Plague Doctor's Round — Fexingo Horror

A quiet, self-contained encounter from Luna's own past: the autumn she spent in a dying Massachusetts mill town, cataloguing the archives of a church that was about to be demolished. Inside the basement she found a single candle, still burning, in a room that had been sealed for seventy years. The candle never flickered. The candle never went out. The priest who had lit it was still there too, or...

A woman on a solo road trip stops for gas at a dusty station outside Wisteria, Texas, where the attendant warns her not to listen to the wind. She presses on, but the radio begins to play a child's nursery rhyme about a Tick Tock Man, and the road keeps looping back to the same abandoned barn. Stranded and desperate, she follows a sound into the dark—a ticking, like a clock, but slower than any cl...

In the summer of 1997, the only 24-hour pharmacy in New Carthage was a fluorescent-lit box on the edge of town. Luna's cousin worked the graveyard shift there, and one night in July he called her with a story he couldn't finish over the phone. A woman came in just after midnight, barefoot and dry-mouthed, asking for a prescription that didn't exist. The pharmacist on duty—a man who had worked the...

October 1999. Three weeks before Halloween, the night stock crew at the Piggly Wiggly in Wolf Creek, Tennessee, started hearing things from the walk-in freezer. Not the compressor. Not the pipes. A sound like fingernails on frost, like someone breathing through a straw of ice. Luna knew the assistant manager, Darren Coyle — a quiet man who wore a hearing aid in his left ear and never told ghost st...

In the winter of 1998, Luna's great-aunt Maeve called her to the old Croft house in Shady Grove, Tennessee. Maeve had been hearing something in the attic—a rhythmic creak, like a rocking chair or a cradle, that started each night at exactly 11:47 PM and stopped precisely at 2:13 AM. She was ninety-two, sharp as a tack, and not given to imagining things. Luna spent three nights in that cold, dusty...

Summer of 1997, Haskell County, Oklahoma. The fair came to town every August—the same Ferris wheel, the same funnel cake, the same dusty midway. But that year, a new attraction appeared at the edge of the livestock barn: a fortune-telling booth operated by a silent woman in a mask. Luna's cousin Maybelle went in for a lark. She came out pale, refusing to say what she'd heard. Then the crows began...

In the summer of 2018, Luna spent three nights at a crumbling Victorian boarding house in Pendleton, Ohio, cataloguing the belongings of a deceased antique dealer. The house was quiet, dust-choked, and smelled of dried lavender and something sour. On the second night, she noticed the wardrobe in the corner of the bedroom — a towering walnut piece with a warped mirror — seemed to shift when she was...

October 1987, just outside of Bakersfield, Missouri. Luna's aunt Clara called her to an old Victorian farmhouse she'd inherited from a distant cousin — a woman named Esther Treadwell who had lived alone for forty years and died in her sleep. The house smelled wrong, sweet and thick, and in every room the floorboards were splintered with rose canes — deep red, almost black, with thorns like fishhoo...

October 1989, just outside of Ashland, Kentucky. Luna's great-aunt Edie called her at 3 AM with a single sentence: 'They're digging up the poor ground again.' By the time Luna reached the old county poor farm cemetery—Potter's Field, they called it—the backhoe was silent and the hole was empty. Not empty of bones—empty of dirt. A perfect rectangle of darkness in the frost, six feet deep, with noth...

In the autumn of 2019, near the forgotten town of Marrow, Georgia, a stretch of Draper Road wound through pine forest so dense it swallowed headlights by four in the afternoon. Luna heard about a woman who lived alone in a rusted single-wide at the dead end — a woman who claimed the pines moved when you weren't looking. Not a ghost story told over beer. A quiet, documented obsession that began wit...

October of 1987. Luna's father took her to a bone-setter on the outskirts of a dying Texas town, a man who worked out of a tin-roofed shed behind his house. He had an old leather chair and a way of pressing his thumbs into a person's joints until the bones made a sound like a door opening. He told her father she had a 'break that hadn't happened yet'—a hairline fracture in her collarbone that no X...

November 1988. A locked psychiatric ward in a small-town Catholic hospital. Luna's aunt worked the night shift there, and after she died, Luna found a taped confession in a shoebox under the bed. This is what the tape said—about the patient in Room 17 who never spoke, the orderlies who lasted less than a week, and the three nights when the lights flickered in sequence. No one ever explained why th...

November 1998. A cold fog settled over the last bus stop on Skinners Lane in Barlow County. Luna was waiting for the 11:07 that never came. Instead, an old man in a long coat sat down beside her, humming a tune she almost recognized. He didn't speak — just whistled, softly, between his teeth. The fog grew thicker. The streetlights flickered. And when she finally looked at his face, she understood...

It was the summer of 2002, and I was stranded overnight at the Greyhound station in Dunmore County, Virginia—a place that looked like it had been forgotten by the schedule itself. The only other person was a woman in a green coat who never bought a ticket, who watched the doors with a stillness that didn't belong to waiting. She told me about the bus that comes at 3:33 a.m., the one that doesn't s...

When a young man disappears from a locked room at a historic inn in Millbrook, Vermont, his mother asks Luna to investigate. The innkeeper's stories of a guest who never checked out—and the persistent smell of woodsmoke and apples from a room that hasn't held a fire in decades—lead Luna to a hidden door in the cellar, where she finds a journal that ends mid-sentence, and a pair of boots still warm...

December 1987. A narrow valley in the Ozarks where the church bells haven't rung in thirty years. Luna's grandmother told her about Cold Spring Hollow as a child—a place where the bells toll on their own, always at the witching hour, always three times. When a family emergency brings Luna to the hollow for the first time, she learns the bells are not a ghost story. They are a summons. And the ones...

Summer 1979. A slow evening at the Telford Basin pump station, where I worked the night shift. The well had been dry for years — until it started singing. Not a mechanical sound. Not water. A voice, rising from six hundred feet down, calling out names one by one. I checked the logbook. Every name matched a missing person from the county, going back decades. When it called mine, I understood why th...

December 23rd, 1987. A stalled pickup on a rural road outside Harmony Falls. The driver was hauling a load of unsold Christmas trees from the lot at St. Mark's. When the engine died, the trees didn't. Luna recounts a night of cold, quiet terror on Route 9 — where the spruces began to move, and the smell of pine became something else entirely. No gore. Just the sound of needles scraping asphalt, an...

It was the last week of October, 1989, when the night clerk at the Twin Pines Gas Station off Route 9 in Coldwater, Ohio stopped showing up for his shifts. The owner, a man named Harlan Peevey, asked around town but nobody knew where the kid had gone. So Harlan covered the graveyard shift himself for three nights, and on the third night he saw something that made him sell the station at a loss and...

December 1987. A temporary night nurse takes a two-week assignment at Whittaker Hollow Rest Home, a county facility tucked into the hills of southern Ohio. The home is quiet, underfunded, and mostly forgotten — just twenty-three beds, a staff of four, and a hallway light that hums at a frequency that sits wrong in the teeth. On her third night, she notices that one of the long-term residents, a wo...

A trucker’s regular stop at a lonely diner off the interstate turns strange when he notices the waitress never seems to leave. Night after night, same booth, same coffee order, same flickering fluorescent lights. The cook says she’s been there longer than anyone remembers. But it’s the thing she keeps in the back—behind the swinging doors, past the walk-in cooler—that finally makes him take the lo...

February 1987. A traveling salesman checks into the Green Gables Hotel outside Eureka Springs, Arkansas, during a freak ice storm. The third floor has been closed for years — water damage, they say — but the elevator still stops there, and the bell still rings in room 312. The man who tends the front desk has a tremor in his hands and a story he won't finish. Luna pieces together what happened to...

June 2019. The boiler room of Larkspur Apartments, a crumbling complex on the edge of Denton, Missouri. Luna's friend Margie calls her in the middle of the night, whispering that the furnace man is back — the one who isn't a man at all. He tends the fire in the subbasement, and no one can remember who hired him. Luna drives over and spends the night watching the basement door with Margie, listenin...

In the summer of 1987, a teenager named Jess is sent to stay with her aunt in the dying town of Farlow, Kentucky. The old county road is being repaved after a sinkhole swallows a pickup truck, but what the road crew unearths is not limestone or clay. It is something that breathes, something that has been waiting under the gravel for a long time. Jess begins to dream of a hand reaching up through t...

October 1987. The annual Harvest Moon Dance at Pikeville Community Hall. A town tradition older than anyone can remember. But this year, a stranger arrives uninvited—a quiet woman in a white dress who does not dance, does not speak, and seems to know everyone's name. By midnight, she has chosen a partner. By morning, that partner is gone. Luna pieces together the story from the whispers that follo...