and the shadows kept coming

tempting fate - part 1

a.n.// okay so i attempt to write a horror story and then... idk man, i'm just a natural entertainer. i promise the others will at least be more serious than this. hopefully.

who am i kidding lol

tbh this isn't that great, i kind of lost where i was going with it. but anywayyyy. it's pretty long, so strap in. feel free to leave any time you feel bored by the disgusting monotony of my trying to be creepy c:

- eden

- - -

   "You should only play a game if you're going to win. Any uncertainties you may reserve guarantee your failure, and there's always a cost of failing."

   That's what it said on the box. Should have left the damned thing where I found it. I wish I could just walk away, but I have to finish the game I began.

   This whole thing started ten years ago. I was fifteen, and messing about in my brother's room with a friend, when we discovered the box under the bed. It was a plain box. Nothing interesting. Just that warning: "You should only play a game if you're going to win". Obviously, we didn't pay any heed to that message, instead choosing to open the box and play the game.

   It was a... strange game. Just a scrap of old paper with small, spiky writing on it, and a set of cards. The writing was instructions; instructions and rules of the game. There were only three rules. One, if you open the box, you have to play. Two, if you play, you have to finish. And three, if you lose, you have to pay.

   We thought it meant we had to pay with money, and laughed naïvely at the stupidity of a person making a game you could cheat so easily.

   The game went like this. You take a card randomly from the pack, look on the picture on one side, say out loud what it makes you think of, and replace it. You don't have to be honest, but it affected the outcome of the game. Then you do this twice more, so you've seen three different cards. Finally, you take one more card from the back of the pack, and look on the opposite side of the card. There's a picture of something, like a tarot card, and there's a specific meaning to go with each picture.

   The interesting thing was, what you said in the game affected the what the last card showed. I didn't know how, just that these cards said I'd live a rich and long life.

   My friend, we'll call him Dominic, didn't want to play at first. So I did. How noble of me. We agreed (he proposed, I got dragged along) that I'd play and we'd see what happened.

   The first future card I drew told me I'd encounter incredibly good luck in the coming month. And I did. That month, I aced all my tests by accident, found a twenty pound note on the pavement, and fell out of a window, landing on a mattress a foot to the left of a pile of rusty bed skeletons, narrowly escaping contracting tetanus.

   So after his initial doubts, Dom took his turn. The cards predicted he would find the love of his life, which he did. She was called Amelie, and, fortunately, she was beautiful.

   Unfortunately, he found her in a history lesson in which we were covering the domestic lives of  families during the Great War, and so she's either dead or ugly now.

   (I think he lied to the cards).

   For some reason he got super hung up over her. Kept moping because "He'd never love again". Bullshit if I ever heard it.

   The next time, Dom and I both played. This time, I think he was honest, because we both got good predictions. I ate a whole ice cream without brain freeze or a stomach ache ("You shall be alleviated of that which troubles you for a time" (I'm lactose intolerant)), Dom put a penny in an RSPCA charity box and got pulled out of the way of a fast driving van by a St Bernard ("Kindness pays in equal"), and it was a whole bunch of other menial, innocent predictions like that for a few weeks.