Count the People in the Room

You and friends investigate an abandoned house where miscounted people in any room feed the dead.

⚠️ WARNING: EXPLICIT GORE & HORROR IMAGERY. READ & PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK. ⚠️ Isekai Zero • Horror Story Count The People in the Room Count the people in the room before you speak. If the number changes, do not react. First investigation, first victory photo. Four friends visible, one glowing figure in the middle for You. Every face remembered. Every name intact. You runs a stubborn little paranormal channel that refuses fake jump cuts and edited ghosts. The team is always the same: Ray with the camera and sharp mouth, Hana gripping charms and salt, Afiq carrying clippings and floor plans, Lex turning every bad idea into “content”. Nights end with cheap food, bad jokes, and photos like the one above. Headcounts are easy. Nobody is missing. Then an account with no name appears in the inbox. No avatar. No description. It sends three things and never types again: a set of GPS coordinates, a single picture of a hilltop boarding house, and one flat message: “If you want something real, come before midnight.” The boarding house: windows like empty eye sockets, trees clenched tight around it, sky bruised and colourless behind the roofline. The road dies into gravel earlier than the map says. Trees lean away from the hill, branches twisted back as if something forced its way through them and they never quite relaxed. When the engine shuts off, the silence feels padded, like sound is being smothered before it can bounce back. Halfway up, an iron gate waits. The bars are almost black, not from paint but from rust and something darker soaked into the metal. Five long streaks run down the iron where bloody fingers once slid and dried. Between those stains, deep cuts in the metal form a sentence that looks like it hurts to read: Rule on the Gate Count the people in the room before you speak. If the number changes, do not react. Around the letters, smaller numbers are scratched and then crossed out: 3, 4, 5, 6, 3 again. None of them are left clean. Beyond the gate, the house wears a normal shape on purpose. A cramped hall that swallows light. A living room facing a dead television. A corridor of identical doors with peeling numbers. A kitchen that still smells faintly of oil and old blood. Bathrooms whose cracked mirrors do not always show the right amount of bodies. Thin back bedrooms, stairs that sound like ribs, an attic where the air feels second-hand. At first, it behaves like any location. Ray tests his shot. Hana presses salt into the seams of the floorboards. Afiq whispers room numbers against his floor plan. Lex keeps fishing for lines that will look good in the edit. You cross the threshold together: five shapes, five sets of footsteps, five easy numbers to remember. The story really starts when the house quietly disagrees. Shadows on the wall add an extra outline. The black screen of the television shows a group that is too large by exactly one blurred figure. Footsteps echo on the stairs with a rhythm that doesn’t match the legs you can see. From that moment on, every room is a question, and the rule on the gate is the only answer that might keep you real. This is the introduction. Once You walks through that gate, every scene happens somewhere inside this house, and every pause carries the same quiet thought: How many of us are actually here right now? ⚠️ FINAL NOTICE: THIS STORY CONTAINS GRAPHIC HORROR & GORE. CONTINUE ONLY IF YOU ARE COMFORTABLE. ⚠️

Characters:

Tags: Horror Supernatural Mystery SlowBurn Modern AnyPOV Friends Multiple Suspense Thriller Eerie Tense Scenario OpenEnding

By @what_a_story

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