The Dark Web Diary Leak
Until the dark web diary leak, I thought the notebook was helping me. I had a blue notebook for things I couldn’t trust myself to remember. Whether I’d turned the cooker off. Where I’d put my bank card. What time I locked the door.
Daniel bought it for me. He wrote my name inside the cover and said keeping a record might help with the anxiety. When I cried because I’d lost something again, he found it. He was exceptionally good at finding things.
We’d been together eighteen months when a woman contacted me through my public art account. She sent a photograph of two handwritten pages and asked if they belonged to me.
They did. One described a night I’d called Daniel at work because the front door was standing open. I was certain I’d locked it. He’d come home, checked the flat, and made tea while I tried to stop shaking.
The woman said she’d found the pages in a private forum on a dark-web portal. Her former partner had used it. She was looking for material concerning herself when she recognised my name and found my account.
I asked what sort of forum.
She didn’t answer that in a message. She called me and asked whether I was alone.
At my friend’s flat, we opened the page using the access information she’d provided. I remember wanting it to be a collection of leaked documents. Something impersonal. A stolen backup Daniel hadn’t known about.
The Passport
It was a discussion about me.
There were photographs of the notebook, short recordings from our kitchen, and little updates about how I’d behaved that week. My crying had been transcribed. He’d given me a number instead of a name in the thread title, but he hadn’t bothered to remove my name from the pages.
In one recording, I asked him whether he thought I was getting worse.
He sounded so patient that I almost forgot what I was looking at.
Beneath it, somebody asked how long it had taken to get me to stop arguing about what I remembered. Daniel replied with a date.
I knew that date. We’d gone away for his birthday. I’d spent part of the journey apologising because he’d found my passport in a kitchen drawer after I’d accused him of moving it.
Further down was a photograph of the passport. It was on his desk at work. The photograph was from the day before our trip.
I stared at the little dent in its cover. I’d dropped it years earlier; there was no mistaking it.
My friend rang my dad. I kept asking her to wait because I needed to check something else. There were months of entries. I couldn’t stop trying to find the first one, as if the beginning would explain why.
We saved what we could. I didn’t go home alone. Daniel had sent five messages by the time we reached the police station. The first asked whether I’d eaten. The last said he was worried I might be having an episode.
I still had the notebook in my bag. An officer asked if she could look at it. When she reached the pages from the screenshot, I pointed out the passport and began explaining that I normally kept it somewhere sensible.
She put her hand flat on the desk and waited until I stopped explaining.
The Notebook
It’s been seven months. I live with Dad. I have support. I understand, intellectually, that I wasn’t imagining those things.
Yesterday I couldn’t find my keys. Dad had moved them out of the way of a leaking plant pot. He called from the kitchen that they were on the shelf.
Before I went to get them, I opened the blue notebook. I’d brought it with me when I left. I still write down where I put things. On the first page, beneath my name, Daniel had written: Now you won’t have to worry.
Original horror fiction by J.Dark. Fictional narrator: Isabel Costa, 22. The named submitter and events are fictional. Read more dark web stories or explore the Horror Fiction archive.
