So far we’ve mostly covered stories that are very well-known, so here’s a more obscure one. I stumbled across this story on the Creepypasta Wiki while looking for creepypasta to review, and I’ve never seen it talked about elsewhere, but I decided to cover it because it’s more representative of what an “average” creepypasta is like than the other stories I’ve reviewed thus far. This is another LiveJournal repost.
There’s murder in this story.
“Folder hjklrk”
Plot Summary
This creepypasta is slightly unusual in that the narrator has a name — he's David, a young Irish lad from County Cork. David narrates this story in an upbeat manner, telling us that he's from an outdoorsy family; his parents met through a mountaineering club, and he and his dad regularly go hiking around the hilly countryside. David also started going with a group of his friends once he hit his teen years, including a friend named Adam, who mysteriously vanished a year prior. David thinks he's managed to solve the mystery of what happened to Adam.
Recently, David has been laid up at home after undergoing foot surgery for a particularly bad ingrown toenail. While at home, he passed the time on his computer. He's had said computer for five or six years, but has replaced almost all of its original parts since to keep its hardware up to date. It still has its original hard drive, along with three others he's added, since he's sort of a digital hoarder and has never been good at reducing clutter on his machine. In total, his computer now boasts six terabytes of storage space, most of which is used up.
After a couple days of gaming, David became bored, but was inspired to dig through older files on his computer in search of nostalgia. He had folders full of videos he'd made as a younger kid, more folders full of attempts at programming, and yet more folders that he didn't even remember creating and filling up. One folder he didn't remember making had the rather ambiguous name of "hjklrk" — apparently just a random keysmash, which isn't generally his style. David decides to investigate the folder.
Inside the folder is another folder with the same name (followed by the number 1), with yet more folders inside of that. Some folders are empty. A bunch of them are numbered, 1 through 67. The contents of the hjklrk folder total 235GB in total, quashing David's original thought that maybe this was a game he'd never installed properly — 235GB is way too big for a video game. He looks in the folder numbered 1 and sees it contains a bunch of videos. All of them are porn.
Now, David tells us he's not in the habit of downloading porn (he may view it, but he never saves it to his hard drive). The files are dated 2012. Opening another of the numbered folders (number 34 — I see what you did there, author), he finds more porn. He scrolls down to number 67 and checks inside — yet more porn. He's a bit shocked that he apparently saved massive amounts of porn to his hard drive years ago, but gives up investigating further for the day. That night he has a dream about hiking around with his old pal Adam, but nothing particularly weird or noteworthy happens in it.
The hjklrk folder reminds David of an idea he once had on a potential way to hide sensitive data on a computer so it would be difficult for, say, authorities to recover it. His idea is as follows:
Sort data into five categories — say, A through E.
Encrypt all data using progressively tougher encryption, with A being the easiest to crack and E being the most challenging.
Put all the sensitive data in C, and fill A, B, D, and E with unimportant data.
The logic is that an outside party trying to break the encryption would either start at the path of least resistance (A) and give up after finding nothing of note, or assume the juicy data was hidden in the best-encrypted folder (E) and give up after finding nothing of note.
David's folder isn't actually encrypted, but maybe it followed a simpler version of this concept by just having a massive amount of folders filled with unimportant stuff (in this case, porn, which he doesn't store on his hard drive as a general rule) to disguise the fact that there's more important stuff concealed in a select folder or folders. His theory seems proven correct when he opens folder 24 and finds that it also contains videos, but that these aren't porn.
After searching folders 1 through 67, he finds that 1 through 12 contain porn, 30 through 44 contain porn, and 55 through 67 contain porn. Of the remaining folders, some are empty. The rest contain non-pornographic videos. David notices that some of the creation/edit dates on the content are recent, as if someone is still actively adding to the hjklrk folder. He thinks maybe his brother did it, but when asked his brother tells David that he doesn't even know David's login info.
David goes on YouTube to look at his friend Adam's old YouTube channel, both for the nostalgia factor of seeing his old friend and for the creepy factor of viewing an abandoned social media account run by a now-missing person. After that, he goes back to hjklrk and looks at the non-porn videos, finding that they're videos he shot during mountaineering expeditions with his friends, although he doesn't remember taking any videos while mountaineering. He enjoys watching these videos a lot, gets a sort of thrill off of reliving good times spent outdoors.
After getting distracted, he goes to search "hjklrk" on Google, but gets an error message. He confirms that his internet is working and that Google functions fine for other search terms.
Later that evening, David goes back to looking through the mountaineering videos he apparently shot. In another of the numbered folders, he finds videos where he's walking a good ways back from the rest of his friend group, filming them from a distance. His friends don't seem to know they're being recorded, or even that David is present behind them.
In one video, filmed inside, David asks Adam why he's been acting weird lately. Adam confesses to feeling anxious, saying he's worried something bad is about to happen. Other videos just show a blank wall with unimportant background noise, as if the camera was left on accidentally. David reiterates again at this point that he doesn't remember any of this, but he's still apprehensive about watching the last non-pornographic video left in the subfolders. After some hesitation, he decides to watch it anyway.
The video is close to an hour in length, and David ends up skimming through much of it; it's apparently being filmed outside at night, nobody is talking, and the lack of light makes it nearly impossible to tell what's going on. Eventually, the cameraman (again, it turns out to have been David filming) stops outside the window of a house and films the interior for about half an hour, although nothing is going on inside.
Around the fifty-minute mark, David turns the camera to face himself and addresses the lens, saying he's been intending on doing this for ages although it's still not clear what "this" is. He's apparently addressing his future self and says "you're happy this happened, aren't you?" The following five minutes don't contain any clear footage, but from the audio it sounds like a window opening, then a door, followed by both being closed. Following that, about three minutes of rustling foliage, and then David turns the camera back towards his own face. He steps away from the camera, revealing that he's in the woods — and so is Adam, unconscious but alive and breathing.
In the video, David again addresses his future self watching, dedicating his next act to his little one-man audience as he pulls out a kitchen knife and commences violently stabbing Adam to death. He says to his future self that he (future!David) really doesn't care, does he — that he's enjoying this.
David, watching the video, realizes that his past self was right.
Closing Thoughts
I'll begin with what I liked. David's narration, albeit rambling to the point where you could argue he's bogging down the pace, is endearing and makes you feel like you know the guy. He's cheery, candid about personal details (I cut a lot of them for relevance when I was summarizing, but we learn David has color/letter synesthesia, has dabbled in game development but never managed to finish a project, used to make up fictional planets for fun complete with elaborate worldbuilding, and tried to be a YouTube Let's Player as a tween), and generally comes off as someone who writes the way he talks, which I think is fun for a first-person narrator. If David hasn't already kissed the Blarney Stone, he doesn't need to.
I'll actually argue in favor of the pacing: if this story were shorter and its narrator more focused on his tale, the twist that David is actually the sort of fellow who murdered a close friend for funsies wouldn't have impact. For that twist to work, it's crucial that us readers feel like we know David, and his conversational writing style accomplishes that goal.
Unfortunately, that's about all the praise I can give, because there are too many baffling elements in play and the story doesn't even hint at what the explanations might be. David is adamant that he doesn't remember making a folder filled with over two hundred gigs of video, most of it being porn in order to disguise the ones showing the events leading up to his murder of Adam as well as the actual murder. There's no indication that he's lying about having forgotten about that, or about the murder itself. And yet, nothing in the story even hints at why David can't remember any of this, which leaves me with little choice but to assume the author intended it to read as David having a dissociative disorder... which, apart from being a bad and tired horror trope, also doesn't make sense if you know how dissociative disorders actually work. I'd get into it, but it's a complicated topic and this post is long enough already.
I'm also baffled by the bit about Google giving David an error message when he tried to search "hjklrk." It's a red herring, sure, but it never gets explained and I can't think of any reason why Google couldn't search for that particular keysmash.
We don't know why David murdered Adam, other than "for the thrill of it," but while that's something I might speculate about in another story, here it's so overshadowed by all the other puzzling stuff that I'm fine just accepting that David, or his alternate personality or whatever, is a thrill killer — I mean, plenty of real-life murderers (especially teenage white boys) murder simply for the rush.
In the end, I guess I'd give this one a 5/10 if I was the sort of person who typically ranked things out of 10. It's an engaging read, but it raises more questions than it has an interest in answering, and that ultimately makes it fall flat.