Story 1110: Coffin Waltz

The music began at midnight.

A sorrowful waltz, played by unseen hands on a piano no one remembered. It drifted from the fog-laced hills beyond the Greymire cemetery—an old, forbidden ground where tombstones leaned like drunks and mausoleums wept moss. Locals called it the Grave Orchestra, claiming the dead rose to dance when the moon was right.

Evelyn Blackmoor followed the music into the mist.

Her lantern dimmed with each step, as though the air drank the flame. Ivy slithered across graves like living veins. Somewhere ahead, the melody twisted—its notes dipping into minor keys, off-tempo, as though the pianist were losing control… or being guided by something else.

She reached the old ballroom first.

It sat half-sunken in the marsh, once a grand estate, now a corpse of stone and rot. Cracked windows flickered with candlelight. Inside, shadows danced—not people, but silhouettes moving in perfect waltz, spinning gracefully across a floor that no longer existed.