Day 856

There's a Thing in the rural areas of England and other Atlantic islands that often goes completely unspoken, unwritten and unbroken and that is respect for the unusual creatures that lurk just out of sight. Call them fairies, fae, the fair folk, the good folke of the hills - call them whatever you like just not too loudly in case they're near enough to hear you.

It's those parts of our mythology that have survived unchanged to the modern times in literature and physicality. All the old bedtime stories about changelings and baby snatchers who demanded ridiculous or impossible things that the human heroes always somehow managed to produce. Our ingenuity is the thin line between our perpetual survival and their multitudinous attempts to end us.

It's not that they don't like us (on the contrary they find us greatly entertaining) it's that they don't care about us. Presently they couldn't care any less for our rules, our physical limitations, our feelings - all just silly human things to them. It's the main reason that they are so well known, so loved and feared to this day.

We teach our children all about Rumpelstiltskin, Thumbelina and Tam Lin in the hopes that they will subconsciously understand that fairies aren't those cutesy little flower babies, they are fully grown beings who will quite happily turn your mother into a pumpkin and kill your dog because you forgot to call them "sir" or "ma'am" once.

They aren't seen as much any more, thankfully. We use so much iron that our homes have become physically repellent to them, even our mobiles and their lithium iron phosphate batteries are miniature wards against them but it doesn't stop them from trying to get back at us in their little ways.

It's why fairy circles appear in crowded suburbs, casually scattered by playgrounds and the small patches of grass beside local shops. It's why the woods near my own home haven't changed in size or shape for over five hundred years and why all streetlights are still made with iron cases.

We don't talk about them but we do everything we possibly cal, as casually as we can, to avoid them.

Day 845

The children that play in the park don't mind the mess. They continue to swing and jump and chase each other until their little bodies are numb from joy; all the while the bodies begin to pile up across the field, cluttering the bushes and gradually creating a dam over the stream the children often play in during lazy summer afternoons.

The children that play in the park still don't mind this mess. Their little feet dart between splayed and bloated arms, hopscotching with the dead as if they were little more than the stepping stones across the nearby pond that was slowly running dry. They still went through the motions of playing in the stream as if the water was still there.

The children that play in the park don't mind the growing mess at all. In fact they adjust to it so quickly that the smell of decay becomes a comforting aroma and the buzzing of flies their own personal orchestra. They don't care where the bodies are coming from or why there are so many, they only know that the park is where children play and they are children. Therefore they must play.

The children that play in the park love the mess. As the dead come to cover every inch of the ground the children find new ways to play on top of them, creating new toys from old bodies in the innocent way that children these days are in the habit of doing. Imaginary tea parties have never had to many guests as now, with the children sitting as many corpses upright as they can, creating furniture from the ones with rigormortis too.

The children in the part don't mind the mess. After all, they made it in the first place.

Day 854

There were rumours about the old townhouse at the end of Brookman Street, the one with the faux Tudor front and cloudy brown windows. It was all to do with the courtyard entrance and how it was the largest in the south of England thanks to the owner's daughter who was never seen by the public during her lifespan and whose body was never found - only the scent of death lingered about the place.

With her father vanished a few days before the sickly smell appeared, the house remained empty and waiting for his return until forty years later when it was brought and sold to a children fostering company.

The children had all heard of the rumours before they arrived, the ones saying the daughter had been gigantic - eleven foot tall as some stories would have you believe. Of course with there being no proof, any story was theoretically possible, though general consensus was that the owner never had a daughter and used the unusual architecture to hide his mistress coming and going at odd hours.

None of the stories were believed until one child, playing where they shouldn't be, found a staircase hidden underneath the floorboards of the cellar. The stairs were metal and seemed to be heavily reinforced with thick tracks on either side, like they were meant to carry cargo down beyond the cellar, possibly towards the docks.

Being sensible the child ran for the closest adult and physically dragged them to the stairs, saying at first that someone had fallen down them so that the adult would grab a torch and explore the place with them as quickly as they could. It was so exciting at first until the adult's calls were answered by a deep woman's voice.

She sounded like she was in the far corner where an enormous mound of dress-shaped fabric was. As the pair drew closer, keeping the voice in conversation by asking if she was okay (she was tired and so thirsty, so hungry. Please bring me a drink, I've been down here for so long) and trying to see where she was hiding.

The adult nearly tripped over what they thought was loose fireplace wood at first until their torchlight revealed it was a femur as long as their entire leg. There were little indents all along it as it disappeared underneath what was now clearly a skirt. The adult dragged the child out, calling for help, for the police, for someone who knows what to do in this situation when a skeleton is found under the damn floor and it's talking!

While the adults were flustered and frantically placing call after call, the child snuck back down to the cellar to await the results of the oncoming investigation. They didn't have to wait for too long, the police get very speedy and concerned when bones are found under a children's home.

From the snippets of conversation passing by them, the child learned that there were actually two skeletons, an adult male cradled in the arm of a (possibly fake) nine foot female. Teeth marks were found on most of the male's bones, his time of death was almost a month before her's so cannibalism was the suspected cause of death.

And her's? Major blood loss from her legs, originating from a head wound that would have caused significant brain damage to the Sylvian Fissure. She would have suffered from vibrant and near constant visual and auditory hallucinations, they had no idea what she could have seen but the end result was likely that she had murdered and eaten the male before beginning to self-cannibalise wherever she could, in this case her legs. She got as far as mid calf before passing out from blood loss or pain or a combination of the two.

While the child crouched, hidden and hearing the entire forensic report given to the foster home's leader, another woman's voice began to speak right next to her. Some unseen person, the same deep voiced person whispered agreements and laughed into the child's ear as the report was muttered between equally horrified adults.

Day 853

The forest was older than any town around it and had remained the same size and shape for as long as any surviving record admits. There were old stories that claimed the locals around there had made pacts with the woodland folk and in return for their protection the woods had to stay the same as the day they made their deal. Other stories say that the woods were cursed to stay that way when a woodcutter was killed by a falling tree. Gasped out the curse with his dying breath, the usual spiel.

Aside from its apparently set shape, size and basic landmarks, the woods were also home to great fissures within the clay-rich soil. Some were only a few inches deep, trip hazards at best, but deeper in they grew to several feet in length and up to twenty feet down into root-dense earth.

There was always at least one or two deaths per year from some elderly hiker falling down and getting trapped. Sometimes bones were found trapped in the roots, generally animal but the occasional human ribcage made an appearance. Just the ribcage though, never anything else. It was almost like something was trying to get a signal out, a clear "GET LOST" if ever there was one.

Tonight we follow Abbie who climbed down the deepest fissure (locally known as Devil's Maw) on a dare. She was set to win fifty quid if she made it back alive with a photo of her view from the very bottom or as close as she could get, as well as leaving a neon ribbon tied to the lowest root she could find.

It all seemed so simple at the time. And then her climbing rope (her dad's borrowed one that he'd used to climb Mount Snowdon five years ago) snapped, sending her plummeting down the fissure to land with a painful thud on the cold damp ground of what appeared to be a cave.

Nobody had told Abbie there was a cave below the Devil's Maw so perhaps this was a brand new discovery? After giving herself a quick once-over and determining she wasn't injured, merely bruised, she took her phone out to snap a photo of the crack above her, the surface seemed to much further away from where she sat.

There wasn't much room to stand, she found, the roof of the cave was a foot shorter than her but still,she must have been almost thirty feet below the woods. As she switched to her phone's torch app and began to examine her surroundings she saw that she wasn't alone. There were about ten children huddled as far from her as they could possibly get, all filthy and painfully thin.

At first they wouldn't talk to her, not until she had a one-sided conversation with herself about how she got there and how her friends were mean, eventually getting small smiles from the children. After she fell silent the oldest looking child (probably no older then eight) asked if her parents hated her too or was it just her friends?

With a little prompting the young boy explained that they were all down there because their families "couldn't keep them" and this was "the kindest thing to do". One by one their parents had taken them to the Devil's Maw and tossed them down, crying their apologies and goodbyes in the same breath, assuming their children were already deceased.

None of them knew how long they'd been down there but their clothes looked like they'd all gone to the Medieval Festival that happened at the field nearby. They asked if Abbie could climb back out and bring them back some food. They didn't want to come back out, not when their families couldn't afford to have them around, despite Abbie insisting that the police could help them (until a young girl called Greta Matilde said her dad was a local Constable "and he didn't even stop walking to push me down!").

Promising to bring adults back with her, Abbie began to ascend to the woods, the roots almost forming a ladder right in front of her while the children quietly cheered her from below. Fighting back her exhaustion, the thought of those tiny fragile faces starving to death driving her on, she refused to pause or slow down until she had finally clawed her way to the surface.

As soon as she'd caught her breath she called 999, telling them there were children stuck at the bottom of Devil's Maw and waiting for them to arrive impatiently. The wait and the next few hours were hazy and unfocused, like she was seeing the world through a kaleidoscope until she eventually came back into consciousness in hospital, her leg in a thick cast.

Apparently the police had found her, not on the surface but stuck in the roots several feet down, clinging to her phone and deliriously muttering about the children in the cave. They told her there was no cave, never had been. It struck her later how the Constable who'd come to check up on her had the surname of Matilde and how he'd seemed so nervous.

Day 852

Nobody's quite sure when the trains began to change, only that they did and that hundreds of thousands were changed alongside them - or rather inside them. Now the term "passenger" is synonymous with "parasite" and "monster", something akin to a locust that comes in London-bound swarms to eat anything and everything between the train and the station's edge. They seem too afraid to go any further.

Generally train stations can be avoided with ease, the tracks too in more rural settings where people prefer farm animals of whatever availability to carry them to their destinations. In cities and high density towns avoiding train lines is a little harder, especially in London where there are underground stops almost on every street.

London is practically a city for ghosts and locusts now, especially when the trains pull in every five minutes or less and their multitude of passengers spill out along the tunnels and escalators in search of fresh food. They don't seem to eat other passengers though they hiss and snarl at any from a different line to theirs. The worst rivalries seem to be between the Circle and Metropolitan for reasons beyond present knowledge.

As with any disaster or dramatic cultural shift, the native Londoners have adapted to the new predators in the very core of their city. New paths were going to be made that connected skyscraper to skyscraper, bypassing any need for the underground system and leaving the passengers to hiss and claw at any living thing that dares to walk past them. Unfortunately with so few unchanged people still inhabiting the area, the work is slow and the casualties are high.

No one in their right mind willingly moves to London in order to help rebuild the capital, in fact talks are being had by the Parliament (from the safety of somewhere in the Lake District) to move the official capital to another city or somewhere smaller and safer. The country would be rioting over this but the common folk are too busy trying to survive and the upper classes are too safe to concern themselves with anything but their own comforts.

And so the trains finally start to run perfectly on time, nothing on the tracks to delay them and nobody desperate enough to throw themselves in front of the speeding creatures. The signs in the underground repeat the same cheerful phrase of "All lines are clear. Service is perfect." to an audience that are forgetting how to read and learning how to hunt.

Day 851

When he went diving it was a little past midnight, though he was technically not supposed to be there. There weren't any gates around, despite all the new renovations to the little tourist trap so it wasn't quite trespassing. He only wanted to know more about the village without the usual crowd clamouring over every inch of it.

The focal point was the church which hadn't surfaced since the mid 1100's, remaining a brick shell at the bottom of the lake. It was a popular diving spot thanks to the community adding informative plaques and smaller buildings around it to recreate the surrounding village. None of the signs admitted that the church was the only original structure, much less how it came to be there or why there was no record of the settlement that had been there before the lake expanded.

From other local records it is only known that there was a sudden storm, possibly a tornado according to some sources. The entire village holed themselves up inside the church and went down with it which is as much as anyone of the time saw fit to write (that survived to this day, of course).

The interior of the sunken church showed none of the usual signs that anyone had been in there - graffiti, human remains, tools buried underneath the sand covered flooring etcetera. If there weren't written records from neighbouring churches it would be all too easy to assume that there had never been a settlement around it at all, much less that they had all hidden inside the church during a storm and sunk all together.

As he shone his torch around his light fell onto the remains of the stone pulpit where sermons would be given from to the local God-Fearing-Folk. He swam closer to it, wanting to stand there for the thrill of it, to be where a priest had been hundreds of years ago, now little more than worn rock covered in lake weeds.

It took him a while to notice that the water was draining, in fact it took him until the newly formed doors slammed shut behind him just as his flippers touched the pulpit floor. He turned to see the water ending just above his head and sinking by the second. As it left he found himself staring into the anxious eyes of at least fifty people of all ages staring back up at him from wooden benches.

They all wore similar sack-ish clothing in varying shades of brown and green as they clutched rosaries and held their children close. He would have stood up there for longer but a polite cough behind him startled him so that he nearly fell over the ledge. An old man dressed as the very picture of an old fashioned monk waited a few steps down, Bible in his hands and a look of fearful bewilderment upon his face.

The diver awkwardly shuffled past him and waited at the base of the steps until he was beckoned to a bench by a parishioner. When he had seated himself the sermon began in...modern English. The monk was speaking directly to the diver and somehow the more he spoke the louder the sound of wind was until it howled all around them.

The monk kept calling the congregation "Children of Noah", claiming that them being inside the church had kept them safe all these years, for them to reappear every night and continue to praise God Almighty for giving them eternal life to worship him in peace and safety. His every pause was echoed with thunderous Amen from the people around him, all fervently believing that they came ti life each night.

The diver sat there in confused and awed silence, wondering if they were in fact alive or if he was suffering from some sort of oxygen deprivation as he still hadn't removed his mask. He listened as several people around him spoke of their fears during the Great Storm and how the windows had shattered upon them as the waters crashed into the church, leaving them formerly at the bottom of a valley and now inside of a new lake.

As it turned out, they remembered drowning in vivid detail and how the bodies of the young, weak and other early dead floated to the ceiling "like angels". It was a sign to them that they had all been saved. Saved yet sentenced to repeat the drowning every night after they had finished their prayer. He was lucky enough to be with them to witness this.

Nothing stays to fresh in the mind as the dying spasms of a village. As their bodies drift past you gradually bloating. As the glazed eyes of an infant meet yours, their little legs still kicking in their mother's lax arms while their older sibling still clings on beside them.

Once the church was fully flooded their bodies seemed to fade into the water, the sand covered the tiles, the benches decayed to nothing all in a matter of minutes. Within an hour it was like nothing had happened there for nine hundred years.

Day 850

It came from the landfill sites, or so the world thought. Some slow growing kind of mould that trapped whatever vaguely organic thing was in its way before moving onto the next one. By the time the papers got word of it and its locations (the active ones at least), it was well on its way to reaching the nearby cities.

They'd given it the nickname "Creep-o" for the way that its tendrils seemed to sniff the air, swaying and spasming when they got a hint of something alive. It never killed directly, preferring that its prey die slowly of starvation rather than a quicker and more merciful drowning. A technical drowning as nobody was quite sure what "Creep-o" was made of and if it possessed any kind of intelligence.

Unsurprisingly by the time local governments had gotten themselves together enough to attempt blocking "Creep-o" it was already at their doors, thinner but tougher. No matter how heavy the vehicles were it remained in shape, no matter what tools they tried to use to remove it the damn thing remained unmoveable.

Four years down the line from the first printed stories and "Creep-o" was thriving, the rest of the world less so. It had choked over sixty-five percent of European flora and was working its way up the fauna - humans included - working its way through Russia, Asia and gradually drifting over the seabeds to reach the next living thing.

Nothing was safe from them unless it was in the air. Self-sustaining sky cities were still works in progress but the world was more willing to die falling than starving and trapped up to their elbows in something they still barely understood. It was hard to do research when the pressure was more focused on survival against the threat rather than removing it. That would have to come when there were stable places to rebuild their laboratories.

All the while "Creep-o" grew and grew and grew, gradually crushing skyscrapers, cars and smothering entire islands with no end in sight. The world was eerily silent as those thick, deep green tendrils pulsed and writhed in the air, scenting for the next biggest meal with increasing difficulty.

It was only a matter of months before the sky cities would have to move further out. Eventually a total planetary exodus would be their only option as the world became nothing but a mass of the almost arm-like feelers sprouting out into the sky and towards the stars in search of more organic life to feed on and overwhelm just like it was doing with us.