Tales from the Cold Room — Fexingo Horror

September 1998. A two-lane road outside Dutton, Alabama. Luna stops at a gas station on a night run and meets a woman sitting alone at a picnic table—a woman who insists she is waiting for something that comes through the fence at the Honeycutt place every night at two in the morning. Luna offers her a ride. The woman refuses. She says she has seen the same car pass four times, driven by a man who...

It's late autumn, 1987, in the little town of Gretna, Illinois, and I ended up at the old Hoke House—a place kids dared each other to touch, not enter. I was there to check on a friend of a friend, a woman named Miriam who'd moved in alone after her husband died. She'd been calling the station with complaints about a knocking in the walls. Nothing structural, she said. It came from inside the bric...

February 1998. A woman checks into Room 8 of the Bluebird Motel outside Bakersfield, California on a cold, wet Tuesday night. She is running from something she will not name. Luna watches from the office window as the woman carries a single duffel bag inside. But the motel has a history — a guest who never checked out, a mirror that shows rooms that do not exist. What Luna witnesses through the th...

Luna takes a late-night shift at the Penrose Diner outside Mercer, Pennsylvania, in October of 2008. The regulars are sparse, the coffee is weak, and the waitress before her left a cryptic note taped under the register: 'Watch the change.' Luna thinks it's a warning about the till. She's wrong. Through the graveyard hours, she watches a man in a grey coat count and recount coins at the counter, hi...

In the winter of 1987, Luna’s great-aunt took a job as night aide at St. Dymphna's, a crumbling Catholic asylum outside Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The east wing had been sealed for decades, but every night at 2:17 AM, the bell tower rang three times—a bell that had been locked and disconnected since 1954. Luna's aunt kept a log of the nights she heard it, and of the footsteps that followed. When the...

February 1998, Carson City, Nevada. Luna was stranded at a Greyhound depot that had closed for the night. The last bus didn't come. The waiting room was empty except for a woman in a grey coat who sat by the window and never blinked. Luna watched her watch the glass. She watched her mouth the words. She watched her press her palm to the pane until the frost melted in the shape of a hand that did n...

Luna remembers a winter night in 2019 when she stopped at a crumbling stone church outside Mount Gilead, Kentucky. A boy named Caleb had been leaving food on the altar for a stray cat that never came. But when Luna sat in the pew and watched, she saw something else moving through the shadows—something that wore the cat's shape but wasn't the cat. The church had been abandoned for forty years. The...

Luna checks into the Garfield Hotel outside Elko, Nevada, a crumbling Route 66 relic that should have been demolished decades ago. It is a dry, wind-scoured February night, and the clerk gives her a key to Room 16 without meeting her eyes. The room smells of carpet cleaner and something older, something that has seeped into the baseboards. She spends the night watching the door — not because she h...

March 1992. A woman named Evelyn checks into the Last Chance Motel outside of Mojave, California — a faded U-shaped motor court with a neon sign that flickers between 'Vacancy' and 'No.' She's driving cross-country after leaving her husband, and she just needs one night of sleep. But the room is too cold, the lock doesn't catch, and the sign... the sign isn't wired to spell anything but 'VACANCY'...

December 1987. A roadside motel in Edisto, West Virginia, where the snow fell so thick the roads closed by noon. Luna was working the front desk when a man in a gray coat checked in — no luggage, no car, just a long stare at the registration book. He asked for Room 14, the one at the end of the hall with the warped door. Over three days, she watched him walk the same path: from his room to the pay...

November 1987. Luna's father worked the graveyard shift at the railroad crossing in Shiloh, a two-stoplight town in central Illinois where the trains never stopped running. After he died, she took his place for one night—just to see what he saw. The crossing guard's shack is a rusted box on concrete blocks, lit by a single bulb that buzzes when the 3:17 freight comes through. That night, a train p...

October 1987. Twin Forks, West Virginia. A garage at the edge of town that only opens after midnight. Luna's cousin Ray had been working the night shift for three weeks when the first car pulled in at 2 AM—a rusted Ford LTD with no plates and a man who wouldn't get out. Ray thought it was just a drunk. Then the next night, another car. Same model, different color. Same man behind the wheel. Same r...

Luna recalls a summer night in 1997 when a woman named Esther kept watch over a vacant lot on Sycamore Street in the small town of Meridian, Ohio. Esther was hired by the town council after a boy disappeared from that lot three weeks earlier. Night after night, Luna sat with her in a lawn chair, watching the weeds shift in the dark. What came out of the ground was not a body. What came out of the...

June 1987, just past midnight, in the parking lot of Benton's Grocery outside Hargrove, Illinois. Luna's car won't start, and the only working payphone for miles sits under a buzzing fluorescent light. She calls for a tow, but the phone rings back — and the voice on the other end knows things it shouldn't. A story about the last payphone in a dying town, the crackling line that connects the living...

It's 2008, late November, and Luna is a junior at Hartsville High in rural Tennessee. She takes a part-time job watching the faculty parking lot from a booth in the northeast corner, 8 PM to midnight, after the football games and before the janitors leave. The lot is empty most nights — just her, a space heater, and a crackling police scanner. But around 11:15, a minivan pulls in and parks under a...

October 1987. A rural grain elevator outside Crescent, Illinois, three hours before dawn. Luna's cousin Della took a temp shift monitoring the silos after the night man walked off. The job was simple: sit in the control room, watch the temperature gauges, log the moisture content every hour. But the grain speaks when it settles—a low groan through the steel. And the augers, even when the power's c...

In the winter of 2003, Luna worked a graveyard shift at the county coroner's office in rural Maysville, Kentucky. A routine call came in from the state road crew about an unmarked grave near an old pauper's cemetery known as Potters Field. What they found beneath the frozen dirt was not what anyone expected—a shallow grave, a single iron headstone with a name scratched into rust, and a hole that s...

It was the fall of '93 in a town called Bowers Hollow, and I was staying in a borrowed house at the dead end of Fitch Lane. Every night around 2 a.m., a light came on in the upstairs window of the house next door—the one that had been empty for six years. I watched for three weeks, and I never saw anyone go in. But I saw the shadow on the wall, night after night, and it was always doing the same t...

October 1993, a back road outside Driftwood, West Virginia. Luna's cousin calls her at 2 AM, frantic and out of breath, saying the same old iron bridge she crosses every night is refusing to let her go. Luna drives out to find her cousin's truck idling on the gravel approach, headlights cutting through fog that smells of wet stone and cold metal. The bridge is barely thirty feet long, but her cous...

October 1997. A woman named Della takes the night shift at a deserted tollbooth on a mountain road nobody uses anymore. The state is about to decommission the pass—too many accidents, too many people going missing between the switchbacks. Della's job is to sit in the booth until dawn and log the last cars through. She brings a thermos of coffee, a paperback, and a radio that only picks up static a...

It's late autumn, 1998, in the small town of Crab Orchard, West Virginia. Luna's friend Danny asks her to sit with a body at the local VFW hall — a watching, he calls it, for a man who died alone with no family to claim him. She agrees, expecting a quiet, dutiful night. But as the hours crawl past midnight, she begins to notice details that don't add up: the man's hands, clenched too tight; the br...

October 1987. Luna's cousin Marlene takes a seasonal job at Cold Spring Orchard, a pick-your-own apple farm in Ellenton, New York. The job is simple: man the register, fill bags, smile at families. But Marlene starts noticing the well behind the barn — a stone ring covered by a rusted grate that the owner, old man Haskill, keeps padlocked. He tells her it's 'just an old well, nothing down there bu...

November 1967. Luna takes a temporary job at Hollybrook Mortuary in rural Vermont, assisting the elderly mortician, Mr. Coyle. Her task is simple: sit with the dead on the night before burial, recording any anomalies in a ledger. But the body of a young woman, found drowned in the Batten Kill, refuses to stay still. The watch on her wrist ticks backward. Her fingernails grow in the dark. And at ex...

October 1982. Luna takes a temporary night watchman job at the Peabody Boarding House in Balsam Grove, a dying mill town in eastern Tennessee. The house is almost empty — just three long-term tenants, all elderly, all quiet. Her instructions are simple: walk the halls every hour, check the attic door stays locked, and never open it. The first week is boring. The second week, she starts hearing the...

December 1987. Luna takes a temp job at the abandoned Morton Tannery, where a night watchman vanished two weeks earlier. Her only instruction: walk the perimeter every hour and listen for the pumps. But the pumps haven't run in years. The building breathes. The drains cough. And somewhere in the dark, something is still drying the hides. This is a story about a place that never stopped working — e...