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.

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Here's story 297, 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.

Obstacles

It was raining in Edinburgh, but that was nothing unusual — except that it had been too cold for rain since the weekend, and didn’t feel much warmer on this grey morning.

Glancey tapped her forefinger rhythmically against her lips as she looked out of the car’s water-beaded side window. The adjacent building was a grand old townhouse of the kind found all throughout the city. This one was a little dilapidated now, but it would still sell for well over a million even if it was a complete bombsite inside.

And it probably will be, she thought.

She was pulled from her musings by the sound of the passenger door opening, and then her recently-assigned partner ducked into the vehicle and slammed the door shut again, muttering something about the damned weather. His hair was noticeably wet, and his nondescript dark suit was spotted with rain.

“You really should dress appropriately to the climate,” she said, and he gave her an irritated look.

“It was blue skies yesterday,” Wilder replied, his tone just a little bit petulant. “T-shirt temperature. I haven’t had the chance to get a proper coat.”

“Scottish weather,” Glancey replied. “All the seasons in a day. If you’re done complaining, are you ready to do some work?”

“I’m not done complaining, but yes, I’m ready,” Wilder replied, brushing a few droplets of water from his lapels.

He was an American, with an accent from somewhere in the Midwest, and he was here on detached duty from an analogous agency back home — a sort of overseas field training exercise, in a locale with a distinctly higher concentration of cases within their shared area of interest.

Glancey thought his voice was vaguely whiny, but she wasn’t about to hold that against him. Besides, he looked to be almost ten years her junior, and seemed to have no trouble deciphering her admittedly fairly broad Glasgow accent. She had seniority in more than one sense, and the truth was that she enjoyed these acclimatisation outings. The police report had come in two hours ago, and she’d immediately decided it was an ideal opportunity to show him an aspect of the capital city that virtually nobody knew about.

The warrant and identification cards in the leather wallet tucked into her coat pocket proclaimed her to represent the Serious Crimes Squad of Lothian and Borders Police, but that was merely its current configuration. If required, it would read entirely differently when it was advantageous for it to do so. It was probably the most mundane example of the somewhat exotic equipment her department had access to, but it was also by far the most useful.

“So some guy was disturbing the peace?” Wilder asked, and Glancey gave a kind of half-nod.

“This particular gent probably disturbs the peace wherever he goes,” she replied. “The police report said that neighbours heard what might have been furniture being pushed over, and a lot of swearing. Apparently he’s got a bit of a temper.”

“This sounds like a job for a social worker, or the local cops,” Wilder said, his voice conveying disinterest that bordered on disdain. To Glancey’s ear, he pronounced job as jab, and cops as caps. She smiled.

“Wait and see,” she replied, then she pulled the door handle and stepped out into the downpour.

It took only a few seconds to cross the pavement, ascend the eight steps, and reach the shelter of the storm doors. Glancey used the brass knocker to strike the wooden surface twice, but then she immediately put her hand into her coat pocket and pulled out a small, flat polished stone. It was an irregular oval shape, and dark blue in colour.

“Shouldn’t we wait for him to at least open the door voluntarily?” Wilder asked. “He might be upstairs.”

“If he wanted to open the door, he’d have done it by now,” Glancey replied, then she pressed the stone between her thumb and pinky, and lifted it towards the lock. When it got within ten centimetres of the keyhole, there was a muffled clunk from the mechanism. Glancey pocketed the stone once more, turned the handle, and the door swung open.

“Just so you know,” she said, turning to look at Wilder and taking no small amount of satisfaction at his startled expression, “we’ll probably face some obstacles in here.”

Without waiting for his response, she stepped inside, and he had no choice but to follow. The door closed behind them, and there was an inner door of frosted glass ahead, the coloured panels merely adhesive, and peeling at the edges with age and neglect. Glancey motioned to Wilder, and he stepped forward to open it — then immediately stumbled back.

“Holy shit,” he said.

The hallway ahead had no floor whatsoever. After the short atrium and the inner door, there was a ragged hole that fell away three stories to a rubble-strewn basement far below. The doorways that lined the hallway in front of them had no doors within them, and some of the rooms likewise looked like their floors had been removed or destroyed.

Halfway to the far wall, and three-quarters of the way up towards the first floor, there was the remains of a staircase that had presumably once come all the way down to just a couple of metres from where they stood. Now, though, only the uppermost three steps remained, far overhead and at least seven metres distant.

Glancey’s instincts kicked in, and she took a quick step to the right just moments before an object hurtled down towards them from somewhere in the gloom above. It hit the wall beside the inner door with a splat, and then slid to floor level before dropping off into the chasm beneath.

Wilder belatedly ducked, then immediately wrinkled his nose in disgust.

“Was that… a diaper?”

“Aye,” Glancey replied. “We call it a nappy, though. He’s a single father. Or didn’t I mention that?”

“No, you damn well didn’t,” Wilder replied, inspecting his suit for any splashback from the unsanitary missile, and thankfully finding none. Then he flinched when a voice boomed out above them.

“Get the fuck out of my fuckin house!”

A man stood at the top of the stairs, and as they both watched, he came down the first step, then the second, then the third, and then he stepped off into the void… but seemed to remain on an unseen but solid surface. Wilder’s neck prickled with gooseflesh.

“We’re here on official business, Mr. Cowan,” Glancey replied calmly, “and we’ve got every right to come in. Now just calm down.”

“I’ve been up half the fuckin night with my wee lad,” Cowan replied, “so just you two fuck off and shut the door behind yersel.”

Glancey pressed her lips together, but it was a laugh she was suppressing rather than frustration. Wilder was still in a half-crouch beside her, and now he stood up cautiously.

“What age is your lad now?” Glancey asked the man floating above them, and Cowan looked suspiciously from her to Wilder and back again before answering.

“He’ll be seven months on Thursday,” he replied.

Glancey smiled and nodded, as if she knew exactly what it was like to have a son of almost seven months old — and indeed she did, though even the youngest of her two children had already long since entered high school. “And what’s his name?”

“Ross,” Cowan replied. His tone had lost some of its earlier anger, but he was still defensive. Glancey could certainly understand that.

“Well, we won’t keep you long, Mr. Cowan,” she said, “and you can get back to taking good care of Ross. We just need to have a word with you about a complaint the local police received regarding a noise disturbance.”

Cowan folded his arms, and as Wilder watched, he pointed his feet downwards at the same time.

Not standing on anything, Wilder thought. Not even something invisible.

“Oh aye?” Cowan replied. “And how are you planning to come up here and have that word with me, love?”

Glancey smiled again, turning to Wilder. When she spoke, her tone was conversational, as if she was introducing an acquaintance.

“Mr. Cowan here is what we call a reacher. Scientists sometimes use the word telekinetic, but we try to avoid that because it gets ordinary people a bit too excited. The interesting thing is that people like him always like to be left alone. They all live in places like this, where you can’t even get past the front door if you’re not like him. Who needs stairs when you can just scoot straight up to the next floor, isn’t that right, Mr. Cowan?”

Cowan just looked at her impassively. Glancey took another object from her coat pocket, and then Cowan’s brow creased in confusion. It was a cutting from some kind of plant, like a trimmed section of a bonsai tree. She shook it, and tiny green leaves broke off and drifted outwards, floating in an unseen current of air. They seemed to multiply, then multiply again, and within moments there were thousands of them. They flowed languidly, and to Wilder’s amazement they assumed the shape of the long-gone stairs, and a strip of floor leading from the base of what was once the staircase right over to where he and Glancey stood. A green carpet, millimetres thick, but now perfectly still.

Cowan glowered down at them. “You’re a witch as far as I’m concerned, whoever you are,” he said, but his voice was subdued now.

Glancey shrugged before taking a step forward onto the living surface. It held her weight perfectly, making only a gentle whispering sound as she walked to the base of the temporarily restored stairway, with Wilder following reluctantly behind.

She began climbing the strange, green stairs up towards the man floating above them, who quickly withdrew to the intact part of the upper hallway, touching down onto the faded carpet as gently as a feather. Glancey took her wallet from her coat, the warrant card now displaying its true form as it responded to her intentions.

“We’re with the Scottish Government, Mr. Cowan, as I think you well know,” she said. “Department of Restricted Talents. And if you behave, sir, this should take hardly any time at all.”

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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