Ten Fathoms — Fexingo Horror

October 2021, just past midnight. Luna pulls her skiff up to an old lock on the Trent River near New Bern, North Carolina. The lock keeper is a woman named Elara who has been alone out here for seven years. She shows Luna the ledger where she records every vessel that passes through. But there is a second ledger. Names that go in but never come out. That night, Luna watches a jon boat drift toward...

Luna recounts a late-October night on the Rogue River, when the fish stopped biting at Drowned Man's Reach and the water began to hum. Old Man Whittaker, who had been fishing those banks for fifty years, said he'd heard it once before—back in '78, the year the river took three men in one spring. She stayed on the bank long after he left, listening to the sound that wasn't quite a voice, watching t...

A late-winter night in 1997 on a backwater curve of the Peace River. Luna's cousin Harlan runs a bait shack at Mossy Point Landing, a place the river folk avoid after dark. When a woman in a green coat walks out onto the landing and stares at the water for three hours without blinking, Harlan calls Luna. She arrives to find the woman gone, but something else shuffles under the dock — something tha...

On a bone-dry November night in 2017, Luna trails an old fisherman named Cobb to a backwater cove in the Okefenokee — a place he calls Greaseboat Bay. The air smells of diesel and rotting lilies, and the water is so still it looks like a black mirror. Cobb has been netting ghost catfish for forty years, but lately his nets bring up something else: old things, rusted things, drowned things that sho...

Luna spent a summer at a fly-fishing camp on Gray Heron Inlet in coastal Maine, guiding tourists on the flats. One morning in late August, before the fog burned off, she took out a quiet guest named Hollis — a man in his forties who barely spoke and never cast a line. He said he was there to find something his grandfather had lost sixty years ago, something caught on a snag at low tide. As the tid...

September 1998. Luna drives through a coastal fog to meet a man named Elroy at a bar called The Raft, perched on pilings above Hempstead Bar — a sandbar that shifts with every tide. Elroy claims he's been seeing the same woman walk out of the surf at dusk, night after night, for two weeks. She stands at the edge of the water, dripping, and stares at him until the fog swallows her. But Elroy is not...

In the autumn of 1998, on a fog-thick night at Wicker's Spit, a forgotten cove off the Georgia coast, a fisherman named Elias found an anchor lodged in the hull of his skiff. It was not his anchor. It was old, wrought-iron, encrusted with barnacles that seemed to shift when he wasn't looking. He tried to cut it loose, but the chain led down into the black water, taut and humming. That night, the f...

In the summer of 1987, Luna's trawler dredged up a brass lantern from the shallows off Sister Shoals—an old harbor light engraved with a name she didn't recognize. The same night, a fog rolled in thick as wool, and from the wheelhouse she heard a woman's voice calling out coordinates no longer on any chart. The lantern's glass was warm to the touch, though the sea had been thirty feet deep. Luna t...

December 1998, a still night on the Pamlico Sound. Luna's uncle Frank, a crabber out of Belhaven, hauls his pots alone on the slack tide — the eerie pause between ebb and flood when the water barely breathes. Near the outermost buoy, where the sound meets the open Atlantic, his net snags on something heavy. Not a log. Not a buoy line cut loose. Up it comes — a tangle of black mesh, old lead weight...

Luna pulls into a fog-choked marina on the Waccamaw River one November evening and finds an old man waiting on the dock with an oar. He claims he's been rowing for forty years, ferrying passengers to an island that isn't on any chart. The fare is a secret, not money. But when his boat reaches the shore, Luna realizes no passengers ever come back. A story about ferrymen, forgotten rivers, and the w...

October 2023. Luna takes her boat to the edge of a shallow, tea-colored lake in the Florida Panhandle, following a story about a missing fisherman. At Sweetwater Point, the water is never deeper than twelve feet, but the bottom is a soft muck that swallows anything that sinks. She meets an old woman who ties a line to a cypress knee and says she's been waiting for someone to ask. What she pulls up...

Luna remembers a night she spent anchored in Mermaid's Purse, a narrow channel off the coast of Matunuck, Rhode Island, in late October of 2018. She was alone, waiting for the tide to turn, when she heard a bell ringing from the water. Not a buoy bell—something smaller, closer, with a dull, wet clapper. She followed the sound in her skiff, and found a woman standing waist-deep in the frigid black...

Luna recalls a night in the fall of 2018 when she anchored off Drowned Creek, a narrow channel near Long Pine, Georgia, to wait out a storm. The rain stopped, the fog rolled in, and she heard a sound she still can't place: the slow, rhythmic creak of a rocking cradle coming from a house that wasn't supposed to be there. She tells the story of what she saw through the window—a woman in a nightgown,...

In the summer of 1998, Luna's uncle ran the marina at Shadyside Dock on Lake Champlain. One August night, she stayed late to help him retie a drifting pontoon. That's when the light appeared under the water — a pale, steady glow moving in a straight line against the current. Uncle Roy said it was just a mudpuppy with a flashlight. But he wouldn't take the boat out after dark for the rest of the se...

December 2023. The night after a nor'easter, Luna motors out past Gannet's Ledge to check on a bell buoy that's been silent for three days. She finds the buoy still floating, its clapper gone, and a man sitting on the chain plate in a yellow raincoat that belongs to a fisherman who went missing ten years ago. He doesn't speak. He doesn't shiver. He just points east, toward the open ocean, where th...

Luna recounts a night in early November when she helped an old boatwright named Elias haul a skiff from the mud at Blackwater Landing. The boat had been sunk for thirty years—a wooden sloop called the Adeline that went down in a squall with its owner still aboard. Elias found the hull perfectly preserved in the silt, the varnish still glossy, a lantern still burning in the forward berth. Luna desc...

In the summer of 2017, Luna was hired to document the last night of the Parker's Landing ferry—a century-old chain-drawn scow that crossed the Nottoway River in coastal Virginia. The ferryman, a quiet man named Eli Wainwright, had been running it alone for forty years. As the midnight crossing approached, Luna noticed the ferry never touched the opposite bank. It stopped dead in the channel, the c...

In the summer of 2008, a lobsterman named August Treadwell hauled something out of the water thirty miles off Owl’s Head, Maine. It wasn’t a fish. It wasn’t a trap. It was a leather satchel, sealed with tar, and inside was a journal written in a language no one could read. August kept it in his wheelhouse for three weeks. By the time the Coast Guard found his boat drifting off Sister Shoals, he wa...

October 1987. Luna's uncle Mo takes her night-fishing on the Pamlico River, anchoring near the rotted remains of Gum Swamp Landing — a place the old-timers say was never fully abandoned. He tells her about the lantern you sometimes see floating above the water, how it moves against the current, how the men who followed it were never found. That night, Luna sees it for herself. A single point of ye...

September 2023, just outside a town called Oysterback on the Virginia tidewater. A man named Caleb Tolliver finds a sealed pine box wedged in the reeds along Eelgrass Creek at low tide. Inside is not a body but a handwritten logbook dated 1957, the entries growing shorter and stranger over a two-week period. Luna pieces together what happened to the man who built the coffin—a waterman named Ezra P...

A foggy November night at Whiskey Point, a narrow spit of land jutting into Pamlico Sound. Luna recalls the old story of the whistle — a brass train whistle that washes ashore after every big storm, always found by someone who needs to hear it. She tells of a woman named Cora who found it last autumn, and the quiet, terrible thing it did to her. No ghosts, no monsters — just a sound that knows whe...

July 1987. Luna takes a charter job out of Pelican Slough, Louisiana, for a woman named Margaret who claims she needs to scatter her husband's ashes at a specific bend in the bayou. But Margaret knows the water too well — knows the current, knows the cypress stumps, knows exactly where the boat should stop. And she doesn't say a word about her husband the whole ride out. The story of what Luna saw...

June 1987, just outside the town of Port Blakely, Washington. Luna remembers the summer her uncle's fishing boat started hauling up things that weren't fish. Not garbage, not debris—things that seemed deliberate. Things that had been down there a long time, but only started coming up that one season. She tells the story of what they found tangled in the nets, what the old-timers at the dock refuse...

October 1987. A small fishing town on the Maine coast, where the fog doesn't lift for days. Luna hears about a bell buoy that rings at odd hours, even when the water is flat calm. The local fishermen avoid it. A man named Harlan tells her about the night he rowed out to see what was pulling the chain. She meets him at the dock at dusk, his hands shaking around a cup of coffee. He says the bell doe...

In the winter of 1987, the fishing village of Tumbledown Bay, Maine, was haunted by a bell that rang from a ship that had been underwater for fifty years. Luna recounts the story of Old Man Pritchard, who claimed the bell only tolled when someone was about to drown. One night, he took a rowboat out into a storm to find the source—and what he found under the waves changed how the town understood th...