The Challenge

The challenge: Share this photo in fifteen minutes or else She will visit you tonight and steal your soul. It was laughable. The picture in question was a blurry photograph of a young woman staring through a pane of glass, her face and hands pressed flat against it, but it had been touched up so that her eyes were black pits that seemed to stretch and run down her cheeks like wet eyeliner. The skin around her mouth looked jagged around the gaping hole. Honestly, the picture itself looked like it would steal his soul if he kept looking at it, so Daren clicked Like and kept scrolling.

It was just another chain letter, like the ones that circulated through email when everyone first got online. There had been a few stories of those things coming true, but as far as he knew, they’d all been elaborate hoaxes. Now that his two boys were online, he had to contend with a whole new generation of “keep it going or else,” this time with cursed images.

He kept scrolling, running his thumb up the screen on his phone, but he couldn’t shake the image of the girl from his mind. Those vacant eyes called out to him. Her silent scream roared through his head. She was crying out a warning. Something was on the other side of the glass, something coming for her, and once it finished her, it would come for whoever was on the other side of the screen, looking through to the carnage.

He scrolled back up to the picture at some point without even realizing and stared at the face. She wasn’t coming for anyone’s soul. She was being consumed by a darkness that had no solid form, something from the depths of the abyss of human fear, that thing that had chased people out of the darkest night into the firelight countless ages ago. The torment captured in her image served as a reminder that it was still coming. Even after all this time, the original source of terror lurked just beyond the glow of the screen.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Daren told himself, blacking out the screen and turning his phone over. He rubbed his eyes. “Enough internet for today.”

He reached over the side of the bed and pulled up the charger, plugging his phone in for the night before checking to make sure his alarms were set for in the morning. Then, pulling up the covers and cutting off the light, he rolled away from the door to face the window, the cool blue-white glow of the new streetlights giving his room a relaxing aura. And the shadows closed in around his vision, pulling him deep into their comforting grasp.

She waited for him. Young and full of life. Vibrant blue eyes stared at him, round and innocent. Pouty red lips, perfect for kissing, parted with words unspoken. Long dark hair flowed behind her like shadows in the night. She reached a slender, feminine hand for him, pleading either for his help or for him to come to her.

Daren tried to lift his hand to hers, but he couldn’t move. He struggled, grunting against the invisible restraints holding him down. She tilted her head, and the look on her face changed from curiosity to worry. He couldn’t understand, couldn’t comprehend her expression or why she would look at him the way she did.

The girl drifted closer to him in the fog of sleep, her hair suddenly falling forward as he realized he lay on his back. She floated above him, her hands waving in the air like she was treading water. He could feel himself getting aroused by her closeness.

Young, with all the right curves in all the right places, he longed to grab her and pull her down to him, to feel her weight on him, to feel her warmth and every soft bend of her shape. He longed for the swell of her perky breasts, her tight round ass, and the sweet little cleft between her legs. He tried to shake the thoughts from his head; she was easily within dating range of his sons, both freshmen in college. He had no business with a girl that young, but she came to him. She had called out to him in the night. Was he wrong for answering? Even if he couldn’t help it?

She reached her hand out again, her ethereal touch brushing ever so slightly against his cheek.

He woke with a gasp, his lungs pulling ineffectively for air, burning as they fought whatever force kept him from breathing. He arched his back, trying to rise, to sit up, but held down by hands clutching him from the shadows. His dream had become a nightmare.

The darkness above him parted to reveal not the lively face of the young woman he’d seen in his dream, but the pale lifeless face and black eyes of the girl in the photo. She rested atop him, her skeletal body grinding into his, her bony slit riding his erection through his boxers. She leaned forward, her breath hissing against his cheek as the gash in her face opened to release a long black tongue that ran the line of his jaw and flicked hungrily at his ear lobe.

Daren shuddered with revulsion as a gray hand slid down his chest, her blackened fingertips leaving dark trails behind. She parted the front of his shorts to pull out his shaft, wrapping her fingers around him and giving him a few good, tight pumps before sitting upright and guiding him into place between her legs.

Her pussy clutched at his cock, fitting perfectly and sucking slightly as she lifted her narrow hips, sliding up along his length. He stared at her body as she writhed above him, her skin gray, her ribs showing, her stomach sunken in, her little nipples black as coal. She moaned as she fucked him, her voice rasping in inhuman gasps and grunts. Her jagged mouth opened, her tongue lashed out at the night like some kind of tentacle.

No darkness chased her through that glass, he realized. She was the darkness. Night incarnate. Terror in the flesh. This horrid creature stealing his seed was the thing early man had feared in the night. She was the reason behind the stories they shared by the fire.

She looked down at him, as if in response to his thoughts, and a savage smile spread across her gash. She leaned forward against, resting her cold body against his, her hips still working his cock, still pulling his seed from his balls, calling it up through his shaft. His arms, suddenly springing free from their restraints, wrapped around her, holding her frail little body against his as he began pumping himself into her.

“Cum for me,” she said in a low preternatural growl.

Her chest heaved with her gasping breath, though he felt no pulse reaching to him through her flesh. Her twat gripped him, her hole clenching and releasing with the same frantic rhythm as her breathing. She whined as she neared her own orgasm, sounding now the way he would have expected the girl in his dream to sound. He suspected if he looked her in the face, he would see those pouting lips, those deep blue eyes.

“Fuck!” he yelled as he erupted inside her. His hands took her face and pulled it to his, kissing her mouth, her lips coming together, their jagged flesh forming something kissable for him. Her breath felt like smoke filling his mouth and lungs.

Her fingers pressed hard against his chest, growing sharper and longer until they pierced his skin and dug deep inside. She rocked her hips forward, thrust her head back, and roared into the night as darkness flooded the room from between her legs, engulfing everything in the wake of her ecstasy.

Daren saw it all. His entire life passed before his eyes, shadows being ripped away from the fabric of reality as his consciousness was slowly eaten by the girl from the photo. In the end, nothing remained but a wispy shadow flitting towards the light in the window. The glow on his screen flashed out, and the room fell into darkness as she returned to her place in the back of men’s minds, the object of both their darkest desires and deepest fears.