Day 1,361

They were extending the Metropolis again. Onward, upwards and ever upwards in the hope that they'd finally outrun the pink plague. With every new floor they added another layer of security, another bio-scanner, another decontamination chamber, another pointless piece of technology that didn't seem to do a damned thing against the ever-growing threat.

It starts as an itch behind the eyes, one that no amount of yawning or allergy medicine can fix, one that develops into compulsive scratching and clawing at the eyes - anything to make the itch stop. As a result most victims go blind, removal of the eyes or paralysis of the optic nerves in their entirety is the best cure for the time being.

Still doesn't fix them, still doesn't stop the other symptoms from developing but its all that they can do while the majority of their finance is devoted to building barriers between them and the infected. Really it should be called the red tape plague for all the hassle it is to simply walk from your home to the shops and back. Every ten or so paces a medical officer stops you to do yet another scan in case you manage to contract the plague in the next five seconds.

To those of us at the base of the metropolis, the ones who still aren't infected, the sky might as well be as mythical as the alleged cure they float about the higher levels. All we see are slivers of sunlight squeezing between the buildings, thinner than our hope for living til the next month.

Day 1,360

I thought the shadows around her were odd but fortune tellers often have an oddness about them. Her words didn't quite seem to come from her mouth but again I blamed the poor lighting and the multitude of gauzy fabrics wrapped around her haphazardly. It was like she fell into a scarf bin and called it a day.

All of this should have been a great big head's up that something wasn't right, a non-verbal neon sign saying "INHUMAN" and yet I somehow managed to ignore it all in favour of hearing my fortune, risking my life yet again just to find out if anything had made it out of the portal that opened up near Tashla, Russia.

The fortune teller kept saying nothing got loose, in fact, nothing was any more free than it had been last week which didn't exactly answer my question to begin with. I chalked it up to the whimsy and mystique that the job requires rather than seeing the signs as they were thrown at me.

As she opened her third and fourth eyes, those molten amber slit-pupil monstrosities that were thrice the size of my own head, I froze. It felt like they were pinning me as a child pins their first butterfly to rough cork-board. When I woke up again the tent was gone and all that remained were bloodstained silk scarves and paw prints the size of a small car.

Day 1,359

The fairgrounds were always set up overnight, fleeing after the first death leaving little more than torn flyers scattered about the town - their hunting grounds - like neon confetti. Most people seem to agree that it's never the same one twice though the staff never change. They'll say they don't know you, that they've never been to these parts before yet the next year they'll be back again, un-ageing and uncaring for the trail of broken bodies they leave behind.

Every year they replace the last death-ride for something new, something that won't kill for another few towns at least. Nobody quite knows what they do with the old rides, whether they are sold for scrap metal, exchanged with another overnight fairground or whether they are incorporated into the newer rides.

Whatever they are doing, it doesn't change the fact that Death follows them. They say He rides a different attraction every year, choosing someone from the crowds to join Him and the fairgrounds all know Him by name. Some people even go so far as to say that they are in some kind of pact with Death, a new soul every year in exchange for immortality.

It's a reasonable deal.

Day 1,358

It creaked and groaned from somewhere behind them, far enough that they could catch their breath but not so far that they felt safe.

This is where our story begins.

The old university had been a labyrinth back when they were young, back when they dropped out at least, and it had only been expanded since, now boasting eight buildings that spanned twenty acres.  However they were only interested in the old music department and all the instruments left behind. A decent enough violin could raise upwards of a hundred pounds if they could stain the wood dark enough and blag it off as some eighteenth century antique. It was easy money left lying around.

In all their excitement they forgot why they'd left in the first place, too eager to make as much profit from as little work as possible. They didn't hear the other footsteps until they fell slightly out of sync, as did the breathing of whoever was behind them. When they turned around they saw nothing but heard the faint skittering of feet brought to a sudden stop, a faint gasp as breath was held to conceal their position.

Now at this point most people would have circled round and headed back to the relative safety of their car, of civilisation and pray that it hadn't followed them but they were not like that. They kept going, trying to remain calm and quiet all the while glancing over their shoulder, trying to see who or what was following them and having no such luck until they stumbled into the old gymnasium.

The floorboards were warped with age and mottled by an assortment of fungal plants that seemed to be thriving in the humid shelter. This aside the entire room was without so much as a scrap of fabric to hide behind, leaving them no choice but to back against a wall, close by the furthest door, and wait to see who was behind them.

They did not have to wait long.

What had formerly been quiet footsteps soon became thundering and the muffled breathing now panicked gasps as it burst into the gym, facing him with a plethora of worried eyes and a body that had more in common with a dozen scarecrows piled in a corner than an actual person. It looked like it had been nailed together at every possible joint, each one stained a deep brownish red and seemingly frozen for the most part.

Its head- or rather, heads - tilted like a pack of dogs as it slowly approached them, giving them a moment to process what they were seeing before its body tensed and it sprung towards them.

The chase began.

Day 1,357

The rain had turned to pus again, severed heads screamed down from the massacred heavens. I thought a virus had gotten into my V.R. window projector again. Last time it did something similar it had no sound, just the visuals of every photo I'd ever taken being eaten by this gigantic leech-like thing that pretended to be breaking the glass too.

This time it was different. This time I could hear the rain, hear the chaos on the street below as the heads collided with ground and person alike. I could smell the iron in the air mixed with the sickly stench of pus as it stubbornly clung to my window.

Usually I'd switch it of and run the auto-clean program, fixing everything and resuming my scenic view.

This time I turned it off and nothing changed.

Nothing changed at all.

Day 1,356

The original owner of the old store left traces of himself scattered about the place.

Three owners later and they were still finding him.

A finger trapped under the faucet, teeth inside an old mug in the breakroom, his scalp caught in the fan.

Of course, every time they found a new piece the police shut them down for the day.

Almost three decades since his death and he still isn't whole.

Day 1,355

The depths of the ocean made your ocular implants glitch like one of the Malfers (that's Navy-speak for Malformed Automatonic Renegade Systems, much catchier) was close by. The geeks back in the lab centers claimed that the glitching was caused by deteriorated Malfer particles, probably tracing back to shore skirmishes. We were seeing their equivalent to a ghost I suppose, not that they ever spoke or were capable of doing much more than floating with the current.

It wouldn't be so bad normally but normally we wouldn't be heading out to fix our thermal power generators every single day. As one of the senior officers I was generally the one who went out to do the preliminary checks to determine what the actual problem was. That's how I was able to spot it first.

The thing about the oceanic depths is that they can sometimes make you hear or see things. I thought I was going half mad when I caught a glimpse of countless eyes staring at me from below but my diving suit's visual feed showed it too.

In fact it showed far more than my own eyes could ever hope to see. They were all connected, every single eye out there was attached to some kind of stalk that led down, deep deep down into the abyss. I never wanted to imagine what kind of creature they were a part of, never wanted to believe they were real and yet as I look outside right now I can see the eyes rising up from the pitch black waters.

I can see what they are a part of.

Day 1,354

Only with my eyes could I see her rocking in the grass, arms grasping her shins so tightly she bled. No matter how many times or what language I asked if she was alright in, she didn't reply, she just kept rocking and digging her nails in deeper and deeper, the blood beginning to flow thicker.

I went to dial 911 only to accidentally open my camera to see... nothing. Just plain grass where there should be a youngish woman sitting and rocking with her nails biting into her legs but no. Nothing showed. I tried swapping to the front camera, turning it around to take her photo that way just in case my rear camera was broken but all I saw was a vaguely blurry photo of grass.

There wasn't even any blood on the grass in the photo yet I could see it pooling all around her.

Day 1,353

When the angels came they were nothing like we expected. They had adapted to fit our modern world, their wings a flickering mass of JPEG images that circled them in a dizzying pixelated array.

Their voices were made of every person who had ever spoken into a phone, their words archaic and modern all at once. Though everyone heard different words, we all knew what was coming for us and why the angels had arrived first.

He'd been with us since the dawn of time, before humans even had a word for what we are and he has made sure he's always one step ahead. Every thought we have, every hurt we inflict, every violent curse we throw all comes from him.

He doesn't have a body anymore, or so the angels say. He lives on in our wires and broadcasts and climbs his way into our thoughts like a virus. From there he spreads his own ideas about until all we are is another carrier for his plans.

We asked the angels why they'd waited so long to cone to our aid, we asked whose god they serve and we were answers with their silence. The same silence you hear the second your router shuts down and you have to comprehend that you are now cut off from the rest of the world.

They had been cutting us off and letting our souls fall into limbo to preserve the rest from His virus, His thoughts and His violence. They gladly doomed us to save our ancestors and they came down in person to deliver the final blow.

Day 1,352

The house sat inside its twin, deformed in an unseen way until one faces a mirror. Nothing reflected is the house you are inside yet it all seems far more familiar than your present surroundings. Something on the other side calls to you and beckons you to a home you have never been to and cannot possibly reach and yet... and yet you feel as though you're already there.

Such houses are not commonplace, reality can only hold so much before it stretches too thin and the edge begin to fray. That's when the mirrors begin to shimmer like liquid platinum, dripping from their frames to form dimensional puddles that engulf those familiarly unfamiliar floors, the furniture you never felt quite right on, the carpets that muffled all noise in a distinctly unsettling way until all you are left with is a floor that will swallow you whole.

The other side isn't so bad, it feels like the home you were never able to find comfort in, feels like your first heartache and toothache and deepest satisfaction all at once. It isn't the kind of place you can leave, not that you'd ever want to. Not when you're finally there.

Not when you're finally home.

Day 1,351

He hoped the creaking outside his window was just the trees being torn asunder by the storm and that his mother hasn't gotten caught up in the ropes again. She insisted on leaving them to dry after she'd bathed them in tar and then she forgot about them.

It'd been so hot the past few days that the tar had all but melted off entirely, bathing the base of the tree in glistening night. No matter how much he'd warned her about it, begged her to come back and take then down, to it the bottle away and keep herself safe but she couldn't hear him.

He always hoped that one day she would hear him knocking on his window but she never looked up. He hoped she might see him pushing the vase of flowers but she just blamed the cat and walked away, a bottle clutched in one hand and crumpled flowers in the other.

When the storm came his first thought was how he wished he could go outside and play in the rain one last time. Then he heard the creaking. It began as the wind picked up, as if the branches were the switch his mother used on him from time to time.

He couldn't quite point out when it stopped sounding like branches and started sounding like rope but somehow he already knew what had happened. Come morning he peered under the curtains to see his mother's bloodshot eyes peering back, glazed and unblinking.

He stayed there staring at her until she woke up that night and saw him too. For the first time in over fifty years his mother could see him and hear him and talk to him and he could talk to her and... and...

She was sad. She was so very, very sad. So very disappointed. She blamed herself for not punishing him enough, she blamed him for continuing to misbehave until that afternoon where she'd hit him one tine too many and snapped his frail bird-like neck.

She honestly thought he'd be in heaven.

He honestly thought death would change her.

They were both very, very wrong. 

Day 1,350

There's not many places for the dead to go, I'll be the first to admit that, but the grove needs to be guarded all the same and who better to do it than someone with nothing to lose? Best case scenario I live long enough to raise an apprentice to carry on once I'm down the grove myself, worst case scenario some poor bastard's going to have to learn the job the hard way.

It's not too hard a job, much as I may complain. At the end if the day if the dead are still down in the grove then I've done my job right. Now there has been the odd escapee but they don't have the mental capacity to plan that, it just sort of happens.

The dead wander about - it's in their nature to follow the scent of blood on the wind and more often than not they smell me. I used to be worried about it at first, took ridiculous precautions like west of denim under a full body of chainmail and carrying a fully loaded shotgun at all times but now I just bring a pistol when I'm checking the borders.

Sometimes I'll see someone I used to know down in the grove, all rotting and bloodthirsty as the dead generally are. It made me sad once but I've long since stopped seeing them as anything more than corpses with functional stomachs.

Day 1,349

To most people the sounds of gentle snoring from another room would be comforting, a sign that peaceful sleep will soon take them. For others it means that they are not as alone as they supposed themselves to be.

They lie awake, trying to keep their breathing in synch with this stranger, trying to wait out the night in the hopes that they would go away with the morning light. It seems a safer option than making their presence knowing an unknown number of intruders.

Each time the breathing stutters is a jolt of fear to their hearts. Every toss and turn of the intruder is mimicked by their stomach flipping and churning with worry. Every creaking floorboard is a potential attacker creeping steadily towards them.

Of course, as with all intruders, the danger isn't what you hear - it's what you don't hear.

Day 1,348

There's a room in Granny's house where a demon lives, or so the story normally goes. The grandchild will go into it unthinkingly and either be saved by Granny's sixth sense for endangered children or they are never seen or heard from again.

This is not one of those stories.


His name was Nathan, you couldn't ask for a more kind and thoughtful child. The thing that's been wearing his skin since he came back from summer camp won't tell us its name so we still call it Nathan, much as we'd rather just crack its skull open and see if that will let our little boy out again.

Paul and I took him in when our daughter could no longer stand those empty eyes, that smile that never sat right on his young face or the way he dissected every helpless creature he could get his hands on. She thought he was being difficult about their divorce but Paul already had his suspicions, for all the good they did him.

We gave him free run of the attic rather than let him run rampant about the woods and cause the same chaos (or worse than) he did back with his mum. Ever since then the house hasn't felt right, something changed when he first closed that door and it doesn't want to leave.

Day 1,347

The simulation flickered and for a moment she could see exactly which people around her were corpses still strapped into their augmented pods. Every time the sim began to glitch, she saw more and more bodies. No matter what the sim showed, she could always smell the faint sickly-sweet stench of a slow and quiet death.

The avatars never changed their behaviours, their speech patterns, those little mannerisms that made them all the more realistic. It was like the humans behind them were still alive, at least until the bodies were removed. She couldn't see it happening but occasionally she heard the cleaning crew talking about the mess left behind.

They may be physically gone but their avatars didn't leave like they were supposed to. Even when she reported them to the moderators they still remained. She wasn't sure if it was out of respect or disrespect for the dead that these fakes were allowed to wander about like nothing had happened while their families mourned over their meat.

It may have begun as a way to talk to people allover the solar system but now it was a necropolis.

Day 1,346

They kept the well covered at all times and told us that we were never to look down there. Even when we were drawing water from it we had to keep our eyes dead ahead. We were never even told why but in those days you listened to your elders without question and hoped you'd survive to be let in on all their secrets as an adult.

All my life I've only heard of one person looking down the well and living long enough to tell us. Her name was Jasmine and she was only nine when she eventually died. We were told it was dropsy but she'd already said what had caused it.

We all knew the fluid in her body was the same water we drank from the well, the same water infested with creatures she described as being a cross between a baby and a puffed up frog. Looking back I now realise she'd been seeing the corpses of the children that had been "lost" during the flu epidemic earlier that year.

The well would have been an easier burial place than the frozen earth but the toxins released by all those decaying bodies caught up with us eventually. We all began seeing them, their little bloated bodies staggering from doorway to doorway, belting their watery lungs out for mothers who had already mourned them and moved on.

Eight weeks after Jasmine died, ten weeks since we began seeing the dead infants, the council ordered the well to be closed for good and a new one dug five miles from there. We knew that wouldn't solve it, only lessen it. Those children should have been brought up and buried in the dirt where they could rest among the worms in peace rather than be left down there to sit and soak for Lord knows how many years.

Any time I walk past the old well I can still hear their muffled cries.

They always sound so fresh.

Day 1,345

The human brain wasn't made to cope with the dark. The utter absence of anything doesn't agree with our need for something, anything, to exist. We weren't meant to see or experience nothing and yet when all the lights are off, when we are left to ourselves or facing a cloudy night all our mind can do is try to make sense of the sheer emptiness of it all.

At least, that's what we tell ourselves rather than admit that things might exist in our world only at night, things beyond our full comprehension. We say they linger in liminal spaces - the places that don't quite exist. We say its all in our heads. We say there are no monsters in the closet yet we check for them every single night.

I encountered my first proper glimpse of a thing-within-nothing on a train. It was when we were heading through a mountain tunnel - the interior lights never turned on and all I remember seeing were people's faces lit up from their phone screens and feeling the train begin to move backwards.

Nobody batted an eyelid, not a single soul seemed to realise that we could be stuck there forever, being pulled back and released by some gargantuan unseen hand that saw our lives as playthings. No tunnel in England is long enough to keep you inside for fifty seven minutes and yet, when I checked my watch that's how long we'd spent being toyed with.

Of course, I could be wrong.

After all, the human brain isn't meant to cope.

Day 1,344

Its been three days since she last smiled. Three days since she laughed at your inside jokes. Three days you've been trapped beside her and for once in your life you hated her.

It's not like either of you could help it, no matter what the rest of the world had to say and they always had something to say about you both. They blamed the devil, they blamed your mother, they blamed everything and everyone they could think of and it never did you or her any good. 

You'd always promised that your die together - you never saw another option. You never thought that you'd last so long without her but ever since she got sick you could feel death running from her veins into yours.

By some small miracle you didn't share much more than veins and a partially fused pelvis. Pygopagus, they called it. Back in your youth there was no other option but to parade yourselves about for money - who would employ you as anything but freaks?

Now you were older, far older than any doctor said you could hope for, all you and her seemed to do was hide away. Now you were more trapped than you'd ever been, held down by the corpse that once was your other half.

The phone downstairs felt like it was miles away, the nearby window felt further. All you wanted to do was to open it and breathe fresh air again. Even if it might be for the last time, anything was better than smelling her rot beside you, rot inside you.

Day 1,343

The bids came in fast, each blood-stained paddle shooting up regardless of who or what mat be in the way. Every item had already seen violence, the souls of their victims still trapped in those final moments, forced to relive them again and again and again.

The bid caller's mouth frothed and foamed as he spat out the rapidly increasing prices, his eyes still covered in scabs from the last auction. Some people are sore losers, others are sadists waiting for their opportunity.

Day 1,342

From a distance it looked like some kind of costume, one of those nude illusion style pieces you see on showgirls only instead of rhinestones it was covered in a thin layer of hair.

Honestly she wouldn't have given it a second thought if it hadn't started twitching. Pulsing was the word that came to mind, the hypnotic throbbing of a heart that seemed to emanate from the bundle of fabric as it slowly rose up.

That's when the head began to emerge from the dough-like folds of its torso, eyelids flapping as though it was trying to blink its gaping eye sockets at her.

When it had risen to its full seven feet in height it froze. No breathing, no more pulsing and no twitching whatsoever. She turned to run for the door when she heard the faint shuffle of skin-on-skin.

It had moved.

Day 1,341

They say the woods take as much as they give, always have and always will. That's why we gave it the dying - they're no good to us any more. That's why it gave us their years, not that they were using them.

Five of the world's oldest people live here and the media has the audacity to claim its something in the water, its the fresh air or its their carefree attitude no matter how many times we tell them that the woods give and take our lives in equal measure.

They all think that we mean the tranquility aids our stress-free lifestyle. We say we're too numb to feel stress or sorrow or anything other than a parvasive, dull acceptance of our eventual fate.

We will all go to the woods eventually, on our final walk.

It's for the best, is what we always tell them.

I hope I believe it when they come for me.

Day 1,340

It took us far too long to realise that the Northern Lights were gone. The nights were left to the stars and humanity fought to place the blame somewhere - anywhere but themselves. It was only a matter of weeks before the nightmares began, the long deep dreams that sucked you in and kept you wandering a burning forest for months on end.

When the Lights came back we were too overjoyed to realise that they were so much lower than they had once been. Too many generations had come and gone since they were last seen that nobody really knew what they were supposed to look like.

They didn't stop the nightmares like we thought they would, they just brought the dreams to reality instead. People would fall asleep in their beds, fall into the endless burning dreams and wake up days or even weeks later in an unfamiliar forest with ash-black hands.

Every year since the Lights came back more and more people have fallen into the endless sleep. Every year since the Lights came back they have continued to grow harsher, more vibrant and move lower as they empty the northern hemisphere of all waking life.

The world is glowing brighter and growing quieter than ever before.

Day 1,339

The house felt like a fever dream. There was no other way to describe the way the walls melted into the floor, the way everything shifted in a kaleidoscope of room-like approximations. It was as if something had been given a few magazines and told to make somewhere you could put a human, only that something had never seen or experienced humanity before and as such only had the vaguest ideas of what this meant.

I don't remember what the outside looked like, I don't even remember how I got here. All I know is that every room looks new every I blink and every time I blink I catch a glimpse of someone running past the door or whatever room I'm in.

I don't know if they're real - I don't know if any of this is real or if I'm just lying comatose in a hospital somewhere. I just want to know how to get home, who this other person is (if they even are a person and not another part of this fabricated nightmare) and what they do while I sleep.

Day 1,338

She looked so peaceful floating out there among the fish she'd spent her whole life studying. They darted between the long strands of hair tangled in her clenched fist as if she was just another part of the reef. It's what she would have wanted.

You watched her drifting towards a better place from the observation deck, crouched between a few fake plants that you'd rearranged to conceal you from anything that might walk in and with most of the power gone, most of the door seals were gone too.

Everything you'd been studying these past few years was now trapped in flooded sectors, bashing at the walls to escape only to end up flooding more areas and trapping you instead. You counted yourself lucky that you'd outlasted everyone else, especially the ones who were now little more than incubators gasping for each painful breath.

The sounds of scale breaking metal were steadily growing closer, your time was limited but your view made it all worth while. She even looked like she was smiling from where you sat. You spent your last few minutes wondering if you'd manage to die in such a tranquil way.

Being crushed by the ocean sounded kinder than being eaten alive.

Day 1,337

Dear Dad,

I saw him outside again last night, our Toby.

He hasn't aged a day since I last saw him but as you know, that was nine years ago.

I swear it feels like he left this morning and Mike isn't helping by insisting that everything stays the same.

It won't bring him back, I know he can't come back and he should just move on.

Toby's too much like his dad, neither of them can accept change.

Mike copes by forcing things to remain as they are and Toby seems to be coping by waiting outside.

His little head is just as crushed as it was after I'd taken the sledgehammer to it.

He doesn't seem angry though, in fact I don't think he can move his face at all.

I tried to make it as quick as possible but he kept wriggling.

Now he's standing by the back door.

I think he wants to come home and tonight I think I'll let him in.


Wish me luck Dad.

Day 1,336

He woke up to darkness.
Something wasn't right.

Using his phone as a torch he checked every inch of his room.
Nothing was out of place but something still wasn't right.

He pinched himself.
Not dreaming, so what was it?

As he lay there in thought somebody coughed.
From under his bed.

Day 1,335

The dust was disturbed before she even got there and the basement door was as mutilated as the family who'd been hiding behind it. In the harbour, a strange submarine waited in waters that were cordoned off by worried authorities who claimed that Everything Was Fine When It Was Very Much Not.

Both of these were connected, though it wasn't apparent at first. You see, the submarine was meant to report to a harbour on the neighbouring island but their acquisition had broken out twice already, damaging their navigational systems in the process.

As soon as they tried to dock they realised their mistake, all to late to correct it as their coded pleas for back-up were met by confused civilian enquiries. The last known outgoing message is hard to decipher amidst the crew's screaming but two words were clear enough.

Forgive Us

Day 1,334

It starts as an itch behind your eyes that nothing quite scratches. It spreads to a gummy feeling in your ears that dulls your hearing, a cough that never quite catches and then the tears begin. They're perfectly normal at first, just another symptom of the cold you obviously must have until it proves you wrong.

The tears turn to a cloudy discharge that clings to your cheeks, your chin, your hands when you try to wipe them away until you find yourself cocooned. At this stage it only takes a few hours before the webbing turns acidic enough to burrow back underneath the skin but by then you're already at the hospital and panicking and screaming from the searing pain and you don't even realise what's happening to you.

Any noise the host makes only serves to further disturb the larvae nestled in the mucus membrane along the roof of their mouth. They then make their way along the scar-tissue pathways caused by the webbing until they reach either the eyes or the heart (depending on subspecies, of course).

A good doctor does their research before touching a potentially contagious patient, a frightened one takes all the samples they can get their hands on. A frightened doctor makes just enough mistakes for the larvae to find a new host.

All it takes is a stray drop of blood, skin-to-skin contact and the larvae jump. A few days later and the hosts will be compelled to meet each other again and they will begin to form a fully fledged web that renders them blind, deaf and utterly immobile.

Once the larvae have matured they will consume both host and web, leaving no evidence that they were ever there aside from their host's clothing which will be found by an unsuspecting jogger within a week. By then new eggs will have been laid and will find their way to another host to begin the cycle again, cutting humanity down slowly but surely.

Day 1,333

Death didn't always come for us so quickly, you know. There was a time when it only took one or two humans, when we could potentially live forever as long as we weren't interesting enough for Death. Now it takes so many we barely have enough time to think let alone consciously become as dull and uninspiring as possible.

By now you've possibly guessed that Death isn't a natural thing, it is a being that we know as the end of our physical self and the one who takes our loved ones away to entertain it forever. At least, forever in theory. Seems with every person it takes, ten others suddenly become so much more appealing and the recently taken is cast aside like an unwanted doll at Christmas.

Death is a capricious thing, prone to bouts of mass collection and rejection that we call outbreaks, rare strains of treatment-resistant illnesses that wipe us out so that it can enjoy being surrounded by a wealth of unique individuals to play with until it grows bored again.

It grows bored so fast now, too fast for humanity to keep up with.

We can't keep it busy for much longer.

Day 1,332

They may have knocked down the old hotel but all the guests are still there. Maybe there was something about the scenic hillside, something in the spring water or even something in the bricks and mortar of their former residence that kept them locked in place. Nobody can say for sure - nobody hangs around long enough to find out.

After dark the hillside belongs to the wandering dead and though the hotel may be gone, they still remember how it used to be. They carry on their lives as though nothing had ever happened. Not one of them references their brutal demise, their blatant murder or agonizingly slow suicide.

Take, for example, the former Duchess of Broad Ledencliff who can be seen where the eighth floor used to be (about twenty-four meters or so in the air), her ballgown and intestines trailing behind her on an unseen floor. By the time her body was found, that baby blue dress of hers was soaked red and the woman who did it had already caught the train to the other side of the country.

She may be the most known and the most visible but she isn't always there. Daisy is. Daisy was a scullery maid and the cause of the hotel's original closure. A lifetime of ungrateful patrons, too much work and too little of everything else took their toll and she took the lives of over thirty people by poisoning the soup. They say she died with a smile on her face - her ghost certainly looks the calmest.

Of course wherever Daisy goes, Mac follows. He's harder to see, barely a wisp of shadow beside her yet he still manages to hold his favourite knife. Mac's as close as the hotel gets to a true poltergeist but he only has eyes for Daisy. See, he was the only one who realised it was her who'd done the poisoning (according to four separate seances) and he has no intention of forgiving her.

Sadly he moves just a fraction too slowly to ever catch up to her.

Sadly this is the happiest that Daisy has ever been.

Sadder still, the Duchess paces her old rooms waiting for the very lover who murdered her to return.

Day 1,331

A trio on the theme of rest...


Every since the car accident, my baby's been ever so restless.

I've tried rocking her, feeding her, singing - anything I could think of.

She just won't stop crying.

Maybe if I had cremated her instead of burying her she'd be able to sleep?

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

It calls to him when he is in bed, that reedy voice from his closet.

When he was younger he called it Joey and they played together.

As he grew, so did Joey and their games changed from imaginary fights to killing mice.

Every passing day meant another night of frantically scrubbing blood from his clothes.

He thought he could hide from Joey by moving house.

Joey didn't think that was very nice.

Joey won't let him sleep any more, not until he plays again.

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

It's 2AM and my neighbours are at it again.

Every Monday without fail -  it's like they forget we share a a wall.

All I can hear is the screaming, the crying, the victim begging someone to call the police.

Why can't they just take the poor bastards out to a field or one of the old warehouses like the rest of us?

It's just common decency, you know?