Day 1,210

They both knew it was a ghost but neither of them wanted to say it.

There was simply nothing else he could be, not when he was only visible through the security cameras while the three guards stood beside him and claimed they were alone. At one point they even walked through him, causing him to flicker briefly before resuming his standard position.

He must have been from the plague pit - it was the only thing that made sense. You can't even dig up your garden in London without unearthing a few bones, let alone adding an extension to a bus depot. Of course they expected mild hauntings from their excavation but not an actual manifestation of what appeared to be a lower class man, his arms crossed and expression unplaceable.

Having a priest come along only made things worse as Reverend Thomas was Protestant while the apparition must have been Catholic, judging by the way he grabbed the Reverend and threw the poor man half way across the depot. Luckily he wasn't killed, not immediately at least and not in a way that could be linked back to them. That's all that mattered.

Aside from that one incident, the peasant did nothing else but stand there and gradually stare at everything and everyone around him - even going so far as to gaze right into the camera with his milky white eyes that somehow looked right through you.

Day 1,209

In Broad Peycroft they keep the lake and surrounding marshlands fenced off under the guise of a "nature reserve". All funding comes from the family who own the abandoned manor house that squats along the shoreline, now home to birds, beetles and (if local legend is to be believed) the mad aunt of the family who is locked away in the attic still.

There is always a light on in the attic window. Though officially it's a memorial light for the last great war, shadows flitter about in front of it from time to time and no explanation has ever been released. Unofficially somehow an old woman lives there and survives by eating whatever wanders close enough for her skeletal arms to seize.

Teenagers and drunken adults alike dare each other to climb the fence and pay her a visit but very few make it past up the stairs. The house has a way of disturbing something in your hindbrain that makes every fibre of your being scream "NOPE" as your legs reverse before you can fully comprehend what you are doing.

If anyone were to make it past the stairs all they'd find is empty bedrooms, bathrooms and an open hatch leading to the attic itself. Thick power chords run throughout the house, linking the light to three generators so that no matter what, the light will be kept going. It's the only thing keeping her up there, she loathes the cold.

She isn't alive any more, not that she knows it. She died back in 1914, five weeks after her family moved out and swore they'd come back for her only to be delayed by the war. By the time they could come back to her she was little more than rags wrapped around bones. Bones that asked for food.

Though her eyes are long gone and her movements are limited, it doesn't mean she won't come for you if she sees you - if anything feels real to her it's the warmth of the light and the hunger pains in her stomach. They keep her bent low and keen for something living to eat, something with warm blood that'll slip down her throat and temporarily ease the ache.

Doesn't even matter if it's human.

Day 1,208

The snow fell thick and fast, shutting down railway lines and major roads within a handful of hours. Tens of thousands were without electricity, many more were left stranded in their commutes with strangers who were all growing steadily angrier as time went on and the chances of their rescue dwindled like a poorly kept fire.

It took three days for the death toll to reach one hundred and two days more for that number to double as panic settled in deeper than the snow that had them all trapped. The first to die were on long distance trains, namely ones who had come to a halt out in the countrysides where only semi-domesticated cattle thrive.

None of them were prepared for a long wait.

Some tried to leave in search of nearby settlements, never returning, while the remaining passengers ate through their rations and soon began rationalising cannibalism. All around these trains the snow is stained a dark red, an ever-growing warning sign to any rescue attempts- come armed and come prepared for the worst.

It really doesn't take long for civility to be abandoned.

As bad as the trains were, as quickly as they became abattoirs, the roads were far worse. Every car became a microcosm surrounded by enemy nations that wanted their meagre supplies and would do anything to get to them. Windows were broken and made into weapons, the cold air petrified the weak into parodies of death, their breath still clouding the air in front of them while their skin froze and their fingers turned black.

Small country roads (glorified footpaths really) went from charming to picturesque to utterly silent as a churchyard. The only sign that a cars had ever been there were the slightly larger burial mounds of snow that occasionally had a frostbitten arm jutting out in a desperate final bid for escape.

After three months of brutally heavy snowstorms, countless pockets of survivors began to develop their own civilisations, their own rules, new countries formed, merged and died all in the span of hours as life tried and tried to keep going amidst a climate that told them to just let themselves go to sleep, they'll be warm as soon as they close their eyes.

When the snow melted, the bloodstains didn't.

Day 1,207

November 25th

Dahlia walks about the house when I'm asleep - she thinks I don't know but I hear her footsteps all around me. The floors above and deep below practically have her tracks worn right into them yet she won't tell me why. She won't even admit that it's her traipsing about in the small hours of the morning and claims she sleeps through the night.

She's been changing too, over the past few weeks. She grows thinner and thinner, her skin now hanging around her body like a child wearing her mother's dress. She grows greyer too in every aspect of her physical self. At times I almost feel as though I'm talking to a photographic portrait and that my dearest sister is no more. Her body almost appears to elongate itself and I fear that soon she may resemble a circus mirror more than the Dahlia I know...or is it now knew?

But something of her old self is still there. Perhaps that's why she paces all through the night and refuses to admit to doing so. This may be her seeking her cure or it may indeed be the very cause for her depletion, so to speak, but alas I am no doctor and she continues to alter day by day.

December 15th

Dahlia has gotten worse these past few days. She's taken to muttering to herself during her nightly patrols of the house as well as ordering the butler to lock all the servants and myself in our respective rooms for the night so that she may "meditate in peace". I fail to see what part of her behaviours constitutes to any form of meditation but as she is Duchess and I but her lowly sibling, I can do little else but wait and write.

Since these nightly lock-ups I've noticed that the servants are far quieter, far less prone to gossip than they were even last week. We seem to be hiring more of them too and old faces vanish overnight. Dahlia blames the reopening of the old copper mines, the ones that our great, great  Grandmama closed amidst a string of murders in the neighbouring village.

They welcome the work we provide yet remain so brutally superstitious one can't help but wonder if they've all fled.

All the while I do hope my sister's changes are but a temporary sickness and that the walks I persuade her into are of some help. She is so very thin now, I hate to make comparisons but her skin hangs so loose about her delicate face that she closer resembles a purebred basset hound than purebred aristocracy

Oh how her poor eyes bleed from the strain of her condition and how her gums bleed and recede in equal measure. Still, Dahlia is as strong as she's ever been and never complains, no matter how she stains her muslin gowns and tea alike.

February 3rd

That is not my sister. It hasn't been her for quite some time too, judging by the rags and bones I found in her bed. Oh my poor Dahlia, are these rags you or are you now the creature that prowls the halls at night and chases servants to their deaths?

I pray you are dead, cruel as that may seem.

At least then, once I strike you down at breakfast, it won't be murder.

I will be saving you, saving us all.

God be with me.

Day 1,207

The art show was based around the concept of the unseen, divided into the literal and the figurative.

Stepping past the threshold brings you to a room that smells faintly of iron and formaldehyde. Pitifully thin wires suspend the entirety of a horse, dissected down to its basest components as guests walk past self-inflating lungs and a steadily beating heart that fills the room with its low thumps.

A narrow passage forces guests to walk single file past glass panes that alternate between explaining the process of mummification and leaking canopic jars. The room they walk into is filled with three dimensional portraits of the backs of people's heads. Some are split with axes,scalpels and worse still embedded in them while others remain pristine and so lifelike you half expect them to turn around.

From there a set of stairs leads guests into a hallway seemingly suspended above a void and surrounded by a Faraday cage that arcs whenever a certain noise level is reached. The act of seeing their words produce raw lightning unsettles them, creating the perfect atmosphere for the final two rooms.

As the stairs reach their climax, guests flee into the penultimate room. A room that explores the harsh chill you experience upon meeting someone who is somehow not right in ways you won't be able to place until you search for their name online and see that they've just been released from prison for "accidentally" killing seventy eight dogs at the same veterinary clinic you took your own dog to just last week. Every inch of the room is filled with portraits that aren't right, aren't natural in their own unique way, be it that the mouth reaches both sides of their face at rest or they have three smaller sets of eyes surrounding their normal sized ones.

The portraits gradually shrink in size and fade until they meet a corner that leads them to the end.

The final room is pitch black. A member of staff ties guests hands together with cable ties so they form a human daisy chain, a conveyor belt of anxious nerves that slowly file into a space that feels to very large and empty and occupied all at once. It feels like they are walking into the last place they will ever experience and nobody makes a single sound, some going so far as to hold their breath because it just feels like there's something waiting for them in the dark.

What they will not be told until they are exiting the building, escorted by police past a heavy metal barrier, is that they were never alone in that last room. There are nine ambulances on scene, two leaving and five more pulling in. Everyone who has left the gallery is immediately drawn into an ambulance and presumably taken to a nearby hospital.

None are seen or heard from again.

Whatever was in the final room is never spoken of, not by the authorities at least.

All staff from the gallery ere replaced the next day and it was never discussed again.

Day 1,206

The waiting rooms are empty.

The staff room is empty.

The Doctors are on the prowl again.

They leave through a carefully concealed vent and surface somewhere near a new cul-de-sac that doesn't yet have a warning siren. In spite of the local laws that forbid the introduction of new tenants into such areas, three houses were lit up and full of life.

The Doctors began the search for new patients, starting with the furthest and leaving a few Doctors crouched by the vent in case anybody tried to run. The best thing about new builds is that they exist around a single main road and others is ever any danger people instinctively head towards it.

The next best thing about new builds is that they don't link them to any network until every home is inhabited. Anything that isolates a potential patient is well worth the hassle of crawling through spider-infested vents deep below the utterly ignorant town.

Now at this point you may be wondering where the Nurses are and to that I provide the age-old saying "behind every Doctor are three tired Nurses" and they are always so very tired. They walk like they'e in a trance, their eyes so sunken that they no longer open as they softly bump into each other, trying to keep pace with their counterparts.

It's the Nurses who break into the homes and begin the assssments while a Doctor scours the perimeter for stragglers and would-be escapees. After an initial tranquilising dose has been administered they are moved to the security of the waiting room and the silence of the hospital breaks like their bones.

Day 1,205

Going to the island my grandmother lives on is like taking a step back two hundred years. They just got electricity last year, not that they quite know what to do with it. Most of the still prefer to use their fireplaces and stay by candlelight at all times. They rise and sleep with the sun and claim that doing anything else is against the laws of nature.

They're the sort of folk that'll cherish you if you're any form of relation and keep their distance from everyone else. Tourism would be utterly non-existent if the ferry didn't circle the island once or twice a day. People seem to feel safer looking at the locals from the sea while they go about their business.

It's certainly safer that way. The village itself barely covers three miles all around the rest of the island is taken up by a mix of dense forest and deep chasms. If local legend is to be believed then they don't end until they hit the sea floor and that's only for the sheer number of skeletons tangled together deep below.

I used to love these stories, love visiting my grandmother and especially loved spending the night in the bird watching tower right at the heart of the woods. Every summer I'd be allowed up there for the night, all by myself as gran was too old to make it up that many stairs.

I don't go there anymore, not since she died. Well, was killed by something that apparently is just a story and couldn't possibly exist in nature no matter what kind if science was involved. There's just no logic to such a creature and yet I saw it when it was seven years old and it killed my grandmother right in front of me.

Well, I say in front... she was at the base of the bird watching tower trying to get me to come down because there was a "bear" loose in the woods... on a small island by the Scottish coast which hasn't seen bears for well over a thousand years. At least they tried to make their cover story vaguely plausible.

Rogue zoo bear is a lot easer to swallow than "it crawled out of a chasm in the year of our Lord 978 and it won't stop trying to eat anyone who stays in the woods for too long". According to the church records, that's exactly what happened and they've been hiding it ever since, trying to make their island as difficult to reach and inhospitable to remain on as possble without making seem like anything more than them judt being a bit eccentric and local.

Whatever it is, I know it'l find a way off the island eventually. Nobody wants to live there and without any young blood, soon the islanders will die off completely and the creature will find their boats. I know it will, I saw it skulking around the outskirts of the village the night before it killed my grandmother.

It's only a matter of time now and the mainland will never be prepared enough.

Day 1,204

Sometimes an exorcism is as simple as saying "You need to leave now" and sometimes so much blood is spilled that the original ghost pales in comparison. Nothing quite compares to the rage of the recently and unexpectedly deceased.

It's not just the wails of anguish when they see themselves being moved into a body bag, it's not just being able to see the ghost you were dealing with for the first time, it's the mindset that gradually sinks in and tells you that your friends let you die.

Now most experts would say that a recently formed ghost is at its weakest and they would be right in most cases. Generally most people come to grips with their impending death before it happens, giving them just enough time to understand why they are dying.

Sudden death isn't nearly so kind to the human psyche. The mind seeks to blame someone, something - anything to help it comprehend what has happened, why them etcetera. It doesn't take much to flip a ghost to a poltergeist, it's why most people's first instinct when finding a dead body is to keep well away.

Aeons of gradual exposure to poltergeists has given us all an ingrained fear of them, enough to keep us at a safe distance but not enough to make us question it. We give ourselves thousands of reasons to stay away rather than check if someone is alive and breathing (I'm not trained in CPR, what if the police find my DNA on them and think I killed them, what if they're just homeless and asleep and they'll attack me if I wake them up).

Exorcisms are humanity's answer to poltergeists - the spiritual equivalent of putting them in a cup and tipping them outside so they can be on their merry way to their respective afterlife, whether they want it or not. Remaining simply isn't an option, not when they can crush you with a single thought and are prone to spontaneous violent outbursts.

Day 1,203

When we found a new species of whale we were excited beyond all comprehension not just for finding a new subspecies but finding one that seems to be amphibious in a way that seemed impossible to any mammal of such a size.

Where science says it can't be so, nature finds a way to say "Oh really? Then what's this then?" which is as adored as it is despised - mostly from biologists whose thesis rarely last a month before something groundbreaking is stumbled upon.

Were it not for the fact that nature isn't s sentient being, one could almost go so far as to say that it's toying with us. Deliberately showing us everything we claim cannot physically exist just to watch us lose our grip and try to destroy it before the whole world finds out.

Unfortunately the new whale was discovered crawling into a public pool, using the claw-like ends of its frontal fins to drag its upper half while the tail (naturally bifurcated deeper than any other species of whale) walks the lower end in an eerily humanoid fashion.

Even its calls (mostly at the subsonic level which humans can't hear without technical assistance) sound almost like words. We thought it was just another part of the new species, its stuttered and oddly repetitive cries that changed completely depending on who was in the room and what they were wearing.

The longest call we recorded from it lasted three minutes non-stop. As a joke one of the more tech-proficient guys played it backwards. The longer we listened the closer we edged to the doorway and away from the whale-like creature that was no longer swimming but was now resting on the floor of the tank staring at us.

When their calls are reversed they come through as near perfect speech. They've been telling us that they can understand us, that they live deeper inland than we know and that they eat just as much meat as they do plankton. They explicitly state that they know how to escape their tanks and plan on doing so when we least expect it.

They don't say where they'll go or what they'll do when they're free but they've expressed such hatred for their confinement and such utter loathing for the way we've dissected their dead that I wouldn;t be surprised if this was the last thing I ever wrote.

They can be so very quiet on land when they want to be.

Day 1,202

"I'll be waiting for you when you get home."

Those were her last words. Anything else she might have said was cut off as the train derailed somewhere between Elgin and Aberdeen. Her body won't be found among the wreckage for a further three days, her phone and three fingers now embedded into her left cheek.

I knew this before any details of the accident came out.

How could I not when she kept her promise?

Day 1,201

They may have all been our guests for almost a hundred years but they weren't, you know, The Good Folk. The tea shop's far too deep into our iron infested city for them to bother coming near it, even if we are right on the outskirts. I mean, I've seen a few of Them around but they're always in a hurry to leave.

Doesn't make our patrons any less deserving of suspicion and a sharp eye. Whatever they are it isn't human, it isn't fae and none of them react too kindly to the assumption that they're anything less than law abiding senior citizens just having tea and cake with their knitting club thankyouverymuch.

Found that one out when a new girl - Katie or Keelie, some K-ee name - just straight up asked a being known as Mrs Shippendon what she was. She carried on to say "cause you've been here literally since the shop opened and that was ninety something years ago and you clearly haven't aged or died or whatever so are you human or what?" all in a single, courageous and final breath.

She collapsed right after with no answer given, only a rather unimpressed "Oh Dearie." from Mrs Shippendon while the rest of our staff dragged the girl to the break room and called for an ambulance.

It wasn't a heart attack, they said. It was just that her heart had been stopped. Literally. Like a hand had reached inside her chest and squeezed her heart until it no longer had the room to pulsate and caused her body to go straight into shock and then a quick, oxygen deprived death.

They said it would have been painless so we sent Mrs Shippendon an apology card for any distress and a thank you card for not making the poor girl suffer. It wasn't that we believed she did it, it was just that we wanted to be sure she didn't do it again - if it was even her.

There's no way for us to know that doesn't put us all in the firing line.

Day 1,200

When we were seven, the teacher taught us all about clouds. How they were formed by interstellar lifeforms as a shield against Earth's toxic atmosphere, how they could grow and shrink in the blink of an eye, how they slithered across the ground when the fog rolled in off the river every night.

As you can imagine, we took it seriously - so much so that whenever there was fog outside we'd beg and scream to stay away. We genuinely thought there were monsters crawling around outside just waiting to tear us up and eat us like garlic bread.

The bodies that were sometimes found around the riverbanks only confirmed it for us in our young minds. We never thought to suspect the very people who'd given us this life saving information that somehow nobody else ever questioned.

Some of us realised sooner than others. They were the first to be found by the river, or rather most of them was found. Hands and feet are always the first things to go, you know. Regardless of whatever eye-witnesses claimed they were holding at the time, they remain lost

We still teach our children that the clouds are bloodthirsty monsters and that the fog will eat them alive. It's kinder for them to think that than look up at you with broken eyes as they realise just how many people you've killed and just how close they've been to monsters all this time.

Day 1,199

I never knew I had a great uncle, much less that he knew me. Of course I found this out when I was invited to the reading of his will and learned that he'd left me his beach hut. Those things are ridiculously expensive to rent, let alone flat out buy so you can understand why I wanted to get out to see it ASAP.

I timed my visit for a cold and rainy day hoping that I wouldn't be disturbed by anyone who'd known him. Trust me to forget that storms are always so much worse on the coast - I was nearly swept right into the sea when a massive wave just straight up came out of nowhere.

With that in mind it took me almost an hour of stumbling down the beach trying to find number 602 as half the damned things had names instead like "Sunshine and Waves" or "Life's a Beach" which is really helpful. The most helpful. Ever.

So that's partly why I was out there for so long, the main reason being that when I finally found hut 602 and managed to pry off the rusty lock (which made me think he didn't really use it, at least until I got inside and saw why he wouldn't use it) I froze and it wasn't just because of the stench that hit me.

It's not every day you come face to face with a wall of glass, let alone a wall of glass with a dead mermaid pressed against it. Seems she'd been trying to claw her way out, half succeeded but wasn't able to pull her hands free again. There were gouges large enough for most of the water to have drained out so it would have taken her weeks, maybe even months to die.

Day 1,198

The silence between them was so thick you could carve it away with an ice-cream scoop. She never thought she'd see him again, especially after she buried his remains in four disused mine-shafts. It made his spirity return all the more awkward.

"So...have you met your nan yet?"

Could she have thought of a worse question to ask when he was clearly still pissed off and very much not Resting In Peace! A strangely calm part of her mind wondered if she could get his tombstone redone to say 'too stubborn to rest, as always' after all, she'd hate to be any more of a liar than she already was.

If only he hadn't had an affair with that bloody jigsaw artist. Still, if anyone found his body - any part of it - all the signs would point to his affair. Jealous bit on the side and all that good stuff, all the anguish she felt shoved at someone else who could potentially be arrested for her crime.

Facing him again, she felt glad she hadn't tried to make it seem like a murder suicide. The thought of sitting opposite two bleeding (literally leaking that ecto-whatsit all over the place... does ecto-whatsit stain?) ghosts was a bit more than she felt she could take. Not that they wouldn't have deserved it, mind you.

He didn't seem to be able to talk, that or he was giving her the silent treatment. He loved to give her the silent treatment when he was alive, it made him feel superior that she'd have to beg him to say something - anything - even if it was cruel. Now he was just sitting in his old chair, limbs floating roughly where they should be on a living person and his eyes unblinkingly focused on her.

She didn't remember falling asleep, waking up when her teacup hit the carpet and spilled the cold liquid everywhere. The stain looked a bit like his face but he, or rather his ghost, was nowhere to be found. No sign he'd ever been there.

As terrified as she'd been, there were so many things she'd wanted to ask him but she felt she already knew the answer to most of them. He didn't forgive her, at least not yet, but he'd vanished so he might have gotten all his glaring and silence out of the way and gone to rest in peace just like his tombstone said he was.

By the time she noticed that she'd stepped out of her body, she was too late to turn back.

Somebody knocked on her front door and somehow she knew it was him.

Day 1,197

They always put me on grave watch because they know I'll always find something and with the missing persons rate around this area, they need all the help they can get. You'd think that with such a small population it'd be hard for anyone to just up and vanish but that's a damned lie if ever I heard one.

Folk disappear all the time here and they're rarely found alive. Might be a serial killer with no set style other than burying their victims in shallow graves out in the desert. Might be that there's something in the air that's been driving people of all sorts to bury themselves and wait for death or coyotes to take them. Usually the coyotes come first judging by the blood and fur that's often caught underneath their nails.

Every patrol I've ever been on has resulted in at least three bodies found. They used to think I was behind it until the commissioner shadowed a few of my shifts and saw all the signs I kept my eyes out for that the untrained eye would skip completely.

It wasn't just down to vultures gathering (though that was the easiest to look for), it was the faint metallic tang on the breeze, paw prints gradually changing colour from dusty brown to deep red, tattered cloth or skin clinging to a cactus and of course, the one everybody ignores - the dunes.

A normal dune sits at a drunken angle and is always in the process of moving. If a dune hasn't move all day then it'll be heavier dirt dug up and piled on top of something or someone. Turf that doesn't move is often damp from the pitiful amounts of sub-surface moisture that the arid air and sparse rainfall provide.

The only downside to finding one of these man-made dunes is that the bodies beneath them rot much faster than if a wild animal buries them. See, a human wants the body to go quicker and have all evidence of their crimes turn to bone fragments and dirt while animals want to save a little something for later, just in case.

It's all well and good talking about this but it doesn't stop people from disappearing, doesn't stop me from finding them days or weeks later and doesn't stop me from wondering where they go before they wind up dead and half buried out in the middle of nowhere.

More of them appear each week but the missing rate is still a steady 3 per month. I only put two-and-two together when I found my neighbour's body. The same neighbour who I'd greeted that morning and who was now a corpse, roughly eight weeks into rot.

Most people think you can't talk to the dead but if you don't know they're dead then they look just like us.

Day 1,196

Of all the people you've met working nights at a convenience store in the middle of nowhere this stranger was, well, the strangest yet. In the harsh yellow of the store's fluorescent lighting their skin doesn't just look the normal kind of odd - they look downright diseased and for all you knew they could have been. It wasn't what made them so strange though.

They purchased thirty eight packs of frozen bacon, a six pack of lager and the largest tube of WD-40 you had. You've had worse purchases for sure but that still wasn't what made them strange. Nor was it the strong scent of burnt fur that lingered around the store after they left and it wasn't their pinprick pupils that never stopped darting to the exit, to the bacon, to your face and back.

It was their teeth.

Honestly it took you a solid eight minutes of menial retail conversation before you noticed that either their gums were very receded or their teeth were growing. You cut your answers back to monosyllables, too focused on how pronounced their teeth were becoming. Now they didn't change shape, they just got longer.

By the time you excused yourself to swap out with whoever was in the staff room, their mouth looked more like a deranged shark than a human. Then again, as soon as your butt hit the seat and the staff room door closed they stopped being your problem.

Day 1,195

The end of the world began with a child who'd been bitten by the closet monster. The parents only saw that the bite was small enough for their son to have done it themself and blamed the cartoons they let him watch.

Meanwhile a few dozen miles away, a military base scoured the countryside for their own child.

School passed in a warm haze for the bitten boy, all he was aware of was how his arm ached and how everywhere felt warmer than midsummer. By the time he'd gotten home, half-stumbling and half-dragged by his friends, he was well into the fever stage.

The troops were told to avoid direct contact with the child or anything it touched to minimise infection.

His parents found him in the back garden trying to cut his arm off with a trowel, completely unaware of what he was doing. His speech was garbled and sounded like he was talking through water as pus began to seep into his little lungs. The drive to the hospital had never felt longer.

A trail of tiny footprints led them to a neighbouring farmhouse, all occupants infected and sharply disposed of.

Unbeknownst to the parents, the nurses and the entirety of the waiting room, an apocalypse was brewing among them, asleep in his parent's arms. Every exhale, every bead of sweat mopped away, every fitful little cough forced the contagion out into a world that would never be told where it all started.

The footsteps carried onwards into a small town where they merged with general traffic.

As the waiting room began to feel a gradual rise in temperature, several miles away a closet door opened.

Day 1,194

The police weren't saying anything. The news called "him"a literal ice-cold killer for the way the victims were always found in snow-dusted homes with the closest window to them wide open. There were never any signs of forced entry so all fingers pointed to someone posing as a salesman.

All I know is that it wasn't human, I found that out when I narrowly avoided becoming the next headline.

I pinpoint the start of it hunting me when I walked past one of its victims homes on the way to a friend's house. It may have been fairly cold out but the wind that drove right through me felt like I'd just been submerged in the arctic ocean.

From that evening onwards I couldn't get warm enough, no amount of piping hot tea of electric blankets eased the bone-rattling icy ache. People began to comment on how pale I was getting and how they could see my breath no matter how warm the place was.

I didn't notice my breath until a few evenings ago when every misty exhale showed a perfectly formed arm reaching out from my mouth, translucent fingers fumbling at the window latch while I retched and tried to pull back. The more I pulled the more it pushed until I felt something let go of the back of my throat, allowing me to breathe properly again as I fell to my knees and vomited nothing but cold saliva.

The sound of my window opening halted my slow descent into the numbness of shock. I looked up in time to see the window closed by a hand that looked more like clumped snow with icicles shoved roughly into it. Thank heavens I didn't see its face, I dread to think what kind of unearthly creature it might resemble or worse - it may have the face of someone I know!

With every retreating step it took, the air around me grew warmer.

Day 1,193

Every year when the snow first falls, your family go down to the border between field and forest to camp for the night. It was a tradition from your mother's side that dated back to the early 900's, something pagan that had long since lost all meaning to you and your siblings other than an excuse to stay up late, roast dinner over a sheltered fire and build snowmen at midnight.

The older you grew the stranger the snowmen seemed. As a child it made sense to have them face away from the tent you can pretend to sneak up on them in the morning, made sense to put herbs around their necks so they'd smell nice in the morning, made sense to draw symbols on them so they'd look cool. You'd never seen those symbols other than when your mother helped you all make the midnight snowmen.

When you were ten, partly out of annoyance at having to go out in the cold and partly because you felt you were too old for it all, you covered the symbol on your little brother's snowman just before you all went to bed. That was the night you woke up to the sight of the snow-smothered field covered in tiny handprints and your brother nowhere to be found. Nobody knew it was you who'd covered his snowman, you were never even a suspect. 

When snow came the following year none of you went out. Your mother said you had to see what she'd been protecting you from and what you were protecting each other from. That night she used pink salt to make a circle on the floor with your sleeping bag inside while she stayed outside, facing the back door.

You only remember half waking up that night and hearing her crying faintly as the back door opened itself. In the morning she was gone too, nowhere to be found just like your brother and the entire house covered in handprints made of snow.

Day 1,192

Around here all the apartment blocks are so close together that the communal garden spaces between them are little more than buckshaw and ivy nests rarely used by actual people. The wildlife (or rather, the city counterparts to actual wild animals) thrive there to the extent that iron gates now surround them all.

It doesn't stop the animals from getting in or out but it makes us feel safer. Unfortunately the buildings are all so close that they hop from overhang to overhang to window ledge and often climb into the stairwells. There's nothing quite as disconcerting as seeing something vaguely cat-shaped saunter past you with a mouth full of blood and fur. Worse still to see it on your windowsill first thing in the morning.

In spite of the animals, these apartments are the safest places to live in the area, namely for the unique wildlife and the way it acts so aggressively protective over the resident humans. If you move in and manage to live there for more then three months you become part of their pack and pack kill for each other on a regular basis. Humans and animal alike but I never said that.

I certainly didn't say that the animals are more than happy to be pointed at a stranger and left to sin their teeth and claws in. All meat is food to them and anything not pack is meat. Moral issues aside, you'll get used to being pack and the permanent iron tang to the air. The alternative doesn't bear thinking.

Day 1,191

You hadn't meant to kill him, only to hit him hard enough that he wouldn't be able to speak for a while. You couldn't risk him ruining your years of hard work, not tonight and now not ever. He'd be found by some cousin or aunt eventually and if they ever traced it back to you then the best case scenario would be exile and execution at the worst.

If you'd have known your cousins would be out tonight you could have made some excuse to avoid the area, tell the human survivors you were going to the bar instead and they could have joined you there. Instead they just had to go and poke around the unspoken border between the human and mutant markets.

Life was tense enough between the two groups without idiot teens trying to stir up trouble by "sightseeing the freaks", aka everyone you grew up with. Luckily for you, your mutation was mostly internal with the only external sign being abnormal bone growths on your hips that were easy enough to hide with carefully cut padding from a sofa you found in an alley.

None of them suspected that you were one of the "freaks" and if you wanted to get into university then you needed at least three of them to vouch for you. Humans don't vouch for mutants, they nod from a distance and stare in horrified awe when your back is turned.

Killing your cousin was an accident but your future was far more important than guilt over a freak.

Day 1,190

He awoke to cold, slick oil dripping onto his forehead and the feeling that hundreds of eyes were staring at him. The damned thing must have gotten out again somehow. No matter how many locks he installed, how many puzzles and playthings he left inside its container it always wanted to just sit and stare at him, usually from its preferred vantage point - the ceiling.

It's been leaking oil ever since its first escape and the ensuing fire, brief chaos, minor run-in with the law and their threat to end its life. Minor disfiguration, aside it had been quite the adventure and was all the town could talk about for the next week or so. Now they just used it as a scary bedtime story to keep their children in bed through the night.

Meanwhile he had to triple his efforts to keep it contained - it had tasted the salty tang of his fear and it was hooked right away. He always reasoned that eventually it would realise that he wasn't afraid of it in its present state, he was afraid of it growing up and developing into the same nightmarish Goliaths that lingered around the mountain passages.

He just needed more time to study it, find its weaknesses and figure out a way to exploit them enough that they stopped being threats.

All he ever wanted was more time but now as he rounds the corner leading to the greenhouse he finds himself staring straight into its shifting cluster of eyes. For the first time in as long as he can remember, it's on the floor, crouched and still staring at him - always staring at him.

He never heard the one behind him.

Day 1,189

The town grew like an unknown tumour, slowly engulfing the surrounding parishes and replacing their centuries old names with its own - Tewkespool. Soon it had a total of twelve churches each with their own sprawling graveyard and each in risk of losing their graveyard so that new housing can be built to accommodate the constant influx of residents.

It wasn't uncommon to have a block of flats surrounded by tombstones from as early as the 1500's, some even used them as decoration for the lobby areas or community gardens. Morbid as it may seem it was still better than losing the markers altogether and having the deceased be forgotten by their descendants.

It was kinder to let them still have somewhere to mourn, kinder to leave the dead somewhere to return to on their anniversaries rather than leaving them to wander the town unchecked and untethered. A soul without a home soon begins to ponder their existence and the extent of their somewhat physical self.

It only leads to poltergeist forming where you least expect it. Just last week one came through the wall of a bakery and nearly burnt it all down purely because they wanted to know if they could still move things and they just so happened to move the temperature gauge up to a ridiculous degree.

Absolute bloody pests when they don't have a tombstone to linger by, waiting for relatives that aren't likely to visit, with the sudden increase of poltergeist activity following the latest tower of flats to be built in the new way - that is to say, over consecrated ground and with all the stones removed.

Day 1,188

I recognised his quivering voice the moment I heard the first note of Amazing Grace, I didn't even need to turn around to see if he was there. I knew he'd be sitting in the same seat he'd died in five years ago to this day.

It was nice that he remembered this anniversary at least. Made it seem like he'd been unwilling to leave but the multiple self-inflicted stab wounds to his torso and face said otherwise. At least I had one day where I could hear him again and pretend he hadn't smothered our three children, set the house ablaze and then killed himself in the back garden.

There was always someone else who noticed him, some tourist who felt the need to point out that a drunk in a Halloween costume was slumped in a corner singing hymns. At least the Reverend had the decency to look away and pretend nothing unusual or spiritually doubtful was occurring.

These past few years we've been getting more and more tourists in, more people who interrupt our anniversary to whisper and wonder at who he is and why he's singing by himself. I'm glad they don't realise he's dead and gladder still that they don't notice him slowly moving through the pews, trying to reach the front.

I think he's coming for me, after sixty years since he ruined our family he now wants us all back together again under God's own roof. It'd almost be romantic, were it not for the murder-suicide aspect of our situation and all.

This year I think I'll wait for him at the front.

This year I won't run away when I hear him moving behind me.

Day 1,187

She turned back just in time to see the entire island implode as the formerly dormant creature beneath inhaled. Birds shrieked and hurtled past their boat which, in spite of the engine's running dangerously close to full throttle, was slowly being dragged back towards the now gaping mouth.

As they were pulled closer, its teeth became visible as did the barnacle-crusted lips that were drawing back into a vicious snarl. Time seemed to pause for what felt like hours as the creature stopped breathing, frozen in place before it began to twitch. The water jerked, the waves disrupted and sent into a confused frenzy until the world erupted.

It may have been easier to say that the creature sneezed out the island it had inhaled, showering the ocean around it with debris  - living and otherwise - before it slunk down a few hundred metres, its blue tinged skin blending in with the rocky base of the ocean floor.

As for the boat, most of the crew were crushed in the ensuing fallout and those that survived that slowly suffocated as several thousand tonnes of sand gradually settled over the course of the net six months. By that point the boat was little more than the basis for a new island, a replacement for the one lost to the creature yet still dangerously close.

Day 1,186

You thought the bells were calling to you and you alone yet as you waded through the knee high grass you heard several dozen others walking alongside you. In spite of the moonless night you were all heading towards the remains of the old church out by Ongar.

It hurt you to think that there were others being called for something greater, hurt that you weren't enough for the church's call, hurt enough that you forced yourself to turn back. The allotments were closest, every tool shed held a potential arsenal.

You would make sure you were the only one called by the bells.

Day 1,185

It had been living in the old cathedral for as long as anyone can remember, devouring stragglers and heretics with seemingly no preference. Back in the inquisitional days it was fed thrice a day at least -  the congregation feared, despised and worshipped it in equal measure yet all the while they had no idea what it actually was.

Some called it a fallen angel sent to aid God's vengeance upon the sinners that plagued their city, others aid it was a demon bound to the cathedral by the Pope himself as punishment for killing a high ranking member of his inner circle. Most agreed that it was more than happy to eat whoever they left near to it and that's how a lot of their problems were solved.

Still after five hundred or so years most animals would be dead and with the creature being as full of life as it had been when it was first sighted slinking into the hollow wooden bell above the font, only lent itself to the accumulating legends claiming it to be the immortal justice of God himself.

As cameras became commonplace the cathedral became strictly for congregational members, nobody wanted to find out what the creature looked like when exposed to the sudden sharp light of the flash. When the internet began its ascent into a rapid communicative platform, the cathedral closed its doors to the public indefinitely rather than risk global exposure of their little problem-solver.

Word got out somehow and, as with any old building that explicitly forbids entry, somebody found a way inside and began filming their first and final encounter with the creature. Their phone was found in the morning, the rest of them was not and the creature seemed more content than usual.

Day 1,184

You didn't realise you'd stumbled into a building until you found the first door. It was practically invisible among the ivy drenched trees but for the rusty iron handle jutting out at an unlocked angle. The faint scent of rotting meat and mould came from behind it so you turned back, avoiding one of the inhabitants.

Hearing a loud swish you turned back only to find the corridor of trees you'd been walking through was now a wall of ivy with three small, door-ish openings. Two were far too dark for the time of day, they clearly led deeper into wherever you now were, the third showed a short hallway and a set of rather unstable looking stairs leading down.

Rationalising to yourself that you could probably dig your way up if you needed to, you headed to the stairwell, narrowly avoiding encounters with yet more inhabitants as you follow the varying twists and turns of what now seems to be a council office for a town you've never heard of before.

You rushed forward upon seeing sunlight through the office's main doors only to find yourself deep underground in a town square utterly void of people and overcome by bright lanterns. At the corners of your eyes you saw hints of movement - curtains flickering, faint footsteps, voices shushing one another before vanishing down alleyways and behind bolted doors.

Not once did you see so much as the corner of someone's shoe around a corner.

The inhabitants narrowly avoided you.

Day 1,183

Margaret was the very model of a model neighbourhood mother, the perfect suburbanite and the last uninfected human in the entire north American continent. While she cooked, cleaned and maintained a picturesque household, hoards of the shambling never-dead peered through the stark white lace curtains in scorn.

They had already succumbed to, accepted and adapted to the world-ending apocalypse that left society little more than a shivering wreck of humans surrounded by the slowly decaying bodies of former loved ones. Some would argue that they were still loved ones only different - better in some ways and a lot cheaper to take care of. No more grocery shopping, trips to the doctors or dentists and no ailment that a little formaldehyde can't cure.

Margaret had no plans to become infected, no matter how the other mothers in the cul-de-sac tutted at her healthy and unblemished skin. Her family had already succumb to it and moved on from her into an infected-only suburb, sending her a rather curt letter which simply stated that if she wanted to be a part of this family then she'd better move with the times and move on from "living". Yes, living was in quotation marks, thanks to the new moral conundrum in defining where life ended. Quite the headache.

Still she carried on attending school meetings, book clubs, wine clubs and all manner of her usual social gatherings albeit at a marginally increased distance from her neighbours. Through their rigor-mortis clenched mouths and broken bodies that betrayed the violent nature of their rebirth they criticised Margaret and her stubborn desire to live.

Behind her back they placed bets on her eventual death day, after all, even mountains become sand.

Day 1,182

I should have known something wasn't right the moment I saw the rental contract. It stated in full capitals that "UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCE IS THE LOFT TO BE ACCESSED AT ANY  GIVEN TIME" which seemed off at the time but in hindsight it was the first of many red flags. Over the next five months I spent there, more warning signs developed and they all stemmed from the loft.

It was the fourth or fifth night in my new home and as always I locked the front door and shut my bedroom door before going to sleep. I woke up seeing the bedroom door wide open and found the front door unlocked. I couldn't prove anything had happened so from then on I left my keys in the lock and left a spoon balanced on all the door handles - that way I'd hear if someone opened them.

A few weeks later I began to lose small things like packs of noodles or crisps or my cheap travelling headphones. Again, no way to prove I had company but my thoughts kept coming back to the loft door and the thought that somebody could easily be hiding up there, sneaking around the flat and evading my little alarms.

I was finally proven right last week when I crept into the kitchen late at night to get a drink and saw the loft hatch close.

Day 1,181

I knew she was dead the moment I saw her walking outside. When the fog began to roll in from the moat, the staff locked the castle's doors and told the thirty or so tourists inside that we'd have to wait until it passed. Within five minutes everything outside had vanished, replaced by a floating haze that made it seem like the castle was high up in the clouds.

The staff gave us ground rules - don't stare at the fog, don't open any windows or doors, stay inside until the fog has fully retreated and finally, ignore anyone and anything you see or hear coming from outside. They tried to hype this up like it was some kind of local tradition, some elaborate in-character activity that we were all privy to but their smiles were too sharp, their eyes darted about and the pleaded too desperately for it to all be fake.

Every ten minutes we'd be counted to make sure nobody had wandered off and broken any rules but finally, after two hours of tense waiting, we were one less. Every window and door was checked and all were found just as locked and barred as they'd been since the fog first showed.

There was no possible way she could have gotten out and yet there she was, slowly circling the castle. The staff tried to stop us all from staring out at her but it didn't take long before they were outnumbered by stubborn tourists who all wanted to leave and wanted the keys right this very instant.

While the instigators and the staff argued back and forth I kept on staring out at her, waiting for her to come back around so I could try to get a better look at her face. Something seemed off about her face and it took me far too long to realise it. Her skin was slowly becoming the same shade as the fog, draining from a deep brown to sickly grey while her clothes began to look like she'd just emerged from the moat.

When the keys were finally pried from the scrabbling claws of the staff  I knew we'd never be found again, none of us would. The fog would be thicker next time, last longer and become more saturated with the life and memories of the thirty-something group who let it inside the castle and themselves.