Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The music began at midnight.

A sorrowful waltz, played by unseen hands on a piano no one remembered. It drifted from the fog-laced hills beyond the Greymire cemetery—an old, forbidden ground where tombstones leaned like drunks and mausoleums wept moss. Locals called it the Grave Orchestra, claiming the dead rose to dance when the moon was right.

Evelyn Blackmoor followed the music into the mist.

Her lantern dimmed with each step, as though the air drank the flame. Ivy slithered across graves like living veins. Somewhere ahead, the melody twisted—its notes dipping into minor keys, off-tempo, as though the pianist were losing control… or being guided by something else.

She reached the old ballroom first.

It sat half-sunken in the marsh, once a grand estate, now a corpse of stone and rot. Cracked windows flickered with candlelight. Inside, shadows danced—not people, but silhouettes moving in perfect waltz, spinning gracefully across a floor that no longer existed.

Evelyn stepped through the threshold. Cold gripped her spine.

There were no dancers. No orchestra.

Only coffins.

Twelve of them, arranged in a perfect circle around the ballroom. Each lid creaked open and shut, in time with the music. And in each, a rotted corpse in formal dress, limbs twitching, decayed fingers tapping to the rhythm.

A grand piano stood in the center of the room.

It played itself.

As Evelyn moved closer, the coffins began to rise—not the wood, but the bodies within. Suspended by strings of black hair and bone, they twirled like marionettes in a macabre ballet.

Then a new figure emerged from the largest coffin.

The Composer.

Draped in a tattered conductor's coat, skin tight over his bones, he held a baton fashioned from a broken femur. His jaw unhinged, and his voice was a raspy melody.

"One dance for the forgotten… one song for the damned…"

He bowed to Evelyn.

"May I have this waltz?"

The corpses surged, dragging her into the center of the ballroom. Cold, dead hands took hers. The music controlled her feet. She spun, stepped, dipped, her mind reeling—a prisoner in the dance.

"I'm not one of you," she gasped.

The Composer's grin widened. "You wear sorrow like a gown, Miss Blackmoor. You belong here more than most."

Her lantern, still clutched in one hand, flickered violently. With a final spin, she threw it high.

The glass shattered against the piano.

Flames erupted.

The music shrieked. The corpses flailed, limbs snapping like brittle sticks. The Composer screamed, his coat catching fire, his baton curling to ash.

Evelyn stumbled out as the ballroom burned, the melody dying with it.

By dawn, the estate was gone—reclaimed by fog and root.

But that night, as she laid her head down in the inn at Greymoor's edge, Evelyn heard a soft, distant hum.

A waltz.

Waiting.

Somewhere in the dark.