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 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.

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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.

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He still speaks with authority, though his voice is shot through with old hurts. The fluorescent lights in the common room of Sweetbrook Hospital’s psychiatric wing etch the elderly man’s face in stark lines.

“That town? That whole place? Poison.”

He smokes his cigarettes with stained fingers that shake just a little. He looks over his shoulder as if expecting an attack.

Thomas “Tommy” Dalton was town manager of the ghost hamlet of Ichor Falls for between 1972 and 1979, a time of great tumult for the tiny coal town. “Folk started getting sick, horrible sick. Passing blood, coughing blood… and the poor, poor babbies what were born,” Dalton said, trailing off.

The mysterious illnesses were only the culmination of the problems facing Ichor Falls residents. The place was in the midst of an economic downward spiral that was dramatic even by Appalachian standards, drug use was rampant, and there seemed to be a missing child epidemic there. But even that, according to Dalton, wasn’t the worst of it.

“People done things there, you know? Done things they ought not have done. Made the wrong kinds of deals.” I asked him if he meant the New Elysium Group, who is ramping up negotiations to redevelop the community. Dalton seemed to be searching for the right words, but settled on “Worse.”

Federal investigation into alleged conspiracies centered in the town, involving drugs, prostitution, human trafficking, and multiple killings all came up with nothing; on the surface, Ichor Falls is the ideal quaint mountain town, exuding charm and history, and welcoming new residents and tourists alike.

Ask Tommy Dalton, however, and you’ll get a much different answer.

I did ask him just that — I asked him what he thought about the renewal of the town. He began to weep, then to moan. “The town’s poison,” he raved, as one orderly rushed over with a syringe full of sedative and another hustled me out. “Poison, and every man woman and child who moves there will die screaming!”

New Elysium corporate spokespersons were contacted in connection with the development of this article, but refused to comment, other than to say via press release “Ichor Falls will be the scene of what we call The Great Renewal, and we want as many people as possible to come take part!”

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.”

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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

Other than hearsay, very little is known of the once-popular regional vintage called “Erytheia’s Tears.” Appearing infrequently in the journals and letters of local aristocrats, the wine is described as retaining a golden hue, with a mild body resembling most Rieslings. Aged during the prohibition era, it was held in high repute for its low bottle variation and high resistance to bottle shock.

Though the region is chiefly known for its production of wines from the Vinifera grape, with its sweet finish when aged in regional steel casks, some have speculated that the grape used in Erytheia’s Tears was distantly related to the Kerner grape, also bred in the late 1920s. While such speculation is considered implausible, recent documents found at the archives at the Weinsberg State Breeding Institute do show a correspondence between August Herold (the varietal breeder of the Kerner grape) and an Ichor Falls herbalist named Alfons Kobell.

It is said of Kobell that he discovered this grape near the northern ingress of the Stillwood. He wrote that though it was a mild October, frost outlined the fruit, imbuing it with “an angelic hue.” He further wrote that when attempting to transplant it, he found that the rootstock had intertwined with an “unidentifiable mass.”

Much speculation has been made regarding this entry. Local lore says that the roots had grown into the shape of a human heart, while others go so far as to claim it had grown from an actual heart, animal or human. Regardless of the truth, rumors spread to include tales of transient workers that went missing after being employed by the winery that cultivated the vines. Some said that their hearts had been removed to fertilize the grape. These stories only served to increase interest in this unique wine, particularly in select aristocratic circles of Ichor Falls and neighboring towns.

However, rumor soon grew into suspicion, and on November 7th, 1931, a group of “prohibitionists” raided the small winery and razed the fields. Later, under sworn affidavit, witnesses claimed that while the vines burned, the late fruit could be seen untouched among the ash. One such witness claimed that when he went to rescue the grapes from the encroaching blaze, the ground beneath was cold to the touch.

Recent excavation of the area found nothing of note.

It is said, a long time ago, when Queens Bay was just a small fishing village, the mayor’s young wife Maura was killed by “the Bitch Queen.”

I’m not one to say whether this is true, but I do know that certain nights are colder than others.

You see, you’re too young to remember, but your mother used to run the inn where the Lady Maura used to live. And there were times, young man, when you woke up screaming, because “the scary woman was staring at you.”

Laugh if you will, but your mother was never too sure about this. Until that night when you didn’t wake up.

She had put you down for the night and returned to the common room, to have a glass of wine and tally the evening’s profits. About an hour later there was a crash from your room upstairs. Thinking you were waking up from another one of your nightmares, she hesitated to run upstairs, waiting for you to cry for her before coming to the rescue. Strange thing is, young man, you never started screaming.

She eventually closed everything up and, thinking you had gone back to sleep, doused the lantern and went to her room.

The next morning came and you were late for breakfast. After calling for you several times, she went up to your room. I can tell you, she intended to skin you raw — your mother with a common room full of customers and a dish boy who was too lazy to get out of bed.

She gasped as she entered your room to find it empty. The window was open, and the toy horse you kept by the windowsill lay shattered on the floor. Your sheets were strewn across the room, and you were nowhere to be found — the only evidence being the merest trace of a lady’s bootprints, and a few drops of blood.

The whole town was up in arms looking for you that morning. For days, we searched high and low to no avail. Devastated, we returned home to wait for the news.

It wasn’t until about a week later when your mother, still inconsolable, heard another crash in your room, late in the evening. Hoping you had somehow returned, she rushed up the steps only to find your door open and a young woman — beautiful they say — placing you on your bed. Your mother screamed and the woman looked at her. I can hear your mother now, just as she told me the first time: “Her hair was blond, her eyes blue as cornflowers. She had such a sad smile, and a thin line of red that ran across her neck.” As your mother approached, the woman faded as if she had merely been smoke in the shape of a person, now blown by the wind into nothingness.

The town cleric told us that it was a changeling or some other evil spirit that had gotten you — one of the servants of The Bitch Queen’s court. But that night your mother cradled you close, screaming. It was all we could do to pull your lifeless, cold body from her arms.

Oh, my boy. Your poor mother, right before she took her own life, made me swear to visit your sweet grave once a year and tell you this story. She wanted you never to forget the woman-shaped thing that took you from us, and how she will see you soon.

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 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.

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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 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 TYPE FOREVER 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 HIS OFFICE AND IF I HAD NEVER READ THE PAPER I’D HAVE NEVER SEEN THE FULCRUM BUT GOD HELP ME I DID

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“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.”

“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.