The Dark Web Room Listing
I found the dark web room listing six weeks after moving in. By then, I had started to feel safe in the house. My first room cost less than the others because the window didn’t open. The landlord said the previous tenant had lost the key to it. Only later did I notice there wasn’t a lock on the window at all. Someone had painted it shut.
That should have bothered me more. Mostly I was pleased I could afford somewhere without asking Dad for money.
The house had five bedrooms, a kitchen with a permanently damp floor, and a maintenance man called Colin. He collected parcels for us. If you lost a key, Colin had another. Once, when I was ill, he left a supermarket bag of food outside my door.
My cousin showed me the portal on a Friday evening. He was visiting, and we were laughing at a directory of strange sites he’d found through an anonymous forum. Most of the links were dead. One opened a catalogue of rooms.
No people. No explanation. Just small photographs and numbers.
I recognised my yellow mug before I recognised the room.
It was on the windowsill beside the radiator. Behind it was the oval mark I’d made on the wallpaper trying to kill a moth with a damp towel.
The photograph had been taken from above my wardrobe.
My cousin stopped laughing. We opened the listing.
There were three photographs, a short video, and a table headed AVAILABILITY. Most entries were green. Tuesday afternoons. Saturday mornings. Thursday nights from eleven until six.
Thursday nights made no sense. I worked early on Fridays. By eleven, I was always in bed.
In the video, a hand came into view and lifted my duvet at the corner. Whoever it belonged to checked underneath, then put it back. The hand had a flat silver ring.
We didn’t watch the rest.
The Wardrobe
I rang Dad from the pavement. He stayed on the phone while we waited in the takeaway across the road. I remember apologising because he’d have to miss work the next day. He said, very quietly, that I should stop apologising.
He and my cousin found the camera in a plastic box fixed above the wardrobe. It looked like an old alarm sensor. The cable ran through a hole into the neighbouring room, which Colin used for storing paint.
We photographed everything and called the police. I gave a statement. Another tenant gave one too. She’d been finding crumbs in her bed and thought mice were getting in.
Colin wasn’t there when the officers came. His van was gone. The landlord kept saying he couldn’t understand it because he’d known him for years.
There were things I remembered afterwards: my mug washed when I’d left it dirty; the chair pushed in; the supermarket bag delivered while I was asleep. Little conveniences I’d felt grateful for.
Empty
My cousin had saved the listing before it disappeared. I didn’t look at the saved pages until months later, when an investigator asked me to identify a pair of shoes visible at the bottom of one photograph.
I enlarged the picture. My duvet was a dark shape at the right-hand edge. Beyond it, on the pillow, there was a narrow strip of my face. One closed eye. My hair across my mouth.
The green label beneath the photograph said EMPTY.
Dad was sitting beside me when I began crying. He thought it was because of the picture. I couldn’t explain that it was the label. I’d been in the room. I’d been there the whole time.
Original horror fiction by J.Dark. Fictional narrator: Mara Bell, 19. The named submitter and events are fictional. Read more dark web stories or explore the Horror Fiction archive.
