Day 1,546

It said it was a visitor, said it wouldn't be staying for too long - couldn't stay for too long - and we believed it. We just let it into our lives, our homes, like it had always been there and after a while we realised that it never planned to leave.

By then it had already ingrained itself into the every fabric of our town so that even our clothing was held together by thread interwoven with strands of its hair "For luck," it said, "Just to keep you close to me so that when I leave, a little part of me will always be with you."

We were fools to believe it was even capable of such things as compassion or empty but it was a damned good mimic. It had us all utterly enamoured with the way it stumbled about the place, causing pure chaos in its wake while it stuttered apologies until we believed it.

Nobody questioned why it suddenly wanted to spend time with our children or why it asked us to help it build nests all over the forest. We just thought it lived like birds but shared our maternal tenderness.

We still haven't found all of their bodies, we reckon it's taken some of them with it either as as entertainment or a snack or worse. It might not even have left us yet - every letter we've sent out has been found pinned to the town noticeboard with a child's finger nailed beside it.

Day 1,545

It was antique, 17th baroque according to my grandmother who claimed she adored it while she kept it in a locked closet in the attic. It seemed so painfully cliche to think that it was haunted or possessed but my nine year old self couldn't think of any other reason for it being shut away.

Of course when my grandmother died she just had to leave me the mirror in her will. Apparently I was the only person in the family who'd ever asked about the blatantly noticeable mirror in the background of all her childhood photos which was reason enough for her to think "This is a great idea".

It was not a great idea.

Well, it was until I took it out of  the closet and sent it off to a friend who worked in an antique shop to both restore it and price it up. In hindsight I should have just sold it but it looked so nice against my dining room wall that I just couldn't bear to part with it.

The first time I saw my reflection change I was too drunk to pay it much mind, the second time I was distracted by a knock on the door but the third time... there was nothing to turn me away from the creature I saw myself becoming.

A creature that stopped mimicking my movements as soon as it had developed enough to escape.

Day 1,544

He's been going around the neighbourhood, just walking around people's houses and wandering away, for the better part of a hundred odd years. The children have always known about him - even gave him the nickname of Legless Bernie -  but it was another one of those urban legends that you grow out of until someone or something reminds you that he exists.

Our town was founded when a local Lord decided that the village on the outskirts of his land needed a factory put in it to make him even richer. The people welcomed the work for the most part and labour laws were simply left at "be careful and remember that you can be replaced".

With most factories of their time, in that great technological leap of the 19th century, accidents were another part of life and almost as common as sparrows. So many people died in that factory that the Lord set up a church and graveyard right beside it, offering free burials to placate the grieving workforce.

While there aren't any records Legless Bernie working there, or anyone by the name of Bernie, some part of us just knows he was killed there and wasn't buried properly. So he walks about looking for the rest of his body and we just watch him go.

For a disembodied set of legs, he moves awfully fast.

Day 1,542

We've been crouching in the half-flooded basement for eight days now and it still hasn't given up. We thought it did on day five but it was waiting for us at the front door. Uncle Leo didn't make it back but he gave us enough time to retreat deeper into the basement and even grab a few supplies from the kitchen cupboards on our way back.

It shut the taps off yesterday, totally gutten the pipework from inside the walls while we were sleeping on half-floating furniture. Without fresh water we won't last much longer and with summer just around the corner, the water will drain away and our safety with it.

You see, it hates water. Utterly repulsed by it to the point where we briefly had it cornered by throwing buckets of floodwater at it until it retreated to a corner of the dining room. Didn't last too long but we don't need much time for our supply runs now. We've had plenty of practice.

We might not be able to feel our legs properly now but we thought we had a chance to outlast it. Without clean water though, I say we'll be gone by the end of the week if we're lucky. I know for a fact that I'm not the only one eyeing up the staircase.

Day 1.541

Danny missed school today, the Upside-Down Men were waiting for him outside again. They've moved house about five times now and their family always wear disguises whenever they leave but none of it ever matters. Once the Upside-Down Men get your scent they never lose track of you.

I know this, everyone at school knows this and Danny knows this but his parents refuse to believe him. They think it's just another children's story all while they're up against a child's worst nightmare made real. We hope they listen to him soon or he'll end up waiting outside their windows with the other Upside-Down Men.

You'd think that after Ellie and her family being taken last year, that adults would take them more seriously and listen to us when we talk about how to get rid of them. Tanya's family have been hunted by them since before she was born but they're still safe because they listen to her.

Adults don't know how to defeat nightmares - they think you can just wake up and everything is back to normal but the bad dreams are always lurking behind your eyelids. That's how the Upside-Down Men stay close by - one look and they're inside your head forever.

We won't miss Danny, we know he's already gone.

Day 1,540

I've never been a lucky guy, in fact I'm generally that guy running in the rain with their book or shirt over their head as an umbrella. I'm the kind of person who prepares for the worst and yet somehow things always go just that little bit further than I expected them to.

My house was full of charms, wards and whatever people suggested online - I even had a priest come and bless everything. Nothing seemed to work so I threw all the charms in the trash, let life go as downhill as it felt like and hoped it wouldn't kill me.

Five minutes later and I'd cut my arm pretty badly when my hallway mirror fell off the wall and I tried to catch it. Of course it had to break and I had to go and replace it because I'm stubborn and I need to check myself for clothing-mishaps before I leave or something will be ripped or stained or worse.

One surprise storm later and I was lurking in a charity shop, pretending to browse when I noticed a mirror that looked exactly like the one I broke that morning. They even gave me a discount because it fell on me too!

I woke up the next day and everything just seemed better, like my string of bad luck was at an end. I was awake early enough to make a decent breakfast, my clothes didn't get ruined by anything and I didn't get stuck in traffic on the way to work.

Everything felt like it was falling into place, like I'd outlasted whatever had been tormenting me all my life and then I sat down in the office and noticed how the numbers on the clock were backwards... and the mole on my coworker's face was on the wrong side and the computers type in reverse...

And my reflection looks more and more battered every day.

I can't help but wonder what will happen if the mirror me dies.

Day 1,539

We weren't afraid when all the world's volcanoes went off in one ear-shattering burst.

We weren't afraid of the aftermath and how the air would be nothing but ash for centuries.

We weren't even afraid of losing our loved ones or lives in the fallout.

We were afraid that They might have survives too.

So we crouched in our bunkers and waited for the world to settle again, praying that we'd made our ventilation shafts tall enough to not be smothered by the ash and that the filters wouldn't clog up before the surface temperature had stabilised.

We waited for what felt like aeons, silent and still and too terrified to even contemplate our rations or tend to the livestock or do anything other than listen for Them and Their call. The initial blasts knocked over most of our cameras and microphones leaving the surface full of empty space where They could so easily be gathering.

Though we could see that nearly all life had died, those empty cameraless spaces continued to taunt us with the promise of an unseen threat. Eventually the paranoia grew too great and we made the mistake of letting someone out to repair our equipment, to mend the spaces and put all of our minds at ease. 

We didn't see what happened to them.

They just walked into the empty spaces and never came back.

We hoped that they might still be alive but something brought their bodies back to us last night.

Day 1,538

Exorcisms are never easy to witness and worse to perform. It's just so difficult to tell which spirit you're throwing out until they open their eyes and they're the wrong colour and you're now a monster and blah blah blah. Even when you get it right, you're still a monster to them for being able to do it in the first place.

I've been doing this since I was thirteen, when the local priest got possessed by his dying mother when she collapsed in church and let me tell you, that was one hell of a family feud. Still, in all my years I've never met any spirit that I knew in life, like actually knew.

Then I got a call saying that something's gotten into little Maria and its using her voice to say the most unlawful things. I figured it was probably the restless leftovers from the town drunk who'd wandered onto the train tracks last week and didn't wander off in time.

I was all set for another vaguely emotional exorcism until I heard the spirit's voice. My son's voice. He begged me to let him stay, said he just wanted another chance and I couldn't bring myself to throw him out into the cold, cruel world again.

So I let the girl die, I let her parents die and I took my child home with me.

Day 1,537

They're out there in the woods still, veins full of mud and eyes crawling with worms. We never gave them a name in case they were some sort of fae - names are power to them and a bane to the rest of us. All we can do is wear iron and stick to the shallows, let them have the deeper woods.

For hundreds of years this was enough, they kept to their homes and we kept to ours but somewhere along the line things changed. Something utterly miniscule tipped the precarious balance between us and them and now we are forced to remember what they look like.

How can we not when they sit outside our windows every night and draw on the glass with filthy fingers. We don't even know where they keep getting these fingers from but they leave them neatly lined up beneath the windowsill for us to find in the morning.

Nobody can quite decide if this is good luck or bad luck...

Day 1,536

It's amazing what can trigger a lost memory, what tiny insignificant sight or scent can throw you back into a moment you didn't even realise you'd forgotten. Even something as innocent as the way a beam of sunlight hits the bonnets of the parked cars outside your house can leave you trembling in fear as you recall the time you mistook a corpse for some cheap Halloween trick until you noticed how the maggots danced in that same dappled sunlight.

Everybody has sudden flashes of memory like these, for me it was the sight of drying blood on a STOP sign out by the caravan park. That was when I remembered by first friend, my dearest friend who I knew for less than a day and whose presence hasn't left me since.

She stole her cousin's pellet gun and tried to reenact a scene from one of the dodgy action movies her aunt and uncle adored. She never thought to check that it was loaded and neither of us reckoned it had that much punch to it.

The sound of a small metal ball tearing through flesh is one you never forget, much like the way she just slumped over as blood flew in an arc behind her, painting the faded STOP sign and the grass and her neck and her dress.

The fact that such a small body can contain so much blood still astounds me.

Day 1,535

In the final years, when the world was dying and we were fleeing in favour of Mars, we decided to preserve what was left. The common person wouldn't have seen the aftermath, wouldn't have understood the technical jargon being slung about, wouldn't have witnessed the global graveyard they left behind.

Only a few eagle-eyed souls noticed how the oceans took on an oily sheen and how pods of whales never seemed to move. Then they noticed that the land looked much the same, that birds were frozen mid-flight, that herds of zebra were both motionless and in motion as they ran across narrow rivers yet never moved an inch.

It was called Project Amber - preserving the world in the throes of death, right down to the mantle. The public were told that everything they left behind would become relics in the museum of Earth and that when they had the technology to fix everything then they could all go back home.

Nothing mentioned the chemical process that forced aerosolized formaldehyde through the lungs of every living creature until they gently froze in place. Nothing mentioned how uninhabitable the world now was as a result of this and how unbreathable the air was, how there were no plans to return and that they were leaving behind a mummified corpse, not some kind of sleeping beauty that they could just wake up with the flick of a switch.

Day 1,534

Pendlewater Hotel, like most older buildings, is full of little secrets. Unlike most older buildings none of the secrets are linked to pleasant or amusing anecdotes nor are they to do with celebrities staying the night with unnamed lovers and other such trivial things.

We'll start at the lobby with its famous red, black and white chequered floor. It used to be just black and white until a rather brutal gunfight broke out amongst three political factions at an electoral debate. The only ones to survive were a handful of staff who'd scurried off to the servant's passages as soon as the first weapon was drawn.

Pendlewater is ever such a remote place and by the time the authorities arrived the summer heat had all but baked most of the bodies and fused them with the tiles. It was cheaper to shuffle the blood-stains into the overall pattern but as a result it has a delightfully unique appearance.

Moving on from there we find ourselves at the grand staircase which the staff have dubbed the 'heart' of the Hotel for the way it seems to pulse with every step you take. That and the architect entombed both his young family and himself as his final living act. He was a genius and traditionalist to the last and their souls watch over us all.

Fun fact - and by 'fun' I mean 'morbidly inclined' - there are no less than eight rooms on the first floor alone wherein someone has passed away. The second and third floors follow much the same routine, similar deaths occurring in what could almost be a pattern, until one reaches the attic that doesn't show up on the blueprints and is Never To be Discussed Lest They Hear You.

Enjoy your stay!

Day 1,533

I opened the door and felt time melt before me as the sky blinked, galaxies disappearing behind colossal eyelids as something bigger than our comprehension finally noticed us. Each gentle draft of wind was its breath, lulling us all into a state of unease that wa tempered by our curiosity.

We wanted it to vanish back into the night sky, leaving us all to believe it was all a dream. We wanted it to show it entirety so we might try and understand what it was. We knew we had no say in whatever outcome would occur that night.

Day 1,532

They called it Mother's Bane once they figured out that it only affected children. There's only so much their little immune systems could handle and this was so very far beyond them. Survivors were unheard of but thankfully they only lasted a few weeks.

Nobody survived beyond the twenty-one day threshold - by that point the child's skin would be covered in fragile cysts that burst at the slightest breeze and aerosolized the contagion. That's how it spread so quickly, all it took was one infected child in a playground and within a day they'd all be carriers.

Within a week the first cysts would appear and they'd only deteriorate from there until they were pus-drenched, little bodies wracked with pain and begging for it all to end. After the first few wards were overrun with their cries they began to soundproof the hospitals. It didn't help the children but it made everyone else feel better not having to listen to them dying.

They'd swarm anyone who walked into the ward, and people used to visit the ward all the time to try and comfort them. When the news announced that finding a cure would take them years and by that point an entire generation would be dead, the visits stopped. Why try and give comfort to children who were as good as dead?

Day 1,531

I fell asleep in the back of a taxi and woke up in a tub full ice. A typical vacation gone wrong moment right? One of those horror stories you read about on trashy news sites that make up glad to be wherever you are.

Except I couldn't find what they took.

When I walked myself to the closest hospital they treated me for mild ice-burns and told me to take it easy for a few days. They couldn't find what I was missing but I just didn't feel complete, didn't feel like a proper person.

There were no scars, no bloodstains or bruises.

I didn't find out what was gone until my uncle's funeral eight hollow years later. Every day felt like I was watching my body through a camera but when I set don't in that church it just clicked into place and I knew what was missing at long last.

My soul.

Day 1,530

When I took up a job as a council worker I expected to be another paper pusher in one of their unnamed offices but they chose to put me to field work instead. Quite literally in some cases, like last week when they had be and a few others patrolling the old Roman ruins by the Creechwoods. They gave us eight bottles of blessed water, three bronze arrows, told us to "keep our eyes sharp" and never said why.

It was just how they worked. We'd head into the main depot first thing in the morning, grab assignments and equipment and head out to do strange things with no reason behind them for mediocre pay. I mean, they told me to wipe vaseline on the eyes of all the statues in the town centre and demanded I get it all done before 3.36PM.

I think the final straw was when they told me to go to the local dump and join "The Watchers" (yes, the memo capitalised that). When I got there as the absolute arse-crack of dawn I was given a thick hazmat style suit, thicker gloves and a told to keep perfectly still.

We were shown where to stand around the edges of the largest shipping container I'd ever seen, about two-thirds full of trash, and left there all day. Now that sounds easy enough, right? Not the sort of thing to make you just quit, right?

If It had stayed like that then yes, I'd still be a council worker but whatever they're keeping in there is not a happy chap in the slightest and made that point very clearly. I only caught glimpses of it between the junk and small bones which was bad enough but when it started mimicking a baby whose cries turned to screams turned to gurgled coughs and then utter silence, I decided to leave right then and there.

I don't want to even think about where it learnt those sounds.

Day 1,529

I never had proper dreams as a child, no flying beds or falling teeth or showing up to class in just my pants. I only ever dreamt of those amber eyes and the sad boy behind them. My parents called it a recurring nightmare and said I used to wake up screaming about the boy but I don't remember it like that.

All I remember is his hands reaching towards me, all stick-thin and just starting to bloat from all the water between us. His skin was beginning to turn blue-ish grey and his eyes darted about wildly. We never spoke in the dreams, we just floated until I woke up still wet from the water.

I stopped dreaming of the sad boy with the amber eyes when my parents finally told me who he was and what had happened. I never remembered having a brother or that there was a pond near the garden where we used to spend our summers swimming.

Traumatic suppression is what they called it, recurring nightmares where my mind desperately tried to relive his last few moments without remembering the emotions attached to that memory. It all made sense at last and now I wish it didn't.

From what my parents said and what the dream always was, he went swimming without me, without telling anybody. I was the one who found him and spend a good half hour trying to untangle him from the weeds at the bottom of the pond but I was too late - he was already dead.

When they pulled him to the surface they found goldfish eating away at his eyes.

Day 1,528

I thought it was a bug bite until it began to grow lashes and even then I wasn't worried - I was jealous. How dare something as repulsive as an eye on my arm have such perfect lashes while I scraped my way through mascara after mascara.

It even had the audacity to judge me, to roll whenever I dd something it didn't approve of. I got so fed up of the damned thing that I tried blindfolding it. Turns out I'd been seeing through it without even realising to the point where I couldn't do anything right until I let it see again.

Still it continued to roll and judge and I couldn't stand it any more. I took my mascara wand and shoved it right into that damned eye until it stopped twitching and blinking and just froze half-shut and bleeding. I didn't feel a thing.

Day 1,527

My parents looked so scared when I told them that Nanna was in their room and was asking for them. I remembered that she'd died but I was too young to really know what death was, to me she just wasn't coming to visit us any more and that made everyone sad.

I thought that death meant she'd just moved away somewhere and seeing her in the dim light of my parents room was great - she was back and everyone would be so happy to see her again. It made no sense when mum dragged me out to the car while dad called the police.

They never even told me what happened that night, I found out from an article online. Turns out I did see Nanna, she just wasn't... her. Someone had broken into the morgue she was in and skinned several of the bodies, wearing them under whatever clothing he could find and heading to their next-of-kin's homes.

We weren't the first people he'd visited, the trunk of his car was stuffed to the brim with fresh skins.

Day 1,526

My parents always warned me not to get too attached to the rabbits. 'They never last long', they always said but never told me why. Nobody else in my class had rabbits and were of the same mindset that they were wicked little creatures, farmer's bane and impossibly hard to be rid of.

I couldn't help but adore their soft little faces - those bulging eyes that couldn't possibly be full of malice. Their bones were barely able to support their bodies, I truly failed to see how they could possibly do even an ounce of the things they were allegedly capable of.

Then they started growing up. It took me a while to realise that the sticky texture to their fur wasn't grease and couldn't be washed off - they were getting ready to build their cocoons and they would emerge on the cusp of adulthood.

My dad said we'd need to cull them before they hatched or we'd have to release them into the wild. They can't be kept as pets when they're full grown, they get too good at unlocking cages and feeding themselves on whatever meat is closest.

I swore that I'd trained them to only eat when I sounded a small bell and swore it enough that my parents caved and let the rabbits hatch so I could prove it. Five hours was all they promised me, five hours to prove that we'd be safe and in five minutes I proved them wrong.

It doesn't matter though, I got to keep my rabbits.

Day 1,525

We don't whistle hymns near the old church in case it wakes the congregation up. The dead are a reflection of their bodies at all times - they aren't able to make any noise but they so desperately want to worship the very being that told them all to die.

We don't like to say the word "cult", it makes them sound like bad people and they weren't. Misguided but not bad. They never hurt anybody but themselves and since whole families joined there were so few left to mourn them that it barely felt like a tragedy.

Everyone knew someone in the congregation but they were all so distant from us, that's what made them easy pickings for their beloved Reverend. He did everything he promised he would - he delivered them from the perils and damnations of this world and guided them into the afterlife.

It seemed the afterlife brought them closer to us than ever before. Outsiders don't see it, could never see their faces pressed against the glass windows, never read their lips begging for a song. Every day they decayed a little more, the stitching on their mouths growing looser as their jaws fell apart and then they began to beg.

We closed down the buildings around them, claimed it was to centrify the town but really we were quarantining it. Eventually it worked, the congregation sunk back down onto the ground, all collapsed around each other just how they were when they were found all those years ago.

Now the doors have rotted off we don't dare get too close in case they wake up and notice.

Day 1,524

The worms were bioengineered to eat inorganic waste, our ultimate eco-solution. Theoretically they were meant to grow to about nine feet in length and thirty centimeters in width but, like all our creations, they adaptations surpassed every barrier we put in place.

Every landfill site we tested them in was emptied in hours and we were too busy congratulating ourselves on our successes to count how many worms were returned to us. Who can say how many originally escaped, all we know now is that somewhere along the line they began to eat meat.

Perhaps a batch was contaminated by a stray piece of hair or a fingerprint or maybe we throw away so much food that they were eventually left with nothing but that to eat. Maybe there were just to many bodies hidden under all the detritus that they began to learn that these too were waste.

The few of us that have survived are stuck out at sea or up in the sky. What little fuel we have left isn't enough to keep us airbound and we fear surviving the impact. We never programmed the worms to feel empathy or pain, they don't even know they've killed.

I don't know if I should pity them or pity us.

Day 1,523

Nana always made us set an extra place at the table, always put the best portions there and left them until we'd gone to bed. We were young enough to not ask questions and old enough to assume she just put the food away when we were asleep.

Then I saw who Nana was feeding every night.

It came pouring from the fireplace like oil-coloured jelly and smelled like something sickly sweet and decaying. I don't know how many nights I sat at the top of the stairs and peered into the dining room to watch it eat but I was there enough to know it didn't take the same shape twice.

Every night it came out the same way, same stench and Nana would say the same words to it ("Welcome home, I made your favourite and kept it nice and cool for you"). Every night it would look like something or someone else, once it looked like my sister.

The last time I spied on it eating, it looked like me. From the way my hair curled to the crumpled pyjamas I wore that night to the way I slouched at the table to the way I held my cutlery. I think it knew I'd been watching it and was fed up of the additional audience.

That was the night Nana went missing.

Day 1,522

There's old gods buried beneath the earth, hair tangled up in tree roots and arms tangled up in wires.

They used to warn us of impending doom and natural disasters through the dreams of prophets.

Now they post videos from dead accounts with unpronounceable usernames.


The more we kill the forests the more awake they become, no longer lulled by nature.

We are slowly smothering then with digitised information until they begin to forget who they are.

They begin to forget what they are and embrace their new place in the anonymous online world.


New temples are carved from unused websites and gibberish domain names with no traceable server.

Their followers like and share their messages, thinking they are just neo-surrealist humour.

All the while deep below us, the old gods toss and turn and ponder the new world.


They aren't sure if they like it yet.

Day 1,521

If a person's been dead for long enough, you don't need to ask anyone's permission to splice their genes. If you have the right permits you don't even need to notify the government. The rules got awfully vague around genetic evolution and the use of corpses, perhaps if they were a little more enforced I wouldn't have found my grandfather's face staring at me from inside that aquarium.

It seems that only direct kin have to be asked and as my parents are both dead, in the eyes of the law I'm too far removed to count. The people who did this to him didn't look as smug as I thought they would, they just looked worried every time the it turned to face them.

There's nothing quite as disconcerting as expecting a normal eel only to see an old man's face instead.

I wondered if it had his voice, if they'd gone that far or if they stopped at the face and the smile. Even the patterns along its skin looked like his moustache and receding hairline. It caught my eye a few times and winked just like he used to when he snuck me sweets from his jacket pocket.

He wasn't the only one they used either.

There was a tank full of fish that all had the same crooked teeth that matched the photo from the "genetic donor". Further inside there were lobsters whose claws ended in fleshy fingers, complete with nails and light hair on the knuckles.

My grandfather's tank was right at the back next to a wall of black glass simply labelled "Moe". I must have stood and stared at my grandfather for so long it felt comfortable enough to move forward without me even noticing until I caught movement in the corner of my eye and saw thousands of little heads fused together to form a humanoid sponge.

They seemed to scream with every breath.

Day 1,520

The actors weren't blind when they auditioned and yet on the opening night they gazed at the audience without seeing a single thing. They moved about the stage with a practised ease born from endless hours of repetition ensuring they didn't bump into anything or anyone.

When they heard the applause of the audience, they were glad for their blindness.

Nothing human could make those sounds.

Day 1,519

We weren't allowed to talk to the people next door, not even if our football landed in their back garden. We weren't even allowed to see our neighbours when our parents went to ask them for our balls back. I never realised how scared they sounded each time until I overheard dad's voice trembling when he promised that this would be the last time we kicked anything over the fence.

After that day we were told to only play outside when there was an adult with us and to never interact with, or bother the neighbours. So we did what any kids would do when told that something wasn't allowed - we did it anyway. Waited until we were certain that our parents were asleep and pushed back the ivy that covered both sides of the fence.

We knew there was a hole in there somewhere, we remembered mum telling dad that next door were using it to spy on us. I figured it might be big enough to look through so we could finally see the garden of our mysterious neighbours but in reality it was big enough that I could have straight up walked through it.

Needless to say we felt pretty freaked out that the spyhole was so large and we talked it into ourselves that the neighbours must have monstrously huge eyes or three heads each. We never realised that they'd seen us looking through and were just as curious about us as we were of them.

From that night on we all felt like we were being watched but I was the only one who caught a glimpse of anything. We couldn't tell our parents that we'd broken the biggest rule they ever gave us so we just lived with far less sleep than we should have.

Especially me.

The neighbours would climb over my window, hands and feet sticking to the glass.

They kept trying to open it from the outside, covering the entire ledge in brutal bitemarks of frustration.

Day 1,518

Just west of Barra, right in the outermost Hebrides, there is an island that hasn't been seen for over two hundred years. The remnants of a tropical storm touched down, mixing with the harsh northern air and an unusually warm undercurrent that's kept it perfectly in place all these years.

Boats wouldn't go near it for fear of washing ashore and getting trapped among a culture that hasn't seen outsiders for such a long time. Of course as the years progressed, the world only grew more and more fixated on the longest standing storm ever known.

Rumours soon began to flitter about, talks of disrupting the storm and freeing the island. Counter-talks wondered if the island's ecosystem might have already adapted to the eye of the storm and after two hundred years, what culture had been brought up by it.

As arguments flew between furious keystrokes, a plan was already underway. Several planes dropped specially made early-release firebombs over the weaker parts of the eye wall and set the perfect storm loose to drift about the oceans once more, leaving utter chaos in its wake as the island experienced its full force.

When the first few boats docked they expected to be met by survivors, furious and utterly alienated from their forced isolation but instead they were met with an eerie silence. As they walked up rickety wooden stairs to the main body of the island they saw the carnage the storm had caused.

Not even the birds survived its fury, their broken bodies scattered among the rubble of old stone homes and the motionless figures trapped beneath them. The world wept for the island it had killed with its curiosity and then it moved on.

The nameless islanders did not.

Day 1,517

The worst monsters are the ones that have been lurking inside us for years. The ones we pretend don't exist, pretend everything is fine and we don't need to see a doctor of any description. We didn't even realise these monsters were as alive as we were until they decided to leave us.

It feels... cathartic. Like you're tearing out a chunk of your soul to better yourself, ignoring the way it trembles on the tiled bathroom floor, newborn and unsure of itself. They grow up so fast, slinking their way down drains, through open windows and out into the great wide world.

When they came back we hardly recognised them as the same grey-tinged, rusty red sludge that had poured itself from our burning throats mere months before. Some were almost uncomfortably human, though their skin swirled like oil against tarmac, while others refused that pretence and embraced every bit of nightmare fuel we'd ever given them.

They came back to us like children after their first day at school - tired and changed in ways we can vaguely sympathise with. They wanted to go home, not to us as people but to our bodies as shields. Millions are gone already, reunited as they like to say.

Reunion is a harsh word to swallow when you see all the meat they had to scoop out to make room for themselves inside of us. In some places the skies are always black - full of crows feasting like they've never feasted before and spoilt for choice among the fields of the dead.