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 291, 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.

Knock Knock

The knock came late in the evening.

The weather was calm and clear, and the sky was already dark. The house was quiet. The child’s parents were downstairs — two storeys below, not just one, because the house was old and cold and vast, with too many rooms — and they didn’t hear anything at all. The knock was restrained, and polite.

The knock came from the cupboard door.

The child opened her eyes, and after a moment she sat up in bed. Her room was dimly lit, but not quite dark. The door to the upper hallway was closed, but there was a nightlight — in the shape of a friendly frog — on her bedside table. It glowed a soft green, smiling at her, and it was oblivious to the knock and everything else.

The knock came again, and the child got out of bed. All she felt was curiosity, not fear, because she was a child possessed of extraordinary confidence and good sense, and she knew that nothing harmful existed within her own home. She opened the cupboard door, neither slowly nor quickly, because either would be the behaviour of a frivolous and foolish child, which she was most assuredly not.

“Knock knock,” the monster said.

“Who’s there?” the girl replied, following the expected pattern.

“I am,” the monster said, with a note of confusion passing over his strange features; all glossy, dark fur, and large yellow eyes, and claws of midnight blue that clicked as it gestured towards itself. The girl realised that the monster did not in fact know the expected pattern of knock knock, and for some reason she felt sad for a moment.

“And why are you here?” she asked, instead of remarking on the momentary sadness which she didn’t quite understand.

“I’m always here,” the monster replied. “Surely you know that. Children always know.”

The child considered this, and found that it was true. Children did know that monsters were always there, and they also knew which places the monsters were most likely to be. In a dark bedroom cupboard on a dark evening, it was a virtual certainty.

“But why did you knock? I’ve never known a monster to knock.”

The monster’s strange brow furrowed, and there was a look on its face that seemed altogether too similar to how the child had felt a few moments earlier, but then its expression became neutral and watchful again.

“Have you ever known a monster at all, I wonder?” it asked, and the child blew out a puff of air in sudden frustration.

“It’s rude to answer a question with a question, you know,” she said. “My mother says so.”

“And what does your father say?” the monster asked in return, its large head tilting to one side inquisitively.

“You did it again,” the child said. “That’s doubly rude. It’s positively inconsiderate.”

“Well you haven’t invited me in,” the monster replied, and it crossed its arms in a defensive gesture that seemed oddly small given its size. Its dark blue claws clicked rhythmically against each other, and the child thought it seemed more uneasy than threatening in any way.

“Invited you in where?” she asked, shaking her head. “You’re in our house already. You said you’re always here, in fact.”

The monster exhaled, and for a moment the child could smell its warm breath. It was animal-like, but not foul or frightening. It was the breath of a beast, and it seemed appropriate.

“Now you’re just being disingenuous,” the monster said, but it could see from the child’s face that she didn’t know that word yet, so it thought for a moment before continuing. “You’re pretending not to know what I mean, even though you certainly do. You know how cupboards work for monsters like myself. They’re a part of our own world, at the points where it touches yours. For a monster, a cupboard is your front door.”

The child blushed because she had indeed been pretending not to understand, and of course she knew — without ever being taught, somehow — that cupboards worked that way. Cupboards, and basements, and attics, and of course the space underneath the bed.

“I’m sorry,” she said, because she had been raised to be a generous child, and a polite child, and it was in fact she who had been rude. To a monster to had actually knocked, for goodness’ sake. “I was just… surprised, that’s all.”

“Because you’ve never known a monster to knock,” the monster said, and the child nodded.

“Nor have I,” the monster added quietly. “But I’ve come to believe that perhaps they ought to. Perhaps that has been the problem all along.”

The child thought about this, but she could tell that it was a large thought; the kind that her parents had. It was the sort of thought that was too big to fit entirely into her head, at least for now. It wouldn’t always be so, and she sensed that gaining the ability to fully think such thoughts would also involve a loss of some kind. But that, too, was a large thought, and so it slipped away from her, unthought-of.

She looked at the monster, and the monster looked back at her with its large yellow eyes. Its claws were still now. She thought that perhaps it was making an effort to appear calm, and somehow that fact made her come to a decision all on its own.

“Then I suppose you had better come in,” she said.

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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