Wormwood and Gall

Circles. Will the circle be unbroken? The dancers held hands and spun in a circle. They went round and round the statue. It looked much like an old tombstone but it was just a statue. The old moss covered marker told of a man that had lived some unknown years before. He was forgotten. The location of the marker was forgotten. Leastwise, he was forgotten by all but a few. It was a mild evening. The stone marker was out past the original city limits in a thicket behind a salvage yard. Every once in a while someone would pass close enough to hear someone in the thicket but everyone figured it was just high school kids getting stoned. Not only that, legends of a dark and morbid past from that area kept most everyone at bay. This day was his birthday. The dancers gathered again as they had always done to try and resurrect him. They held hands and went around the marker in slow methodical circles calling his name. He was a scientist off sorts. The old rudimentary clapboard house where in which he did his experiments had long since vanished. His name was Johann Von Eisenfahl. Eisenfahl had been far ahead of his time. Indeed the time for him may have never existed. He had curious notions about the nature of energy. He started with simple principles like "Known and Unknown" and worked out binary chains of progressive thoughts. Another theory which he had extrapolated from the "Known and Unknown" Theorum was the one of "electrical spirit conservationism" or ESC. ESC was the belief that spiritual energy could be placed in ersatz "batteries" or storage containers. The spirit being somewhat of an electrical field that could be captured and stored. Sort of demonic possession of a Leyden jar. Eisenfahl felt that free floating spirits were merely electrical charges that had yet to find a new home. These "charges" as it were being released upon the death of the individual. Eisenfahl himself had the statue built and placed in the area that had one time been a flower garden. The statue had inscriptions describing him as somewhat of a Humanitarian. He was concerned that he would be remembered in less than flattering light. So, he had the statue made in Belgium and shipped all the way to the then fledgling Berg of "Redstone." Redstone was a corruption of the old Chickasaw name for the village from which Redstone sprang. The Indians called it "Bleeding Rock." At the end of Eisenfahl's life the town elders burnt his house down along with all of his papers that were inside of it. His name was stricken from all township records and he was buried in an unmarked grave. His statue remained because no one knew of it and it had become overgrown with vines in the twilight years of Von Eisenfahl's time, in this plane of existence.