Tracks in the Snow — Fexingo Horror

In the deep winter of 1998, Luna visits a friend in the town of Kingdom Cross, Vermont, where the snow has been falling without pause for weeks. Her friend's neighbor, a retired surveyor named Elias, has begun building a fence along Old Kingdom Road — a fence that snakes through the woods, crosses the frozen river, and climbs the ridge for no apparent reason. At first, it seems like the work of a...

In a small-town library in northern New Hampshire, Luna finds a hand-drawn map tucked inside a book that hasn't been checked out in forty-seven years. The map shows a network of trails through the White Mountain National Forest—trails that don't exist on any official chart. She follows one of them on a late November afternoon, just before sunset. The trail leads to a clearing where three stones st...

In the winter of 2018, Luna's cousin Benji disappeared into the woods above Echo Lake, Maine, following a set of tracks that led nowhere on any map. The search party found his coat hung neatly on a branch at the edge of a frozen cove—folded, zipped, waiting. But the tracks went on. Luna tells the story of what she found when she followed them alone, two days after the last footprints had been smoo...

September 1987. The fire season had been quiet until the night Darla Henshaw, the lone lookout at Juniper Ridge, radioed in to report a strange man climbing the stairs of her tower. He wore no coat, carried no gear, and walked through the locked trapdoor as if it weren't there. He sat down across from her and said her name. Darla told me this story herself, sitting at my kitchen table twenty years...

Luna drives a back road north of Lost Creek, Montana, on a night in late February when the snow is falling so thick the wipers can't keep up. She nearly hits a woman in a long coat sweeping the road with a push broom at two in the morning. The woman doesn't speak, doesn't flinch—just keeps sweeping snow off a single set of tracks that lead from the tree line, cross the asphalt, and vanish into the...

In the dead of a January night on a back road in central Wisconsin, a man driving home from a late shift counts seven crossings over a bridge that should only have one. The seventh crossing brings him face to face with a figure standing in the middle of the road—a woman in a thin dress, barefoot, her mouth moving without sound. He swerves, she vanishes, but the damage is done. His truck stalls. Th...

In the dead of a January night in 2017, I pulled off Route 9 outside of Errol, New Hampshire, to wait out a whiteout at the Juniper Diner. The place was empty except for a waitress named Cora, who moved like she was narrating a slow disaster. She told me about the blizzard of '85—the one that trapped a trucker in his cab for three days, the one that made the power lines sing. But the story she rea...

It was the winter of 2008, the year the lake froze solid by Thanksgiving. I was renting a cabin on Cranberry Lake in northern Minnesota, trying to finish a manuscript I'd been avoiding for months. The icehouse belonged to an old man named Harlan Sutter, who had lived on the east shore his whole life. He told me he'd stopped fishing three winters ago, but he still went out every night to sit in the...

In the winter of 1998, Luna's uncle disappeared from a gas station at the junction of two state highways in northern Minnesota. Twenty-five years later, she returns to the crossroads on a frozen December night, where a faint orange light still flickers in a locked booth and the snow holds messages that weren't there moments before. This is a story about roads that don't lead anywhere, about the ma...

In December 1989, a strange man appeared at a gas station on County Road 7 outside Munising, Michigan. He was soaked to the bone in a snowstorm, wearing no coat, no hat, no gloves. He bought a cup of coffee, left a wet handprint on the counter, and walked back out into the storm. For years afterward, people who passed mile marker 14 would see a figure standing in the trees, always wet, always watc...

Luna recalls a January night in 2019 when she drove through Wolf Creek, Arizona, a town that had vanished from the map decades earlier. The snow stopped abruptly at the town line, as if cut by a knife. Inside the gas station, a woman named Etta kept the registers from 1957, and the clock had been ticking the same second for sixty-two years. Luna buys a candy bar from a shelf that shouldn't exist a...

January 2021. Low Road, outside a town called Harwood, New Hampshire. Luna drives out to look at a snowshoe maker's property—an old man who vanished two weeks before Christmas. His workshop is still warm. His last project sits unfinished on the bench. The snow outside is marked with prints that circle the house, then stop. Inside, something waits in the dark of the cellar stairs. A story about cra...

A story about a woman named Margo who lived alone at the top of Needle Ridge, a dead-end gravel road in the Oregon Cascades. It was the winter of 2009, and the snow came early that year—heavy, wet, and silent. Margo's nearest neighbor was three miles down the mountain. She didn't mind the isolation. She had her dogs, her wood stove, and the mail came three times a week. But one night in December,...

In the winter of 1998, an abandoned farmhouse on a dead-end road in northern Minnesota became the site of something the locals never spoke about. Luna pieces together the story of a woman who moved there alone, and the tracks in the snow that led to her door. Not animal tracks. Not human. Something that walked on two legs but never stopped. This episode lingers on the edge of a frozen field, where...

In the winter of 2002, Luna drove through the abandoned logging town of Seven Pines, New Hampshire, to visit a woman named Eileen who claimed a bell in her barn rang every night at the same time—even though the clapper had been removed. Over coffee and kerosene light, Eileen told a story of the last log drive in 1948, of a boy who never came home and a foreman who swore he heard the bell toll as t...

In January of 2021, during a blizzard that closed every road in northern New Hampshire, a man named Dwight Pelfrey went missing from his hunting camp on Cutter's Run. No footprints led away from the door, but a single set of tracks — human in shape but too long, too deep, and too far apart — led toward the frozen river. Luna was working the overnight shift at the county dispatch that night, loggin...

It’s late October 2019, and the first real snow has fallen on the town of West Hemlock, Wisconsin. Luna drives Foster Road at 2:43 AM—a gravel stretch she knows by memory—when her high beams catch something that shouldn’t be there: a figure standing perfectly still in the middle of the road, dressed in a worn canvas coat and no hat, no gloves. She brakes hard. But when she gets out to check, there...