The Lantern Anthology — Fexingo Horror

In the winter of 2017, the 24-hour grocery in Crescent City, Oregon, became a place where nothing stayed where you left it. I worked the overnight shift there for six weeks, long enough to see the stock clerk disappear, long enough to hear the aisles whisper my name, long enough to understand that the store was not a building but a hunger with fluorescent lights. This is what happened between midn...

In the autumn of 2007, on a stretch of Old Jericho Road just outside of Tularosa, New Mexico, Luna stopped at a roadside fruit stand that wasn't on any map. The woman running it—gray-eyed, barefoot, wearing a faded denim dress—spoke only in questions. She sold apricots that left a metallic taste, and she asked Luna to stay until the crows landed. The crows came at sunset. Hundreds of them. They li...

In October of 2019, a dry cleaner in the small town of Prosper, Nebraska, received an unusual delivery: a woman's coat, left in the after-hours drop box with no order slip and no caller. The coat was expensive — charcoal wool, tailored, with a note stitched into the lining. The owner, a man named Gerald, tried to track down the woman who left it. He found her house, but the woman who answered the...

In the winter of 2019, a young manicurist at the Happy Nails salon in Laramie, Wyoming, began to notice something wrong with her reflection in the salon mirrors. At first it was just a flicker—a smile that lingered a second too long. Then the reflection started moving independently, mouthing words she couldn't hear. By the third week, it refused to follow her commands at all. This is the story of...

In the small town of Mapleton, Ohio, Luna visits the McCoy Memorial Library — a building so quiet she can hear her own heartbeat. The head librarian, Mrs. Dellarosa, has worked there for forty-three years. She knows every book by spine, but there's one shelf, on the third floor, behind a locked door, that she has never touched. The shelf is labeled 'FINAL SHELF — DO NOT READ.' Luna asks why. Mrs....

Luna recounts a story from a sleepless summer in the small town of Two Rivers, Kansas, where she spent a week cataloging artifacts at the local historical museum. The elderly keeper, Mr. Aldridge, was a quiet man who kept the basement locked. On her last night, he finally offered to show her what was down there — a collection of objects that had been removed from homes after strange events. Among...

In the cold autumn of 1997, a freelance photographer named June drove out to the abandoned lighthouse at Hollis Point, a place where the tide comes in strange and the fog settles like a held breath. She went to shoot the ruins, but the camera caught something else — a woman in a blue dress standing in a window that hadn't existed in sixty years. June developed the roll herself, and every frame aft...

A quiet evening in the town of Dry River, Nevada, where Luna stops at a gas station and meets an old man who tells her about the bell that rings at midnight from the abandoned mission church. He says it rings on its own, and those who hear it see something in the bell tower window. Luna stays to listen, and what she hears changes how she understands sound itself. A story about resonance, memory, a...

Outside of Holbrook, Arizona, on a stretch of Route 66 that hasn't seen a new coat of paint since the sixties, a tired traveler pulls into the Dusty Roads Diner at four in the morning. The coffee is old, the pie is cold, and on the wall behind the register hangs a jackalope head with glass eyes that seem to follow. The waitress, a woman named Margo who hasn't smiled in years, warns him not to look...

In the late autumn of 1987, on a gravel road just outside Mineral Wells, Texas, a railroad crossing gate began lowering itself at odd hours — long after the last train had passed. The town said it was a faulty sensor. But the woman who lived in the white farmhouse a hundred yards from the tracks knew better. She saw the same figure every time: a boy in a soaked flannel shirt, standing just beyond...

In the autumn of 2018, the Grayson County Fairgrounds had been abandoned for thirty years. The carousel, a relic of the 1920s, still stood under a collapsed tent, its wooden horses frozen mid-gallop. I went there one October evening, not for a story, but because I'd heard a rumor from a man at a gas station—he said the animals sang at dusk. What I found wasn't song. It was a chorus of whispers, ea...

Luna recalls a night in late October 2007 when her car broke down on a gravel road outside Tangent, Oregon. A woman named Miriam appeared from a house with no lights, selling birds in cages — canaries, finches, a raven. Luna bought a small grey bird on impulse, and it sang a song she had never heard before. Back in her motel room, she discovered the song was a recording of a voice — a missing woma...

Luna recalls the summer of 2009, when she worked as a groundskeeper at Oak Hill Cemetery in the sleepy town of Pemberton, Ohio. Every evening at dusk, a bell would ring from the old chapel — even though the rope had been cut decades before. She met the man who tended the bell, an old groundskeeper named Cyrus, who told her the story of the bell's origins and the price it demanded to keep the dead...

On a cold December night in 1997, my uncle Caleb drove me out to the abandoned sawmill at Three Forks Creek, West Virginia. He said there was something he needed me to hear—something the mill had been singing at night ever since the last log went through the blade in 1964. I was sixteen, skeptical, and freezing in the passenger seat of his rusted Ford F-150. He told me the story of Charlie Haskins...

On a humid August night in 1998, I pulled off Route 17 outside Longview, Virginia, into the cracked parking lot of the Longview Motor Lodge. The neon sign buzzed, half the letters dead. The clerk was a man named Roy who didn't blink enough. He gave me Room 14, key on a plastic diamond fob. The room smelled of cigarettes and Pine-Sol. On the wall above the bed was a framed photograph of the motel i...

Somewhere outside Tucumcari, New Mexico, on a February night so cold the highway diesel froze solid in the tanks, the Copper Kettle Diner stayed open for the truckers and the desperate. I was just passing through, the only customer in the place, when the waitress — a woman named Della with forty years of coffee stains and quiet resignation in her eyes — started laying out plates on the empty count...

In the winter of 1997, Luna's great-aunt Therese called her to the small town of Bridgewater, Illinois, to clean out a condemned church before demolition. Saint Dymphna's had been abandoned for thirty years, but the stained-glass rose window above the altar was still intact. When Luna climbed the bell tower to examine it, she found something trapped inside the lead and glass — a face that had been...

In the autumn of 1999, on a quiet street in Granite Falls, North Carolina, an artist set up his easel at the same corner every night. He painted the same view—a single stretch of Mulberry Avenue—over and over, never finishing a single canvas. Luna met him in late October, when the leaves had turned and the nights were cold enough to see your breath. He told her he was trying to get it right. But t...

December on the high plains of eastern Colorado. Silver Creek County, population nine hundred and dropping. The county museum sits at the dead end of Main Street, a former bank building filled with taxidermy, arrowheads, and the preserved wedding dress of a woman nobody remembers. Luna's cousin took the night custodian job there for two weeks one winter. He was supposed to lock up, check the therm...

September 1987. A dry stretch of county road in Stillwater County, Montana. Luna's car overheats outside a town that doesn't appear on any map — a place called Gravelot, population never more than a few dozen. The gas station attendant, a woman named Delia who hasn't seen a customer in weeks, is the only person around. She offers Luna a glass of iced tea and a story about the road that leads out o...

October 1993. A nineteen-year-old named Cassie takes the graveyard shift at the Spin Cycle Laundromat on the outskirts of Elko, Nevada — a dead-end job she needs to save for community college. The first two weeks are uneventful: the hum of dryers, the flicker of fluorescent lights, the occasional trucker passing through. But then a woman in a blue dress starts appearing around 3:15 a.m. — always s...

Luna recalls a long night in a small Texas town—the only customer at a fluorescent-lit laundromat where the attendant never blinked. She tells the story of how she learned that some stains don't come out, and that the quietest people are often the loudest when you start to listen. Set in 2017, just after midnight in August, heat lightning flickering beyond the glass. A story about repetition, the...

October of 1987, just outside Balsam Grove, North Carolina. Luna's grandfather was a watchmaker who took a job nobody else would touch—the old clock in St. Elmo's church tower, stopped for forty-three years. He worked by lantern light, alone, and he brought Luna along. She remembers the way the gears felt wrong, the sound of something winding itself back from the other side, and the face she saw i...

A lone truck stop outside Waverly, Tennessee, on a January night so cold the diesel fumes froze midair. Ellie had been working the counter for three years, long enough to know every regular, every shift, every quiet hour between midnight and four a.m. But she had never seen the car that pulled in at 2:17 a.m. — a dusty sedan with no license plates and a woman in the back seat who did not blink. El...

January 1994. A disused train station outside Reedsboro, Illinois. Luna's uncle left her a single key in his will — no lock, no explanation, just a brass key with a paper tag that read 'Station. Bottom drawer.' She drove three hours in a sleet storm to find the building still standing, the waiting room frozen in time, and a locked door in the basement where the cold breathed. This episode is about...