Game Trail — Fexingo Horror

After a late-season blizzard strands her at an abandoned hunting camp, Luna discovers a single kerosene lantern burning in the window of a cabin that should have been empty for forty years. Inside, a table set for one, a fire still warm in the stove, and a photograph of a woman who looks just like her—dated the week before. As the storm closes in, she follows a set of tracks leading into the woods...

Outside Shade Gap, Pennsylvania, in the wet gray of a November evening. Luna's uncle Frank had a bull that kept getting out. One evening he followed it through a gap in the barbed wire that he had never seen before. Beyond the gap, the field stretched longer than it should have, and the fence kept going. This episode is about a man who followed his own fence further than any fence has a right to g...

Luna hears a story from an old game warden named Conley about a stretch of gravel road in Schoharie County called Moseley's Crossing — a place where, for three nights every October, a single headlight appears on the empty road at exactly 2:17 a.m. Conley worked the Crossing for thirty years. He knew the history: a 1971 night, a boy on a dirt bike hit by a logging truck, no surviving witnesses, no...

In the winter of 2018, deep in the Monongahela National Forest, a hunter named Clyde Stoltzfus followed a blood trail that led him not to a wounded deer, but to an old stone formation known locally as Parson's Rock. What he found there—a heap of small objects, each left by someone who had no intention of coming back—drew him back night after night. Clyde told me this story over coffee at a diner i...

November 1987. A doe, hit-and-run on a back road outside Hadley, Pennsylvania. Luna kneels in the gravel, knife in hand, when she notices the wound is wrong — not from a car, but something else. The deer's eyes do not close. The blood does not freeze. And the thing that made this wound is still moving through the woods, tracking her as she follows a trail of warm blood through the snow. A hunter's...

Luna recounts a December night in 1998 when she and her cousin Amos drove out to an abandoned well on the old Haskins farm in Tompkins County, New York. Amos had been hearing a woman's voice calling from it for three nights straight. They went to prove it was nothing. But the well had no bottom—or it had a bottom that moved. What they found there changed how Luna understands sound, silence, and th...

November 1987. Along a stretch of Route 9 that deer have learned to avoid, an old man named Tolland spent forty years building a fence. Not to keep anything out—to keep something in. Luna heard the story from a game warden who found Tolland's body in the snow, and the fence still standing. But the gate was open. And the tracks leading away from it were not deer. Not bear. Not anything with a name....

It's March in the Alleghenies — mud season, when the snow rots from below and creeks run brown with melt. Luna meets an old tracker named Emmett Sorrow at a gas stove outside the Deer Kill Diner, and he tells her about the winter he spent alone in a cabin on Third Pine Creek. How the thaw came early that year, how the deer came down with something in their eyes, how he followed a blood trail that...

October 2022, just north of Millbrook, Pennsylvania. Luna joins a veteran deer hunter named Ed Gunderman on the last day of rifle season. Ed is seventy-three, quiet, and meticulous—he has hunted these same two hundred acres for forty years. But this morning, he breaks his own rules. He follows a blood trail that leads not to a wounded buck but to a creek that should not exist on any map. Luna watc...

On the outskirts of Tuscarawas, Ohio, a stretch of old-growth willows along the riverbank has held a rope swing since before anyone can remember. Luna's father told her the rope was there when he was a boy, and his father before him. But this summer, the kids who use it start coming down with strange fevers, and the rope feels different in your hand—not coarse, but soft, like skin. Luna goes back...

December 1997, outside Lost Creek, West Virginia. Luna recalls a weekend tracking a wounded buck into a decaying hunting lodge where a single upright piano stood in the main room, perfectly clean. The man who lived there hadn't hunted in twenty years. He spoke of his wife's disappearance and the music that played from the locked basement at night. Luna stayed to listen, and what she heard changed...

January 2007. A back road outside the village of Kreider, Pennsylvania, where the snow doesn't melt until April. Luna was hired to track a wounded deer, but the blood trail led her to a man named Wendell Cope, who lived alone in a house surrounded by dozens of handmade birdhouses. He told her about the sounds he heard at night — not birds, but something that imitated them. Something that had been...

October 1997. Luna's cousin Caleb packs his truck for a two-week solo hunt on the shoulder of Mount Tabor, a hundred miles of national forest south of the Canadian line. Four days in, he finds a girl walking up the dry bed of the Mashpee River—barefoot, wearing a dress that might have been white once, speaking a language that sounds like English but isn't. He brings her back to camp. He radios for...

February 2022, a stretch of County Road 17 outside White Falls, Wisconsin. Luna's uncle lost a buck at dusk, and she volunteered to track it at first light. The blood trail led through a hardwood stand, past a dry creek bed, and into a clearing where the snow had melted in a perfect circle. Inside that thawed ring, a man sat in his truck, killed by nothing anyone could name. The county sheriff cal...

December 2022, just north of Whetstone, New York. A state trooper I knew from the old days — Dale Voss — called me at 2:17 AM, said he had something I needed to see at the old train station. I drove through a snow that was coming down sideways, found him sitting on the platform with his service pistol in his lap and a story he couldn't stop telling. He was the only one who had responded to a 911 c...

Luna recalls a late autumn deer hunt in the upper peninsula of Michigan, near a ghost town called Harrel's Ford. She was sixteen, tracking a wounded buck along an old logging road when she found a man in a plaid coat sitting against a tree. He wasn't dead. He was humming. What he told her about the town's last night—and what she heard when she knelt beside him—has stayed with her for twenty years....

In the winter of 1992, a poacher's blood trail leads Luna off the game trail near Packsaddle, West Virginia, to the foot of a collapsed railroad trestle called the Devil's Rib. There she finds an old man who tells her about the night in 1958 when a hunt went wrong and a boy named Elias disappeared into the hollow. The story she hears is about what hunts back — not bears, not deer, but something th...