Enter The Dark

by Chris Thomas

  Jarvis went over to the furthest van and motioned for the window to be opened. He leant in to tell the driver the plan and request that they hold their position for the time being.

  ‘Suits me,’ said the driver. ‘This bloke’s absolutely sparko anyway.’

  The driver-side door of the other van opened and out stepped a large-set man, well over six foot tall, with shoulders like an ox. Out of the passenger side climbed a smaller, older man. He walked purposefully over towards the three men and held out his hand.

  ‘Alistair, good to see you. We have your merchandise.’ He spoke with a distinguished, gentlemanly tone.

  ‘Thank you, Eric,’ replied Alistair, as he shook the man’s hand.

  Eric Wolfe, ex-security services and an expert in breaking and entering, smiled back. The shock of grey hair swept back over his head revealed wrinkles across his tanned forehead. Years of experience from his work in covert operations had found its perfect partner in a man of Alistair Goodfellow’s moral standing. And with the resources now at his disposal, his new company had become a trusted part of the Brotherhood.

  ‘I trust you took care of her?’ Alistair asked.

  ‘Of course,’ came the almost indignant reply. ‘I would have considered it a grave dereliction of duty if she had arrived here with even a hair on her head harmed.’

  ‘Indeed, how rude of me. And the tag?’

  ‘It worked like a charm. That kid really does know his stuff. As far as the police are concerned, she’s probably just sat on her fat lazy arse watching television. I was tempted to attach it to one of her cats, but they’d probably become suspicious if they traced her to a neighbour’s flowerbed.’

  The men laughed and motioned to the large man to open the back of the van. He reached inside and grabbed the pasty, chubby arm that was sticking out from underneath a blanket. As the woman struggled, he leant further inside and, with an almighty grunt, heaved her rotund frame out through the back doors.

  ‘Christ al-fucking-mighty. I think my back’s gone,’ the man groaned, his grasp of English belying the thick Eastern European accent with which he spoke.

  ‘Language!’ shouted Alistair. ‘There’s a lady present.’

  ‘Lady my arse. You should have heard some of the language coming out of her mouth all the way here; it might as well have been a rugby-playing squaddie in the back,’ he replied, as he handcuffed her arms behind her back.

  The woman stood fixed to the spot, shivering, the hessian sack still on her head, cloaking her in darkness.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she stuttered. ‘Where am I? Who are you people?’

  ‘Slow down, slow down,’ laughed Alistair. ‘So many questions. Well, it’s quite simple you see. We’re the Brotherhood of the Righteous. You’re at our house. And you’re going to be the very special guest on our little gameshow.’

  She started crying, and a trickle of warm wetness ran down her bright pink jogging bottoms.

  ‘Why? I didn’t do nothing. You can’t do this.’

  ‘My dear, we’ll take good care of you until it’s time. After that though, well, I can’t promise you anything,’ said Alistair, patting her on the head. ‘Take her to the holding room in the east wing, but do not remove the cover from her head until she’s there.’

  The large man took her by the arm and marched her into the house.

  ‘Pathetic,’ said Alistair, shaking his head. ‘Even after everything she’s done, she’s still utterly devoid of any comprehension of anything. As though this is all just one massive mistake and she’s the victim.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Jarvis, nodding in agreement. ‘I think she might attract quite a large audience though.’

  The empty van drove off to the workshop at the side of the house, where it would be resprayed and its number plates changed.

  ‘Right, let’s have a look at our second volunteer.’

  Jarvis motioned to the other vehicle, which reversed to meet them. Out of the front seat climbed another man with slicked back grey hair, almost identical to Eric.

  ‘Stan my man, good to see you,’ said Alistair, holding out a hand.

  Eric’s twin brother, Stan, reciprocated the handshake. Along with his brother he had vast experience in covert and ‘black’ operations from their time serving together in the security services. Being twins also added an extra dimension to their ability to deceive and evade, something which was very useful in the line of work in which they now found themselves.

  ‘Evening, boss,’ he replied. ‘We’ve got ourselves a feisty one here.’

  ‘Is he secure?’

  ‘Of course he is, what do you take me for?’

  ‘OK, let’s get him out.’

  Two more burly goons opened the back doors to the transit van, which was the cue for the prisoner inside to start thrashing around wildly, kicking his legs at everything and nothing. Once they eventually managed to grab a leg each, the two men pulled the body from the van. The large passenger landed face first in the gravel and shouted a muffled profanity through the sack that covered his face. Once a knee was planted firmly in the small of his back, he stopped thrashing around and let out a painful cry.

  Alistair knelt down next to him and caught sight of the fastenings that held his wrists together.

  ‘Cable ties? I thought you said he was secure,’ he asked, dubiously.

  ‘Of course he’s secure,’ responded Stan. ‘There is nothing, repeat nothing, in this world that cannot be secured with cable ties.’

  ‘Well I get that cables can, obviously. But this is a rather violent six foot stocky man we’re talking about. Couldn’t you have used cuffs like a normal person?’

  ‘God, you’re so boringly practical, aren’t you?’

  ‘How do you think I got all this? Use cuffs next time, please. We need to keep them apart, so put this one in the north wing. And put some bloody cuffs on him,’ said Alistair, adopting a more managerial tone.

  The two men hoisted him to his feet and made sure they kept a firm grip on both his arms. Stan led the way into the house.

  ‘It really is freaky how similar they look, isn’t it?’ said Jarvis, as he sidled up to Alistair. ‘Which one do you think is the evil twin? There’s always an evil one.’

  Alistair looked him in the eye. ‘They both are.’

  As the remaining van started up and drove around the side of the house to join the first, the two men walked back into the house and shut the huge wooden front doors behind them.

  ‘Gather everyone in the drawing room, Jarvis,’ said Alistair. ‘I think a celebration is in order.’

  8

  ‘Are we going to talk about this?’ asked Ellie, as she slid a plate of pork chop, peas, and potatoes in front of Joe.

  ‘Talk about what?’ replied Joe, taking a mouthful of cabernet sauvignon and trying hard to look as though he had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘God, you can be so fucking annoying sometimes. You know precisely what. We’re supposed to be getting married in a couple of months and you haven’t spoken to me for the best part of a week.’

  ‘What, when you stormed out of the house and didn’t come back until the following day you mean?’ said Joe, as though he had only just that second worked out what she meant.

  ‘You can’t talk. You’d only just stumbled back into the house from not coming home that night as well,’ Ellie replied. ‘And anyway, it’s not as if—’

  She was cut off by the familiar, yet all of a sudden infuriating, beep beep, beep beep, of a text message arriving on Joe’s phone. She sighed and looked away as Joe picked his phone up and held it in front of his face. He sniggered at whatever it was he had just read, put the phone back on the table, and took a mouthful of chop.

  As Ellie chased a potato around the plate with her fork, she raised her gaze to meet his.

  ‘As I was saying, it’s not as if I haven’t mentioned this to you on god knows how many occasions. You know exactly how I feel about the amount you go out with Billy an
d those other dickheads that you call friends.’

  ‘Don’t call them dickheads. And don’t try and blame everything on Billy like you always do. It’s not like he’s my boss.’

  ‘But he is a tosser. I can’t believe it’s simply coincidence that every time you don’t manage to make it home, you’re always with him,’ she replied, trying to hide her increasing frustration by keeping a relatively soft tone. ‘I’ve asked so many times for a bit of respect—’

  ‘I do fucking well respect you,’ he protested, but the severity of Ellie’s crossed arms and pout suggested she believed otherwise.

  Beep, beep! Beep, beep!

  ‘Sorry,’ said Joe, picking up his phone once more and laughing again at the new text.

  ‘See what I mean? It’s just ludicrous. It’s like trying to have a civilised conversation with a demented five-year-old.’

  ‘What?’ replied Joe, incredulously. ‘You get texts way more than me.’

  ‘Yes, but I ignore them when we’re trying to have a reasonably important conversation about the state of our relationship. Anyway, it’s not just the going out thing. You seem to be spending more and more time in the garage.’

  ‘Jeez, that’s what we had it converted for, isn’t it? To spend time in it?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied. ‘But whenever you’re in there, you’re sat at the computer desk. If I come in you quickly shut whatever windows you had open. And I looked up that TOR browser thing you installed the other day. Jesus Christ, Joe! That’s what fucking paedos use!’

  ‘Oh, so now you think I’m a paedo as well then?’ said Joe, in the belief that, if he slammed his cutlery down either side of the plate in order to ram home the sheer indignation that he felt, this argument was in the bag.

  Weirdly, it didn’t seem to have worked. ‘Well, are you?’

  ‘Of course I’m fucking not.’

  ‘So what the hell do you use it for then?’

  ‘Just stuff.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Yes stuff.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He knew it was true; paedophiles did use the browser, as did drug dealers, supposed hitmen, human experimenters, the worst kind of conspiracy theorists, and the odd cannibal. But he used it to explore the boundaries of creativity, to experience the visceral head-fuck of what passed for entertainment down there. He’d seen independent horror movies that made the latest Hollywood blockbuster scary films seem like a Jane Austen novel. The CCTV footage he could access was of real life suicides, murders, accidental deaths, rather than teenagers crushing their testicles on railings after falling off a skateboard or cats falling into a fish bowl. He was opening his eyes and opening his mind to real life and real creativity. The way he saw it, this was only for the truly enlightened. The Google-fed zombies of the comfortable surface world were probably not ready to have their minds messed with in this manner. No matter how hard he could try and explain it to Ellie, he doubted she would ever understand.

  ‘Just, you know, stuff. I doubt you’d ever understand.’

  ‘So porn then.’

  ‘If that’s what you want to believe then fine.’ He was getting bored of this now.

  ‘Want to believe?’ she stressed, sarcastically. ‘How could you possibly think that I want to believe you are watching anything on this ‘deep web’? It makes my skin crawl.’

  Beep, beep! Beep, beep!

  ‘Aaaargh!’ she screamed, clutching her hair in both hands and then grabbing Joe’s phone before he could pick it up. ‘Great, it’s Billy. ‘Got some ales. Be round about nine-ish. See you then you big fucking poof’,’ she read aloud. ‘Well if he’s coming here, I’m going out. That way you two can cuddle up in front of the computer, jerking each other off to whatever filth you’re watching on your new nonce channel.’

  She threw the phone in his lap and collected up the half-eaten plates of food from the table. Joe placed the phone on the table and rubbed his eyes with his hands.

  ‘Look, this is ridiculous. I promise you, I am not a paedophile, nor would I ever look at that sort of thing. If you really think that I am – no, actually – if you really think that there is even the slightest possibility that I might be, then you shouldn’t be fucking marrying me,’ he said, quietly.

  At last a breakthrough. No-one in their right minds would either want to knowingly marry a sex-offender or believe that they were stupid enough to marry one without knowing it. Ellie put the plates on the worktop then came and sat on his lap.

  ‘No, of course I don’t think you are. I just read some pretty horrible things about that deep web stuff. And we seem to be spending less time together. We need to make more of an effort together, if we’re going to make this marriage work. But if he’s coming here tonight, I’m going round to Helen’s.’

  She snuggled into him and he reciprocated her cuddle by rubbing her back with his right hand. He looked over her shoulder, picked up the phone in his left hand and, as carefully and quietly as he could, texted back,

  Cool.

  SHE FELL on top of him in a sweaty naked heap, breathing heavily as he lay there making circles on her back with his finger.

  She rolled off to lie next to him.

  ‘I love you,’ she whispered in his ear.

  ‘I love you too,’ he replied, staring, exhausted, at the ceiling.

  After a few minutes of lying next to each other in restful silence, she sat upright and grabbed her dressing gown from beside the bed.

  ‘Hopefully that will take care of any need you had to go looking at grown up material with Billy later.’ She leant down and kissed him on the forehead. ‘I’m going for a shower.’

  As she walked out of the bedroom, Joe picked up his phone from the bedside table and pressed in his four digit passcode, 8008. It always made him chuckle inwardly. He swiped across to Apps and then across two more screens until he got to File Commander. He opened the app and swiped across another screen until he found the file called Work. Pressing on Work, he scrolled past the PDF documents and spreadsheets, a couple of blank screens, until he arrived at the grey and purple onion icon for OrBot, the mobile app instance of Tor. As he clicked on it, he noticed a small red circle with a 1 in it bobbing up and down at the top of the screen. He had synced his mobile home page to a deep web message board that he had begun visiting. It was like a marketplace where people could advertise their sites, services, and worse. It also provided forums where people could post links to other like-minded visitors. He had once made the mistake of inadvertently clicking on a forum called ‘True Love Doesn’t Wait’. It only needed the first two or three thread titles for him to realise that this wasn’t somewhere he really wanted to be.

  He dragged the red circle down. Usually, the icon would indicate a private message or a profile update or something similar. But in this world it meant that a new post had been added in the main forum. As the forum opened up on his screen, the new thread flashed at the top, entitled ‘TRATD’. He clicked into the thread and it simply posted a link, http://tratd39058nfdn.onion, with a statement, Access 1 XBT.

  He quickly exited and loaded up Google, typing in XBT. The top result was from a currency exchange website with the title ‘XBT – Bitcoin rates, news and tools’. Clicking on the link, it brought up a page with a drop down menu to convert bitcoins into various other currencies. After selecting GBP – British Pound, he pressed the Convert Now button and up came the result, 1 XBT = 667.92GBP.

  ‘Bugger me,’ he whispered to himself. It seemed a lot. But for some reason the idea of spending over six hundred pounds to access an anonymous website that he had absolutely no idea about was still tempting.

  He switched back to the thread, which had already received close to thirty replies, mostly simply stating Done.

  Hearing the shower turn off and the door to the bathroom open, he quickly took a screenshot of the thread, closed everything down on his phone, and put it back on the bedside table.

  Ellie sauntered back into the bedroom with
a towel wrapped up around her body, drying her short blonde bob with another. Joe stood up and collected another towel from the radiator. Before he could walk out of the room, Ellie stood in the doorway, blocking his exit. She reached up and grabbed the frame, allowing the towel to slip off on to the floor. Joe had always loved her body, and her recent interest in yoga had made it even more toned and desirable.

  ‘Just remember,’ she said, staring straight at him. ‘This is yours. It should be all the ‘adult entertainment’ you ever need!’

  Joe lassoed his towel around her waist, dragged her from the door, and pressed her naked body against his.

  ‘Get off me,’ she protested, feebly. ‘I’m all clean and you stink.’

  ‘You love it really,’ he replied, softly. ‘Go on, you’d better get ready. My dickhead friend will be here soon and I’m sure Helen’s already opened a bottle of prosecco that’ll be warm before she’s had the chance to tell about her latest failed relationship with someone from work.’

  ‘Don’t be nasty about her,’ replied Ellie. ‘Come to think of it though, she did mention something about a bloke called Tim from her accounts department.’

  ‘Well there you go,’ said Joe, as he slid past her. ‘I’m going for a shower. Have a nice evening.’

  They kissed a final time before going their separate ways for the evening. But as soon as she heard the shower start up and the door to the cubicle close, Ellie picked up his phone and swiped the screen to unlock it. She always cringed at his immaturity every time she put his passcode in. The phone lit up with the screenshot he had taken of the forum.

  Access 1XBT,.onion. None of this made any sense. She grabbed her own phone and quickly brought up a new Google page. Slowly, she started typing the web address into the search field, double checking the seemingly random string of letters and numbers. Pressing the magnifying glass icon, she waited for the buffering to stop. The Wi-Fi was always rubbish up in the bedroom. After a couple of seconds, the result appeared on the screen: Your search - http://tratd39058nfdn.onion - did not match any documents.

  She thought it was a little weird, but was at least relieved not to find some hideous, unimaginable website at the end of it. After dressing, she left the house slightly more relaxed about what he may or may not be getting up to.