Cul-de-Sac — Fexingo Horror

In the summer of 2021, a woman named Claire moved into 43 Bantry Circle—the only house on the cul-de-sac that had been empty for years. She was quiet, kept to herself, and never seemed to sleep. I noticed her porch light stayed on all night, every night, even when she wasn't home. Then I started seeing her in the window at 3 a.m., standing perfectly still, watching the street. I asked her about it...

October 1997. Luna and her brother Ben used to dare each other to crawl into the storm drain at the end of Piping Rock Road. It was a game — until the summer Ben went in and didn't come out for three days. When he finally did, he brought something with him. Something that lived in the dark, that he called 'the quiet.' Now, fifteen years later, Luna returns to the cul-de-sac where they grew up. She...

There are dogs that bark at nothing, and then there is the dog at 19 Juniper Lane. In the fall of 2017, I lived three doors down from that house, and I learned that some animals are not guarding against intruders — they are guarding against the thing that already lives inside. On cool October nights, when the leaves stacked against the curbs like wet skin, the dog would begin at a quarter past mid...

In the autumn of 2018, Luna's neighbor on Hawthorne Court began receiving notes slipped under her basement door. The handwriting was her own, but the messages predicted things she hadn't yet done. Each note arrived at dusk, and each one was a little more desperate, a little more certain that the door should never be opened. By the time the leaves had fully fallen, Luna understood that the person w...

Luna returns to a dead-end street she once knew as a child — Oakwood Lane, in the town of Millbrook, New York. It's late autumn 2023, a Tuesday night just past midnight. She's standing in the middle of the road, facing number 33: a house she and her friends dared each other to approach every Halloween. The birch tree in the front yard is still there, its bark peeling like old parchment. But the ho...

June 2021. A cul-de-sac in Montvale, New Jersey, where the house at number 39 has been for sale for fourteen months. Everyone in the neighborhood knows the story: the Parrishes left in the middle of the night, left the lights on, left a half-eaten dinner on the table. Luna got curious when she noticed the sign never had a realtor's number—just a phone number with a 555 exchange. She called it. A w...

Summer 2018. A golden retriever named Gus appears in every photo taken on Bantry Circle — always in the background, always watching the same house. At first it's a neighborhood joke. Then people start remembering they don't own a dog. Luna pieces together when Gus first showed up, and who he might be waiting for. A story about a loyal companion, a woman named Margery, and the night she didn't come...

August, 2017. A heatwave in Stillwater, Ohio. Luna's neighbor on Mulberry Court starts backing out of his driveway at exactly 11:37 every night. Not going anywhere—just reversing to the street, sitting there with the engine running for seventeen minutes, then pulling back in. Luna watches from her porch for three nights before she walks over. The man's name is Harold. He doesn't seem to recognize...

Luna recalls a late summer night in 2017 when she was housesitting for a neighbor on Hawthorne Court. The street was quiet, the cicadas loud, and the abandoned house at number 7 had a porch light that flickered in a pattern she couldn't ignore. She watched it for three hours, and then she saw the figure standing on the lawn. Not moving, just watching back. She tells you what happened when she fina...

One summer night in 2022, Luna notices a new family has moved into the long-empty house at the end of Piping Rock Road. The house is ordinary—white siding, a single porch light that flickers at odd intervals. The family keeps to themselves, but the boy, maybe ten years old, starts leaving things on the curb: a worn-out sneaker, a broken watch, a child's drawing of a house with every window blacked...

It was late August in the cul-de-sac, the kind of heat that makes the asphalt shimmer and the air go still. The greenhouse at 19 Juniper Lane had sat empty for years—a cracked glass box at the edge of the yard, half-swallowed by kudzu. But this summer, someone new moved in. A woman named Claire. And within a week, the greenhouse was clean, the glass replaced, and a single light burned inside every...

It was July of 1999 when my friend Danny and I found the swimming hole. Not the one everyone knew about, but another one—hidden off Old Mill Road, past the no-trespassing signs, through a break in the fence that someone had cut. The water was darker than it should have been, and the trees leaned in too close. Danny said it was perfect. He went in first. I sat on the bank and watched him disappear...

In the summer of 2003, the kids on Mulberry Court discovered that the old man at number 23 never opened his garage. Not once. Not for a car, not for a lawnmower, not for anything. Years later, after he died, I found out why. The story involves a man named Arthur Keene, a missing girl named Emily Parrish, and a concrete floor that had been freshly poured in June of 1987. I didn't believe it until I...

Luna remembers the summer of 2009, when the new family moved into 13 Maplewood Drive and the outdoor light on their patio never turned off. The father, a quiet man named Tom, would stand beneath it every night at exactly 2:13 AM, staring at nothing. The light flickered only when he did. Luna watched from her bedroom window for weeks, until one night the light went out and Tom was gone. No one else...

It was October, just before Halloween, and the For Sale sign had been up at 9 Bantry Circle for eight months. Nobody bought it because nobody stayed long enough to forget what happened to the family before. I met the real estate agent who had to show the place. She told me about the lockbox code that kept changing by itself, the nameplate that read 'CALL BEFORE ENTERING' in handwriting that matche...

It was the summer of 2017, just after midnight on a Tuesday in late July. The cul-de-sac was silent except for the low hum of air conditioners and the occasional bark of a dog three streets over. Luna was walking home from a friend's house when she noticed something off about the recycling bin at 11 Bantry Circle. It was perfectly lined up with the curb, but the lid was slightly ajar — and from in...

It's autumn in Westbrook, New Hampshire, and the leaves have finally fallen from the oaks along Hawthorne Court. Luna's neighbor, Mrs. Kelleher, stops her one evening to ask if she's seen the woman who keeps leaving letters in her mailbox — letters addressed to a man who died in that house forty years ago. What starts as a small-town curiosity becomes a quiet unease when Luna finds a letter of her...

It was the summer of 1997, the hottest on record in our corner of New Hampshire. The Murphys' pool was the only one on the block, and every kid in the cul-de-sac was welcome — until late July, when the water started turning a shade of green no algae could explain. Luna remembers the night she and her friend Emma snuck over after midnight, the night the pool lights flickered on by themselves, revea...

One Tuesday in late October, I found myself standing outside a house that didn't exist on any map but was there all the same. A new house, at the end of a cul-de-sac I knew by heart. A woman stood in the window, her hands pressed to the glass, and she played a melody on the glass with her fingernails. I didn't know her. I don't know if she was real. But I know what I heard. This is a story about t...

In the autumn of 2018, Luna notices a small wooden shed in the backyard of 24 Bantry Circle that wasn't there the week before. The neighbor, Mrs. Kettering, insists it's always been there. The shed's door is never locked, but no one has ever seen her go inside. Inside, the walls are lined with photographs of people Luna recognizes from the cul-de-sac — all of them sleeping, all of them younger. An...

In the summer of 2003, the kids on Gable Court built a clubhouse in the woods behind number 14. It had a sign that said NO GIRLS, NO ADULTS, and for a few weeks it was the best place in the world. Then things started going missing from inside — not toys, but things that had never been there in the first place. A watch that wasn't anyone's. A photograph of a woman none of us knew. A page torn from...

A cold October night in Whistler's Bend. A woman named Claire starts seeing a tall figure standing at the foot of her driveway every night, always at the exact same time. She never approaches it. She never speaks to it. But the gate between her house and the street is never fully open anymore — only a gap of exactly sixteen inches. Her husband doesn't see it. Her son laughs it off. But the gate ke...

It's October 1998 in the small town of Ridgewood, New York. The cul-de-sac called Hawthorne Court has a streetlamp at its far end that has been flickering every night for three weeks. The neighbors say it's just a bad bulb, but after midnight the light goes out completely and a man in a gray coat stands beneath it, staring at the houses. Luna meets the man on the last night of October and learns t...

It was the summer of 2003, and the Hawthorne Court Little League field sat at the far end of a cul-de-sac that nobody used unless they had a kid in the game. I was just passing through, but I stopped to watch a practice that never should have happened after dark. The coach's son was pitching, and every time he threw a strike, the lights flickered. The parents in the bleachers didn't seem to notice...

Luna remembers the spring of 2019, when the streetlights on Birch Court started dying one by one. She met a woman named Grace who lived at number 6, a house where the porch light never flickered. Grace told her about the maintenance man who came every Tuesday and the last afternoon he spent trimming the hedges near the transformer box. What he found there — what he told her before he stopped comin...