Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

It began with a church bell that rang at midnight, though the chapel had long been abandoned.

Locals called it The Hollow Spire, a jagged ruin at the edge of the moor. Once a place of worship, now a monument to forgotten rituals and names that burned the tongue. None dared approach—save for Father Merek, who had returned to the town of Drowmere after twenty years of silence.

He walked with a limp, his left hand always clenched. In his youth, he was a man of scripture. Now he carried only a satchel, stitched from skin not quite human.

Inside: a bone-white reliquary with no seams or openings.

By dawn, animals were found turned inside out near the chapel grounds. Crops wilted under the touch of unseen fingers. And in the center of the old nave, something had been dug up—a pit, deep and wide, lined with symbols that bled ink when stared at too long.

Whispers began to ripple through town.

They spoke of a god that had no form, a presence that needed no body, no eyes, no tongue.

Only belief.

On the seventh night, under a sky writhing with stars that didn't belong, Father Merek performed the ritual.

He stood alone at the altar, where once blood was spilled in sacrifice.

And he unclenched his left hand.

Inside was nothing.

Not a wound.

Not a relic.

Just void—a gap in reality, as though something had fed upon the space between his fingers.

He lowered the reliquary into the pit.

And from the earth rose a shape—not flesh, not bone, not spirit.

It crawled up the walls.

Pulsed beneath the floor.

Its form was suggestion, its limbs like wind.

And it spoke in memory, echoing thoughts that weren't Merek's.

"We are the god before the marrow.

The hollow breath. The silence after the scream."

Father Merek knelt.

And the god entered him—not through mouth, nor skin, but through unmade space.

His bones snapped.

Then vanished.

He remained standing.

But no skeleton supported him.

Only faith.

By morning, the townsfolk gathered at the edge of the moor, drawn by song—though no one sang.

Father Merek walked among them, faceless now.

His robes hung as if filled by wind.

Behind him, the chapel rose higher.

New spires.

New bells.

A temple of absence, growing where nothing should grow.

Those who looked upon him too long forgot their own names.

Those who prayed… disappeared.

Those who believed?

They became hollowed—shells through which the boneless god whispered to the world.

And from that day on, the wind carried sermons that ended in sobbing.

No bones.

No face.

Only worship.

Only the shape of something too large for creation.

God Without Bones had found a home.