Dark Web School Photos
I wasn’t even looking at my own screen when I saw my brother in the dark web school photos. We were at Millie’s house. Her older brother was showing off things he’d found online, and we’d been pretending to be impressed for about twenty minutes.
There was a private portal with hundreds of tiny pictures. People walking dogs. Someone loading shopping into a car. A bus shelter. He said it was probably leaked security footage.
Then my brother came up.
He’s eleven. He was wearing the blue coat Mum had bought him too big, with the sleeves almost covering his hands. He was outside school, talking to somebody beyond the left edge of the photograph.
I told Millie’s brother to stop scrolling.
At first he thought I was messing about. When I said my brother’s name, he put the laptop on my knees.
The picture opened into a page with eight more images. Different days. Same coat. In one, my brother was getting onto his usual bus. In another he was outside the shop where he bought sweets on Fridays.
Somebody had written times underneath. There was a comment saying the older girl no longer collected him.
That was me. I’d stopped collecting him when my revision sessions started.
We got Millie’s mum. She didn’t ask why we’d been on the site. She took photographs of the screen with her phone, then rang my mum and told her to collect my brother herself.
Len
The next bit happened in our kitchen. I remember it better than the portal.
Mum kept asking whether anybody had bothered him. He said no. She asked whether anybody had offered him a lift. He said no again, looking more and more upset, because he thought he’d done something wrong.
Then I asked who he was talking to in the photograph.
He said, “Len.”
Len was the man who swept outside the little community hall next to school. He wore a bright vest. Parents waved to him. Sometimes he helped younger children cross the car park even though it wasn’t his job.
My brother said Len knew Dad’s car had broken down. He knew Mum worked late on Wednesdays. He’d asked whether I liked my new school.
I hadn’t changed schools. I had changed the days I went to revision.
Mum went into the hall to make another call. I stayed at the table with my brother while he picked dried glue off his coat sleeve.
“He said he’d take me if the bus didn’t come,” he told me.
I asked whether he’d ever gone with him.
He shook his head. Then he said, “It came every time.”
The police spoke to him with Mum present. School sent a message about collection arrangements. The hall said Len wasn’t an employee; he sometimes volunteered there. For a week, nobody seemed able to say who had first let him start doing that.
I don’t know who made the portal or who was looking at the pictures. Adults kept discussing those questions over my head, which made me feel about six years old. What mattered to me was that Len knew where my brother stood when it rained.
The Torch
We collect him now. He complains about it. He says his friends can go home on their own.
A few nights after everything happened, he came into my room with the small metal torch Len had given him. He wanted me to take it because Mum had told him not to keep it.
I asked why he hadn’t put it in the kitchen with the other things.
He said he’d been using it to see whether the bus was coming. Len had told him to wait behind the hall if it wasn’t, where he could stay dry. The torch was so he wouldn’t be frightened while he waited.
He’d kept the batteries charged.
Original horror fiction by J.Dark. Fictional narrator: Leah Sanderson, 16. The named submitter and events are fictional. Read more dark web stories or explore the Horror Fiction archive.
