20180131

Day 1,241

When the sirens rang out I was still sea fishing with our cousins. I knew we wouldn't be back in time to do anything more than die as soon as our feet touched dry land. Such was the village curse and as such I knew I'd never see our kin again.

One cousin - and there is always a foolish one in every group - thought to test the curse to see if it still held true. He swam with the ease of a true coast-born and looked as healthy as he ever had until he took his first step onto the dry sand past the tide.

We'd all grown up with the tales that when the mountain stream ran red we had to crank up our sirens and head to the hidden attic in the town hall to hide until the sand ran red instead as the creatures finished their massacre at our shores.

We didn't expect to see our own cousin turn into one of the creatures. The stories of the curse never said where they came from, only that if sea-skin met dry land after the stream had begun to bleed then the town would die and be reborn to chase the bleeding for the rest of their days.

As his bones shattered and reformed we did what we thought was best.

We waited until the screaming had stopped coming from the town hall, until the doors had opened and all the newly-formed creatures had come out and seen our cousin, until they'd finished tearing him limb from limb.

We turned our harpoons against them all, dragging them out to us to drown, letting them go and heading for the next in a seemingly endless loop that made the sands far bloodier than even a legion of creatures could have.

We saved them.

Now we must save ourselves.

20180130

Day 1,240

We can hear the devil singing and the song is coming to an end.

He's started early this year, generally we only catch a few of the opening lines before camp ends for the summer but according to Councillor Raj he began three days ago. On the bright side we're all excited to be hearing all the verses we've never been able to hear before but on the other hand none of us know what will happen when he stops.

The Councillors are forever trying to distract us from the song but even they end up listening to it all the same. We've spent hours just sitting and hearing words we can't understand but the meaning is somehow deep in our minds.

Right from day 1 we've been told that the bus is on its way to take us to the nearest town where our parents will pick us up but its been over a week now. I reckon the devil got there first, forced the driver off the road and counted it as a sacrifice. I know he takes sacrifices - Craig's been catching and killing squirrels for him and now he's got really sharp teeth and weird eyes.

He's been offering to kill squirrels for the other campers and so far nobody's said no.

We all want to become something better and the devil's song can do that for us.

We don't want him to stop singing.

20180129

Day 1,239

They called it the Undercity - a place for things to be forgotten, a place for the missing to be found and a place you don't willingly seek out in case you find something you weren't looking for but had still lost. The official bio states that the native population, the long term civilians, number less than one thousand yet those who've made it down and back again say the city spans the entire length of Russia coast-to-coast.

Nobody can reach a proper consensus still, their reports are somehow never found. That's just the way of the Undercity, keeps you in the dark just as much as it keeps the locals themselves deep down beneath the rest of the world.

They never complain, the locals, never really talk to outsiders much beyond casual pleasantries. it's like they were taught exactly what to say to someone in order to creep them out while remaining plausibly decent enough that they can't find a reason for their fear. At least, not in a way they can verbalise.

Their entire civilisation's survival hinges on their hoard of government secrets, the abominations that their laboratories cooked up and disposed of without so much as a second thought, the ones that escaped and found a home within the Undercity and the ones that are fighting to make their way back to the surface with rage in their eyes and blood under their nails.

20180128

Day 1,238

I'd heard of the way the fog crept over the moorlands many years before my time, like an army of beggars crawling towards our doorsteps but I didn't expect it to be so... literal.

In the days beforehand the weather forecast warned us all to pad out our door frames, window sills, anywhere that let in a breeze had to be blocked. They said that the fog contained traces of some factory chemical with an unpronounceable name but now I see that was just to make the outsiders and newcomers pay attention.

Those who haven't grown up with our tales aren't likely to heed when they must and likely to die from it. Best to let them think there's a rational explanation behind it all rather than saying that the fog isn't anything natural and it likes to rip the breath straight from your lungs for no apparent reason.

Now I've only ever seen the fog once but the stories have been around for well over eight hundred years, possibly for as long as the area's been inhabited by humans and possibly for as long as the land has been above the sea. It may have been around before the world had even formed, with all its arms reaching for air that wasn't there.

All I can say for sure is that everything they say about the fog is true.

Everything and worse.

20180127

Day 1,237

It had been roaming Alpha Base in Officer Ryan's body for almost eight days now.  At first all it did was walk, treating each step like a novelty but like any child, it soon grew bored and began searching for the next New Thing.

It found the control panel.

Before we could fully comprehend that Officer Ryan was dead and something was wearing his suit (and possibly his skin, we never got close enough to tell) it had figured out how to switch off life support. Of course it didn't need the circulating air, not with the dynamic rebreather built into the suit but only those of us who'd been paranoid enough to hide our gear survived.

It likes to play with the gravity, switching it on and off as it pleases, really wreaks havoc on you when you're trying to hide or eat or do anything that isn't running from its still clunky steps. No matter what it does to the grav systems, somehow its feet never leave the floor. We suspect it's either magnetic or heavier than it looks, far too heavy to possibly be contained in Officer Ryan's suit and yet there it goes.

We've managed to hide from it quite well so far, myself and three others. Unfortunately we're all just that little bit too paranoid to remain around each other, settling for scribbled codes underneath desks and inside cupboards to let the others know we're still alive and still trying to get off the base without letting the creature out as well.

Our only defence was that it didn't know how to use the doors. After shutting off all power it grew bored and began actively hunting us down but it didn't know how to use the manual levers reach us. At least, it used to not be able to.

The sound of a door being prised apart woke me up from my brief nap in equipment room J. As I  opened the cupboard by a fraction and peered through the gap I saw the broken and decaying suit of Officer Ryan shambling into the room.

I don't think it saw me but just in case it did, I've hidden a supply of ration bars in hydroponic bay 4.

You'll need them more than me.

20180126

Day 1,236

At first you thought the radio broadcast was leading you to a safehouse, possibly the last on the continent by your reckoning. It was so utterly isolated that the chances of the plague reaching it were low enough for you to take the risk and trek across the frozen landscape to the heart of the melting forest where it apparently was.

Places like this were rumoured to be ground zero for the world-ending virus but the last batch of survivors you'd encountered said otherwise. In the moments you spent with them they told you about the laboratory they'd hidden in for a few days and the reports they found detailing the creation of the super-virus that was meant to be the ultimate test for some miracle cure to influenza.

Obviously it got out somehow, though no report said how, and kickstarted the beginning of the end of everything as you knew it. Of course now, nearly eight years post patient zero, survival was the new norm and those old-fashioned plague doctor suits from 17th century France were back in fashion! Mostly for all the plague victims who had been right at the heart of the disease's breeding grounds in their overcrowded hospitals and the shredded hazmat suits they now wore. Finding those in one piece and not being worn by a plague victim was like finding the loch ness monster.

So to save yourself you listened closely to the radio broadcast and spent the next eight months gradually making your way to the safehouse that they promised was clean. By the time you got there the front doors had been busted down, bloody handprints trailed across the windows right before your eyes as the last of the survivors succumbed to the undeath.

With no more broadcasts left to trust, no safehouses in sight, you sat down by the gate and waited for the end.

20180125

Day 1,235

We departed Penfordshire Station with every carriage full, steam blasting away into the grey summer skies of the Peak district. By the time I noticed how unusually quiet it had become, I was too late to do anything but hide in the luggage compartments beneath the seats and wait for my stop to be announced.

All throughout the journey I'd heard the doors of the other compartments open and close, heard the sounds of papers being rustled and throats being cleared but at the time I didn't realised those weren't done by human hands. Even now I find myself questioning just how human the fellows who had once shared my own compartment were.

They all seemed human enough with the usual minor eccentricities one grows to expect from small towns within the vast countryside. In hindsight they were poorly disguised creatures whose origins I have yet to discover, no matter how many times I board that same cursed train, no matter nowmany hidden places I crouch in wait formy stop while listening as intently as I can.

I think they all recognise me by now, upon my last visit I was welcomed by name and invited to a carriage wherein a letter had been left addressed to me. It simply said Keep watching and gave no hint as to what I should be watching for.

That was the first time I switched carriages before the train had left the station and I am convinced that is what saved me from the same fate as the three hundred or so other passengers who have since vanished from the train and into the ether. Something certainly had a go at the glass of my former compartment and left a great deal of bird carcasses in my luggage. Very unseemly.

Upon my next journey I endeavour to hide my human nature and pray this tricks them.

Should all go well I may indeed find out what their plans for us are, or at the least where the missing go.

Otherwise, this letter will be released alongside my Last Will and Testament.

God be with me.

20180124

Day 1,234

Every year just before summer break, the school would send us all on the same trip. Each year group was separate, of course, but we all went to one of those soft play centres. Ours was called GoAdventure and no amount of protesting got us out of it for the whole five years we were stuck in that school.

The teachers seemed utterly oblivious to the dangers we faced whenever they dragged us all in there. One year my class tried to stage a sit down protest only to be called one-by-one into the plastic tubes, behind the neon net walls, by some unseen compelling force that urged us to run and run and never look behind us just run until they say you can leave.

We stopped trying to resist after that and tried to hold our own for the next three years.

Sometimes kids went missing in the ball-pits only to appear at the back of the class lines, ready to go home with their pockets full of baby teeth that weren't entirely theirs.

Sometimes the food would writhe about on our plastic trays, trying to crawl away.

Every year someone would cut themselves on the same rope swing and swear that it glowed after.

I hear they renovated it last year, modernised every inch of it. Maybe they finally emptied the ball-pit, removing those matted clumps of hair and fingertips that were always lodged deep into the plastic balls. They might have gotten rid of the lingering scent of vomit from those claustrophobic tubes that ran around the ceiling.

Management's still the same though and the staff are still the same as they've always been for the past twenty five years so who can say without going in again, this time without all the protections afforded to children and the knowledge that your friends will come after you if you scream because they've seen what lurks behind the slides.

20180123

Day 1,233

It's strange to think that my son is somehow a criminal at the ripe old age of six and three quarters. The three quarters were important, as he used to say. He doesn't do much talking now, not with the way he's been wired up and bundled up into machines with names too long for me to remember just to keep him alive.

It's only happening because he refused to give up his first baby tooth to the tooth fairy.

He's a sensible lad, so very bright for his age and serious enough for me to lovingly call him the world's youngest pensioner. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a bad parent. I told him about the tooth fairy when his teeth first started growing, when they were all grown in and when his friends started losing theirs before him.

I tried my best to keep him safe and I failed.

He refused to believe in them and refused point blank to put his first tooth under his pillow in exchange for the tooth fairy's blessing over his bones. When they came for their payment and found nothing they took the bones in his little toe. I woke up hearing him screaming and crying over what wasnow just limp, useless flesh.

Every night they've taken another bone or two and he still refuses to tell me where his tooth is. That's all they want, it's what they were promised from the moment he was born. Every single one of his baby teeth in exchange for protection and now he has no more bones to give.

His poor little body is suspended between machines that keep his chest inflated enough so that he can breath, keep his head from collapsing and crushing his brain, force hi eyes to blink and his throat to swallow and his back to bend so that he doesn't smother himself in his sleep.

With no more bones to be stolen, I wonder what else they'll take tonight.

20180122

Day 1,232

With a stuttered inhale every head inside the cage opened their eyes all at once, formerly silent mouths now gasping for air as they tried and failed to examine their surroundings. Once they all seemed to establish that they were stuck in their positions, they began to contort their faces instead, working through an array of emotions before settling on annoyance.

It was the largest one that tried to speak as though they still had a functional neck and vocal chords. It took them a fair few frustrating moments before they resorted to overly exaggeratedly mouthing out their words instead, or rather, their orders.

Open            The            Cage
Have            Been            Trapped            Too            Long
Free            Us            Now
Now
            Now
                        Now

And on, and on they went demanding that the cage be opened to let all the living severed heads roll out onto the floor and onward to some better place, should it even exist.Perhaps it did not and they merely wished to be able to look around them rather than escape their fate in its entirety.

Captivity is so cruel to the mind, surely releasing them can't hurt?

20180121

Day 1,231

"Night watchman for the museum - it's a simple enough job" they said, "Easy pay" they said, "If you hear someone calling your name nearby then hide and pray" they never said! The one thing they should have warned him about and his benevolent new employers didn't feel the need to mention it at all until the night after it happened.

Of course he answered the unseen voice - it sounded like the boss, it had the same footfall as the boss ergo it must have been him pulling a prank, right? According to the expressions he found himself at the business end of when he tried to explain himself, he had been wrong.

Luckily for him he'd never seen what was mimicking the boss, never even set foot near the breakroom while that thing had been patrolling the exhibitions nearby, as the CCTV footage showed. It looked eerily similar to something he'd pondered over while staring at a diorama of a taxidermied fox den, this dark humanish stain that writhed if he looked at it for too long.

Apparently that was also a Big No that, again, they hadn't told him. Looking at it means it starts to look back and starts walking towards you which is what it had been doing last night. He didn't know why it never made it as far as the breakroom, his obvious hiding spot. It only went as far as the other dioramas before turning back and walking into the painted wall behind the fox den again.

This he could have accepted, this he could have adapted to and worked around but the final bloody thing they never told him was that it had come back out of the wall at the end of his shift and was now waiting in a painting right beside the breakroom entrance.

It was easier to let them go missing rather than explain yet another thing.

20180120

Day 1,230

The houses loomed through the woods, sickly yellow lights shone through their curtained window-eyes as they searched for the small group of humans they knew were still nearby. They must have been young, too young to have heard of the nomadic town of Lower Rutside whose homes are devourers and whose people aren't human any more.

Camping. They'd only wanted to go camping, drink some booze and just forget about everything else for the night. Maybe two if the weather held up. Now they were very much lost, separated and crouching under whatever cover they could find in the hopes that the walking houses wouldn't spot them.

It was like something out of Baba Yaga's nightmares.

Instead of chicken legs, the houses all had large cross-beamed foundations that collapsed and reformed like a wave made of splinters. They were still to hard to hear against tree branches snapping together in the wind. Sometimes their front doors would open and vaguely human shapes would lean out, calling "Who's there?" and "Please help me!" to attract their prey.

Hiding in trees worked. The windows never looked up, always blinding the ground while we hid in the old oaks and held our breaths. I don't know what shook harder - the trees or my teeth in the blistering cold. Still,cold and alive was always better than warm and dead or whatever the things inside the houses were.

It had been so long since humans had come through the woods, some homes had forgotten what they were meant to look like or how their spines worked. They definitely bend but in which direction? And how do their arms sit when they aren't in use? Their eyes glow too, right? Bright with souls like our eyes, right?

Right?

20180119

Day 1,229

There are strange lights at the bottom of the lake, not like a torch but all wavy and ethereal like the borealis. They've been there for three months now, illuminating all the shipwrecks and casting illusions of lost souls wandering them. At least, that's what everyone thought they were.

All it took was for a group of scouts to go missing just the other week while kayaking in broad daylight and suddenly the whole lake was sealed off. The police have been scouring it all night and slowly going missing too. Soon enough the shore will be lined with their cars, empty and running while the owners are somewhere deep down with all the others.


20180118

Day 1,228

The night began as it always did at Fairfowl Grange Manor every January 18th. As midnight rolled around, the old organ would bellow out a year's worth of dust in a single note that seemed to loom out over the night and under the music until dawn.

The note would gradually fade amidst the sounds of a rather large party that came to its usual crescendo around 4AM when all the guests would reenact their deaths. Visitors weren't encouraged to such an event, though they weren't exactly discouraged either. This one night accounted for most of their yearly revenue, after all.

The living mingled with the dead, all in period appropriate attire and always on the lookout for the elusive poisoner who had spiked every barrel of wine in cellar. Two hundred and thirty years later and they hadn't been found, no matter how many guests scoured the extensive grounds each and every year. Their regulars were obsessed with finding the culprit and giving rest to the party once and for all.

After speaking to everyone they possibly could (some ghosts were just too caught up in their reenactments to break from their pre-death script) and everyone who could answer always said the same thing. Somehow there was an extra guest that nobody could name.

20180117

Day 1,227

The distance from town to the graveyard always seemed so much shorter when he was a just a boy. Then again, he'd spend most of the journey asleep and not on his ragged feet under a sun that was barely slipping past noon. He wasn't sure what burned more - the sun or the sand. Either way he had one hell of a long walk to make up his mind.

See with the crows suddenly all gone and the dogs driven mad, leaving town felt like the safest option and as everyone knows - wild animals don't go places where the dead have no meat. The sand would shift his scent to the winds that shifted the dunes each and every night so the chances of anything or anyone tracking him were slim.

If only other folks had understood the same as him and known that the town wasn't a safe place any more. If he still had shoes he'd've bet them on the fact that groups made people go dumb, made them clump together like prey and wait for death to arrive on the frothing, snarling mouths of the dogs whose legs they'd broken so they could be used to ward off whatever was coming for them.

He'd rather take his chances among the dustdevils and bones than risk getting caught up in the middle of a human stampede once they realise where safety ain't. Him and his shovel would do just fine breaking into the old mayor's mausoleum and together they'd wait for the crows to come back.

20180116

Day 1,226

The whale's cries followed her across the fresh snow as she tried to run as quietly as possible back to the medical centre where it all began. Between the wind picking up and the metallic exteriors of the separate containers that housed... had housed the thirty eight members of Arctic Base 6, it became impossible to tell how far away they were.

She almost ran full tilt into one as its tail loomed out of the darkness as it slowly circled around Research Blocks 3 and 4, skidding to a swift halt and holding her breath. The seconds felt like hours before its tail had fully passed the narrow pathway between the two buildings, allowing her to slip through and edge just that little bit closer to her goal.

As she crouched behind half buried pallets of supplies, a soul-shattering screech cut through the softer whalesong. When it cut off abruptly she could only assume that yet another colleague had been caught and this time she knew that it must have been their own fault - after five years of sneaking around them, salvaging and scraping out a solution, they should all know better than to drop their guard for even a split second when outside.

On the bright side, what little of it there was, their death would draw all the whales towards the freshly spilled blood. Unfortunately this meant she had to bury herself as much as she could while several passed her byon their way to inspect the carnage and spill their virus-laced saliva onto the presumed corpse.

Soon she'd be dealing with yet another whale, or rather what appeared to be the twisted reimagining of a whale if something eldritch had been asked to make one out of fibrous clay and set it loose in a subzero climate. If it hadn't been for that eighth core sample they'd taken then maybe everyone would still be human...

All she had to do was get to the medical centre, to where all the survivors were gathering to operate their makeshift radio. If they could just get word out to Base 7 then they'd be able to send over back-up. At least, that was the plan.

She couldn't help but wonder if they should have made a bomb instead and wiped the creatures out in case those who'd once been her colleagues somehow remembered the existence of the other bases and decided to lead the others in search of new recruits.

Still, something would happen soon.

She just had to wait for the whales to pass.

After a quick nap she'd head right off.

Just five minutes.

Just five

20180115

Day 1,225

The library in Blickbridge Manor was unusual to say the least. It's not every day you get to see a room full of as many inset cages as there are shelves. It dates back to the mid eighteen hundreds, it was a symbol of high society to house exotic animals alongside your children and both treated with more stick than carrot.

Lord Blickbridge integrated a series of ironclad walkways right into the heart of his home, deeper than they'll ever let a tourist see. He kept over thirty tigers within its walls during his lifetime, apparently it was as much entertainment as it was a delicacy.

He let his children play in the caged hallways sometimes, daring his twin sons to race from one end of the manor to another and avoid the tigers all the way. Nine times out of ten they both made it. The tenth time was just a little too far for young Jacob. His twin Elijah slammed the door behind him, locking it just as Jacob's tiny body was crushed between metal and claws, both as cruel as each other.

They say the manor was never quite the same again, that Lord Blickbridge decided that locking young Elijah away with the tigers for good was the best solution. No sons - no evidence but for the sound of his screams and his broken fists beating against the bars in the library.

That's where his father shot him apparently, though the wood is stained too dark to tell if there's a bloodstain.

20180114

Day 1,224

The power fluctuated across the city and with every second of darkness, a life was lost.

They called it Going Home to make themselves feel better, to make them feel like the end wasn't so bad. It didn't work. It's just not possible to see a human body - to see any body - in that state of absolute visceral chaos and think that they went on to a better place.

The messages scrawled on every surface around the bodies didn't help. It wasn't what the messages said (the usual you're next, see you when the lights fade, we eat souls etcetera) it was how they followed you afterwards as if they could see you reading them and they latched onto you just to prolong the nautious terror you felt when you saw whatever was left of the last one they'd gotten.

They'd appear where you least expected it. You'd be moving a sofa, opening a cupboard or just reading a book and there'd be those same bloody phrases in that same bloody handwriting letting you know that when the lights flickered again the chances of you dying were much higher than average.

Of course this can't be proved. There's not really any way to tell if someone is more or less likely to be killed by unseen forces, have their body shredded beyond recognition and their remaining fluids used to write vile things that would select the next people to die.

But what other explanation was there?

20180113

Day 1,223

I finally managed to lose myself on the way home from school and now I'm lost in streets I've never been down in a part of town I never go to so I guess I'm now lost twice over. As long as I don't come across myself on the way back home then I should be fine.

I've been seeing myself allover the place these past few weeks, well, this version of me that's almost a reflection... if reflections were three dimensional, breathing, stalking, killing creatures that liked to line the windowsills of your classrooms with broken birds and dying squirrels.

Occasionally a friend of mine would have an encounter with this other me and somehow not realise that I'm not that me, I'm this me - the real me. It's the little details they mention without realising just how disturbing it actually is. Like how I had beetles crawling in my hair, how I appeared in their window at night asking them for one of their newborn kittens or how I was chewing on a human ear like gum.

Whatever it is, it's gotten into their heads and it's trying to take my place. Hopefully I've lost it and myself enough that whichever one of us comes out of this strange part of town will consider themself the winner. I hope it's me but I've been catching glimpses of the me that isn't me as I've been heading down to the sub-ground level housing.

Tomorrow we'll see who I am, I guess.

20180112

Day 1,222

At first we thought that the firefighters didn't want us to watch them burning the monsters because it was dangerous for us to be so close to the damned. Now I realise that we aren't nearly as human as we believed we were... coincidentally the mass burnings have stopped and the firefighters hide from us.

I wonder if that's because they know we've realised that they might just be the only humans left and that they tricked us into cheering them on while they murdered our kin. Maybe they're becoming like us and they're now afraid of themselves. I would be too if I'd spent my youth killing people whose only crime was an unstoppable mutation that I'd probably develop too.

I mean, we all wear the same hazmat suits that the government (what's left of them at least) handed out en masse yet we've all gradually succumb to the great change of life, as my Nanna kindly out it. Sounds nicer than "yesterday all my teeth fell out and by morning they'd grown back all needle-like and iridescent among a plethora of, quite frankly, rather gross changes that I refuse to mention in polite company." which is pretty much the new normal.

We all go to bed with a those horrible crinkly plastic sheets over our mattresses and duvets in case anything else decides to fall off or out during the night and we keep a bucket beside the bed for whatever occurs in the morning. I thought I was tired as a human - this daily butcher's show is so much more hassle than any period every was.

Still, the air doesn't smell like burning meat any more, we no longer drift off to the dying wails of alleged monsters and we know that we are now comfortably in the majority.

Let the firefighters come back.

I dare them to.

20180111

Day 1,221

The church was half full at the best of times and bare bones for the rest of the year.

It wasn't that the church was in a bad area, on the contrary it was situated in the heart of the town centre.

It wasn't that the townsfolk weren't religious any more, at least according to local surveys.

It wasn't even due to any kind of scandal or alleged haunting of the of church building.



It was that Reverend McCallahast was possessed and nobody knew quite what had hold of him.



All anybody knew was that they had to visit the church once year at least and Sundays had to have an audience.

They'd tried ignoring it but it used the Reverend to kill nine dogs, five horses and (allegedly) two hitchhikers.

Once a year was bearable to most people, anything more and the nightmares would begin.

In the beginning there was a solid group of six who braved this to sit there every Sunday without fail.

Their eyes all bloodshot, their bodies sagging and twitching in their seats as they clung to consciousness.

They were so very brave and so very foolish but they loved their Reverend and their church too much.

Only one of them is alive now, trying to train others to follow in his footsteps so the townsfolk don't have to.



It won't help the Reverend much, won't cast out whatever is possessing him.

It makes everyone else feel better though.

That's what counts, right?

20180110

Day 1,220

We weren't supposed to go into the attic, the rental contract told us it was off limits. They never gave us a reason so we just assumed the landlord was still using it as extra storage or whatever. Neither of us put any more thought into it beyond the passing joke that when anything went missing (as things always do during a move) it was definitely hiding in the attic.

Then we found a box of vintage eyeglasses under the bathroom sink. They were all a similar kind of oval gold frame with thick grey-tinted glass. At first we tried them on, giggling at how daft we looked, how ill fitting they were and how they made everything in the room look swirly.

It took wearing them to work to realise that the swirls were forming clear faces and figures that noticed us looking at them and ran towards us every time. Of course the moment the glasses were off we saw nothing, no strange figures or faces of any sort but the second we put them on again we'd be swarmed by translucent shapes that felt so cold it made our bones ache.

Last night I took a pair of glasses and pt my camera behind them. If it goes how I think it should then I can prove that we aren't going mad and that there is so much more around us than we can see with just our eyes.


20180109

Day 1,219

If there's one complaint I had about working in Greater Mockbarrow Medical Centre it would be that you were never more than five feet from some kind of abomination. The area's got a long history of things just appearing from around empty corners, somehow already sporting more blood than just one human body can contain.

It was bad enough having to walk about with a knife and pocket siren on me at all times just in case something unnatural walked up to me. That only happened three times and two of those were the same creature trying to peel a strip of my skin off. They collect it you see, it's like a mix between currency and a display of status that nobody wants any part of.

The third time it was a completely different creature that looked like the unholy result of a spider, a fish and a cactus - all gaping gills and projectile spines and lightning quick reflexes that managed to tear a good portion of skin off before I got it back in kind. Bloody pests they all are.

It's worse when you're working the night shift on one of the terminal wards and all you can hear in the distance is the shuffle of far too many legs and the faint whimpers of pain from patients who shouldn't be able to feel anything at their late stage in life. Security refuses to do more than herd them into the courtyards, locking the doors as they go.

It doesn't stop them but it does delay them enough for the rest of us staff to lock the drug cabinets and hide.

20180108

Day 1,218

When I went into the fortune teller's tent I'll admit I wasn't thinking that anything they said would be even remotely relevant to me. I just thought it'd be a laugh, you know the whole "you will meet a handsome stranger" spiel and then I'd carry on as usual.

They didn't even say hello, they just looked me dead in the eye and said "There are bones in the ground that cry for you." and refused to say anything else. I was escorted (rather forcefully by a clown who'd been hiding behind the backdrop curtain) the moment they'd said that and left to my own devices.

At first nothing happened, I was a little freaked out and confused but I just couldn't think what they'd meant by that. Bones that cry out for me? I mean, I had a few old hamsters buried in the back yard but that hardly warrants some spooky warning.

I didn't hear them until last week and didn't see them until last night when I was driving home from work. Normally I have to swap busses between my village and the next to another bus that takes me into the city. It's one of those half-scenic-half-creepy places that all depend on the weather to shift the atmosphere. That and the derelict church just over the road. That never stops being a little disconcerting.

Last week I began to hear whispers coming from the church that almost sounded like my family. Over the next few days I began to realise that somehow the conversations I'd been having at home were now being repeated by an unseen recorder (at least, I hoped it was a recorder).

Last night I was at the usual return stop just down the road from the church when the whispering started up again. It was louder than it had previously been. almost didn't spot them, the way they were crouched down in the grass like that but it was the faintly wooden clanking of their exposed bones that drew my attention.

I just hope they can't follow me home.

20180107

Day 1,217

When the north pole began to melt, a forest emerged as did its inhabitants who thawed much faster than we could have predicted. The more they were uncovered, the more we realised that the previous ice age wasn't a gradual occurrence. It couldn't have been - not with the way that everything seemed to be trying to climb up.

It wasn't just animals either, humans wrapped in the thick furs of long extinct beasts were just as frozen in their terror. They didn't go quietly, their hands were bloodied and broken, nails lodged deep into bark in their desperation to survive.

While the ice around the forest broke and all manner of bacterium and bio-organisms found themselves released into a world 11,000 years past their time yet the humans (neanderthal and sapient alike) remained unchanged. It was one less problem to deal with however the sudden reintroduction of prehistoric birds (among all else) was a little harder to restrict.

Within a week the world was in turmoil as ancient predators and prey forced their way into already precarious ecosystems and fractured them beyond any hope of repair. Landscapes were irreparably altered and a mass extinction took place, the likes of which had never been witnessed in recorded memory.

Blessedly nature settled itself and formed a new order of coexistence between ancient and present creatures, ecosystems began the slow process of recovery and only a few dozen new diseases found their way into human bloodstreams. It was the best we could have hoped for.

Just when we thought the chaos was ending, the neanderthals disappeared.

20180106

Day 1,216

"Light has always been the fine line between life and death and humanity first harnessing it became our greatest ally against everything that lurked in the dark. A well made fire of decent size is a guarantee that you will survive the night." the tour guide droned on, trying to put on a show in the harshly lit cave that attracted hundreds of tourists a year.

Their big selling point was the ancient human jawbone that had been found by the mining company who originally purchased the land, not expecting to find several hollow chambers forming an interconnected citadel. After that the local council demanded that they hand the site over to an archaeological team to scour the place for any further items of interest.

It didn't take long for the site to be named "The Cavern of Lost Souls" upon the discovery of a mass grave at the centre of the citadel. Few tour groups made it that far though, with the chambers being so vast and the hallways between them creating a complex grid that never seemed to end, it cast the illusion that just out of sight, they was something waiting.

Everyone who went in there experienced the same feeling that they were being hunted by an unseen creature. Nobody could explain or describe it and most went online to say that the feeling persisted weeks, even months later.

What none of them knew was that it wasn't a single creature that followed them, it was the dead whose bones had long since crumbled to the dust they all walked on. The dust they dragged home with them on their shoes, their clothes, their breath.

Every inch of the caverns was gently dusted with the debris of the dead who weren't buried by choice. The sudden influx of life unsettled them, reminded them of their own former lives and instilled in them all a harsh jealousy for all that they'd never experience again.

Several thousand years without seeing anything living makes it easy to forget basic what being human is like. Being dead is so very different, so much colder and distant than any living being can comprehend and now there were tens of thousands of departed souls all wide awake and being dragged out of their resting grounds by unthinking, trampling feet.

In a sense, the tourists were being hunted just not by anything they could stop.

20180105

Day 1,215

When you were little you worried that the crows would come for your eyes because you were human. Now you are old enough to know better, old enough to keep your mouth shut but young enough to feel the guilt of killing the last person you told as fresh as if it was yesterday.

Everyone in the area pretended to be something else, anything but human. Since a neighbouring dimension merged with Earth, the crows developed a craving for human flesh. Nothing else would sate them and every migration ended in a funeral.Such was the new order of things.

You were part of the first generation to be born since the Conjunction, the first to be raised believing they weren't human and the first to realise what being a "human" now meant. There were thousands of ways to trick the crows from masks to prosthetics to implants but someone was always discovered.

In the back of your mind you wondered if the crows knew that everyone was lying and they all voted on who to kill each year while laughing at everyone else in their costumes and false mannerisms. There was always the fear that you would be next, that the crows would break from their tradition and come for you because you looked like a human pretending to be a creature or worse - that the humans around you would realise you weren't human, dress you as one and leave you to a slow death by crows.

The last person you told tried to do just that, though you'd been friends for as long as you could remember. They didn't think you could be trusted around actual humans, no matter how you'd been raised or how many trials you'd been through together.

You did what any human would do.

You protected yourself.

You gave them to the crows.

20180104

Day 1,214

The engines were monstrous things, squat and slick with oil-tainted condensation. All it took was a hand in the wrong place and another engineer would be lost to the brutal pistons, nothing left but remnants of their gear and a red tinge to the oil.

Stopping the engines was a rare event but a necessary one - too many bodies tended to clog up the pipes further down and put a slow, crunching halt to the factory though it felt like the whole world went quiet. Beneath the glistening bulk were always at least three bodies, shredded, wrung dry and barely recognisable as human.

They were never untangled from each other. Every engineer was buried in the same old mine chute with a few kind words from their comrades and as many shovels of dirt tossed down as they could spare. Nobody went there to mourn, too many restless souls all trying to climb out displaced any sense of peace it might have held.

The dead were left to rot and everyone else fought for scraps of their old uniforms as tokens to ward off their soul, should it actually climb out. Most made it about halfway at best before another dragged them down and tried to escape instead. The dead don't pity each other.

As soon as a new engineer joins they are taken to the burial pit to see their predecessors, to understand their mortality and their legacy. They are given their tools, usually the belongings of the recently deceased, and asked to give their blood to the engines in appeasement of the souls still trapped within and beneath it.

They almost never refuse and those that do find themselves dreaming of faces being crushed beneath the pistons,. They dream that their blood is the oil and oil is their blood and the engine is a creature with the face of their father and all it has ever asked for is what it gave them.

Life.

20180102

Day 1,213

In my dream I woke up with a jolt, gasping for breath like I'd just run a marathon. After the unexplained ache in my lungs faded I looked up, eyes meeting with the only other person I've ever seen in my dreams. They're not a human person but they're still the only being who talks back to me.

They look something like a human, if humans were made of oatmeal filled balloons that had been stitched together by a child in the vague approximation of a person. Misshapen fingers rhythmically tapped against their tumour-encrusted thigh as we stared at each other across some strange approximation of a waiting room, me still confused and them looking rather fed up.

With a deep and weary sigh they said "You know, if you keep coming back here you'll forget how to wake up and then we'll both be stuck. You hear me?" and when I tried to respond, finding I could only move one hand to mimic their tapping, the look of annoyance on their face morphed into fear.

"How long have you been able to - you know what? It doesn't matter, time is the only thing that matters and if you can move then we're running out so wait there, no moving, okay?"

I moved my finger, drawing out the word yes onto my thigh. As if I could do anything else.

They rolled themselves out of their chair, every inch roiling and writhing into an upright position as they stumbled towards me, past me and opened a door I hadn't even realised existed. I had never been able to move before, I'd always just sat there while they talked to me, or rather at me while I tried to figure out what was going on.

They came back with a wheelchair and unceremoniously bundled me into it, fidgeting with my arms and legs as if they weren't sure exactly what they were or how they were meant to sit. After a few moments they gave up with a huff, leaving me awkwardly sitting on one hand, the other free to tap against the arm of the wheelchair.

As they pushed me through the door I'd never seen before, they began talking again.

"Okay... I'll make this short and simple. You've been coming here for eight years and now you might be physically coming here instead of projecting your dream state and that's bad. Really. Bad. So I'm taking you to the exit and when we get there I'm going to give you a knife and you're going to kill the version of you that isn't real. Whichever one of you that may be. I've got no clue."

By the time that had sunken in I'd been wheeled right up to a seemingly endless mirror and was now staring at myself, soundly asleep in my room, in my bed. They handed me a knife, just like they said, and gave the chair enough of a shove to send me into my room to gently bump into my bed.

I don't remember who I stabbed, the me that slept or the me that in the wheelchair but I haven't had any dreams since.

Day 1,212

As the sun crept below the trees, the highway grew darker and the shadow figures could be seen once more in our headlights and their voices began to echo inside our minds. Most of them were just harmless lost souls wandering around the world, looking for their body to rest inside of or looking for their loved ones with a message to give them.

Unfortunately the further away from civilisation you get, the more aggressive and older the souls are. It's not that they don't want to rest, it's that they don't want to go alone. The dead can't see each other, in fact there could be several thousand of them in a football stadium and each would believe that they were all alone save for any living who found themselves in attendance.

During the day they are little more than faint outlines that whisper their questions to your occupied mind. As night falls, so the countless distractions we surround ourselves with slip away too. It leaves our minds unprotected from the relentless curiosity and desperate longing for companionship that plague the dead and cause them to plague us in return.

Sometimes they just want to know the time or the date, other  times they want to know if you'd consider jerking your car to the left and veering off the road to join them in the afterlife. They are all so very lonely and your company would be so very greatly appreciated.

So if you should find yourself suddenly thinking "I could kill myself with this" then blame the lonely dead and think no more of it.

Thinking about it only encourages them.

20180101

Day 1,211

Every year we send out whoever has the darkest hair. We give them coal, a lamp and tell them to come back when they've found us some luck for the upcoming months. Doesn't matter the weather, doesn't matter if they're sober or exhausted or barely old enough to walk - we have to keep to these traditions.


This year we sent out Nadia. We didn't expect her to come back with anything, we didn't expect her to come back at all. Still January fifth she crawled through the basement window dragging behind her a writhing bundle of fabric that she kept shushing as it let out muffled snarls and snippets of radio static.

This was our luck for the year.