Day 2,670

We told them to take the path across the fields, making sure the train tracks were always on their left and making sure they never spoke to the people-shaped things that lived under the iron sleepers. You see, the ground beneath the tracks is hollow, just drops down dark as a tar pit and full of twice as many bones.

Lord knows what our ancestors made of those endless trenches but replacing the old iron stakes that stuck out like broken teeth in the hills was out solution. Iron hurtling over iron has kept the things down there awfully quiet and made us complacent enough to not realise that they'd been digging right under our feet.

Now we line our floors and windows with iron, carry nails in our pockets and between our teeth to ward the bastards off. Out-of-towners don't catch the memo til their cars are halfway down those cursed burrows and they're just as stranded as we all are.

So we do what we can.

We send them following the train tracks with nails clutched like a crucifix.

We try not to notice all the new scarecrows we'll see in the morning and the nails placed at our doorsteps.