Maya’s hand trembled over the trackpad. She couldn’t look away.

The man opened the front door. On the porch stood three children. Pumpkin buckets. Classic costumes: a witch, a vampire, a skeleton. Their faces were normal. Innocent. But their shadows—their shadows stretched backward into the yard, and the shadows were adults . Ragged. Waiting.

The footage was shot on a camcorder, the kind with a date stamp burned into the corner. Grainy. Jittery. A living room decorated with dollar-store cobwebs and a single jack-o’-lantern on a coffee table. Its grin was too wide, carved by someone who didn’t understand where the teeth should stop.

The uploader’s username: .

She clicked download. The progress bar inched forward like a confession. 2%... 15%... 44%... Her studio apartment felt colder. The streetlights outside flickered—Halloween decorations, she told herself. Kids TP-ing a neighbor’s tree. Nothing more.

On screen, the woman in the ghost costume was standing now. She faced the front door—same door Maya had just closed. The camcorder wobbled as the person holding it stepped closer. A man’s voice, low and happy: “They’re here.”

Maya slammed the spacebar. The video froze. Outside her door, the buzzer screamed again. Trick-or-treaters. Of course. She checked her phone: 10:14 PM. Halloween night. She’d lost track of time.

The woman pulled off the bedsheet. Her face was wrong. Not deformed—just… empty. As if someone had erased her features and drawn them back from memory, but badly. Eyes too close together. Mouth a straight line. She smiled, and her teeth kept going, row after row, like a shark’s.

“Hello?” Maya whispered at the screen. The woman didn’t answer. She just sat there, breathing so slowly that Maya had to check her own chest to make sure she was still doing it.