The Dark Web Location Game
I thought the dark web location game was just a harder version of the games I already played. I liked being useful to people who seemed better at this stuff than I was. I was good at finding places in photographs. Road markings, hills, signs reflected in windows. I spent whole evenings playing location games and felt better at them than at anything I was doing in college.
A player I knew invited me to a private challenge board. It ran through a dark-web portal because, he said, its sponsors didn’t want their research material indexed. The prizes were small. Most people were there for the ranking.
The clips looked like footage gathered to train navigation software. Streets seen from vehicles, crossings, entrances to public buildings. Sometimes a pedestrian’s face hadn’t been blurred. If anyone mentioned privacy, a moderator said participants had signed releases.
My winning clip lasted thirty-four seconds.
A woman left a supermarket carrying a green shopping bag and a bunch of flowers wrapped in brown paper. The camera followed her from inside a vehicle parked across the road. She kept looking behind her.
The challenge asked for the destination, rather than the supermarket. That made it difficult. She walked past a bus stop and towards an alley. The final frame showed the edge of a sign over the alley entrance.
I spent an afternoon on it. I remember forgetting lunch. When I found the sign, I punched the air hard enough to hurt my wrist.
It belonged to a small support centre. The alley was a side entrance. I posted the answer and a street image that confirmed it.
My entry turned green. I moved from fourteenth to sixth on the board.
The Green Bag
Two days later a woman was attacked outside that centre. I saw the report because I’d searched the place so many times that local news had started appearing in my feed. The police appeal mentioned a green shopping bag.
I returned to the portal.
The clip was gone. My answer was gone. The ranking was still there.
I messaged the moderator asking whether the woman was a participant. He replied that I was confusing a research exercise with an unrelated event. Then he asked me to delete my saved copy because it was proprietary material.
That was when I told my dad.
He didn’t shout. He made me show him everything, including the message where I’d boasted to a friend about how quickly I’d found it. We went to the police with the laptop.
An investigator later told me the woman had previously moved to get away from somebody. She’d been followed to the supermarket, but whoever sent the clip hadn’t known where she’d gone afterwards.
I wanted to ask whether my answer had caused it. He said he couldn’t discuss the evidence in that way. She had survived. He made sure I understood that.
The Answer
I stopped playing the games. My friends think I got bored.
For weeks, I couldn’t get past how ordinary the clip had looked. The flowers kept catching against her leg. She shifted the bag to her other hand. At the alley, she checked behind her one more time, then seemed to relax.
In my browser history I found a page I’d opened while solving it. The centre ran appointments for people experiencing stalking and abuse. I’d seen that information during the challenge. I’d used its opening hours to confirm that the clip had been filmed on a Wednesday.
The last thing I wrote beneath my answer was: This has to be it. There’s nowhere else she could be going.
The moderator had replied with a thumbs-up.
Original horror fiction by J.Dark. Fictional narrator: Ben Kessler, 18. The named submitter and events are fictional. Read more dark web stories or explore the Horror Fiction archive.
