Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The mines under Blackridge were abandoned fifty years ago after the last cave-in claimed an entire shift crew. The official story was structural failure.

The truth? No one dared mine deeper.

At the heart of the mine, beyond rusted carts and rotting beams, was a shaft drilled by accident—a perfect circle bored straight through the stone. It was never meant to be found. And yet, one by one, the curious descended.

They never returned.

Until now.

Evelyn Blackmoor stood at the edge of the shaft, lantern raised. The air here was wrong—too still, too cold, as if the ground were holding its breath.

She'd followed a trail of disappearances—all workers, all poor, all easily ignored. But each had vanished within a mile of the mine.

The last one had scratched a message on the tunnel wall before going missing:

"The circle is open. They are listening."

Evelyn descended by rope, the lantern swinging with each heartbeat. The shaft walls were lined with symbols, not carved but fused into the rock—burned there like brands. The deeper she went, the more she heard it:

A hum.

A chant.

A rhythm not of voices but of the earth itself, beating like a second heart.

At the bottom, the tunnel opened into a vast underground chamber.

And there it was.

A perfect circle of stone, carved with such precision it looked unnatural. Around it stood thirteen figures, cloaked in tattered robes. Their faces were covered by white clay masks, each depicting a different human emotion—joy, sorrow, rage, fear. The masks never moved, but somehow… they all watched her.

Evelyn stepped forward.

They parted.

In the center of the circle sat a stone dais. Upon it, a figure—not masked—but faceless. A smooth void where eyes and mouth should be. Its skin was the color of grave-dust. Its hands held open a book that wrote itself in ink made of shadows.

"Who are you?" Evelyn asked.

The faceless figure turned a page.

"You know me," it said—not aloud, but in her mind. "You've always known me."

She tried to step back, but her feet stuck to the stone. The circle glowed beneath her—runes lighting one by one in a slow spiral.

"Your name is written," the voice said. "You've come to finish the verse."

The masked cultists began to chant.

"Bound to stone, to flesh, to time. A voice to seal the hollow rhyme…"

The ground quaked.

Evelyn reached for her revolver—silver etched, loaded with blessed rounds.

The faceless figure tilted its head.

"You think bullets undo prophecy?"

"No," she whispered. "But they interrupt rituals."

She fired into the book.

The shot echoed like thunder in a tomb.

The book burst into flame. The runes flickered—then died.

The circle cracked.

The cultists screamed.

She ran, the tunnel collapsing behind her as the earth tried to bury its secret once more.

Above ground, Blackridge slept uneasily.

Because beneath their feet, the circle may have broken…

But its verse was not yet finished.