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 270, 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.

Lag

They always worked in pairs: one man, and one woman. And no matter what their real names were, when they worked, they were always called Adam and Eve.

The building was abandoned, according to the local authority, but the reports they had received indicated otherwise. Each of the dozens of Adams and Eves distributed around the world referred to their employer as the Department of Wildlife Control, but any bystander who happened to glimpse any of the pairs of operatives would be very worried indeed about what sort of wildlife could possibly justify the equipment and weaponry.

“Making entry,” Adam said, easily breaking the lock on the main doors of the grand old place.

It had been a hospital once, and then a barracks, and then an upmarket hotel, and now it was nothing at all. The ornate stonework above the doors indicated that it had been built in 1832, and it was in generally good condition for its age, showing clear signs of its various eras of renovation and purpose.

The entrance hall was empty, lightly coated in dust, and still smelled vaguely of furniture polish. Eve swept the area, finding nothing amiss, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were safe, or even alone.

Adam had his weapon raised again, and with his other hand he reached up to the device on his head, flipping down the visor with a sigh. “I hate this thing,” he said. “Makes me feel seasick.”

Eve also lowered her visor, hearing the device powering up automatically when it reached its operational position. She couldn’t see anything for a brief moment, then the entrance hall reappeared in front of her eyes. “Now remember,” she said, “try not to turn your head if you can avoid it. If you do have to, it can help to blink while you turn.”

Adam remembered the training, and he especially remembered how he’d wanted to vomit during most of it. But there was no other viable option.

The visors were simple in design. They covered the wearer’s eyes, and held a pair of high-resolution display screens, each one showing the feed from a corresponding small video camera mounted in front of the relevant screen. The camera images weren’t filtered in any way — but the feed was delayed by one third of a second. If the wearer’s head was stationary, it was no problem, and the effect was even tolerable when walking forward, even though it posed a hazard when navigating obstacles. Turning, though, was a different matter. The human brain very much did not like a disparity between visual information and the balance data coming from the inner ears; instant nausea was the result.

“Let’s clear the ground floor first,” Eve said, and Adam nodded, grimacing as he steadied himself.

They moved forward, walking stiffly but virtually silently, pausing in each threshold to visually scan the room ahead. They took one horizontal half each to minimise head-movements, weapons ready at all times. The hotel was plush and sophisticated, or at least it had been once. Now, it was a melancholy, faded place with a museum-like quality, all of its former occupants long gone.

But we’re not alone, Adam thought, gritting his teeth against the persistent disorientation caused by the visor.

The creature had been going in this direction through the surrounding woodland when the monitoring airborne drones had lost track of it, and the hotel was the only structure for several miles. It was definitely somewhere in here, and the situation was a rare and prized opportunity to kill the thing while it was contained, and without drawing undue attention. There was also the matter of the small town which lay five miles down the road, in the direction the thing had been going. The population was large enough to sustain it for months, and that scenario really didn’t bear thinking about.

“They didn’t even have any photos or drawings of the thing,” Adam muttered to himself. “They would have been useful.”

“No they wouldn’t,” Eve replied. “You know that. We don’t even know how its… defence mechanism actually works. Even thinking about it gives me the creeps. The implications.”

The creature was unique, as far as they knew, but its special nature made it impossible to say so with any certainty. It was a large and powerful predator, land-based, carnivorous, fast, and highly intelligent, but it also had an unusual ability. By some unknown means, the creature was capable of excluding itself from the beholder’s short-term memory on a moment-to-moment basis. It wasn’t physically invisible, but it was effectively so because an onlooker couldn’t commit the sensory evidence of its existence to memory.

“You see it with your eyes, your eyes tell your brain, but your brain never records the info,” Adam said aloud, as if mirroring her thoughts. “So an instant later you’ve forgotten you ever saw it, even though it’s still coming straight for you.”

They had seen many bizarre things in their line of work, but this creature was one of the most chilling because of its ability to hide in plain sight, even openly walking amongst people without being detected. The sheer speed at which any perceptions of it were excised from the viewer’s mind even prevented the panic and revulsion responses which would surely have taken place. Its victims died quickly, and utterly unaware of what was killing them. Until the visors.

One third of a second isn’t long at all, but it’s much longer than it took the creature to censor itself from the human brain. Reintroducing visual evidence of its presence just after that erasure had the effect of making it visible, though with an unavoidable and extremely dangerous moment of lag.

They moved into the next chamber, which seemed to be a dining hall judging by the few remaining pieces of scattered furniture pushed up against the far wall. Adam went in first, and chose the left side of the room to scan, struggling against the rising queasiness he felt. But then another feeling flashed through him, a primitive note of wordless alarm despite there being nothing there, and in the space between two heartbeats he heard Eve’s quick intake of breath nearby.

He turned his head, the image juddering as it didn’t quite match with the movements of his body, and then an area of the floor in the middle of the room seemed to flicker. A dark shape, there and not there; something hideous, and large, and approaching impossibly fast.

I love my work, and I am doing the work of the Lord, thought Adam and Eve simultaneously, repeating the affirmation that was common to all of their brothers and sisters.

The unrememberable thing leapt, and the large room rang out with gunfire.

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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