1Abby thought she had struck gold. It was predictable of her, really. She was always looking for a get-rich-quick scheme, hopping on every trend that might earn her a few bucks. Her newest bright idea? Become a Youtube star. I told her she was a little late to the party, but she didn't listen. In her mind, she was already rolling in the ad revenue.
She tried her hand at being a beauty guru, but makeup was too expensive. She wasn't creative enough for a DIY channel, wasn't witty enough for comedy.
Now, Abby was the type of girl who could eat anything she wanted and never put on a pound. I'd always been jealous at how she'd be able to wolf down half a pizza and keep a flat stomach, whereas I'd look at a donut and bloat up. So when she found out about this whole mukbang thing, I could practically see the lightbulb go off over her head.
If you don't know what mukbang is, it's this Korean trend of filming yourself eating. Sounds pretty bizarre, yeah? The video's "host" just sits down in front of the camera and eats, usually for twenty minutes or longer. They don't have to talk. The more food they can eat, the better, and extra points if it's artery-clogging. A foodie's dream come true.
I was weirded out by it, but it seemed Abby had finally found her calling. She started filming about one video a week. She'd bring home a huge feast of junk food – the greasiest stuff she could find from Pizza Hut, McDonald's, KFC – and set up in front of a camera to gorge on it. Afterwards, she'd upload the unedited video under her screen name, AbbyEats.
"This has got to be some someone's fetish, right?" I said to her half-jokingly one night, right after we'd pulled out of a drive-thru. "Like people get off on 'hot girl eating entire bucket of fried chicken'?"
Defensively, she replied, "It's not like that. Nobody likes eating alone. The videos just give people a little company, you know? That's why they're so popular." Was it me, or was that doubt in her voice?
"How much are you earning from this, anyway?" I asked her. Her past schemes had never been particularly successful, and she'd always dropped them after a few weeks or so.
Abby broke out into a wide grin. "A hundred bucks already. It's awesome, and I'm only starting out!" She turned to face me, and her expression became more serious. "Are you sure you don't want in on this? You could make a channel too –"
"Oh, that's fine," I said, disturbed at the prospect. "It's just not… not really my thing. No offense."
"Suit yourself," she said with a shrug.
Things carried on like that for a few weeks. I only went to look up her channel once, more out of curiosity than anything. Her videos looked totally homemade, with poor lighting and shabby quality. She was sitting at her dinner table for all them, and would start by introducing the meal of the day, then get into eating. Seeing it for myself, I supposed I could understand why some people would want to watch it. It was relaxing, something mindless you could put on in the background. At least, that was my impression of it.
After a while, I could tell things weren't working out for Abby quite the way she wanted them to. Her subscriber count was levelling off, and she was getting frustrated. She told me that she'd starting uploading twice a week, hoping to grow her fanbase. No doubt her Youtube career was quickly coming to an end, despite having lasted longer than most of her other ideas. I gave it another three weeks at most.
We were having a TV night when I realized that I might be proven wrong. I'd popped a bag of microwave popcorn and set out Doritos in a bowl, but for once, Abby didn't touch the snacks. Twenty minutes in, I'd made a pretty big dent in the popcorn, and she hadn't even had a single kernel. "You don't want any?" I asked her.
"Nah," she said, her voice casual. "I'm saving room for later."
"What's later?"
"Five thousand calorie challenge." She laughed and laced her fingers over her stomach. "Wish me luck."
I frowned. "Dude. That can't be good for you."
She waved me off. "It's fine. Tons of people are doing them now. I just gotta add some variety to the mix." Her tone warned me not to make a big deal out of it.
After that night, I didn't see Abby for a long time. My schedule had gotten busier, so I didn't have much free time, and I guess it was one of those things that just fell through the cracks. In hindsight, I should have realized how strange it was that I never even bumped into her while buying my groceries or something, given that we barely lived ten minutes apart. Almost like she was avoiding me on purpose.
It wasn't until last week that I tried getting back into touch with her. My calls went straight to voicemail. My texts went unread. I wondered what she was up to, or if she was even still in the country; maybe one of her ideas had taken her overseas. I didn't think much of it, at first. It was her Instagram that did it, really. She'd been posting consistently for years, cutesy shots of her food or a fresh manicure or a vacation pic, and now it had come to sudden stop. There hadn't been any new posts for almost three months – just about the same time she slipped off my radar.
Feeling guilty, I realized that I had been a poor excuse for a friend. The girl could've been going through something, and I hadn't even bothered to check up on her. I looked up her Youtube account again. She had about forty videos posted on her account, but my attention was drawn to the newest one: it was simply titled "Leaving Youtube" with a grim-looking thumbnail of Abby staring into the camera.
Watching it, I felt almost like a voyeur. Maybe a stranger would've thought nothing of it, but I noticed that underneath her calm tone, Abby seemed a little bit shaky, without her usual confidence. She apologized to her viewers and explained how the channel hadn't turned out the way she'd wanted. Towards the end, she paused, as if mulling something over, and then said:
Of course, if you still want to see my content, you know where to find me.
That was it. The video ended. There was no link in the description box, no further information, nothing. What had she meant by that? I might have brushed it off, but the way she said it had been unusually serious, like she was delivering a coded message.
I checked Abby's Facebook. No new updates for three months, save for her changing her profile picture to a stock photo of a girl's silhouette. I texted one of our mutual friends. He hadn't been in contact with her either. All the while, that cryptic line echoed in my head. I re-watched her final video to see if there was anything I'd missed.
The set-up was the same as before, with her sitting at the dinner table in front of the camera. There was only one difference: there was a small framed painting of a red rabbit on the wall behind her. I'm talking firetruck-red. It was done in a pretty cutesy style, I guess, but the color was an odd choice, almost making the rabbit look as if it had been skinned. Not Abby's taste at all. Hell, it wasn't anyone's taste, as far as I was aware. The way she had set up the video, though, the painting was clearly in view, hovering just to the right of her head. And I noticed she kept glancing up at it, turning towards it every few minutes. Like she wanted to draw attention to it.
Call it a hunch. I googled "red rabbit", then "red rabbit youtube", then "red rabbit mukbang". I scrolled through pages and pages of results, but I found nothing of meaning. and Finally, after thirty minutes of searching, I came across an obscure forum. The layout of the website was bizarre, with links leading me to blank pages and some of the text written in foreign languages – Mandarin and Russian, mainly. It was like the designer had purposely made the website hard to navigate.
The thread that I stumbled across was talking specifically about "Red Rabbit". The users wrote in obtuse chat-speak, full of what I assumed were code words. After combing it through, I figured "Red Rabbit" was a website on the dark net, hosting video content of some sort. Some of the more legible user comments were as follows:
been watching crushchick12. want to go next level. looking for harder etrs. pref 15 – 25, any race is ok.
tabitha_chews, old stuff is tame but newer vids r 10/10. no roadkill there.
My mind jumped immediately to pornography, and I felt disgusted at the mention of 15 – 25, but something told me that wasn't it. What did they mean by "roadkill"? And what was up with the names?
At this point, it was morbid curiosity driving me forward. I installed a VPN. Now that I'd found the forum, finding an actual link to Red Rabbit wasn't too hard. I knew that I probably wouldn't like what I found, but I just… had to know whatever it was.
God, was I an idiot.
The front page of the website had no images, only categories you could choose from. It was all red text set against a black background, with a logo of a large scarlet rabbit being the only other feature.
If you'll forgive me, I won't mention what all the categories were. I clicked on the foremost link: "eating show".
That took me to a page full of pictures. At a first glance, it looked like a whole bunch of Tinder profiles, with flatteringly-angled images of girls wearing heavy makeup. Each photo was paired with a screenname, along with a number that I assumed was their ranking. I spotted tabitha_chews near the top. The girl in the photo was all too familiar.
I clicked on the name.
At first, I didn't understand what I was seeing. There was Abby, but the video quality was all different. It was much higher-definition, sharp enough so that I could see the dark flyaways crowning her head, make out the imperfections in her eyeliner. She was sitting at a table I didn't recognize with a sterile gray wall behind her. She was eating meat. Raw meat.
She gripped the slab with her hands and tore a piece from it, leaving her chin stained with red. She chewed silently, eyes cast downwards, and swallowed with a loud gulp. Feeling my stomach churn, I tore my eyes from the video to look at the view counter: 226,793.
At random, I opened one of the recommended videos in the sidebar. Abby again, her features void of expression. Before her was a plate of – sausages? What were those? I leaned closer for a better look –
Not sausages.
Baby hamsters, a dozen of them. Hairless and vivid-pink, their wrinkled bodies squirming over each other, tiny limbs scrabbling for purchase. Eyes black spots underneath a translucent seal of skin.
Abby picked one up gingerly with two fingers and dropped it into her open mouth. Her white teeth came down on it in a mechanical motion. Crunch.
I slammed my computer lid shut, abruptly jerked out of my horrified trance, and emptied the contents of my dinner into the nearest trashcan.
Of course, not before catching a glimpse of the little bar just underneath the video:
Two million views and counting.