Day 2,214

We call them Herne's Children - weird antlery people that follow you around the forests if they think you're a hunter. Calling them people is a tad generous when some of the better known Children are mentioned in old newspapers and diaries dating back about seven hundred years. That mixed with their deerlike faces, joints, hoof-hand things and antler-like jagged ridges all along their spines are a definite giveaway that whatever they are is people-adjacent at best.

If you're lucky enough you'll only hear branches breaking in the distance and maybe catch a glimpse of a big deer out the corner of your eyes. Happens often enough that we just tell visitors that there's a few herds of deer in the woods and that keeps them happily ignorant.

The unlucky ones get followed. Closely. As in you hear heavy breathing and see one of Herne's Children crouched down about five feet away from you and no matter how far or fast you run they always seem to be within eyesight until you break away from the trees and back out into the carpark. Even then, you'd still see them all lined up and waiting just within the treeshade.

They don't seem to be killing as many people as the old sources say they once did. Somewhere along the years, alleged monthly sacrifices became twice yearly "deer accidents" which all involve illegal hunting. I suppose calling them accidents instead of Herne's revenge means they'll keep coming back with their guns and traps and the killings will continue.

Just remember, they can't leave the woods but you can so you'd better hope you can outrun them.

Day 2,213

Liminal creatures, we call them. Half-formed and desperate to be whole but unable to be anything more than, well...less. Nobody knows what they used to be, what made them want to change and when it all began but the shadows and formerly inhabited areas of society are teeming with them.

They try to live as normally as possible, as normally as their full-formed counterparts do. Have you ever seen a parrot try to fly with wings that look like they're made of pure bone and all the gristley parts of cheap meat? It sounds as unpleasant as it looks but that hardly stops them from trying and sending little shards of wing-meat in every damned direction.

The one that got me the most knows how much my heart aches at the sight of it and it won't leave me alone. Whatever it was must have been something lonely, something that aw or heard about 'man's best friend' and decided that being that was better than anything it had once been.

It's almost a puppy. It's almost cute if you look past the way it writhes beneath the lightly-rotting skin it stole. There's something in those pitch black eyes that almost makes me want to open my heart and home to the poor little thing... almost.

The thing about these liminal creatures is how quickly their goals can shift.

One day a parrot, the next day a dog.

The next day a man.

Day 2,212

Nobody tells you how attached you can grow to a parasite, how much you rely on its unwanted company, until it's utterly and irrevocably gone and you're left feeling more alone than ever before. You mourn something that only used you for nutrients and transportation to the next host after it had bled you dry but I know it cared.

It cared because it hadn't killed me by the time everyone said it should. I was told by several doctors, a dozen nurses and every bloody website that knew about its existence that I should expect to be dead in about four months. I was still alive and kicking at the two year mark.

Of course by then I'd dropped all contact with the rest of the world, I didn't want their pity or probing questions - I didn't want anything that might harm me or the parasite I was sustaining. It's still weird to think of it as a parasite when it gave back just a much as it took.

Sure there were blackouts and regular nosebleeds and my hair fell out but that all seemed so superficial when I realised that it was speaking to me. I'd always heard people talking about a little voice in the back of their minds but this voice wasn't mind and when it realised I could hear it, the first proper thing it said to me, was don't worry, we'll be fine if you listen to me.

And I did.

I did everything it told me to from eating certain foods to keeping our apartment at a certain temperature to bathing for hours and hours on end and I thought we'd be fine. I thought we could just live like this forever and generally mellow our way through life.

All I wanted was to grab a coffee, it never liked the stuff but I'd been craving a latte for months so I ignored it yelling, ignored the way its body writhed against the back of my kidneys and tried to enjoy my little treat. When it went quiet and still I thought it was sulking.

It never spoke to me again and my lower back began to ache not too long after. Softly at first but then the skin started to feel like it was on fire while the rest of my back felt numb. When I woke up sitting my own blood and vomit I broke my promise to avoid doctors and checked myself into the hospital, hoping it was just the flu or something.

They took one look at my back and rushed me to the operating theatre so fast I could barely process what they were saying. Necrosis, organ failure, nerve decay - and worst of all, they removed it. Said it was more developed than any other creature they'd seen and something had thrown it into cardiac arrest.

I thought I killed the closest friend I ever had until I heard a dozen quiet voices and realised it had laid eggs.

Day 2,211

It was easy enough to mistake it for a shadow, that greyish outline on the ground, only it wasn't attached to anyone. It reminded me of Peter Pan - the boy who lost his shadow and had to go chasing after it but for the fact that this shadow was walking around so casually I couldn't help but think its person was long gone.

I don't know why I decided to follow it but I felt like I had to know where it was going so I stayed a few paces behind it and made sure that my own shadow made me out to be as uninterested and ignorant as possible. Somewhere along the line, it figured me out and began to slow down until it was walking right next to me, our shadows almost touching.

Of all the mistakes I've made in my life, looking down at this unattached shadow was probably the worst. It looked larger to me, not in terms of scale but in terms of depth as though I was standing above a three dimensional person and not an absence of light.

While I was caught up in my wonderings it seemed to move upwards, closer toward me as if it was stepping out of the pavement and before I knew it there was a face where only an outline should be. It opened its eyes and I suddenly felt like something had scoured my very soul, dragging pieces out and leaving me gasping for air.

When the world stopped spinning, it began to sink back down and as it opened its eyes one final time I saw that they were mine. I don't know what else it took, I'm still finding out how many memories I've lost and people I've forgotten and who even knows what it's doing with all the things it took.

I just keep my eyes front and centre and hope it doesn't come back for the rest of me.

Day 2,210

 I recently drove past a fast food joint I used to go to as a kid, the ones that had those big plastic playgrounds surrounded by a cage of colourful mesh. It brought back a lot of memories, mostly good but overshadowed by the last time I was there. The last time I saw my best friend.

There's always something a little off in those playgrounds, always the faint smell of piss mixed with industrial strength bleach and you never knew which was making your eyes water but either way you were determined to climb about until a parent dragged you back to eat.

We were there for his seventh birthday along with a few others from our class and as soon as we crawled through that first opening and into the main cube - something felt off. The ground had always been a little damp in places and there as the bolts keeping the windows on were rusted to hell and back but that time there was a thin layer of dark water on the floor and the air didn't smell right.

Thinking back on it I know it was blood and I know why there were no other kids there despite all the parent yelling for them to come out and eat. I know why the staff refused to send anybody in there until my best friend died - until it was finally full and couldn't eat the rest of us.

The papers said a serial killer had hidden in one of the upper rooms overnight and went on a spree as soon as the place was busy enough to cause a delay in anyone noticing. They're all damned liars who didn't see a thing - they didn't see how inhuman it was or how you could see all those kids trying to climb back out whenever it opened its mouth to speak.

Maybe that's why the adults all thought there was a person in there - because it gave them a name and there was a human in the area with that name who was arrested a couple of days later. While his trial was going on someone "accidentally" drove a car into the playground and it had to be demolished for health and safety reasons.

I hope they used that as an opportunity to kill the monster and free those kids but I reckon it escaped. Since they've rebuilt the playground they made it a little wooden-slat-castle-shaped climbing frame with a proper roof and walls instead of plastic mesh.

There's no reports of children going missing from there but I can't say the same for the rest of the city.

Day 2,209

Nobody goes into the woods at night, not if we can help it. No amount of breathtakingly scenic views and cozy campsite spots can make up for the corpses we'll find in the morning. At least the electric fence puts most of them off their little illicit visits and keeps out cleanup to a minimum. Combine that with all the warning signs about bears and we don't even catch any trouble from it.

Ask any ranger and they'll swear blind that the bears in the area are super territorial this time of year, no matter what time of year it actually is and no matter that bears aren't really found in our region. Tourists either don't know or they're too scared to look into it. The ones that do know better often find the signs and realise there's something far worse than bears out there.

I don't think anybody's ever seen it and lived to tell the tale. I mean we've all seen the blurry snapshots they take in their final moments but for all we know there's only trees and dirt on those cracked screens. Even the clearest photos to date barely show part of an elbow, which was only enough for us to say 'Yep, that ain't human.' and call it a day.

All we know for sure is that they travel in packs, they're strictly nocturnal and they hate the sound of electricity. The fence works perfectly at keeping them inside and stopping them from wandering about the town like they used to but lord the mess they leave every morning is growing worse.

I don't know where they're getting all those deer carcasses from but they sure are creative with their displays. Whether its meant to intimidate us or attract others like them, I can't rightly say. I can, however, confirm that something is trying to chew through the fence and claw underneath it - trying to get in.

I say - let them.

Day 2,208

When we talk about urban legends we only tell the better-known tales that blur into popular countrywide figures or the ever-present fae and their kind. Out in the heart of the country, beside wide lakes and forests that swallow sounds and souls alike - there you find real legends.

They aren't all ancient and invulnerable godlike thing - some are soft and sad and meant to teach us rather than instil fears into us. Like the wasteland kelpie of Barrowisle who is said to have once been as ferocious and bloodthirsty as any proud keplie ever was. A true terror that lured countless souls deep down into the lake to feast on their flesh.

Then modernity came and its lake became the unofficial dumping ground for a nearby holiday park. On the rare occasions that is is seen, the poor beast is found choking on empty food wrappers, black sacks full to the brim weigh it down til its back seems about to break and its mane is so tangled up with wires its impossible to tell where the cables end and the hair begins.

Further up the country there's the faceless lambs of Duntfield who are born as normal little lambs until the storm winds come and those sweet little faces go flying away, leaving broken bodies that don't seem to realise that they're dead.

They say you can hear them screaming if the wind is just right. They also say that if you are by a window when this happens then you're bound to see those little faces pressed against the glass while their bleeding bodies run about close by.

Finally we come to the weeping tractor of Bishops Mabfleet which is by far the strangest of legends I've heard thus far. From what the locals have said it reacted almost like a horse - one day it was fine and the next day its wheel was turned a tad too far on uneven ground, it overbalanced and broke an axle.

Now normally this would be a simple enough fix but it wasn't a simple tractor. It didn't slow to a stop, engine purring away totally unaffected, it howled a deep, mechanical roar that set everyone's hair on end. Its engine stuttered and hiccuped like a child with a grazed knee and its headlights swivelled towards anything that moved.

In the end the farmer shot it until the engine died and sold it for scrap.

In the end the lambs did die, mothers still nudging their cooling bodies.

In the end they drained the lake and built several apartments that always feel damp.

Day 2,207

They float about five feet off the floor, eyes covered in the same stone-like substance that covered most of their exposed skin, backs covered in bulbous helium-filled sacks and vestigial limbs dragging along the floor. They use those to sense vibrations along the ground and hunt for their prey. As we found out the hard way, even when standing perfectly still the human body moves just enough for them to find us.

Lying down and holding your breath works of they're far enough away. Hiding by a waterfall or source of intense natural movement works best - when a 5.5 scale earthquake struck us last month we could run right in front of them and they didn't even notice!

For the most part we deal with them by setting up movement traps that mimic rivers and waterfall, creating safe pathways where we're less likely to be attacked. It's not foolproof, not by a long shot, but until we find a way to poison them or pierce their thick skin we can't do too much else.

Day 2,206

The walls of the great greenhouse are cloudier than an old man's cataracts, the life inside smothered by a dense fog of condensation that seems to drift throughout the rooms in one bulbous wave. It's said that it was designed to act as a prison for some kind of bioweapon but all we've managed to glimpse is plants and people.

They walk like they're drowning and with the air so full of water I suppose they might just be. We see the odd couple who aren't quite as people-shaped as you'd expect a person to be. I may not be an expert but fungal-looking protrusions and worryingly vine-like arms aren't in a general anatomy book.

Maybe somewhere along the way the line between person and plant began to blur. Maybe the bioweapon is some kind of spore and the poor people who built the great greenhouse had to seal themselves inside after becoming infected. Maybe they're the next evolutionary step.

Either way, the main doors have started to rattle and rumour has it that one of the side doors has been broken down from the inside. It's only a matter of time before we end up like them or worse, depending on what this alleged bioweapon actually is.

Day 2,205

 We called it a godcorpse - horrible great rotting thing that washed ashore, strewn over some fifty miles, fouling the air for half the damned country and still most of it was somehow beneath the water. What little of it we were able to see looked painfully human, looked almost like somebody we knew.

All of us felt a connection to the godcorpse, like we'd grown up with it in the back of our minds all our lives. Everyone reacted differently to it - some wept while others were angry while others felt a joy unlike anything they'd ever experienced before and none of us could explain why.

I was one of the weepers, absolutely bawled my eyes out for hour but I couldn't tell you who or what for - not even if you held a gun to my head. Something about the godcorpse broke my heart and I became so irrationally angry at the ones who felt rapturous towards it.

None of us said it but we were all relieved to wake up and find it gone, leaving nothing but the lingering stench of decay and an impossibly deep imprint on the coastline. No amount of scouring the oceans around us have led to finding it again, though how something of that size could just vanish is beyond me.

I'm certain that it was dead.

I hope it was dead.

Day 2,204

 She saw the new world through a small crack in the bathroom grout, not enough for the matrons to notice, but enough for her to catch glimpses of a whole other reality every time she went to shower and the matrons made them shower after every single shift in the tunnels, in the kitchen - anywhere that wasn't the common room. They learned to stop asking why after the matrons shot the first to refuse.

Every night before bed they read through the mantra, repeating each verse with the same reverence as the matrons even if they felt nothing for it. These words weren't there for them, they were there for all those who would come after them, after their lives had ended and there were no more workers or matrons left to bury everything that needed to be buried.

It was not a place of honour. No highly esteemed deed was being commemorated and nothing of value left behind. The danger was down in the tunnels, that much they knew, but the matrons always said that the less aware they all were the safer they would feel. The greater their ignorance, the likelier they would be to go back to work every day until the lumps or losses killed them.

She was one of the many with losses - hair and teeth so far, but she knew it was all a part of their life cycle. She suspected her lumps were in her lungs or stomach or both and she was always so very tired. Still, every glimpse she took outside, every frantic worker in their smart white suits made her feel less alone.

Although she knew she should report the breach in the bathroom, she wanted to be selfish just a little bit longer, unaware of how much radiation was leaking through such a tiny gap and unaware of how many others were suffering as a result.

All she knew was that the world outside was vast and busy and so much more alive than their facility.

Day 2,203

It's alway cold when the herd walk by, not that you can really notice them walking... not unless they're in direct sunlight and even then only if you happen to glance down at the pavement from the right angle and see their shadows moving across the concrete. Hard to see but the sharp drop in temperature is felt by everyone when they pass by.

We don't know what happened to the herd to keep them stuck fast to their route like this. We've only come to terms with their existence fairly recently - about forty five years, give or take a few. The whole area's well known farming grounds and their route takes them through streets that used to be grazing pastures so we've solved that side of it.

Still, we don't know what traumatic event could possibly be keeping them here. We only ever see their shadows, their spirits, never the shepherds. For all we know there's one with them, unseen to our eyes just like the bodies of the herd. Maybe humans can't see human ghost at all, just animal ones.

Their bodies show up on thermal scans - deep purplish blues against the oranges and reds of a summer's afternoon. They might have frozen to death one winter, we reckoned, midway between their home and the pastures and maybe they don't even realise it.

After all, what is a ghost but a series of habits that don't know when to stop?

Day 2,202

 Out of all the graffitti decorating the underpass, the one piece that stood out the most were a set of bright green eyes right at the farthest end where the steps leading back to the surface sat just out of sight. You could have sworn you saw those same painted eyes dotted all around the city... you could have sworn they weren't looking at you a second ago.

You stared the eyes right in their pupil, trying to hold off the urge to blink, just to see if they would move again or if you'd imagined them being in a different position to begin with. A fly hurtled towards you, breaking your concentration and causing you to flail about briefly as you tried to swat it away.

When you turned back the eyes were shut.

You didn't stop yourself from blinking again, standing utterly still as the painted eyes blinked with you. It took you a good couple of minutes to realise that there were several sets of identical eyes along the walls near you now, with more appearing every time you opened your eyes again.

Before long you couldn't see anything other than those eyes, a sea of green that opened and closed without you having to blink at all. A sound like bird's wings began to fill the air as the eyes all moved faster and faster and closer and closer until all you could saw was a singular set of green eyes staring back at you from your own face.

Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. The underpass was filled with the usual assorted scrawls and tags and you were all alone. There were no eyes on the walls anymore, nor anywhere you looked on your way back home. The world felt a little emptier somehow.

Day 2,201

There are three voices, two children both claiming to be your daughter and one bullet left to fix all of this.

One child is clinging to your waist, asking you who is under the tarp-covered pool and why is daddy hiding in the shed. She doesn't seem to remember him leaving for work, that or she's the imposter and those little hands pressing against the plastic sheet are your real daughter's as she tries to pry it free.

You could try and ask them both something only your child would know but you have no way of knowing how there came to be two of them in the first place. The voice in the shed guesses your internal dilemma and tries to get you to shoot the child in the pool.

That solidifies it for you - there's no way your husband could be in the shed so whatever it is must be trying to protect the thing that is also like itself so you push the child away from you and release your single bullet. It dies just like a real child would and you hurt like you've just killed your actual child.

Then you hear laughter coming from the shed and pool - the same laugh echoing from two places.

Day 2,200

Tommy's been silent for the past three days but that's okay, you talk enough for two now. He doesn't eat anymore either but you've been eating for two for five months already, what's a few more now? It should be kicking already but the baby is as quiet as its father, you hope aloud that everything is alright and hope in your mind that you aren't bringing another life into the shitstorm you can barely survive in.

Tommy hasn't taken a breath since you both hid under that bridge in June, where you both hid beneath the water and tried to not seem alive until the dangers passed you by. You try not to think about it too much and assume that as he still has a pulse (or whatever he has pulsing in his chest) that he's alive and well... as well as anyone can be at least.

Tommy doesn't seem to blink anymore, just stares out at the world with his weird watery eyes that haven't looked quite the same since June. You wonder if he ever came back out of the water or if you've been travelling with a monster all this time - a kind monster, one that always offers you the larger share of food, the thicker blanket, the safer shelter - but a monster nonetheless.

You wonder if being a monster even matters anymore.

You wonder if that's what you're bringing into the world.

You wonder and wonder and wonder until Tommy holds your hand and smiles.

You smile back and move on,surviving another day.

Day 2,199

 He should have been calmly strolling through the empty storeroom of the derelict shell once known as The Hanged Banker Pub and Inn. He should have been quite happily snapping shot after shot of the broken caskets and decaying bar stools. He should be hearing his mate Kieron just behind him, taking a slower and more methodical approach to his photography.

It should have been a quiet little venture that would inevitably end in a functional pub a few miles away.

Instead there was silence that Kieron's humming should be filling, there were fresh stains on the floor that barely resembled wine and sure as hell didn't smell like it. There were footsteps directly above him as someone matched his every pace on an upper floor that he knew had caved in last week.

The entry hatch creaked, Kieron's voice trembled out a soft "Sorry mate" as it slammed shut and locked. The footsteps now came from in front of him, moving with the deliberate slowness of something that wants you to know how close it is.

The stains on the floor became worse.

Day 2,198

As you spoke to her you began to realise she already knew she was dead. That was a relief - usually when you meet a haint they plain refuse to admit they are anything other than as alive as you are, no matter which limbs they trail behind them or even if they're carrying their own head like a baby. Absolute pains to deal with, they are.

This one was almost refreshing. A haint who knew she was dead, who admitted that yes, she was carrying her innards in a leaking paper shopping bag and thankfully had no intentions of staying any longer than she absolutely had do. So all you had to do was help her find her last living relation and get them to place some flowers on her grave so she didn't feel so forgotten.

Easier said than done, even in such a tiny town but at the end of it some flowers were placed and she kept her word. As quickly as you'd first spotted her weaving her way through oncoming traffic, she left. It was like she just chose to not exist and if any other haint was so easy to deal with you'd damned well be out of a job.

With her gone to rest you knew you'd soon have to move onto the next town and the next haint but for now, you were a simple tourist in a quaint little mountainside town. You were normal, the town was normal and if there just so happened to be a group of mutilated children running towards you begging for help then you'd just have to stay another day or two.

The devil sure loves to make work for idle thumbs.

Day 2,197

We've explored less than twenty percent of our oceans so seeing the inky darkness of the ocean floor blink at me shouldn't have been so surprising. Watching the seabed rise up and tilt its now-uncovered head like a dog was something we should have not necessarily expected but accepted as a new discovery.

Granted, we should have been more cautious... really we should have pushed the boat to go as fast as possible in any other direction but instead we just sat there and waited to see what it would do next as waterfall cascaded from jagged scales as it kept rising and rising and rising.

I didn't even want to consider what something so colossal ate, I just hoped it wouldn't be us and I hoped in vain. Claws the size of a bus gently picked up the first mate by the back of his shirt and before we had even the remotest chance to process what was going on it just popped him into its mouth and began to chew.

I suppose I should have been grateful that he tasted so foul as to make the monster sink back down again, vomiting up his remains as it went. There wasn't enough of him left to fill a bucket let alone a casket. In the end we decided it was better to leave him to the sea and pray it didn't try to follow us back ashore.

Day 2,196

 They hadn't always been trapped in the caves below Bishops Blickmore, they used to leave every autumn to swarm the country until they were sealed in for good. Unfortunately time and a few purposeful fires erased all mentions of the caves, the creatures they contained and the destruction they'd cause if they were ever set loose again.

If the people of that time had known that all it would take to set them free again was several decades of heavy traffic and a mild earthquake then they might have done more than just collapse the entrance and heave a few larger boulders in front for good measure.

The first ones to discover the newly opened cave were devoured in an instant, picked clean to the bones which were brought into the nests so the larvae could suck out the marrow. They would never be found among the hundreds of others that decorated the caverns by the time the main host was destroyed.

Day 2,195

Its body shudders and twitches in the downpour, contrasted against the utter stillness of all the bodies piled up at its feet. Your mother's words come back to you from the last time you saw her alive, her voice trembling with barely concealed fear as she whispered to you "Keep dry."

She said that just before she ran out of the tent you were huddled in, hoping to catch up to your father before something else did. You never saw either of them again and never found their bodies among all the others. Even now you check the corpse piles when they're dry enough.

Some small, treacherous part of your mind wonders if the monsters in the rain are what people become if they survive the water long enough. Perhaps you've already seen your parents, twitching and staggering through the rain, bodies piling up at their feet while they search for their missing child.

Day 2,194

 The world holds its breath here, out by the docks, out by the empty fishing boats and desolate promenade. The world holds its breath and waits for the tide to surge and fall, surge and fall, surge and bring something onto the pebbled shore that no longer remembers what sunlight feels like against the softer ridges of its fins where fingers used to be before the sea took them.

The sea took more from it than it remembered having and left it perfectly adapted for its lifeless, lightless depths. Still, it knew it had lost and knew it was now somewhere so familiar every fibre of it being ached for a home that hadn't existed in centuries.

The shapes of the fishing boats leaning against wet sand and the silhouettes of sleeping houses struck a chord it didn't know it still had and for the first time in a very long time it began to weep. It was so caught up in nameless grief for times long since passed that it barely noticed the tide slowly ebbing away, stranding it.

The morning would come soon enough and the locals would wonder what strange tides brought such an odd fish to them. Something as small as a newborn with strangely human eyes that stared up at the sky. A look on its face almost akin to awe, if one were so inclined as to personify an animal.

Day 2,193

 The sound of old nursery rhymes echo throughout the industrial estate, alerting the rest of the town that the sleepers were restless. Doors were locked and barricaded, windows were boarded up on both sides - it was almost enough to make them feel safe, almost enough for them to convince their own children that the nursery rhymes were meant for them so they could drift to sleep.

Then something stopped the music.

Then the sleepers turned from restless to curious.

Then they left their burrows beneath the industrial estate and began to wander the town.

Fifteen were filmed leaving and only ten returned. Where the others are, it's hard to say. They stopped leaving a trail of broken hands with missing fingers about twenty miles past the town's outskirts, right where the last houses meet dense woodlands.

All we can say for certain is that the nursery rhymes have stopped working for the ones who returned, if the sharp increase in missing and murdered persons is of any correlation. We still call them the sleepers, still whisper the word like saying it any louder would wake them up and we still thoroughly imprison ourselves every night in the hope that we'll live to see the morning.

Day 2,192

 At first we didn't know how such a monster could be sustaining itself, trapped for so long so deeply beneath the town that its eyes were now shrivelled husks and its skin a translucent pus-white. It didn't seem to be aggressive from what we could tell, or maybe we were so small it couldn't really see us. We certainly felt like insects by comparison.

As we ducked under and stepped over the countless emaciated limbs that stuck out of it at odd angles,we began to hear something gurgling and snapping. We reckoned were coming closer to its mouth, closer to finding out what this creature was eating and thereby determine if it was a threat.

Sure enough, half an hour after passing by its eyes we found a corner of its mouth and several dozen pipes pushing food into it from some unknown chamber above the cave we were all inside. Fruit, vegetables, even whole pigs were falling down into the eagerly awaiting maw to feed what was now seeming less like a monster and more like a goldfish in a plastic bag that it was inches away from outgrowing.

Someone spotted a ladder leading up through the ceiling to the suspected chamber above and one-by-one we ascended, hoping to find answers. We certainly found something. The basement of one of the town shops and several panicked locals shoving yet another dead pig into a pipe, to be precise.

They used the old dialect to describe the behemoth, called it the heart of the town and said that if it died then the whole valley would collapse with it. Possibly due to the fact that its body was propping up a gaping chasm more then superstition.

Now we are left with our report and final choice - who do we kill and who will it save?

Day 2,191

Something brushes against your legs and chirps. Absentmindedly you reach down to pet it before realising where you are and remembering that you brought a canary on board, not a cat. The captain is allergic to cats... he was allergic to cats. You supposed that allergies aren't really relevant when the person in question is dead and the thing that might have killed them is gently clawing at your shin.

A quick glance down confirms that it is very much Not A Cat and you are now very much Not As Alone As You Should Have Been, Given That You Are Currently The Only Surviving Crew Member. Even though the life support system was doing its best to process the air like you were doing your best to process what you were seeing - the air still smelled like rotting meat and a two foot tall humanoid was staring right back at you.

It might have been cute if its lower jaw hadn't started to peel away from the rest of its face, curling down to reveal a tooth-lined gullet with scraps of flesh and fabric caught up in fishing-wire looking spikes that filled all the spaces between its teeth.

When panic stops and proper fear sets in, people react in all sorts of unusual and unpredictable ways. Some people faint, others laugh hysterically and you - you started to sing. You didn't know what you were singing, too busy focusing on the way the scraps of fabric and flesh twitched in its throat but at least it wasn't attacking you just yet.

If anything its mouth started to close and it began to tilt its head like a curious puppy. Again, if it wasn't for all the teeth it might have been cute. Without quite realising it you started walking backwards, heading cautiously for the escape pods and hoping that it would stop clinging to your shin long enough for you to get yourself back to Earth.

Day 2,190

 The dirt stood up, a hole opening where a mouth would be on a person and a sound like the exhale a the end of every sentence you'd ever said drifted out in a deliberately gentle motion. The ground all around you didn't seem to move like the figure was, didn't seem like it would stand up and try to speak which was somewhat comforting.

The figure attempted to walk towards you but as soon a it tried to lift one leg it all collapsed and the dirt began to settle over freshly exposed bones. You noticed the pink braces on its upper and lower jaws, remembering photos of a missing girl and hesitatingly putting a name to the body as the dirt began to rise up around it once more.

Dy 2,189

 They wander the hospital halls searching for stray patients. Whether the people they find are in need of medical care is another matter entirely, they simply collect whoever looks to be the most alone and lead them away to Ward 35 where they will re-emerge in the same grey scrubs that resemble a nun's habit more than surgical attire.

When asked what happened they simply say that they were in need of treatment and now they are feeling much better. The city knows better than to investigate any further than this. The city knows that the core members of Ward 35 are about a human as maggots and half as empathetic.

Maybe when they realise just how many members of staff the ward has accumulated, the city will take action and close it down for good instead of their feeble month long closures for "renovation and modernisation". The staff undo these changes as soon as they set foot back in their territory, reverting the ward back to its usual retrofuturistic, brutalist aesthetic.

When Ward 35 is closed, it does seem to make the staff vanish for a while. It's like they can only exist when they have open access to their rooms, even the ones who have been treated as opposed to the beings who founded it, or should I say the ones who merged the ward to the rest of the hospital.

Day 2,188

We found her in the upper ballroom about three hours after we practically ransacked the entire theatre looking for her and the thing that had dragged her away. We only caught a glimpse of barbed claws snagging the back of her shirt but it looked bloody enormous and honestly I just wanted to leg it back to the van and call it quits.

The others persuaded me to stay, said that Cassie would have done the same for us and we outnumbered it anyway. I didn't feel reassured until we all had something we could weaponise - I found a broken fire extinguisher, empty but weighty enough to break bones I reckoned.

I know we checked the upper ballroom fairly early on, following the trail of scratches it left on the ceiling as it skittered across with Cassie in tow. I know it was empty and that all the chairs were shoved to one side like the whole room had been tilted. I know we heard her yelling from one of the floors below us a few seconds before we found her.

Day 2,187

 We buried them deep enough that our water supply became contaminated within minutes, deep enough to buy ourselves time to think of a long-lasting solution, deep enough that they might know the peace their existence denies us. We could have buried them at the very heart of the world and it still wouldn't be deep enough to stop them clawing towards the sky.

They used to be our children, once upon a time. I never liked that phrase "once upon a time". It was too vague, too flimsy and now it's too painful. None of us want to think about the lost generation, none of us want it to happen again but every healthy birth is another mmonster we'll have to bury before they're strong enough to kill us all.

Even when you take people out of the equation and combine anonymous donors who have never had children before, the offspring develop as a perfectly normal human foetus for about four months. Then some little switch in the DNA gets flicked and it goes downhill from there.

I used to be naive enough to think that we could find that little switch and just flick it back or remove it entirely but it seem we've always had it. It seems that the switch is so heavily ingrained within our DNA that removing it sends the rest of the body into a state of rapid decay and leads to a brutal death in a matter of minutes.

So for now we're trying to remove the switch in utero. Trying and failing and trying again while the ground outside tremble with all the little ones we've born and buried and buried again because they just won't stop clawing at the earth to claw at our skin and kill their makers.

Day 2,186

 You can tell who's been bitten by the glassy, dry texture of their eyes now that they no longer need to blink. That and the bruising around their jaw where it dislocated around the time they died as the creature becomes developed enough to chew through their oesophagus and peer through their mouth.

By the time they're fully grown, their meat-suit is usually too decayed to move. That's when they are most likely to attack, bite and infect a new human. We'd been taking photos of the bitten ones, timing them to see how long it takes before they're within the biting period in the hopes that, with a timeframe, we could plan our supply trips better and keep ourselves safe.

We didn't take into account that they might be able to bite before the meat-suit is spoiled (honestly it's less painful to think of them as just moving meat instead of remembering their names and what they meant to us). The bitten outnumber us a couple of hundred to one but we're learning how to blend in now.

Still, at this moment we don't even know when they become able to bite - is it as soon as they kill their host or is it when they're able to extend past the host's own teeth or is it something that they are capable of right from the moment they're able to move?

With any luck we'll find out before we join them.