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 186, of 240 so far.

The Bad Colour

Orla and Jake were playing together, as they did every day. Although they weren’t related, they lived in the same little street, and had been friends since they were able to say each other’s names.

They had attended the same nursery, and they now went to the same primary school, and their parents had become friends too, for reasons of mutual convenience.

Jake and Orla usually played outside, but at this time of year it got dark much earlier, so they were in Orla’s room instead. Her mother was downstairs, cleaning up after dinner, and soon Jake’s father would arrive from work to take him home to bed. But there was still a little while before then.

Today, Orla was drawing, which was something she’d been doing a lot of lately. Jake thought that drawing was just OK, but Orla thought it was the best thing ever. Jake didn’t even think that Orla was very good at it, but his mother had told him that it didn’t matter how good you were at a thing, as long as you enjoyed it. She’d said that enjoying something was the most important part, and also trying your best at whatever you were doing.

Orla was certainly trying her best, going through sheet after sheet of paper, using every pen in the shoebox of art supplies, and drawing all manner of things. Jake could recognise only some of them, but whenever she showed him a picture — which was every few minutes — he told her that it was good. Jake’s mother had also told him that it was important to be nice, even if it meant not telling the complete truth at times.

“Do you know what my favourite colour is?” Orla asked, her eyes still fixed on her latest artwork, which seemed to be a horse or perhaps a dog.

Jake shrugged, glancing up at her. “I like blue,” he said, and Orla wrinkled her nose.

“I don’t like blue,” she replied. “It’s a boring colour.”

Jake considered this, truly, for several moments, in the way that only a five-year-old can. Was blue a boring colour? Was he wrong to like it? What did it mean for a colour to be boring? And what kind of blue did she mean? There were lots of blues. They couldn’t all be boring. Could they?

“OK,” he said. “But I like it though.”

Orla nodded to herself, as if he had confirmed something that she was thinking, and to Jake’s relief, she went back to her drawing. A couple of minutes later, though, she spoke again.

“But do you know what my favourite is?”

Jake looked at her again, even though she was still focused on her drawing. His gaze moved down to the paper, searching for a clue there, but it was a riot of different hues. There was no clear preference. He shook his head.

“I don’t know.”

Orla looked at him now, and for some reason, Jake started to feel uneasy.

“It’s a secret, but I can tell you,” she said. Her dark eyes twinkled in the light of the lamp nearby, whose shade cast silhouettes of unicorns and stars and crescent moons upon everything.

Orla stood up and went over to a chest of drawers in the corner of the room, opening the top drawer. She lifted out a small wooden box, opened it, and took out a slender pencil. She returned to where she had been drawing.

“This is my favourite,” she said, showing it to Jake.

She didn’t hold the pencil out to him, and Jake was glad about that, because he found that he didn’t like the object at all. It looked old, and strange, and the barrel was of an unfamiliar and indeterminate shade he couldn’t name. Orla twirled it in her fingers, then lowered it to the large sheet of paper spread out below her, and began to draw. The trail the pencil left was sometimes a bit like gold, and sometimes more like silver, and sometimes a deep red, but sometimes it was all of them at once.

“This is the bad colour,” she said, and there was something in her voice that Jake didn’t like. An eagerness, or perhaps a teasing tone. Jake wished that his father would arrive soon.

“Maybe we should do something else now,” he said, but Orla shook her head without speaking, the tip of her tongue poking out the side of her mouth as she concentrated on her drawing. Jake looked down at the lines on the paper, seeing that they changed their shade from one moment to the next. He also saw that she was drawing a spider.

Jake usually liked to draw spiders, and to see them in real life, but he didn’t like this one at all. Despite the simple lines, there was an unsettling suggestion of movement within it, and of size. The nearby drawing of Orla’s mother was only two or three times taller than the thing. As if she was making the same comparison, Orla spoke again.

“My mother is afraid of spiders,” she said, and again there was the eagerness in her voice, and the disturbing suggestion of playfulness.

Jake looked over at the open door of the room, but he didn’t get up. Orla would just have told him to stay, and he usually did what he was told, because she could get really angry sometimes.

Orla made a few more lines, and then nodded and sat up straight once more.

“Finished,” she said, looking at her own work with obvious approval. The creature glittered on the paper, squat and gathered as if to leap, all legs and joints and alien cunning. It seemed to waver against the white background, like steam rising from the trees in the morning sun.

Orla let the pencil fall onto the paper, and when it struck the surface, the sound was too deep, as if something much heavier had fallen. Something bigger.

Downstairs, the screams began.

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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