The Hidden Webpage(Jared Roberts)Part-1

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 co-workers. 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 wasn't there. When you had to leaf through an encyclopedia set to find an answer. When you could only find Gillian Anderson's picture in magazines. Or later, when songs took 30 minutes to download and full-length movies were almost impossible to find, because no-one's hard drive could hold them.

First 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 ol' Lycos, one of many pre-Google search engines, and there it would be. I was interested in naked celebrities and the paranormal back then. I was only 13, give me a break. I was so interested in the paranormal, I built a Fortunecity 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, dark art, and a gross-out page or two. It was through the webring that I met Angelica.

Angelica hosted a Wiccan geocities or tripod homepage that I found particularly alluring. No wait, it was Angelfire. She just made the best of some cool animated gifs, midis, 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 been happening?" A catch-up question. We had almost 20 years of catching up to do. And this is pure Angelica: She signed the email with her ICQ contact #. I enjoyed the quaint touch. It'd be like someone in the '90s sending a letter with a wax seal, right?

I replied back with a summary of how my life had gone over the past 18 years or so since I'd last communicated with her. 18 years—makes you think. She shot back a response almost immediately asking for details. We exchanged a few emails this way. I was pretty excited to come home from work and write to her, 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 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 that didn't occur to me at all until then. Her email address was at globetrotter.net. That may not mean anything to you. But it struck me as strange. You see, Globetrotter was a Canadian ISP way back in the mid-90s. I didn't even realize they still hosted. 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 answer my questions. She asked me, "Hey, do you remember The Hole?" 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'd dreamed about something called 'The Hole' once. Whatever it was, I was instinctively repulsed by it. I couldn't remember anything solid, though. In my head I went over IRC rooms, websites, newsgroups, 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 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. 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 the bar. It was just the letter 'M.' I tried everything to pin 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 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 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 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 Hole has so much for us to discover, so many secrets, you could just keep going and going. It's 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 webring is gone, Netscape 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 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 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. 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've been using in the '90s? That wasn't just quaint anymore. Also, we hadn't talked in 18 years. Why did she suddenly 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've just ignored her and went on with my life, but I wanted to know what was going on. 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 Angelfire homepage. No Facebook, no Google Plus, not even a MySpace. It's like her last presence on the internet actually was in the '90s. Like she disappeared completely, waited in hiding for almost twenty years, then 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 computers all around. And I was concerned about the beehive in the corner.

After that, 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 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, was really upsetting.

I didn't dare 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. 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 Hole. A place on archive.org, on their "Wayback Machine," still had the dot to click on. That was 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 the link to a gopher site. Now, I hadn't seen a gopher site in a good 15 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 in folders, usually. You'd go to Gopher colon slash-slash blahblah dot com. 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 filenames, but they were the same. The muffled sound of a boy's voice saying, "Help me, please" over and over. I was shaking. 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 pretty sure it was my voice when I was a boy.

I stopped received 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 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 printout of all my correspondence with Angelica. All of it. Not just the new stuff. Emails I'd written her back in the '90s.

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 1999. 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? Maybe she'd had a psychotic break or something? What's this stuff about "The Hole"? 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 in. I decided to go looking for any contacts I could remember from the time when I was speaking to Angelica. Anyone who would've known both me and her. We had a few mutual contacts. Mostly people from the webring, 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 Rapskhellion_42. 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. Not only could I not find any trace of a Rapskhellion_42, I couldn't find any Rapskhellion 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 1997 HP running Windows 98. 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 5 minutes for it to boot up. Then I got the Ethernet cable plugged in. It was like it'd just been in sleep mode for two decades. 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 ICQ 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 mention that because, not only did ICQ load, but it loaded with a message. 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, 1999. It was from Angelica, so it had to have been sent right before she disappeared. It just said, "You coming?" It sent a shiver down my spine. Where was she going? Could I have helped her if I'd seen it in time? Why'd she act like I knew?

Even weirder is that I'm sure I'd been on ICQ after November 1999. I'd say I used it up to 2001 or so. That's when 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 Rapskhellion_42. 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 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 2017. Anyway, I fired off a message to Rap 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 replied back with a friendly hello and asked me how I was doing. After exchanging pleasantries, 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 Y2K. "Y2K really happened," he said. It just didn't happen the way everyone expected. It was 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, as long as it didn't get 'patched'. But everything made after December 31st, 1999 would be tainted. That's why he still used ICQ and never let go of his NetZero dialup connection.

I hadn't heard a Y2K conspiracy theory in a very long time. So that was interesting. I chose to ignore it and asked him if he knew about Angelica going missing back in '99. 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 Y2K. "A lot of strange things happened then. The world changed. Only a few people even noticed." Rap was always a 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, 1999, then he was right, she disappeared right before Y2K.

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, "R0xT4r" or to his closer friends just "Reggie", who used to frequent an internet forum on hacking and phreaking back in the mid-90s. 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 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 forum's still there, Rap said. Nowhere near what it used to be, but the regulars like him are dedicated. A few months ago, 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 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 it to them.

The forum folk were flabbergasted 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 TinyURL link. Rap's friend thought it was all a joke and that Reggie was just leading the whole forum up to an epic rickroll. 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 saying what the link was. He sees a post in 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 shit. 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 whatever was in there wrecked it. And that box had security 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 daughter on the screen. She'd died five years ago. There were no pictures of her on the computer. Worse, he'd 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.

Rap added, "If you've 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 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. Thing is, I don't even have a "homepage" anymore. That thing was taken down in like 2001.

He insisted it was my Fortunecity 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 Fortunecity doesn't even exist anymore.

Rap went quiet for a few minutes. 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 message with my contact info and to let me know if he was ok. I haven't heard from him since. I've checked ICQ a few times and he's 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 when I noticed a folder on the desktop that stood out. 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 wav files. My instincts told me to get out of there. One picture after another was just kids. Teens, boys and girls, sitting at their computers. None of them seemed aware they were being photographed. The pics all seemed pointless. All I knew for sure is I didn't take or download those pictures. Ever. They were all time-stamped 11/21/1999.

The wav 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 a voice I'd never heard before. I know it. Because I don't think anything could've 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 should talk like that. What it said—it was the same as Angelica's message. Also from '99. 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. 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 Guelph. I know that may not sound like the most prestigious place to be, but they actively poached him. 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 anything to this Hole site. He said that wouldn't be a problem.

The next day he already comes back to me with the question, "Is this some sort of a 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 a joke, I wasn't in on it. So he said 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 set up the damn thing.

While I was waiting for Ben to get back to me, I got a call from a Detective Thereault. The police hadn't shown much interest in my case, but it happened to land in front of this guy. Thankfully. He said 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 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 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'd been so long and I was excited to hear from her again.

She answered quickly and asked if it was me. I told her yes and said it was nice to hear her voice after all this time. 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 know you at all."

A part of me was screaming, 'She's lying.' She just sounded so certain. 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 through her Wiccan homepage on Angelfire 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 and dreams and her family. She said it was all true. But whoever told him 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'd never spoken to them. And they'd tell her she was doing things she knew she'd 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 he knew her math problem, was he spying on her. And he told her, no, she asked him for help. She didn't believe him. So he sent her a screenshot. The message was from a day ago. She'd just gotten the homework that day.

She said the worst it got was when she messaged a close friend of hers she 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, "Umm, I 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. 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 Hole. She went silent for so long, I thought we lost connection. She said she's still there, she just never expected to hear that again. There was this guy who used to harass her back when she was just about 12 or 13, on IRC. He called himself "HolyMoses." He started off nice. He seemed to understand all her problems. And to know what she was thinking. At 12, 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 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 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 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. 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. HolyMoses went offline and she didn't see him after. Until 2010, when she got an email from TheNewCommandments@HolyMoses.com saying, "You coming?"

If anyone was impersonating her, she said that was the most likely person. At the time, she was so naïve. Looking back on it now, talking to me, she said he was the creepiest person she'd 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 Tumblr generations will 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 meant whoever I spoke to for years in my teens—I don't even know who that person is. It was all a lie. And 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 in a sub-basement below his office. He was aware of the basement, but it was abandoned years before he even 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 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 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 date was the same day I was there to shut it down. Dude, it's like it knew I was going to be there that day."

He said after shutting it down, he went and told his manager all about it. Just a fun, IT anecdote. His manager told him there's really only one man who could've set that up. Back in the early '90s, he said, a guy worked in the department they all called "Milky," 'cause his last name was Melke 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 ok. According to Ben's boss, 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. You just got bad vibes around him, the manager said.

It got worse. Every day around 3pm 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 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 SkyNet. But he said it wasn't created by machines either. It was always there, the 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 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 gopher server, he straight up refused to look into The Hole. I told him it really wasn't that bad and to quit being a wimp. That's when he said he hadn't told me everything. The server had a linkup, through the phone line, to a really old webcam. One of those low res webcams where the image updates every 4 seconds or so. It'd been running non-stop since '97. All of the saved images just show the front of someone���s house. The same house back to '97. He sent me some of the photos. Because he knew what it was. It was my house.

"Why would this guy have been spying on you all those years ago, man? How did he even know you? It doesn't make any sense and it honestly scares the shit out of me."

And 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 astronomically improbable coincidence. At least, that's what it should be. But I didn't believe that's what it was anymore than he did.

* * * * * *

The next day, I 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. 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. 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 why. She said because of my little prank. I grew concerned immediately. 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?" 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 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.

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 the door and locked it. Then I looked all around the house with a kitchen knife in hand. I have a one-storey with a 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 bee costumes leaving my home. They just walked straight across the road and behind the neighbor's house, into the woods. "How can 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. But I got the feeling it was all connected in some way.

The 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 dialup modem and when you'd run it, 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 set it a-go and in all the beeps and pops you said there was 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 listen. And you told me it was saying, 'Everything's better in here. Abracadabra.' Can't believe I even remembered 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 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 '90s, 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 fortunecity 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 had the internet in our home."

I said she must've gotten hit in the head. Because I remember distinctly all these experiences being online. Building my homepage. Yiffnet. IRC. ICQ. All of that was when I was in high school. She flat denied it.

She said she remembered, though, 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 Det. Thereault came to get us, she looked into my eyes. "You should be careful on that internet, y'know," 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 more time. Then I got to work. The best lead I had at that point was this 'HolyMoses' character. So I downloaded mIRC to see if I could find him in his old haunts.

It had been a long time since I'd used mIRC. I barely remembered how it worked. And there are so many channels on EFNet, it would take forever. So, I decided to focus on channels that would've been relevant to "Angelica" back in the day. I just started asking in channels, like @gothic and @vampires, if anyone knew of HolyMoses or heard of him. But each time I mentioned him, the channel fell to almost complete "silence." I didn't get 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 "u47284u".

He (or she) told me I shouldn't be doing what I was doing. I asked him why. He said it "doesn't come off well to them," whatever that means. He also said HolyMoses is just a bot. It's been around forever, never logs off, and is almost always idling for days at a time. I told him if that was true, why was everyone so reluctant to talk about it? I didn't want to tell him Angelica's story. I just wanted to find out what he knew.

He said the whole thing weirds people out because nobody knows who built HolyMoses. Nobody. Over decades, no-one has ever claimed ownership. Not even trolls. Nobody knows where it came from. Or why it's there. It doesn't do anything. It's just there, he said. That's the creepiest thing about it. Always just there.

Legends had built up around HolyMoses, he said. Like it was a government supercomputer monitoring IRC. Or it was the KGB. Or a "ghost," a bot left running long after the owner died and his bank 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 apparent 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.

He said there was only one time when it did anything substantial, as far as anyone knew. Once in over two decades. And that only made things weirder.

I was typing out a message to ask this guy what it was, because he wasn't saying. But just then I heard what sounded like my front door slam. I paused and listened carefully, trying not even to breathe. I didn't hear anything. So 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, u47284u had sent me a message: "Where'd you go? Hope nothing strange happened."

That was a little eerie. But I was focused on getting answers, so I ignored it and asked what it was HolyMoses did. He said, "Fine, I'll tell you."

And this is what he said happened. In 1999, at 5AM CST on November 21st, HolyMoses joined the channel #ornithology and made a series of short statements. First, "Deceive them" at 7AM, "Empty it" at 9AM, "Abandon them" at 6PM. "Turn back" at 9PM. And "Have it your way" just before midnight. Then it went offline until January 5th. "Why?" he asked. Why be silent and useless for years, do that, and then never do anything after? Sometimes, when he really thought about it, he said, it gave him the serious heebie-jeebies.

That was all he knew. Or anyone knew. And he reiterated that I really shouldn't be looking into this and to just drop it. I thanked him for his help.

I remembered a little more of what commands mIRC had after getting into the groove some. So I tried a WhoIs on HolyMoses, to see if he was out there. He was! Or it was. It was on one channel only, #stilllife. It'd been signed on for 16 days and idle for 3. Its IP was showing only the letter 'Y'.

I was thinking about going to the channel and messaging him. To see what would happen. But I suddenly got another message from u47284u, "I TOLD YOU TO DROP IT!"

I know it's just text, but it freaked me out. I closed out of mIRC immediately and walked away. I figured it was just a nut trying to psyche me out. And y'know what, it worked.

I continued to argue with my mother the next few days about what she'd said. Telling her she confused reality with a Lifetime movie. But she assured 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 before 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 home with disks. 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 disks and pop up with just the one I wanted. Generally she didn't intrude on my privacy, she said, 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. 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. Ricky was an old high school buddy of mine. Well, we were friends from Grade 2 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 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 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 though. While I waited, looking at my phone, Ricky started typing out periods over and over. I answered.

The voice on the other end sorta sounded like Ricky. As much as I could remember. But like he was really far away on a beat-up CB. 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 and 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 he was in a car accident years back and was mostly bedridden. I made a note to try visit him someday…

Anyway, alt dot rec dot birdwatch, is of course a UseNet newsgroup. I used to browse newsgroups all the time as a teen. Mostly for the porn. I was surprised they still existed. Now I had to look up how to get to them. I remembered 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 I'd used back in the day. Then I found some servers and started looking for alt.rec.birdwatch.

When I finally found it, it turned out to be mostly British up-skirt photography. I didn't understand why Ricky wanted me there. Until I saw a post with the header, "Remember the dog?" and instantly felt clammy and cold. I didn't know why, but there was something to it. Something I couldn't put my finger on.

This is what the post read:

"Everyone remember how sometimes you'd 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? And remember how sometimes you'd go in and there'd be these people there and they were really weird and they'd just watch you like you were a rat in a maze and sometimes they were in costumes? Anyone remember the dog? Sometimes there were no people and there was just this dog at the counter. I think it was a golden retriever. It never panted. But it watched. And sometimes it'd make you do things."

That was it. And that was enough. I was trembling and I didn't know why. It didn't look like anyone had replied to the message and it had been posted 3 years ago. It seemed so out of place.

I kind of started to remember. I remembered at least that there was an internet café in town. It didn't last long. Like most internet cafes, it popped up around '96/'97 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 café was popular with the teens in '96. It got stale after that. That's when something happened to it. 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. I had 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 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 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 was called. None of these people would say its name. But I remembered it then, suddenly. That strange, little internet café, 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 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. I'm thinking this is a dumb joke, but it pisses me off. So I told him that was weird and I was not okay with a webcam in my room. He just said, 'Something's going to happen.' Gave me the heebie-jeebies. He wasn't joking. And 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 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 dude's face. It was me! No doubt about it. That was my face. How is that possible?

"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 to that with:

"I did. He said he'd let me in, but there's no door."

In the sea of birdwatching photos and up-skirts dating back to '95, that was all I could find. Took me all night. I closed it down. It was too much. I was psyching myself out. 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 who owned it. They're public records, so it wasn't hard. I'd expected to find some change in management in the '90s. Or where the place got sold in the 2000s. I expected wrong. It was purchased in 1980 and had had the same owner ever since. A company or organization called 'The New Way.' It sounded like a cult. The weird thing is, that place was never used before the Egypt, as far as I know. In 1980 there wasn't really an internet. So… who would buy a place and do nothing with it for 15 years, just waiting for the internet to happen? It all seemed too mysterious. Plus there was nothing about this company anywhere.

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Credit: Jared Roberts (Facebook • Twitter • Reddit)