Day 2,728

She drifted down the stairs, gracefully igniting anything her smouldering dress brushed against. He had long since sprinted away from her, the lenses of his mask fogged up with his panicked gasping as he fled from room to room in search of the broken window he originally entered.

He'd disturbed her from her rest among the remains of a colossal pyre in the sunken pit that had once been the ballroom floor. A careless misstep sent a single broken tile falling and set her sharp senses against him - her new prey. The first one in a very long time.

After almost running into her a dozen or so times, he began to resign himself to his death. Not enough that he'd given up completely but just enough that he stopped running and settled for hiding until she'd gotten bored and gone back to sleep.

It was easier said than done, as these things tended to be.

He spent five days crouching, hiding and generally making as little noise as possible until she finally stopped actively hunting him. He waited one hour, then two then five until the sun had begun to peer through unbroken glass and she still hadn't made a reappearance.

In his eagerness to escape he threw an old chair through the closest window and jumped, feeling the gentle warmth of the morning sun hitting his exhausted body and as he opened his eyes... he found himself back in the ballroom. He found himself kneeling right in front of her.

He found himself relaxing into her burning arms, free at last.

Day 2,727

He left the door unlocked on purpose, just to see what would happen. He'd been warned by both Ma and Da that strange men would creep into the house and eat him alive if he ever left a door or window unlocked but his friends at school said they were lying.

So he put it to the test.

He'd left a couple windows unlocked for the last few nights and nothing had come from it. Maybe a few more beetles around the place but nothing as drastic as his parents had warned him about so leaving the back door unlocked was the logical next step in his test.

In the morning there were beetles clustered all over the place and the door itself was slightly open. He shut it and locked it before his parents came down to check and locked it again when he left for school. In his mind it was definitive proof that they were wrong, something he planned to confront them about when he got home.

He never got the chance.

The back door was unlocked and wide open, as was the front door. He called out for his Ma and Da, hearing only a faint clicking sound coming from upstairs. Being a child without much experience in fearful events, he ran to the source of the sound and didn't think to look around first.

The sound itself was coming from the master bedroom, another door that was always meant to be left closed and was wideopen today. He caught his breath at the top of the stairs and called out for his parents one more time. The sound stopped.

A chitinous shape emerged from the doorway, blood spilling from its eerily still mandibles that whirred into action again as its jewel-tones eyes met the frightened gaze of a child who didn't stand a chance. The world became a blur of glistening black and red and then silence.

If anyone noticed an unusual amount of beetles running from the house, they kept quiet and ran home.

Day 2,726

Officially I have been dead for thirty six days, not that anyone other than me has noticed. My apartment remains as quiet as my remain, save for the occasional piece of junk mail hitting the pile that was already embarrassingly sizeable before my death.

Work won't call for another few hours - dying right at the start of a vacation you'd been anticipating for years certainly puts a much greater damper on the whole death business than keeling over in the office would. Though I suppose that lingering in the office for the rest of my afterlife might have been worse than watching flies crawl in and out of my mouth in the comfort of my own home.

I'd likely have been buried by now if I'd died at work. Hopefully by the sea but I never really got round to making a funeral plan or a last will and testament. Part of me thought I'd have more time to get these things sorted but death doesn't care for the plans of the living.

It's a right bastard like that.

Still, in a few hours work will start to call, then text, then email and maybe they'll send someone over to check on me. Maybe that someone will smell my decay and break the door down. Maybe they'll assume I never came back and fire me instead.

Maybe someone will come looking for me.

Maybe.

Day 2,725

It's spines jutted above the tall grass is was failing to hide in as it slowly made its way towards their half-open tent. They'd huddled as far into the back as they could possibly get, whispering frantically as they tried to keep an eye on it while trying to find a pen knife or anything to cut the fabric behind them.

The wind picked up, knocking the creature's spines together and sending a chill through them all.

A sharp clink from behind caught their attention and in the split-second they all stopped looking - it leapt.

Day 2,724

The faint sound of someone trying to sing, off key and pitchy, came from the room he saw her run into before she started to scream. It had been silent for a good while until the singing picked up and it took him a good while longer to gather up the nerve to crawl towards the half-open door and peer around it.

The voice sounded like hers, mindlessly repeating "la la... la la la la...la..." in the same way you'd play random notes on a piano or guitar to test it out. The thing making these noises was hunkered over her bloodied, crumpled body and as he noticed how her throat had been torn open he realised that it wasn't simply mimicking her - it had stolen her voice.

It didn't seem to have much of a head attached to its mottled-grey body, it was more of a fleshy stump that flapped open and closed, puckering and twitching as it played about with her voice. Gradually the sounds began to form words until it asked a question with her voice that chilled him to his core.

"So, exactly how long are you planning to hide by the door?"

Day 2,723

I remember the sound of hands slapping against concrete and got up to peer through my curtains and see what was going on. At first I just saw a few tarpaulin sheets blowing in the wind but as a particularly harsh gust swept by, it lifted the corner of a sheet just enough for me to see dozens of scrawny hands attached to a tube-like body.

The hands quickly grabbed at the sheet, tugging it back over itself before skittering after the two larger sheets in front whose hands I couldn't fully see, just the tips of their clawed fingers that looked to be as long and thick as my own arm.

I didn't sleep much for the rest of the night, continuously checking the window to see if they'd come back or left any sign that they'd ever passed us by. It wasn't until several days later that I finally found proof that I hadn't dreamt it all up.

Two handprints the size of most of my body, neatly side-by-side beneath my window.

To let me know they'd seen me too.

Day 2,722

It took the form of a mathematics textbook when I encountered it all those years ago, spine crinkled from years of heavy use and even blue pen scribbles on the front cover. It was so detailed that I checked it out and took it to class without a second thought.

I suppose it worked in my favour that it was stolen by Jamie who never had a textbook with her and knew I wouldn't put up a fight if she took mine. She taunted me by waving the book above my head, saying I was a sweaty freak because it felt so warm in her hands. It had felt oddly warm when I first picked it up off the shelf as well, I'm hindsight this was the first sign that it was a living thing.

I ended up sharing a textbook with a boy called Rhyce who was a kinder soul than Jamie, he never seemed to pay the rest of the world much mind but I remember that he whispered to me, the first to me he'd ever spoken to me at all. He said "Can you feel that? Something bad is in here with us today."

At first I thought he meant Jamie and agreed with a light laugh til I saw the look of utter terror on his face and asked what he meant. He didn't say anything else, on fact he never spoke again for the rest of the school year but somehow he knew we were all in danger before the danger had fully presented itself.

I remember Jamie complaining that the book's pages were moist, again blaming the "sweaty freak who gave her the book" and refused to stop complaining until the teacher tries to take the book from her altogether. I think that's what triggered it and caused everything else to happen.

As soon as the teacher's hand made contact with the book, it snapped shut with a loud crunch and he dropped to the floor, screaming and rolling around with the book still clinging on tightly. He staggered to his feet and slammed his hand against the wall, splattering blood everywhere as he desperately tried to free himself.

After about ten or fifteen minutes of him struggling and all of us panicking, the book dropped and he was free to bleed all over the floor. His fingers from the fiert knuckle onwards were completely gone and the flesh was cut up all jagged and blackened like he'd been burnt.

He ran out to the nurse and we all ran with him, I barricaded the door behind me with a chair just as the book began to wriggle and shift towards us. When the police went in later after deciding the teacher had a breakdown and we were all just scared children speaking nonsense, they saw nothing that could have inflicted that damage.

They didn't even see the book but one noted down a loose vent with a blood trail leading somewhere further into the school so we know where it went at least. From then on our class made sure to block all the vents we could find and damn anyone who tried to stop us. 

We had to lock it in there as best as we could.

We had to hope it would keep the others safe.

We had to carry on like nothing ever happened. 

Day 2,721

Moss seeped out of the old piano tucked safely away in a long forgotten ballroom in a long forgotten mansion whose Lord had died some several hundred years ago.

The occasional note clipped the air as the dying child curled up in the piano's heart twitched and writhed through yet another burst of agony that no mother's gentle hand would soothe this time.

His only solace was in the faint music he heard coming from somewhere deeper inside the piano, somewhere beneath him in a void-like chasm below the time-worn strings. He felt that if he played the right combination, he'd find a way to the below where the sweet music came from, somewhere kinder than his current resting place.

He wouldn't be found for many, many years after his death and even then only his hands were still there. They clutched at the old strings like he'd tried to stop himself from falling down and sliced his palms to ribbons in the process.

It was said that even after removing the hands, you'd still hear the piano being played late at night as tiny unseen hands tried yet another combination in the hopes that wherever the other place was, it might be better than dying alone in the old forgotten house. 

Day 2,720

He didn't think he'd ever forget the sight of three giants huddled around the burning remains of the school bus they'd run off the road. He was lucky enough to have been thrown through a window and luckier still to have landed somewhat softly among overgrown bushes on the side of the road. 

The air smelled like his dad's drunken attempts at barbecuing and if he closed his eyes he was almost home, waiting for his plateful of burnt sausages and a slightly moldy bun. The faint sound of screaming kept him grounded, reminded him that his classmates were dying a few feet away from him.

The giants were watching it all unfold now that the chase was over and their prey weren't going anywhere any time soon. They must have been fourteen or so feet tall, bodies heavily obscured by the same ragged cloth that drivers covered their lorries with.

They kept their mouths and arms free though, and as he lay there slowly losing consciousness he saw them licking their lips like his old dog used to when it smelled the butcher walking by.

The roof of the bus peeled away like a tin of tuna and the giants dug in. 

Day 2,719

They encouraged the other children to put something over their head and follow them to the fields behind the old allotments, claiming there was a monster they needed to defeat. We joined them, like all the other children of our time we were expected to stay out of sight and out of the house til dinner so we grabbed old buckets, rubbish bags, pots and pans and headed out for the old allotments.

It was the kind of area I'd never let my own children go near, not just for the broken glass and used needles lying around but for the way the world around there, and especially around the fields behind it, just felt so... other. 'Other' is the only way I can think to describe the feeling that you aren't where you were a few footsteps ago - you're elsewhere.

The older children who'd invited us along were quick to cover their own faces and grabbed a large stick from a pile of cut firewood, blocking the gap in the fence until we'd all done the same. Crouching through the gap and crossing into the field beyond felt like stepping through a god made of cold soup but even that wasn't enough to distract me from what was lying on the ground beyond.

I remembered him from before he became the thing slumped under a blanket made of hastily tied together rubbish sacks. He was my brother, thrown out of our house after one too many arguments with our parents. We hadn't seen head nor hair of him for months and in that moment I knew he'd been spending all that time out in the other, becoming less human by the hour til he was in the state we found him in.

I couldn't tell the older children who he was, not without risking my life. Children are always somewhat deranged but these ones were worse than the usual feral and somewhat neglected crowd - they'd seen enough violence in their homes to have some idea of what they were about to do when they gathered a crowd and armed them.

The rubbish bags were slick with his blood by the time they were done. I remember getting a slap about the head for staining my clothes with berry juice. I didn't have the heard to confess that it was blood and whose blood it was. Mother never asked but I reckon she knew.

I recognised her hanky in his hand, clutched tightly as we beat to death the thing he'd become.

Day 2,718

There was only one other person in the carriage, an old man wearing a mask. The carriages on either side were empty but he didn't feel threatened or worried. It was broad daylight and he was on his way to meet a childhood friend a few cities over, what danger could there possibly be?

He'd never taken this route before, never had a reason to visit until last week when a random message asked him if he remembered a child who used to sit with him every lunch and share ghost stories. The child had moved away and they'd lost each other but now they were found and they would soon sit and share ghost stories once again.

He didn't know that the train was not supposed to take a right turn at the junction by an old hanging tree, heading for mountains and tunnels instead of open country fiends and soon after, his destination. As the train entered the first tunnel, his eyes were immediately drawn to the old man in the mask, finding that he'd moved a couple of seats closer.

The tunnel ended and they were back in the sunshine again, the old man somehow in his original seat.

The next tunnel came all too quickly and he found his eyes drawn back to the old man, now closer than before, one hand on his mask as if he meant to pull it off. Again, the tunnel ended abruptly and the old man was back in his original seat. Our dear protagonist was too scared to stay put and moved to the next carriage just as they entered a third tunnel.

Feeling eyes digging into his back he turned around to see the old man right at the door, maskin hand and hand on the glass of the carriage door. where his face should have been there was only a dark void that matched the tunnel outside.

A voice growled the name of the next stop into the tannoy, starling both of them as the train reached a platform within the mountain. The old man grudgingly muttered "shouldn't be here, too alive" before departing onto the empty platform.

The train pulled away, taking the confused and terrified young man with it, never to be found again.

Day 2,717

Death would have been kinder than letting her live down there in the well as some half-drowned thing that still managed to call him dad through lungs full of muddy water. Death would have been kinder but his heart was too weak and she still knew who he was so she couldn't have been too changed when he lowered her down and cut the rope.

He brought her food every day, using her old toy drone to lower a plate down and take it back up again. Sure her dietary requirements changed as quickly as the rest of her, going from her favourite home-cooked meals to raw fish and nothing else but he'd always loved to fish so it was no trouble at all.

No, the only trouble came when she decided she needed to leave for the river. When she said that the well's water was too shallow, too stale for her gills. When she begged for his trust and he had to choose between keeping her close and keeping everyone else ignorant of the monster she'd become, or setting her free to thrive where she was best suited and ignore the fact that her claws were as long as his forearm.

His heart won in the end and he kept her down there, feeding her fish until she stopped eating.

As she stopped moving and started gasping for air, for water, for help, for the river.

When she grew quiet and the well began to reek of rot he simply boarded it up and claimed she ran away.

Day 2,716

The storm brought them up from the bottom of the lake, bloated and skeletal alike as if it had been keeping the town's dead for such an occasion as a storm of the century. The waters lined each body up neatly along its perimeter, eyes open to stare up at the sky and all hands arranged to point towards the church by the shore.

The town had always suspected something odd was going on behind doors that only opened for a congregation of people who never entered or left in any visible way, they were simply seen when the vicar opened the shutters to shed sunlight upon his sermons.

Now the lake itself was declaring him a suspect, of what the town couldn't say but seeing long lost loved ones accusatory fingers spurred them into gruesome action. The doors were broken down revealing a congregation made up of straw dolls and a terrified vicar who said that the lake wouldn't let him leave.

And so the town settled it by drowning the poor man in the very waters that had held him prisoner for seventeen years. They weighed him down with stones from the broken remains of his church and dropped him down the lake's centre, praying everything would clear up again.

The next morning the only body there was the vicer's, his eyes open to the sky and finger pointing to the town.

Day 2,715

The shadow of a child stood waving, alone and unattached to a person - a stark contrast against the otherwise empty moss-and-brick wall that signalled the end of the upper town and the beginning of the old town. It wasn't one of the main paths so it remained there,silently waving to an unseen person for most of the day and long into the afternoon, until two children on bikes tried to ride by.

Their immediate reaction was confusion - to look around and see who was trying to prank them. When they realised there there was no possible way for it to be a prank one grew afraid and the other entranced by the ownerless shadow of the waving child

As soon as one waved back, the shadow stopped and began to walk forwards, hazy body becoming three-dimensional asit stepped away from the wall and towards the two children.Both were frozen with fear but the shadow-child was only heading for the one who waved back, completely ignoring the other one's cries.

In less than a breath, there was one child left, a bloodstain where the other was and a wall without shadows.

Day 2,714

Thick yellow pus ran down chasmic cracks in its lips that only worsened as its smile grew. The huddled spot of warmth that thought itself safe beneath an upturned school-desk didn't know she had been spotted which delighted it to no end - so many years had been and gone since it last had a decent chase.

She might have heard the sound of pus hitting the floor in thick excited globules... she definitely heard the rattled exhale it let out to spark her into running. It loved a runner and she did not disappoint as she threw a rock to the right and dashed for the open door on the left.

How funny - she thought it was tracking movement.

How naïve -  she thought a metal door would stop it.

How... strange...

When it broke through the metal door all it could see was varying shades of cold. It she was among them she must have been near frozen to the bone,much as it felt trying to track her through the somewhat-functioning meat locker. It hoped she'd run out the door on the other side and tried to head straight for it.

It heard the wind rushing through the air too late as she swung an old butcher's knife at its back and ran back out leaving it shocked, sluggish and bleeding profusely among the other chunks of flesh the room contained. Underestimating an opponent is the most lethal mistake anyone could make and as it struggled to get to its feet, it realised that she'd likely found her way out.

She'd tell others and bring them back to finish the job.

It tore down a curtain on its way down to the basement to prepare.

If she was bringing it more meat then it would gorge until all of them were dead.

Day 2,713

Falling into an open dumpster full of broken dolls was somehow less terrifying than looking up and seeing its cracked porcelain face staring down at them from the balcony. Terror soon returned as the pulsing flesh behind its mask contorted into an especially hideous snarl as it retreated, still intent on finding a way to reach them.

The twins looked at each other, faces far paler than normal and eyes wide with fear as they tried to catch their breath as quickly as possible before clambering over the dolls to the dumpster's edge and hauling themselves over the greasy and worn metal.

As soon as they finished a quick survey of their immediate surroundings, seeing themselves in an alley to the side of the old apartment tower with far too many entrances around them to feel safe but not seeing the creature so feeling reassured, they began to whisper-argue.

Each thought the other was to blame for getting them into this mess. One found the apartment tower online and the other drove them there, both agreed it could be fun to tag the place and neither bothered to look into why it had been left to rot in the first place.

While they were arguing, they failed to notice the faint click of sharpened claws against wet concrete.

Day 2,712

The roadside shrines should have been demolished several centuries ago but the creatures they kept at bay were deemed worth the cost. Now whatever they kept at bay has long since gone extinct but they still get paid their bloody dues as regular as clockwork.

There was briefly talk of breaking them down but superstitious locals outnumbered the heartbroken and the fear of the creatures returning outvoted the ones who begged for no more lives to be lost. They had this meeting at least once a year, sometimes twice depending on the aggrieved, and no change was ever made.

At least, not by them and their democracy.

No, change came in the form of an exhausted truck driver trying to make up for lost time and so little sleep that sunlight felt like needles searing into the back of his skull. He didn't notice when he hit the first shrine at all, though it did jolt him somewhat awake as he wondered when they put speedbumps down that road.

The second one was also ignored, another brand new speedbump forcing him to wake up and slap at his face to keep himself in a more conscious state of mind. While he was doing so, he hit the third shrine and pulled over straight after to assess the damage done to his truck and remove any evidence that it had been him.

Much like the shrines, he never saw the creature come hurtling towards him nor did he feel any pain, for whatever that's worth. His death was far calmer, quicker and quieter than the deaths the townsfolk were soon to suffer without the shrine and their dues to keep the creatures at bay.

Day 2,711

Deep in the woods, several miles north from a barely used campsite and several miles underground, three friends trudged through ankle deep water and cursed at their dying flashlights. They whispered angrily at each other, fear making them lash out and jump at every shadow as they desperately tried to remember where the stairs were.

It had all been Reece's idea. He'd been hanging around his uncle too much - the one who likes to drink and remember old rumoured treasures from his childhood. One of those tall tales told of a mansion out in the woods full of the former owner's most treasured possessions.

As his uncle spun the story along, Reece became more and more determined to finish the old man's childhood dream of finding the legendary mansion and all the treasures it contained and with his own boyish enthusiasm he easily roped his two best friends into a trip they'd never forget.

It was eerily easy to find the old place, which unsettled them a little. If it was so close to a campsite, even if people rarely went there, there'd still be enough people around to have already gone into the old place and stolen whatever valuables they liked. So if it was still untouched after all these years, it begged the question

Why?

Even the front door was ajar enough that they could all squeeze through, immediately noting all the footprints around them and how muddy they seemed when it hadn't rained in the area for months. They stuffed a few gold candlesticks and fancy looking statues in their backpacks as they followed the footprints deeper and deeper, scarcely noting how stale the air was becoming. 

Day 2,710

The seams on their faces split with a wet hiss, skin peeling back like flower petals greeting the morning sun only as they turned towards us we were greeted with gaping chasms filled with teeth. Their bodies gracefully flickered between dimensions, vanishing and reappearing vaguely beneath their flowerish heads as the pack began to stalk towards us.

I knew from experience that the safest thing we could do was to stay completely still and hope our scents were less enticing than the other exploratory teams a few hallways away. If the last team had managed to send their message in its entirety we'd have been more prepared but one of the pack managed knock the router over and crush it in pursuit.

It's hard to say who started the fight in the atrium but it drew the pack's attention away from us, allowing us to recover the previous team's samples without any further confrontations. We held a vote in the truck so see if we should go back to check for survivors in the other teams but the vote fell in favour of completing our mission.

We just didn't have the munitions, manpower or mapping to make it to check for survivors and complete our mission. There was no scenario where we could have faced that pack and made it back alive with even one of their team. They were as good as dead as soon as they started fighting amongst themselves and, god willing, their deaths were quicker than the last team's.

Day 2,709

It staggered down the hallway, giggling to itself as the rest of the residents desperately tried to pretend they were sleeping. They were less likely to die if they didn't do anything to attract its attention which was easier said than done for the less lucid among them.

Retirement homes are always a mixed lot of folks, some of whom are as chirpy as they were in their fifties, others stare at the walls while their minds replay what little of their past they are able to remember. This one was no different to any other, save for the resident creature they'd been trapped with for thirty five years now, the one who stalked the halls at night and stole life wherever it could.

It all started with a resident who liked to dig, not garden, just dig and dig and dig until either he hit a pipe or had his spade confiscated again. He always managed to break it out and it kept him quietly occupied for the most part so the staff allowed him his little quirk and all was reasonably well.

Until the end of his spade hit something fleshy. Something that dragged him down and spat out his blood-drenched clothes before sprinting into the building and hiding itself away within the walls. It's hunted them ever since but officially there's nothing wrong and the residents are just talking age-induced nonsense when they say they're scared of the night time man.

Day 2,708

Have you ever had a dream so terrible that you don't even know why you woke up screaming? The kind of dream where the only thing that sticks in your head and festers there all day is a single phrase that someone said or part of the awful place you were all trapped in.

Mine was "the windowless barn" and I can't remember much of what happened but I do remember that they removed the windows so it couldn't see how long it had been kept in there. They promised it would only be in there for a few days, you see, and in my dream the door was opened and it saw just how much time had passed by just from how tall a single tree had become.

My wife said I woke up screaming someone's name and begging them to run faster.

I was hysterical for a good half hour before I started to actually wake up and realise where I was.

To realise that the windowless barn had all been a dream and we were safe again.

Day 2,707

I stopped letting my daughter stay with my parents over the summer when she told me about her new imaginary friend, the Bare Bones Man. I told my daughter to tell her new friend that we'd come back in a few years so we could spend some summers by the seaside instead, which placated them both, or so I thought.

I never expected her to tell him where we lived.

I never expected to wake up and see the Bare Bones Man walking out of my room and down the hallway, holding my daughter's tiny hand as he tried to lead her outside. Of course the bastard vanished as soon as I called out to them, as he did when my older sister called out some twenty years ago.

Who'd have imagined I'd be in her shoes, desperately trying to figure out how to move homes without the Bare Bones Man finding out and without putting another family's lives in danger should they move in. For her it was easier as he kept his focus on me, allowing her to house hunt and eventually take me with her while he ignored our parents entirely.

She told me he was only imaginary.

Now I'm left adding more and more locks to the doors and debating how to burn it all down without anybody knowing it was me, without losing my daughter, in the process. It's the only thing I can think of to get him out of our lives and keep my child safe.

I just need to burn my home down with him and only him inside.

Day 2,706

It was the kind of town that looked unfinished - dozens of dead end roads, unpainted signposts and shops that were fully furnished yet always closed. It was the kind of place that managed to make even the most oblivious tourist feel unwelcome within a matter of minutes.

It was home, but not to humans.

Occasionally someone would manage to lose their way badly enough to find themselves there, without phone signal or anyone around to here them scream. They always panic and try the closest payphone first, soon finding that it's just an empty shell rather than a functioning phone.

They they knock on empty houses and peer through empty shop windows until a human-enough hidden resident asks them if they are lost. They offer them a room that's technically inhabitable, albeit the proportions of every window, door and piece of furniture are all wrong.

They are offered a can of unlabelled soda and a sandwich with some kind of paste-filling and given a map to help them find their way back to the nearest highway. They will describe the experience to their friends and loved ones as "unsettling" and only start to wonder if they made it all up when they go to check the map again, finding it blank on both sides.

They will not manage to find their way back there again but the more they think about that town, the more worried they'll become, the more inconsistencies and subtle signs that the person they spoke to was anything but human, the more they'll wonder if it was all a bad dream instead.

They'll hope it was a bad dream.

Day 2,705

It had been silent outside for so long that when she heard birdsong again she nearly locked herself back in the shelter. She crept to the window, peering through the wooden planks and cracked glass to see a single starling strangely perched on a pile of debris that certainly hadn't been there yesterday.

With well-practiced movements she slipped up the stairs, along the hallway, up the ropes and into the attic to get a better vantage point over the still-singing curiosity. There hadn't been birds since the beginning of it all, when the world was made to fall silent and the all the lands flooded.

And now, fifteen years of noiseless existence, not a single non-threatening lifeform to be found for miles around until today. Before she began adjusting her rifle scope, she prayed that this was a sign that things were turning for the better, that the world was somehow healing.

As her eyes refocused on the bird, she noticed, with great disappointment, that the debris was breathing and the bird was rotting. Holding back a sigh, she retreated to the far side of the attic to wait for the creature to grow bored and seek easier prey elsewhere.

The world was silent again by sundown.

Day 2,704

It pressed its hands against her window, impossibly long arms stretching out into the darkness, no body in sight yet she knew that just out of her sight it was still smiling with a mouth full of her stolen baby teeth. It wasn't the first time this had happened but it was the first time she'd come prepared.

Nineteen bullets within arms reach and several boxes stored around the apartment, a water gun filled with lighter fluid and her trusty lighter stashed under the bed as a last resort. As its fingers began rhythmically tapping against the glass, she began to load the bullets in, checking that everything else was in place and ready to start firing the moment it broke the glass and lunged.

Cracks were already forming.

She tensed and prepared for the worst.

Day 2,703

 The house, though half-swallowed by the grass, was just visible enough to tempt them inside. A flickering light in the corner of the window reflecting the faint glimmer of gold only sealed their fate as they pushed past each other to reach the presumed treasure and lay claim to it first.

As they dropped down through the window they both choked on the thick layer of dust they'd disturbed, distracted enough that neither notice the golden light move just outside of the room. One they'd regained their breath they began to search, happily forgetting where they first saw the light, only remembering that it was somewhere nearby.

Such is the effect of certain spores, they fog the memory and set one goal in mind - onwards. And onwards they went, down staircase after staircase after staircase until all the could think about was the golden light nearby. Always nearby and just out of sight.

They never even felt the walls closing around them, pulverising their meat to allow the spores to further feed.

Day 2,702

The candles never seemed to last long enough and with them being firmly within the depths of winter, the scant few hours of sunlight they had were spent desperately scouring the ruins all around for anything that would burn. They'd long since cleared their immediate surroundings right down to the bones of their long-dead neighbours so their brief trips were now far more dangerous treks deep into the wider community.

They were alone at least, the only ones who'd taken the early warnings seriously and made it to the town's panic bunker before they were sealed in. They didn't even hear the frantic banging or feel the anguished last attempts to break the doors down before the world outside fell into silence and decay.

Now, thirty years later the doors had declared the air clean and the world safe, the doors self-opened and they were turned away to a pile of broken corpses at the doorway and welcomed into a desolate landscape by howling winds and whatever mangled remains hadn't quite managed to die.

Day 2,701

There have been stories about the canals for as long as they have been canals, varying from unwanted babies being thrown away to jilted lovers leaping/being pushed to their deaths to whole families being forced into the waters and crushed by weighted barges.

Regardless of how true any of those were, it was clear as day that the canal through the city was haunted at every step and enough human bones had been found downstream at low tide to put all sorts of stories in people's heads. But all these years that was as clear as it got - stories and pub talk and nothing more concrete than old bones too worn and too scrambled to see a cause of death.

Then some fresh-faced councillor decided that the entire canal system needed to be drained, cleaned and repaired for the first time in its five hundred years of service. Honestly it was doomed from the start as workmen got into accident after accident, half formed figures wandered the worksites and tools flew out of their user's hands in plain daylight.

In the end the plans were abandoned before the first lock was done... the more water drained away, the louder and clearer the screams became until all the workers collapsed. They awoke after vividly dreaming the same dream of being tied to stones and thrown in as their loved ones and half the city called them a witch.

Unsurprisingly nobody wanted to pick up their tools and finish the job - better to let sleeping ghosts lie.