Moonlyte - part 5

Author's Note: PROGRESS, at long last. I have a bit more done too but I'm gonna save it until I feel like I have another complete section of the story.

Anyway, as always, this is NOT PORN. It is a non-erotic horror/crime short story in the process of being made by me. If you didn't read the original story that this is a prequel to, you can find it here.

Also note that these are all early drafts, so if you have suggestions or criticisms now would be a good time to give them, as none of this is currently set in stone and will likely be subject to changes.

[story] [non-erotic] [explicit horror/gore]

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‭The Third Day

I haven’t heard from Adam since his weird link he sent from offline. Then again, it’s only been a little more than a day. He could be sleeping, or busy, even if I couldn’t necessarily imagine what he’d be busy with. In any event, I’ve kept plenty occupied myself.

Skimming through over four hundred websites dedicated to the most depraved, the most deranged, the most sick fucking people I can possibly imagine has been... taxing. To be honest, most of it isn’t shit you can’t find on 4chan or the more gross areas of Motherless. A lot of homophobia, a lot of violence towards women, a lot of regular message-board posturing and fucked up ideas. It’s weird to think that, at this point in my experience with the internet, it almost seems... vanilla? More or less what I’d expect from a bunch of sixteen year old white kids with anonymity and the sense of superiority they no doubt got from their ability to access the dark web in the first place.

The part the disgusts me is how... visual, it can sometimes become. I’m used to some gross images and a lot of shit talk. But here, in this neverending matrix of URLs, binary becomes a force of its own, somehow. Those 1s and 0s have offered a new world that could never have existed before them. A world where the planet’s sickest can congregate and become a whole; chaotic but nonetheless one. A world where there is no threat of reprimand. A world you can make your own.

These people chose to make their world one where women have had their teeth removed, spider-gags jammed onto their faces so they can be face-fucked without risk. They made a world where you can burn a kid alive, in a cage, with a hood over his head, and all that makes him or her unique is the special sound of their agonized screams. They’ve made a place where no act of torture, violence, or crime can be abhorrent enough to rebuke.

I know this, because in the countless vodka-soaked hours I’ve endured this weirdly-expected hideousness, I’ve seen almost every awful thing I can imagine. Soaked it all up like a bottle of 151 poured into my asshole. I thought I’d seen every foul thing there was to see, and never even flirted with finding the Yog-Sothoth cult. Until I found this site. Until I found kids-friendly.ejk, and spent the next two hours scrolling through message boards.

Can we... I mean, let’s, just... this isn’t kid friendly. I knew it wasn’t going to be when I clicked on that stark red link on the index Adam linked me. But there are certain acts of humankind I had refused to believe in until this exact day. The reality of people keeping kids captive to make videos. Forcing them to... do things, to each other. The idea that a couple could fuck their own newborn, and film it. The chance -- no, now, the fact -- that someone’s fetish could be the sexual torture of children.

Nothing can give back what I’ve paid to investigate this case. Nothing, after what I’ve seen, will make me the same again. Not even justice for those limbless fucking kids will make me not regret this.

Ascendant: You’ve spent a lot of time searching for something.

My tired eyes flutter, and I down a long swig of my energy drink. Can’t be right. Nobody can crack my IP, much less my fucking chat log. Have I been awake too long?

One way to find out, I guess.

Moonlyte: Who the fuck are you.

Curiously, there isn’t a moment -- not even a split second -- of “Ascendant is typing...”, before I receive a reply. I’d guess it might have been a macro, but it seems too... specific.

Ascendant: A friend. You want to find the young ones, those destroyed in order to be
Ascendant: utilized

I suck in a deep breath of air in my seat. Can this guy be legit? Or is he offering me something I want no part of? Either or, he could be my next lead to finding out who these Yog-Sothoth freaks are.

Moonlyte: What do you know?

Ascendant: More than I’d like to.

Moonlyte: About the fucking kids.

Ascendant: I know it can’t be stopped. The rituals will keep going. They’re spread too widely.

Moonlyte: Who the fuck is ‘they’? Can you just give me the infodump so I don’t have to pull everything out of you like I’m ripping your fucking molars out?

There’s a pause, then, for a long moment, and I find myself just staring at the screen. As before, every time Ascendant says something he says it without typing first -- his messages just appear. In fact, they also haven’t been making the little ‘blong’ sound they’re supposed to. Maybe it’s all in my head? I seriously need to start getting more sleep. If I can ever sleep again after the things I’ve been looking at on this sick fucking archive.

Ascendant: You’ll keep looking for them, won’t you?

His (her? its?) response comes after about exactly a minute, again without sound. I breathe in through my nose, thinking for a moment. Ascendant said they were ‘spread too widely,’ and Lindsay had mentioned that there had been other, similar deaths across the rest of the country. For all I know it’s worldwide now. Which raises the question -- do I keep looking for them? I can’t possibly make a difference here, can I? If there are physical manifestations of this fucking... cult or whatever it is, all around the world, what can I possibly expect to do to fix it? Dox the shit out of all of them?

Actually that could technically work if I pulled it off. Hrm.

The back of my mind, though, keeps telling me that it doesn’t matter whether I can help or not. I’ve come this far, exposed myself to... way too much. Like it or not, this little crusade is a part of me, now. I have to keep going.

Moonlyte: Yes.

Ascendant: Then you leave me with little choice. I can’t let the shepherds take you. Not you. I’m sorry, Kate.

Moonlyte: wait

My fingers smash rapidly across the keyboard, getting as far as ‘what the fuck did you just’ before I smell smoke and hear a sudden crackle. The screen in front of me goes black, leaving me cloaked only in the shadow of my apartment living room. Then I hear the roar of flame, psychotic shadows cavorting across the room as it blazes blue, then orange, then to blue again, rushing up from around my computer tower, swallowing it, now starting to spread. More crackles and pops erupt from my three thousand dollar setup and the flames begin to spread, lashing out to the carpet now, crawling hungrily up along the half-rotted plaster walls.

I scramble backwards, quickly grabbing my phone from where it lays in the center of my unmade bed, then my ratty-ass green bathrobe. My brain has yet to really register what I’ve just loss, what I’m about to lose, and what the fuck just happened. I hear the building’s alarm go off as smoke billows around me. I can feel intense heat on my bare skin from the fire, but it hasn’t reached me yet -- and I’m lucky that the way to the door remains clear. I rush towards it, not bothering to grab my keys from the hook beside it. Something tells me I won’t need them for quite a while. I swing the door open, eyes closed, stinging from the smoke, my ears filled with the sound of inferno, and I rush out into the lofty, concrete halls between apartment buildings. Only now do I take the time to throw the bathrobe around my body, hopefully fast enough to retain what modesty I have left, and flames rush out from the open door, a blistering warning not to return.

My computer. My home. My life. So fast. My eyes go wide as I watch my world burn through the open doorway, the ghosts of what shitty little empire I’d built screaming out through the smoke. Alarms and shouting swell up around me, but I barely hear any of it. In that moment I just feel... numb.