User blog:MrTyeDye/The Nightmare House (Part 4: Luan)

Luan jittered with excitement as she hid behind the curtain, causing it to rustle. After making her triumphant debut at the Chortle Cave, she was called back for an encore performance the following week, which she agreed to with no hesitation. This time around, her entire family, parents included, was in attendance, and she knew that they'd be expecting a lot from her. Regardless, she reassured herself that if she just stuck to her strongest material, she'd be fine.

She allowed herself a peek through the curtain, and was a little disappointed to find that her family was sitting too far back for her to see. Granted, she was there to make everyone in the audience laugh, but she was hoping to see the reactions of those closest to her. Nothing lifted her spirits like a chuckle from her loving, supportive family. Regardless, she just told herself that they'd have plenty of time to praise her after the show.

A light, bouncy piano jingle started up, and that was Luan's cue to storm the stage. Flashing her biggest smile, she strutted through the curtain, snatched up the microphone, and waited for the jingle to fade out. Once it did, she decided to open with a tried-and-true classic:

"I just flew in here from Royal Woods, and boy, are my arms tired!"

...

...

...

As an experienced performer, Luan had gotten into the habit of allowing herself a pause after a joke, to give the audience a chance to laugh. This time, though, there was no response during that pause. Not a single peep from the audience was heard. Luan wasn't expecting her opening line to bring the house down, but she expecting more of a reaction than this.

I guess that one doesn't really work, since I'm still in Royal Woods, Luan reasoned to herself. Lemme try something else.

"Sorry if I'm a little late," she said. "I had to spend a few hours in gridlock. And then I left congress."

...

Once again, Luan's quip was met with dead silence from the audience.

"Heh, tough crowd," she muttered, tugging at the collar of her blouse.

''Okay, political humor's not cutting it. Maybe I'll just stick to my usual material.''

"How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?...Just one, but the lightbulb has to want to change!"

...

Again, nary a sound was heard from the audience. The Chortle Portal was so utterly bereft of noise that Luan swore she could hear a faucet dripping in the upstairs bathroom. Truth be told, Luan was a little puzzled. As a performer, she was no stranger to the experience of bombing, but never before had she encountered an audience this apathetic. Furthermore, the audience at the Chortle Portal during he last performance was quite lively. What happened between then and now?

Whatever the case was, Luan decided to soldier on.

"What kind of music do mummies listen to?...Wrap!"

...

Usually, a pun that bad would at least provoke a groan if she told it at home in front of her siblings. But, once again, her audience responded to her joke with stony, unflinching silence. At the very least, she thought her family in attendance would muster up the occasional giggle for her sake, but apparently, she was wrong.

"What's brown and sticky?! A stick!" she spouted off. "What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?! A flat miner! Why do seagulls fly over the sea?! Because if they flew over the bay, they'd be bagels!"

Joke after joke after joke, each one delivered with less patience than the last. But no matter what she said, nothing seemed to be breaking the audience's vow of silence.

"Geez Louise, what is wrong with you people?!" she spat. "What do I have to do to get a reaction out of you? Pledge my allegiance to Donald Trump?!"

...

"Oh, come on! That doesn't offend you?!"

At this point, Luan had given up trying to make the audience laugh, and was ready to settle for any kind of response, no matter how negative. A gasp. A boo. A hiss. A cry of, "Get off the stage, loser!"

Anything. Anything.

"Do you feel good about yourselves?" asked Luan, giving the crowd a scolding scowl and crossing her arms. "That this is how you've decided to spend your Saturday night? Is this what your idea of fun is?"

...

...

"You know what? I didn't want to have to do this, but you all left me no choice."

Luan threw the mic stand aside and stepped downstage, cracking her knuckles. "It's time to go Don Rickles on all of you."

Luan jumped off the stage and stomped over to a well-dressed gentleman sitting at a nearby table. The spotlight was still projected on the stage, so she could scarcely see him through the darkness, but at that point she really didn't care.

"Hey, everyone, look at this bozo over here!" she cried, her voice seized by vitriol. "Got allllll dressed up in his best suit, just so he could come to my show and daydream! Gosh, I wonder what he's thinking about? Counting his money?"

Much to her frustration, her words elicited no reaction whatsoever from the man. He didn't even turn his head. He just continued to sit with his hands folded in his lap, eyes pointed towards the stage.

"Answer me!"

Luan reared back her open hand and threw it forward, giving him a hard slap across the face. A stinging pain shot up from her fingers as soon as they struck the surface, which, much to her shock, was cold, unyielding, and gravelly.

"W-what the heck?!" she yelped, clutching her aching hand. "Who... what are you?!"

Once the pain in her hand died down, she reached it back over towards the man's face and rubbed her fingers against it.

Icy. Rigid. Coarse.

She was haranguing a statue.

With her heart rate accelerating, Luan looked to her right, and saw a middle-aged lady in a sundress at the same table, who, like the gentleman, sat completely motionless. She reached her trembling hand towards her, caressed her face, and found it to be just as stony as that of the gentleman.

Luan bolted from the table, knocking over a couple of empty chairs in the process, and started running around the Chortle Portal, in search of a single audience member who could explain what was happening. Much to her dismay, there was nary a person in attendance who was any more lifelike than the gentleman she confronted. Table after table of inanimate chunks of granite, sitting with their chiseled hands folded across their chiseled laps.

"Mom? Dad?" she called into the darkness, suddenly remembering that her family had come to see her. "Lori? Luna? What's going on?!"

But even after she repeated herself again and again - even calling out every single one of her siblings by name - nobody from her family answered her call.

I'm the only one here alive!, she thought. How can they not hear me?!

The young comedienne would get her answer once she arrived at their table. What she saw caused her throat to dry up and start to swell shut, leaving her short of breath. Everyone at the table, both parent and sibling, was sitting in the exact same pose: feet planted on the floor, hands folded in the lap. And none of them were moving so much as a millimeter. With her entire body convulsing, Luan grabbed herself by the wrist and forced her hand over towards her mother's face, desperate to reassure herself that this was all some sort of elaborate prank. But her mother's skin, as she feared, had the unmistakable texture of cold, lifeless marble.

Before she could even start to process what happened, she heard a voice calling out to her from the stage, one that sounded eerily similar to her own:

"Looks like you've got the audience bored stiff!"

Luan gasped and whipped around towards the stage. To her bewilderment, she saw the stage spotlight shining down on her dummy, Mr. Coconuts, who was gripping the microphone in his tiny hands.

"Can't say I blame 'em," sneered Mr. Coconuts. "You'd have to be a real dummy to come to this show. I should know!"

Luan, still reeling from the shock of seeing her family petrified, barely managed to eke out a retort.

"T...that's not funny..."

Mr. Coconuts rolled his painted-on eyes. "Oh, right, because you're the comedy expert here. You've left everyone in the club stone-faced!"

The dummy's lower jaw bobbed up and down as he let out a haughty laugh. "Get it?! 'Stone faced'?! HA HA HA HA HA HA!"

Each laugh felt like a stinging nettle piercing Luan's heart. As her breathing became even more labored, the young teen's face scrunched up and tears started to well up in her eyes.

"S-shut up!" she cried. "Stop laughing at me!"

"But I thought you wanted to be laughed at!" taunted Mr. Coconuts, who followed up his remark with another string of malevolent laughter. Then, just to further embellish his sadistic glee, he started dancing a jig around the stage, hopping up and down while somehow keeping his gaze perpetually focused on Luan.

"Luan isn't fun-ny, Luan isn't fun-ny!" he sang.

"SHUT UP!" Luan screamed with tears streaming down her face. "SHUT UP AND GO AWAY!"

To her surprise, her words were actually heeded by the dummy, as he stopped dancing, planted his feet on the floor and let his arms fall to his sides.

"If you insist."

A thick plume of white smoke rose up from the stage, and when the smoke dissipated, Mr. Coconuts was nowhere to be seen. Luan was relieved to hear the teasing stop, but any relief that she felt was quelched once the thick, suffocating fog of silence started to settle back in.

"W-wait! I change my mind!" she cried, running up to the stage. "Come back! Come back!"

The sound of her voice echoing throughout the halls of the club only served to reinforce how vast and empty it was. What was supposed to be a place of merriment and leisure was a lifeless, endless abyss.

Luan stopped just before the stage and dropped to her knees, wrapping her shivering arms around herself and choking out labored sobs. The girl couldn't bring herself to get back up on the stage and face that endless sea of dead, stone-carved eyes, incapable of displaying even the faintest sign of amusement.

"Come back," she whimpered, falling into a fetal position. "I don't want to be alone..."

Her sobbing degenerated into weeping, then full-on bawling, as if she could somehow cause the statues to stir by crying loudly enough.

"I DON'T WANT TO BE ALONE!" she wailed into the darkness, desperate to be heard.

The sound of her own crying was the last thing she heard before she woke up.