Tracks in the Snow — Fexingo Horror

A rural mail carrier recounts the December she found an envelope wedged into a snowdrift on Blackwood Road, addressed only to 'The One Who Follows Tracks.' Inside was a single sheet of paper with a hand-drawn map leading to a clearing she had never seen before. When she followed it, she found a cabin that should not have been there — and a lantern left burning for someone who never arrived. This e...

On a frozen February night in 2023, Luna's truck dies outside an abandoned farmhouse on a dead-end road in northern Wisconsin. She seeks shelter and finds a single room lit by an oil lamp, a woman named Claire who hasn't left in thirty years, and a door that only opens from the outside. Claire doesn't remember how the snow sealed her in, but she remembers the name of the man who built the house, a...

Late December on Lost Creek Road, the snow does something no one can explain. Luna's neighbor, an old man named Harlan, starts hearing a melody carried on the wind at night—a song that pulls him to the edge of the woods. He asks Luna to come listen. What they find isn't a voice, isn't an instrument, and isn't anything that belongs to this world. The snow itself hums, in a key that makes your teeth...

In early December of 2007, along a desolate stretch of Red Ridge Road in northern New Hampshire, a state trooper named Everett found something in the snow that couldn't be explained—a single human footprint, barefoot, leading away from a car that had been parked there for three days with no one inside. But the print didn't sink into the snow; it was pressed up from underneath, as if someone had st...

February 2021, Pendell Road, Vermont. Luna's truck skids into a ditch during a blizzard. A woman in a red coat offers her shelter in a farmhouse that has been counting something for a very long time — every footprint, every breath, every life that passed through. The snow outside keeps falling, but the numbers on the wall keep changing. A hushed, slow-burn horror about debts we don't know we owe,...

In the winter of 2022, a retired biologist named Cora Mendez called me from a payphone at the edge of Proctor Road. She said she had found something in her late uncle's barn that the snow wouldn't cover. I drove out that night to a place I knew well from other stories — a stretch of road I'd visited in three prior episodes, but never this barn. Cora showed me a patch of floor, maybe six feet acros...

In December 2019, Luna drove a back road near Lost Creek, Minnesota, and found an elderly woman named Edith standing in the middle of Sycamore Lane at 3 AM, dressed in a thin housecoat. Edith insisted the snow had written her dead husband's name in the field — and she wasn't wrong. The story that follows is about what it means when the world remembers something you've tried to forget, and why you...

In the winter of 2007, on a dead-end gravel lane called Old Foster Road outside the town of Bellamy, New Hampshire, a woman named Cora Brant began seeing something impossible: a low hill, no more than thirty feet tall, that changed position between dusk and dawn. She kept a log of its movements, photographing it from her porch, watching it inch closer over the course of four weeks. By the time I m...

Luna recounts a night in December 2019 when she stopped at the all-night gas station on Route 22 outside of Tanager, New Hampshire, and met a man whose car was coated in a kind of frost she had never seen. It did not melt when he ran the defroster. It did not flake off when he scraped it. It was not water. As he told her where he had driven from — a town that does not appear on any map, a road tha...

Luna recounts a night in early December 2019 on a remote stretch of Route 22 west of Elko, Nevada, where the snow fell so fast it erased the road before her eyes. She pulled over at a small gas station with a flickering sign—the only light for miles. Inside, the attendant was a woman named Dorothy who had been waiting for someone to arrive. She said the snow had been falling for three hours, but L...

It was the last stretch of county road to be plowed each winter, a gravel cut between two ridges that the snow claimed early and held late. Luna had driven it a hundred times in daylight, but never at night in a storm. The detour sign was new — hand-painted, no county markings — and the road it pointed to was not on any map. She followed it for three miles before the headlights showed her the firs...

Late autumn, 2019, on an unmarked game trail below Gifford Peak. Luna meets a man named Kellen who carries a lantern through the scrub pines at 4 AM. He is walking a line of old iron fence posts that he insists mark a property line drawn in 1872. He says the gate at the end of the line must never be opened. He says that last winter someone opened it. He says what came through took the shape of a d...

March 2021, just before the thaw on Gifford Peak Road, twelve miles outside the town of Ironbite, Vermont. The snow was old and granular, the kind that compresses under boots and holds a shape. I was driving the mail route that week for a friend—and that's how I found the snowman. It wasn't the one on the corner. It was the other one, half-hidden in the trees, with its face turned toward the mount...

In the winter of 2018, a man named Dale Bowen took a shortcut he'd taken a hundred times—Solomon Road, a two-mile gravel stretch that connects Route 9 to the old mill town of Treadwell. He should have been home in twelve minutes. Instead, he drove for four hours, passing the same collapsed barn, the same rusted mailbox, the same curve of pines, over and over. He never saw another car. His phone sh...

Luna recalls a February night on Dead Man's Curve, a notorious stretch of Vermont Route 12 outside the town of Greyville, where she pulled over after spotting a figure in the road. What she found was not a stranded motorist but a man whose every exhale crystallized into frost that did not melt. He spoke of a debt owed to the cold, and of the tracks that had been following him since childhood. By m...

In the deep winter of 2022, on the dead-end stretch of Proctor Road outside Lost Creek, a man named Ellis Tanner disappeared from his own locked barn. His wife found a spiral notebook propped open on the workbench. Inside, a single column of numbers began at 1, ending at 37,871. Every digit written in his hand. The local sheriff called it a mental break. But the numbers kept appearing — in the fro...

February 1987. Luna's aunt rents a cabin for a week in the dead of winter outside a town called Elkhart, Minnesota. The cabin sits at the edge of a frozen lake, and behind it, half a mile into the pines, stands the empty shell of Saint Agatha's Catholic Church—abandoned since the 1950s. Every night at 3:17 AM, its bell rings exactly seven times. The locals say it's the wind. The priest who left in...

Luna recalls a winter night in the small town of Proctor, New Hampshire, when the snow told a story no one wanted to hear. A local woman named Ellen Marsh called the county dispatcher to report a single set of footprints circling her house for hours—never approaching, never leaving, just pacing. When Luna arrived, the tracks were precise, deliberate, and unbroken by any visible source. The snow wa...

February 2024 on Highway 9, just south of Sparrow Hill, Vermont. Luna is driving home through a snow squall when her headlights catch a figure at the edge of the road—a woman in a thin coat, no hat, no gloves, staring into the dark pines. Luna stops. The woman doesn't blink. She points into the woods and says, 'They let me count them. Nine. But there should have been ten.' Luna follows her into th...

In the winter of 2009, on a dead-end road in the town of Alder Creek, a man named Hollis Brant claimed the snow fell twice over the same stretch of asphalt — once at dusk, once at midnight, and the second fall erased everything that had walked there in between. Luna retraces his story through the report he left at the fire station, the empty boot prints leading nowhere, and the one photograph he t...

A lone diner on a frozen highway outside of Ely, Minnesota, serves coffee and pie to travelers who vanish before dawn. Luna recounts a shift she worked in January 2009, when a man in a gray coat sat in booth four and ordered two slices of apple pie—one for himself, one for someone who never arrived. The pie cooled. The man's reflection in the window showed an empty seat. By morning, the diner's cl...

In the winter of 1989, just north of Hemlock Hollow on a dead-end stretch called Proctor Road, there was a fence that didn't behave like a fence. Luna's cousin Teo found it one December night when his truck died and he had to walk the last mile home. The fence was old, split-rail cedar, half-sunk in snow. But it was moving. Not swaying in wind. Not settling under frost. It was rearranging its own...

In December of 2008, a payphone rang at a deserted rest stop on Hemlock Hollow Road, three miles outside of Mercer, New Hampshire. I answered it because no one else would. The voice on the other end was my grandmother, who had been dead for eleven years. She told me to leave town before the first snow melted. She told me not to look at the tracks. She told me she loved me, and then the line went d...

February 2023, just north of Pine Junction. Luna's cousin's boy, nine-year-old Caleb, found a strange light in the woods behind his grandparents' house. It wasn't like a flashlight or a lantern — it moved like a thread being pulled through the dark, sewing the trees together. He followed it for three nights, and on the fourth he came home with his eyes still open. Luna drove out there to see for h...

In the winter of 1998, in the small town of North Hemlock, a twelve-year-old boy named Caleb McKinnon built a snowman at the edge of the woods. It was a perfect, towering figure, with coal eyes and a carrot nose. But by morning, the snowman had moved. Not melted — moved, its base a hundred feet from where he'd left it, dragging a deep furrow across the frozen ground. Over the next week, Caleb watc...