Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The first time Jasper Crane heard the chant, he was kneeling by an unmarked grave.

The cemetery had always murmured, but this was different. The usual sighs of wind and whispers of the dead had given way to a rhythm—wet, slithering syllables echoing beneath the soil.

It started as a hum in his bones.

Then the ground… moved.

He stumbled back, dropping his spade as the earth cracked open like a yawning mouth. Dozens of skeletal fingers emerged, not clawing upward, but gently tapping the dirt in time with the sound.

Tap. Tap. Pause. Tap-tap. Pause.

It was a language.

A summons.

He should have run. Any sane man would.

But Jasper had never been sane—not since the worms in the graveyard began whispering dreams to him, not since he dug up the child's coffin and found it empty, save for a mouth that spoke his name.

So instead, he listened.

He followed the chant past broken headstones, past weeping angels with black tears, down into the catacombs beneath Blackmoor Cemetery—a place no one spoke of, even in drunken murmurs.

There, in the lowest chamber, the walls were slick with rot. Roots pulsed like veins. And at the center stood a congregation.

They had no faces—only mouths stitched shut with twine and mold. Dozens of hunched, worm-covered figures crawling in circles, heads bowed to the floor, their flesh warped and weeping.

But still, the chant rang out.

It came not from their mouths, but from beneath them, from the stone itself, as if the world's foundation were singing.

"Lurshen kahlma... Thurshen nah... Tha'ul druun…"

The sound sank into Jasper's marrow.

Suddenly, he understood—these were not cultists. These were vessels, made empty so that the song could wear them. The chant had no speaker because it was alive. Ancient. Starless.

"Why me?" Jasper whispered.

A figure rose from the center of the crawl.

It had no skin—only sinew and black tendrils, shifting constantly. Its face was carved with mouths that didn't blink, each humming a different line of the chant in perfect disharmony.

"Because you buried the silence," it answered.

The chant crescendoed. The walls cracked.

And from beneath the stone, thousands of insects poured forth—glassy-eyed, each bearing the sigil of a tongue, their wings vibrating in rhythm with the sacred crawling chant.

Jasper felt them crawl into his mouth, his ears, his soul.

He did not scream.

Instead, he began to hum along, his voice melding with the song.

By morning, the cemetery was quiet again.

Except for one grave. A fresh one.

Carved into the headstone were the words:

"Here lies the first note of the Crawling Chant. Do not disturb the hymn."

And if you knelt too close,

you could hear something beneath…

tapping. humming. waiting.