The Dark Track

Instructions

--- **The Dark Track** I don’t know why I clicked on it. I was just killing time late one night, skimming through old forums, looking for something obscure, something *new*. That’s when I found it—*The Dark Track*. Hidden in some decaying corner of a forgotten thread, buried beneath spam and dead links. The thumbnail was a black screen with a single, pulsating red dot at the center. My skin prickled. It felt off, like staring into the abyss of a haunted mirror. But still, I clicked. It was a .exe file, of course. Something about that felt wrong, too, but I dismissed it. I’d played the creepypasta games—*Sonic.exe*, *The Harvest*, all of them—and I was a skeptic. I didn’t believe in haunted files or cursed games. It was just another urban legend. But something in my gut told me this one was different. It *felt* different. I ran the game, and the first thing I noticed was the sound. Not the usual jingle or startup screen—no, this was worse. Static. Harsh, violent static, like an old radio stuck between stations. A low hum under it, something primal. Then the screen flickered, and slowly, the landscape began to form. It was wrong. So wrong. The colors bled into each other like something out of a fever dream. Nothing looked real. The landscape wasn’t just barren—it was twisted, like a warped version of a place you’ve seen before but never quite remembered. Everything was muted, sickly, and stretched, as if the very fabric of reality had been bent. I moved to close the game, but then a text box flashed on the screen: **“Ready to run?”** I hesitated. Then I hit *Enter*. The screen went black. A deep thudding noise rumbled through the speakers, like something massive moving beneath the earth, closing in. My pulse spiked. I wasn’t alone. And whatever it was, it was getting closer. A figure appeared at the edge of the screen, barely visible at first—a shadow, a distortion. Then it stepped into view. My stomach lurched. It was tall, gaunt, skeletal—like it had been pulled out of a nightmare and stitched together in the dark. Its limbs were twisted in unnatural angles, the joints wrong. Its face—a grin too wide, too stretched, like it was carved into its skull, pulling apart the flesh. But it was the eyes that made me freeze. Black. Empty. No whites. Just deep, unblinking voids that seemed to pierce through the screen, *right into me*. And then it spoke, its voice scraping through the speakers like nails on glass. **“Let’s race, human.”** The game jerked to life. I found myself controlling something, though I couldn’t make sense of what it was. A silhouette. A figure, but featureless, faceless. It wasn’t a character—I wasn’t controlling a person or a creature. It was just… *empty*. A blankness running through a track that twisted like a nightmare. The world around me flickered and warped, the track stretching into impossible angles. The scenery twisted—pools of blackness, sharp, jagged turns, walls that appeared out of nowhere. There was no sense of direction, no up or down. It felt like I was floating in some space between dreams and reality. And then I felt it. *It* was behind me. I could feel it, like a dark weight closing in. **“Faster…”** The voice was inside my head now, a whisper in my bones. The words weren’t just spoken—they were *felt*. “*Faster, or you’ll never get out.*” I pushed the controls. The character, this empty thing I was controlling, surged forward. But no matter how fast I ran, it was still there. It was always there, just behind me. The sound of its footsteps was now loud, reverberating through my chest, growing heavier, closer. **“You think you can outrun me? You can’t.”** The track was a maze. It kept shifting, like the game was bending itself to trap me. I couldn’t keep up. The scenery blurred. Every time I hit a corner, the track snapped into an impossible angle. My pulse was racing, my hands sweating. But there was no choice. I had to go faster, had to finish.