Laugh Track

Scranton, 1982.Janice Kowal leaves her shift at the Rusty Nail and never makes it home.By morning, her apartment door is open. Her bedroom is torn apart. Her dog won't stop staring at one patch of wall. And according to the police, it's just another disappearance with no clean answer.Then the laugh starts.Not Janice's real laugh—the soft one her brother remembers—but something sharper, louder, wrong. Every night at 3:07 a.m., it comes from behind the bedroom wall, cutting through the apartment like a blade. Her dog hears it first. Her brother hears it next. And once they do, the room no longer feels empty.When a hidden crawlspace is uncovered behind the plaster, it reveals Janice's purse, her keys, and a Polaroid taken two weeks after she vanished.In the photo, she's standing in her own apartment.Smiling too wide.Laugh Track is a slow-burn horror novella about disappearance, grief, and the terror of realizing a place may still be holding someone long after the world has let them go. Set against the worn streets and dim apartments of 1980s Scranton, it blends urban realism with supernatural unease and the creeping dread of something still living in the walls.Some people vanish.Some stay behind differently.