Day 1,608

We'd been heading landwards for eight weeks.

We should have seen the coast at three weeks.

The maps all said that we were way past the shoreline and yet all we saw was the sea.


Once or twice we saw little lights on the horizon and thought they might be houses or boats but we never seem to be getting any closer to them. For all we know we've been stuck in place for days while the engine putters away like it's doing just fine.


We thought we saw a lighthouse yesterday and nearly wept at the sight of that pale little beacon.

Then another one appeared beside it.

And then they blinked.


Still don't know what that was but we turned the ship around and sailed back out to sea, hoping that the shore's out there somewhere. Even if we end up in another country entirely we can still try to catch a plane back home.


Anything's better than ending up inside a creature with eyes tat big.

Day 1,607

Most days I'll sleep in a motel - on the company's card of course which means I either pick the cheapest place around or I get bitched at by the accounting guys... again. Sometimes it just easier to pull into a layby and drop the seat back for four or five hours and if it keeps me on schedule, the company is more than happy to fudge my hours a bit and slip me a little extra to keep quiet.

Of course laybys are a little riskier than your average motel - especially with half the idiots they let drive about nowadays. Still, it beats a lecture from a guy who hasn't left his desk in twentysomething years... or at least it did.

I'll admit I've had a few run-ins with some pretty dodgy characters whose businesses range from drugs to parts (mechanical and organic) but nothing like the fella I met last night. I nearly drove right into him as I was pulling into the layby - daft bastard was just standing in the middle of it in the pitch black like it was nothing odd.

I thought he was wearing costume at first, I mean human skin isn't naturally greyish/green and nothing has eyes that large naturally. Then he unhinged his jaw and leapt at the windscreen, sticking to the glass and just staring at me, mouth gaping and eyes unblinking for the whole night.

He slunk off around dawn, hunkered down in the ditch by the road and I haven't stopped at a layby since.

Day 1,606

"Mum's outside again." Jane said, though she knew she wasn't supposed to be looking at the windows but when those familiar hands pressed themselves against the frosted glass she couldn't do anything but stare. She noticed that they weren't leaving a trail of blood behind like last time so it must have rained at some point.

Normally her dad would just sigh and head into the attic, out onto the roof and toss raw meat into the garden to distract mum until night so he could drag her out onto the street with all the other shamblers. They never said anything out loud but Jane and her dad both hoped that mum would leave and never come back so they could mourn her properly.

You can't mourn someone when they're right there dragging their hands over the glass the same way they used to smooth the duvet over you when they tucked you in. It feels like forever since they tucked you in, almost a lifetime away but in reality it'd been five weeks.

Her dad hadn't been getting up much lately, not since mum hit him when he was trying to push her back onto the road. He said he hadn't been scratched but Jane wasn't so sure anymore. Shamblers always hide the infection until it's too late and then they scramble away at the closest person to spread the disease.

She didn't think she'd mind being a shambler too much, not if it meant they'd be shambling together.

Day 1,605

It was meant to be a standard mapping mission - scan a few hundred meters of the ocean floor, report any new species and head back in time for dinner. We barely made it back in one piece and had to make up some nonsense oxygen tank malfunction to explain out sudden sporadic movements.

We thought there was just static interference at first, maybe some kind of magnetic disruption that was making our navigational equipment go haywire but in all honesty the Bathypelagic Zone is just one oddity after another with little to no reprieve in normality.

Still, who'd believe us if we said we'd met a flotilla of broken wartime submarines who wanted us to go back to their bodies and bring them all ashore to rest? Some of the vessels were cracked and others were fragments held together by the memories of the dead and nothing else.

And all of them just wanted to go home, they're so tired of being so far down and they want to rest in a sensible wooden coffin, all tucked in tightly with dirt like everyone else in their family. We couldn't say no to them, not after they proved that they could still potentially kill us by ramming our sub into the ocean bed.

We placated them by saying we'd take down their last known coordinates and get help. We'd definitely be back to bring them all home because we were truly moved by their stories and we wanted them to rest too. All we had to do was get bigger subs and better diving equipment and then we'd be right back.

We definitely didn't abandon them...

Day 1,604

It was supposed to be a relaxing boat trip downstream in a quaint little wooden raft and it did start out just as planned. The sun shone down in a picturesque summer way, the cows in the adjacent fields grazed peacefully and the people in the boat ahead of them weren't disrupting the ambience in the slightest.

All-in-all it was looking to be a perfect date where nothing looked like it could possibly go wrong.

The boat in front met the turn in the river before them, giggling as they ducked under the overhanging willow trees until they abruptly stopped. A few seconds later there was a loud splash as if their boat had been flipped and a spray of red shot through the draping leaves.

They tried to turn their own boat back, iguring that this was someone else's problem and they were already too involved in it all. As one rowed the other kept glancing back, almost expecting the giggling to resume and the other couple to swim out declaring it all a prank.

That did not happen.

Something did swim out though, deep green and licking red from its webbed fingers. Eyes as large as a man's hand were fixed firmly upon them and they knew their best chance was to row close to the shore and make a run for it.

In all fairness they tried their best and it would have worked if the creature wasn't amphibious and highly adept at jumping great distances. They barely made it a few feet in before it pounced on one of them, teeth ripping into a juicy neck as it leapt back into the water to conceal its prey.

It was truly spolt for choice for the next few weeks just with the three.

Day 1,603

The dancers spun around, graceful and elegant and masked. They were dressed to the nines and everything about them seemed to glisten with unspoken wealth as they resolutely ignored the faces staring at them from the cold, dark night beyond the elaborate mirrored walls of their ballroom.

They didn't see the awe and wonder gradually turn to fear as the outsiders realised that the room was full and yet the mirrors showed nothing. In the mirrors the ballroom looked as cold and bleak as the gardens they crouched in, not even the dancer's clothing was visible and yet they could faintly hear it swishing as the figures twirled their way to and fro.

As with any group, one person always feels they have to take charge of any unnatural situation in order to protect the others and restore some semblance of normality. This led to a rather fearless young man doing the unthinkable and opening the ballroom door.

At first the dancers continued to ignore him, moving further away without disrupting their rhythm in the slightest. Then he spoke and all at once the dancers stopped, the music stopped and the outsider's hearts stopped as all eyes were on the young man who was the only one in there who had a reflection.

In that moment of silence you could have heard an owl blink and in as much time as a blink it was all over and the dancers pounced on him. Their bodies blocked most o the view but in the mirrors all around, the others could see him being ripped limb from limb and each bloody morsal torn from his juddering frame was eagerly stuffed into a mouth too wide to be human.

When all that was left of him was a pile of red bones, the dancers took up a waltz with his remains as their centrepiece while the outsiders crept away, tears in their eyes and hurriedly trying to find an excuse for their friend's disappearance.

Day 1,602

The only light for miles around was the flashing orange of the indicators and the insipid torch he was using to read a book while he waited for help to arrive. He'd rung some local mechanic who knew exactly where he was when he mentioned a run-down bus stop with a crucifix hanging over it. They'd said to stay put, stay quiet and stay absolutely still if he saw anything unusual.

Being in the middle of the lake district, unusual people and creatures were as abundant as they were vocal and every odd encounter he suffered through made him miss the repetitive nature of the city just that little bit more. Adding a smoking engine to the list only made him regret ever wanting to leave in the first place.

It was a case of trading one set of evils for another - sure, he could actually breathe the air without feeling the dust settling into his lungs but then he'd been told by a waiter that the beef was locally sourced and every cow he'd seen looked half-mutilated already... at least the death rate was somewhat lower.

The rhythmic orange glow from the indicators coupled with the otherwise quiet atmosphere soon settled his disgruntlement and he began to doze off behind the wheel. In-between lethargic blinks he saw a herd of cows approaching his car in absolute silence, crippled legs moving in perfect synch while their heads (or what little remained) jolted on their shoulders like they'd been struck by lightning.

He woke up startled as something - someone knocked on the car door.

Day 1,601

We dug ourselves in for the night a few miles into the ruins of a town, making sure the dogs covered our pods securely. The Wanderers only seem to bother with humans and the few species of birds that mimic our speech - anything else is background noise to them.

It's gotten to the point where they recognise our breathing and hone in on it from the second they wake up. Daylight is safe enough, we can at least see where we're running to but at night we're as good as dead unless we're buried nice and safe in the re-breather pods.

They convert our carbon dioxide into oxygen and exhaling the leftover carbon monoxide into the ground beneath us. We thought we'd finally found a way to outlast them until one of the dogs just kept digging and digging and digging where Maya's pod should have been.

We all joined in, wondering if a sinkhole had dropped her somewhere far below us all and eventually gave up after five hours shovelling dirt aside with no signs of the ground having come loose during the night. Nobody said anything but we all shared the same look and wondered how safe we still were.

Day 1,600

It hadn't rained since Spring and even then we only got a few light showers. The plants were little more than grey husks, the river dried up and the local crops hadn't even sprouted. Every breath felt like your lungs were being coated in a fine layer of dust.

Imagine our joy when it finally rained. Imagine how we flocked to the windows, to our gardens just to revel in the fact that we had rain at last and it wasn't just another insipid flutter of rain - it was a fully fledged storm and we were loving every second of it.

That is, until the river started flowing again. There were a handful of people nearby it at first but word spread quickly and soon the whole town was just watching as almost a year's worth of detritus oozed passed with a stench to match.

At first it looked like a mix of plastic bottles, rubbish sacks and even an old shopping trolley or two... then someone saw a decaying arm clinging onto an old tyre. The police were called, although nobody seems to know who called them, and before long we were craning our necks over their attempted blockade as more and more bodies came floating along, all trapped in that pent-up debris.

A few of us had the idea to check the reservoir in case it had been contaminated by so many corpses in close proximity. It had been closed since about April, declared empty and left to rot like the rest of the town. Now we were wondering how empty it had been, if at all...

Day 1,599

She'd lived in that house all her life and knew every crease in the wallpaper, every scuff on the skirting boards and every faint stain on the carpets by heart. There wasn't an inch of the old place without some kind of story attached to it and yet she found herself standing in front of a hallway she'd never seen before.

The carpet flowed through as if there had always been a hallway between the guest room and main bathroom when she knew for a fact that it had just been a wall that morning. There were several doors on either side and all them were ajar.

She'd barely taken one step forward and into the newly discovered area when she heard somebody sigh behind her. It was as if several people had been stitched together, rather haphazardly and recently at that. The blood between their stitches still glistened in the low light ad all of their heads gently shook at her.

One of them, presumably the one who sighed, stage whispered to her "You're not supposed to be here, you're supposed to be asleep when we come out. What are you doing?" to which her dazed and rather put-off response was: "Well it's my house, you see, and I don't seem to recall this hallway being he-"

Three hands were raised in unison and her mouth shut with a sharp click. They slowly pushed her away and tottered forward, collapsing and splitting back into several mildly wounded individuals as soon as they passed the unseen threshold.

She rubbed her eyes in disbelief and when she opened them again - they were all gone.

Day 1,598

They may have been tightly wrapped in thick sailcloth but they could still see us running from them. We'd padded the ground with sand and wrapped our feet in cotton and yet they always managed to find us. Even after we blinded them they still found us, though their blood trails made it a little easier to avoid them.

Whenever we thought we'd found a place they couldn't reach - a boat in the middle of a lake, a treehouse with the ladder hacked apart, an old zoo enclosure built for crocodiles - nothing seemed to stop them... only delay their arrival.

Somewhere along the line they managed to unravel themselves just enough that they could tie themselves together and climb pretty much anything by writhing about enough to hook a couple of limbs through. It was entertaining for the most part... until they made it to your side and began their mad sprint straight for you.

Day 1,597

Something is eating away at my thoughts again, I can hear the gnawing in my ears.

It starts with small things, the minute details that you'd expect the average person to forget. A name,an address, your keys-nothing out of the ordinary. At this point you'd even mistake the faint chewing noises for tinnitus and do nothing about it.

That's how it gets you, lets you think that everything is normal and you are normal and then colours begin to flash before your eyes and you forget your mother's  face. By then it's too deep to remove. By then it's just a matter of waiting until you forget how to breathe.

Sometimes it can be caught fairly early, like it was with me three years ago. I kept insisting that I was hearing things, that it wasn't normal  and it took me lying about hearing voices to get them to scan mybrain and find thebloody thing.

Removal isn't pretty and barelysafe. It happens so rarely that we don't really know the long-term effects ofit except that it makes you moresusceptible. I mean, why go through a full hedge when someone's hacked a path through one a few minutes away?

I can hear it chewing on my mind and I'mlosing

Day 1,596

She keeps trying to speak to me, trying to explain herself - I don't need to hear it though.

I already know what she's going to tell me and it won't make me pull the axe out of her head.

It's the only thing keeping her pinned to the old oak tree, stopping her from killing again.

She's been smiling around it all week, acting like its not bothering her but we all know it is.

The second we turn our backs her smile drops and she starts twitching, trying to writhe her way out.

Whenever someone goes to visit her they make sure to push the axe back in again, just in case.

It's getting looser though, she's working it out slowly.

Day 1,595

We stopped going to the park when it rained - our reflections didn't match up and we were afraid.

Our fears soon became justified when someone walked past and managed to film their reflection reaching out to them. The second their hand came out of the puddle it changed from an average human arm into a series of jagged sinewy tendrils that merged into the shape of a hand and jolted out towards them.

They jerked back just in time but the arm-like thing lingered about and waved at them as they walked away, still filming the abomination. They were the first person to record the full extent of the reflections and the first to connect this to the spike in missing persons around the rainier months.

We couldn't do too much about them if they'd been dragged down below but we could avoid the park and pray that whatever's going on there isn't able to spread. We were so sure that the living reflections were only found there that we stopped being so vigilant around the rest of the town.

It's hard to say when they moved or if they'd always been there just biding their time but now practically every puddle, every surface wet enough to hold a reflection holds them inside it too. For all we know it's spread to the rest of the world.

Just avoid rainwater and be quicker than them.

Day 1,594

They only wanted us for our skin so we took it all off. We built ourselves isolated chambers to make sure we never dried out, became too cold or developed infections. It was a time for trial-and-error and so many died in the process, too many for any graveyard to hold but their bodies are left to rot away outside.

We speak to each other every day, no visuals allowed. Most of us don't want to think about the state of our facesand we lose a few dozen every month to suicide as a result. Still, many more lives have been saved by giving away our skins and preserving our meat.

At first we thought that they were eating our skin as a lizard does when shedding but last week I saw myself stumbling about outside. I was laughing and falling and picking myself up again and falling and falling and tearing myself to shreds until I could see the creature who was using my skin for its own amusement.

I'll admit I didn't react too well. I screamed and cursed at it until it threw my skin back to me, though at that point it resembled rags more than anything else. Several others have reported similar instances of the creatures wearing their skin and parading about as mockeries of humanity.

For what it's worth, I'll happily take this over death.

Day 1,593

It's hard to say quite when the railway tracks appeared, any records of that time were probably stuck with their creators on the trains that looped endlessly around the city. They were always searching for new passengers to add to their collection, those poor wretched faces crammed tightly against the fogged up windows had been dead for more years than anyone felt comfortable admitting.

We built bridges high over the lines, high up enough to avoid the power cables and created havens for ourselves at every junction. It wasn't a perfect system - the supports were always being attacked by passing trains and occasionally rammed to pieces but we did our best to stay above the tracks.

At the outermost edges of our bridges there are stairways leading to the ground. We had to start building from somewhere and we thought they were too useful to remove until someone saw a train trying to force itself off the tracks and roll onto the stairs.

Nobody's sure how, or even if, a train would be able to use the stairs to reach us all up here and nobody wants to find out. Unfortunately the way our bridges were designed is that the stairways act as major support beams for the outermost regions and to effectively hold up the entire system.

If we lose them we risk everything we've built just falling onto the tracks.

If we keep them then the trains might figure out a way to come up to us.

Day 1,592

Most of the things we fear are above ground - spiders, heights, crushing loneliness, etcetera.

These fears, though sensible, are nothing compared to what lies beneath us.

Vast catacombs of lost souls, desperately searching for their bodies among the countless millions buried at our feet. Limbs twitch and writhe as they are tried on and discarded like second hand gloves while their quiet weeping fills the otherwise vacant stone hallways.


Twisted corpses clawing at their tombs, aching to join us above. They remember their lives, their loves and they so desperately want to be a part of it all one last time. Some even make it back out, ragged and broken heaps of tattered flesh and jagged bones that are just grateful to see the sun again.


Entire citadels frozen in time and in place, their minds very much alive and oh so very eager to meet us all. The world has changed and their hunger has not. They once ruled the world with an iron fist and endless appetite and they are more than ready to do so again.


We are always digging down for jewels, for oil, forgetting just how close by they are.

Day 1,591

Fabric holds onto scent deeply and memories deeper still. No matter how many times you get a new mattress or paint the headboard - a deathbed will always be a deathbed. Both you and it will remember who took their last breath there and that soft rattle fading into nothingness will linger until you throw the damned thing away.

I know someone once died on my bed. The sheets will always crease to form the shape of a body whose face is utterly contorted, mouth wide open and limbs pencil-straight. In all honesty I don't care who died or how... I just want them to stop talking to me when I'm trying to sleep.

Every night it's the same "Please help me... Find the doctor... Where's my husband..." and I'm beyond fed up of it all. I reckon that even if I did manage to find their husband or the doctor they'd still linger about and ask for more and more and more because the dead are eternal and very quickly forget how to be quiet.

Day 1,590

As far as workplaces go, there are far worse ones than a gas station perched between farmland, forests and a fairly busy highway. We were rarely short of customers during the day but the night shift crawled like a half-dead badger, trailing the seconds like entrails behind it.

I'll never forget what the old manager taught me on my first day there. In fact, everything she's ever said has kept me alive and my pockets full of little favours to trade when the worse parts of humanity come driving through treating the pitstop like their personal lawless town.

There were three things she told me to never forget, three things I was made to memorise.

1. When they stumble out of the forest, eyes yellow and weepy and hands blistered to the bone - just let them fill their gas canisters and don't ask questions. If they ask for you to pick out a random pack of cigarettes stating that "Anything'll do" - always go mid-shelf. anything lower's an insult and anything higher's tricking them out of their money.

If you get this right, expect to never run out of small change in your purse.

2. Always put roadkill out of their misery, even if their eyes beg you not to and especially if their beg you with your own mother's voice. They're just testing your capacity for violence and they need to know that you can fight for yourself against them and all that follows.

Keep killing them and you'll find your own enemies quietly disappearing.

3. Don't try to look for the crows at night - just don't.

She never explained that one to me... she'd just clench her prosthetic hands.

Day 1,589

The ocean is full of the dead.


Their faces appear to us in the broken windows of shipwrecks and in sea foam.

Their voices whisper among the swirling currents and in the crashing waves.

Their corpses devoured by the same fish we all eat, bringing them home at last.


We hear them in the mist and call them mermaids when they cry out for their final resting place.

We watch them dart about among the deepest oceans and claim we found a new species of shark.

We wonder why so many lost ships go unfound and ignore whatever manages to wash ashore.

Day 1,588

It was one of those ceiling-to-floor kind of mirrors, one that nobody remembers buying but it's always been there. For all anyone knew it came with the house when they first moved in - maybe left by the last owners, maybe just a wall feature.

Either way there was always something off about it and the way it reflected things slightly wrongly. It wasn't until someone fell into it and through it that we realised it wasn't a mirror at all - it was a door.

Behind it was a wooden landing and a stairway leading to a basement we didn't even know we had. It wasn't on the original floorplan and we should have reported it right then and there but the thought that the last owners might have left something behind was too tempting for us to ignore.

The wood was damp and smelled faintly of lemons as if someone had just cleaned it. With all the rags on the ground we couldn't even tell if the floor was wooden too. We didn't even notice the fabric rippling around us until someone got pulled under and a gaunt face retreated under the rags once more.

We ran out of there, the sound of rustling cloth following us all the way. It was only when we got upstairs that we realised we had nothing to block the broken door with and the rustling was coming closer...

Day 1,587

After Infection Z had all but wiped out humanity a small group of surviving scientists claimed to have found the cure. They claimed it would not only immunize the living but nullify the living dead and render them harmless abominations who would decay naturally and never bite again.

Their base was located on an unnamed outer isle near the coast of Scotland, somewhere that had never been steadily populated by anything other than birds and a fee stray sheep. Getting there decimated the remaining survivors from a few thousand to just over a hundred.

Those blessed few were welcomed and immediately offered the cure - no questions asked and none answered either. Normally this would have triggered an alarm or two but the survivors were just glad to be alive and relieved that they were finally getting their cure.

The symptoms started an hour or so later. A fog seeped through their brains and their speech began to slur as neurons were overridden and rewritten. Some recognised the symptoms and began to panic, frantically looking for the people who gave them the alleged cure only to find them infected too.

As their bodies succumbed to Infection Z their mental filter dissolved and they gibbered among themselves about how such a small group couldn't possibly survive long term - let along repopulate the world.

This was the cure to end all cures.

Day 1,586

The council said the roadworks would be over soon.

They said they were repairing something that was broken but refused to say what.

We found out soon after when it escaped.

It left a trail of broken bodies in its wake, the eyes and tongues torn out.

The trail lead to the train station and we never had the guts to follow it.

The council are still trying to repair the road.

Day 1,585

My right eye won't stop twitching.

Nobody can see it but I can feel it spasming from the moment I wake up and right until I fall asleep.

I've rubbed my almost to the point of bleeding just to try and get it to stop but no luck.

My vision is starting to twitch too.

People's faces move in and out of reality as something else jolts forward to take their place.

A part of me wants to wait and see what they become... a part of me thinks their masks are finally fading.

I cried blood last night so I think the end of this all is coming soon.

Day 1,584

Honestly I don't know how he could sit there and tell me that nothing was wrong when the restless ghosts of his victims stood behind him screaming. Every time he opened his mouth they opened theirs to call him out for every single lie he told me that night.

He said he stayed late at work to fire off a few last-minute emails... the young man whose wrists were tied to his beck with course rope said he was ambushed while walking home. He said he then got dragged to a bar by a couple of colleagues... the young man told me where to find his body.

This was hardly the first time he'd made these excuses but it seemed like a new ghost joined him every night after work, each looking worse than the last while he remained so perfectly composed. One even joined overnight - she wasn't there when we went to bed but this morning she was with the rest of them, well most of her was.

They all told me where to find them and how they died.

Killing him just seemed like the next step.

I wonder if he started like this too.

Day 1,583

Driving a taxi is like watching eight movies all at once, constantly flickering back and forth between plots and characters with no discernable end in sight. Your evenings are filled with snippets of overheard conversation, brief but stale idle chatter and the same script to end it every time.

After a while the routes to most places become so familiar you begin to pay less and less attention to the roads and begin to notice everything else around you. Little glimpses of things you don't think you were ever meant to see - things that your passengers either don't notice or are somehow a part of.

For example a month or so ago when you were waiting for the lights to change and caught a glimpse of wild dogs chasing after a small deer further into a cul-de-sac. Just as the car behind you honked to get your attention as the lights changed, you saw them all change into children that stopped and stared right at you.

You notice that dogs are reluctant to go near you now.

There was also that time you were waiting near a pub for a customer who said they were "five minutes away"... they were always five minutes away. It was your last job of the night and you figured you may be there a while so you switched the car off and were about to pull out a newspaper when someone burst through the rear door of the pub and staggered into the closest alley that you just so happened to be outside of.

Your windows were up but you still heard the sound his skin made as he peeled it off to reveal scales.

Even as recently as yesterday you found yourself glancing up at the windows of Hotel Hallmarshe only to see a man on the phone, pacing between three windows agitatedly while an impossibly shaped shadowy figure walked three steps behind him.

You jolted in your seat when it pounced and forced your eyes to the road when it looked down at you.

Day 1,582

There were few places he hated delivering to more than the old Isaac's place. It wasn't especially hard to get to and he didn't have to go there very often but every time he went, something ended up coming back with him and lingering around the post office.

They could be heard tapping on the windows and seen on the security cameras flipping letters into the wrong sacks. Absolute pests that they were, for the most part at least. There was one who kept trying to follow him back that he had to swerve and evade and break practically every traffic rule to lose in the twists and turns of the town - anything to stop it getting to the office.

From the distance he usually saw it at, it almost looked like four or five black sacks tied into the rough shape of a person and filled with countless squirming somethings that cried like children and used his name to beg for a freedom he didn't dare give them.

Last time he saw it, it was in the process of skinning and eating a dog. Dozens of little black arms had sprouted all over its body and were clawing at the dying critter, peeling it slowly... thoughtfully... while other limbs tore chunks off and retreated back into the overall mass.

He dreaded to think what it would do if it caught a person.

Day 1,581

Down the old side of town there was a stone bridge over the river that was always locked. It had piqued her curiosity right from the start - who would put an iron gate right in the middle of a bridge and why? For years she thought she'd never have an answer until one evening when she saw that the gate was wide open.

There were a few people milling about as usual, nobody paying any mind to the bridge at all. Figuring it was a one-time kind of opportunity to cross to the other side of town this way she started walking, not feeling the worried glances behind her and not hearing everything come to a halt as she crossed the threshold and set foot on the path once more.

She turned back to see if anyone else would be joining her and saw nobody. The street looked utterly deserted to the point where it seemed like it hadn't been walked down for centuries. Turning back she saw the rest of the town in much the same condition - abandoned and decaying with nothing but the wind whispering along the roads.

Turning back one last time she saw that the gate was now locked, leaving her with one way to go - onwards.

Day 1,580

Starting out at a new school is one of the most terrifying things a child can experience. They lose all sense of who they were and where they stood among their peers and these are not easy to regain. Starting a new school is daunting enough with parents in tow and even worse without.

And that's where we begin today - a small child waiting outside of the headmaster's office at 08:30AM sharp. The bench was as sturdy as the rest of the school and almost as old, ornately carved along the back and crudely carved along the armrests where restless arms scraped at the varnish to inscribe their initials instead.

The child was supposed to be meeting the headmaster to be introduced to the layout of the school and to receive their schedule but not it was 08:45AM and not a single soul was in sight. An old mobile was cautiously removed from an almost empty rucksack to double check the time and date. Both were correct and yet the child was still so very alone.

The child decided that when the clock showed 09:30AM they would walk home- anything delayed over an hour just simply isn't happening, as their mother was fond of saying. Time dragged by like the overflowing trawl net, the seconds reluctantly scraped by and just before the hour had struck, the child saw someone.

He looked older but barely, dressed in the school's autumnal reds and greens and frantically gesturing from the far end of the hallway as his eyes darted around wildly. "Quickly, this way!" the boy loudly whispered, "He's coming and you'll be right in his way!"

The child looked worried, hurriedly grabbing their rucksack and darting over to the boy who grabbed their hand to pull them towards a storage room. He wedged several boxes underneath the handle before backing to to greet the child with that naive trust the young so often have.

He went to give his name only to snap his mouth shut as the sound of a wooden cane striking the floor grew closer and closer. The child knew it would be the headmaster and that they must meet the headmaster and this boy was interfering.

This simply would not do.

The wooden cane kept coming closer and closer and closer, polished wood striking polished wood until it struck something wet. Something red. Something leaking out from the other side of a storage room where a child had decided to remove the interruption and had just finished removing the boxes beneath the handle when the door was opened by a sharp tug and light spilled from the many eyes of the headmaster onto the drenched pile of meat on the floor and the child standing beside it.

Day 1,579

To get to the old ballroom he had to innocently meander down a series of unsavory alleyways full of people that weren't entirely human and didn't quite know how to keep one alive for very long. From there he reached a courtyard with a fountain that had been used as a communal dumping space for so long that the water was no longer visible, though the rubbish bobbed about as something swam beneath it.

Taking the third exit from the courtyard took him passed several small shops that seemed to exist in another age altogether and whose owners glared at him through dust-coated windows, or perhaps it was the dust itself... in this part of town nothing was as you'd expect.

He ducked down a final alley and set to work prying damp boards from a broken basement window so that he could slip into the unguarded side of the old theatre and work his way towards a ballroom that hadn't been seen for almost two hundred years.

As he gently placed the boards back over the window to try and cover his entry point, he closed his eyes to help them adjust faster to the dark. As he turned around he saw that there was a lit candle by the open door that led to the lower workshop of the theatre.

Holding his breath he waited and listened for the sounds of whoever had been here just that little bit before him, long enough ago to have lit the candle but not so long that the candle had burnt out or even reached the halfway mark. He heard the faint sounds of birds outside and his own heartbeat thudding in his ears but all else was silent.

The candle felt warm as he picked it up, debating between sing it for light or using his own torch and ultimately choosing the candle for being a softer light, something harder to spot than the harsh white of an LED flashlight. Armed with this, he carried on into the underbelly of the theatre with the ballroom - his goal- at the forefront of his mind.

After what felt like hours of trekking through spiderweb-infested hallways, hiding underneath old sewing desks from patrolling denizens and tricking the lingering patrons into pretending he didn't exist, he finally found himself at the grandiose entrance to the ballroom.

The denizens found him shortly after.