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 190, of 240 so far.

The Fear Shape

Kinsey hated runs like this. Maybe he even hated them more than the clean-up jobs.

He’d been getting a sinking feeling for a couple of miles now. The place was way out of the city, for a start, and that didn’t tend to bode well unless it was a farm. By and large, farms were fine. Villages tended to be fine, too. It was when you got to the outskirts of things, though, that the situation changed.

Next year would be his fifteenth in this line of work. The animal welfare society wasn’t well-funded, but it was staffed by passionate people who gave as much of their own time as the time they were actually paid for. There were only a few regional offices, and Kinsey’s had the unenviable remit of a vast swathe of countryside encompassing hundreds of small settlements, some of them borderline isolated, so he spent his weeks abusing his truck on all classes of roads, many of them little more than tracks.

The clean-up jobs were marked as R in the system, meaning removal, and specifically removal of a corpse. When someone reported a dead large animal on the roadside, it was an R, and a nasty couple of hours. Kinsey had long since lost count of the number of those he’d done, each one tragic. Deer, cows, sheep, and even the occasional horse. Sometimes, euthanasia was a necessary first step. It was never a good day when you got an R call, but today was worse.

When the job code was W, it meant a welfare concern.

About seventy percent of welfare call-outs were sightings of injured animals, with the injuries being the result of accident or misadventure. They were the society’s bread and butter, and its primary reason for being. An officer would attend and assess, then arrange veterinary treatment. Afterwards, the job would be amended in the log as W1. There were a lot of those.

Maybe another twenty percent of W-code jobs were actually just neighbours causing trouble for each other by making spurious allegations out of spite. Those were logged as W2 after an animal welfare officer had attended. Sometimes, they even cautioned the people involved, and once in a blue moon the police had to be notified. But it was the final ten percent that caused the vague feeling of dread in an officer’s stomach when they saw the letter on the call-out.

W3 calls were mistreatment and cruelty, and they involved the greatest risk, because people didn’t like being confronted regarding abuse of their pets or livestock. Humans were proprietary about other species, and out in the countryside where uniforms and authority were less visible and often less welcome, it could get dicey. The other risk was the emotional impact. Kinsey had seen things that had turned his stomach at the time, and which continued to do so every time he thought about them. He tried not to think about them, but that wasn’t how the human mind worked. The memories would come back at odd times, triggered by innocuous and unrelated things.

Every W call could turn into a W3, and as the trees rolled by and the sky began to darken, Kinsey was almost certain that today was one of those damned days.

The truck’s navigation indicated that his destination was only a mile or so ahead, though GPS directions were advisory at best in places like this. Kinsey already knew he was in the right place, nonetheless. There were little clues everywhere. The dilapidated fence he’d passed a little way back. The discarded, rusted, and dangerous household appliances carelessly dumped near the foot of the access road. The overgrown verge. Even just the feel of the place.

Kinsey sighed, urging the vehicle onwards, and within another few minutes he had pulled into what served as a parking area, but was really just a mix of old gravel and fresh mud. The building beyond was ramshackle, and the parts that had ever seen paint were now the nondescript colour produced by decades of weathering. It looked deserted, and Kinsey was glad to note that there were no other vehicles present — for now.

He got out and looked around, noticing a path worn into the rough grass on the left side of the house, and his instincts told him that he should go that way. He had left the truck well to the front and side of the house, and pointed outwards ready to leave in a hurry, if it should turn out to be necessary. By law he was entitled to carry a loop-tipped pole for snaring dangerous animals, and a small pepper spray, and he took both with him, but only as protection against the return of whoever lived here.

The path led to a dirty yard, and sure enough, there was a rotting shed with the upper half of its door removed. From within, he heard the sound of a heavy chain dragging over wood. The stink came out to meet him even several metres away, but it was the smell of life rather than death.

The dog’s coat was matted, and its ribs were too prominent. There was a wound on the side of its face that looked recent, and there was suspicion and alarm in its still-bright eyes. It didn’t bark, or snarl, and when Kinsey came right up to the door, the animal withdrew. He took a deep breath, and closed his eyes.

The shapes in the dog’s mind were just what he expected. There was the fear shape, red and jagged. There was the helplessness shape, wide and low. There was hunger, so bright, but flickering. But there were others too.

It had known a life before this, somewhere. With a family. Kinsey couldn’t quite see them, because animals held those memories differently, and images weren’t very clear or important. He knew how those people had sounded, though, and he had some diminished notion of how they smelled. The dog had hoped, just for a moment when he approached, that they had come back at last.

Kinsey pushed his anger and pity deep down, because when he was looking into this creature’s mind, there was a risk that it would perceive the echoes of those feelings too. Instead, he focused on his own compassion.

Do you want to leave with me? he thought.

The dog considered the question, but only for a moment. Kinsey saw a blur of shapes, which included things that his mind interpreted as The Man, and The Machine, and The Darkening Sky. He understood.

He won’t be back for a while, he replied, saying nothing aloud. We can be gone before then.

The dog whined, and Kinsey felt the chain in his mind, and the half-door, and the animal’s weariness from malnourishment.

“I can handle that,” he said.

It took Kinsey only a minute to return to the truck, then he came back with a hammer, and a pry bar, and bolt cutters, and it was the work of only a few further minutes to set the dog free. The animal came out shakily, but there was no longer any fear in its eyes. They looked at each other.

Away, the dog thought, and Kinsey nodded.

“Let’s go,” he replied.

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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