The curtain parted without a sound.
No hand pulled it aside. It simply opened—slow and smooth—like a mouth ready to swallow.
Malik hovered at the threshold, peering into the shadowed room beyond. "This doesn't feel like backstage."
"It's not," Anna murmured. Her voice sounded far away, like it had traveled a long distance to reach her own ears. "This is somewhere else."
They stepped through.
The air changed.
Gone was the rot, the dust, the choking smell of mildew and regret that haunted the rest of the manor. No mocking voices, no laugh tracks in the walls. Just silence.
A thick, oppressive silence that hurt to breathe. It stretched time into threads, fragile and fraying, like one wrong word might tear it open. The room itself was not grand or theatrical—it had none of the dramatic elegance of Eden's stage or the twisted parody the manor had built. It was small. Cramped. Walls bowed inward like they'd collapsed under the weight of what they contained.
The room was filled with paper.
Not stacked. Not stored.
Flooded.
Torn napkins, crumpled notebook pages, yellowed printouts. Sheets pinned to the walls, curling at the edges. Joke cards split in half. Setlists scribbled and scratched out. Notebooks gutted. Pages blackened by fire. Some bled ink. Others bled something darker.
The floor crunched underfoot.
Riley crouched, sifting through the mess, lifting a scrap between ink-stained fingers. "She actually wrote these."
Jonah hovered by a leaning stack of pages near the wall. "They're all hers. Every single one."
Siobhan held up a taped-together page, fragile as breath. The scrawl was furious and etched deep:
SET 4 – THIN ICE NIGHT
Open with: dead dad, car jokes
Middle: audience abuse, the coat bit
Close with: if they laugh at suicide, I'm never coming back
She lowered it slowly, face pale. "She wasn't just writing jokes. She was testing them. Testing them—the audience."
Malik moved to the center, where a mountain of shredded paper formed something like a nest. A grave made of punchlines. At its peak sat one page, pristine, untouched by rot or time.
He picked it up.
It read:
I never wanted to be funny.
I just wanted to be heard.
The words burned in his hands. Not hot. Not sharp. Just true. So true it hurt.
"Jesus," he whispered.
Around them, the pages began to stir—gently. No wind. No touch. Just motion. Like breath. Like memory.
Anna reached down to brush one from her boot. It clung to her skin for a second, charged with static. She caught another fragment as it peeled away:
They only listen when they're laughing.
So I bled in punchlines.
No sarcasm. No mockery. Just sorrow made legible. Every page was a cry transcribed, edited, packaged into something palatable.
Jonah stared at the walls, his mouth barely moving. "This was her real stage."
Siobhan's eyes brimmed, jaw clenched. "She wrote her pain. Revised it. Trimmed it down until it fit inside a laugh. Until we could pretend she was okay."
Riley kicked at a balled-up script. It crumbled to dust. "We weren't friends. Not really. We were part of the bit. Just props in the set."
"No," Anna said quietly. "We were the audience."
Silence returned.
Not just empty. Revealing. The kind of silence that makes you see what you've been trying not to.
Then—thmp, thmp.
The soft sound of a mic being tapped, distant and precise. From nowhere and everywhere.
Then Eden's voice.
Dry. Measured. Practiced.
"You ever tell a joke so honest it stops being funny?"
Malik turned in a slow circle. "Where is she?"
A single spotlight flickered on in the far corner.
But it didn't land on a stage. No podium. No performer. Just more paper. Another mound of thoughts unspoken.
Her voice came again, steadier this time. The cadence she used after recovering from a bombed opening.
"I said I wanted to die once. On stage. Got the biggest laugh of the night."
Soft laughter rippled through the room. Not cruel. Not taunting. But hollow. Familiar. Like memory trying to laugh through pain.
"So I tried again. Louder. Funnier. Sharper. And they laughed harder."
Around them, pages began to rise again, spinning gently in the still air.
"It's weird, isn't it? If you set your despair to the right rhythm, they clap."
The laughter thinned—like a dying crowd applauding something they didn't understand.
Jonah crossed the room slowly. On a lonely stool, a composition notebook lay open, its spine cracked. He flipped through pages filled with scratched-out jokes, one red-circled entry catching his eye:
The joke is that I keep coming back.
The punchline is that no one asked me to.
"She was rehearsing her death," he said.
Anna shook her head. "No. She was rehearsing her silence."
That's when the floor trembled.
Not like before. Not part of the manor's theatrics.
This was different.
This was grief breaking its container.
The paper nest in the center convulsed—once, twice—and began to rise.
At first they thought it was the wind.
Then it formed a shape.
Not quite a person. A figure. Constructed entirely from torn scripts, balled-up jokes, failed bits, bleeding ink. Her discarded truths. Her silenced pain.
And inside it, flickering like a candle behind wet glass—a face.
Eden's.
Eyes like inkblots. Lips half-open, as if mid-punchline.
She didn't scream.
She smiled.
Her voice—dozens of overlapping takes, hundreds of past performances—rose from her patchwork throat.
"Tell me—what's the difference between a joke and a cry for help?"
No one spoke.
The room didn't want laughter anymore.
The paper-Eden stepped forward. Pages fell from her shoulders like shedding skin.
"Timing."
She collapsed.
Instantly.
The mound of paper exploded outward like shrapnel. Dozens—hundreds—of pages filled the air, fluttering in a storm of unfinished thoughts.
Malik threw himself over Anna. Riley ducked. Siobhan screamed.
And then—
Silence.
The papers drifted to the ground.
Eden was gone.
But the room was different now. Still. Listening.
Anna rose, her hands still clenched. In her fist: the single clean sheet.
I never wanted to be funny.
I just wanted to be heard.
"She's not done," Anna said. "She left this for us. Not to punish. To make us understand."
Jonah looked around, seeing the mess with new eyes. "Understand what?"
Riley exhaled. "That she died talking."
Malik answered for all of them. His voice was low. Reverent.
"And we laughed over it."
He reached down and touched the scattered remains of her story—her truth. "And now... we're her last audience."