Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

He had no name. No voice. No sound.

Only silence followed him—a vacuum that devoured the world's noise.

They called him The Man With No Sound.

He appeared in Greyhollow the day after the moon cracked. A walking absence. Boots made no echo on cobblestone, coat never rustled, breath didn't fog the air. Birds stopped singing when he passed. Dogs whimpered without barking. Even the church bells refused to ring as he walked by.

Children pointed, but their cries died in their throats. Mothers screamed, yet no sound came. He moved like a glitch in reality, his very presence swallowing every note, every whisper, every scream.

Evelyn Blackmoor was the first to confront him.

She found him standing at the fountain in Silence Square, where water once danced but now hovered mid-fall, suspended in a timeless hush. Her revolver was drawn—not that it would help. Not against something like him.

"You followed the Hollow One," she said.

The man turned, revealing a face that seemed to fade in and out of definition. He wore a black hat, rim frayed by time, and where his eyes should be, there was nothing—just dim recesses that absorbed all light.

He didn't speak. He couldn't.

But Evelyn heard him anyway.

Not in her ears, but in the marrow of her bones.

"You opened the gate."

She flinched. "I didn't choose to."

"But it chose you."

As he moved forward, reality warped. Each footstep dragged silence like a shadow, muting everything in a widening radius. Windows cracked without noise. Stone groaned in invisible grief. She felt her heartbeat slow, quieting like a song drawing to a close.

"What are you?" she asked.

He lifted a pale hand, revealing a broken tuning fork wrapped in black string. It vibrated, but emitted no tone.

Then he pointed toward the north—the Cathedral of Still Echoes, where the Choir of the Hollow Ones once sang their black hymns.

Evelyn understood.

"You're here to erase their voice."

He nodded. Slowly.

But something else stirred in the fountain behind him.

A child's laugh—sharp and real—broke the silence.

They both turned.

A girl no older than five stood by the stone rim, eyes glowing faintly green. Her skin shimmered with residual eldritch light, and in her hands was a music box playing a tune that shouldn't exist.

Sound bled back into the world.

The Man With No Sound staggered. It was the first time he'd reacted to anything.

The girl smiled. "Mother says you can't take our voices anymore."

And just like that, he screamed—a noiseless scream that cracked every mirror in the city.

He vanished, evaporating like smoke sucked into a void.

The music box wound down. The girl blinked at Evelyn.

"Is the silence gone?" she asked.

Evelyn dropped to one knee, stunned. "Who are you?"

The girl giggled. "I'm the song they couldn't kill."

And far above, from the cracked moon's wound, a hum began—a warning in a forgotten key.

The world would not go quiet again.