Game Trail — Fexingo Horror

November 2017. A cold dawn on Lacey Road, just outside the town of Minton, Ohio. Luna follows a blood trail into the woods behind an abandoned farmhouse — deer sign, she tells herself, but the tracks are too deliberate, too human in their hesitation. The trail leads to a clearing where the snow is undisturbed except for a circle of rocks, a fire pit full of ash, and a single word written in the fr...

October 1998, just outside the dying town of Tinsbury, West Virginia. Luna follows a blood trail from an old hunting lease into a dry creek bed where she finds what looks like a human hand. The bones are arranged in a spiral, each one clean, no flesh, no smell. She calls it in, waits with the sheriff's deputy until dawn, and watches the county coroner bag them. But the hand is missing a finger, an...

On a wet November night in 2017, Luna stops at a deserted gas station outside the dying town of Dunmore, West Virginia, after following a deer blood trail too deep into the woods. Inside the station, a hand-scrawled note taped to the register warns: 'If you see the woman in the yellow dress, do not let her touch you.' The attendant, a hollow-eyed man named Garrett, tells her about the woman who ap...

I drove out to Trapp's Farm in early March, when the frost was just starting to crack and the ground was soft. The farmer's wife had been hearing something in the well at night—not water, not wind. I sat with her in the kitchen after dark, watching the back door, and she told me about the girl who drowned there in '62. By midnight, the sound had changed. It had a pattern. She made me promise not t...

Late November in the town of Henshaw, Montana. Luna follows a deer blood trail into the woods behind the old meadow, but the prints beside it are not what she expected. A story about a man named Ezra Cole, a hunting accident ten years ago, and the thing that's been following him ever since. This is not a ghost story. It's about the weight of a debt that won't stay buried, and the cold that settles...

January 1989. A secondary road in Pendleton County, West Virginia, where the snow falls and never seems to stop. Luna's uncle Bill worked a chain of hunting leases up on Taggart's Turnaround, a dead-end spur off Route 7 that dead-ended into the Monongahela National Forest. The deer were scarce that year, but what he found at the turnaround was worse than an empty freezer. A single white oak standi...

It was the last Saturday of deer season, and I was working a ridge above Hargrove Grade—a switchback that hadn't seen a plow in thirty years. A kid named Caleb came out of the dark before dawn, no jacket, no gun, no boots. Said he'd heard a bell in the woods behind his uncle's place and followed it until he couldn't find his way back. I put him in the truck with the heater on full and went looking...

In the winter of 2017, a call comes in on a payphone that hasn't worked in forty years. Luna's old friend Hank — a retired lineman who still checks the dead lines out of habit — answers it. The voice on the other end is a woman asking for directions to a house that burned down in 1975. Hank keeps picking up, night after night. Luna pieces together what happened to the woman, the house, and the str...

Deep in the Missouri Ozarks, past the last gravel turnoff on Decker's Road, there's a ravine where the phone signal dies and the deer don't go. I met a man there in November of 2022, sitting on a fallen oak at the bottom of the gorge, staring at a straight line of stones he'd laid across the dry creek bed. He told me he'd been laying that line for three years, every dawn, one stone at a time. He s...

In the winter of 2007, in the small town of Meridian, Kansas, a young woman named Eliza Moreland started hearing things from the old well on her family's property. At first it was just a whisper, a word she could never quite catch. But as the weeks passed, the voice grew clearer, and the presence in the well began to reach for her. Luna tells the story of what Eliza found when she finally looked d...

Luna follows a wounded buck into the deep snow of the Kiamichi Mountains, near a place called Broken Bow, Oklahoma. The trail leads her to a rusted railway trestle that shouldn't be there—a bridge that vanished from maps decades ago. On the far side, she finds a man in a muddy coat who speaks like he's been waiting for someone to finally come. He offers her a cup of coffee from a thermos, and the...

In the winter of 2018, I drove out to Haines Hollow, Pennsylvania, to help a friend track a deer he'd shot at dusk. The blood trail led us deeper into the woods than either of us expected, past the old fire tower that had been decommissioned for years. What we found wasn't a deer. It was something that had been waiting for us — something that knew our names and spoke in static. This is a story abo...

January 2022. A deer trail behind an abandoned gas station outside Roscoe, New York. Luna follows a blood smear into a stand of old-growth pines where the snow doesn't fall the same way twice. She finds a hunter's blind built from bones and a pair of boots still warm. The boots are empty. She waits until dark. Something breathes in the blind with her. She never sees what it is—but she hears it whi...

March 1997. In the hills above Millbrook, New York, an old apple orchard sits abandoned after the last Furlong died. Luna's father told her never to walk past the fallen stone wall at dusk—the door wasn't meant to be opened from this side. Years later, alone and stubborn, she goes back with a flashlight and a pair of wire cutters. What she finds behind that rusted hatch is not an old cold cellar....

Luna recalls a late October morning in 2019, when she tracked a deer into a hollow she had never heard of — Garvey Hollow, off an unmarked logging road in Cameron County. The deer was not a deer. The trail did not end. And the thing that walked out from behind the deadfall was wearing the face of a boy she had known in high school, a boy who had vanished from a fishing trip seven years before. She...

On a frozen November night in 2019, a snowplow driver on Cherry Valley Grade near the town of Dunmore picks up a man walking the shoulder without a coat. The driver knows every mile of that road—the way it snakes up the ridge, the places where the guardrail is gone, the spot where the radio dies for three full minutes. But he does not know the man in the passenger seat. He does not know why the ma...

November 2023. A hunter named Everett built a tree stand in the woods outside a village called Sutter's Cove, New York. He told me he worked on it for three weekends, alone, nailing boards into a white oak at the edge of a gravel pit. The first time he sat in it, before dawn, he noticed a light coming from the bottom of the pit. Not a flashlight. Not a campfire. It was blue and it pulsed like a he...

November 2023. Luna was tracking a wounded doe through the hardwood stands behind Milner's Hollow when she found a second blood trail—human, dragging, leading to an abandoned fire tower. Inside, a man in a shredded hunting jacket sat against the wall, his rifle empty, his eyes fixed on something in the corner that Luna couldn't see. He spoke without moving his mouth. He said the deer had been lead...

Luna recalls a winter morning in 2019 when she followed a blood trail not from a deer, but from a man named Hollis who had been missing for three days. The trail led through the hardwoods on the western edge of Stillwater Bog, past a rusted snowmobile, to a cabin that wasn't on any map. Inside, she found a fire still burning, a pot of coffee still warm, and a single boot by the door. But no Hollis...

In the winter of 2017, a man named Hollis Durn kept a barn that no one in Schoharie County would go near. Not because it was abandoned, but because it was too clean — swept dirt, oiled hinges, and a single trapdoor that stayed padlocked from the outside. Luna's father knew Hollis from the old days, and after the funeral she drove out to Copperhead Lane to help clear the place. What she found insid...

In December of 2003, I spent three nights at the Cutter's Motel outside Barlow, Ohio, while tracking a deer that had strayed south of the Muskingum River. The motel was a low cinderblock building with a flickering vacancy sign and a manager who never showed his face after dark. On the second night, I found a hunting knife taped under the loose floorboard beside the bed, its blade etched with a nam...

In October of 2018, a retired fire watchman named Harlan Croft radioed the Monteagle ranger station to report a signal he could not explain. For thirty-two years he had sat alone in the Pigeon Mountain Lookout, watching for smoke in the Cherokee National Forest. But that night, the fire finder—the alidade instrument used to triangulate smoke plumes—began to track something that burned with no heat...

November 1987. A solo deer hunter named Carl Pederson goes missing from his tree stand on Swainson's Ridge, a stretch of state forest just outside the town of Lost Creek, New York. Search and rescue finds his rifle, his backpack, and a half-eaten granola bar, but no sign of Carl. Three days later, another hunter reports hearing a voice calling for help from the ridge at dusk—not a human voice, but...

It's the last day of deer season in the foothills above Minton, New York, and Luna is tracking a blood trail that doesn't add up. The snow is too clean, the tracks too few, and the thing that left them is not a deer. She follows the trail to a place where the trees stop growing, where the snow has never been touched by the sun, and where something has been waiting for years. This is a story about...

It's November 2017, and Luna is driving through the Monongahela National Forest when her truck skids off a gravel road near a place called Wagon Wheel Gap. She finds shelter in a hollowed-out general store run by an old woman named Elara, who hasn't seen another person in months. Over weak coffee and canned peaches, Elara tells her about the bridge that washed out twenty years ago—and the people w...