Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

Rain whispered across the crumbling stones of Elder Hollow, falling like ash over the ancient cemetery that lay hidden beneath the forest's sigh. Evelyn Blackmoor's boots sank slightly into the muddy earth as she stepped between leaning headstones etched with names no living soul remembered. Her lantern flickered in protest against the wind, its light barely piercing the fog that curled like pale fingers through the trees.

The villagers had spoken of screams—unearthly, echoing, and mournful—heard at dusk near the grave of Liora Nyx, a woman buried a century ago after vanishing into the woods. They whispered that her death had never truly settled, that the soil had not accepted her. Evelyn, a detective with a reputation for delving into unspeakable affairs, had come not for answers, but for silence. She had heard the scream herself.

It was not the cry of something dying. It was the call of something waiting.

She paused beside a headstone veiled in ivy. "Liora Nyx," she whispered aloud, fingers tracing the faint inscription. The lantern dimmed for a heartbeat, then flared.

And then—

A song.

High, keening, and mournful, it came from the mist like a sorrowful violin strung with bone. Evelyn's blood ran cold. The melody didn't echo—it lingered, circling her like breath on her neck. She turned slowly, and the fog parted before her.

There she stood.

Lady Nyxara.

Not a corpse. Not entirely. Her skin was pale and luminous, her eyes glowing pools of white sorrow. Hair floated around her as though underwater. Her mouth moved with each note of the banshee's song, though her lips never opened. She hovered inches above the ground, robes trailing through the mist like forgotten prayers.

Evelyn dared not move.

The banshee's gaze locked onto her, not with malice, but with mourning. The melody twisted into something deeper, something personal. Evelyn staggered back. She saw flashes—her brother's lifeless face, the fire, the case she never solved. Every loss she'd buried clawed to the surface, screaming through the song.

"You… see," Nyxara whispered. Her voice was silk wrapped in grief. "You carry death. Not yours… yet."

Evelyn dropped to her knees, overwhelmed. "What do you want from me?"

"To remember," the banshee replied. "So I may rest."

Suddenly, the song stopped.

Nyxara faded into the fog, leaving only silence and the fading echo of sorrow behind. But in Evelyn's lantern, the flame now burned blue, and in her coat pocket she found something she had not placed: a silver locket, cold as the grave, etched with the symbol of a hollow eye.

She didn't scream. Not yet.

But she knew the song would return.

And next time, it might call her name.