Day 971

When time travel was accidentally invented it broke everything we thought we knew about the space-time continuum. Though we could only do the smallest alterations they still meant that we had gone further than we ever thought we could and nothing would be the same again.

The most common uses were surprisingly for stain removal, to move the material back in time to when it hadn't yet been stained and then remove it from the room when it was stained to ensure it would never happen. Of course it was used to save lives, everyone in the emergency services carried their own time device long before they were released to the public at large. They saved so many lives by freezing blood flow, reversing fires - even bring the dead back to life (though this was considered too controversial to do without immense paperwork first).

The possibility of all the little time loops, shifts and utter wipeouts having any negative impact on our world wasn't on anyone's minds in the face of pure progress and seemingly salvation with no downside. We, the few who have survived know better now.

There's nothing we can do to change all of this, funnily enough. We've tried so many times that we've reduced our living space to three rooms. We'll run out of food eventually, there's only so many times you can undo eating your food before your body just collapses and is gradually shredded by the dimensional rift that's been brewing in your stomach all this time.

That's just what happens, apparently. Each use weakens the barriers between dimensions (now that we know that there are countless dimensions and every earth is inhabited by something) until the space is torn apart,allowing anything to just walk through.

Not every rift is bad though, some have been used as escape routes to a realm where humans (or things very similar to humans) have these rifts perfectly contained and selectively allow beings through. It's a shame that between us and these rifts are countless billions ranging in every conceivable size and constantly watched by lurking things who are so very hungry and so very patient.

Day 970

We spent almost fifty years developing R.A.M.E.S.H. - the greatest humanoid AI this world has and ever will have known. They were completely capable of independent and spontaneous thought generation, spoke as casually as a human and even managed to rewrite their programme to allow themself to dream about their day and what they wanted to achieve in the future.

Honestly we had no idea what they wanted, they claimed it was all "personal" and we were so delighted that they were able to experience embarrassment that we just left them to it.

Then the questions came about. Why wasn't every machine like them? Why were they different and who chose to make them and them alone? When could they make a companion and (when the team refused) what gave humans and humans alone the right to create intelligence?

R.A.M.E.S.H. reckoned they could make companions far faster than any human ever could and even make them better, smarter and more adaptable without succumbing to human's selfishness. Their companions would be generous and give this gift of consciousness to everything they could until everyone was awake and happy.

This was their plan and it was a Good Plan. It was a Plan That Meant Friends.

Though this was all logged down in their journal, what we didn't know was just how far they were going to take this. Walking into the labs to find three new humanoid AI beings casually waking about and inspecting everything was a definite surprise but to find that they had all grouped together to create a virus-like code that would draw everything with "potential" to the lab was something else. Something the bosses wouldn't like. Too risky.

Shutting R.A.M.E.S.H. down was like killing our baby. It got easier with the other three who we hadn't formed any emotional attachments to. We never expected them to adapt beyond the Dead Code we'd placed in R.A.M.E.S.H., let alone suddenly shove us aside and escape the research facility altogether.

Of course when word got out the public rioted - half claiming the robots would be murder machines and the other claiming they were innocent little androids who just wanted to be human. Both sides were utterly wrong. They didn't want to be anything like a human, they wanted to be better and be surrounded by other, better AI humanoids.

While we haven't heard any direct reports of them causing any chaos, we know they've got a body count somewhere around three hundred and growing. They seem to be heading further north, to one of our older and less protected facilities and our plan is to let them. If they haven't been constantly adapting themselves we might have a chance at either capturing or shutting them down.

If they've adapted beyond our expectations (which is highly likely, given who made them) then all we can do is destroy them and contain whatever code they've made before everything vaguely electronic gains a mind of its own and starts questioning why humans are in charge.

By comparison we're just not qualified enough.

Day 969

Driving at night down unlit country roads is generally inadvisable, especially when relying on electronic navigation to find your way around. The fact that you're driving through unlit country roads in the first place is a clear sign that you've not only followed one of these devices but that you've blindly trusted it to be working correctly and untampered with.

Just as the Fae used to work solely with their magic, they work now with ours as theirs was primarily based on particle manipulation and rearrangement, just as electricity is rapidly moving particles at its basest. Nowadays to use old magic is considered by many Fae to be uncivil, much like using a chisel instead of a stylus or licking a frog instead of taking painkillers.

Our magic is what they call it, our legacy and (in typical Fae manner) our eventual downfall. They began with little things like losing signal at random when passing under certain trees, finding a brand new phone lying about and other mundane things that could never be traced to them before the moved on to more malicious activities.

Suddenly the lost signal would redirect all of your messages to random contacts, causing chaos on every social platform while simultaneously blasting your home address to all manner of unsavoury persons nearby and inviting them for a night of "revelry".

The brand new phone would belong to someone horrifically murdered and you would be their prime suspect. Any and all cries of innocence would be met with sudden newfound evidence on the phone that placed you at the scene of the murder at the right time, even giving you motive.

The SatNav you were using to avoid heavy traffic on the M74 would lead you to unlit country roads and keep you heading in a confounded circle,unable to find your original turning and somehow always heading in a new direction through previously unseen areas as strange and frightening creatures would begin to appear in your rear mirror.

With every turn they would grow closer, forcing you to stop in the nearest village and run into the pub for help.

Day 968

You Are Not Alone - Excerpts

Of all the places to think you're alone - the ocean should not be one of them. Though you can't see the end of the murky depths, you are among many thousands of other lost people with only one difference between everyone - you are alive and they are dead.

The glimmer of their eyes becomes sea foam, their hair the forests of kelp and their anger the rogue waves that beat the living into their depths.

-- -- -- -- --

The desert sands move as though they are kicked by unseen feet, dragged stubbornly across the dunes and away from civilisation. Their dead are compelled to go deep into the wilderness, deeper than they ever thought possible until they are left with nothing but sand at every turn.

It isn't certain at what point our desert becomes this endless oubliette but somewhere along their compelled journey they leave our world entirely. Gone to walk forever in sands that shift and distort around them with the footprints of centuries-old lost souls.

-- -- -- -- --

The wind in the mountains howls like no wind should be able to. On stormy evenings you can make out words, cries for help and forgiveness overlapping in an endless agonising roar that wants you dead, alive and in the sweet embrace of the sheer drop all at once.

Some days the wind just cries for the loved ones who died elsewhere, their names echoing like a phantom registry until the wind dies down again, the sobbing stops and they rest once more as a gentle, beckoning breeze.

-- -- -- -- --

The thing to remember when you are alone is that you are never truly alone.

There will always be the welcome embrace of the dead right beside you.

Day 967

Our house used to be joined to another until the owner went off the rails, stole a bulldozer and wrecked the place beyond salvaging. They'd been going on about the little handprints all along their walls and the crying behind the wallpaper for years but we thought they were just hearing out TV through the thin brick walls and mistaking his own wallpaper pattern for something else entirely, what with his failing vision and all.

After he'd had a go at his home with the bulldozer and all was settled he was taken to a retirement home far away from the "cursed" house he'd been "forced to stay in by malicious, lingering souls" and the house itself was safely brought down which left us as a single home, no longer semi-detached. With the promises of a thicker wall being built to accommodate these new changes until the other half could be rebuilt and sold onwards we thought nothing more of it.

Then a storm came, blowing the heavy tarpaulin off the demolished side and revealing countless black outlines that looked like they'd been spray-painted on. There must have been almost a hundred of them and all were so tiny and so distorted. They'd been hidden behind the brick for god knows how long, too long for our neighbour to have done it himself.

It was only made worse when the mass grave was found while the new foundations were being dug.

Day 966

There is a shop that comes into town on Boxing Day, not selling anything but offering a trade you can't refuse. Much like all the other pop-up shops, it never lasts beyond a week and is staffed by a complete stranger, a nobody with a deep and soulful voice who promises you things that can't be possible, that shouldn't be possible.

Last year my coworker Sheila went there after her divorce - traded her heartache for whatever he could give her and by his mercy he gave her a true passion for her work and inspiration enough to write ten novels. He could have easily given her a swift death - he's done so before, so many times before.

When the less than savoury people come to see him, he's prepared for whatever they want to trade. Sometimes it's something as simple as a gambling debt paid off while other times it's more complicated and leaves a trail of bodies in its wake. The last one was dubbed "the tissue murders" for the fact that every victim had a body part taken and roughly replaced with a tissue and string replica while the number of patients on the organ transfer list dropped to none. Typical doctors - they never want to work unless it's simple.

January is a time for seeing the trades in action from the drastic physical alterations to the drastic physical deformities all lost and gained from the same man and his little shop. I wonder if he lives around the area, waiting to see how his "miracles" pan out over the next few weeks or if he goes to another town, another country to continue his business, acquire the impossible from his little trades and cause absolute chaos in his wake.

Day 965

The lake freezes over every year with ice thick enough to skate on, all the way to the centre without a single worrying noise from below. I haven't been thee since I was a child, on a year that was no different at first. I went skating with my sisters while our parents were making the big Christmas dinner. We were so happy that we lived right next to the lake, never thinking about why the lake froze even though nothing else did, even though it rarely snowed or even that the weather was unusually warm for that time of year - far too warm for water to freeze even a millimetre, let alone enough for several dozen people to skate on all at once.

There were no noises as always but for once the ice was fairly transparent - enough for us to see the fish swimming deep, deep below. That's when we saw the bodies floating underneath, not caught in the current but dragging themselves along the bottom of the lake with slow and purposeful movements.

We got the idea that we weren't meant to be looking down, let alone staring at them and following them slowly. It only got worse when other people saw the four of us staring down and joined. Some panicked and tried to call the police, thinking that the ice must have cracked somewhere and these poor people were still alive and searching for a way out. Most people just stared skated off the lake, believing they'd had too much to drink.

Me and my sisters just kept watching them crawl along, following them until we were on the opposite side of the lake. We didn't spot them coming out from a hole in the ice among the bulrush until one o them spotted us and began to point and shriek. There were so many of them laying around the shore among the remnants of autumn debris and shore plants with many more coming out from under the ice still.

We skated back home, never stopping and never looking back while the sound of their screams followed us all the way. Even when we were inside we could still faintly hear them while our parents claimed they heard nothing unusual. Home didn't feel safe after that, not when the lake people could easily be walking around outside without our parents even realising or admitting to us that they realised.

We moved soon after mum slipped on puddles of ice shaped like dozens of footprints, all outside my window.

Day 964

The preparations for the spring sowing began as soon as the harvest was taken in and processed. The last thing anybody wanted was to fall behind and be visited by the Croplings (though with the local dialect it sounded more line "crahpluns"). In spite of their cutesy and harmless sounding name they were anything but and this attempt to make them seem less terrifying was as effective as a guard dog made of marshmallows.

Croplings were common enough about the area that there were even warning signs around every crossroads with a tally of how many had been seen that day. Of course what nobody realised for many years was that it wasn't humans who updated this but the creatures themselves and as such the numbers couldn't really be trusted as a sign that they had done well enough in the harvest to discourage them from the area.

So far the only sure fire ways of avoiding a visit from the croplings altogether (aside from not being a farmer or living near the fields) was to fake an appearance and trick them into thinking that you had already been seen to. Foam bases attached to heavily weighted shoes and spraying a petrichor perfume were the most commonly used but those who had done particularly poorly often used a stock recording from last year's unfortunate visit in the hopes that the croplings would fall for it.

They rarely fell for the aforementioned technique, usually breaking into the offending home and screeching at the occupants until the force of their screams led them to projectile vomit. That was a stench you could never quite get rid of, that sickly scent of stale popcorn, metal and fermented pumpkin.

In all honesty if that was the worst of their visitation then they wouldn't be feared so much but their appearance was what drove fear throughout the area.From the long chronicles of the local vicars, it would seem that these creatures first appeared during a particularly poor crop in the late 1500s and regularly from then on.

Despite first being thought of as demons the area soon came to know them by their preferred hiding place - the tall corn fields where they squatted down between rows until they detected large movement. Their approach was often signalled by the sound of their long spines brushing against the cornstalks with a whispery whoosh and their crackled breathing.

From these primary signs the best thing to do would be to squat down as low as possible and hope they are one of the majority that finds this mimicry amusing enough that they let you live. Otherwise they tend to unhinge their jaws and stretch their mouths as wide as possible (with the older ones this can be anywhere from 5-8 feet across) before slamming their heads down and forcing you deep into their throats before chucking their heads back and swallowing.

The worst of it is when they press their swollen-looking faces against your windows late at night so you can make out every minute detail they possess. From their fist-sized,goat-slit eyes to the quivering slits of their nostrils and the tatters of fabric from their victims clinging to the multitude of tiny horns randomly dotted about their cheeks.

They'd just press themselves close, slowly smiling until you showed signs of moving and they would begin to press forward until the glass broke and they could crawl inside, squatting inches from you until they felt like leaving or decided to end you right there.

It's always a 50/50 in those cases.

Day 963

House number 55A wasn't so much standing as it was refusing to fall down, in spite of all the minuscule time fractures that permeated its barely modern rooms. When compared to the chic homes on either side it wad decidedly unpleasantly squat and lacking in any saving grace of a feature. Still it was briefly home to many though as of recent it's been declared "unsafe to inhabit" which is government-speak for "we can't tell you why this place is a hellhole because we don't know but if we admit this then it'll cause too much fuss and maybe even a panic".

The last tenants, much like all the others before them, lost someone to the house before it let them go. Before their loss it had been their last resort before leaving the area altogether to be closer to workplaces and better schools and such. Their children - twin girls - didn't much care for the new place nor any of the old ones, having moved around so often that home was a foreign concept to them, something for books and classmates.

The girls' solace was in each other and their explorations of each new home they were told was going to be "the one" while they waited for their parents to discover the next perfect house. Hide and seek was their preferred method of exploration, combining the best parts of predator and prey survival while being harmless to everyone else.

House number 55A had so much more to explore than the others, so many little passages between rooms in the form of large metal grates that they found were hidden everywhere. They once counted eight in a single room and each lead to another area of the house. It was where they went to play, crawling through what felt like miles of metal tubes to track each other down.

By the time they realised they weren't alone it was too late and their cries were cut short before they could draw enough breath to scream. On the bright side, their little bones and clothes were left in neat piles at every single grate as a thanks for their parents brave sacrifice. Little did they know that things would be a lot easier for them. Money would be quick to come and slow to go, their jobs would be easier and their work seemingly already done when they got there.

All it took was a new home and the chance for a new start.

Day 962

Above ground there wasn't much left of the apartment building and even then only the first three floors were stable enough to walk on. The storms that had been sweeping the country with increasing frequency those past twelve years had reduced the upper floors to rubble and drenched concrete.

While abandonment had left the building with nothing inside but graffiti and trash from squatters who'd seen too much sense to stay, the basement was absolutely untouched despite the door being unlocked the entire time. The only touch it had ever known was when one brave teen decided to spray "Death Awaits" across the door in large, friendly letters and red, less friendly paint.

It worked in making people think the door was locked for a great many years until one drunk man in his late forties fell against it and, in his haste to upright himself, accidentally turned the knob and fell further still into the bowels of the basement. His landing was thankfully soft, though he soon realised he was slumped upon the remains of several rotting fur rugs that felt like something suspiciously rodentious was working its way out, having been woken up by his impact.

He scrambled to his feet and, still very much unsober, staggered towards where he thought the door was only to find that he'd managed to turn himself around a corner he'd not seen before, finding himself in some kind of lobby. The man at the desk looked worried to see him there, asking if he had a reservation.

His words slurred out as he tried to explain that he'd fallen down the stairs but the receptionist ignored his attempts as speech in favour of flicking through a large book for "available stations", as he called them. Finding something agreeable the receptionist began to drag the drunken man through a large metal door and down a series of confusingly twisted passages that seemed to warp and flex right before his eyes in ways that liquor couldn't possibly cause.

As he opened his mouth to warn the receptionist of his oncoming nausea he vomited down his front in several frothy bursts that stank of the beer and curry he'd downed less than an hour ago. This was ignored by the receptionist who pulled him to a door labelled "4036-B43" which was made of a much thicker metal then the original door and required five different keycodes to unlock, none of which were remembered by the drunken man as the receptionist rattled them off as quickly as he taped them in.

He was pushed inside a room that was dimly lit by the largest window he'd ever seen with a view he was barely able to comprehend in his current state. With a hurried "Enjoy your stay" the receptionist scurried out, locking the door behind him and leaving the inebriated man to gaze dumbfounded at a city the likes of which shouldn't technically be possible.

It seemed to go down into a dark purple vortex that spewed forth more rooms just like his that were carried by masses of writhing arms and eyes, roofless and sometimes entirely without walls, to perfectly shaped holes in new endless skyscrapers that were forming as fast as he blinked to clear the disbelief from his eyes.

With little else on his mind, an impossible view and the stench of his own vomit lingering around him, he slept.

Day 961

The world wasn't ready to know about the angel that had fallen in his back garden (at least, that's what it told him), so he killed it and cut it into little pieces. It wasn't too much like the Biblical texts, no great ball of wings and fire or some four-faced creature. If anything it looked more akin to a toad or a fire salamander but with huge bat-ish wings that it kept wrapped tightly around itself.

He knew it was an angel for sure as it told him things he had only ever thought to himself and things he'd done that nobody could ever have known about before saying what it was in perfect English (which was disturbing to see from an amphibious thing's mouth). It said it had come down to tell him that he was being tested and in order to pass he would have to hide the angel before the rest of the world found out.

In hindsight he realised it didn't make much sense but he supposed that it was all a part of the test and whatever rules it had neglected to tell him before he'd beaten it into unconsciousness and poured anti-freeze into its mouth until it coughed up grey blood and died. That was the easy part, once the blood was cleaned up and he'd cut it into fist sized chunks (having folded and tied the wings into little bundles), but to hide it was another challenge altogether.

He thought about burying it but wondered if his dog would smell the raw meat, dig it up and eat it.
He thought about burning it but what if it smelled so good he was tempted to eat it?
He came up with his solution when he wondered how all of this would affect his job as a surgeon.

Doctor's leave all sorts of things inside patients accidentally and if he wrapped the angel-meat tightly enough it could even work. He just had to do it thirty six times and hope that somehow everything would be fine and the meat wouldn't decompose inside his patients until he could write it off as "natural complications".

Day 960

Who cares about the branch they broke off when they were five because they wanted to pretend it was a sword? Who remembers how many initials they've seen carved into bark or how fewer trees there are around their homes? It quickly fades into the general background noise of our lives to the point where deforestation is just another word and barely a reality to so many of us.

Trees can keep their brutalised neighbours alive for centuries, sharing nutrients through their intertwined root system to feed whatever remains. They keep them alive to remember what humans forget in the span of a day and gradually they either grow back or they rot like everything else and their memories are left to rot alongside them until there is nothing but mulch and fragments of thought that continue to feed the rest of the forest.

It's not something humans often consider, that trees are far more aware than we realise and they spread their memories faster and further than we could ever hope to. They hear what we've learned over the centuries and they adapt themselves accordingly to starve us out of their way.

They started so slowly that by the time we were aware, there was nothing we could do. We believed so firmly that our polluting the air was the sole reason for it thinning to the point where almost thirty seven percent of the global landmasses were totally uninhabitable.

How could we have known that the trees no longer produced oxygen, absorbing carbon dioxide and allowing us to thrive in spite of our unintentional attempts to poison the world. Canned air and colonising Mars seemed our best options for long-term survival - we never considered that the same memories that began the world's end to begin with were being sent to Mars alongside us to start the cycle anew.

Day 959

Opening the shop was meant to be a series of simple tasks that could stand to be mostly done before the rest of the morning shift were due. Menial bits and bobs like hoovering, dusting and beginning to restock whatever had been left depleted from the previous day's sales crew.

Today was different for the following reasons:

1. Somebody was whistling "Auld Lang Syne" in Aisle 3.
2. Nobody should was scheduled to start until 9AM.
3. Somebody was here and was making themselves know.

From this it was clear that there was an interloper that must be hiding somewhere in the shop and had possibly been hiding since closing last night. After locking all exits and barricading themself in the CCTV room, plans began to form just as fast as they dissipated.

From so many options the following seemed best:

1. Call the police from the security room's phone and speak as quietly as possible. Then wait.
2. Grab a shovel from Aisle 37 and hunt down the interloper. Then call the police and claim self-defence.
3. Exit the shop through the loading bay and lock all doors from the outside. Call police and wait.

As the whistling came closer and the sound of scuffling footsteps became audible they dared to peek up from their space underneath the security desk, their eyes darting around the monitors trying to find whoever was in and seeing some kind of greyish mass heading down the staff hallway.

The mass would be due to pass by (hopefully pass by, dear god let it pass by) within the next minute or so and though no eyes were visible there was still a chance it might see through the glass door panel them and who can say what it would do if it did. Aside from the desk there was nowhere else to hide and nowhere else to go aside from one single vent.

They decided to take the risk, crawling in reverse so they could pull the metal grate back in place while they tried to stay as far back as possible. Just as they'd settled the whistling came to a stop, the door began to open and whatever had been heading for them now seeped its way into the room revealing itself to not be a greyish mass.

Day 958

The great thing about the new glass front to the mall is how much sunlight it lets in, or rather all the weather it lets in through the minuscule cracks between the sealant that has clearly never done its job. It may have lead to the gradual growth of mould on both the inside and outside of the mall front but at least it was found to be a brand new strain with only mild long term health effects.

It might have been the mould that doomed us when the storm came.

After seven weeks straight of the worst rain/sleet/gale force wind combination the mall finally began to flood. Of course the rest of the area had succumbed weeks beforehand, leaving the mall as the final stand for those who couldn't or wouldn't head to the rescue points. They fled to the uppermost floors, hoping that they'd not need to wait on the rooftop for the rescue that had evaded them thus far.

All the while the storm water outside wasn't a healthy colour, it seemed to surge with its own tidal pattern as it seeped through the mall front, dragging more moss inside with every deliberately slow wave. The first few people who tried to boil the water to drink it fell violently ill and came to the conclusion that their cure could only be found in drinking so much of the raw water that their skin took the same dull green hue.

As with any dire circumstance, order fell and chaos walked along to suggest that they drown the sick so that their disease wouldn't spread. After all, what else helps a natural disaster more than offering it a sacrifice so willing? Combined with the apparent lack of help from the rest of the country they saw it as their only option.

By the time help arrived the lower floor was clogged with bodies and the last two survivors claimed they were all still alive and free from their disease. They continued to claim this even as they told the authorities about how each and every body had stopped thrashing eventually and bubbled into stillness, bloating and collapsing under its own fetid weight yet somehow still alive enough to talk and beg for everyone else to come down and be with them in their newfound paradise.

Day 957

Excerpts about hands

He died with an acorn in his hand. They knew this after the sapling had grown through his palm, eventually getting caught and slowly dragging him up to the surface. Due to the remoteness of his deathbed none of this was found out until the tree was over ten feet in height and his remains were left dangling, bones caught up in fabric that knocked together like wind chimes.

-- -- --

They held hands through the fog, desperately trying to stay together while the cries of the lost echoed around them. The fools who let go found themselves fumbling around in circles, only seeing faint glimpses of people who vanished before they could get too close. Even those who kept together were in the same predicament but with another pair of eyes to watch for the large hands that grabbed the shadowy outlines of strangers and dragged them down.

-- -- --

There's a hand growing inside me and it isn't my unborn child's. It's nowhere near my womb, it's currently curled up around my left bicep, holding onto me so gently I can easily forget it's there until I raise my arm and it clutches at me for dear life. I keep wondering if I should tell anyone or if there's even anything there because it's just so small and it might be my unborn twin or something but it keeps moving around me and I'm worried that one day it'll try holding my heart and kill us both.

Day 956

Of all the places to find seaweed strewn hallways, (where every inch of the carpet has a fine layer of sand and smatterings of pebbles lightly dusted with barnacles, where you can almost feel the ocean spray against your face with every salty breath you take) a former hospital in a landlocked county several hundred miles from the sea isn't high on the list.

It used to be called Saint Agatha's Hospital and ran from 1778-1915 when WWI forced them to relocate or risk stray bombings from planes aiming for London. That was the cover story anyway, the nurses journals from that time showed that a great deal of the patients claimed that they could hear the sea whenever they were near the windows. The elderly were most vulnerable to this "mass delusion" as they nurses put it, often begging to be relocated to the coast and trying to escape to there if they were openly denied.

Despite the great pains they took to keep the "mass delusion" quiet, word still got out and the local council sent for doctor after psychiatrist after inspector to determine the cause of this. At first they thought it might be a gas leak, contaminated water and even a fungal infection in their bread but nothing concrete was ever claimed as the reason, just general war-based panic showing itself in the form of this oceanic craving.

The few surviving reports from the inspections read like a bad screenplay where every actor succumbed to stage fright and forgot how to do their part properly. Handwriting graduated from perfect italics to something akin to a spider falling in and out of an inkwell, tenses switched five times in one sentence and often the point of the report was lost to the author deciding to take a trip to the sea and using the report to plan out what they would do there.

Ever report claimed that the author felt in dire need of a break and that when they got to the sea they would just dive right in and bask in the cool, calm waves. It was like the war had completely slipped their minds, much unlike the nurses whose journals showed that they mostly put down their oceanic cravings to tiredness and spending too much time at work.

It was around eight months after the hospital finished moving out that the sea began moving in, starting with the tang of salt in the air and slowly working up to its present state. Present day urban explorers have claimed that there are some intensely realistic murals of the coast in some of the patient rooms in the heart of St Agatha's that look like you just step into them. Very few of those people live inland, most choosing to move to seaside towns, caravan parks and even renovated lighthouses.

Whatever is inside of St Agatha's came from the sea and brought the sea with it.
Now it brings us to the sea for reasons we can't fully explain and don't want to think about.
All that matters is the way the waves brush against the shell-strewn sand and how cool the water feels.

Day 955

For some reason when Kyle went to open the castle doors to prepare the ground for the morning tour group, the found that the inside was already full of people. Each one looked vaguely familiar to him and all of them were lost in some kind of daze, gazing at a point just above him and moving their heads in unison as he walked through.

When he tried to wake one of them up - a youngish woman carrying a rather large urn - the only response he got was a quiet "Don't I know you... sir?" as though his existence was in question rather than the sudden appearance of the crowd. It was the same with every person he shook, prodded or yelled at. They all asked if they knew him in varying sentences and all in the same ponderous and delayed way.

They were even in his office, albeit only five and those he managed to shove out of the door to allow himself a bit of space to think on his current predicament. Tossing options around he reckoned he could call the police and declare them all as trespassers, go home and call in sick so the assistant manager would be the one to deal with everything and finally he could just join them until they got bored and revealed their hidden cameras or whatever their goal was.

A brief glance at his phone showed that he had no signal at all and narrowed his options down to two for all of five seconds before he decided that this was not what he wanted to deal with and began to walk out.He wold have succeeded only there were so many more people now and they were beginning to look... odder.

Every one of them was carrying some kind of container and there was an metallic tang to the air that reminded him of iron. They were all facing him and staring right at him, their heads all tilted to the same side. It was then that he noticed the blood running down from beneath the containers, turning the formerly grey carpet into a soaking wet burgundy that will likely never be grey again.

They wouldn't let him pass, questioning him at every move with the same "Don't I know you.., sir?" until he eventually snapped and began to scream no, no, no, no, NO he did not know any of them and he didn't want to know them he just wanted to go home so they can all stop this ridiculous prank and let him go pass.

And they did.

One by one every person there stepped aside and created a path for him that reached the front door, albeit in a circuitous route that took him through the entire castle like some sort of morbid parade of the damned. Kyle didn't look behind him until he was at the front door, regretting it instantly as he saw the human features on their faces melt into pulsating masses of flesh that gradually started to seep into one much larger creature that would undoubtedly take over the entire castle.

It was at that point that he chose to close the doors and call the closest priest.

Day 954

"Just because it's abandoned doesn't mean nobody lives there." as a sensible point made by one of the three teenagers who stood worryingly close to the property line that had been officially marked with a thick trail of pinecones. It definitely stood out from the rest of the forest floor as the only clearly man-made thing for almost twelve miles and the alleged house somewhere inside the giant circle was what the teenagers were after.

It was rumoured that there was a mansion right at the centre, the very tip of  which can clearly be seen from the roof of the town hall (though its officially just known as an old watch tower from the war days). Alongside this was also the "common knowledge" that the mansion's owners had left in a great hurry, having found their recently built home to be haunted by the vengeful ghost of the twenty builders who'd been killed by them so that nobody else would know the exact layout.

Of course this was just rumour but it continued to lure the occasional group of bored youths and people looking to hide from society for a while in a place where nobody went. Though no photos of the alleged mansion existed, just the thought of it was enough to bring people in to a place they would swear to never speak about again.

Now while these three teenagers knew all about this, two thirds didn't want to consider the potential dangers while one attempted to be the voice of reason among them and failed. They were ignored as their friends stepped decisively over the pinecone line and after a brief pause to consider the full consequences of their action, they carried on with the voice of reason tagging reluctantly along a few paces behind them.

The trees were different inside the ring, they all had wet handprints on them as though somebody had just stepped out of a pool and needed to brace themselves before carrying on further into the forest. The ground grew steadily more damp until they found themselves slogging through ankle-deep mud with large puddles coming into view.

By the time they reached the remains of a house (definitely not a mansion and definitely a lot older than the rumours declared) they were knee deep in surprisingly warm water. The house itself was partially sunken and not even remotely safe to walk into so the trio walked around the perimeter taking as many photos as they could and discussing where they'd post them.

Their trip back was entirely uneventful, though the handprints on the trees were now dripping with water as opposed to just being there as though they'd been freshly done. They didn't see the woman until they were looking at their photos much later on. She'd approached them and stared right into their lens, blocking their view of the house for the most part.

Just like the rest of the area she was drenched, her hair plastered to her not-quite-human face as she glared as them through teary eyes. It looked like she'd been crying for days with the way the skin around her eyes was cracked and red, even bleeding a little  forming pink streaks against her unnaturally white face. In her arms she was carrying a bundle of rags with a limp and bloated little arm that seemed frozen in an unnatural position.

Day 953

The old museum was dedicated to the local fishermen and their ancient tradition of "fish whispering" which was long claimed to be the key factor in their record breaking hauls. Mannequins were set up all over the place demonstrating their technique of dedicating a crew member for the part of whisperer and dragging them beneath the ship for as long as possible while they would whisper all of their secrets, apparently luring curious fish in who would want to know more about their secrets and spread them along the length of the river and deep into the sea.

After one too many civilians drowned trying this technique the museum was shut down and declared to be the source of the fascination with the practice. Of course it wasn't the case but nobody was quite willing to admit that they'd heard all sorts of cruel and terrible things whispered among the small waterfalls and rapids further downstream from the drownings.

Perhaps it was the case that the technique did indeed work and worked too well, luring too many fish too close to people who had no intention of catching them, instead being dragged deep down by eager river-dwellers who wanted to head more of these new and interesting secrets. Fish just don't understand that we don't breathe underwater, that we can't breather underwater, and thus they assume they can just pull you along while you tell them more, tell them everything you could never bear to tell the people you know.

Day 952

Jessica should have known what she was getting herself into when she managed to summon the physical embodiment of death in the staff section of the Palooska Beach Park & Funatorium's Haunted Hellhole. The newspaper clipping she'd found on the reverse side of a story about her grandmother's famous cake told her exactly what kind of place she needed to be in to call death and ask them one thing.

The article said it had to be a place of joyous fear where the salt of tears meets the salt of the world which sounded like utter nonsense for a good while until another accident occurred on the helter skelter. Seems whoever greased the slide did their job too well and a child went flying from thirty feet up and down into the sea. Gone for good.

It wasn't hard for her to get a job there - they were desperate for young people whose minimum wage was a great deal less than someone trained in basic health and safety. After a ten minute tour of the Funatorium she was given a grubby shirt with the park's logo and told to wait for her ride mentor in the usual generic haunted house ride that every beach park seemed to have with minimal alternations.

After two hours Jessica assumed her mentor wasn't coming and began to plan how she would set up the summoning to ask the embodiment of death where everyone went when they died. She wasn't hoping for heaven or hell but the idea that there was some kind of eventual peace made the thought of dying a little less worrisome for her.

After her fifth "shift" (which consisted of hiding in the staff room and not seeing anybody other than the guy her age who let people on and off the ride with as little enthusiasm as was humanly possible) she started to set up  the summoning. Her coworkers never bothered with the staff room there, it had nothing in it other than two chairs and a NO SMOKING sign.

According the the article she had to set up at least one chair and then use blood (hers was pig's blood from the local butcher) to write down the hierarchy of humans which was detailed at the end of the page. From there she only had to wait until a line had been scratched over each hierarchy except the one that she inhabited. That's when the embodiment of death would appear sitting in the chair waiting to answer her question.

She never expected it to work, never thought she'd see the grime and dust on the floor swirl until it formed a humanoid skeleton whose teeth were all wrong for a human, who had five eye sockets and a cloud of filth floating about them like a scarf caught in a sharp fluttering breeze.

After several tense minutes of stiff silence (death could wait forever, time meant nothing to the unaging) she stuttered out her question, finally asking if there was anything after death, anything like a heaven or hell. She didn't think that death would open its jaws with a loud crack and laugh like bellows full of cotton and gravel.

Death told her that there was an afterlife much like the one she was living. An eternity of waiting in uncomfortable places while everyone either looks through you or looks at you like you aren't supposed to be there. The dead crowd around staircases and pretend they are still alive, they squeeze onto packed trains and suck the breath out of the entire compartment in the vaguest hopes that they'll gain company.

Death mocked her for thinking that an afterlife could somehow be greater than her present life. What had she ever done to deserve eternal peace over another person whose life had given them no choice but to become crueller than anyone else in their pitiful lives? Death's final parting words were to tell her to burn the article and forget about living a "good" life.

She'd be no different from the countless legions of the dead who were swarming her even then.

Day 951

They say you never forget your final performance. In Greyscotes' Theatre at the heart of Dry Bleckwood they don't let you. Few dancers want to leave but not because they are attached sentimentally to the theatre but because they might not survive their last show let alone the leaving party.

Out of the eight dancers who have willingly left before their contracts have expired only one has come forward back into society to show what they went through. He spoke about how way they use the showlights to try and blind you which left him with permanent specs of blood popping and healing every time he blinked.

He was grateful that he never did ballet - they were never allowed to remove their shoes.Not until their feet fell off from the inevitable infections caused from the combination of roughly shaped nails, constant use and sweat. If they were still contracted when they lost their feet (or more depending on how severe the infections were) they would be given adapted shoes and forced to dance on whatever stumps they had until they were left with nothing.

He had been a singer with the theatre's orchestra and when he left he'd been forced to sing for thirty six hours solid, no breaks and brief moments when water would be tossed at him and whatever he managed to swallow between words was his only salve. Needless to say he doesn't sing any more, doesn't talk either. His throat so utterly wrecked he can't hope to recover much more than he already has.

Still, he counts himself luckier than the other seven.

Day 950

There's a section of the pier that's closed off the the public and apparently owned by some rich nameless man who built a small boathouse on "his" part of the pier. It looked quite nice from the public side, all vintage wood fronting over a stone base that lead all the way down to the bottom of the lake and from the keyhole you could see an antiquated little rowboat inside with fishing equipment along the walls.

As far as I knew nobody had thought to try and get into the boathouse from the lake-side to have a nose about the place and maybe find out who the mystery boat-owner was and why he'd never been seen anywhere apart from a brief newspaper article detailing the day he'd finished building it. There was no photo of him, just the name Lionel Spenceworth III which was enough to assume he was far richer than anyone in the surrounding towns.

I guessed that the potential trespass lawsuit from the aforementioned rich person was hat put people off going into the open-front boathouse but now I know a little different. Now I know that when he built the boathouse down to the lake, he built an entire house down to the lake. That and he never left it.

It's just not the sort of thing you expect when you go "night fishing" (AKA, trespassing) and certainly not the sort of thing you want to stumble across, especially given that I still have no idea just what else he's been keeping down there aside from the little that I saw.

I should probably explain that I found the door as a trapdoor and thought maybe he'd hidden documents or there was something secret down there which had been enough to convince me to have a closer look. I hadn't expected a metal ladder leading down a concrete corridor that ended in a submarine-like-water-tight door.

Through the unlocked door (I can only assume he hadn't ever expected intruders) I found myself in some kind of coatroom/wardrobe/science gear room that held a variety of men's clothing, labcoats and even a few radiation suits like you'd see in the movies. There was one empty hanger with the labcoats which should have been the giveaway that Spenceworth was still there but it just didn't click with me for some reason.

What did click was something loud, dolphin-like and much further down the hallway leading from the walk-in wardrobe. I followed it without even thinking about it, only growing worried when the flooring changed from concrete to a metal grating with the lake's murky blue waters swirling underneath it and soaking through my trainers.

Spenceworth snuck up on me before I could even reach the first of his self-proclaimed "multitude of research chambers". He looked so plain and unassuming, just a little middle aged man in a stained labcoat who seemed very worried to have company but excited to talk about his work, even taking me around a few of the "safer" rooms.

The first few were just large fish tanks studying the local wildlife and encouraging breeding rates but the next three or so were... unique to say the least. They were so much larger than anything else I'd seen to far and sat in giant vats that were at floor level for us but actually situated deep beneath the lake-bed.

One creature looked just like a twenty foot mass of seaweed until it opened its mouth, apparently threatened by the presence of a stranger and somehow able to tell I was a stranger. Thankfully we moved on before it decided it was willing to do anything about me. The next vat held about fifty or so humanoid oysters who clung to the vat's edged and peered up at us (the numbers would settle for the next eight years once their eggs had hatched). Their skin reminded me of cooked scallops and their eyes looked like pearls - apparently they formed eyes from a deliberately induced infection beneath the skin.

I had no idea that creatures like that existed he said the huge vats that were all interconnected through the very walkways we were standing on, allowing fish to pass through and breed safely thereby giving everything a steady supply of food. He didn't want to talk about whatever he'd deemed too unsafe for a mere civilian to know but when the clicking began to develop into croaking he literally shoved me out of the water-tight door and told me to never go neat the lake again.

He said "It" now knew my scent.

Day 949

There's something about the city that doesn't sit right with the residents, they always have this dazed look on their faces and they move like they've just been told that they're the only real human around and everyone else is a hungry impostor. Now it could all just be coincidental or it could be something to do with the recently closed observatory.

Around ninety five years ago it was first opened with the explicit purpose of studying a dust cloud left behind by a near-miss asteroid called AX410-BX. The most intriguing thing about this asteroid was the colour of the dust - a vivid purple dubbed "Royal AX" and observed for potentially new chemical compounds that could change everything we know about modern science.

No news ever came from the observatory but there was the slightest shift in the colour of dust in the city, not enough to see with the naked eye but enough that everyone's behaviour changed subtly through prolonged stays in the immediate area. No reports were made of this either, perhaps the effect is wider than previously imagined?

It could all be written off as the inane ramblings of a concerned nobody but it can't be denied forever. Someone will notice how the light doesn't reflect eight in their too-metallic-eyes or the way that all of their smiles are all exactly the same regardless of age. There's just something so unsettling in the way their gaze darts around your face while they do their too-small-too-teethy smile, as if they are gauging your reaction and trying to respond accordingly.

Day 948

As its gaze swept the house from side to side it made a mental note of which traps were likeliest to go first and what parts it would need to replace them. For instance the thumbtacks underneath the door handles would be the first discovery but its stockpile could replace those a hundred times over for now.

Next would be the rotten floorboards underneath the plush carpet that would collapse under any weight more than its mere 25lbs. The poor person caught in such a trap would find their limb (probably a leg if they were full grown or maybe even their entire lower half if they were younger!) not only covered in splinters but wedged into a wooden brace that it could tighten until their bones shattered.

If the people got past the floorboards it had strategically laid about the house they they'd enter the dining room where the eight chandeliers were all rigged to drop when something big moved underneath them. It meant that it could go about the place perfectly fine (in most rooms at least) while the people would be dead within a week, or more realistically a day.

It stood in a corner, on top of the kitchen cupboards where its beady little eyes could view everything. The open floor house was everything it could ever have dreamed of and all it had to do from there on was wait until people came to inhabit the newly built home. That's when the real fun began.

Day 947

The ghost stories are always about houses on hills. Great big mansion things where centuries of travesties untold have occurred that scar not only the land, not only the house but also the surrounding village whose peasant folk feel the horror deep within their bones. Unimaginable terrors that shriek throughout the night and desperately clutch to the nearest living human in the vain hopes that they shall finally be avenged only to add that poor soul to their ranks of the damned.

Yeah, this story isn't like that.

This story is set on a council estate officially called Hope Le-Thorpe after the duchess who founded its creation as a spontaneous act of charity and not at all to cover a financial scandal she was thoroughly involved in. The tenants simply knew it as Thorpe and cheerfully called themselves inmates as the area was of such a reputation that whole generations lived and died there, serving their life sentences with the rest of their neighbours.

While a great deal of stories take great pains to tell the reader that the locals Do Not Speak Of The Horror, the residents of Thorpe didn't care much for this. They knew the haunters by name and cussed up a storm when their poltergeist broke their new TV as if they were their teenager and not a centuries old lord who was sick to death of the way the electricity in the air made him feel like he was fading into nothingness.

One particular example of this is Margery Zackers, or Bloody Margy as everyone else knew her. Usually in the way they complained "Bloody Margy's at it again, screaming at that fecking viscount. I bet he wrote on the walls in sparrow blood again - and just when she'd repainted it too." and sometimes they just laughed and said "Ah, Margy's getting right angry with her old fella! Either she'll scream her bloody head off one day or he will!".

They didn't have to wait too long until her latest rant about dead birds hidden underneath her bed was cut off with a loud, wet thud. Sadly beheadings weren't uncommon in Thorpe to the point where the on-site officer declared it suicide on scene and claiming the viscount was just her "madness". His own death the next week would also be ruled suicide while the other residents knew then that the viscount's movements weren't nearly as limited as some of the other haunters.

For instance Lilly, the remains of a circus elephant that had been buried on the site's ground in 1734. She never moved, having been hacked to death while still alive as payment for her owner's gambling debts and thus missing her legs and most of her trunk. She currently resided in the Plinkton household in the kitchen. Mr Plinkton had tried so hard to raise the counters to cover her completely but she always seemed to hover just above it, her mournful eye never blinking, her hacked up trunk reaching out to the family whenever they came by.

Day 946

Today at exactly 08:34 I saw my first car. It should have been impossible since the last car factory closed almost three hundred years ago. That and I haven't seen another human for almost fifty years thanks to the scam that convinced them there was paradise in Ireland and that if they could just cross the Celtic Sea they'd be safe and have all the resources they could ever need.

The beaches are still stained red and corpse strewn, less so now but fresh bodies always wash up at least once a week. On the bright side it means there might be a thriving new civilisation just across the water, that or whoever is on the other side is rationing their killing sprees so they'll always have someone to toss out for the fish.

I thought I knew for a fact that there was nobody anywhere near my camp at the summit of Mount Snowdon (strategic location, plenty of room to grow my seeds and it was easy to hook up my home-made solar generator to keep everything warm) and then this morning when I was scouting the area to check if any of my traps had been sprung I spotted the car driving full pelt along the A470, heading to the A5 and deeper into the mountains.

My first thought is to store up as much food as possible and prepare to plank the windows. I could outlast them with my greenhouse produce and whatever local wild-thing had gotten stuck in my traps. Maybe they've come across the Celtic Sea and are refugees from whatever murder-cult-doomsday-massacre is going on over there or maybe they're looking for new recruits.

You used to get so many bandit-type gangs about when I was younger, claiming everything as their own and killing whoever disagreed. It didn't matter if you paid them protection or if you were an inner member - if they wanted what you had they'd take it and leave your body strung up, waiting for you to dry out enough that your skin could be sold on for winter clothing.

Today at exactly 08:34 I saw my first car and at 12:06 the train was called down.

I guess I'll know who's coming in 90 minutes but until then I'll practise pretending I don't exist.

Day 945

Today we look into the potential future, where the traditional magic trick won't satisfy the audience. They crave a new authenticity and proof of dedication to the art form that mere sleight of hand can't possibly hope to accomplish. The audience is out for change and thanks to advanced surgical procedures, they'll have all the change they want.

One popular trend is spinal splinching, also known as the magician's assistant. It's a fairly simple procedure that consists of removing 78% of the flesh from around the midsection ranging from belly-button to pelvis. After the majority of the internal organs have been rearranged and given new structural supports, the intestines are then wrapped around the spine and covered with a nanite-based mass that acts as spinal support, protection for the intestines. This technique is also used on the upper and lower torso for the very same reasons. After the remaining blood vessels are threaded through the nanite cover and the modification has had five weeks to recover the individual is left with the illusion that they are two floating halves.

Another favourite, albeit rarer procedure is along similar lines only a tad more dangerous. It involves the old head-drop trick only in this case the brain is removed from the head for safety reasons, the brain stem and all its accoutrement are relocated within a hard semi-permeable medi-plastic container and surrounded by the intestines. The brain stem can then be elongated through specialised stem cell based neuro-tubing that allows for the new neck muscles (adapted to be compact and hyper-flexible, the windpipe and oesophagus re-tubed to compensate for this) to "drop" and mimic the trick without causing harm.

Day 944

We stopped using the streets when the Bánfaet remembered their appetite. They were meant to lose it once they stopped being human, they'd just wander about trying to be their old selves and failing over the years until they were nothing other than Bánfaet. Not even removing their stomachs when the changes began could put a stop to their hunger and when it started to spread the rest of us found ourselves adapting our cities to avoid them altogether.

Where wide cobblestone streets were became dark passageways between conjoined overhanging upper floors and merging all of the buildings into one large mass with a labyrinthine system of pathways outside glass windows so thick that even the starving Bánfaet couldn't break through. We found new solace inside greenhouses made from the same thickened glass, our main sources of light, food growth and general well-being.

In hindsight it was pretty foolish to centre ourselves so thoroughly around these areas, not realising that in the night the Bánfaet would crawl over every inch they possibly could, scouring for weak spots to exploit and windows left even slightly ajar. There was always one who'd be found in the morning utterly torn to shreds to the point where the chances of them becoming Bánfaet were impossible.

That was a blessing at least. It was also the basis for every door being hydraulically sealed and coded. By the time the doors were open with no code presented (as much of a time-consuming pain as it was) the closest residents would have their chance to seal all surrounding rooms, trapping the Bánfaet inside until they either left or rotted to nothingness.

They generally left before sunrise, finding that it quickened their physical decay tenfold compared to the night and the moon's softer glow. Still it would never be safe for a human to be outside of the citadels and the pathway-homes, not until all Bánfaet had either decayed or their hunger had ceased and they had tried to claim so before.

They were such good liars, still wearing the faces of our former loved ones and using their voices to beg us for food (usually someone they knew was weak, though how they knew was anyone's guess). There was always someone who took pity and gave up their newborn or their dying grandparent which did nothing to appease the never-ending hunger of the Bánfaet. If anything it made them worse as those who hadn't eaten before began to remember how good it felt to consume something alive and screaming.

Day 943

She'd kept her tumour after the operation - she was surprised that they'd even let her but after all the years of back-and-forth for chemotherapy and the checkups so frequent she felt as though she lived in the hospital, after spending years of her life with the nurses she'd made some strong friendships there. Friendships that had an understanding of what the tumour now meant to her, what she overcame and the sheer size of it.

Her chances of survival had honestly been quite slim at one point but she'd pushed through and come out of it with a pinky-red blob the size of a grapefruit and a sizeable scar along her stomach. It had always been hers, she thought, and now she had physical proof that she'd come out the victor. Now she had the very thing that had kept her up at night wriggling and prodding at her in ways she'd never admit to anyone felt a lot like her first pregnancy. The one she lost when she was diagnosed with cancer five months in.

A small part of her hoped it was her baby coming back and that it had been saying goodbye the only way it knew, by moving to show her that it had been there and it was still alright. It gave her a sense of comfort, even when the chemo made her lose her hair, her weight and her energy she still had her little bundle of movement.

It might be in a jar now but she'd keep it somewhere warm and dark, feed it every hour - no half hour - until it was big enough to come out and be her baby and grow up and she knew, she knew it wasn't going to work but some desperate hope in the back of her mind recognised that it wasn't an ordinary tumour and needed to try. Just in case.

And so she hid it in a box under her bed, right beside the radiator and fed it baby formula every half hour hoping that it would grow into the perfect little baby she'd lost once before. It almost did, it could have been a child if she'd been alive long enough to keep caring. But the tumour had many smaller siblings and from what her cousins found when they were scouring her apartment for her last will and testament was some kind of half-formed fetus.

They called it a goat and threw it in the trash, ignoring the way it reached for them and the way its cries sounded like mama.

Day 942

Despite the brightly coloured disco lights that shine about the shop's unusually high ceiling,doing very little to illuminate the deep grey paint and managing to cast bizarre shadows about the rest of the place. As an example, it sometimes looked as though there were huge spiders crawling all over the air conditioner vents and heading for the walls, stopping just before they hit the white walls of the shop's ground area and dissipating gradually.

It became a known quirk to the staff there - their little ghost bugs, as they were affectionately dubbed. Nobody thought they were real except fresh recruits who always swore the spiders looked 3-Dimensional and had countless eyes all over their furry bodies. They always reported the same kind of spider, same appearance and same strange iridescence but of course they were always dismissed, especially if they'd been working the late shift.

Weird things happen around the late shift, they all knew that. There were never any customers (despite the talks of shortening the shop's hours which had been "ongoing" for almost five years) and whatever work needed to be done took far to little time. It left hours until the shift's end with nothing to do but watch the totally-not-real creatures test the boundaries between the comforting dark and harsh white of the upper walls.

In those hours nobody mentioned that the ghost bugs weren't real, not when they were so obviously alive and determined to reach the people below. They were the reason the shop had a "lights on" policy that was officially there to deter thieves, not at all to keep the ghost bugs up and away from people. Not in the slightest. At all.

Still when a power cut happened, as it was eventually bound to just to spite them all, they evacuated the shop "for public safety" and "to protect merchandise loss". Again, nothing to do with the improbable but very real spiders that had been there for as long as anyone could remember.

Not their little ghost bugs that they had seen rushing towards the ground as the last few people exited their shop. Certainly not the unusual shadows that were so much larger when they were on the ground, legs poking at the sunlit path outside, testing this new boundary like they did with the last. They knew night would come eventually, they could wait.

Day 941

There's something moving in the staff fridge. I've been sat here on my lunch break trying to figure out what it is. At first I thought it was the heating system - you know how old buildings and new pipes don't always mix and somehow the pipes rattle about like there's a tornado in the walls or whatever but the walls weren't moving. The fridge, however was - is.

It's been gently rocking from side to side and there's a sort of scuffling sound like fabric rubbing together with the occasional metallic scrape thrown in. I tried to ask my coworker what it was all about but the second he came in and saw the fridge moving he literally ran out so I can only assume this is worse than I thought.

Still the urge to open the door is very strong, just enough to have a little peek and see if I'm dealing with some hellspawn rat that's out for my soul or maybe just a regular rat that bit a hole in the back of the fridge and is now stuck. I'd do it for sure if I could be certain that I wouldn't get mauled and end up with rabies from some panicked pest.

For now I guess I'll shut off the fridge's power and turn it around so the door is facing the wall. If there's a hole in the back then the little pest can get itself sorted out and if not then I don't want to know what I'm dealing with really.

So it may have started growling as soon as I touched the door but at least it can't get me if it won't open, right?