Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

910: Story 910: The House That Hungers 910: Story 910: The House That Hungers The train’s unnatural screeching faded into silence as Draven and Mira stepped onto the next stretch of their journey.

The landscape was an eerie, moonlit countryside, its trees twisted and gnarled like skeletal fingers clawing at the sky.

In the distance, nestled in the fog, stood a mansion, its gothic spires stabbing into the night.

Mira exhaled sharply.

“That wasn’t here before.”

Draven, gripping his shotgun, narrowed his eyes.

“Nothing ever is.”

A black iron gate stood ajar, its hinges creaking as if whispering an invitation.

Beyond it, the mansion loomed, its broken windows glowing faintly with an unnatural amber light.

A sign, rotted and barely hanging, read:

LOCKWOOD MANOR

A name that made Mira’s stomach twist.

“Silas Lockwood,” she murmured.

“The detective.”

Draven’s jaw tightened.

The former detective who had been hunting the truth behind the cabal of necromancers.

If his house still stood in this forsaken world, it meant something inside had survived… or something inside refused to die.

The front doors creaked open at their approach.

The moment they stepped inside, the door slammed shut behind them.

The walls breathed.

Not metaphorically—literally.

The wallpaper pulsed, shifting as if a thousand unseen lungs inhaled in unison.

The flickering chandelier cast shadows that moved independently, slithering along the cracked floorboards.

Then came the whisper.

“You shouldn’t have come.”

Mira spun, vial in hand.

Draven raised his shotgun.

At the end of the dimly lit corridor, a figure stood—or rather, hovered.

His face was half-decayed, his detective’s trench coat hanging in spectral tatters.

Silas Lockwood’s specter watched them with hollow, haunted eyes.

“You’re too late,” he murmured.

Draven took a step forward.

“Too late for what?”

Lockwood lifted a rotting hand and pointed to the farthest door in the hallway.

Beyond it, something knocked.

A slow, rhythmic tapping.

Knock.

Knock.

Knock.

Mira’s breath hitched.

“What’s behind there?”

Lockwood’s spectral form flickered, his voice barely a whisper.

“The thing that ate my soul.”

The knocking grew louder.

Then, without warning—the door burst open.

A maelstrom of darkness erupted, tendrils of living shadow twisting and writhing like an ancient, starving beast.

The walls of the manor screamed, the portraits weeping black ichor.

The thing within the room was no mere ghost.

It was the house itself.

It had consumed Lockwood.

And now, it wanted more.

Draven fired his shotgun, but the buckshot vanished into the abyss.

Mira hurled a vial of her last experimental serum, and for a brief moment, the darkness recoiled, revealing—

A book.

Bound in flesh.

Pages inscribed in blood.

The cursed tome they had been seeking.

Mira lunged forward as the house shrieked, trying to consume them.

She grabbed the book, and reality shattered.

The manor collapsed inward.

And the world went dark.