Stay Silent

Final Chapter - The Red Room

Matt closed his eyes and clicked on the last link.

This is it. He thought. One more code. One more code and I'll find them. Jason, Nate, Steph...

He clicked the very last link on page two of the deep Web wiki. It lead to another average "The end is nigh" sites, but just as he expected, there, above a picture of some type of demon, there was the last code.

Matt quickly scribbled the last code onto the notepad. That was it. All eight codes. Taking a deep breath, he wrote all the codes into the URL and pressed enter.

The computer connected to the Red Room site. The screen displayed a long, dark, hallway. There was text text in the middle of the screen that very plainly said,

"LAST CHANCE. If you don't know what's ahead already, you're probably in the wrong place."

Matt was given two options. LEAVE, which would bring him back to the deep wiki page, or ENTER, which would let him enter the red room.

Matt considered the warning. "If you don't know what's ahead already, you're probably in the wrong place?" Matt thought carefully. I do know what's ahead already. That's why I'm here in the first place, to find them.

Matt, with a look of determination, clicked on enter. The screen went black, displaying only one word, "Connecting..."

Matt held his breath. Would it work?

Well, if it didn't, the story would end here, with Matt doing the SMART thing and calling the police, but since he's not going to do that anytime soon, of course it worked.

There it was, the red room. It was very dimly lit, but Matt could clearly see the bloodstains on the wall. He shuddered. Out of all the creepy sites he saw that night, this one was the worst.

In the middle of the room, there was a man's body, sitting in a chair. The man wore a Neon pink sweater, hand-knitted absolutely pitifully, with jagged lettering that he thought read, "Nuber 1 Dady!" Although the sweater was poorly made, and now covered in blood, Matt could see the love placed into every stitch, perhaps made by a young daughter.

But Matt knew that his loved ones would never see him again. Because Matt had watched Sweeney Todd enough times to know what a slit throat looks like. This man was dead.

A darkened shadow of a figure unstrapped the man from the chair, and dragged him out of the camera's view. A few minutes after, another unconscious man was put into the chair, and then strapped in. But before much could go down, the screen started glitching.

Buffering....
Buffering....

After about three victims had passed, Matt started to realize that maybe the kidnapper and the Red Room were unrelated. It was possible.

As he had promised himself, Matt went over to the phone to call the police. He had found nothing in his own investigation, so he should have left it go them. He could explain being on the deep Web somehow, right? I mean, he didn't break the law...

Just as Matt was about to go over to the phone, Matt's spotty connection fixed itself, returning the video to the red room, but the second the video came back in, Matt was shocked with a scream of agony. Shocked, Matt turned his attention back to the computer.

The man sitting in the chair was much younger this time, only in his twenties. It was hard to see how long he had been tortured, first because of Matt's poor connection, but also because the blood was hard to see against the man's black shirt. The sleeves only went up to his elbows, displaying a very large gash down his right arm. The man's head was down, so all Matt could see was the top of the man's head, but he couldn't even decide on the color of his hair thanks to the dim lighting.