Those who have followed my short stories are familiar with Augustus Valley, my fictional southern-WV town, once a thriving hub of the mining industry, “now a blip on a long detour you’ll never take, the coal having run out there, as is its way” (as I describe it in the prologue to my unpublished novel, Schafer). Wind up the mountain along steep, narrow backroads and you’ll find High Point, where the Yellow Carousel secretly turns, where Mr V reclines in his fire-lit library, where some have reported seeing a black horse with glowing embers for eyes galloping through the night.
Readers of my new story, “The Christmas Cabinet” (appearing in the Summer 2026 issue of Assemble Artifacts Short Story Magazine) are introduced to a new mysterious, small mountain town: Port Crayon, West Virginia.
Early drafts of “The Christmas Cabinet” were set in Mount Lebanon, PA, an affluent suburb of Pittsburgh. While the main character was from West Virginia, this would have made “The Christmas Cabinet” one of my very few stories set outside our beloved state. But the editors at Assemble wanted more to impress Elizabeth’s isolation on readers than just a Snowmageddon-level blizzard shutting down highways and flights across the east coast. So I looked home again. And while I didn’t want to use a real town for this story, I knew that Augustus Valley would not fit the bill this time. What was I to do?
It did not take long before I realized that this story was perfect for Port Crayon, which I created for another as-of-yet unpublished novel, The Cricket King. Named after David Hunter Strother, who wrote and illustrated his adventures in the Canaan Valley area under the pen name Porte Crayon, this fictional place is a small mountain town high in the Alleghenies, surrounded by the Monongahela National Forest. Elizabeth, of course, sees very little of Port Crayon, being confined to the cul-de-sac on its outskirts, where she gets to know Arnold, Greta, their daughter Carol, and wonders what could be making the sounds that coming from within the beautiful, tiny cabinet in their kitchen.
There really is a place in West Virginia named Porte Crayon, but it is not a town. At 4,770 feet, Mount Porte Crayon is West Virginia’s sixth highest peak, and the highest point of both the Roaring Plains Wilderness as well as the Allegheny Front itself. The summit is hard to access, requiring off-trail backcountry navigation through thick red spruce and rhododendron.
Pictures from the trip my wife and I took in 2023 to the top of Mt. Porte Crayon. The USGS marker indicating the summit can be difficult to find.
Port Crayon the town, though remote, is rather less rugged than the wilderness summit. But I wouldn’t let my guard down traveling there.
Venture to Port Crayon today and read “The Christmas Cabinet” in Assemble Artifacts Short Story Magazine.
When a babysitter gets stranded with a Hallmark-perfect family over the holidays, their cheerful traditions start to feel less like Christmas spirit and more like ritual. The daughter’s unsettling obsession with a locked cabinet opened only on Christmas causes a growing dread for what is unleashed on December 25.