Sam Singer here.
Remember when I told you I had a very special TV appearance coming up?
Yeah, it didn’t exactly go as planned.
It was a bright and sunny Wednesday afternoon when I parked my car at the local Habitsville TV station. This would be my debut on the small screen—or, on any screen for that matter—and I was feeling supremely nervous.
But nothing bad can happen when it’s sunny out, right?
I was early, partly because the Habitsville Gazette office where I work is so close by, and partly because I was so apprehensive. Not only had I never been on TV, but I’ve also never spoken aloud about the strange things I’ve seen around Habitsville, things I’ve even sometimes been a part of. I was also wildly underdressed, thanks to my time with Mr. Chatter at the tailor’s shop a few days ago.
The building looked as you might expect: small, flat, and brick—the lobby was actually sort of depressing. It was like the saturation knob had been turned all the way down, all beige and lifeless. Even the bowl of fake fruit on the unmanned front desk was muted in colors, with gray grapes and pale apples. The air was stale and sour, and since no one greeted me when I walked in, I took it upon myself to uneasily walk down the hallway, which I assumed would lead me to the rest of the studio.
The hallway was… weird.
Small towns are almost always steeped in one thing—nostalgia. Specifically, nostalgia for their own history. So it wasn’t surprising when I found that the hallway was lined with picture frames. Any normal TV station might have reminders of their past development hanging around—but, this is Habitsville. Nothing is normal here.
The frames were empty. All of them. Wooden outlines of varying size and age, with nothing but thin shields of protective glass over blank white squares within.
There was one door at the end of the stretch, and as I tore my eyes away from the odd decorations around me, I could hear something coming from the closed door.
Laughter.
The possibility of a live studio audience hadn’t occurred to me, and did nothing to ease my nerves. As I approached the entrance to the next room, waiting for the laughter to subside, I stole another glance at one of the empty frames.
Only, it wasn’t empty.
I blinked, but just as quickly as it appeared, it was gone—but for a moment, I had been able to see it. An outline; a mere tracing of a crowd of people, lined up and posing. It rose to the surface of the white background within the frame, before sinking back into the paper.
I assumed what any rational person would—I had imagined it. A symptom of the overwhelming anxiety pulsating through my very being.
So then, I opened the door—and things got even stranger.
It was a small studio, with a typical three camera set up. The lights overhead were bright and warm, and immediately made me squint. But once my eyes adjusted, I saw it. Or rather, I didn’t see it.
The place was completely empty.
Not only was there no studio audience, but there were no camera operators, no floor director, no audio engineer—I was standing alone in the doorway of a seemingly abandoned TV studio.
So where had the laughter come from
“Hello?” I called out, peering into the darkness surrounding the bright stage. There was a teleprompter to the side, and surprising amount of empty seats in rows behind it.
The corners of the room were shrouded in such a thick darkness that it was impossible to tell just how large the room was. I followed the path from the door I’d entered. It led directly to the empty stage in the center. As I looked around, nervous and confused, I took my first step onto the platform.
As soon as my foot touched the linoleum stage floor, a series of things happened.
First, the lights on the stage grew brighter, so bright I could actually hear the buzzing of the electricity. I had to cover my eyes, and as I did, I heard a strange sound—a loud THUMP. Then, the sound faded, and so did the light. I removed my hand, blinked a few times, and then took in the intensely disturbing sight that was now before me.
For one, although the equipment was still unmanned, the seats in the audience were no longer empty.
There, sitting in rows, hands politely folded in their laps, were twenty-two wooden mannequins.
They had hardly any detail—in fact, they looked like human-sized artist’s figures, the kind you can bend to make different poses for reference. I couldn’t tell where they had come from, until I saw the slight glimmer of thin string coming from their wrists, connected to something so far up in the darkness above that I couldn’t see it.
But that wasn’t the weirdest thing.
The weirdest thing was that the teleprompter had changed. Instead of a flat black screen, it now read, quite plainly:
Tell Us A Joke
I hesitated. The ‘audience’ was completely still, and the only sound in the air was my own rapid breathing. Tell them a joke? Was this some sort of prank?
My instinct was to leave, but as I turned back towards the door, the one that led down that hallway, my blood ran cold. It was gone—that same inky blackness that lined the studio had creeped in, covering my only escape.
I turned back to the wooden crowd. I cleared my throat.
“Uh,” I started, unsure of what to say. It was really stupid to try this. I knew that. But here went nothing. “Where does the general keep his armies?” I asked, my voice hanging hollow and solitary in the dead air. There was no movement.
I smiled weakly. “His sleevies.”
I waited a moment, my pulse hammering hard in my head and my chest.
And then, I heard it. One, low, stifled snicker.
It came from the mannequin seated all the way to the left. I could tell because as it laughed, its shoulder shook slightly, the light bouncing against the string as it tugged. It was quiet and slow at first, but gradually, it grew to a great bellow, a strange, deep voice.
And then, as though contagious, the rest of the crowd followed suit. They were all shaking a bit, a few clapping their wooden hands together, and giggling in drastically different voices. It sounded like the laugh track from an old sitcom, except this made me shiver with fear.
But that wasn’t the only odd thing—it was like, as they reacted to my terrible joke, the room got a bit more… lively. The darkness that covered the walls and ceiling crept back ever so slightly, and the lights around the studio grew warmer.
Then, something from the ceiling fell directly in front of my face, and I jumped back.
On a thin string, like those controlling the figures, was an old-fashioned microphone.
Tentatively, I leaned forwards. I cleared my throat again. “Hi—,” I started, my voice breaking at the end with nervousness and fear. And, as I did, the audience ceased cheering. Their hands fell limp into their laps, and what little ground I had cleared from that darkness became re-enveloped.
I shook myself a bit, and straightened up my shoulders. I took the microphone, still on the string, into my hand and held it to my mouth. I took a deep breath.
“How are we doing tonight, folks?” I said, in my best stand-up act impression. “I am delighted to be here.”
I was right. At my enthusiasm, they cheered and whistled, and the darkness shrank back. The rules were clear—play the part of entertainer for this demented wooden audience, and gradually create a path to the exit.
Fail to do so and, well—I hoped I wouldn’t find out.
My hands were sweating so much I nearly dropped the mic. “You guys seem like a great crowd,” I started, and saw the room get a little bit brighter. “Say, what do you call a really motivated mannequin? A manne-CAN.”
I jumped as there was a loud ba dum tss from somewhere off stage, and the crowd went wild. They were shaking with laughter, the sound growing louder and more warped. I could see that very back wall now, and plain and beige as it was, I was relieved to see it, though the door that led out of the studio remained hidden.
Still...something was wrong.
I had felt it slightly when I had told the first joke, but hadn’t thought anything of it. But after that particular bout of laughter, it couldn’t be ignored. I was growing more and more out of breath, and it was from more than just nerves. There was an achiness in my joints, and my mouth felt dry.
I decided to try something. “Why did the chicken cross the road?” I asked, in a small, anxious voice. I looked at my shoes. “To get to the other side,” I said without enthusiasm.
Again, there was dead silence. The microphone reeled back up to its mystery source in the ceiling, and the back wall disappeared as the darkness crept back inward.
But, just as I feared, I felt… better. My breathing eased, my arms and legs didn’t hurt. And suddenly, things became very clear and very confusing all at once.
Somehow, making the mannequins laugh took some of my energy, and transferred it to the TV studio. Find the sweet spot, and uncover the door to escape. Over or under shoot it, and…
“You know, I love mannequins,” I said, taking a hint from how well my last dummy-themed joke went. My hunch must have been right, because as I spoke, the microphone bounced back down from the ceiling. “My wife’s a one-legged mannequin, actually. But I can’t stand her.”
Although it made me cringe, they enjoyed it. I know this because the lights got a bit brighter, I could hear and see their unhinged cackling as they all thrashed in their seats, and because my nose started to bleed.
I wiped it away, my hand smearing the red. “You’re too kind,” I said, and the rusty taste of blood filled my mouth. “What would you call a Darth Vader Statue?” I paused, for comedic effect, and to brace myself for the next wave of pain. “Mannequin Skywalker.”
I felt a jolt of an excruciating sensation go down my spine as the mannequins writhed even harder. They were holding onto each other now, pulling so hard in ecstasy that I even saw one’s arm be yanked off. The one who did the yanking held it above their head, whooping loudly.
I could see some of the side walls now, and the lights had come on in the back of the studio. The blood was dripping slowly from the corners of my mouth now, and there was a ringing in my ears. My knees threatened to buckle, and yet, I turned my aching neck to the side—
I could see it, barely poking out of the shroud. The very edge of the door handle.
One more ought to do it, though I wasn’t sure if I could take it.
I held onto the microphone, pulling on the string just to keep myself standing. Through labored breaths and bubbles of blood, I said into the mic, “I’m having… a wonderful time.” They cheered back to me, and I could see the surface of the door.
“Did you all… hear about… the mannequin … who was given… a key to the city…?” I asked, my voice ragged and hoarse. I eyed the door. My feet inched a bit closer. My vision was getting blurry, my pulse weak.
“He was a model citizen.”
I moved as quickly as I could, which wasn’t nearly as fast as usual. A trail of blood followed me as I stumble towards the door amidst the screaming laughter that filled the studio. Arms and legs went flying as the figures began pulling each other and themselves apart form their hilarity. The darkness was nearly gone from the room.
I reached the door, grabbed the handle, and pulled.
And there I was, back into the hallway. I shut the door behind me, but I could still hear the frenzied laughter. I slid down to the floor, struggling to stay conscious. My head tilted up towards the lights, which were clear and bright, not nearly as dull as when I first entered.
And then, I saw them, too.
Those picture frames, the one’s that had been empty upon my arrival. They all had their pictures.
It was exactly what I thought—the history of the TV studio, some things from around Habitsville. I was able to stand up, but couldn’t look at them for long.
As the laughter in the studio faded and I grew stronger, the pictures faded from their frames.
The light grew dimmer, the color leached out of everything—and suddenly, I was right back where I started. In that same, plain building.
The last red was draining from the apple and the purple from the grapes as I went back into the lobby. The blood had stopped streaming from my nose and mouth, and I absentmindedly wiped away what I could.
But I wasn’t thinking about that.
I was thinking about that picture, the outline I had seen upon my arrival, which I had thought to be my mind playing tricks.
I had seen it, in its entirety, that second time. People lined up in rows, smiling brightly, on the front page of a very, very old issue of The Habitsville Gazette.
I could make out the headline before it faded to white:
Twenty-two killed in Habitsville Television Station Fire During Live Broadcast
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