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 203, of 240 so far.

Whatever Is Required

It was so typical. Just his damned luck.

Alan forced himself to unclench his fists, knowing that his anger had no productive outlet, and would only make the situation worse. These things happened; that was life. And it was only a tablet computer.

Thousands of miles from home, on the last day of a holiday trip, and he’d dropped the damned thing. It had all his photos, and his work, and his music, and even though it automatically backed itself up to the cloud every day, it was still damned inconvenient for it to be out of commission. He had a long flight tomorrow to get back home, and he’d been really looking forward to watching some of the movies he’d downloaded for that reason, and also maybe doing a little bit of journaling about the trip itself. But that wasn’t going to happen now.

The screen took most of the impact, and to the device’s credit, the toughened glass had spiderwebbed dramatically but hadn’t broken apart or fallen out. Alan couldn’t make the thing turn back on, though, so he had no way of knowing if the damage extended to more than just the display.

He was always so careful with things. The tablet had its own magnetically-attached keyboard folio, and then a big padded sleeve that he kept the whole thing inside, and then that went into the padded laptop compartment in his carry-on luggage. It would have survived just about anything — but of course he’d only been holding the device itself, doing a quick pencil sketch of an old church using the stylus, when it slipped from his cold-numbed fingers and tumbled sickeningly to the cobblestones. Alan had been sitting on a low wall, so the drop was barely a metre, but it had been more than enough.

Damn it, he thought, for the fiftieth time.

He’d been in a rotten mood when he gathered the device up into his bag, feeling the sympathetic winces of bystanders all around him, and stormed off. He knew there was nothing he could do it about it until he got back home the day after tomorrow, unpacked, and could then take it to one of the manufacturer’s retail stores to enquire about a repair. He did, at least, have the extended warranty.

For now, he was walking off his anger at himself, as he’d been doing for the past few hours, notwithstanding a break for a quick dinner which wasn’t at all the sort he’d planned for his final night away. The narrow, winding streets were virtually deserted now, the small rural town almost closed for the night, and Alan was dreading the 3AM taxi ride taking him all the way to the nearest city with an international airport. It would be an extremely long day-and-a-half of travel.

He tried to remind himself that he’d hugely enjoyed his holiday, and taken any number of photos, had a lot of delightful experiences, and truly did feel refreshed — at least up until a few hours earlier. Try as he might, though, his mind kept returning to his moment of clumsiness that had cost him his good cheer, and may well cost him a hefty sum, too, if the warranty didn’t cover the accidental damage. But that was a problem for the near future.

The street he’d turned onto was dark, the old stone walls echoing to his footsteps, and there was only a single source of illumination a short distance ahead. A small shop, no doubt closing up, still had its lights on, the warm glow spilling out onto the uneven road surface. A man came out, tall and dressed in a waistcoat, shirt, and trousers, carrying a black plastic bag to the large bin in the adjoining alley. He spotted Alan on his way back to the shop’s door, and nodded pleasantly.

Alan returned the gesture, despite feeling little enthusiasm for social graces at the moment, and then his gait faltered as he saw a distinctive symbol in the window. The shop building itself was probably a couple of centuries old, but the logo was unmistakeable: that of the maker of his tablet device. Below, a notice said Warranty repairs and replacements.

A feeling of unreality washed over him, and he felt his pulse increase. Alan blinked, forcing himself to verify what he’d seen, but there it was in black and white. He couldn’t believe it, and it seemed so unlikely as to be ridiculous: the storefronts on either side of the place were closed up, and they looked to be a woollen goods seller, and a small bakery respectively. There wasn’t a single building in sight that seemed younger than a century or so, and during his trip Alan had barely even seen a mobile phone in the hands of any of the locals. It was what made the place so quaint, and such an attractive destination. But apparently the modern world had somehow intruded nonetheless.

There’s no way this guy even has an email address, Alan thought, much less can repair the damned tablet. But a spark of hope had already bloomed in his chest, and he was speaking before he knew he was going to.

“Uh, good evening,” he said, and the shopkeeper paused on his way back through the lit doorway, turning to him with a smile.

“Good evening to you too,” the man replied, his dark eyes almost black now that he was back-lit. “I was just about to close, but is there anything I might help you with?”

Alan, feeling ridiculous, found himself gesturing to the sign in the window, and the shopkeeper followed his gaze and then nodded.

“Yes, that’s right,” the shopkeeper said. “Why don’t you come inside and we’ll see what we can do?”

The man walked through the doorway and Alan followed, seeing immediately that there was a large, sleek table taking up a significant portion of the right side of the space. It was just like the ones he’d seen in the retail stores of his tablet’s manufacturer, and it held all sorts of precision tools, components packaged in anti-static containers, and even a few boxed and brand new tablets from the same range, neatly stacked.

Alan almost exclaimed aloud at the bizarre sight, all of the clean-lined and shining technology only a couple of metres from wood-panelled walls that had likely been there since long before his great-great-great-grandfather was born. The shopkeeper ushered him over to the table, and Alan slipped off his bag and laboriously unpacked the damaged device.

The shopkeeper took the tablet from him, looking at it with a curious expression on his face. Alan could almost have sworn that the man had never even seen one of the machines before, and his heart sank. It had been a foolish thought, of course. Here, of all places. Then the shopkeeper nodded.

“Well,” he said, “I’d say this is more in the realm of replacement rather than repair, wouldn’t you agree?”

Alan nodded, reaching out after a moment in expectation of being handed the device back, but the other man instead placed it on the smooth surface of the table, and then picked up one of the boxes. It was the only one of precisely the same range of devices as Alan’s own, and after a moment Alan saw that it was in fact an identical device in every way: the model, year, storage capacity, colourway, and connectivity options were exactly the same.

“I believe this ought to do it,” he said. “And I’ll see to it that the damaged unit is recycled for you, unless you’d like to keep it too.”

Alan blinked several times, and then shook his head, and the shopkeeper smiled with his thin lips, the ambient lighting reflecting in his dark eyes.

“I… so, what do I owe you?” he asked awkwardly, after a silence that was slightly too long. The shopkeeper shook his head.

“Nothing at all,” he said. “Part of the service. I’m relieved I was able to help.”

Alan internally debated a number of responses, but he had a growing feeling of unease, and the materialistic part of him very much wanted to escape with the pristine new machine.

“Thank you so much,” he said. “I really appreciate it.”

The remarks were inelegant, but the shopkeeper seemed to receive them well, and with another smile he gestured towards the doorway. Alan slipped the boxed replacement device into his bag, taking one last glance at the broken unit on the large table, and then slung the bag onto his shoulder and walked back out onto the street. He turned, and saw the shopkeeper still standing in the doorway looking at him, the man’s face once again in shadow.

Alan looked past him to the island of light that was the little shop’s interior, and he saw that the sleek table within was gone, replaced with a wooden one that looked as old as the proprietor. The logo of the technology company, and the notice about repairs, had also vanished from the window. He felt his blood run cold.

“We’re rather isolated out here,” the shopkeeper said, his tone still warm and conversational. “We have to rely on each other. A man must wear many hats in a small community.”

He smiled once more, his thin lips very red in the meagre reflected light from the street. Alan looked at him for a long moment, and then allowed his gaze to travel upwards, over the man’s head towards the top of the doorway, and to the large and exquisitely hand-painted sign that had no doubt hung over the portal for countless decades and beyond.

Whatever Is Required.

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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