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

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 | thirteen

She watched as the door slowly pushed open.

She shivered. A memory, of him? Her thin white cotton shift torn, barely covering her aching body. Flesh bruised and torn. Metal hospital cot hard under her back, limbs heavy, arms still by her sides, legs splayed apart, one hanging over the edge of the cot. A sharp pain flaring deep inside her.

Thick choking dust filled her cell, covered the walls, the floor, her body. Turning her face to the door, a memory curled, snaked, buried inside her abused mind.

The door stood open. Cold damp air flowed into the room. Icy tendrils oozing across the floor. Her eyes staring vacantly at the empty doorway, breathing ragged.

She heard a low breathless groaning, a deepening moan. A sound that chilled her as it spawned, grew, filled the room. A sound coming from her own tortured throat.

She turned her head, slowly, away from the empty doorway, her burning eyes passing over the now quiet machine from which she had been unplugged. Had he been here? Had he taken out the needle? Her mind drifted. The wall. The wall was throbbing, coalescing.

The dust covering the room, smothering her, was drifting, shifting, gathering, accreting. Long putrid dusty ribbons seeping down the walls, sliding across the floor, slithering toward the door. Beyond the door, nothing, only darkness.

She felt rivulets of dust running from her nose, her eyes, the corner of her open dry mouth, cracked lips. Dust that poured away, off her body, spilling in a hideous mock waterfall to the floor, dust draining down between her open thighs, pooling beneath the bare metal cot, a puddle of despair on the cold tiles. Streaming across those tiles, merging with the dust that was piling up at the entrance to the room.

The dust gathered in the doorway, building, shifting, growing and extending upward, cold damp air swirling around the emerging column, a vortex of terror, spiralling up, layers of dust taking shape. A terrible, familiar shape.

A faceless stone shadow, palms opened out, began to form from the swirling dust, standing silently in the doorway, its blank face turned toward her. Memories, of pain and desire, lust and terror, love and hope. Despair, death and darkness.

A sob escaped her lips. Pain tore through her body as she tried to heave herself up.

It was shadowy unmoving, passive, terrible in its coldness.

She stood. Her legs trembling, she scrabbled one foot in front of the other, each step provoking the pain deep inside her to bloom and flare.

She stood in front of its empty stone face, reached out, fingers caressing its featureless curves.

The room reverberated with a terrible scream, a shattering screech, as if the doors of hell had burst apart. A fissure opened. In its face.

A torrent of icy dark water erupted from that fissure, a thick jet of water pumping, spurting, blasting into her face, her mouth. An endless torrent of water, filling the room, filling her.

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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.

thirteen | fiftytwo