The Lantern Anthology — Fexingo Horror

In the autumn of 1998, Luna spent a week in Winslow, Arizona, helping her aunt close the family diner on Route 66. One evening, she found a locked door at the top of a narrow staircase — a room no one had entered in decades. Inside, a single table held a stack of letters, a cracked mirror, and a child's drawing of a woman with no face. As Luna read the letters, she began to understand why the room...

October 1998, just outside Milledgeville, Georgia — a lonely gas station at the junction of two county roads where the pumps are old and the fluorescent lights hum low. Luna tells the story of Delia, the overnight clerk who had been working the 11-to-7 shift for three years at the Texaco on Highway 57. It starts with a custom — a man in a gray sedan who pulls in every Tuesday at 2:17 AM, buys a pa...

In the summer of 1998, the town of Red Valley, Oklahoma had a barber named Emmett Cross who had been cutting hair in the same shop on Main Street for forty-seven years. Everyone trusted Emmett. He knew the shape of every head in town, the cowlicks, the old wounds, the way a man held his shoulders when he was trying not to cry. Then, one Tuesday in late July, a stranger walked in off the highway. H...

Luna remembers a summer evening in 1997 when her car broke down near Lost Creek, West Virginia. She found her way to a glassblower's workshop lit by furnace glow, where the old man told her about the pieces he made that no one ever bought. He showed her a row of vials on a high shelf, each one containing a single breath of air from someone who had died in the hollows—his wife, his daughter, the po...

It was the summer of the cicada swarm, the one that came seventeen years early. Luna remembers the old man on Sycamore Lane who built birdhouses — hundreds of them, hanging from every branch and eave. But the birds never came. Not once. And when she finally asked why, he told her about the bargain he'd made with something that nested in the pine grove behind his house. Something that wore his wife...

January 1998 in the small town of Greenhollow, Vermont. The coldest night in thirty years. Luna's uncle had a side job at the old icehouse on the edge of town, a relic from before refrigeration. A week after he went missing, she borrowed a truck and drove out to look for him. The steel door was unlocked. The air inside was not cold. She found his boots placed neatly by the wall, and a patch of flo...

Luna recounts a winter spent in a borrowed cabin near Banner Elk, North Carolina, where a solitary neighbor tended a kerosene lamp on a hillside every night. At first it seemed quaint, a holdover from an older time. But when she tried to meet him, the light moved in ways that made no sense—flickering through a locked cellar door, appearing at windows in a house with no stairs. The man himself was...

In the summer of 1987, Luna spent two weeks as a counselor at Camp Gilead, a sleepy overnight camp tucked into the pine woods of northern Minnesota. The place was supposed to be a reprieve from everything—a freshwater lake, canoeing, campfire songs. But by the third night, the campers started talking about a bird they saw at dusk, a bird too large and too quiet, with eyes like cracked mirrors. Lun...

Luna recalls a summer job at Big Cypress Lodge, a decaying resort town in the Florida Panhandle, where the full moon hung for three weeks in 1997. It was the season the guests stopped leaving, the season the paper cutouts appeared, the season the real moon vanished and something else rose in its place. This is the story of the girl who folded the moon into paper and pinned it to the sky, and the q...

In the autumn of 2019, I spent a week in the small town of Marrow, Missouri—a place you won't find on any map. I was cataloging old folk songs, but what I found was a melody that should never have been recorded. This is the story of the gravel pit on Old Three Notch Road, the woman who lived alone at the end of the lane, and the song that played backward at midnight. I still hear it sometimes, whe...

December 1987. A woman checks into Room 9 of the Pines Motel on Route 17 outside Varick, New York, and does not check out. Not because she died—but because she never left. Luna tells the story of how the motel's night clerk, her uncle, tried to forget the guest who only ever appeared in the reflection of the ice machine's glass, in the static of the office television, in the smell of damp wool and...

Vermont, December 1987. Luna's car slid off an unplowed road near the ghost town of Frost Hollow. She took shelter in an abandoned clapboard chapel where the oil lamps were still lit and the air smelled of old incense. In the sacristy she found a leather-bound ledger dated 1928, its pages filled with the same name written over and over in different hands—the name of a man who died in 1910. The bel...

October 1998. A waitress at a tired diner off Route 17 in upstate New York takes a call from her own future — but the warning arrives too late. The payphone rings every night at 2:47 AM, and the voice on the other end sounds just like her. A story about time folding in on itself, the things you cannot unhear, and the bell that keeps ringing long after the line goes dead. Luna brings you a quiet, d...

In the autumn of 1998, the Red Clay General Store in upstate New York stopped selling certain things. Not because they were out of stock, but because nobody came to buy them anymore. Luna tells the story of that store, the old man who ran it, and the customer who walked in one November night looking for something that wasn't on any shelf. A story about memory, absence, and the spaces we leave behi...

In the autumn of 1998, Luna's car died on a back road outside Corbitt, Pennsylvania — a town so small the gas station closes at six. While waiting for a tow, she wandered into a diner where an old man told her about the last train that ever stopped there: a midnight express that arrived fifty years late, carrying passengers who had been missing since 1948. That night, standing on the rusted tracks...

Luna recounts a night in mid-October 2018, driving a rural stretch of Ohio highway where she stumbled upon a house that had been underwater for thirty years—until the drought brought it back. Inside, she found everything preserved: family photos on the fridge, a birthday cake still on the table, and a sound from the basement that wasn't water. This is a story about what happens when a reservoir dr...

In the summer of 1994, the fireflies came early to Stone Hollow, Virginia, and they never left. Luna recalls a season when the light in the fields hummed with something more than insect wings—when the town watched the sky change and no one spoke of it. This is a story about the boy who counted them, the woman who painted the darkness, and the night the fireflies formed a door. No one died. No one...