Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The voice didn't come from the wind or sky. It came from within—from bone, from blood, from sinew.

A summons older than language, more intimate than memory.

Jasper Crane felt it first.

While digging graves at Hollowgate Cemetery, he collapsed into a pit he hadn't dug. The earth whispered his name—not aloud, but in the silent rasp of marrow trembling inside his limbs.

"Below the skin. Beneath the shell. Come."

When he awoke, his hands were bleeding. Not from the fall—but from carving strange symbols into the coffin lid beneath him. Symbols he didn't recognize, but which pulsed with living warmth.

He tried to flee. But the cemetery had changed.

The graves were breathing.

Tombs swelled like lungs inhaling dust. Headstones wept dark sap. Root veins broke through soil, spelling messages in spirals. He ran until he reached the Mourner's Chapel, now half-swallowed by ivy with eyes that blinked.

Inside sat the priest. Or what was left of him.

Father Aldwych had been dead for three years, but his body now twitched, whispering sermons through a mouth sewn shut with silver thorns.

"You've heard the call," said a voice—not from the priest, but from behind the altar.

There stood Clara Veil, dressed in mourning black, her pale face framed by a veil that seemed to ripple in unseen currents. Her eyes were no longer human.

"They're choosing new vessels," she said, voice soft as a dirge. "Voices without tongues. Thought without flesh. You're being called to become more."

Jasper trembled. "What if I refuse?"

Clara stepped closer. "Then your skin will be used for someone else."

Suddenly, the chapel walls dissolved into an abyss of sinew and stars. Jasper saw beings—raw consciousness wrapped in screaming anatomy, clawing at the veil between dimensions. Their shapes weren't fixed, but remembered in flesh: things with too many mouths, too many bones, too much awareness.

The air rippled with a psychic wail.

"Join us. Shatter your shape. Become unbound."

Jasper's hand moved of its own accord, pressing against his chest. His heartbeat stuttered—not out of fear, but anticipation. Part of him—buried deep and ancient—longed to shed his name, to become something vast and unspeakable.

But another part, still human, clung to the world.

He reached for Clara, whispering, "Help me."

Her eyes softened. "Then follow the pain. It's the only part of you that still belongs to you."

She handed him a shard of black bone, etched with runes that shimmered like veins under skin. He plunged it into his palm.

Agony. White-hot. Pure.

The chapel vanished.

Jasper awoke at his shovel's edge, kneeling by a fresh grave.

The air was still. The voices gone.

But under his skin, something waited.

A hunger not of flesh, but of formless identity.

And far beneath the soil, in the catacombs that spiraled down into unreality, something smiled.