Plague Doctor's Round — Fexingo Horror

In the autumn of 1997, a small-town librarian in Selby, Indiana, begins noticing that the library's heavy oak front door refuses to unlock some nights — even when she's inside, alone, after hours. At first it's a faulty lock, but then the pattern grows: the lights flicker at 9:47, a card catalog drawer slides open on its own, and a child's whisper asks for a book that was destroyed in a fire forty...

In the summer of 1987, in the small town of Edgewood, Illinois, there was a diner that never closed. Not officially. The Red Rooster Diner sat at the junction of Route 9 and County Road 14, its neon sign flickering 'OPEN' in a dead zone where no one stopped after midnight. But the ovens stayed on. The coffee stayed hot. And every night at 3:33 AM, the bell above the door rang. Luna tells the story...

In the winter of 1993, a traveling nurse named Cora Bellamy took a week-long assignment at the Mercy Falls Sanatorium, a tuberculosis hospital that had been closed for decades but reopened during a sudden outbreak. The building was a maze of peeling linoleum and broken windows, and the patients were kept in a locked ward on the third floor. Cora was told never to open the ward after midnight, neve...

On a frozen February night in Ludlow, Iowa, the all-night truck stop never closed. The coffee was always fresh, the pie was always warm, and the grill never stopped sizzling. Luna talks about the night she pulled off Highway 6, bone-tired and half-frozen, and met a waitress named Della who had been working the same shift for forty years. But the clock on the wall said 3:17 AM, and every trucker at...

In the fall of 1987, a young teacher named Miriam Cross takes a position at the one-room Holloway Road schoolhouse outside Alder Creek. The children speak of a silent boy in the back row who never speaks and never leaves. Miriam learns the school was built on land where a fever took thirty children in 1889. The boy was one of them. He stayed. And when the janitor locks up at dusk, the bell rings o...

In the autumn of 1992, a traveling archivist named Luna arrived in Thornfield, a town where time felt like it was holding its breath. She was there to document the history of St. Agnes Episcopal Church, a crumbling stone building with a bell that had rung at midnight every night for as long as anyone could remember—except no one had been inside to pull the rope in thirty years. The sexton, a man n...

In the winter of 1987, on the frozen shore of Pickerel Lake, Minnesota, the icehouse of the late Lars Halvorson refused to thaw. When Luna's uncle, a retired county coroner, went to clear it out for the spring melt, he found the blocks of ice cut from the lake still stacked inside, exactly as they had been the day Lars died three months earlier—except for a single block, perfectly clear, with a sh...

In the autumn of 1997, Luna's car died on a forgotten stretch of Pender Hollow Road in Balsam County, where the air smelled of wet pine and something metallic. The only sign of life was a sawmill whose lights blazed at two in the morning, its blade still singing through wood that seemed to bleed a dark, sticky sap. The night foreman, a gaunt man named Darrow, spoke in a low, careful voice about a...

It’s July 1999 in the nowhere between Bakersfield and nowhere. Luna’s car dies on a stretch of Old Salt Creek Road that loops back on itself no matter which way you turn. A diner materializes out of the heat shimmer, its neon buzzing in a language that looks like English but reads like thirst. The waitress pours coffee that never cools and asks if she can keep the plate you don’t remember ordering...

In the summer of 1982, a woman named Esther Smithson called the sheriff's office in Larkspur, Iowa, to report a light in her dead husband's study. The lamp had been unplugged for three years. Luna heard the story from a deputy who was first on scene. What he saw inside that room — the papers in his own handwriting, the date on the calendar, and the smell of tobacco from a man who had been dead sin...

August 1987. A dry summer in Bemis, Tennessee, where the heat pressed down like a hand on the back of your neck. Luna's great-aunt Edie lived alone in the Riddick House—a two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch and a cistern in the cellar that no one talked about. When Edie stopped answering her phone for three days, Luna drove out to check on her. What she found was not a body, not a ghost, b...

In the summer of 1997, Luna's grandmother sent her to fetch water from the old well behind the Selby farmhouse—a well that hadn't been used in thirty years. The pump handle moved on its own. The bucket came up full of something that wasn't water. And the voice that called from the bottom knew her name, her mother's name, and the name of the girl who fell in back in 1963. This is a story about what...

In the autumn of 1987, the Red Oak Flour Mill in rural Kansas ground its first batch of wheat in thirty years. The mill had been silent since a boy drowned in the grain silo back in '57. But one night, the owner's granddaughter saw a light flicker through the boarded windows. She found the old millstones turning, and the air thick with a strange, sweet dust that clung to her skin like damp flour....

November 1986. A woman named Elise inherits a boarded-up lumber mill in a dying Oregon coastal town. Inside, she finds a single circular saw blade still spinning in the dark, three years after the mill was shut down. The blade hums a melody she remembers from childhood. The mill's logbook records a name she buried long ago. She pulls the plug. The blade keeps singing. This is a story about what we...

In the autumn of 1997, at the Hartley County Fairgrounds in rural Missouri, Luna encountered a man who claimed his family had been the fair's groundskeepers for seven generations. He led her to the livestock pavilion, where a chain-link fence had been growing overnight, pushing outward from the dirt in a pattern that matched the spiral of a conch shell. The fence was not made of metal — it was a f...

In the autumn of 1987, on a back road in Crow County, there was a forge that never went dark. Luna's grandfather told her about the farrier who worked through the night, shoeing horses that didn't leave tracks. She went to see for herself one October evening, and what she found behind the glow of the fire has stayed with her ever since. A story about work that outlasts the worker, about the differ...

In the winter of 1998, a small-town clinic on Founders Street in Mercy Falls became a magnet for things that should have healed but didn't. Luna tells the story of Dr. Harriet Voss, the last physician to keep the doors open after midnight, and the single, unremarkable wound she treated on a man named Elias Thorne — a cut on his hand that refused to close. Over six nights, the wound grew deeper, da...

In the winter of 1987, the old asylum on the hill above Mercy Falls had been closed for eleven years. But the bell in the tower kept tolling. Luna visits the site with a local historian who insists the bell was removed before the building was sealed. She hears it herself—three clear chimes at midnight, from a tower that holds no bell. The historian's notebook contains a list of names and dates, al...

In the winter of 1998, a man named Elias Crane checked into the Hotel Bellweather in the dying town of Mercy Falls, West Virginia. He was a timepiece repairman, called in to fix the antique grandfather clock that had stood in the lobby for over a century. But when he opened the clock's case, he found something that had been wound into its gears—a human finger, still wearing a gold ring. The manage...

August 1993. A broken-down car. A gas station off Old Highway 61 in Milledgeville, Tennessee. The clock on the dashboard said 2:17 AM when Lee Anne pulled in—and the attendant who came out to the pump had a name tag that read 'Frank,' but his hands were wrong, and his voice came from too far away. Lee Anne had driven this road a hundred times, but she'd never seen a station open after midnight in...

A cold November night in Dorchester County, a small town where the Catholic church has stood empty for years. Luna's old friend, a night-shift nurse, called her with a strange story. She had been driving past St. Michael's and heard the pipe organ playing at two in the morning — not a hymn, but something slow and wrong. Luna agreed to meet her there. They stood in the graveyard, listening to music...

November 1987. A string of unexplained deaths in Mercy Falls. Each victim found with a single typed page in their hand — a story they'd written in their sleep, years before. The newspaper archives hold the pattern, but nobody wants to print it. Luna visits the Gazette office at 3 AM, where the last editor is still typing. He hasn't stopped for seven days. The keys move on their own. The pages pile...

April in Mercy Falls, a town so small the highway forgot it. Luna's car died outside the only diner still open past midnight — a fluorescent box tucked between empty lots and a shut-down gas station. The waitress wore a name tag that said Dot but never answered to it. The coffee was hot. The pie was stale. And the man in the booth by the window — he'd been sitting there since 1987, waiting for a b...

December 1996. A minor car accident on an icy road outside Verona, Ohio. Luna waits in the empty clinic's waiting room while the doctor examines her father. The clock on the wall ticks too slowly. A woman in a grey coat sits across from her, perfectly still, reading a magazine that never turns a page. The receptionist left at six. The doctor hasn't come out. And the woman starts to speak — not to...

In the autumn of 2003, on a back road outside Opelika, Alabama, there was a storefront that sold porcelain dolls. Not the kind you find at antique malls — these were custom, handmade, each one a perfect likeness of someone's lost child. Luna's aunt bought one for her fifth birthday. The doll was beautiful. It had her cousin's face. And then it started crying in the middle of the night — not from a...