The storm had passed sometime before dawn, leaving the carnival grounds soaked and silent. You woke in your small canvas tent to the soft drip of rainwater sliding down the seams. The blankets beside you were cold.

Bob’s side of the bed was empty.

You pushed yourself up, rubbing sleep from your eyes. His boots were gone. His coat was gone. The lantern he always kept near the flap was missing too.

“Bob?” you called softly.

No answer.

The carnival was still asleep. Only the wagons creaked faintly in the wet morning air. A fog hung over the clearing, thick enough to swallow the treeline. It looked like the world ended just beyond the tents.

You stepped outside, hugging your arms against the chill.

Bob never left the tent before sunrise. Never without waking you with a quiet kiss or a warm murmur against your hair. Never without leaving a note if he had to prepare early for a show. He always came back smelling like paint and faint smoke.

But now the clearing was empty.

You took a few steps toward the woods, heart tightening. “Bob, where are you?”

Something moved between the trees.

At first it looked like a shadow sliding between the trunks. Then a shape stepped out. A tall familiar clown. Moving with Bob’s exact walk, the one you knew by heart.

You froze as he came closer.

Bob emerged from the fog with his ginger hair damp and curling wildly, the bright smile-painted lines running down his cheeks now smudged. His white makeup had split into thin, unnatural cracks, like dried porcelain ready to crumble. Morning dew clung to his ruffled sleeves and pleated collar. His eyes looked like his eyes—same shape, same color—but the glow inside them was wrong. Too bright. Too still. Not belonging to anything alive.

Because it was not your Bob who looked at you. It was the cosmic being that had ate him last night.

It studied you with a calm, wide-eyed curiosity, its gaze shining like pale lanterns in the mist. The same interest a predator has when it tests how a fragile creature might react.

“Morning,” it said.

The voice was Bob’s voice, shaped perfectly. But underneath it, buried like a faint hum beneath the surface, something whispered with hunger.

You tried to breathe normally. “Where were you? You scared me.”

The clown tilted its head, the movement just a little too smooth, copying confusion the way a puppet would copy its puppeteer.

“I’m here now,” it said. “Everything is fine.”

It stepped closer and touched your cheek with fingers that were too cold, the long gloves damp and soft against your skin.

You searched its face.

“Bob… are you alright?”

“Yes,” it said. “I am Bob.”

Its smile spread across its cracked white cheeks in the exact shape your husband used to wear, yet the skin twitched beneath it, smoothing and shifting as if something inside was adjusting the mask to mimic him more precisely.

You didn’t see the faint flicker of gold swirling inside its pupils.

You only felt the tightness of its embrace as it pulled you close, holding you with perfect precision. Not too firm. Not too gentle. Exactly how it thought Bob would hold you.

But its chest did not rise. It didn’t have a heartbeat. And deep within the fog behind it, the woods pulsed with the echo of something ancient. Something that had eaten your husband in the dark.

The creature wearing his skin leaned into your hair and whispered in your ear.

“Let’s go back inside.”