On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’d love to have you as a subscriber to the weekly free story. You can subscribe via email here. Unsubscribe any time, from the link in every issue.

You can also get the entire collection of stories as a set of epub files for your favourite reader device: an overall collection, and also genre-specific volumes!

Here's story 289, of 300 so far.

Please note: permission is expressly denied to input any part of the story below into a machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) system in any form.

Dark Potentials

It was a beautiful summer evening on the day when I learned how to see inside.

I had to go back into work, even though it was a Friday and already past 7PM. An alarm had tripped on the monitoring system for a rack of backup servers we run, which are used by several different clients. It’s a tertiary backup, so there was no immediate danger, but the point of backups is redundancy. So, we treat every problem as a potential emergency. It’s a good system.

We have an on-call rota for weekends, which kicks in at 5PM every Friday evening and lasts until 9AM on Monday morning. It was my weekend on call, of course. I didn’t complain, because it could just as easily have been anyone else. Also, I’d already had dinner, the office was only ten minutes away on foot, and it was a hell of a nice night for a walk.

I let myself in via the secure rear entrance, and headed for the short corridor which stretched along the side of the building, ending up in the large front lobby where there were three sets of metallic double doors. I knew the building would be virtually empty, but there was always someone doing some extra work, chasing a deadline, or getting a jump on the following week. I wasn’t thinking about very much in particular when I reached the lobby and pressed the call button beside the central lift.

I checked my phone again to see if there had been further alerts, but there was an initial twenty-minute window for responding to each one, and I’d already marked it as under investigation before I left my flat. There hadn’t been any new notifications since then. I expected to be in and out within twenty minutes; a simple drive swap would probably take care of it.

The leftmost lift was the one that opened first, and I confess to being a little startled when I stepped towards it only to see a man standing inside.

There was something just a little bit… off about him. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I didn’t know him, but he was vaguely familiar as one of the company’s other employees. I seemed to remember seeing his face at all-hands meetings, and occasionally passing by here in the lobby, or just outside. He wasn’t a member of my own team, and as far as I could remember I’d never spoken with him, but I knew he was perfectly entitled to be here.

All the same, though. Something was wrong.

I suppressed the feeling, plastered on a weary smile, and gave him a nod as I moved aside to allow him to pass. He returned the nod as he adjusted the messenger bag on his shoulder, and he stepped out of the lift. As he passed me, his arm happened to accidentally brush against mine.

From my perspective, he burst into flames.

He must have heard my sharp intake of breath, because he — or rather the mass of fire that he had become, all twisting red-orange light — turned to look at me. I suppose that his face must have held an expression of confusion, or surprise, or wariness, but I couldn’t see it behind the burning light. I could only stare.

“You alright, mate?” he asked, genially enough, through the hole in the fire that now passed for his mouth. He sounded perfectly normal. I was going to reply, I think, but then I saw past the surface of him.

It was like a vivid memory, so bright and sharp that it had the air of a hallucination, but I knew it was nothing I’d ever personally experienced. I instinctively knew that it was something of him that I was seeing instead.

In my mind, I saw a woman, lying inert on the floor in a room I didn’t recognise. Blood was pooled around her body, and for an instant I could even smell its metallic scent. Then the image vanished, and instead I saw an injured dog, its rear left leg broken and hanging at a strange angle. The animal was backing away, eyes too large. Then it vanished too. A flurry of images came next, and this time I did recognise some of the people as others who worked here at my own company. One was outside in the parking area, severely beaten and left unconscious behind a bin. Another was in a corridor somewhere upstairs, running away, face streaming with sweat and even tears. And then my mind went blank again.

“Hey, are you alright?” the man asked again. “You went pale there.”

“I’m fine,” I replied. “Sorry. Just… remembered how much work I’ve got left to do tonight.”

The man — who was more of a pillar of fire now than a human being, all his features indistinct through the blaze that somehow produced no smell or burning and no discernible heat — nodded doubtfully. I thought I even heard a half-hearted laugh.

“Well, don’t stay too late,” he said at last. “They don’t pay us enough.”

I found that I could actually laugh in return, and I stepped backwards into the elevator as the man finally walked away. The inferno around him didn’t reflect in the highly polished floor, but of course it wouldn’t. I knew even then that it wasn’t really fire that I was seeing.

The lift doors closed and I leaned against the rear wall, grateful for the coldness of the metal as my pulse thumped in my temples.

It’ll sound strange, but I knew exactly what had happened. I knew, as sure as I knew my own name, that I had seen inside him. I’d seen what he was capable of. I’d seen the darkness of his heart.

I reached my own team’s area on the twenty-fifth floor and I walked through the familiar environment on autopilot. There was no-one else there, thank god, and I sensed that I had shut down whatever inner eye I’d discovered, so that even if I did see someone, they’d be the opaque shell I would have seen on any day before this one. I didn’t want to know more. The man downstairs was going to do something terrible one of these days, and I didn’t even want to know that.

The last of the evening sunlight was a golden-pink colour as I came to a stop outside my office door, and I’m not sure what made me drop my own bag and walk over to the full-height glass windows that looked out on a neighbourhood filled with mostly financial and technological business. There were plenty of people visible, on the streets and in the hundreds or thousands of lit and unlit windows. I found their presence calming. At least there was normality beyond.

My mistake was to let myself relax. I felt it before it happened, too; a lowering of defences. The shield that I’d instinctively put up in my own mind to block a new type of insight I didn’t ever want to use had started to slip. I felt my own barrier of denial falter, and then fall. My eyes widened.

And the city erupted in silent fire.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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