Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The fog rolled in unnaturally thick that night, swallowing streets, steeples, and screams alike. Even the gaslamps flickered like dying stars. In the deepest alleys of the Drowned District, something old had begun to move again.

They said it had no face—only antlers, ribs like knives, and a voice like wet breath behind your ear.

They called it the Lurker of the Fog.

And it had returned.

For years, the Lurker was a myth—a tale whispered in dusk taverns and across frostbitten graveyards. The fog was its veil. Its home. When the Spiral took hold of Greybridge, most assumed the Lurker had been consumed like the rest.

They were wrong.

It had been waiting.

Elric Dunn, an ex-cultist turned scavenger, stumbled across its trail by accident. He'd been looting a charred chapel for relics to sell—bones, holy symbols, whatever the cultists hadn't burned in their rituals. That's when he saw the antlers.

At first, he thought it was a sculpture—twisted bone wrapped in cloth and moss. But then it breathed.

He backed away, torch trembling, and fell through a rotted trapdoor into the under-chapel crypt.

Down there, it followed him.

The sound of wet claws dragging across stone.

The whispers—not words, but feelings: regret, hunger, and something worse—recognition.

"You returned to me," the voice said. "You sang once."

Elric didn't remember singing.

The crypt twisted as he moved—passages looping on themselves, bones arranged like sigils. The deeper he ran, the thicker the fog became, even below ground. It filled his mouth, his eyes, his memories.

Visions danced in the mist.

His old robes.

The circle of masked worshippers.

The child they offered.

The chant they sang.

It was all coming back—his place in the original offering, the pact made in silence. Elric had fled then. Hidden. Survived. But the Lurker had not forgotten. The Spiral might devour, but the Lurker marked.

"You left a door open," it hissed, "and through it, I came crawling."

He tried to bargain. Beg. Promise things he no longer had.

But the fog only thickened.

A clawed hand, long as a man's arm, reached out of the mist and pressed against his chest.

"You will sing again," it breathed.

Then—darkness.

At dawn, the fog lifted over the Drowned District. People emerged from their hovels to find symbols etched in soot across the walls—antlers, spirals, a crown of smoke.

In the city square, Elric stood naked and weeping, humming a melody no one recognized but all felt afraid to interrupt.

His eyes were gone.

But in their place glowed white smoke, curling like breath.

The Lurker had returned.

And it had chosen a voice.