The only thing louder than the taunts was the silence that followed. For Kaito, the walk home from school was a gauntlet of echoes. The cruel laughter of his classmates, led by the hulking brute Kenji, rang in his ears long after they’d grown bored and left him in a ditch by the riverbank, his backpack torn, his spirit bruised.

It was on one of these walks, as he wiped mud and blood from his lip, that he saw the man. He was impossibly tall and thin, standing unnervingly still beneath the skeletal branches of a willow tree. His body was draped in ragged, dark robes that seemed to drink the fading evening light, and his face was entirely obscured by a woven reed hat, casting his features into a void of shadow.

Kaito froze, his fear of bullies momentarily eclipsed by a deeper, primal dread. The man didn’t speak. He merely extended a long, skeletal hand from his sleeve. In his palm sat a statue, no larger than a fist.

It was a Buddha, but unlike any Kaito had ever seen in a temple. Its face was contorted in a paroxysm of manic, unsettling glee. The eyes were wide, manic slits, and the mouth was stretched into a grotesque, open-mouthed roar of laughter that seemed to hold a scream within it. The aged, dark wood it was carved from gave it a sinister, ancient weight.

“They find their joy in your sorrow,” a voice whispered, though the man’s hidden mouth never moved. The sound was like dry leaves skittering across stone. “This will help you find your joy in theirs. A single drop is all it asks. A drop for a laugh.”

Trembling, driven by a pain deeper than reason, Kaito reached out. His finger, still smeared with blood from his split lip, brushed against the statue’s jagged, laughing mouth.

A sharp prick. A single, ruby bead of his blood welled up and was absorbed into the hungry wood, disappearing instantly.

The Hock Man was gone. Vanished. As if he were never there. Only the cold, laughing statue remained in Kaito’s hand.

The change began that night. A strange feeling bubbled in his chest, a foreign warmth. He looked at the homework Kenji had ripped up, and instead of crying, a small, dry chuckle escaped his lips. It felt good. It felt… powerful.

The next day at school, Kenji cornered him by the lockers. “What’s wrong, little worm? Forgotten how to cry?”

Kenji’s friend, Taro, snickered, leaning against a fire extinguisher case mounted on the wall. As Kenji shoved Kaito, the case’s lock, rusted and old, gave way with a metallic pop.

The heavy red cylinder fell. It didn’t just drop; it spun, and the metal valve at the top struck Taro square in the temple with a sickening, wet thock. He dropped without a sound.

Panic erupted. Students screamed. Teachers ran. But Kaito… Kaito stared. A giggle, soft and incredulous, bubbled past his lips. Then another. He couldn’t stop. He laughed as teachers performed CPR, laughed as the ambulance sirens wailed, laughed at the perfect, beautiful absurdity of it. Kenji stared at him, his bully’s bravado replaced by pure, unadulterated terror.

Taro didn’t make it.

Kaito’s laughter grew. It became his constant companion. He’d chuckle at the news report about a local chef who, in a bizarre accident, somehow fell into his own industrial noodle maker. The man had been particularly cruel, always yelling at Kaito for walking too slowly past his shop.

He’d guffaw when he heard a famous, mean-spirited socialite had been found in her koi pond, drowned. The official report said she’d slipped, but the koi were unnervingly, disproportionately fat that week.

With every strange, tragic death that circled him, Kaito’s laughter grew louder, more unhinged. He was no longer the victim. He was the audience to a grand, horrific comedy orchestrated just for him. And after each event, he would retreat to his room, take a sterilized needle, and prick his finger.

He would let a single drop of blood fall into the statue’s ever-grinning maw. The wood would darken, and the statue’s expression seemed to grow even more gleeful, more hungry. It was their ritual.

The world around him became a circus of the macabre. A traffic light malfunctioned exactly as a rude driver sped through, leading to a crash that was both tragic and, in its Rube Goldberg-like precision, hilarious. Kaito howled with laughter from the sidewalk.

But the statue was never satisfied. The drop became two. Then three. The laughter wasn’t just outside him anymore; it was inside, a constant ringing in his skull, a pressure in his soul. His own smile in the mirror began to look like the statue’s—too wide, too full of teeth, his eyes gleaming with a manic light.

He knew what he had to do for the grand finale. The source.

He found Kenji hiding in an alley, shaking, a shell of the boy he once was. He’d seen the pattern. He knew.

“Please, Kaito… I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…” Kenji begged, backing away until he hit a damp brick wall.

Kaito just smiled his terrible, jagged smile. The Laughing Buddha felt warm in his hand, almost pulsating. He didn’t need a needle anymore. He simply dragged his own palm across a jagged piece of metal on a dumpster, letting a stream of blood flow freely onto the statue.

It drank it in, and for a moment, the alley was silent.

Then, Kenji started to laugh. It was a choked, horrified sound. He clawed at his own throat, but the laughter kept coming, louder and louder, tearing from his lungs. His eyes bulged in terror, contradicting the hysterical sounds forcing their way out of him. He laughed until he couldn’t breathe. He laughed as he vomited. He laughed as he convulsed on the ground, his body starving for air his laughing fits would not allow.

Kaito watched, his own laughter now a silent, breathless shaking. He watched until Kenji’s final, choked chuckle faded into the quiet of the alley.

Silence.

For the first time in weeks, there was true silence. And in that silence, Kaito felt a new feeling rise, cold and sharp beneath the fading warmth of his glee.

It was hunger.

He looked down at the statue. Its wooden face was now slick, almost wet with a dark, bloody sheen. The laugh was no longer carved. It was alive. And it was looking back at him.

A dry, rustling whisper filled his mind, not from the alley, but from inside his own head. It was the voice of the Hock Man, the voice of the statue, the voice of his own laughter.

“More,” it whispered.

And Kaito, his own smile stretching wider than any human mouth should, could only agree. The joke, he realized, was never on them. It was on him. And it was the funniest thing he had ever known.

He began to laugh again, the sound echoing down the alleyway, as he reached for the sharp metal once more. The show, it seemed, must go on.