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 244, of 266 so far.

Stairs

My father worked in the forestry service for forty-one years. He took early retirement last October. These days he’s discovering the joys of binge-watching all the TV shows he missed out on during his working life. He mostly stays indoors now, and I suppose I know why.

After university, I bounced from job to job for eight years before deciding to throw away my collection of bland shirts and ties and follow in the old man’s footsteps. That was eleven months ago. My 30th birthday is next week, actually.

It’s a rewarding job. The long hours — and frequent bad weather — don’t really bother me. You just always load the truck for the worst case scenario, then you’re prepared no matter what. My old office had a buzzing fluorescent light and a desk that creaked if you leaned on the right side of it. My current office is the more than 1,700 square miles of Scottish outdoors called the Cairngorms National Park, and everything in it.

There’s a lot to do. Most days we’re doing three main things: ecological and habitat conservation, facilities maintenance and management, and patrols. On the average week, the biggest thing I’ll encounter is a full-grown stag. The stupidest and most dangerous things are one and the same: other people.

I’ve seen some things, let me tell you. Reckless and unprepared hikers who don’t respect the environment, and end up stuck somewhere, almost dying of exposure. Wounded animals. Careless campfires. I saw the rear half of a badger once, with no sign of the rest of it. I saw two tents, pitched side by side in a great location, completely abandoned. They were still there three days later, and we took them down. We never did manage to trace their owners, but nor did we get any missing persons reports. Maybe they just decided camping wasn’t for them.

I’ve seen plenty, out in the forests and on the mountains, by the lochs and across the fields. I’ve seen plenty, but there’s something we don’t talk about. I learned about it in my second week on the job. When I spoke to my father later that night, he gripped my upper arm tightly, and he said we’d never speak of it again.

Stay away from them, he said. Don’t ever go near. Just look the other way, and walk away, and they’ll be gone the next time you pass.

He was right, as always, and every other ranger abides by the same rules. But I didn’t know that yet in my second week, when we were on a routine patrol through a dense area of pine forest only a mile or so from a minor road. It’s a popular patch for ramblers, though we hadn’t passed any, and it was maybe quarter past one on a beautiful but cold afternoon. Sunlight filtered through the tree canopy, and a thousand wildlife sounds surrounded us — until there was an abrupt silence that made the crack of twigs beneath my boots seem praeternaturally loud.

I was working alongside an older guy called Calum, and I saw him tense up in my peripheral vision. I barely had time to frown before I felt his hand tap my shoulder.

“Let’s pick up the pace,” he said, but his voice was quieter than usual. I glanced around at him, and saw that he was looking straight ahead, almost stubbornly, and he licked his lips.

“What’s spooking the birds?” I asked, peering up to see if a weather front might be moving in, but the day was still bright and with none of the alloyed light that would warn of a thunderstorm.

“Let’s just get going,” Calum replied, and now I knew that something was wrong, because he was fifty-odd years old and grizzled as a bear; nothing at all fazed him. I’d seen him stare down drunken groups of ten or more lads without blinking. But now he was uneasy, so I was immediately uneasy too. I was about to reply when something caught my eye off to the right, and I turned my head.

I’m not sure if it’s different for everyone — that’s one of the problems with never talking about it: you don’t get a consensus. You can’t compare notes. And you can’t be forewarned, which is why I stopped in my tracks and I think I even laughed in amused disbelief. Calum wasn’t laughing, because he already knew.

That was the first time I saw the stairs.

This particular set were like the kind you’d see in an ordinary suburban home, probably in the front hall. They were a natural light wood colour, perhaps pine. Maybe four steps up from the ground, then they turned a corner, and they continued up for about another twelve or fourteen before abruptly ending. They weren’t carpeted or anything, and there were no adjoining walls. They sat in the middle of a small clearing, criss-crossed with the shadows cast by the tall trees on all sides. You can imagine how surreal a sight it was; like something ripped from someone’s home but perfectly intact. And the stairs were clean, too; I remember that vividly. No pine needles, unlike the ground all around.

“What in the hell is that?” I asked aloud, but I wasn’t really talking to Calum. His answer was to grab a fistful of my jacket and pull me the other way, almost knocking me off balance. Then he grasped my shoulders and made me face him.

“Now listen, because this is the only time I’ll tell you,” he said. His face was too close to mine, and I could smell his lunch on his breath. He shook me slightly when I instinctively began to turn my head to seek out the strange sight again. “It’s nothing you should pay any attention to. Forget about it. Don’t tell anybody else, because you’ll get the same answer. If you want to do this job, you’re going to forget about it right now. And when you see them again, you forget about it then too.”

There was no doubt in my mind that he was serious. That this wasn’t a prank, or a mental aberration, or anything of the sort — because I could see that he was scared. This huge man, having seen two more decades of the world than I had, was frightened. He looked at me for a long moment, then he yanked my jacket to indicate that I should follow him. His pace was quick now, and we moved in silence for several minutes. When he finally stopped, he sighed deeply, and when he spoke, it was in an even quieter voice.

“They’ve always been here. Your father knows, and you can ask him, but you should save your breath. You’re going to see them again — all different, from one day to the next, looking like they’ve come from every kind of place — and every time, you look the other way and get out of there. They’re none of our business, but…”

He tailed off, and I saw that his jaw was tight. I swallowed, waiting for him to continue. Eventually he did.

“We think they’re like… have you ever had mice in your house? Ever had to get rid of them?”

The stairs are traps, my mind said. I felt gooseflesh prickle on my arms.

“But for who?” I asked, my voice even quieter than this, and Calum raised an eyebrow as if the question was stupid. And he was right enough.

“For us,” he replied. “People. And you can save your questions, because I don’t know — we don’t know. Why it’s always stairs, or why they’re sometimes stairs from a house or stairs from a fire escape or stairs from a… from a fucking castle, or a ship, or every other kind of stairs in the world. Or who puts them there. Or how they can be there one minute and gone the next. But I can tell you one thing, and you’d do well to heed it.”

His hands were on my shoulders again, pressing tight, and his face had paled.

“If you ever go near them, you’re going to want to get closer. You’re going to want it more than anything in the world. You won’t be able to think of anything else. And if you’re enough of a damned weak fool to set foot on them, you’re going to go up — and you’re never going to come back down.”

He stared at me for at least ten full seconds as my heart thudded inside my ribs, his focus switching from my left eye to my right and back again, then finally he sighed again and I felt his hands release me. He stepped back.

“They’ve always been here,” he said again. “We go about our business, and we leave them well enough alone, and everybody gets to go home for dinner. If you’re going to survive out here, that’s rule number one.”

He spat on the ground, and it’s the only time I’ve seen him do it, before or since. He stretched his neck, as if to ease some tension, before adding a last remark.

“The stairs don’t exist. When they’re there, you don’t see them. And when they’re not, you can be bloody glad.”

The sounds had returned to the forest now, and without another word Calum turned and began to trudge up an incline towards a nearby path.

I felt a sudden and almost irresistible urge to look behind me, and my hands felt too cold inside my gloves.

After a moment, I ran to catch up with him.

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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