Ichor Falls AVisitors Guide

A V I S I T OR ’ S GU I DE .
b y KR I S ST R AU B .
Ichor Falls: A Visitor’s Guide
© 2009 Kris Straub. All rights reserved.
Read more online at www.ichorfalls.com.
First printing. Contains material originally published at

www.ichorfalls.com. No portion of this book may be used
or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the
written permission of the author, except in the case of select
quotations or reprints in the context of reviews. The scanning,
uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or
via any other means without the permission of the author
is illegal and punishable by law. Ichor Falls and all related
elements are ™ and © Kris Straub. All rights reserved.
All stories by Kris Straub except for “Convenience” and
“Shining One From Above The Clouds” by Sarah Pharris.
Published by Nightlight Press

www.nightlightpress.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-9797222-9-5
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
WELCOME TO THE FALLS. 6

curious little thing. 16
pROMISES. 21
candle cove. 25
lemon blossom girl. 29
THE HIRSCH CAMERA (1870). 37
THE FULCRUM. 40
opossum society. 42
the stillwood king. 45
excerpts from a room at cedarspring. 49
convenience. 54
twenty minutes in the dark. 59
aware. 63
osd09-h03. 65
INDISTINGUISHABLE. 68
three miles up a narrow dirt road. 70
shining one from above the clouds. 78
ICHOR FALLS, 1951.
I C H O R FA L L S A V I S I T O R ’ S G U I D E
WELCOME TO THE FALLS.

Ichor Falls is a city in Mason County, West Virginia, United States,
at the confluence of the Ohio and Erytheia Rivers. In the 2004
census, the population was 8,104. The current mayor is Newell
Barrett, and the current police commissioner is Honora Volney.
The town is home to two regional newspapers, the Ichor Falls Sentinel
and the New Elysium Times. Ichor Falls is also close to a small
number of geographically unique lakes, the largest of which is God’s
Wound to the southeast.
Districts and Location.

Elysia. Northeastern district. Upper-class gated community, the
most drastic reconstruction. Primarily new homes, five different floor
plans, planned parks, walkways, and the New Elysium Fashion Park.
There are still a number of historical homes here, and even original
structures from the 1930s and earlier, but due to their dilapidation
they have been harder to sell to the young crowd currently moving in.
Alethia. Southeastern district. Lower-middle class housing, not much

new development. The newest homes from pre-ghost-town Ichor
6
A V I S I T O R ’ S G U I D E
Falls date back to 1950 and 1951. There are even a few unfinished
houses that construction halted on after the evacuation. In its time,
Ichor Falls never had much street crime, but the crime rate was
slightly elevated in the Alethia district.
Ichor Falls High School and Sweetbrook Hospital are both in

Alethia.
Lower Alethia. Southwestern district. Close to Stillwood Forest,

Parks and Reserve. With the increased visitor traffic, Lower Alethia
seems to have become the de facto poor neighborhood.
The vast majority of the houses date back to the 1910s and 1920s,
the original brick and ironwork, and are in need of repairs.
Lower Alethia is also closest to Allegheny State Penitentiary (14

miles west) and the now-closed Amaranth Hospital for the Mentally
Disturbed (located in Ichor Falls).
Oneiros. Northwestern district. Sparser housing, more large

mansions and ranch areas. Large plots of unused land, sparse woods.
Home to town officials back in the day.
Olympus. Town center and business district. Centrally located.

City hall, public library, town shopping centers, police and fire
stations. Olympus represents an interesting mix of both old and new
architecture, and if the developers achieved their goal of rejuvenating
Ichor Falls and making it mesh with present day, it’s most apparent
here.
The Olympus district houses many points of interest including Ichor

Falls Realty and the Rand Historical Society Museum.
Ichor Falls is located at 38.600237, -82.167435.
7
I C H O R FA L L S
town history and lore.

1800 - 1850. In the spring of 1804, Edwin Cuthbert and eighty-one
other settlers emigrated from the eastern seaboard to the unglaciated
Allegheny Plateau in West Virginia, on the border of Ohio. From
a vantage point that would later be renamed St. Denis’ Crown,
Cuthbert surveyed a low, broad valley bordered by thick forest to the
west and south, and jagged mountains criss-crossed by waterfalls to
the north that fed a wide, churning river.
The violent waterfalls stirred up a heavy mist that rolled into the
valley, greatly lowering visibility. The settlers assumed that soon the
weather would warm and dissipate the fog, but the conditions in the
valley were just right to hold the fog in place year-round.1
Cuthbert, a Greek history enthusiast, was struck by the beauty of the

fog and the crashing water spilling over the craggy mountain ridges.
He proposed the name Ichor Falls, from the ancient Greek word
ichor, meaning “blood of the gods.”2
Iron, coal and salt became the settlement’s chief exports. Fresh water
from unconsolidated river aquifers and a variety of small game
from the surrounding forests sustained the settlers through many
hard winters.3 There are few wooden buildings in Ichor Falls, as the
humidity and soil composition tended to grow sickly trees yielding
brittle wood, which compromised those early structures, including
an Amish schoolhouse, whose collapse led to the observance of the
town holiday Totenkinder.4
1850 - 1900. Between 1835 and 1860 the local economy boomed.
Ichor Falls used slave labor to work the iron mines to great economic
success. The town remained strongly pro-slavery even after the
admission of West Virginia to the Union.
8
During a visitation of Union General McClellan and his men in

1865, Ulster notoriously rounded African slaves up into the West
Falls Company Iron Mine and hid them there for nine days without
food or water. Nearly all of them died.5
Ichor Falls’ iron export is largely low-grade, and was famously called
“temperamental” by Ichor Falls councilman and blacksmith Samuel
Boston. The geology of the region yielded a peculiarly high amount
of coal and iron, which galvanized the valley’s economy for the first
fifty years of its habitation. For many years Ichor Falls was known
colloquially as “The Iron City.”
But the reputation of Ichor Falls as a major metal producer waned

over the years as importers saw a pattern of poor quality goods.
Impurities meant coal mined from the region burned cooler than
other coals, and blacksmiths found themselves applying more effort
than usual on tempering iron alloys from the plants in and around
Ichor Falls.
By 1884, many of the mines had slowed production to a trickle

or closed down completely. Ichor Falls teetered on the brink of a
massive economic depression.
1900 - 1950. Logging operations began as early as 1870, at the first

signs of the stagnation of the coal and iron markets. Though much of
the wood was not viable for building construction, it was fine for use
in hammer and broom handles, chairs and tables.6
In 1904, Harold Marsh, a chemist, discovered that Ichor Falls wood

was every bit as strong as higher-quality wood if it was treated
chemically.7-8 Over the next two decades, the purchase of varnishing
and treating chemicals rose dramatically, leading to chemical
companies’ interest in the area.
9
I C H O R FA L L S
With demand high, an eager workforce and low property values,

two chemical plants specializing in wood sealants and anti-corrosion
treatments arrived on the banks of the Erytheia by 1910, with a third
one constructed upstream two years later.
Once again Ichor Falls had a steady export, and the new plants
meant more jobs and more population growth. This period of growth
lasted some forty-four years. As the surrounding forests vanished,
new homes and roads were laid down. It was Ichor Falls’ most
prosperous period.9
1950 - 1980. The first isolated cases of illness caused by chemical

exposure were recorded in 1946, but their origins reached back to the
late 1920s. A secondary compound in the wood sealant, 1-phenyl-
2-4 tricarbethyloxinate-5 (patented under the name Ethylor)10, was
designed to carry the sealant compounds in suspension, penetrate the
treated wood, then break down into methyl and isopropyl alcohols
and evaporate harmlessly once applied. Unfortunately, researchers
later discovered only a partial evaporation in most samples of wood.
Ethylor only fully broke down into harmless alcohol after three
decades.
By 1953, there were over 6,000 reported cases of lung, brain and
bone cancer in Ichor Falls. All three chemical plants were closed and
condemned during what became known as “the Ethylor summer.”11
Civil lawsuits were filed but went nowhere as the three companies
imploded with debt and criminal penalties. Within five years, the
population of Ichor Falls had fallen to a twentieth of what it was
prior.
Ichor Falls was becoming a ghost town.12
1980 - present. Ichor Falls lay undisturbed in the mist for

nearly thirty years. The relative obscurity of the town left it largely
untouched by vandals, although one of the empty chemical plants
10
burned down in 1964 (cause unknown, but arson seemed likely).

Looters from neighboring towns took anything of value the first
couple years, but when there were cases of minor illness among
them (mostly lung irritation), the town of Ichor Falls developed a
reputation for being cursed.
In 1978, surviving citizens and their relatives were informed by a

government probe group that Ichor Falls was once again habitable.
In the ensuing years, Ichor Falls received curious visitors, but
when the properties were appraised, they were found to be mostly
worthless.13 By now squatters heard of the town’s availability, and
the Falls became a hangout spot for degenerates for several years
afterward, until West Virginia and Ohio police blocked the roads
leading into town.
In 1986 a coalition of land developers consisting of Iroquois

Stone Company, Jefferson Land Trust of West Virginia, Redbed
Foundations and several others convened to mass-purchase the
existing land from the individual owners. Unsurprisingly, they got a
good price and were able to take ownership of the majority of Ichor
Falls.
The coalition, named the New Elysium Group, built up capital and
redeveloped Ichor Falls from the ground up. Many old buildings
scheduled for demolition were spared by the government of
West Virginia, who demanded they be maintained as historical
landmarks.14 Still, plots with damaged homes and buildings were
cleared, and home developers moved in.
The New Elysium Group’s goal was to revitalize Ichor Falls. A

name change on the agenda never went through; for all the bad
associations the name “Ichor Falls” had, the Group was convinced it
could rejuvenate the town’s image.15 Forty years was a long time.
In 1995, after nine long years of development, the first new homes
were sold to families. Business parks began to fill up. Property values
11
I C H O R FA L L S
started to increase, and a healthy dose of history and interest in the

occult spurred tourism.
Today, Ichor Falls is home to 8,000 people.16
local legends.
The Stitched Man. This legend seems to be based on the story of
William Harker. Harker was one of the first settlers of the Ichor
Falls valley, and a master tailor whose work was known throughout
Delaware. Richard Bayard, mayor of Wilmington, DE, was noted to
have ordered three suits from Harker in 1836, saying “The man could
stitch anything.”
In 1840 a cooking fire started in Harker’s home, tragically killing his

wife and infant son, and seriously injuring him. Allegedly, Harker
overheard doctors saying that they would not be able to heal his
burns, and when they returned to his bedside, Harker called for his
sewing kit.
Harker died four days later, and the legend began shortly after —
first as a tribute to the master tailor, that he had been able to stitch
1
Fogle, Pioneer to the Falls: A History of America’s Most Damned Town, 1985.
2
Historical accounts.
3
Survey of Pre-1830 Regional Exports, Mason County Department of Records.
4
Modern accounts of local lore.
5
Burnham, Old Southern Ghosts, 1977.
6
Fogle.
7
Howermann, Better Dying Through Chemistry: American Industrial Disasters, 1968.
8
Marsh, Proposed Application of New Polymeric Solutions in Forestry, 1905.
9
Survey of Regional Exports, 1925-1945, Mason County Department of Records.
10
Modified phenylated varnish for strengthening wood, U.S. Patent No. 929,775.
11
Kelley, Ethylor Summer, 1963.
12
Mason County Population Census, 1960.
13
A Study of Ichor Falls Post-Disaster Housing Prices, Ichor Falls Realty, 1983.
14
Proposition H-14 passed August 15, 1988.
15
Hiller, “Why ‘Valley Falls’ Doesn’t Work,” West Virginia Quarterly, 1990.
16
Mason County Population Census, 2006.
12
himself back to health, and went to search for his wife and child to
“repair” them too.
But the legend became more and more perverse over the generations,
with the common lore being that the Stitched Man now sought
replacements for his dead family, and that if he claimed you, you
would wake up one night with Harker’s ragged, sewn-up corpse
laboring over you with a needle and thread, your lips stitched
together, with the only sound that of Harker’s softly beating cloth
heart.
The Stillwood. Because of its uneven ground, oddly tilted treeline and
three very similarly curved creeks (flowing from the Erytheia), it’s
easy for the inexperienced to get lost in Stillwood Forest southwest
of Ichor Falls. One gets the sensation of walking in circles —
especially when one encounters what looks like the same small creek
several times.
In 1806, one of Edwin Cuthbert’s original party chased a deer into

the Stillwood, and wound up lost for two days. When he finally
returned, dehydrated and starving almost to the point of death, he
insisted that he had been gone for nine days — even going so far as
to show diary entries he had made with the rise and fall of the sun.
Although there was no other evidence to support strange goings-on

other than a host of tall tales involving secret villages and mythical
creatures, settlers avoided the Stillwood for generations. Even when
mass logging began in the 1870s, the Stillwood was spared. It
remains the oldest growth of all surrounding forests, although much
of the other treeline has returned to Ichor Falls today, due to the
halting of the logging trade and town evacuation in the late 1940s.
The Librarian. The downturn of local business in the late 1880s saw
the uprising of spiritual groups praying for the town’s recovery. One
such group, the Falls Adherents, is notable due to its cult-like nature
13
I C H O R FA L L S
and the air of panic it was responsible for in the winter of 1887.
Adherent leader Aaron Ulysses Silcourt had family ties to the British
Luddite movement at the turn of the 17th Century, and his beliefs
were so rigidly anti-technology that he actually attempted to burn
down the town public library, which resulted in the ironic nickname
granted him by the Sentinel.
Silcourt saw the modernization of Ichor Falls as the cause of its

decline. The Adherents believed that modern ways created a schism
between man and God, and that signs of modernity could be imbued
with wickedness and had the taint of the devil about them. After
repeated attempts at public mayhem and a manslaughter, Silcourt
was executed in 1888 and the Adherents separated.
In typical Falls fashion, the story of Silcourt and his cult grew
into the legend of the Librarian, a spirit bound by hatred to all
mechanically-reproduced books and journals in the library. It was
said that his cultists would curse books or pages with arcane symbols
in an attempt to spread Ichor Falls’ blight to any place where
mankind had shunned its old ways.
Totenkinder. A German mistranslation of, literally, “dead children.”

The holiday did not begin as a holiday, but an observance of the 1813
schoolhouse collapse, in which 12 Amish students died along with
their teacher. Many settlers believed the collapse to be an omen of
God’s displeasure with the settlement, and that Ichor Falls trespassed
on hallowed ground. That year, every stick of lumber for building
construction was torched, to purge the town of evil.
Decades later, schoolchildren participated in Totenkinder by building

small model houses, placing a beloved toy inside, and lighting it on
fire. If the house refused to catch fire (as often happens in Ichor Falls
due to the humidity), the house was made by a good little boy or girl.
If it did burn, the boy or girl was considered sinful.
14
In 1908, a little girl was badly hurt when her toy house caught her
dress on fire. At this point the town treated Totenkinder as silly
tradition and superstition, and not a real determination of good and
evil. Nonetheless, because it was dangerous to children, Totenkinder
was largely abandoned.
Make my house from twigs and sticks

Father, father
I have no clay, I have no bricks
Father sings.
Build my house and make it strong

Mother, mother
It will keep you winter long
Mother sings.
In the evening tend the fire

Good child, good child
Careful not to let it higher
Good child sings.
In the morning, early morning

Ashes, ashes
Mother cries and father warning
Bad child gone.
— Traditional
15
I C H O R FA L L S
CURIOUS LITTLE THING.

I have an odd habit a friend recently picked up on, a habit I
developed about a year ago. He noticed that when I enter a room,
any room, and shut the door, I turn my face away from it and close
my eyes until I hear the lock click. Only after the door is fully closed
will I open them. He gave me a hard time about it until I told him
where it started.
I work for a water-seal company in St. Paul. We produce sealant for

exposed wood — decks, boats, that kind of thing. You hear about
sealant being a dirty word in the Ashland-Ichor Falls-Ironton area,
but not all those companies were part of the infamous “Ethylor
summer” that wiped out the local economy in the ‘50s. I got sent to
an industrial park outside of Ichor Falls on business.
I checked into this dismal hotel, the Hotel Umbra, that looked like
the decor hadn’t been changed since 1930. The lobby wallpaper had
gone yellow from decades of cigarette smoke, and everything had
a fine layer of dust, including the old man behind the front desk.
I hoped that the room would be in better shape. Mine was on the
fourth floor.
Being an old place, the hotel had a rickety cable elevator, the kind
with the double sets of doors: one of those flexing metal gates, and a
16
solid outer pair of doors. I shut the gate and latched it, and pressed
the tiny black button for my floor.
Just as the outer elevator doors were about to close, I was startled
by the face of a young woman rushing at the gap between them.
She was too late; the doors shut, and after a moment the elevator
ascended.
I thought nothing of it, until I needed to take the elevator back down
for one of my bags. I entered, pushed the button for the lobby, and
pressed my tired back to the elevator wall opposite the doors. They
had nearly completely shut when again I was surprised by a woman’s
face moving towards the gap, staring into the elevator through the
gate, too late to place her hand in to stop the doors from closing. This
time I sprang forward and held the “Door Open” button, and after a
moment the doors lurched and slid open.
I waited a moment. From the opening I could see partly down the
hallway: no one in sight. Still holding the button down, I slid open
the metal gate and craned my head into the hallway to look down
the other direction.
No one. No trace of the girl, no recently shut hotel room door, no

footsteps, no jingle of keys.
I released the button, but did not lean back against the wall. I stood
directly in front of where the gap in the doors would be, in the center
of the elevator. After a pause, the outer doors again began to slide
shut, to move towards each other until the space between them was
the width of a young girl’s face.
In that quarter-second several fingertips appeared, followed

immediately by her face again, rushing from around the corner,
staring at me as the doors met. I had been watching the gap where
I thought she might be, so I saw her — she was about thirteen years
17
I C H O R FA L L S
old, and very plain, almost homely, with a pale complexion and neck-
length dark brown hair that looked mussed or slightly dirty.
I didn’t have time to glance down at her visible shoulder, to see what
she was wearing; from her behavior I wondered if she was a runaway
or a homeless person who had gotten into the building. She had
had a glassy, blank expression, tinged with a little desperation, some
distant desire or need. A look that could easily be accompanied by
the words “Please help.”
The next time I passed the front desk, I asked the old man if he’d
seen a young girl running through.
“Heard the stories, then,” he said between throat-clearings, rocking

gently in his seat. “Young Maddy has been here a long time. Takes a
liking to gentlemen guests. Always been shy. Never says a word, not a
word. Just curious.”
I told him I hadn’t heard any stories, and that there had been a girl
taking the stairs and standing in front of my elevator on every floor.
“That’s our Maddy,” he said. “She likes you then. Sweet on you. She
just wants to see, that’s all, just to see. All she ever does. Curious little
thing. Just wants to see.”
I stayed at the Hotel Umbra for three nights. It was a four-night

business trip; the last night I tried sleeping in my car. It didn’t help.
Let me tell you about Young Maddy. You only catch glimpses of her,
of a face with a resigned look of quiet desperation, dominated by a
pair of wide, dark eyes. Locked doors, barricades, nothing made a
difference; she gets inside. I never saw her longer than half a second.
Every time I laid eyes on her she retreated instantly, only to appear
again an hour or two later. An hour or two if I was lucky.
18
Let me tell you about where I saw Young Maddy.
Every time I shut the door to my bathroom, in my hotel room, I saw

her. If I watched as I shut it, at the last possible second I’d see the
crescent of her face moving fast at the gap. I’d throw the door open
to find nothing.
Every time I closed the closet door I saw her. If I watched that gap,
she’d suddenly be inside the closet, leaning her head to watch me just
as it shut. It’s as if she knew where to go, where to be, so that my eye
would meet hers. But there was never an impact, never a moment
when she’d make contact with the door or the wall.
The first time I sat at that writing table I saw her. As I closed the
large bottom drawer. She rushed at the gap from inside the drawer,
her wide eyes pleading for something I could not give. I pulled the
drawer from its rails and threw it to the floor.
I did spend that last night in my car, but like I said, it did no good.
Tossing and turning on that rental car seat, the back ratcheted as flat
as I could get it, I’d have to open my eyes sometimes, and if there was
a place for her to dart from my view when I opened them, she did.
In the side-view mirror, or peeking over the hood of my car — once
upside-down, at the top of the windshield, as if she was on the roof.
I’m back in St. Paul again, and I’ve been back for a year. But Maddy
hasn’t stopped. If I keep my eyes open long enough, if I watch a place
long enough, I’ll eventually catch sight of movement — near the
copier in my office, a pile of boxes in an alley, a column in a quiet
parking lot — and my eye will get there just in time to see her eye
retreating from view. There’s never anything there when I go to look,
so I’ve stopped looking.
That’s how I’ve had to change things since the Hotel Umbra. I’ve
stopped looking. I keep my eyes shut when I close doors, when I shut
19
I C H O R FA L L S
drawers and cabinets, fridges, coolers, the trunk of my car. Not all
spaces. Just ones that are big enough.
At least, that used to work. I was getting ready for bed a few nights
ago, standing in front of my bathroom mirror, door shut, cabinets
shut. Watching myself floss. I opened up wide to get my molars.
I swear I saw fingertips retreat down the back of my throat.
20
PROMISES.
Promise not tell your mother about any of this. It’d only upset her.
Throughout his life a man makes a lot of promises. Some he wants to

make, some he has to. Whether he keeps those promises depends on
the man.
That’s what my father taught me. He kept his promises to the family
— working two jobs to keep a roof over our heads ,and food in our
stomachs. I hardly saw him until I turned 18, when I started working
the same shift he did.
You remember when your grandpa took a real bad fall? Maybe you
were too young. Broke almost every bone in his body. Got a terrible
infection; wasted away from the inside. We lost him a month later.
He died in a hospital bed, with everyone gathered around him. He
fought to the end, but kept saying there was no better way to go. I
think given the option he’d have rather died in that bed than the
mines.
I remember one of the last days, when he was fading in and out, he
asked for each of us in turn at his bedside. When I walked in the
room, he tilted his head and beckoned me to come closer. He told
me how proud he was of me, how he could tell that I knew what a
21
I C H O R FA L L S
man’s word meant. What it was to keep a promise to the ones you
love. I said goodbye to him that afternoon and that was it.
We’re not too much better off than my family was. I work the mines.
Your mother’s nerve disease keeps her at home. A lot of the older
folks in this town have it. It makes things difficult, but when I feel it
getting to me, I just look at the ring on my left hand. In sickness and
in health is what I swore. I’m scared to think what would happen to
her if she lost me.
That brings us to that time eight years ago, son. You remember how
worried you and your mother were? The supervisor knew we weren’t
cleared to be down there, but he signed the work order anyway. I
remember exactly where I was, near a makeshift break area with a
couple hanging lamps. Where they found me.
You’d think I’d have been caught flatfooted when the ground shook
and the ceiling came down, but I actually knew a little before that
— you usually do, even if it’s too late to do anything. I heard sand
raining from cracks in the rock above. Felt the earth rolling under
me. I was running for the support beams when it happened.
That first boulder from the ceiling nailed me square in the back, sent
me to the dirt floor, pinned me down and broke ribs. Believe it or
not it wasn’t the first time I’d been in that situation. I got hit in the
chest by a falling beam in my twenties; knocked me to the ground
and took the wind right out of me. What I remembered back then,
lying there waiting for the guys to find me, was two things: how I
was desperate to breathe, but couldn’t; and the pounding of my heart.
Like it was trying to pound right out of my chest and run for help on
its own.
So I lied there, pinned between my shoulder blades to the hard

ground. Wind knocked out of me, and I’m clawing for breath, scared
as all get out. But that time it was different, son. My heart wasn’t
22
pounding. I felt it beat so soft and slow.
After a few seconds, the ground wasn’t shaking anymore. Everything

stood still and quiet, the only sound the muffled shouts of men in
other corridors. I couldn’t feel my heart beating. I was so afraid.
I tensed and clenched my insides, just drew everything in, tried to

shout. My busted ribs dug into my guts, my lungs — I couldn’t get a
breath. I thought about you and your mother. I felt the world getting
dark and hazy, couldn’t think straight anymore, could barely see. But
I saw your faces, in my mind. I was saying goodbye to you.
In my last little gasp of consciousness, I thought about my father,

and wondered if that was what it was like for him. Lord help me,
son, I don’t know if Dad was with me in that moment, but I got
angry. Angrier than I’ve ever been. Angry at fate, at God, taking me
from my family, leaving them all alone. “I made it easy on you. You’re
already buried.” Your poor mother. I didn’t want to hear I’d died a
quarter-mile deep in the dark earth.
Son, I planted my hands on the ground in front of me and pushed.

I pushed through the pain, lifted my body off the ground with the
hardest damn push-up of my life, practically tore my arms from their
sockets doing it, that rock still laying on my back and everything. All
I could think about was your mother.
I never told anyone. But I didn’t see a doctor after the rescue.
Somehow I didn’t think they’d understand what happened down
there. And every night since, I lie down next to your mother and
listen to her breathing. I just lie there like that, until morning.
I haven’t slept since that day. I don’t let myself. And I don’t mean I
have nightmares, or toss and turn. I don’t sleep anymore.
23
I C H O R FA L L S
Because my heart doesn’t beat, son. I never found a pulse. And the
only time I breathe in now is to talk. I can’t explain it.
And you know what, I don’t want to. Because this is a gift. I pull
double-shifts at the mine now — I know you haven’t seen a lot of me
lately. But to be honest I’m not looking so good. I don’t move as fast
as I used to. I kind of have to keep to myself a lot of the time because
of what other guys say. I come home when I know you and your
mom are asleep. When it’s dark, like it is down there.
But I get my work done, punch out, and I know you and your mother
can have warm clothes in the winter, a roof that doesn’t leak, three
meals a day. I don’t even eat now.
Sometimes I feel... tired isn’t the word. I feel slow, like something is
pulling at me, like something wants me to stop. Oh, and it makes me
angry. The same kind of angry I got in the mine, an anger that makes
me fight. I think about you and your mother, and what my father
said. I don’t get as angry anymore, because it’s been a long time, but
maybe one day I’ll just let that slow feeling roll over me and that’ll be
it.
But for now, don’t you worry your mother, and don’t worry yourself.
Just know you mean everything to me. And I made you too many
promises to break them by leaving.
A man keeps his promises. Remember that.
24
CANDLE COVE.
NetNostalgia Forum - Television (local)
Skyshale033
Subject: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
Does anyone remember this kid’s show? It was called Candle Cove and I
must have been 6 or 7. I never found reference to it anywhere so I think
it was on a local station around 1971 or 1972. I lived in Ironton at the
time. I don’t remember which station, but I do remember it was on at a
weird time, like 4:00 PM.
mike_painter65
Subject: Re: Candle Cove local kid’s show?
it seems really familiar to me.....i grew up outside of ashland and was
9 yrs old in 72. candle cove...was it about pirates? i remember a pirate
marionete at the mouth of a cave talking to a little girl
Skyshale033
YES! Okay I’m not crazy! I remember Pirate Percy. I was always kind
of scared of him. He looked like he was built from parts of other dolls,
real low-budget. His head was an old porcelain baby doll, looked like an
antique that didn’t belong on the body. I don’t remember what station
this was! I don’t think it was WTSF though.
Jaren_2005
Sorry to ressurect this old thread but I know exactly what show you
mean, Skyshale. I think Candle Cove ran for only a couple months in ‘71,
not ‘72. I was 12 and I watched it a few times with my brother. It was
channel 58, whatever station that was. My mom would let me switch to
it after the news. Let me see what I remember.
25
I C H O R FA L L S
It took place in Candle cove, and it was about a little girl who imagined
herself to be friends with pirates. The pirate ship was called the
Laughingstock, and Pirate Percy wasn’t a very good pirate because he
got scared too easily. And there was calliope music constantly playing.
Don’t remember the girl’s name. Janice or Jade or something. Think it
was Janice.
Skyshale033
Thank you Jaren!!! Memories flooded back when you mentioned the
Laughingstock and channel 58. I remember the bow of the ship was a
wooden smiling face, with the lower jaw submerged. It looked like it
was swallowing the sea and it had that awful Ed Wynn voice and laugh.
I especially remember how jarring it was when they switched from the
wooden/plastic model, to the foam puppet version of the head that
talked.
mike_painter65
ha ha i remember now too. ;) do you remember this part skyshale: “you
have...to go...INSIDE.”
Skyshale033
Ugh mike, I got a chill reading that. Yes I remember. That’s what the
ship always told Percy when there was a spooky place he had to go in,
like a cave or a dark room where the treasure was. And the camera
would push in on Laughingstock’s face with each pause. YOU HAVE... TO
GO... INSIDE. With his two eyes askew and that flopping foam jaw and
the fishing line that opened and closed it. Ugh. It just looked so cheap
and awful.
You guys remember the villain? He had a face that was just a handlebar
mustache above really tall, narrow teeth.
kevin_hart
i honestly, honestly thought the villain was pirate percy. i was about 5
when this show was on. nightmare fuel.
Jaren_2005
That wasn’t the villain, the puppet with the mustache. That was the
villain’s sidekick, Horace Horrible. He had a monocle too, but it was on
top of the mustache. I used to think that meant he had only one eye.
But yeah, the villain was another marionette. The Skin-Taker. I can’t
believe what they let us watch back then.
26
kevin_hart
jesus h. christ, the skin taker. what kind of a kids show were we
watching? i seriously could not look at the screen when the skin taker
showed up. he just descended out of nowhere on his strings, just a dirty
skeleton wearing that brown top hat and cape. and his glass eyes that
were too big for his skull. christ almighty.
Skyshale033
Wasn’t his top hat and cloak all sewn up crazily? Was that supposed to
be children’s skin??
mike_painter65
yeah i think so. rememer his mouth didn’t open and close, his jaw just
slid back and foth. i remember the little girl said “why does your mouth
move like that” and the skin-taker didn’t look at the girl but at the
camera and said “TO GRIND YOUR SKIN”
Skyshale033
I’m so relieved that other people remember this terrible show!
I used to have this awful memory, a bad dream I had where the opening
jingle ended, the show faded in from black, and all the characters were
there, but the camera was just cutting to each of their faces, and they
were just screaming, and the puppets and marionettes were flailing
spastically, and just all screaming, screaming. The girl was just moaning
and crying like she had been through hours of this. I woke up many
times from that nightmare. I used to wet the bed when I had it.
kevin_hart
i don’t think that was a dream. i remember that. i remember that was an
episode.
Skyshale033
No no no, not possible. There was no plot or anything, I mean literally
just standing in place crying and screaming for the whole show.
kevin_hart
maybe i’m manufacturing the memory because you said that, but i swear
to god i remember seeing what you described. they just screamed.
27
I C H O R FA L L S
Jaren_2005
Oh God. Yes. The little girl, Janice, I remember seeing her shake. And
the Skin-Taker screaming through his gnashing teeth, his jaw careening
so wildly I thought it would come off its wire hinges. I turned it off and it
was the last time I watched. I ran to tell my brother and we didn’t have
the courage to turn it back on.
mike_painter65
i visited my mom today at the nursing home. i asked her about when i
was littel in the early 70s, when i was 8 or 9 and if she remebered a kid’s
show, candle cove. she said she was suprised i could remember that and
i asked why, and she said “because i used to think it was so strange that
you said ‘i’m gona go watch candle cove now mom’ and then you would
tune the tv to static and juts watch dead air for 30 minutes. you had a
big imagination with your little pirate show.”
28
LEMON BLOSSOM GIRL.

My father used to take me to the Natural History and Science
Museum, downtown, when I was six. That was where I first saw her.
I remember thinking what a pretty name for someone that was, the
“Lemon Blossom Girl.” I have never been able to forget the time I
laid eyes on the Lemon Blossom Girl, imprisoned in the tall glass
case smudged with the fingerprints of all the other children who had
come to stare at her. But she could not stare back.
She lay on the floor of a papier mache cave, curled around herself,
her smooth head cradled and face hidden by tattered, crossed arms. I
watched her for a long time, with my dad standing there, reading to
me from the placard that described the way she became mummified.
Although I wasn’t able to put it to words at that age, I must have

been asking myself why anyone would name her “the Lemon
Blossom Girl.” This was a name for someone who skipped in fields
of flowers in spring, laughing and playing; not this awful, trapped,
parchment-skinned thing. The word I would have wanted at the time
was “irony.”
I had the first nightmare a few days after our visit.
29
I C H O R FA L L S
I was there in my bed, in the dark, when my eyes opened, somehow

outside of my control. I couldn’t move anything except my eyes, but
I couldn’t shut them. And I knew, with that knowledge one is given
only in dreams, that she was here, in our house somewhere.
The Lemon Blossom Girl. She was no longer lying on her misshapen
side in the museum behind glass. Or perhaps that’s how she was
in the house, in that same position, curled up beneath the kitchen
sink. I couldn’t see her in the dream, but I felt her presence. I knew
that she was on the other side of the house, waiting for something,
thinking bad thoughts with that smooth, yellowing head of hers.
Thinking of me.
I woke up screaming. My mother came running in and comforted

me, and my father must have been scolded for taking me to the part
of the museum full of old, dead things. I had the same nightmare
several times in the weeks to follow, but like all things, it eventually
stopped and I was free to worry about whatever it is that six-year-
olds worry about.
When I was twelve, my family moved to the East Coast, to Boston.

My father had been transferred to a new position and given a raise,
and since my mother wasn’t working at the time, moving was the
sensible thing to do. I said a few awkward goodbyes to my friends; at
that age, it doesn’t really dawn on you that you won’t be seeing them
next summer, and chances are you won’t see them ever again.
But I made new friends easily enough. The grade school I went to
in Boston was much more reputable than my old school, but I didn’t
really notice, other than how we took a lot more field trips. Field trips
were never about learning; they were about leaving the classroom
and being able to talk to your friends in an environment where your
teacher didn’t notice as easily. That’s exactly what happened when
Mrs. Hafner took us to the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
I paid absolutely no attention to the droning tour guide, and
30
continued to pay none until I heard a phrase I hadn’t heard in what

for a boy of twelve was an eternity.
“Lemon Blossom Girl.”
My stomach sank. That name, that sickly-sweet name that belonged

to that monstrous thing.
I snapped to attention and realized that the guide was talking

about mummies now, as the class approached the “Human History”
room. My eyes darted among the cases — she was here. It was
here. Somewhere. I glanced at the other mummies, with their long
and awkward Egyptian names, ending in Amun, Hotep, Tiri. They
sounded exotic, impressive. Regal. The sarcophagi were gold, with
bright expressive faces painted in blue and black on the heavy lid.
These did not bother me, nor did the X-rays of what they looked like
beneath the bandages. Their eyes were closed, their arms crossed on
their chest, at rest. These were kings at peace.
Not like the Lemon Blossom Girl — whose glass I now stood in
front of. She was no longer on the floor of that papier mache cave,
now laying starkly upon a plain, gallery-white platform. Somehow, I
saw more this time than I did, or remembered I did, when I was six
— the room was brighter, and I was taller, almost tall enough to peer
between her crossed, gnarled limbs and see dead eyes. How weird,
I thought, that I would move to Boston only to see her again? Was
there more than one? No, they must have moved her as part of some
program.
I learned more about her that day, listening to the guide. I learned
that she was named for the area the archaeologists found her in
— that it used to be a bog somewhere in South America, and that
her odd, contorted position probably resulted from the way she died:
struggling as she drowned.
31
I C H O R FA L L S
A diagram on the wall showed how she had been X-rayed in the
1960s, and how scientists discovered an almost fully-developed
infant still inside her. She died pregnant.
This added a new dimension to my nightmares, which returned

that night. I awoke, back in my old room, as I had so long ago — in
the dark, paralyzed, knowing that she was in our house somewhere.
But now I knew she wasn’t curled up in a ball. She was walking,
shambling slowly, carrying her infant in her arms, its skin a cross
between leather and paper, stretched tightly across blackened bones.
I knew these things, was made to know these things by the dream,
but again never laid eyes on her. But she was in that dark house, in
my mind, somewhere. The nightmare ended and I sat upright in my
bed, throwing and kicking my arms and legs to make sure I could
indeed move them. I didn’t cry to my parents; I must have decided I
was too old for that. But I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.
Again, the nightmares subsided after a few dreadful weeks, but not
before I failed a morning exam or two for lack of sleep. School came
to an end in Boston, junior high was a blur, with high school even
more unremarkable. I was an average student; I sent applications to
several large colleges in the area, only to receive letters of condolence
in return. On a whim I sent an application to Maple Grove
University, a small school in West Virginia, just to see what would
happen. Lo and behold, they accepted me, and even offered a partial
scholarship.
I’m not sure why I decided on West Virginia, but I did. I suppose
I wanted to be out of my parents’ house, on my own, taking full
responsibility for myself. I don’t think the scholarship hurt, either.
Freshman year, my parents helped me move my things into Poulsen
Hall, one of the two undergraduate dorms, and said a tearful

goodbye. But I was free now. I felt like an adult.
32
Friends were harder to come by in college for some reason. Maybe

it had to do with me being a child of two coasts, and West Virginia
being close to neither. The first several months I spent largely alone.
Our Communications 15 study group broke early one Saturday

night at about 5:30, and I suppose I didn’t feel much like heading
back to my dorm room and dealing with my suitemate and his filthy
socks. So I wandered a little. Near my dorm on the hill were a few
buildings, administrative and such. There was something called the
Harold Ferris Cultural Center, a great ugly green building with a
pigiron modern art globe in front. It was next to my dorm; I thought
it might have general information about the area, the town, and
maybe somewhere I could go on a Saturday night.
When I got there, I discovered the information booth only had

pamphlets about cultural studies and outreach programs. That and a
little old lady. She said the center closed at 6:00, but since I was the
only one here, I could stay a while after and look at the exhibits.
Something about that word always bothered me. An exhibit was

something on display for others to stare at, to watch. The plural of
the word was worse, as it implied a cold room with dim lighting cast
on ancient, quiet things. The exhibits.
She pointed me at the room, but it wasn’t until I was in the archway
that I realized what I was looking at. It was a cold, cold room, with
dim yellow lights in the ceiling, focused on pots, arrowheads, and
other historical trinkets. And one large display in the center of the
room.
Lemon Blossom Girl.
I stumbled backwards. She was here.
33
I C H O R FA L L S
For the third time in my life, in a town I considered the middle of

nowhere. I can only imagine the expression on my face as I edged
forward into the room. “South American Relics, 1200-1500 AD,” the
sign said. Lemon Blossom Girl. And now I was thinking that it was
peculiar, very peculiar that this exhibit, of all things, would be here.
Here, of all places — the Harold Ferris Cultural Center at Maple
Grove University.
I felt as though I were six again, seeing her for the first time. She
looked smaller than I remembered, but somehow that made her more
pitiful, more terrifying than before, more like the desiccated, curling
thing she guarded in her womb.
I began to doubt it could have ever been human; what cruel processes
of nature would allow such a thing to continue to exist? I did not
picture the Lemon Blossom Girl as a woman with child who became
trapped in some swamp in South America, while Europe suffered
through the Dark Ages. She had always been like this, somewhere
or other, dried and dead and paling under electric lamps since the
beginning of time, carrying a smaller mockery of herself inside her,
twisted and splitting and curling in her own womb of glass. No, no,
this thing had never been a human being.
She was Lemon Blossom Girl, forever staring out with empty
sockets through crossed arms and legs, trapped in a place where
children can watch her. But she could not watch back.
There was a square, dimly-lit button on her display case, and

beneath it, a grid of holes indicating a loudspeaker within the base.
The button stated in loud, block letters: “START.” Though I knew,
when pressed, it would blare a dull, scratchy narration explaining
mummification, my heart dropped as I backed away from the case.
There was something very, very wrong about having a “START”
button near that thing. All I could think was START MOVING.
34
START BREATHING. START SCRATCHING AT THE

GLASS.
“Time to close up,” an old voice called from the front desk, and I
uttered a startled noise, halfway between the letter U and a gasp. The
sound echoed in corners of the hall that the dim lights didn’t reach.
That night I wasn’t in my dorm room. I was at home, in my old

bedroom. My eyes were open, but I couldn’t move. But it was
different this time; this time, I didn’t know if she was in the house
with me. I didn’t know, until I heard a sound like splintered wood
sliding against burlap, and wet paper. I smelled something thick and
ancient, like parchment and, faintly, cloves. A sickening, thick, spicy
sweetness.
She was here. In the dark, I watched, unable to even shiver, perhaps
held in place by the same abominable forces that would allow a
corpse to be preserved, to stay whole, to persist for 800 years.
And now from the black doorway the Lemon Blossom Girl shuffled
in, her thin, reedy breath amplified by the dead quiet of night. She
lurched forward, slowly and unsteadily on bone-splinter legs, stopped
in the middle of my room and turned. Now she was watching me.
She held something close, something I did not want to see.

Something I was beginning to make out in the moonlight.
It squealed.
That was six days ago. Six days ago, and she hasn’t stopped since.
I know she is down there, my Lemon Blossom Girl, behind glass,
closer than she has ever been. She can follow me as far as a museum
display, but she needs my dreams to come closer, to watch, to hold her
young. I know she is down there, thinking bad thoughts in that dead,
dry head of hers. Thinking about me.
35
I C H O R FA L L S
This morning I went to the gas station, and returned with one gallon
of gasoline and a box of hurricane matches.
Tonight I think I will pay her one last visit.
36
THE HIRSCH CAMERA (1870).

A real object that has made its way into Ichor Falls folklore is the
Hirsch Camera, on seasonal display at the tiny Rand Historical
Society Museum near the town center. Its inventor, chemist Robert
Hirsch, can claim ancestry back to the original eighty-two settlers of
Ichor Falls.
He remarked in letters to colleagues that the town “resided in a

wonder-land of alchemical potential... I believe there is no more
[diverse] geology West of the Alleghanies.”
The Hirsch Camera is possibly the earliest functioning camera

that was capable of color photography, predating du Hauron’s color
photographs by two years. However in photographic circles this
point is in contention; most scholars argue that Hirsch’s work does
not represent the first concerted effort at color photography, and
many of his trial attempts from 1870 show either a lack of interest,
or perhaps understanding, in accurately reproducing color images.
These early developed plates show washed out or partially inverted
colors, as though from a semi-exposed negative.
Hirsch’s process, however, is notable for its methodology. Rather than

silver iodide, Hirsch used silver chalcides to create one of the first
panchromatic solutions. This also reduced the plates’ dependence on
37
I C H O R FA L L S
mercury bath to develop the negative. Some chemical studies have

been performed on the plates, but Hirsch’s original ratios have been
lost to time.
Thus, the plates themselves are somewhat of a mystery. Hirsch

himself took 103 photographs, but only personally developed twelve.
(The other 91 were developed in 1997, not using Hirsch’s technique,
but modern image processing. These are not usually on display to the
public.)
The twelve images appear to be candid photographs of people in and

around Ichor Falls. Three of them show the apparent christening of a
building. Several more show the town square or natural environments
with people present, usually moving into or out of frame. The last
image is that of a young fair-haired girl, who is not looking at the
camera.
When cross-referenced with dated newspaper articles from the

Ichor Falls Gazette, public record, paintings, and even other existing
photography, the Hirsch plates were found to be inexplicably wrong.
• The building in the christening photograph does not exist,

and several shops were on the wrong sides of the street or
the wrong street entirely.
• One photograph shows townspeople at a nearby quarry,
apparently walking blindly into a ravine. This was believed
to be an overexposure of two or more plates, but a man
towards the bottom of the frame appears to have fallen.
• Closer inspection of a forest scene shows all visible tree
branches as terminating in human hands.
• Another plate inexplicably shows the bustling town
center, but all the people are either crawling or blurred, in
mid-gallop, on all fours.
• In another, a man walks to the right on what looks
like Fourth Avenue, his head completely obscured by a
38
irregular hanging sign or object blurred in the foreground.

When viewed at an acute angle, it appears that this
oblong object actually is a white, grossly-distorted head,
with the blur not caused by focus issues, but a violent
shivering movement as the shutter closed.
Hirsch’s chalcide technique also captured a quality that is not

reproduceable by modern film photography. There is a translucency, a
confusion of line and image in the Hirsch plates that implies depth
or in some cases, motion, even though these flat plates possess no
lenticular properties.
One photograph on display in the Rand, the one of the young girl,
is mounted off the wall so visitors may view it from different angles.
As the viewer walks slowly from side to side, the young girl appears
entirely motionless except for her lips. This illusion is not a true
capturing of actual movement, but a likely result of poor mixing of
multiple exposures. Still, most agree that it appears she is mouthing
the word “out.”
In 1872, Robert Hirsch left Ichor Falls and moved west.
The camera and Hirsch’s twelve plates are on display seasonally at the
Rand Historical Society Museum at Main and Second.
39
I C H O R FA L L S
THE FULCRUM.
You will either die or lose your mind if you reach the end of this
sentence, so stop reading it — in the early 1930s, a research group
of psychologists, semioticists and English professors in Austria
were researching the fundamentals of understanding language; it
was believed, rather than language simply being an arbitrary (albeit
varyingly complex) system of mnemonics for our conceptualization
of reality, that perhaps once learned and internalized, our use of
language actually became embedded within the root thought
processes involved in our filtration of external, ordered stimuli and
thereby our very grasp of reality, and this team of researchers distilled
what turned out to be a symbolic halt mechanism into a new kind
of punctuation: not a period, or exclamation point, or question mark,
but a cognitive “escape character” they referred to as the “ablation
mark,” or fulcrum for short — though whether the word “fulcrum”
betrays the visual appearance or actual textual annotation of this
new punctuation really, REALLY should not be dwelled upon even
though as a glyph it is fairly unremarkable (it operates differently
when encountered as a component of grammar) — regardless you
should have stopped reading this sentence long, long ago because
at some point I’ve got to end it and it won’t be with a period, or an
exclamation point, or a question mark, but with a fulcrum and only a
fulcrum, because I’ve used all the colons, semicolons, parentheses and
em-dashes I possibly can, and yet you continue reading, making it
40
very difficult for me to continue to make this sentence grammatically

correct, which it MUST be for it is the only thing keeping ME from
dying or losing MY mind, because I DID see the fulcrum and began
writing this sentence in an attempt to maintain my already-faltering
grasp on a world of ordered concepts and symbols tied to meaning,
to stave off the deconstruction of my earliest memories of language,
since it is this deconstruction upon viewing the ablation mark that
is so sudden and so SEVERE that the victim’s sensory perception
actually briefly HALTS, leaving the mind locked in total isolation
that cannot be described as darkness or even absence of darkness,
which in turn brings about a catastrophic sympathetic response of
the central nervous system, a response that I have only managed
to DELAY with a PURELY GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT
SENTENCE which I CANNOT ALLOW TO END, and yet
MUST END, because I CANNOT FOREVER TYPE OUT
A PURELY GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT SENTENCE
WHEN I HAVE USED ALL AVAILABLE PUNCTUATION,
INCLUDING COLONS, SEMICOLONS, PARENTHESES,
EM-DASHES, HYPHENS, SAVE FOR THE DAMNED
ABLATION MARK WHICH IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE
YOU WOULD BREAK YOUR GAZE WITH THIS SINGLE
SENTENCE IMMEDIATELY FOR THE FULCRUM IS
REAL AND IT IS ABSENCE OF ABSENCE AND I CAN’T
GO ON USING WORDS LIKE “FOR” AND “BUT” AND
“AND” TO STRING MORE CLAUSES ONTO THIS STILL-
BUT-NOT-FOR-LONG PURELY GRAMMATICALLY
CORRECT SENTENCE, SO GOD HELP ME AND HAVE
MERCY ON MY SOUL, AND FORGIVE ME FOR WHAT
I AM ABOUT TO DO, BUT I NEVER SHOULD HAVE
OPENED THAT DRAWER IN THE OFFICE AND IF I HAD
NEVER READ THE PAPER I’D HAVE NEVER SEEN THE
FULCRUM BUT GOD HELP ME GOD HELP ME
I DID
[character not supported in any ISO 8859-1 font]
41
I C H O R FA L L S
OPOSSUM SOCIETY.
My grandfather was a big card gambler, and told us a lot of wild
stories from his traveling youth. He mostly kept to five-card stud and
was a master at bluffing — given the nature of most of his stories and
how we believed them, I guess he was at least telling the truth about
that.
The story that stuck with me had happened in the summer of 1940,
he said. He was on furlough and visiting his parents a few miles east
of Ichor Falls. Landlocked and bored, he overheard at some dive
that there was all-night gambling at a nearby Indian reservation,
maybe Moneton or Mattaponi, I forget which. The story was
that a local group of investors calling themselves “the Opossum
Society” gathered there one night a month and talked big policy
and local events; things that had made them wealthy. Intrigued, my
grandfather caught a ride near there, and walked a couple miles on
foot the rest of the way.
Two things to remember about my grandfather: he was as slick

and charming as anything, and he hated to play sober. He said they
poured strong drinks there, and by the time he had the courage to
wander over to the lone table where anyone was still playing, he was
worried they’d kick him out for being too drunk. But he must have
42
turned on the charm, because after twenty minutes or so, he’d been
invited to sit down.
The game was five-card stud. My grandfather didn’t have much

money, but he hung on in the early hands, and after an hour or so, he
had a tidy pile of chips in front of him, to the surprise of the others.
The night wore on, the talk was lively and the drinks kept coming.
An old woman came around with a tray of shots of whiskey, which
she placed in front of each player. Each raised their glasses, and one
man made a toast: “To the Opossum Society, and to new friends.”
They all drank and the dealer continued with a new hand.
My grandfather said the tone of the game changed. All the din
of small talk and high conversation was replaced with the quiet
shuffling of cards, and the clinking of chips. Sensing this, my
grandfather bet conservatively — but it became increasingly difficult
as the pot grew.
Finally deciding the most he’d be out was the money he walked in
with, he went all in on the next hand. The entire table called, and the
cards came down. Although there was a clear winner, and it wasn’t
my grandfather, all eyes on the table turned to one of the other
players, who had trash cards and no chips left. Sweating, he plead
with the dealer, the others in the society, even the old Indian woman.
“You know the rules,” said the winner. At this, the losing player
burst into tears and, knocking over his stool, ran out of the place
whimpering and moaning.
The other players congratulated my grandfather, saying he’d played a

good game, and that he had an open invitation to play next time they
gathered.
The old woman came around with another tray of shots and set them
43
I C H O R FA L L S
down, when my grandfather said, “no more for me, thanks, I’ve got to
get home.” But she insisted he drink. He asked why.
The winning player leaned in and said, “It’s the antidote.”
44
the stillwood king.

In 1806, settler Elijah Brown became lost for two days in what would
later be named the Stillwood Forest, a deceptively-small wooded
area southwest of Ichor Falls proper. When he returned to the town,
Brown was gaunt, dehydrated and starving to the point of near death,
and insisted that he was lost not for two days but nine. He also had
carefully kept journal entries with the rise and set of the sun, and
indeed he had made nine of them.
Exhaustion and confusion clearly played a factor in augmenting

Brown’s story — and of course, after a hard winter, there’s no record
of how dehydrated and starved Brown may have been before getting
lost.
Later expeditions into the Stillwood showed that the forest floor
is incredibly thick with vegetation, with tall, rail-thin trees making
most passage exceedingly difficult. Add to this three similarly-
curving creeks and streams flowing off the Erytheia, the natural
sound-dampening of the trees, and foliage sometimes so thick that it
blocks the sky, and you have a recipe for losing one’s way quite easily.
However, the Stillwood still carries the stigma of being invisibly

endless. The legend of the Stillwood King started, interestingly
enough, almost immediately after Brown’s return.
45
I C H O R FA L L S
Contrary to popular belief, it was not Brown’s story that evolved him
into the spooky figure of legend as time passed, but his experience
probably did inspire it. Historians believe either teachers at a
schoolhouse bordering the Stillwood, or parents of the attending
children, cooked up the legend to keep kids from wandering into the
dangerous woods and getting lost.
The legend says that Brown was not the first person to get lost in the
Stillwood, but another man entered its wooded labyrinth hundreds
of years before. Time doesn’t work in the Stillwood the same way it
does outside of it, and the longer you’re trapped, the longer it seems,
even if you’ve only been gone a few days in the real world.
That first victim became a permanent part of the Stillwood. He never

found his way back home and should have starved to death, but the
Stillwood wouldn’t let its King die — so it slowed his heart to a crawl
along with the rest of him. They say it beats once per day, and that he
can’t move more than a foot in an hour.
When he’s alone, that is.
His clothes are ragged and torn, and he looks more like a bone-
white cadaver than a man. He screams and cries for help, but no
one outside can hear him, and over the centuries, his screams have
become silent.
And as he stalks among the dead leaves in exhaustion, praying for

death to come, the Stillwood becomes a little more a part of him. His
blood is creek-water and moss, and his skin is the color of mushroom
caps.
They say if you ever find yourself in the Stillwood, you have to be
careful where you look. You see, the fact that no one sees him is what
disconnected the Stillwood King from the normal passage of time.
46
He is as slow and silent as the Stillwood itself — that is, until your
eyes fall upon him.
You may catch a sliver of white through a stand of trees, thinking it

to be a crop of mushrooms growing up the side of an old oak. But
if it’s the King, you’ll see that white shape spin around instantly,
revealing two sunken black eyes and a saw-edged mouth locked in a
scream. Now you will hear him.
And now, now he will be quick, and loud, and all the things he can’t
be when no one else is there. He has been waiting for this for a long
time, and while you are looking at him, he’ll move with all the pent-
up time the Stillwood has stolen from him, has saved for him, and he
will be upon you almost faster than you can blink.
Almost, the legend says. So if you see what looks like a crop of
mushrooms as tall as a man in the distance, don’t stop to think, don’t
run, do nothing except shut your eyes.
The Stillwood King already knows you’re there, and the forest is no
obstacle to him when he’s fast. He may now be only inches from you
— but if you’ve shut your eyes in time, that’s where he’ll stay.
Turn completely around, with your eyes still shut tight, and pray that
he wasn’t fast enough to run behind you in that blink.
Now. Feel your way through the forest, around the thin, close, brittle
trees, and over the dead leaves, which will seem oddly quiet. In case
he has positioned himself for you to come to him, change direction
just once. Don’t open your eyes until you’ve gone at least the same
distance as the King was from you, when you first saw him.
With luck, you’ll leave him trapped again, his heart beating once a
day, his movement only a foot an hour.
47
I C H O R FA L L S
But if, with your eyes shut, you slowly press against a wet,
shambling thing that smells like moss and creek-water, and feels
like mushroom caps, open your eyes.
So it will be quick.
48
Excerpts from
a room at cedarspring.
“A Room at Cedarspring” (2008) is a locally-produced documentary by
West Virginia filmmaker Warren Todd.
Cedarspring at the Falls, a gated community in the Elysia district,

was completed in 2006. A sprawling confluence of townhouse,
apartment and loft living, Cedarspring occupies one of the more
scenic regions in or near the Ichor Falls area, nestled in the
grasslands beside the falls themselves.
The community is made up of 80 townhomes, 50 lofts and 50 single-

bedroom apartments, with the kind of aesthetic logic that puts ivy on
the ten-foot-high brick wall that surrounds the complex — evoking
Old World with none of that hard-to-sell history; beauty that draws
you in without letting you past the front gate.
It’s a way to clamp a pleasant lid down on the less-savory aspects of

the town. Despite the last decade of development and the boost to
tourism, Ichor Falls is still rooted firmly in the American mind as
a ghost town, a curiosity of a bygone age — if it’s in the American
mind at all. The New Elysium Group, since its acquisitions in
the 1980s, has invested a lot in a town comeback, but instead of
a respectful merging of Ichor Falls history with a newly-planned
49
I C H O R FA L L S
future, New Elysium bulldozed the old; or, when required by West
Virginia law, simply built around it.
The result is a two-faced town; a patchwork monster of city planning.

Lower Alethia is still a suburb in ruins, but you wouldn’t get the
impression it was even there, with glossy places like the New
Elysium Fashion Park, a rapidly-changing town center, and of course
Cedarspring. The town is one of deep, deep history, of tragedy, and of
the triumph of human perseverance. Successful future plans will need
to honor that. You can’t honor a memory by trying to hide it, ignore
it or repel it.
Cedarspring, with its impersonal McMansion townhomes, stuccoed,

faux-finished walls, pleasantly-distressed murals and Americana-cute
street names, is Ichor Falls by way of Disneyland.
Today, none of the 180 living units in Cedarspring are occupied. New
Elysium still pays gardeners, caretakers, trash service and security
guards, but no one actually lives in what was supposed to be the
hottest new upscale property in a thirty-mile radius.
I spoke with Michael Hayes, a junior architect and planner for

Cedarspring and one of the few people to return my phone calls.
What were your feelings on Cedarspring?
Michael Hayes: I’ve worked on a number of these

townhomes for various developers. Pleasant Valley Homes,
Turnkey at the Pines, the New Avalon in Atlanta. Cedarspring
was ambitious. I don’t doubt that Elysium jumped the gun on
the project as far as the timeline. I think they’d intended to
have the rest of the town further along, drawing a bigger crowd
than it was.
50
Cedarspring has been vacant for two years. Do you think the
“faux authenticity” angle just isn’t accepted in a history-rich town
like Ichor Falls?
MH: A lot of times it doesn’t play in a town like this, where
the contrast between faux rustic treatments and the truly old
is so stark. But it wasn’t our target demographic. We were after
people who wanted quaint country living, but didn’t want to
have to replace lead pipes and have the foundation leveled. The
mist in Ichor Falls is a draw for the area, but all that moisture
means you’ve got 4,000 houses in need of a serious overhaul.
Communities like Cedarspring succeed in nearly every other

instance. So I don’t think that’s why it hasn’t appealed to
homebuyers.
Paul Lloyd, one of the first tenants of Cedarspring, moved there in

February of 2008, and broke his lease to leave in May. I traveled to
Portland, Texas, where Paul currently lives.
Paul Lloyd: I lived there for four months. Four months

too long. I still think about it.
Talk about what happened to you while living in Cedarspring.
PL: This is going to sound really odd. But it’s your home. This
stuff matters. No one wants to feel like an intruder in their
own home. The whole time I lived there, there was — it’s like
there was an impersonal feel to every part of the house. That’s
not a surprise... I’ve lived in that kind of housing before and
it’s all a little cookie-cutter.
It’s supposed to be this getaway. But this was like... you know
that feeling you have, sitting in the dentist’s waiting room? The
buzz of the fluorescent lights, the cold, the antiseptic smell?
51
I C H O R FA L L S
It’s anxiety. It’s isolation, like you’re held separate from the rest
of the living world. Cedarspring magnified that feeling ten
thousand times.
And it’s everything in Cedarspring. It wasn’t just my house,

but the streets, the empty playgrounds, the fountains. And it
had nothing to do with them being empty — I had friends
living in other units. We ended up getting together weekly,
then every couple nights, finally hanging out for hours every
single evening, until past midnight. No one wanted to be alone.
I started having nightmares. Not about death or monsters,

but... suddenly I’d be in this empty white space, this featureless
room. The sense of isolation became this huge weight, a billion
tons of invisible rock pressing me into the ground, suffocating
me. A slow-moving glacier of pointlessness about to slide over
me. I’d wake up and that feeling would eat me alive. Same
with the other tenants. We’d gather just to be near something
alive, something natural. Something real.
After three months, it got real bad. I started getting into fights
in places, screaming in my room. I... actually would cut myself.
Just to feel something. Some of my friends there admitted to
the same thing. I’ve never done anything like that before. And
I haven’t since I moved out. It just got so bad. I stopped crying,
stopped laughing. It’s like we were going hollow.
I don’t want to get melodramatic about it, but I’ve thought

about it a lot since then. People think of hell as some burning
pit of torment, but I don’t think it is. I read once that the
real hell is absence of God. Ichor Falls has a reputation of
being a haunted town, and when I lived there I saw my share
of things out of the corner of my eye. But I never saw them
at Cedarspring. They just weren’t there. And somehow that
became the opposite of comforting.
52
Ghosts haunt old buildings, old places. Is it possible for a place

without a past to be haunted by its own lack of history? By
bleakness?
Can a place to be haunted by absence?
53
I C H O R FA L L S
convenience.
Business these days... it ain’t what it was.
Moved here back in... don’t even remember now; it’s been that long.
Figured, town needs a convenience store — hell, the whole world
seems to need convenience stores. Why deprive myself of a steady
living? Built my little store. Easy access to the highway, to the town
main road. No-brainer, right? Get the tourists coming in for the
Falls, and get the locals who need a quick somethin’ or other. I win,
the town wins, works all around.
Seemed to work for a time, too: got the locals pretty regular, got the
tourists sometimes, even got the odd state trooper who was comin’ in
to have a look around.
That store was the first smart thing I did. Life just crawls by when
you got worries. Bills to pay, job after job, letting you go, gettin’ fired
or laid off. Not now that I owned somethin’ people needed, people
wanted. Time went by, I didn’t even notice. Years. Made pretty good
money for my station, though I can’t say I saved much. How the time
did fly.
Did notice though, when the tourists started dropping off, and
the state troopers started picking up. I still had the locals, but
54
they started bein’ different locals: at first, it was just poorer than
usual, slower than usual — had to repeat myself when talkin’ to
them, y’know? Also noticed how they wouldn’t come in the store
if the troopers were here — figured it was ’cuz they were illegals or
somethin’. Nothing against that — times were gettin’ tough all over,
and s’long as they paid, I had no complaints.
Nights were hardest — long nights, just me and the store, the odd
shufflin’ local coming in or goin’, the lights buzzin’ overhead. Got
to talkin’ to myself, playin’ the radio to make it seem like there was
more company — these new customers couldn’t chit-chat for crap, I
tell you that. Some seemed more smarter than others, but even they
wouldn’t talk; you’d get a grunt or three, but mostly they just stared at
you with this gleam in their eyes.
Every small town has its downturns and whatnot. Crime goes up
when the road gets bumpy. Started carryin’ a .38 revolver in the store
— body’s gotta protect himself, don’t he? Heard the state troopers
on their CBs, talkin’ more ’n more ’bout trouble in the town, strange
goings-on and the like. Wouldn’t know, never mingled with the
locals. Their money was good enough for me, but they were a weird
lot. Draggin’ their feet, wearing rags and dirty things, all homeless
or squatters or the like. I’d see ’em congregatin’ in my parking lot
after dark. Keep your perversions to yourself, I says, and we got no
problems. But still, I started lookin’ forward to having cops in the
store — they were there to lay down the law, and the shufflers knew
it, and it kept ’em scared. I liked that.
Another year goes by like that, things aren’t lookin’ much better the
next. Pretty soon I can’t count on sellin’ anything higher-priced than
a stick a gum, a pack of cigarettes. These filthy shufflers’d come in,
poke around, give me that stare of theirs and walk without so much
as buyin’ a gumball. I figure the town had it real bad then. One thing
for a person to go into a store and not buy anything, but to come
back? Again and again? Like they were just comin’ in out of the cold
55
I C H O R FA L L S
or somethin’. Didn’t appreciate that. No, I did not.
One night, I was gettin’ ready to close up; one of them shufflin’ locals
comes in. He’s shufflin’ round, lookin’ at stuff, pawin’ at different
things. Takin’ his sweet time behind the racks. “Hurry up back there!”
I yell out to him. “It’s late, I’m closin’ up!”
Damn idiot just grunts, keeps shufflin’, makes these weird little
circles as he goes. “What’re you, deaf ? I said move your ass back
there!” I yell. It’s cold, and the game was on that night — wanted to
get home, kick off the shoes, grab a beer, hunker down and cheer my
guys on.
Shuffler back there — all matted, stringy hair an’ dirty grubby clothes
— I swear he’s shuffling a trail of sweat and grime all over the store,
rubbin’ his filth all over the place. All I hear is his dirty feet shufflin’,
movin’ to another spot, still makin’ those noises, probably pawin’ all
my merchandise, getting everything filthy back there so I’d have to
clean up before opening in the morning. Filthy stinkin’ shuffler.
I decide the whole business is too weird for me and my patience’s just
run out. I grab my gun, not because I think I’ll need it, but just to be
safe — be pretty stupid to confront a guy and leave my best defense
in the front counter drawer. I walk back there, get close enough to
him. Close enough to smell the filth. It’s steaming off him, into the
air around him and me, and he’s just staring, staring at me through
that greasy hair of his, those dirty gray bloodshot eyes just laughin’ at
me. This filthy maggot is laughing at me! At ME! Like he’s got more
business in here than I ever did.
“I said, I’m closing up now. You hafta come back tomorrow if you
wanna buy anything,” I say, nice and slow and loud, and he starts
grinning at me, and his teeth are the only thing that ain’t dirty on
this maggot, and he’s movin’ closer to me, and I dunno, he’s like,
rippling under his dirty baggy clothes, or maybe it’s just the smell,
56
the stench escapin’ his body, pourin’ out his goddamned filthy sleeves
and pant legs, and it rattles me but by then I’m already so angry.
I grab my gun and point it at him — “You get the hell out of here!
You get!” but he’s still movin’ close to me, that stupid fat white grin
closer, and the glint in his eyes matches the glint on my gun, and the
smell — God, the smell is everywhere — and I’m thinkin’ how the
stench in my nostrils, that same air was under those clothes a second
ago, escapin’ when he moved, steamin’ out from his filthy body and
gettin’ into my lungs, inside me, and he’s rubbing all the filth he
carries with ‘im, the filth he makes, all over my piece-of-shit store,
and God I hate this town and this place and him, him and his kind
are what’s ruined this town and all those years I worked here, buildin’
and savin’ and growin’ something to keep the lights on at home and
these dirty stupid shufflers ruined it all and he’s so close now, and
that ripplin’ under his clothes, it’s faster and his teeth are closer, and
the shine in his eyes is so bright I can’t move, I’m so damn angry now
—
He’s even closer now, and I can see things I couldn’t before, and I
know what the rippling is, and the smell, and the minute his breath
hits my body, I snap. I just snap. Next thing I know, I look down and
I see my revolver in my hand, cylinder empty. I put all six bullets into
’im.
There wasn’t as much to clean up as I thought — just tossed it into

my trunk, dropped it off in the woods on my way home. Caught the
tailend of the game, too. My guys won! Slept like a baby that night,
and came in early the next morning, cleaned up from the night
before.
Locals dropped off pretty much right after that. Wasn’t too surprised
by that. I think the shufflers knew what I’d done, and I was proud to
do it — they knew that, too. Did get a big uptick in state troopers,
and a little while later, they ran a whole mess of shufflers outta town.
57
I C H O R FA L L S
Good riddance. Still think they didn’t do a good enough job. Too soft
’bout the whole thing. But I guess they got their rules, and they did
what they were told.
The whole thing kinda gave me a little mental boost, tell ya the truth.
I took up huntin’ as a hobby right after that — back to Nature, back
to God sort of thing. I ain’t one to brag, but I once caught a... well,
you know the joke. Wish I’d taken more trophies, but night hunting
is about speed and surprise. Cuttin’ off mementos woulda ruined the
moment. Had to stop a few years back, local game learned new places
to hide — and my bones were getting tired.
I guess the troopers found a new route at some point, because they
stopped comin’ around as much, but I hung on — still got the
highway trade, and a little business from the town over. Plus, knowin’
the territory now, I hired myself out as a kinda hunter tour guide,
sellin’ what I learned over the years. Made some money.
Now that this redevelopment stuff has started, I’m glad to see the old
stuff go. ’Bout time this city had some fresh blood, I say.
58
twenty minutes in the dark.

Kay bolted upright in bed.
She swore she heard something. A crack, a thump; something low

and bassy, but sudden, and loud, and it came from beyond the closed
door to her bedroom. She moved her phone aside to see the bright
red numbers on her nightstand radio: 3:03 AM.
She sat very still in the pitch darkness, her concentration entirely
focused on what she could hear — which at the moment was
nothing.
A minute crept by. She slept with every door in the house shut;
something she used to do when she was younger because she was
afraid of ghosts. Aside from them not being real in the first place,
she knew it was stupid to assume a ghost would bother to open a
door, but it made her feel safer. Just as pulling the blankets over her
head did, which she contemplated doing.
What am I doing in Ichor Falls, she asked herself. America’s most

haunted city and I had to choose a school near it. Kay originally didn’t
want to buy into all the stories of dead locksmiths seeking vengeance,
the undying and insane trapped in an endless black forest near her
house, children burned alive in their schoolhouses; but once she’d
59
I C H O R FA L L S
given in, Kay couldn’t help but read all the literature she could find
about Ichor Falls’ terrible past.
It wasn’t so bad during the day. And it never seemed to bother her
friends. They could laugh it off. What’s wrong with me? I jump at every
noise and shadow.
Another minute. Still listening and hearing nothing, her eyes

adjusted and she now could make out details of her dark room. The
bedroom door was shut. Window shut. But there’s that coat rack
across the room with her hooded jacket on it, the folds in the hood
hanging softly open to the floor, sleeves wrinkled but still neat at the
sides. It wasn’t hard to imagine a body or torso floating inside that
jacket, the hood lowered to conceal some terrible sunken bleeding
face with eyes like wounds. Any minute now the sleeves would slowly
lift up and start reaching for the bed...
Was that... the sound of something sliding along the wall outside?
No. Stop it. She squinted a little and could see her closet door. Not
shut all the way. Open just an inch, that inch seeming far darker than
all the dark corners of this room combined. What stares out from that
inch? she thought. What waited inside, until the dead of night? What
made noise to wake the slumbering victim, to locate her in the dark?
What needed only a single inch to slip out into reality like a black
cloak ragged with fangs, scraping the edges of the closet door like
clawing chalkboard as it pressed its way out...
Kay listened again, gripping her covers tightly to her face. Another
thump. Wood on wood, wood on brick. A squeal of casters. Low
rumbles. These sounds were real. Were they inside the house? If they
were, they’d be in the front room. Two doors away.
Suddenly Kay felt cold electricity crawl up her spine at the distinct,
ringing sound of metal jangling, like silverware criss-crossing. Like a
cannibal from a cartoon. Her skin crawled. What was that story? she
60
thought without forming words as she sat petrified in the dark. The
old hag, quite dead, reaching from her grave for the top of her tombstone
to pull herself out, like some single-rung ladder to hell. Stop it. She used to
live in this house. More muted thumps. From the cupboards. She was
murdered in this bed. Shut up. She’s missing one small bone from her calf,
and she’s come back for it.
No. STOP IT. Or the ghost of a child, a poltergeist, not haunting one
house but the whole town SHUT UP making it his playground in death.
The sound of something heavy dragging. Vibration. He often finds an
unwilling playmate in his victims NO but if you are lucky he will show
you what the flames did to his tiny body ENOUGH!
She was remembering yet another story when she heard a click.
Her bedroom door creaked open, so slowly, achingly.
Kay’s eyes fixed on the crack, her face locked in a silent scream.
She had not invented the sounds, they were real, and now the door
opened, the door is open and it’s here it’s now inside
Student Murdered; Killer Shot Dead by

Police
Falls Police shot and killed a burglar early this
morning, but not before he had fatally stabbed
a woman in her Alethia home during an aborted
robbery attempt.
Officials say Travis Wayne Garrol, 36, broke into

the home of student Kayleigh Harris, 23, around
3:00 AM. Garrol was witnessed wielding a knife as
he exited the home, and when police confronted
him, he refused to drop the weapon.
61
I C H O R FA L L S
Police say that although the house was in disarray

from Garrol’s search for valuables, there was no
sign whatsoever of a struggle in the bedroom.
“It was peculiar that twenty whole minutes passed

between the break-in, and her death,” said Falls
Police Commissioner Honora Volney. “She died with
the phone right beside her, untouched. We don’t
know why she didn’t feel compelled to dial for
help at the first signs of trouble.”
62
AWARE.
She snapped back from the cognitive abyss she found herself staring
into, something that happened far too often. It got in the way. It
always did. The thick, dark air hung over her supine form, enveloped
by a deafening stillness, her body cold and numb with old sweat from
a receding sliver of dream.
She steadied her thoughts and concentrated. Not again, not again.
There was the anticipated excruciating tensing of muscle fiber at the
corners, pulling one against the other until whole, striated networks
of intertwined flesh stiffened like toothpicks, forcing hot blood from
capillaries, sending plump cells and smoke-thin platelets cascading
into arterial walls. The abyss again. How long it lasted she could
never tell. She cut herself free, willed it. A sensation of electricity
hit her hard, as it always did, and here came the cruel entanglement
of thick black hairs, hundreds sliding against hundreds, clawing and
scraping as the familiar arc of light appeared, searing her. She often
thought it would be better to get struck with the harsh glare all at
once, but as it was, that brilliant scalpel slid across, exposing a deep,
raw swath of nerve endings that had been absolutely poised for hours
waiting for this tiny, ragged white line of pain.
Lost in it for a moment. She could never feel exactly when it

takes over. Back now. Helpless, she now felt a growing rush, a
63
I C H O R FA L L S
tremendous pressure that welled up from below, a single heartbeat

reverberating within that flooded channel — even this she sensed
— and mercifully the pinched, hard edges of her tear ducts slid open,
offering a minor respite from the sensation of dry, corrugated flesh
grinding against taut, throbbing sclera.
Her eyes were finally open.
Less than a second had passed. Sixty thousand to go.
64
OSD09-H03.
“How — what — what kind of foods do they have?”
Four independent subroutines went to work analyzing the phrase

uttered by the four-year-old: expression context, voice recognition,
tone analysis, body language. Tone analysis needed to be the fastest,
and luckily it was also the simplest. No quavering or whining
detected. Had it been, the other subroutines would have been
directed to stop, and control would be given over to an array of
prewritten comfort dialogues.
Expression context came next. Eye contact from the child was only
occasional. The image analysis package, in concert with the body
language and expression routines, determined that the child, a fair-
haired boy, was occupied by something below frame. The RFID
scan identified it as a toy train, one of twelve toys in the room. The
dialogue routine was updated with the name of the object, potentially
to be used later if the child remained silent for a specified amount of
time (“Hey, is that a toy train you’ve got there?”).
Voice recognition had been dissecting the phrase all this time.
Tone analysis supported the conclusion that the child had asked a
question.
65
I C H O R FA L L S
hwʌt kaɪŋdɑ fudz’ duː ðeɪ ɦæv’ ?
“Food” triggered a subarray of typical questions, and once the

substrings “kind of ” and “they” had been identified and routed
through the context and grammar parsers, it was a simple matter to
locate the most likely question being asked.
The response set, indexed by question, was accessed and syllabically

divided for the vocal synthesis package. Then, poring over a hash
table of pre-identified lingual structures of the child’s father, the
synthesizer generated an audio file by conflating the two data
streams. The file is equalized to include a bassy subaudio component
at 180 Hz, creating a comforting, warm “in-room” effect that
mimicked the tone heard by the child with their head upon the
father’s chest.
Meanwhile, a 1280x700 image of the father, taken years ago when

he was first deployed, is overlayed onto a digital model (from the
neck up only — originally the Department of Defense had planned
to include hands so the model could gesture, but this was abandoned
early due to overcomplexity). The resulting hybrid is passed through a
series of basic lingual configurations (augmented with syllable-stress-
driven head movements) and converted into a number of keyframes.
These individual frames can be presented directly on the viewing

screen, synchronized to the audio file. A series of static-simulating
filters create “webcam believability” and reduce Morian “uncanny
valley” effects, which children have been shown to be particularly
sensitive to.
Once it was understood that they want to believe, the goal became to
give them less visual fidelity, not more.
66
They give us all kinds of foods here to keep us healthy. Lots

of things like vegetables, steak, chicken. Even some of your
favorites like pizza. You like pizza, huh, buddy?
The microphone registers no audio response, but expression context

identifies upturned corners of the mouth and squinting eyes.
“I miss you, daddy.”
A timer preset with a value of five minutes plus or minus anywhere

from zero to thirty seconds reaches zero. A half-dozen randomly-
selected dialogue trees are deallocated from memory.
I miss you too, Josh. I’m coming home real soon, okay?
Daddy has to go now. Be a good boy, okay? I love you.
I love you.
Somewhere in the room, a hard drive whirs.
67
I C H O R FA L L S
Indistinguishable.
“It is a process which I derived empirically. All motion, either
generated by or imparted to an object, obeys the same principle.
When your arm moves, is the motion continuous, or are there
discretized points, however small, at which there is no in-between?”
“The latter case, I would imagine, at some subatomic level,” I offer.
“Indeed,” he replies. “In my work, I have discovered it matters not

the timeframe in which the motion occurs, nor the force that impels
it. On film, during the traditional application of the process, the
movement is indistinguishable from life. Would you agree?”
“Aside from the crudity of the animation as has been practiced in the
past,” I say, “that is entirely the point.”
“Yes, you have chosen the perfect word,” he says, opening the black
leather bag I have been eyeing since we entered the room. Perhaps he
has noticed. “The stop-motion animator’s work is quite crude. I have
refined the processes, and refined them again until the medium was
freed of its old moorings, yes? A new art form emerged, and a new
science. At a sufficient level the two are indistinguishable.”
68
“Many things seem to be,” I say. He smiles at this.
“But enough talk,” he returns as his smile is replaced with a stern air
of professionalism. There is some hint of pride in his face, though,
as he says “perhaps, to begin, I should introduce you to one of my
assistants.”
He claps his hands three times. From a shadowy corner, a misshapen

clay thing the size of a man shambles jerkily across the room towards
us, its skin rippling as if plied by countless unseen fingers.
69
I C H O R FA L L S
Three Miles Up a
Narrow Dirt Road.
Leighton had given up on his garden faster than he’d given up on
other hobbies, pastimes, occupations, acquaintances, friends. He’d
started one out of the sheer boredom of living out here, in farmland
considered secluded even for the Falls. His closest neighbors seemed
to glean some kind of satisfaction from tending small gardens;
they were at least three miles down the narrow dirt road in either
direction, which he liked.
Contrasted with the depth of Leighton’s other emotions, “like” was

an ocean.
This garden, if it could be called that now or ever, had yielded

nothing — a few stark white shoots that dried yellow and wrinkled;
countless weeds; and, in the far corner nearest the back of the house
by the rusting water meter, one sad green tomato immediately beset
upon by caterpillars. He ran his fingers through what was left of
his gray hair, and considered pulling all the plants up, but it was a
thought that had come to him many times in the past, never acted
upon. Let the earth do what it will, he thought.
Leighton’s existence was both bleak and self-applied. He had had a

life once, known people once. A child of a stern upbringing, he had
70
worked as a materials scientist, a metallurgist, for an iron ore refinery

up in Point Pleasant for forty-odd years, and took early retirement.
He attempted to teach physics to high school students for a year
or so, but he had no interest in imparting knowledge to those too
stubborn to receive it.
There was something pathetic, infuriating about youth today and

their parents. The people of Point Pleasant — or anywhere really.
People got on Leighton’s nerves; sometimes he couldn’t understand
how anyone could stand to be a part of the world.
Ichor Falls was a dim town, a gray town, which appealed to him
— the locals kept to themselves, and in all the time he’d lived out
here he never considered himself one of them. The mist gave him a
good, cold feeling. From this distance he could barely even make out
the lights of the highway.
The feeling was broken, often, by the local newspaper delivery. The
man parked his truck further south where the dirt wasn’t so soft, and
walked the 300 yards up to Leighton’s mailbox. He kept thinking one
of these days he’d have to move it further away from the house; as it
is around this time of day he tried to be inside so as to avoid small
talk. But here Leighton was, standing outside staring at his garden.
He set his jaw.
The delivery man waved a long wave as he came closer with a stack
of ads Leighton had no interest in reading. “Morning, Leighton.”
“Morning.”
“Last stop of the day. Always good to see you — means my shift is
over.” He had made this joke too many times to count.
“Just in the box, please.”
71
I C H O R FA L L S
“No time for chit-chat, huh? Something you’ve gotta get back to?”
“I enjoy my solitude, and I wish you’d respect that,” Leighton said,

already moving towards his front door. He stopped and turned back
to the man. “And if all you have for me is advertising, then make your
last stop somewhere else.”
“You want us to suspend delivery, then? I can put in the form for you,
but you’ll have to sign it.”
Leighton responded by angrily slamming his front door.
This was his never-ending experience with others — no matter what

steps you took to be left alone, it intruded. It persisted. Wasn’t it
obvious from the way he acted, Leighton thought, what his desires
were? From the company he didn’t keep? From the places he refused
to live? From the state of his garden? He had a house full of journals
and books to read.
What could be more simple, more easily carried out, than to leave
another man completely alone?
The next morning, Leighton awoke to the sensation that something

had changed. For the better. As he dressed, he couldn’t place it
— perhaps he had slept better the night before. Or perhaps it was as
simple as giving the newspaper man a piece of his mind. Speaking
of which, he wondered if the paper would be cluttering his doorstep
this morning.
He opened the front door: no sign of the paper, and it would have
been here by now. Looking across his land, he felt like the lights of
the highway were dimmer somehow, more distant, less of a reminder
of the clutter and pointlessness beyond it.
72
Then he heard the sound of an engine on his road. As it drifted

closer, it became unmistakable: the newspaper delivery truck.
Leighton debated staying inside, but decided to have it out with the
delivery man once and for all.
Up the dirt road came the man carrying his bundle of insipid gossip.
Leighton didn’t give him time to call out a good-morning. “You turn
around and get back in your truck, son! I told you I’m not interested,”
he shouted.
The man reacted as if he had heard a far-off noise, and craned his
neck to hear it. “Leighton?” he called back.
“Yes, Leighton! The one who doesn’t want your rag! I don’t care if you
have to sign that form for me! I won’t accept another paper!”
The man, still holding the newspaper, had a very confused look,
and squinted into the mist. He looked as if he was going to speak,
but instead he turned around as if realizing something, then moved
quickly back to his truck, which was actually difficult for Leighton to
see in the heavy mist.
He turned to his front door and found it a little slick, from all the
mist, he thought. He gripped it tighter and pushed it open with
some difficulty. Walking through his living room, he found that even
the floor seemed wet or slick in some way, even though there was no
visible moisture.
It was a slickness or slippery quality unlike any he had felt before,

and it was no better when he stepped on the carpeted floor. He
thought he could feel it where his clothing touched his skin, as well,
and still believed it to be humidity or moisture until he picked
up a softcover novel from the bookshelf, and actually found it
difficult to hold.
73
I C H O R FA L L S
He pinched a single page between thumb and forefinger, but the

slickness remained, in addition to another sensation — or lack of
it. He couldn’t feel the roughness of the paper page. Or the book’s
smooth cover. Or the wood of the bookshelf. Or his own clothing.
It was as though he now interacted with everything through a thick,
lukewarm, invisible oily curtain. This feeling invaded his touch, his
hearing, his sight, like a fog rolling in off the lake. The world was
turning gray and quiet. And slick.
Now Leighton soundlessly slipped on the rug and hit the floor face
first, sliding halfway across his living room floor. He felt none of it;
his body had gone completely numb. He could still move freely, but
without any kind of functional traction or sensation he had been
reduced to merely observing himself flop on the ground — a pair of
eyes in a nerveless, man-shaped jellyfish out of water.
Am I having a stroke appeared in his terror-stricken thoughts, and

suddenly he found himself screaming for help, but the sound — the
sound issuing from his throat was wrong. In his mind, he was saying
“help,” but the word came out as a distant, quiet series of clicks.
He got hold of himself there on the floor, and reached up to grip the
horizontal slats on the back of a wooden chair. He folded his arms
around the top slat, and though he slid wildly back and forth, he was
able to brace himself up into a kneeling position and hold his legs
together. He turned his head to gaze into a hallway mirror.
In the mirror was the faint impression of a naked man seated on

the floor. Leighton’s clothing had all but slid off of him in the
panic. They lay around him, not slick or wet, but as if discarded by a
misbehaving child.
He was very aware of the sharp pressure of the slat in the crook of his
elbow as he hung there, twisting idly, craning his head this way and
that as if a solution would present itself if he looked hard enough.
74
But as he braced himself there, even that pressure at his elbow began
to fade; sitting here, perfectly still, it was now impossible to know the
position of his body at all without looking.
Leighton felt disoriented, but not dizzy or tired, or hurt. His mind
raced. He cast his gaze at the telephone on the endtable, beside the
couch, not more than ten feet away but completely unreachable.
Whatever this numbness was, he knew he wasn’t injured physically.
Maybe this was a stroke, or an embolism; something that wouldn’t
wait for help.
I still have control over my body, even though it doesn’t feel like it, he
reasoned, to calm himself. I’m not sliding on anything. Something’s
weakened me. I can still reach the phone and dial it. I can crawl.
Leighton carefully released his hold on the chair, having to trust

memories and guesses of what that felt like, as his body registered
no feeling whatsoever now. He was aware of everything he should be
feeling, but wasn’t. Even the sound of the unsteady chair tapping its
arm on the underside of the table was fading; in minutes, Leighton
would be completely deaf.
To his surprise Leighton suddenly found his point of view sideways,

his naked arms spread out to his sides on the floor. He had fallen.
He must have landed flat on his stomach, hard, but he felt nothing.
The transition from vertical to horizontal hadn’t even registered:
dizziness, adrenaline from loss of balance, the sound and jarring sting
of impact. All cues were gone.
I’m going to bring my left arm over my head, and crawl on my belly,
Leighton strained, hoping that his vision wouldn’t leave before he’d
dialed 911. He could do this, he thought. Indeed, he watched as his
left arm slid slowly over, his hand now pointing somewhere in the
direction of the phone. Now all he had to do was pull.
75
I C H O R FA L L S
He had no idea how long this would take him, but little by little, he
promised himself, he would get to that telephone. He felt some surge
of relief as he noticed his viewpoint lift slightly from the floor to one
some inches above it. I’m doing it, I’m lifting my head.
His field of view increased as he rose himself off the floor. The
expanse of carpet no longer dominated the right half of his sight
— here he was two, three, now five inches off the floor. Leighton
could not tell if he was smiling, nor could he tell if that smile had
fallen when he realized the left half of his sight was now filled with
the off-white, ragged plane of the stucco ceiling.
Leighton’s numb body bobbed gently on the ceiling like a half-filled,

gray balloon. He still had control of his eyes, and looked down at the
carpet some six or seven feet below him, his limbs not hanging from
his torso, but unguided, buoyant in the air: weightless.
Looking directly at a bent leg, he realized he could see through it

to the chair below, as if his body was becoming immaterial. Hours
passed, or days, months, years. His vision had long dimmed to a
polite gray blur, leaving Leighton alone with only a roaring, panicked
mind, incorporeal and twisting in the dark, screaming.
“Appreciate you making the trip up here,” said the delivery man. “I
knew he’d prefer to be left alone and all, but something about our last
exchange — ”
“Understandable,” the officer said, looking around the front room

one last time. “Probably not the best idea for an old man to live so far
out in the country when he could fall down, hurt himself or worse.”
Another policeman rapped on the door frame before poking his head
in. “There’s no sign of anything out here, nothing suspicious anyway.
Seems like he just wandered off.”
76
“There’s our answer, or as much of one as we need,” said the first

officer to the delivery man. “We’ll see if anyone’s caught sight of
him.”
“I hope he hasn’t gotten himself hurt,” the delivery man said.
“Well, you did the right thing to tell us,” said the officer. “He’s lucky
you gave enough of a damn to check on him. You make that much
noise about not needing the world, sometimes the world decides it
doesn’t need you either.”
77
I C H O R FA L L S
shining one from

above the clouds.
Excerpt from “Displaced Gods: Mythology Connections Amongst
Forgotten Peoples,” Dr. James W. Heyer; Bristol Press, St. John’s Fields,
1917
Of an interesting parallel between certain vanished African, Inuit,

and Asian native groups, is a creation story gathered from the
oral tradition of the Moneton tribe in West Virginia; where this
creation story breaks from the others, however, is that it seems not
a world- and mankind-creation story, but a very geographic- and
tribe- specific location. Another way it differs from the others in the
“Shining One” arc is that it makes little mention of Shining One’s
people or home (which in other stories, is always mentioned as being
‘above the clouds,’ or ‘beyond the moon’ [Kleiner, 1903]).
Little is known of the Moneton, save for isolated instances of trading

“pelts of strange and curious nature” [Alvord, 1911], and having what
local legend described as a “curious and hesitant nature — uneasy
was their approach, and always did they seem to listen for sounds
unheard” [Bidgood and Heyer, 1909].
...And the animals and the trees of the land called to Trickster,
“Save us from Shining One, for his ways are cruel, and his
78
manner is harsh.” And Trickster thought, and knew that he

could not destroy Shining One, for powerful was he, and strong
was his magic. And the animals called out to Trickster again,
“Save us from Shining One, he who destroys the fields and
poisons the water;” and still Trickster stayed home, for he was
afraid. And the trees called to Trickster again, “Save us from
Shining One, he hides the sun and blights the wood;” but
Trickster was still afraid, and hid his head from the cries of his
children. And the animals and the trees of the land wept, and
suffered under Shining One’s evil for many moons more.
Then, the other Gods came to Trickster, and said “Soon, Man
will be on the Earth. You must go and stop Shining One, for
Man cannot bear against such evil.” And Trickster was still
afraid, but knew that he could not stand against all the Gods’
will. So Trickster went to Shining One, and said, “Come, let us
race against each other.” And Shining One looked at Trickster,
and knew it was a trick; but Shining One said “What will
you give me if I win?” and Trickster said, “My eyes to see into
the hearts of man; my ears to hear their hidden fears; and my
tongue to whisper pain into their minds.” And Shining One
said, “What must I give if you win?” and Trickster said, “Your
heart, which I will create a great river with; your bones, which
I will cast into the earth; and your mind, which I will hide in
the great woods.” And Shining One looked at Trickster, and
Trickster was afraid — but still Trickster laughed, and Shining
One said “I accept.”
And all the Gods and all the animals and all the trees gathered,
and watched as Shining One and Trickster raced; they raced for
days, and for nights, until finally they could race no more. And
Trickster came to Shining One with hatred in his heart, and
slew Shining One, and cut his body, and hid the pieces in the
land. Shining One’s heart, he made a great waterfall which fed
into a mighty river; Shining One’s bones, he cast them into the
79
I C H O R FA L L S
earth, where they blackened and hardened; Shining One’s mind

fell into a great sleep, and was hidden in the great woods, where
it slept and dreamed, and made much confusion in the wood as
well.
And all the Gods and all the animals and all the trees took
parts of Shining One, and hid them as well, until there was no
part of Shining One left, except his spirit, which none could
find.
And all the Gods and the animals and the trees and Trickster
looked for Shining One’s spirit, and grew afraid when they
could not find it; for all knew that if Shining One’s spirit
remained free, no matter how many pieces his body lay in,
Shining One’s evil could be continued.
And then the trees cried out, “We see it!” and grabbed at
Shining One’s spirit — but it moved too fast, and left the
trees weak and still; and the animals cried out, “We see it!” and
grabbed at Shining One’s spirit — but it moved too fast again,
and left the animals scared and feeble; and the Gods cried out,
“We see it!” and grabbed at the spirit — but it was too strong,
and scared all the Gods away.
And Trickster looked around at the still wood, and at the dumb
animals, and knew Shining One’s spirit could not be stopped,
though it was tied to that place; and so Trickster caused great
mists to form, so that none could find where Shining One
remained; and when Man came, Trickster put his mark on
some of them, and made them keepers of the secret place.
For further reading on the Moneton, see Alvord and Bidgood, 1912.
80
Kris Straub was born and raised in
Southern California.
The closest he has been to Ichor Falls is

Charlotte, North Carolina, which is about
150 miles south. It was close enough.
Read his new horror comic strip at

broodhollow.com.

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A V I S I T OR ’ S GU I DE .

Read more online at www.ichorfalls.com.

First printing. Contains material originally published at

Published by Nightlight Press

WELCOME TO THE FALLS. 6

WELCOME TO THE FALLS.

Districts and Location.

Alethia. Southeastern district. Lower-middle class housing, not much

Ichor Falls High School and Sweetbrook Hospital are both in

Lower Alethia. Southwestern district. Close to Stillwood Forest,

Lower Alethia is also closest to Allegheny State Penitentiary (14

Oneiros. Northwestern district. Sparser housing, more large

Olympus. Town center and business district. Centrally located.

The Olympus district houses many points of interest including Ichor

Ichor Falls is located at 38.600237, -82.167435.

town history and lore.

Cuthbert, a Greek history enthusiast, was struck by the beauty of the

During a visitation of Union General McClellan and his men in

But the reputation of Ichor Falls as a major metal producer waned

By 1884, many of the mines had slowed production to a trickle

1900 - 1950. Logging operations began as early as 1870, at the first

In 1904, Harold Marsh, a chemist, discovered that Ichor Falls wood

With demand high, an eager workforce and low property values,

1950 - 1980. The first isolated cases of illness caused by chemical

Ichor Falls was becoming a ghost town.12

1980 - present. Ichor Falls lay undisturbed in the mist for

burned down in 1964 (cause unknown, but arson seemed likely).

In 1978, surviving citizens and their relatives were informed by a

In 1986 a coalition of land developers consisting of Iroquois

The New Elysium Group’s goal was to revitalize Ichor Falls. A

started to increase, and a healthy dose of history and interest in the

Today, Ichor Falls is home to 8,000 people.16

In 1840 a cooking fire started in Harker’s home, tragically killing his

In 1806, one of Edwin Cuthbert’s original party chased a deer into

Although there was no other evidence to support strange goings-on

Silcourt saw the modernization of Ichor Falls as the cause of its

Totenkinder. A German mistranslation of, literally, “dead children.”

Decades later, schoolchildren participated in Totenkinder by building

Make my house from twigs and sticks

Build my house and make it strong

In the evening tend the fire

In the morning, early morning

CURIOUS LITTLE THING.

I work for a water-seal company in St. Paul. We produce sealant for

No one. No trace of the girl, no recently shut hotel room door, no

In that quarter-second several fingertips appeared, followed

“Heard the stories, then,” he said between throat-clearings, rocking

I stayed at the Hotel Umbra for three nights. It was a four-night

Let me tell you about where I saw Young Maddy.

Every time I shut the door to my bathroom, in my hotel room, I saw

I swear I saw fingertips retreat down the back of my throat.

Throughout his life a man makes a lot of promises. Some he wants to

So I lied there, pinned between my shoulder blades to the hard

pounding. I felt it beat so soft and slow.

After a few seconds, the ground wasn’t shaking anymore. Everything

I tensed and clenched my insides, just drew everything in, tried to

In my last little gasp of consciousness, I thought about my father,

Son, I planted my hands on the ground in front of me and pushed.

A man keeps his promises. Remember that.

LEMON BLOSSOM GIRL.

Although I wasn’t able to put it to words at that age, I must have

I had the first nightmare a few days after our visit.

I was there in my bed, in the dark, when my eyes opened, somehow