Dark Web Voice Messages
I haven’t told my friends the whole thing about the dark web voice messages. They know my dad took my old laptop away. They think I bought something stupid with his card. I’d rather they thought that.
I met Daisy on a small forum linked from a gaming server. The forum was hosted on a dark-web portal. People used it to talk about problems at home without accounts being tied to their other profiles. At least, that was the explanation.
She said she was sixteen. She liked the same terrible game I liked and sent voice messages because typing on her borrowed phone was difficult. There was often a television in the background. Once, somebody coughed for so long she stopped talking until they finished.
We spoke for nearly three months.
I knew what annoyed her at school. I knew she hated bananas. She knew about my parents arguing and the fact that I went to Gran’s on Thursdays because Mum worked late and Dad had football.
She said it sounded nice to have somewhere else to go.
The night she asked for help, she sent a voice message saying she’d left home. She sounded cold. You could hear her teeth clicking together. She said she couldn’t go to the police because her stepdad would tell them she was lying.
I offered to ask Mum what to do. She begged me not to. She just needed to charge her phone and sit somewhere for an hour. Her cousin was going to collect her.
I gave her Gran’s address. Gran was upstairs by eight most nights. I thought I could let Daisy sit in the kitchen without making a big thing of it.
The Second Mug
Dad came to collect me from Gran’s early because the pitch was flooded. He found me putting a second mug beside the kettle.
I tried telling him she was a girl from school. He asked which school. I said mine. He asked her surname, and I couldn’t answer quickly enough.
He read the messages. He said we were staying there together until he had spoken to the police.
I thought he was being horrible. I thought there was a frightened girl outside somewhere and he was treating her like a criminal. I stayed angry while he moved Gran away from the front windows and checked the lock.
A man came to Gran’s house forty minutes later. He said he was checking on a young person and asked if Finn was inside. He had a plastic identification card on a lanyard. Dad asked who employed him. Instead of answering, he walked back down the path.
Dad had already called the police. He called again with the man’s description and the registration of the car waiting at the corner.
The Birthday Message
Several weeks later, an investigator asked me to identify Daisy’s voice in material recovered during the investigation. Dad sat beside me.
The girl was real. There was video of her sitting at a table with a phone propped against a jar. She was reading from a sheet of paper. A man’s hand entered the picture and tapped a line when she stopped.
I recognised the television I’d heard in her messages. It was on in the next room.
There were recordings for names other than mine.
In one, she started to say something that wasn’t on the page. The investigator stopped it before I heard the rest. I asked whether she’d been found. He said they were still trying to identify her.
I haven’t deleted the messages. The police told us to keep them, and Dad has copies. I don’t listen, but sometimes I look at the lengths. Twelve seconds. Eight. Twenty-three.
The longest was the birthday message she sent me. Forty-one seconds. She laughed halfway through because she said she hadn’t expected me to be awake.
I used to replay that part. I thought it meant she was happy to hear from me. Now I keep wondering who was standing on the other side of the phone, waiting for her to get it right.
Original horror fiction by J.Dark. Fictional narrator: Finn Mercer, 15. The named submitter and events are fictional. Read more dark web stories or explore the Horror Fiction archive.
