Editor Note: This creepypasta short story came to me in a nightmare. It gets very dark, and is only recommended for dedicated horror fans.
I’ve seen most of the videos people describe as being the worst, most traumatising things on the internet. Some of those used to haunt me, with brief flashbacks that temporarily removed my faith in humanity. But there was always a way to come back to myself, to recover. Now I see no path forward. I am terrified of the consequences of my knowledge, and any remaining optimism feels deceitful. I think my mind has had enough now, and I’m almost ready to accept my final defeat. But before I go, I need to tell someone what I saw.
I got into using the Tor browser to explore the deep web. If you don’t know, Tor is what lets you visit “onion” URLs, long strings of characters that are impossible to guess, or even remember. When you start your deep web journey you’ll probably be using one of the index portals, which take you to the most popular sites. But I became obsessed with exploring every kind of thing it has to offer. Eventually I found my way on to the oldest form of dark links: URLs posted by anonymous accounts on dated forums.
You’d never know what you’d get. Guns and drugs would be obvious guesses, but dark web storefronts can’t thrive if nobody knows about them, so you could never find anything too underground there. The real secretive stores sold precursor chemicals for making other chemicals in bulk, the kind of the thing that only a few buyers would be interested in. Weird drugs I’d never heard of, poisons, corrosives, all that heavy stuff. A lot of deep web stores use the same software, so they mostly looked the same, aside from what was on offer. Some of them even had shopping lists, so you could, quite literally, pick your poison, and have all the ingredients added to your cart at once.
There was murder for hire stuff, of course, but I never ventured too far into that. Mostly it was just an info sheet: Send an email via Proton Mail to so-and-so address, and await further instructions. There was plenty of hacking stuff too, but I know well enough to steer clear of that. I was a coder myself and I know more than enough to understand how severely just visiting the wrong site can fuck you.
But that’s enough preamble. I’m probably just putting it off because I don’t know how to say it. So here goes.
I found a link on one of those forums. And this was deep stuff, a link from a link from a link. It was anonymously posted, with the forum itself being Russian, which is to be expected if you go deep enough. The only description offered was “Броненосцы”, which apparently means “Battleships”.
All the page showed was “1 BTC”, a Bitcoin wallet address, and a password input box. This was only last year, so that’s about $90k. A fair bit more than what I can afford, but like I said, I was a coder, and I had to know what could possibly cost that much.
I looked at the source code for the site and found the script that verifies the password. For the record, most form handling on the internet takes place on the server, away from the user. But here, the important bit here was running in the browser, so it could be viewed by anyone. Amateurs, I thought to myself.
I found the bit of code that handled the password confirmation, which checked for a certain response from a server. My best guess is that it was using a pre-existing service for verifying a transaction; like I said, a lot of this stuff was based on the same stock code. But the result of this site’s own code was always the same: One of two onion URLs. One was called “red” in the code, the other called “blue”. I chose red and visited the URL.
Most of the page showed a camera feed. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing at first. It looked like a top-down view of a large cellar, or a dingy warehouse or something. In the middle a large wooden surface, made up of lots of wooden planks. That’s what clued me into the scale of this thing, it was massive. It had a grid drawn onto it with white paint, and letters down the side, ABC etc, and numbers across the top, 123 etc. Across the surface were what looked like rusted metal circles. Some of them had these blue plastic discs on top, maybe frisbees or something. Each grid space had either a metal circle or a plastic disc in its center. Some of the blue discs were in a line, with others dotted around the grid.
On the left of the page was a chat feed. There were a bunch of grid values, alternating in red and blue. B6, E8, back and forth. Very occasionally there was white text saying “SUNK”. So it was red vs. blue, I gathered, in what looked like a very large, live game of Battleships. I still wasn’t sure why the cost of entry was so high though.
I watched the chat until someone sent new coordinates. It was a middle value, E5 or something. Then I understood the full scale of the platform, even bigger than I thought, as a man in heavy boots and a balaclava walked up to the E5 space and stomped heavily on the metal circle several times. I thought that it must have been the top of a pipe, and the man was pushing it through the wood. Then he dropped a blue disc onto the now-flatted metal thing.
There were two more things on the page: An audio button, and numbered buttons along the bottom. 1 to 7, I think. I clicked button #2.
The video feed changed to show below the platform. Some kind of metal caging. The metal things being pushed through the wood were huge spikes, driving into wire and rust wrapped around flesh. There were bodies fastened to the bottom of the platform. Masses of broken body parts, bones, skin, blood, organs, hanging down, dripping, on the floor, mashed up into the wire. Then I saw a face. Just about, half off, pierced. It was still moving.
I was horrified, but still couldn’t believe quite what I was looking at. Then I made the biggest mistake of my life, and clicked the audio button. Another metal spike came smashing through. It pushed into a set of thighs, snapping off their bottom halves completely. Stomping. Cracking. Screaming. I’d never heard terror before, now it’s all I hear.
Then I saw a smaller body, two grid cells worth of a person. That’s when it all hit me. I screamed, swore, puked all over my desk. I wanted to pour bleach into my brain and burn it all away.
The chat updated, white text. It said: “INTRUDER” — followed by my IP, the post code for my computer.
How the hell could they know that? This was supposed to be completely anonymous. Who else knows my location? Was I sure I downloaded the right browser? Did I have any spyware on my PC? Who else out here has seen me messing around on their websites? For god’s sake, I wasn’t even using a VPN!
That’s when the reality of all this hit me like a fucking truck.
I closed everything as fast as I could. Still covered in vomit, trying to hold back more but spewing over everything, I unplugged my computer, yanking out every cable from the back of it, breaking some in the process. I ran to my kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife I could find, turned off every light, hid in my bathroom, locked the door, curled up, and started crying.
I stayed there for days, shaking, unable to sleep. I stopped eating. I stopped going to work. I stopped talking to people. I couldn’t trust anyone. I lost my job, my home, all of it. Then I saw the news: an explosion at my old house, everything burned. The two residents were missing, wanted for questioning.
I went into hiding, spent a year cowering in the shadows, waiting to be found. I moved around as much as I could. No friends, always covered my face. Change location very week. Avoid towns. Avoid parks. Avoid daylight.
But that’s enough now. I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. If I’m going out, I’m doing it on my own terms. Not strapped to a fucking game of battleships.