Authors: Gray Barker
The Silver Bridge (6 page)
“Maybe we’ll catch somebody at it,” remarked Steve, and Roger laughed.
“Steve!” Mary shouted in disapproval.
“You were young once yourself, old lady,” Steve rejoined, “don’t be so blue-nosed.”
“But we never…”
Steve grasped her hand, and she grew silent.
Roger halted the car in front of the powerhouse. A bright moon outlined the vast, ghostly structure. The broken windows stared like blind eyes at them, as clouds, caught in high winds, threw intermittent pools of shadow on the lonely place. The blustery local winds shook loosened parts of the powerhouse while wailing through its empty blackness.
And there in that dark setting, lurking close to the cadaverous structure, Mothman came to Point Pleasant.
“Rog, look! Look at those eyes!” Steve yelled.
“Then I too saw them,” Scarberry told me.
“Those eyes. It was like they were staring at me, like they were looking
inside
me, and
through
me!” he continued.
“You couldn’t draw away from those eyes. I don’t know if they were hypnotic or if it was the shade of them. It was a different color, you know, kind of red; they just glowed and lit up when light hit them (actual words from tape recording).”
Benjamin Franklin IV, retired school executive, an apt professional magician (and a direct descendant of the noted ancestor), sat with me and four witnesses around a table in a relative’s kitchen, as the story of their wild flight from the T.N.T. area, and from Mothman, unfolded.
When Steve saw the eyes, his reaction marked the beginning of a miasma of fear which would continue to plague the couple long after the initial experience. His first impulse was to get out of there, but the eyes held him momentarily in an almost hypnotic trance, while he tried to fill in the features of the creature or thing which looked out through them.
It was a tall, waddling, ungainly thing. Folded around and behind its shadowy body was an enormous pair of wings. It seemed to be trying to get away, out of the light.
“It was more or less running,” Steve told us, “trying to balance itself with its wings which spread slightly outward. It staggered like a crippled chicken as it disappeared around the corner of the building. I’m sure it was trying to get out of sight, into the door just around the corner.
“We paused for about a minute, not knowing what to do. The girls hadn’t got a good look at it, though Mary had caught a glimpse of its eyes.”
Roger insisted it was only a bird of some kind, and that they had nothing to fear. But he hadn’t got a good look at it, as had Steve.
“It looks something like those old pictures in the family bible. Like an evil angel. I don’t think we ought to hang around here any longer,” Steve argued.
This description startled Roger, and suddenly convinced that Steve was right, he pushed in the clutch and shifted into second. The Chevy lurched forward and stopped, as the motor died.
“Roger, it’s not going to let us go,” Linda screamed. “Let’s get out of here and run!”
Roger ground at the starter. In his excitement he had flooded the engine. He pushed the gas feed to the floor and turned the engine over a few times. Waiting a few precious seconds, while the suspense, and his fright mounted, he tried the starter again and the motor uttered an encouraging cough. But the starter slowed, gave one last groan and quit. The battery was dead.
“Hurry, give me a shove. We’re on a downhill grade,” he insisted to Steve.
“I didn’t want to get out of that car, but I was desperate, I suppose. I felt that that thing was going to come back around that corner and get us at any moment. But I knew we had to get out of there. I jumped out, put my hands in the window frame and rocked the car. After a few rocks it began to move, and then I really shoved at that old Chevy!”
The car gradually picked up momentum on the downgrade, and Steve pushed harder, each yard of progress putting him farther out of reach of a nameless horror. He did not look back, for fear the ugly thing was looking at him, following him, ready to jump on his back.
With a grinding of gears Roger threw the shift into low, and released the clutch. The car paused, stiffened, and backfired. Then the motor started with little spurts, and he pushed in the clutch and gunned it. Linda opened the door, crying, “Hurry, Steve!” and he hopped in.
Roger let out the clutch and burned rubber.
“I guess we’re getting away from that old buzzard!” he yelled jauntily. But Steve knew that by then Roger was just as frightened as he.
“I saw the back of old Rog’s neck get white,” Steve told us, “and he’s always red back there,” and he grasped his crony’s head and twisted it, somewhat to the other’s embarrassment, to show us the ruddy complexioned neck.
“Could those have been animal eyes, do you think?” Ben Franklin asked Steve.
“I see a lot of animal eyes at night. You could see them along the road all the time. These eyes seemed to be so much larger. That’s what made me notice them.”
“Would you say they were as big as a half-dollar?” I asked.
“They were bigger!” Roger averred. “When you see animal eyes on the road, they just aren’t that large, or spaced as far apart. Then this thing was six or seven foot tall.”
“That’s about as tall as I am,” I joked, but nobody laughed. The witnesses were ready to recount the further events of the night.
Once the suspense of starting the stalled car had ended, their fears lessened, and they were further relieved as they turned off the side road onto the main highway, which would take them back into town. Route 62 is very crooked in that area, and they slowed to a comfortable 40 miles per hour. But Mothman’s reign of terror had just begun.
As they rounded a bend and their lights reflected momentarily on a small hillside, they saw it again, standing there, as if waiting. That was where they got their terrifying, best look at it.
“You couldn’t tell if it had a head or not, or if it had arms. I don’t think it had any, but it had wings. I mean you could tell the wings, for they came up and turned down, you know, and kind of wrapped around behind it!
“Those eyes were about two inches in diameter, and six to eight inches apart.”
Did you see its legs?” Ben directed this question to Roger, who was speaking, but Mary interrupted:
“Yes, it definitely had legs. They seemed to be as thick as a man’s legs!”
“You mean, not like a bird’s legs?”
“They were muscular legs. You could tell that, somehow,” Steve declared.
“Did you see any feathers, or skin, or clothing?”
“Not that we could distinguish as such. I mean I couldn’t say if it were fur, feathers or what!”
“What color was the thing?”
“You couldn’t see exactly. We saw it only for a few brief moments, before it took off, as if it couldn’t stand the light, I guess you could say it had a grayish body.”
“Did you see any knee, or bend in the legs?”
“No, I did not.”
Mothman’s departure was as novel as its appearance. When it left it did not flap its wings, but took off vertically, shooting upward into the air like a rocket at great speed, but without visible means of propulsion.
Scarberry had hit the brake when he saw the apparition the second time. He didn’t know why, except that again the eyes had demonstrated a hypnotic effect, which held him “in its spell”. Upon the creature’s takeoff, however, the spell was broken, but supplanted with indescribable fright.
He tried to drive the gas pedal into the floor, as the car quickly picked up speed and the wheels screamed on curves. As the road straightened he became aware that the speedometer was hitting 100, then 105. He didn’t know the old car would do it, but at the moment that didn’t impress him. He only knew he wanted to get out of there, and back into town. Linda clutched at him, sobbing.
“Can’t you go any faster?”
“I’m doing all this old car will do!”
In the back seat, Mary screamed.
“I see it, I see it!” It’s after us!”
Clutching and tearing at the wheel, Roger saw the dark shadow, subtle and indistinct in the moonlight. Along with the shadow was the
feeling
that something was stalking them. He
knew
it was up there, following them, at incredible speed.
The huge hulk of a trailer truck loomed suddenly; Roger swerved and screamed around it in a tight curve, careening almost into the ditch to avoid an oncoming car with its brights up.
“I just had to get away from that thing,” he told us. “It’s a wonder we didn’t crack up!”
He became a part of the speeding and complaining machinery that was the ’57 Chevy. Linda now gripped him like a madwoman. From behind, Steve leaned forward, grabbed his shoulders and shook him.
“Get out of here! Get out of here!”
Steve’s fingers, in terrified frenzy, dug into his shoulders. Then he pounded at him, and at the front seat.
“I know it’s after us! Let’s make it! It’s keeping right up with us!” Mary cried.
“I know my hair stood on end,” Steve declared, “and I was pushin’ and poundin’ at old Rog to make him go faster, and all that time that old junker was doin’ all she would do. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve been scared before, but nothing like that.”
Ben asked Steve to describe his fear, but he couldn’t.
“Seemed like you could feel it all around you; seemed like it left my mind a blank till we got to where we could talk about it. All I could think of was getting away from it.”
“Really though,” Roger chimed in, “I don’t think any of us really felt we had seen it until we got down the road and got to talking about it and knew all of us had seen the same thing.”
“It was kind of like a dream—a bad dream,” Mary added.
The gathering clouds had blocked out the moon, and no longer could they see Mothman’s shadow, though they could still
feel
the presence, hovering above them.
On December 15, 1967, exactly one year and one month from the advent of Mothman, another kind of darkness would descend upon Point Pleasant. People would gather in little groups and murmur about what had occurred:
“We drive up there and it’s barricaded. I wish we could get rid of it. If we didn’t have the barricade, people would drive up there and go into the river. We’ve got to build a new street or a memorial of some kind up there.”
And meanwhile there would be boats, dozens of them, plying the muddy waters, searching, dragging for bodies.
“One woman’s husband ran off, and he’s no doubt over in Cleveland, Ohio. But she stands down there on the river bank, hoping they’ll drag him up. People are strange. She’d rather have a dead husband in her arms, all still and cold from the bottom of that river—rather than know that he was alive, and embracing that bitch from Cleveland!”
F
or John Peters the proud bravado of the Fifth Symphony, the sobbing of Tchaikovsky, the “Te DUM DUM DUM!” of
Aida’s
Grand March, and the subtle nuances of Debussy, had been stilled. WPDX, Clarksburg’s powerful daytime radio station, had abandoned its more dignified programming, and had gone “all country”, as the trade papers described the burgeoning of total country and western music programming among many stations. South of the Mason-Dixon line many small broadcasters, unable to show a profit in competition with the established “hard rock” stations, had taken advantage of the resurgence of the often-nasal, more often dulcet and sad, airs of the Nashville establishment. And some of these stations were making money for the first time since Uncle Milton Berle had peered out at America through the ghostly phosphors of the TV screen.
John pushed the button that would put the corn remedy tape cartridge on the air. In the old days he had read “live” all the public service announcements, and the too few sponsored commercials. His artistic senses smarting, he unfolded the pay check he had just received and rationalized the situation. Recent broadcast technology had made his job easier, and he was receiving greater talent fees.
He put on the next commercial, back to back with the preceding. With some relief he noted the management had asked Kim Smith, another staff announcer, to do
that
one.
It described, in the most shocking script possible for airing, the movie that “Skyline Sam”, a local motion picture exhibitor who booked exploitation movies, was promoting. It explained that “This is an adult movie, for adult minds, and nobody under sixteen will be admitted.”
Sam would probably have a policeman at the ticket window, early in the evening, who would identify and turn away a few teenagers, who would immediately drive back to town and spread the news. Later in the evening the “policeman” would shed his rented uniform, don his white jacket and take up his regular duties at the snack bar. The drive-in theatre would be jam-packed and Sam would buy more and more commercials.
John’s station had retained a little of the earlier programming, including three preachers from the midwest who bought time on the station to solicit letters for free literature from local folk. One of them, though occasionally deprecating the money system, still begged “free will” donations from listeners. And the schedule was still fouled up between 9:05 and 9:10, a short segment between the news and the first preacher, which the management had been unable or unwilling to get rid of by reshuffling programs, for the past three years. They had asked John to “fill” the segment. Ordinarily an announcer would simply play a couple of records to get through the space, but John, a really fine radio man, apparently frustrated by mediocrity, found the short segment an outlet for his extraordinary wit.