Day 1,089

I can hear a ship's bell tolling close by and wonder what it's doing in a landlocked town.

I can smell the ocean and wonder if I'm still awake.

I can see light-reflected water ripples dancing across my bedroom ceiling and risk a glance outside.


A galleon is floating gently down the street, passing through the houses on either side of its hull. The crew flitting about its deck are like will-o-wisps, if will-o-wisps were human sized and had painfully distorted bodies that didn't quite move as a human should be able to.

It is coming closer and I know that I am one of many who are awake and witnessing this dead ship reenact something historical, albeit far from their original dying ground, perhaps they drifted with the wind as ships are made for?

I suppose that without the ocean it has no confines, no borders and nowhere to dock.

As it comes closer I step back, instinctively flinching from the bright light that floods my room as the hull passes through me and I finally see their cargo. Hundreds of eyes gaze at me, into me and straight through me all at once and I understand why they are landbound.

The ship itself is looking for lost souls to fill its crew roster, forever cycling through the old who eventually find peace and move on, to the new who know no better than to fill their place and move the galleon further inland.

I wonder if I'll join them some day.

Day 1,088

There's something new in the air, something different about the town that nobody can quite place yet it raises the hairs on their necks whenever they catch a glimpse of this something else. It's the sort of something you only see from the corner of your eyes, that flicker of inherent wrongness, that speck of impossibility that you know you shouldn't be able to see.

Some attribute it to the newly cleaned war memorial, claiming that washing away the decades of grime has woken up the dead who are now running around the edges of the living searching for answers. It would certainly explain the whispers that follow you when you're walking by yourself, no matter the time of day.

Others have blamed the new betting shop that's been opened in what the shell of a Tudor-aged house. Once more, they say the dead can't rest but this time it's because their Puritan home is being desecrated by modern vices. It has potential but is only one small place and doesn't explain how or why the feeling of discomfort surrounds the entire town.

Thus far the only rumour that makes enough sens to apply to the town-wide oddities and lingering sickly-sweet scent of decay is the new motorway that cuts just past the outskirts. It brings in hundreds of new cars, new trade and old souls who'd been travelling for so long they no longer remembered their deaths, names or the reason for their unrest. They mean no harm, they're just more travellers than we're used to, just enough to break the boundaries between life and death, just enough to unsettle us all.

Still, for all the theories and maybe's there is still something new in the air, hard as it is to breathe now. For all our efforts to cleanse, to appease or otherwise put the dead back where they bloody belong we still find ourselves freezing in the summer heat from the intense gazes of the deceased who are demanding answers to questions we can't hear.

Day 1,087

Back in high school we would dare rival cliques to dress as ghosts (white sheets, eye holes poorly cut out - the works) and walk single file through Friday Woods. Most refused of course - they were at that age where ghosts weren't cool and nothing was scary to them. Without a potential risk or thrill it was seen as pointless.

Still, the few that went came back with their stories that soon became playground legends.

Noeline McCallister and a few other music kids went (witnessed by the year group above them, as per tradition). Their strategy was to play classical folk tunes in the hopes that nothing weird would happen and that they'd all come back just as they left.

This did not happen.

As they began their rendition of Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes all the birds flew from the immediate area. This should have been enough to startle them into sense but they had a dare to win and so their little parade carried on, aiming for the bridge on the other side of the woods.

It took them twenty minutes to get there, all the while they heard sharp laughter between the pauses in their notes. It took them twenty minutes to realise they had been walking with an extra person who somehow played the harp, flute and violin all in one sound.

They looked at each other, trying not to state too hard at the shoddily cut eyeholes of the unknown being playing alongside them and, without a single word spoken, they all turned back and prayed their guest would leave them.

They did not leave the group until they got to the very edge of Friday Woods.

Whatever had followed them couldn't leave, instead they stood there clutching their harp until it cracked in half before turning slowly and running back into the depths of the woods. It left behind a trail of long grey hair tangled with mud that each of the children kept a strand of for good luck.

Other groups, like the relay team,turned it into a competition. The Ghost Run. Some even went weekly as a part of their training but those people weren't quite normal - they had an air of uncanniness about them as though someone had the idea of a child but didn't know how to make one function without the occasional flicker of Otherness.

Like Green-Eyed Jamie who went through Friday Woods to get home each day, every time dressed as a ghost and holding a large bushel of sage. Everyone else thought she was a witch but she protested that it was something her nan had taught her - sage to keep danger away.

She never ran into any oddities in all her years of travelling back and forth through the woods- at least, none that she would ever mention. Come to think of it, she never talked about what anybody else had seen in the woods, not even if it was the Big News Of The Week around school.

Maybe she never ran into anything and her sage really did protect her.

Maybe she was the thing that everyone else ran into.

Day 1,086

They grow through the cracks between both the concrete and reality. Those little yellow flowers, waterfalls of moss, odd patches of leaves that you can't quite put a name to. They aren't plants, they aren't from this world and they aren't safe to take home.

Still there's always a child who sees something pretty and plucks it out of the street, shoves it into their pocket and forgets all about it. That's how they get in. Those little sprouts are homing beacons, a shiny piece of silver hanging before a fish who snaps it up without seeing the string above it.

A child won't care that the flower they found smells like iron, they won't even notice the way it bends towards them no matter where they put it down as it keeps an eye on them until the rest of the creature can get through to our world.

Even the little rivers of moss that trail down from odd holes in odd buildings are just another way to get us interested, get us close enough that they can snap their jaws around us. With our absolute confidence that we are the dominant species on our world we make for the easiest prey  - we simply refuse to believe that there are things just outside of our immediate vision that are waiting to drag us away into impossibly small pipes to slowly consume.

It just doesn't seem plausible, right?

Day 1,085

They called her the Chosen One from the day she was born - some star-crossed thing bound by destiny solely for being born at exactly 11:36:42AM one year after her predecessors death. At least that's what her parents claimed, what the midwife confirmed and what was officially ruled across the lands.

But they were three seconds out.

You see, her predecessor had died locked in combat with a being known as the greatest evil of their time, one who outlived their rival by exactly three seconds. One who was reborn in the form of a baby girl whose eyes caught the sun like no others, whose smile stopped birdsong and whose laughter made flowers bloom.

Nobody realised these were not the signs of a Good Chosen One.

By the time they realised this she had already seized control of the seven kingdoms, having had her rival killed when they were a child whose predecessor began to shine through (his laughter made the rain fall and fed the plants, though it was seen as a wicked attempt to drown his home town, his touch made you feel warm and numb as he took your onto his own heart, though it was claimed he stole your life).

Still, the two were doomed to face each other as enemies for all eternity, she had the upper hand.

No matter how her eyes caught the sun and cast its searing heat onto all who displeased her, no matter how all of nature feared her attentions, no matter how the simple sound of her laughter forced the plants to age and die in a single breath, her people loved her still.

She was their Chosen One.

Day 1,084

You thought you were alone in the frozen woods yet a few feet away, a small cloud of fog mimicked your own chilled breath. There wasn't anything there, you were both in the centre of a small clearing - you outside the stone circle and the breath-without-a-creature inside.

Your grandmother had told you all about the Remnants (not to be confused with ghosts, the two are Very Different) but you never thought you'd encounter one, not even if you sought them out. They weren't fond of human company - too much of a reminder about their own former lives and of what they had become since their deaths.

The other breaths remained slow and steady, almost sighing with each exhale, while your own breath was stuttered with the seeping chill that was gradually worming its way into your bones. You couldn't stay out for much longer but you had so many questions - too many questions for what little daylight remained.

Everyone knows that Remnants can only roam freely at night, at least that's what your grandmother had told you. She'd been right about everything else so far from the way the air was a faint haze around the breath-without-a-creature to the eyes you could only see when your own were shut tight.

You had so many questions, you still do.

Day 1,083

The worst thing about the lunar colonies is the lack of proper burial sites. No government wants to be the first to bury someone on the moon and have to deal with the religious hassle of whatever ceremony the deceased wanted to use so the general procedure is to jettison them.

It used to work just fine, the micro-boosters sending the coffin far off into space, to where we wouldn't have to deal with it until humanity could settle down that far from home. Now we're running out of micro-boosters and the bodies keep coming thanks to that collapse in Residential Sector 4 and the following suicides of their grieving loved ones.

The best we can do to keep the lunar colonies somewhat hygienic is to just push the bodies out of the airlocks and let them float away in whatever direction we can. It worked for  brief while, even allowed the mourning to work through the stages of grief in around the same time as it took for the body to float out of sight.

We didn't exactly plan for them to float back around the moon.

There are just so many bodies and so many more to join them.

Day 1,082

Legend has it that the souls of drowned children move on to become frogs. I knew this was true when my little sister went missing five years ago. Since then we've been told to "stay strong" and "never give up" and "try to move on" and we have tried.

She was never found, no trace of anything more than her watch by a lake fifty miles away. It was always harder for my parents to accept her death without seeing her body but ever since that watch was found I keep finding frogs on her windowsill.

They just sit there and blink at me with their bulbous black eyes. A little part of me thinks that if I can somehow follow them I'll find my sister's remains, wherever she is. There's just something about those frogs that reminds me of other children who've gone missing - a tilt of the head, the way they all press their hands up against the glass when I go to leave, the way their croaks sometimes sound like sobbing.

Day 1,081

They maintained they didn't know there was a cellar. They kept denying and denying though the floorboards were new and their DNA had been found alongside the fresh bones and under the fingernails of three naturally mummified children.

The press had a field day over it - the Segchurch Serial Killer Sweethearts who'd hidden their victims right below their own quaint antiques shop. They made leaps and bounds in assumptions claiming that several of the bodies were the couple's own children, that the shop was stocked with the victim's own personal goods and anyone who'd made a purchase their had a genuine haunted item.

Only a few assumptions turned out to be correct as a string of mysterious deaths from former clientele revealed that the afterlife is much more active than previously assumed. It wasn't just the items sold there that were cursed by the dead - even the very stones of the basement held lost the souls of people who'd died hundreds of years ago.

The very foundation was built from the bricks of an old Roman temple that had been burnt by Boadicea herself, the civilians trapped inside remained with the stones all that time. It made the locals question if the murderous couple had been possessed by these vengeful souls, after all the dead do love to accompany the living to the point where,if unchecked, they begin to merge together.

For now the shop remains empty, the floorboards still dug up to reveal a thoroughly cleaned cellar, the faint sound of whispering echoes through the keyhole and the dead wait just inside for something living to let them out once more.

Day 1,080

She woke with a nightmare's terror still running fresh through her veins. Her mind was consumed by the overwhelming urge to make sure her boyfriend was still there, still safe and sound where they'd last met. A quick glance out of her window confirmed that the storm had grown worse and she feared for him.

Steadying her shaking breath she shoved her feet into the closest shoes to hand, made sure to grab the coat and he'd left behind before finally bundling her hair up into a beanie. It wasn't that she didn't want to be recognised, its just that everyone was more used to seeing him run out to check his chicken coop than they were seeing her run out in the middle of the night.

The less people saw of her the safer she would feel, at least until someone else saw her boyfriend. She knew everything would change when they met him - it would make or break her whole world and she had nobody to blame but him.

When she found out he was keeping more than chickens out by the lake, when she saw the messages scratched into the sides of the coops, bloody and overlapping,when she heard someone sob out their last breath while he tried to claim he was being framed.

As she approached the lakeside she saw him there, still where she'd left him. The scarf-turned-noose around his neck was holding out fine against the wind, just as she'd hoped but "his" suicide note had blown away. Searching for it that late and in such bad weather would never work.

She turned back, praying she wouldn't run into anyone.

Day 1,079

Back then, though, all we knew was that the cows were dying and we were safe.

It all changed when Beth got stung by nettles when we were out. It was the four of us as always, a spur-of-the-moment decision as always and all we wanted to do was kill time and maybe pick blackcurrants on the way back. The weather was perfect for a walk in the woods, bright sunny and not at all how we expected the end of the world to begin.

Sure we'd all heard from the local news station that livestock were dying from something called bovine yersinia pestis but the news had jokingly called it the Moo-bonic Plague. They claimed it was such an odd strain that there was no way it could possibly infect a human and that even if it somehow did we had the cure for the human strain, adapting it wouldn't be difficult.

Of course now we know that's a load of bullshit, they had no clue what they were dealing with and they still haven't found a cure. We're just being left to it at this point and expected to either die or miraculously be immune so that they can claim this was their plan all along.

When Beth got stung we grabbed dock leaves and thought no more of it. We were young and didn't know much beyond that in terms of medical aid. She didn't even notice her lymph nodes developing into buboes, she just thought it was the flu.then her family got sick too, then her neighbours and it spread from there.

When we found out we were glad that we hadn't seen her in weeks, assumed we'd managed to avoid it altogether until Meg stopped coming to school too. Slowly but surely our class dropped like flies on a hot windowsill, dragging their families down with them.

This isn't like the old plague, the one we learned about in history class. It's adapted since then and all the news is saying is that scientists are working on a vaccine - the one they claimed they'd never need to make and was basically made already.

Out of the four of us I'm the last one left alive and I know I won't last much longer. Everything hurts and everywhere you go just smells like rotting meat. There are too many bodies and not enough living people to bury them.

I'm going to lie down in the garden now, with the rest of my family.

Day 1,078

No amount of fairy tales before bed prepares you for the real deal.


Let's start with dryads, formerly human souls who died by hanging from trees over the age of three hundred and thirty three (nature holds great preference for the number three). Some trees, those hulking great behemoths of oak and willow, are often stuffed to bursting with dryads from the times of mass hangings. The human equivalent would be an overcrowded apartment tower with no doors.

In their trees they are utterly invisible, perfectly in tune with the woods around them to the point where most of them can peer straight out of their homes without a single person noticing. This isn't so much the case when they choose to leave the tree, as they are often wont to do during warmer days.

The sight of a mostly-humanoid body pulling itself out of bark like a butterfly fresh from the cocoon is something you never forget, especially the sound their body's make as they leave. That dry tearing of old parchment being peeled off a stone wall kind of sound.

It's been theorised that they physically tear their bodies apart from their home trees, that their souls become bonded the second they enter and that each time they leave, their soul becomes just that little bit more torn, just that fraction smaller until they eventually tear themselves to shreds.


Moving on, we come to gnomes, those little creatures we mimic in statues, traditionally to keep actual gnomes from setting up nests too close to our own. They are territorial and commonly prone to killing household pets, often leaving the remains strung up outside all available windows.

It isn't quite known what their end goal seems to be, there are no records of them talking to humans or even being capable of any form of sound. When confronted their default behaviour is fairly akin to a snake's. They twist and writhe their necks (they have an extra three to eight vertebrae that allow for owl-like tilting), darting their heads forward and aiming to bite as high up as they can.

While they posses no venom to speak of, should their saliva come into contact with certain metals it can be highly corrosive. Iron elicits the strongest reactions and as the average human contains four grams of iron in their body, confronting a gnome should only ever be a last resort.

Day 1,077

I've always had a set of extra...well, everything, for as long as I can remember. Nobody else can see them, they just sort of drift about me all pale and translucent. I can use them just as well as I can use my own limbs but sometimes we have disagreements.

It's the most worrying thing to have arms that nobody else sees suddenly shove you about just because you wore that shirt that they liked and they can't wear it because they can't touch most solid objects while you are always the exception to this. Still, I learned to adapt and get on with my life, claiming these little incidents as me just being clumsy.

I never knew why this had ever happened to me until I dug up an old photo album when my parents were moving house. There was an ultrasound photo that clearly showed twins, yet there I was thinking I was an only child all these years.

It took a fair few weeks of persuasion before my parents would tell me anything and I almost wish they hadn't,although it does explain why she's so angry at me exactly eight days before our birthday. My parents blame themselves out loud but something in their eyes says it was somehow my fault and I suppose they're right.

After all, nobody made me push her out of the open crib.

Day 1,076

There were only people on the top deck of the bus, their faces only visible through thin swipes against the condensation-drenched glass. Though hastily cleared, those little patches of clarity showed a totally different being compared to the murkier outlines that suggested they had features which were definitely not human.

Great horns that curved in impossible arcs, somehow managing to be through the glass, through the roof and not there all at once. A woman's bored face on the body of a large, fur-covered snake that writhed rhythmically. Eight heads all crammed into one tiny clear patch, jostling about to peer down at you, snarling at each other over the slightest movement.

A single patch kept clearing itself with no creature behind it, no visible hand or even the vaguest outline. You got the feeling that this was a space meant for you. The sole reason that this bus was still parked when the timetable stated that it should have left ten minutes ago. No others arrived - it was scaring them off.

Taking a deep breath you walk forwards. The driver doesn't ask you where you are going, he doesn't take the money you offer, he only tells you to take a seat. You head upstairs, wondering exactly what you will see, what you have seen and what is even real at this point.

When you reach the end of the stairs, that seemed far longer than they could feasibly be, you see only normal people. You see only humans whose faces match the ones you saw from the bus stop. The inhuman things are now waiting where you stood, staring up at you with a distinct air of impatience.

The bus moves as soon as you take your seat, right where the glass clears itself.

It continues to clear itself as the bus finally pulls away.

Suddenly everyone else seems a lot less human.

Day 1,075

There is a city inside of London, not above ground but deep below. It is what London used to be, centuries of relics and forgotten streets carefully arranged into a labyrinthine amalgamation of remnants. It is everything that London wants you to forget.

Take the Circle Line from Bayswater at 4.36AM on the third Tuesday of August. There will be an announcement for a stop that isn't on the maps, between Farringdon and Barbican, and nobody else will get off at that stop except you and three pigeons. Wherever there is the slightest chance of food, there will be pigeons. Do not follow them.

A small mercy of this stop is that, if you are wise and do not follow the pigeons, there is only one way to go. It leads you to the old High Street, now a musty row of shops that you shouldn't enter, no matter how inviting they may seem or whoever you hear calling to you from the inside. The residents of Old London crave company as intensely as only lost souls can.

If you choose to venture into the lesser inhabited areas of Old London, be prepared to see creatures that should be extinct, and by all biological surveys very much are. Flocks of reptilian birds merge with the pigeons, gathering around rotting piles of something unidentifiable, never stay to stare at them for too long. Don't let them notice you.

Further still from long dead creatures are the old fences, rows and rows and mazes of rows of nothing but dividing lines that beckon you in so innocently to wander through and see what's on the other side. The deeper into this particular maze you get, the more people you will find until you end up in a queue behind three young women who you saw on the news the other week, having been killed in a car crash.

New London forgets them but Old London treasures them all.

Day 1,074

Every sound has a colour to it. For instance, laughter varies from giggles in teal to guffawing neon blue while coughing is a creamy kind of purple. Bird-songs are always my favourite for the tittering rainbows of colour that quietly erupt across my eyes every time I hear them.

Still, not every sound has a colour, at least not one that I can immediately link together as I've been able to for so many common things. Sometimes it takes a while for a colour to appear for a sound, other times sounds share colours which causes a fair amount of confusion for me. It can be hard enough to see around these bright flashes of colour normally, let alone having new colours appear for sounds I thought were blank.

Lately all the colours have started to fade for me. All the neons are now pastel, the glittering beating colours more akin to a dying pulse and the rapid shifting from one sound to another is a dreary rainbow that scrolls listlessly over the world like a poorly edited filter.

The only colour that isn't fading is the blue-tinted orange of footsteps.

If anything it's been getting brighter, crushing everything else until all I can see at night are footsteps that I can't hear.

Day 1,073

We used to think they were coming for us, that they'd track us down from our last checkpoint and we'd be back as base camp by the end of the week. Now five months down the line we've come to accept our abandonment and started to make our shelter into something more permanent, just in case they've ditched us altogether.

Admittedly we wouldn't be the first, I mean we're Team 8 for Christ's sake. We'd all heard the rumoured ends of the others, we just never thought we'd be added to that list - let alone that everything would add up and point to deliberate sabotage.

We knew as soon as we stumbled upon the remains of Team 5. Their camp was a little less advanced that ours, far less focused on protection far more focused on comfort - a mistake we couldn't afford to repeat. Every day we've been going farther and farther afield, finding the old camps and figuring out where they went wrong.

We won't be the last to be left for dead but we'll be the first to survive.

Every day we bide our time and plan our way back to base camp. They won't be expecting us, that much is clear. We've not seen or heard any kind of recon drone, seems they're so confident we're already dead that they've probably assigned the next team and begun their training.

It's when base camp is at its most vulnerable. When all the upper staff members are too busy babysitting to pay much attention to their parameters, let alone the emergency exits they showed us on day 1 of our training.

It'd be so easy to just slip back inside and slit their throats while they slept, saving the newest team from our current predicament.

We'd be the heroes.

Day 1,072

The door wasn't used to being opened, too accustomed to keeping prisoners locked in 'til they rotted to dust.

Its hinges shrieked and groaned in protest as something forced it to open from within.

This wasn't supposed to happen, they shouldn't be able to do this.

Usually it was held securely in place with an electric seal, to be opened only with the right keycard.

Today it seemed that the power had been shut off.

Today it was nothing more than a slab of metal, hinges barely able to open at all through years of rust.

Today it failed and the prisoner inside walked freely down the corridor.

Day 1,071

Sometimes the unexpected arrives in the most mundane way. Tonight it arrives in the sound of a tap letting loose one final spurt of water into a sink full of three day old water. The house's lone occupant wouldn't notice the sound, not consciously at least, for several minutes.

Prior to those several minutes a few things happened.

1. An infected rat escaped from a private medicinal testing facility three miles away.
2. It fell down an open manhole cover, biting a workman in panic on its way down, passing on the contagion to a man who history will only know as Patient Zero.
3. Seeking the smallest space possible, it fled farther and farther in, gradually moving upwards.
4. It stopped moving like a normal rat and became something far more gelatinous.
5. Following the faint scent of food, it eventually made its way into a kitchen.
6. It fell out of a tap and into water that smelled like stale pasta.

Day 1,070

Whenever there's a mess made in the office, though we all cringe and make excuses as to why we should take care of it, we must call the janitors. Company policy states so and the last one who broke the policy ended up as the subject of a janitorial request. Nasty piece of work that was.

Most days they patrol the basement levels, shifting bins from one side to another or so I've heard. Whatever keeps them busy is best for all of us, I guess. Still doesn't delay them from our calls in the slightest. I swear you can hear their wet, slogging footsteps half a mile away - not to mention the stench of month-old coffee and half eaten sandwiches that just surrounds them in a dense aromatic fog.

They do their job well, to say the least. Rumours around the water cooler say that they eat the messes left behind by deals gone wrong. It'd explain why the bodies are never found, not that there's been too many of those in the last few weeks. Management demanded cut-backs, no questions asked or answered.

Business is just so much harder to do when you can't hold your client's head over stump grinder until they waver their fee. Still, the economy's turned sour for all of us and even the janitors are starting to feel the pinch. They've been a lot more active and down right inquisitive, hanging outside the meeting rooms and asking how its going every five or so minutes.

It's off-putting for those of us who've seen them before but for our clients it can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Shame management won't do anything about them for fear of losing their biggest problem solvers/waste disposal/whatever else those hulking great behemoths do below our feet.

Day 1,069

As a child I never realised that there were only four people in our house. I saw so many more each night, they gathered about the stairs and talked amongst themselves - talked to me - as if this was normal. It might have been normal four hundred or so years ago, back when there used to be an old manor house where my childhood home was.

I never told my family about this, the people on the stairs assured me they already knew and that this was just another evening party for them. The way they dressed looked like everything I'd ever dreamed that royalty wore - huge elaborate gowns and ribbons everywhere. I believed every word they said, never mentioning to my parents the long evenings I'd spent chatting to these people while they watched loud TV downstairs.

It seemed so normal until I hit puberty and they changed with me, finally showing their deaths just as I was researching them. They'd all told me their long titles and family history so it wasn't exactly a task to find that their manor had been burned down in a peasant revolution while they were celebrating the birthday of a young Countess.

The more I knew the more they let me see them as they had died, not as they wanted to be remembered.

I haven't been back to my childhood home since I hit seventeen. Seeing their burning corpses still having animated conversations on the stairs eventually became too much. I never even said goodbye to them, I still wonder if I should have.

Day 1,068

We'd been camping at this site with no name for about three days before we noticed its quirks. We only found the place because these bloody middle-of-nowhere country roads twist and turn like they were designed by a drunk with a crayon - not to mention the fact that none of the signposts have arrows or anything to indicate where anywhere is!

So of course we got lost.

There are eight other caravans here, ones that we now think might be abandoned but seemed to be occupied when we first arrived. We're all spread out in a field with little clumps of trees dotted about that do nothing to cover the horse shite dotted about in generous amounts.

We still haven't seen the horse responsible but there's always a steaming fresh pile somewhere.

The owners are friendly enough, claimed that most of the caravans there were family members who were staying over or other lost tourists. It sort of explained the bowl full of keys beside their front door/reception area but we all left feeling just a little bit off without being able to place why.

So as I said, three days in we began to notice little oddities.

The other caravans shifted about like people were moving inside but we never saw or heard them. The lights flickered on towards the evening and off at sunset, regular as clockwork. We never smelled any food coming from them (and any kind of cooking clings to the inside of a caravan for weeks on end, they generally smell like some kind of take-out) nor saw anything being delivered.

Come to think of it, the take-out guy who came refused to go further than the front gate.

He made excuses about new shoes, busy deliveries in remote villages and the weather (cloudy with a chance of more cloud). At the time we believed him but now we're starting to understand it all. Now that we've caught glimpses of the things that live underneath the caravans.

They've already dug beneath ours, we're hiding in the car and praying for an early sunrise.

Day 1,067

This isn't your house but you feel like you've been here before.

The banisters are worn with your touch, the steps with your tread, the door handles with your cautious grip.

It is all in your imagination surely?

Still the house has something of you in every room.

A painting whose face is your exact likeness, a vase your once saw in town, the flowers your aunt grows.

Somehow something has made this place for you.

A scuffle in the east wing may be them.

Sharp shadows that slink into locked doors may be them.

The faint warmth of breath on the back of your neck may be them.

Day 1,066

It was the littlest things that set me off thinking something Bad was coming our way. It was the birds, the way the starlings fought each other to death, devouring the fallen like half-starved crows and leaving nothing but feathers and a thin layer of blood in their wake.

The first reported attack was the gulls at Brittle Bay, not five miles from here. Someone left a sandwich unattended and made the mistake of trying to rescue it from a swarm of gulls. Poor bastard never made it out alive and three more died that same day, that same way.

Word soon spread that they'd developed a taste for warm blood and before you could say "That sounds grim" all the beaches in the county were closed for ecological studies.We still don't know much about them, none of the biologists made it back to their camps and their research was washed out to sea alongside their bones.

Somewhere along the line whatever the birds had began to spread to their predators. Firstly the birds of prey who now attack anything that moves like it's alive (fairly easy to fool though) and secondly stray cats who became the straw that broke the camel's back.

It's a well established fact that they'll hunt anything smaller than them that had a pulse and that moves so it only made sense for more cases of this bloodlust to be found in practically every wild creature within a twenty mile radius. Lord knows we were never prepared for them to breed that quickly and outnumber us in a matter of days.

Not even the underground is safe, not with all the rats. The best places to be are heavily armoured and fast moving with glass as thick as a man's fist. My family headed for the train station, grabbing the earliest one we could with the aim of heading too far north for anything to live, one of the little islands off the coast of Scotland.

Now I'm the only one that's left, driving this train alone and praying that tracks aren't blocked.

Day 1,065

It was the 1920's and the lines between reality and otherness were a helluva lot blurrier. Tonight we explore the lesser know, but no less important, Americana artefacts that this period brought with it into the harsh glaring lights of the 21's century.



McGallaster's Bar was as dingy as it was smokey, the ceiling lights flickered in the cigarette-based miasma that drifted around the room within a series of unfelt air currents. Any patron would tell you they haven't been allowed a smoke all night and they're going half crazy with their cravings yet the air still reeks of Murad's finest.

In several places the smoke drifted gently down the walls, almost forming figures that held their vaporous arms out to anyone who came near. Occasionally a more inebriated patron will swagger up with all the confidence of a pint too much and go to embrace what's not-quite-there. The smoke seems to suck them in and spit them out right beside the No Smoking signs, asking the patrons to light one up and appease their cravings.

Nobody's had the guts to try just yet but some day, a pint too many will make a fool try.


-- -- -- -- -- --


Al that could be heard from Mrs Sharma's School For The Secretarial was the harsh clacking of rigid nails against unforgiving plastic as the same paragraphs were typed out by over a hundred students who all wanted that ideal secretary-style life. They aspired to aid the greatest in the country, giving whatever they could to achieve this.

As a result, few were the same as they arrived but not noticeably so. Food preferences were the first to change, whatever kept them from the typewriter was deemed unnecessary and blacklisted in favour of things that could be prepared with one hand or even both feet (which soon became as dexterous as any hand could be).

The next to change was always nails, louder sounds kept the administrators at bay. Last time anyone tried to hold an hour of silent typing for memorial day, Mrs Sharma's lost an entire class. All that remained were bloody fingernails, the skin roughly attached underneath as though whatever had tried to pull them off had used something narrower and sharper to pry them away from their owner's hands.

Nowadays the world is too full of noise for the administrators to survive, they cower in abandoned office blocks and wait for it all to fall silent ad long, long last but it never will again.


-- -- -- -- -- --

Day 1,064

I didn't think learning to type by touch would save my life but then again I didn't think the vent in my bedroom led anywhere, much less that it was large enough to fit anything larger than a starling. Judging by the size of the eyes that followed me around my room as I tried to reverse out of the door (and failed as it had somehow blocked me in from the other side), the creature must have been about eight feet tall, if it had human-like proportions.

I didn't see all of it - only the head and shoulders as it tried to cram its entire body into view. What little I did manage to see was covered in matted black fur that blended in surprisingly well with the interior of the vent. I only noticed it when I turned my bedroom lights on and saw the glow reflected in its eyes, eyes that only moved when I wasn't looking.

Didn't take me too long to work out how it moved, that weird snake-like twist that was slowly unscrewing the vent from the inside. Somehow it had planned this in advance, or collaborated with my family in order to trap me in there, perhaps my life in exchange for their safety? It'd be something they'd accept without question.

Thankfully I was able to text a friend while maintaining direct eye contact with it, convincing them to come up to my room from the tree that practically touched the hallway window. By the time they'd unblocked my door I'd wriggled myself into a corner I could safely duck down into and then shove them forward as they opened the door.

It worked better than I expected, they didn't even have time to scream as it leapt from the vent in that split-second that neither of us were watching it. His entire head fit into its mouth and it bit down sharply with a sickeningly wet crunch.

His parents, the police, everyone at school - they all ask me where he went after he left my house and I kept to my story. He turned left and never looked back. He never had the time to look back. He never told me where he was heading, only that he wouldn't be home for quite some time.

My family never mentioned the creature in the vents, we never had anything to discuss from their perspective except my missing friend. They seemed detached from the whole situation, cold and unfeeling like they were only present physically.

The creature is back again and I'm hoping that another friend will come visit me.

I don't want to die.

Day 1,063

The former charity shop was a Grade II Tudor building, a little crumbled and generally crumpled. Old Bible verses painted onto the walls in burgundy paint by people who meant well but failed to see how closely it resembled blood, or noticed and failed to care.

As such small, unheard of charities do, they remained for a year and then vanished overnight leaving their wares behind. They never sold anything of value, only donated junk with prices scrawled on in red biro and never worth even a fraction of whatever the labels said. It's a miracle they lasted for as long as they did and of no surprise when they left it all behind in search of more profitable trade.

It was almost three years before the council got the permissions to clear and renovate it all, having to hire an expensive private company who specialised in listed buildings and the like. As they were clearing out the junk they made little discoveries, remnants of the building's Tudor past tucked away under tattered romance novels and between clothes that stank of mothballs and urine.

Mostly they found mummified rats stuffed with lavender and rosemary - wards against misfortune.

Clearly these hadn't worked but there were so many of them that people began to worry about their removal, after all theirs was the fastest growing town in all of England and they wanted to keep it prosperous. Meetings were held in every pub that would have them until a decision was made.

The rats had to stay, for the greater good. Now while most people took to protesting outside of the old shop while the renovators ignored them in favour of digging up yet more rats, smaller groups with stronger opinions formed much harsher plans that were carried out overnight.

Come the following morning the renovation crew was witnessed choking to death on some kind of gas, blood pouring from their noses and mouths as they slowly collapsed to the floor in puddles of their own liquid life. Their hair seemed to fall from their falling bodies in great clouds, their skin blackening with intense internal bleeding as they drowned in front of the protesting crowd.

Work ceased as the shop was cordoned off for a full investigation though the forensics teams soon suffered the exact same symptoms, all dying within a week of each other until the shop was sealed for good, thick sheets of metal covering every known exit.

It's almost a same they never found the original blueprints or checked for the basement where powdered rat poison covered everything with a fine white layer, several dust masks lying innocently beside it as though they there purely by coincidence.

Day 1,062

The roads hadn't been silent for almost eight years, the cars never stopped or slowed no matter what the rest of the world was becoming. People leap between the countless lanes full of cars, between the fuel tankers and those who have been pushed by the people behind them for too long to be safe.

Running out of fuel or breaking down in any way is a death sentence.

Everyone tried to get into the middle lanes at first, causing countless pile-ups and road blockages until it was firmly agreed upon that if there was a central lane, the drivers would switch between them regularly. Nobody wanted to be on the outer lanes - not with the way the shadows ran alongside their cars, waiting for them to slow down just enough that they could be caught.

Millions of lives have been lost already, the usable roads are growing fewer and fewer by the week as drivers get too tired to carry on and just let themselves drift off to the roadsides and into those blood-encrusted arms that have been swiping at them for longer than their exhausted minds can remember.

Nobody wants to consider what will happen when all the fuel finally runs out.

Day 1,061

My dear wayward friend,

    Please accept my humblest apologies for the vague and abrupt nature of my last letter. The eyes if our enemies were too many and their minions have even gone so far as to hide my writing implements!

    Fortunately this has been remedied and the culprits disposed of.

    Bless your sturdy nature and thorough research for your studies have led me to the doorstep of a man known only by the name on the toe tag he was found wearing at a morgue in Liverpool before he was found to be not dead but near comatose.

    Upon waking he described the following to me and I found it pertinent to report to your wise ears.

        Yours in faith,

            Midas Pen

MY DEAREST COMPANION IN ARMS STOP

THE VISCOUNT IS CLOSING IN ON ME STOP

I HAVE LEFT MY RESEARCH WHERE YOU BURNT YOUR FIRST LETTER STOP

PRAY FOR US ALL STOP

DRAKESMOUTH

My troubled friend and dearest lost soul,

    Your research confirmed my worst fears over the patient known only as John Doe. All symptoms match so perfectly I daresay he that, when our research is published (preferably, but not necessarily post-mortem), will be considered the textbook case that defined this disease.

    I have taken to naming it after your deceased brother (G-D rest his remains, please G-D let his remains rest!) in memory of his brave sacrifice in Geneva. We must never forget that his self-immolation gave us the time needed to hide our notes from our enemies, lest they take our creation and spread it further than our accident has already.

    Reports have come through my network bringing news both as bad and worse than we had previously hoped. I hate to be the bearer of such sorrows but it would seem that our pathogen has become airborne and has reached as far as northern Tunisia.

   Oh my last and truest friend, we must make amends!

        Yours in faith, as always,

            Midas Pen

MIDAS STOP

YOUR SOURCES HAVE BEEN LYING STOP

TUNISIA FELL JULY 29TH STOP

ONLY THE SEAS ARE SAFE STOP

I BEG YOU - JOIN ME ABOARD THE QUEEN CAROLINA STOP

WE WILL WAIT FOR 3 MORE DAYS STOP

DRAKESMOUTH

Day 1,060

When the city flooded twice a year, there was an exodus of its residents. The alleged reasoning for this was public safety and to allow the public sector workers to do their best to shorten the flooding period from three weeks to eight days. No matter how many official reports were released, no matter the photographs taken or the social media posts from the workers, nothing explained what they couldn't clean up.

The most noticeable were the claw marks embedded deep into the sides of the old war memorials, gauging the horses sides as though they meant to spill blood. Sometimes small iridescent scales were found inside these marks and have long since been considered a sign of good luck. Other times needle-thin teeth were found with gums still attached - these are taken to mean that the floods will return sooner, as the creatures that reside deep within it are too hungry to be sated by just two trips.

Locals never go so far as to say that these creatures are holding their city hostage, far from it. They are fond of the mild chaos caused by the biannual need to relocate to higher grounds and the clean-up period when they return. It's a matter of pride for them, their resistance to greater forces and things that they have only ever caught glimpses of.

They say you never forget your first sighting - the way those jagged spines glisten in the water like oil-slick rainbows on barbed wire and the trail of viscera left in their wake from whatever stray animals were left behind. Some even seem to play in it.

Day 1,059

The point where the city met the forest was controversial at best. The official boundary is where the concrete paths abruptly end though the residents say that it begins much farther back and that the apartment blocks right up to the main road are all fake, just fancy oversized pots to hide how far in the forest has come.

Everyone who has heard of the city understands that every alley leads to the forest eventually. Anyone who has been to the city will quite happily tell you that this isn't quite correct - everything leads to the forest eventually, some ways sooner than others.

They will tell you that if you peer into any apartment window you will only see the forest and that if you peer close enough or for long enough you will see exactly what lives inside those buildings. They talk about great shadowy things whose horns spiral into shapes that can't possibly exist on a natural being, humans who have their animal companions sewn to their fingertips so that they may never become lost, saplings who use their branches like clawed hands to drag themselves up their older and more established counterparts in search of sunlight.