They say there was a man in his forties — a husband, a father, a professional who no one ever really noticed. At work, he was reliable but invisible. At home, steady but unremarkable. He was the kind of man who could vanish from his own life without anyone realizing it right away.

But at night, when the house was quiet, he wore another face. He called it spoopy: skeleton emojis, blurry selfies, cheap vampire jokes. A mask built of irony and glow-screen light. Behind it, he was quick, clever, seen. People laughed at his words, answered his quips. Online, at last, he existed.

One night, a young woman answered louder than the rest. She was quick with her replies, her laughter too eager. He liked the attention, the way she repeated his words as if they meant something. For the first time in years, someone made him feel visible.

But then she wrote: “I want the man under the mask.”

That was when he panicked. He deleted everything. Told himself it was over.

It wasn’t.

At 3:33 a.m., his phone buzzed.
A skeleton meme.
From no account he recognized.

The next night, the same.
And the next.

Packages began to arrive: a plastic skeleton hand clutching a note — “Miss me?” A plush pumpkin. A smashed gourd on his porch, seeds scattered like an offering.

He told himself she was stalking him. A younger woman, obsessed, unstable. He saw her across the street after work one night, standing still as a photograph, a cheap plastic skeleton mask covering her face.

But when he described her to the police, they only shrugged. Generic. Forgettable. No one could place her. And when he searched the accounts she used, they vanished the moment he looked.

Colleagues claimed they never saw her. His wife dismissed the name he muttered as a dream. Soon, he wasn’t sure she’d ever existed at all.

Only the rituals remained.
Every night at 3:33.
Every grin, every chalk skeleton on his sidewalk.
Every tilt of the mask in the dark.

They say he drew the curtains tight, double-locked the doors, and sat in silence. He waited for nothing, until nothing finally came.

But through the narrow gap where the curtains didn’t quite meet, he saw it.

The mask.
Cheap, plastic, absurd.
Spoopy.

And behind it — something patient, something endless.

Some say he screamed, others say he fell to the floor in silence. But no one saw him again the next morning. His accounts were gone. His phone wiped clean.

All that remained was a chalk drawing on his front step:
a skeleton grin, tilted just so.

⸻

And they say if you stay up past 3:33 a.m.,
and send a joke with too many skeletons,
she might answer you, too.