The Giggle Chamber

CW: Horror, mental health

They say every tragedy begins with someone laughing.

That’s how I open my statement. The detective gives me a look that lives somewhere between pity and paperwork. The room smells of burnt coffee, old carpet, and that faint metallic aftertaste you get when blood tries to pass as disinfectant. Amber light hums through the blinds. Dust hangs in the air like applause that forgot to stop.

“Relax,” he says. “You’re not the one on trial.”

I give him a short customer-service chuckle. “You’d be surprised how often I hear that.”

He presses record. The red light blinks, a tiny accusation.

Before the clubs and the crowds, there was a house where we never cried. Mum said tears made ghosts jealous. So we laughed, at funerals, at break-ups, at bills we couldn’t pay. I was five when my father slipped on black ice. Mum stood over him and laughed so hard her voice cracked like the pavement under his head. That sound stitched something in me, a thread that never stopped vibrating. I learnt early that laughter is cheaper than grief.

“It started,” I tell him, “with a chuckle.”

The club was called The Giggle Chamber. Bad omen but a decent bar. Neon sputtered outside, casting red and blue across faces that wanted to forget their day jobs. Inside, the walls were painted black, but you could still see the water stains underneath, like old bruises showing through makeup. The mic smelt of nerves and mint gum.

That first night, someone cracked a joke about penguins or politicians, the usual sort. The crowd laughed in unison - people-pleaser kind of laughter that says,’ We’re fine, honestly’. watched from the bar, nursing a warm beer. When the comedian left the stage the applause died.

But the laughter didn’t.

It stayed in the room like smoke after a fire. Soft at first, barely there. The bartender wiped down glasses and hummed along to it, thought it was the speakers. The manager checked the sound system twice. But I heard it clearly, underneath everything - a chuckle that didn’t belong to anyone.

I walked to the stage. Empty now, just the microphone stand and a stool with a wobbly leg. The laughter seemed to come from the floorboards, or maybe the walls. I touched the mic. It was warm.

Behind the bar hung a yellowing poster from an old comedy tour. In small print: Fear and farce share a punchline. I used to think it was clever marketing. Now I think it was a warning.

The detective tilts his pen. “You’re saying laughter spread?”

“I’m saying it evolved.”

A week later, I was back on stage - different crowd, same hunger for distraction. I told a story about my mother, about black ice and cracked voices. They laughed nervously at first, unsure if it was allowed. Then harder and then - too hard.

A woman in the third row couldn’t stop. Her friends patted her back, handed her water. She doubled over, gasping between convulsions. The laughter twisted into something else, something wet. She slid off her chair. Security carried her out still giggling, tears streaming down her face.

The rest of the audience watched, frozen. Then someone in the back started laughing. Then another. Within seconds, the whole room was howling - not at my joke but at her.

I stood on stage and felt it, that hum beneath the sound. The Nervous Laugh. It smelt of static and perfume testers - panic dressed in polite clothes.

A man keeled over mid-chuckle at the 6 o’clock news two days later. His chest still jolted when the paramedics zipped the bag.

I smiled along when I saw it online.

You have to.

Silence gets you noticed.

“Didn’t that strike you as odd?” the detective asks.

“Everything’s normal if it’s popular.”

Then came The Contagious Laugh.

It travelled quicker than rumour. People caught it on buses, in lifts, during moments of silence. So seemly, a stranger’s grin could expand your lungs. The media ( unusually in agreement) called it The Joy Plague. Couples who hadn’t spoken in months started wheezing together. Some posted pics in panic, #4better4worse, then waited for likes that never came - while the chuckles kept going.

Teachers collapsed mid-lesson. Students smirked in the surprising silence. A funeral went viral when the priest slipped on wet grass. The mourners clapped for five straight minutes. The mayor livestreamed herself laughing for six, when she finally gasped - ‘please stop recording’, - no one did.

The detective folds his arms. “And you? Did you catch it?”

“I was born with it.”

He frowns. “What kind?”

“The quiet one. The sort that looks like control. The one grief wears to work.”

He hesitates. The tape hums.

“I call it The Silent Laugh. It sounds like relief, feels like drowning. It’s what happens when a scream learns manners.”

I lean back in my chair. For the first time since we started, my hands are shaking. I press them flat against the table but they won’t stop.

“There’s a moment right after the laughter dies when your body forgets who it belongs to. Your lungs still remember the rhythm. Your heart doesn’t. That’s where I live - in that pause.”

The detective watches my hands. I pull them back into my lap.

He says nothing. Good - Silence is the only honest audience.

He slides photographs across the table. Mouths open mid-laugh, eyes all wrong.

“Recognise anyone?”

I point. “That’s The Chuckle. Blue jacket. That’s The Nervous one, see her hands? And then, thats The Contagious one. Centre frame.”

“We ran facial recognition,” he says. “There’s only one person in every photo.”

I smile, but it takes effort this time. “You don’t say.”

“You were on stage.”

“I was. So were they.”

He closes the folder. “Forty-eight dead.”

“Forty-eight set free.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Neither was their laughter.”

A twitch flickers at his mouth. A single chuckle escapes. The mirror breathes back the sound, stretching it. He touches his throat, a touch too late.

“You shouldn’t laugh in small rooms,” I whisper.

They say the tape corrupted there. The laughter distorted into something liquid and underneath, was a whisper: ‘help me’.

The report calls it mass psychogenic illness. Tiktok calls me The Laughing Man of Block M. I call it feedback. The viral kind.

They moved me to isolation, where guards wear headphones that play rain. Doctors hum children’s songs as they walk the corridor, and yet, still, their shoulders shake. They always pretend it’s a cough.

You want truth? They were all mine. Every single one. The Chuckle opened the door. The Nervous filled the cracks. The Contagious made sure everyone heard.

The Silent waited underneath them all.

It wasn’t joy. It was need, a plea for someone to listen to grief without remixing it as comedy.

Behind my eyes, scenes replay in wandering visions: Moonlit confession rooms, shifting walls, shows that never end but change sets each episode. You’d like them, Detective. They’re darkly funny.

They send a new interrogator, young, fresh, the sort who still believes empathy is sterile. He brings tea he won’t drink.

“Do you feel remorse?”

“Of course. Every time someone laughs, I hear it.”

He stops the recorder. “Then what do you want?”

I lean close enough for my breath to fog the glass. “To hear silence again.”

He half-laughs, a reflex,a habit - then catches himself and leaves.

The light flickers amber, then white, while dust floats like ghosts taking thier unwelcome bows.

I open my mouth but no sound comes.

Some laughs are better left unheard.

The footage ends there.

The Side Laugh - They built a storage loft above the interview room years later. Boxes of unsolved cases stacked beneath the same flickering light. Sometimes the guards swear they hear laughter from up there - soft, almost polite, like someone trying not to interrupt. They checked once, found nothing but dust and the faint smell of burnt coffee. Still, no one stores anything there now. They call it The Loft Room. Not a laughing matter, really. Unless you know the joke;)