Plague Doctor's Round — Fexingo Horror

I remember the first time I crossed the Porters Ford Bridge after dark. It was early autumn, 2019—the kind of warm September night where the crickets sound like static and the air smells of dry corn and diesel. The bridge was just a single-lane iron truss over the Roanoke River, built in 1927, with a wooden deck that rattled under your tires. But that night, something was wrong. There was a figure...

In the autumn of 1997, a county surveyor named Owen Teague drove a stretch of rural Missouri road that didn't exist on any map. He found a town called Beechwood that had been erased from records since 1887. The people there were polite, hollow-eyed, and all wore clothes a century out of fashion. They invited him to the Harvest Social. He stayed three days. When he came back, he couldn't stop measu...

December 24th, 1987. A blizzard traps a librarian and a stray cat inside the Carnegie library on Main Street, Oakdale. At first it's a quiet, almost cozy night—sheltering from the storm, a gas heater, an old radio playing carols. But the library has a basement. And in that basement, a door that was never supposed to be opened. By midnight, the cat is hissing at the dark. By three a.m., the librari...

In the autumn of 2008, a traveling salesman named Ellis Thorne checked into the Dusty Boot Inn outside Marble Falls, Texas. He was the only guest. The innkeeper, a woman named Hattie, gave him Room 8 at the end of the hall—a room with a door that didn't quite close, and a lock that clicked but didn't hold. That night, Ellis woke to the sound of footsteps in the hallway, passing his door again and...

October 1971. A dry autumn in Gilead's Crossing, a farming town no one has heard of. Luna's grandmother told her a story about the year the corn came late—and what came with it. A traveling preacher, a locked church basement, and a sound like breathing from the silo after dark. But the harvest was normal. The soil was fine. The only thing wrong was the offering plate. This episode is a slow-burn f...

In the fall of 2008, a traveling archivist named Elara Crane stopped in the dying town of Beulah, Kansas to document the abandoned St. Simeon's Church. The building had been sealed for forty years after the congregation vanished overnight. Elara found the pews dustless, the hymnals open to the same page, and a bell rope that moved on its own. She stayed too long. By the time she tried to leave the...

In the summer of 2007, the town of Mercy Springs, Kentucky held its annual Firefly Festival on the last Saturday of July. Luna drove through that night, on her way to nothing in particular, and stopped at the edge of the fairgrounds because the lights looked wrong. Not the string bulbs—they were fine—but the lanterns people carried into the woods. They moved like people, but they weren't. She watc...

Luna checks into room 14 of the Pines Motel outside Elko, Nevada, on a windless November night. The carpet is wrong — a deep crimson pattern that seems to shift in the corner of your eye. The front desk clerk warns her not to look at it too long. She doesn't listen. She traces the stains, the faded flowers, the way the pile rises in a trail from the door to the bathroom. She learns why the motel k...

Luna recounts a story handed down from a retired surveyor named Elias Thorne, who spent forty years mapping the back roads of rural Pennsylvania. In the autumn of 1989, he was called to resurvey a forgotten valley near the town of Corbin's Mill — a place that appeared on no modern map but was marked on an old deed as 'The Hollow.' Elias drove out one cold October morning, following a dirt track th...

March 1987, Pembroke, Illinois. The night the old Memorial Hospital was supposed to close its doors for good, Luna sat in the empty east wing with a woman who refused to leave. Eleanor Graves had been a nurse there since 1952, and she claimed the building wasn't empty. Not really. Between midnight and three AM, the fifth-floor ward hummed with a sound that wasn't machinery. The elevators moved on...

October 1997. Luna's aunt rents a farmhouse on the outskirts of Denton Flats, Kansas — a town whose only notable feature is a row of abandoned grain silos standing on the county line like a row of tombstones. The harvest moon is full and the wind is wrong. On the third night, Luna hears them: a low, rhythmic hum vibrating through the walls, through her ribs, through the marrow of her bones. The so...

September 1987, just outside of Harlow, Illinois. Luna spent three nights working the second shift at Moons Mill, a feed-and-grain operation that had sat silent for twenty years before it started running again under new management. The foreman, an old man named Birch, gave her a single rule: never step inside the grain silo after midnight. She didn't. But the silo had its own ideas. What she heard...

In August of 1998, the town of Lost Creek, Arkansas hired a private paving crew to resurface a dead-end county road that had been dirt for as long as anyone could remember. The crew foreman, a man named Harlan Driscoll, kept a detailed journal of the job because the residents along that road — all three families — made him uneasy. They never came outside during daylight. They never spoke. And ever...

In the autumn of 1998, a town called Heston, Missouri, had a single remaining patient in its shuttered tuberculosis sanatorium. Luna's cousin, a hospice nurse named Margot, took the night shift alone. The patient was an old woman named Mrs. Gable who had not spoken in forty years—not since the sanatorium closed and the last doctor left. But that night, Mrs. Gable began to whisper. She whispered ab...

January 2019, and Luna takes a temp night shift at Mercy Rest Home in Elkhart, Indiana — a low-budget senior care facility with a reputation for cutting corners. The job is simple: sit at the front desk, take calls, check on residents. But the building has a locked basement wing that no one talks about, and the night nurse, Delia, gives her a key ring with instructions she doesn't fully explain. A...

In the autumn of 1998, I drove through Thornwood Hollow, Maine — a town so small it didn't appear on any map I owned. A local woman named Esther Crane told me about the well in her backyard, bricked up since her grandmother's time. But every night, she said, she heard something climbing up from inside it. Something that knew her name. This is the story of what I found at the bottom of that well, a...

Luna recounts a night in the autumn of 2003, when she drove through the dying town of Stillwater, Illinois. The grain elevator had been silent for a decade, and the only sound was a bell tolling from beneath the reservoir. She met Elias, a former millworker who couldn't stop listening. He said the bell rang at midnight every night, and counted down to something no one remembered. Luna stayed, hudd...