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’d love to have you as a subscriber to the weekly free story. You can subscribe via email here. Unsubscribe any time, from the link in every issue.

You can also get the entire collection of stories as a set of epub files for your favourite reader device: an overall collection, and also genre-specific volumes!

Here's story 283, of 288 so far.

Please note: permission is expressly denied to input any part of the story below into a machine learning (ML) or artificial intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) system in any form.

The Ministry

In London, only a few minutes’ walk from the Ministry of Defence, Downing Street, and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, there is a building which blends in perfectly with those around it.

The same white stone and grand but anonymous frontage. The same brass railings, polished periodically but not obsessively, framing the four wide stairs up from the pavement. The same windows mostly obscured by blinds. The same secured entrance.

Those who work there are divided into two groups. The first group is employed by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, as an annex office for that department. They believe utterly that, upon entering the building, the primary corridor takes a sharp left turn, leading to their office space. They also believe that the uppermost two floors of the building are vacant and sealed.

The second group is employed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, as an annex office to that department. They believe utterly that, upon entering the building, the primary corridor takes a sharp right turn, leading to their office space. They, like their counterparts and cohabitants, believe that the uppermost two floors of the building are vacant and sealed.

But there is a third group.

They come and go largely unnoticed, and are indistinguishable from the mass of other government employees forever purposefully striding around Whitehall. When they enter, they dismiss the left and right branches in the primary corridor, and they proceed straight ahead towards the staircase at the rear. They ascend two floors, and they pass into an area which has no mechanical, electronic, or personnel-based security whatsoever — because to even be there is fantastically unlikely without due authority.

Those who work on the uppermost two floors are civil servants, in a manner of speaking, but they are also government employees, in another way. They are non-partisan, and they are beholden of a strict and unshakeable ideology. They are singularly secular in duty, and they are also possessed of the most devoted spirituality.

Their particular organisation has existed for millennia, in one form or another, and it found its most recent and most natural home in the warren of bureaucracy and administration. They are accountable to no-one beyond their unique hierarchy, and they are freed entirely from the meagre and mundane concerns of budget, jurisdiction, and oversight.

At the top of the staircase leading to their domain, there is a large door, studded in red fabric, and always unlocked. If someone with no business there happened to locate and traverse the staircase — a virtual impossibility, and completely without precedence in the organisation’s history — they would see a simple metal plaque affixed to the door, at eye level. The plaque is silver-grey, not brass, and its engraved inscription is entirely dependent on the person viewing it.

Someone without authorisation would see something which immediately provoked a strong sense of panic, and a profound need to turn around and leave the building — a traumatic emotional experience so intense that it would actually prevent the consolidation of that person’s short-term memory of the entire incident.

A person, however, who had due cause to be in that place, and to know of the staircase and the equally unseeable corridor that led to it, would instead notice a symbol on the modest plaque — of a book, held shut by the serpent coiled around it, all within a shield whose background bore a regular pattern reminiscent of brickwork — and below, three words.

Ministry of Perception

Beyond the door, a sanctioned visitor would encounter an area both expected and surprising. Rows of mahogany desks in a central open-plan expanse, bordered with wood-panelled offices and meeting rooms — but too many. Further staircases in the far corners of the too-large space, climbing to join floors which extend markedly beyond the exterior confines of the building they occupy. A vast atrium, airy and with a million motes of dust drifting in the shafts of daylight streaming from windows which climbed impossible walls towards a ceiling so far above that it vanished into haze.

A visitor would see the many doors which lined this place occasionally open to admit someone, always clad in the drab but immaculate business attire of the city, and then the appropriate door would close again. A few moments — or minutes, or hours — later, it would open once more, and this time the room beyond would be different. Sometimes bigger, and sometimes smaller. Sometimes clearly in a place where it was night, though the Ministry itself was just about to observe its regular 45-minute lunch break at precisely noon. Sometimes, the doors would open onto a place of absolute darkness, giving the impression of the doorway being a void somehow filled with a motionless volume of oil, held in place by a strange perturbation of physical laws. Sometimes the doors would open onto an exterior vista; perhaps rural, or arid, or glacial.

And very occasionally, there would be a Disturbance.

A tremor, more sensed than actually felt, would run through the place, and hundreds (or was it thousands?) of faces would glance up from computers and ledgers and telephones, all wearing an identical look of concern — then there would be a hive of activity. In time, the odd sensation of movement would subside, and the palpable tension of the cavernous but oddly quiet place would dissipate.

The very topmost level, which in the irrelevant geography of the city of London was hovering far, far above the urban sprawl, held a single office — though to call it such was to do it a grave disservice. Within, a council of twelve people sat in session whenever required, day or night, and they both ruled upon and carried out their sacred duty of making modifications to everything that lay beyond their unguessed-of enclave. Alongside their sister organisations in every major country, they worked tirelessly to enact the twin pillars of their ancient mandate, given to their long-ago forebears by the Almighty Himself.

There will be Order, first and last, for all living beings under God.

And no-one, no matter their blood or birth, will ever learn of the Fabric.

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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