1071: Story 1071: The Moon That Screams 1071: Story 1071: The Moon That Screams They called it a red moon, but that was a mercy.
A lie.
Because the moon that rose over Deadroot Hollow that night was no celestial body—it was an eye.
A wound.
A mouth.
And it screamed.
It started with the howlers—feral zombies whose shrieks suddenly matched the pitch of the lunar wail.
Their bodies twisted skyward, jaws dislocating as they echoed the unholy sound.
Flocks of crows dove from the trees mid-flight, crashing to the ground in twitching heaps.
Livestock burst into flames.
Glass fractured without being touched.
And people?
They dreamed of teeth.
Sergeant Margo Ellis—one of the last surviving members of the Hollow Pack militia—led a dwindling caravan of survivors toward the ruins of an observatory nestled in the woods.
It was there the wails began.
And it was there she hoped they’d end.
But every step closer to the peak brought hallucinations.
Memories twisted into nightmares.
The dead walking not as zombies but reflections, whispering truths that broke sanity like glass under boot.
“The moon sees you,” one muttered in the voice of her dead brother.
“The moon remembers,” another gurgled, wearing her own face.
The trees bled shadows that moved like beasts, and the sky cracked with unnatural lightning.
But Ellis pressed on.
The observatory held secrets older than the infection—older than humanity.
Secrets not meant for eyes.
Inside the shattered observatory dome, the source was clear.
A mirror telescope, warped and weeping black ichor, was aimed at the screaming moon.
Carved runes glowed along its base, pulsing with unholy rhythm.
A journal, open beside it, read only one phrase scrawled again and again:
“WE LOOKED TOO LONG.”
One of her team, Daz, approached the mirror.
He never made it back.
His reflection split from his body—an eyeless, grinning thing—and dragged him in.
His body stood for a second, then melted like wax.
Ellis destroyed the telescope.
With fire, rage, and screams of her own.
She hurled explosives into its heart, the ancient metal shrieking in tandem with the moon above.
When the lens cracked, so did the sky.
The scream stopped.
But the silence that followed was worse.
Outside, the howlers collapsed.
The sky went black.
And the moon—the real one—returned, pale and blank as bone.
Weeks later, Ellis walks alone.
The others were either taken… or now follow her as shadows.
She doesn’t sleep.
Because sometimes the clouds part.
And above her, the wrong moon grins.
And though it no longer screams…
She does.
The infection was just the beginning.
The sky has eyes.
The moon has a mouth.
And now—it knows your name.