set in fall of 2015

We first found the site sometime in early fall. The year doesn’t matter. None of us are quite sure how it happened. It was a Friday and we were hanging out at Michael’s house after school, looking for fucked up shit to watch like usual. We’d pooled cash for Daniel to buy a 30-rack with his fake and we were all a little buzzed. We had been on our usual sites, trying to source a webm of a guy in a gimp suit eating broken glass that Luke had seen last night, but then Michael must have clicked something by mistake, because suddenly we were somewhere we had never been before.

The page looked like a fossil, one of those weird Web 1.0 hobby sites that hadn’t been updated in decades. At the top, in big red Helvetica against plain black, were the words “CRUEL LIGHTS.” Beneath them was a tiny gif of a cartoon skull, endlessly laughing in a jerky loop, and a much larger image, taking up nearly the whole window, of what looked like just a formless mass of colors, a bunch of blurry splotches bent and twisted around one another. A row of buttons, unlabeled, ran along the bottom of the page. We stared at the screen for a minute, uncomprehending. “This looks gay,” one of us said, and we closed the tab. We found a good beheading compilation and tried to forget about it, but our course was set.

The next night, all of us, alone in our separate bedrooms, without planning to and without talking to anyone else, found ourselves looking up the site. It wasn’t on the first page of the search results, or the second, but we clicked through to the third and there it was, just sitting there. Like it had always been there, and maybe it had been. Each button, it turned out, led to a new page with dozens of images displayed under headers like “Slammed,” “Punctured,” “Scraped”. Single words, violent but nonspecific, doing nothing to help explain the images beneath them, which were all like the one on the front page: sludgy, indistinct pools of hazy color, vague shapes jumbled together with no apparent logic. When we first saw them we had all taken the images to be computer generated, MS Paint scribbles run through a heavy blur filter or something, but now studying them more closely, we realized they were actually scanned photos. We could see nicks and creases in some of them, or an edge of white photo paper cutting off the expanse of ambiguous colors.

Noticing this did little to help us understand what we were looking at; they were still so out of focus that they could conceivably be of almost anything. Somehow, though, we all had the sense that what we were looking at was profoundly, nauseatingly violent, in a way that was far more upsetting than what we were used to. The images throbbed with it. We couldn’t understand why, or how, but it was undeniable. We were fascinated. The glow from our screens painted faint impressions of the images on our faces. These impressions, although we couldn’t have known it at the time, are permanent, and no amount of scrubbing can wash them away. You can see them on us now, if you know how to look. We all slept little that night, and when we did, our dreams were full of things peeled back to reveal dark and shifting shadows stretching out beneath.

School came on Monday, We were all having lunch together on the steps outside the cafeteria. Our conversation was strained. None of our jokes were landing like they should. We would start to say something, then get tangled up and have to back out of the sentence. It was like we were stranded in some high, remote mountain pass where the air was too thin to carry our words. Instinctually, we all knew what we had all spent the weekend doing, but no one wanted to say anything about it. In some childish way, the silence felt protective. But then Thomas said, “So, what the fuck is up with that site?”, and no one pretended not to know what he was talking about. The gates just fell open. We all started sharing our theories, comparing our notes, talking over one another, hoping to expel whatever had gotten inside of us.

Daniel pulled a folded sheet of paper from the same jacket pocket he always kept his lighter in and everyone got quiet. “I printed this one out,” he said. “It’s from Punctured. I don’t know why I did it. It’s been burning a fucking hole in my pocket. I haven’t been able to forget about it for one second all day.” We clustered around him and stared. It wasn’t particularly different from any of the others, maybe slightly simpler than most. At the center was a lumpy purplish shape, flecked with thin streaks of yellow and roughly circular, with a large dent in its top-left. The shape filled most of the image, its edges cut off at the top and bottom. It sat on a ground of dark, mottled blue with a streak of silver, like the blade of a knife, jutting into it from the top right. We all felt the same nausea welling up again. The seconds passed like years.

Finally, John said, “Put that shit away, man.” Sudden, helpless anger, anger that he seemed surprised to discover within him, appeared on his face. “Better yet, burn it.”

Eventually, we figured out that between us we’d seen pretty much the whole site, or at least what was immediately accessible on it. All we were missing was part of Gouged. Luke had started looking through it, but had closed the tab halfway down when he thought he heard someone opening his door. There had been no one there, of course. Not then. Thomas had gone far enough to pull up the domain registry, hoping to discover who was behind the site or at least get a fix on where it came from, but it just led to a string of companies with names like “GWL Information Solutions” or “Dynamic Analytics Associated,”; LLCs that all, as we would learn, seemed to be owned by each other; a loop with no entrance or exit. We agreed certain shapes (dark triangles, long rectangles, broken rings) seemed to appear with unusual frequency in the images, but this was as far as we could take it. Although the longer we looked at them the more convinced we were that these were not just random abstractions, that there was something to be seen beneath the blur, we couldn’t make any progress on resolving what they might be. All we could say for sure was that it all inspired a sense of overwhelming hopelessness.

At this stage we still hadn’t told anyone else about the site. No one wanted to make what had wormed inside of us real like that, and even if we did, we wouldn’t have known where to begin. Instead, we had all become regular customers of the sheriff’s son, who had dyed his hair white and started selling pressed bars out of his SUV last year. They helped a little, but it didn’t matter. Even through the benzo haze, it showed despite ourselves: a tremor in our steps, a tension in our postures, a grey heaviness in our eyes when we met another’s gaze. Everyone could see it, even if they didn’t understand it, and so eventually, like any secret, it stopped being one. It’s not that anyone overheard our hushed conversations, caught enough to figure out the subject, and chose to spread it around. There’s no one at fault, no one to blame. These things just happen.

Soon we started catching glimpses of weird colors on people’s phones, unnatural shapes on computer screens half-hidden behind hunched and furtive bodies. References started showing up sharpied on the doors of the bathroom stalls. We heard the basketball team had made a group chat just for discussing it. Someone tripped the autistic girl with bad skin in the hall and the contents of her binder had spilled out across the floor. Dozens of the images overlaid with ugly, intricate diagrams, the margins of the pages crammed full of carefully-penciled notes. No one helped her pick them up but no one laughed either. We thought about talking to her, but we weren’t sure it would do any of us any good.

Daniel texted everyone that weekend, or maybe it was the next one. Time had started going fuzzy for us by then. Regardless, the message was: “come over. i found something.” We knew it must be important, because Daniel’s house wasn’t somewhere we usually ever hung out. It seemed like his dad or his older brother was always passed out on the living room couch and he’d freak out at you if you made too much noise. Most of us hadn’t been past the front door in years. Within a half hour, we were gathered awkwardly around his laptop in the stale air of his bedroom. “I plugged the site into Google,” he was saying. “No search terms, just wanted a list of all the pages it had scraped. In case we missed anything.” He switched to another tab. “This came up.” It was a file directory with about a dozen jpgs in it called “MICHAEL.” “I checked”, Daniel said. “There’s folders for all of us.”

Meanwhile, everything started to fall apart. A kid spent a week in the hospital after his parents caught him cutting shapes out of his forearm and filling in the raw, red patches with charcoal from their grill. There was an assembly about a suicide. Then about another. Car crashes kept happening that no one could understand, the drivers suddenly swerving off wide, straight roads into trees and telephone poles. They would wake up in the hospital hours later, drenched in sweat. When they tried to speak, all they could get out were strangled little whimpers. Flyers started showing up around town in the places you’d usually see ones for lost pets or children. Much later, after her death, we found out they were being put up by the principal’s wife. On all of them, “DO YOU SEE IT?” was printed in block letters above one of a handful of images from Scraped or Burned; “HOW DO YOU BEAR IT? I CAN’T SLEEP. PLEASE HELP ME.”

“Hey, have any of you noticed your vision getting worse? Like, more nearsighted? Whatever the one is where you can’t see shit far away.” Luke tried to sound casual asking it, but we could hear the strain in his voice. We all knew what he was talking about. It had been happening to us, too. None of us were sure if we were relieved to find out we weren’t the only one. What it was, was that off in the distance sometimes, it would look wrong. Like when we hadn’t been looking, or even just not paying attention, something had been changed over there; off at the limits of our vision, too far away to be quite sure what we were seeing. If we walked over to the spot where it had happened, everything would look normal, but it didn’t matter. We knew what it looked like when we saw it. We had been staring at things just like it on our computer screens for weeks.

We all stopped going to school. Our parents didn’t care, as usual, so it wasn’t a problem. It just didn’t feel safe there anymore, like everything was suddenly too close. Locked up in our rooms, we could do things that felt like precautions, or things that at least would get us fucked up enough not to think about it. Then one night Michael texted everyone: “look under your beds.” When we did, we all found the same thing. A ragged hole in the floor, about as big as a car tire. Maybe they had been slowly growing there for weeks. Maybe they hadn’t existed until the moment we found them. It doesn’t matter. Logically, they should have opened directly onto a lower floor or a basement, but instead the holes were nothing but inky black. We could feel cool air flowing out. Each of us, alone but together, inhaled slowly, feeling our lungs fill. Then each of us crawled inside.

In many ways, we’re all much older now. Down here in the darkness, we come across small stacks of pictures sometimes. They’re teaching us how to see again. Our new vision is blurry still, half-formed, but things are slowly coming into focus. We’re beginning to understand. We don’t dream anymore, but sometimes we see the gif of the laughing skull floating inside us, and it feels like one.

David can be found at davidcporter.net, his new book, NTTN, is available here.