Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The town of Greymarrow was a place Evelyn Blackmoor had once visited in childhood—a decaying cluster of stone buildings where whispers outlived memories. Its streets were cobbled with moss and dust, and its windows watched like old, blind eyes. But she had not returned for nostalgia. She came seeking the smiling man in the mirror.

Local legend named him Lord Hargrave, once a nobleman, now something else—something that grinned through reflections and fed on vanity and sorrow. His manor, long abandoned, had been the source of increasing disappearances. And each victim was found with one trait in common: their faces frozen in grotesque, toothy smiles, mouths split impossibly wide.

Evelyn stood outside the iron gates of Hargrave Manor, its spires lost in storm clouds and shadow. Her lantern flickered once and died—again replaced by the faint, unnatural blue flame that now followed her.

Inside, the manor stank of old perfume and rotting wood. Velvet curtains clung to the windows like dried blood. Every mirror she passed seemed to ripple in her peripheral vision.

Then, she heard it.

Laughter.

Soft.

Gentle.

Wrong.

She followed it upstairs to a long hallway lined with mirrors. They stretched floor to ceiling, each reflecting not just her—but variations of herself. Some older, some injured, one weeping blood.

One smiled.

She stopped. In the third mirror on the left, her reflection grinned widely. Too widely. It lifted its hand and waved, though she hadn't moved.

"That's not me," she whispered.

"No," came a voice from behind the glass. "You are merely the mask. I am what waits beneath."

The mirror cracked from the inside.

And then he stepped out.

The Smiling Revenant.

Lord Hargrave's skin was waxen, stretched unnaturally tight. His smile was impossibly wide, lips cut back to the cheekbones, revealing yellowed teeth and gums slick with black fluid. His eyes glistened with hunger and delight.

"I took their faces," he whispered, circling her. "To remember what it felt like. To be admired. To be seen."

Evelyn held her ground, drawing a silver dagger from her coat. "You're nothing but a ghost clinging to a corpse."

He chuckled. "And you are a woman wearing grief like armor. Shall we trade?"

The revenant lunged, vanishing in midair and reappearing in every mirror at once—laughing. Evelyn closed her eyes, listening. She struck the mirror with the weeping reflection—her own sorrow—and it shattered.

A scream echoed, then silence.

When she opened her eyes, all the mirrors were empty.

But on the wall behind her, written in red, were the words:

"Your smile will be next."

She left the manor as dawn crept in, face pale and jaw clenched. In her pocket, the locket burned.

And in the shattered glass of a store window on Greymarrow's main street—just for a second—she saw herself smile.

But she wasn't smiling.