Day 63

Perhaps you wondered where this was or perhaps you never noticed it move in the first place.

Perhaps this was once something entirely different, for example a list of future possibilities or a goodbye note or your grandmother's famous fruit cake recipe.

Perhaps this never existed at all until today, whenever that may be.

Regardless all that can be said is that somewhere, somehow, things have gone astray and now we are left with something that does not belong in its current position.

What to do, what to do, what to do indeed.

I am, of course, speaking about the eyes our shadows seem to have developed and how our own eyes are no longer visible on our faces as if the absence of light has snatched them up and decided that we no longer require nor deserve our eyesight.

I wonder what they will use them for and what they can see. There have been no studies upon our shadows newly acquired vision nor will there be at the rate we are going blind. How are we to know what they are seeing when our frame of reference rests upon their eerily familiar faces?

Day 1,000

"I never trusted the scarecrows" Sarah said, as if the pride in her fear of everything would somehow changed our circumstances from dire to mildly lethal. What she seemed to forget was that nobody in their right mind would trust a scarecrow, let alone turn their back to one long enough to get us all into a situation where the best outcome was that only one person would die before the first day of winter.

We had five hours remaining, nine so far spent hiding in the rusty remains of the tractor graveyard outside of town. If Sarah had only stayed home for once and not gone out of her way to come with us and get us into peril yet again then we'd be safely inside the town's grounds, standing a much better chance of evading the scarecrows instead of joining their ranks.

Sure our town's had the traditional "Scarecrow Fun Run" with a 2% death rate guaranteed every year but it's different when they're out and about later than they should be and they've already whetted their appetite on Milo. If I've had even the slightest inkling that Sarah would be a typical tripper and rush up to the first scarecrow she saw to snap a photo of it (with the flash on, of course) then I would have straight up told her to sod off.

But no, she had to come along to be a part of the group and cause the death of someone I've known for nine years now. It wouldn't have been so bad if she was genuinely ignorant and if nobody had told her but we sent her all the do's and do not's in an email and then reminded her again while we were leaving.

Judging by the dampness in the steps below us I'd say that Milo has come to find us himself sat down and is tilting his head around like he's trying to listen out for us. Even though we pulled the ladder up with us I'm not taking any chances tonight and if this gets read then assume that we as a group failed to smother Sarah and her incessant sobbing lead them right to us.

Little Miss I-Understand-Completely will be dragged in front of them if we make it out of this alive but for now we've got just over four hours to go and now she won't stop hyperventilating. It's so easy to forget that most people haven't ever seen death up close, let alone seen their friend's flesh and bones sucked out of them, leaving the scarecrows to stuff his pulpy skin with barley and replace his eyes with old Roman coins.

Just in case, my final words will be "God dammit Sarah" before dying in the usual scarecrow-related way.

Day 999

The ocean washes all sorts of oddities onto our beaches, this we call certainty, eventuality and unavoidable. From the corpses of unidentifiable creatures to the remains of rockets (successful and otherwise), we remain forever mystified at what the sea brings back to us.

Mam says the sea has a way of returning anything we've lost but then again she also said that dad took my brothers to the shops. That was fifteen years ago and while she hid the posters well, it never stopped my classmates from asking if he'd killed them, never stopped me from wondering if he had or if he'd just abandoned us or if they'd all been killed by someone or something else.

I liked to pretend they had gotten lost along the main road between us and the rest of the country. It floods twice a day and we've nearly been caught out by it before, debating whether it was too deep to drive across and waiting for someone else to try only to see them bob off into the distance. For me, it was easier to picture them floating away, my brothers laughing at dad's mistake, never realising the danger.

Yesterday I was called by the police and asked to identify a vehicle. Despite the way the sea had coated it in rust, past all the barnacles, weed and mud I saw that bumper sticker I begged dad to buy me for my fifth birthday. They had the nerve to thank me, as if they couldn't have read the license plate and tracked back to who the last owner was.

No mater how many times I ask they won't tell me if they found any bodies in the car, specifically a man and three young boys. All I got in reply was that "the investigation is still underway" which makes no sense. They are either alive or dead and I saw that they'd recently cut the seat belts (to which their explanation was that they were "testing the age of the vehicle").

What they don't realise is that I saw more than they wanted when I asked to see the interior and check for the things I remembered about my dad's old car. It was a blatant lie that thankfully they didn't see straight through and gave me the chance to snoop about right under their noses.

Mam always said I had eyes too sharp for my own good and she was right. I saw claw marks that had carved the bottom of the car right up, bits of flesh embedded around the edges and a piece of wool that looked like it could have been on my brother's favourite jumper. It's such a hideous shade of yellow but he loved it and he wore it the day dad took them all away.

After fifteen years they have to be dead but the police have no plans to close the case any time soon.

Day 998

It's finally happened - I can't tell who's human and who isn't any more. They all have the same tell-tale signs that I've been using these past fifteen years to keep myself safe and now I don't know who to trust, where to go or what to do to ensure my survival as potentially the last human alive.

It used to be that the Others smiled whenever they saw me and not just a causal friendly "I vaguely know you from somewhere so hey" or "I like your appearance" kind of smile. These smiles were more like snarls that vaguely resembled a smile, the kind you can get away with on a busy street or passing by in a bus. Their teeth looked so brown I swear they were all wooden.

The Others also smelled strongly of the sea, that tangy salty scent so strong that my eyes watered and my lungs ached whenever I stumbled upon one of their nests. From what I've gathered over they years it's got something to do with the water concentration in their bodies - namely that humans are freshwater based creatures and the Others are somehow saltwater based with possible aquatic ancestry.

This potential ancestry brings me to their final tell-tale sign, the one that has become trendy to the point where it seems that at least 80% of every day humans have surgically "enhanced" themselves with. Now, the webbing of human hands is only barely there, enough to limit the mobility of our fingers but not enough to effect us otherwise. With the Others their webbing always extends to the first knuckle and is highly transparent, it looks like they're wearing iridescent gloves from a distance but it was enough that I could spy them from rooftops.

Now with the sudden popularity of "web implants" and nationwide "scent streets" that pump the air full of a chemical Smell Of The Day that's so overwhelming I can barely think straight, how am I supposed to be able to focus long enough to keep an eye on the Others that are always around? The number of alleged suicides has shot up since I haven't been able to keep their numbers too low to act.

I suppose now it's just a matter of time before they come for me.

Tell the world I'm sorry, I guess.

Day 997

The faint sound of rushing water echoed through the empty car park, setting her nerves on edge as she waited for her ride to arrive. It hadn't rained for five months but the rumours of underground rivers in the area were commonplace enough that she considered it an option. Still, it sounded like it was getting worse, getting louder, getting faster and making all the pipes rattle with the sheer force of it.

Soon the entire car park was filled with the shaking pipes and water pounding against the turns in them like drunken fists on a plywood door. Everything sounded like it was about to split apart at the joints and shower her with whatever was forcing its way around her.

The sudden buzz of her phone nearly made her shriek in fright but it was only a brief text from the taxi company, saying that they'd be "understandably late". Honestly she wasn't too sure how she'd received the message as she hadn't been able to get a signal from the moment she set foot inside the car park's grounds. It had been declared a "dead zone" for years but it still unsettled her.

She did wonder what they meant by "understandably", surely it can't have rained at long last? The forecast said they'd be in their winter drought for another month at least thanks to El Nino buggering about with the local climate. Even if it was raining outside, she was too far into the car park to see or hear it, especially over the pipes.

After what felt like hours, but according to her phone was only forty three minutes, she caught sight of the taxi's headlights coming round the corner from her. The first thing she noticed was that the wipers were on full blast and the pipes slowly quietened as the driver pulled over to her.

He looked thoroughly spooked, his knuckles gripping the wheel white-tight as he confirmed her drop-off point, explaining he'd have to take a longer route to avoid the riverside areas. The storm had taken everyone by surprise, coming from nowhere and causing the river to burst its banks, creating flash floods like they'd never had before in all their recorded history.

It was a wonder she'd stayed so safe in there, he said, what with all the levels beneath her having flooded. She was lucky to have waited on the ground floor and right at the back - too far from the slopes to have even seen or heard the cars crashing into each other as they all tried to escape at once.

He slowed right down as they pulled over to the entrance, showing her the carnage left behind by the sudden flooding. Bodies floated inside their cars, already bloating from the water that had ended them. It was like this the entire journey back, every now and then where a road sloped down into the water, cars and bodies alike bobbed gently away with an otherwise unseen current. Being drawn out to sea, presumably.

Perhaps they'd come to rest there, she wondered.

Day 996

We keep the gardeners locked away, have done ever since they got too carried away at the hedge maze competition of '65. It wasn't really their fault, I think. Anyone can get too excited and around here you aren't meant to show just how much you're feeling or how many feelings you're capable of.

It upsets the town council, you see, what with them not being human and all. Come to mention it, I don't think anyone quite knows what they are or how long they've been our town council. I can't recall there ever being an election for them nor any mutterings about one down at the Goat's Eye Pub - and that's where everything that you need to know is talked about.

Like how you don't look directly at any member of the town council cause it'll only give you a headache and it's not like you'll remember their faces afterwards. Can't think of even a single business round here that takes "I looked at a councillor" as an excuse to skip work neither, if you do it then it's your own damn fault is all.

I remember that the gardeners were able to look at the town council, Mr Simperly flaunted it from time to time and claimed they had all sorts of unnatural facial features and whatnots but then again these gardening types are all an odd bunch. It takes a special sort of person to be able to build and navigate a hedge maze in under an hour, much less fill it with dangerous oddities on the way out.

Oh, that reminds me of the competition of 1961, mind you I was only a nipper back then but I remember running around that maze. I was so desperate to get out I started bawling the absolute second I turned that first corner and looked back to find the entrance had gone. It's such a classic gardener thing, to put their hedges on rotating platforms. Almost as classic as the poison ivy along the walls so you can't feel your way back to the entrance if you get hit in the face by the peeping blinder gas!

Now this may all sound grim but that's just how it was back in my day - and a fine time it was too!

An extract from "Living Irregularities: Interviewing the town of  Gristlehill Upon Stour"

Subject: Edith Ward (aged 65)

Day 995

Most of the websites all said that the only entrance was through an old air vent at the side of the property and that the rear of the house was too dangerous to go near. Not a single user specified why, all saying it was pretty self-explanatory that when you're going into an abandoned location you should take great pains to avoid being seen by anybody. It was odd as the building in question (a former farm just south of Upper Broomwick) had allegedly been left to rot for the past eighty-something years.

The thing about first timers is that they either ask every question that pops into their heads, fully assessing the potential risks before diving right in, or they just ask where the place is and get there without so much as spare batteries. The former are never heard from, they're too careful to cause any hassle, while the latter are often found by joggers the next morning.

The farm grounds near Upper Broomwick have been described as "lovingly haunted" and "sickeningly atmospheric" by those who've visited and made it back in one piece (or close enough). It seemed common to lose a finger for trying to open any window or door, seemed that sustaining any kind of injury was as a direct result of disobeying unspoken rules, as if the house was watched over by a strict parent.

Visitors were fine between the hours of seven and ten at night, anything outside of those hours was considered an insta-kill offence (though no deaths have ever been officially linked to the farm). Boots had to be wrapped in clean plastic bags or taken off when inside the property or the rule-breaker would find thick welts allover their backs, arms and feet when they left.

It was clear that the farm grounds had never been left alone but nobody had safely made contact with whatever remained there, either guarding or just maliciously lingering. The last person to try this used a static box while sat in the air vent, hoping that they'd hear the answers to everything they asked among the static and radio frequency sweeps.

It didn't matter what they asked, they got no reply yet still heard a great many things among white noise and sound blips, for instance they heard the sound of bare feet slapping against tile, matches being lit and liquid being enthusiastically slurped. They heard the sound of stairs creaking and metal clasps being undone. They heard bare feet running away from them, a door opening and footsteps through swishing grass.

At this point they gave up, switched off the box and crawled through the air vent that lead them eventually to the kitchen where a bowl of steaming alphabet soup was on the table, the letters inside spelling "delicious" and "eat me", which they didn't do for a multitude of sensible reasons.

As they turned to face the windows (expecting them closed and locked as always) one was instead wide open, allowing the scent of the soup to drift away in the late winter breeze. They didn't go anywhere near it, remembering just how many people had lost fingers and hands to the farm and not wanting to be among their number, after all their lost appendages were never recovered and could be anywhere on the property still.

From the kitchen they headed into the hallway, thinking they could get a nice stair shot with their fish-eye lens and have both proof and a souvenir for their troubles. Instead they were distracted by the wide open door, with wet foot prints leading out and to the right, to where the side of the building where the entry vent was.

Now if at this point they had turned the box back on they would have heard the sound of  wet flesh moving through a metal tube, a vent if you will. Instead they tried to crawl back the way they came, not knowing that they had been heard,followed and trapped.

Rule Seven: No loud noises - it has excellent hearing and prefers apologies to any other sound.

Day 994

The thing about "mass" incidents is that the survivors and the ensuing aftermath become the new norm. Whatever is left of humanity calls itself the best version and proceeds along an almost identical path to their predecessors until the next "mass" incident either forces them out or forces them to dramatically change til they no longer resemble their former society.

In this particular day and age, not too removed from our present, the common phrase "sex sells" shifted to "sex cells" and the constant need to provide them in order to produce as many infants as possible within a very limited time frame. The more genetic combinations created to engage in the cure trials, the faster they could achieve a workable antidote with less side effects than the last one.

The poor wretches left over from Cure 346-B had scarcely left civilisation before they were hailed as martyrs and considered dead to all who knew them. Not that they were aware of this of course, what with their consciousnesses becoming telepathically merged into one confused mesh of personalities. It had been interesting to study, calling out one name and hearing three people with the exact same voice answer and simultaneously tell the others to shut up.

Unfortunately that wasn't the progress they were after, though it was considered a back-up as it did reduce the full body pustules down to manageable golf balls instead of the standard spine-fracturing ones that burst at the most inconvenient times. No amount of injected dye could make them less repulsive but society, as always, was determined to work with what they had and they had disfiguring pustules (among many other symptoms).

Currently there is no further progress being made and with the lull in reports the public has taken it upon themselves to become even more creative around their state of being and what beauty now is. Colourful dyes were one thing, and very pretty when done right, but they still wanted to feel wanted.

To make disease-ridden disfigurement desirable was easier than it seemed. Straggly hair and bloodied gums became key features on the latest pin-up models, the thinner the hair the better their tumerous scalps could be seen. Blood stained teeth were more of a fad, quickly switched in favour of shiny yellow false teeth (all the better for concealing their decaying gums).

They made their shortened lives beautiful.

Day 993

Judging by the state of the young lad who'd just burst in through the post office's door, he was new to the area. Took him all of five seconds to catch his breath before he began ranting and raving about things that looked like "bin bags with rotten legs sticking out of them, just leaping all over the place and spewing maggots everywhere" which was fairly accurate.

We call them Hoppers and they help fertilise the ground, its what makes our area the best for cabbages and a wide assortment of root vegetables. We tried to tell him this but he was having none of it, kept saying they were demons sent to devour our souls and we should flee immediately.

Our Dennis sat him down, gave him a shot of whisky to stead his nerves and explained it to him proper. He said "Look, its plain as rain you've never been this far out from London or whichever hustle and bustle you're from but down here we don't take to kindly to demonic accusations. Especially where our good neighbours are concerned."

The lad still looked paler than boiled cauliflower but didn't try to argue back, which was better than the last townie to head through our way. Dennis told him plain and straight that "Hoppers are about as vicious as potatoes with brains to match. Literally all they do is put back into the earth what is needed and its good for everybody. Now quit your fussing, have a drink and catch the next train back. You're clearly not ready for these parts."

He was a good lad, did just as our Dennis said and we haven't seen him since. It's a good thing he didn't ask where the Hoppers came from or we'd be obliged to demonstrate and missing persons paperwork takes ever such a long time, not to mention cleaning up afterwards.

Day 992

The unexpected is nearly always heavily planned by someone or something.

Take, for instance a bench that sits underneath a suspiciously shaded tree, far along the path running right through the heart of the Isselsteine Marshland Reserve. It was such a remote location that a bench, while being useful for tired travellers, was not necessary as it had been declared the nation's 2nd least visited national trust property. Even if anyone were ever to travel so far in it would appear to be nothing more than a memorial to somebody by the name of Rupert Rosenbaum who passed on in 1832.

Looking closer at the bench they would note how lichen-covered the bench seemed to be, almost as if it had grown out of the marshland itself as opposed to having been built in memorandum to someone who clearly treasured their place beneath the suspiciously shaded tree. A tree whose shadows seemed to moved with every blink, and not in ways that shadows should.

If anyone were ever to travel so far into the marshlands and if they were to sit on the bench they would find themselves sucked right into it as though it were a steep waterslide and they were a child's lost pool-float.

The name on the bench would change and it would wait for its next visitor, just as it planned.

Another such unexpected occurrence in situated in the sole pub of Avitoise, France (a town that boasts about its 452 residents). Among the well used and darkly polished chairs there is one pale stool made from European Ash. It looks freshly made with a small pile of sawdust circling it but it isn't what it seems at all.

The pub's owner, a man known only as Barbet, placed the odd mix of sawdust and salt around the stool first thing in the morning and late afternoon. Over the course of the day the air around the stool would shift, gradually blowing the dust away as the soft sounds of scraping wood clashed with the gentle murmur of friendly conversation.

If asked Barbet would claim that the chair tripped people over, causing them to sit on it and when they did their souls were sucked clean out and replaced with the souls of their unborn twins. He'd say that it happened to his very own sister who now calls herself by another woman's name and claims to have been born an later than the hospital records state. Not only that but his mother did confirm that he wold have had twin sisters if the midwife hadn't dropped one on her way to the intensive care unit.

Barbet will say he has seen what these twin souls do, says they have made a pact with the devil in the form of that stool so that they can have the lives they were meant to have. The residents of Avitoise make no comments on this, only the occasional offering of salt to Barbet at Christmas and Easter to further contain the stool in case it escapes from his home and ends up in theirs when they least expect it.

It is unclear as to how many residents of Avitoise have previously sat on the stool but none want to again.

Day 991

I knew there had once been a river where my house was but I didn't know we had a basement with thick iron grates for flooring. It was in my great aunt's journal, the one she'd kept on her person since a week after she moved into the house that I'd inherited upon her presumed death (though technically as her body hadn't been found, she was just missing). She spent most of the pages describing the way the water reflected about the basement ceiling, pondering her own insignificance when compared to a seemingly bottomless river.

It took me a while to figure out where she'd hidden the entranced, having used her remaining few years to conceal it perfectly. It was about the time when she began to deteriorate in every way, slowly progressing from a relatively healthy 87 year old to a decrepit skeletal banshee who bit the postman so violently he had to get stitches all up his arm.

The last few pages of her journal were hard to decipher, her writing went down with the rest of her it seemed. I never knew her well enough to even know about this journal but she'd left it and the house to me for reasons I wouldn't know until I finally got into the basement and saw what had kept her obsessed all these years before it drove her out of her mind.

She was sane enough in her last few days to write down a clue as to where she'd hidden the basement door, after finding the house's blueprints at the library, stealing them and having them burned in the back garden. There was absolutely nothing left to even remotely piece together into a functional plan of the house which left me with her clue.

What had hands but cannot hold, a face but cannot smile and the longer it goes, the less you have.

So I looked at the grandfather clock by the kitchen door, finding a small door hidden behind it. The remnant of the basement door. Sure enough, just as she'd written, there was a small light switch halfway up the left hand side that illuminated the stairs all the way down to the basement where small yellowish lights hung evenly spaced along the walls.

The room itself was fairly standard, flooring aside of course. Plain plasterboard walls, no other entrance or exit and the sound of dripping water coming from the far corner where the outline of a human-ish shaped bundle of rags stood quaking, just between two lights and obscured by their shadows.

I'd only ever seen her as a a healthy old woman, smiling with her journal in one hand and her cane in the other. Now she was only recognisable by birthmark on her face, shaped something like Ireland and now just as sunken as the rusty grating along the floor. It was as if all the water had been drained from her body, though I only saw her from an odd angle at first.

As I got closer I saw the water beneath me flickering, quick silver movements like a hundred fish or one man-sized fish. Just as I got within arms reach of her she was yanked down into the water by what I can only describe as a thirty foot albino arm, webbed and encrusted with barnacles. It handled her so gently, turning her from side-to-side as if it was pondering what she was.

Day 990

When we were sending signals out deep into space, half hoping for an answer and half hoping for silence, we never thought it would drive anything back to us. In hindsight we were so painfully ignorant there's no way we could have known that there were creatures out deep in space, feeding on things very much like us and always in want of more.

Our first glimpse of these was in the readings from Voyager 1 which, despite being outside our solar system, was more active than it had ever been. Its magnetic feedback was nothing like we'd ever seen before and all we thought at the time was the outer atmosphere of a new planet and that Voyager 1 had gotten itself caught up in a new gravitational pull, though there were no records of any planet being there.

We thought we'd been wrong about a planet being where it shouldn't be, where it hadn't ever been and continued to argue amongst ourselves about how we could be so wrong about such a blatantly enormous world with an intense magnetic field. It was then that Voyager 1's signal cut out completely, leaving us in the dark once more while something that belonged to the utmost depths of space travelled closer towards us.

It never occurred to us just how blind we were until we looked up one day to see countless rows of bone-like spines with rigid light-absorbing sails gently floating through our sky with no head in sight. Five minutes after the first major news broadcast we lost our satellites. Moments after the blackout it began to rain metal shreds and the spines grew larger and larger as the creature began to tighten its coils around our fragile world, intent on feeding.

Day 989

The boat was so small that they honestly hadn't expected to get so far without losing a few passengers along the way. It seemed that Mac's idea to swish the oars through the water instead of full strokes was working, slow as it was. All around them they heard only the sounds of chirping insects with the occasional angry bellow from nearby crocodiles who could see them clear as day, despite it being barely into the wee hours of the morning.

The group of survivors didn't care about the time, only that they made it to the next town - or safer still, the ocean. If it wasn't too near to the town of St. Plaquemines, it wasn't probably at risk, or at least not as likely to catch whatever had been growing inside the old Marigny Manor.

They'd let it out, you see, during the charity concert that had been held there only a few hours ago. It could all be blamed on a few too many drinks, a door made from gnarled black wood that seemed to follow them about the house and the accidental mass suicide caused by too many people trying to get the shadows out from inside them.

If it weren't for the fact that the Marigny family had purchased dozens of small boats for "romantic night fishing" along the bayou beside the manor, the group would all be dead by now. It was their first thought to get to the water and pray that whatever they'd let out couldn't swim. Being that they were in the heart of the bayou already and the thing they'd let out had spoken English there was still the possibility that it could swim.

It certainly couldn't row a boat, it didn't seem to have arms as such and its lower limbs were more akin to fleshy flabs than anything resembling legs. Still it was following them, bringing derangement and bloodlust with it as it had been doing for however many miles they'd been rowing for. Screams echoed quietly behind them and the occasional loud splash was heard as bodies hit the bayou, luring crocodiles into feeding frenzies.

Though they kept watch on all sides they neglected to check the water beneath them, never seeing large flaps of flesh rippling like an eight foot stingray just out of arm's reach of their fragile vessel. Foolishly placing all of their hope into reaching the ocean, they never heard the thing behind them calling out softly for its brethren, never saw several new pairs of rippling flesh join in silent pursuit.

Day 988

At first it seemed like the acceptance letter from Carnival Island was too good to be true - free on-site accommodation and food, access to all rides at all times and five hour work shifts every day for the entire three month contract. Jay felt like he'd hit the employment jackpot, eagerly awaiting his start date and the long ferry ride out to his new workplace thirty miles out at sea.

The island used to be called the Isle of Awyrgda and had never been permanently inhabited for as long as any national historical record states. Spanning twelve miles roughly in all directions, every inch of the island had been covered in carnival themed rides with tram-tracks instead of pavements.

It was certainly unique however it meant that there was literally nowhere you could go solely by foot, you had no choice but to hop from one tranquil tram carriage to another until you reached your intended ride. There were complaints initially but the inherent laziness of people won over eventually and it was greatly appreciated (ignoring the catastrophic environmental affects the entire construction had by removing ninety-eight percent of all organic material on the island).

Jay was swept from the docks as soon as a costumed employee spotted him, being dragged though tram after tram until they both stood in front of a drop-ride known as "Big Man's Mallet" for the distinctive hammer shape of the seats. Apparently this was the closest way to get to the staff rooms which were situated beneath the ground floor, commonly known to the staff as the guest floor or overground.

The staff area was a mimicry of the overground, every inch decorated in neon carnival themed statues and murals that smothered the myriad of buildings that glowed in the dim caves beneath the island. Jay was taken to what would be his home for the next three months, the former occupant having been attacked by an island guest and left in critical condition.

This was quite concerning as Jay had thought he'd just be showing people where to go and maybe cleaning up sometimes instead of consoling the irate, the irrational and the downright incongruous requests they spewed from the moment they set foot on the island's dock.

He never made it past his first shift, having been repeatedly warned against going in the rides and told to stay beneath the tracks when in uniform, even though he was wearing a similar mask to the rest of his colleagues. This was their trick to make the guests think they were always accompanied by the same caring companion when in actuality it made the staff a faceless target for the guest's newfound rage.

All it takes it one "rigged" game to cause a snowball of outrage that often lead to staff casualties and due to the island's remote location, their best option was to take injured staff away in groups, replacing them as soon as possible and praying the newer ones would last longer.

Even though Jay had done his best to keep out of sight while on cleanup patrol, he was spotted by an older couple who'd spent their day trying to find a staff member to be responsible for the money they'd spent in the casino. They stalked Jay back down to the underbelly of the island, where the rest of the staff limped from the crowded makeshift hospital to their rooms, then they waited for everything to get real busy.

If the panic was big enough then nobody would notice that they'd killed one or two greedy and corrupt employees until it was too late. They'd never be identified - there were no cameras down here and far too few on the overground, most having been wrecked by guests so as to preserve their anonymity when "dealing" with the staff.

Exactly two weeks after Jay's contract had expired his family received a letter saying that Jay had stolen from the company and fled the island, heading out into the ocean on one of their shuttle boats, never to be seen again. Of course this was partially true, he'd gone out to see in a shuttle boat that contained the remains of seven other former staff members, each weighted and tossed overboard, each having been caught by a guest and each having paid for imaginary crimes.

Day 987

Not every plane came home from the war, some never even made it to the coast before they were shot down by the enemy and left to spiral down in smoke and flames, hitting the sea with loud metallic thuds. Their comrades in arms threw mournful salutes towards the falling wrecks, assuming their pilots were already dead.

Who can say what's worse to witness - the bodies of your friends burning, lifeless and rolling about the cabin like ragdolls, or the sight of their arms frantically tugging at windows that refused to open as their screaming faces slowly fall lax as they succumb to the pain and a slow death.

As soon as a plane hits the water its crew are considered deceased. They are mourned, memorialised and left to be memories, all the while they remain alive and in control of their now ghostly planes that glide under the waves, deep down among a graveyard of broken bones and wings alike.

They occasionally surface from the depths, the light of their still-burning aircraft being mistaken for St.Elmo's Fire as they repeat their battles among the soaring ranks of the sunken pilots. Sometimes they fall in the same way they originally died, sometimes they win, but they never stop flying.

Day 986

The Sackmoor zoo specialised in taxidermy instead of the expected live animals.Budget cuts had hit them harder than any other source of entertainment and conversation in the area, even the tree society hadn't been challenged to contribute more to their surroundings but as government owned property they had no say in the matter.

One by one dozen they sent their animals away to be "rehomed" while they had "counterparts" brought in to replace them as perfect replicas in cages that would never need cleaning again. It became something of a tourist attraction with the patrons trying to guess which animals were still alive and which were now stuffed.

It was easier with some, for example the meerkats who were usually seen scampering around their sandpit and now stood in clusters as snow began to cover their stiff little faces. The reptiles were a lot harder to guess, what with the heating cuts from previous years meaning they were often too cold to do much more than huddle under their meagre hotspots.

Now with so many of the creatures at Sackmoor being nothing more than sawdust and fur, the public found it amusing to climb into the cages and environmental spaces and take pictures with the stiffly posed critters. The thrill was in not quite knowing which were alive and which were just too tired and underfed to move.

Officially the zoo said "over 45 perfectly preserved replicas" but unofficially there was only one animal left alive. It was the one creature that the staff were too nervous to go anywhere near, save from feeding it and making sure that there was a steady waterflow.

Their resident saltwater crocodile, known as Guile, who measured around nineteen feet long and was the only crocodile in England to have eaten six people during its time at the zoo (of course those were all put down to staff negligence).

Guile rarely moved, even during feeding time he would grudgingly slink over to his food. As the crowds found this as dull as the actual dead animals they moved feeding time to the nights, offering midnight shows that were never popular.

Not everyone knew this about Guile though, especially with the rumours that said he'd been the first to go and that the midnight feedings were just a cover story to make it seem like the zoo was still rich enough to afford living animals. this was, of course, untrue.

This was of course not found out until the last minute for most unlucky trespassers. The crowds the next morning just assumed that the blood and body parts were there to convince them that the blatantly stuffed animal was a cold blooded killer. The zoo went along with it, calling it their little joke and leaving the corpses to rot with their families watching and rolling their eyes at the zoo's "fake" gore.

Day 985

There are times when your body is trying to tell you something is wrong and there are times when you are trying to tell your body that something is wrong. Unfortunately these two rarely occur at the same time, preferring to clash or suddenly come into play at precisely the wrong time.

Though the classic example is an anxiety attack, today we examine the phenomenon known as pins and needles, or by its scientific name "Paresthesia". While the accepted reason for this is reduced blood flow suddenly being able to flow utterly uninhibited, causing a prickling, numbness or burning sensation on the skin of the affected limb, there are always other paths to be considered.

One such path was proposed by the classic 16th century philosopher Vincent van Nuil who argued exclusively for the existence of the human soul. He considered the soul to be a liquid force that thrived within our blood, and as such, thought flow of blood to be crucial in maintaining the soul's necessary and equal presence throughout the average person.

Mr. van Nuil theorised that the negative sensations were, in fact, the primary signs of the soul's flow being so interrupted that the soul would begin to evaporate. He claimed that even after the Paresthesia had ended, the soul would not return or regrow. By his methodology, those most effected by this gradual recession of their soul were found to be prone to disassociation, thinking that they were not human and thus proceeding to act outside of the expected societal norms.

Other symptoms of this "soul shortage" were physical characteristics that Mr. van Nuil had measured over his thirty five year career. His results were remarkable - those with less of a soul looked less human and lacked, or at least showed a great reduction in reaction, to regular uncontrollable responses to physical stimuli such as the knee jerk reflex.

What his research didn't do was come to a conclusion, though he speculated the eventual evolutionary impact of the alterations that he claimed were caused by the lack of a soul. From his reasoning humans we he knew them now no longer exist. We aren't the same kind of human that existed in the 16th century, in fact we are barely as human as out ancestors.

We are something else entirely, something with little to no free flowing soul in our blood.

We do not care.

Day 984

When E-Graves came out people were quite sceptical, even going so far as calling it sacrilegious and tasteless. Still the first few recordings were made and saved to a global database to await their creator's deaths. These messages would then be embedded within the gravestone, ready to be activated via the app (just a quick area scan and the screen would light up with the hazy outlines of user's faces, ready to speak with a single tap).

The first few were successes, the creators were congratulated in solemn tones while people came from around the world to the five original sites just to see the dead talking. Most messages talked about loved ones and how the deceased wanted to be remembered in the moment they were recorded, ignoring how age warped them as their messages progressed throughout several years.

After a few decades with no negative impact, E-Graves became just another part of our funeral rites as people would sit and listen to their grandparents reminisce about their wedding day or the birth of their first child as if they were talking through a webcam.

The issues didn't come along until a severe storm hit E-Graves' head quarters and central data bank. Their entire office was flooded, the data banks simultaneously damaged by the rising water levels and overloaded by electrical surges from stray lightning that hit far too many times to be just a coincidence.

From then onwards the E-Grave users began to change their messages and even their appearance in some cases, their flesh seeming to melt away into a flurry of maggots until they were nothing but bones that cried out for help, to be pulled out from burning pits and damnation. Of course these were the more extreme cases, the "lesser" ones were only categorised as such for their lack of visual disturbance, what they actually said was a lot more disturbing.

The system somehow managed to further integrate with the user's app devices, namely the speakers and microphone, seemingly listening in as people passed their graveyards by. They learned names and asked for those people to visit only to appear as full figures and not the faces that were programmed in.

Even when E-Graves was officially shut down, they had no idea how to remedy their mistake. The programme wasn't responding to them any more and the graves that were already set up continued to wreak havoc on any user who came within their radius. Even when their stones were destroyed, they still stood by their bodies like sentinels.

Day 983

They called it a hard water area and claimed the reservoirs were clogged with natural limescale. As far as reasons to deny an entire county fresh water in the middle of summer go, this was less flimsy than their attempt the previous year when they tried to blow the pipes. We caught them before they could do too much damage but now they try and turn the blame to us for "ruining a controlled demolition that would, in no way, have affected the reservoir had it gone correctly" which was a bold lie if ever we heard one.

Every year it was the same - three days into summer and the county council would attempt to shut down the water without truthfully explaining why. Council employees were scarcely seem around that time which was odd, given how they - like to bask on the high grounds by the old coal mines. When I was a kid we'd gather up gangs and pretend to throw stones at them just to watch them hiss and scuttle back down into the mines. No harm was ever done, just annoyances.

I do wonder if they try to shut off the water for weird council-beast reasons like they have some sort of connection to the local water or something. Or if they just really hate the rest of us and want us dead so we can stop complicating their oh-so-important town plannings and rearrangements. People are surprisingly good at accidentally messing everything up.

This time they might be right,for once in their cold blooded lives. The cases of petrification have shot up in the past five or so weeks which could indeed be limescale reacting to the inherent empathetic nature of the countyfolk's digestive systems. We tend to mimic what we eat for reasons we don't quite know, but still blame on the council. In this case it's entirely possible we are becoming limescale, slowly petrified by our body's defence mechanism.

Day 982

Hypothetically we'd never know if someone had the ability to freeze time indefinitely. Hypothetically we could have been left suspended for hours while this person (or persons) did as they pleased with the world - assuming that only organic material was suspended and not everything with kinetic potential.

Perhaps there was only one person who could do this and lived their life using it for menial tasks like planting crops in seemingly an hour, delivering their postal rounds in record time or never missing an appointment. Perhaps they died of old age, surrounded by people who believed they were the fastest human alive and that their lives had all progressed in proper linear fashion.

Perhaps they considered death and found that they didn't want to die after all, choosing instead to suspend themselves and leave behind instructions to bring them back when the cure for death had been found. Their self-induced coma may never end but neither will their life. A perpetual state of dying with no end in sight is heaven for those who sincerely feel their life fleeing their body and hell for the rest of us.

Hypothetically if this person who refuses to die was particularly insistent on keeping life at the exact moment of their revelation, their triumph against death itself, they might spread this and call it a gift. We could have locked in a state of suspension for centuries and not even realised it, we could still be suspended and this could all be an elaborate dream but that would be too simple, too cliche.

Perhaps so cliche for all the times we've realised this before?

Day 981

Of all the times she'd hopped over or crawled under the fence surrounding the huge tree in her favourite museum, she never thought to look up. Every day after school she would cross the road to the museum with her latest book and sit in the hollow at the base of the tree to read. It was half hidden with plastic bushes to make it look more "natural" but it was Her Space and the staff thought it sweet.

She was their bookworm who hid in the weird tree for a couple of hours before her parents would come to bring her home for her dinner. It was routine, it was her safety and her certainty. At least it was until the teacher assigned the class a project to write all about their favourite place to be using the descriptive words they'd studied that lesson.

To keep Her Space secret from her classmates she chose to write about her small rocking chair in her room, thinking it would be easy but her curious nature compelled her to look into the museum's tree and how it got there. The staff didn't know - she'd asked them before, but they did mention a few books that might tell her something.

 Of course these books were "for adults" and "too scary for kids" but that kind of warning never stopped anyone, certainly not a nine year old who hadn't been taught any better. The first book they'd said was called "Blood Trees of England: A Species Long Gone" and was full of words she didn't understand but the pictures said more than enough.

Every other page had some kind of diagram on it that reminded her of Her Space and the weirdness of the tree. For example these "blood trees" apparently fed on animals like a venus flytrap did, only with trees they tended to provide a shelter big enough for smaller prey to minimalise any potential struggles. Her Space had always been just the right size for her, just the right warmth too, with the faint smell of sausages that made her feel right at home and welcome.

After luring their prey inside and lulling them to sleep, the "blood trees" would then slowly close up around whatever they'd ensnared, partially crushing the body so as to drain it of all fluids better. The remaining husk would calcify and resemble bark more than bones. She remembered how she'd always thought that Her Space had loads of smiling faces cheering her on when she was reading.

Now, in her mind they were screaming.

Day 980

There are things in this world that we've made that remember a great deal better than we do, and for so much longer too. All those vintage, hand-me-down, cheap-o shops that come and go like bugs on a corpse are nothing but memories loosely kept in whatever knickknacks are present at the time.

They almost become brains, weaving webs of thought and former lives between shoelaces, doll's hair and cracked leather belts whose lines vaguely resemble someone you walked past when you were a child. Though we can't hear it they talk amongst themselves about whose lives they've been a part of until their stories gradually warp and twist until they lose their original tale and become a sentence fragment in a near-endless train of thought.

In the larger shops they aren't limited to these networks, they are strong enough to feel ours and take little strands of worse to bring us into their stories. It's that feeling of walking into a room and not knowing why you came in there, the way that older shops have a nostalgic feel to them, even though you've never been there before.

In a way it's not as bad as it may seem. Though we lose small parts of ourselves to our own possessions and the possessions of strangers, where any memory we have ever held can be taken at any moment, we are also made immortal in their unheard babble of stolen lives.

Day 979

It was expected that with all the strange things that had recently been seen in the nearby rivers and lakes, that flooding would bring them right to our doorsteps and lead us all into Damnation. Quite the opposite happened and now we question if we ever had souls or if we were like the water creatures all this time, after all humans are sixty-something percent water.

I remember the first time I saw one of these new beings when I was out fishing with my friend Marlene and her nephew Ray. I thought I'd just seen the biggest fish of my life until a worryingly human face appeared where I'd cast my line out. The cheeky thing waggled my own baited hook at me, slipping a fat fish onto it, giving it a pat and dropping the line back into the water before swimming off again. I suppose we should have known from that moment that they were looking out for us more water-some folk.

When the floods finally came, as we'd all expected our communities were torn in half between those like me who'd had only kindness from the water creatures and folks who didn't trust them one tiny bit. We soon found ourselves on the brink of civil war with each side taking to their preferred turf. Boats and barriers alike were built to keep everything in its new place and I found myself on a small cuddy boat-turned-tent called "Wierwolf".

The owner had a similar experience to mine only the water creature handed him a sack of half drowned puppies, crying and making noises that sounded like the word 'help'. So many of us have stories like this where the water folk have been so much more human than the ones that have now formed a blockade against us and called for our damnation alongside the so-called abominations who we call friend.

Haven't heard much from the land-stuck for quite a while, come to think of it. Whenever we got too close to one of their settlements they'd yell all sorts of abuse before throwing their trash at us. It hasn't happened for a few weeks which is new. We aren't sure if we should be worried or happy that everyone we knew on land might potentially be dead.

Nobody wants to go inland or even on land to check and I don't blame them. My own brother stabbed my arm when I said I was heading out to the docks. He claimed this was all the devil's work,just like the Vicars and Bishops had said but the Pope himself had set sail several weeks earlier with a holy flotilla of his staff.

It's odd to think that my brother might be dead, perhaps its worse that I don't feel anything about it.

Day 978

Upon arriving at the local library she wasn't surprised at all to see several members of staff rushing to the lift while calling for others to hit the stairs. There had been another "breakout" on floor five, which was mostly used as a waiting room for the obligatory council meetings in the connecting offices.

Nobody likes to wait, especially when they have no say in the matter and find themselves sitting in the same vicinity as someone they have held a grudge against for thirty or so years. Sadly this was all too common for the area, given how few people left and fewer arrived.

After the staff rush to get to floor five and, with any luck, stop the "breakout" before anyone loses a tooth again, she pushed the Call button and waited. With any luck nobody would be being brought down to wait in the isolation office for the police to arrive and she could get to floor three in peace, do her research and go home with no further chaos.

The lift arrived with the usual quiet groan, the oil that was supposed to be poured over the rotational gears at either end of the pulley was still in its packaging at the information desk, as far as she knew, and had been there for almost ten years now. After the doors had opened with further complaining noises from a machine that desperately needed some TLC, she and a few other patrons quickly stepped inside, bracing themselves against the smell that they all knew would cling to their clothes for at least three washes.

The elderly gent standing next to the level sign glanced about as everyone quietly held up their fingers to show which floor they needed to get to. It was some unspoken rule that you didn't talk in the lift, only the staff did that. Being quiet meant that you wouldn't be yelled at by anyone waiting on floor five (though half the time any noise from the lift would set somebody off on an ironic tirade about noise control in a sensitive environment).

After confirming that everyone else wanted floor three and only one man wanted floor four, the lift shuddered and began its ascent. It slowly rose above floors one and two with no signs of stopping or slowing for floor three as it went right past the majority's stop. It slowed as it got to floor four, only coming to a stop on the floor nobody wanted to visit.

The doors opened unusually quietly as everyone inside the lift looked about at each other as if one of them would suddenly admit they had pushed the button for floor five. The elderly gent stepped out slowly, whispering to the others "It's safe to say the old gal's lost it. Best if we walk down, eh? Heads low, no sudden moves and we'll be right as rain." which didn't reassure the others nearly as much as he'd hoped.

As they moved out, one young woman gasped and began rapidly pointing to the far end of the seemingly endless rows of unoccupied chairs. For a place that was always so loud and allegedly full of trouble makers, there didn't appear to be anybody at first until everyone's eyes followed her shaking finger to the dark red footprints that glistened under the florescent lighting.

The prints were heading in the same direction as the stairs so the group, still lead by the elderly gent, followed along in parallel, eyes rarely leaving the bloody trail as if they expected a person to just appear there all of a sudden. Despite their best efforts to keep silent they heard people yelling at them to be quiet, yet still saw no-one the entire way along. Murmuring apologies they hurried quieter to the stairs, the footprints alongside them the entire way, seemingly following them down the stairs.

The group were so fixated on them that the young man didn't stop at floor four and nobody stopped at floor three. Instead they continued following the prints right to the ground floor, coming to an abrupt halt at the exit doors. The handles were covered in what could only be described as fresh blood, the source of which was coming from the brutalised remains of a staff member whose lanyard had been used to choke him so tightly it was embedded deep within his throat.

Judging by the child's face that had been pushed half way through the door, whatever happened on floor five had come down just ahead of them.

Day 977

Buddy and Jake had used this trade route a dozen or so times in the past year alone and were expecting nothing out of the ordinary. From the mileage counter to the security checks to the way that Buddy complained about the oxygen intake on their (admittedly rather old) Class 6 trade vessel, everything went as smoothly as always.

As they hit the gravity belt for Mars they pulled over into "The Minty Shrimp Diner & Genuine Seafood" docking bay for the umpteenth time on their umpteenth trip to the planet, they debated the potential staff on shift, trying to decide if they wanted to risk it with the chef who loathed their very existence (for reasons beyond them) and sit down for a meal or if they wanted to grab coffees to go and eat when they hit the surface.

In the end they voted on coffee as Jake vaguely remembered a waitress telling him that the chef had gone to Earth for a month to get some weird salivary gland implant that may or may not induce severe vomiting with certain hormonal balances. It wasn't worth the risk and with the coffee machine being right on the front counter they could rest assured that it wouldn't be tampered with.

The entire time they were docking and debating they never noticed the sudden stampede of wounded customers fleeing to their ships and disengaging so fast they risked oxygen leakage. Neither of then saw the way that the fleeing ships turned on one another and set off on bulldog chases that quickly spiralled down to the planet's surface. They didn't even see the bloodied hands that beat at the diner's windows with such desperate fervour before being yanked back into the kitchen.

Buddy and Jake ignored the little blue dot that indicated incoming calls from other vessel, heading straight for the docking tube to get their much needed coffee for the day.

Day 976

They called it the world's most haunted forest, the second deadliest next to Aokigahara. There were no suicides in Grittlecot, every death was somehow ruled as accidental and politely ignored by anyone who was unaffected by the loss of the presently deceased.

Bodies were found in the central lake trapped between moss covered rocks that were always too slippery to go close to yet somehow even the most experienced locals had been found floating there in a puddle of their own bodily fluids and lake water. This was, of course, an accident and not at all caused by the witches who had been drowned there almost three hundred and thirty years ago.

Children would go there to climb the witch trees and never come back, their little blue hands clutching at the ivy that had somehow wrapped itself around their necks as they slipped and fell from the branches to their deaths. This too was an accident, everyone knows ghosts aren't real and the thought of one being able to wrap a vine into a near perfect noose it preposterous.

The occasional family would visit the woods with a picnic, hoping to offer food to the more active death zones (as they had so kindly been dubbed) and never coming back together. The forest of Grittlecot was one of the few areas of England where Cortinarius Orellanus (or Fools Webcap) is most heavily concentrated. The chances of a few spores slipping into a drink, getting caught on your lip or your hand were apparently high enough that whole families had been found poisoned on their tartan blankets, surrounded by cold tea and spore-ridden sandwiches. This was an act of nature, not supernatural in the slightest.

And finally, no death in the forest of Grittlecot had anything at all to do with an old man who lived in an old army bunker hidden beneath a moss smothered tree stump. Even though he'd been declared dead some forty years ago and hated the thought of encountering another living being anywhere within his personal solitude,it couldn't have been him to cause so many deaths.

Surely not?

Day 975

 The city perched at the very edge of the cliff, as it had done for almost four thousand years. Of course it wasn't the same as it had always been - the residents had a Thing about "resurrecting" their entire city every five hundred years and throwing everything old over the cliffside to be used by whoever dwelled by the lake far down below.

They had no idea who, if anyone, lived there but they assumed they were doing their unseen neighbours a good deed by sharing their resources in such a liberal, no strings attached sort of way and so regularly too. At least, they thought it was regular, after all even their records were thrown over, in case keeping it counteracted the resurrectional aspect of the old tradition.

In a way they were doing themselves a world of good and unknowingly isolating their city from everything and everyone that wasn't a bird or insect. The sheer mass of material tossed down the steep cliffside had blocked off the only possible passage up to them and given its incredible instability the chances of anything heavier than a few dozen grams making its way up the blockade of rubble was highly unlikely.

This started on purpose.

Four thousand and seventy six years ago everyone began to have almost the exact same dream. Shadowy figures at their windows, phantom infants crawling over their bedsheets and spewing maggots from rotting lips. After a painful month of this, the shadowy figures began to say one word over and over again. Not everyone could hear it, some infants cried louder than others, but those that did hear it all swore they were saying "renewal, release, relapse".

In their sleep deprived state they took it to mean that they had to make their homes anew and alter every aspect of their lives, right down to their names and mannerisms so that the nightmare things would get confused and head somewhere else.

It may have worked eight times so far but there was no guarantee that it would always be that way.

Just like their town, everything has to change at some point.

Sometimes sooner than later.

Day 974

I could tell when it was happening outside my door by the way the shadow gently swayed back and forth. They did this every Wednesday, reenacted their deaths in utter silence. On the bright side it meant that I wasn't ever tempted by a late night snack, just in case I came back to my room to find them waiting for me to hide behind the door so they'd have a proper audience.

It was always the same - one would be shot by the homeowner who'd discovered them upstairs where he'd set up his noose in order to end his own life. The one he didn't shoot would drag him along the hallway and string him up before yanking his legs so hard they tore right off with a wet crunching sound.

Some times they changed the script, sometimes they let him win and sometimes they changed in more subtle ways. For example the homeowner didn't always have the air to scream in pain but when he did it seemed to echo all around me and right into my ears. Drives the neighbours dog mad, sets it off yowling into the wee hours of the morning.

Still it could be worse, from the forums I've found there's one poor woman who had to live out her lease with five children who were constantly running from their older brother and dying in truly... creative ways before resetting and sleeping the weekdays away. From 07:00 on Saturday to 21:00 on Sunday they'd loop about her and through her, sometimes shrieking and sometimes just whispering "go away," over and over again until they got caught.

I still say she's luckier than me - her ghosts are at least human.

Day 973

My nana never let chairs stay empty in her house, always folding them up and putting them away if nobody was going to use them. She was convinced that any chair left empty would be used by a ghost and then she'd have to get the house exorcised to get the damn thing out. In her words she was "too bloody old for that ruckus and besides, the Clergy will steal my good silver!" and nobody wanted to start an argument with her so we just let it be.

All the while she lived in that house there was never a chair left unattended,not even on her 95th birthday. She had my aunt go around on chair patrol, folding the chairs whenever someone got up which caused no end of amusement and annoyance but again nobody wanted to start anything.

When she died I was volunteered to stay with her body overnight (another family tradition to stop demons eating her soul or something like that) and to open the doors for the morticians in the morning. They never tell you that when you're dead you empty every orifice and I mean every orifice. It's one scent I'll never forget and one I never wanted to associate with nana.

I left her bedside for less than ten minutes - just long enough for me to have some fresh air and make a strong smelling drink - and when I got back she had moved. It was like she'd just been asleep and if it weren't for the faintly stained bedsheets she'd just vacated I'd've believed it too.

And then her head turned in stiff jagged movements like a glitched video, her hands gripped the chair's arms so hard they began to splinter. I did what anybody would do in that position - bolted out, locked the door and sat in the hallway, unable to sleep until the morticians knocked for her in the morning. By then she was back in bed, her palms covered in splinters and the chair neatly folded away.

Day 972

He'd spent all day polishing the mirrored doors of his closet, making them perfectly pristine just to spite his wife. She'd never been fond of having such large mirrors about when they weren't aware, as she'd put it, never giving him much more of a reason than it made her feel "odd".

From that day onwards she'd refused to sleep in the master bedroom, using the guest room until he listened to her and covered the mirrors, which he refused to do as he'd spent so long cleaning them. He thought she'd be happy with how lovely and sparkly the house was but the moment she'd seen the closet doors she'd been in a right foul mood with him.

He suggested painting the glass or putting stickers on it which placated her for the time being. When the paint peeled off overnight and the stickers all refused to stay in place she went right back to the guest room and begged him to put something over the doors, something better.

No matter what he tried nothing seemed to work, always falling overnight and leaving the mirrors reflecting the room as perfectly as the day he'd first polished them. And so he gave up, resigning himself to either sleep in the guest room, get rid of the closet or sleep alone.

He chose to sleep alone for the first few days, telling his wife he was going to exchange the closet for a wooden one when their next payday came which settled her for the time being. Meanwhile he set up a camera and tried taping an old bedsheet to the wall above the mirrors, hoping to catch the moment the sheet fell.

The footage itself starts with his face as he turns the camera on, giving it a cheeky wink as he goes and settles into bed, turning the bedroom light off as he goes. Once his breathing and shuffling have ceased and it becomes clear that he's fast asleep, the sounds of rustling fabric continue, albeit quieter as something behind the covered mirror begins to push forward in the shape of a hand that grips the sheet so tightly it tears and drags the fabric off.

A blurry version of him drops the sheet and retreats back into the mirror, covering itself with the familiar blankets before resuming a peaceful sleep and not moving until it mimics him in the morning.