Goodnight, Listener — Fexingo Horror

On a winter night in 1997, Luna drives a back road along the Maine coast and stops at a lighthouse that shouldn't be lit. The keeper is an old man who hasn't spoken in decades—or so the town says. He invites her inside for tea, and what he shows her in the lantern room makes her understand why some lights can never be turned off. A quiet, slow-burn encounter with grief, duty, and the things that w...

Luna's cousin Caleb took a janitor job at the abandoned Harlow State Asylum in October of 2018. He was told to expect rats, mold, and the occasional trespasser. Nobody mentioned the piano in the old rec room that played by itself—not a recording, not a draft, but something that knew the living were listening. The first night Caleb heard it, he thought it was a prank. By the third night, he started...

Luna pulls off the interstate at a truck stop outside Dighton, Kansas, and meets an old man who tells her about a stretch of farmland where the corn doesn't just rustle in the wind — it hums. He claims he heard it one harvest night in October of '73, and that the sound stayed in his bones for decades. Luna stays up to listen, and what she hears behind the truck stop changes the way she'll think ab...

In the winter of 2019, a radiologist in the small town of Red Bluff Falls, Nebraska, began noticing something impossible in her patients' X-rays: a shadow that looked like a person standing just behind the clavicle, or curled inside the ribcage. Not a tumor. Not an artifact. Something with fingers. Dr. Alma Chen kept it to herself at first, then shared it with a colleague. By the time she stopped,...

Luna recalls a summer night in 1997 when her car broke down outside Durance, Oklahoma, a town that didn't appear on any map. She found shelter at a roadside workshop run by an old woman named Hester, who made porcelain dolls in a dim, silent room. The dolls were perfect—too perfect—with eyes that seemed to watch, and one of them had a fleck of green that matched Luna's own eyes. Hester spoke of a...

In the summer of 2006, the town of Pine Hollow, Tennessee, lost power for three days after a storm split the oldest oak in the county clean down the middle. Everyone saw the wound—black, wet, and hollow—but no one talked about what came out of it. Luna remembers the night her father took her to see it, the way the air smelled like cut wood and wet earth, and the sound that started at midnight. A l...

October 2021. A small town in central Ohio. The old playground at the edge of Miller's Field had been there since the seventies—rusted slide, a set of swings that creaked in any wind, a tire tunnel half-buried in weeds. Kids stopped going there years ago. But in the autumn of 2021, something started drawing them back. Not the children of Miller's Field—they stayed away. It was other kids. Kids fro...

In the late autumn of 2019, Luna pulls off a lonely stretch of Highway 17 in the Florida panhandle to buy gas at a three-way junction she's never seen before. The station is run by a man named Harlan who speaks as if he's been waiting for her. He tells her about the road that doesn't appear on any map, about the travelers who vanish at the crossroads, and about the pact his family made with someth...

In the summer of 2009, a truck driver stumbles into a diner on a forgotten stretch of highway in rural Kansas. The waitress moves like a ghost, the coffee tastes like ash, and the pie is always warm but never fresh. Every hour the same man walks in and orders the same thing—a slice of cherry pie, no ice cream—and leaves without a word. The driver can't leave. The road outside loops back to the sam...

It was the summer of 2019, just past midnight on a Tuesday, when I stopped at a Waffle House off Route 9 in a town called Mercer, Missouri. The waitress had a name tag that read 'Darla,' but she looked like she hadn't slept in years. She poured my coffee without asking, her hands trembling just barely, and she started talking about the man in booth four. The one who'd been there for three weeks, e...

In the brittle autumn of 2019, I drove through the Missouri Ozarks and found a white clapboard church that wasn't on any map. The sign out front promised services every second Sunday, but the doors were chained from the outside. I met a man named Harlan who smelled of wet earth and spoke of a congregation that never missed a Sunday. He showed me a ledger of names, all crossed out, and a photograph...

In the summer of 2019, off a forgotten exit on I-40 in eastern Tennessee, a single billboard began rewriting itself. Luna's cousin, a trucker named Danny, was the first to notice the numbers changing every time he passed. Then the name. Then the message. Then the face. By the third week, the billboard was showing a photograph of Danny's childhood bedroom—and beneath it, a countdown. This is the st...

Late October 2017, on a desolate stretch of Oklahoma highway, Luna's car breaks down outside a town called Bitter Creek — one gas station, one diner, one barbershop that never closes. The barber's name is Emmett. He's been cutting hair in that chair for forty-seven years. But nobody in town remembers him ever leaving the shop. Luna waits for a tow truck and watches through the window as he trims a...

In the fall of 2019, Luna's car broke down outside a small town in eastern Kentucky. The only mechanic in town was a man named Elias, who worked out of a garage beside a house that had been abandoned for fifty years. As she waited for a repair, she heard a story about the house — a story about a mother who lost her son and never stopped calling for him. But some calls don't end. Some houses rememb...

In the summer of 2008, a dry lightning storm swept through the high desert of eastern Oregon. I was nineteen, driving home to Bend from a friend's funeral in Burns. The highway was empty, the sky was purple, and somewhere between Wagontire and the turnoff for Glass Buttes, I saw a woman standing at the side of the road. She was wearing a yellow dress. No car. No phone. No shoes. I stopped because...

In the winter of 2019, the 11:35 p.m. bus from Baton Rouge to Vacherie, Louisiana, carried exactly one passenger who didn't buy a ticket. Luna's cousin, a Greyhound driver named Ray, picked up a woman at a gas station on Airline Highway — no luggage, no coat, just a single question she asked every rider she met. By the time they reached the bayou parish line, the bus had gone quiet in a way that h...

In the autumn of 2019, I spent three weeks in a borrowed cabin outside a town called Pender's Mill, North Carolina. The town was small and quiet, the kind of place where everyone knows your truck before they know your name. I was there to write, but the writing never came. Instead, I found myself walking the same stretch of Old County Road 17 every evening, past the blackwater creek and the live o...