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 234, of 240 so far.

Take Me Home

Jason could feel his heart thumping steadily, doing what he’d trained it to do, keeping pace with the drumbeat of his feet against the ground. The breeze was a godsend as the sun kissed the horizon and then began to merge with it, and his fitness watch made a reassuring sound that told him he was in the final couple of miles.

Cross-country running had been an entirely new experience after so much time spent in the city, dodging traffic and pedestrians and every kind of danger, real or imagined. Out here, there was only the land and the sky, and his own ability to traverse the one beneath the other. He loved it.

He had moved out here just a couple of months ago, and now had to face a commute by rail, but only for three days each week. The remaining two were designated for work from home, and he made the most of them by starting early, then finishing by 4pm so that he could run. At this time of year, he would start in broad daylight, and arrive back in twilight, ready to make dinner and to unwind. It was a much more civilised schedule than the remainder of the week, and it restored him for the weekend.

There had been a few difficult points as Jason first adjusted to the uneven terrain and the need to constantly watch out for branches and the like. His favourite route took him along a few country lanes and then into the forest which bordered the town on two sides, weaving his way along some paths that were well-worn, and some that he seemed to have discovered for himself. His little semi-detached house was at the very edge of the town, and he could stand in his modest front garden and imagine that he was in the middle of nowhere.

He was on his usual route now, well into the forest already, and this was always the most isolated stretch. There were clearings amongst the trees that he sometimes stopped in for a moment, just to feel the ambience and take in the incredible smell of the place, but today he pushed on, barely glancing at these more open places amidst the dense trees.

The sky was darkening, birds calling as they protested his intrusion into their domain, and the first warning he had that there was something ahead of him on the rough path was the momentary occlusion of pale light from somewhere in the distance ahead. Jason’s hindbrain reacted long before his conscious mind could, bringing him to an abrupt stop which strained his knees and sent his pulse up another notch.

He had sometimes wondered if this would be the perfect place for a mugging, and what the consequences might be if he became the victim of one. He had also wondered how he would respond in the moment, endorphins and adrenalin mixing in his blood stream, heart and legs strong and with sure knowledge of his surroundings. Would he run? Would he fight? Ultimately, there was only one way to know, and it required experiencing the circumstances. A moment later he saw that the dark daydream would not become reality today, because the figure in front of him, standing not quite on the path and not quite under a nearby tree, was a woman.

She was small, and slender, and of that ambiguous age between twenty and thirty, especially in the furtive light of the woods at dusk. She wore a simple summer dress, which was enough for the day that was now ending, but not enough for the evening that was quickly taking hold. Even at a distance of several metres, Jason thought that her eyes were dark, and while she was not quite beautiful, there was something arresting about her, even without the circumstances in which he’d happened upon her.

“Oh, sorry,” he said between breaths, for the lack of anything else. “I didn’t see you there.”

The woman didn’t respond, and Jason immediately came to the conclusion that she, too, had assumed that she was about to become the victim of a mugging, or indeed worse, and was now waiting in silent fear to see what her fate would be. He forced a smile onto his face.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said, exaggerating how winded he was from the run in an attempt to seem less threatening. “I run here at this time of the day. Just on my way home. I’m the friendliest creature in the area, I swear.”

He inwardly winced at his last remark, imagining the ways it could be misinterpreted, but the woman seemed unperturbed. In fact, she seemed positively detached, standing there in a pose of complete passivity, but looking directly at him and seeming to track his gaze. It took another five seconds for Jason to become uneasy, and a further five to realise why.

The birds have gone quiet, he thought, and then he wished he hadn’t noticed it, because now he was even more unsettled. He cleared his throat, and decided to address his discomfort via the most ancient and masculine means: asserting himself.

“Are you alright?” he asked, trying to sound kindly but only succeeding in sounding concerned. “Lost, maybe? I can tell you how to get back to the main road from here. It’s not far at all.”

His mind observed that he’d said tell instead of show, and then it observed that this wasn’t the right time for such observations. It would be the right time soon, hopefully. But not now.

Less than two miles, his mind said. He knew the way. He could just start running.

The woman said nothing, and just as Jason began to reflect upon his dilemma, suddenly it seemed that she had said something, even though she clearly had done no such thing. But there was the feeling that she had; that something had been communicated. It was the strangest thing. He felt as if he had the recollection of her having spoken, without having witnessed it happening, and without knowing what had been said. And then it happened again.

Her voice was clearer now, spoken without her lips moving, and it wasn’t the voice of a woman. It wasn’t even the voice of something that was pretending to be a woman. It was the voice of something that neither knew nor cared about the distinction in the first place. Jason found that he could replay the memory of her unuttered utterance this time. But it didn’t make sense.

“Home?” he asked, and if she had known how to nod, the woman would probably have done so. She repeated herself, and he heard the words in his mind, if they could even be called words when they were assembled from a thousand whispered fragments and associations, like the pieces of a broken mirror swept into crude lines and curves.

Take me home, they said.

An image, suddenly in his mind, coalesced and then shattered again in the same instant. A glimpse of the appalling, yawning darkness between bright points of light. Time stretching into impossible aeons of travel. And a place so utterly unlike this one, with beings so different that to see them clearly would be to lose himself.

A sample. An experiment. A borrowing forever, snatched up and into the black.

There was light above him now, utterly silent and cold. He could feel static electricity in the air, and he couldn’t move. He knew, deep in the places of the mind where things can only be known, how animals felt in a thunderstorm; the bone-sick, abject, inarticulate and helpless terror.

It was only when his feet lifted from the sane ground for the final time, that Jason realised just how far he still had to go.

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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