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.

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Here's story 154, of 240 so far.

Flickers

Harry sat in the church hall listening to the rain drumming on the cheap roof. There was a drip somewhere, sounding like it was hitting a bucket, but he couldn’t see where it was.

The church itself was a beautiful old thing that had seen better days but still retained most of its grandeur and sanctity, but the hall was a much more recent addition, thrown up at minimal expense, and somehow more draughty than the elegant pile of stone it was attached to. While the church smelled like varnished wood and old paper, the hall just smelled like disinfectant.

He looked around at the sallow faces. There were a dozen or so, including the man who was clearly in charge of the meeting. It was Harry’s first time, so he knew that he would be called upon soon. Some of the others were looking at him with vague curiosity, but most were just staring at the floor like they were hoping it would open up and swallow them.

Sure enough, the organiser finished whatever he was saying, then said that they had someone new tonight, and he gestured towards Harry and nodded. Harry slowly stood up, finding that he wasn’t nervous, but he wasn’t sure what to do with his hands. He just let them hang at his sides, and he looked around the circle of chairs.

“My name’s Harry, and I’m an alcoholic,” he said.

“Hi, Harry,” came the reply from most of the others. Those who had been looking at the floor were still doing so, but he didn’t mind that. Harry took a deep breath, and started talking.

“I suppose I started drinking too much after I lost my wife a couple of years ago,” he said. “At the time it wasn’t enough; couldn’t be enough. Then it was for a while. Then it wasn’t.”

A few heads nodded, including the organiser’s. The man was wearing a cardigan, which was probably required by international law for these situations. Harry supposed it was meant to make him look non-threatening and nurturing, or something. He just looked like an ex-addict who had stolen a cardigan.

“I don’t have kids,” Harry said. “Thank god for that. I lost my job, lost my apartment. Family stopped talking to me for a while, but I’m working on patching that up. And I’ve got a part time job again now. I haven’t had a drink in twenty-two days.”

There was a little round of applause, which startled him, making him look at all of the faces again. The organiser looked genuinely proud, like a sap. Some of the other guys nodded with respect for a fellow traveller. Some of the rest just looked resentful, like they might offer to buy him a drink to celebrate.

There was a woman too, thirty-five going on fifty, dressed like she wanted to make some booze money. She was smoking, even though you weren’t allowed to. Nobody seemed to care. Harry sure as hell didn’t.

“I’m doing OK,” Harry said. “Feel like maybe the worst part is over. The first worst part, anyway.”

Somebody laughed, and the organiser smiled and gave a worldly-wise nod that he’d seen in a movie sometime. Somebody else coughed the way people who need a chest x-ray do.

“I, uh,” Harry said, losing his train of thought for a moment. He thought he’d seen it, just for an instant. In the far corner, beside a piano covered in a dust sheet that was at least fulfilling its purpose in life. He felt his pulse increase, but there was nothing there.

“Sorry,” he said. “I came here to keep on the straight and narrow, you know? Stay focused. Not slip back into…”

He tailed off. Again, but in a different corner, like heat haze over a radiator making the wallpaper twist and dance. Then the shadow too dark to be a shadow. Then gone again. He took a breath.

“You know what, that’s not why I came here,” he said, licking his lips in unconscious mimicry of just about everyone else in the hall. “I came because I wanted to ask if anyone else, when you started coming off the booze, I mean… if anyone else started to… see things.”

One of the men who had been staring at the floor the whole time looked up now, and there were suddenly patches of red in the middle of his pale cheeks. His eyes were a little too bright. And then another man. And another. He recognised the look from his own bathroom mirror. They were afraid. He looked straight at the man who had been first to look up.

“You’ve seen it too,” he said. “It’s something to do with the withdrawal or something. It lets you see it. See them.”

The man became even more white, then he licked his own lips and started to look around. The organiser was frowning now, and he started to raise a hand, clearly about to speak. Harry cut him off.

“They’re around the edges of things, right? Dark and fast. I think they’re here all the time. Something changes in your head when you quit drinking. They’re… sharp, and they’re quick. Not human. Shapes.”

“Flickers,” the frightened man sitting just across from him said, and it was like he’d opened a door with a snowstorm outside. Some of the others hunched their shoulders, and a couple even half-turned away. Harry could actually see the goosebumps on the arm of the guy sitting to his own right.

The organiser was saying something now, in his calm voice, but Harry wasn’t paying attention and told him to shut up. Because they were there again, halfway across the hall, flashing in and out of existence like an afterimage on your eyes from a bright light. But black, so black, and quick. First at one side, then another. He swore he could almost hear them, clicking and scuttling.

They knew he could see them. They knew. That’s why they’d come. Harry stepped backwards, but his chair was in the way and it tipped over. He distantly thought about picking it up as a weapon, but he would have preferred a bottle of whisky.

The man who had named the things was looking around, and his face showed naked terror. He could see them too, for all the good it would do. Harry looked at him, and at the organiser’s stupid, blissfully unaware face, even though one of them was right behind him. Harry licked his lips.

“They’re here,” he 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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