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’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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.

Here's story 157, of 240 so far.

Banshee

Miles knew the dog was going to stop. Some instinct common to both species, which somehow hadn’t died out in mankind just yet.

He usually walked the dog along the narrow roads between the fields, waving to his neighbours and the other folk, but when the weather was good he would bring the old animal all the way out here to the cliffs, and enjoy the view and the sea air. The weather was only moderate today, and it was later than he’d usually ever come out, but he had felt the urge for some reason.

The dog was getting on in years, and probably wouldn’t be around for too much longer. Miles had never given the animal a name, but the dog had never asked for one either. They understood each other perfectly, and each was the other’s best friend in the world.

The dog stood alert, one forepaw raised from the ground, and Miles knew that he had expected this. Why else would he have brought the dog on a windswept and cloudy evening, with darkness not far away, risking breaking a leg or his neck, just to look out at the sea that would soon be a black void stretching off towards an unseen horizon?

Why else would he have gone to the attic of his little farmhouse first, crawling right in, shifting boxes and sneezing away dust, to retrieve the small case he hadn’t looked at in the long years since he returned from the war?

Because a part of him knew. A part of him had known ever since the funeral a few days ago.

Half the county had been there, it seemed, and even a reporter and a photographer from the city. A great man had died, the last of his line, with a name that could be found up and down the land on libraries and lecture halls and theatres and schools. One of the old bloodlines, running back to the first settlers or so they said, respected and wealthy for untold centuries. The man had died a childless widower, cared for by some of the tenants of his own land, and everyone was in mourning.

The women had started their talking in the days between the death and the funeral, as women do. They had heard the sound — the keen — rolling in over the hills by moonlight. Some thought it was like a child, and some said a fox, or a cat, but those were only the most mundane of comparisons. The undertaker’s wife had said at church that it was like a demon, and old Cormac who lived on the last strip of worthwhile land before the road to the coast said that he had heard it too, and that the woman was right enough.

Miles had heard the tales all his life, just as his own ten-times-great grandfather no doubt had. He’d paid them little heed, but he hadn’t disbelieved them either. Some lands had already been ancient and strange on the day that men’s feet first stood upon them, and Ireland was surely included.

The dog looked back at him, asking a question, and Miles nodded. The animal didn’t move, though, waiting for its master at the edge before the start of the winding cliffside path. Miles caught up, and peered over and down, looking for any sign of life down on the sharp rocks and the seaweed-draped hollows and the coarse, wet sand below. There was nothing.

He put a reassuring hand on the animal’s back, watching its tail swish once and then stay upright. Then he started forward and downwards. The dog kept pace at his heel, and he was grateful for it all over again.

When they reached the beach, it seemed lighter because of the reflection from the water, and there wasn’t another human being to be seen. When the sound came, Miles and the animal both leapt back a full yard, startled.

He could understand what the undertaker’s wife had meant, because the shriek seemed to fill his blood with ice, and his heart skipped a couple of beats in his chest.

“Mother of Christ,” he muttered to himself, but he had been a soldier once, and so he was destined always to be a soldier deep within himself, and he pressed on. It took only a minute or two before they came upon it.

Miles had wondered if he might have to hold the dog back, but the animal had stopped a few steps behind him, forepaws spread and ready, haunches low, teeth bared and plumes of breath coming out of the sides of its muzzle like it was a steam engine. He knew that it would attack on a single command, and he also knew that it was terrified.

The thing lay there on the silvery sand, face down by the grace of God. It must have been nine feet tall if it stood up, and it had the general outline of a slender woman except for the wings, one of which was bent at an unnatural angle and clearly useless. What might have looked like long, dark hair from a distance was instead some kind of leathery continuation of the thing’s head, and at the end of all four of its limbs there were black talons that could disembowel a cart horse in a single slash.

The folklore was true in this case, at least, he thought. Some bloodlines had heralds as they crossed from this life to the next, and these strange, mourning devils would scream into the night for the recently dead until the fourteenth day had passed. But something had happened to this creature; maybe another wild animal, or the storm, or a lapse in attention. It would never fly again, and its shrieks now were at least half for itself.

Miles drew the pistol, freshly cleaned, lubricated, and loaded. He told himself that he was on an errand of mercy, but in truth he just wanted the devil gone from the earth. It seemed to sense him, and it began to lift its misshapen head from the wet sand to turn in his direction. That was all the prompting that Miles needed, and he fired three shots into the back of its skull, then three more into the places where a human being would have a heart and lungs.

The dog barked, once, and loped in a tight circle, staying well away. Miles waved it back anyway. The thing on the sand had already began to blacken, and would likely be dust before the tide came to claim it in a half hour or so.

Maybe they even came from the sea, in which case it was a fitting burial, and a return home.

That’s what he’d tell himself, he decided, on the many long nights to come when he would wake up in a sweat, ripped from a dream in which he’d hesitated a moment too long on the trigger, and been cursed to look upon the face of a banshee.

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.

Find Out More

I'd love to hear any feedback or other thoughts; you can find my contact info here.

I encourage you to share this story with anyone you think would enjoy it. If you’d like to receive a tale like this via email every week, you can sign up to receive them here.

Thanks for reading.