Day 2,246

It is autumn and the land is dying.

It does not go gently.

The woods howl and scream, begging for one more day, one more sip of sunlight or blood - whichever will stave off winter's grip best. We do not leave the house when they scream, we bolt the doors and shutter the windows. We pray our food will last us and know that if one of us dies the rest will stand a better chance at surviving.

Sometimes the woods will uproot and head into town to search for the warmth of flesh and blood beings. To them we are immortals and something in our bodies must hold the key to breaking winter's death sleep. They do not understand how we are different, only knowing that we are and that somehow we still live.

They have empathy enough to cry out their sincere apologies when they disembowel us and drench their roots with our blood but not enough empathy to look for a better way out. Sooner or later they will realise this is hopeless - they must realise this before the whole town dies to them and their carnage spreads to the unknowing ones.

By the time of the first snows, the woods have ether retreated or departed in the town itself. Though they may be dead for the winter, the danger is still there and their roots still thirst for our warmth. We do not come close to them until the spring thaw, when we lead them back to the rest of the woods where they feast on sunlight and soil.

They feast and we begin the toil or replenishing our stores for the coming winter.

Day 2,245

We try not to pay attention to any of the faces staring out the windows when we're walking to the shops after school. Last one of us to do that ended up strung from the telephone wires the next morning and her family moved out of town the very next day. They didn't even bother to arrange a funeral, they just changed all their details and vanished before they were made to join her up there.

Running away doesn't stop them, doesn't change anything. Any child here could tell you as much but she and her family only moved in a few months beforehand and none of them ever went near the pub so they weren't told about all the local customs.

We did what we could in school, tried to distract her from looking at the windows, tried to tell her in little ways because people don't understand unless they're from here. They either don't believe us or they look out of spite but either way they end up dead before they've even been here a year.

And the worst of it is how normal the faces look. People have taken photos of them, drawn them or described them and while they all wound up dead their work lives on and we survive knowing just a little bit more about the world looking back at us from our own homes.

Thanks to them we know that the faces we see in our windows are just parts of a larger thing all wearing humanity like a mask while they wave and bang on the glass to draw our eyes into their trap. What I still don't get is why they stay put for so long when they're clearly capable of leaving whenever they like.

Day 2,244

 The smoke was so thick here that the whole town felt like a bad dream but the mental haze left by carbon monoxide poisoning was what brought people here in the first place. If the town had a name before the sky started to burn, it was as long gone as the people who built it.

Now it was called Lethe - birthplace of lost memories and lost souls. It was named after one of the rivers of the Greek underworld, though I'd be hard pressed to think of somewhere in this godsforsaken planet that still had some kind of life to it that wasn't slowly suffocating or starving.

Maybe the underworld would be a kinder place. I mean, the bar's pretty low but anywhere is better than slumping over in an especially hazy corner with several other people and trying to wait out the burn in your lungs so you can stumble away feeling like your legs are made of cotton.

Day 2,243

 It keeps peering around the corner when it thinks I'm not looking. Sometimes I swear I hear it laugh, well, as close to laughter as a corpse can manage with several months of decay and a slit throat. This is why I remove the heads entirely - I'd rather face a body trying to find you by feeling the ground for the vibrations of your movements than outsmart one.

The last settlement I was in used to throw all the heads into a well and make bets as to which ones would figure out how to climb back up again. Of course the ones that got within arm's reach were scooped up in anet and tossed into a woodchipper that flung their biohazardous remains over the wall and usually onto their fumbling bodies.

I still don't know how they manage to find their heads so quickly. It's like they have some kind of homing instinct but for body parts instead of places. Maybe their bodies can still see through their eyes? I don't know but guessing passes the time and distracts me from the fact that I'm cornered in a ship I swear I checked a million times before sailing.

This is what happens when you feel safe - you make mistakes like leaving your gun in a bedroom and heading to an exitless hallway to take a smoke with one of the portholes open so you don't make the whole deck reek even though you are/were the only one around so it's not like it really mattered and now it's not bothering to duck back when I look at it.

We're just staring at each other.

Day 2,242

Its gums flashed and pulsed with in sickeningly neon rainbow as it spread its mouth into a mockery of a smile meant to placate and amuse the children left in its care. Judging by all the tiny bones crammed into broken cradles, its programming had malfunctioned like all the others.

The upper echelons of humanity once decided that raising children was something best done by machines who would make no mistakes, would foster no weaknesses and turn writhing screaming infants into productive adults. This soon led to the extinction of the upper ranks when a virus found its way into the nanny's mainframe.

Rumours spread that it was the poor, the jealous competitors, the childless and countless other scapegoats who did this. The final few moral tethers frayed and broke as the androids learnt to revel in mindless violence just like their blessed creators.

A-a-a is ffor a-a-a-a-apple.... 

They tried to give them nurturing feminine voices but someone had damaged its speech motors during the initial assault that left man and machine in a stalemate void of destruction. Everyone and everything tried to go back to whatever small semblance of their former lives they could scrape together but seeing bloodstained, broken and rusted androids in the same nurseries where they slaughtered their charges still stung.

B i-i-is for b-b-b-b-b-

It pointed to the closest cradle before reaching in and gently picking up a fractured skull that was dwarfed by its broken hand. Sparks flared as it closed its remaining fingers, arching across fragile bone and splintering it further. The android looked at the crumpling mess in its hands then back to the people who had sought it out that night.

They weren't made to feel pain so the sickening crunch of their metal bats didn't feel nearly as satisfying as they hoped it might. They struck again and again and again, bringing the android to its knees, to the floor and slowly to pieces.

All the while it kept trying to speak, kept trying to repeat the same things it used to teach their children or maybe trying to impart one final apology with the only words its damned creators thought to give it. Words that had taught and comforted hundreds of children right to their very end and now were its final plea.

B-b-b-b i-is f-f-for b-bab-

The neon rainbow came to an abrupt halt and it died with a smile its face.

Day 2,241

There's something living in the reservoir, something that had dug its way out from deep beneath the ground and submerged itself in the heart of our town's water supply. Whatever it was polluting the water with was slowly turning people to stone.

It wasn't pleasant to witness but they made beautiful corpses, all glistening crystalised ruby in place of rotting flesh, no sickly-sweet scent of decay and not a single maggot in sight. When photos got out of the shining corpses, a disturbing new trend began to take shape.

At first it was displayed as accidental, as a "poor, clumsy old me and my horrible, terrible, inevitable death but see how richly my open flesh glistens brighter than any jewel could ever hope to". It wasn't subtle to begin with and now I have the misfortune to see half the town walking about looking half mauled, arms torn right down to the diamond-white bone.

People are dying faster than ever before but at least we're keeping hydrated.

We've not seen or heard anything from whatever's set up residence in the reservoir but at this point I think the town would riot if anyone dared to mention getting rid of it. Perhaps that's another effect of the polluted water - it's in our heads making us love how it's killing us so that we protect it.

God it's working well.

Day 2,240

The barn looked like it had recently been burnt down, even in the dense fog it still seemed to have a lingering heat and the stench of burning meat hung around the scorched grass closeby where the animals tried and failed to run away.

The owners either hadn't finished or hadn't bothered disposing of the remains - there were about eighteen cows lying around, mostly dead but a few were still gasping and trying to cry out in pain. They must have broken free at some point but far too late for them to survive.

A normal person in a normal world would be horrified, would call for help or put the poor beasts out of their misery and fast. We simply stayed in the truck and waited for the telltale signs of movement in the alleged dead ones - we'd seen this kind of trap before.

Somewhere in all the chaos of the rising dead, the animals learnt that we feel pity for them more so than our own kind to the point where we will endanger ourselves to help them. They bait us into rescuing a puppy from its dead mother's side and as soon as she feels the warmth of our body her jaws snap around our jugular and her puppies feed on our blood.

When they realised we weren't falling for it, the whole herd began to stand up and approach. We sped off as quietly as possible but one heifer was unburnt enough to call out to others in the area and before long we were facing a herd of hundreds, all burning and broken and desperately hungry.

Shame whoever started the fires didn't survive long enough to finish them but we've got a full tank and a grill guard full of nails - we'll outdrive them like we always do. Someone makes the obligatory remark on how undead humans seem dumber than undead animals and what if we've always been dumber than animals.

We joke and say they're welcome to get out and have a chat with the cows if they want to.

Day 2,239

It was easy enough to mistake for leaves at first, the way its limbs bent at odd angles, the way it writhed and twisted with the wind, the way it slunk closer and further away every time she blinked. It hadn't been up there during the day, that much she was sure of. She'd would have spotted it in an instant, or so she like to think.

The reality was that she didn't quite know when it had climbed into the tree or why it decided that remaining perched outside her bedroom window suited it best but their eyes had been locked for a good half hour now. At least, she thought she was looking into its eyes - it was just outside of the light and seemed intent on staying there.

She knew she could simply lift her hand up and turn on her phone's torch to illuminate the rest of it, to see if it was the creature it appeared to be or an idiotic boy from her school filming her fear for minor fame. There was something about the way it moved towards her that made her doubt it was someone she knew from school, made her doubt it was even remotely human.

One simple movement would confirm this though. Just raising her hand and tapping the torch icon would show it as either human or not but she couldn't find it in herself to do this. There's comfort in ignorance, a bravery in uncertainty that meant she felt safer watching an outline dart back and forth with no real intent to fully enter or retreat.

She was certain that this would end before morning.

Day 2,238

It was a baby when we left it in the hedge maze and drove away. Guilt and fear made us beg the owner until he sold us the maze and far more than it was physically worth but the peace of knowing that it was locked away and occupied was priceless to us.

First thing we did was rent a drone to make sure it hadn't left - sure enough it was only a few feet from where we placed it, happily gnawing on the severed leg of whoever was unfortunate enough to find it. In the short weeks since we saw it last, it had grown a couple more arms and they appeared to be covered in tiny mouths.

Not good.

After finding it, our next step was to block all exits so we called a few pet shops and adopted as many rats as we could without arousing any suspicion. Released them into the maze to keep it busy and fed while we hired landscapers to place a full grown hedge that blocked the entrance. Builders came next to put a brick wall around the hedges just in case it ever strayed too close to the outskirts.

We felt safe for about eight years, by which time the former owner happily exchanged his nearby homestead for our place in the city so we could stay closer to our "pet project" as we called it when he was in earshot. Now we have one less person to worry about and a three mile drive to our maze.

Seems it learnt to talk while we were away finalising all the estate details. Soon as it heard our car approaching it began to howl and when it heard us step out of the car it called us mommy and daddy. I've never seen my wife so angry before but lord how she yelled and screamed at it.

I might have felt sorry for it but I remember our own child, the one whose skin it crawled into all those years ago, and I simply hold my wife's hand while she cries and rages at a monster who has the audacity to call us its parents while our child is still "missing".

It'll run out of rats sooner or later and then we'll be able to open us the maze again.

All the bloodstains and tiny bones will make for a great Halloween attraction.

I'm almost looking forward to it.

Day 2,237

 They roamed the carpark and warehouses of some company called Prion Logistics Ltd, draped in dozens of layers of dense fabric and seemingly walking on three sets of stilts each. None of the neighbouring companies had anything to say about the faceless figures or the faceless business they patrolled. Most reckoned it was some kind of PR stunt and left it at that.

A few weeks ago, footage emerged showing one of the figures lashing out with a stilt, snaring a stray cat in what appeared to be retractable claws, bringing it up to the presumed face area and forcing it down like a snake eating an egg. The video showed blood leaking as it bent down to cough up the bones a few moments later.

By the time enough people saw the video to warrant an investigation, there was nothing to be found aside from recently hired actors who were already complaining about their sore joints and lack of job description. The real walkers returned as soon as the company sent a vague apology for a lapse in judgement for their "Halloween-themed" content and the public lost interest.

We knew when the walkers came back though, the birds around the business district stopped singing and there were no strays to be found anywhere. They looked almost the same as the actors had, only they looked more organic, the stilts were more arm-like with faint veins and muscular twitches. The fabric moved with each breath they took.

The company shut down a few weeks later, the gates were left wide open and we haven't seen the walkers since but we know they're out there. We listen to the birds, noting when they fall silent and keeping ourselves locked away til they sing again.

Stepping outside your front door and seeing a pile of fresh bones is the new norm- it means they like you.

Day 2,236

Light doesn't really move out here. Something about the vastness and stillness of the lake draws it in, keeps it from breaking past the surface of the water and protects us from seeing what's down there. We should be grateful, truly we should, that we are so loved.

We don't go outside much any more. It's too hard to see and not even midsummer makes an ounce of difference compared to the depths of winter. Every year it's all the same shades of twilight and the same sharp breeze coming over the lake from whatever's on the other side of the barbed wire fence that our ancestors set up to protect ourselves.

They left us pages and pages of letters explaining it all but they were taken when someone breached the fence. Of all the small wealths we keep in our homes, our money and heirlooms - they didn't bother with any of that or any of us. All they wanted were the letters.

We'd only discovered their existence when Monday's storm blew that tree in the town square clean over to reveal an engraved box. It was marked for us - the descendants of the great travellers, the last bastion of... something. Time and the storm had damaged a fair amount of the words but it said that all our answers inside.

The plan was to open it in a formal meeting later in the week, to give us time to prepare for the best and worst case scenarios line other surviving clusters or a dying world where we're the last pitiful scraps of life left to scrape by til its final breath.

I don't know how word got out but clearly we aren't as alone as we'd previously reckoned and somewhere out beyond the safety of the barbed wire and landmines is someone with all of our hard earned answers. Answers we mean to take back at any cost.

The land here likes to keep pieces of whatever's dumb enough to meet it with bare skin and the stranger goes barefoot. Must be a truly mad thing to touch such hungry earth with so much flesh but we won't make the same mistake. We have a few diving suits left after our attempts at fishing the lake lead to nothing but death.

Either way, we will be far more prepared than our elusive stranger.

We will leave our safety and pursue our truth.

Gods willing we'll find it or die trying.

Day 2,235

The upper half of his face may have blended in with the deep shadows of the fire-lit room but nothing could hide the mottled pallor of his skin, a stark reminder that he was very much deceased. The cigarette in his mouth was a barely visible stub, flaring and fading with each unnecessary breath he took.

She'd arrived late, purse clutched in one hand and a warm pistol in the other. Her hands shook like an autumn tree's last leaf in the middle of a hurricane. She never did have the stomach for the family business after all but being the only living one left in a world where the undead are still a new concept, she was the face of their affairs and on occasions like tonight - the body too.

Some day she'd be sat next to him, bloating and rotting and watching her grandchild come in from the vibrant world of the living with a warm gun in their hand and a gentle smattering of blood along their trousers. Some day she'd be the one handing them a tumbler of brandy and speaking in the solemn soothing tones of the dead.

Some day... but for now she was sat in a chair that smelled vaguely of the formaldehyde she helped inject into the worst of her decaying family. She placed her gun in the waiting tray to be disposed of and took the brandy with welcome hands, hoping to forget her latest mission.

It was hard to say which left a more bitter taste in her mouth.

Day 2,234

We can only see them when the lake freezes over, when the ice is clear enough to see all the bones they hoard over the summer months to line their many nests. These are the only months when we are finally able to cross to the mainland for trade without it being completely suicidal.

In the first few frozen weeks they slither around the depths, sunlight barely able to glean off their scales and the skins taken from their prey. Sometimes if I stare for long enough I can see the one who wears my father's tattooed back around its left forearm and we lock eyes once more, as is our tradition.

I know that one day I'll either find a way to kill them or my own child will find my tattooed skin beside their grandfather's and know I died well. Until then I'll join the others and walk over the thickest parts of the ice, always staring down at them while they circle closer and closer to the surface, claws scraping for weak spots.

I have a good feeling about this winter for once.

Day 2,233

She watched helplessly from the roadside as mist crept over the fields on a thousand hands, dragging itself towards the town that refused to believe her. They didn't seem to remember the eight other nearby towns and villages that the mist had already consumed, something she was unfortunate enough to witness on her route to work.

Perhaps she was able to remember because she'd been in a moving vehicle when the mist struck each time, barely able to complete her deliveries on more than a few occasions. Now as the county seemed to be shrinking, swallowed in the starving fog, work was becoming scarce.

It should have been the least of her worries as she saw the houses of her loved ones vanish into grey obscurity but a traitorous little part of her mind patted itself smugly on the back for packing her bags and parking her van in a layby outside of the fog's intended route.

She tried not to wonder how she knew where the fog would and would not be. Tried not to make any connections between her presence in each of the missing towns. Tried not to feel that warm nostalgic comfort that the sight of the fog brought to mind every time she saw those dear little hands clutch at the dirt like a child to their mother's apron.

Day 2,232

Whoever built the temple didn't want anyone to find it, that much we guessed from the fact that they'd built it some 200 feet beneath the riverbed. It was far down enough and surrounded by enough densely packed clay that everything inside was bone dry and we'd been lucky enough to have hit it from inland, avoiding the worst of the potential water damage.

Nothing could explain what we found in there or how anything had lived in a sealed subterranean structure with no logical ecosystem. What we did know was that they worshipped something colossal and shark-like, though originally we thought it was a representation of masculine energy and the strength of a hunter but the preserved creature we found disproved that pretty quickly.

It was like Lovecraft's wet dreams and worst nightmares rolled into one twelve foot tall corpse dressed in several shades of leather. A few sneaky samples later and we knew that only some of them were from cows - the same breed that happily wandered about the temple, leaving no faecal matter and eating nothing, just existing.

Most of the leather was human skin, expertly tanned and sewn into elaborate robes that did nothing to hide the dense musculature and deep scarration all along the creature's body from the fin-like protrusions on top of its head to its torn webbed feet.

Worst of all were its eyes - pitch black orbs, still wet, still glistening and seemingly following us wherever we went. Of course we already knew it was dead - its internal organs hung from a racks on the ceiling in great ropes and bundles and a small core sample showed that it had been stuffed with a mixture of smoked wood and human hair.

Whatever it meant to the people who made the temple has been lost to time. There were no reading materials, no messages in the carvings aside from multiple depictions of the creature just standing and nothing to warn us against allowing it to come into contact with water.

How were we to know better?

Day 2,231

We hoped that if we left it to rot, it might forget us and we could all move on. We hoped that abandoning the town, burying the roads and burning all the records would keep people away. We should have just burnt the whole place to the ground with it inside and saved ourselves a whole heap of misery and misfortune.

The first sign that it had followed us was a news article about a serial cat killer - we knew it hated cats almost as much as it hated children. Back in the town it used kittens as bait to lure them out of the school's playground and out into the woods where we'd never find all of their body.

The second sign was a series of bloodied handprints all over the police station. The blood was fresh yet the person it belonged to had died over fifty years ago. Back in the town it used to bring back the faces and forms of our lost loved ones, having either remembered them or killed them, so it only stood to reason that it could bring back their blood as well.

The third and final sign was a shared dream - a field of scarecrows alight and our children on their knees in worship before them while it stood at our sides as we both watched. It told us we needed to either move further afield and lead it away from other folks or head back into town and finish it for good - no more middleground.

By this point we were too scattered about the county, too ingrained in other lives to want to change but some of us did choose to return. Haven't heard from them since but the signs have all stopped so whatever they did has worked. That or it killed them and is heading back for us right this very moment.

I'd almost be glad to see it - for closure if nothing else.

Day 2,230

What went into the office was human, what came back out at 5.30pm sharp, was not. It may have looked like the man, walked like the man and even talked like the man but it was about as human as a leech with all the same craving for blood to boot.

The day he was replaced was his first day, you know. Whole new job, whole new office and now a whole new person just itching to get out in the world and share the joys of working for the company. All the benefits and the better wages and shorter working days - all without saying what the job actually was.

The broke, desperate and naive were their usual employees, though their lives weren't the happiest of starting places compared to the luxury of the hatchery. Going from constant access to vats of fresh blood, bones to sharpen the teeth and gristle to chew for hours to a small flat in the middle of eighty other small flats was not so fun.

Still, the initial employees got them out there, spreading the good word of the company and how it changed their lives for the better soon got the attentions of the right people. The kind of people whose very name invokes wealth upon a business and trade deals by the dozen.

What went into the negotiations were humans, what came back out at 5.30pm sharp, were not.

Day 2,229

It started because we were bored and found one of those weird geo-apps that would take you to the closest leyline where strange things were bound to happen. Apparently. Ours was about two hours away and a fair way into some forest we'd never heard of before.

We got there a few minutes before noon and headed straight to the nearest part of the leyline, intending to walk along it to maximise the chances of something strange occuring. We must have been walking for about twenty odd minutes before we spotted the roof of a house poking out of the ground just off the leyline.

Nobody wanted to go in at first but dares were thrown about and I found myself circling the roof looking for a way in while the others egged me on. I didn't have to look for long - there was just enough of a broken window sticking out of the ground for us to crawl through and into the attic.

Right away everyone felt watched by something barely out of sight. We all turned our phone lights on and shone them everywhere we could, trying to see if we were actually alone. All I saw was darkness trying to climb up through the gaps in the floor but mostly gathered on the other side of the attic.

It moved like fog but more... physical somehow and no matter how close we got to the other side of the attic we couldn't see the wall, only the darkness. One by one we walked backwards, one person looking forwards and one looking back, until we were all outside.

As soon as the last of us was outside the darkness threw itself against the window, trying to spill out and burning when it met the scattered sunlight. It made a sound like someone screaming underwater and I swear that for just a second it had a face - shark-like and furious.

Day 2,228

It was almost a person, in fact if the lighting were a fraction darker he never would have noticed how it looked more like a child's drawing than an actual human. Its limbs appeared to be perfectly normal at a glance but the joints were all odd-angles and a sharpness generally only found in broken bones.

If it had stayed still and kept quiet he would have walked right past it and into the web covering the alley just behind it. Instead it jerked forwards like a puppet on too-short strings while its mouth dropped open to allow it to cry for help and its head lolled in several uneven circles, eyes fixed on him as it began to approach.

He made the mistake of looking up, mind so insistent that it was a puppet so there must be a puppeteer perched above them. And there it was, looking like the love-child of eight nightmares and an anglerfish, all limbs and teeth and those same sharp angles all angled towards him.

Day 2,227

The last thing you gave me was a torch - your torch. I hated what it meant and every time it saved my life I remembered how you'd given up by giving your light away and walked out into the empty town square to be swallowed by everything that feared the sun.

Baines, haints, caoineadh and worse all wait right where the light doesn't go which is usually exactly where you need to pass through. They laugh in the voices of everyone they've killed and it takes everything you've got to not break down and remember them all.

One of them sounded like you. It was a few days ago but when it called me a ghrá, I knew they'd got to you. I only wish I knew when, not that I wanted you to die as soon as you left but I just don't want to think that you lived long enough to suffer and die all alone.

I should hate you for leaving me, by all means I should despise you for being a hero when my own torch broke and saving me instead of saving yourself but I can't do it. I never could stay angry at you back then and I still can't now, not even when the walls drip with blood and your voice calls to me from the mouths of the monsters outside.

Day 2,226

When we buried the river, we left an entire ecosystem to adapt to darkness and all the rot we thoughtlessly threw below. All we were concerned with was building higher and higher and as long as the river flowed out to the sea somewhere deep below our perfect city all was well.

If the estuary was black, if the banks were strewn with the corpses of whatever marine life didn't or couldn't adapt fast enough, if the surrounding land looked scorched and strange creatures were sighted coming out of the river  - it's simply how things are supposed to be. Isn't nature bizarre and amazing?

That's what we were told at least and while the denizens of the river stayed in their space, everything was fine. Until fins began to grow into hands and they learnt how to use ladders, doors and tools. Until they dammed the river and exposed centuries of our pollution. Until the ninth maintenance team we sent down there failed to return.

Unmanned drones were the apparent solution - if they went down then we hadn't lost a person... again. They were so certain that they'd find nothing, that all the rumours of fishfolk were only rumours, that they livestreamed the footage and broadcast the truth to the world.

The first things they encountered were a kind of hairless otter, about six feet in length and with paws that were dexterous enough for them to have figured out how to use the maintenance worker's phones, scrolling through their feeds and accidentally posting - something that had long fuelled the rumours of them running away to start new lives instead of heading down to the river.

Once they lost interest and the drone was able to descend slightly to pass over the dam we found clusters of hard hats moving about, lights flashing and flickering as their batteries slowly died. They made the mistake of moving down instead of zooming the camera and something nagged the drone, pulling it into the dam and into a nest full of what looked like skulls at first.

Slowly, the skulls rotated in their hard hats to reveal swarms of crustacean-esque legs as they leapt towards the drone. It was easy enough to guess what had happened to all the workers after that and now there are plans being carelessly floated about to just seal the river off and wait for everything to die out.

A slow and secret suffocation is somehow easier than owning up to our mistakes.

Day 2,225

The records of who made the island and when they abandoned it burnt down with the rest of the town. It was situated in the middle of a lake surrounded by a forest that had been a battleground so many times the wind through the trees still echoed with the screams of the dying, so few people were inclined to travel deep enough to reach the island.

The town itself was scorched but surprisingly intact, all the thatchwork long gone but the slate roofs and thick stone walls weren't much worse for it. Whatever bodies had been left behind when the island was finally abandoned were dust and memory, a very aware memory.

Sometimes the wind carried their voices across the lake and you'd catch little snippets of their final moments, which were mostly cries for help, the names of their loved ones or near incomprehensible screams of rage against whatever god had allowed such a tragedy to strike them all down.

The rare, brave souls who manage to make it through the forest's many haunts, cross the barren lake and set foot upon the burnt island all say the same thing - it hunts you to the shore's edge. They always seem to have a hard time saying exactly what it is, a distant and fearful look overtakes them and all the manage to describe is some kind of amalgamation of the dead.

Everyone who tried to survive the fire, limping and crawling to the docks to try and leave, all suffocating or generally succumbing along the way and none of them getting any farther than the the town centre. Seems like their bodies were all connected in death, sharing that same pain, those same feelings and now this same fate.

What used to be a Them is now an It and It can't remember anything other than Its final moments. They say It hunts like an animal, finding you by the scent of your fear and the warmth of your body. Diving into the lake is safest - the icy cold water scares It but you risk hypothermia.

Anyone who's been there and back says the hypothermia was nothing compared to what hunted them.

Day 2,224

Maybe they were angels once. Maybe they're here to bring us closer to God and this is some kind of rapture That's what I told myself when the winged bastards tore through the streets at night, racing towards every church they could find and killing anyone stupid enough to still be in there after all the deaths before.

I'm not naive. I just want to try and have a little hope that I'll wake up in a better place where the drains aren't clogged with viscera and little winged humanoids aren't the leading cause of death for a fairly large portion of the world.

When they were first sighted everybody around here went off the rails and you couldn't get into any church for miles around for all the newcomers eagerly praying for a ticket to heaven. I mean, they got their wish in a twisted kind of way.

I know they aren't going to heaven though, I've been seeing new winged ones with facesI recognise. Somehow they're reborn like they prayed for - not in God's new kingdom though - back in the world the were so eager to abandon for paradise only now their sole purpose seems to be mass homicide.

In spite of all this, the churches are still full at every safe moment, as if praying will make a difference.

Day 2,223

The train was still burning when we found it washed up a few metres away from the pier. There aren't any tracks or even a station for a good hundred-odd miles but there were worn looking rails leading into the sea and dozens of footprints coming from the train, heading into the water.

Out of the nine carriages only one body was found and it made everything that little bit more confusing. The official forensics report just states that they died of smoke inhalation. Sources from the inside say the body was so decomposed they predicted the time of death as being over five years ago.

He was found curled up inside the furnace, not burnt like everything else but having asphyxiated nonetheless. It was as if the fire had come from somewhere outside or around the furnace but the furnace itself was so clean it might as well have been brand new.

The train was moved to a secure location within hours and the news is declaring it a prank, a movie set and a whole cluster of lies to stop us from asking any more questions. However, the tracks are still there and every day since, more footprints are found in the morning - all circling the tracks and leading back into the sea.

Someone out there is still waiting for their train and they're getting impatient.

Day 2,222

Summer doesn't come here, neither do spring and winter. The trees are always bare save for a few grey leaves and shrivelled, bitter fruit - shadows of what they should be. Everything here feels like a shadow of the life we see on our screens, just grey-toned and slow.

People here move out as soon as they are able to, sometimes they come back to visit us, whether that's out of misplaced guilt or a sickness from all the colour and life the rest of the world throws at them, we don't care. The land doesn't care, it welcomes us all back beneath its grey skies and cracked earth.

I don't think I've ever seen anything growing in the fields but the farmers are always saying the harvest is coming. I don't think they know what a harvest is, they're just saying what they think they should and hoping that the land agrees with them.

I don't think I've ever seen a live cow before either. The only things grazing in the fields are ghosts. At least, I think they're ghosts. They look like ghosts - vague whiteish shapes that get easily lost in the fog, shapes that moves through trees, hedges and buildings like they were never there, shapes that were here long before our homes and will be here long after we're gone.

The only difference between the grazers and ghosts is that the grazers can be killed but their meat tastes like water, burns in a split-second and rots so quickly that your best chance at making a meal of them is eating straight from the kill.The less time you leave between death and dinner, the better the taste.

Maybe we're just like them - little grey things wandering around a land that doesn't care enough to let us die.

Day 2,221

Something's moved into Challowmoore Lake and now not even the crows will drink from it. Dogs bark at the lake like it can hear them and the thing inside it waits for them to get that little bit closer. The shoreline is always a little too red, clouds of flies swarm around whatever wasn't fast enough.

The water looks fine at first, a little greyer perhaps, but if you stare for too long your reflection begins to move by itself. It tilts your head from side to side, eyes a little bigger perhaps and skin a little greyer, but if you stare for much longer your reflection begins to move closer.

We never find the people it takes, only the animals and even then we rarely find a complete corpse. We know it eats them but we think the people are still alive down there. We can hear them at night,calling for their friends and families and in the morning their footprints cover the sand,filling the space between al the dead and dying animals.

Day 2,220

 The market meets in the out-of-service underground stations every night at 23:37 until midnight. They let you buy back whatever they've stolen for a hefty price that people gladly pay - none of them would ever even consider putting prices on what they lose but they are desperate to have it back.

Not everyone wants their losses back though, I know I wish I hadn't paid so dearly for mine. They took a year of my life - the worst year of my life - that I begged them to take and the bastards knew I'd try to buy it back and suffer for it.

I swapped the last twelve years of my life for the missing one because I just had to know what happened to everyone. Can you imagine waking up one day to an empty house and a town full of pitying stares and silence? It was far more bearable than knowing where the pity came from and where my family went.

Tomorrow I'm going back to the market to get rid of that year and this time I'm prepared to wake up again.

Day 2,219

The shoreline is full of broken ships, broken cargo and broken bodies - all because the lighthouse prefers to watch our village instead. Maybe it's the spirit of the person we buried in the walls to give the lighthouse a heart. Maybe the fixtures are rusted from the ocean spray. Either way, it only shines on us while the shoreline suffocates.

The doors might as well be painted on for all the good they do - damned things are stuck fast and nothing we've tried, short of explosives, has made them budge an inch. The last keeper had to lower himself out of a window, not wanting to risk starving to death or facing the buried man's rage.

This has never happened anywhere else, at least nowhere that still talks to the mainland. We are an outlier that seems doomed to die like the guardian in the lighthouse - trapped like rats in a barrel of tar, surrounded by the rest of the swarm while the mainlanders holds their breath and waits for the struggling and squeaking to end.

We can't sleep, we can't sail away, we can't get any supplies delivered and autumn is in full swing. The ocean feels miles away for all the shipwrecks in the way and the night air is full of waves crashing against their emptying hulls while the lighthouse shines down upon us bright as the summer solstice.

Something's got to give and I reckon it'll be us.

Day 2,218

 It's been five years since the stars vanished and the last Lord died but the lights are on at the great house again. Nobody goes up there anymore, there's been no point since the last of the valuables were shipped to his distant relatives down south. We didn't know what had happened to his staff until a group of teens flew their drone over the old place.

The groundskeeper was the first one we saw and the only one still human enough to be considered safe. It seems like everyone who worked inside the great house decayed faster, grew further apart from what they once were and generally forgot what humanity meant to them.

The few maids and internal caretakers we've seen are barely recognisable against the old staff roster and there are dozens more who don't appear to have ever been human. We think they might have been brought back from wherever the family went on the night the stars vanished.

There's been talk of attaching a microphone to the drone to try and speak to the groundskeeper, to assess how human he still is and if he can be saved. The others have already been condemned but he still has a slim chance at outliving them and spending the rest of his days in a cushy facility instead of slowly decaying and warping til he's all but bones and sinew and more teeth than a human could ever contain.

Day 2,217

They emerged from the marshwater perfectly preserved and gasping for air. They did not come back for us like they promised. They did not come to take us into the waters with them to receive the same eternal life but instead they headed for the sea.

I wanted to wait for them to realise that they were missing us but I was outvoted. Shamefully, whilst the rest of the village took to their boats to follow the risen I stayed at home until they were out of sight and then ran for the marshes in the hope that someone would be there for me.

While I did consider taking to the waters myself, I know that it does not work alone. There must be witnesses and words said if you are to rise again, perfect as you went in and ready to be made whole in the ocean's deepest heart. So I watched the horizon and waited for others to rise and bring me with them.

I've been waiting for so long that my dear old body lies beneath me, huddled up as if to protect me from the cold that still seeps into my bones. I am not there now, not in that flesh and blood but above it. I stand and I wait while the village rots with me.

Some day more will rise from the marshwater to bring us all to warmer, deeper homes.

Day 2,216

 I used to be a surgeon, you know. Not that you can tell anymore, not with these shaking hands. The first thing I got told when I was in medical school was that no human body is like the textbooks. Flipped hearts, inch thick skulls, surprise tumours - not one single patient I worked on was anything like those neat little diagrams they make you study.

What got to me though, what had me handing in my resignation before the end of my shift was meant to be a simple lum removal. Just a benign tumour in their mid back, not too near the spine and not too big either. Whoever did the initial scans must have fudged them to hide what was really going on in that poor man.

When I went to make the initial incision, it moved. Just writhed in place for a second and slowly began to travel towards the lower back, heading right for the spine. I knew that if it got there it could do irreparable damage and we'd risk losing the patient altogether.

If it wasn't for our anesthesiologist shooting the damn thing with a sizeable amount of morphine we might never have stood a chance at removing it. I didn't even know what I was removing, not even when it was writhing about on a little metal tray.

I just know that it had pale green eyes that were squinting, trying to focus and unable to from the morphine and seeing light for the first time in its life. It took an hour to die and we never told the patient what we'd found. The official note was a parasitic twin.

Watching the life fade from those tiny eyes, from that tennis ball sized tumour, it broke me.

Day 2,215

 They closed off the third floor when a pair of old brown shoe were found in the middle of the hallway. The last office they appeared in looked like a scene from a zombie movie before the end of the day. I head that the bodies were so brutalised they had to piece them together limb-by-limb and even then there were parts missing.

Management have started talking about acceptable losses - the staff who were on the floor last night and earlier this morning I assume. Sharon from HR says that when she was walking in from the carpark she saw bloody handprints all over the windows up there and someone was banging on the glass without making a sound.

I know she's lying though - I've been watching the livestream from the security room on the third floor. Someone's still alive in there and they're making sure people know what's going on. So far we've seen the shoes walking about the place like there was someone actually there and all the AC vents are leaking.

Whoever's up there keeps zooming in on the vents, showing limbs and faces all broken and mashed in there like a child trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, only they're trying to fit an entire person into a small AC vent... badly.

The chat's been going crazy asking for the names of everyone on the third floor, asking for close-ups of the vents, calling it all fake like they have any idea what's happening from their safe and comfy homes while the main doors to the building get locked with us all inside.

Nobody else seems to have noticed that part but I made eye contact with the head of security while he did it. Him safely on the other side of the glass looking sad like he actually cares that he's left us all to die while he gets to go back to his family. The higher ups are with him, leaving us plebs and lower management to distract and complain to each other for now.

They don't even know that the shoes have found the stairs, door unlocked, and are heading down to meet us.