I Should Not Have Clicked The Link My Best Friend Sent Me. He Disappeared Three Days Later. That Was Two Weeks Ago And Whatever Found Me On That Website Has Been Following Me Ever Since.

I am posting this from a McDonald’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I live in Portland, Oregon. I have been driving for six days and I have slept in my car four of those nights and in a motel the other two and I checked into the motel both times under a fake name and paid cash and kept the curtains closed and left before sunrise and it didn’t matter because both times when I pulled out of the parking lot there was a grey sedan parked across the street that had not been there when I arrived and that pulled out after me and followed me for exactly eleven miles before disappearing and I do not know what the eleven miles means but it has been exactly eleven miles both times and the consistency of that is somehow worse than if it were random.

I need to tell this from the beginning because the beginning is the part that explains everything and I have been driving for six days with nothing but time to think and I understand now in a way I didn’t at the start exactly what I clicked on and exactly what it cost me and exactly what it is that has been following me since.

I just don’t know how to make it stop.

My best friend’s name is Joel Crane. We have been friends since we were eleven years old – the kind of friendship that gets built in childhood and becomes load-bearing without you noticing, the kind where the other person knows things about you that you have never said out loud because they were there when the things happened. Twenty two years of that. He is the person I call when something goes wrong and he is the person who calls me and we have never in twenty two years gone more than four days without talking.

It has been seventeen days since Joel sent me the link.

It has been fourteen days since Joel answered his phone.

His apartment has been empty since day eleven according to his neighbour Mrs. Farrow who has a key and checked when I called her from somewhere in Nevada and asked her to look. His car is still in the parking garage. His phone goes straight to voicemail now – not ringing out, not unanswered, straight to voicemail, which means it is either off or destroyed or somewhere without power and I do not let myself think too hard about which of those is most likely.

The police have a missing persons report. They have not called me back. I do not know if that is because they have nothing to report or because something has happened to the report itself and I know how paranoid that sounds and I know how paranoid all of this sounds and I also know what I have seen with my own eyes for the past two weeks and paranoid does not feel like the right word for it anymore.

Joel sent me the link on a Tuesday evening at 9:47 PM. I know the exact time because I still have the message and I have looked at it so many times the timestamp is memorised. The message said only: bro you need to see this. don’t tell me you’ve already found it. Which is exactly the kind of message Joel sends – no context, no explanation, assuming I will follow along because I always follow along, because that is the dynamic of twenty two years and he is usually right.

The link was a Tor address. A string of random characters ending in .onion which is the extension for dark web sites that only resolve through the Tor browser. I want to be clear that this was not unusual for Joel to send me – we are both in tech, we have both been casually curious about the dark web in the way that people in tech sometimes are, we have both used Tor for legitimate privacy purposes and occasionally for the slightly-less-legitimate purpose of seeing what was out there. We had sent each other strange corners of the internet for years. I opened Tor and typed in the address without significant hesitation because Joel had sent it and Joel had good taste in strange things and I trusted him.

I should not have trusted the link. I should not have trusted that the link came from Joel. I should have called him first and asked what it was and waited for his answer before I clicked anything. I did not do any of those things.

I clicked.

The site loaded slowly the way Tor sites do – the anonymised routing adding lag, the progress bar moving in fits and starts. While it loaded I noticed the address bar. The string of characters that made up the URL was different from what Joel had sent me. Not slightly different – completely different, an entirely new string of characters, as though the link had redirected mid-load to a different address. I almost closed it then. I remember thinking I should close it. I remember deciding to see what it was first and then close it.

The site that loaded was simple. Dark background, white text, a layout so stripped down it felt like something from the early internet – no images, no formatting beyond basic paragraph breaks, a single column of text that extended further down the page than I initially expected. At the top, in slightly larger text that served as a header, were four words:

YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED.

I want to tell you I closed it immediately. I did not close it immediately. I read the text below the header because I am a person who reads things and because some part of my brain had already filed this under weird dark web art project or elaborate creepypasta or any of the other categories that let you keep looking at something you should stop looking at. The text was dense and I did not read all of it. What I read was enough.

It said that the site had been expecting me. It said my name – my full name, first and last, which I had not given – and my IP address which should have been masked by Tor and was not and I do not understand how it was not. It said that I had been brought here by someone who had already completed their part and that the completion of their part had cost them something that could not be returned. It said that I had thirty seconds to close the browser before the selection became binding.

I counted. I closed it at twenty two seconds. I am certain of this because I counted out loud and my roommate heard me and asked what I was doing and I said nothing and closed my laptop.

I called Joel. He didn’t answer. I texted him – dude what was that link – and he did not respond. I told myself he was asleep. I told myself I would talk to him in the morning. I went to bed and lay in the dark and thought about the thirty seconds and told myself twenty two was enough margin and eventually I slept.

I was wrong about twenty two seconds. I was wrong about the margin. Whatever the threshold was it was somewhere above twenty two and below thirty and I sat in exactly the wrong place in that window and the selection became binding anyway and I understand now that the thirty seconds was not a genuine offer of escape but a performance of one – something that looked like a door and functioned like a cage.

The first thing appeared four days after I clicked the link.

I need to describe the website more fully first because the first thing that appeared was something I had seen on it and the connection only makes sense if you understand what was on the site in the eight seconds between the header and my closing the browser.

Below the text I described – the name, the IP address, the thirty seconds – the page continued with what I can only describe as a catalogue. Images, small and low resolution, arranged in a grid below the text. I saw maybe two rows of them in the eight seconds I was scrolling before I closed the browser. They were photographs of locations – outdoor locations, specific places, shot from the ground level in the style of someone documenting rather than composing. A parking lot at night. A stretch of highway with a particular overpass. A field with a single tree. A motel exterior with a lit vacancy sign. Each image had a small caption below it in the same white text but I was closing the browser before I could read them and I caught only fragments.

What I caught was enough.

The parking lot appeared on day four. I came out of my building in the morning and stopped walking and stood on the pavement because the lot across the street – a lot I have walked past every day for two years, a lot I know the way you know any incidental piece of your neighbourhood – looked exactly like the photograph. The angle. The light. The specific arrangement of parked cars and painted lines and the dumpster in the far left corner. It was not similar to the photograph. It was the photograph, real and three dimensional and present in a way that made the two years of walking past it feel suddenly like preparation rather than coincidence.

I took a photograph of it on my phone. I still have it. I look at it next to the fragment of memory I have of the image on the site and they are the same image in every detail that I can compare.

I called Joel. Straight to voicemail. First time that had happened.

The highway overpass appeared on day six.

I was driving to work – my normal route, a route I have driven for three years – and I came around a curve and the overpass was in front of me and I recognised it before I had consciously processed why and I hit my brakes hard enough that the car behind me laid on his horn and I sat in the middle of the road for a moment with my hands on the wheel and my heart doing something unpleasant in my chest.

Same concrete. Same weathering pattern on the support columns. Same gap in the guardrail on the right side that I had never consciously noticed before but that I had seen in the photograph and that was there, real, exactly as photographed. I drove under it without stopping because stopping felt like the wrong thing to do on an overpass on a Tuesday morning and because I was beginning to understand that the locations in the catalogue were not random locations. They were locations I went to. Locations that were part of my life already. The site had not photographed some abstract set of places. It had photographed my world specifically and arranged the images in a grid and I had seen them and now I was seeing them again in sequence and I did not know what happened when I had seen them all.

I called Joel’s neighbour Mrs. Farrow that night. She went and knocked on his door. No answer. She said his lights were off. I told her I was worried and asked if she could check again in the morning. She said she would.

The next morning she called me and said the apartment was empty. Not just unlocked and empty – empty in the way that suggested rapid departure, personal items still present, no note, no indication of planning. Empty the way a place goes empty when something takes a person rather than the person taking themselves.

I booked a flight to Portland for that afternoon and then I sat at my kitchen table for a long time thinking about the catalogue and the locations and the sequence and I cancelled the flight and I packed a bag and I got in my car and I started driving away from Portland instead of toward it because something in my gut said that the flight would land me somewhere the catalogue expected me to be.

That was six days ago.

I have seen three more locations since I started driving.

A rest stop in northern California on day two – the specific configuration of the vending machines and the concrete pillars and the particular quality of the overhead lighting at night. I had stopped to use the bathroom and I walked in and stopped walking and stood in the fluorescent light for a long time before I went back to my car and drove for another three hours before I stopped again.

A stretch of highway in Nevada on day four with a rock formation on the right side that I recognised mid-drive and accelerated past without stopping, pushing the car to ninety for the next twenty miles until the formation was far enough behind me that I could no longer see it in the mirrors.

A gas station in Utah on day five where I had stopped for fuel and walked to the pump and looked up and recognised the canopy and the particular angle of the building and the dead tree in the lot to the left and I pumped my gas without going inside and did not use my card because my card has my name on it and I paid cash and got back in the car and drove.

Each time I recognise a location I have the same experience – a full body recognition that arrives before conscious thought, a drop in body temperature, a certainty that I am standing inside a photograph I have already seen. Each time I drive away. Each time the grey sedan appears behind me within the hour and follows me for exactly eleven miles and disappears.

I have not been able to determine who is driving the sedan. The windows are tinted beyond legal limit. It maintains enough distance that I cannot read the plates. I have tried slowing to force it to pass me and it slows with me. I have tried pulling off the highway suddenly and it pulls off behind me and sits. It has never approached me. It has never done anything except follow for eleven miles and leave. I have begun to think the eleven miles is not arbitrary – that there is a geography to this the same way there is a geography to the catalogue, a set of rules I don’t have access to that governs the distance it can come and the distance it maintains and what happens when those distances change.

I do not want to find out what happens when those distances change.

I have been trying to find the website again since day three. I want to read the full text beneath the header. I want to see the complete catalogue and understand the sequence and know how many locations are left and what happens at the end of the sequence. I have searched every Tor directory I know. I have posted on three different dark web forums asking if anyone has encountered a site matching the description. Two posts were deleted within an hour of posting – not by me. One received a single reply from an account with no history that said only: stop looking. looking makes it faster. The account was gone when I tried to reply.

I have also been trying to find other people who received the link. I went back through Joel’s messages – I have access to his email through a shared account we set up years ago for a project – and I found the link in his sent folder. He had received it four days before he sent it to me, from an address that no longer exists. He had sent it to me and to one other person – a woman named Carla Dinh who I know vaguely, a friend of a friend, someone Joel had met at a conference last year.

I found Carla on LinkedIn. I sent her a message explaining who I was and asking if she had clicked the link. She read it. LinkedIn shows you that, and did not respond for two days and then sent me a message that said: I clicked it. I closed it at twenty eight seconds. I haven’t seen anything yet. Please don’t contact me again. I have not contacted her again. I think about the two seconds between twenty eight and thirty and I hope they are enough. I do not think they are enough.

I am at twenty three percent battery. The McDonald’s closes in forty minutes and I need to be back in my car before then because being inside when it closes means being visible when the parking lot empties and visibility has become something I manage carefully.

I want to say some things clearly before the battery goes.

Joel – if you are somewhere that has internet access and you see this somehow please contact anyone. Mrs. Farrow. Your sister. Anyone. I am not in Portland. I am not in Oregon. I am moving and I am going to keep moving and I am going to find a way to fix this if there is a way to fix this and I need to know you are somewhere that can be found.

To whoever else has seen this site or received this link – I believe there are more of us. I believe the catalogue is different for each person, specific to each life, and I believe the sequence ends somewhere and I am trying very hard to believe that the ending is something other than what I think it is. If you have information please post it here. I will check this thread when I have wifi and battery.

To whoever is driving the grey sedan – I know you are reading this. I know because the site knows where I am and you know where I am and the two things are not separate. I want you to know that I am not going to stop moving and I am not going to go back to Portland and I am not going to make this easy and whatever the eleven miles means I intend to stay outside it for as long as my car has fuel and my body has function.

There are four images left in the sequence. I have worked this out from what I saw and what has appeared and the mathematics of it. Four locations I haven’t seen yet that are part of my life, part of my geography, places I go or went or was going to go. When I have seen all of them I don’t know what happens. I don’t know if the sequence completing is a door or a destination or something else entirely.

What I know is that I am not going to be in the places the catalogue expects me to be. I am going to stay in the wrong places – the places that are not in the catalogue, the places the site did not photograph, the rest stops and McDonald’s parking lots and stretches of highway that do not belong to my life and therefore do not belong to the sequence.

I am going to stay in the cracks between my own life and hope that whatever is running this cannot follow me into territory it has not already mapped.

Nineteen percent.

I have to go.