Day 2,112

When I was a kid my parents used to freak out whenever the dog barked after dark. I always thought they didn't want to get into trouble with the neighbours by causing a ruckus at odd hours but when I mentioned it to them last week they looked shocked.

They called me daft and said that of all people I should remember what had gone on the clearest. I was the one who lost all my friends to the shapeless death that hid in the night sky. I was the one who saw them all die and had to live with that guilt.

Funny thing is I don't really remember it like that at all.

I know the night they mean, where we were at a school sleepover for our entire year group. Where I woke up in an empty room full of writhing sleeping bags and several police officers whispering and frantically gesturing at me from the fire escape doors.

I remember tiptoeing around everyone and I remember them making weird crunchy noises like they were all eating ice cubes or popping candy. I remember that there was a weird smell in the air, the same smell you get in the butcher's shop but ten times stronger.

Five hours after I'd crept outside, been wrapped up in a thick blanket and questioned, I was let go and my parents were given the card for a child psychiatrist. I never understood why they wanted me to go - I hadn't seen anything and at that point I was too young to understand where everyone had gone.

Or rather, that they were being eaten alive and I'd only survived by being so heavily asleep that the shapeless death thought I was already dead. It liked them alive enough to scream. Mum always said I slept like a corpse but she never said it again after that day.

We moved out of the area soon after, not wanting to stay where so many grieving parents think I should have died instead of their own child. Not that I heard about this until I went back there years later and faced absolute hatred from so many strangers whose survivor's guilt far outweighed my own.

The shapeless death is still around there, still picking people off whenever it fancies but it's never taken so many as it did that night. I guess it's had its main meal and is just snacking now. Cruel as it sounds to say that, crueller still for them blaming all those deaths on me and not the monster that killed themto begin with.