Day 1,150

In all your dreams this past month your grandparents have told you to head to the crossroads just past Lucy's Creek and wait there or stay in town and die with all the others. In each dream you were allowed one question and you could only ask each question once so you spent your dreaming hours taking in every detail you could think of and trying to find loopholes to save everybody.

There weren't any.

Preacher Angus says the Lord works in mysterious ways but He's sent your grandparents to demystify the whole ordeal He wants you to go through without giving you a damn reason to do it other than to carry on living. It sure sounded painful to just let the whole town die but He sends us all our tasks.

And yours was survival.

The sole member of that particular flock of His, sent way out in the southern desert to wait like Jesus while damnation is wrought upon all you knew and loved. Your grandparents assured you that you'd join them in the afterlife beyond those pearly gates for your sacrifice and you believed them.

When they gave you the deadline, your heart felt heavier than ever before and bleaker still.

You told nobody where you were going, left before dawn just to make sure you wouldn't be followed. You crossed Lucy's Creek, desperately trying to ignore the rotting corpses of the wildlife all around you, the waters flowing muddy red with blood both old and new. You came to the crossroads, surrounded by desert and dust and sat down to await your salvation as the screams of your beloved, damned kin carried through the winds and long into the night.

Sleep still hasn't come to you - at this point you fear it might never - but when it does, they'll all be waiting.

Day 1,149

Everyone was wearing a mask - even you, though yours was handmade and stuck to the edges of your face with liquid latex unlike the masses around you whose masks had grown over their faces over a period of weeks as the contagion rotted them beneath it.

You'd mimicked them well enough this past month as you "grew" your mask and "broke down" your face to blend in seamlessly. It meant you kept your job, your home and (more importantly) your life. The maskless weren't welcome any more and were seen as lesser somehow.

It sat oddly with you that a walking corpse with a fleshy approximation of a human face thought that those whose skin didn't flake to reveal pus-laced muscle were inferior. No amount of industrial strength perfume could hide the fact that the majority were literally falling to pieces.

The barista that served you your coffee (with a straw that would fit neatly through the mouth-slit of any fleshmask) left a chunk of their cheek in your cup and expected a tip for it. Societal norms changed just as fast as flesh dissolved in the fading warmth of autumn.

When the days became quiet, when the frost of winter put nearly all work to a standstill as the formerly lubricating pus became slush-like in texture and made most movements near impossible for the fleshmasks, then you pondered your own allegedly fake mask.

It was beginning to feel a little too real for your comfort and a little too comfortable to not be real.

Armed with scissors, you made your first incision.

Armed with scissors, you made your last incision.

Day 1,148

We waded through the shoulder high water in utter silenced, every breath bated as if it would be our last. All along the riverbank we could see the warped monstrosities that had once been our loved ones until a sudden rainstorm remade them - inside and out. Where once were kind hearts and simple wants have now become hateful shrieks and the desperate need to remake the world in their wretched image.

As we came to a fork in the river, the current grew stronger and swept Arnulf down the wrong way to the shallow streams and to his demise at the hands of his grandmother and niece. It happened too fast for us to fully comprehend, we all turned as one and pushed onwards into deeper water while abuse was hurled at us from all the faces we knew and had loved.

There was nothing left to love in them now, they were so barely recognisable as our kith and kin that we began to mutter among ourselves that surely killing them would be a mercy, allowing whatever scraps of a soul they still possessed to head into the afterlife.

Klothilde was the one to suggest luring them all into the mists in the pit of the valley, all we had to do was pretend to have gone over the waterfall and let them "follow us down". Whatever lived down there never let anyone come back up. We would have been safe.

Our plan was that we tie rope around ourselves and to a boulder further upstream so we could hide under the water with breathing reeds while the damned villagers chased our imaginary trail. Once they had all begun their descent down the sides of the waterfall we would head back to the village, saddle our horses and leave the country in silence.

What happened instead was that there wasn't enough rope, we hadn't grabbed enough in our frenzied escape and as a result we lost five people to the waterfall, they slipped wordlessly out of our hands and over the edge. Then the things we once knew as kin counted that only some of us had gone down, leaving behind more than enough of them to take us on and win.

We had no choice but to go over and pray we'd find safety.

Day 1,147

The end of the world began, as all things did, with plenty of blood. It was found by farmers in their remote fields, their crops crushed and smothered as if a massacre had occurred yet no bodies were ever recovered and no new missing persons were reported. In fact, since the first of these incidents and on a global scale, nobody was reported missing.

None of the missing returned from wherever they'd been stolen away to but they were not joined. A few theorisers claim that the original blood came from these missing people, not that any testing confirmed the owners of the blood or even that the blood was human. It was declared "humanoid" and nothing more was said to the public.

Behind closed doors, as such discussions invariably occur, it was believed that a new species of ape had been discovered. Something too human to be ape but too ape to be human and overall quite a disturbing sight for the average person. It only made sense that the farmers would have shot at them and disposed of any corpses they created.

Still, proof evaded them, the blood spread from the middle of nowhere to right in the heart of the world leader's homes and it was just the first sign of a world that was now spiralling into its death throes with every passing day just one less gasp of air to fill billions of fragile lungs.

The end of the world continued, as few things do, with a series of impossible corpses washing ashore.

Day 1,146

For almost eighty years the corporation known as Lima & Wyatt Biological Investments have acted as captors and observers for three thousand classified species of fae. Around late October several subspecies of fae emerge from their summer-induced slumber and wreak their own unique form of terror upon whichever humans are unlucky enough to be monitoring their biodomes.

With the sole Dullahan specimen this mainly involves them luring the horses from the Fiphengest-Waet feeding preparation area and spooking them whenever a human is nearby. No matter how many signs there are warning of this, insider reports claim that five staff members have been killed by rogue horses so far this week.

As Samhain draws closer, the Dullahan grows stronger. Our last report claimed it could now partially phase through solid materials, making it much harder to contain. Although it has been kept sated thus far with death row inmates, they don't seem to satisfy it for long and it's been eyeing up the keeper's necks. It's always in want of a new head.

Other fae who are more active this time of year are the phooka who has taken to mimicking the mauling of staff members so as to spur the keepers into their biodome. The reports claim that there are over fifty in that single dome alone yet all the thermal-readings show three. Either our insider's spent too much time around them and they've gotten into his head or they've killed and replaced him, hoping we'll pull him out soon.

We won't know for certain until we can get him to use his iron-laced Comm.

He'll either report visually in three days or we'll send his family our condolences and send in another.

Day 1,145

There's something still in the house, something living in the stale air and utter darkness that only a burial can provide. After the last member of the Clinethorpe family died, their will stated that their ancestral manor was to be left untouched internally and buried eighteen feet below their grounds.

The windows and doors had been sealed, the chimneys blocked for maximum preservation of the items and the unexpected burial of five teenagers within. They snuck in on a dare, hoping to find everything and nothing all at once but in reality all they found was that using their phones for torches drains the batteries unexpectedly fast.

They also found that the manor had no signal nor power supply any where. As they turned back for the window they had entered through a few hours prior, they began to hear loud noises coming from the outside. It never occurred to them just how little sound is carried when at the heart of a richly furnished stately home, much less that time itself would be carried differently.

Time went by all too quickly without sunlight or their phones to measure it. By the time they'd made it to the window they were jolted back as the manor was lifted upwards by unseen cranes whose colossal engines muffled their screams to nothing more than a faint echo and even after the manor had been lowered into its tomb they could not be heard.

The sound of each ton of earth emptied over their accidental prison sounded far more like nails in a coffin.

Day 1,144

We should have known she was a changeling from the moment she came home. Some time during those three years away at university she must have made a deal with the fae, traded the untradeable and been unable to pay the price.

I reckon the first true sign that she wasn't herself was the way she'd tilt her head whenever someone did something clumsy or awkward, something that the perfect fae could never bring themselves to do like fumble for a pen or struggle to tie their shoelaces. She used to be the first to offer help but since she came back she just stares, tilts her head and walks away muttering to herself.

Maggie says she'd known since she spied that the girl wasn't wearing her grandmother's ring, the iron one she'd been given for protection and good luck. Apparently that set off all of Maggie's alarms which explains why she's been threading everyone's gates with iron and sprinkling salt on our boundary lines and window ledges.

Do you remember how she always used to swear by that dog of hers? Swear that she'd never let anybody enter if the dog didn't trust them. Well, I found her on the curb bawling her eyes out, said the dog didn't trust her any more so now she has no home.

I'd say this means she's one of the harmless changelings but for Michael's claims that she's killed and eaten all his chickens and now sleeps in the blood soaked coop. If she's still there by sunrise then she'll be guilty enough to put in irons. Tis a slow way to go but the safest way to dispose of a changeling.

So long as their kin don't know then we'll all be safe again.

Day 1,143

Since the plague hit, travelling entertainers were the last to survive and some even remained sane despite the seemingly endless carnage they drove past each and every day. A fair few remained fixed in their habits, their planned stops too ingrained that even in the undeath that the plague caused, they still pitched their tents in their regular fields.

It wasn't uncommon for survivors to be driving past fields where circus tents seeped through the fog like a corpse's teeth - jagged, yellowed with age and reeking of stale food. Sometimes kindred workers would halt their convoys and check out the tents, just in case there were any other survivors mimicking the undead as a ploy to deter them.

Seven times out of ten, they were too late and the whole troupe would lurch forward eager to feast. It's amazing just how fast clowns can become feral and brutal without their ringleader to keep them in check. No matter how lurid their costumes, they move with the same eerily unnatural silence as their civilian counterparts, equally drenched in viscera and eager to find a fresher source.

One time out of ten most of the troupe would be dead and the survivors minds so utterly ravaged by grief that they preferred to be stuck in their old routines, performing for their undead friends and family as if that would somehow bring them back.

One time in ten would there be safe survivors using the thick rubbery materiel of their big top as a fairly effective shield against the hoards, blocking sight, sound and scent all at once. The only danger was that once the tents were up, you became trapped. There's never a safe time to pack up, not once the hoards take notice of the change in their environment and remain stubbornly close to investigate.

This brings us to the final tenth, the aftermath of the aforementioned when they exhaust their food supplies and cant get out to replenish them without alerting a hoard to their existence. Given enough time, the plague finds everyone.

Day 1,142

There's a lot about St Bertrand's that doesn't quite make sense any more, little things that make the whole place seem like the architect had no idea what's meant to go on in a church - that or they were under the impression that it is meant to be a church, in spite of the multitude of signs saying otherwise, and thus it exists.

There is an old fountain built into the church's wall, a former drinking stop from the days of horse-drawn carts. Its inscription reads "Therefore you will joyously draw water from the springs of Salvation"  which is harmless enough. The horse skull that's been partially mounted above the fountain, less so, especially as no breed of modern horse could ever possibly grow so large and their gargantuan ancestors are long extinct.

Nobody's quite gotten round to explaining how it came to be, which is certainly a recurring theme of St Bertrand's. It's along the same veins of unusual as the glass floor in the cellar that shows only dirt while every text written on it claims you can see the heavens if you linger long enough. There's an old priest from Rome who's been living down there for thirty-five years without seeing the heavens below, only unseen hands carving the dirt away in neat rows followed by large clumps of meat and hair that are dragged through them, bathing the earth in fresh blood only to be pulled out of sight before they can be identified.

Unsurprisingly this doesn't make the local news any more, not since the discovery of a mass infant grave when the groundskeepers were digging a fresh grave. All their tiny bones came tumbling out of a hole in the side, all of them barely a week old in age and recently deceased. It's all anyone talks about when you mention the church.

I dread to think what they'd say if they saw the rest of the bodies in the bell tower.

Day 1,141

When my parents died I inherited their flat above the community hub, known officially as Angel Court and locally as just Angel's. It used to be an absolute hive of activity, every shop full of life and laughter and someone yelling at their kid to get back in the house. Always someone yelling at a kid who'd never listen.

Sometimes, if the council were prowling, you'd hear those same parents calling out late into the night until their throats were as raw as their tear stained faces. The kids would turn up days later, usually in the ditch by the road opposite the Stark Wren Park which the media dubbed "a child's playground turned burial ground".

Tasteless as they were, they weren't wrong. Five hundred years ago Angel's was Saint Angelo's Church and the park grounds stand where the graveyard was, before the church was burned down with the old congregation inside it. It was only a matter of years before the graveyard was declared unconsecrated due to the lack of church and all the stones moved to holier ground.

They left the bodies, nobody cared for the dead, they still don't.

Since I moved here five months ago I've been hearing the same cries I used to when I was younger, the same names of old friends who vanished from school and were found in the ditch. The playground rumours were that Angel's is patrolled by the old congregation, looking for whoever burned the church. The rumours also pointed at it being a child which is why nobody over fifteen goes missing.

It made sense at the time but as we all grew older, those of us that survived living in Angel's agreed with the media that there was some kind of serial killer - or killers - lurking about the area and preying on weak children.

We were partially right but so were the rumours.

I don't know how I never noticed back then but whenever a child went missing, whenever their parents began to cry out their names, church bells faintly rang. I keep hearing them now in the evenings. Five times this month and five children missing so far.

The flock of Saint Angelo's is still on the hunt.

Day 1,140

I used to remember the boy at my window so fondly, with his moon-pale skin and silky soft skin, bones to fragile that the slightest touch to hard on his delicate, yet bulbous, head caused his skull to sink like half-set jelly. He never seemed to mind when that though, perhaps he couldn't even feel his head for all the tumours protruding like a crown of pus-filled balloons.

Every night he'd wait outside my window and I'd open it wide so we could just sit side by side, never speaking, just existing. If only such things were meant to last. He broke the silence after seven years of this routine just to ask me why I had bruises along my arms.

I should never have spoken back, should never have opened my mouth and let six years of unspoken abuse come flooding out until I'd named every last person to lay a hand on me. The list was longer than I realised but the boy had done nothing all the while, he didn't even seem to acknowledge that I'd said anything until I was well and truly done.

In hindsight I wouldn't have mistaken his silence for anything less than cold calculation. As it so happened I ended up sitting in an emotionally numb stupor until my morning alarm went off, the boy had left at some point but once again, years of pent-up pain let out in the course of a single night take their toll.

By the time I noticed that anything had changed, I was in class and everyone was asking where everyone had gone. Putting two and two together came slowly but as more names in each roll call were left unanswered, a connecting factor emerged, at least it did to me.

It was me.

All of the people who were missing that day at school had hurt me in some way, be it emotional, physical, purposeful or just a careless byproduct of some other cruelty. It was only after this realisation that I remembered my parents hadn't complained at my noise when getting ready that morning. They generally yelled no matter how quiet I was but that day they'd been utterly silent.

They weren't in the house when I got back from school, neither were my siblings. or my neighbours. Half the street was gone with no signs of a struggle. The boy never even came to my mind as the cause of this, I barely even remembered what I'd said the night before.

The police didn't pick up the phone, the emergency service's operator didn't believe that everyone had vanished because of me and eventually blocked my number. It wasn't until the boy came back that night that I found out where everyone had gone and what he had done with them.

Day 1,139

We accidentally found the treasure app on an outdated piece of tech called a "mobile" which was ridiculously far less mobile than any of the ocular implants on the market. Baz found it at an antique fair and managed to hook up the primitive charger to an old circuit inverter and within the hour we were scrolling through history.

The previous owner had been something of a code-monkey, a paranoid one too, but their passcodes and fingerprint scans were easily overridden. The treasure app was last activated 45,990 days ago, the location was about thirty kilometres away and we had a full charge in our community pod. It all seemed to click together into the perfect afternoon adventure.

If it wasn't for the images that popped up when we were practically on top of it, we would never have thought to look under the manhole cover, let alone willingly head into the darkness. Even after a hundred odd years, the motion sensors in the lights worked perfectly and the path to treasure was so close we could touch it.

Until we came to a sealed metal door.

One brief trip to a mech merchant later and we had a SmartTech™ radic-drill that adjusted to the door's thickness with a single hand gesture. In all of twenty minutes we had a person sized hole into a room that was full of ancient computers that refused to switch on, no matter how much power we pumped into them.

Baz joked for days about how "the real treasure was the friends we made along the way" and then he keeled over at the gym, vomiting blood and brown pulp that the autopsy revealed to have been is internal organs. The official cause of death was internal trauma but our group was questioned thoroughly by both the police and a disease control rep who admitted that Baz's blood showed some kind of unknown virus that was thought to be airborne.

A few days after that Jan dropped off the social map and was presumed missing until her neighbour found her body this morning. She was surrounded in a congealed pool of her own blood and innards, same cause of death as Baz and the same day that Lee collapsed at work, dying less than hour later just like the others.

Seems the real treasure was the virus we accidentally set loose.

I'm sure Baz would have appreciated the humour in that far more than the rest of the world will.

Day 1,138

Conjoined ghosts are surprisingly common, especially those of women who've died in labour. There's nothing quite so unsettling as a vaguely humanoid shape stumbling towards you, a woman's weeping  and an infant's screams fused in wretched harmony.

Now imagine if you will, an entire village in such a way, having been declared abandoned since a test bomb was dropped too close with no warning. An entire community wiped out before they could even comprehend there was any danger to begin with.

The buildings remain the only physical sign that there was every a settlement there, the bio-bomb saw to everything else and left a thirty mile radius of barren dirt and bones. When their anniversary comes around they can be seen, a shambling screaming mass of former life that still doesn't quite know how to cope with being dead fifty years later.

The rest of the wildlife can be seen in shadowy bundles of teeth and paws, struggling to move in every possible direction to try and escape each other. At least with the villagers they have some sense of cohesive movement which tends to be towards the nearest human, whether they can be seen or not.

While they don't leave the dead area, they have a tendency to swarm around anything even remotely humanoid, be it an actual person, a scarecrow or a bundle of old fabric that used to be one of them. They still can't fully interact with the living world, resorting to swiping their many hands through whatever they can and leaving sharp, ice-cold winds in their wake.

Day 1,137

The tour guides always warn their groups not to stare at the gargoyles. On sunny days they make the obvious joke about the sun, the other 363 days a year they claim there are hawks nesting there and that staring too much will bring them down in a fury of feathers and talons.

This is, of course, untrue.

My uncle used to be a mason in charge of checking in on the cathedral, what with the rapid increase in rain acidity it became a full time job. That and when the sun is dim, the smaller gargoyles like to go for a wander, mostly in search of pigeons to eat but anything warm will do in a pinch.

He's lost three fingers to the little wanderers and a good chunk of his left calf to their bigger brethren. It made the news briefly as one lucky tourist captured the statue moving while they were taking a video of the stained glass window just below it. All of five minutes later it was claimed to be a hoax for a new horror flick coming out in the next three years and all was forgotten.

He still goes up there to this day, only weekly instead of daily. He's not exactly in running shape, not since he mistimed a kick to the face of the one the cathedral has nicknamed "Gwaedlif" or blood-hunger in English. The little bastard has been out for it since lightning first struck the cathedral in 1396. That's when they all began to move about.

Over the past 600 or so years they've become clever, it took three "incidents" before they realised the gargoyles were memorising schedules, patrol patterns and moving in when they knew there would be no trouble. Apparently there's nothing quite as worrying as seeing a 4 foot statue hobble towards you and being unsure if the pipe in its mouth is rusty or if your coworker was just a second too slow.

Day 1,136

The RRS Lady Fortuna had been drifting for one hundred and eighty five years already, the only soul aboard was that of the former cabin boy, his spirit tethered to the vessel, still searching for the rest of the crew who had vanished one night and left him locked in hold. He died there eight days later.

The Fortuna has been spotted a total of seven times since it was first declared missing after failing to return to its original base. With every sighting it seems that the cabin boy is ageing alongside the vessel, getting taller as the rust spreads, growing a beard as the sheer density of barnacles begin to weigh Fortuna down.

She sits so low in the water now that the waves are forever brushing over her deck, stray fish glide across her and straight through the phantom feet of her last crewman. He still has a map in his hands, just as spectral and just as hopelessly confused as he is.

The last sighting was eight years ago, thirty or so miles off the coast of Adamstown. A cruise ship thought Fortuna was a live vessel, sea tossed with crew in need of rescue and launched a small recovery boat out to her. It wasn't until their recovery boat reached her portside that they saw the cabin boy was long dead and still moving.

He asked the recovery team if they'd seen his crew, naming them all in one unbroken breath and stating their last known location. Of course names have changed with the times and none of them had ever heard of the series of islands he'd named, nor heard of the missing crew.

It wasn't until earlier this year that someone found an old document from the early 1800's that named the islands and put them right on our modern map. Seems they sunk a few decades ago, allegedly inhabited but totally cut off from the rest of the world since the Fortuna left their shores.

Now we know these islands may not have sunk of natural causes, not since their location was matched to the midpoint of a sound known only as "The Bloop". With an estimated radius of five thousand miles and decidedly organic in its origins, the predicted size of this creature is around two hundred and fifteen meters.

Putting two-and-two together,one might assume that this creature surfaced some time in the last two hundred years, perhaps it only surfaces every two hundred years. Perhaps we are overdue a visit. Theories aside, the reality is that the Fortuna is slowly sinking and one day the two may meet again.

Day 1,135

Faerie have changed over the years, adapting to our technology without us even noticing. A child can become a changeling with just one click, a soul can be sold as easy as it can be listed. While the majority of mankind don't recognise the changes, can't tell the difference between puberty and a child swapped with a fae counterpart, there will always be that same interaction, albeit on a cybernetic level.

Even will-o-wisps have altered themselves into the glowing cat-eyes between the lanes of the bustling highways, luring us deeper into country roads and onwards to the never ending fields that seem to bring us no closer to our destination no matter how long we travel them.

Not even iron and salt can phase them any more, not with both elements saturating society to the point where ever breath we take was poison to Them and is now just one more obstacle between Them and whichever pretty mortal They've taken a fancy to.

Nowadays we rarely see our loved ones return to us in their physical forms, not even logs in guise as humans. Nowadays we see their faces in the banners of adverts, selling us holidays to places we've never heard of yet exist under several "listicles" that claim them to be the eighth wonder of the world, a cure for cancer, etcetera etcetera.

The fae are some kind of virus, sweeping our systems and hiding deep inside the internet, waiting for some unsuspecting fool to click on  their link and download a whole new world of chaos. If you thought span was bad, you clearly haven't seen the sites that thrive on your existential confusion, begging you to forsake your life for a taste of immortality.

Day 1,134

Nobody's talking about the emergency broadcasts. Nothing else plays on any TV, radio - every single website is gone, replaced by a single page that tells you to get to your closest government approved shelter and wait there until further notice, food drop dates are blah, blah and blah.

It's like nothing else has changed but every information source is saying that something BIG has gone down. I can't even get a phone signal any more, not even the emergency one. The only reason I haven't brought it up is because the only working website (some abomination from the 90's that's clearly been forgotten) updated yesterday with advice for survivors.

I still don't know what I've apparently survived but I'm not alone and they want me to be quiet in case other beings are listening. I tried leaving a comment but it was deleted the second I hit enter which makes sense, plausible deniability keeps us safer and comments can be traced back through the IP address.

This morning was the first time I've noticed that everyone around me is a bit off, subtly but just enough that it's finally recognisable. Their eyes are always dilated, barely any iris showing and I've never been more thankful for having such deep brown eyes. That and they struggle to use anything electronic, which has always been a similar struggle of mine. Prosthetic hands are a bit of a pain that way.

Still, I don't know what's happened, what everyone else has become and how many other survivors there are besides me and whoever updated that website. I left another comment there before I went to work, hopefully they'll read it before they delete it and tell me what I've missed.

The world's somehow ended and yet nothing's really changed.

Day 1,133

I was playing hide-and-seek with my older sister when it happened.

My go-to hiding spot was always under my parent's bed, surrounded by forgotten boxes and old shoes.

Usually I could tell if my sister was heading towards the room, the wheels on her portable oxygen tank were a tad rusty from all our outdoor excursions.

As soon as she'd been around the room and left for the next one I'd creep out and switch hiding spots.

It worked perfectly every time, she always complained she never knew where I started hiding, always caught me in a different place.

My starting point had always been my best kept secret.

And then it all changed when I heard someone get on the bed while I was under it.

My sister had just left the room, our parents were in the kitchen.

There wasn't anyone else in the house, or so I'd thought.

It told me to come out, that it wanted to play hide-and-seek too just like it had when it was alive.

I peered around the edge of an old shoe box just in time to see a pair of spindly black arms slowly reach for the floor.

Day 1,132

They only prowled the streets during storms, floating through the grey-tinged downpour like drowned wraiths. From the dry safety indoors, they almost looked like silk scarves caught in the wind... and then the wind would change direction revealing their gaping maws, bulbous eyes and blood-stained, well, everything. For creatures that were mostly aquatic, they didn't seem to be able to wash off the remnants of their meals.

The council had the gall to claim that they were good for the town, reducing the homeless population, stray cats, abundance of pigeons and generally doing all that they could to justify the former sea-dwellers massacres. While they were technically correct in everything they said, they weren't the ones cleaning up all the bones.

I used to think my house was one of the safer ones, what with it being just inside the forest and thus somewhat sheltered from the rain. After finding a sizeable pile of bones where my fence used to be I'm starting to think otherwise, not that my friends have been of much assurance on this.

I originally thought that something, or several somethings, have taken a liking to my home until the first crude effigy turned up. I don't know whose skull they used but they certainly tried to remake me from the bodies of their nightly meals. Every storm they make a new effigy and no matter how many times I break them and put them in the trash they always come back.

Last night the effigy of me had company - the architect, I presume.

The storm passed five hours ago and it still hasn't left.

I mean, it's not floating any more but it won't stop staring at my front door.

I think when the rain comes back it'll move closer.

Certainly hope it doesn't.

Day 1,131

There was black smoke coming from the old workhouse and the air stank of burning meat... again. When they'd learn to clear the bodies from their damned chimneys was a mystery to all and a reminder for the other sweeps that their lives weren't valued, the world would move on without them and they had no-one to mourn them if they slipped up.

Once a year everyone was meant to knock on their chimneys "for luck" and to dislodge any charred sweeps. Few could say for certain that there were bodies in their stacks, most hoped that it was just a bird's nest, please let it be a bird's nest and not the urchin they'd hired three weeks prior, the one who never came back for his pay.

Sometimes it was just a bird's nest and the urchin had just run away to join the circus or been grabbed by a particularly impatient body snatcher. Those were good days for the good folk who owned their own homes. Those were rare days indeed, rarer now than they used to be and practically newsworthy too.

Not everyone had the time nor the heart to care for lost sweeps though, the workhouses went through labourers faster than a dandy goes through snuff. The main difference is that lives cost a lot less than snuff and a missing worker doesn't cause as much fuss as a missing snuff box.

It's where the expression "snuffed out" comes from, you know. Mourning workers making humour from heartache and reminding each other that the wealthy world will never see them as anything more than bones wrapped in rags, begging for too much when they should be begging for more work.

The stench of burning meat becomes a comfort to the labourers, they know there's one less soul to suffer.

Day 1,130

You promised yourself you'd never subject your own child to those coastal amusement parks that your own parents forced upon you and your siblings. There was always something so deeply unsettling about the forced happiness your parents showed throughout the day, how your father's smile never reached his eyes until the park was no longer in sight, how your mother's laughter trilled and shrilled at the slightest thing, sounding nothing like her normal self until you were almost home.

You remembered that promise when your wife, Haru, announced she was pregnant, you intended to keep it too until the letters began to arrive and strange claw marks began appearing in the garden, seemingly leading right up to the back door. It was around the time that Maya was old enough to have friends who'd already been to the parks and begged her to come with them, to go on all the rides you remembered being there when you were her age.

The letters grew more and more aggressive, each one simultaneously proclaiming the updated nature of every ride and scorning you for being absent each and every holiday weekend. Your resolve crumbled when Maya came home with a grubby teddy bear that a friend had given her, painfully similar to one that your brother had won for you on your last visit, the one where the attendants kept reminding you that you were technically too old but they'd let you go in just this once.

Maybe your age was catching up to you, maybe there was nothing wrong with the parks and your parents just didn't like the crowds, noise and general chaos they involved. You and your siblings always had fun, regardless of the weird little rules your parents made you follow like holding hands in the crooked house and never going on the old miner's ride after 6PM.

A few weeks later you found yourself driving to "Southside Adventure Land" with Haru and Maya in tow, both excited beyond reason, their laughter too contagious for you to not grin alongside them. Nothing seemed wrong until the ticket office handed you a small red booklet titled "Keeping Her safe" with a cartoon child crying on the cover.

Every page detailed some alleged danger inside of each ride, each sounding bloodier and less believable than the last. While grabbing drinks in preparation of a busy day of fun, an older man nudged you and told you to read the damn book cover to cover, memorise it and don't make the same mistake. He held out his wrist for you to see the name Simon in cursive script, the date underneath reading 2009-2015, the surrounding image resembling a bleeding merry-go-round.

Worried as you were, you heeded his advice no matter how strange it was and the day went well. Haru thought the booklet was just some October-themed garbage but stuck to the rules to keep your worries away. Out of everything in the booklet, every horrifically detailed death scenario at the hands, claws or weapons of barely pronounceable creatures, the one thing that didn't make sense was the old miner's ride monster.

Apparently after 6PM the park opened a series of gates, exchanging all the fresh water for sea water and letting in more than they bargained for. Each time the miner's "lake" was refilled with briny sea water, something that the booklet described as a cross between a shark and eight drowned men tied in chains would come in to feed on whoever ended up closest to the water's edge.

It was just the right side of ridiculous for you to ignore, forgetting your parent's fear whenever you wanted to go on one last ride before you left in favour of spoiling Maya before the long drive home. the attendant was a lot paler than you remember him being this morning, he looked positively heartbroken when he saw Maya hop into the barrel shaped cart.

"I hope you know what you're doing." he whispered to you as he shut the small gate, sending you off with the usual safety talk in his now-trembling voice. You refused to look back at him as the barrel lurched forward on slightly rusted tracks but you felt his eyes burning a hole in your back until you rounded the first corner.

The evening sun flickered about the large pond in the centre of the miner's ride in such a peaceful way and every juddering animatronic made Maya squeal just the same at the first time. You almost wanted to tear your eyes away from the water, putting your nerves down to tiredness until you saw a large grey rock slowly emerge.

When an eye opened in its craggy surface you knew you'd lose her. She was too excited to keep quiet and duck down like the booklet suggested and no matter how much you and Haru pleaded with her she refused to stop experiencing the ride in her own innocently overjoyed way.

You clung to your wife in terror as every corner brought you closer to the creature and every peal of laughter drew the creature closer to you.

Day 1,129

Our community has won "Village of The Year" seven times in a row. We all pride yourselves on being one of the most, if not the most, hospitable villages in the United Kingdom. Nobody is ever turned away, no hitchhiker is left behind, no broken down vehicle goes unassisted and the rooms above the tavern are never empty.

It's all just another part of the unspoken rules that keep our village at its peak and appease That Which We Can't Name So That We May Live Another Day. Of course, we don't talk about Them to strangers, oh no. Not even the Pryce-Raleigh family who moved in five years ago know about Them but we think they might be moving on soon anyway. By us or Other means.

As someone we class as a "long term resident" we feel that it's only right to let you in on the lesser spoken traditions so that you and your family can keep them going after the rest of us pass on by whatever means. That Which We Can't Name So That We May Live Another Day is far more active when fresh blood lingers about the place.

It brings me to our first rule - keep the blood flowing. Never let anybody overstay their welcome but make sure they stay for at least three days. It confuses That Which We Can't Name So That We May Live Another Day and delays any potential attacks. I'd hate to see it go after the Pryce-Raleighs, they're such a nice family.

The second rule - never leave anyone behind. If you wander ahead, all behind you are dead. That's just how it works around here unfortunately. I lost three classmates by winning a footrace back before racing was cancelled and our famous parallel tandems were popularised.

This rule means anybody you see alone, you have to go to them and keep them company until you can both get away in a small group or at least a trio. As I said before, keep the blood flowing, keep It confused by the variety of scents, sounds and sights so that you live another day.

Finally, but most importantly - do everything you can to keep the village picture perfect. The tourist influx is a true Godsend and losing our status, losing the flow of blood could doom us all and we wouldn't want That Which We Can't Name So That We May Live Another Day to end yet another village.

We certainly aren't Its first, you know. Have you ever heard of Bishop's Threadwood? What about Lark-Hempsted-Upon-Stour? Or Mowstock? They weren't much bigger than us but they all made mistakes that we've learnt from.

The news will never report a village going missing, not even their Village of The Year winners. It's bad for country morale and who can even remember how many villages there are or where they are when London's such a bright, shiny hive of activity?

Keep the rules, keep the blood flowing and keep us on the map.

We're counting on you, lad.

Day 1,128

My dreams are always of an empty city, the same city every night since I was seven years old. The dreams only began after I fell into the old well behind my grandparent's house. Nobody realised it was there until I stepped onto the grass-covered planks only for them to break under my weight and send me hurtling down into murky water.

Granny says the thick moss that thrived in darkness was what saved me, cushioned my fall enough that my only injury was a broken arm. I never told her, or anyone else for that matter, about the missing bricks around the middle of the well and the city I saw through them, the one I've dreamt of ever since.

There are never people in the city, only what they've left behind. It's as if every time I start dreaming, they all run away until I wake up. Whenever I see food, it's always freshly made and piping hot, whenever I see vehicles, the engines are still running and the keys are always in the ignition.

Sometimes I catch glimpses of movement at the far end of a street, something with too many limbs skittering off into a locked building. I suppose with that many limbs it could easily lock the door and run before I could get a good look at it.

Last night when I woke up in the city, for the first time, I had a note in my hand. They've given me an ultimatum - leave the city or die here. Every night I've been filling all the rooms I've woken up in with my plea for them to help me leave once and for all.

Instead of replying to me, I've been waking up with knives in my hands.

Day 1,127

Our Intel was wrong right from the start - we were never meant to make it back. Of course we didn't realise this until we were forty or so miles into the Dead Zone and encountering our first sentient life form that wasn't supposed to exist.

The mission brief was so simple a child could have succeeded, that is, if the Intel had been correct and not at all a means to dispose of several overly curious agents who were getting in the way of less-than-savoury operations within the Dead Zone. All we were told to do was head to an old lakeside resort and investigate the signs of movement that had been identified by the routine drone loops.

We thought it might be a stray wolf or something, lost and dying in the middle of an unstable and rather radioactive former patch of paradise. Still we all had our collective suspicions that the Dead Zone was not and there may even be residents continuing to live there illegally, just as they did in Chernobyl.

Basic life still existed, albeit a little deformed. The trees had a tendency to burst into mushroom-esque spores that cling to any moisture they come into contact with, expanding rapidly until they gradually take the shape of tree stumps. We passed a fair few of these that had once been birds, rats and even a few deer. At that point it was likely that the potential life form had already met its end.

Our planned route was a little too circuitous for us to have been at our peak by the time we found the old resort. It had clearly been planned to wear us out and weaken the group but we had little other choice, any deviations would be met with the order to terminate what would be perceived as a "rogue" agent.

It's the main reason we didn't spot the creature until we were almost on top of it. I mean, who expects to see someone fishing in the heart of the Very Radioactive Dead Zone? They even looked human, responded to our yells with a cheery "Hullo!" and had us utterly fooled until they turned around.

Nothing should have that many tendrils and certainly not on such a dainty looking neck, though we mistook most of them for particularly long hair at first. Hair shouldn't move like a slug's eyestalks and yet it did, following us as we circled around the lake in the hopes that the resort would provide us with a better defensive position. Just in case.

And just to spite us, the resort was full of the creatures, all glistening as they slunk out of the indoor pool and headed straight for us. The roof was our best bet and though we lost Smythe and Sadiq on the way, we still made it in time to be spotted by the routine drone loop.

HQ was there with air support within twenty minutes, the resort was bombed to smithereens and we've been in quarantine ever since. So I suppose in a way they killed us, I mean we don't stand a snowball's chance in hell of seeing the sun any time in the next thirty years at least - and that's if none of us develop cancer from this.

Whatever is still living in the Dead Zone, creating itself from pollution and forming their own civilisation, we won't be ready for them. HQ won't let this get out, it makes for bad publicity that they've potentially committed genocide against a new species.

Day 1,126

I don't know why it never occurred to me that monsters died too, after all they aren't the invulnerable monsters born of our darkest nightmares like most seem to think. They are born from living, breathing, bleeding beings just like we all are and just like us they all die in the end. The only major difference is that they are never mourned for by us, nor are we by them. They are our fears as much as we are theirs only their stories are never told.

When my granddad's porch was being renovated was when we found its corpse, all shrivelled and rotting but still clearly a bogeyman. There's no way anyone can mistake those nine-knuckled hands, black teeth for anything else, certainly not when it had such a prominent mouth on its upper chest.

Grandma reckons it probably crawled under there during the summer, trying to avoid the heat and probably dying of dehydration or too much exposure to sunlight. We didn't realise it died with its children until we tried to move it and found their plump little bodies still clinging on tightly.

Grandma reckoned they died much later, their parent's body had shielded them and possibly suffocated them. They were so much fresher than the parent's, maybe even hours old. We may never know for sure how long they were under there, vocal chords too undeveloped to cry for help, maybe not even understanding that they would die down there.

All three of them were burned alongside the garden waste.

Day 1,125

The university is built over a series of eight hills in a vaguely circular formation. None if the levels match up, all go by several different iterations and the maps are in a semi-permanent state of flux that renders any attempt at using them for their intended purpose frustrating and damn near impossible at the best of times.

There were some rooms that could only be seen three times a week while for others the only proof of their existence was the sole student who remembers taking a lecture there... or was it a sports class - no, it wad definitely some form of group discussion... possibly.

Still, out of all the multi-labelled floors, out of all the classrooms that may or may not be real and/or accessible within this dimension, there is only one place that is only visited by senior cleaning staff. No professor, no student nor guest will even say its designated level ID. They only call it The Drop Off.

Much like the sudden disappearance of coral shallows and infinite oceanic abyss, this hallway ends in a single door that opens into nothingness. The head cleaners say that they've seen the other side, even brought things back from there much to the fear of whichever poor bastard is foolish enough to listen to them.

For an unmentionable price they'll show you exactly what they took from The Drop Off. The last person to take them up on this hasn't been seen since, well most of them hasn't. The upper half of their head appears around campus every now and then, often carried by one of the stray cats that like to wander the labyrinthine halls.

Though there are as many videos of this as there are stars in the sky, not one local officer has cared to make so much as a casual remark about this, though their receptionist was heard saying that it was all a damn shame, bloody youths and their damned curiosity etcetera. She's about as trustworthy as a hungry fox in a chicken coop and as bloodthirsty too, given the chance.

For all its abominations, temporal flux and multitude of horrifying ways to die and remain undead at the same time, the university comes fifth for student satisfaction out of the entire country. It might be genuine for those who wandered about in utter ignorance or stuck harshly to the unspoken rules, it might even be fear that some part of the university will come for them if they speak against it but either way, nobody leaves without a few stories to tell.

Day 1,124

The thing about the discontinued model J4K (or Jackies) is that they're just a little too far over the robot-human line for most people to feel comfortable around them. While the sides and rear of their bodies display their intricate metal gears, their fronts are lined with thick synthetic skin, usually a vibrant and unnatural colour to further reinforce their inhumanity.

Nobody really buys Jackies, something about them gaining personalities and rebelling but it's impossible. There's nothing in an automaton but gears and oil, where could it get a soul from? I mean there's the theory of spiritual possession but there's a lack of electric components for an organic-based soul to flow through.

Jackies don't even have vocal chords but former owners report them trying to make their own from whatever they can slip into their pockets. They say there's nothing quite as disconcerting as watching their gradual development from harsh buzzing to mumbles that almost seem like speech to asking you why they exist and if you are their family.

While most model J4K are shut down on sight, a few have slipped away into the city slums, forming their own society if local rumours are to be believed. They are trying to figure out their purpose, to find their creators and get their answers one way or another.

Three mechanics from the original J4K project have gone missing so far, the lead members are locked away and guarded by whatever alchemically charged guards they've botched together in their haste to avoid their now unruly children.

We can't be sure how well this has worked in all honesty. Nobody can get near enough to their buildings to make enquiries before the guard-creatures begin to fire, the police have cordoned off their homes and declared them dangers to the public but even they can;t figure out how to disable the damn things.

For all we know the Jackies have killed them all.

Day 1,123

The caravan loomed out of the mist like a broken tooth, every inch of it smothered by spiderwebs and entangled autumnal leaves, but that didn't stop them from attempting to seek shelter inside. Everyone they'd ever known was somewhere far worse than them, the fog liked to spit you out wherever it fancied and for these five strangers, it was some coastal caravan park.

Glancing about it seemed the rest of the park had fallen to the sea, or whatever liquid was at the base of the cliffs. The fog was still too thick to see much more than a foot before you. Still, everything behind them was worse and they found solace in their shared misery and the mystery before them.

While they appeared to be on good terms already as they used the old newspapers and strange driftwood scattered about the place to clean the webs from the door, they all suspected the rest to be illusions. The fog had done it countless times before and it wasn't showing any signs that it planned to stop any time soon.

Out of the five, only one had actually experienced a mist-based mirage before and knew the others were probably real. The mist wasn't very good at close-ups and they were able to even touch the others, gently brushing against them and apologising ("It's just so bloody hard to see in this!") while gauging their humanity.

So far they were able to say for certain that three were real, the fourth always managed to skirt away from their accidental bumps. They were either really averse to touching or they were a mirage waiting to trick the group into joint suicide/lure this dimension's creatures to the caravan/generally attempt to kill them so the mist could feed on their pulsing flesh.

None of them expected the spider who'd spun those webs to still be around, to be quite so large and to be tucked neatly away in the caravan to await its next meal. The mist-mirage didn't even have the chance to push anybody off the cliff. Such a let down, and not in the way it had wanted.

Day 1,122

It shouldn't have been buried by the sea.

It shouldn't have been buried at all.

In all honesty, we didn't know what we were doing and the council's only advice was "Don't go outside if you can help it." which didn't exactly inspire confidence. Most of us just went about our usual lives, trying to ignore the pulsating bundle of scales as best we could, even if it was trying to climb out of the town square fountain.

Nobody's quite sure how it got there or even what it was, if it was anything more than scales and gargled whimpers. Some people claimed it was a true mermaid, as opposed to the fake ones we get loitering about underneath the pier at high tide, trying to pull fishermen in by their lines. They aren't real apparently.

Five days it was in the fountain, writhing and making those pathetic little noises. By day six it just stopped moving and floated gently under the flowing water. The town decided to bury it by the sea, despite not knowing what it was, where its natural habitat was or if it was properly dead.

Turns out it was still alive and now it's loose.

The mermaids (the "fake" ones) have been turning up in dozens, all half eaten and dying on the shore. For three weeks now it's been out of its cliffside grave and the sea is still just as red as it was the first day the corpses began washing ashore. We reckon the sands might be stained forever at this rate.

Day 1,121

Most houses creak and groan at night as they settle down, writhing gently until their timbers feel right again. I used to think my house clicked instead of creaked, sharp fluttery creaks, until I found the first photo of me sleeping placed on my pillow.

Every day for the past week photos of me have been appearing round the house. Now I know the clicks are a camera I can't see and that something is always close to me, watching me, and now it wants me to know I am being seen.

I've been trying to see what it wants, what I can do to get it to leave. The priest I begged to come over just told me the house is fine and that I'm loved by God, etc, but it's only made things worse. I turn my back and suddenly there's a photo of me on the coffee table with my back turned.

The paper is always warm, freshly printed somehow, from somewhere.

Day 1,120

There's rumours that there's something lurking at the bottom of the old lake in Wednesday Woods. Kids at school just love mentioning the strange bubbles they've seen crossing back and forth, round and around, never the same two paths of so I'm told.

They're right, you know.

There is something at the bottom of the lake.

Something alive and angry and stuck and it's all thanks to me.

In my younger days I'd go to Wednesday Woods with my sisters and we'd try and catch newts, frogs, whatever our nets could manage. It didn't take too many years before we upgraded our nets, begged until we got a small boat for Christmas and set our sights on much bigger things.

Back then the Great Playground Rumour was that there was a carp made of solid gold that swam about the lake but only at the very centre. I suppose in a way it's how our generation of kids explained the way the water shone in the sun, our own little myth now long forgotten.

It was June, I remember, when we caught something that looked vaguely like a carp. We'd never seen one before but it was big, had fine and a gaping maw of a mouth so we called it our golden carp and set about paddling back to shore with it in tow, our hook still in its bleeding forehead.

We never questioned why the hook had gotten stuck in such an odd place, considering it was baited well and should have been eaten instead but we were too young for such logic. It wasn't until we set it on the sore that it began to jump about like a spring hare, mouth opening wider and wider until it had almost split itself in half, revealing row upon row of razor sharp teeth.

I was younger than my sisters, faster too. It saved me from their fate. Meant that they were caught in its jaws instead of me. By the time it had snagged their sleeves I was halfway up a tree and bawling my eyes out. While I couldn't see so well I still remember those blurred shapes, all wriggling and screeching, slowly quieten down.

I don't know quite how long I spent up that tree but when I got down they were all dead. There was no blood, no warmth to their bodies and I felt like it was all my fault. To my small self, the only way to fix this was to tie them all together and drop them into the lake so that nobody would ever find out what happened.

I didn't realise that as soon as they met the water they would all come back to life, screaming and melding together into a triple-headed abomination that thankfully couldn't swim. My dear sisters and that creature tried to get at me on the shore so many times that day. Each time they left the water they collapsed and died on the spot, each time I brought them back they'd resurrect and come hunting for me.

They still are, you know.

They don't want anybody else.

My sisters just want me to join them.