Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

Evelyn Blackmoor had grown used to silence. But this silence—thick, choking, watchful—pressed against her skin as she crossed the threshold of an old cottage nestled within the outskirts of Greymarrow's cursed woods.

The air inside was stale, tinged with soot and something older… charred bone. Dust motes hung like spirits in the lantern light. She'd come here following whispers of a fire that had never burned out.

The house once belonged to Annaliese Grey, a reclusive woman who vanished the same year children started disappearing from the village. Locals claimed her house "breathed wrong." Doors opened on their own. Wood groaned as if it remembered.

Evelyn stepped lightly across warped floorboards that groaned beneath her weight. Her lantern pulsed faintly, drawing her toward the hearth. There, she noticed something odd—ashes spread not inside the fireplace, but leading away from it, seeping from beneath a cracked section of floorboards.

She knelt, fingers brushing soot.

The lantern dimmed.

And the whispers began.

Faint at first. Children's voices. A lullaby, twisted and off-key.

"Ring around the cradle… ashes, ashes…"

Then the boards moved.

A sudden snap echoed through the house as one board popped free. Beneath it: blackened bone fragments, scraps of burnt cloth, and a doll's head melted into a grimace. But what chilled Evelyn most wasn't what she saw—it was the breathing.

From under the house.

Slow. Labored. Wet.

She leaned closer—and a hand shot up.

Small. Skeletal. On fire.

It grasped her wrist, and for a moment she saw through its eyes:

Flames licking the walls. Screams behind locked doors. A shadowed figure standing over the trapdoor, whispering prayers in reverse.

"Annaliese burned us," a voice cried out—high-pitched and cracked with smoke. "To keep them quiet. To keep the thing below fed."

Then Evelyn was back in the room, panting, yanking herself free. The hand had vanished, leaving scorch marks across her wrist. Her lantern hissed and flared bright blue.

Behind her, the cottage began to quake.

Ash poured from the ceiling. The walls wept smoke. And from below, she heard them rise—not just the children, but others. Forgotten victims. Old sacrifices.

They moaned, staggered, howled.

She stumbled out of the house just as it collapsed inward on itself—consumed in blue fire from her lantern's magic, or the wrath of the forgotten dead.

The ashes blew into the trees, carried by a wind that hadn't stirred in decades.

As she stood in the clearing, the voices faded. All but one.

A girl's whisper, clear and close:

"We remember you now, Miss Blackmoor."

Evelyn's breath caught.

She had never been here before.

Had she?