Day 1,789

Beneath our meat we are all near identical bones.

For the most part, our bones are us as well but every now and then a person is born with the wrong bones.

It's usually found in twins, not that they notice for the majority of their lives. Most are so close to being the same person physically and genetically that they never realise it at all and merely feel a little odd in themselves sometimes. Those who do notice don't last too long.

Nobody likes being away from their bones.

Occasionally it will happen to strangers born on the exact same day in the exact same maternity ward. It won't be picked up by the staff, it all starts in the brain when it starts understanding what it is and it not and it is not the bones that dwell within it.

Day 1,788

When they were drilling the tunnel they expected to find nothing more than rocks and dirt.

Instead they found Her.

She'd been asleep beneath the mountain for so long that there weren't even any stories of her floating about in local folklore. She was a total mystery. A sixteen foot tall mystery covered in flaky grey skin and patches of dense fur. Her mouth was full or heavily serrated teeth, all stained deep red.

She learnt our language within an hour and within a day She'd laid out her terms and conditions.

We could finish the tunnel and travel freely as long as She was allowed to eat whenever and whomever She pleased. The alternative was letting Her roam freely which had the potential for murder on a far larger scale than the occasional driver.

So we said yes and let Her kill and eat thousands.

The road on both sides of the tunnel is stained as red as her teeth.

The entire area reeks of something putrid and rotting.

The alternative was worse - we repeat to ourselves when someone else goes missing.

We did The Right Thing.

Day 1,787

When the wind is right you can hear singing coming from the drains near the river. When we were younger we'd dare each other to stick our arms through and wait for something to grab them. We were so convinced that someone lived down there and now we're old enough to know better.

Nobody lives down there - they all died thirty odd years back.

They either didn't get the memo or they refused to read it but we've all seen their pale, skinny little faces in the distance. We used to wonder why they never came towards us or tried to open the grate until we caught them coming back to it.

We must have been walking real quiet for them to not notice us all but we sure as hell noticed them dragging an entire stag through the open grate, guts trailing behind it like toilet paper stuck to your shoe. We made sure to hang back and keep low until they'd closed the grate back up again.

Dead as they might be, we didn't fancy our chances at taking them on face to face. I mean, how do you even hurt a ghost and were they even that? There's plenty of fiction to say that ghosts can kill but far less to explain why they'd drag dead meat to their main haunting grounds.

Unless they aren;t fully dead and whatever's left of their bodies still needs to eat.

Day 1,786

The fog was so thick we had to wear our respirators or risk drinking the air instead. If we'd had a choice we would have turned back and waited it out but luckily for us we were being pulled through it by Fernsby's dead daughter and she had somewhere important to take us.

Sometimes she blended in so perfectly with the fog that we thought we were walking ourselves through it but she kept turning around to make sure we were still there and hers wasn't a face we'd soon forget. Riddled with bullet holes and a nasty gash across her throat to top it all off- brutal way to go but unfortunately a common one.

We were deep in the woods when dawn came, not that we really noticed it through the fog but we felt its warmth graze us from time to time as young Miss Fernsby led us further still. I couldn't feel my legs at that point and I was glad for it, I'll take numbness over crippling pain any day.

Must have been noon by the time we reached the other side of the woods, out to the other side of town. Neither of us had been there since the amnesty talks had dissolved eight years ago and the whole planet had become more and more divided as countries became states became cities became gangs.

Now we were back and still being pulled towards the old apartment towers, towards a strong stench of decay that pierced through the respirators like nothing else could, towards her end goal we assumed. For all we knew she was taking us to our deaths - we hoped they'd be quicker than hers.

When she stopped leading us, when she stopped and raised both arms up and reached for a gaping hole in one of the towers that had been hit by one hell of a bomb, we saw what she wanted us to see. We saw what the initial war machines had left in their wake.

Nobody wanted to admit to adding radioactive material to their bombs. that would be far more immoral than a regular bomb and would last so much longer with much worse consequences in the long run. Consequences like cancerous mutations of the skin, ones that lingered in bloodlines and soil alike.

The young Miss Fernsby was reaching out through the fog to what initially appeared to be fabric tangled in a weird web that spanned the gaping hole. As we stood, trying to figure out what we wanted us to do about it, the fabric moved in a way fabric shouldn't - a way it can't- and we saw it for what it actually was.

Have you ever heard of a rat king? A whole bunch of rats tangled at the tails, squabbling and clawing at each other, desperately trying to get free. We just found the human equivalent and it wasn't tangled by clothes but by skin fused together so tightly that we couldn't really see where one person ended and another one began.

We slowly started recognising parts of people we used to know, people we left behind when the town split into gangs. We remembered the weird meteor shower we'd seen a few days ago, realising that they weren't meteors at all. They were miniature nukes, ones that were often sent into densely populated areas to wipe them clean for mass invasion.

Fernsby's daughter was giving us a head start - Lord knows we'd need it.

Day 1,785

She had broken every rule her mother ever gave her and in the end it still wasn't enough to save her.

In her defence, he approached her to begin with and she treated him just like anyone else at the bakery.
Don't talk to strangers - especially if they're outsiders.

She saw a cut on his hand and she knew blood that red was probably human, she sold him a bandage.
Don't help them, you don't want things like That in your debt - they'll repay you cruelly.

They kept bumping into each other around town, gradually growing closer and closer.
Don't invite them into your home or they'll never go and you'll not leave alive.

Before long she was spending several days in a row just sitting beside him in gentle silence.
If you say "I love you", they'll take your voice away.

Everything made sense when he invited her for a moonlit walk along the moors.
Don't go out there at night child - the water's been hungry for as long as it's been.

Will-o-wisps flittered about her, forming a path that led away from him.
Follow the little ones, they're all mothers and they'll always lead you back home.

No matter how much she wanted to run, her feet were stuck matching his steady pace.
If you go out too late then they'll snatch your soul straight from your shadow.

There must have been hundreds of them in the water, countless eyes shining in the lantern's dim glow.
The water's all theirs and you'd do well to remember that before you traipsing off for them to drown.

Day 1,784

If it were alive, it can become a haint.

Don't matter none if it were human or not.

Haints is haints, boy.


I lost count of how many times Nana said that to me when I was a kid and I doubted one of her many ghost stories. Now I've found reason to believe she was onto something. At least I think she is, i Mean there's simply no other explanation for cave divers to drown when there's not a single stream in the entire network of tunnels.

They were also found eighteen miles away near a dried up old riverbed which makes me wonder if the river itself counted as alive, or was so full of little critters that it felt alive. Either way, I reckon we're looking at the ghost of a long lost river.

Now there's nothing I can think of to put a dead river to rest. I doubt it has unfinished business or feels vengeful... maybe it doesn't know it's all dried up and gone? But surely it would have felt all the little lives inside it leave or die or both?

How to put a dead river to rest... Do we feed it more souls until it feels at peace? Do we seal the caves and hope it doesn't figure out how to move? Do we find what killed it - if we even can? There are too many questions for me to know where to even start and yet someone has to try.

There's not a snowball's chance in hell that the police will see this as logical, let alone enough to seal the caves themselves. I could do it with enough explosives but that would draw too much attention and then someone would wonder if anyone was trapped inside and they'd dig it all up again.

I could fence it off and post a few official looking signs up but deterrents never really deter, do they?

Day 1,783

Some say the audience date back as far as mankind has existed, possibly further still. As long as one can perform and be seen, for as long as the audience is required, they are there. Their lips may strain over teeth that struggle to be in one place at the same time but they are smiling with joy.

They meant no harm at first - they only wanted to join in and participate with us. They inspired us to mix blood and dirt to make the first drawings on cave walls. They stood among the crowds in the Globe Theatre to watch Shakespeare's plays and steer him towards tragedy every time. They killed so many millions and we watched them.

We hid behind a thousand excuses, saying how realistic movies were getting whole praying all the blood was fake and the screams were just really good acting. There's only so much that can be manufactured and we know it, we feel it every time they kill another dozen people in some z-list horror flick that we call fake and boring.

They adapt and learn and evolve alongside us, as visible and invisible as any other person for the most part. As soon as they start to gather, as soon as they become an audience they drop all pretense of being human and become spectators.

When one show fails they're already halfway through the next.

When one contestant dies they've already got another dozen lined up and ignorant.

When one person writes this all out they're already waiting to stop the next post.