Day 2,322

There's a house down by the lake that's little more than sticks held together by old fishing nets. It's one of those places you hear teenagers daring each other to go but when you reach their age somehow all of your friends have heard about all the dead things that wash up there and how they follow you home if you trespass. They all refuse to go as sensible people should.

Unfortunately, places like this will always draw in fools with a death wish and their stories remain the liveliest thing about them. Places like this don't kill you - you do that for them and end up joining the unseen hundreds that have been crowding around its shore since before it had a name.

It starts with the first corpse you see - something that might have been a dog or a raccoon, something you try to identify and that curiosity only gets worse when you hear something moving in the stick house. The average person might turn tail and live with only the vaguest feeling of being followed, only the faintest scent of decay when the wind blows just right but those people aren't drawn to these places.

The kind of person who lingers around trying to figure out exactly what they're seeing will only want to see more and will only feel satisfied when they know all there is to be seen. This person will head towards the creaking floorboards upstairs when nobody else is home, the laughter in the basement- the noise of something moving in the stick house.

All they'll find is bones, piles and piles of tiny rodent-sized bones and wet footprints that look almost human heading from a soaking wet mess of fabric in the back of the house, down to the lake. They'll see the algae shifting as something - perhaps someone - beneath the water moves to the forest on the other side of the lake.

They won't stick around to see it get out. Instead they'll find themselves full of a fear they hadn't felt since they spotted the first dead thing and they'll turn tail faster than a cat in a thunderstorm. They won't return alone - they never do - not that they'll notice this.

They won't notice it until they see its empty eye sockets in the bathroom mirror, standing on its hind legs and tilting its cracked head from side to side like it's trying to remember what a living thing is and does. They won't ever see it again but they will hear its bones tapping against carpet, concrete and lino as it begins to follow them until they take it back to the stick house and stay there by he lake with all the others.