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 266, of 266 so far.

Underground

The biologist had been talking almost non-stop for the last fifteen minutes, and the constant drone of his voice was starting to irritate Glancey.

“The Glasgow Subway is the third oldest underground metro system in the world, you know,” he said. “Only London’s and Budapest’s are older. It’s fascinating.”

“That it is, professor,” Glancey replied drily, pointing her flashlight down the access tunnel ahead. Still no sign of what they were looking for. And long may it continue, she thought.

The man’s name was Hamilton, and he had already taken great pleasure in telling her that he lived only ten minutes away from the town of that same name, which was only fifteen miles from where they now stood. Glancey doubted there was a single person he’d ever encountered who hadn’t been subjected to the same anecdote, in just the same manner.

Glasgow’s underground railway consisted of two loops running in opposite directions, one within the other. The platforms all had a distinct smell, of warmed air, people, oil and metal. If you asked Glancey’s opinion, she’d say that it was the most Glaswegian smell your nose would ever encounter. But Hamilton had yet to ask her opinion on anything.

If you looked at the subway map, you’d see that there were fifteen stations; eight north of the River Clyde, and seven south. The asymmetry troubled some people, but it was generally assumed that it was just due to the age-old socio-economic segregation that rendered those on the south side as second-class citizens.

But they’re all wrong about that, Glancey thought.

It was a matter of such secrecy that very few even in government knew about it, but there were in fact also eight stations south of the river, just like their counterparts to the north. One had been isolated mere days after construction was completed in the early 1890s, and all public record of it erased.

Glancey’s flashlight finally found the door in the darkness ahead, kept locked at all times and monitored perpetually by an equally secret emergency response unit within Strathclyde Police. The handful of people briefed on its existence liked to think of it as the one and only branch in the subway network, modelled after the London Underground system.

They called it the Nightmare Line.

Its real name was much more prosaic, defined as usual by the nearest surface-level thoroughfare that the station lay below. Glancey reached the door and produced a small silver key from her coat, watching with professional disinterest as it floated upwards from her palm until it hung in the air approximately in front of where a lock would be on the featureless door. There was a clunk from some hidden mechanism, and the door swung noiselessly inwards. Glancey grabbed the key from midair and pocketed it with the barest backwards look at Hamilton.

The little man seemed agitated and afraid, and Glancey thought it was an eminently sensible reaction. They both passed through the doorway, allowing the door to close and lock behind them, and then a few dim lights clicked on above their heads. They were standing on a subway platform that had never seen the feet of passengers, and had lain here in the earth virtually untouched for more than a century. Without sunlight to fade them, the painted enamel signs were eerily bold and clear beneath the dust of decades.

BROOMLOAN ROAD, they said.

“I… I’m not sure I truly believed it until this moment,” Hamilton said.

“This is the easy part,” Glancey replied, and she felt a pang of guilt as the man’s face paled further under the sallow light. She took another object from her pocket, this time a carved piece of greenish stone less than ten centimetres in length. It bore markings that might have been runic. It had a disturbing coldness to it despite having been carried next to her body since Glancey had retrieved it from a safe at the Department of Restricted Talents, and it seemed just a little bit too heavy for its size.

There was a noise from somewhere deeper in the darkness ahead of them. A sort of rustling, but too low and too fast. Glancey’s hindbrain immediately knew that it was the sound of something very large. Glancey’s conscious mind, unfortunately, knew exactly what it was.

Hamilton stepped back against the slightly curved wall of the platform. He was visibly sweating.

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” he said. His voice was strangled; a whisper in the perpetual night of this forgotten station.

“It’s always a bad idea to come here,” Glancey replied, “but we’re here now and we have a job to do. You’ve been cleared, and your expertise is in cephalopods and related fauna. So this is your time to shine.”

Hamilton raised a hand to forestall her, but Glancey had already spoken the old words under her breath. The effect was immediate, as if a bell had been struck.

The blackness at the mouth of the onward subway tunnel seemed to vibrate for an instant, and then it appeared. Sickeningly fast, and quiet, and fluid. A movement that spoke equally of deadliness but also of supreme intelligence.

Hamilton’s mind whirled with images, trying and failing again and again to match the spectacle with something from his known and sane world.

Thunderclouds. A giant squid. Billowing smoke, or oil. And every special-effects monster and behemoth he had ever seen on television in the small hours of the night when sleep eluded him.

It was gigantic, filling the entire cylinder of space where the subway trains had never run. It was in constant, agitated but somehow calculated motion, and it was disturbingly general in form, with no specific features at any particular point.

Hamilton knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was watching them, and Glancey knew that its attention was focused entirely on the carved stone she held white-knuckled in her hand — the only thing that seemed to keep the creature at bay.

“Professor, I’d like to introduce you to the Queen of the City,” she said, knowing that Hamilton wouldn’t reply. “Now if you’d be so kind, we’d really like to know how to kill her.”

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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