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 223, of 240 so far.

Non-conforming

The place was one of those little community church halls or youth centres, all faded paint and mesh-enclosed windows above head height, with graffiti on the walls and broken glass scattered on the path leading to the padlocked front door. The kind of thing you could find anywhere at all, one per neighbourhood. At least from the outside.

Inspector Jill Glancey leaned against her car, smoking a cigarette and frowning at the low building which lay directly in front of her. She was waiting impatiently for her latest protégé, a lass of the tender age of twenty-seven, hailing from the wilds of Caithness far to the north. So far, Glancey was unimpressed with the young woman’s timekeeping.

Sure enough, a minute later she heard the hum of an electric vehicle, and along came one of those silly little spaceship-looking upright city runarounds that could seat two people uncomfortably, and would probably have a maximum range of about a hundred and twenty miles on a full battery.

And it’d take two hours flat out to go that far, she thought to herself.

The younger woman’s last name was Tain which must have got her some hassle while growing up, and Glancey had read her first name on the file and promptly forgotten it. They didn’t tend to use them anyway. Tain walked up, and to her credit, looked utterly unapologetic for her few minutes of tardiness.

“Afternoon,” Glancey said, knowing full well it was only just after ten o’clock in the morning.

Tain chose not to dignify the jab, and instead wrinkled her nose at the acrid smoke. “Those things are an anachronism,” she said, as if the remark was the coup de grace in some imagined debate.

“So was your mother,” Glancey replied, and with the matter settled appropriately, the two women smiled and then Glancey led the way up the path.

The building was utterly quiet, and despite the casual vandalism, it had an air of foreboding about it. The graffiti was of the hurried, bravery-proving kind you found on tombstones or town-centre shop shutters; not the detailed, deliberate, artistic pieces from alley walls and less-travelled areas. The kids who did it had felt the hot breath of the devil on their arses, and they were proving something to themselves rather than making a statement.

“Are we opening a YMCA?” Tain asked, and Glancey studiously refused to even curl a corner of her mouth.

“They should never have shut them,” she replied. “But this place they were right to lock up.”

She took her key fob from her pocket, the central locking remote for the car dangling from it beside a small medallion of obscure design. Tain had one too, though the younger woman was only qualified in its most basic uses at the moment. Glancey placed the pad of her thumb on the disc of metal, gently rubbing the surface while muttering words under her breath in a language which had been systematically erased from recorded history by many generations of Vatican functionaries. The padlock on the door sprang open, a cold mist drifting from the metal despite the warmth of the morning.

They stepped into the vestibule and closed the door behind them, hearing the padlock fasten itself again outside. There was another door just ahead, with the intervening space intended for coats and brollies and shoes, once upon a time when the building had still been serving its original purpose.

“What happened to your last recruit?” Tain asked suddenly, and Glancey did actually smile now. The tone of the question was casual, but the subtext was clear: Tain wanted to know if her predecessor had been killed in action. Or worse.

“Went home,” Glancey replied truthfully. “He was a cooperative placement. The Americans recalled him when they changed their policy, which these days happens as often as a bairn needs a clean nappy.”

Tain nodded, obviously still convincing herself of it, and Glancey realised that the other woman had assumed that the man was dead. That was interesting, but for another time. She gestured to the inner door, and Tain walked forward two steps and pulled it open. Then she gasped, and instinctively withdrew from what she saw beyond.

Two steps forward and one step back, Glancey thought. That’s the job, alright.

The inner door, now fully ajar, opened onto the top of a staircase which was at least twice as wide as the building itself, and which stretched ahead and downwards within a space that was easily forty times its volume. It was an impossibility, and Glancey was making a point by showing it to the younger woman.

Tain seemed stunned, understandably, so Glancey didn’t wait for whatever her first remark might be before speaking.

“This is a non-conforming building,” she said. “The first of many you’ll be seeing. You’ll hear them called non-cons, or nickies. Congrats on losing your virginity.”

Tain either ignored the off-colour remark or, more likely, was only peripherally aware of it. Her eyes were fixed on the grand stone staircase which descended for six or seven storeys below them, before reaching an enormous set of double doors that looked like they could admit a double-decker bus with room to spare.

“Conforming?” she asked, and Glancey nodded.

“To the Euclidean system of geometry,” Glancey replied. “Or to logic. Or intuition. Take your pick.”

Tain only nodded, looking pale in the dim ambient lighting. The stairs themselves seemed faintly radiant, giving them an aura of incongruous vividness in the gloom. “Alright,” the young woman said at last, her voice not entirely steady, but with a note of determination that Glancey approved of. “And what’s down there?”

“What, who, where; all relevant and valid,” Glancey replied, taking out her cigarettes again as she started down the huge stairs, her heels echoing against the stone like gunshots in the vaulted space. After descending six steps she stopped and looked back, beckoning Tain to join her.

“The important question is when,” she continued, “because we’re running a wee bit behind.” She pointed at the large doors below, still distant but slightly closer now. “And you really don’t want to keep him waiting.”

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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