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 274, of 288 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.

Chiaroscuro

I look up from below, at the patchwork of shapes above me.

They come in all forms, and all geometries, some moving and some perfectly still. Many have a human shape, or the shape of a tree, or a building, all with skewed angles that shallow and then deepen as each day dawns and passes.

To me, they’re like clouds; black clouds on a negative sky, far above me but all within reach. I need only look to one, or fasten my attention upon it, to go there — and then I can be in the real world too.

Distances are different here, when I’m submerged. I can see out, but only dimly, but if I press my face to one of my black clouds I can look at everything. And I can climb through.

I used to be part of the World Above. I was born there. I spent many years of my life exclusively there, but when I learned that I could escape, I found myself here Below more and more often. I now consider this to be my home, and ordinary people seem like a different species, trapped in the light of their star, clinging to their ball in space. Most of them are good, but some of them are not, and they reap the consequences.

From a certain perspective, I’m a worm, burrowing below the ground and popping up when I have reason to. But the ground I burrow into isn’t permeable to anyone else, and I can’t be detected when I’m there. My domain doesn’t occupy the physical space that it might seem to, and its doorways are opaque to all but me.

A week ago, I stepped through into the home of a corrupt legislator with a long history of domestic violence. I had watched him do it, from the walls and from the floor, and when I came through he didn’t even say a word. His face drained of colour, and he was dead before he could utter a sound. I was gone within another moment.

Just two days ago, a trafficker of people and a trafficker of controlled substances respectively, both met their ends in closed rooms, seen by no-one. I remained near to the surface in the latter case, my face pressed to the dark from the other side, looking through and waiting for the body to be discovered. They thought it was natural causes. And perhaps I am natural after all.

Those men moved in the shadows of society, but I move in the shadows themselves. In my World Below, all shadows cast by the sun or other sources of light are an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of doorways. I see them surrounding me, high above and far below, wrapped around the inner surface of the sphere of this domain with its distorted geometry. I perceive them as a ballet of obscurities, painting this hidden space in restless chiaroscuro. My black clouds.

I can appear in one place and resubmerge in another, moving through the World Above as much as I like. Wherever there is light, there will be shadow, and wherever there is darkness, I can dance along the edge between the two worlds as I see fit. In either case, I can strike suddenly and in utter silence, surveilling my prey at leisure from just microns away.

There are investigations into my acts in many places, though they don’t know that they all seek the same being. They know nothing of a means of entry or exit, or even a motive. I take care to keep it that way.

There are some places beyond my immediate reach. Soft light banishes shadows, and renders my black clouds too diffuse to permit traversal; the thinner the shadow, the thicker the barrier to me. But no-one remains in moderate illumation forever, especially when they don’t know that it can save them.

I flit from place to place, sometimes crossing hundreds of miles in minutes, such is the biased curvature of my domain. Elevation presents no impediment; I can be high on a rooftop and then down on a street surface in adjacent moments. Wherever shadow falls upon my body, I return to my place Below, like some undreamed-of marine creature from the abyss of the oceans.

From a splash of darkness cast against a wall, or the gloom beneath furniture, or from around a corner, I watch. I can leap between shadows as easily as changing a channel, or shifting my gaze. And I can reach out from any of them as you pass by, my hand upon your shoulder, there with you when you were alone an instant before. I am beside you in the dark, and to switch on a light is to create a hundred doorways for me.

I’m on my way now, travelling in my place Below, to the seats of government, where the greatest liars reside. Those who would cast their own shadows over the world, never suspecting that something can live within those patches of darkness, looking out from within. I’ll step from my private domain into their own silhouettes, anchored to their feet, and take their lives in the space between two breaths.

In all this time I’ve never been glimpsed, not by any who have lived to speak of it, but sooner or later my discovery is inevitable. It doesn’t matter. No-one else can find me down here Below, beyond reach, inverted and hidden in the consequences of the light.

I approach even now, already within the security perimeter, inside the building and then to the upper floors, along the negative of the corridor, and underneath the door without detection. The room is mostly in darkness, with lamps casting pools of light which throw long slashes of black across the carpet and the furniture and the walls.

They are my inlets and byways, and each is also one of the myriad windows of my own palace. I choose the one created by the man himself, extending from his form and across his desk as he works.

And I emerge.

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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