Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

Time had stopped in the attic of Thornwick Orphanage.

Not metaphorically. Not nostalgically. Literally.

The great iron hourglass that sat in the corner—its sands a sickly gray, neither liquid nor dust—hung frozen mid-drip. The children never touched it. They were told not to by the matron. But whispers rose from it in the quiet hours, curling into ears like lullabies of despair.

They said it spoke to you if you were alone long enough. Promised to show you what you missed. Or what you feared.

Clara Veil, no stranger to whispers, had returned to Thornwick not as a child, but as an investigator of the arcane. She stood now in that very attic, breath shallow, her gloved hands brushing against the relic's cold rim. It had belonged to Father Eryx, the old headmaster, who vanished the night the hourglass froze over thirty years ago.

The hourglass ticked once.

She jolted back.

A whisper slithered up the walls, low and unhuman:

"Do you want to see how it ends?"

Clara's heart thudded. The attic flickered—once dusty and empty, now candlelit and shadow-thick. A boy sat in the corner, knees drawn to his chest, mouth stitched shut with red thread. He pointed at the hourglass.

"Time lies," came a voice behind her.

She turned.

There stood Father Eryx—or something wearing his face. His eyes were black clocks, hands ticking counter to each other. His fingers bled sand.

"I offered them the gift," he said calmly. "A moment to erase regret. But they all wanted more. A future unearned."

He reached for the hourglass. It began to tremble.

Clara raised the silver sigil from her coat. "You trapped them," she said. "This place is a cage of borrowed time."

Eryx smiled. "And yet, you came back. Still dreaming of a life without shame."

The attic twisted.

Clara was no longer in Thornwick.

She was standing in a candlelit hallway of her youth, her mother's crying echoing from a room beyond. The choice she'd made—the door she hadn't opened—loomed before her again.

The hourglass hovered before her, dripping slowly once more. Each grain fell like a heartbeat, heavy and inevitable.

"Step through," the whisper beckoned. "Undo it. Free them all. Free yourself."

Clara's hand hovered near the glass.

And then, she whispered a counterspell her mentor once taught her:

"To bind the lie, speak the truth unyielding."

The attic shattered.

Time snapped back into place.

The hourglass cracked, sand spilling in a hiss like dying breath. Father Eryx screamed, his form folding in on itself, sucked into the glass like smoke. The stitched-mouthed boy vanished with a sigh of peace.

Clara collapsed to her knees.

In the silence that followed, the attic was still. No candles. No ghosts. No whispers.

Just the shattered hourglass, and a final grain of gray sand... still warm in her palm.