The Replacement

On the morning of November 1, Beth Ralston wakes up on her own couch in her own house in Sleepy Hollow, New York, and the last thing she remembers is tucking her kids into bed on September 30. The month of October is simply gone. On her front porch sits a jack-o'-lantern she never carved, and the face carved into it is hers. Her husband shows her his phone, and there she is, all October long: at the Blaze with the kids, at the street fair, laughing in a witch hat at the Tarrytown parade. She does not remember a single frame of it. The children say she was more fun than usual this October. And every photograph has the same wrongness she cannot name until she does: the woman in the photos is her, exactly her, and she has never been happier, and Beth has never felt less like that woman in her life. As November grinds on, Beth begins to understand that she was not asleep through October. She was taken, the way the Horseman's victims are taken: something rode out of the legend's shadow and wore her life for a month, and it wore it well enough that her family preferred it. The thing did not leave when October ended. And it has started trying on the faces of other women on her block.