The Lonely Plains — Fexingo Horror

October 1937. Luna drives a dirt road west of Thornburg, Kansas, following a rumor of a ghost train that runs without tracks. She finds a crossing gate that shouldn't exist, a waiting woman in a blue dress, and a story about a brakeman who disappeared into the light. Over coffee and canned peaches, the woman tells Luna what the crossing takes and what it gives back. But the question Luna carries h...

On a humid August night in 1998, Luna finds herself parked at the junction of two dirt roads on the Jewell County line, chasing a story about a light that appears only to those who are lost. She meets an old man named Harlan who tells her about his wife, who vanished into the wheat field twenty years ago. He brings her to the edge of a field where the wheat grows in a perfect circle, and shows her...

I met a man named Arthur at a crossroads in Jewell County, Kansas, in the fall of 2019. He was calling a bell that hung from a rusted iron frame, ringing it at four in the morning. He told me about the bell's history — how it was forged from a meteorite that fell in 1872, and how it was used to call the dead home. But the dead had their own ideas. I stood there in the cold, watching the grass bend...

In the fall of 1998, Luna's grandmother sent her to help an old man named Harlan with his livestock at the Jewell County Fairgrounds. The fair had been over for weeks, but Harlan kept the lights on in the cattle barn, feeding animals no one came to claim. Luna found him standing at the hitching post under the mercury lamps, staring at a horse that didn't belong to him. The horse had a brand she di...

In the summer of 1987, a night freight train stopped at the abandoned Jewell County Depot and never left. Luna recounts the story of an old railroad man named Harlan who saw something board that train in the dark — something that had been waiting on the platform for forty years. Set in north-central Kansas, in the dry heat of August, this is a story about duty, loneliness, and the cargo some train...

In October 1963, Luna's aunt Helen bought the Keystone Orchard outside Hoxie, Kansas — forty acres of dying apple trees and one perfectly preserved barn. The previous owner vanished without a word. The apples that season were the sweetest anyone had ever tasted, but they carried something in their flesh that made the town forget. Luna arrives for the last harvest and finds a ledger with names cros...

In the autumn of 1921, Luna's great-uncle Jonas worked the apple harvest at Keystone Orchard, three miles east of the dying town of Hoxie. Every year the trees bore fruit that no one could explain—apples that tasted of copper and something older. The old men told stories of what the orchard had been before the settlers came, of the thing that slept beneath the root system. Jonas learned that some...

September 1921. A dry stretch of the Republican River near the Kansas-Nebraska line. Luna's great-uncle Alden, a farmer past sixty, told her this story one night in the lean-to off the barn, the lamp turned low so the moths wouldn't find it. He was eighteen, riding home from Scandia after dark, his horse favoring the left foreleg. The river was low — he could see the gravel bars. But a woman stood...

November of 1987. A cold Tuesday night on a gravel road south of Oberlin, Kansas. Luna stops at the Spring Creek Burying Ground to check on an old iron fence her great-uncle helped build. What she finds is a man in a canvas coat, kneeling at a grave that shouldn't be there. He isn't digging. He isn't praying. He is driving a fence post into the frozen ground, one inch at a time, by hand. The clang...

Luna recalls a night in August 1987, when she was called to the Foss place outside Oakley, Kansas. The fence line between the Foss and Drummond properties had been coming down every night for a week. Old man Foss thought it was the Drummond boy. He was wrong. Luna arrives at dusk and finds a two-strand barbed wire fence with the staples pulled clean, as if by something with hands but no weight. Sh...

October 1987. Luna's car breaks down on a gravel road outside Porter, Kansas, and she takes shelter at a farmhouse where an old woman named Hattie lives alone. The woman offers her coffee and a story about a fence that keeps appearing across her property line, night after night, no matter how many times she tears it down. The wood is old, the wire rusted, and the posts are buried deeper than any f...

October 1935. Luna arrives at a remote homestead near Dugout Creek, Kansas, to catalog an old barbed-wire fence that locals refuse to touch. The farmer's widow, Mrs. Hargrave, warns her not to walk the line after sunset. Luna ignores her. What she finds between the strands of wire is not rust or weather—it's a pattern of human hair, braided tight, and a single leather shoe, size six, laces snapped...

October 1963. A woman named Hattie Boyd walks the fence line of Willow Creek Cemetery every night, rain or shine, dragging a burlap sack. She never stops to kneel at a grave. She never speaks. But if you stand close enough at midnight, you'll hear her whisper the same three names over and over — names that don't match a single headstone in the ground. Luna heard Hattie's story from a retired sheri...

Luna remembers the summer of '97, when she worked construction on a new addition to Hoxie Methodist Church. The foreman, old Bill Travers, had a rule: never go into the crawlspace after dark. One Friday, a thunderstorm trapped them inside, and Bill told her why. The church was built on a foundation that wasn't empty. That night, she heard something scratching at the basement door, and she learned...

Luna recalls a summer night in 1987 at a diner on the edge of Oakley, Kansas. The place was called the Walnut Creek Diner, and it had a single booth in the back that nobody ever sat in. The owner, an old woman named Mrs. Coyle, kept it roped off with velvet cord. Luna was passing through alone, and she asked about the chair. What Mrs. Coyle told her — about the man who had sat there every night fo...

Luna returns to Hoxie, Kansas, where a drought has gripped the land for three summers. The town's Methodist church has a well in its basement that never ran dry — until now. When the pastor's daughter goes missing, Luna descends the stone steps to find something waiting in the dark water. Not a body. Not a monster. Something that had been listening to every Sunday prayer, every whispered sin, ever...

June 1954. A dry lightning storm rolls over Hoxie, Kansas, and Luna's uncle Earl—the last caretaker of the Hoxie Methodist Church—sees something in the wheat field behind the bell tower. Every year, a farmhand or a drifter walks into that field during the first thunderstorm and never comes back. Tonight, a girl named May is the one who walks. Luna recounts what happened the night the church bell r...

October 1922. A young teacher named Eliza Harker takes a position at a one-room schoolhouse in Lone Tree, Kansas, fifteen miles from the nearest town. The wind never stops. It moans through the clapboards, rattles the stovepipe, and sometimes sounds like a woman singing. The children tell her not to stay past dark. She doesn't listen. On her third night alone in the teacherage, she learns why the...

In the summer of 2003, Luna's cousin built a fence along the back forty of his family's homestead in Mingo Flats, Kansas. The fence was meant to keep cattle in and the neighbor's windbreak from encroaching. But the posts he dug came from a stand of black locust trees that had been struck by lightning three years before. Within a week, the fence began to hum at night. Within a month, the cattle wou...

September 1922, a lone grain elevator outside Brewster, Kansas. Luna's great-uncle worked the night shift when a stranger arrived on foot, asking for work. He was polite. He was quiet. And he did not seem to breathe. By the third morning, the stationmaster's notes stopped mentioning his name. By the fourth, the grain in bin seven had started to shift, as if something was breathing from inside it....

In the autumn of 1917, a traveling seed salesman named Harlan Tull stopped at a remote farmhouse outside Clear Creek, Kansas. The barn was freshly painted white, the fields were healthy, and the farmer's wife offered him coffee and pie. But the farmer himself spoke in a voice that didn't match his mouth, and the flock of crows that shadowed him all day seemed to watch Harlan with something almost...

Luna recalls a bitter winter night in 1982 when she took shelter in an abandoned farmhouse near Trego Creek, Kansas. The house had been empty for years, but someone—or something—had been mending the barbed-wire fence that bordered the property. She tells the story of the old man she found out there, the one who spoke of a debt he had to settle, and the cold that followed her even after she left. N...

October 1987. A boy named Eli watches his father climb the rusted ladder of the abandoned Cawker City grain silo every night for a week. The silo had been sealed since a fire in '72, but his father insists he hears something alive inside—something that knows his name. Luna pieces together what Eli saw from the hayloft window across the road: the shape his father carried down, the way the grass ben...

October 1987, five miles south of Broken Bow, Nebraska. Luna was nineteen, driving home from a night shift at the grain elevator, when she saw a woman in a white dress standing at the center of the Antelope Creek Bridge — a woman who had been dead for thirty years. That night she learned why the old-timers called it the widow's bridge, and why no one crossed it after midnight. This is not a ghost...

In the autumn of 1987, Luna drives the long gravel road to Gandy's Corner, a crossroads town that has been slowly unpeopling for decades. The only business left is a gas station run by an old man named Harlan, who warns her not to stop after dark at the corner itself. That night, stranded by a flat tire, she learns why: the bell in the empty church tower rings on its own every midnight, and those...