Day 1,034

During the late 1800s, Queen Victoria popularised a rare delicacy among her court. It was considered so utterly taboo that the only records of it exist within a single page of her diary that went on to describe the origins of the delicacy, the cooking process and which members of her court claimed to have previously tried it out in one of the many colonies.

The delicacy in question - human flesh and the origins - three small villages in the Scottish highlands that farmed children like cattle, aiming to produce the most tender and flavoursome meat for her majesty's sumptuous feasts.

The disease that spread to Queen Victoria's court was only mentioned briefly, a short list of symptoms jotted down at the very end of the diary that detailed the famed feast with a check mark beside five of them and a circle around the final one - a constant craving for human meat.

It is a scarcely known fact that those who ate at these taboo feasts are still alive today, safely guarded within the three hundred or so properties that have been entrusted to the National Trust. Their now inhuman wards remain drugged and contained to their rooms, all safely locked away from the public while their personal belongings are displayed for the world to see.

Occasionally someone will stray from the safely marked areas and wander into a room that should have been locked. The will never be seen again. Occasionally an almost-two-hundred-year-old creature will awaken from their drug induced haze long enough to scrape and clatter about their rooms, drawing attention where none should be and forcing the immediate closure of the entire property until the threat can be put to sleep once more.

Remember which rooms you find locked in the old English mansions and listen for their occupants carefully. Some are far quieter and far more cunning than their kin and all are eager to feast once more.

Day 1,033

The windows stared back at him, as cloudy as his grandmother's cataracts and almost as accusingly as the old bat. Of all the miserable bastards in the family, she just had to leave her house to him. He had to wonder what he'd done to deserve this or if one of his uncles had altered her will so that they wouldn't have to deal with it themselves.

It sounded about right for them, lazy and overly entitled as they were, but perhaps the old bat had her reasons for bequeathing him an absolute behemoth of wreck that she called home in her final days. It looked like she'd become the house at this point - cloudy eyes/windows, cracked face/facade, weather beaten as all hells and smelling distinctly of vinegar and lavender.

Overall the place was so rundown there was no way he'd be able to restore it and demolishing it was just as expensive so leaving it to collapse seemed the best option, if a little too close to how his grandmother had ended up dying to be a comfortable choice.

It's not every day you see a death in the family on TV before you hear about it from a relative but that was her way. She'd just do her own thing and let the rest of the world chase after her in a fearful flurry until the rest of the world got fed up and left her be at the ripe old age of one hundred and two.

The only reason anybody suspected something was wrong was that they hadn't seen her in the local news. Turns out she'd tried to repair her own electrics and fried herself to death. Her charred corpse was found fused to the ladder but at least her hair was back to its original black and she'd have been happy with that, less so about dying or so everyone assumed.

The thing is that the woman who found her, a 'concerned neighbour', originally reported that the old bat had been breathing. The police report said she'd told them that there'd been a nasty shock and that they should call an ambulance when they got the time. Bloody woman made it sound like his grandmother had poked a toaster, not toasted herself!

Five weeks later they sent a squaddie over to say hello and there she was, or whatever was left of her. The news reports varied so much that the only consistent detail is that they had to cut her body from the ladder and that they left the ladder behind.

A small part of him, a morbid part that he probably inherited from the old bat, wondered what the ladder looked like. As he found himself stepping inside the unlocked front door he swore he heard her wheezy snigger coming from the living room. Of course he must have been the only person there, who else would visit?

It didn't stop him from seeing her shadow flicker in the corners of his eyes, like she was leading him to the blackened leathery flesh that the forensic team had been to lazy to remove. With her attitude, not even burying the ladder in a church would stop the old bat from following him now that she'd gotten a taste for haunting.

It was so typical of her to carry on being a nuisance even in death.

Day 1,032

I fell asleep playing hide-and-seek with my friends so I'm still trying to piece everything together and figure out what could have caused everyone to die like they did. I guess those four years of being the hide-and-seek champion of Reignton Primary School paid off as I reckon it was how I got missed.

From the calendars I've been marking, it's been nine years since everyone died. All I ever found of them were their skins in a pile, like they'd just shrugged them off like they'd gone to find something more comfortable. Now those damp piles were shrivelled up, resembling raisins more than anything.

Now I know there are more survivors out there, or at least something that knows how to drive. There's this ice cream van that's been driving around the mall I'm hiding in, blasting out its music like it's trying to lure me out.

It might have worked nine years ago. Now I wait until it's at the opposite side of the mall and start placing my traps. It knows I'm doing this, manages to avoid all the nails, the barbed wire and the oil. I'll get it sooner or later though.

I'm the world's greatest hide-and-seek champion.

Day 1,031

A house is an odd place for a horror to occur, what with it being a human's primal zone of comfort and safety. This story follows a house designed solely to be a weapon against the human mind, something so perfectly innocuous on the outside yet contain within it a series of rooms that would eventually break whomever it was set upon.

Still, somewhere in this house, a door slammed shut. The person behind it swallowed their gasp and carried ever onwards as they navigated the labyrinth of their surroundings, praying that the odds were enough for them to outlast the architect.

Somewhere in the house this architect continued to manipulate the house's controls, inciting fear and paranoia in the person whose only crime was trespassing. Every corner became a risk, whispered voices stalked the person as the architect's sources scoured Web for further information that could be used to break their newest test subject.

The sources couldn't find a name, an address or even a birth certificate no matter how many times the architect made the person scream out their alleged life story. The person seemed to be breaking but where all the other testers had tried to flee, to hide or even kill themselves to escape the torment, the person kept going.

It soon became clear that the person intended to find the architect and his sources and to stop them. The person wasn't with any agency, gave the sources no new information, their DNA wasn't registered with any country and to top it all off, the were getting closer.

The architect briefly considered whether this was the house turned against them, that his own precious creation had made the person to bring an end to its master. The sources were afraid, cowering behind their multitude of screens as the architect's mutterings grew more frantic by the minute.

They were so occupied by the architect that they failed to notice the person waiting outside their door, staring into the camera and mouthing out the words "LET ME IN"

Day 1,030

It wore my friend's face like a cheap Halloween mask, grinning through her as it sauntered towards me through the crowd that stood around my body.

Funny how I always thought death was peaceful, what with the soul leaving and all the potential afterlives out there. If I'd have known just how wrong I was then I dare say I would be very much alive and studying for my exams right now.

The afterlife I found myself in looks like a city in perpetual night with tens of thousands of cars always gridlocked and shrieking at each other. I took a wrong turn trying to get home and now I'm stuck in a place where the buildings never seem to end, always spiralling upwards and every doorway has something crouching in it, waiting for whatever poor soul is stupid enough to try and enter.

I'm not alone here, I'm never alone. There are so many others who've been here for so long they don't even remember their names, let alone where they are. Some of they claim they've been here since it was all a village but nobody can be trusted in this place.

The thing that wears my friend's face is the only trustworthy creature around. Sometimes it talks like she did, warning me when I'm too close to danger and other times it just walks beside me, acting like a barrier against the other people or whatever's trying to pass for a person.

Day 1,029

The melting icecaps have freed so much more than methane gas. The very tip of Everest is sinking slowly as the ice warms and slides down, dragging with it the frozen bodies of failed explorers and the few guides who caught the tourist's misfortune. The ice began to release them,one by one until there were none left and Everest was left bare stone, right to the tip.

The world was flooding, freezing and boiling all at once. Nobody had the time or cared enough to bring the dead to their proper rest or to consider what else the ice might be giving up to the air once more. By the time anyone connected the dots, the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands and they roamed as though they were never killed by an unnamed virus.

They clawed their way through every ragged inch of the dramatically shifting weather, desperately trying to find some semblance of the world they left when they went up into the icy tomb of Everest. All they found were the remnants of their towns, their streets, their homes. The former occupants sought refuge in floating cities, well aware that the resurrected dead couldn't float and hadn't seemed to figure out how boats worked.

They were fragments of their living selves, held together by desperate need to find living, breathing humans to carry the virus on and remind them that they were once the same creatures they craved contact with. They were so misunderstood, so hated and so very lost in a drowning, burning hellscape that only ever hinted that they lived there too, a very long time ago.

Day 1,028

I'd always been told to never follow Will-O-The-Wisps that lingered by the back door of the library. Out of all the Wisps in the area, these were the worst by far, at least that's what everyone says. Every other cluster leads humans out of the way, usually to the nearby woods (or in one case, a pub whose landlord had bribed them to do so).

Nobody quite knows where the library Wisps lead you and as nobody's come back, we can only assume they're dead or worse - in the woods. The same woods that glow so brightly at night from the sheer number of Wisp colonies that thrive there. The same woods where people report hearing songs sung by long dead relatives.

The same woods I found myself being led to by the library Wisps - unwillingly, mind you. I only went out back for a quick smoke and then there they were all clustered around my legs, pushing me onwards and far too strong to resist.

It felt like wading through a river of blunt teeth that only dug in if I tried to walk against their current. They didn't bring me to the edge of the woods like all the others did, no they pushed me along a raised wooden walkway that ended at the mouth of a cave.

At least, it looked like a cave until I felt it breathe out and saw the ground twitch upwards as a colossal tongue scented the air. The Wisps scattered and I ran right after them as they unknowingly brought me straight back to the relative safety of the library.

As strange as things are around here, nobody will believe that Ponder's Hill is alive and that a cave in the woods is its mouth.