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 146, of 240 so far.

Mr. Hideaway

Alec stood in the middle of the room, turning every few moments, looking around at every part of the well-trodden planks. He couldn’t see anything out of place, but he kept looking anyway, beads of sweat on his brow, hearing the old rhyme over and over in his head.

Tidy up, tidy up, tidy up the floor,
Mess brings Mr. Hideaway to knock upon your door.

He thought he heard a sound from somewhere downstairs, and he froze in place, but there was only silence. Alec patted his jacket pocket, feeling the reassuring but maddening solidity of the gun. He thought that he should call someone — his therapist, his doctor, his elderly mother; just someone — but he knew that there was no-one who could truly help him.

The room had changed a lot over the decades, but he still remembered it as it was when he was a child, and when it was his own. His mother was in a care facility now, and his father was long dead, but the house remained in the family. He had become its de facto owner when his mother had moved out, but he had never sold it. A part of him knew that he never could, or perhaps that he never should. And now he was here again, alone, at night, and hoping to end the torment he’d endured for all the long years since he had run away from the place as a teenager.

Tidy up, tidy up, little girls and boys,
Mess brings Mr. Hideaway to steal your favourite toys.

Alec’s mother had heard the rhyme from his grandmother, and Alec himself had always hated the old woman. Her blood was from some half-remembered country across the sea and to the east; a place of mountains and villages, forests and superstitions. His grandmother had never entirely lost the accent, and had certainly kept the folklore. Above all else, she had taught him that children ought to clean up after themselves, from the very earliest age.

He had no idea whether the old woman had heard the rhyme from her own mother, or her own grandmother even, but he had a dim memory of the first time she’d recited it to him. Viewed through the lens of his own decades and his bitterness, she had looked almost gleeful when she first spoke the words, and eager.

The young Alec had learned to tidy up his toys. He had learned to clear the floor of his room, and to make sure nothing was in the way, and to do it all before bedtime. A strange child who sat downstairs in winter, once the nights were coming early, reading in a chair beside his mother instead of playing in his own room upstairs like any normal boy. And when his mother took him upstairs later to tuck him in, the room was already clean.

Tidy up, tidy up, all goes in its place,
Mess brings Mr. Hideaway who doesn’t have a face.

Alec had seen it once, when he was eight years old.

He had been at a friend’s home that afternoon, and had marvelled at the comfortable chaos of the other boy’s room, remarking that he himself always tidied up before dark. The other boy was derisive, and Alec had left early, thinking that he was angry at his friend but actually just angry at himself. In defiance of his fear — and of his grandmother — he had thrown his backpack onto the floor of his room, and hadn’t moved it before he climbed into bed that evening and turned out the lights.

The sound came as a scuttling at first, and then the gentlest tapping at the door. Alec had grumpily called out that he wanted to be left alone, but there was no answering remark from a family member. Then the door creaked open, and something moved in the slender gap of light, too quickly and too fluidly. It was on the ceiling in a moment, and in the sodium glare from the window’s slightly parted curtains, he had discerned something like a child’s drawing of a man, but too long or too tall, clinging there above the bed, and then of course he screamed.

It was almost thirty years ago, and he’d never been able to remember whether he’d sprang from bed himself to sweep the discarded backpack up and throw it into the closet, or whether his mother had reached him first and done it for him, but he did remember that the woman hadn’t asked the questions he expected her to ask. Because she had already known. He also remembered seeing his grandmother out in the hall, her face a mask of fear and triumph and accusation.

Tidy up, tidy up, quick before he’s here,
Mess brings Mr. Hideaway and he’s already near.

The thing had followed him since then.

Thousands of miles, and dozens of years, feeling its presence each night in the dark. It was held at bay by his fastidiousness, but it was always watching for another lapse. And now, Alec had at last returned to the little house, to the place it had all began, with the intent of ending it one way or another.

There was no-one else there, but nor was he entirely alone. He could feel the thing, perfectly attuned to its silence and concealment. He had fetched the old box of his childhood toys from the attic earlier, and now he picked the box up, the cardboard soft and velvety with age and dust.

Alec knew that Mr. Hideaway was paying attention, and tonight, that was just fine. Let it come.

He hefted the box to his side, and then swung it outwards in an arc, scattering books and plastic figures and board games and building blocks in a shocking kaleidoscope across the bare wooden floor. The sound was like thunder for a moment, and then there was silence again. Alec held his breath.

A scuttling, and a tap-tap-tap at the door of the room, which was already very slightly ajar. He drew the gun.

The door flew open, and the thing was darker than the dark, flowing up the wall and onto the ceiling, and it kept coming.

Alec looked directly at it, and it was a man but not a man, looking at him with only blankness where a face should have been. He laughed out loud, knowing that the sound was one of madness.

Tidy up, tidy up, no mess can remain,
Children who don’t tidy up are never seen again.

It was upon him already, above his head, and it was surely too late. Alec fired anyway.

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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