Day 879

'There are worse places to wake up, surely?' he thought as he stared balefully at the growing puddle of blood forming from underneath the limp form of his probably-sleeping friend as if he could will it to stop creeping closer to him. There was only so much room to back away into inside a two-man tent, especially when the aforementioned tent is itched against the wall of a cave and you've made the mistake of taking the side closest to the wall in the hope that it would be warmer but everywhere is cold and just damp enough to be uncomfortable and that puddle just blinked.

The puddle had grown an eye somehow while he'd been distracted by his poor decision to join his friend for a weekend of camping and then go onto trap himself in a tent with what now seemed to be a monster. He thought briefly of waking his friend so they could both run out of the tent and to (presumed) safety but that would mean A - his friend moving while the creature is very much underneath him with no clear intent - and B - getting past the creature to get outside, assuming it hadn't killed one or both of them at that point.

The eye began to rise up out of the not-a-blood-puddle on a wobbly stalk that began to look about, almost comical with its flexibility and slow movements. It was like the creature was aware that they probably hadn't seen something like it before and didn't want to scare them by darting about. The scene became very reminiscent of a child trying to get a stray cat to come over to it as the eye stalk started to bob from side to side in a jaunty manner.

He found himself relaxing, in spite of the situation at hand, and was about to reach out to the creature until his friend moaned in his sleep, all colour seeming to drain from his resting face. The creature continued to bob as blood started to leak out of the sides of his friend's mouth, running down his face to plip gently onto the creature below.

It didn't seem to mind, if anything it only moved faster. With its increasing speed his sleeping friend slowly came into consciousness as a moan bubbled out of him, gradually rising in volume until he was shrieking and trying to sit upright. His back appeared to be stuck to the creature at first until he had writhed enough to dislodge some kind of thick, tapering tendril from his upper back.

Blood poured out of the hole it had left and the creature's entire puddle-like body started to rise and fall in time with its eye-stalk. His friend was in some kind of shrieking daze, utterly uncomprehending of anything and helpless to move while the other sat half a metre away and equally paralysed by the unfolding scene.

Within minutes the creature's body was practically bouncing up and down until it reached a peak and its sides shot up to grab at the screaming man, clenching down with a sickeningly wet crunch. The screaming came to an abrupt halt as the creature's sides twitched and gradually sunk back into the ground, dragging its prey into a newly formed hole that was as damp and red as the rest of the creature.

He remained frozen in fear until dawn, staring down at a hole that was slowly closing up. By sunrise it had caught the edge of the tent and was attempting to drag the whole thing down, spurring the surviving man to grab his backpack and shoes and run back to the path, not quite trusting the ground on the way and certainly not looking back to see the tent suddenly vanish downwards and definitely not stopping to stare at the much larger eye-stalk that tried to follow him down the path, the rest of its body puddling behind him until he reached the crowded campsite.

It withdrew when it saw the dozens of tents but not entirely, hovering around the bushes as if it was scoping out all the new-found prey. He realised then that he might have doomed almost three hundred innocent people. At least he had a better chance of survival, now that the trip was over and he could head back into the city or better yet another country with little to no campsites.

Day 878

The building that emerged from the sand dune on Old Piphill beach shouldn't have been opened. We see that now but at the time it was this cloudy glass, pyrimid-shaped monstrosity of a thing that could contain some unheard of Pharaoh who'd made it to Wales and decided to be buried there for reasons we would only know from breaking the glass and carefully climbing inside.

In hindsight it was a trap to begin with but it was so well constructed and such a big discovery and anyone who had even the vaguest ambitions wanted to delve right on into it. The smell of rotting meat should have clued us that something was wrong right from the start but that potential treasure lured us out of suspicion and further down to the depths of the assumed tomb.

Several archaeologists quit before they'd even gotten half way, the stench of blood and mould was too much for them to bear. The few that made it to ground level described a scene of utter carnage - fresh carnage that dripped from glass walls and onto a glass floor.

They described how there were paths dug into the sand all around them, flooded but well lit with dark shapes flitting about that were too oddly shaped to be fish. There was some kind of chasm towards the centre with the glass pyramid balancing over the top of it, edges barely overlapping, and down in its very depths were thousands of multicoloured lights.

Some lights were stationary, almost forming buildings in the rocks, while others rushed about in oddly straight lines to and from specific points. The thought that there was a thriving city beneath them was too much for the team, never mind what manner of being clearly still occupied both that and the pyrimad they still stood in, and so they radio'd their counterpart team on the surface for immediate extraction.

The ropes that came up felt heavy enough that nobody suspected a thing, communications between the two teams were regular and informative. With constant bits and pieces of information about the symbols carved into the glass, the appearance of lights below them where they had been standing and strange barking noises in the distance the surface team assumed that all was well until the ropes began to turn red.

It wasn't minerals or the rope's natural colour, it was fresh and dripping as if someone had poured paint all down it. By the time the end was in sight they knew it was too late to do anything but seal up the pyramid, the investigation and the beach.

While the remains at the rope'send were declared human, they didn't match the DNA of anyone from the team , according to the reports. Then again the reports were declared unreliable after the surface team all wrote that they remained in communication with the exploration team for days after the remains were extracted and examined.

The final message, confirmed across all reports, was simply "Team E is fine, all members accounted for."

Day 877

How quickly they learnt to blend in with us.
How many of them appeared around October.
How long did it take them to evolve such specific forms.

What came first, our masks or theirs?

These are things we are still figuring out about the creatures known only by the newspaper-coined term "Facers". At first we didn't even know they weren't human, they just seemed to be wearing very detailed masks. The fact that they have a tendency to travel in packs just made them seem like trick-or-treaters come early.

It's hard to say what gave them away first - there are so many accounts on so many hyperactive forums that getting to the primary post, the source itself, is damn near impossible. The earliest ones found so far date back four years and are centred mostly within the United States. It seems their fondness for Halloween gave them the advantage of being able to tell a mask from a cleverly evolved facial pattern.

One of the earlier accounts says that their friend tried to mug a lone Facer and, after finding that their mask connected to their face, quickly fled. The image they hastily snapped over their shoulder as they ran showed the Facer giving chase, jaw unhinged and measuring approximately half a foot in size - utterly inhumane yet cleverly disguised as a stereotypical devil. From the neon red colouration that stopped in a sharp line with paler pink flesh behind it, sunken in as to make the face appear to be a protruding mask, to the incredibly shiny horns, this Facer was perfectly adapted to resemble a costume.

As of last week, the attempts to successfully capture a live Facer have finally paid off and we have what appears to be a young boy in a rabbit mask. The noted irregularities so far seem to be the regular twitching of the nose as the boy breathes, pain receptors throughout the "mask" area of the face and muscular movement of the ears, allowing for full 360 degree turning at will. Still his "mask" looks and feels cold and plastic, perhaps from reduced circulation to better mimic the intended design.

Day 876

At first glance it looked like a scarf blowing through the sunset soaked woods, somebody's lost possession as opposed to somebody lost to possession which was all too common in the woods. Ever since the civil war, ghosts clung to every tree like spiderwebs in an old farmhouse, refusing to leave for the simplest reason. They didn't want to.

Exorcisms only work if the dead are willing to go and if they aren't, there's no force in this life or the next that can make them. More often than not they end up slipping into something that can move faster than them (admittedly this is almost everything bar slugs and snails). This time it was the remnants of their body.

The hair that drifted between the branches bore leaves tangled so badly in the strands it resembled a sapling from the right angle. Her face resembled a deflated balloon, flesh all gone but skin weather-worn to a leathery sack that fluttered in the breeze barely ahead of her hair.

She'd been killed accidentally, the shot wasn't meant for her at all. Like most ghosts she'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time when she lived and paid for it dearly. Like most ghosts she found her post-death freedom too much fun to give up for the sake of peace for the living and to silence the never-ending howling all around her as her fellow restless souls tried to snatch her physical form from her.

She'd been winning that tug-of-war for just over a hundred and fifty years and had plenty more fight in her. It wouldn't have been so bad but she kept trying to upgrade her physical form for something more substantial. She'd only go after children, believing that she'd be able to grow up and live in their young bodies after kicking their own souls right out. She'd managed the latter a good dozen or so times but the former required the body to be more... together than she tended to leave them.

Day 875

The dark can trick you, you know. Make you see things, hear things, speak to people that never existed in the first place and go to places that haven't opened for years and years and years and the dark hides so much from us. So much that we can't see in the light.


There's a small brick shed in the fields outside of a town, one you've only ever seen glimpses of from the roads as you pass it by in favour of friendlier places, necessary places but it's always been there. That little grey door that's rusty around the edges, without a padlock and without any viewable purpose other than to taunt you with the thought that there's something inside it.

If you walked past there at night you'd see light coming through the keyhole and hear the faint sounds of glassware smashing and voices laughing at a joke too mumbled for you to hear. You might turn the door handle to find it unlocked and leading to a set of concrete stairs that spiral down into darkness. You might even go down those stairs, hands sweating as you grab the surprisingly warm handrail.

There could be lights glowing dimly on the walls at odd intervals, there could even be the vague outline of hands holding those lights against the walls. It would be too dark to see clearly enough until you reached the bottom, where the sound of breaking glass and laughter is loudest. A grey door matching the entrance would be at the end of a short corridor and shadows would be seen through the small glass window at the top.

The shadows might not be as human as they sound. They might have limbs where limbs shouldn't be or no limbs where limbs should be or worse. You would be able to hear them a lot clearer by pressing your ear against the door, under the window so you wouldn't be seen, of course.

Thirty years we told them! Thirty years until we could even consider going to the surface AND THEY BELIEVED EVERY WORD OF IT!

                    Oh hush already, you daft old fool - they'll hear us.

What does it matter? All we'd have to do is remind them that we've "saved their lives" and they'll fall right back into line as they've been doing the past FIFTY EIGHT YEARS ALREADY!

                   Just because they believed us last time doesn't mean they will this time. I can't cover for you every time you feel like gloating about it.

The... beings might be so distracted that they wouldn't see you slowly peeping into the window at their strange forms and the stranger activity they seem to be observing as writhing brown tentacles attempt to reach them through countless layers of paper-thin glass. The only thing that's between them-and-it and them-and-it-and-you.

If you backed out at that point you'd get away with this glimpse. You'd run as quietly as possible back up the stairs, trying to ignore the way the lights lean towards you as their holders realise what you aren't. You'd make it to the top of the stairs and close the door silently but firmly, planning to bring a lock with you next time to prevent the beings down there from following you.

You wouldn't realise you'd been spotted until several nights later when familiar voices are trying to get your attention from a manhole in your back garden. They beg that you come down and help them open it so they can talk to you.They might ask for your help as a matter of national importance - something that you can do will save the world as you know it!

You would have two options from there.

Open the manhole and be dragged away with them to "save the world" or ignore them for the rest of your days and pray that some day, somehow, they will forget about you and let you forget about them in turn. You may die with the sounds of their begging coming through the hospital vents, the hotel dumbwaiter, the maintenance door at the top of the elevator, the front grill of your car.

Day 874

The old Saxon burial mounds are sinking, slowly caving in around the centre despite being supported by a stone chamber that protects the body within. Originally the geological scans of the cluster of mounds showed that each one was "in use" so to speak and showed no signs of structural anomalies.

There are rumours circulating that if you put your ear to the mounds late at night you can hear feet walking along stone paths as the dead walk towards their hidden afterlife citadel deep below the Sussex countryside. There's no proof though, the council refuse to allow anyone to dig up and have restricted all attempts in their legislative web.

It won't be long until the public gets to see what's inside the mounds anyway, there are cracks forming in the concave dirt, great splits that everyone's been trying to shine a light down. So far all that's been officially seen is the stone roof of the burial chambers but unofficially they've seen a lot more.

The beginnings of a vast staircase with figures in thick cloth and chainmail, helmeted and quietly conversing with each other in a dead version of our modern tongue. Some figures look up through the cracks,worming their fingers through to feel the sunlight and pull chunks of dirt aside.

The whites of their eyes are stained yellow, their skin the colour of bonfire ash. The running theories are that somewhere down the line they either stopped being human or they were never human to begin with. No bodies have ever been taken from the mounds, for all we know they buried things that they wanted to protect us all from and slowly they're letting themselves out.

Judging by the size of the cracks, it won't be much longer before we meet them face to face.

Day 873

Finding a mass grave in England, while fairly uncommon, isn't unusual. The black death left its mark scattered throughout the countryside, clustered around churches and buried beneath the great cities. So when a new mass grave was found while a building company was working on the foundations for a new shopping centre they sent historians before police.

Sure enough the bones on top dated back to the mid 1300s and the state of the bones was about right for the plague and it all seemed perfectly normal until they dug a little deeper. The bones on top may have been ancient but the ones just beneath were so recent that remnants of flesh still clung around their joints, freezing their arms in an upwards reaching position.

They were known as plague angels from then on.

Nameless and clueless the police left the case as open as the arms of the recently deceased for the next forty odd years.

Day 872

It could have been any one of us, that's what we thought at first. I mean, the ship was so huge and we'd lost so many already, how would we even notice there were doppelgangers until it was too late? We didn't even know when they arrived here or whereabouts they came from in particular, just that the ship had experienced severe technological difficulties ever since we pulled out of Dowbridge Port.

There were countless little islands surrounding the port where seals would perch and hide in, slipping into the water through unusually smooth holes. It stood to reason that there might be other things inside the islands aside from seals, perhaps the things that slipped onto the ship somehow and began picking us off one by one.

I'll admit I was one of the last to notice but in all fairness I was a little busy as, when the head engineer's upper torso was found hanging from a vent and declared "indisposed of", I took on his duties and had been in the midst of fixing the multitude of problems the doppelgangers were causing. Technologically at least, preventing the murders was beyond my skill set to say the least.

Over the weeks that we'd been collectively hiding, repairing and generally trying to sail the ship to the nearest port while debating if that was a good idea, we managed to find an old airbase to dock beside. It was one of those floating monstrosities that was little more than a rusted outline but it gave us somewhere stable to sump the ship and escape on our lifeboats while not necessarily losing the cargo.

From the brief snippets of radio talk we'd all been able to establish, as well as a list of crewmen who were known to be dead for sure, we understood there were between 15 and 30 survivors when we docked. The doppelgangers put us back to almost a full crew and they outnumbered us  by far, at least we thought so.

During our time scavenging and surviving their repeated attempts to kill and eat us they had begun to stack the remains of the dead crewmen on deck, all neatly laid out for some reason. It was quite a sight to stumble across, even more so when the doppelgangers were still ferrying bits and pieces of the bodies to their original owners.

While three of us finally managed to get off the ship and find a port, the rest we can presume to be dead or as good as. I mean there are other lifeboats but I don't think the doppelgangers know how to use them, not when it took them almost a week to figure out how to use the horn and two weeks to open the doors.

So I'm telling you now, the "miracle rescue" that's recovering the remainder of the crew - all 36 - is not the crew we set out with. Most, if not all, of them aren't even human and they've either moved the bodies of the originals again or finished them off entirely. I don't know which is worse but the worst thing you can do is allow my crew to come ashore. They died weeks ago and they need to stay dead, however you can manage that.

Day 871

Urban rumours say that the statue in Angel's Tree used to be a person. You know how when you're a kid whatever someone older says somehow makes perfect sense? My uncle used to say that if you were buried and there were seeds underneath you then when they grew into trees they'd lift your skeleton right up out of the ground.

Of course now I know it's a load of nonsense but at the time it explained Angel's Tree and that was what I told everyone else. I still hear that rumour circling about the school I work in only somewhere along the line they've changed the statue's position.

When I was a kid the statue was always only visible up to the shoulders with a few fingers peeping through lower down in the trunk and of course the upper part of the spread wings that gave the tree its nickname. Now they're saying that the statue has one arm nearly fully outside of the tree with its fingers pointing directly below.

People are starting to wonder who or what is buried beneath the tree but its on consecrated church grounds so nobody can dig there without the church's permission. Who'd honestly ask to dig up a potential grave just because some statue halfway up a tree might be pointing to a grave?

Day 870

As he read the last sentence he felt the air begin to clear at last as the sound of dirt hitting concrete filled the room. Glancing around felt like ringing a church bell for his own funeral. It was finally over and they were all at rest. All but him and his story.

He walked out of the library, now a tomb for every last person from Dagbarrow. Everyone but him - he still had work to do to make sure that the Ash Days wouldn't plague any other town. That their history wouldn't be repeated and innocent people left to suffer among sinners as though they were all the same.

It had begun with book burning - the greatest sacrilege of a town whose founding principles were the preservation of knowledge that dated back long before the Roman invasion. When political powers shifted and demanded that certain things were erased from modern viewing, that they were impure somehow, the people of Dagbarrow were the last to succumb but when they did it was the most violent of all the burnings.

The fires raged on for months, constantly fed by whatever books were deemed wrong and as the town choked on the ash of their own making they began to curse. It was quiet at first, the occasional "damn it all to hell" as someone's treasured novella was destroyed for the sake of the government's whims but it grew.

Their collective rage grew and grew until people began screaming incoherent damnation against the church, at the parliament, at their neighbours and themselves until the entire town had cursed itself into a state that could only be undone by quiet, kind reading.

You see, they were so passionate about their beloved books that their cries had bound them together, warping the words to mesh a human life and a human life's work until their story was inseparable from the original. It kept a great many books safe from the burnings, they physically couldn't be destroyed and neither could the humans bound to them.

Dagbarrow was declared a casualty of war, barred from the world and left to crumble but they survived a great many years. Books don't need to eat, they don't need sunlight or rain. Books sustain themselves just fine in dry and dark rooms where the townsfolk whispered the stories until both book and reader crumbled to dust. At peace with themselves at last, considering this a redemption.

And he did more than witness it all. He, a young man of eighteen took it upon himself to free his town from their curse by reading an and every book he could.Whether the others wanted it or not. By barring himself inside the remains of the library he had full access to all the town's stories, the curse had spread to every book and he with his own single copy tucked away in his shirt, began to read.

Day 869

Of all the places where trains should be, the bottom of an underground lake on an island that was only recently inhabited is one of the stranger ones. The cave leading to the lake was only recently discovered by a visiting tourist whose drone flew over the off-limit areas of the mountains and spied the gaping entrance in a relatively stable area.

It may have taken seventy years to finally establish a permanent base there but the thought that there may be precious stones inside the cave suddenly boosted the island's reputation and the settlement boomed practically overnight. After months of debating, meeting, planning and gathering resources a small team were selected to make the first trip to the cave entrance and examine the opening tunnel for signs of precious stones and ore.

They were met with a tunnel less than seven feet long, ending in a sharp drop that seemed to go on forever. After dropping several loose stones down there and timing their fall they determined the drop was perhaps forty feet and had a curve to it before ending in water.

It was several weeks later before a second team was sent with enough equipment to face the depths and survive whatever may be down there, however deep the water may be and if it was affected by the tides. Nobody wanted to drown but it was a very real possibility until they better understood how the cave's unique system worked.

The drop itself was fairly normal, the occasional interesting minerals streaked their way through the otherwise unassumingly grey stone as the team lowered themselves to the surprisingly smooth curve at the end of the drop. Dangling as far past the curve as they could they shone their head-mounted torches as far as possible to determine the height of the cave.

It was spacious enough for them to use the raft they brought with them,an instant inflatable thing made to withstand the sharp rocks found in rapid rivers, now helping the team navigate deeper inside the cave and to whatever else they may find.

It wasn't long before they came to the lake itself, after several twists, turns and drops in the river. There was a large hole in the cave ceiling that allowed light and weather from the outside to pass through and fall down onto what appeared to be a train station. It was on a natural rocky island but covered in foliage and so heavily overgrown it must have been there for years.

The team decided to first paddle around it before trying to walk into the open station doors, just in case the island wasn't stable. They got halfway around the back when they spotted the partially submerged train and the bones inside it all wearing identical scuba gear.

They were too distracted by the sight, too busy bickering with each other about how this could possibly be an elaborate prank by somebody - some country - that had gotten to the cave before them and set this up to scare them from any valuable materials, to notice the faint pop and hiss of a knife being stuck into the raft.

Too caught up in yelling at each other to notice until they were almost waist deep in the tepid waters with the swift undercurrent pulling them firmly into the train's open doors, dragging them down into first class and shutting behind them with a satisfying click.

Day 868

There's a part of the suburbs you can only access if you have a keycard for the iron gates that surround it. The houses inside look exactly the same as the rest of the area, all perfectly neat and always in line with the regulations. It's often used as the picture-perfect representation of what every home owner should aspire to live in.

The only foreseeable downside to that particular area of the suburbs is that it doesn't appear to have any residents, not at first glance. A local kid took it upon themself to mark the two bars you need to peer through in order to be able to see the home owners.His family moved out of the country a week later but that's apparently unrelated.

I must admit I was sceptic at first until my neighbour Julia dragged out there and made me look through those bars just to prove it wasn't a story. Sure enough I saw a man walk right past me but only through the bars, he just didn't seem to exist outside of them. For a brief moment I thought nobody would believe me if I told them but Julia was beside me looking all grim and understanding. 

She's gone now, of course. The last anyone heard of her was María who lived next door to her and often overheard her phone conversations. She says Julia was invited to dinner with one of the families in the fenced off area. Nobody saw her go in or out and a week later all of her things were being moved to her mother's address in Romania.

I find myself going back to those bars whenever I have a spare moment just to see if I can spy Julia over there. It's just that I have a sneaking suspicion that she never left, that she's still over there and that she can't get out. Maybe that's why the're all there, the strange people who can only be seen from one angle. They only ever face one direction too, like they're just cardboard models moving as people are supposed to.

Day 867

She remembered having a sister when she was little, one who looked just like her. Annika, she remembered yelling that and seeing her sister turn around smiling and mouthing Elba. How quickly she forgot the sound of her sister's voice but never her smile. Never.

Her parents didn't talk about Annika, they had no pictures of her on the walls or in the books. Elba only had her memory, her one precious memory and her reflection to remind her that she could always see her sister in the mirror.

When she was younger she had once told her parents that she saw Annika in the mirror and they explained to her what reflections was despite her insisting that the knew this and that wasn't what she'd meant. She didn't see the whole of Annika, just the top of her sister's head peeping over her shoulder.

She always seemed to be there, just watching from behind Elba. It was like she was hiding from something. Her eyes would always dart around before she ducked out of sight to somewhere Elba had never been able to see. Not even when she stood high up and gazed down at the reflected floor only to see Annika scuttle away out of sight still.

It reminded her of the day she'd died trying to rescue a cat from underneath a car parked on the hill. The driver claimed he'd always put the handbrake on and that was the one day he forgot but nothing could change the fact that the cat ran out into oncoming traffic and Annika had knocked her head against the underside of the car, stunning herself and bumping it just enough to get it rolling over her fragile little head.

Elba remembered exactly where the tyre had crushed Annika's head. It was along the bridge of her nose, just about where her head stopped peeping in the mirrors. She wondered if the rest of Annika haunted her or if it was just the topmost part of her. Maybe that's where the soul was kept?

Day 866

It was Victorian custom that when the dead were interred they would be buried so that the head-end of the coffin was facing the walkway that was often narrowly sandwiched between heavily laden rows of similarly elaborate coffins. They would come in to pay their respects and talk with their dearly departed knowing with solace that they would never tell.

Then the rumours of the living dead came to be and with it the fear that everything they had whispered to the coffins would be known when they rose up and burst from their lead-sealed coffins, which they were apparently capable of as they couldn't feel the pain of bones breaking.

This is not when we first thought to attack the undead but when it was first published and spread as the only survivable choice when faced with the reanimated corpse of someone who knows exactly who killed them and where the murder weapon is buried. Just to state an example, of course.

From this came our response when the dead did begin to rise up. We attacked without guilt, considering them monsters and that their conscience had already passed on.We couldn't have been more wrongly lead or better armed for the resurgence not just of our dead but our pasts.

When they first tried to speak flies and dust came out alongside the stench of decaying flesh. We killed so many before they finally found their speech again and begged us to spare them as they didn't know what would happen to their souls a second time. They only ever wanted to be reunited with their families, living and otherwise.

For the sake of all they might know, we couldn't allow that.

We didn't.

Day 865

My dear wayward friend,

Please accept my humblest apologies for the vague and abrupt nature of my last letter. The eyes of our enemies were too many and their minions have even gone so far as to hide my writing implements! Unfortunately this has yet to be remedied, though the culprits were found and disposed of after their fervent denial in the partaking of the theft.

Bless your sturdy nature and thorough research. Your studies have led me to the doorstep of a man known only by the name on the toe tag he was wearing when his body was found in the alley beside Ibrox Street in Glasgow. Though he was pronounced dead on scene he awoke during the autopsy and was soon transferred to the hospital upstairs.

Upon waking he described the following to me and I found it pertinent to report to your wise ears. You'll find that his written account of the beasts seem to match the sources you discovered in your dig on Two Tree Island.

Yours in faith,

Midas' Pen


It was on the way to the pub is when it happened. I was set to meet an old mate from school, hadn't seen him since he swanned off to Lancashire for university. Too good for the strong work he was. Always had one of them minds made for thinking not doing and he was always keen to prove so. Reckon he was afraid of the rest of us. We could have snapped him like a twig but he was our lad still, just an odd one.

So I get to the pub and wait outside for him just as he'd asked in his letter. He was a nervous sort of person, see, and having a big lad like me waiting for him made him feel a bit safer about coming home.Not that he had any real reason to avoid home save for the fact that his dad was disappointed he'd rather get educated than paid for real work.

I must have waited for a good hour or so, killing time chatting to the lads as they went in for their brew and laughed at me for pandering to old brainyboxes' nerves when out of the blue he came slamming into me. I never saw him coming but judging by the state of him he'd been coming in fast for quite some time. Never seen a face so shiny with sweat outside of the factory.

He stammered something about  running into these things with more limbs than anything ought to have and "impossibly insectoid" or something like that. I reckoned he'd spotted one of them wasps from Africa that get caught up in cargo and find their way out and about but I'd already humoured him thus far and saw no harm in doing so some more.

So I goes along with him to the place he said he'd seen the creatures that had sent him scarpering. I didn't even know he'd been stung at that point, no unusual behaviour that hadn't been there when we was young at least. Sure enough when we got there we spotted this hunched over stripe thing. Great big bugger of a wasp if ever I'd seen one and not yer missus version of big. This one was about the size of my nephew Alphie and he's five.

Right as I start to make my plan of attack old brainybox starts slicking up a storm. Thought his teeth were chittering out of fright but he was only talking to the bloody thing! I did wonder what they taught over in Lincolnshire until I got stung too. Came at me faster than a cat tossed into a basin and hurt far fiercer.

Once I'd gotten over the initial shock of being rushed by an oversized wasp thing I began to hear it too. Had a voice like me old man who's been chain-smoking for almost fifty years. It said it was gonna tell me what it told old brainybox and if I was to listen good and proper I'd live til morning and if not it'd paralyse me and drag me to its nest to be grub for its grubs.

I didn't much fancy that so I said I'd do anything, as any sane bugger would in that sort of thing and all it told me was to keep in touch. It'll come back for me somehow. I know its what dragged me up to Glasgow, I'll be buggered if I know any other way I'd've got there without any memory of travelling.

I hate to worry a nice fellow like yourself but I do reckon that sting has done me a mischief somewhere deep inside and I don't know what I'll be capable of doing now. They said I'd gone and died barely a day ago and now you're here knowing a lot more about this than I ever did. Makes me think there's a bigger picture that I ain't seeing. I do hope I live long enough to.

Day 864

It had been snowing for almost three weeks before the storm finally cleared. Most houses were completely buried, bungalows all but forgotten under a thick carpet of icy cold. The majority of residents had already been recovered but a few still stubbornly remained, insistent that they had seen worse and would outlast the whole damn thing. They were mostly the elderly and the authorities didn't have the time to spare trying to persuade them that the recovery wasn't optional and so they remained. All nineteen of them.

A few days after the storm stopped recovery teams were sent to try and move the remaining nineteen to safety and, most likely, a local hospital. With temperatures well below minus fifty degrees there was almost no way they would have survived without succumbing to hypothermia.

They dug their way down to the houses that had been marked as still inhabited, searching every floor for the residents and all finding the same thing. Empty homes with snow filled rooms and wide open front doors that led to pathways dug out of the snow. Every path ended in a wall of snow and the risk of the tunnel collapsing should they try and dig the assumed corpses out was too great. The nineteen were declared dead and the recovery operation was postponed until the snow level dropped.

As the snow began to melt around two months down the line, after the failed recovery attempts something unusual was revealed. The collapsed snow paths hadn't killed the residents, they had been deliberately sunk in order to conceal several tunnels that lead to a vast underground chamber. The nineteen who stayed behind were all huddled around a fire at the far end, bundled up and roasting some kind of animal.

When the authorities checked in on them they found one person missing. The eighteen claimed there had only ever been eighteen of them and that there was a miscount, the missing person must have been airlifted out like all the others. The roasted animal was a stray deer that had found its way down to them and they'd taken advantage of that. Nothing more.

Day 863

Your uncle never mentioned that he had a parrot in his bedroom any time while he was alive. The cage seemed as utterly out of place as the bird itself in his run down home. If the secret parrot wasn't strange enough, he'd included it the day before he died alone in his back garden. The official cause of death was an animal attack but they never said what kind of animal. "Something wild, that's for sure." was as detailed as they got.

The cage was truly unique, the bars were made of an almost rubbery substance, warm and grey like a fresh bruise. It looked like one of those old-timey cartoon birdcages, the bell shaped ones that housed tiny little budgies and now barely housed a 40 inch tall parrot. It seemed happy enough in there but oddly silent for a parrot, the species widely renown for their ability to mimic and repeat whatever they were taught. And now it was yours.

There were a few sheets of care notes to go alongside it, starting normal and ending with some kind of warning. Was your uncle sane in his last few days? After he'd made detailed notes about the usual food routine he quickly turned to cleaning, or rather a lack thereof. His instructions specified to never open the cage, never keep the cage near to you for prolonged periods of time, never try to remove the parrot from the cage just leave them be in a separate room and you might be okay.

He never said what would happen if the rules weren't followed or why he'd broken them by keeping the bird right next to hos bed. You soon found out why he suggested locking the bird inside a room as you woke up with the cage right next to your bed, seeming to be tilted towards you, the parrot's black eyes pressed right against the bars trying to be close to you.

You didn't make the same mistake twice, locking and barricading the door from then on, only to hear something turning the doorknob every now and then, testing it before shuffling away. It repeated several times a day and near constantly at night, you began to worry about what you'd let into your home and begged a friend to stay over for the night.

They weren't told the rules, you wondered what would happen to them, too afraid that they'd call you crazy for trying to convince them that the parrot was something unusual and possibly dangerous. When the doorknob began to turn late in the evening your friend opened the door, advising they wanted to comfort the bird and chastising you for neglecting the poor thing.

They then did the unthinkable - they opened the birdcage and let the it hop onto their arm, cooing "who's a nice parrot" to it. The parrot, looking larger than before, tilted its head and said with perfect clarity "Hello, I'm not a parrot." before its beak stretched over its mouth, no longer the hard and sharp mouth of a bird but flexible flesh parting in a large grin that revealed large brown teeth.

Before you open your mouth to scream the parrot-type creature had already opened its own, clamping its teeth down hard on your friend's face. It tore off their nose and a good chunk of the flesh beneath before moving slightly down to tear out their throat before they could properly scream. It fluttered onto the floor as your friend collapsed, gasping into a pool of their own blood before falling silent with a final wet gurgle.

The parrot looked at you and began to walk forward slowly and deliberately.

You wondered how fast it was.

Day 862

They walked about in the early morning, the fog clinging to their elongated legs like a second skin as they headed out from the centre of  Marshland Manor to find food. As usual they went off in pairs, preferring to be many small targets instead of weak individuals or a cumbersome herd that could easily miss smaller prey.

As it was early autumn the cold was only just starting to come in, following the morning fog with chillier winds and the faintest hints of golden amber were flitting through the nearby trees. Though their feet had long since adapted to the constant presence of water they still preferred the summer and to let the warmth soak through their leathery skin, speeding their movements with its life.

Today we follow Lucia and Eva briefly, the sisters who had a set route that they took much unlike the rest of the family group. It was dangerous to do so but they were young, foolish and more concerned with racing frogs than killing and eating them. They had no idea that the nearby villagers several miles from their marshland home had been monitoring their route and laying traps wherever they could. The girls never saw it coming.

Their deaths were felt by the rest of the family group who darted back to the safety of Marshland Manor to plan their next move. Though the old mansion was mostly submerged with only the uppermost level peeping above the surface they all agreed that it was still accessible enough to a human. A plan was set into motion to prevent further deaths to the family.

Several miles away in the typically quaint village of Newton Bittlesby, several of the fishermen returned with a cart full of green overlapping limbs, the girl's heads had already been severed and were now proudly shaken about by their killers. It was cause for a celebration as they figured out how to best preserve the heads of the monsters that had haunted the otherwise empty marshes for almost a hundred years.

Day 861

Most people when asked would say that a ghost looks like a white floating person, dressed in old clothing and almost like real people only slightly wrong. They picture the famous representations from cartoons, movies, photos they've seen online but what they don't think about is how the people died.

It's a theory that a ghost is what's left of a person who's death resonated so vibrantly that it stuck where it was, either repeating the person's death or living as them. To be blunt a ghost is not the person who died, it's whatever was left of them while they were dying - their thoughts, feelings, their final moments all encapsulated into one being of infinite lifespan and very few goals or recreational wants.

Some ghosts only want to relive their deaths, as if they are trying to figure out what went wrong between them living and what they are now. Others soon lose interest and turn their attentions to the living that surround them and mostly walk through them. When questioned a fair few poltergeist admit that they are only seeking company, that the past eight hundred years has consisted of everyone they know existing as they sit in an unaging void between the world of the living and the afterlife.

This brings us to another query - do ghosts still believe in an afterlife or do they accept that their current state believing that they are the deceased person and not the continuous resonating afterimage of their death? It could be that the ever present memories of their untimely demise coupled with the world around them continuing to adapt and change into an unrecognisable mesh of chaos might be too much for them to accept as their fate. It could be that they have seen hints at an afterlife beyond our comprehension as living beings.

Whatever the case may be it is unarguable that ghosts vastly outnumber the living and while they may choose to remain inert and simply watch us as we carry on our lives, the fact is that they are perfectly capable of having us join them without any warning whatsoever.

Day 860

Sometimes there are people who just need to be silenced. We all know a few loudmouths who we wish would just clamp their hands over their faces and keep them there indefinitely. In England during the clashes between Catholics and Protestants it was common for the currently-out-of-favour groups to be hunted down when they tried to worship in their own ways.

They weren't just imprisoned or killed though, justice in those days was a lot more... creative and liberally adhered to. General law ruled but the local law stated that they would firstly be made to pick the person among them who was most likely to spill the locations of further hidden groups. Once they were selected all other members would take turns whispering anything they didn't want to be known to this person which could take minutes or days to fully disclose.

It was like a final confession with harsher consequences as one by one all of their hands were cut off and sewn onto and around the face of the secret keeper. Even the keeper's hands were removed and the fingers sewn to their tongue, the roof of their mouth and finally their lips. The groups were always let go after that, those without hands forced to live with their shame a public marker while the keepers were driven out, believed to now be the bearer of the group's sins.

Out of the multitude of skeletons uncovered with no hands and out of the countless records of keepers around the easterly regions of England, no bodies have been found that bear any resemblance to a keeper. No heads surrounded by finger bones, no accounts of a keeper having the hands removed from their person for the purposes of blackmail or incriminating their former companions either.

Perhaps there was a kind of deep respect for a keeper. Regardless of their religion they alone were allowed to continue their worship as they pleased, if they survived the countless complications of amputation before sterilisation, multiple facial wounds and very limited mouth access.

Perhaps it was fear that the keepers might remove the hands, unsilence themselves and tell the whole kingdom everything their companions told them. After all, those you trusted with your life nominated you to become the living embodiment of their failure to remain a secret. To become their secret.

It must hurt a great deal.

Day 859

It's called The Dome now, though the construction was nowhere near completion. They said it would be done by 2000, ready to welcome the new millennium by containing every single spirit in a concrete-holy-water-mixture designed to keep them inside. Sixteen years later and The Dome is a circular-ish border that's only twelve feet high at its peak that kept the majority of the spirits inside the house grounds but certainly not contained.

The origins of the building inside The Dome are a mixture of practically every conceivable public space you can think of. It was originally a manor home built on the ruins of an ancient Britannic town that was violently destroyed when Rome invaded. Then it was a convent, joint hospital-asylum, orphanage, briefly a prison, workhouse for the poor and destitute, hotel and most recently a drug den that acted as the birth place of a particularly brutal cult.

From its long, blood soaked history it didn't just pick up one or two lingering spirits. There's a whole village to contend with primarily, acting out their last day as they run shrieking and burning towards anything vaguely resembling a human. They tend to come out when the sunset looks particularly red or when it's a hot summer day or if anyone trespassing uses a lighter or smokes a cigarette(equal parts problematic and ignored depending on the era of the occupants).

Long story short, it got crowded there and fast. The spirits were coming and going and coming and coming and coming while the surrounding area remained clueless and afraid. Then they began to spill out with packs of starving orphans, heads partially caved in and blood running down their ragged clothing as they roamed the streets trying to find other children to play with. They forgot that living children couldn't walk through walls like them and their numbers soon grew.

Not all the spirits were so malicious, accidentally or not. When The Dome was the "Convent of the Holy Mother Mary" the nuns preached absolute pacifism and even though they were brutally slaughtered during the Protestant/Catholic clashes they still maintain a serene smile. They may be holding their heads in their arms, or sitting in whatever pile their body ended up as, but they remained unfighting and as malicious as dandelions.

They are the main argument for anti-Dome protesters, as they claim that the nuns souls can teach peace not just to the other spirits but to the world as well. What they forget is that the nuns don't, and in most cases can't interfere when other spirits are out for blood as they relive their dying hours endlessly.

Still, they are just a fraction of the reasons for the building progress running sixteen years behind schedule. The workers keep being killed off by the dead in some truly creative and horrifying ways. The gravel around The Dome is constantly a rusty orange, swarming with flies no matter the time of year. The heat from the spiritual activity inside The Dome keeps the immediate area quite hot.

The new deadline is 2030 but it's been almost two years since any construction crew so much as glanced at the place, let alone went over the plans and begun to further The Dome so that the dead are kept inside where they can live out their deaths without causing any more.

Day 858

It was a place born of contradiction and subjected constantly to the question of "which came first, the highway exit or the town around it?" to which the answer was generally that they both arrived at the same time, both needing the other to survive. This answer was the basis behind their town's founders who were revered with an almost religious fervour - Margarita and Imelda, the conjoined sisters whose symbiotic relationship was the truest representation of the town they founded.

Their existence was speculation, their words alleged and their home a museum that was only visited by people who passed through and even then they only ever went there once. No matter how many times a single person passed through, stopping for gas and food, they never went to the museum twice for reasons they never talked about, not quite comprehending why they ever went to begin with.

It was once a unique little place full of quaint cafés and bistros from the migrants who'd come to call it their home, now a conglomeration of corporations all vying and shoving for the attentions of anyone willing to shove a few coins in exchange for their mass produced goods. The original settlers adapted from craftsmen to salesmen, gradually forgetting their handmade wonders for words that paid them better.

Nobody seemed to live in the town, there were no houses and the shops weren't spacious enough for beds to be in place too. Even the hotels were full of guests, never the townsfolk. It was debated as to whether or not anyone was a local to the town or if they'd been driven into the mountainous wilds to form their own homes while giving up their land to bigger names.

Some say the town was never a home, only a stop. The rumours all call this true and go further to claim that the people only exist as long as there is someone new arriving in the town to interact with them. A kind of ghost if you will, the sort that can only survive as long as they are known in the present, known as a living breathing person who just sold you a soda that you'd never heard of before. Not something super unusual but just unusual enough that you talk about them every now and then, keeping them alive for another day.

Day 857

There used to be six dormitories in our boarding school until the headmistress finally had enough of the complaints and shut it down, cramming everyone into the other five instead. It wasn't the room itself that made the other girls complain, it was the presence inside the room and how it seemed to follow them about all day.

I never slept or stayed in that dormitory, quite frankly I'm glad too. The other girls always looked like hell and once a year their screams could be heard all throughout the night. They'd talk about eyes all over the ceiling, big ones, and the windows growing teeth. It was enough to give the rest of us nightmares, let alone having to sleep there indefinitely while the tutors were two floors below, all nice and cosy and untouched by the sixth dormitory hauntings.

I remember how Janice, a girl who graduated last year, used to set up cameras at the foot of as many beds as she could so she'd have proof in the morning. The only thing is that the disturbing images that she developed faded to normal after a few minutes. It was just long enough for her to dash around and show as many of us as she could, proving that dorm six wasn't telling lies. The tutors claimed they never saw anything, while the colour drained from their faces and they clutched their crosses tightly.

Not every girl coped with dorm six, certainly not with the braveness of Janice either. If it wasn't screams and faint sobbing, all you'd hear at night is the sound of their door opening and closing as they fled to their friends in the other dorms, usually dorm one as it was furthest away. It didn't help much, the hauntings followed them, albeit toned down.

Dorm six was the epicentre and something had gone wrong there, but none of us have been able to figure out what. Those of us who have graduated still keep in touch with the other year groups, still trying to get answers and coming up with nothing more than what the hauntings have told us already, and believe me whoever is haunting the dorm is quite talkative.

Aside from making eyes and mouths appear where they absolutely shouldn't be, little girl's heads float about and unhinge their jaws. They like to swoop down and pretend to swallow whoever is unlucky enough to meet their eyes, and only if you meet their eyes. Otherwise they just float about, rotating around to try and catch someone out.

On quieter nights, when the dorm grouped together and brought eye masks so they'd never have to see the hauntings again, the heads would chatter. Sometimes it was just gnashing their teeth and growling in the surprisingly deep way that young girls are somehow capable of.

On the anniversary night (as we came to know it, the night when the terrible event had happened that spurred the hauntings in the first place) the heads would have conversations with the window-mouths who all spoke in the same adult's voice. Whoever this adult was, they were the one who'd caused the event to happen, the one who'd killed the girls. Still no names were ever passed, only the occasional nicknames like Curly or Lizzie.

A few days ago one of the older girls posted to the group chat saying that the newest year had arrived and their nicknames matched the ones that the heads used. This wasn't too bad at first, the dorm had been closed for so long that the current years had never been in it, only knowing about the terrors from what they've spied through the keyhole and heard about from us.

Then we saw the year group photo that was posted to the school's page, siblings tagging each other until it eventually came to all our eyes and to our horror we already recognised them. All of them. Their little faces had swooped down on our friends every night for five years and now they were there in person.

All we have to do now it wait for a new tutor to arrive and to have their voice posted online so we can be certain that the hauntings were just a warning, the children terrifying us for not being able to save them. Surely if we could save them then they would never have appeared? Or did we try and fail and now they're asking us to try something else? Have we already failed by not telling the current year groups any of this?

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.