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 | twentynine

And so, the dance, started again.

He typed, enjoying the gentle click, click, click as the square, black plastic buttons, with glowing white characters, gently depressed under his flying fingers. His wrist resting on the clean aluminium skin of the machine on which he was writing. The screen glowing white, nothing  to see but the words appearing, one after the other, in the old school font that was a soft spot of his. When he did this, he felt at home, comforted somehow. For now.

And by his side, the battered old journal, bound tight, its secrets still shut away inside a leather thong.  The leather, a base and wanton challenge to the gleaming aluminium usurper.

He looked up from the shallow laminated wooden desk on which he was typing. His eyes, distracted for a moment by the red woven plaid thrown over the sofa, looked towards the windows. Distracted by memories, and almost memories, of things that had happened, that were going to happen, and those that didn’t. His view of the empty industrial landscape outside interrupted by the thin plastic gauze that had been applied to the window, ostensibly in the interests of privacy. A wry almost smile formed on his lips. The rain forever lashing against the windows, a susurration of sensation that stealthily stole his attention.

He remembered the origin of the man in black. The one who always wore black, the man in the song. The Byronic anti-hero. The song inspired by pictures on a domed roof. In the entrance hall of a municipal station that had been in a state of constant renovation. Until the time came for it to finish. In another world.

He continued to type.

The words kept appearing. He had no idea how or why. Pretty much how he felt about it all. Type. And see.

The man in black, his narrator, had travelled far, in a circle. And yet, only now had his journey really started. He knew that many many roads lay ahead of him, roads covered in ice and snow, roads ahead that held promise. And he knew that promise, that fake premise, would be his undoing.

He thought of her, the woman that had been the nemesis of his man in black. The conflicting and contrasting emotions, the walk in the soft light that led to that terrible hole in the ground. The loss and despair. The search, the seeking, and the resolution.

The cold clinical way in which the man in black and that woman had been conjoined in a convergence of chaos in a white tiled hospital room.

Images of that square, empty of people, the tower, the climb to the top. The despair.

He stood up. The keyboard stilled for a moment. He looked through the rain, at the chimney stack, a relic of times gone by. Industrial, and fanciful.

The rain smeared across the dirty exterior of the window.

And a tear spilled from his eye as he remembered. It all.

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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.

twentynine | fiftytwo