The Lantern Anthology — Fexingo Horror

December 1987, Elkton, Virginia. Luna recounts a night she spent sorting mail with old Mack, the town's postmaster, in the crumbling Dead Letter Office behind the post office. Among the undeliverable parcels was a shoebox tied with twine, postmarked 1952, addressed to a house that had been vacant for forty years. Inside: letters written by a woman named Eleanor, each one a quiet plea to someone wh...

September 1997, Ponderosa Lodge outside Haggerstown, Indiana. Luna recounts a night shift at a run-down motel where the register holds a name that doesn't belong — her own, written in a hand she doesn't recognize, dated three years before she ever set foot in that town. The clerk on duty that night, a man named Ellis, shows her the page with a quiet dread that passes for calm. The ink is dry, the...

December 2008, outside a town called Havenwood that no longer appears on any map. Luna's cousin rented a single-wide trailer at the dead end of Cypress Road, and for two weeks the Christmas lights on the porch never went out—not when the breaker tripped, not when the power company cut the line, not when he tried to pull the plug himself. This is the account of what he saw through the window after...

It's autumn of 2008 in the small town of Iron Gap, Pennsylvania. You're working the late shift at the Rusty Spoon Diner when a man in a tan coat walks in, sits in booth seven, and orders black coffee and apple pie. But the reservation book — the one nobody ever uses — has his name written in it, from three nights ago. And then again from six months ago. And then from a Tuesday in 1974. The handwri...

October 1998. A broken-down payphone at an abandoned gas station outside Lost Creek, Nevada. Luna's car died on the shoulder of a two-lane blacktop, and the nearest light was a rusted Sinclair station with a dead sign and a phone that should not have rung. But it did. And she answered. What came through the earpiece was not a wrong number. It was a voice that knew her name, knew why she was runnin...

It was a Tuesday in late October, just past midnight, at the Spin Cycle Laundromat on Birch Street in Mapleton, New Hampshire. The air smelled of bleach and wet wool. A man in a brown coat sat on the cracked vinyl bench by the dryers, staring at a machine that hadn't moved in hours. He didn't have any laundry. When I asked if he needed help, he said, 'I'm waiting for my clothes to finish drying.'...

Luna recounts a November night she spent at a century-old boarding house in the small town of Morningside, Oregon. The owner, an elderly woman named Mrs. Galloway, warned her never to look into the antique mirror in the third-floor hallway after midnight. But at 2:47 AM, a draft stirred, and Luna glanced at the glass—only to see someone standing behind her that she did not recognize. The reflectio...

Mercy Falls, Ohio. A town so quiet the only sound after dark is the creek. I spent a summer there cataloging old records for the historical society, and every Wednesday I'd walk past the First Baptist Church—boarded up since '78. The bells never rang. Until one night in August, midnight, they did. I found the door unlocked, the pews empty, and a single candle burning on the altar. The bells were s...

In the autumn of 2007, a county surveyor named Arthur Crandall was mapping an undeveloped tract of woods outside Pembroke, Kentucky, when his GPS led him to a road that did not appear on any record. It was a narrow asphalt lane, recently paved, with fresh guardrails and a sign reading 'County Line Road' — but the county line was two miles east, and the road ended at a locked gate that opened onto...

When Luna stops for gas outside Stonewall, Mississippi, the station attendant warns her not to visit the old funeral home on Miller's Lane — a place that was closed years ago, yet where lights have been seen flickering at midnight. But a cold rain is falling, and the detour leads her to a building that isn't as empty as it should be. Inside, she finds an open ledger, a set of freshly polished bras...

October of '94, a county paving crew outside Marlin, Kansas hit something granite-hard under ten inches of asphalt. What they uncovered wasn't rock — it was a slab of black stone, perfectly smooth, warm to the touch, engraved with letters no one could read. The foreman, a man named Hoyt, made them keep working. But by midnight the stone had grown warmer, and the letters had changed. Luna tells the...

In the fall of 2019, a woman named Cora moved into a second-floor apartment above a closed-down washateria in a town called Mercer. The phone booth out front had been dead for years — no dial tone, no receiver on the cradle. But at 2:47 every morning, the fluorescent light inside flickered on. Cora watched it for three nights from her window before she finally went down to see who was calling. She...

This week, Luna returns to the dim, dusty attic and the amber glow of the hurricane lantern to tell a story about a quiet Tuesday in late October, at the public library in the small town of Millbrook. She worked the graveyard shift there one autumn, reshelving books and cleaning the old wooden floors. One night, just past three in the morning, she heard the creak of the reference section's heavy d...

Luna recounts the story of a late-night ferry crossing on the Missouri River, just north of a town called Stillwater that doesn't appear on any map. It's November 2019, just past midnight, and the ferryman's face is wrong—too old, too still, as if carved from river-slicked wood. He doesn't take credit or cash, only old silver dollars, and he knows the names of passengers who haven't boarded yet. A...

A slow-burn horror episode set in the summer of 2004 at the Wagon Wheel Inn, a rundown motel just outside the dried-up town of Marlow, Oklahoma. Luna recounts the story of a night clerk named Delia, who worked the graveyard shift alone and began to hear faint voices seeping through the plaster and wallpaper of room 14. At first, she thought it was the air conditioner or the TV in an empty room. Bu...

It was the summer of 2003, and I was driving through the Mojave Desert on a stretch of Route 66 that most people don't take anymore. Somewhere between Needles and Amboy, I stopped at a gas station that shouldn't have been open. The attendant was an old man in a khaki uniform. He didn't ask me how much I wanted. He just said, 'You're Luna, right? Your father used to come through here.' Only I never...

It was October, just after midnight, on a rain-slicked stretch of Main Street in a town called Needle Creek. The kind of town where the hardware store still has a hand-painted sign and a grandfather clock that no one winds. But that night, it chimed. I met a man named Elias who had been a custodian there for thirty years, and he told me about the after-hours customer who always asked for keys. The...

On a humid August night in 1987, a young woman named Ellen drove down a gravel road in eastern Kentucky toward a bridge that should not have had a keeper. The man in the folding chair by the Saylor Creek bridge did not look like a toll collector — he looked like someone who had been waiting a very long time. He asked for her name. Then he asked for the name of the person she had lost. Ellen told h...

It was the slowest shift of the year at the diner just past the county line — the one with the flickering sign and the pie case that hums at a weird pitch. Lena had worked the 11-to-7 for fifteen years, so when the specials board changed by itself at 2:17 a.m., she noticed. What she heard next wasn't the cook calling out orders. It was her own voice, from the booth in the back, reading the evening...

Luna recalls a humid July night in 1997 when she stopped at the Blue Moon Motel outside Guthrie, Oklahoma. The room was cheap, the air conditioner wheezed, and the taps ran brown. But it was what came up through the drain after midnight that she still can't explain. A slow, intimate account of a single encounter with something that lived beneath the foundation — something that knew her name, and t...

In the summer of 2007, Luna spent a week at her grandmother's farm in Redbud Hollow, Kentucky. The property was circled by an old weeping willow that her grandmother called the 'listening tree.' It was supposed to be a quiet visit, but Luna noticed something strange about the tree after dark — a faint sound like whispers, and roots that seemed to move. She dug at the base one night and found bones...

In the dying town of Prosper, Oklahoma, the railroad tracks still hum at midnight — even though the last train stopped running in 1987. Luna walks the rusted line with a woman named Cora, who claims she can still hear the 11:45 Express coming through. What they find on the trestle bridge near Caddo Creek is not a train, but something that has been waiting for a passenger who never got off. A quiet...

It was late October in Glenhollow, Oregon, and I'd stopped at a rundown used bookstore called The Last Page — the kind of place that smells of mildew and silence. A yellow-eyed dog sat by the register, watched me, then walked to a door I hadn't noticed. I followed it down concrete stairs into a room lined with books that had no titles, no authors — just dates on their spines. The oldest was 1886....

It was the autumn of 2008, and the Starlight Motel outside Dunmore, West Virginia, had been closed for eleven years. The neon sign still stood—a crescent moon on its back, letters spelling VACANCY in pink—but the owner, an old man named Harlan Bostwick, had been dead since 1997. I heard about it from a trucker named Eddie who pulled off Route 9 one foggy October night looking for a room. He found...

It was mid-September, just past midnight, when I stopped for gas at the old Shell station off Route 7 outside Prairie Junction. The place had been dying for years — one pump, a convenience store with expired candy bars, and a payphone bolted to the wall near the restrooms. The phone started ringing as I was filling my tank. I ignored it at first, but it kept going. No one else was around. The cash...