The Dark Web Voice Job
The dark web voice job paid exactly one hundred and eighty euros. I still have it, in a separate account, because spending it feels impossible and keeping it isn’t any better.
I do voice work. Training videos, telephone menus, the sort of advert you skip before the actual video starts. Work was slow that winter. A man I’d recorded with sent me an invitation to a private jobs board hosted through a dark-web portal. He said some clients preferred anonymity because they were outsourcing work they weren’t supposed to outsource.
I knew it sounded dodgy. I also had rent due.
The job required short reassurance prompts for an interactive experience. The client wanted a neutral British accent. Warm, without sounding cheerful.
The first lines were ordinary enough.
“You’re doing well.”
“Please remain where you are.”
“Someone will be with you shortly.”
I asked what the experience was. They said an escape-room project. I believed them partly because an explanation had been offered, which is a stupidly low standard now I think about it.
The second batch was stranger. Names, mainly. Single names spoken gently, followed by instructions to sit down or put something on a table. When I questioned those, the client said players wore headphones and needed individual directions.
I sent the recordings. They paid promptly.
The Recording
Nine days later, the man who’d invited me messaged: DON’T GO BACK ON THAT BOARD. Then he called. He’d opened a link somebody posted in a dispute thread. A buyer was complaining that a recording wasn’t recent enough.
He sent me a short screen capture.
It showed a woman sitting on a mattress, fully dressed, with a plastic cup between her shoes. There was nothing theatrical in the room. Paint tins. A folded stepladder. A bin liner caught beneath the door.
My voice said her name.
She looked towards the sound so quickly that water spilled from the cup.
“Keep breathing,” I told her. “Someone is coming to help you.”
I’d recorded that sentence standing in my socks, annoyed because the neighbour’s washing machine was ruining the take.
In the video, the woman pressed both hands over her face. Someone outside the frame laughed. A real laugh, sudden and unplanned.
I took the messages, invoices, and original recordings to the police. The client account was gone by then. My friend had kept more of the thread than I had. For several weeks I heard nothing, and each time the phone rang I had to let it ring once before I could answer.
The Other Exit
Eventually a detective asked me to come in. A woman had been found alive. He didn’t tell me everything. He said recordings had been played to make her comply and to keep her expecting that her situation would change.
He asked whether I had ever spoken to her directly.
I said no. He wrote that down. Then he asked me to stop talking for a moment while he made a call outside.
I could hear voices through the wall. A chair moving. A woman asking him something twice.
When he came back, he explained that she was in the next interview room. She’d heard me through the partition. She didn’t want to leave while I was still in the corridor.
I went out through a different exit.
I’ve stopped doing reassurance scripts. Last month my sister asked me to record a story for her little boy so he could hear it while I was away. I got as far as the first page.
There was a line about someone coming to the rescue. I tried three different ways of saying it. They all sounded like me.
Original horror fiction by J.Dark. Fictional narrator: Owen Price, 27. The named submitter and events are fictional. Read more dark web stories or explore the Horror Fiction archive.
