Day 2,366

In my dreams I'm back in the ocean - pitch black water above and below as I float among thousands of empty whaleskins. The pods are somewhere far away and I am gently drifting a little closer towards them each night. Sometimes fragments of their songs are carried over to me along the current but I am too weak to swim any faster and they are too far away to hear me in return.

It's always been like this. Every night for as long as I can remember I wake up in my dreams and I am still so very far away. I don't even know what I am in this dream or why I am so desperate to be among the pod but before I wake up each morning I am filled with a heartache so deep it could only come from centuries of this.

Day 2,365

The first body was so well-hidden in the undergrowth that he tripped right over them, glasses falling from his face only to be discovered a few unfortunate footsteps later. Without them he still had to carry on, had to find his way back to the car park on the other side of the woods and get back to civilisation - to help.

There was no way he'd be able to find the others and rescue them from whatever was out there pretending to be a hurt human. A thought crossed his mind and filled him with dread - he could barely make anything out without his glasses... he wouldn't know if a friend or creature was stood silently in front of him until it was too late.

He found the second body when he was fumbling on the ground for a stick big enough to use as a weapon. Just like the first body, this one was curled up tight. Unlike the first, they weren't fully wrapped up in the thick, rope-like substance the creature spat from its dripping maw.

Something must have interrupted it.

The questions remained - had it seen him coming and panicked or had just moved away so it could get a better angle to attack him? Had he even been the one to disturb it or was something bigger and deadlier approaching? Would either one matter when he'd likely die before he made it halfway to the safety?

As the branches above him dipped under the weight of something too far away for him to see, he curled up beside the body of his friend to wait for the inevitable. As the undergrowth began to rustle a final thought crossed his mind - there was more than one.

Day 2,364

It slipped between the trees, teeth chattering as wordless sounds forced their way past blood-stained lips. She hadn't been spotted but she had been heard and that was a death sentence in itself, even more so as the autumn leaves beneath her feet were dry as a desert from all those months without rain.

Her hiding spot was good. Her hiding spot was safe and rational and everything she desperately wanted it to be as reality kept creeping in around her false hopes. There was nowhere for her go that wouldn't alert it immediately and it didn't seem to have seen her ducking into the hollowed-out dead tree so that was something positive at least.

The last broadcasts had mentioned something about its sense of smell but the radio towers fell almost eight years ago so she couldn't quite remember if they said highly advantageous or highly atrocious. As the sound of its footfalls grew closer and closer she began to suspect the former.

Something red and wet hit her knee, drawing her gaze up for the last time.

Day 2,363

It looked like a perfectly normal pub from the outside, not too busy nor too empty and everyone quietly sat with a lone pint in their left hand. It was the kind of place you could walk past and not think twice about, the kind of place that made something in the back of your mind wince for no obvious reason.

A child waiting outside the post office next began to notice a thousand tiny details that were wrong with the place and the inhabitants inside, for example, none of them appeared to be breathing. The side of their bodies were still as the identical pint they stared into with pale, unblinking eyes.

The child also noticed that none of them were facing the door - in fact not a single person's face could be seen from the outside.They casually walked back and forth trying to catch a glimpse and coming back with nothing each time as the patron's heads subtly turned away.

When their parents came out of the post office they managed to time their last pass just right as they left but where a face should be there was nothing. Not a blank area where facial features would usually be but the dark nothingness of a starless sky that seemed to invite them in for a drink.

As they left, pretending they never saw anything, every patron's faceless head turned and watched them go.

Day 2,362

There was nowhere else to go but back to the old house. We had faith that it would be empty when we arrived but doubt was always in the back of my mind, warning me that we never had time to lock the basement before we fled the first time and something else might have come up... something far worse than our current tormentor.

Voicing this to the rest of my family was pointless - I was just a child and they were busy adults who were the only reason we'd survived for so long and definitely not the ones who started this all by digging up a dead god and calling it Hope. The only hope it gave was the hope that you'd die peacefully in your sleep and not end up another maw among the screaming chaos of flesh that surrounded it day and night.

By going back to the old house we thought we might be able to head into Hope's prison and find a way to send it back there for good. By going back we thought we might be able to break its grasp over everyone else's minds and let the screaming masses rest at long last. By going back we thought we'd find a way to move on from all this.

Hope has a funny way of seeping into your mind and telling you what to do with such subtlety that you don't even realise who you're working for until you find a way to imprison it for good and you destroy it before you can even take a breath in and inform the others of your discovery.

We are all working for Hope and now that Hope can never die, we can return to it for good.

Day 2,361

They must have died together, he assumed from the way they were partially fused. There'd been a lot more of those types around since the storm brought that landslide upon the town. All those sudden deaths, trapped families desperately trying to survive and slowly suffocating with no escape in sight makes for a lot of fresh souls all crying out for a peace they won't find in all the deaths they keep causing.

A collection as new and traumatised as these was bound to snowball if left unchecked and untampered with which is why he was called. Now, it wasn't a grieving relative or concerned governor who called him there - it was one of the dead who'd managed to cling onto enough of their wits to know that their very existence would only bring about more tragedy.

From his perspective it had been a series of prank calls to a phone that hadn't had a battery in it for several weeks at that point. Any normal man might dismiss it and toss the phone in the trash but after the fifth or sixth voicemail begging him to go to the same place he let curiosity get the better of him.

That leaves him at the present - persuading the restless to rest whilst trying not to join them.

Day 2,360

Doesn't matter what the holiday itself is, any day after a night full of fireworks is bound to have at least three deaths. Last night was no exception, though the body was a lot smaller than our usuals - terrified veterans caught up in flashbacks, the elderly who's heart couldn't take or someone who shouldn't be let anywhere near an explosive getting their hands on as many fireworks as they could.

The call we got today wasn't for any of them though, it was for a five year old girl found with her eyes gauged out under a bed in abandoned house next door to her own family home. Strangest part was her family were on holiday some seven hours away at the time and remember tucking her into bed that night after their little fireworks show was over.

Her appearance and sudden change of location weren't even the strangest part of it. That came when the sniffer dogs found her blood all over two dolls hidden away in the kitchen of the house. There was blood on their hands and around their mouths... we found her eyes in their chests as if her killer wanted to make it look like they ate them.

We made sure her family didn't find this out, just said she was found dead and that we'd be looking into it. We didn't tell them that the dolls started moving around the evidence locker or that one of them managed to escape. We'll just blame it on a random description we'll pull from a neighbour and call it a cold case.

Hopefully the next big celebration will another moron with a firecracker in their mouth instead of this...

Day 2,359

When we found him he'd been hollowed out like a Jack O'Lantern and filled with shark egg cases. The poor things were still alive inside him - we later found that this was because he'd been kept in seawater, chained by the ankle until the tether broke and the tides carried him back to us.

Nature's funny like that - always circling around so that no matter how far you think you've gone you'll always find your starting point is barely a few steps behind. He'd washed up on the very same beach he went missing from five years ago but the coroners report said he only died a few hours before he'd been found.

He had been alive when they put those egg cases in him and took out everything else to make more space. It shouldn't be possible - it couldn't be possible for someone to survive without their internal organs but the report claims that somehow he did.

They barely had to do anything at the funeral home, he was as lifelike as the day he vanished and that only made burying him that much worse. He looked like he'd open his eyes any minute and ask us what we'd be having for dinner. He looked like he was just holding his breath and playing dead.

When his grave was found busted open from the inside we weren't at all surprised.

I expect him to turn up again sooner or later.

I'll keep a plate warm for him til he does.

Day 2,358

I can hear my neighbour yelling for his dead wife again. We know we'll be fine - we've already placed crucifixes on the walls, ceilings and floors of our house like we do every night because no matter how many times he is told, that damned man keeps thinking he can open the sealed door and talk to her as usual.

I turned to my partner, hoping they would make the call to the long-suffering priests and have them come to catch her wandering body again but they refused to. Said we should just hack off her head and burn her instead - end the poor woman's suffering once and for all but I know that's not our choice to make.

Ours is to call for help and hope that eejit does what's right for them both while knowing that he's no longer capable of doing much more than desperately clinging to the good old days and pretending his wife isn't a vicious, rotting, wandering corpse.

The church's policy is always answer in three rings or less. I didn't even know they had a voicemail until tonight which is far more concerning than it would be for any other small parish. Soon as I heard my neighbour get in his car, tyres screeching as he turned right.

Neither of us said anything but we both reckon his wife is already in the church making herself a feast.

Day 2,357

They called this part of the cave 'Heaven's Gate', not that the naming had to do with religion per say. You see the waterfall over there that drops off into nothingness, the one that doesn't seem to go anywhere if you believe the science-folk and their multitude of probes, well according to the old stories, it was used to send unwanted children away... if you catch my drift.

Of course there's plenty of proof for this in well-preserved diaries, carved apologies in the walls around it and all the little trinkets and offerings that are still placed around there. It's more as a memorial nowadays rather than folks continuing the practice but if you linger round here for long enough they say you'll hear the weeping mothers.

I haven't heard them myself but I have heard their drowned infants playing a few tunnels deeper where another waterfall leads into a smallish lake. They opened that section up for guided tours last year and recently added a raised platform 'to allow for a better overview' apparently but those of us who work here know that they just want to avoid another casualty.

We're meant to go along with their overview story and keep the music playing but if I switch it of for even a minute you can hear them playing below us. They want you to think that they are children and they want you to go down there. They've figured out how to appeal to our parental instincts and then go for the throat while we're still floundering about wondering where the unseen children are.

After the raised platforms it's a pretty straightforward series of tunnels leading back up to the main chamber and blissful sunlight once again. We pretend it's all stories and special effects and draw straws to see who has to go back and lock up the infants just in case they find their way up to the walkway and decide to make a break for it.

Then we open again same time the next morning and hope that we close with the same number of people.

Day 2,356

I stopped thinking of it as being her when it lunged for me and seeing it pick itself up after that fall, limbs all out of place and grey blood flowing like oatmeal from the cut on its head, scared me more than the sight of my dead friend come back to life.

It wasn't a ghost, that much I knew. Ghosts aren't physical beings and I managed to shove it away from me when it went for my throat. Ghosts don't bleed like it did when it fell and landed on the broken glass of the cups it threw across the floor a few moments before it manifested.

So that begged the question... what looks pale as a sheet, perfectly resembles a recently deceased person and knows more about you than anyone in your life - even things you'd only thought in your head when nobody else was around. What could vanish into thin air yet remain physical enough for you to touch?

Whatever it was, it wasn't her. Maybe it used to be her but the only part of her that hadn't changed was the dress the buried her in. Its skin looked like all the life had been drained away but its eyes were unnaturally sharp and followed me around the kitchen like a hawk watching a rabbit.

Day 2,355

My neighbours called the police again last night, complained about all the noise coming from my apartment. The apartment I died in three days ago. All the uniforms did was give a courtesy knock, speak to the roommate who killed me and consider their job well done because he assured them he'd keep the music down.

He threw the radio out this morning and I'm running out of ways to make enough of a commotion to bring the police inside before he has the time to dispose of my body. He knows what I'm trying to do but he hasn't figured out any other way to stop me aside from removing all the electronics.

What he doesn't know is that I managed to make myself visible this morning and wave to a jogger. I hope they saw my caved-in head and I hope they go to the police before he finishes loading me into black bags. He'll throw me down the laundry chute, load me into his car and take me to god only knows where but I know I won't be found and he'll get away with it.

Every footstep I hear could be my salvation.

Someone has to notice that I'm gone.

Surely someone would notice.

Day 2,354

At first I thought they were smiling but then I noticed the purple hue around their eyes and mouth, how stiff and bloated their joints were and how rotten the air began to smell. They must have broken into a clothing bin and ditched whatever they'd died in but there's only so much you can do to cover the stench of a fresh corpse.

Rigor mortis is not very forgiving up close and by the time you realise exactly what you are seeing, you're too late to do anything about it. They might not be able to move particularly fast but they are relentless in their pursuit and hungrier than an army. 

I made my fatal mistake when I recognised one of them as being a teacher I had in high school. He was always laughing at something but now that smile he wore was a shallow mockery of his former warmth and kindness. I was frozen, trapped in that lifeless smile and those cold, glazed eyes.

You're supposed to run when you see them. Run and hide until the group passes through but I couldn't bear the thought of him wandering around when he should be at rest. So I took aim and tried to get a headshot, tried to lay him to rest myself.

It only drew more of them downtown and turned a small gathering into a full-fledged herd of the undead. I never stood a chance, nor will anyone unfortunate enough to run into them. In fact the last time there was a herd of this size they cleared half a county flat out.

And to really salt the wound... I missed my damn shot. 

Day 2,353

The fog was so thick you could hardly see your hand in front of your face so of course the gym teacher insisted it was warm enough for us to be outside. We were split into groups of three and one person was given a flashlight, told to follow the white lines of the running track and come back after five laps.

The girls I was with immediately planned to run to the far edge of the school field and hang out instead of running laps. It sounded good enough to me and it wasn't like we could even see the running track through all the fog anyway. So we made sure to go last and kept at a fair distance from everyone else, saw our gap and sprinted for the farthest edge, desperately trying not to laugh.

We must have been about halfway there when we almost ran into the first figure. They were so pale they blended in perfectly with the fog, their body warped and breaking apart at the edges like they were in the process of becoming the fog itself.

In the distance we heard the teacher's whistle calling us all back and the creature shot towards the sound.

Day 2,352

The best time to see them is dawn, when your eyes are still heavy enough from sleep that their edges are blurred and you can pretend that they are trailing shiny red ribbons behind them. You can pretend their hands are full of flowers or bundles of fabric. You can pretend the air doesn't smell like blood and death.

They are at their safest during dawn - their arms and bellies too full of their latest victims to want to gather any more. Doesn't stop their eyes from wandering though, assessing you for how easy a kill you'd be, many mouthfuls you'd be... how entertaining you'd be.

A quick kill isn't their style - they prefer a good hunt, though they're more built for climbing than running. The younger among them have since learnt to use their elongated twin set of arms to propel themselves across the ground at great speed while their shorter legs remain tucked away, talons ready to lash out at a moment's notice.

If their faces were any less human, they'd be extinct by now but they know how to garner sympathy from a crowd. Their mouths may be smeared with someone's blood but they know how to tilt their heads and the corners of their mouths to appear far friendlier than any human-hunting nightmare ought to.

Day 2,351

Humans were the last to succumb to the cordyceps - nasty fungus that made a leap in a lab and hopped from insects to just about everything else. And now it was our long awaited turn to succumb to numbness as it drains the body of all available nutrients before forcing you to ascend to the highest point you possibly can so it can burst free in great clouds of spores, seeking out a fresh host.

We'd been breathing these in for years now, even developed a few drugs out of them which helped ease our aches and pains whilst unfortunately hastening the end. By the time the first case was officially announced everybody already knew somebody who'd suddenly gone real quiet and decided to take a trip out of town.

Some people took it better than others, choosing to get their affairs in order before they even felt the itch in their throat as the spores began to expand and settle. Others either took their own lives or spent their remaining time trying to become as narcotised as humanly possible so as to not even feel the end nor be able to action it.

As for me, I took to the highlands. Found a cushy holiday home that probably wouldn't be missed and I'm spending the last weeks of humanity in comfort. I know I won't live to be the last human standing and honestly I'm quite grateful for that, but I still hope that the end doesn't hurt.

 I haven't found any research to say that it stops the host from feeling the sporing but I'm optimistic.

Not much else I can be at this point.

Day 2,350

I buried it so deep it'll never know the peace I found from its dying hours. How the weight in my heart lifted with every laboured breath that rattled through its blood-filled lungs. How I had to hold back a smile whenever it started weeping from the pain.

And now I'm free.

Now I don't have to tiptoe around the house, being as quiet as humanly possible in the hopes that it won't lash out for once and console myself that whenever it does it's because it hurts worse than I could ever imagine. I don't have to pretend that I'm lucky to only suffer this much.

I didn't even bother to follow the instructions in its will.

It wanted a traditional burial with a funeral and it wanted me to mourn. It wanted to be remembered as the human it was born as and not the shrivelled little beast who traded humanity for wealth and expected to still be praised. It stopped being my parent when it signed that contract.

I scooped its corpse into a cardboard box and made sure to bury it upside-down in case it tried to come back. Then I poured concrete over the ground and turned it into a nice little rockery. I wouldn't be surprised if it tried to come back again, damned thing loved making my life difficult.

If it had read the contract first, like I did, it would have struck out the clause that led to its death.

A clause that I made sure to remove, along with several others until the contract finally worked in my favour. Their death was my blood sacrifice, their ignorance was my lesson and their master has granted me the eternity they so desperately sought and were to ignorant to find.

Someday I'll watch this world burn and smile again, knowing that it will never come back.

Day 2,349

It had been standing in almost the exact same form for over six hundred years so it only stood to reason that sooner or later it would begin to collapse.We hoped it wouldn't attempt this while it was still occupied but it seemed determined to die.

Over the centuries it had been patched up, torn out and put back together, modernised over and over and over again and all it wanted was to rest for good. It didn't want measle little humans running around its rooms forcing nails into its walls or ripping the carpet from its poor worn floors. It wanted to be broken down on its own terms and reduced to rubble like all the others it remembered from its youth.

Every other part of the street was now utterly alien - full of new builds that had barely seen a decade and roads that were re-paved every five or so years and the constant roaring of traffic. The days of quiet horse-and-carriage rides once a week for church were as long gone as the family that built it.

So in its desperation it did the unthinkable - it made contact with its inhabitants. They cried ghost at first, calling in all the wrong experts and even a few priests before the right ones came. The ones who read the mould-writing on the walls and told the owners that the building needed to be demolished for it to be at peace.

They warned the inhabitants that the longer they delayed, the more dangerous the house would become until it was actively hostile to any lifeform inside it. Like rational, modern people the inhabitants scoffed and refused to believe that their house wanted to die. Ghosts made more sense somehow so they threw out more holy water and waited for normality to return.

It took less than a week for the house to finally succumb to its despair and collapse in on itself.

"Unexpected instability" and "freak accident" were thrown around until it was believed.

Nobody wanted to say it after such a tragedy but the air around the broken remains felt... happy.

Day 2,348

The lake and the sky were so intensely blurred together by the dense fog that it was almost impossible to see what was attacking their boat. All they could say for certain was that something of that size couldn't possibly survive with such a limited food supply and no nearby cattle to drown either.

They all caught glimpses of scales and soaking wet fur and eyes as large as their heads but none of them could agree on what colour any of the features were. Their attentions turned away from the creature as they began to argue amongst themselves as to whether or not it was deep green with brown fur and yellow eyes or deep brown with blue fur and red eyes - all the while the boat was rocked to-and-fro until it flipped altogether.

The next few moments were a blur or teeth, blood and someone trying to scream underwater. Only one of them washed ashore, three days after the attack and covered in dried blood that was definitely not theirs. It was dry - they were dry and they'd clearly been lying on the shoreline for a while. 

They were soon spotted and the police were called, surprised and amazed to find a survivor in a spot that their dogs had gone berserk over just the day before. It was like they'd been invisible until they woke up but when asked, they claimed they only remembered a sudden wave and the capsize.

There wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that any sane person would believe that the lake was full of monsters and even though they hadn't been near the lake since, they always seemed to fall asleep rocking as if they were still back on the boat.

Day 2,347

Judging by the jagged wooden shards and fresh blood on the ground, something had broken out of the house and taken its unfortunate meal elsewhere. All the better for her and the precious few rounds she had left for the sturdy handgun he "gifted" to her when he took her car and fled like the gutless worm that she'd always known he would be.

Part of her hoped the blood was his, the rest of her checked which direction the trail went so she could avoid it and listened for any sounds of life in the house. Faint somethings from somewhere further in... could be the dying breaths of whatever it didn't want to take with it or there could be another one inside.

After weighing the pros and cons and checking her surroundings she took a step forward. The wind changed direction and the smell of inhuman rot choked her for a moment before she controlled her instinct to retch and expel all her hard earned food onto the filthy tarmac below.

In the distance, a car horn sounded a very familiar pattern. One she had custom made for her pride and joy that bastard had stolen. She checked her rounds again, checked her surroundings again and set off towards the sound of squealing tyres and monstrous shrieking.

If there was any luck left in the world she might just get her ride back.

If there was any karma left in the world she'd be lifting his corpse from her seat.

It was enough to make a smile ghost across her face and for the first time in a long time - she was excited.

Day 2,346

We spoke of it in euphemisms - have you been visited, how is your resident today, how are the neighbours taking to the new weather front coming in... calling it by what it is would only make it feel real. We don't want reality. Reality means we'll all die surrounded by blood, pus and whatever hallucinations our minds conjure up to rationalise and comfort us in our final hours.

If we treat it like a guest who's soon to be on their way out then we can pretend that our lives are just scattered with coincidences and brief periods of sickness. The worst symptoms are clearly just stress dreams and we will be fine with a bit of rest and good soup.

If we hear each other's voices whispering through the mycelium in our veins, feel their emotions pulsing in our temples, if we speak with another person's voice then we must be letting our imaginations run away with us and we just need a day off. Everything will settle down in the morning.

If some homes are more like fungal nests, if the school is a spore-trap, if the town all has been barricaded for so long a new strain has developed then we have a little pest problem. Nothings bit of anti-mould spray wouldn't fix... if we could bring ourselves to go anywhere near it without the network screaming in our veins and begging us to protect the colony.

We all have a friend living with us.

Day 2,345

Something had been swimming below our vessel for a few days, shadowing us while we tried to carry out our research but the damned thing kept eating any probes we sent down. Our cameras must have some fascinating pictures of it and its digestive tract but unfortunately it's quite likely that we'll never recover them.

On a clear day when the water is calm we catch glimpses of eye stalks - red eyes and skin which makes it best suited for the deep where red light is the first of the spectrum to be filtered out in the depths. What the rest of it looks like remains a mystery but we're beginning to think that it's attached itself to the hull like remora fish to sharks.

It doesn't endanger us right away but it does mean that we're sitting much farther down in the ocean than I feel comfortable with. If it continues to drag us down we'll have to risk abandoning ship and with the way it treated our floating probes we know we won't stand a chance.

Our best bet is making it close enough to shore that we can hail for a helicopter rescue and hope that it takes the damned ship back out to sea. We can't risk something of that size and strength hanging around a port or finding a populated beach.

There's been talks of deliberately sinking the ship.

Whatever we do, it'll need to happen soon.

It's started watching us through the portholes.

Day 2,344

She was so caught up in the perfect clarity of the frozen lake that she didn't even notice what was swimming towards her, propelling its serpentine body on unsettlingly human hands. Even the cracks in the ice were somehow perfect to her - a shame that her camera was focusing on the large eyes moving steadily closer to her than the ice itself.

It jolted her from the hypnotically perfect beauty of the surface and she found herself too scared to stand and skate back to the safety of the pier. Instead of calmly assessing the thickness of the ice and realising that it would take far more strength than such a slim creature cold possibly possess, she did the worst thing someone could do on a frozen lake - she began to panic.

Her skates dug into the ice as she scrabbled backwards, cutting inch upon inch and carving little trenches that only served to weaken the surface and put her in more danger than she ever was before. Those worryingly human hands pressed against the underside of the ice - each palm the size of her torso - and the face came into horrifying view soon after.

Day 2,343

When I went downstairs to check out the source of the noise it was halfway over the threshold, clusters of arms reaching out to corrupt everything they could while it continued to feed the rest of its body into my home. Grey fungal tendrils sprouted from the walls, rising to meet its touch and pull the life of the place with it.

I felt like I'd been standing at the base of the stairs for hours but the clock hands hadn't moved so it's hard to be sure just how long we were both there. It - an unaware beast, hellbent on draining the world dry and leaving it a lifeless husk, and me - hyper-aware and struggling to remain calm in the face of a slow and painful death.

Crouching and heading for the opposite side of the house bought me a little time, just enough to remember that the dining room window was broken and currently kept locked with a single nail. Something I could probably pry free with my hands and then make a break for my car, heading to a friend's house deep in the city where it wasn't strong enough to venture.

That's if it didn't notice me or get greedy and speed up or decide it's full from feeding from the walls and hunt for me directly. I hid behind the sofa, trying to steady my nerves as quietly as possible when I saw movement in the corner of my eye.

It wasn't quite within killing reach but its tendrils would soon be within striking distance - going for the lungs first, then the eyes and finally the mind. There wasn't a better or worse time to make my move so I did what I had to, making as little noise as possible and hoping I had enough phone battery to use the remote start app.

Against it all it worked - the damned thing that was always running slow or accidentally setting my alarm off actually worked. I was able to tear out of my drive just as it flung its upper half out the window, tendrils shooting out in every direction and all falling short.

Or so I thought.

It's slower than they'd have you believe but maybe I'm not dying from this.

Maybe I'm Becoming... strangely I don't mind that at all.

Day 2,342

We're supposed to be taken out to sea when we're old and nearing our end. We're supposed to walk with the receding tide and sink into oblivion, scales overwhelming us until we are as our ancestors once were. We're supposed to live forever among the great abyssal reefs.

Instead they take us inland, they take us into great tanks and pressurise them until the changes take place and they watch us like starving hawks. Instead of living in peace with all who came before us we are trapped and begging for a death that will not come.

My time is approaching and my children are begging me to take a boat and head out past their nets and blockades to join the others but I am conflicted. If I am able to go to the others and have enough strength in me to break them from their prisons, to take us all to the great abyssal reefs then surely it's my duty to do so.

I wonder if they'll still recognise me when I get there...

Day 2,341

When I opened the curtains I found that the window had been bricked up from the inside. Every window save for the one I'd been staring through all night. They must have done it while I'd been camped out by the backdoor, waiting for them to slip out from the shadows of the burnt-down house beside the woods.

Every morning I watched them creeping back there, using the house as storage for their dying prey before they lugged the corpses back to their own nests much further in. I know a couple of them had spotted me before but I always made sure to leave bandages and knife sharpening kits as a peace offering.

I thought I'd bought myself safety but it seems that all I did was annoy them until they decided they'd rather force me to walk dangerously close to their territory instead of letting me use the front door and keep away from them. Now with every other window, door and vent bricked up I had no other options.

And now I'm just realising that if they bricked everything from the inside and I never saw anyone leave...

There's still someone in here with me.

Day 2,340

Nobody else is acknowledging the old man coughing up blood on the subway stairs, they all just step around him and fix their gazes elsewhere until they are out of his sight. He is a memory from the turn of the century - a pauper who wasn't fully dead when they buried him, still coughing up blood in the mass grave where all the other victims of Tuberculosis in the town.

It's an old place, an odd place full of memories that refuse to die. Some are as harmless as a child playing with a ball in a market that used to be a field. Others, like the old man, hate how they died and aim to being that pain to any living being that dares to look them in the eye.

Even my own home has a memory - a firefighter who couldn't save the house that used to be here and is mostly just perplexed by everything that now surrounds him. He wanders around, carrying a sharp warmth and burnt scent with him that I can never wash out of my clothes, body or hair. Luckily he died how he wanted - as a hero - meaning he has no malice, just confusion.

Even the roads leading to and from our town have memories wandering them, trying to lure vehicles off the road to where their own were found in smouldering, crumpled piles. The woods nearby are the worst for memories, all ancient and deadly things that utterly despise humans - even the dead. They are the only beings I know who are capable of killing a ghost.

When the body's decayed to nothing and the soul is brutalised beyond any hope of survival - what is left?

Day 2,339

My passenger was a dead woman - I saw them pulling her body from the river on the news this morning alongside a photo of her smiling at a birthday party. They'd been asking for people to come forward if they knew anything about her murder but I don't think anyone would believe this.

She didn't look dead at first, she'd been waiting at the taxi rank and just so happened to step in my cab. Could have been anyone else but I seem to welcome strangeness somehow. She asked to go to the lake, something about a meeting she couldn't miss which seemed odd at such a late hour.

It took me a few minutes to recognise her but she seemed to know when I did, our eyes meeting in the rear-view mirror as she gave me that same smile from the birthday photo. I kept driving even though I knew she wouldn't be able to pay the fare, something compelled me to see what how this encounter would end.

The closer we got to the lake, the more she began to decay until she was a water-bloated, blue-tinged, strangulated corpse -  likely mimicking how she was in the morgue's drawer at that very moment. I pulled over in the carpark,close as I could get and she asked me to walk with her a moment.

I couldn't refuse - I had to know what she wanted from this not-so-chance meeting we were having. She didn't speak for most of the walk, just silently left a trail of watery footsteps behind her until we reached the shore. That's when she told me to pick up whichever woman was waiting by herself the next night at the exact time she'd been waiting at the exact stop.

And I did.

And I do every single night.

And they haven't pulled another one from the lake since.

Day 2,338

How could he possibly fight something he could only see within the split-second moment after he turned off the light? In that briefness, he caught glimpses of something that was human in the same way an octopus was - sure there were similar parts but the numbers were all wrong.

Arms were stacked upon arms til the wretched thing seemed like it might topple over at the slightest breeze and the way all those arms clung to the walls as it shuffled towards him made that all the more likely. Somewhere among the limbs was a head or eyes of some sort, enough of a visual front that it knew where he was standing and was heading right for him.

Much as he knew he should run, much as he reckoned he could outrun it if he heeded to, he also wanted to see if it actually meant to harm him. All the bodies downstairs had been dead long before reports of the creature had been sent in so the likelihood of it being the killer was fairly slim, if at all.

The closer it got, the better he could see it between the now rhythmic flicking of the light switch. Not every arm had a hand but every hand ended in a cluster of eyes curled neatly on each palm - all green and all staring right at him. There were larger eyes huddled up among the joints of the arms too, right where they met the torso.

Strangely enough, it wasn't making any sound as it moved towards him. No feet shuffling against the concrete floor, no hands sliding across the cracked and peeling wallpaper - just silence broken by his own staggered breathing and the steady click of the light switch.

It was only seconds away from him when the lightbulb finally broke, throwing them both into darkness