Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The room pulsed with sickly, black light, emanating from the sigils etched into the stone. Draven hovered above the floor like a marionette with severed strings, his limbs limp, yet bound by the tendrils of living shadow. The voice that had escaped his lips was not his own—it was older, colder, and filled with delight.

Mira stepped forward, voice trembling. "Draven, can you hear me?"

His eyes flicked toward her—just for a moment, a spark of recognition. Then, they clouded again.

Zara readied her blade. "If he's gone, we put him down. We can't risk—"

"Wait," Mira snapped. She flipped open the cursed book, its pages feverishly fluttering. The ink bled as she turned, as if the book itself feared what was coming.

The Forsaken Girl moved closer, her voice eerily calm. "He's still in there… but the Hollow Man has rooted himself deep. You'll have to tear him out."

Elias growled, raising his revolver. "And if we can't?"

"Then he becomes another vessel. Another screaming echo in the manor's halls."

A low rumble shook the chamber. From the corners of the room, black vines erupted—twisting with bone and sinew, spreading across the walls and ceiling like veins in a decaying corpse.

The Hollow Man was coming.

Mira began chanting—reading from the book even as blood dripped from her nose. The cursed words scraped her throat raw, but she pushed forward. The symbols on the floor lit up in response, each syllable pulling something dark and foul into the open.

From behind Draven, a shape began to form—towering, thin, draped in shadows like funeral cloth. No face. Only an outline, shifting like a thing never meant to be seen.

Zara gasped. "That's him. That's the Hollow Man."

He leaned in, whispering across the chamber like a draft through a coffin lid. "You came so far. And for what? A broken man?"

Draven screamed—not in fear, but in defiance. For a brief second, his voice was his own. "Kill it! Burn me if you have to!"

"No!" Mira yelled. Her hands trembled, the book searing hot now. "There's another way—there has to be."

The Hollow Man began to unravel, stretching toward them, his limbs splintering into knives of shadow.

Zara lunged forward, slicing through the vines crawling across the chamber. Elias backed her up with gunfire, but nothing seemed to wound the Hollow Man.

Mira turned the final page. Her vision blurred. A last spell, written in a language her soul barely understood. She spoke it anyway.

A blinding burst of white fire erupted from the book.

The vines screamed. The tendrils recoiled.

And Draven's body fell, hitting the stone floor with a sickening thud—free.

But behind him, the Hollow Man began to reform, grinning wider than before.

"You only delayed me…" he hissed. "Not ended me."

The room began to collapse, the manor shrieking in fury.

And the survivors ran—dragging Draven with them into the unknown.