The Hole: A Secret 90s Website That Traps Your Mind

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I've been
an Internet user for twenty years now. That's older than
some of my coworkers. It's over half my life, and
still the Internet feels like the new thing. I used
to take it for granted, like we all do. But
at least I remember what it was like when it

(00:25):
wasn't there, when you had to leave through an encyclopedia
set to find an answer, when you could only find
Jillian Anderson's picture in magazines, or later, when songs took
thirty minutes to download and full length movies were almost
impossible to find because no one's hard drive could hold them. First,

(00:45):
getting online was super exciting. I mean the first time
I did it without supervision. Because I knew I had
anything at my fingertips, I could type it into good
old Licos and one of many pre Google search in
and there it would be. I was interested in naked
celebrities and the paranormal. Back then I was only thirteen,

(01:08):
Give me a break. I was so interested in the paranormal.
I built a Fortune City free homepage all about the
occult and the X files. I linked it to the
Darknet webring where all the best dark websites and homepages
came together. Pages on spell books, goth babes, the occult,

(01:30):
dark art, and a gross out page or two. It
was through the Webring that I met Angelica. Welcome Weirdos.
I'm Darren Marler and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll

(01:51):
find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange
and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious maccobbre unsolved and unexplained coming
up in this episode, and bring you a creepypasta from
Jared Roberts entitled The Hidden Webpage. If you'd like to

(02:14):
read along with the story, I've placed a link to
it at creepypasta dot com in the show notes, and
if you want to read more from Jared Roberts, I've
also linked to his reddit that has many more creepy
tales to find. Now, bult your doors, lock your windows,
turn off your lights, and come with me into the

(02:36):
Weird Darkness. It was through the Webring that I met Angelica.
Angelica hosted a Wiccan GeoCities or tripod homepage that I
found particularly alluring. Now wait, it was angel Fire. She

(03:01):
just made the best of some cool animated gifts. Middies
and frames, amazing stuff at the time, Just like her.
The page was creative and attractive, but also simple. The
reason I bring all this up is she suddenly contacted
me just a few weeks ago by email, asking what's

(03:21):
been happening? A catch up question. We had almost twenty
years of catching up to do, and this is pure Angelica.
She signed the email with her ICQ contact number. I
enjoyed the quaint touch. It'd be like somebody in the
nineties sending a letter with a wax seal. Right. I

(03:42):
replied back with a summary of how my life had
gone over the past eighteen years or so, since I
had last communicated with her eighteen years makes you think
She shot back a response almost immediately, asking for details.
We exchanged a few email this way. I was pretty
excited to come home from work and write to her.

(04:03):
Actually nothing romantic. It was just it was reconnecting with
my past. It's a strange but addictive feeling. Soon I
started to notice something just a little off. She never
really answered anything about herself. She ignored my suggestions that
we text or talk on the phone. All she wanted

(04:26):
was to know more about me. It got me wondering,
like maybe she's dying and just doesn't want to say so.
I asked her. I asked why she wasn't sharing and
if there was something I should know. I start reading
over her previous messages for clues, and I noticed something

(04:46):
that didn't occur to me at all until then. Her
email address was at globetrotter dot net. That may not
mean anything to you, but it struck me as strange.
You see, globe Trotter was a Canadian ISP way back
in the mid nineties. I didn't even realize they still hosted.

(05:08):
I know a lot of people still have their old
email addresses for sentimental value and all, but it's like
she was purposely trying to be old school. Something about
it creeped me out, like she was trying too hard
to make me feel nostalgic or something. Again, I didn't
have to wait long for her reply. Oh, she didn't

(05:30):
answer my questions. She asked me, hey, do you remember
the whole? I didn't know why then, but the moment
I read that sentence, I felt uneasy, like I was
being watched. I had a hazy sense that I had
dreamed about something called the Hole once. Whatever it was,

(05:52):
I was instinctively repulsed by it. I couldn't remember anything
solid though in my head. I went over IRC rooms, websites,
news groups, webrings, all the old Internet stuff, and came
up empty. She sent me another email before I could
even reply, You really don't remember. The hole was our

(06:13):
little secret. Not many knew about it, even fewer how
to find it. But we found it. It was right
there all along. Sometimes when you'd load Darknet in Netscape,
there'd be a tiny black dot in the bottom left
corner in all this blank space. You had to hover
over it exactly and click it. Then you'd be there.

(06:34):
You'd be in the hole. You remember it, now, don't you?
She was right, I did. I just didn't remember ever
calling it the hole. What I remembered was that secret
little space we found. I remember. It was like the
browser didn't see it as a real website or something.
There wasn't even an address to copy and paste from

(06:57):
the bar. It was just the letter M. I tried
everything to pit it down to an IP, but M
was all I could ever find. Another thing I remember
is that I never liked that place, not at all.
There was nothing there. It was all empty. I remember
being excited the first time we found it because it

(07:20):
was something hidden and it felt like somewhere we shouldn't be.
Then I hated it because it was just empty, and
it made me feel bad and empty, not boredom, like
it wasn't supposed to be there or anywhere, wasn't part
of anything. I wrote Angelica back, telling her I wasn't

(07:41):
interested in talking about that. I didn't hear back from
her that night. That was unusual. She normally replied right away,
eerily fast. I realized while mulling it over, it was
like she already had her answer typed out, and it
didn't matter what I actually said to her now that
I was waiting for a response because this whole thing

(08:04):
had me inexplicably shaken up. Of course, she didn't reply.
The next day. When I got home from work, an
email was waiting. She said, we were missing so much.
The whole has so much for us to discover, so
many secrets. You could just keep going and going. It's

(08:24):
like an endless puzzle. Everyone else stopped at the first layer.
You remember that, right. I just knew there had to
be something else in it. I knew no one would
create and hide it for no reason. I kept going
back to it, looking closely until I discovered how to
go deeper, and I kept going It's still there, you know,
it's not too late. The web ring is gone, Netscape

(08:47):
is gone, but the hole is still there for you.
I felt a strange chill down my spine that I
brushed off as nerves. I was up for a promotion
and a little stressed after all. Then I started to
wonder if she was pranking me. Angelica wasn't really a
humorous girl. She'd laugh at your jokes, but she didn't

(09:08):
really make her own. In fact, something about her earnestness
was really disturbing. I didn't reply to her right then.
I decided to run some checks on her because things
just weren't adding up. I started with her email address
to see if she'd been posting anywhere. I was searching
for a while before I hit something. I didn't find

(09:31):
any forum posts or websites or anything like that. What
I found was that her email host, Globetrotter, had stopped
hosting eleven years ago. The email address she was writing
from was impossible. Now I knew something was wrong with her.

(09:51):
If it was even really Angelica, I mean, why would
she go through so much trouble to create a fake
email address that mirrored whatever email address she would have
been using in the nineties. That wasn't just quaint anymore. Also,
we hadn't talked in eighteen years. Why does she suddenly

(10:12):
want to reach out to me, and why just to
talk about some long forgotten website? Because I felt like
that's what she was building up to all along. The
more I thought about it, the more weird it seemed.
I should have just ignored her and went on with
my life, but I wanted to know what was going on.

(10:33):
I kept digging around. I used her ICQ number, her name,
the state I believed she lived in. I could find
no record of her doing anything after her angel Fire homepage.
No Facebook, no Google Plus, not even a MySpace. It's
like her last presence on the internet actually was in

(10:53):
the nineties, Like she disappeared, completely waited in hiding for
almost twenty years, that reappeared just to talk to me
about an old website. The whole thing was so bizarre.
I started having trouble sleeping. I was having nightmares about
staring into a monitor, not able to move. There were

(11:15):
computers all around, and I was concerned about the beehive
in the corner. After that, and I went a week
without sending her an email or her sending me one.
I felt guilty about it, but I had every right.
I just knew I'd regret it if I sent her
another email. And it seemed like she took the hint

(11:37):
at first, until a new email came in. This one
was short and to the point. It read, I think
I'm coming to the center. You could spend your whole
life in here. I remember those words exactly. Oh yes,
because whatever the hell they meant, the way she said
them so real and urgent, really upsetting. I didn't dare

(12:03):
answer her. Another week went by without a strange email.
This one was a different kind of email. This one
didn't even have an email address. That was spooky enough
in itself, it gets worse. The text read don't trust emails,
not from good place, Delete and forget. It wasn't signed.

(12:26):
I figured it had to be Angelica. It just wasn't
her style. Not long after, I received another email from
Angelica with instructions of where to go looking for the
whole a place on archive dot org on their wayback machine.
It still had the dot to click on. That was

(12:47):
the only way in. She said it had to be
the dot I thought about going to check it. I
would have, except I was afraid of it. I couldn't
remember what happened to me with that site, but I
knew there was something bad about it. Then another email
came from the blank email address in the body, just

(13:09):
the link to a Gopher site. Now I hadn't seen
a Gopher site in a good fifteen years. I had
to download an old browser just to access it. If
you weren't on the internet back then, Gopher sites just
housed a bunch of text files and folders. Usually you'd
got a Gopher colon slash slash blah blah dot com,

(13:30):
and they were usually run by universities. This particular Gopher
site only had a few files, all audio files. I
listened to them all they had different file names, but
they were the same, the muffled sound of a boy's
voice saying help me please, over and over. I was shaking.

(13:53):
I got the police involved this time. They thought I
was being pranked. I asked them if they could at
least look into Angelica. I told them all I knew
about her. The only thing I didn't tell them is
who I thought the voice was. I know it's crazy,
but the reason I didn't tell them is that I'm

(14:14):
pretty sure it was my voice when I was a boy.
I stopped receiving emails from Angelica and the blank address.
After that, I hoped it was over. I think a
month passed before anything else happened. I got the promotion,
things were feeling normal. I told myself, some secrets are

(14:35):
best left secret. Well, I got a large Manila envelope
in the mail, no return address. I went against my
gut and opened it. Inside was a print out of
all of my correspondents with Angelica, all of it, not
just the new stuff emails I'd written her back in

(14:57):
the nineties. I took this stack of papers to the police.
This was evidence. They told me they still thought it
was a sick prank. That struck me as odd, I
asked them, but why sick. That's when they told me
they actually had heard back from the local PD where
Angelica lived. She'd been a missing person since nineteen ninety nine.

(15:22):
Her parents offered a reward and everything. They never found her,
no clues. One night, she was in her room listening
to music on the computer in the morning, she was
gone without a trace. I was so shocked I had
to sit down. Maybe it was a prank, But then
what if it was her, wouldn't her family want to know?

(15:45):
Maybe she'd had a psychotic break or something. What's this
stuff about the whole and what about the blank email address?
I didn't have a clue. The police were no help
with these questions, and I was pulled back back in.
I decided to go looking for any contacts I could
remember from the time when I was speaking to Angelica,

(16:08):
anyone who would have known both me and her. We
had a few mutual contacts, mostly people from the web ring,
but also people we introduced to each other, just not
many I remembered by their real names, actually none. There
was one guy. He went by the handle Repskellion forty two.

(16:32):
He was an odd guy into hacking and anarchy, the
good clean internet taboos we had back then. He'd been
on the net forever, since the days of bulletin board systems.
That guy, if he was still around, he'd probably still
be going by the same username. So I got to searching.

(16:53):
Not only could I not find any trace of Rapscalion
forty two, I couldn't find any reps skill at all.
He was all over the web in the day, so
that in itself was weird, like someone scrubbed any trace
of him. That's when I got the idea to go
dig out my old computer. It was an old nineteen

(17:15):
ninety seven HP running Windows ninety eight. I had it
stashed in the basement since I went to college. It
would at least have all of my old contacts stored
just where I left them. If it would even load,
I had to wait five minutes for it to boot up.
Then I got the ethernet cable plugged in. It was
like it had just been in sleep mode for two decades,

(17:39):
and there they were my desktop icons for IRC, ICQ, Netscape,
and even Napster. Napster I learned there was more to
music than the radio from Napster some good memories. I
honestly wasn't sure ICQ would load. I believe I ICQ

(18:00):
still exists in some form, but I just doubted their
servers would still accommodate the old software. One of the
key features of ICQ that made it so ahead of
its time was that, besides being the only instant messenger,
it also allowed offline messaging I mentioned that because not
only did ICQ load, but it loaded with a message

(18:25):
that perturbed me a little, because it's like it was
just waiting for me, knowing i'd boot it up. Except
for one detail. The message was dated from November nineteen
ninety nine. It was from Angelica, so it had to
have been sent right before she disappeared. It just said

(18:46):
you coming. Sent a shiver down my spine. Where was
she going? Could I have helped her if I'd seen
it in time? Why did she act like I knew?
Even weirder is that I'm sure i'd been on ICQ
after November nineteen ninety nine. I'd say I used it
up to two thousand and one or so. That's when

(19:08):
I went to college. It's like the message got trapped
in the server all that time, and I was only
getting it now. I closed the message and looked for
a rap scaley in forty two. I was hoping just
to find an email address on his ICQ info. I
really didn't expect to see a green online icon beside

(19:30):
his name, but that's what I got. That only added
to how unsettled I was. I almost had to check
to make sure it was really twenty seventeen. Anyway, I
fired off a message to WRAP, saying, hey man, long
time no speak. I didn't want to just start with
business after all that time. I was relieved when he

(19:54):
replied back with a friendly hello and asked me how
I was doing. After exchanging PLA and catching up a little,
I had to ask him why he was still using
ICQ after all this time. He said, it's because of
Y two K. Y two K really happened, he said,
it just didn't happen the way everyone expected. It was

(20:16):
way more insidious. We all thought computers would just stop
working because they couldn't handle the millennium change. But it
wasn't that they stopped working. Something happened inside the connection
of things, something bad. The old equipment would be fine

(20:36):
as long as it didn't get patched, but everything made
after December thirty first, nineteen ninety nine would be tainted.
That's why he still used ICQ and never let go
of his net zero dial up connection. I hadn't heard
a Y two K conspiracy theory in a very long time,
so that was interesting. I chose to ignore it and

(20:59):
asked him if he about Angelica going missing back in
ninety nine. He said he didn't. He figured she just
dropped off the internet. But he said, it's no coincidence.
She went missing right at y two K. A lot
of strange things happened then the world changed. Only a
few people even noticed. He said, Rap was always a

(21:21):
little on the fringe, but what he was saying was
strangely upsetting. Maybe it was just hitting too close to home.
If that last message really was sent November nineteen ninety nine,
that he was right, she disappeared right before y two K.

(21:41):
Given his views, I went ahead and told Rap everything
that had happened. He believed me. That was a nice
change in a way. It also made it feel more real.
I was shaking while typing. He told me my story
reminded him of something he'd heard from another old friend.
Just recently. There was this guy Rocks T four R

(22:04):
or to his closer friends just Reggie, who used to
frequent an Internet forum on hacking and freaking back in
the mid nineties. This guy had a lot of friends there,
was well spoken and clever enough to earn real respect.
Over time, As often happens, he just drifted away from
the forum. His posts became less frequent as other aspects

(22:27):
of life preoccupied him, and soon enough he was gone.
The forum strove for anonymity for obvious reasons, so no
one kept in contact with him. The forums still there,
Rapp said, nowhere near what it used to be, but
the regulars like him are dedicated. A few months ago,

(22:48):
after twenty years absence, Reggie suddenly showed up on the
forum again. His posts were polite, conversational, but just off somehow,
like someone feigning familiarity. He was just trying so hard.
It was weird, but they were happy he was alive

(23:08):
and well, so they replied to him and brought him
up to date. Then, without acknowledging anything they said, he
started making post after post about how his life was revolutionized.
He found a whole new frontier of hacking. The hacking
begins inside you, he said, and he wanted to show

(23:28):
it to them. The forum folk were flabbercasted by his
odd behavior, so they started interrogating him. He went silent
for about a week, then he sent one last message
saying I love you guys so much, with a tiny
URL link. Erhap's friend thought it was all a joke

(23:49):
and that Reggie was just leading the whole forum up
to an epic rick roll. He didn't click it because
he didn't need to hear any Astley and he was
busy with something else. He came back to the forum
later and decided he was going to go ahead and
click the link anyway, it may be something legit. On
a whim. He refreshed first to see if anyone replied

(24:12):
saying what the link was. He sees a post in
the reply from a very trusted and respected member of
the forum saying in all caps, do not click that
link whatever you do, and that is not Reggie. For
an old pro to use all caps. That was serious crap.

(24:32):
Even I knew that. So that was enough to dissuade
everyone from clicking the fake Reggie deleted his account immediately.
The forum moderator and others tried to figure out who
the guy was, but no luck. The guy who made
the all caps post explained after that he tried to
safe browse the link with an old Linux box and

(24:56):
whatever was in there wrecked it, and that box had
secure already out the wazoo. He couldn't explain it. Also,
before the computer wiped out completely, he said he thought
he saw something. The regulars pressed him to say what
it was. He made them promise first that it stays
with them. He said he saw a picture of his

(25:17):
daughter on the screen. She had died five years ago.
There were no pictures of her on the computer. Worse,
he had never seen that picture before. That, more than anything,
convinced him to post the warning in all caps. Whatever
it is, he said, it's evil. Wrap added, if you've

(25:38):
been on the Internet long enough, you learn that there's
evil out there, not the child porn or torture videos,
something deeper, something hidden in all the code and connections.
Maybe it came from us. At one point he was
giving me the creeps. So I tried to bring the
subject back to Angelica. He said, no, listen, sometimes it

(26:00):
tries to get out. That was enough. I told him
he was freaking me out with that kind of talk,
and I had enough to deal with. He said he
didn't understand what I was talking about. He still reads
my homepage all the time, and that I've been doing
great work exposing the evil. The thing is, I don't
have a homepage anymore. That thing was taken down in

(26:23):
like two thousand and one. He insisted it was my
Fortune City homepage. He'd been reading my updates all these years,
even after we lost contact, he said. I sent him
a link to prove to him that Fortune City doesn't
even exist anymore. Rapp went quiet for a few minutes.

(26:43):
Then he said he was looking at the homepage at
that moment. It was last updated just a few days ago,
and it was all about what they were talking about
now and what was going to happen next. It's a doozy,
he said, then immediately went offline. I sent him a
mess with my contact info and to let him know
if he was okay. I haven't heard from him since.

(27:06):
I've checked ICQ a few times and he has never
been back online. I had to walk away from that computer.
I felt like I was being watched or something. Every
noise was freaking me out. After a sandwich and some tea,
I went back just to shut it down. That's what
I noticed A folder on the desktop that stood out.

(27:30):
For one, I never really kept folders on my desktop,
and two I didn't remember this folder at all. It
was called Noah's Cape, which sounds like a crappy Bible game.
I never played crappy Bible games. Something about it didn't
seem right. I opened it. Inside was all pictures and

(27:52):
wave files. My instincts told me to get out of there.
One picture after another was just kids, teen boys and
girls sitting at their computers. None of them seemed aware
they were being photographed. The picks all seemed pointless. All
I knew for sure is I didn't take or download

(28:14):
those pictures. Ever, they were all timestamped eleven twenty one,
nineteen ninety nine. The way files were the sounds of typing, muttering,
chairs moving, the sounds of people at a computer, the
sounds of surveillance. Until one of the files, it was

(28:35):
a voice I'd never heard before. I know it because
I don't think anything could have made me forget that voice.
It was a hollow, metallic voice, almost inhuman, but a man.
It whispered with a hiss, you coming, and its whispers
were like flesh sizzling on iron. Nothing of this earth

(29:01):
should talk like that. What it said it was the
same as Angelica's message, also from ninety nine. I shut
down the computer and left the house. I didn't even
want to be in my own home. I just drove
around for a while, thinking whatever was going on it
was really not good. Yet I couldn't let it go.

(29:25):
I felt drawn into something secret, and I wanted to
figure it out for Angelica's sake too, if she really
was a victim. I decided to contact my buddy Ben.
He's a real computer wizard, works it at the University
of Gelph. I know that may not sound like the
most prestigious place to be, but they actively poached him.

(29:47):
He's good anyway. I gave Ben an idea of what
was going on and asked if he could get a
lock on that Gopher site for me. I also asked
if he could safely do it to see if there
was any thing to this whole site. He said that
wouldn't be a problem. The next day he already comes
back to me with a question, is there some sort

(30:08):
of joke? I don't like wasting my time. I'd never
seen Ben even slightly irritated before, but he was mad.
He told me. When he traced the Gopher site, it
turned out it was being hosted right there at the
University of Guelph. But they didn't have a Gopher site,
he said, never have. I assured him if it was

(30:29):
a joke, I wasn't in on it, so we said
that he'd try to find the server tower it was
running on. If he could do that, he could read
the logs find out who's set up the damn thing.
While I was waiting for Ben to get back to me,
I got a call from a detective th Rault. The
police hadn't shown much interest in my case, but it
happened to land in front of this guy. Thankfully. He said,

(30:53):
the simple fact that Angelica had disappeared meant there was
the possibility that a crime had taken place. I agreed.
Because of that, he had done a little more work,
and he felt I should know he found Angelica. When
he told me she was alive and well, I was thrilled.
He said she voluntarily ran away from home and chose

(31:16):
not to have contact with her family. She declined to
say why, and he had no right to compel her otherwise. Legally,
he was bound to protect her privacy. The point is
there was no crime. However, when he told her how
it came about that he went looking for her, she
asked him if she could speak to me. He said

(31:37):
he took the liberty of accepting for me and passed
on her phone number. I thanked him heartily. It was
the first bit of good news, the first real break
in this mess. As soon as I hung up with
the detective, I called her. I was nervous, it had
been so long, and I was excited to hear from
her again. She answered quickly and asked if it was me.

(32:00):
I told her yes, and said it was nice to
hear her voice after all this time. And then she said,
without any pleasantries, it wasn't me sending you messages. I
told her I'd figured that much out already. I don't
think you understand, she said, I have never once in
my life sent you any sort of communication. I don't

(32:21):
know you at all. A part of me was screaming,
she's lying. She just sounded so certain, though it almost
felt like drowning, because if she wasn't lying, a whole
chunk of my youth was a lie. I told her
all I knew about her personal things, and she said
they were true. I told her how I found her

(32:44):
through her wicked homepage on angel Fire, and I described
the page to her and the webring. She said she
didn't make that thing and I should never have gone there.
It's bad, she said, and wouldn't elaborate. What do you mean,
I asked. Then I told her all the details. I
knew of her personal life, about her likes and hopes

(33:07):
and dreams, and her family. She said it was all true,
but whoever told me about it it wasn't her. That's
why she wanted to talk to me now so I
would know the truth. She remembered how it used to
happen every now and then, a long time ago, she
would have people tell her they talked to her online
all night, but she knew she had never spoken to them,

(33:32):
and they tell her that she was doing things that
she had never done. She was asleep or sometimes not
even in town. Then they'd get weird or disappear. She
remembered this. One time she was doing her math homework
and a random guy messaged her with the solution to
the problem. She was terrified, but she asked him how

(33:54):
he knew her math problem. Was he spying on her?
And he told her no. Asked Tim for help. She
didn't believe him, so he sent her a screenshot. The
message was from a day ago. She had just gotten
the homework that day. She said. The worst it got
was when she messaged a close friend of hers she

(34:15):
saw online on ICQ. Her friend replied with who is this?
She thought it was just a joke, so she said
something silly. She didn't remember what her friend said. She
didn't think it was cool to be hacking Angelica's account,
or if this was her brother. To knock it off.
Angelica swore it was her, and her friend replied, I

(34:38):
know you're not Angelica because Angelica's sitting right here with me.
She knew this friend wouldn't joke like that. She didn't
have the imagination for it. Whatever it was, Her friend
really believed she was in the room with her, but
she wasn't. Her friend always insisted she was there that night.

(35:00):
She said Angelica was showing her her cool new homepage.
The friendship fell apart after that because her friend got strange.
That was the first she'd ever seen of the homepage,
and she knew it was bad. Juju I asked her
if she'd ever heard of the whole. She went silent

(35:20):
for so long. I thought we lost connection. She said,
She's still there. She just never expected to hear the
whole again. There was this guy who used to harass
her back when she was just about twelve or thirteen.
On IRC. He called himself Holy Moses. He started off nice.

(35:41):
He seemed to understand all her problems and to know
what she was thinking. At twelve, that felt romantic, but
she noticed weird things, like he didn't seem to have
any life or personality any time of the day. He
was always online and active, but no one knew anything

(36:01):
about him. One day, he started telling her stranger things
like do you remember the three men dressed as bees
at the Halloween party? She didn't know what he was
talking about. Eight years later, at a college Halloween party,
she saw three men dressed as bees sitting in the

(36:21):
corner of the room. They weren't doing anything, just sitting
still and staring at the floor. Then they turned to
her and their eyes looked so black she ran out
of the party. Another time, he told her, you can
drink and smoke. You know you died in a car crash.
It scared the life out of her. She briefly wondered

(36:43):
if she really was a ghost. She said. When she
told him to stop telling her things like that, he
said there was a place she could go that was
for special people only, and she'd never need to go
anywhere else. It was a place on the internet that
was infinite in all directions, she said. She remembered him
saying that specifically and everything she needed would be there.

(37:07):
It was called the Hole and she just had to
send him a message with the letter M to get there.
She actually tried to do it because things weren't going
well for her, but she sent the letter N by
accident because her hands were shaking. Holy Moses went offline
and she didn't see him after until twenty ten, when

(37:31):
she got an email from the New Commandments at Holymoses
dot com saying you coming. If anyone was impersonating her,
she said that was the most likely person. At the time,
she was so naive. Looking back on it now talking
to me, she said he was the creepiest person she'd

(37:52):
ever encountered. Just thinking of him creeped her out and
made her afraid he'd sense it somehow and come for her.
I don't know you, but I told you all this
for a reason, she said. What you're digging into, be careful.
There are a lot of very bad things hidden in
the old Internet, things the Twitter and tumbler generations will

(38:14):
never see, and lucky them. She promised we'd never speak
again and bid me a good life before hanging up.
I was left reeling what she said whoever I spoke
to for years in my teens. I don't even know
who that person is. It was all a lie. And

(38:38):
why what's so interesting about me? I wondered how much
else in my life was trickery? Before I could dwell
on it too much, Ben called me back. He said
he'd managed to track the server to a storage room
and a sub basement below his office. He was aware
of the basement, but he was abandoned years before he

(38:58):
ever started working there due to ventilation and mold issues.
It's just full of old it crap now and some
storage lockers. Someone had set up the server in a
storage closet, and the closet itself was completely obscured by
old computer equipment, probably for years. He figures that's why

(39:19):
it was never found, meaning the server had been running
under their noses all that time. When he gets in,
he sees an old desktop hooked up to a landline.
Beside it, he saw a notepad with please stop written
on it. That alone made him want to get the
hell out of there. The whole place is covered in

(39:41):
thick dust too, and his allergies were acting up. Somehow,
the server was still running. He has to hook up
a monitor and keyboard just to interact with it. One
thing he said in passing really disturbed me. He said.
The ironic thing is the server was built with an
auto shutdown date, and the the date was the same
day I was there to shut it down. Dude. It's

(40:03):
like it knew I was going to be there that day,
he said. After shutting it down, he went and told
his manager about it, just a fun it anecdote. His
manager told him there's really only one man who could
have set that up. Back in the early nineties, he said,
a guy worked in the department they called Milky. His

(40:24):
last name was Milky, and he was really white. He
was a little eccentric too. That had nothing to do
with Milk. It just happened to be true. Then he
had a burnout and he got a lot eccentric. It
started with him pounding his desk. The manager at the
time asked him if he was okay. According to Ben's boss,

(40:46):
he answered with there's no way out. Then he heard
Milky say something like, you think you exist, but you're
just another part of it. Everything is just another puzzle.
Do I exist? After that, the rest of the department
started getting nervous around Milky, he just got bad vibes
around him. The manager said it got worse every day.

(41:08):
Around three pm, Milky started standing in a dark corner
of the office, facing the wall. He'd mutter some things.
The guys joked that he was at his prayers, but
he'd always come away looking more upset than anything else.
Once a new guy asked him if he was a Muslim,
and he replied with I'm sorry. The guy asked what

(41:31):
he was sorry for. It was telling me how your
children die, he answered. Toward the end, before they fired him,
he started telling them about how he found a place
on the Internet that wasn't made by humans. The guys
joked that it was sky net, but he said it
wasn't created by machines either. It was always there the

(41:53):
Internet just found it by accident. It showed him things
he couldn't unsee. Ben's boss even recalled that he started
to tear up. Ben's boss told him it was sad
to see such a smart guy clearly losing it. Even
though Milky was never caught stealing anything, equipment disappeared during

(42:16):
his shift, probably the equipment that went into the server.
When they fired him, he told them that the secret
place got into his head, and that he'd sometimes wake
up in strange places and had no idea how he
got there. They never saw him again after he left
that day. Ben said, after that story and that creepy

(42:39):
gopher server, he straight up refused to look into the hole.
I told him it really wasn't that bad, and quit
being a whimp. That's when he said he hadn't told
me everything. The server had a link up through the
phone line to a really old webcam, one of those
low res webcams where the image updates every four seconds

(43:02):
or so. It had been running NonStop since nineteen ninety seven.
All of the sad images just show the front of
someone's house, the same house back to ninety seven. He
sent me some of the photos because he knew what
it was. It was my house. Why would this guy

(43:24):
have been spying on you all those years? Man? How
did he even know you? Doesn't make any sense and
honestly scares the crap out of me. Here's what I
told him. The thing about that webcam is I just
bought this house two years ago. That camera was pointed
here before I ever moved in. It was just an

(43:46):
astronomically improbable coincidence. At least that's what it should be.
But I didn't believe that's what it was any more
than he did. More of the Hidden webpage by Jared

(44:06):
Roberts up next on Weird Darkness. The next day, I

(44:33):
was still reeling from my conversations with Ben and the
real Angelica. I ran it over in my head so
many times, like maybe the police made a mistake. So
of course I'd never spoken to this woman. She was
the wrong Angelica, but no I knew everything about her.

(44:54):
Someone systematically deceived me for two years, and someone had
been recording a house I was going to move into
for twenty years, and someone had recorded me when I
was a boy. What happened twenty years ago to cause
all this? It was so insane. I started questioning everything.

(45:16):
I felt I was being watched constantly. I started to
wonder if my mom remembered anything. She saw me more
than anyone at the time. Naturally, when I called her up,
she said she was expecting me to call. I generally
didn't call during the week, so I asked her why.
She said, because of my little prank. I grew concerned immediately.

(45:40):
I wasn't pranking anyone. I tried to calmly ask her
what prank. She said, the two guys. They showed up
with a note from me to let them in. They
don't say anything or do anything. They've just been sitting
there with their chairs pulled together in her kitchen, just
looking at the floor. You don't recognize them at all,

(46:02):
I asked her. She laughed and said no, but I
think she was starting to realize I didn't know what
was going on. They're dressed in bee costumes, she said,
almost as an afterthought. I told her to calmly get
out of the house and call the police because I
didn't have anything to do with this. She said she

(46:24):
was upstairs. She'd have to go past them to get out.
I told her to keep me on the phone until
she got out. I listened carefully. It seemed to be
taking forever. Finally she said, they're gone. The front door
was left open. I told her to call the police
right away and check in with me. In a bit.

(46:46):
While talking, I had absent mindedly walked from my office
to my own kitchen. My front door was also left open.
Not only was it locked just a moment ago, but
it seemed like quite a coincidence. I closed door and
locked it. Then I looked all around the house with
a kitchen knife in hand. I have a one story

(47:07):
with the basement, so it was easy enough to cover
all hiding places. Fortunately there was nobody, so I tried
to tell myself. I just didn't close the door right
until my neighbor came over and asked me if I
was having a costume party. I said no. That's when
he told me he saw two guys in b costumes
leaving my home. They just walked straight across the road

(47:30):
and behind the neighbor's house into the woods. How could
they even see in the woods at night, he asked.
I picked up my mother and we went to the
police station. I figured this one would be best in person.
All these strange events barely seemed coherent. When I got
the feeling it was all connected in some way. The

(47:53):
police were baffled. They admitted someone was harassing me, but
without more evidence, there was really nothing they could do.
When we were making the report, my mom told me
she was thinking about something just after this happened, because
it struck her as odd. Do you remember how you
had this dial up modem and when you'd run it,

(48:14):
you could swear you'd hear a little voice inside talking
to you. The way she said it like it was
nothing sent a shiver through me because I didn't remember
that at all. What was all I could say? This
is what she said. Yes, you'd said it ago, and
in all the beeps and pops, you said there was

(48:36):
a little voice in there with a message to me.
It was a lot of crazy noise, but you made
me get real close and listened, and you told me
it was saying, everything's better in here. Abra cadabra, kip.
Believe I even remember that. I told her, I couldn't
remember that. That sounds crazy, but she just gave me
a blank stare. I thought maybe she was concerned, so

(49:00):
I started to tell her about what was happening, the
whole Angelica thing, so she'd understand. I was saying, you
remember that girl I used to chat with online in
the nineties, Angelica. She kept giving me a blank stare,
like she couldn't understand me. So I told her more
how I met her on the Webring my Fortune city

(49:22):
page was on and didn't she remember my homepage at least?
She shook her head. What she said next scared me
in a way, I've never been scared before. She told
me she got an Internet connection after I left for
college to email me, but before that, we never ever

(49:42):
had the Internet in our home. I said, she must
have gotten hit in the head, because I remember distinctly
all these experiences being online, building my homepage, yif net
irc ICQ. All of that was when I was in
high school. Flat denied it. She said she remembered, though,

(50:04):
that I used to tell her I'd found a way
to get into the Internet without a connection. I'd have
to call some number with my modem, then I'd have
to sit still at the screen for a few minutes,
something like that. She always thought I was joking. Before
Detective thor Rault came to get us, she looked into
my eyes. You should be careful on that Internet, you know,

(50:26):
she said, a lot of bad things on there. She
rose to shake the detective's hand. I was grateful to
get off the subject. The detective offered to have a
friend in computer forensics take a look at some of
the sites I'd reported, but he didn't have much hope.
After I got back home, I secured the house one

(50:47):
more time. Then I got to work. The best lead
I had at that point was this Holy Moses character.
So I downloaded mIRC to see if I could find
him in his old haunts. It had been a long
time since I had used merk, I barely remembered how
it worked, and there were so many channels on ef

(51:09):
nets and it'd take forever. So I decided to focus
on channels that would have been relevant to Angelica back
in the day. I just started asking in channels like
at Gothic and at Vampires if anyone knew of Holy
Moses or heard of him. But each time I mentioned him,
the channel fell to almost complete silence. I didn't get

(51:32):
a yes or a no. I got ignored. Sometimes users
even started to leave the channel. I was about to
give up and try another avenue when I got a
private message from U four seven to eight for you.
He or she told me I shouldn't be doing what

(51:52):
I'm doing. I asked him or her why. They said,
it doesn't come off well to them, whatever that means.
They also said Holy Moses is just a bot. It's
been around forever, never logs off, and is almost always
idling for days at a time. I told them that's true.

(52:13):
Why was everyone so reluctant to talk about it. I
didn't want to tell them Angelica's story. I just wanted
to find out what they knew. They said. The whole
thing weirds people out because nobody knows who built Holy Moses.
Nobody over decades, no one has ever claimed ownership, not

(52:33):
even trolls. Nobody knows where it came from or why
it's there. It doesn't do anything. It's just there, they said.
That's the creepiest thing about it, always just there. Legends
had built up around Holy Moses, they said, like it
was a government supercomputer monitoring IRC, or it was the KGB,

(52:55):
or a ghost a bot left running long after the
owner died and his account kept paying the bills. But
no one knows. It was just there. Users tried messaging it,
and it never responded. It never interacts in any channel.
It offers no services. It has moments of a parent

(53:15):
activity where it's no longer idle, but no one's been
able to detect what it does during this time, except
occasionally a change of channel, seemingly at random. They said,
there was only one time when it did anything substantial,
as far as anyone knew. Once in over two decades

(53:35):
and that only made things weirder. I was typing out
a message to ask this person what it was, because
they weren't saying. But just then I heard what sounded
like my front door slam. I paused and listened carefully,
trying not to even breathe. I didn't hear anything, so

(53:57):
I rushed out to the front door. Nobody was there,
nothing disturbed. The doors were all closed and locked. I
chalked it up to nerves and went back to my office.
When I got back U four seven two eighty four.
U had sent me a message, where'd you go? Hope
nothing strange happened. That was a little eerie, but I

(54:18):
was focused on getting answers, so I ignored it and
asked what it was Holy Moses did. They said, fine,
I'll tell you, and this is what they said. Happened
in nineteen ninety nine. At five am Central Standard Time
on November twenty first, Holy Moses joined the channel hashtag
O Mythology and made a series of short statements. First,

(54:43):
deceive them at seven am, empty it at nine am,
abandoned them at six pm, turn back at nine pm,
have it your way just before midnight. Then it went
off until January fifth why. They asked, why be silent

(55:06):
and useless for years do that and then never do
anything after Sometimes when they really thought about it, they
said it gave them the serious hebgbis. That was all
they knew, or anyone knew, and they reiterated that I
really shouldn't be looking into this and to just drop it.

(55:27):
I thanked them for their help. I remembered a little
more of what commands mIRC had after getting into the
groove some so I tried a holes on Holy Moses
to see if he was out there. He was or
it was. It was on one channel only hashtag still life.

(55:48):
It had been signed on for sixteen days, and IDOL
four three. It's IP was showing only the letter why.
I was thinking about going to the channel and messaging
him to see what would happen. But I suddenly got
another message from you four seven two eight for you.
I told you to drop it. I know it's just text,

(56:10):
but it freaked me out. I closed out of Murk
immediately and walked away. I figured it was just a
nut trying to psych me out, and you know what,
it worked. I continue to argue with my mother the
next few days about what she had said, telling her
she confused reality with a lifetime movie. But she assured

(56:31):
me there was no internet in her house while I
lived there. She said I had my floppy disks that
I'd take home with me, but that was it. We
went on arguing for a while because it occurred to
me to ask take home from where? She said she
didn't know. I'd go out at times and I'd come

(56:51):
home with discs. I had a sterilite tub full of
them in my closet. None of them were labeled, so
she didn't know how I had any idea what was
on each one, but I seemed to know. She remembered
how I'd dive into my bin and dig around through
all the black discs and pop up with just the

(57:12):
one I wanted. Generally, she didn't intrude on my privacy,
she says, she just saw me do it a few times.
Of Course, I didn't remember any floppy disks. Either my
mother was becoming senile or I was losing my mind.
Both possibilities were upsetting. My Mom's a really good person.

(57:34):
She'd had a rough time since my dad died a
few years ago, but she was super caring. She didn't
like to see anyone hurt, and she could see I
was truly upset, not just trying to be right. So
she gave me a big hug, and she told me
I should ask Ricky. Ricky I hadn't thought of him.

(57:55):
Ricky was an old high school buddy of mine. While
we were friends from great two until we left for college,
we just drifted apart after I had him friended on
Facebook and we never talked. You know how it goes,
she said. When I'd go out to wherever it was
I went, I usually had Ricky with me. We'd walk

(58:17):
all the way across the bridge into town to pass
our weekends. I decided to take her advice. I sent
Ricky a message on Facebook. He wrote back really fast.
I was surprised because I never see status updates or
any activity from him. I asked him if he was
free for a phone call. I was scared about having
another Internet only conversation. Frankly, Facebook said he was typing

(58:41):
a reply for about five minutes without anything happening. I
was wondering what the hell novel he was typing. Then
my phone rang. I didn't recognize the number. I know.
I never gave my number to Ricky, so there's no
way it could be him, I thought. While I weeded
looking at my phone, Ricky started typing out periods over

(59:04):
and over. I answered. The voice on the other end
sort of sounded like Ricky as much as I could remember,
but like he was really far away on a beat
up CBE radio. I don't know why, but it made
me feel weird and uneasy. I said, I think we
have a bad connection. He said, it's the best possible

(59:26):
that he knows. I was about to ask what he
knows when he said alt dot rec dot birdwatch and
hung up. I got a message on Facebook saying nice
catching up. He wouldn't answer anything I said. After that,
I asked, folks I knew if Ricky was okay. Apparently

(59:48):
he was in a car accident years back and was
mostly bedridden. I made a note to try and visit
him someday. Anyway, Alt dot rec dot birdwatch. That's, of
course a Usenet newsgroup. I used to browse newsgroups all
the time as a teen, mostly for the porn. I

(01:00:09):
was surprised they still existed now. I had to look
up how to get to them. I remember being able
to do it through my email software, but apparently that's
not a feature of Outlook anymore. So I looked up
newsgroup readers and found one and i'd used back in
the day. Then I found some servers and started looking

(01:00:29):
for alt dot rec Dot Birdwatch. When I finally found it,
it turned out to be mostly British upskirt photography. I
didn't understand why Ricky wanted me there until I saw
posts with the header remember the Dog, and instantly felt
clammy and cold. I didn't know why, but there was

(01:00:52):
something to it, something I couldn't put my finger on.
This is what the post read. Everyone remembers how sometimes
should go in there and it'd be all dusty and
no one was there, like it was abandoned years ago,
but you could still go sit at a computer and
get online. I remember how sometimes should go in and
there'd be these people there and they were really weird,

(01:01:15):
and they just watch you like you were a rat
in a maze. And sometimes they were in costumes, and
he would remember the dog. Sometimes there were no people
and there was just this dog at the counter. I
think I was a Golden retriever. It never panted, but
it watched, and sometimes it would make you do things
that was it and that was enough. I was trembling

(01:01:37):
and I didn't know why. It didn't look like anyone
had replied to the message, and it had been posted
three years ago. It seemed so out of place. I
kind of started to remember. I remembered, at least that
there was an internet cafe in town. It didn't last long.
Like most internet cafes. It popped up around nineteen ninety

(01:02:01):
six ninety seven to take advantage of the Internet craze
and let people who didn't own computers experience the wonder.
When personal computers became more common, they died a quick death.
This cafe was popular with the teens in ninety six.
It got stale after that. That's when something happened to it.

(01:02:22):
It changed management or something it changed. We tried going
back just to hang out, but most kids didn't want
to be there anymore, as some friends who just wouldn't
go or say why. But Ricky and I would hang
out there all the time. Why couldn't I remember that before?
Maybe Mom was right all along, Maybe that's where I

(01:02:45):
was on the internet. I replied to the newsgroup message
with why wasn't I able to remember? It was a
long shot since the post was so old. Then I
started looking through the other posts to see if there
were others like it. There were others. They were all vague,
but I knew what they were about. I knew someone

(01:03:07):
posted sometimes when we were hanging out, we thought we
were there for just an hour or so, but when
we came out, the whole day had passed, and when
we talked about what we did there, we had completely
different stories. Even though we were together the whole time.
It was like an acid trip, and we were stupid kids,
so we kept going. The Egypt. That's what the place

(01:03:29):
was called. None of these people would say its name,
but I remembered it. Then suddenly, the strange little internet
cafe just behind the post office, where I didn't even
realize there was commercial space. Before the Egypt, someone else
posted there. Was this one time when my friend dragged

(01:03:49):
me along and I didn't feel like being there. The
owners or staff or whatever weren't there that day. It
was the dog. I don't like to think about it.
Remember how it never panted. Somehow that sticks out After
all this time, we were just goofing off, nothing special.
When I looked over at my friend's screen, he was
watching a live webcam of my bedroom just staring at it.

(01:04:11):
I'm thinking this is a dumb joke, but it pisses
me off. So I told him that that was weird
and I was not okay with a webcam in my room.
He just said something's gonna happen. Give me the hev gbis.
He wasn't joking. It didn't even sound like him. Here's
the thing that gets me most. I decided to leave,
but need to piss first. On the way out, I

(01:04:32):
go over to my buddy and he's still watching the webcam.
That annoys me. But worse, when I look at the screen,
someone's in my bedroom ransacking the place under the mattress
in drawers. I'm ready to go home and get one
of dad's golf clubs. Then the guy looks right at
the camera and starts taking it down. I saw that

(01:04:53):
dude's face. It was me, no doubt about it. That
was my face. How was that poss You're thinking the
webcam wasn't live, but it was. Someone replied to that
post with when you were in the bathroom, did you
try knocking on the wall someone knocks back? Someone replied

(01:05:15):
to that with I did. He said he'd let me in,
But there's no door in the sea of bird watching
photos and upskirts dating back to ninety five. That was
all I could find. Took me all night. I closed
it down. It was too much. I was psyching myself out.

(01:05:35):
The next day I had a reply to my post
asking why I couldn't remember It read you weren't meant to.
I felt it then that something really wrong would happen
in that place the Egypt. So I started doing some
research into local records to see if I could find

(01:05:56):
who owned it. They are public records, so it wasn't
I'd expected to find some change in management in the
nineties or where the place got sold in the two thousands.
I expected wrong. It was purchased in nineteen eighty and
had had the same owner ever since. The company or
organization called the New Way sounded like a cult. The

(01:06:21):
weird thing is that place was never used before the
Egypt as far as I know. In nineteen eighty there
wasn't really an Internet, So who would buy a place
and do nothing with it for fifteen years, just waiting
for the Internet to happen. It all seemed too mysterious. Plus,
there was nothing about this company anywhere. It's hard to

(01:06:44):
describe how alone I started to feel at this time.
I talked to some people in my life about what
was going on, but their help was limited. That's why
I decided to try to go back to Alt dot
rec Dot birdwatch. If it was still there, at least
there someone might be having a similar experience. So I

(01:07:06):
made my post. I asked if anyone else had heard
of the new way. Then I waited. To my surprise,
I got a call from Ben right after. He asked
me if I'd done anything recently. I asked him to
be more specific. You must have done something, because something happened,

(01:07:27):
he said. I still had no idea what he meant.
He sounded strange. His words were just slightly slurred, and
there was no accent anywhere in his sentences, just a
string of words, almost like a robot, but not quite.
And it had that distant quality that Rick's call had.

(01:07:48):
Something's happening right now. He told me, I booted it
up again. Ben was just the most rational, bland guy.
Something was definitely wrong for him to be at acting
like this. I asked him if he was okay. He
said that I needed to check my messages. I asked
what messages. He insisted, listen, you have to check your messages.

(01:08:11):
They've been waiting for you. The whole thing didn't feel
right at all. I asked him again what messages He meant.
All I heard was little whispering sounds like PSPs. Thought
I was losing him, But when I listened carefully and
turned up the volume, I heard it. He was saying please,

(01:08:33):
over and over and over. I felt a pit in
my stomach. I asked if he needed help, if there
was anything I could do. He went silent for several seconds,
then still silence. Please, he shouted so loud. I dropped
my phone. I scrambled to put the battery back in

(01:08:56):
with shaking hands, and then I called in a wellness
check on him. I called the Gulf Campus too, just
in case. I didn't know what else to do. I'd
never experienced anything like that. I checked my email right
after to see if I had anything from him, but
I didn't. I had no voicemails. The only other messages

(01:09:19):
I could think of was ICQ, so I powered up
the old computer again to check on my ICQ account.
It's possible there was nothing. I just had to make
sure it took forever to load up, but there was
a message waiting. It wasn't from anyone I recognized the
name on the account was Bernie Bush. The message said Heaven.

(01:09:45):
There was a link to an MP four video. I
clicked it. The download box said it would take thirty
hours to complete, so I just let it go. I
tried replying to the message to Bernie too, but I
see Q alerted me that the account was disabled. I
also couldn't find any results on any search for such

(01:10:06):
a person. I don't think Ben would ever make a
fake account like that, But how did Ben know about
the message? They got contacted by someone from Guelf University's
campus security later that day. They asked me when i'd
last spoken to Ben. I told them he'd just called.
They said he hadn't been to work in a few

(01:10:27):
days and has not been answering the phone. I was
apparently the last one to hear from him. They recommended
I file a missing person's report. I asked if his
family shouldn't do that, but the dude just snorted, So
I made the report over the phone to the gelf PD.
I was pretty worried about the guy. I hoped he

(01:10:49):
was okay. I also hoped his disappearing had nothing to
do with anything I got him involved in. The next day,
I got an email replying to my newsgroup. I recognized
the address. It was the same person who posted about
the dog. She said I needed to call her urgently,
and provided a one eight hundred number followed by what

(01:11:11):
looked like a license plate number four seven to two BMT.
But I called. I got an interactive menu system for
a tanning supplies company. When I listened to the options,
I got the idea that four seven two bmt might
be how to navigate the menu. So I pressed each

(01:11:33):
of the numbers in the order she said. The system
said I was being transferred to an account specialist. I
heard someone pick up the line. You're starting to remember,
aren't you? A voice said, I think. I gasped. She
said she couldn't talk long, so I had to just listen.
She wanted to tell me something that might help me.

(01:11:56):
She says she started remembering about a year ago. I
remembered the sessions in the Egypt. They preyed on vulnerable
misfit kids. Whoever came there got introduced gradually to this
website called The Hole. Once they showed it to us.
We had to sit there and study it solve its puzzles.

(01:12:18):
But it had changed us. That's what they always said.
She didn't know if they built it or not, but
it's what they were all about. I think we're still
in the hole, she said. I tried to ask her
what that even meant. What was she talking about. She'd
already hung up before I got the chance. I tried

(01:12:39):
calling her back, but the menu options didn't work anymore.
I was more confused than ever. I felt like I
didn't know what was real anymore. That's a terrible place
to be, trust me. All I was sure of was
that I'd come into something very wrong when I was
a teen, and it was coming back. I didn't know

(01:13:01):
why it took a vacation or what it wanted. I
just wanted my life back to normal. After that, I
suddenly remembered the video file I left downloading on my
old computer. I checked and it had completely downloaded. I
wasn't sure I wanted to know what it was, but
I played it anyway. I knew what I was looking

(01:13:24):
at as soon as the video started. It was footage
of inside the Egypt. It had been a long time
but it hit me fast. There was no timestamp, The
footage was grainy and the tracking was off, but I
knew it. It looked like it was from a corner
security cam. There we all were sitting at our computers.

(01:13:49):
Strangely enough, our backs were to the monitors. We were
staring at a wall. I spotted myself in the group.
We just sat there, staring ahead. Nobody was moving or
saying anything. I couldn't make out what the computers were
doing behind us, but we weren't touching them. What were

(01:14:11):
we staring at? What were we doing? Why would I
do this? I couldn't remember these events at all. I
was the only one that ever looked away from the wall.
I kept glancing over behind the bar. It was hard
to tell, but I think I was afraid of something.
I looked frightened. I tried to make out what I

(01:14:32):
was looking at, but the tracking lines were in the way.
When they faded a little, I was able to make
it out. Someone was standing there in the shadows. Whoever
it was, at just that moment turned to look right
at the camera. It's like they knew I was watching.
I know that's crazy, but it creeped the heck out

(01:14:52):
of me. I shut the video down there, and I
don't plan to open it again. After that, I kept
researching the new way because there had to be something
to it. I was able to find a record that
mentioned the owner's name, Bernard K. Bush, the same name
as on the ICQ message. I looked for obituaries, white pages,

(01:15:15):
anything that could lead me to him. I didn't think
to look for missing persons cases, but I stumbled on
one anyway, an old homepage asking to help us find
uncle Brn. I emailed his niece, presumably from the address listed,
asking for more information. The page was made in the

(01:15:35):
year two thousand, so I didn't expect the email to work,
but it did. I got a reply the same day
asking me how I knew Uncle Berne. I wasn't sure
how to answer, but I decided to go with honesty.
I told her more or less what was going on,
leaving out the parts that would make me sound delusional.

(01:15:57):
This is what I got back. I'm going to put
this all in one message because I don't want us
to have to talk again. Uncle Brn was a good man.
He used to be a rabbi. He raised me after
my parents died in an accident. He was good with electronics.
He thought computers were the future. That's why he called
his company The New Way. He bought up all the

(01:16:17):
commercial space he could afford with his inheritance, all over
the country. It was more than he could handle, so
he just rented it out. Life was good. He kept
selling computers in his little shop. I helped when I
got home from school, and on weekends he kept bees
and I helped with that too. Really, life was good
until he married Connie in nineteen ninety four. He met

(01:16:40):
her during a visit to Europe. He said she worked
in the same orphanage she'd been raised in, and nobody
knew much else about her. She was a strange woman.
She didn't like me. She was into things that scared me.
I saw her make a homeless man cry by staring
at him. Animals would go quiet when she was around.
Sometimes she'd hide under my bed for hours, waiting for

(01:17:02):
me to go to bend at night. When I did,
she'd slide out and grab me. I'd scream and scream.
She'd walk away like nothing happened. She didn't laugh or
say anything. It wasn't a prank or joke. It was
something else. I didn't understand. I still don't. I started
sleeping on a bean bag chair in the basement. After that,

(01:17:22):
she'd often go into a corner of the room and
whisper to someone. There was nobody there, no phone or nothing.
She'd even get mad at whoever it was. Then she'd
go back to knitting. She was always knitting something. But
the things she'd knit were useless gloves with three fingers, socks,
but she'd seal up the ends so you couldn't wear them.

(01:17:44):
I didn't hate her, I was scared to death of her.
I don't know why she made Uncle Burn so happy.
I remember the day she started pressuring him to turn
his rental spaces into Internet cafes. She told him the
internet was the real future, and without last computers, she'd say,
we are the Internet. She made him get it at home,
even though it was really expensive. Then she had him

(01:18:06):
go to this website she said didn't really exist. I
remember that because it always made me nervous when she
talked about it. Uncle Byrne asked her who made it.
She said she had no idea, nobody did. She found
it already made, just like everyone else. She told him
it called to her it called to everyone like her.
At the time, I thought that sounded flaky. Now it

(01:18:28):
just gives me creeps. Uncle Barne changed after that. They
spent a lot of time on that website. I don't
understand it. There was nothing there. I looked over their
shoulders and it was all blank. But they saw all
sorts of things. And when the internet cafes started opening
and more people were involved, it was strange. They would

(01:18:48):
sit and stare into space, and strange things would happen.
Like I could swear. I heard a voice in my
modem when i'd dial up, and when I listened, it
was saying it hurts. It was all in my head.
Another time I got an email asking why wasn't I
able to remember. I don't know why that message upset
me so much twenty years ago, but I remember it

(01:19:10):
so vividly. One night, when I was alone with Uncle
Brne for once, I told him I wished things would
be like they used to be. He said, that's what
everyone wants, but it can't be. He leaned in close
and whispered, it talks tells us things. He told me
about how this is strange, and I didn't understand it.
But I'll try how human beings are set to be obsolete,

(01:19:33):
and then he do to upgrade for the new era.
He said, why two k if you remember that wasn't
going to affect computers like everyone thought they'd be fine.
It was going to change people. Either you evolved or
you wouldn't like what's coming. I didn't dare tell my
uncle burn that this was crazy. I couldn't hurt his
feelings like that, but I knew something bad was going

(01:19:54):
to happen. He and Connie went off to open their
internet cafes all over and I left home for Uncle
burn kept in contact until nineteen ninety nine. Then he
just disappeared. Connie too. I know some bad things happened
around those internet cafes, but it's not Uncle Burne's fault.
Please don't blame him. I had plenty more questions, and

(01:20:17):
I sent them to her. I never heard beck. That's
getting to be a real motif in my life. But
at least she gave me some answers, and it all
led right back to the whole. It had to be
the same mysterious website. It just had to be. I
figured if I ever wanted to know what was going on,
i'd have to go to the whole myself. I pulled

(01:20:40):
up the instructions and Angelica sent to me on how
to get there. I can't say I felt like I
was doing the right thing. I didn't. It felt ass
over tea kettle wrong, like there was something really terrible
just off screen in my memories. I knew it was there,
but I couldn't see it, so I welcomed the interruption.

(01:21:01):
When my phone rang, my neighbor was calling to tell
me the man in the bee costume was back. He said,
the man was standing in my front yard. I walked
over to the window and peeped out. It was nice
and toasty outside, but I felt my whole body breaking
into goosebumps. He was there under the street light, looking

(01:21:22):
right at the window with his insectoid eyes. I asked
my neighbor how long he'd been there. He said he
called me as soon as he saw it, and that
I should hang up and call the police. I started
to do that, but there was no point calling the police.
As soon as I hung up, he walked across the
road and into the woods. When hanging up, I received

(01:21:44):
a notification on my phone of an e mail from Ben.
There was no text, just a video file. I played
it right away. It started with him speaking to the camera.
He looked scared and like he hadn't had sleep in
About two days. I went into hiding, he said, his
voice shaking. Things just got too weird. Little stuff at first.

(01:22:06):
Then one night, like three am, a group of people
I've never seen before knock on my door. I didn't answer.
I watched them through the peepoles. They didn't move, they
didn't knock again. They didn't try to look in the people.
They just stood there staring at the door. They didn't
look homeless or crazy, just people, normal everyday people. I

(01:22:27):
called through the door that they had the wrong address.
They started laughing loud fake guffaws. Then they silently walked away.
Then I start getting calls where all I can hear
is a man growling like a dog on the other end,
and a few growley words like why and abercadabra. Must
have really gotten to me, man, because I started having fits.

(01:22:50):
I don't know what I do during these fits. I
know I upset a lady at the grocery store. Whatever
you got me into, it's bad juju like kgb illumina bad.
He pointed, the camera away from himself to a computer monitor.
When he was turning, I recognized the notepad on the desk,
the same one from his description. He was in that

(01:23:12):
basement storage locker with the Gopher site. I thought he'd
shut that thing down. There was an image on the screen,
updating every few seconds, but this one wasn't pointing at
my house like before. It was inside watch. He whispered
with each frame update. I saw a new shot of

(01:23:34):
the inside of my house. First the kitchen update, the
hallway update, my office door update, the door slightly ajar update,
the door opened. More update, entering my room update. Me

(01:23:55):
sitting at the computer, I could hardly breathe. I turned
around slowly, expecting to see someone there, but the video
wasn't live. Of course. When I turned around, the webcam
was just a black screen. Because of that, I was
able to make out the timestamp. It was tomorrow's date.

(01:24:15):
I'm sure someone just fiddled with the date, but that
only made it creepier, if that's even possible. Now I
had video evidence of breaking and entering, except nothing to
say who did it or why. I was losing confidence
in police altogether. The last thing Ben said on the

(01:24:36):
video is that he went ahead and traced that link
I gave him to the whole he was able to
get a specific address. I knew the address he gave
me very well, because it's a duplex apartment I grew
up in. Well, that didn't make any sense. Still, I
knew if I wanted to know what was happening, that's

(01:24:57):
where i'd have to go. My hometown isn't too far
from where I live now. I moved to go to college.
It's about a four hour drive away. My mom moved
to be close to me after Dad died, so I
rarely have a reason to go there. I heard from
Mom when they decided to abandon the duplexus for whatever reason.

(01:25:19):
They couldn't sell or rent them anymore and didn't have
the budget to renovate, so the town government is just
letting them rot. When I first heard that news, I
didn't care much. I try not to get sentimental, but
preparing to see the place again where I had so
many memories, it got to me. The days of watching

(01:25:42):
he Man in my fuzzy Star Wars pajamas, the days
of watching X Files with Mom, the days of lying
in bed all summer reading UFO books, Of course, I
realized it just be empty space now, nothing in common
with those memories other than a floor place. Those feelings vanished.

(01:26:03):
Soon after I arrived. I was able to sneak in
through the living room window in the back, just like
I used to do when I'd get home from school
and realize I forgot my keys. The moment my feet
hit the linoleum floor, the music started. It was low
and distorted at first, so I couldn't make out what
it was. It didn't matter. Someone had to be in there,

(01:26:27):
and that someone knew I was there. I waited for
a sound other than the music. Nothing. I felt a
little more courage so I started walking toward the stairs.
The music got louder, but no less distorted. The tune
was familiar, though I went up the stairs slowly, that's

(01:26:50):
where my old room was. By the time I got
to the top, I knew what I was listening to
Early in the morning by Vanity, Fair and Old, and
it was coming from a grimy old radio propped in
front of my bedroom door. That was odd because the
same song started playing again when it reached the end.

(01:27:13):
What radio station plays the same song twice in a row?
I switched the radio off. Doing that, I realized telegraphed
my exact location. I broke out into a cold sweat
for a moment, waiting for something to happen. But all
I heard now was a buzzing from in the room,

(01:27:34):
like a beehive. I noticed my name placard was still
on the door. Other people had lived there after Mom left.
I'm sure of that either those people chose to leave
my name on a door in their home or someone
had put it back. Either way was weird. I opened it.

(01:27:56):
I didn't and still don't know how to react to
what I saw inside. The room had been set up
to look exactly like it did when I was a teen,
not like it did after I left for college, or
even just before, like it did in nineteen ninety nine.
Down to the details, the Halloween lights around the desktop,

(01:28:19):
Fangoria posters on the walls, my old mister T pillow
on the bed. Someone had to have known my room
in intimate detail to have done this. It was insane. Me,
my mom, and Ricky are about the only ones. But
there were some details that were off At first that

(01:28:41):
was comforting, and the more I thought about it, they
seemed intentional, Like on the candy Man poster. It said
it starred Tiny Lister instead of Tony Todd. And the
wall was painted with the same style of stucco, but
the color was a shape or two off. Things like
that they were everywhere. That was more troubling to me

(01:29:05):
than the recreation itself. It was like it was recreated
in a bad dream, or it all meant something. I
found where the buzzing was coming from. At any rate,
it was the computer. It was running. I sat down
and activated the screen. Like the rest of the room,
the desktop was a faithful snapshot of nineteen ninety nine,

(01:29:30):
every icon just as I remembered. I couldn't find anything
running out of the ordinary. It was like being transported
to the past. That's what I noticed. The one thing
out of order with my desktop an icon way in
the corner, almost off the screen called Milk and Honey.

(01:29:51):
I'd never had any such file, I'm sure of that.
I started moving the mouse up to it. I felt
strangely afraid to open it. Before I could, the radio
started blasting early in the morning again. My heart almost stopped.
I looked behind me, expecting the worst. Nobody was there.

(01:30:14):
I got up to switch the radio off, but it
was still off. I checked the batteries. There were none.
That's when I realized the music wasn't coming from the radio.
I don't think it ever was. The conclusion to the
hidden web page by Jared Roberts is up next on

(01:30:37):
Weird Darkness. That's what I realized the music wasn't coming

(01:31:02):
from the radio. I don't think it ever was. I
wanted to get out of there. I have felt fear before.
I don't think I've ever known what dread feels like
before then, not really, but I had to find out
what milk and Honey was. It loaded a telnet connection.

(01:31:24):
I hadn't seen one of those in a while. The
connection worked because in a few seconds, an asky mountain
filled the window. I waited and waited for something to happen,
but nothing did, just the mountain. I tried submitting some inputs.
I even wondered if the connection died. I was going

(01:31:45):
to retry, but I got a phone call from Detective
Thorrault just then. Are you alone? He asked? I thought
that was strange, but I told him I believed I was,
but I wasn't sure. He asked where I was. I
told him He said, I needed to get out of
that house, slowly and calmly, get in my car and

(01:32:08):
drive back to him. His voice, I knew that sound.
It was controlled panic. Something was definitely wrong. I was
ready to listen, but I told him I wanted to
know what's going on. He said he had a gut
feeling about something and decided to check back with Angelica

(01:32:29):
to make sure everything was okay. Everything was not. He said,
that girl he put me in contact with two weeks
ago was not Angelica. They had no idea who that
woman was because no one's been able to find her.
The home she was in was apparently between renters, nobody

(01:32:50):
lived there at the time. All they found left behind
was a script detailing what she was supposed to say.
When she spoke to me, I was speechless and confused.
I had just readjusted my thinking to believe everything with
Angelica was a lie, and now that the truth about

(01:33:11):
the lie was also a lie? Did that make the
lie true? But it got worse. Detective the Rault said
he contacted Angelica's family again and asked more questions, a
lot more. She had every message I ever sent her,
printed out pictures of me, a map of my hometown

(01:33:33):
a doll, he said, in some of the pictures I
was clearly sleeping. Did I know of any such pictures?
I couldn't speak. He took my silence for a no,
and he was right. There's more, he said, but you
have to get back here now. Calmly. I thanked him

(01:33:53):
and prepared to do just what he said. That's what
I noticed. More had happened on the telnet screen. There
was a question up. Are you alone? Is that you?
I asked, but the detective had already hung up. I
didn't really think it was him anyway, I just hoped.

(01:34:14):
I responded, in the telling that client that I believed
I was alone. As soon as I did, sound started
coming from the computer speakers. It came out slow and garbled.
This message as a warning transmitted by diletons after twenty
one hundred break this device shut it all down, get out,

(01:34:35):
save yourself. I had no idea what it meant. Really,
I only remember it because it kept repeating, so I
was able to record it. Other than that, I couldn't
find anything strange on the computer. I unplugged it from
everything anyway, just in case. I got up, ready to

(01:34:56):
calmly exit like the detective said. I would have been okay,
I think, but I saw something, something that froze me
in place. There were strands of dark hair flowing from
under the bed. I just kept staring at them. Mentally,
I needed to make sure I was seeing right, that

(01:35:16):
it wasn't just threads. It was dark in that area
after all. My eyes adjusted slowly, and I realized I
wasn't just looking at hair. I had been looking right
into someone's eye for half a minute, and whoever it
was had just been staring right back the whole time.

(01:35:38):
I screamed, and I ran, jumping several steps at a
time out the front door. Sure it wasn't my proudest moment.
What matters is I lived. I don't know who that was.
I didn't want to find out. Knowing I was being
watched that whole time, it still felt like the eye

(01:35:58):
was on me. That pretty much ruined my memories of
that place forever. There was one thing to do in
town while I was there, the Egypt. I don't know
if I disconnected the hole by unplugging that computer, but
I still had to face the Egypt again. When I
got there. The parking lot of the post office was

(01:36:20):
completely empty. I parked in back in front of the
filthy old windows of what used to be in Internet cafe.
I didn't even have to break in. The glass in
the door had already been busted. I just had to
reach in and unlock. My hand started tingling as soon
as I reached it. I kept expecting someone or something

(01:36:43):
to grab my hand. When I got in, I was
shocked to see it hadn't really changed at all. Computers everywhere,
a sign up sheet on the counter, and no one there.
I started hearing some low voices. As soon as I did,
I looked around for a place to hide. The voices continued,

(01:37:05):
distant and muffled. It took me a moment to recognize
my own voice. It was the conversation I'd had with Angelica,
the part where she told me about being seen in
places she'd never been. It was coming from one of
the computers. I got closer to it and I could
see someone was up on the screen. I knew what

(01:37:27):
it was right away, the animated skeleton, gifts and links
to conspiracy theories and Heaven's Gate. Yeah, it was my homepage,
the one that was deleted almost two decades ago. I
never thought I'd see it again, but why who put
it there? On another computer, I saw a video of

(01:37:50):
a middle aged couple staring into the camera like they
were watching me, and a little girl peeking over their shoulder.
A woman said it chose you, and the man was
shaking his head slightly. He looked frightened. Then another computer
started playing a song. I recognized the sound of Vanity

(01:38:12):
Fair again kitchin a ride that made it click. I
just walked into a trap. I had to get out,
but I couldn't. These people started coming inside. I hadn't
even heard them, approaching A middle aged woman with long
black hair, well dressed, an older businessman. It looked like

(01:38:34):
a rough looking homeless guy. More and more people crowded
in without saying anything. They were moving toward me. I
tried talking to them, but their faces were blank, emotionless.
They didn't seem to hear. I ran into the bathroom
and closed the door behind me. It had a simple

(01:38:55):
turn the bolt lock, so I locked it. Pulled out
my phone to see if I could get the police,
but there was no signal. I started hyperventilating and had
to catch myself against the wall. That's when I remembered
the story about the guy knocking on the wall. Maybe
there weren't bricks on the other side. I knocked for
a hollow spot, and when I found one, I started

(01:39:18):
kicking a hole in the drywall. I tore the rest
of the hole open with my hands. There was space
back there. I used my phone's flashlight to look inside.
The space was about two feet in width to the
brick wall. I stepped inside. There were tons of floppy
disks stashed in there. It was crazy. I heard those

(01:39:39):
people breathing outside the door. They weren't trying to open
it or beat it down. They were breathing heavily against it.
Then I saw something moving under the doorframe. I thought
it was a finger slipping under, maybe trying to grab
a shoelace or something, but it was too pink, too wet.

(01:40:00):
It was a tongue. One of them was licking under
the door. That scared me enough to go deeper into
the space, stumbling over pieces of sheet rock, but there
was nowhere to go. While I waited for something, anything,
to happen, I noticed two things. One written above the

(01:40:20):
hole I just made on the inside were the words
the hole had been painted. The other it wasn't sheet
rock I was stumbling over. It was bones. I don't
know how long I sat there. Suddenly the breathing sounds stopped.
A few minutes later, Detective Thrault burst into the bathroom.

(01:40:41):
The door splintered at the first thrust. Those people could
have gotten to me if they'd wanted to. The detectives
said no one was out there when he arrived. While
he escorted me out, I saw all the computers were gone,
the guest book, all of it gone, But the bones
and floppy disks were there and very real. He said,

(01:41:06):
we'd have a lot to discuss. After I got away
from the police station, I came home and settled down
to try and relax, anything to rest my nerves. Just
as I settled, I got an email notification on my
phone that said please look and provided a link. I

(01:41:26):
didn't recognize the number, but since the link was to
a gelf University page, I figured it was Ben. The
link brought me to the webcam that Ben found weeks
ago on the Gopher Surfer. I was regretting my decision
to trust it already. Why couldn't they just leave me alone?
The frames kept updating, but nothing was happening until with

(01:41:49):
one update, I saw the trunk of my car was opening.
When the frame updated four seconds later, the trunk was
fully open and someone was hanging half out. I guess
I was mesmerized because I just kept watching, waiting for
the next frame update. Whoever it was he was standing

(01:42:10):
at my door. I went to my front door and
looked out the peep hole. No one was there. I
looked at my phone again to check the webcam. Someone
was or should be, standing right in front of it.
Maybe it was something that happened in the past. I
looked through the peephole again and it was blocked. It

(01:42:32):
took a moment to realize I was looking right into
someone's face, an awful, hate filled face. I took my
phone with me to my office and locked the door.
I heard my front doorknob rattle and then open. I
knew i'd locked it. Whoever it was walked in purposefully
right to the office, like they already knew where I

(01:42:55):
was going. I didn't have much confidence in the office lock.
I expected the door to fly open immediately. Instead, I
heard a weird, distant voice, just like when I spoke
to Ricky. It was like the weather radio tuned to
the wrong frequency. Why did you leave, it, asked? I

(01:43:16):
called nine one one. I heard the operator pick up,
but I couldn't speak. The door opened and this person
walked in. His face was hazy, but it was familiar.
He had some kind of weapon. He forced me to
get on my computer and go to the hole. He
walked me through each step. I didn't have a choice.

(01:43:40):
I did it. After all those years there it was
the same bland page that seemed to do nothing. But
I could feel it, like fingers poking in my brain.
It was like I was still in my office, but
that guy was gone. So were other things. I could

(01:44:02):
see things that were always there but weren't really there.
It was all the same, but just a little different.
I was still on the phone with nine to one one,
I realized. I tried to tell the operator that the
man was gone. Nothing I said was coming out right.
I kept telling the operator that I saw tot I

(01:44:24):
saw a putty cat, and the operator was telling me
that's the captain. He's a jackal, and he's not happy
with you. You ever heard of freaking, someone asked. It
was disorienting, but I knew right away. I was looking
at Ben, and I wasn't in my home. There was
a guy standing with Ben that I didn't recognize. I

(01:44:46):
asked if I was in Gulf and how I got there.
He assured me I was in a motel in my hometown.
He didn't trust technologically facilitated communication anymore, so he came
all the way to talk to me, and he introduced
his associate as Milky. He found him hold up in

(01:45:07):
a Catholic commune in rural Ontario. They said I was
in serious danger. Milky spoke then his voice was slurred.
He was aware of it because he apologized for it.
He went on to tell me what happened to him.
He said he'd been a part of this hacking community
for years. Nothing for profit, just good old fashioned mischief.

(01:45:30):
They especially liked messing with fringe and religious groups. They
started on IRC. When the Worldwide Web became the thing,
they migrated to a web forum. One day, a hidden
link appears on the forum. Other members try to scrub
it and insists that no one touch it. One of

(01:45:50):
the guys on the forum, one of their oldest members,
who fled the Soviet Union back in the seventies, said
he knew what it was. It was studied before, and
it was never ever supposed to be available to the public.
He'd seen what Stalin could do, what murderers could do,
and he wasn't scared. That was life. This thing scared him.

(01:46:13):
It sounded like a put on, Milky said, this guy
had a healthy sense of humor. But the guy swore
it was real. He said it started way back when
the first computers were being networked, the electrons and other
particles that are brought together. And heard it about in
making these connections leave empty spaces of nothing where they were.

(01:46:34):
It's like an anti net. And the more and more
we connect all over the world, the more this emptiness grows.
And what's so scary about that, someone on the forum asked,
He replied, just because his empty space doesn't mean there's
nothing in it. He wouldn't elaborate on that, no matter
how much they tried. He'd only tell them he'd seen

(01:46:57):
it for himself. Milkifigure. The guy didn't want to make
them curious about it. That failed. He was very curious
about it, more than ever, so he clicked the link.
He remembered being disappointed by it because it was just
a blank page. But after clicking it. He started to

(01:47:18):
notice strange things happening. He lost track of time. He'd
be told by acquaintances that he'd done things he had
no memory of doing, or even that he couldn't have
done because he was doing something else. This One time,
he heard his dog barking. It was three am. He
got up to see what was going on. The dog

(01:47:40):
was standing in the entrance to his living room, just
barking non stop. He expects to find a mouse cornered
in there, but he said, he remembers being so startled
he tried to scream, but no sound would come out.
Two men in business suits were sitting on his couch.
He immediately thought of a mob hit, but it's Canada.

(01:48:03):
What mob? He turned on the light. They didn't flinch.
They looked like normal businessmen. They were staring at the floor,
drinking Caprice's son. He told them to get out of
his house or he'd call the police. They just got
up and left. On the way out, one of them said,
you asked us to come and sit here. He never

(01:48:24):
saw those men again in his life. Another time, he
called his brother in Vancouver to wish him a happy birthday.
They had a pleasant chat and he hung up the
phone went about his business. About an hour later, it
hit him like a punch in the gut. His brother
died two years ago. He always called him on his birthday.

(01:48:46):
He just did it so reflexively, and when he got
an answer, it was like old times. Who the hell
was I talking to? Man, he asked. His stories sounded
a lot like the ones the slash real Angelica told
me about when I talked to her weeks ago. So
either I was speaking to the real Angelica then, or

(01:49:09):
maybe this wasn't the real Ben and Melky. I guess
I couldn't be sure about anything anymore. At least it
was less scary to believe they were real. During that time,
he said, he kept checking the whole He wanted to
figure it out. He thought it was controlling him. He
didn't remember the things he saw when he visited, but

(01:49:31):
he said the old Soviet was right. It wasn't empty
what he saw in there. His brain wouldn't let him remember.
I just wanted to know why all of this was happening.
Ben stepped in. He said, there's only one way he
can think of for this site, if it can be
called that, to influence a mind that way, it has

(01:49:54):
to be electromagnetic emissions. It must somehow be able to
read them off of us and produce them as well.
It's a technique that was experimented with as a form
of freaking, but never with biological systems. As to why
he didn't think there was any purpose, I was just

(01:50:14):
there and did what it did. It was the anti net.
It introduces emptiness, division, and chaos instead of connection. That's
just a byproduct of its existence, and its existence is
a byproduct of the Internet, like angry Facebook arguments sorry,
byproduct of the Internet. It was never supposed to be

(01:50:35):
something you could just navigate to. It was theoretical a
thing a few computer scientists knew about. Somehow someone leaked
it out there. It was all over. It was buried
on the Heaven's Gate website, hacking forums, occult sites. The
fringe of the Internet is where it moved. That was

(01:50:56):
a lot to take in, and I'm not sure how
much of it I really blow leave. On top of that,
apparently several hours had passed since the man made me
click to the hole. I suddenly remembered what the nine
to one one operator said to me. Who's the captain?
I asked. Milky was shaving. When I asked him, his

(01:51:20):
hand stopped moving. I saw in the mirror tears forming
in his eyes. He was visibly shaking Captain Meet from
the hole. He looks kind of like a dog. Then
he went back to shaving like nothing happened. Later, I
thanked Ben and Milky for saving me for risking so much,

(01:51:41):
really especially Ben and for trying to warn me with
the link into the webcam, but both of them denied
ever sending that text. They asked to see it, they
couldn't figure out where it came from. They checked the
link to the webcam too, it still worked. There was
the front of my home, my car with the trunk

(01:52:04):
still open. We watched it for a few frame updates
before Ben noticed someone was in the trunk. It was
dark and grainy, but that was definitely someone in there,
and I shuddered. When we all agreed that whoever that
person was, they were looking right at the camera or us,

(01:52:26):
we turned it off. I woke up in the middle
of the night. A few nights later, we decided we
didn't want to keep paying for the motel, so we
were crashing with my mom. By then, she was happy
for the company, and she was obviously worried about me.
She said I had to get a grip and not
let my life slip away. Just solve this thing. She said.

(01:52:49):
It was weird. It wasn't the sort of thing my
mom would say. Anyway. I woke up because I was
hearing whispering sounds. You'd think louder sounds would wake you,
but no, the whispers are the worst. I listened carefully.
I tried not to move. I wanted to hear where

(01:53:09):
they were coming from. It was a two way conversation.
I couldn't make out any of the content, though, just
a word here and there. I got up slowly and
looked toward the corner of the room. That's where I
thought the sounds were. It took a while from my
eyes to adjust. When they did, I saw Milky kneeling

(01:53:30):
in front of one of the electrical sockets. He'd whisper
something into it, then turn his head and wait. Whispers
came back. He saw me looking and said some trick. Huh.
I guess it was ventriloquism, But why do that alone
in the middle of the night, Because he was crazy.

(01:53:51):
I got out of bed and went out to the
kitchen for water. I could see someone standing out on
the front porch through the kitchen window. Figuring Ben couldn't
sleep either. I went out to ask him if Milky
was really okay, because well, he didn't seem to be.
I flicked on the outdoor light and stepped out. But
it wasn't Ben out there. It was Milky again. He

(01:54:14):
tried to tell me something about constellations, but I walked
back in. Something wasn't making sense. There was no way
he could have gotten out that fast, some trick, huh.
I went into the living room. The TV was on.
It was the episode of Seinfeld where George finds a
doll that looks like his mother. That made me uncomfortable,

(01:54:36):
so I changed to another channel. The program guide said
the Ninth Gate would be showing. I just liked that one.
But instead of the Ninth Gait, it was The Ten Commandments.
Very different movies, only one number off. Though seeing Heston's
Moses posturing with the Egyptians struck me. I never did

(01:54:58):
get to speak to Holy I let myself be distracted,
chased off for both and everything happening just seemed to
be getting more and more filled with coincidences and connections
that weren't adding up or added up too well, which
is the same thing if you ask me. I started

(01:55:18):
up my mom's computer. It still ran Windows XP. It
was Dad's computer and she didn't like change. I had
to download mIRC. As soon as I did, I connected
to f net. This time I was going to talk
to him. He wasn't hard to find, just a holes
and there he was, and at h one and one

(01:55:41):
he was the only one in there besides me. Not
a lot of bird flu fans. I guess. Before I
could send him a message, an email notification appeared on screen.
I guess Mom had it on auto start. The notification
caught my eye because it said it was from Detective
the rault subject information requested. I shouldn't have, but since

(01:56:05):
it was from the detective, I felt it had to
concern my situation. I clicked on it and read, as
we discussed, here is the documentation on the dental records
with the doctor's signature. The attachment document was about these
skeletal remains found in the Egypt. I felt a sudden

(01:56:26):
wave of horror because I thought I knew what was coming.
Dad's bones somehow got in there. But I was wrong.
They matched the skeleton up to my dental records. Mine.
I don't know who that man is. He went on,
but he is not your son. That was just absurd.

(01:56:49):
I knew my own mother for Pete's sake. I thought
about deleting the email, but that wouldn't do any good.
Then I started piecing things together, wondering if maybe I
really was dead, or maybe I was an impostor and
that's why I had memory lapses. Then I remembered I

(01:57:09):
was just about to message Holy Moses. Why did something
always happen when I was about to message him? It
had to be a trick. I went back to IRC
and sent Holy Moses a message, who are you? No response?
I got a sudden message from you four seven two

(01:57:30):
eight for you? Do you know where your mother is?
I ignore them. I sent another message to Holy Moses,
do you know what's going on? No response? U four
seven two eight for you messaged me again? Are you
sure she's okay? I took a chance on what I

(01:57:51):
remembered from Angelica's story. I sent Holy Moses a short
message the letter M. This immediately triggered a file transmission,
which I accepted. It was a video file it downloaded
in about five minutes. If Holy Moses was as old
as they claimed, this video would have taken a day

(01:58:14):
or two. Back then, the video was called Freedom Dot MOV.
Milky came in from outside, stood a few feet away
from me and stared at me. That was unnerving enough.
Then the pantry door started to open. Ben stepped out.
He had to have been sitting cramped in there all

(01:58:35):
that time. He also stood still and just stared at me.
My mom came in from outdoors. Why was she outdoors?
And where she joined Milky and Ben? What's going on?
I asked them. They didn't speak. I felt the tension

(01:58:55):
in the air and the assurance that something would happen.
The suspense stillness was getting worse than anything they could
do to me. My heart was beating so fast, and
I'd been hearing a dripping sound for a minute or
two without paying attention. Too much was going on now?
I looked to where the dripping sound was coming from.

(01:59:18):
I saw fat beetles crawling out from Milky's sleeves, over
his hands and dropping to the floor. What was going on?
I think? I was so afraid I couldn't feel it anymore.
Slowly I grabbed a loose USB dongle, attached it to
my phone and to the computer. I'm surprised that old
computer could read the phone, but it did. While they

(01:59:40):
stared at me, I transferred the video file to my phone.
I unplugged the dongle, took my phone and ran to
the bathroom, where I locked myself in. I heard feet
shuffle up to the door and stop there. I turned
on the shower to drown out sound, and then started
watching the video. The webcam being used was severely damaged

(02:00:03):
by the looks of it, but I could make out
a very sickly looking older man. The audio was distorted
it and I had the shower running, so I had
to start it over and up the volume. The man
said he'd been trying to warn me the dileton distortion
from the hole allows him to send messages during brief windows.

(02:00:25):
If I'm listening to this, he said, I am in
the hole and have been for a while. Other things
are also in here. While he spoke, I kept hearing
screams in the background of the recording, some sounded closer
than others. He said, these things don't want me going anywhere.
I need to get out before it's too late. He knows,

(02:00:48):
he said, because he's me. The last thing he said
before the video ended abruptly was the birds and the bees.
I couldn't leave through the door, so I pulled up
the blind to leave through the bathroom window. I almost
shrieked when I saw my mother's face pressed up against

(02:01:09):
the window outside. I was trapped. I thought about pushing
through anyway, but I couldn't hit my mother. I could
hit Ben or Milky if I had to, but not
my mother. So I took the door. Nobody was there.
That just made me worry about where they really were.

(02:01:29):
I stepped outside and still nobody there. I hurried to
my car before Mom could come around from the back.
Then I heard rapid footsteps. Ben was running right toward
me from way down the street. Stop hurting me, he shouted,
But he didn't look in pain. He looked in a rage.
I got in my car and started backing up. When

(02:01:52):
he got to me, he was pounding on the windows,
still screaming. I drove straight back to my home, leaving
them all behind. The only explanation could be that I'm
in the hole, whatever that means. Because there was no
other way. Ben and my mom would act like that.
But when did that happen? And what does that even mean? Anyway,

(02:02:16):
Before I even stepped inside my home, I knew something
was wrong. Waves of something just bad, pure bad, were
hitting me. I opened my front door. Everything looked normal.
I started turning on all the lights, and I grabbed
a knife from the kitchen drawer. Then I saw them,

(02:02:37):
two men in bee costumes, sitting on my treadmill, looking
at the floor, not moving, almost like they were stuffed
or forgot where they were. What do you people want
from me? I said, I kept a tight grip on
the knife. They stood up. They both looked down the

(02:02:59):
hall toward my office. I followed their gaze but saw
nothing down there. After a few seconds of wondering what
they saw, I heard the song start early in the morning.
While I was looking down the hall, they were already
heading out the door. I decided to follow them because

(02:03:20):
whatever started that music gave me a worse feeling than them.
As I stepped out the door, I'm sure I heard
a dog growling behind me. I followed them across the
road and into the woods. I turned my phone flashlight
on to be able to follow them. It's like they
could see in the dark. The way they navigated the woods.

(02:03:42):
The deeper we went, the more uneasy I became. They
just seemed to keep going and going. But the deeper
we went, the more I started to hear birds. Never
even thought of it before, but I hadn't heard any
birds for a long time, weeks at least, or locusts,

(02:04:03):
or any normal springtime sounds. The more I followed the bees,
the more I heard the birds, until then got loud enough.
I figured we must be under a massive collection of nests.
I kept following them until it got too loud to bear.
And then it sounded like machinery, like elevators. There was

(02:04:26):
a machine hidden out in the middle of nowhere. I
followed them inside then and then I was back in
my office, sitting at my desk, slumped over my keyboard.
The corner of my mouth was wet. I must have
blacked out. I picked myself up. It felt like I

(02:04:49):
was just waking up from a deep sleep. The room
was bright, sunlight, I could hear birds chirping up a
frenzy outside screensaver was on. When I shifted the mouse
just to see what time it was. There was an
email from the globetrotter dot net Angelica. It read pretty intense. Huh,

(02:05:14):
you could spend the rest of your life in there.
I sat disoriented for a while before realizing I had
to urinate, eat, and drink. When I had done those things,
I looked around my home for clues. The knife I
had taken was back where it belonged. My old computer
was put up in its box. I called my mom

(02:05:36):
to ask if she was okay. She didn't remember any
of the events from the previous night. That's what I remembered.
The video on my phone from Holy Moses. I checked
and it was still there. I knew I wasn't dreaming.
I played it back. Here would be my evidence. The

(02:05:59):
video was two minutes of distorted audio and video. In
all the distortions, no recognizable sounds or images. That was
a few weeks ago. It's taken me some time to
get calibrated to reality. Nothing strange has happened since. I

(02:06:19):
can't explain what happened. Maybe I had a psychotic break.
It was under a lot of stress at work. Maybe
someone was gaslighting the hell out of me. Maybe there
really is a secret website that uses electromagnetic waves to
mess with your mind. I'm just glad it's over. I'm

(02:06:42):
glad to be going back to work like a regular
person making banana smoothies, not thinking about sinister internet cafes.
I really do remember the Egypt and the whole, and
it's like reality all twisted. I'll just end by saying

(02:07:04):
I don't think I'll be feeling any nostalgia for the
old days of Internet for a good long while. The
only problem I'm having is whenever I'm trying to sleep,
I keep remembering the whole nightmare and asking myself, am
I still inside? But then what difference would it make?

(02:07:38):
Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share
it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or
strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do.
The creepypasta story the hidden webpage was written by Jared Roberts.
I placed a link to the story in the show notes,
along with a link to Jared roberts Reddit, where you

(02:07:59):
can read more of his creepy stories. Weird Darkness is
a production and trademark of Marler House Productions. Copyright Weird
Darkness and now that We're coming out of the Dark
I'll leave you with a little light Proverbs fifteen, verse four.
The tongue that brings healing is a tree of life,
but a deceitful tongue brushes the spirit and a final thought,

(02:08:24):
train your mind and heart to see the good in everything.
There's always something to be thankful for. I'm Darren Marler.
Thanks for joining me in the weird darkness.

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