The Dark Web Horror Forum
The dark web horror forum was supposed to help me write about Mum. Mum disappeared when I was nine. I was in the cupboard under the stairs when the man took her out of the house.
For years, the part I remembered most clearly was a sentence from the hallway. Everything sounded muffled through the door. I thought I heard Mum say, “I don’t want her.”
I thought she meant me.
There were messages sent from her phone after she vanished. They said she was leaving and that I should stay with my aunt. The police didn’t close the case, but relatives still had their theories. Mum had debts. Mum had been unhappy. Mum hadn’t been good at asking for help.
Writing was meant to get it out of my head. I changed the town and the names. I changed the cupboard into a bedroom. I couldn’t make myself change what she said.
A friend belonged to an anonymous writing group on a dark-web portal. She said people there shared things they couldn’t put their names to. Some of it was horrible. Some seemed obviously invented. I thought mine would fit.
I posted it as fiction.
The first comments concerned the tense and the ending. Somebody said a nine-year-old wouldn’t describe a hallway like that. Somebody else said the mother’s departure needed a clearer motive.
Then a user with a blank profile wrote: You’ve put the child in the wrong room.
I assumed he meant the structure of the story. I asked what he suggested.
He replied: The cupboard. Under the stairs. The one with the broken hook on the inside.
I hadn’t mentioned the hook. I’d caught my sleeve on it while Mum pushed me inside. She’d untangled me impatiently, whispering that I mustn’t make a sound.
I rang my aunt. She told me to save the page and come over.
The Recording
While she was driving to collect me, another reply appeared. It quoted the sentence I’d carried for twelve years.
“I don’t want her” wasn’t the mother speaking, he wrote. It was the man. The mother offered something else.
Attached was a short audio file.
I shouldn’t have opened it alone. I know that. But the first sound was our old door chime, and then I could hear Mum. Not as I remembered her voice. Closer. Breathless.
She said, “She’s only little. Please. Take me.”
A man answered, “I don’t want her.”
Then there was a scrape. The coat stand falling, maybe. I’d heard it from the cupboard and thought Mum had dropped her bag.
I played it again. The same chime. The same scrape. A tiny cough at the end that I recognised as mine.
We took it to the police. The old file was brought back out. An investigator listened to the recording and asked me about sounds that weren’t in any published account. He was careful about what he said. He told me it could be significant evidence. He didn’t tell me they could bring her home.
For two days, all I could think about was the fact that she’d wanted me. I’d spent years wondering what I’d done. My aunt sat beside me while I cried about something she had been trying to tell me since I was nine.
The Sock
Then I went back to the saved thread.
There was one message I’d missed, posted before the account disappeared. It was a correction to another detail in my story.
I’d written that the man never found the child.
He wrote: I could see her sock beneath the door. I left her there because the mother kept looking at that cupboard whenever I stopped talking.
In the recording, Mum said “please” six times. Each time, there was a pause before she said it again.
I’d been sitting on the other side of the door, pressing my mouth into my knees so nobody would hear. I thought hiding was the thing that had kept me safe. He’d been using me the whole time.
Original horror fiction by J.Dark. Fictional narrator: Ruby Ellis, 21. The named submitter and events are fictional. Read more dark web stories or explore the Horror Fiction archive.
