Kay bolted upright in bed.

She could swear 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. She realized 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.

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I always loved children, always wanted to be a father. To raise some small version of myself, teach it the lessons I never learned, all part of the dream. But it was truly for their faces. A child sees the world as it should be, not as it is. They have wonder and joy in those eyes that we all lose in time. It is perhaps unusual for a man to feel this way, but I cannot help it.

When I moved to Ichor Falls, it was sadly not for the children. A local newspaper, the Sentinel, needed someone to type up obituaries, and lacking a better option, I took it. Life as a journalism undergrad is filled with these choices. I have flitted from obit job to obit job. It is not a career that draws companion. I had been working here for three months when I finally was able to move into my house. The realtor, a handsome man with a close-cropped goatee who introduced himself as August Parrish, had shown me the house earlier. It was in that district called Lower Alethia. I had needed the months to gather enough money for the down payment. He had explained its history, built before the Ethylor Summer, had even been home to an Amish school for a time. It was a nice Victorian home, and with time, I could certainly make a profit, once Ichor Falls’ housing market started filling up a bit more. The perfect time to buy.

He asked the strangest question at the time.

“Do you like children?”

“Actually, yes.”

“The neighborhood is supposed to have several families moving in soon, I was checking to see if that was a problem.” He flashed me a smile.

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“A Room at Cedarspring” (2008) is a locally-produced documentary by West Virginia filmmaker Warren Jeffs.

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 future, New Elysium bulldozed the old; or, when required by West Virginia law, simply built around it.

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I am now sitting on an old bench, the green paint chipping as the old boards splinter underneath my weight. My heart is beating rapidly, and I am fatigued, cold with sweat in the frosty morning air. It is four o’clock, and the moon is heavy in the sky, masked here and there by a vagrant cloud or two. The soft hushes carry the smell of damp grass and dirt; the dew is congealing upon the withered blades found creeping through the cracks in the concrete walkway.

Behind me is the madhouse; the malign edifice from which I recently came, bolting madly with the cumbersome voices whispering at my back. I swear I could almost feel their words upon my skin, as some weight upon me; almost as much as the wind that cools my perspiration as of this very moment. But as I wait here, pausing often to look timidly over my shoulder, half-hoping to see the faint outlines of animated bodies in pursuit, to prove that I am not quite insane, I do so that I may bolt again in fear for my life.

If I should die this morning, if those deviant figures should rise against me unexpectedly, I wish to have the events prior recorded here, so that any who may come across my dismembered body may know what has come to pass.

My name is William L. Hume Jr., and I am a middle-aged man living out a very poor mode of existence in Ichor Falls, West Virginia. My means for such a distasteful living are as equally detestable as the mode, but do not assume that I have lived as such since the days of my ignorant youth. I once attended a small community college, around the ripe young age of nineteen, spending two years as a studious incumbent of the collegiate atmosphere, but my father fell under the effects of an illness from which he did not recover. I dropped out to care for him for a period of time, though it swept him eagerly, and thus was a curt struggle.

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This isn’t a story unless you pretend it is. I added some more background information on Ichor Falls to the Visitors Center page, like the approximate location of the town, current mayor, districts and names of lakes and newspapers. I’m not doing that to stifle creativity, but to keep things consistent, and not force you to reinvent the wheel if you want to reference a newspaper, for example. Go check out the new content.

Also, the original Ichor Falls story, Terminus, lives on the site now. It was the first thing I laid down, although it’s more tongue-in-cheek than scary.

Then somebody died! Boo! The end.

The street fair was in full swing, and I couldn’t have been more bored.

The usual assortment of vendors was there; local artisans who had honed their skill in little wooden knick-knacks, politicos who waved their flyers at anyone who wandered within range, and enough representatives from the local churches that everyone in attendance was bound to have their soul saved five times over. I went from stall to stall looking over their offerings. I had just decided to leave when I saw the “Used Books!!!! Cheap!!!” sign. I’m a sucker for books, new or used, and I immediately wandered over.

It was a simple card table with a grease-spotted tablecloth draped over it. Three cardboard boxes overflowing with ratty and torn books sat side by side. A large “$1” was written on each box in black Sharpie. The proprietor was a rail-thin woman wearing a dress that had seen better days. Her eyes were magnified a thousand times over behind thick lenses, and they seemed to protrude from her face. She was absorbed in a romance novel with a bountiful lass spilling out of her dress on the cover. The woman looked up when I approached her and grimaced a smile, her teeth yellowing and small. Then she returned to her book.

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Ichor Falls Police Department archives, exact date unknown
Preceding documents indicate report was taken around December 1944

We lost Billy just over five months ago, now, and -

No, no, that was the name of our dog. Our children are long since grown and moved away. One to the Coast, then two to the War, you know how that goes. Good boys all.

As I was saying, it’s usually so quiet out here at the edge of town, is why Wallace and I bought this property when we wanted to start a family, and that was just fine. Just fine. He worked at the mill until they got bought and after that it was every day at the factory, steady income. Oh, some times were difficult, especially around winter, but we had lived through the Dark Years so you have to keep it all in perspective.

Now we got Billy, oh, around when the Pope passed away, and that Indian man stopped eating, bless him. So not that long ago. Very important to have a dog this close to the woods, Wallace would say, and I think it helped to have someone around the house to take care of besides us, with the boys grown up.

Billy liked to guard the house after dark, I suppose you would call it, but he was very excitable, always barking and whining at the door even though nobody lives near. Wallace would humor him and let him run outside and back in, but it never did any harm. Well, until one night when Billy didn’t come back. I was worried but Wallace said, “no, it’s fine, he’s just got to run around a bit,” so we set out his food by the door and went to bed.

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Everyone’s got something they enjoy more than they should.

For some people, it’s an oddity -– but harmless –- like that guy at the
supermarket who’s always checking the corncobs for blight until an
attendant has to ask him to please get out of the produce department.

For some people, it’s problematic -– or worse -– like that truck driver
who paid more attention to the radio announcer’s opinion on the
economy than his vehicle’s opinion on going 70MPH around a hairpin
turn.

For some people, it’s acceptable –- even encouraged –- like my late
aunt’s penchant for embroidering historical scenes, except I don’t
think Colonel Sanders fought at the Battle of Kanawha.

For me, it has been Ichor Falls, with all its small-town
idiosyncrasies and legends. I hope tourists and residents have enjoyed
reading my weekly column “Stories of the Quiet Valley,” which was an
effort to plumb the depth of this area’s history.

Hearing tales of the supernatural, or just strange, may have increased
tourism revenue and
encouraged people to travel in this area, but it should not be
forgotten that there is a
lasting impact of focusing on the unsettling events of history, so
much that placing em-
phasis on haunted houses may lower property values, and recounting the
numerous local
murder sites in print can only discourage business growth.

Eventually, any journalist who values his community should understand
the fact that
some stories don’t have to be told. But your humble correspondent
thinks, despite his
training, the residents of Ichor Falls deserve to hear truth, and this
is a place where
one can have difficulty separating truth from fiction.

People have claimed that the FDA has no records of Ethylor being
certified as safe for
non-industrial use until 1938, long after the laminating industry
claimed it was harmless.

In later court battles, this theory was debunked, based on 1966
legislation releasing all
government records into the care of Rick (?) Donfeld, but at the time
Ichor Falls was
enduring

Lasting effects include a moratorium on intravenous — [recount details
of "Dawst v.
Opprobrium" case especially section IV.8.a]

Get tapes and reformat interview with Walter Mattias, check licence(s?)

• need more cereal, butter/cream ch, bagel plain NO CHIVES
• move P.O. box
• talk with CFO McKinsley about insur
• ??movie nightJennifer??
• certain problems with voice mail fix fix

Last three years of The Times indicates a serious problem with

Editors’ note:

We regret that no additional parts of Jonathan Tollant’s last article
were discovered in his studio. Law enforcement has been unable to
produce evidence that the fire there was connected to his ongoing
investigations for the Falls Inquirer.

We have attempted to reprint all of his notes here without editing to
honor both the memory of Mr. Tollant and also to reinforce our
commitment to the community of fair reporting.

Publisher-in-Chief Nigel Oglethorpe and The Times‘ editorial staff would like to
thank Mr. Tollant for his many years of contributions to that news
agency, which is now in our care. We regret that much of his research
was never formatted for publication, especially regarding the rise and
fall of this town’s logging industry.

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.

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*ding ding* “The library will be closing in fifteen minutes.”

We call that the “nerd bell,” but it’s not derogatory. Or at least it’s only a little self-deprecating. Most students here don’t stay up until midnight… not to study, anyway. There isn’t much else to do in a small town, though, so the library stays open until 12:15 and every night, I end up reading here until the bell rings and the doors close. This common room is nice for relaxing, isn’t it? Haven’t seen you here before.

Oh, if you want to get real work done, not just chatting and reading novels, make sure you claim a spot in the building. People are creatures of habit, right, so it’s an unspoken custom here that students find spots and stick to them.

The first week of school I actually found this little study niche, framed by the government document section, that no one else uses. It isn’t near either of the computer labs, so the area doesn’t see much foot traffic, and I don’t have to worry about anyone crunching chips or listening to a Walkman set so loud the music bleeds out.

Sure, the heating vent right overhead can be a little noisy now that it’s winter, and the shelves close to both sides of this desk mean you have to squeeze by sideways to sit down, but it has a heavy, padded oak chair that’s really comfortable. I have no idea how long ago someone bothered to carry it down here, but it’s not going anywhere. (They probably stole it from the Provost’s office, anyway.)

There’s also a big oil painting of Edwin Cuthbert, from 1810, that dominates the wall right behind the chair. I guess that could be unsettling to people, since it’s about life-sized, or maybe a little larger than life. I used to think of old Cuthbert as my study partner, since he’s reading over my shoulder as I work.

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