Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The town of Bleakhaven had no music. No laughter. No birdsong. Only wind that whispered through dead trees and the tolling of a cracked bell at dusk. Its people spoke in hushed tones, their eyes sunken, their steps slow.

They were waiting.

Evelyn Blackmoor arrived on the eve of the lunar eclipse, following tales of a cursed melody—a funeral song so sorrowful, it could raise the dead. It was said to echo once a decade from the crypt beneath Bleakhaven's ruined cathedral.

The locals called it The Elegy for the Damned.

They begged her not to go.

She went anyway.

The cathedral was a skeleton of its former glory—its roof half-collapsed, pews broken, and stained glass turned to razor-sharp mosaics. Beneath the altar, a spiral staircase led into the earth, into the Weeping Crypts.

The air grew colder with each step, thick with moisture and the scent of dust-covered bone.

At the final landing, the silence shattered.

A single violin note hung in the air.

It wept.

The source stood before a wall of tombs: a pale boy with hollow eyes, no older than ten. He wore funeral garb—moth-eaten, black as pitch—and cradled a violin carved from bleached wood and human sinew. His bow moved slowly. Precisely.

And behind him, the coffins began to stir.

Lids creaked open. Skeletal hands emerged. Dead mouths opened in silence. The bodies did not walk—they listened. Dozens. Hundreds. Some were just bone, others still wrapped in burial cloth.

The music called them.

The boy turned to Evelyn. His lips did not move, but she heard his voice.

"They are not gone. They are forgotten. The Elegy reminds them."

She stepped forward. "Why play it?"

"Because silence is crueler than death."

The music intensified. Evelyn saw memories not her own—lives cut short, loves lost, promises unkept. A mother crying for her stillborn child. A soldier writing a final letter. A priest praying to a god who never came.

The Elegy sang of every unmarked grave.

Then the boy played the final note.

Silence returned. The dead did not speak. They wept.

And one by one, they lay back in their coffins.

"I don't understand," Evelyn whispered. "You're mourning them?"

The boy nodded. "Until someone remembers their names."

He turned to dust before her eyes, the violin falling to the stone floor—whole, but unplayable.

Evelyn stood in the crypt for hours, the silence pressing against her chest. She thought of the names she'd forgotten. The graves she'd passed. The people no one mourned.

When she returned to Bleakhaven, the people looked her in the eye for the first time.

And at dusk, when the cracked bell rang once more, it no longer sounded broken.

It sounded like a farewell.