Tales from the Cold Room — Fexingo Horror

December 2021. Luna takes a temp job cleaning the bell tower of Saint Mark's Episcopal Church in the small Massachusetts town of Millbrook. The steeple keeper, a quiet man named Elias, warns her never to touch the bells after dark. But the old brass is caked with decades of grime, and the job takes longer than expected. As dusk settles, she finds herself alone with the bells and a sound that isn't...

March 1998. A frozen pond on the outskirts of a town called Treadwell. Luna was housesitting for a friend's aunt—just a few days, feeding a cat and watering geraniums. But the property had a small icehouse at the back of the lot, a remnant from when the pond was commercially harvested. The aunt warned her not to go near it. 'It's not safe,' she said. 'The floor's rotten.' But the cat kept slipping...

October 1998. Luna's cousin Margaret bought an old farmhouse outside Thompson, Vermont — Honeysuckle Farm — with acres of overgrown apple trees and a stone root cellar she found charming. But the previous owner, Mr. Ashworth, had a clause in the deed: 'Never lock the root cellar from the inside.' Margaret laughed it off until the night she lost the key. The lock clicked behind her. And something t...

Luna tells the story of a man she met while driving through the town of Edgecombe, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 2018. It was a cold October night, and she stopped at a diner near St. Agatha's Cemetery, where she encountered the groundskeeper—a quiet, weathered man named Harlan. He spoke of the quiet hours he spent among the headstones, of a particular grave he tended every day without fail, and...

December 1987. A train station in Wallbridge, Vermont, closed to the public for thirty years. Luna's aunt Marjorie worked the last shift before they locked the doors. She never talked about it. But after she died, Luna found a key among her things — brass, tarnished, stamped with a number that doesn't match any locker or door in the station's blueprints. The key led her to a basement corridor no o...

October 1987. A dry autumn in the town of Cold Spring, New York. Luna's friend Cora — a quiet woman who worked at the local diner — began walking the same country road every night after closing, following the harvest moon as it rose over the farm fields. She said it helped her sleep. But as the weeks passed, the moon seemed to hang lower. The road felt longer. And the figure she saw standing at th...

October 1987. A town called Pender's Hollow, tucked between two ridges where the radio goes to static. Luna tells the story of a woman named Cora who house-sat for a summer neighbor — a larchwood house at the end of a dead-end road, number 14 Briar Lane. The instructions were simple: water the plants, feed the cat, don't open the basement door. But the cat kept scratching at it. The phone kept rin...

On a bitter November night in 1958, Luna's great-aunt Marian took the temporary keeper's post at Gull Rock Light, a solitary tower off the coast of a small Maine town called Heron's Reach. The job was simple: keep the lamp burning and the fog bell ringing. But on her third night, she began to notice something wrong with the beam—a shadow that crossed it irregularly, too low for any ship, too fast...

In the basement of Fairhaven Town Hall, the records go back farther than they should. Luna knew a man named Carl Renshaw who spent forty years filing property deeds, birth certificates, and death notices in that windowless room. His job was to keep the town's history in order, but somewhere around 1983 he started noticing things that didn't belong—documents dated before the town existed, photograp...

In the summer of 2008, I worked a temp job at the Millbrook Water Treatment Plant in western Massachusetts. The night shift was supposed to be quiet—just me, the hum of pumps, and the slow dance of gauges. But on the third week, I started noticing things that didn't belong: a single wet footprint on the concrete floor, the smell of algae where there was no standing water, a low singing that seemed...

October 1997. Luna works the night shift at St. Isidore's Hospital morgue in Millbrook, Vermont. It's a quiet town, and the dead are mostly peaceful — car accidents, heart attacks, the occasional overdose. But one night, a body is brought in from the old Meyer farmhouse. John Orris, sixty-seven, died alone in his bedroom. Except the paramedics say his jaw was dislocated, his hands were bruised, an...

In the winter of 2015, a diner waitress named Ellie begins to notice that the same old man appears at the same booth at closing time every third Tuesday. He orders black coffee, never drinks it, and leaves a single silver dollar as a tip. She tries to ask him about it, but he just smiles with too many teeth and says, 'You'll remember when it's your turn.' That spring, the owner fires her for givin...

Winter of 2017. Luna's car dies outside a small Maine town called Sorrel, population six hundred and twelve. She shelters in a roadside diner where a quiet man in a wool coat shows her a hand-drawn map of the town — but the town on the map isn't the town outside. The roads lead to places that don't exist, and the woods behind the diner have a scent that shouldn't be there. This is a story about ma...

Luna drives through a November gale to a ghost town in western Kansas — a place called Foster, erased from most maps, where the grain elevator still stands like a tombstone and the courthouse clock stopped at 4:18. She is there to meet an old woman named Marguerite, the last resident, who lives alone in the dance hall above the old mercantile. But the ballroom remembers. The floorboards remember t...

October 2019. A two-lane blacktop in western Nebraska, dry grass and broken fence lines. Luna's cousin Delia drove out there alone after a fight she never fully explained to anyone. Her car was found parked at the base of a wind turbine with the driver's door open, the engine still warm, and the headlights pointed north into empty field. The county sheriff wrote it off as a walk-off—rural depressi...

October 1995. Luna's uncle Frank manages the Blackwood Flats, a crumbling apartment building on the edge of a dying Massachusetts mill town. When the last tenant—an old woman named Edie Moss—finally vacates unit 3B, Frank asks Luna to help him clean out the apartment before the building is condemned. They find a single room: a mattress, a chair, a television playing static, and the walls papered i...

A cold January night in 1997. Luna's car dies on a county road outside Red Hill, Nevada — a town that isn't on any map. She walks to a house with a single lit window, where a woman named Iris offers her a candle and a warning. The candle never melts. The house never leaves her. A story about the places we find when we're lost and the things we carry away without meaning to. #FexingoHorror #HorrorP...