Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The bell at Saint Elitha's Chapel hadn't rung in over twenty years. The steeple had collapsed, the stained-glass windows shattered, and the stone walls were strangled in black ivy. Locals whispered that the chapel still breathed. They warned Evelyn Blackmoor not to enter.

She went anyway.

Her lantern cast long, trembling shadows across the nave as she stepped through the ruined archway. The pews were split and warped, arranged like ribs in the corpse of a once-sacred place. Cold draft curled through the air, carrying with it the faint scent of old myrrh—and something fouler beneath it. Burnt fabric. Rotted blood.

The altar remained intact, but something new now stood behind it.

A statue. Or what looked like one.

A tall woman in a nun's habit, head bowed, hands folded in prayer. Her face was blank marble—except for two long, hollow sockets where her eyes should have been. From them, waxen tears had dripped down the statue's cheeks and solidified into the stone.

Evelyn took a step closer. Her breath fogged the air.

The statue moved.

Ever so slightly, its head tilted.

Evelyn reached for her lantern—but the shadows flickered faster than flame. She heard a voice, quiet and low. A prayer repeated over and over, spoken in a trembling, breathless whisper:

"Blessed be the blind… for they shall see… beyond the veil…"

The nun stepped down from the altar.

Her eyes were still gone, but her mouth stretched into a serene, cracked smile.

"I gave them my sight," she said. "To see His shape in the dark. The Hollow One showed me the true scripture—written in blood and bone."

Evelyn raised the lantern. The light sputtered—resisted—then steadied. The nun hissed, her veil flaring like black wings. From the shadows around the chapel, figures emerged: eyeless children in tattered vestments, humming the same prayer, blood running from their sockets.

"They are my flock," the nun said proudly. "Unseeing. Unquestioning. Saved."

Evelyn backed toward the ruined doorway. "You blinded them."

"I freed them," the nun answered. "And you, Evelyn Blackmoor… you will see next."

The children surged forward, hands outstretched.

Evelyn tossed her lantern into the center of the chapel.

Flame bloomed—holy, silver-blue—and roared through the ruin like a tidal wave of cleansing fire. The prayer became a scream. The statue cracked. The nun's veil caught fire, and in her final moment, she turned toward Evelyn—not in rage, but in pity.

"May your eyes never open," she whispered.

Then silence fell.

Ash drifted through the broken roof like snow.

Evelyn stepped from the chapel, shaken, her vision stinging. In the distance, church bells rang—though no chapel remained to ring them.

And far behind her, nestled in the ivy, a single eye blinked open in the stone wall and watched her go.