Day 1,585

My right eye won't stop twitching.

Nobody can see it but I can feel it spasming from the moment I wake up and right until I fall asleep.

I've rubbed my almost to the point of bleeding just to try and get it to stop but no luck.

My vision is starting to twitch too.

People's faces move in and out of reality as something else jolts forward to take their place.

A part of me wants to wait and see what they become... a part of me thinks their masks are finally fading.

I cried blood last night so I think the end of this all is coming soon.

Day 1,584

Honestly I don't know how he could sit there and tell me that nothing was wrong when the restless ghosts of his victims stood behind him screaming. Every time he opened his mouth they opened theirs to call him out for every single lie he told me that night.

He said he stayed late at work to fire off a few last-minute emails... the young man whose wrists were tied to his beck with course rope said he was ambushed while walking home. He said he then got dragged to a bar by a couple of colleagues... the young man told me where to find his body.

This was hardly the first time he'd made these excuses but it seemed like a new ghost joined him every night after work, each looking worse than the last while he remained so perfectly composed. One even joined overnight - she wasn't there when we went to bed but this morning she was with the rest of them, well most of her was.

They all told me where to find them and how they died.

Killing him just seemed like the next step.

I wonder if he started like this too.

Day 1,583

Driving a taxi is like watching eight movies all at once, constantly flickering back and forth between plots and characters with no discernable end in sight. Your evenings are filled with snippets of overheard conversation, brief but stale idle chatter and the same script to end it every time.

After a while the routes to most places become so familiar you begin to pay less and less attention to the roads and begin to notice everything else around you. Little glimpses of things you don't think you were ever meant to see - things that your passengers either don't notice or are somehow a part of.

For example a month or so ago when you were waiting for the lights to change and caught a glimpse of wild dogs chasing after a small deer further into a cul-de-sac. Just as the car behind you honked to get your attention as the lights changed, you saw them all change into children that stopped and stared right at you.

You notice that dogs are reluctant to go near you now.

There was also that time you were waiting near a pub for a customer who said they were "five minutes away"... they were always five minutes away. It was your last job of the night and you figured you may be there a while so you switched the car off and were about to pull out a newspaper when someone burst through the rear door of the pub and staggered into the closest alley that you just so happened to be outside of.

Your windows were up but you still heard the sound his skin made as he peeled it off to reveal scales.

Even as recently as yesterday you found yourself glancing up at the windows of Hotel Hallmarshe only to see a man on the phone, pacing between three windows agitatedly while an impossibly shaped shadowy figure walked three steps behind him.

You jolted in your seat when it pounced and forced your eyes to the road when it looked down at you.

Day 1,582

There were few places he hated delivering to more than the old Isaac's place. It wasn't especially hard to get to and he didn't have to go there very often but every time he went, something ended up coming back with him and lingering around the post office.

They could be heard tapping on the windows and seen on the security cameras flipping letters into the wrong sacks. Absolute pests that they were, for the most part at least. There was one who kept trying to follow him back that he had to swerve and evade and break practically every traffic rule to lose in the twists and turns of the town - anything to stop it getting to the office.

From the distance he usually saw it at, it almost looked like four or five black sacks tied into the rough shape of a person and filled with countless squirming somethings that cried like children and used his name to beg for a freedom he didn't dare give them.

Last time he saw it, it was in the process of skinning and eating a dog. Dozens of little black arms had sprouted all over its body and were clawing at the dying critter, peeling it slowly... thoughtfully... while other limbs tore chunks off and retreated back into the overall mass.

He dreaded to think what it would do if it caught a person.

Day 1,581

Down the old side of town there was a stone bridge over the river that was always locked. It had piqued her curiosity right from the start - who would put an iron gate right in the middle of a bridge and why? For years she thought she'd never have an answer until one evening when she saw that the gate was wide open.

There were a few people milling about as usual, nobody paying any mind to the bridge at all. Figuring it was a one-time kind of opportunity to cross to the other side of town this way she started walking, not feeling the worried glances behind her and not hearing everything come to a halt as she crossed the threshold and set foot on the path once more.

She turned back to see if anyone else would be joining her and saw nobody. The street looked utterly deserted to the point where it seemed like it hadn't been walked down for centuries. Turning back she saw the rest of the town in much the same condition - abandoned and decaying with nothing but the wind whispering along the roads.

Turning back one last time she saw that the gate was now locked, leaving her with one way to go - onwards.

Day 1,580

Starting out at a new school is one of the most terrifying things a child can experience. They lose all sense of who they were and where they stood among their peers and these are not easy to regain. Starting a new school is daunting enough with parents in tow and even worse without.

And that's where we begin today - a small child waiting outside of the headmaster's office at 08:30AM sharp. The bench was as sturdy as the rest of the school and almost as old, ornately carved along the back and crudely carved along the armrests where restless arms scraped at the varnish to inscribe their initials instead.

The child was supposed to be meeting the headmaster to be introduced to the layout of the school and to receive their schedule but not it was 08:45AM and not a single soul was in sight. An old mobile was cautiously removed from an almost empty rucksack to double check the time and date. Both were correct and yet the child was still so very alone.

The child decided that when the clock showed 09:30AM they would walk home- anything delayed over an hour just simply isn't happening, as their mother was fond of saying. Time dragged by like the overflowing trawl net, the seconds reluctantly scraped by and just before the hour had struck, the child saw someone.

He looked older but barely, dressed in the school's autumnal reds and greens and frantically gesturing from the far end of the hallway as his eyes darted around wildly. "Quickly, this way!" the boy loudly whispered, "He's coming and you'll be right in his way!"

The child looked worried, hurriedly grabbing their rucksack and darting over to the boy who grabbed their hand to pull them towards a storage room. He wedged several boxes underneath the handle before backing to to greet the child with that naive trust the young so often have.

He went to give his name only to snap his mouth shut as the sound of a wooden cane striking the floor grew closer and closer. The child knew it would be the headmaster and that they must meet the headmaster and this boy was interfering.

This simply would not do.

The wooden cane kept coming closer and closer and closer, polished wood striking polished wood until it struck something wet. Something red. Something leaking out from the other side of a storage room where a child had decided to remove the interruption and had just finished removing the boxes beneath the handle when the door was opened by a sharp tug and light spilled from the many eyes of the headmaster onto the drenched pile of meat on the floor and the child standing beside it.

Day 1,579

To get to the old ballroom he had to innocently meander down a series of unsavory alleyways full of people that weren't entirely human and didn't quite know how to keep one alive for very long. From there he reached a courtyard with a fountain that had been used as a communal dumping space for so long that the water was no longer visible, though the rubbish bobbed about as something swam beneath it.

Taking the third exit from the courtyard took him passed several small shops that seemed to exist in another age altogether and whose owners glared at him through dust-coated windows, or perhaps it was the dust itself... in this part of town nothing was as you'd expect.

He ducked down a final alley and set to work prying damp boards from a broken basement window so that he could slip into the unguarded side of the old theatre and work his way towards a ballroom that hadn't been seen for almost two hundred years.

As he gently placed the boards back over the window to try and cover his entry point, he closed his eyes to help them adjust faster to the dark. As he turned around he saw that there was a lit candle by the open door that led to the lower workshop of the theatre.

Holding his breath he waited and listened for the sounds of whoever had been here just that little bit before him, long enough ago to have lit the candle but not so long that the candle had burnt out or even reached the halfway mark. He heard the faint sounds of birds outside and his own heartbeat thudding in his ears but all else was silent.

The candle felt warm as he picked it up, debating between sing it for light or using his own torch and ultimately choosing the candle for being a softer light, something harder to spot than the harsh white of an LED flashlight. Armed with this, he carried on into the underbelly of the theatre with the ballroom - his goal- at the forefront of his mind.

After what felt like hours of trekking through spiderweb-infested hallways, hiding underneath old sewing desks from patrolling denizens and tricking the lingering patrons into pretending he didn't exist, he finally found himself at the grandiose entrance to the ballroom.

The denizens found him shortly after.