Chapter 1: The Forbidden Laptop

I was twenty years old, dumb as a box of rocks, and completely addicted to the dopamine hit of online gaming. This was back in the mid-2000s, the Wild West of the internet. No polished algorithms, no safety nets—just a vast digital ocean where you could surf from a recipe site to a gore forum in three clicks if you weren’t careful.

It was a Tuesday, the kind of stifling, humid night in the American suburbs where the air feels heavy enough to chew. I was sitting in the basement, staring at my reflection in the black screen of my laptop. Dead. Totally fried. I’d spilled a Grape Monster Energy drink directly onto the motherboard three days ago, and my life had been on pause ever since.

Desperation breeds stupidity.

My eyes drifted to the desk on the other side of the room. My older brother’s desk.

Mike was twenty-six, worked in cybersecurity for a defense contractor, and treated his custom-built PC like it was the Ark of the Covenant. Rule number one of living in Mike’s house: Do not touch the rig. Rule number two: Seriously, don’t even look at it.

But Mike was out on a date, likely trying to explain encryption keys to a girl who just wanted to eat her Olive Garden in peace. He wouldn’t be back for hours.

“Just one game,” I whispered to myself, the lie tasting sweet on my tongue. “Check a few forums, play some Flash games, shut it down. He’ll never know.”

I slid into his ergonomic chair, the leather creaking loudly in the silent basement. The computer hummed to life, the fans glowing a soft, menacing red. I bypassed his password—he used our childhood dog’s name, backward; for a security expert, he was sentimental—and opened the browser.

I didn’t go to Facebook. I didn’t go to YouTube. I wanted the obscure stuff. I typed into the search bar: cool browser games not blocked.

I surfed through the usual junk. Stick figure shooters, tower defense clones, sites loaded with so much malware I could practically feel the computer itching. I was about to give up, boredom gnawing at my bones.

That’s when the screen flickered.

It wasn’t a banner ad. It wasn’t a pop-up window that you could just click away. A small, rectangular box materialized in the top right corner of the monitor, overlaid on top of the browser. It didn’t look like code from a website; it looked like a system command.

The background was pitch black. The text was a jagged, bleeding red font, the kind that drips slowly down the screen.

DEATH GAMES

My first instinct was panic. I broke it. I downloaded a virus. Mike was going to kill me, and then he was going to revive me so he could kill me again.

I frantically moved the mouse to hover over the box, looking for an ‘X’ or a close button. There was nothing. Just the black void and the dripping red letters.

“Come on, come on,” I hissed, clicking randomly.

Then, the text wiped itself away and new words typed out, character by character, accompanied by a wet, squishing sound effect.

“HELLO. DO YOU WANT TO WATCH SOMEONE DIE?”

“CLICK THE SUBMIT BUTTON TO CONTINUE.”

I sat back, the breath hitching in my throat. I almost laughed. It was so… edgy. It looked like something an emo kid made for a school project to scare his teachers. It was tacky. Cheap.

“Lame,” I muttered.

I reached for the power button on the tower to force a restart. That seemed like the smartest play. Just reboot, clear the history, and pretend this never happened.

But as my finger hovered over the power button, the text on the screen changed again. It was faster this time. Aggressive.

“OH, WHAT’S WRONG? SCARED?”

“DON’T BE A CHICKEN. IT’S JUST A GAME.”

“DON’T BE SHY. CLICK THE BUTTON NOW.”

My hand stopped.

It was the timing. It was perfect. It felt less like a pre-programmed script and more like someone watching me through a two-way mirror.

I’m a guy. I was twenty. And when a computer screen questions your masculinity at 11:00 PM on a Tuesday, logic goes out the window.

“You think I’m scared of a JPEG?” I said to the screen.

I grabbed the mouse. A rusted, grey “SUBMIT” button had appeared below the text. It was pulsing, like a heartbeat.

I clicked it.

Chapter 2: The Audio of Hell

The screen went black for a solid minute. I sat in the dark, the only sound the whirring of the cooling fans and the distant hum of the refrigerator upstairs. I was just about to smash the restart button when the monitor exploded with light.

It was a cartoon.

And I don’t mean a professionally animated flash cartoon like on Newgrounds. I mean a crude, MS-Paint style nightmare. The background was a flat grey static.

There were three characters drawn in shaky black lines. They looked like demented versions of Peppa Pig characters, but human.

Two were men. They were drawn like classic caricatures of criminals—black and white striped shirts, little bandit masks over their eyes. The third character was a woman. She was sitting in a chair in the center of the screen.

The animation style was jerky and unnatural. The woman was vibrating, her head moving back and forth rapidly to simulate… terror. She was shaking. Whimpering.

One of the bandit characters turned to face the “camera.”

Then, he spoke.

I expected a text bubble. Or maybe a robotic, text-to-speech voice.

“Do you want to see her die?”

The voice came through Mike’s high-end surround sound speakers with terrifying clarity. It was a man’s voice. It was digitally altered—pitched down and distorted—but the cadence was human. It was mocking. Smug.

Two buttons appeared on the screen: YES and NO.

I hesitated. A cold sweat pricked at my hairline. This felt wrong. It didn’t feel like a game. It felt like walking into a room you weren’t supposed to be in.

“What the hell is this?” I whispered.

The man on the screen spoke again. The animation didn’t match the words; his mouth just flapped open and closed like a puppet.

“Look, you clicked on the link. I know you want to see what happens next. Just do it. It’s just a game. Click the button.”

He sounded annoyed. Impatient. Like a telemarketer who wanted to go home.

My curiosity, that fatal flaw of every dumb kid in a horror movie, took the wheel. I convinced myself it was just an edgy art project. A “shock site” meant to gross people out.

“Whatever,” I said.

I clicked YES.

The animation shifted. The second bandit, the one who hadn’t spoken, walked to the background. He disappeared for a second and reappeared wearing a white butcher’s apron covered in red splotches. He was holding a hacksaw.

Suddenly, music started. It was a loop of distorted, cheerful circus music. Doot-doot-doddle-doot.

The butcher walked up to the woman.

The animation was laughable. The saw moved back and forth over the woman’s stick-figure arm without even touching the line art.

But the sound.

Oh god, the sound.

The moment the saw “touched” her, a scream tore through the room that made my blood turn to ice.

It wasn’t an actor. You can tell when someone is acting. You can hear the breath control.

This was the sound of pure, unadulterated agony. It was a high-pitched, shredding shriek that broke into guttural sobs. I heard the wet, tearing sound of metal biting into meat. I heard the snap of bone. I heard the wet gurgle of blood filling a throat.

I scrambled for the volume knob, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. I turned it down, but I couldn’t mute it. I couldn’t stop watching.

On screen, the crude animation showed the butcher tossing the woman’s limbs aside, one by one. Pop. Pop. Pop. Red pixels sprayed everywhere.

But the audio continued to play the wet, heavy thuds of real heavy objects hitting a floor.

I sat there, mouth open, unable to comprehend the disconnect. My brain was trying to reconcile the childish drawing with the audio of a brutal, slow dismemberment.

Finally, the screaming stopped. The cartoon woman was just a torso and a head. Then, the butcher took the head.

Silence fell over the room.

The first bandit looked at the screen again. He was smiling—a simple curved line drawn on his face.

“Did you like it?” the voice asked. “I knew you were curious. Want to see something even better?”

I felt sick. Nauseous. I wanted to throw up the pizza I’d eaten earlier. My hand was hovering over the mouse, trembling.

I should have clicked ‘No’. I should have ripped the power cord out of the wall.

But then a new option appeared.

YES.

Just ‘Yes’. There was no ‘No’ button this time.

And God help me, I clicked it.

Chapter 3: The Alligator in the Pond

I sat there in the glow of the monitor, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I had just watched—or rather, listened to—a woman being butchered while a crude cartoon played out on the screen. My brain was trying to do mental gymnastics to justify it. It’s a movie clip, I told myself. They ripped the audio from a horror movie and synced it to this crappy Flash animation. It’s just an edgy art project.

But deep down, in the reptilian part of my brain that senses danger, I knew that scream wasn’t from a soundstage in Hollywood.

The screen had gone black again after I clicked “Yes” for the second time. The pause was longer now. It felt like the computer was thinking, or maybe the person on the other end was setting up the next scene.

Finally, the darkness lifted.

The scene had changed. We weren’t in the cartoon operating room anymore. Now, the background was a solid, flat blue rectangle representing a body of water—a pond or a lake. There was a patch of green at the bottom for grass.

The characters had changed too. The butcher and the bandits were gone. In their place were two figures drawn in black scuba suits with yellow tanks on their backs. They looked ridiculous, like something a third-grader would draw after a trip to the aquarium.

Standing between them, at the edge of the digital water, was a man in a suit. A stick-figure executive. He had a tie, a briefcase lying next to him, and his hands were drawn behind his back, tied with a thick black line.

The text box reappeared, dripping that same animated red blood.

“DO YOU WANT TO WATCH HIM DIE?”

I hesitated. My finger hovered over the mouse. The silence in the basement was deafening. I could hear the house settling, the creak of timber, the wind outside.

The audio track started before I made a choice.

It wasn’t music this time. It was ambient noise. It was the sound of water lapping against a muddy bank. Slosh. Slosh. And wind. The distinct, clipping sound of wind hitting a low-quality microphone. It sounded like someone was filming with a camcorder in a marsh.

“Please,” a voice said.

It wasn’t the distorted narrator’s voice. It was the “executive.”

“Please, don’t. I’ll give you the codes. I’ll give you everything.”

The voice was shaking, cracking with tears. It was a middle-aged man. I could hear the mucus in his throat, the sheer terror of a man bargaining for his life.

I should have walked away. I really, really should have. But the prompt was blinking.

YES.

I clicked it.

The animation jerked into motion. The scuba diver on the left moved forward—gliding without moving his legs—and grabbed the executive by the ankles.

“No! NO! GOD, PLEASE!”

The screaming started instantly. It was loud. The speakers vibrated the desk. I clamped my hands over my ears, but I couldn’t look away.

The cartoon diver dragged the stick figure into the blue rectangle.

SPLASH.

It wasn’t a sound effect from a library. It was the heavy, chaotic sound of a human body struggling in deep water. I heard the thrashing. I heard the water churning.

“Help me! glub-glub-HELP!”

The audio was horrifyingly detailed. I could hear him choking on water. I could hear the wet fabric of his suit weighing him down.

Then, for thirty seconds, nothing happened. The screen showed the blue water with a few ripples drawn on it. The audio went silent, save for the ambient wind and the sound of bubbles breaking the surface.

My breath was caught in my throat. Is it over? Did he drown?

Suddenly, the stick figure surfaced.

“AAAAHHH! MY ARM! OH GOD, MY ARM!”

The scream was so loud it distorted the speakers.

The animation showed the man again, but one of his arms was gone. It wasn’t a clean cut like the hacksaw in the first video. Red lines were scribbled frantically where the shoulder used to be, representing a jagged, torn mess. It looked like he had been put through a meat grinder.

Then, from the right side of the screen, a green shape slid into view.

It was an alligator. Or a crocodile. It was drawn terribly—just a long green snout with zigzag teeth.

The alligator clamped onto the stick figure’s torso.

CRUNCH.

The sound was wet. Like stepping on a rotten pumpkin, but louder. Harder.

The screaming cut off abruptly as the green shape dragged the executive under the digital water. The audio filled with a violent thrashing sound, water splashing everywhere, and a low, guttural growl that vibrated through the floorboards.

Then, silence.

Just the wind.

I sat there, freezing cold despite the summer heat. I felt dirty. I felt like I had just witnessed a crime, but my brain was still trying to tell me it was a cartoon.

It’s fake. It has to be fake.

But then, the screen changed. And my denial shattered into a million pieces.

Chapter 4: The Glitch and The Reveal

I was reaching for the mouse, intending to close the browser, force-quit the computer, maybe even unplug the damn thing from the wall. I was done. The joke wasn’t funny anymore. My stomach was doing flips, and the taste of bile was rising in my throat.

But before I could move the cursor to the corner, the screen shifted.

The crude MS-Paint graphics didn’t just fade away. They… peeled.

For a split second, the cartoon layer flickered, becoming transparent. Behind the drawings—behind the blue square of the pond and the stick figures—was a video feed.

It was blurry, low-resolution, but I saw it.

I saw a grey concrete room. I saw a plastic tarp on the floor. I saw water—red, murky water—pooling around a drain in the center.

Then the cartoon layer vanished completely.

There were no more drawings.

I was looking at a live video. Or maybe a recording. It was hard to tell. The quality was grainy, like a security camera footage.

There were two men in the room. They weren’t wearing bandit masks. They were wearing white surgical masks and clear plastic ponchos over street clothes. They were standing over a table.

On the table was… well, it looked like a pile of meat.

But then I saw the hand. A human hand, pale and lifeless, hanging off the edge of the metal table.

“Oh my god,” I whispered, my voice trembling.

One of the men in the video looked up. He looked directly into the camera lens. Even with the mask, I could tell he was smiling. His eyes were crinkled at the corners.

He held up an object. It was a hook, the kind you use for hanging meat. Draped over it was a tatty, wet piece of a business suit. The fabric was shredded, stained dark with fluid.

The audio crackled back to life. The distorted voice returned, but it wasn’t coming from a pre-recorded track anymore. It sounded live. There was a slight echo, matching the concrete room I was seeing.

“Wasn’t it fun to see them?” the voice asked. “You wanted to see more. We did it for you. Only they had to experience it. But so can you.”

My blood ran cold.

We did it for you.

The implication hit me like a freight train. The cartoons… they were just a filter. An overlay. I hadn’t been watching an animation. I had been watching a snuff film. I had been watching a real murder, censored by a child’s drawing, until they decided I was ready for the real thing.

“Please don’t leave the site,” the voice purred. “You’d be taking all the fun away from us.”

I slammed my hand onto the mouse. I moved the cursor to the ‘X’ in the corner.

It wouldn’t click. The cursor passed right through it.

Three new buttons appeared on the screen, overlaid on top of the gruesome video feed.

1. YES, I WANT TO EXPERIMENT.

2. NO, I DON’T WANT TO EXPERIMENT.

3. I WANT TO MEET YOU.

“What is this? What is this?” I was hyperventilating now. My chest felt tight, like a belt was being cinched around my lungs.

I clicked NO.

Nothing happened.

I clicked it again. Click. Click. Click.

“What’s wrong with you?” the voice boomed, louder this time. The man in the video took a step closer to the camera. “Don’t you want to have fun? You had an amazing experience. You saw us do what we did, and you chose ‘No’? You better choose right this time.”

It was a threat. A direct, personal threat.

I felt tears stinging my eyes. I was a twenty-year-old man, crying in his brother’s basement because a murderer on the internet wouldn’t let me leave.

I started mashing the keyboard. Ctrl+Alt-Delete. Alt-F4. Esc.

Nothing worked. The browser was locked in kiosk mode or something. The man on the screen was reaching for something on a shelf behind him—a new tool.

“Panic,” the voice whispered. “I can smell it.”

I screamed. I physically screamed out loud. “LET ME OUT!”

I grabbed the power cord of the desktop tower and yanked it with both hands.

The screen went black instantly. The fan noise died. The room plunged into silence.

I sat there in the dark, clutching the power cable like a lifeline, gasping for air. I was shaking so hard my teeth were chattering.

The front door upstairs opened.

“Neo? You home?”

It was Mike.

I scrambled up, tripping over the chair. I ran up the basement stairs two at a time, practically colliding with my brother in the hallway. I must have looked insane—pale, sweaty, eyes wide as saucers.

“Whoa, easy,” Mike said, holding up a takeout bag. “What happened? You look like you saw a ghost.”

“Computer,” I wheezed. “Your computer. I didn’t… I didn’t mean to… Death Games. The guy… the alligator…”

Mike’s face went from confused to serious in a nanosecond. He dropped the food and ran past me, down the stairs.

I followed him, terrified to go back down there but too scared to be alone.

Mike plugged the computer back in, but he didn’t boot into Windows. He pulled a USB drive from his keychain and jammed it in, booting into some Linux OS I didn’t recognize. Lines of code scrolled down the screen faster than I could read.

“You idiot,” Mike muttered, his fingers flying across the keyboard. “You absolute idiot.”

“What was it?” I asked, my voice small. “Was it a virus?”

Mike stopped typing. He stared at the screen for a long moment, his jaw tight. Then he turned to me. He didn’t look angry anymore. He looked scared.

“It wasn’t a virus, Neo,” he said quietly. “You found a Red Room. Or a invite portal for one.”

“A what?”

“The Dark Web,” Mike said, pointing at the black screen. “That wasn’t a game. That was a live feed. And because you were on my rig… because you didn’t use a VPN… they pinged the IP.”

He stood up and started unplugging the router, the modem, everything.

“We need to kill the connection,” he said, his voice shaking slightly. “And pray they didn’t get the address before you pulled the plug.”

That night, neither of us slept. Mike spent the next six hours scrubbing the hard drive and setting up firewalls I didn’t understand. I spent the night staring at the window, waiting for a car to pull up. Waiting for a man in a surgical mask to walk up the driveway.

I never touched my brother’s computer again. But sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet… I can still hear the sound of that water. And the scream. That terrible, real scream.

Chapter 5: The Limewire Generation

To understand why I kept poking the bear, you have to understand the era I grew up in.

This was the mid-2000s. The Wild West of the internet. We didn’t have algorithms curating our safety. We had Limewire, Kazaa, and a reckless sense of invincibility. We were the generation that learned that downloading a song by My Chemical Romance was a game of digital Russian Roulette. You had a 50% chance of getting the song, and a 50% chance of downloading a trojan horse or a video of something unspeakable.

My friends and I—let’s call them Mark, Dave, and Sam—were obsessed with the “Deep Web.”

We weren’t criminals. We were just bored suburban kids who spent too much time on Reddit and 4chan, reading creepypastas and urban legends. The Deep Web was the ultimate urban legend. It was the “Last Frontier.” The rumors said you could find anything there: UFO blueprints, government secrets, hired killers.

It was the forbidden fruit, and we were starving for it.

We sat in my bedroom one Friday night, surrounded by empty Mountain Dew cans and bags of Doritos. My computer was a beige tower that sounded like a jet engine taking off, connected to the web via a loud, screeching modem.

“We shouldn’t use your main computer,” Dave said, acting like the paranoid voice of reason. “Hackers can fry your hard drive.”

“Don’t be a wuss,” I said, cracking my knuckles. “I have antivirus. We’re fine.”

I was not fine. I was an idiot.

I had done the research. I downloaded Tor, the browser you needed to access the “.onion” links. I found a “Hidden Wiki”—a directory of links pasted onto a shady text-sharing site. It looked like a list of gibberish. Random strings of numbers and letters.

“Ready?” I asked the room.

“Do it,” Mark whispered.

I pasted the first link. Enter.

Loading… Loading…

Page Not Found.

“Lame,” Sam groaned.

I tried the next one. Dead. And the next. Dead. The first twenty links were just digital graveyards. It was disappointing. We expected to see the Matrix, and all we got were 404 errors.

But then, number twenty-one clicked.

The page loaded slowly, element by element. It wasn’t a flashy site. It looked like Amazon from 1995—just text and hyperlinks on a plain white background.

It was a marketplace.

But they weren’t selling books.

“Holy…” Dave breathed, leaning over my shoulder.

They were selling things I can’t even list here without getting flagged. But the weirdest part was the mundane stuff. You could buy “clean urine” for drug tests. You could buy lifetime subscriptions to Netflix for five dollars.

We spent hours just clicking, eyes wide, feeling like spies. We found a forum that claimed to be a hub for “Cleaners”—people who dispose of problems. Hitmen.

“It’s fake,” I said, scoffing. “Look at the prices. 20k for a hit? No way. It’s just role-playing. It’s a scam to steal Bitcoin.”

We were laughing. We were mocking them. We felt safe behind our screens, treating these dark corners of humanity like a zoo exhibit. We tapped on the glass, thinking the tigers couldn’t get out.

We were wrong. The tigers were already in the room with us.

Chapter 6: The Blue Eye

It started about a week later.

I was back on the regular web, doing homework, when I noticed it.

A small, blue bubble appeared in the upper right corner of my desktop. It wasn’t part of the browser. It wasn’t a notification from Windows. It was just a graphic, about the size of a dime.

It looked like an eyeball. A stylized, blue iris with a black pupil.

I tried to click it. Nothing happened. I right-clicked. No menu. I opened the Task Manager to see if a weird program was running. Everything looked normal.

“Stuck pixel?” I muttered. But pixels don’t look like eyes.

I rebooted the computer. As soon as the desktop loaded, pop. The eye was back.

I called Mark. “Dude, did you download anything on my PC last week?”

“No, man. Why?”

“I got this weird icon. I can’t get rid of it.”

“Probably just adware,” Mark said, dismissing it. “Run a scan.”

I ran Norton Antivirus. It came back clean. I ran Spybot. Clean. I even did a system restore to a date before we visited the Deep Web.

The eye was still there.

Being a dumb teenager, I eventually just… got used to it. It became part of my screen, like a sticker you can’t peel off. I ignored it. I continued to browse the web, check my emails, talk to girls on AIM, and yes, visit the Deep Web with my friends.

We went back to that hacker forum a few times. We felt bold. We started posting comments, asking if the services were real, trolling the users.

Two weeks passed.

One afternoon, the boys were over again. We were on the hacker site, laughing at a post about stolen credit cards.

Suddenly, the blue eye in the corner of the screen vanished.

“Hey,” Sam said, pointing. “The spot is gone.”

“Finally,” I said. “Must have been a glitch.”

And then, my entire screen turned grey.

A text box—not a browser window, but a raw system command prompt—opened dead center. The cursor blinked.

Text began to appear, typing itself out in real-time.

“Hi.”

The room went silent. The four of us froze.

“I am one of the administrators of this website.”

My stomach dropped through the floor. This wasn’t a website pop-up. This was someone controlling my operating system.

“We log everyone who comes through here. But I’ve been monitoring your activity specifically since you first showed up.”

I couldn’t breathe. I reached for the mouse, but it was dead. I was locked out.

“I have seen you on our servers every day. I have come to the conclusion that you have no interest in buying. I suspect you are just a bunch of high school kids messing around with things you don’t understand.”

“He knows,” Dave whispered, terrified. “How does he know?”

The text continued.

“You aren’t in trouble with me. But others aren’t so forgiving. You are browsing from a home connection. No VPN. No protection. You are like a beacon in the dark.”

Then, the next sentence made my blood run cold.

“Did you notice the blue bubble on your monitor for the last two weeks?”

I gasped. ” The eye,” I whispered.

“That was a hitchhiker. You picked up a parasite on one of the lower-level sites. Someone installed a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) on your machine. They have been using your computer as a proxy to route their own illegal traffic. They were hiding behind your IP address.”

“They could see everything you did. They were watching you through your webcam. They were logging your keystrokes. They were likely gathering info to blackmail you.”

I instinctively covered the webcam with my hand. I felt sick. Someone had been watching me? In my room? While I slept?

“I took the liberty of deleting your hitchhiker. I kicked him off.”

“But listen to me closely.”

The text turned red.

“On the Dark Web, there are only two ways to learn. The easy way, or the hard way. I am giving you the easy way. DISCONNECT NOW.”

“If you come back, I will not protect you.”

Then, just to prove his point, he typed a list.

“Neo [My Last Name].” “Mark [Last Name].” “Dave [Last Name].” “[My Home Address].” “[My High School Name].”

“You have 10 seconds to vanish.”

I didn’t wait for the countdown.

I didn’t just turn the computer off. I dove under the desk and ripped the power strip out of the wall. Sparks flew. The monitor died.

We sat in the dark silence of my room, listening to our own heavy breathing. None of us spoke for a long time.

“He knew where we go to school,” Mark whispered, his voice trembling.

I never went back to that site. I took the hard drive out of that computer and smashed it with a hammer in the backyard until it was dust. I told my parents the computer “just died” and I needed a new one.

We thought we were explorers. We thought we were the ones looking into the abyss. We didn’t realize the abyss had eyes, and it had been staring back at us the whole time.

But of course, addiction is a funny thing. Fear fades. Curiosity returns.

And a few years later, in college, I made the mistake of thinking I was smarter. I wasn’t.

And that time, I didn’t just get a warning. I got a package.

Chapter 7: The Black Sedan

I wish I could say that after the “Hitchhiker” incident in high school, I swore off the Dark Web forever. I wish I could say I grew up, got smart, and stayed on the safe, sunny side of the internet. But wisdom rarely chases away boredom, and it certainly doesn’t cure stupidity.

By the time I was twenty-two, I was a senior in college. I was living in a run-down apartment complex that smelled perpetually of mildew and cheap ramen. I wasn’t a bad kid, but I was a frequent flier in the clouds—I smoked a lot of pot. It was my vice, my way of unwinding after failing an exam or dealing with the existential dread of graduation.

One particular Sunday night, I was dry. My usual guy, Mark, wasn’t answering his phone. Desperation is the mother of bad invention. I remembered a conversation I’d heard at a party about buying “specialty goods” online.

“It’s easy,” the guy had said. “It comes in the mail. Vacuum sealed. No risk.”

I still had the knowledge. I knew how to get on Tor. I knew how to find the Hidden Wiki. So, fuelled by a haze of resin hits and bad judgment, I booted up my laptop.

I spent an hour clicking through dead links. The Dark Web isn’t as organized as people think; it’s mostly broken URLs and 404 errors. But eventually, I found a subreddit—a deep web version of Reddit—discussing “services.”

I found a post titled: “Problem Resolution. Permanent.”

The text body was just a long string of gibberish characters. A .onion link.

My brain, foggy and slow, thought, “Jackpot.” I copied and pasted it.

The site that loaded wasn’t a drug store. It was black, with a simple ASCII art skull at the top. The header read: ASSASSINATION AND LIFE DESTRUCTION SERVICES.

I snorted. “Okay, Mr. Robot,” I muttered to the empty room.

It looked like a cheesy RPG site. There was a menu of options: Beatings, Arson, Kidnapping, Termination. The prices were listed in Bitcoin.

To the right was a simple form: PLACE AN ORDER.

I was high. I was bored. And I was convinced this was a role-playing site or a honeypot for idiots. I didn’t have any Bitcoin. I didn’t have any enemies.

So, thinking it was the funniest joke in the world, I filled out the form with my own information.

Target: Neo [My Last Name]. Location: [My Apartment Address]. Method: Surprise me. Payment: Cash on delivery (I wrote this in the comments box).

I hit SUBMIT.

A text box popped up: Order Received. Agent Dispatched.

I laughed, closed the laptop, and passed out on the couch, fully expecting to wake up to nothing but a hangover.

I woke up at 9:00 AM. The sun was slicing through the blinds. I felt groggy, the kind of brain fog that makes the world feel slightly delayed. I shuffled to the kitchen to make coffee.

As I waited for the brew, I looked out the window.

My apartment faced the street. Usually, it was empty on a Sunday morning. But today, there was a car.

A black sedan. It looked like a government car—clean, tinted windows, no front license plate. It was idling directly in front of my building.

I stared at it while sipping my coffee. A weird feeling pricked the back of my neck. Paranoia, I told myself. It’s just the weed hangover.

I went back to the living room and turned on my Xbox. Half an hour passed. I went back to the window.

The car was still there.

Now, the fear started to set in. I leaned closer to the glass, trying to see inside. I couldn’t see a driver. The tint was too dark.

“You’re being paranoid, Neo,” I whispered. “Nobody is coming for you.”

And then, the power went out.

It wasn’t a flicker. It was a hard cut. The hum of the refrigerator died. The LED on the TV vanished. The router lights winked out. The apartment went dead silent.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I stood frozen in the middle of the living room. Coincidence. It’s a coincidence.

Then came the knock.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

It was heavy. Authoritative. It rattled the door in the frame.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t move.

“Hello?” I called out, my voice cracking. “Who is it?”

Silence.

I waited five minutes. Ten. I grabbed a kitchen knife—a dull steak knife that couldn’t cut a tomato, let alone a hitman—and crept to the door.

I looked through the peephole. The hallway was empty.

I unlocked the deadbolt with shaking fingers and cracked the door open.

There was no one there. But on the welcome mat, sitting innocently on the dirty carpet, was a black envelope.

I snatched it and slammed the door, locking it instantly.

I tore the envelope open. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the contents.

Inside were three photographs.

The first photo was of me, sitting at my computer. The angle was from my webcam. My eyes were red, glassy, and I was laughing. The timestamp in the corner was 2:14 AM—the exact moment I placed the order.

The second photo was of me sleeping on the couch. Taken from the webcam again.

The third photo was of the front of my apartment building. Taken from a car window.

On the back of the last photo, written in elegant cursive script, was a note:

“You cannot afford us. Do not waste our time again. Consider this a free trial of our surveillance package. Next time, we come inside.”

I didn’t sleep for three days. I moved out of that apartment a month later. I never found out if it was a hacker messing with me or a real hitman organization proving a point. But I learned one thing: on the Dark Web, even the jokes are watching you.

Chapter 8: The Silk Road Justice

You’d think that would be the end of it. You’d think I’d throw my computer into a river and live as an Amish farmer.

But addiction is a cycle. A few years later, the Dark Web evolved. It became professional. The era of Silk Road had arrived.

This was the “Golden Age” of the black market. It looked like Amazon. It had a shopping cart, user reviews, and customer support. It felt safe. It felt corporate.

I was working two jobs, barely making rent, and I had fallen back into old habits. I was looking for “supplements”—specifically, psychedelic mushrooms. Don’t judge; life was hard.

I found a seller with a 5-star rating. Let’s call him “FungiMaster.” He had great reviews.

“Fast shipping,” said one. “Top quality,” said another.

I placed an order. It was a bulk order—I was planning to split it with friends. It cost me $800. That was my rent money. All of it.

I sent the Bitcoin. I waited.

One week. Two weeks. Nothing.

I messaged FungiMaster. No reply.

Three weeks. I checked his profile. Gone.

My stomach dropped. I checked the forums. Dozens of people were posting: “FungiMaster is a scammer!” “He exit scammed!” “He took the money and ran!”

I was devastated. I was going to be evicted. I was broke, stupid, and $800 in the hole to a ghost.

I did the only thing I could do. I went to his vendor page—which was still cached—and I left a furious review.

“YOU RUINED MY LIFE. I HOPE YOU ROT. I KNOW KARMA IS REAL.”

It was pathetic. I was shouting into the void.

I spent the next day looking for loans, trying to figure out how to not be homeless. I logged back into Silk Road one last time, intending to delete my account forever.

I had a new message.

It wasn’t from the scammer. It was from a user named “The_Janitor.”

“Hi Neo. I saw your review on FungiMaster’s page. I saw that he took you for $800.”

I typed back, angry. “Yeah? So what? You want to scam me too?”

“No,” The_Janitor replied. “I am a vendor here. A real one. We don’t like scammers. They bring heat to the market. They ruin the ecosystem.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“I did some digging. FungiMaster wasn’t careful. He reused a username from his personal email. I found his real name. I found his address in Florida.”

My heart skipped a beat.

“I can’t get your money back directly,” The_Janitor wrote. “But I can offer you satisfaction. I sent a tip to his local Police Department. I told them he is dealing fentanyl. They are raiding his house right now.”

I stared at the screen. Was this real?

“Check the news in Florida tomorrow,” he added.

I didn’t believe him. But the next day, I Googled drug raids in Florida.

There it was. A small news article. “Local Man Arrested in Drug Bust. Computers Seized.”

The name matched the one The_Janitor had sent me.

I felt a strange mix of vindication and horror. A stranger on the internet had destroyed another man’s life because he stole my rent money. It was swift, brutal, vigilante justice.

I logged back into Silk Road to thank him.

There was one final message from The_Janitor.

“Justice is served. Check your wallet.”

I opened my Bitcoin wallet.

There was a transfer. 2.5 BTC. At the time, it was worth exactly $800.

“We have a fund for victims,” The_Janitor wrote. “We take care of our own. Now, leave this place. Go pay your rent. And don’t come back.”

I cashed out. I paid my rent. And for the first time in my life, I listened.

I deleted Tor. I wiped my drives. I grew up.

The Dark Web is a hell of a place. It’s a place where you can accidentally order your own death, and where a criminal will save your life just to prove a point. It’s a chaotic, terrifying mirror of the real world, just with the lights turned off.

And trust me, you don’t want to see what crawls around in the dark.