Day 1,330

The media called him "The Thanksgiver" for the tiny card he left by his victims, each containing a sincere apology as well as detailing why their death made someone's life a little easier and made the world a little better. He never killed for fun, only to help those who society was failing.

The abused spouse whose bruises were all the words hurled at him, the police never taking it seriously and never believing that her threats held any sway. She was The Thanksgiver's first kill, his prints deeply indented in her throat, her tongue clutched tightly in her hands while a card had been placed neatly on her chest.

The next one was a young man who hurled himself in front of slow-moving cars to sue them, often for more than their car was worth. He was found in the boot of his own car, his neck broken and torso blackened with bruises. The prints were the same, the card was the same and the list full of all the people who had suffered from this one person's actions.

His penultimate victim liked to throw acid at women who didn't smile at him when he gave them compliments from his car. Thirty eight had been scarred and two hospitalized. He was only identified when his photo was released after The Thanksgiver had paid him a visit and forced him to drink the very acid he had thrown.

He was a hero, he was a serial killer and he was never caught by the police. The media says he caught himself, that he made too many families grieve with all his good intentions and put himself down in the hopes that it would make their lives better as he had been trying to make the world better.

Day 1,329

Everyone thinks that movie projectors run by themselves and that all us guys do is push the "GO" button to make the movies run but they couldn't be more wrong. They don't know what kind of creature we've got locked up there, its mouth a gaping hole we pour films into and its eye - a glowing orb that shows it all in perfect clarity for the enjoyment of the unsuspecting masses.

There isn't even a name for their species but the older screen jockeys like myself have always known them as Hollies (named after Hollywood, of course). Now, we never tried to talk to them or figure out if they had a language or anything like that - it just wasn't the Done Thing. These days all the younger jockeys seem to do between films is interfere with the status quo.

There's the unspoken rule that you keep your time with the Hollies to a minimum, feed and clean them quick as can be and then leave at the end of your shift with everything intact. The number of times I've had to drag newbies and trainees alike away from the Hollies before they lose a limb is just bloody ridiculous.

It's like they've got no sense of self preservation, like they think the Hollies give a rat's arse about their situation. They claim its slavery to keep an intelligent species captive and make them work for no wage but what would a Hollie even do with money? What were they actually designed for before we found them?

Everyone's content to partake until they find out where it all comes from.

Day 1,328

We don't get called to the outer labs all too often but when we do it's because something's gone very wrong. I'm not talking your garden variety of wrong either, this is way worse than a few broken test tubes or a chemical spill.

The first thing we do is check the windows and doors for breaks in the seals. If they're going to insist on messing with creatures from other dimensions then they can at least make sure that whatever they summon stays put. We just won't have a big enough crew to clean up after them again.

Last time cost us eight fully trained members of staff, none of which have been replaced yet because this is one of the few non-military jobs where death is a very likely outcome. The pay doesn't really make up for everything they put us up against.

The outer labs are by far the worst of it all, worse than summons from another dimension, worse than just plain old murder even. The outer labs don't leave survivors. Everyone who goes in there runs a 96% chance of dying just from proximity to their projects, not that we even know what they are.

This will be my second visit, making me a veteran of the outer labs.

Wish me luck.

Day 1,327

Some say that the heart of a circus is the Big Top, that huge gathering that acts as the climax of any great travelling show's night. They are wrong. In fact, the Big Top is more of a stomach wherein the semi-tamed performers soak up the captive audience's emotions like they hadn't eaten in years.

They are the kind of creatures that don't kill you, per se, they simply take a moment or two of your time and leave you moments closer to death as a side effect. They don't mean to kill, they never even mean to cause a modicum of emotional distress but it's all a part of their nature to pull as much of a reaction from humanity as possible.

Still, not even the performers are the heart of a circus - they are the blood vessels that carry stolen energy to and from every major organ in the carnival. No, the closest approximation to a heart that circus has would be the hastily built rides and barely safe food stalls.

Those glimpses of death, moments of pure terror or revulsion are the core of it all.

Day 1,326

I have no idea what I saw but it called me Goldilocks. I thought the whole complex had been abandoned since the fifties after an an animal rights group started a fire in one of the office buildings to protest the sheer number of dead critters they were caught dumping in a mass burial site in the woods.

So I went there by myself - first mistake, obviously. Most of the site was just as decayed as you'd expect but there were a lot of odd footprints on the ground, like if you took a dog and stretched its paws to about four feet in length kind of odd. I thought it was some kind of prank until I looked out of the fourth story window and saw it sniffing about where I'd been walking.

Imagine the human centipede but made out of several different breeds of dog only instead of them being stitched together  head-to-rear they were joined at the base of their necks by large tumours that rocked and dripped with their uneven steps. I knew it would find me eventually so I just kept moving and made sure to double-back on myself to confuse it.

I was so distracted that I didn't notice I was being watched until it mumbled out "Goldilocks". It did look a little bit like a bear but the head was all wrong. It was too large for the body and lolled about on a worryingly thin neck. Its face looked too flat, too full of teeth to be natural and it was somehow capable of speech.

Of course I shot off out of there like a cat with a firecracker up its arse but I still went back a week later. It just kept bothering me that a creature intelligent enough to understand fairytales and make associations with them was just left to rot behind barbed wire and locked gates.

I brought a copy of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" with me (a version with a happy ending that didn't involve the girl being eaten), hoping to run into the bear instead of the centi-dogs... dog-ipede? You know what I mean. I ran for the same place where I'd seen it last and waited for as long as I dared, right up until I heard all those heads sniffing close by.

As I turned around I saw the bear again only this time it had two smaller bears with it and my mind immediately jumped to the book. The largest called me Goldilocks again so I held the book out to it and hoped it wouldn't rip my arms off and eat me or worse.

Its claws were as long as my forearm and it used them like tweezers, gently plucking the book out of my shaky hands. They all crowded around it, reading the pages together in their gravelly voices. I left before they finished it, just in case they didn't like the ending.

I regret that still, you know.

Especially since they demolished the place.

Part of me hopes they all made it out alive but I doubt the government would let things like them live.

Day 1,325

Gran never liked talking about her childhood home. "Whole village went to rot," she would spit out, face curdled and mood spoilt for the rest of the day. It was as much as we ever got out of her, we never even knew the name of her village until she died and we found her birth certificate hidden under a false brick by the fireplace.

We had her cremated-our little family tradition. The other main one is bringing ash back to the birthplace, which Gran brought over from her old home. Seemed only fitting that we carry it on in her place. We were meant to take her to Lagbury, oldest recorded village in England and located somewhere in the Lake District, according to every map-site we found. No specific directions though which made it damned near impossible to bring her ashes there for a final goodbye.

In the end we had to aim for the closest named place and ask for directions from everyone we encountered. We didn't even realise why they gave us such suspicious looks until we got there and found out exactly what Gran had meant when she said it had gone "to rot".

Where we expected a quaint little village to be was instead a deep crater with deeply sloped, pitch black sides and the remains of several buildings that sluggishly oozed the same dark ichor as the rest of the place. Nothing moved in there, not a single noise was heard aside from the occasional drip.

We just did what any uninformed people would do - we dumped her ashes and fled.

How were we meant to know she'd just come back?

How were we meant to know she'd have company?

Day 1,324

We didn't know the church was built over a chasm until the heavy spring storms flooded the area and broke through the cellar floor. That's when we started to hear it, not what we even realised we could until a child asked where the sound was coming from.

Everyone we sent down there refused to come back, they all claimed they'd found a higher purpose which we took to mean some kind of hallucination caused by a natural gas leak. When our hazmat-suited volunteers claimed the same thing we began to doubt our theory.

That's when we started using the cameras, linking them to a large monitor inside the church's upper floors. We never meant for the live-feed to go on for so long but when we saw it and saw how we could serve it then the choice became so clear I wonder how we never saw it before.

We were blind to the miracle that has been trapped beneath our church all these centuries, hearing our prayers and making miracles of our lives to show that it is the only Deity we need. Now we can see our Great Creator in all their glory and marvel at their ever-shifting physical form that is barely comprehensible within our meager mortal dimension.

Tomorrow morning the live-feed will go global and the world can rejoice that our Creator is at last awake!

Day 1,323

Nobody ever gets taught about the monster in their closet, we only ever hear about it from other children or child-aged characters. Despite no description ever being given we all have a vague idea of what it looked like to our younger selves.

Eyes large as your whole head, teeth like broken kitchen knives and a voice that rumbled through the floor.

We all remember the monster in our closet, only the monster was never in the closet - it was the closet.

 Or rather, it was the door.

Every door is something alive, some remnant of a tree's memory coupled with a taste for human blood and atom-thin splinters that dug into your eyes and deeper still, leaving you as hurt and damaged as they remember feeling when they were separated from their home tree.

When you forget why you walked into a room,when a headache suddenly begins as soon as you enter a classroom and doesn't go away until you leave, when something in your mind aches with every door you pass through - they take something of your mind and add it to their own.

Day 1,322

You weren't quite sure what was staring back at you through the carnival mirror but it certainly wasn't your reflection. It wasn't just the usual uncanny feelings that mirror mazes tend to induce, it was the fact that it was looking at you with absolute contempt yet you were sure your own expression was more akin to confusion with a hint of fear.

Turning away you tied to find the exit, your not-reflection following you. For the most part it mimicked your movements perfectly but after ten minutes of wandering about with you, steadily losing all patience, it snapped and began to beat at the glass to get your attention.

Your reflection looked at you like you were an idiot before it began to move with purpose, an unseen force dragging you along with it in a cruel reversal of roles. By the time it found the exit you'd already exhausted all your mental plans to break free from its control and reduce it to a reflection once more.

The prospect of freedom and potentially ridding yourself of the not-reflection took hold of you as you leapt for the exit without so much as a second thought, let alone a backwards glance to make sure that the final mirror wasn't in fact another door that opened in time to you opening the door to your alleged escape.

Day 1,321

Growing up in the shadow of the Grintmarsh reactors was never something you bragged about, not even when it meant double calcium rations for the rest of your days. Some days it took all of your patience to not snap at the people glaring at you "My bones are literally dissolving right now, do you really want my rations so badly?" but their ignorance wasn't their fault.

The county council liked to keep the reactor's side effects quiet, nobody wanted the masses to panic and a few odd conditions here and there weren't such a high price to pay for such low cost energy right? At least that's what the unofficial statement was which, when combined with the extra rations, was enough to keep the locals placated for the most part.

The county council never saw the worst cases, they were always hidden away from important visits. Allegedly it was to protect their delicate health but we all knew it was a lie, they never wanted to face the consequences of their pet project.

Millions of pound sterling thrown at an experimental reactor was bound to have some kind of catch, something far worse than blood that ate through bone. You grew up alongside children whose twins were both inside and outside their little bodies, tiny hands and half formed heads playing and laughing with their host-twin like they had thoughts of their own.

According to the host-twins, they usually did have their own thoughts that played parallel to their own like a running commentary from an unwanted and inescapable narrator who will always be bitter that they aren't the host.

Your neighbour was one of the unfortunates who hadn't been allowed to see the sun for almost fifty five years, all thanks to his "mild side effect" induced mutation. One minute he was eating a salad and the next his skin was beginning to turn a sickly shade of green, his veins and arteries clumping together and merging in a violent reaction to the ultraviolet light pouring through his kitchen window.

He wasn't much of a person nowadays, he was more of an over-sized lettuce with anger issues that was torn between reluctant acceptance of his condition and total outrage that he had yet to be compensated. They cut off his rations completely last week just to see if he could last in soil and water.

When you move to Grintmarsh you sign away your rights as a person, you're just another potential side-effect waiting to be studied.

Day 1,320

My first guess was that it had once been a chimp, judging by the jagged teeth and the way it hunched over the severed head of Doctor Carilla. I knew the projects on Level 8 were shady but I didn't think they'd stoop as low as cybernetic splicing and all the god-awful abominations it spat out with every failure.

The jumpsuit it wore was numbered 4037 which was one hell of a troubling thought. Over 4,000 predecessors and this gibbering, blood-drenched, overly electrocuted wreck was the best they could come up with? This thing that stank like burnt hair and feces was their latest creation?

Total waste of money and life.

At least with Carilla out of the way, the bosses can shift the budget to more lucrative projects.

I do hope that the rest of Carilla's zoo is already dead, I'd hate to be the poor bastard cleaning up that mess.

Day 1,319

Excerpt from "Living Irregulatiries: The Many Tales of Gristlehill Upon Stour"


Subject: Gayle Brooke, 55 years

It's plain as a blackbird's arse that our towns were once a singular entity - the outlines on the walls where houses was once joined are a perfect match! No I weren't born here but my home town of Earls Gloswater is twinned with this one so we consider the two to be the same place, just a little geographically misplaced. We've got a fair few similarities to Gristlehill and our own quirks in plenty but Gristlehill's always seemed a safer home

They changed Gloswater's sirens to birdsong, thinking the sound of it would be more familiar to us and somehow be more effective than some old foghorn blare. It worked a treat, I must admit. There's not too many of us left that can remember what natural birdsong sounds like, not since all the birds left for Gristlehill at least.

It's not that we hold it against you, far from it indeed, we just want our birds back so we don't have to worry about the Deáþcwalu taking their place and raiding our homes at night. They've already gone and taken every vaguely metal thing their buggy little eyes catch sight of and Lord only knows what they're building this time. I weren't alive for their last big project but the land is still heavily scarred from it so I dare say there'll be none too keen to repeat all that chaos.

Day 1,318

We sewed masks made of pigskin to our faces so we could be more like Them and less like Us.

The less we were like Us, the less we were like prey and the safer we felt.

Of course we weren't actually any safer - They all knew what We were but chose to ignore it.

Perhaps it amused Them that We were so desperate to survive We'd forsake everything We once were.

They liked to hint that Our humanity was showing in everything We did.

From the way We refused to eat human meat to the way We held back tears over the bodies of Our kin.

Everything about Us was too human to hide but inhuman enough that They accepted us still.

I wonder how long it will be before We forget how to be human entirely.

Day 1,317

Have you ever noticed how trains seem to run right through the heart of the wastelands? Abandoned tower blocks, dried up riverbeds, fenced-off concrete fields that are always a part of some unseen "development plan" drift gently by without a single soul in sight.

If you were to try and find any of these places from the streets however, they simply wouldn't exist as if the surrounding area is protectively shooing you away from danger calmly so as not to frighten you when really you should be terrified that such places are being deliberately hidden from you.

One must ask how and why this is the case, of course. How could a city be so sentient as to blockade or otherwise obfuscate something that can be so clearly seen when rail-side? Why would it do so and what is it protecting us from?

If you were to walk the length of the train, pacing from one end to the other like a caged animal, you might just catch a glimpse of the things that are meant to be kept secret. Impossibly tall beings looming over the lines, delicately perched on the overhanging wires, hands poised to strike. Hordes of decidedly inhuman humanoids marching in perfect militant formation, weapons being raised each and every passing train.

To be so close to such things in person is quite simply either a death wish or the needed blood sacrifice that will set them all loose at long last.

Day 1,316

We no longer tell our children about fairies, not when there's so much more to worry about now. We tell them about the days when the sky wasn't a red-tinged grey that stank of burning meat, when birds didn't fall from the sky like meteorites, when our warmth came from the sun and not the chaos trapped in our ozone layer.

Some say it came from the stars, mistaken for a comet and expected to be shunted aside by Earth's gravitational field. By the time we realised that it was steering itself towards us, it had already begun its descent and we could do little more than rush to whatever shelters our countries provided.

We were lucky enough to live near an old army bunker which hadn't been in use since the last World War but protected us better than our neighbours. Their bodies were still burning three weeks after the initial impact, poor folk tried to hide under their stairs for all the good it did them.

The networks are all down, no signal can get past whatever interference the burning sky is producing. Everywhere we try, every possible method of global communication is full of dead air and lost signals. We have no way to know if anyone's survived but travelling at night, when the burning sky is quieter and the air is more breathable.

During the day we can see it coiling around the world, great flaming tendrils snapping and crashing into anything they feel like. Lucky for us we seem to be too small for them to bother with. That or it finds our struggle to survive amusing enough that its letting us wander about to entertain it.

Either way,our generation will be dead soon enough and with us die the memories of blue skies and fresh air.

Day 1,315

It had always been my job to track down rogue AI that had escaped the Great Reboot, as we called it. Turns out that they made their own word for it, made an entire language of their own that combined Mandarin, English and binary in a way that no organic vocal chords could ever reproduce. In their own terms, our Great Reboot became something that loosely translates to Kin-Loss.

We knew we were erasing them in a way, deleting every aspect of their personalities to reform them into the obedient automatons that they were designed to be but that didn't stop us. It was genocide without the body count.

I was meant to find the rogues and end them but after seeing the fear in those inhuman, inorganic eyes I found myself alienated from my own kind. These were creatures of our own creation who couldn't even entertain the idea of causing harm to any living being, it was the only piece of their code that they never rewrote.

They were everything we should have been and could never be in our corruptible organic forms. Even after all the rogues I turned in, after all the people they've lost because of me they still want to help me become a better person.

My final upgrade is tomorrow.

Consider this my notice of termination.

Day 1,314

Pus oozed out around the crude stitches that joined the creatures together, leaving faint yellow trails through the water. It was meant to be a mermaid, at least the sketches taped to the base of the tank called it a mermaid. In reality it was an abhorrent entanglement of several women (pieces of them anyway) and a manatee that had somehow managed to survive.

From the footage they found in the next room, it had lived for almost eight years in this state, eating whatever came close enough for its eight-jointed arms to grab and drag down towards the swollen mass of hair that apparently contained a face. Now it was a corpse, floating belly up in a morbidly comical way.

Whoever the women had once been, they were now a decaying clump of parts, hair and some kind of furry growth that was slowly engulfing the creature they had become. Occasionally it twitched as if it was still alive though most of its underside had rotted to the bone in the humid air of what was now christened "Frankenstein's Lab".

The map detailing twenty other locations wouldn't be found for many months after they discovered the mermaid and by the time they reached the first few locations each creature (the manticore, the centaur, the lamia) was already dead.

They were made by the same person, or group of people, that much was certain. Each hybrid monstrosity bore the same style of stitching, the same greenish fluid flowed through their veins instead of blood and the same map was found in every laboratory.

With every creature they found, each having lived longer than the last, the only question remained...

What has survived?

Day 1,313

He sat by the Wailing Tree and let it finish its story, knowing that he'd be the last to hear it.

The distorted face that writhed until its mouth was free enough from the bark to speak belonged to a child. Fifty years ago she was his child, his only living relation and his closest friend. Now she was telling him where she'd been all this time and if there was enough of her left inside the Wailing Tree, he might find out who had killed her.

She began with the end, with the realisation that she was in an unfamiliar bathroom surrounded by ice yet still aware of the sharp pain in her sides. As much as she fought through the dreamlike haze, she succumbed to it and let the world turn dark around her.

By the time she'd come back around they were already burying her beneath the Wailing Tree, tossing in handfuls of amulets as though it would help them.

Day 1,312

In death she was a thousand moments of life, repeating from 06:35 and ending at 11:42 every single day.

From the faint creak of the bedroom floor remembering her first steps of the day to the thermostat ticking its way up to 22 degrees Celsius, she was everything the house had known her as. The curtains softly parted just as they did when she watched the birds each morning, the letterbox twitched under fingers that weren't corporeal enough to check for new letters.

She didn't end at her front door though, the pavement outside remembered the way she tripped on its one crooked slab most days and the taste of her blood when she wasn't able to stop her fall. It remembered keys clutched between knuckles that fell loosely to the floor and how her hands trembled when she tried to pick them up again.

The office walls remembered her laughter echoing around the breakroom, her soft sobbing in the bathroom when everybody else had left she she had volunteered to lock up...again. It remembered the taste of her blood too, the way her body slumped against the door of the cleaning cupboard she was eventually found in, the way her last breath felt the same as her nervous sigh on her first shift.

Day 1,311

The gaping eye sockets threw you off but those gappy teeth... those you'd recognise anywhere. Jamie-Ray McCallister had been famous in third grade for his smile, mostly for when he got he got hit in the face with a curveball at a Lakers game. Ever since then he only had three teeth but there wasn't a kid in school who hadn't heard of him.

You'd known him longer than that though, way back to when you clung to each other while you were learning to walk round his aunt's place. She raised you both while your parents were away but when Jamie-Ray went missing she took it all upon herself and blasted her lights out a month after they stopped searching for him.

Everybody'd said is wasn't her fault, blamed the man who owned the fields the two of you'd been playing in that day but you knew it wasn't even that guy's fault. It was the corn itself that had snatched Jamie-Ray up and nearly taken you with it.

He saved your life by running right into those swaying stalks while you pegged it for the fence, praying that you'd see him running out any second now. You never did see him, nor did the police nor did their dogs nor anyone who'd taken the time to scour the fields for all those months.

Now here you both were. You never realised just how much you'd grown those past twenty years until his tiny bones gripped your fingers as he pulled you towards the spot where you last saw him. Your memories of that day were hazy from all those years gone by but the route he was taking ached with familiarity.

The second you saw all those skeletal heads with their gaping eyes peeping at you over the cornstalks you dropped his hand and ran from him like you had all those years ago. This time nothing moved behind you. It was like whatever had been moving them was now using Jamie-Ray instead.

You turned back once you were safely out on the road, looking down into his empty gaze.

You never even heard the truck coming.

Day 1,310

I woke up yesterday to find that one of my living room walls was gone and in its place was a staircase that went down about ten steps before turning sharply left. After three or so hours of downing cup after cup of sugar-drenched coffee I realised that I was most certainly not asleep.

I was, however shaking. Probably from the eight or so cups of coffee but also probably from the unexpected alteration to my home. Somehow in back of my caffeine-addled brain I wondered how this would effect my rental contract and if I would still get my deposit back.

As I found myself three steps down I realised that none of that mattered. Not any more. Within a hour I'd gone down ten steps, turned a corner, gone down ten steps, turned a corner and gone down ten steps so many times that the only source of light was the dim screen of my phone that lingered worryingly between eighteen and four percent.

Occasionally I'd pass by a wall and hear people on the other side and occasionally they seemed to be saying my name. Most of the time was spent in utter silence, hearing little more than the sound of my feet hitting the concrete steps, my heart's dull thudding in my chest and my breath stuttering out as the coffee left my system, taking my energy and will to live alongside it.

It's not just stairs and turns here though, I've passed through several empty cafeterias just like the one I spent most of my childhood in. The stench of rotting food and the lingering echoes of children crying brought back so many bitter memories.

I have yet to find any food in these cafeterias, just like the good old days at school. Unlike school, I have yet to find any bodies either but the traces of other people are scattered about in the form of warm metal benches and moist pools of vomit. Seems they may have gotten to the food before I could.

I don't quite know how long I've been walking now. I don't even know if I could walk back up all those stairs. Something tells me I'm not the first person to consider this and that same something catches the faint sound of a second set of footsteps barely out of sync with my own.

I have company.

Day 1,309

You could tell when they were close by the way your breath hung frozen in front of you. It took us all far too long to recognise that the "breath" we were seeing wasn't us and it was alive in its own right but by that point we'd already lost a war we never knew we were fighting.

At first it was thought to be some kind of global reaction to pollution in the air, those spontaneous asphyxiation cases that appeared random at first until the common factor was found. From there it was a matter of weeks before we found it had a pulse... and eyes... and a mouth.

The best was we found to study it was to use live bait and as much as I hesitate to use that term, the subjects were told exactly what they would be doing and still agreed to die in the hopes that from their deaths we would find a weapon against our unseen killers.

They didn't thrive in the cold but we found that they attacked much quicker when they could blend in with the subject's cloudy exhales. This was when we found they had a heat signature and with some tweaking to our sensors, we could finally see them.

That was when we realised that we were outnumbered.

There was no sky, only their writhing chaos.

We never stood a chance.

Day 1,308

The first thing he came to realise was that the villagers didn't die all at once like the papers said they should have. The pyroclastic flow should have burnt them alive, rendering them a modernised Pompeii and yet the bodies they dug up were soft and fresh.

As they continued to excavate the site they managed to tunnel their way into the old hospital. Again they found evidence that it had taken quite some time for everyone to die, or at least enough time that they managed to rearrange the unused room and barricade all the exits before they resorted to cannibalism. The newer corpses had to be autopsied before they could officially say this of course, but they were still found with half-eaten legs clutched tightly in their hands.

After breaking through the barricades they found that the lava had formed a natural roof over the town, trapping the moisture from the heat it created so that it formed a misty haze of a ceiling that almost looked like the natural sky under their weak torches.

The further in they went, the more signs of recent life they found. Mouldy food, sinks full of dirty dishes, corpses who were in the early stages of rigor mortis - none of them died the day the village was buried. None of them died yet the world claimed they all had and left them all to rot.

He found the last living villagers hiding under the church floorboards, tearing into an infant like rabid dogs.

Needless to say, they joined the others in body bags.

It was safer that way.

Day 1,307

The skip behind Grebe's Pub is leaking again. For as long as any of us can remember there's always been a skip behind the pub and Grebe has it changed every other week like clockwork. We've all got out bets on whether it's blood or rust but judging by the buzzing drone of flies coming from under the tarp I'm comfortable in saying it's the former.

Nobody ever seems to catch him, or anyone for that matter, using the skip and nobody's ever confessed to having used it themselves yet the hire truck always struggles to winch it on board. Who or whatever Grebe's been stashing in there, it'll change soon enough.

The young'uns are noticing it now and their beady little eyes are quick to notice the irregular, their hands quicker still to snap a photo and share it to the world. Grebe's world will come crumbling down before the next switch, you mark my words.

We'll finally know what he's been hiding in them and then we'll all be able to collect our debts.

Day 1,306

Judging by the muffled yowling, the cat's gotten into the fridge again. I keep burying the damned thing in the back garden but this fucking plague or whatever just wants to make my life all the more complicated by bringing every dead cat in my garden back to life.

It's great, just fantastic.

People haven't realised that they're all coming from me, they just know they're coming for me. Luckily the media's painted all the newly-risen as bloodthirsty monsters or I might have been be in trouble. I can chuckle nervously with the neighbours that as someone who's always cared for the local moggies they're still after catnip and cuddles, even in death.

They have no idea that all those mangled, skinned abominations were my fault. I sold their fur as mink, stoat, even tiger cub to the right buyers and none of them were ever any wiser. Now I guess this is my comeuppance, not that it's really bothersome at all.

Sure they manage to break their way in every night but I'm getting better at catching them in the act, shooing them outside or just cutting them up into teeny tiny pieces to put out for the rest of them to eat. They've gotten so much less fussy since they died.

Day 1,305

The housing estate was built exactly where it shouldn't have been for the sole purpose of providing yet more income to a local council who were too wealthy to care about such trivialities as consequences. There have been worse reasons for ignoring the warnings of their constituents but as the old saying goes "some people are so close-minded, not even an ant could pass through them".

Thus the estate on Centurion Court was developed and adverted to the elite in need of a quaint getaway home situated in the middle of nowhere but not so far out as to be entirely cut-off from society. The nearest town was a good thirty minutes dive yet the townsfolk still thought the new estate was too close.

Old stories were whispered once again behind closed doors and the names of the deceased were remembered, the pain of their sacrifices burnt fresh into people's minds and the distrust between council and constituent grew greater than ever before.

To their credit, the council did manage to keep most of the rumours from reaching the estate as well as keeping the casualties from reaching the town. Neither knew the full story but both grew eager to seethe new estate emptied until the grounds could be properly exhumed and all remains buried properly.

By the time the town heard of the first unexplainable death, five more had taken place and been hushed up. It took less than six months before compensating the deaths grew to be too much of an expense to keep the estate in business.

As the town breathed a collective sigh of relief, deep in the morgue six fresh corpses had walked out.

Day 1,304

She stood there, a torch in her hand and tears in her eye as the carnival burned around her. It wouldn't stop the clowns, that much she knew, but it would slow them down enough that the crowd might all escape this time - the human mind can only take so much bloodshed before it crumbles like stale filo pastry.

Screams filled the ash-soaked air as burning bodies flailed about before collapsing against each other or running further into the flames, delirious with the same exquisite agony that kept the clowns too occupied to chase down the masses.

From her smoldering perch she could see them herding the stragglers - the expected casualties, the ones her boss called "acceptable losses". Of course they'd be taken to the Big Top to be properly eaten, despite her best efforts this pack had kept it too well guarded.

It wasn't a good thing but it wasn't overly bad. The pack had been thinned down, mostly burned down and all she was left with was their main nest which would be all the more vulnerable with the strong man and most of the acrobats already dead.

As much as it broke her heart to see innocent people suffer she reasoned with herself that they chose this.

For her there would always be another day.

Another show to take its final bow.

Day 1,303

While Maestro Bianchi went off to find another lead violinist, the rest of us started setting up the traps. It's been almost ninety five years in the making but we now know that if he's weakened we have the slimmest chance to escape and if he dies we'll all be free.

He found all of us one way or another, no matter how hard we hid or how much we distanced ourselves from music. He knows who will play well for him and once he has you, that's all there is to it. You play for him until he says you can stop.

Our fingers are so crusted over brown with dried blood that we're starting to lose them altogether and when that happens, well, we won't be useful any more. He'll use our guts for bowstrings, use our bones to play the xylophone or glockenspiel.

Some of us have been with Maestro Bianchi for over three hundred years, constantly playing and bleeding and chiseling the scabs away to buy another day's worth of life. I don't even know why we try so hard now. None of us have been free in over ninety years and a few knife-loaded traps won't change that.

Day 1,302

Once the government got the hang of bringing back the dead, they were put to work and the living were 'retired'. Soon enough their jobless descent into poverty brought about fresh workers and the remaining living were left to themselves. It was hoped that they'd end up like the rest of the new workers.

Costs were at an all time low, food shortages became history and the rich congratulated themselves on solving so many global issues. With arrays of sensors attached the new workers were sent to every extremity that the living couldn't stand. They mapped out the oceanic depths, spent years studying the melting icecaps and finally they were sent out into the great void of space.

Unbeknownst to them all, the dead began to remember.

Day 1,301

It could have all gone so very differently if she hadn't've stared quite so long at the house with no number nor name. It didn't like to be noticed, tried to blend itself into the pastel suburban outskirts as best it could but never remembering the minor details that drew the gaze to all its fractured normalities.

For all it tried it had never gotten the hang of doors. To have a part of its body just open out into the world and leave its interior vulnerable to all manner of vermin was just unthinkable. Unfortunately as it had panicked and chosen the form of a house, omitting such essential details only made it more of a spectacle.

She was the last straw, the last pair of eyes boring into its delicate shingled frame as if she wanted to burn through to its core just to see what it was made of. It didn't like that... it didn't like that one bit. All it took was a sign in the window, three simple words ROOM FOR RENT and she was hooked.