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 295, 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.

When You're Sleeping

The curfew starts earlier in winter.

They begin to extend it once September arrives, by an hour every few weeks, so that once the end of the year approaches we’re all indoors well before full dark. On its own, it’s not so much of a burden.

The big pandemics taught us how to isolate for long periods, so a simple curfew during the hours of darkness is easy by comparison. We quickly learned the routine of closing and locking our doors, obscuring our windows with curtains, blinds, or (for the lucky few) shutters, and generally battening down until dawn. Those who still have a functional chimney have the added task of keeping a fire lit, whatever the weather, throughout the night. Virtually all such features have long since been bricked up, though, or even filled with cement.

The disappearances usually begin in earnest around mid-November, and then reach a peak within a few weeks, but occasionally they happen at other times of the year too. It’s becoming less and less predictable. At least, the times and places are becoming less predictable; not the victims. We all know exactly who they’re likely to be.

I don’t want to give the impression that it’s all bad, because it isn’t. Crime rates dropped precipitously when this all began, decades ago, and our need for law enforcement has diminished substantially. Breaking the law is just far too risky now.

Elderly people, well into retirement, can still remember the time before. They don’t recall exactly how things changed, but they do remember that there was no curfew, and no reason for one. No cause to dread the closing of the year. No stark warning for children and adults alike.

He sees you.

Our statistics say that there are more than two hundred thousand disappearances each year, globally. The vast, vast majority happen without a single witness; only a handful of incidents have ever been seen. Those eyewitness reports are all the same. They all mention a sudden and pervasive sense of terror, paralysing both victim and onlooker. Then something moving at impossible speed, coming down from above. One witness — just one, ever — somehow managed to look up immediately afterwards, and described a point of light receding into the night sky.

He knows.

When the solstice comes, and for days on either side, we mostly remain indoors. To distract the children, we long ago turned it into a festival: with bright decorations and baubles, songs and gifts, and a grand meal to celebrate. Family members congregate in one house as much as possible, staying the night and then travelling back home after daybreak.

There have been isolated incidents over the years when he gained entry to someone’s home. He’d be heard downstairs, and then upstairs a moment later. Children, their hair turned white with fear in an instant, cowered beneath their bedcovers. They would eventually fall asleep from sheer nervous exhaustion, and awaken in the morning to find one or both of their parents missing. There have been assertions that he’s even somehow aware of whether people are conscious or not.

No one who goes missing has ever returned. They’ve never been found, except for the occasional personal item obviously dropped or knocked away at the moment of abduction. There’s speculation that the victims are taken far to the north for some unknown purpose instead of being killed outright. Some say that they’re just used as nourishment later — but that would seem to be at odds with the apparent criteria of their selection.

A creature of overriding moral concern, they call him. Single-minded, beyond all measure, and possessed of a nigh-omniscient perceptiveness. No-one has ever succeeded in even making contact, much less reasoning with him. He can’t be tracked or intercepted, at least with any technology currently available to us. Just too fast. Too unpredictable. Too perfect at his task.

So we follow the rules that we’ve inferred instead. We follow them, and we hide ourselves away when the temperature begins to fall and the days begin to shorten. We lock the doors and cover the windows, we leave nothing out that could be seen as an invitation, and we take ourselves off to bed, to wait and to hope for morning.

Most of all, we warn the children, because they’re young and inexperienced, and foolish in their innocence. Because they haven’t yet lived to see people they know — and people they love — snatched away, never to be seen again. But we warn them mostly because they don’t yet understand right and wrong, at least not in any nuanced way. Actions and consequences.

They don’t yet understand that, somehow and from somewhere, he’s watching all the time. Even during the daylight hours that we treasure. Even when they’re indoors. Even when they’re alone and they believe they’re unobserved. He’s always watching, and he always remembers.

We warn them, not because we ever wanted this life for them, but because it’s the only way they’ll have a chance to grow up, to experience this strange and flawed world for themselves, and perhaps to have children of their own. We warn them so that he might not have to take them. We warn them so that they might live.

At their bedsides, as we kiss them goodnight, we warn them — but gently. In a terrifying world, we don’t want to frighten them, but they do have to learn. We don’t want to stop them from being children, but we need them to understand. We try to make it a point of principle, as it perhaps is to him, and we hope they intuit that it’s no less than a matter of life and death.

But those aren’t words that can be said to a beloved child, especially one who already glances fearfully towards each covered window, and shudders to look up at the darkening sky as we all hasten for the illusory safety of our homes each winter evening.

Instead, we whisper the mantra that the planet now shares.

Be good, for goodness’ sake.

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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