Day 1,911

I was driving to meet my aunt for thanksgiving. Ever since her husband died she'd been alone out in a tiny town in the middle of podunk and nowhere and I was fortunate enough to live closest to her. It was still a nine hour drive but nobody else was willing to go.

Seems to me that no matter when you plan to leave, no matter what the weather forecast says before you go, as soon as you're comfortably far away from all civilisation the heavens open and the road becomes lost in the downpour.

My phone showed a motel about three miles down a turning so small I nearly drove past it. Like I expected, the car park was empty save for a single beaten up jeep and all the lights were off except for a single window with a flashing neon sign that read "Vacant Rooms".

The reception desk was manned by a pale couple - real pallid, sickly-looking people who could have been extras on a zombie movie with minimal effort. The woman introduced them as Mr and Mrs Howardson, smiling as me through a thick wave of hair that covered half her face. Her husband didn't make a sound save for his oddly wheezy breathing.

I was their only guest for the night which was always the plot of some cheesy gore show but I still managed to smile and be courteous when Mr Howardson lead me to a room that was less than 5 feet from their office. The whole place was empty and I still got to be creepily close to them.

Seems they  lived there too, on the other end of the property, and boy were they having one hell of a go at each other. Curse words streaming left, right and centre for two whole hours before someone fired two shots, barely a second apart.

I debated calling the cops but my phone wasn't even switching on. I barely slept, wondering if there was a survivor and if they were angry enough to shoot a potential witness. I was out of there the second the sun was up, glad that I'd paid in cash the previous night, and hightailed it to my aunt's place.

When I told her what happened she looked confused and said the motel had never been finished. The owner and his wife had run out of money and out of excuses to tell the contractors. One thing led to another and they got into an argument and guns were drawn and they'd both been found shot the next morning when the workers showed up - him in the throat and her in the eye.

The motel was left to rot after that, their kids refused to touch it. Vandals set fire to it a few months later and after it was put out it was fenced up and it remained burnt and broken ever since. There were rumours of the restless couple firing at cars that drove by but nobody'd gone back there since the fire so nobody really knew what the place looked like anymore.

The rest of thanksgiving passed uneventfully as did the drive back until I got to the turning for the motel and took it. I had to know it was real and that I hadn't spent the night hallucinating my way around a damp, burnt wreckage or worse - hallucinating my way around a damp, burnt wreckage with ghosts in it.

Day 1,910

As far as tourists are concerned, the red pulp floating in the lake is just a rare form of algae and it's toxic. They don't go near it and it can't go near them and we don't have a repeat of the summer of '82. Everyone's happy and nobody's calling for help, at least none that didn't deserve it.

Anyone with a pair of eyes and a smidge of common sense will tell you that it ain't algae. Algae doesn't move with intent and it sure as hell doesn't blink. Still, it's better to call it by a lie and confuse folks rather than tell them the truth and watch them try to kill the lake at its source.

The pulp is just the extremities of something that spans all seven lakes in our region while the main body sits in the caverns deep below us. The few who've been dumb enough to touch the pulp and lucky enough to escape all claim to have had visions of the greater creature and it doesn't sound good.

They get flashes of a deep red meteorite striking the ground and nearly killing the greater creature.The impact shattered most of its body and buried the crater in a dense shower of dirt and debris that now forms the cavern where it's lived ever since.

Like any living thing, it needs to eat and it isn't picky. If you sit still for long enough it loses interest in you and the pulp stretches into clumpy tendrils that wave about in the air, trying to snag a bird or ten. If you stay still for too long, it starts wandering over to you to check if you're still there.

With enough tourists moving about at a steady pace, we've managed to keep it relatively inactive but winter is coming and tourists move with the good weather. Sooner or later they'll go for several months and we'll be left to tiptoe around the lakes, praying it doesn't catch us off-guard.

Day 1,909

His skin was lumpy around the edges of the mask where the heat of the impact had melted it onto his face. He didn't seem to notice it any more. He was one of the few I'd seen live long enough to cut the oxygen tube that was sealed around the mouth and nose and fashion it into a feeding tube instead.

Most of them were corpses within the hour, dying from shock or sepsis or suicide. None of these were quick enough exits. None of these stopped them from shrieking and collapsing when they were first hit. All of these lead to us taking the bodies to landfill sites and burying them en masse.

Nothing quite prepares you for the stench of people burning or the faint hunger their cooked meat brings. You don't know whether to be disgusted at your stomach growling or if you should try to take a bite when nobody's looking.

But that was then, when everything but death was scarce.

This is now, when things can't get any worse so they have no choice but to improve.

Doesn't mean we have to like where it's going though.

Day 1,908

Our signals have been intercepted.

Our supply drops have been scraped clean.

The walls of our shelter seem to become more fragile with each passing day.


We don't even have the little radio to drown the silence any more, not since someone smuggled it out and used it as a distraction. It may have saved three lives but now we have precious little to distance ourselves from the fact that we may have faced death countless times together but we are all still strangers.

I wouldn't know the first thing about any of them, they could be worse than what's out there for all I know. They could just be biding their time until I actually fall asleep so they can gut me and roast me. God it's been so long since we had proper meat I wouldn't even blame them.

Still, I don't think I'd be able to stomach meat, much as I might want to. The creatures outside have developed a fondness for bringing their prey back to our walls so they can rip it apart and devour it as loudly as they possibly can. And believe me, when there's a good fifty of them the sound is near deafening.

But somehow the silence is worse.

At least when they're feasting away we can all complain about it and feel like we're an actual group of survivors instead of the prisoners we've become. When the creatures have left and all you can hear is the soft drone of flies landing for their own meal, your thoughts start to consume you.

Day 1,907

Judging by the rags that clung to the pus seeping from their burst boils they used to be farmhands back when they were still alive. They were an odd find, the plague hit hardest in the cities and apparently never made it as far out as the countryside but the opposing evidence was lurching towards me.

After a couple of hits of our latest downer (think horse tranquiliser on steroids), we had them docile enough to restrain and contain while we took samples. Then it was just a quick and neat beheading, bagging and putting the bastards in the back of our unit before scoping out the rest of the place.

Oozers this far out meant a minor breach at best and at worst our entire food supply was infested and we were doomed to a slow death. Our first point of call was the nearest building where we found infected cattle - a whole herd swaying just like the human oozers do, almost sliding against each other for all the pus they were leaking.

They didn't seem attracted to our scent but there was enough dried blood and missing pieces to assume they'd been after each other. It's interesting to think the plague can jump species but the variant them seems to self-contain within that species rather than endlessly branching out and causing humans to attack cows to attack rats etcetera.

As there was no immediate threat we just locked the doors and carried on to the next building in search of the originator. Dispatch advised they'd take care of the herd and cull any others within a 10km range just to be on the safe side.

By 1800 we'd completed the search of the farmhouses and surrounding fields and found no evidence of the infection coming from the quarantine zone. Current research indicates contaminated rainwater, an airborne variant or spontaneous reactive infection.

Day 1,906

I wasn't afraid to be burned.

I was excited.


The townsfolk thought I was a simple run-of-the-mill witch who'd changed the colour of their cattle with magic so that faeries would steal them away. None of them bothered to look closely at the grey-flecks floating in the eyes of their precious cows and none of them realised what was causing their milk to taste so musty.

I wasn't a witch but I wasn't human either. I had been once, about three years ago I think. I remember walking through the woods and finding a patch of strange-looking mushrooms. Then I remember falling asleep and waking up choking as the spores settled into my lungs, into my bloodstream and into deepest corners of my mind.

Now I travel and share our spores so that the cluster can grow and thrive and where better to plant a mushroom, where's darker and warmer than a fine set of lungs I ask? And what could possibly be a better way to kickstart the swarm of spores than the rush of hot air from a roaring pyre?


They might be ending my life but theirs is just about to begin.

Day 1,905

The only thing creepier than finding the ruins of a colossal ancient citadel at the bottom of a sinkhole was finding out it that it was still inhabited. Of course by the time we knew, eight people had gone missing and we'd already accidentally caused part of the sinkhole to collapse, opening the formerly isolated lake into the main river basin and releasing the inhabitant.

We never meant to set it free but there was absolutely nothing we could do to stop an eighty foot sea-serpent from swimming away, jagged fins slicing through the air as gracefully as its heavily plated body cut through the current as it headed or deeper water.

The citadel didn't hold much in the way of answers. All we knew was that it was built to be a holding pen and someone, likely a local family or clan, had continued to maintain the herd of cows that roamed the otherwise deserted town.

In other words - they'd been feeding it. And we were assuming there was just the one, though females in most aquatic species are usually far larger than the males. We all knew that but we were hardly expecting a swarm of writhing darkness to pour out into the river a few hours later.

We couldn't have predicted the slaughter that followed. All along the river, from source to sea, body parts washed up covered in the same countless jagged teeth-marks. The males had made the river their home and that was more than enough for us to worry about.

Then someone uploaded a video from a whale watching trip that showed a humpback whale being bitten clean in two and we found the female again. Now barely a month later and our shores are as dotted with whale bones as the river is with corpses and no matter how many we kill in the river, the beast in the sea remains free.

Day 1,904

I usually got the train back home to avoid getting a taxi through those god-awful, narrow country roads that are always a few minutes away from being totally engulfed by bramble and hedges. Last night, however, the train terminated early with no explanation and 'luckily' for me there was still a taxi hanging around.

What should have been an hour-and-a-bit train ride turned into a half hour train ride and an hour long taxi drive through roads I'd never gone down before and never will again. In all honesty I should have just gone to the closest B&B and called it a night.

Soon as we'd left the station the driver asked me when I'd last taken a road home and I was stupid enough to be honest and say six years. That's when he took the next turn and said I'd put it off for too long and tonight would be my night.

Like any sensible person I panicked and tried to open the child-locked doors, break the surprisingly strong windows and even attack the driver through the ridiculously tiny gap in the plastic divider. None of that worked of course and neither did my phone - damned thing had died somewhere along the way.

I didn't have any other choice - I was going down the lesser used roads whether I liked it or not and just when I thought he was turning down a familiar road he swerved into the woods, along a barely-there road that I'd never noticed before.

He must have gone ten, maybe twenty miles in before something crashed nearby and he stopped sharply, shutting the car down and blocking anything lit up until we were left in a silence so tense you could cut it with a butter knife. Unfortunately it didn't last long.

The rear of the car jolted like we'd just gone over a speed bump and the air was suddenly so cold it hurt to breath. We must have been there for a good fifteen minutes before it stopped shoving and rattling the car about. I felt like I'd been run over by a truck but that would have been far more preferable than when the driver turned on the headlights and showed me what I'd been missing all these years.

What had been living just off the roads.

What I'd been subconsciously trying to avoid all these years.

What had ripped train tracks apart to finally meet me.

I

Day 1,903

The river beneath the underpass was haunted by the babies that had been thrown into the rapids a few miles upstream. At night you could hear them wailing and splashing and the water was never stillt begin with but it didn't flow right when the sun set.

Of course people have apparently stopped dropping unwanted newborns into the harsher currents but that doesn't mean all the ones who died before ave suddenly found peace. I doubt they ever will, no matter how many mothers jump from the road above.

They get called, you see. Especially the older ones whose kids have all left home. Something in their souls can't always let go and the river babies count on that. Their crying gets into your head and for most people it fades after a few hours but for mothers it only gets louder.

Day 1,902

Road 252 was a stretch of hastily-poured tarmac that connected a small farmsted to the nearest main road. It lasted thirty-something miles and was heavily forested on either side, not the cutesy picturesque kind of woods - the mossy, something's trying to hide behind that tree and failing kind of woods.

The latter explained why nobody'd ever spoken to, traded with or even met the people who lived on the farm. The second you started to drive down road 252 you'd hear something heavy running nearby with great thumping strides that seemed to shake the ground and further crack the tarmac.

Trees leant so far over the road that they almost formed a perfect tunnel, blocking out almost all of the sun and leaving you driving in perpetual twilight til the end came in sight. A small farm that had seen better days some forty years ago.

At first glance the owners were likely to be somewhere on the premises but after looking through the windows of the main house you'd be able to see how everything had been thrown about, like it had all been pulled towards the rear of the property.

Towards the deeper end of the woods.

Day 1,901

There's always been something odd about the flat next door. The air around it seemed to vibrate and distort anyone who walked through it, making them look more like monsters than men. You'd feel it happening as you passed by their doorway - that itching in your scalp where horns might sit, the ache in your jaw from all those extra teeth settling in, the way your eyes would dart to the closest moving object like they'd just been delivered to your table on a platter.

Much as I'd like to chalk it down to second-hand drug smoke I've had the dubious honour of seeing their door open. There doesn't seem to be a flat there you know, just this endless void that feels like its tugging at your soul, gently taking it by the hand and leading it straight into Wonderland.

A part of me went into the flat and I don't know which part but I don't think I'll ever see it again.

Day 1,900

It only looked like a car... sure as hell didn't act like one.

From enough of a distance all anyone could see was the vague shape of a car covered in an old oil-stained tarpaulin. When you got closer you began to notice all the little things that didn't quite add up, all the details that proved that whatever is was, it was bad at pretending to be a car.

I mean what car breathes like that? As in the sides of the "vehicle" moved in and out accompanied by the faint hiss you get when you sigh through your nose... or blatantly organic grille that seemed to function as its nose. It would even start to sniff like a dog if anyone came too near and growl at any atual cars that drove too close to it.

Nobody wanted to get close enough to see if it bit, though we knew it could.

One of Gina's kids filmed it slowly driving up to a cat and tilting its front half like it was curious. Then it reared back by about three feet and you could kind of see that it may have been metallic on top but the underside was pure meat with a jaw that seemed to slide out from under the bonnet to lash out and rip the poor cat in half.

And if these weren't enough, imagine its yellow headlights snapping on and blinking at you in the dark when you're walking down the road. Imagine them tilt like they did in the cat-eating video. Imagine all the warmth draining from you as it starts to "drive" towards you.

Day 1,899

The Tavermouth factory workers left one of the loading bays open last night and eight people went missing. This might have been left as two separate points were it not for the fact that they were all within three miles of the factory and were all wearing something red.

None of them have been found and nothing was reported missing from Tavermouth but it seems to be a lot busier than normal and there are at least eight new faces among the workers. Not quite the faces of the missing people but from a distance the similarities were striking.


The second time they left a loading bay open felt more deliberate, like the first time was a test and it had been a success so they were trying to replicate the results. It was on Bonfire Night so the whole area was bustling after dark with drinks all around and enough fireworks to mask screams of terror for delight.

Thirteen went this time. All wearing red and all within three miles and slowly but surely thirteen newish workers came to Tavermouth... though nobody ever saw them leave and again, the resemblance to the missing was a tad disconcerting.


The third time didn't go well for them. Something had changed in the year between the last incident and the night they left a loading bay open this time became fatal. Although nine people disappeared, one was found again almost a month later.

Well, the lower half of their face was found. It had been removed with surgical precision - tens of thousands of tiny cuts that gently separated skin from meat. They could have survived this and, if rumours are to be believed, one of the new factory workers has yet to be seen without a scarf covering their face.

Day 1,898

There'd been disappearances down by the river for as long as anyone can remember and they always turn up dead and dismembered in the woods. People suspect this person and that person and claim its demons all in the same breath, hoping they'll stumble upon the right answer before they're the next to go.

I was nearly a river case a few weeks back. It happened on the tail end of an okay night out and a couple of drinks over my limit. In other words I was a staggering, mumbling mess who thought a riverside stroll sounded perfect.

And it was perfect at first. My eyes were so unfocused I didn't spot the dark furry shape swimming towards me until it was so close to the shore I could have reached out and touched it. Around that time I also noticed just how quiet it had become and how still the river was which only drew my eyes straight back to the shape.

At first I thought it was a cat that had slipped into the river.

Then it raised its head and smiled at me with more teeth than anything has the right to.

I thought that was the end for me - just another person gone missing by the river only to turn upin eight carrier bags out by the woods. But I got lucky. It raised its webbed hand and caught up in its nine-fingered grip was someone I'd never met.

It looked at its victim and back to meas if to say this could have been you if you'd been here sooner.

Day 1,897

We knew nobody was coming to help us when it switched on the main drill to drown out our screams. No matter how loud we yelled or how fast we ran - it was always one step in front of us, herding us deeper into the site and the caverns we'd unearthed.

Its caverns.

It had barely been an hour after we'd accidentally dug too deep and broken through into its lair before it peered at us from the darkness and started to hunt. One-by-one most of us fell within minutes and were swallowed whole.

The rest of us were playthings while it worked up an appetite.

Day 1,896

Something's chattered in the hedges, its seven skinny arms reaching out to pluck stray moths as they soared towards the flickering streetlight. It's never been seen as a whole, never been heard saying actual words and never harmed a soul until it bit Ella.

She's not been right since, you know. If you thought she was a bit quiet before, she's now silent as the moors and colder to the touch save for the bite mark. Turned her whole arm grey in less than an hour but the doctors never found a cause for it - not even the slightest hint of an infection.

It didn't stop with her either, might even have developed a taste for meat they say. It doesn't bother with moths any more and chases you down the path, always in the hedges and always a hair's breadth away from sinking its rotting teeth down to the bone.

It's gotten better at hiding during the day - I would have walked right into it yesterday morning if it hadn't grown impatient and unfolded those emaciated little arms out to hurl itself at me. Felt like the whole world came to a halt in those few brief moments before I escaped.

People are starting to say it'd be safer to shut that road down and move the residents elsewhere. A while back and I might have agreed with them but just as I turned to run from it, I caught a glimpse of Mr and Mrs Fullerstow peering out their front window.

They must have been bitten a fair while back - their poor faces were greyer than little Ella's arm and their skin looked like it was about to fall from their bones. In the few seconds before I ran I swear I saw several pairs of arms unfold from their backs.

Day 1,895

They were first spotted when a subway train slowed down as it passed a disused station. They were in shambles at first but began to line up as more carriages passed by until they were in perfect rows, they'd look almost militant were it not for their ragged clothing and rotting skin.

More and more reports came in every day and each time the train seemed to slow a little more, linger a little longer to the point where one of the crowd pressed what little remained of their hand to the grimy window. Their expression might have been taken for sadness or longing if they still had eyes.

As it stood, the crowd somehow managed to resemble undead abominations, an army of the deceased and exhausted commuters all at once. The public scarcely knew what to make of them but they all feared that sooner or later the train would come to a complete stop and the doors would open.

Day 1,894

As its hazy tendrils swung down from clouds that flashed with impossible colours, we wondered if suicide was the better option. Surely the brief glimpses of our deceased loved ones were a trick? Surely death was still death and it couldn't possibly be any worse than facing the nameless behemoth that was slowly moving closer to our world, peering down at us with an incomprehensible face.

Its initial entry had sent out an electromagnetic shockwave that all but annihilated any and every piece of tech we relied upon. Evidently we were the last to know as word got out that our governments had been studying the breach point for the last eight years.

There was no time left for the rest of us to try and run, no spaceships left after the rich stole themselves away to the Martian colonies without so much as a glance back at us. We had been abandoned to something older than our universe, something that warped gravity around it with its sheer size and something that could only see us as insects in comparison.

The sky trembled as it heaved itself through from one unknown realm and into another. The world was in chaos as we ran, hid or died in our millions while it just kept coming through until the air itself felt like it was made of those strange hazy tendrils that seemed to come from inside us as much s they did from the creature itself.

For one moment, one singular, agonizing moment, it was here.

In its entirety.

Staring down at us, soaking in the disorder of our world as tendrils gently collected the bodies of the dead.

And then, with no warning or reason, it retreated. It must have taken over a billion bodies back with it, our estimations are forever rising, still, it left and we count that as a victory. We know as much about it as we did before it arrived but for now we're safe.

The same can't be said for the traitor ships returning from Mars.

Day 1,893

It strung itself between the streetlights like a fisherman's net, waiting for its prey with all the patience of a venus fly trap. If I hadn't seen it on the local news last week I wouldn't have seen it for what it really was and just assumed it was a trick of the light or fog coming off the nearby river.

I wouldn't have thought to look for bodies just beyond the lights, not that many survive being ensnared but the news said we should always check just in case. I've never found a survivor myself but everyone knows someone who found or was found by and lived to tell the tale.

Some nights I sit by my window and watch bats and rodents get caught up, timing how long they take to die and trying to use them as a basis to calculate how long it would take for me to go. I've narrowed it down to somewhere between 15 and 35 minutes.

The rodents don't seem to thrash about much or make any noise so for all I know it's a pretty decent way to go. Imagine it - gently pulled into a cushion of soft light that slowly ebbs away at your life until you drift into sleep followed by death.

I don't know if I've been watching it too long but I think I want to get caught.

Day 1,892

Don't you just hate it when you go to kill someone and it turns out they're already dead?

It's literally the worst, second only to having to explain to them that yes you just tried to kill them and no you weren't their original killer and now they want you to help them find their original killer because clearly all murderers think alike.

So that's about where I am now.

Her name is Charlie and she was seventeen when she was hit by some sharpish object when she was hitchhiking home after a festival. The driver hadn't even slowed down, just stuck their hand out, nearly decapitated her and stuffed her body into their truck.

She doesn't remember much around then and she was too busy choking on her own blood to get a good at their face which is helpful. All I have to go by is half a license plate and the sound of pigs chewing, presumably on her body which was never found.

She doesn't even look dead - something she claims is common for ghosts because they tend to remember how they looked last rather than the state of their corpses which they don't usually see. Charlie never saw hers, she just drifted around the road where she'd died until she figured out how to walk on the ground and blend back in with the living which brings us back to the present.

We're setting up a trap in the area she went missing and during a similar festival. If her murderer is anything like me then they're prepared enough to drive around and strike when they has the best shot. Unfortunately for them, we're more prepared and Charlie makes for perfect bait.

All they'll see is a lone teen girl and a lonely dark road while I hide behind the festival signs with a nice surprise. I get to kill and she gets to have her revenge and we potentially save countless others from sharing her fate so its a win/win/win situation, right?

Day 1,891

All those deaths can be traced back to when we were fifteen and doing shots of Mother's Smile in one of the old warehouses out by the coastal side of town. I smuggled the bottle out of my cousin's caravan a few days back and since he'd finally stopped asking about it we took the opportunity to dispose of the evidence.

We must have been two or three shots in when Kyle started up a game of truth or dare that eventually led me to trespass onto the old navy scout ship. They'd dared me to grab the flag from the top mast and bring it back and I was well on my way up there when I saw someone sitting at the wheel.

If I'd had a bit more to drink I might not have noticed how transparent his hands were or the blood pouring from a gaping wound just by his left hip. He smiled at me and slowly dissolved back into the dark of the cabin and some part of me knew he'd be coming up to see me soon.

So I did what any tipsy teenager would do... exactly what I shouldn't have. I carried on climbing and pretended I hadn't seen anything, ignoring the faint screams from the warehouse because my mates were clearly having a great time without me while I was still trying to get that stupid flag.

It didn't even come off properly - in the end I just tore off what I could and legged it back down as fast as I could. The dead man was nowhere on board and though I tried to ignore it, the gate to the walkway was open and there was a trail of blood leading down to the warehouses.

By the time I got there, everyone was silently crying and covered in blood. I freaked out and tried to call an ambulance but they were too worried about being caught drinking so we just walked ourselves home. They never told me what happened that night.

Now, five years later I'm the only one left and the others all managed to die from all sorts of weird accidents that ended in a deep wound just above their left hip and them dying of blood loss. I keep wondering when it'll be my turn but so far the man's just smiled and waved from a distance.

I might just kill myself before he gets the chance to... anything would be a kinder way to go.

Day 1,890

She awoke to a strange room and a stranger group of people watching her from behind a large glass wall. Two of them looked familiar and by the way they stared at her the feeling was mutual. Perhaps they'd taken her because she reminded them of someone or perhaps they'd known her in the before days.

Regardless of that, she was too hungry to properly look at them and ponder their possible relation. She hadn't eaten for a while before she was taken which must have been a few days ago, or so she estimated by the harsh cramps of her stomach protesting the complete access to food.

And so she did what anyone like her would do when locked in an empty room with living people so close and yet so far away. She screamed and slammed her hands against the glass, against the walls and even against the floor, hoping that somewhere there'd be a way out.


It looked like our Mia and they told us where she'd been found. She'd barely made it a mile from campus before the undead got to her. They liked to go for the neck normally but Mia was always a fast runner - fastest in her track team, you know.

The bite marks were all over her legs, or what little remained of them. There was enough for her to stand but after maybe ten minutes of her staring at us through the window and us silently hoping the serum had worked and she'd remembered us, she flipped.

Seeing them on the news is one thing, it's something you can easily detach yourself from but seeing your own little girl make those inhuman sounds and tear herself to pieces in an attempt to break out and feast on you... it broke our hearts faster than it broke her arms.

Day 1,889

The walk to the church is one undertaken in darkness and quiet and the light from the moon hurts your eyes as if it was the same sunlight you once basked in all those centuries ago. There are others walking with you, bare feet treading briskly through the frost-soaked grass.

Nobody dares break the silence - not before the bells toll and certainly not at night. You all knew you weren't the only inhuman things out after dark and you were on the... safer end of the spectrum. At least, as safe as an immortal soul-consuming being can get.

As the church came into view the ir turned colder and a crisp stillness settled into it. The bells would toll soon and you were all moving too slow to be within a safe range of them. Too close and you risked being drawn into the church never to see the outside again, doomed to wander the endless catacombs forever and too far away risked your eardrums being pierced by the silence.

When the first one began to sprint you all followed suit, trying to ignore the way the frost tore into your bare legs and the wind snarled around you like a pack of wild dogs. You made it to the safe range seconds before the first toll, the ones behind you weren't so lucky.

Thankfully the bells drowned out the sound of their screaming but it didn't stop you from staring at their writhing forms, wanting desperately to look away and being utterly incapable of doing so. It was your warning - do better and run faster next time.

And as the revelry began all you could think of was that there was always a next time.

And next time your luck might run out.

Day 1,888

Electricity scorched through him long after he'd died, jerking his body about as if he were dancing. We couldn't move him until the power was shut off and since the lower corridors of the building were now infested with the same creatures that had caused his death to begin with, going down there wasn't an option.

Rather, it wasn't an option you could walk back out of.

There were people like him all over the city, strung up, swaying and slowly burning as volt after volt seared through them and the grieving loved ones who'd tried to help and gotten themselves entangled instead. It was all part of the creature's design, or so we thought...

Day 1,887

There were as many boats sunk in the desert as there were in all the seven seas combined. Neither rain nor rust touch their remains, though the wrecks have long since been worn smooth from centuries of harsh sandstorms and wandering dunes.

It's hard to say how or why the ships are there or who there crews once were. All that's left is wood and bones and the lingering feeling that nobody had left. Sure the bones could be some other animal or inhuman being and sure it could all be an elaborate prank or art installation but it still wouldn't explain all the words scratched into the lower decks.

It starts off as full sentences, detailed registers of the entire crew and their cargo and the lists gradually shorten s they lose more and more and the neatly scratched writing becomes hastily hacked away scrawls begging for water and death.

The human mind wasn't meant to be trapped in any kind of vastness, be it sea or sand or space. There's just something about a great nothing that turns the mind tricky and uproots all common sense, replacing it with delusion and desperation.

On particularly restless days you can see the crew in the corners of your eyes, peering up from the lower decks. Their footsteps follow you through the sand as they all desperately try to keep up with you, to follow you til the desert ends and the sea begins and they can sail home at long last.

Day 1,886

The police may have lost the trail but I know he's already dead. His ghost keeps floating outside my windows at night, thick rope around his waist, arms reaching for the surface as little bubbles of air slip past his blue-tinged lips. He decomposes more and more every time I see him, bloating and distorting and I know I'm running out of time to find his body and give him a proper burial.

He's trying to tell me where he is and I've narrowed it down to either the stagnant pond at the far side of The Somering Woods or he's in a tidal pool deep in one of the caves by Lilymer Lake. When I touch the glass I feel the stale water all around me and I smell freshly cut trees beneath the foul odour of the rotting body I'm experiencing.

There are three wood processing sites in the immediate area and two of them are close to rarely visited bodies of water. I've tried asking him which one he's in but all I hear when he tries to speak is air leaving his lungs and the ragged wet coughs as water fills them back up.

Dy 1,885

When we were kids my brother used to tell me that our aunt's dining room table was so thick because it had a secret compartment on top and it was full of monsters inside. Our aunt overheard this once and told us we were right. Mum told her not to fill our heads with made-up nonsense but we all knew that Aunt Ruth never told us anything that wasn't true.

She'd been right when she said the mayor was stealing from the town. She'd been right when she said the missing man from the retirement home down the road would be found out in the woods. She'd been right when she said he'd be found half-eaten and that it hadn't been done by an animal.

So when she told us her table was full of monsters my brother and I agreed to sneak down and open it up. We came prepared - my brother took Aunt Ruth's 'secret gun' from under the floorboards in the bathroom and we figured she wouldn't care if we shot a monster in self defence.

Shame we weren't prepared enough to deal with what she'd been hiding in her table - what she and our mum had been hiding since they were both our age. I think they know that we looked, I mean we panicked and left the gun in there with... everything else, but they've never said anything about it.

I just want to know why they'd been keeping those severed heads preserved in resin rather than disposing of the evidence entirely. From what we've uncovered since that night all those years ago, every head we've identified was someone accused of something awful and had disappeared when it looked like they'd end up walking free.

Now the only question is whether we stop them or whether we help them.

Day 1,884

Nanna once told me to never get the train at night, she said that everything after dark is for the dead and damned but whatever just got onto the train was something else entirely. We weren't even at an actual top, we'd just stopped in the middle of a bridge right by a scrapyard and the doors opened up.

It didn't step onto the train, it sort of flowed or oozed on like a slug made of fresh tarmac. There wasn't a face to it but I still felt like I was being watched as it attempted to sit across a row of seats further down from me. It struggled at first and eventually gave up and just squatted in place with one dripping limb clutching onto the upper rail.

With a brief glance around I saw others like it heading into the other carriages and I wondered how the other people were faring, if there were any others at all. I still felt like I was being watched by it so I did what Nanna did best and tried to sound as calm as possible.

Lovely night for it.

I was so tense I swear I heard my teeth creaking as I clenched my jaw and prepared for the worst. All I got was a slight inclination from the headish area of the thing and suddenly the air felt ten times lighter. Seems like we were both a bit nervous.

Soon enough the doors shut and I was trapped with an barely comprehensible being.

Could have been worse though.

Could have been a drunk.

Day 1,883

The ghast was translucent and dressed like a Dickensian understudy which was common for the area. One too many factories and one too many cold winters meant that whole families went under and now roamed about trying to feel mortal again.

This one in particular was called Old Morris and had a thing for waiting right behind you and slightly to the left. He kept his post around what was once his favourite watering hole and had since become an upmarket cocktail bar.

The regulars knew him well enough to have a spare shot on hand to keep him occupied but newcomers and visitors alike left shrieking at his appearance and persistent presence. It wasnt that he was one of the worst looking, far from it, he was too human to bear.

It was easier to accept the ghasts as a bunch of mindless corpses than to consider the human actions ths t had killed them in the first place. Nobody wants to look at actual dead children, they'd rather watch little bones dance like fae-magicked toys.