle beige. This was, of course, contrasted by the way the house shifted and contorted to further resemble its former owner.

Nobody quite knew what to do when the windows blinked, they'd call it a trick of the light and walk faster to their own definitely-just-brick-and-wood homes. Not even the most seasoned postman wanted to hang around for too long, all claiming they'd been invited in by an old man's voice coming through the fluttering letterbox. They'd say they felt as though they were being eyed up like a turkey at Christmas and perhaps they weren't wrong.

It became known as Mr House and was cordoned off by the police accordingly. The potentially sentient was terrifying enough in a doll or a book, let alone a full three storey house and possibly everything inside it! No official statements were made about the house's new found life but the weekly column made subtle references to "a house that contains a great character", just in case the papers were still read by whatever claimed itself to be the inhabitant.

Day 887

She found herself wrapped tightly in her own bed sheets when she woke up in a hole in the ground. Damp dirt was piled all around her and the sun was beginning to set as she struggled to remember how she got there. No amount of writhing seemed to be getting the sheet unstuck from her torso, the ropes digging into her like a vice as she gave up on untangling herself in favour of getting onto the surface and to the nearest phone.

The hole was almost eight feet deep and roughly dug towards the bottom, like someone had started off with patience and the aim to dig out a perfect rectangle but panicked at the end and left it U shaped. No amount of jumping would get her near to the top and the sides were too slippery to grip properly, the dirt crumbling and sliding beneath her desperate clawing.

As she sunk back down, going to lean back on the sloped wall behind her, instead of meeting damp earth she fell through into a tunnel that had been disguised in the growing shadows. It might lead down but it beats waiting here, she reasoned to herself as she hoisted and tucked the sheets further up her waist before crawling into the dark passage.

The tunnel was practically dripping with water and she sunk up to her elbows several times along the way. Eventually the ground seemed to slope upwards, hopefully leading her to the safety of the surface and (doubtfully but still possibly) close to a town where she could get help.

Though the tunnel itself was dark,  the cold stone floor that it led to was colder still. It seemed to be made from concrete and she wondered if she was in a shed or a barn. Feeling her way to the edge of a wall she fumbled about for a light switch, blinding herself when she accidentally flicked it on with her graceless pawing.

After her eyes had adjusted somewhat she found she remembered the room, remembered the metallic tang to the air just before everything went dark. Stumbling over to the sawdust piled in one corner and brushing it aside she found what she last remembered seeing looking less vivid but just as worrying as when it had spilled from her head after she'd hit the floor.

It was then that she noticed the colour of her hands - that odd, bluish, blotchy colour, the way her fingers were frozen in place and beginning to swell at the joints. She didn't feel the need to panic or scream at her realisation, only the need to lie down where she'd originally fallen. It felt safer here, like she was meant to just rest there until she was eventually found.

She didn't know if this realisation had happened to her before, if she was the one who had made the tunnel or if it was made before she'd fallen. This could be her thousandth time at trying to rest before she was taken back to the hole where she was perhaps meant to rest. It didn't matter now, she was there with her sawdust pillow and she was at peace.

Day 886

Heading back into the town for university after a long summer break seemed to have made him forget the rules. He'd spent all of the first and second year memorising them, beating his classmates and rivals alike (metaphorically and literally) and outlasting over seventy eight students in total. He should have known what to do but being home made made him soft.

He saw the first piece of graffiti on the side of a substation from his cushy seat aboard Carriage D of the inbound train. It read HUSH like all the others did and that was the first warning. It marked the entrance to the town, not the official one but the boundaries between the rest of England and the dimension that the town was unknowingly built in.

At this point he was meant to turn all electric devices off and keep salt on his tongue for fifty minutes.

Instead he turned back to his ebook, vaguely noting that he had a further hour or so until he got to the station itself. The trains liked to go the roundabout way that traced a welcoming sigil into the town's dimension and helped to ease and nausea from crossing the border. He remembered this much and nothing more.

The next piece of graffiti was on the window opposite him, again it read HUSH and gave him a second chance to save himself with the salt he'd brought along just for this. He didn't see this graffiti, didn't see when it crawled onto the train door nearly in front of him, onto the wall in front of him, onto the chair in front of him or even onto his shoes.

He only noticed when the screen in front of him went fuzzy and the distorted phrase repeated again and again and again, always telling him to HUSH until it switched to scream and he finally remembered. But he still forgot that when the words changed you had to swallow three spoons of salt instead of letting it sit.

As the salt sat on his tongue, burning more than last time, he noticed how crowded the carriage now was.

He knew that most people got off at the stop before this one, heading into Borderton and pretending it was the end of the line instead of the frontier between dimensions. A quick glance around confirmed that the people who were now with him weren't human, they were Locals. Locals weren't usually seen on the trains unless something was... wrong.

Taking a deep breath he closed his eyes and slowly let it out, opening them to find himself surrounded on all sides by Locals. Their lidless eyes bored into him, weighing him down with the knowledge that he'd royally screwed up this time. He should have known better. Their pencil-thin lips puckered in unison and they raised their singular finger to all say HUSH.

When the train arrived, Carriage D was empty.

Day 885

The thing about the town called Peace was that nobody could bear to stay long enough to cause any hassle. Thus it kept its name and reputation for being utterly conflict-free since before the Vanishing, which was more than most other places could say, especially with resources becoming harder to come by.

It wasn't that there was nothing natural to eat, it was just that nobody trusted the fine layer of possibly-but-not-definitely radioactive dust that eventually covered everything. Thing grown indoors were considered the safest non-canned food but there's only so many cans of beans a person can eat before the dust suddenly becomes appealing.

Travelling was utterly out of the question, everywhere outside of the island went dark during the Vanishing and the radios got no replies on any channel. Most days people kept inside, away from the windows and doorways, just huddles together pretending that the sunset meant they were one day closer to having a safe place to stay for the night.

It was the noise that drove so many of the potential residents away, the way the wind formed half-words from half-lived people torn away too soon. It was unsettling when a voice drifted slowly towards you,chattering on about how it used to sit exactly where you are and that's where the dust stoppered its lungs for good. It might not mean to be so worrying, that's just all it remembers. Then again it might just want its space back.

The dead outnumber the living in Peace nine hundred and four to one, at the last calculation based on the number of bodies that could fit into a burial pit, how many there were and how many tiny lights could be seen across the city at night from individual campfires.

Voices and dust aside, Peace was one of the more affected areas on the island, something about the fallout scattering organic material all over the place and the rain washing it into the porous concrete that now literally breathed at night. It wasn't noticeable in every building but it was always there in the way the floors were always too warm for stone, too damp for the desert-dry weather, too squishy and flexible to be anything but the vague fleshy interior of something more than a building but less than a being. They didn't seem to be fully conscious yet, not enough to do anything at least but the threat that they could kept a great many people as far from Peace as they could.

Whatever organic dust was in the buildings was different to the vaguely yellow dust that made your skin tear like wet tissue. It had gotten into just as much as the organic dust but didn't affect the non-organic things, same as the organic dust couldn't affect living things. There was some kind of balance forming, an equilibrium between new life being made and old life being unmade.

As one person succumbed to the vaguely yellow dust, an old rusted bicycle began to move its pedals for the first time in forty years. Some reckoned that the living objects were just full of the dead while others declared them the future and tried to teach them everything humans had already discovered. The living objects never cared, they just continued their random movements and constant breathing as if that was all there was for them to do.

Day 884

Somewhere between major cities, rolling down a highway in an unusually colourful parade of vehicles, was the circus. It was utterly normal, at least by our standards, and heading for somewhere near London that their boss had assured them was one of the most financially lucrative places for a circus to go. In fact he'd booked them a field for two months!

His confidence was both inspiring and worrying. While he was trusted and admired by all his employees the length of their stay was highly unusual and enough to set them on edge. Stray whispers were sent around in texts suspecting some kind of side deal.

The town's sign was as average and dull as the field they were set up on, no major landmarks nearby, no houses for a good mile but a forest of trees taller than any they'd seen. When the performers did their rounds of the town handing out flyers and vouchers to any and all who would stop for them they found that the people all had a greyish tinge to them.

It was like the entire town was slightly foggy at all times though a few older performers declared that they'd seen this phenomenon before and wanted to leave before nightfall, forgetting that everything was set up already for the show the following night. It was all too far underway to stop, not to mention the boss refused to move until they'd at least made the field's rental cost back.

With this said worries were kept to quiet grumbles and tickets were booked, sold and given away as fast as they'd placed the seats to begin with. The greyish tinge seemed to be following a few performers who'd hung around the town the longest, though they declared that there was nothing there and it was just dust in the air.

The crowd that came the first night only brought more of the fog with them, leaving little grey swirls by their feet and thin plumes gently rising up to the central hole in the tent giving the illusion that the whole place was on fire inside. If that hadn't been enough to worry all performers, the crowd's reactions certainly did.

They didn't laugh, clap, move or even breathe throughout the whole show - not even when they were "randomly selected" to join the clowns on stage. They just smiled a little too widely and spoke quietly when spoken too. There wasn't so much as a flinch when an acrobat, soaked through from the thickening mist, slipped from his post and fell, breaking through the net to land with a loud thud.

The crowd were silent, almost invisible as the mist continued to grow. The show was called off and the crowd silently walked outside, smiling all the while as the acrobat's body was gingerly covered with a large spotted tablecloth until the ambulance arrived an hour later. Even they were the same quietly spoken, mist producing oddities that the town seemed full of though they tried to appear more human at least, as they slipped and admitted they weren't.

They called themselves Gesweorc and translated it as the mist inside bodies willingly given, or a close approximation. Both seemed friendly enough, declaring casually that the acrobat would be up and about in no time if he had fallen on purpose, much to the outrage of his loved ones who called it murder straight up. If the mist hadn't been spreading so much he wouldn't have slipped, they said through their tears.

The paramedics, still gently smiling, advised that they'd see in the morning. Invited them to come to the morgue early in case the acrobat woke up. According to them it was awfully frightful at first, to suddenly Be and to Be Alone with the voice of the mist welcoming them back. Apparently the voice was a terrible comforter, convinced that being told that you were now one with an eternal force of undying life was the best thing to say to the newly reborn.

The circus was gone by morning, never having stopped by the morgue to collect their acrobat (dead or reborn) and never talking about the town again. Though the mist continued to follow them, whispering in their dreams and promising eternal life and youth, the majority never returned. A few did, too tempted by the sombre tones of the mist and how it poured out of the mouth of their dearly departed acrobat as he swung around in their sleep-filled minds.

One by one these deserters stepped into the morgue to begin their new life and one by one freshly formed mistlings drifted out through the walls, eagerly absorbing their new lives.

Day 883

Ever since the low tide that lasted three weeks solid, we only seem to catch fish that are already dead but their wounds are all healed over. I've seen plaice with huge chunks out of their sides healed better than any post-op human I've ever seen. They've clearly been attacked at some point early on in their lives but the bigger ones are at least eight years old and over a month deceased.

At first we thought it was some weird lunar thing brought on by global warming or something science-based that we didn't understand. So we pretended it was normal, used it to gain a few tourists until we figured out that it went deeper than just the odd fish. It was every fish and recently the odd bird too!

I found a gull in my back garden just yesterday with both legs and half of its underside just gone, the feather's grown back all crooked and wrong but the damn thing was stone cold dead just like the fish. If I didn't know any better, and I'll be the first to say I'm not the most up-to-date sort, I'd say this was spreading across species.

From one fish to another is one thing, you see, as fish are all basically the same shape and the same size with all their bits and bobs in different colours. Birds are another thing entirely, what with the egg laying and lack of gills or swim bladder so whatever's getting the fish is getting the birds too.

I do wonder if it's some kind of prehistoric thingy that's survived like the tortoises have and is moving further inland to get better food. None of the fishermen have seen anything unusual in the water though and all their reports state that the fish move just fine below the surface but die the second they hit the air.

Now it could be a particularly unique strain of fish-rabies where they're air-phobic and with something necrotising about it that eats the flesh from the inside all neatly and kills them when they dry out. It could be a parasite that does the same thing. Either way the fish are being taken to labs and furnaces alike in the hopes of figuring this out.

I just hope that whatever this is, germ or animal - I don't care at this point - doesn't spread to humans because the thought of waking up with a huge chunk of me gone and air burning every inch of me as I struggle to breathe what has become a poison to me, doesn't sound appealing at all.

Day 882

There's a lot more than bodies buried beneath London, there's a whole other city down there and its full to bursting. You can see it from topside just by looking down the old grates by the roads. There'll be little things, tiny signs of life if you know what to look for. Little Compton Street is the most well known, the sign is still there if you know where to look and the internet will advise you exactly where to look.

Petty streets aside and deeper beneath even the underground lines there lies the remains of old London, the oldest pieces of the cities loosely connected through the remnants of old buildings stacked one-upon-the-other in a near endless staircase until they end abruptly in the water-logged ground beneath the Thames itself.

To journey down is to journey through time, from era to era in reverse all through ladders, ropes, padded chains and stairs so old they have begun to sprout back into the trees they once were. Wallpaper lies in scattered crumbs to be swept up and reused by whomever is first to spy it and all eyes roam the hallways for such small treasures.

It is said that at the deepest point there's nothing but water, that London ends in the sea, a deep current flowing right through the heart of England and travelling onwards to bifurcate Scotland as well. The fish that swim there were once in the millions but, as nature is wont to do, they feasted on one another until a handful of giants remained, constantly on the prowl for pray and kin alike.

Even the deepest dwelling Londoner avoids the sea below the Thames and whatever lurks within those murky grey waters.

Day 881

The city was like the ocean in that the further in you went, the stranger things became until they were completely removed from anything resembling normality. It was one of those uber-modern-sprawling-metropolis places that you see on some news channel while you're in the waiting room of some doctor's office, too uncomfortable to pay attention beyond the shallow thought of "that looks like an expensive place to live". And you'd be right to think so.

The core population is estimated to be somewhere from four hundred thousand to six million, depending on where you draw the line between human and other. That line gets awfully vague and the people involved prefer it that way, less paperwork to fill out when they're applying for driver's licenses or passports. It's one of the few cities where having a "species" box is considered more important than "gender". They just prefer to know who has poisonous barbs and who can secrete hallucinogens from between their teeth, that's all.

These people are rarely found outside of the city centre and its many odd cafés that cater to the more specific diets of the residents. The outskirts and designated Tourist Zone are kept strictly to normal and normal-passing for the safety of everybody involved. It's just so difficult to explain that this isn't a costume, it's simple biology and if you stare any longer you will lose your eyes so don't say we didn't warn you. Tourists never listen.

They like to try and find "hidden gems" further inland, way out of the safety of the Tourist Zone and end up finding a lot more than they anticipated. The shift starts so slowly,much like the ocean floor as it gracefully descends from cutesy coral to an abyss full of deathly silence and strange lights. Only with the city the shift is from a typical European tourist trap to something out of an oceanographic nightmare.

Much like a starfish, a great many deep dwelling residents are found camouflaged and clinging to whatever surface they match to. It's a little disconcerting, to say the least but not nearly as worrisome as those who resemble jellyfish and live in tall glass buildings where every inch is tinted to near darkness, just as they prefer. It's rare for them to come outside unless it's raining heavily, then their transparent and vaguely humanoid forms like to writhe along the floor in large gelatinous puddles that casually bid you a good day.

No, it's better that tourists be kept as far from the city centre as is humanly possible, or inhumanly possible, given the state of the deep dwellers. 

Day 880

Due to the recent spate of spiritual possessions that have been occurring in large chain supermarkets all over the county, the following guidelines have been approved by the government to aid in prevention, protection and proper disposal of any and all possessed objects.

1. When a spirit finds itself in a state of distress, discomfort or general dissatisfaction there lies the temptation to join itself to a non-organic physical object.
2. Spirits in general have little to no impulse control (a curiosity that is being looked into by top scientists, assure you, our dear public) and due to a combination of expansions into consecrated ground and dwindling religious opinions, they have few reasons to NOT become a nuisance.
3. When confronting a spirit poised to possess an item, kindly note the item in question and any unique markings or peculiarities before reporting the object to the authorities using the number listed on the reverse of this informative bulletin.

Once the spirit has indicated that they are capable of hearing you, clearly state the following.

1. Dearly departed, do pardon the intrusion but it seems as though you are about to insert your spiritual form into [name of object].
2. [Should the spirit confirm that they are indeed about to do the aforementioned action] I would ask that you kindly reconsider this action as your form would alter beyond anything vaguely humanoid and you may even lose your ability to leave it which would be most dreadful and leave you stranded and slowly decomposing.
3. [Should the spirit confirm that they were not about to do the aforementioned action] Please accept my sincerest apologies, dearly departed. I only speak out of concern for your incorporeal well-being and do hope that you have a pleasant day.

If you should suspect that you are in the company of a possessed item or person, consider the following symptoms of possession before referring to the number provided and alerting the authorities that the item is in need of proper disposal in order to free the spirit and lay them to rest.

1. Be on the lookout for items that aren't meant to be skin coloured (referring to the base spectrum of skin tone provided in Diagram B and remembering that skin tine is broader still) gradually taking on a rosy or sunkissed tone. Other symptoms of similar ilk include a fine layer of hair, unusual warmth and the development of eyelids, teeth and fingers,
2. Movement is another key symptom, namely unusual or impossible movements. The example provided is that of a shopping basket, perfectly ordinary in colouration and lack of hair but attempting to walk using broken handles as though they were arms. Note the fluidity of the dragging motion, indicating the item has been possessed for at least a fortnight.
3. Speech seemingly coming from no particular source, while harder to pinpoint to an object, is a crucial sign that an item has been overcome by a displaced spirit. Phrases may be repeated conversations (overheard or remembered), generic creepy sayings (like "I'm behind you", "I can taste your fear","None of this is real", etcetera).

Bearing all of these in mind, the government advises you to take the summary leaflets provided in all major shopping chains, local confectioneries and all public libraries.

Remember: If it doesn't seem nice, don't think twice, call the police!