itsyaboibb6122
They went out as six. They came back as six.
That's the part that makes it worse.
Halloween night in Altrincham. Costumes, Snapchat stories, trick-or-treating through streets that started feeling wrong in ways nobody could name. Decorations that looked less like decoration and more like warning. A Grim Reaper silhouette appearing in upstairs windows across town - simultaneously, impossibly - watching them move. Group photos showing a seventh figure nobody saw standing there. Phones delivering messages that were never sent.
By the time they made it back to the house, something had already followed them inside.
It had been listening all night. To every word, every laugh, every whispered conversation on every dark street. Recording. Learning. Building something from the material it collected - the way each of them moved, spoke, hesitated, breathed. It wasn't random. It wasn't looking for victims.
It was looking for a replacement.
The wardrobe opened on its own. The count kept coming back wrong. And one by one, the things they thought they knew about each other - about themselves - started to come apart.
Something is still in that house.
Something is still wearing the face it chose.
And the scariest part isn't what happened on Halloween night.
It's that by morning, nobody could prove it hadn't always been there.