Day 2,403

Something strange happened today that reminded me of when I was relocating across the country a few years ago and managed to stumble upon a town that doesn't exist. To set the scene, I'd been driving for about seven hours and hadn't seen another living thing out the windows for a good while. It was almost pitch black outside and there hadn't been another car since the main highway.

It was just me and the missus back then, both tired and debating the pros and cons of sleeping in the car versus driving a little longer and hoping we found a motel somewhere along the line. While we'd been talking it had started to rain and not a gentle easing into a storm kind of rain either. It was like turning on a showerhead - just this spontaneous flood of rain, absolutely violent downpour without a single cloud in sight, just stars as far as the eye could see above us.

And if that wasn't weird enough as we drove further those stars turned out to be windows and we found ourselves entering a town whose batter sign declared "Davelmagne  Population: 185". Thankfully there was a small B&B that opened their doors to us even thought the weather was apocalyptic and it was late enough into the night that the sun would soon be up.

The woman who answered was dressed like she'd stepped right out of an old western - spoke like it too but we figured it was just the local dialect. She took our names and said she'd happily take our money first thing in the morning as we'd hardly be able to go anywhere else in the storm. Everything about her seemed slightly... off. Like she was reading from a script and we were meant to know our lines already.

The room itself was quaint, one of those old floral and doily kind of places where all the paintings are either flowers, cats or meadows. At some point in the night I thought I heard somebody coming up the stairs, walking down the hallway til they got to our door and then stopping. I was tempted to get up and look but then I felt a drop of water hit my cheek.

It was like a cloud had been lifted off our heads - we woke up slouched against a sign that said the nearest city was a few dozen miles away, soaked to the bone and shivering like crazy. The car doors were wide open and it was still running but none of our things had been taken and the fuel gauge looked fulled than when we'd set off.

The town itself was nowhere in sight, just fields and nothing far as our eyes could see and we haven't been able to find it on any maps or websites ever since. We made it to our new home, a little shaken and damp but otherwise fine - definitely glad we hadn't paid for the night in advance.

Day 2,402

They tried telling me I lost the fingers on my right hand in a car accident five years ago but I know I had them yesterday. But last night I dreamt that something pulled my hand over the edge of my bed and ate those fingers - I remember the unbearable agony and not being able to scream.

I remember it telling me that everything would be different in the morning, everything would be better.

This is just different, not better.

---- ---- ---- ----

It came back last night and pulled half my arm under the bed. I was dangling at such an awkward angle I could barely breathe let alone turn around and see the damned thing but God did I feel every mouthful it took from me. Either I passed out before it had finished or just woke up from a bad dream.

My missing arm indicates the former but everyone else is saying it went in a car accident six years ago.

I wonder if I've woken up at all or if this is all just an elaborate nightmare.

---- ---- ---- ----

---- ---- ---- 

---- ----

One arm with just my thumb. My last remaining limb after that damned car accident took it all eleven years ago. It'll be night soon enough and I don't know how I'll continue to document this after it takes my thumb as well - if it stops there. Some nights it takes a lone finger and others a whole leg!

Everyone around me pities me, I can see it in the way they avoid looking at me.

I almost wish that thing would just forget about me and take all their eyes instead.

Maybe I'll be able to speak to it tonight and convince it to try fresher meats.

Day 2,401

It had been following their little car for five weeks now.  They found that if they ever stopped for too long they'd find it waiting inside, patting the empty passenger seat beside it like an old friend inviting you to join them for one last drink. Wherever they drove it was usually not too far behind, no matter the distance or waters and mountains they put between them and it.

At one point they sold their car, hoping that was what it was attracted to only to see it sitting in their new car at the dealership. Having to explain why they couldn't take the new car was the hardest part of their troubles and in the end they found enough minor issues to be given another car on the spot. They drove away safely knowing they'd bought themselves a little more time.

Eventually it seemed to grow tired of waiting for them to sit beside it and it took to following them at a much shorter distance. They began to notice a thousand little things about it that they never wanted to know and couldn't seem to forget. Like how cracked its grey-blue mouth were and how rigid its tongue was whenever it licked its lips...which it did uncomfortably often.

Everything about it seemed both far too dead and alive to make sense - even its clothing looked like it had been taken straight out of a guide to Victorian mourning. For all they knew it might have lived in that time but something about its listless gaze suggested that this was the latest in a long line of appearances it had taken on.

Perhaps if they kept this up, it would be wearing their face next and staring at another terrified stranger through their own listless eyes, licking their cracked gray-blue mouth and hoping that this new human would sit beside them. Perhaps they'd wake up one day with its face instead of their own - perhaps that was their real face and the one they thought was theirs belongs to someone else.

The more they spiralled and became lost in a haze of panicked thoughts, the closer it got.

Day 2,400

I know exactly when she turned by the way her screams slowly changed from pleas for me to free her to guttural, hollow roaring the likes of which a human shouldn't be able to make. Of course by that point she was human in the past tense, now another creature ready to join the hoards that blocked all roads in and out of the city. The ones who attacked her when she broke out last night and got herself bitten.

No, I shouldn't blame her for wanting a bit of freedom, for wanting to see the hoards with her own two eyes and not rely on the radio feeding us nothing but half-garbled disasters and cries for help that we have no way of answering without risking our own lives. Now that all seems so meaningless.

Keeping her here is a death sentence to the entire apartment block which could lead to the end of our city as we know it. Still, I don't have it in me to kill her while she looks so much like herself. I'll wait until she rots enough that she doesn't look like my Lisa anymore and then I'll do it.

I promise us both - I will fix this.

Day 2,399

We only saw them after we made it to the hill at top of the hiking trail and could see clear over the forest to the lake about 12 miles away. I went to take a photo of it and as I lined up the shot I saw dozens of the trees turn around to stare at us. My friends noticed around the same time, all taking a step back from the hill's edge before realising there were more trees behind us - now all watching us watching them watch us.

Their eyes were like nothing I'd ever seen before, they were bulbous and rough and with every slow blink I noticed how they looked just like ordinary burls that we'd seen on countless trees countless times before. I wondered if they'd all been eyes and every one of those trees had looked at me when I wasn't paying attention.

I was broken out of my thoughts by the rest of our group deciding that we couldn't spend the night and couldn't call out an air ambulance for something this unbelievable. They chose to try and walk back and as much as I argued against it - we were utterly defenseless and had no idea what these things were capable of - I was told to shut up and walk or get left behind.

After what we went through I've never been so glad to be this short. Arms came down at us from the canopy, claws the size of thighs sliced clean through Javid and Erina before pulling them back up out of sight. Their blood seemed to follow us all the way back to the car park... or maybe their killers did.

Saf and Maya were killed not long after. We didn't see them die but we heard their screams rise and fall and I know they still haven't been found. They aren't looking in the right places- they need to check the trees, I know they'll be tangled up in branches or crushed under roots.

In the end it was just me and Mo gasping for breath and desperately trying to unlock the car with hands that were too scared to work but we managed. We survived and our friends were murdered and we had to say we were attacked by random people because who would ever believe that there are monsters hiding among the trees?

Day 2,398

It wasn't the landslide that took them out, it was what the landslide had unearthed. Thirty three dead and the body count rose every day and every day the blood and bones left behind all led back to the gaping chasm in the cliffside. The stench of rotting meat that wafted out served as a ward against anyone entering alive.

Nobody saw what was coming and going and slaughtering anyone who drove past there at dawn or dusk until someone managed to hit one of the wretched things with their truck. What little of it wasn't splattered against the grill, pressed into the tarmac or leaking over the edge of the road looked disturbingly human.

I swear if it weren't for the claws and eyes the size of your fist they could be mistaken for a passing cousin. For all we know they're out in the street wearing those ridiculous over-sized sunglasses that are somehow fashionable. It would certainly explain how they've been killing so many when the road's been shut down.

Day 2,397

We call them Hléoðor - the sound without form. The unseen arms that wrap around your throat and take your voice, your dying breath and all your memories too. It becomes you for five days and within those 5 days it tracks down people you knew, hoping to take their voice, their life and continue its own.

It can't live without a voice, without that dying breath to keep it wandering the world like the cursed beast that it is. A small family of them moved into the area some thirty-odd years ago and we've not known any peace since nor will we til the last blasted thing is dead as all their victims.

The youngest isn't much trouble, gives you a bad case of asthma-like symptoms and bad memory for five days you always recover. Lazy little bugger tends to stick to the old folk's home where they dcan't tell who it's attacked and who's just senile.

The elder is deadly - a true, cold-hearted Hléoðor who sees us as food and knows just what to say to trick you into walking towards those unseen arms then crunch goes your neck and you're gone. Nasty brute prefers the downtown area where people have always gone missing.

The third though, the third has what the others lack - cunning. It's adapted to modern humanity far quicker and far better than either of the others. It's figured out phones and uses them to call victims all over the city. We've had to set up secret codewords and pray the bloody demon doesn't figure them out.

Sooner or later they'll move on, as is their way. We know the elder will for sure, he's a traditional beast who's been set in his ways for thousands of years but the younger ones worry me. They're too comfortable where they are and they've carved better niches than the old fellow.

Time'll tell if we outlive their comforts or if we join their repertoire of voices.