Chapter Text
Lover's Spittle
Lover's Spit, 2018 Edition: Smaller, Shittier, and Uncut
—
“Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him? Shall one take up a snare from the earth, and have taken nothing at all?"
- Amos 3:5 (King James Version)
“All these people drinking lover's spit Swallowing words while giving head They listen to teeth to learn how to quit Tied to a night they never met”
- Broken Social Scene, "Lover's Spit"
—
Prologue
FACTORY69.ORG WAS NOT known for its moral contribution to society. Outside of niche internet subcultures, it wasn't known at all.
Ernie Macmillan discovered it by chance.
An uneventful day at the local strip with his best mate, Justin, was winding to a dull close, and Ernie half-jokingly suggested they find that horse-bonking porno everyone was going on about. Both boys feigned cluelessness about where to find said video; their interest in sex, though often brought up jocularly, was taboo to mention outside the comfort of humour. A quick perusal of the viral thirty- second clip became a gateway drug into a naughty evening, and within an hour they found what one article deemed 'the darkest corner of the browsable internet'.
No smut site could compare to Factory69. It was something called an imageboard website, a place where anonymous users could post anything they wanted, no matter how disturbed or illegal. There was normal porn, and BDSM porn, and porn of men cutting off their knobs. The content entertained them for hours until Justin's mum came round announcing dinner. The two went off to bed soon after.
“I don’t think we should look at that stuff anymore,” said Justin suddenly, when the lights had long gone out.
“Yeah,” Ernie agreed. “Me neither.”
But this was not true. In the weeks that followed, Ernie swelled with a sinister curiosity. He’d type in the first three letters – f a c – before spacing back, ashamed of himself. There was something about Factory69 that spoke to a deep, untouched part of him, a place he'd grazed with the tips of his fingers in mid-wank reverie. Alone in his room in the dead of night, hand down his trousers, he finally braved the adrenalin spike of fear and simply clicked.
And within a week, the website and all its dangerous quirks did not inspire fear at all.
Ernie learned the lingo: That fap meant wank, that kek meant lol, that all users could be categorized as a sort of fag. Ernie himself was a newfag—new to the forum, eager to explore. General content sufficed for newfags. He initially stuck around lady porn and memes, and when feeling extra curious, snuck a glance at the LGBT section. This sort of thing became less thrilling by the day. He decided to try out the darker things, and was swept up quick by the sexist bits: Soviet-sounding redheads in kinky chains, schoolgirls bent and whipped. What was right, what was wrong, none of this mattered anymore. He was bored of the old Ernie. He needed newer, darker content that suited the newer, darker person he was becoming.
Many months passed before Ernie bothered to think critically about his actions. It was looking back, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, that Ernie pinned the moment his conscience started to shift.
The gore forum. He’d never browsed it before, but he was hard now, right? He thought maybe he’d just have a look. A lot of the content here was posted by a namefag, a person who abused the tagging system to identify their posts within the community of nameless users.
This user appropriately christened himself gorefag. Anytime he reared up there was sure to be a sick photo captioned with ridiculous commentary. And the content was vile, even by Factory69 standards: a woman getting sawed in half; a kitten imploding from a fire work; a corpse with its eyes gouged out. As a special treat, there’d occasionally be a deep web hyperlink. (Ernie stopped clicking on these once he was greeted with a very real snuff film from a dusty Middle Eastern slum.)
Gorefag was prevalent on Factory69 but he didn’t earn infamy until he started posting original content. That was the stuff that made him special. The animal gore in itself was nothing new. Ernie often scrolled down his posts feeling mostly detached: a skinned cat here, a half-burnt live squirrel there, maybe a dog with its innards stretched out in gooey tendrils. No, the content itself was not unnerving to Ernie until he read several users confess: they could find no proof that the images were stolen from other sources.
GOREFAG
>lmao i told u fags it was oc
The existence of gorefag then became uniquely off-putting. He was not simply edgy; he was sadistic. Casually and remorselessly, he described, step-by-step, how he lured off the animals before starting the real fun. His descriptions were never overstated, never felt fake nor unusually shocking. Gorefag’s attitude was in a constant flux. Sometimes he was matter-of-fact and amicable. At other times, if insulted, he was vulgar, and wrote strangely intimate rape threats with links to pornos that showed someone, somewhere committing the act.
Eventually, gorefag’s presence became too much, and Ernie lost his taste for the hard stuff.
He decided instead to hang around the anon crush thread. Most of the replies were cute photos along with a line or two about their crush. It was surprisingly sweet. Unlike the other threads, there was no scathing irony, no edgy death threats, no unexpected porn: just content that tendered a small reprieve from the darker side of life.
That was, until gorefag showed up.
It started as an innocent thread. People were sharing photos of their beloveds and sprinkling in cutesy commentary, when suddenly, amid the selfies, there was a creep shot photo of a child playing football in the park.
GOREFAG
>i’m going to fuck him
For the first time in Ernie’s six months of browsing, not one single user was amused.
Another photo came again, days later. The same little black-haired boy catching a frisbee with an older man. Both were smiling.
GOREFAG
>gonna fuck him while his dad watches then fuck his dad too lol
Queasily, Ernie wrote back:
>seriously fuck off, faggot
The images became more frequent, the remarks obscener. Each time it was the same little boy: at school, at church, walking through a nondescript neighbourhood. Whether gorefag was plotting to really act or not, it couldn’t possibly be altogether fake, not with the regularity of his posts. But what could anyone do? It didn’t seem to matter if anyone responded or not; gorefag was persistent, and his posts were getting nastier by the day.
GOREFAG
>aw he looks so cute all alone
This captioned a photo of the boy alone in his room. Ernie shut his laptop. Thought: Maybe that would be the worst if it. But then the next day, it happened again: the little boy in his room, stripped to his pants.
Summer hit and Ernie had endless hours to devote to his obsession (and parents who couldn't care less what he was doing so long as it didn’t bother them). He grouped up with a couple of others and began archiving gorefag's posts. Whatever their community was, it wasn't a place for true paedos, true predators. Ernie's fascination with gorefag became acute, but it was not inspired by the same spark which brought him, red-cheeked, to the risqué things; it was legitimate disgust, legitimate concern. He watched the threads with hawk-like keenness.
Gorefag had posted a lot of fucked up shite in his day, but it was only upon seeing this – the post that set Factory69 into a furious tailspin to have gorefag investigated, properly, that Ernie decided against all obsession, he had to quit the website for good.
It was a photo of a photograph. The little boy was asleep in his bed, the camera right beside his face. Smeared over his printed image was an unmistakable white substance. And all gorefag wrote this time?
GOREFAG
>soon