Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

They came with the fog—figures cloaked in rusted iron and grave moss. No one saw their faces. No one ever did. But every time the bell at Hollowmeade Cemetery rang thirteen times past midnight, the villagers of Gallow's Brook would lock their doors, douse their fires, and whisper prayers they barely remembered.

The Grave Dancers had returned.

They didn't walk like people. Their limbs moved like ticking gears, stiff and snapping. Heavy chains clanged with every step. They carried no tools, only old-time lanterns burning green flame and sickles with edges like fractured bone. Their metal boots sunk into soil with a hiss, like the ground itself recoiled from them.

They danced around fresh graves—always the newest dead, never the old.

And when they did, the dead danced with them.

The villagers tried to fight once.

A foolish farmhand named Elric had lost his sister to the pox. The night after her burial, he waited in the brush with a rifle and a heart full of grief. When the Iron Grave Dancers arrived, he fired.

The bullet pinged harmlessly off a dancer's helm.

The creature turned its head, slow and deliberate, then opened its chest with a groan of ancient hinges. Inside was not flesh, but an endless void of teeth and sobbing bones.

Elric was never found. But his sister's grave was empty come morning—her casket lid neatly folded like origami.

Some said they were cursed miners, swallowed by a sinkhole during the plague years. Others claimed they were the reanimated husks of executioners, bound by iron so they could never rest. The old priest, long before he burned in his chapel, said they were the debt collectors of death, summoned when too many souls were buried without rites.

One thing was certain:

When the Iron Grave Dancers chose a plot, the soul didn't stay in it.

Recently, a storm hit Gallow's Brook. Floods unearthed dozens of old graves. The dead floated in the streets, bloated and eyeless.

That night, the bell rang not thirteen, but thirty-one times.

The dancers came in full procession—more than ever before. Men of rust and bone, women of wire and shadow. Even children—tiny iron masks, stiff legs, moving like wind-up toys. They circled the town, spinning, scraping, and pulling corpses from the water like partners at a ballroom waltz.

The villagers watched from their windows.

Until one by one, the windows cracked.

And the dancers turned.

Not to the dead this time—but the living.

Now Gallow's Brook is silent.

At night, if you pass the Hollowmeade Cemetery, you'll hear music—something between a dirge and a lullaby played backward. Figures glide across the graves, arms out, chains singing against the stone.

They dance forever.

And they're waiting for a new partner.

Don't linger near the graves.

Iron remembers.

And iron collects.