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Here's story 278, 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.

Hidden

The first thing that surprised me was that she smoked.

Not a vape, or an e-cig. I see those all the time, but generally Edinburgh isn’t really a smokers’ sort of place. No, I mean that she smoked like a European tourist — actual cigarettes, in the little box. A lighter, too. Pretty rare sight in 2018, unless you’re walking past a pub somewhere outside the city centre. That was the first thing, but by no means the last.

It’s hard to explain how I reacted, because usually I don’t trust strangers at all. When I heard a knock at the door at around 10AM and then opened it, I honestly thought she was lost. Maybe visiting a neighbour for the first time, and unsure of the house number. Definitely not a delivery person, or selling something, or conducting a survey, or any of that — I didn’t get those vibes. And you do get a vibe, don’t you?

Except with her. She was dressed like… well, like she was nobody. Like everyone else in the world. The most average, default, bland, usual, normal, forgettable outfit. I spent about six hours with her on that first day, and I couldn’t tell you what she wore. That was important, as I’d soon learn.

As it turned out, she wasn’t lost. She was about as far from lost as you can be.

“Hi?” I said, frowning slightly at how the word had become a question without my permission.

“Alright,” she replied, nonchalantly, her accent as Scottish as mine. I think I might have laughed nervously. I expected her to say more, but she just looked at me with those dark eyes. Maybe a hint of weary amusement. I’d never seen her before in my life, so I thought then, but she was still vaguely familiar. That would turn out to be important too.

“Can I help you?” I asked, and she gave a one-shouldered shrug.

“Maybe I can help you,” she said. Her tone was at odds with her words; excessively casual, as if she had a lot of stops to make today, and this was just one of them. Before I could formulate a response, she was speaking again.

“Yesterday, you noticed something. That’s why I’m here.”

I think my increasingly forced smile disappeared at that point, because somehow I knew what she meant.

I’d been walking up into town, just like any other day. Along the cycle path, past the supermarket. Across the road. Wave to the Turkish guy in the barber’s shop who’s going home to get his teeth fixed next month. Then up the hill, past the church with the clock, and then further on. I’d been just approaching the bigger, older church — it’s a venue now, for weddings and the like — when I just felt that something was… off.

I slowed, then stopped. Put my hand on the railing that separates the pavement from the big junction there, at the roundabout. Everything was normal, and it was a nice enough day. Buses, cars, vans, people. The usual Edinburgh scene. But something felt wrong, and I had a prickling sensation on the back of my neck. I blinked, and I looked around, but everything was the same as always. The big church that’s now a venue. The American-style restaurant across from it. Some flats. A pub. The little grocer’s, half a level below the street. But wasn’t there also something—

“You were there,” I said, pulling myself out of the memory. “You… I think you were there. Over at the other side of the roundabout, somewhere.”

She nodded, looking both impressed and mildly irritated as she took another drag of her cigarette. She was at my door because I’d seen her? But how did she even—

“I followed you home last night,” she said. “You didn’t see me then, at least.”

“Look, what’s this all about? Who are you?” I was starting to get angry now, but only in the way that masks uneasiness and concern.

“When someone notices, we notice. And I’ve got a good feeling about you. I think you’re one of the ones who can handle it.”

I coughed. The wisps of acrid smoke clustered around the doorway, and I instinctively swept my hand through the air to dispel them.

“We can talk outside if you want,” she said, nodding in the direction of the garden.

“I think we’ve finished talking,” I said, irritated at this stranger’s presumptuousness and even more irritated at how unsettled I was feeling. I made to close the door, and she didn’t try to stop me, but she did speak.

“You’re suffering from chronic stress, I bet. Maybe a bit of depression,” she said. “It’s happened within a fairly short space of time; a year or two at most. You’ve been knocked off balance by your problems. By, what? Work? Getting older? Brexit? Whatever the fuck is on your mind. And now you’re noticing. That’s how it happens.”

Then she turned and walked away from the door, but she went into my garden instead of going out through the gate. I think I deliberated for a good ten seconds before I went after her, pulling the door closed behind me, with gooseflesh all down my arms.

She was leaning against the wall of the house, still smoking. She looked a little tired and distracted, but also relaxed, like she had all the time in the world.

“Alright then, love,” I said. “What exactly do you mean by noticing?”

She nodded, like she was grateful I’d finally picked the right question. She blew out a cloud of smoke, and I blinked in distaste.

“I can show you,” she said, “but we need to go back to where you were.”

“That’s a fifteen-minute walk,” I said, folding my arms. She actually laughed, and rolled her eyes — then she stubbed her cigarette out against the wall and flicked the butt into my compostable waste bin, which I’d apparently left open.

“Not today, it’s not,” she replied, and then she did the strangest thing. She raised the forefinger of her right hand as if she was about to say first of all, then she tapped it against one of the bricks that formed the exterior wall between my living room and the home office.

Almost imperceptibly, the brick shifted for a moment.

She tapped another. It moved. Then another, and another, seemingly at random, and before I knew it they were all moving. Twitching, sliding in and out, rubbing against each other, but without any scraping or friction.

A taxi passed by in the street, not twenty feet away. The driver didn’t look around.

The side of the house quivered now, and then she looked at me again for just an instant before she grabbed my forearm. She pulled, and we fell into the wall.

The bricks clittered and tinkled and folded, like they were Lego pieces scattered from a toybox then raked for the right one. There was a flash of… something… but only for a moment, and then I felt a breeze, and I could smell burgers cooking. I was standing at the big junction in front of the roundabout, but at the opposite side from where I’d been the day before. I could see the big old church, large as life. I knew without even looking that there was another wall behind me, and some ATMs just along a bit. The grocer’s was only a few steps away.

“What in the fuck–”

“Later for that,” she said. “We were talking about noticing. I’ve seen you about a hundred times, y’know. And you’ve seen me maybe a tenth as often. But you forget straight away. It’s just… we blend. And it’s not just people.”

She took my forearm again, and I flinched, but she just raised her eyebrow at me and I felt my cheeks flush. She led me the few metres to the nearby ATM machines, and gestured towards them.

“How do you suppose they top up the cash in there?”

I blinked, still scrambling to comprehend what had happened. “Uh… well, they’ll have some way to get into—”

“They go in there,” she interrupted, pointing to the outline of a doorway, less than four feet from the rightmost ATM. There was no handle, only a small lock, and it was painted to match the surrounding surface. It was right there. And I’d never noticed it before.

“Or take your postman here,” she said, pointing to the man with the red mail bag who was just coming across the nearby pedestrian crossing. “He doesn’t go back to the van for every building’s post, right? He’d be doing it all day. Especially when there are parcels.”

“I suppose so,” I said, not sure what she was getting at.

“They have lockers,” she said. “Got the Royal Mail logo on them and everything. There’s one on almost every street in the city. But you’ve had a lifetime of conditioning, so you can’t see them.”

I frowned. There was no way that could be true. And yet, as I watched, the postman first took out his mobile phone and glanced at it for a moment, then pocketed it again and took out a set of keys attached to a chain. He stopped beside a bin that had a broken vacuum cleaner in front of it, and then… he reached towards a nondescript grey-green box mounted on a short pillar, right beside the bin, and unlocked it with one of the keys.

“Now see how many you can spot,” she said.

I looked around, down each of the four streets that met the roundabout. I felt the prickling sensation on the back of my neck again. I stopped counting when I reached ten.

I faced her again, and she just shrugged. “Some things are designed not to be seen, and most people are quite willing to not see them. There’s a homeless guy over there—” she pointed, and I turned to follow the line of her gaze “—and a couple of mothers with pushchairs just coming up past him. You already know what’s going to happen.”

The homeless man said something, but he was too far away for me to hear what it was. His attention was focused on the women in expensive-looking exercise gear, pushing their infants in modular buggies at a pace that was a bit faster than walking. They were talking animatedly. As they drew level with the man who sat on the street corner, one of the women turned her head directly away from him to say something to her companion. Her voice became a little louder than it had been. The other woman nodded enthusiastically, and they continued on their way.

I felt the vague sense of guilty complicity that everyone does when they’re forced to acknowledge what they’d rather ignore.

“There’s a lot you don’t see,” she said. “Some of it is designed that way, and some of it you just choose to ignore.”

“Alright,” I said, taking a deep but not entirely steady breath. “You’ve made your point. Now how exactly did we fucking get here?”

I didn’t tend to swear, and especially not in front of women — my mother had swatted me around the head too often as a teenager — but I was rattled.

“That,” she replied, briefly glancing back to the wall beside the ATMs, “was an Impossible Door. You don’t need to worry about any of that right now. We’ve got an appointment to keep.”

She walked off, and I could only follow her. She didn’t go very far, stopping in front of the low set of five steps that went downwards to the half-level below the pavement, leading into the grocer’s shop.

“An appointment to buy my five-a-day?” I asked, and her eyes gleamed, but she didn’t quite grin.

“It’s not just the postal service or the banks who can hide things right under your nose,” she said. “We do it all the time. That’s where we live: in the spaces between. Always there, but perfectly unnoticeable.”

We were off to the side of the shallow stairway, still standing on the pavement. There was a low wall or railing just beside her, and she reached her hand out to touch it.

And I saw.

I saw that it wasn’t a railing at all, but a metal bannister. I saw that there was a staircase going upwards, too, about ten steps. And I saw the drably-painted doorway of a townhouse that must have sat here, overlooking a busy junction, for a hundred and fifty years or more. It was four storeys high, with at least six windows facing out from each floor, all of them shuttered. In today’s property market, in central Edinburgh, it must have been worth millions.

I’d walked past it a thousand times. It would have been in my peripheral vision for at least five minutes each time. And I had never, ever seen it before.

I stumbled backwards several paces, and I saw that she was looking rather pleased with herself.

“Now you’re noticing things,” she said, before beckoning me back to the foot of those weather-worn, sunken-in-the-middle steps that my mind had never consciously registered.

She strode up them confidently, feet slapping against the stone, and I followed in a state of disorientation. I looked back over my shoulder at the sane, normal street just as a bus rumbled by. No-one spared a glance in our direction. The owner of the grocery store had come out and climbed up to street level, and was now puffing from a vape. I could smell the vanilla-scented smoke. He was so close that if I’d sneezed, he might even have felt it. But he had no idea I was there.

I shook my head in an unsuccessful attempt to calm down, then I climbed the last few steps to where she stood patiently with her hand resting on the ornate handle of one of two storm doors. The house had neither a name nor a number, but there was a brass plate on the rightmost door, bearing an inscription too small to be read from the street. I shifted position so I could read it in the bright morning sunlight.

Genesis 1:1

In the beginning, there was only the Fabric.

I read it again, and then I looked at her. Her eyes were darker now, suddenly without any of her earlier amusement or casualness.

“Welcome to the Hidden House,” she said, and then she opened the door.

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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