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 144, of 240 so far.

Monkey Mask

Dingwall didn’t really care for the whole thing, but he didn’t object to it either.

Yes, he did turn out the lights at the front of the house after dinner on October 31st to discourage any diminutive visitors, and he made sure nothing even remotely resembling a pumpkin was visible in any of his windows, but he had no problem with how others chose to celebrate Hallowe’en. As far as he was concerned, if you tolerated other people’s religions — and he most certainly did — then you had to tolerate their holidays and festivals too.

It went by quietly for him this year too, as intended and desired. He’d been wakened the previous year by some fireworks, but this time he slept right through. When he woke in the morning, he felt refreshed and relaxed, and he had a slow breakfast. Dingwall wasn’t a morning person, and he harboured a deep suspicion about those who claimed to be, quietly believing them to be either lying or the victims or some obscure chemical imbalance whose more serious effects would manifest later in life.

He made his breakfast and had his coffee, and then belatedly realised that he’d finished the whole meal without bothering to retrieve his sole remaining un-environmental indulgence: the morning paper that he still had delivered each day. Dingwall went and got it from the mat, glancing without much interest at the headlines, then his peripheral vision noted that something was different.

His front door was of the type with frosted glass panels running down each side of the widened surround of the frame, and there was some kind of small, dark shape visible outside. Dingwall frowned, making a half turn back towards the door, then he unlocked and opened it. What he saw would be unusual at almost any other time, but this morning it was substantially less out of place.

The small object was roughly hemispherical, brown and black in colour, and about the size of a soup bowl. It was made from some sort of cheap latex-type material, painted, and there was a thick black elasticated strap running across its open side. Dingwall picked it up and turned it over, and a face stared back at him from hollow eye-sockets he could see his own palm through.

A monkey mask, he thought.

The mask made no reply, and of course nor did he expect it to. It was sized for a young child, and had presumably been dropped the night before. Perhaps its owner had made his or her way towards the door before being called back by a parent, upon seeing that the house did not signal the usual welcome for trick-or-treating visitors.

Dingwall looked around, but the street was empty at this hour, and it was broad daylight. He could see a few discarded confectionary wrappers out on the pavement, and a balloon was nodding in the breeze at the foot of a lamp post, but there were certainly no costumed children. He sighed, hoping that the absent young person hadn’t been too upset to learn of the thing going missing.

It didn’t seem right to just drop the mask back onto the ground, or place it out on the street where it would doubtless blow under a car’s tyres and be crushed, so after a moment of indecision, Dingwall shrugged and took the thing back inside, closing the door behind him. He put it on the narrow table in the entranceway which served as a home for letters and keys and his cold-weather gloves and hat, and promptly forgot about it.

That evening, Dingwall was going out to pick up a few things from the supermarket, and he saw the mask as he put his jacket on. An obscure impulse made him pick it up, which he rationalised as the possibility of being able to ask any of his neighbours if they knew who the item’s rightful owner might be. But he saw no-one else outside their houses, because the day had been cold and it was raining insistently.

Nonetheless, he decided to walk, and before long he was trudging through the dreary and glistening streets, mostly alone, shoulders hunched and head down. As he reached the quiet road which ran behind the shopping complex that housed the supermarket, another odd impulse rose up within him, and Dingwall found himself taking the mask from his jacket pocket and looking at it. The eye holes were black in this light, with perhaps the faintest shimmer of light from far within, probably a reflection of the ground in front of him. He turned the mask over, and the plain, dark brown interior began to gather droplets of water.

Then he put it on.

Dingwall had a momentary impression of the scene before him becoming brighter, or clearer, or somehow easier to see. He felt a powerful need to move, and to conceal himself. Then he lost all awareness of himself and of the world.

The next time he became conscious of thinking anything, he was somewhere else. It was up high, maybe on a rooftop, and everything was darker than it had been before. His pulse pounded, and he had an awakening man’s dim awareness of having lost the thread of whatever narrative existed in his mind in its alternate state just moments earlier. His hands were scratched and bleeding, wet with both rain and blood, some of which was not his own.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw that he was on a concrete roof, in an area he didn’t recognise. His clothes were torn, too, and he could feel the strain of unnatural exertion in the muscles of his arms and legs and back. But he also felt alive; more alive than he ever had.

There was no obvious way down from where he was, and he felt a twinge of fear, because he didn’t do well with high places. Another part of him, though, knew that he didn’t need to feel that way. He still had the mask in his hand, and it still stared back at him. The empty yet somehow occupied holes of its eyes seemed to call to him, and there was a part of his mind that understood.

The rain became heavier now, and he became aware of sounds approaching on the streets below, and flashing lights. He didn’t like them, or what they represented. He preferred the mask, and the mask agreed.

Dingwall put it on, and the world went away again.

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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