The tape kept playing even after Mark stopped screaming.

His final moments repeated endlessly on the screen—his face contorted in agony as something peeled his skin back in jagged strips, the camera lingering on the wet, glistening muscle beneath. But the worst part? His eyes. They kept moving. Watching. Alive. 

The basement smelled like copper and spoiled milk now. The black liquid from Mark's phone had spread across the floor in thick, ropey strands, pulsing like veins. The walls breathed.

A new message appeared on the TV:

"AUDIENCE SHARE: 1,347 (AND GROWING)"

The History of Channel 62


The station had always been cursed and the construction crews in 1962 reported nightmares after digging up the land—visions of a vast, chitinous thing buried deep beneath the bedrock. The studio was built anyway.


Former employees whispered about:

  • The "Archive Room" where tapes moved by themselves.
  • News anchors who aged decades overnight.
  • The midnight broadcast that never ended for one technician (they found him fused to his chair, his mouth stretched around the camera lens).

The final broadcast wasn't the first incident. Just the first one recorded.

Present Day

You're reading this on your phone right now.

Notice how the screen just dimmed? How your reflection looks... wrong?

That static whisper in your ear isn't your imagination.

Check your gallery.

There's a new video there now.

"PRESS PLAY TO JOIN THE AUDIENCE"

The curse now breaches the fourth wall. Want to go darker? I can detail the "archive room" or the fate of previous viewers.

The Archive Room exists between broadcasts.

You won't find it on any studio blueprint. The door only appears when the fluorescent lights hum that particular pitch – the one that makes your fillings vibrate. Inside, the shelves stretch farther than physics allows, stacked with Betamax tapes that weren't recorded in this reality.

I know because I worked the overnight shift.

The tapes whisper to each other. You can hear it when the studio empties – a wet, clicking chatter like insect mandibles. Sometimes they play without being inserted. That's how I saw The 1963 Test Pattern Incident before the FCC erased it from history. 

The screen showed the usual color bars at first. Then the red stripe began bleeding. The camera pulled back to reveal the technician – still alive – his skin fused with the broadcast equipment. His screams matched the 1,000Hz tone exactly.

Management called it a "industrial accident." They gave me $500 to sign the NDA. The money's still in my wallet. If you rub the bills between your fingers, they leave a greasy black residue that smells like...

Wait.

Your screen brightness just dropped again, didn't it?

Don't look at the reflection in the dark parts of your screen. It's learning your face.

The Viewer Statistics (Updated Live)

Current audience: 8,912
New viewers this hour: 47
Viewers who stopped screaming: 8,911

Final Transmission Log

The last technician's notes before disappearance:

The archive is hungry tonight. Tapes keep appearing labeled with future dates. Just found one marked with TODAY'S DATE and MY NAME. I can hear something moving in the walls – not rats. The walls are breathing.

The emergency exit signs now lead deeper into the archive.

The static is singing my childhood lullaby.

I think the broadcast wants me to –

[TRANSMISSION ENDS]