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

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.

dark | side | thursday | fortytwo

Of course, he never did see it, nor feel it’s cold dead fingers touching his shoulders. Perhaps if he had, then things might have been different.

Maybe a beast realised, visceral and present, would have been harder to contend with. He would never know, of course.

He did remember the fear though, the endless nights, the longing for that sliver of light, the longing for the voices to welcome him. Voices he knew were never welcoming, but raised and angry, cold and cruel. The light a deceit. The nights that ended in the cold break of day, the longing again for the night. An endless cycle.

He remembered the longing he felt when the bird that was blue, and named pinkie, flew free. And how (back then) he had wanted to be that little bird, to fly to be free.

As he continued typing, he could smell the ripe odour of rampant rhododendrons.

Wet leaves, oozing under the constant rain, giant green sentinels guarding another world, through to which he could never pass.

His thin, scrawny little legs pedalling as hard as he could make them, the wobbling wheels of his bicycle spinning in the air as he rolled to one side and the rattling stabiliser wheels sparing him (once again) more bloodstained knees.

Guiding the bicycle along the rain slickened and bumpy ash filled path that lay between the forest of rhododendrons. Fear filling him as he knew that he was off the path, the path where they could find him. He was alone. Alone to face the dark wet green leaves, the shapes that moved behind their cold embrace.

He could hear the rusted creaking of the swings.

He (thought he) could hear the swishing of the bird’s bright blue feathers as it escaped.

He pedalled quickly past the row of red and blue painted (rusted) swings that towered above him, streaked and covered in slime accumulated under the endless rain. Echoes of long gone children, laughing and crying as they swung (out to dry – he thought).

And ahead, at the top of the rise, across the grass. The bandstand.

He had to reach the bandstand.

He knew he had to reach the bandstand.

Before it, or they, could stop him.

As he typed, he remembered the terror as his little wobbly wheels shot out from under him. Felt again the pain as his head hit the gnarled root of a tree that had been the cause of his tumble, felt the trickle of blood seeping from the gash on his forehead and running into his eyes. Remembered how he had sniffled and forced back the tears, remembered how he had stood again and walked towards the bandstand.

He could hear the music still. Off key and stilted. He could not recall the tune.

The slumped shoulders of the solitary pianist, the way the figures frail fingers fought to slash out the fragmented refrain.

He turned away from his keyboard.

He realised that had been when it began.

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.

fortytwo | fiftytwo

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

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.

dark | side | thursday | fortyone

The clocked ticked over, it was 12:52, nothing had changed.

Or, perhaps, everything had changed.

He began to type, the only thing he could think to do at this point was to get the words out of his head and on to the screen. Only that way could he buy himself some time to think, some freedom from the ghosts, and shades, that haunted him. His fingers flew across the keyboard. The words spewing out and into the hard (unforgiving) drive that spun mindlessly inside the sculpted aluminium case of his Mac.

His recollection of events had become hard to piece together. Distorted and curved. He remembered things that had happened to him when he had been a child, insanely trivial things that remained imprinted on his circuits, trivial things that seemed to have (at least for now) some deeper meaning. Things that happened yesterday he could barely remember. The sequence of events that had resulted in him sitting at this desk, under the dark shadow of the chimney, could well have been shrouded in the thick black smoke that he imagined had once belched from the open throat of that, now defunct, pillar.

His mind wandered as he typed.

He remembered a snake and a tiger, at least that is what he thought he remembered. There had also been a stuffed elephant, with cold dark eyes. The snake and the tiger locked in an eternal power struggle, the thick cord of the snake wrapped around the tiger both terrifying and somehow beguiling. The stained white fangs of the tiger prominent in his mind, the open maw of the animal frozen in a silent and terrible, never ending, roar of pain. The snake’s dripping fangs only seconds away from tearing at the throat of the beast. And all this behind cold glass in an old house that no longer echoed with the laughter of children or the anguish of those who once held sway there.

The buzz of the giant wasp that he (had always known) inhabited the dark space behind the curtains, in the corner of the window. The bloated wasp that he knew scrabbled for freedom against the cold frame of the darkened window. The wasp that he knew would, in the long passage of the night, realise that all it had to do to find freedom was to turn, to fly beneath the curtains, to feast on the flesh of the small human shape that lay shaking beneath the bedsheets night after night.

He remembered rising from his bed, the long walk across his bedroom, turning the cold handle of the door. The voices at the end of the corridor, the light shining at the foot of the door. The promise of safety. The faltering steps along the corridor that lengthened as he began to walk toward that sliver of light. Feeling the ground liquify beneath his dragging feet.

And knowing what he would see as he turned, what he would feel as it reached out.

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.

fortyone | fiftytwo