Day 1,005

"Remember when you thought there was a house buried in the fields? Or the time you told me that Mr Brookby steals people's pets and paints his fence with their blood?" Mum said, laughing at my childish imagination that had apparently run rampant throughout my youth. All I could do was grin and nod - if she didn't believe me when I was five, there was no way she'd believe me forty years later. Not even when I had proof.

There was a lot that I'd "imagined" over the years and she hadn't believed a single word. At this point I do wonder if she actually thought I was making it all up or if she was just trying to convince herself that what I was seeing couldn't possibly be real. Now that I'm older I know that there are reasons for things being as they are, reasons for nobody believing me and reasons for these things happening in the first place.

They are all connected to the buried house out in the barley field.

It was built in the mid 18th century, a rugged stone thing with what might once have been a mossy thatched roof, now calcified and almost the same muddy grey as the rest of the building. When I was young, there was enough space to crawl inside through both the old window and the door. First time I fount it I went through the window, never even saw the door until I went back last month just to see if I'd made it up after all.

The window's too small for me now and I wonder how I ever fit into it at all.

Some part of me hoped it had all been daydreams but the floor was still covered in animal bones, the collars all nailed to the walls with the mouldy "missing" posters behind them. I took so many photos that day, using the flash on my phone without even checking any of the other rooms first in case the Resident was still at home. I saw glimpses of them in some of the images when I checked later on, their serrated fingers dripping from their latest meal of whatever Mr Brookby had stolen for them.

I'm sure they told me their name when I first saw them but I've long since forgotten it, just like I tried to forget the collars and posters and the entire house but I just can't seem to. I tried so hard but every time I come back to visit my mum she reminds me all about it. Not explicitly, at least not always, but in the little ways.

The tiny metal trinkets she kept from my childhood room that the Resident gave me are dotted all about the place, leaving faint stains underneath them like the way the pink sea-salt has stained my windowsill all these years later. Mum says I brought them from a local stall during the summer carnival but we both know she's lying on that one. I'd bring those little objects home, knees always bleeding, eyes full of tears and begging her to tell the police that the missing animals were all found.

Last week she phoned me to say that Mr Brookby had passed away. He was found stone cold dead in the same field where I'd played as a kid, where the house was buried, where he'd been feeding the Resident all his life, just as his dad and grandad had before him.

I felt my blood turn cold when the letter turned up yesterday from his lawyer.

He's made me his heir.

Day 1,004

My second mother has always lived in the glass pane between the kitchen and dining room. I've never told my parents about her - they'd never believe me anyway. As far as they know the house has a few quirks and oddities but no more than anywhere else in the neighbourhood.

I suppose that's what you'd expect when building new homes on top of the infamous largest plague pit in Europe. My second mother still has the marks from it, still sweats and groans from the illness that not even death could cure. She's always covered in sweat and great black pustules that I glimpse whenever she lifts anything.

Still, she's always made it clear that she's going to watch over me for as long as I live and when I die her soul might be redeemed from the plague enough that we can both move on into heaven. When I was a child I loved hearing that - she had this way of making my eventual demise sound so happy, like every Christmas and birthday rolled into one and lifted up with the angels.

I never thought she might get impatient with the wonderfully prolonged lifespans our modern medicines afford us.

Day 1,003

The world's full of places where humans don't belong. Places where reality's a bit stretched and time doesn't mean a thing. We've all been caught in them one or twice and if you're reading this then you've been lucky enough to escape- that or the edges of reality have WiFi somehow. I wouldn't be surprised.

Last time I found myself in one of these un-places was when I fell asleep on a coach from London to Edinburgh. It was meant to be about seven and a half hours but when I woke up and checked my watch I'd somehow missed an entire day! To make matters even worse I was on some tinpot island called Inchmickery!

It looked like something straight out of an apocalypse movie with every building run ragged by nature.The only other human I could see was the bus driver (though I'm not entirely convinced he was human, more like an extension of the bus really) who cheerfully informed me that I wasn't meant to have woken up yet.

Honestly if I hadn't taken a few sneaky photos on my brief walk back to the coach I would have sworn it was all just a dream. I managed to doze after some fitful wriggling and woke up in Edinburgh with a few other passengers who looked just as groggy as I felt.

I keep wondering what would have happened if I had refused to get back on the coach - would the driver have left without me? More importantly how did he get such a large coach onto a ferry, over the rotting pier and right into the heart of the island without causing any damage?

Needless to say I took the train home and downed enough coffee to make my teeth shake.

Day 1,002

It was only after he'd finished sucking the last dregs of cider from his glass that he realised everyone was watching him. Their eyes looked fake, like they'd been drawn on and the artist had run out of colour somewhere in the process but released the drawing nonetheless.

He had several brief flickers of thought all at once - where they human when he arrived, had they ever been human in their lives, where they even alive and if so was he? There was nothing in his alcohol-blurred brain that could have helped him get out of his current predicament so he did what drunkards did best - he bluffed.

"THIS ROUND'S ON ME, LADS!" He cried, trying not to vomit as the creatures all around him seemed to shed their guises all at once in their shrieking joy. It was like watching a spider shed its skin - too full of legs and odd writhing motions, jerky and fluid all at once and ending in something slightly bigger coming out after what felt like a lifetime.

As a formerly regular old man (now nine-armed old man with skin like mossy vines and rotting meat) handed him a pint of something that was Not Cider he knew somewhere in the back of his crumbling sanity that he was past the point of return.

He met the old man's eyes and, with that slowly spreading smile of a man who's two drinks too many, tossed back his drink and tossed out his humanity.

Day 1,001

Blood flowed sluggishly from the wound in his side but Operator_325 did not move to tend to it. Any sudden moves would alert the target to his location and any further encounters with the target had a predicted 87% chance of severe to lethal injury on his part.

They hadn't paid him enough to do this.

In hindsight Operator_325 knew he should have demanded more for dealing with a Class 3 inter-dimensional being but he thought himself lucky to be sought for employment at all since his last job tanked, leaving him fused to his Sky Suit and the Class 3 fused with a wall. His ma always said he'd make one hell of a flyboy but she probably didn't mean it like this... at least he hoped so.

A series of sharp clicking hisses and an overwhelming waft of brimstone pulled him back from his musings just in time to slowly crawl backwards into a shady corner just as the target came in sight. Standing at around 8 feet tall, now hunched over in the narrow storage room, it was one of the larger targets he'd had over his career and one hell of a way to ease himself back into business.

Flicking the sound reduction filter into place, taking a deep (and potentially final) breath he raised his quell phaser and fired, praying to every deity he'd heard of that it would meet its mark.