The teleprompter was lit up.
I stood in the wings of the stage, staring at the line on the screen. It wasn't tonight's script lines. We were staging Wotou Guild Hall tonight. I played Tian Cuilan, and in Act Three, I was supposed to yell at the top of my lungs, "I can't live this life any longer!"
What the teleprompter displayed was—
"You messed up your line. Start over."
I froze for a second and subconsciously glanced toward the stage. Sister Yuan was mid-performance, delivering her lines one after another. The audience sat quietly below, none sensing anything wrong. I looked back at the teleprompter; the words still glowed plainly in black font on a white background, neat and unwavering.
I thought some backstage crew member was playing a prank.
I got through the rest of the show sticking strictly to the original script, not changing a single word. The teleprompter never flashed any other messages, and everything went smoothly for the rest of the performance. After the show ended, I asked Old Zhou, the lighting technician, "Who tampered with the teleprompter tonight?"
"No one touched it," Old Zhou said. "We only loaded one version of the script from start to finish."
"It popped up with a random line halfway through," I insisted.
"You must have imagined it," he replied.
I dropped the subject.
If this had happened at any other theater troupe, word would've spread that very night. But we were the city's drama troupe. We barely put on a handful of shows a year, got paid only half our salaries, and relied on subsidies for the rest. No one had the time or energy to care about a weird line on a teleprompter. A chair leg in the prop room had been broken for two months with no repairs. Loose threads on the costumes hung down like tassels. Whining about something this trivial would just sound melodramatic.
There was another performance the next night.
I arrived an hour earlier than usual. The theater was empty; the house lights were off, and the stage set lay shrouded in darkness, looking like an abandoned living room. I headed straight backstage and pulled up the teleprompter's control interface.
The computer sat on a rickety old table behind the wings, its monitor coated in dust, several keyboard keys stuck and unresponsive when pressed. I scanned through the files—only one document, tonight's script, clean and untouched with no extra content added. I even checked the edit history; the last save was three days prior, no revisions made since then.
The equipment was fine. The script file was fine. That meant I really had imagined it the day before.
I let out a breath of relief, yet felt ridiculous all the same. How could a beat-up old teleprompter possibly be haunted?
The show started at half past seven. Less than half the seats were filled with scattered audience members. Several elderly folks in the front row had come with free tickets, cracking sunflower seeds before the curtain rose. I waited in the wings as the teleprompter stayed lit, showing the opening line perfectly as scheduled.
I stepped onto the stage.
Sister Yuan acted opposite me as Zhou Yaying, while I played Tian Cuilan. The first two acts went off without a hitch, the teleprompter scrolling through each line exactly as we'd rehearsed. I told myself I'd definitely just misread things yesterday.
Then came Act Three—the big argument scene between Tian Cuilan and Zhou Yaying.
I walked to center stage, ready to deliver my first line, when my peripheral vision flicked to the teleprompter.
The words had changed.
"I said start over."
Black text on a white background, exactly like the night before. The font hadn't altered in the slightest, glowing silently there as if someone was whispering right beside my ear.
I froze solid.
A pause in lines on stage is painfully obvious—only two seconds, yet people in the audience were already craning their heads up. Sister Yuan was a seasoned actress. Seeing me freeze, she improvised a line on the spot to carry the scene forward. I snapped back to reality and forced myself to continue acting, my mind buzzing with chaos.
That unwanted line still lingered on the teleprompter screen.
I stared at it, and it stared right back at me. The other actors kept reciting their lines, the audience kept listening, and the theater remained perfectly normal—all except for that screen displaying a sentence that had no business being there.
I refused to follow it. I spoke the original script line instead.
The moment I finished the first genuine line, the words on the teleprompter vanished.
The screen reverted to normal, the next script line popping up right on time, orderly and routine, as if nothing strange had ever happened.
Sweat soaked through my back.
I didn't mention a word to anyone after the show. It would've been useless anyway. Old Zhou would say I was seeing things again. The director would think I was making excuses to skip performances. Sister Yuan would probably pat my shoulder and tell me I was just overworked lately. All reasonable explanations, yet none solved the real problem.
I went home, showered, and lay in bed staring at the ceiling.
A teleprompter is just a machine. Machines don't write words on their own.
Which meant someone was editing it remotely. But who would alter the teleprompter mid-performance? There were only a handful of backstage staff—lighting, sound, stagehands—all busy at their posts, no one free to sneak to the wings and type away on the keyboard. Besides, what would be the point? Just to scare me?
I couldn't convince myself it was human.
I still couldn't fall asleep at two in the morning. I got up and sent Old Zhou a WeChat message, asking if he was free the next day so I could check the teleprompter logs. He replied with a simple "Sure" and nothing more. I tossed my phone aside, tossed and turned in bed, and finally drifted off into a restless sleep.
The next afternoon we had a rehearsal.
I arrived early, before Old Zhou showed up. I unlocked the theater's back door myself, crossed the empty auditorium to the stage, and stood before the teleprompter in the wings.
The screen was off, pitch black.
I didn't turn it on.
I stood there staring at it, like gazing at a silent witness. The theater was deathly quiet, only the low hum of air vents echoing through the ducts. The stage set remained in place—an old Beijing kang bed, a rickety wooden table, an oil lamp. All props, yet under the dim light they looked eerily lifelike, as if someone might push open a door and sit down at any moment.
After thinking for a long time, I made a decision.
I unplugged the teleprompter's power cord.
The plug on the back of the machine was loose, coming free with one tug. The screen flickered once then went completely dark. I rolled up the power cord, tucked it under the table, taped it down, and moved the power strip plug to a far empty socket—ensuring the machine could never turn itself back on.
Then I joined the rehearsal.
The afternoon ran smoothly; we blocked the scenes once and wrapped up early. There was another show that night. The director posted in the group chat that leaders were coming to watch, telling everyone to stay focused. Sister Yuan replied "Noted," and the rest followed suit one by one.
Seven o'clock in the evening.
The theater was busier than the past two nights. Several unfamiliar faces sat in the front row, presumably the leaders the director had mentioned. I was doing my makeup backstage, halfway through applying foundation, when a thought suddenly hit me.
I'd left the teleprompter unplugged.
I set down my powder puff and walked to the wings.
The teleprompter was lit up.
The screen displayed the opening line of Act Three, identical to the script—neat black characters on a white background, glowing steadily.
I knelt down to check under the table. The power cord was still rolled up and taped securely, untouched. The socket on the power strip sat empty.
The machine had no power running to it at all.
I reached out to touch the screen. It was cold, not warm like a device left running all day. Yet the words glowed bright as day, indistinguishable from any normally powered screen.
My throat tightened, a lump stuck there that I couldn't swallow down or spit out.
Sister Yuan called from behind me, saying the show was about to start.
I straightened up, took a deep breath, and walked onto the stage.
Act One. Act Two. Everything normal.
Then Act Three.
It was Tian Cuilan's turn to unleash her rant.
I stepped to center stage, and before I opened my mouth, my eyes darted to the teleprompter.
The screen's text hadn't changed—it still showed the script line.
Then it flickered.
Like someone tapping a keyboard, the cursor flashed, the entire line deleted, replaced with new words:
"Last chance. You messed up your line. Start over."
Beneath it, in smaller font:
"Say exactly what I tell you."
I stood frozen under the stage lights, the auditorium shrouded in darkness. Sister Yuan stood opposite me, waiting for my line.
I stared at the teleprompter.
The words on the screen didn't move an inch.
I refused to follow them.
I recited the original script line instead.
One line.
Two lines.
Three lines.
With every line I spoke, I instinctively glanced at the teleprompter. The words never changed, never faded—they just stayed lit, waiting patiently.
Waiting for me to make a mistake.
Waiting for me to mispronounce even a single character.
I finished the entire scene flawlessly, not a single word out of place. The teleprompter's strange lines still glowed on screen. Sister Yuan delivered her next line, the scene continued, and the audience sat unphased below. Everything appeared normal.
But I was far from normal inside.
After the show, I lingered in the wings staring at the screen. The teleprompter had dimmed automatically, closing the script file as it should after a performance—just a black monitor, still unplugged in the back.
I flipped the machine around to check the port.
The power socket was empty. The cord remained tucked under the table.
The machine truly had no electricity.
For some reason, I suddenly knew I shouldn't touch it anymore. I pulled my hand back, stepped away, and turned to leave. Backstage was nearly empty now. Sister Yuan had already changed and left. Old Zhou was tidying equipment in the storage room. The director chatted with the visiting leaders at the entrance. I walked down the corridor, pushed open the troupe's back door, stepped into the narrow alley, and lit a cigarette.
The alley was cramped, flanked by old residential buildings. Laundry and bed sheets hung strung above, billowing in the wind then deflating again. One streetlamp was broken, the remaining one glowing at the alley's mouth with an orange hue that never reached where I stood.
Old Zhou walked out the back door and spotted me. "Not heading home yet?"
"Finishing this cigarette first."
He pulled his coat tighter. "The weather turned cold out of nowhere."
"Yeah," I murmured.
A heavy silence hung between us.
"Old Zhou," I said quietly, "is there a show tomorrow night?"
He blinked in surprise.
"Tomorrow's show?" he frowned. "There's no show tomorrow."
"The schedule says Wotou Guild Hall runs four consecutive nights," I insisted. "Tomorrow's the final one."
Old Zhou fell silent for a moment. He glanced at me with an unreadable expression, like he didn't know how to respond to my words.
"Tonight's already the last show," he said.
Now it was my turn to freeze.
"Didn't we book four performances?"
"Three total," Old Zhou corrected. "Check the schedule posted in the group chat yourself."
I pulled out my phone, scrolling through chat history until I found the performance calendar the director had sent a month prior. It clearly listed three shows for Wotou Guild Hall. Tonight was the third and final one.
I'm a drama actress. I've memorized scripts for decades; remembering a performance schedule should be as easy as breathing. I couldn't possibly have misremembered.
I was absolutely certain it was four nights.
And yet—
There really was a show tomorrow.
Where had I gotten that certainty from?
My fingers went stiff as the cigarette burned down to the filter, searing my skin. I tossed the butt aside and looked up at Old Zhou.
"The teleprompter wasn't plugged in tonight," I said.
Old Zhou furrowed his brows.
"Then how did you follow your lines?"
I didn't answer.
He could tell I was off, patting my shoulder and telling me to head home and rest early. He locked the back door, his footsteps fading down the alley until they vanished entirely.
I stood alone in the alley. The streetlamp flickered off for a split second then reignited.
The orange light swayed at the alley's mouth, as if someone had walked past the bulb.
But the alley's end was a dead wall. The lamp was mounted flat against the brick, no path for anyone to pass in front of it.
I stared at it for five long seconds.
No shadow appeared again.
I headed home.
The events of the past three days weighed heavily on my mind, leaving me overwhelmed. I replayed everything in my head: the first night, random unscripted lines popped up on screen. The second night it happened again, its tone firmer. The third night—I'd unplugged the power, yet the machine lit up anyway, adding a menacing Last chance.
Three performances. Not four.
Then what was tomorrow's show I'd been certain of?
I reopened the troupe group chat and checked the schedule again. Three shows. Tonight was the finale.
I exited the chat and spotted a reminder on my phone's calendar:
Tomorrow 19:00 – Wotou Guild Hall Fourth Show. Wait in wings.
I'd set this reminder myself a week ago.
I stared at the words for a long time.
I knew I'd scheduled it seven days prior, yet I couldn't recall why. The official calendar listed three shows, but my personal reminder marked four. The contradiction felt like traces left by two different people on the same phone.
I set my phone down and turned off the lights.
In the darkness, I heard noises coming from downstairs.
Nothing terrifying—ordinary household sounds: a faucet twisted open, running water, then turned off again. I lived in an old apartment building with poor sound insulation; pipe echoes between floors were common. But this sound was far too close, as if it came straight from my own kitchen.
I stayed perfectly still.
The water stopped.
Then footsteps. Walking from the kitchen to the living room, pausing briefly, then heading toward the bedroom. My apartment was small—only seven or eight steps from kitchen to bedroom. Whoever it was took four steps and stopped.
Right outside my bedroom door.
I stared at the closed door.
No shadow seeped under the crack. I hadn't turned on the hallway light, so the outside should be pitch black. The gap beneath the door stayed dark.
Yet I knew someone was standing there.
I couldn't explain how I knew—I just did.
After a long while—maybe a minute, maybe longer—I heard a soft sigh. Disappointed, weary.
Then footsteps retreated back to the kitchen. The faucet ran once more.
Then silence.
I woke up at eight the next morning, sunlight slipping through the curtain cracks. I lay in bed for ages trying to convince myself the noises had been a dream—but I knew they weren't. The soles of my shoes were damp with leftover water from the kitchen tile floor.
I decided to wait.
Wait for tonight.
If there really was a fourth show, then the official schedule was wrong and my calendar was right. If not… I'd need to see a doctor.
I left home at six in the afternoon.
November brought early sunsets. By the time the streetlamps flickered on, I'd reached the street where the troupe was located. The theater sat in the old town district, surrounded by run-down 1980s buildings with peeling wall plaster. Withered ivy left dense dark brown vine patterns across the brick, like veins crawling over the walls. The theater itself had been converted from an old cinema; the poster out front was still last month's, edges curled and rain-stained, colors blurring into one messy wash.
The theater lights were on.
I stood across the road staring at the building.
The ticket window was closed, the main door ajar, light spilling through the crack. Someone was already inside.
Sister Yuan walked over from the bus stop, bag slung over her shoulder, and smiled when she saw me.
"You got the notice too?"
"Notice for what?"
"Last-minute extra show tonight," she said. "The director announced it temporarily. Didn't you see the group chat?"
I pulled out my phone.
A new message from the director, posted that afternoon:
Extra performance tonight. Curtain at seven sharp. Everyone be on time.
I scrolled upward. It was the only announcement—no explanation for the last-minute addition, no mention of why the original schedule only listed three shows. Just a blunt, unadorned order.
I followed Sister Yuan inside.
The auditorium already had a decent crowd, fuller than any of the previous three nights. I scanned the seats instinctively—mostly elderly residents, plus a few casually dressed young people, like locals out for an evening stroll who'd wandered in to watch a play. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Yet the crowd size was wrong.
The first three shows never filled half the seats; tonight it was nearly packed.
I headed backstage. Old Zhou was adjusting the stage lights, nodding at me as I passed. Xiao Song was applying makeup to the extras in the dressing room. Sister Yuan was already in costume. Everything looked unnervingly normal, identical to the prior three performances.
I walked to the wings.
The teleprompter was lit up.
The power cord had been plugged back in, neatly arranged into the power strip. The screen displayed the opening line of Act One perfectly.
Old Zhou walked past behind me, and I asked him about the teleprompter.
"What about it?" he said. "You unplugged it the other day, so I plugged it back in today."
"You didn't plug it in," I said flatly.
Old Zhou stared then laughed it off.
"Who else would've done it? A ghost?"
Seven o'clock.
Curtain up.
I waited in the wings, eyes fixed on the teleprompter. Act One lines scrolled by flawlessly, word for word matching the script. Sister Yuan and Xiao Song performed on stage, the audience watched quietly, applause breaking out at all the right moments.
Act One: normal. Act Two: normal.
Then Act Three.
I stepped onto the stage.
The argument between Tian Cuilan and Zhou Yaying.
I walked to center stage as the spotlight hit me, opening my mouth—
The teleprompter flared to life.
Only one line on screen:
"You messed up your line."
No Start over. No Last chance. Just those four cold words.
I froze mid-breath.
Sister Yuan delivered her line, waiting for my reply. My mouth parted, but my mind went completely blank.
The teleprompter's words didn't change.
Someone in the audience coughed softly.
Sister Yuan shot me a subtle look, urging me to continue.
I opened my mouth—
"I was wrong."
The words spilled out before I could process them. They weren't in the script. Tian Cuilan had never once uttered those three words in her life.
Yet I'd said them anyway.
A deathly silence fell over the audience.
Sister Yuan froze mid-expression, mouth half-open, her own lines stuck in her throat.
The teleprompter's text shifted.
"Good. Keep going."
It told me to continue.
But I stood rooted at center stage, spotlight burning on my face, the auditorium dead silent. One thought echoed endlessly in my head: my mouth had stopped obeying me.
I'd spoken words I never chose to say.
The teleprompter told me to say I was wrong, and my body obeyed without question.
Sister Yuan, ever the seasoned actress, forced herself to ad-lib and steer the scene back toward the script. But I'd lost all focus. My subsequent lines stumbled awkwardly, several spoken only because the teleprompter forced them out—whatever flashed on screen, I recited perfectly, no deviation allowed.
I kept testing if I still had control over my own voice.
Later, during one of Sister Yuan's longer monologues, I deliberately tried to alter half a line from the teleprompter's script.
My tongue went rigid.
Completely locked up. Like an invisible hand clamping my vocal cords shut, air trapped in my throat, mouth open yet unable to make a sound. Half a second later, the teleprompter's text flashed bright red—not the usual black font—and the stiffness in my throat vanished. I automatically recited the exact line on screen.
The red faded back to white.
I never dared test it again.
After the show ended, I practically ran off stage.
The audience stood and applauded as usual, just like every prior night. But I noticed one chilling detail—everyone rose in perfect unison. Not simultaneous, but rhythmic: front row first, then the second row a beat later, third row another beat after that. Row by row, timed with mechanical precision, no one rushing, no one lagging.
The applause was equally unnatural. Three crisp claps, pause. Three more claps, pause. No cheers, no whispered chatter—just segmented, robotic clapping, like a broken metronome.
I stood in the wings, peering through the curtain gap at the auditorium.
Over two hundred people stood facing the stage, clapping in rigid unison.
Three claps. Pause. Three claps. Pause.
No one smiled. No one whispered to their neighbor. Every face faced the stage, yet their eyes weren't fixed on the actors—they were locked on the wings.
Locked right where I stood.
I stepped back in fear.
The applause cut off abruptly.
In perfect sync, everyone lowered their hands and turned toward the exits. No pushing, no talking, filing out one by one in eerie order. In less than two minutes, the auditorium was completely empty.
The theater fell silent.
The stage lights still burned, the set untouched. Sister Yuan and Old Zhou murmured quietly on the opposite side of the stage, their voices muffled and indistinct.
I stood in the wings staring at the teleprompter.
It had dimmed automatically, screen black after the performance.
I walked over and touched the monitor.
Cold. No warmth at all.
I pulled my hand away and left the theater.
I didn't head straight home. Instead, I sat in the convenience store next to the troupe for over an hour, drinking two bottles of water and eating a rice ball. The cashier girl played short videos on her phone with the volume blaring, one background track after another blaring loudly. The noise made my temples throb, yet the chaotic bustle strangely grounded me.
My phone buzzed. The director posted in the group chat: Great work tonight everyone. Rest up early. Final show tomorrow night—stay focused.
Final show tomorrow night.
I stared at the screen in disbelief.
Hadn't the fourth show just ended? Why was there another tomorrow?
I frantically scrolled back through chat history. The earlier announcement about the last-minute extra show was gone, replaced by an older message: Two additional performances added for Wotou Guild Hall. Both start at 19:00. All cast prepare accordingly.Posted a week ago.
A week ago.
The original schedule had never been three shows. It was five total—not three, not four, five performances.
My fingers trembled slightly.
I exited the group chat and opened my calendar. The reminder still remained: Tomorrow 19:00 – Wotou Guild Hall Fifth Show. Wait in wings.
Beneath it, in small note text I'd never noticed before, four plain words:
One last time.
The exact same phrase the teleprompter had used.
The convenience store's harsh white fluorescent light glinted off the plastic tabletop, glaringly bright. I flipped my phone face-down on the table. The cashier girl kept scrolling through videos, oblivious.
A terrifying realization dawned on me about the noises I'd heard in the middle of the night—the faucet, the footsteps, the sigh outside my bedroom door. The sound hadn't come from outside my room.
It had come from inside.
The next day I stayed home all day, drawing the curtains wide to let sunlight flood the living room. I replayed the past four nights in my mind, connecting the dots: the first night, strange unscripted lines appeared. The second night it returned, more demanding. The third night I unplugged the power, yet it still lit up without electricity. The fourth night it took control of my voice entirely.
Every strange incident happened during Act Three.
The big argument scene between Tian Cuilan and Zhou Yaying.
What made that scene so special? Long dramatic lines, intense emotional conflict—but ultimately just two women quarreling. Nothing inherently supernatural about it.
I had no answers.
As evening fell, I still found myself heading out. I couldn't explain why. Maybe it was an actor's ingrained habit—once the show starts, you can't walk away, no matter if the audience is human… or something else entirely.
A new poster hung at the theater entrance, freshly pasted perfectly straight. It advertised Wotou Guild Hall, marking tonight as the fifth and final performance. I stared at the poster for seconds. The font was plain standard Song typeface, identical to the teleprompter's text. I reached out to touch it; the paper was cold and slightly damp, as if just stuck up minutes ago. Yet it hadn't rained in days—the air was bone dry.
I pushed open the theater door and stepped inside.
Backstage was business as usual. Old Zhou adjusted lighting levels, Sister Yuan stretched in the dressing room, Xiao Song blocked scene movements for the extras. Everyone went through the motions normally, sensing nothing amiss.
I walked to the wings and stood before the teleprompter.
The screen was lit up, power cord firmly plugged into the strip. Everything looked perfectly ordinary.
The opening line still displayed on screen.
Yet after reciting these lines for years, the words suddenly felt alien. I recognized every character individually, yet together they felt unfamiliar, like seeing them for the first time. I stared at my palms, flipping them over and back, confirming they were still my own hands.
Seven o'clock.
Curtain up.
I waited in the wings, watching the teleprompter scroll line by line. Act One, Act Two—smooth and uneventful. The auditorium was packed full, just like the night before.
Then Act Three.
Time for Tian Cuilan's entrance.
I took a deep breath and stepped onto the stage from the wings. The second the spotlight hit me, I heard a faint low hum behind me—the teleprompter powering on fully.
I walked to center stage and turned to face Sister Yuan.
She parted her lips and delivered Zhou Yaying's line.
It was my turn to speak.
I glanced over at the teleprompter.
No script lines filled the screen anymore. Only one massive line, blown up so large it occupied the entire display:
Still wrong.
The screen flickered once, switching to a new sentence:
Speak with your own words.
I froze completely.
My own words?
I opened my mouth, no stiffness holding my tongue. The teleprompter gave me no lines to follow. It was waiting for me to speak freely.
This was the first time it had ever refused to feed me a script.
Sister Yuan stood opposite me, holding her character's expression, waiting patiently. The audience waited too. The theater was so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat pounding in my ears.
I parted my lips.
What was I supposed to say?
The script lines were written for me by someone else. Now it wanted my own words—but what did Tian Cuilan truly want to say? She raged, she quarreled, she wanted to burn her miserable life to the ground—but all those emotions were written by a screenwriter, not her own. What would she say if left to her own voice?
A sentence suddenly popped into my head.
Not from the script. Not from the teleprompter.
My own honest thought.
"I don't want to act anymore."
My voice rang out, quiet yet clear. Sister Yuan's expression shattered for a split second, caught off guard.
Someone in the audience shifted slightly.
The teleprompter's text changed:
Continue.
I kept speaking. My mouth felt guided by an invisible force, yet every word that came out was truly mine.
"I don't understand the point of these lines. I don't even know who all of you are. I've acted for four nights now, and you've sat watching for four nights—what exactly are you looking for? Watching me recite lines written by someone else? Waiting for me to break down?"
The audience remained motionless. No coughs, no whispers. Yet I could feel their gazes, dozens of cold stares piercing through the darkness, pinning me in place.
I pressed on, my voice starting to tremble.
"Every night I stand here, forced to read lines off this machine, not allowed a single mistake. But when I want to speak my own truth, no one listens. This machine thinks I mess up my lines… do all of you think the same? What exactly did I do wrong?"
The teleprompter flickered once, then twice.
Then it began scrolling rapidly.
Line after line, not script dialogue—but every role I'd ever played.
Lu Shiping in Thunderstorm, Kang Shunzi in Teahouse, Xiaofuzi in Camel Xiangzi. Lines from every character I'd portrayed rolled endlessly across the screen. It finally stopped on two names.
Tian Cuilan from Wotou Guild Hall.
And a role I'd never once played.
Beneath it, one line of text:
Your true self.
Smaller characters slowly faded into view underneath:
You've spent your whole life playing other people.
When will you play yourself?
I stared at the words, lips trembling too much to speak.
Sister Yuan stood frozen opposite me, mouth parted as if desperate to ad-lib and save the scene—but no sound came out. She wasn't unable to help; she was petrified, nailed to the stage just like me. The audience sat perfectly still in the darkness, a solid black mass like the theater's backdrop prop—fake, yet oppressively heavy.
Then music began to play.
Not the drama's background score.
Happy Birthday.
The familiar melody poured from the theater speakers, and a chill ran down my spine like someone shoving ice down my collar. I glanced up at the lighting booth—Old Zhou stood frozen before the control panel, not pressing a single button. The sound system wasn't even turned on. His face paled to match his faded old shirt. Yet the melody continued looping, pouring from every speaker in the room.
The stage lights shifted.
A single spotlight descended from above, landing three steps to my left, not on my position. The beam illuminated an empty patch of floor, dust floating slowly through the golden glow.
Nothing stood in the center of the spotlight.
Yet the shadows on stage were wrong.
The spotlight was circular, bright at its core with a dim halo around the edges. But within that glowing circle sat a pitch-black void—not gray shadow, pure impenetrable darkness. As if something invisible stood in the beam, blocking the light and casting a solid shadow.
Then I smelled it—a cloyingly sweet scent. Creamy frosting, sugary glaze, mixed with the burnt tang of melted birthday candles. Sickly sweet, enough to turn my stomach.
The shadow moved.
It took one step forward. No sound echoed across the stage, yet the shape definitely drifted closer to me.
I stepped back instinctively.
The shadow advanced another step.
Then it spoke.
The voice seemed to come from everywhere at once—not one fixed spot, but seeping from the theater walls, the overhead speakers, the floorboards beneath my feet, layered and overlapping like countless mouths speaking in unison.
Yet the tone was crystal clear, static-free. An elderly woman talking to herself, throat raspy and dry with phlegm.
"Fifty years."
"You're the first one."
First one what? She never finished the sentence.
The shadow took another step forward, the spotlight gliding with it, always illuminating the empty space where the unseen figure stood, always holding that distinct dark shape.
I had nowhere left to retreat, my back hitting the cold fabric of the stage curtain.
The shadow stopped three steps away from me.
The voice spoke again.
"Keep singing."
Happy Birthday looped endlessly from the speakers.
I parted my lips.
"Happy… birthday to you."
I sang the words, forcing them out dry and off-key. Not a single person in the audience laughed.
The edges of the shadow began to warp—not changing shape, but texture. Solid black shifting into a deeper, stained hue, like dampened black cloth. The outline rippled unnaturally.
Then she emerged.
Stepping out from within the shadow, as if the darkness swelled, split open down the middle. First her feet—old Beijing-style black cloth shoes embroidered with faded dark red flowers, worn and stained with age. Then her legs, her body, finally her face.
An elderly woman in her seventies, short graying hair. She wore a faded navy blue linen coat, fabric thin with wear, collar frayed and torn.
Her lips never stopped moving.
Not speaking—singing.
She mouthed along to Happy Birthday, perfectly synced to the melody playing overhead in that same hoarse elderly voice. Yet simultaneously, she spoke entirely different words. Her lip movements didn't match her speech at all, like two radio stations playing over each other on the same frequency.
Her eyes locked onto mine.
"Do you know where I came from?" she asked, still singing the birthday tune.
I shook my head, unable to utter a word.
She lifted a hand, pointing toward the back of the stage. I couldn't tear my gaze from her face, fixated on the way she sang and spoke at the exact same time.
"That teleprompter," she said, "it's never just for lines."
"It writes all our fates."
"Fifty years ago, I stood right where you stand now. It told me what I'd be reborn as. It wrote every word of my life—who I'd marry, the children I'd bear, how I'd die."
Her lips still mouthed the birthday song, yet her expression twisted, mouth moving faster and faster until the melody warped into chaos.
"Every detail was already written."
"I tried to change it. Three times."
"The first time I altered a line I spoke to my husband. The next day I said those exact words, and he beat me." She touched her left cheek gently. "The second time I changed my child's name. When the nurse handed the baby to me, it already had the name the teleprompter chose—not the one I picked."
She paused.
"The third time I tried to change the day I'd die."
"I erased the date from its script. The next day it returned. I erased it again, again it came back. Five times I deleted it, five times it rewrote itself."
"Finally it gave me one sentence."
The light in her eyes dimmed.
"Your performance is over."
She collapsed to the stage floor right then. Fifty-three years old. Heart attack. She'd never had any heart issues before that day.
I stared at her face as it began to cave in, skin sinking inward, bones protruding one by one beneath.
"Fifty years," she murmured, singing and speaking overlapping into one tangled tone. "You're the only one who ever dared to question it."
"I don't know what you mean," I whispered hoarsely.
"You do," she insisted.
Her form began to retreat—not turning around, but walking backward into the spotlight, step by step the way she'd come.
"That teleprompter will keep writing forever," her voice faded, crackling like static. "It's already written your next line. Right here in Act Three."
"You can recite it… or you can change it."
"I tried three times." A bitter smile tugged at her lips, still singing. "The third time killed me."
"But maybe… you'll be the first to break free."
Her body shrank back into the shadow, the shadow swallowed by the spotlight, and the light snapped off with a sharp click.
The stage returned to normal lighting.
The birthday music cut out instantly.
Sister Yuan stared at me in horror, mouth agape, eyes wide with terror. Old Zhou leaned halfway out of the lighting booth, still clutching a screwdriver. The audience sat deathly silent.
The teleprompter remained lit.
Only one line on screen, the final line of its final page.
Just two words.
It's over.
Not I'm dead. Not You're dead. Just It's over. I couldn't explain why the difference mattered, but I knew it did deeply.
The words lingered for five seconds then flickered and vanished.
The teleprompter went black.
The audience stood to leave normally this time, murmuring quietly about the unexplained impromptu monologue they'd just witnessed. Old Zhou shouted for someone to check the sound system. Sister Yuan patted my shoulder, telling me I must be overworked. Everything slipped back into mundane routine.
I stood in the wings staring at the dark teleprompter.
The power light was off, screen ice cold. I felt around the back; the plug was still firmly in the strip, yet the machine refused to turn on no matter how I pressed the power button.
Old Zhou later called a repairman to inspect it. The technician took the machine apart, found no faults at all—yet it would never light up again.
It was moved to the troupe's warehouse afterward, piled away with outdated stage lights and broken crates, collecting endless layers of dust.
I never left the drama troupe. I still act, still take the same roles, reciting lines exactly as the screenwriter writes them. A new teleprompter was installed, perfectly ordinary and reliable from the first day it turned on—never glitching, never altering lines out of nowhere. Just a normal, functional machine.
But sometimes, after every show ends and everyone leaves, I sit alone in the empty theater, staring at the unlit spotlight on stage.
Waiting for it to turn on.
It never has.
Yet I know it will one day. Because everything the old teleprompter wrote always came true.
And the last line I saw wasn't You're finished.
It was It's finished.
The machine itself declared its own end.
It's afraid of me.