Do you need, desire or crave a new challenge?  Are you open to sharing your dark side?   Then read on.

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Do you have a dark side?

Or, think you may have one. Or indeed worry that you might have one. Or, for that matter, worry that you don’t and would like one? If so,  join me here each week for dark | side | thursday.

Over a period of 52 weeks, I am writing a story. A dark story that will unfold as the weeks pass. Each Thursday, at 13:00 UTC, I will post a new chapter. Each chapter will be exactly 500 words long, and will be accompanied by a photograph. You can catch up on the story so far by clicking here on dark | side | thursday

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Share your dark side?

I invite you to join me either by writing your own dark story, week by week, or, if that is too much, by dropping by, now and then, perhaps when the mood suits you or, perhaps, when it doesn’t, and by sharing a photograph, poem or a suitably dark piece of prose. To cross over to dark | side | thursday create your post, tag it dark side thursday and link to it by clicking on the dark | side | thursday badge below, where you can also find all the contributions so far. Or you can simply share your link in the comments section of my weekly post. And, should the mood take you, you can add the badge to your post.

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dark | side | thursday | three

He opened the box.

Again, as he always did when the time was right. Since he had first found it.

Pressing the concealed button, he slid open the lid with care, darkness seeming to slither out of the box.

He stood, walked to the window.

The rain continued to sluice down, the window smeared. His bones ached. His heart too. He sighed. He turned back to the box.

He took it out.

The key.

The key he had first found in the box, in the hole in the ground. He had crouched down at the edge of that hole, gazing into the darkness. Feeling, as he did again now, the cold, the uneasy shifting sensation deep inside. The fear, yes, always that fear.

He had spotted the simple wooden box, sitting in a niche in the dark walls of that terrible hole in the ground. A black painted wooden box. A box lined with smooth black metal, a box that seemed to reject the very idea of light. And, the box that contained the key.

The key, which, on that uncommonly warm spring evening so long ago, as their fingers touched, they had found on the grass as they sat there on the side of that path. And so it had begun.

And they had felt the cold, the same bone chilling cold he felt now.

How things might have been had they left that key lost amongst the grasses of that path.

He picked up the key.

A simple, not ornate, key. Black. Like his heavy heart. He turned it again in his fingers.

He held the key as he looked into the rain, the dark clouds. Thinking, again, of them. Of it. Always of it.

He turned back to his desk, placed the key back in the box, slid the lid closed tight. For now.

He sat again. Picked up once more the pen and continued to write.

They stood, she took the key from his hands, she intended to keep it safe. It was, they were not. The sun, that had warmed them as they walked had abandoned them.

They walked on. Still not wanting the moment to end. Even though the evening had grown cold. Had they looked back, would they have seen? Their fingers entwined, they looked up. The stars seemed different tonight. Shivering, she turned to him.

His hand aching, he stopped to write for a moment. His mind drifting back, to the moment he had decided. Decided to reach down into that terrible hole, to reach for that box.

He had lain on the dusty bricks, his face pressed against the filth at the edge of that terrible hole. Stretching he had been able to grasp the box. And he brought it out. Into the light.

At that moment, the air had grown chill. And, he felt it. For the first time. Its presence.

As she had felt it when, holding the key in her fingers, she looked into his eyes.

And saw.

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The portal to dark | side | thursday opened on the twenty first day of may in the year twenty hundred and fifteen and will remain open for fifty two weeks.

three | fiftytwo