"scariest Night Of My Life" Devil Of A Deal / A... -

(an urban apartment, a lonely highway, or a dark forest)

I turned to find a man—if you could call him that—sitting in my moth-eaten armchair. He wore a suit that looked woven from midnight, and his eyes weren't eyes at all; they were two pits of smoldering embers. He didn't offer a contract on parchment or demand a drop of blood. He just tapped a long, grey fingernail against a heavy gold coin on my coffee table.

The wind didn't just howl that night; it screamed, rattling the windowpanes of my cramped apartment like a debt collector demanding entry. I was staring at a pile of past-due notices when the air in the room curdled. It went from drafty to frigid in a heartbeat, and the shadows in the corner began to bleed toward me.

"Desperation has a very specific scent," a voice purred. It wasn't loud, but it felt like a cold needle sliding into my ear.

"A simple trade," he whispered, leaning into the dim light of my desk lamp. "The crushing weight of your 'now' for the hollow silence of your 'later.' You get the life you’ve envied, and I get the years you’ll eventually spend wishing you’d never met me."

The terror wasn't in his appearance; it was in the logic. I looked at the red ink on my bills and then at the shimmering coin. My hand trembled as I reached out. The moment my skin touched the cold metal, the screaming wind fell dead silent, replaced by a sound far worse: the rhythmic, heavy thud of footsteps approaching my door from the inside.

If you’d like to take this story in a specific direction, tell me: (the specific debt or dream you're trading for) The twist (how the deal immediately goes wrong)