The Silver Bridge

by Gray Barker

  Steve entered the old power plant building through a decrepit door, sagging on rusty hinges. He heard a loud clang. He started, then surveyed the interior. One of the large boiler doors was open.

  Aside from that noise, the interior was strangely quiet. Then he noted the reason: the large flock of pigeons that previously had occupied the building and filled it with flappings and cooings were no longer there. He wondered why. Could Mothman have frightened them away? The creature probably was using the building as a hideout.

  He heaved at one of the other large boiler doors. It was rusty and didn’t give easily. Finally the complaining hinges gave way and the door swung open. As it opened, Steve once again experienced that compelling fear of the previous night, and felt he should get out of there.

  Then, suddenly in the cavernous darkness of the immense boiler, a large dark form seemed to flutter by. Steve stumbled out of the building, white as a sheet.

  “It’s in there! It’s in the boiler!”

  They wondered what they should do. But none of them could summon enough courage to re-enter the building.

  “Hey, look at this,” Roger shouted, bending near the ground. “I think we’ve found its tracks!”

  They examined the important finding.

  “They aren’t bird tracks, that’s for sure!” commented Steve. “They’re more like horse tracks.”

  Impressed in the coal dust was a series of broken ovals, somewhat horeshoe-shaped, but only about three or four inches in diameter. Roger put his foot beside one of them and bore his weight down. But the Mothman track remained much more deeply impressed.

  “I had to work my feet around several times to make as deep a track as those,” he told me. The thing must have been much heavier than I.”

  Next they drove to the Lewis Gate, where they had spotted the dead dog, and there, too, were the tracks, along with those of a dog, in a soft, muddy spot.

  “We examined the ditch there. The thing must have leaped out of it when it jumped over the car, for something had dug into the side of the ditch, apparently as it was climbing out. It was all torn up, and reminded us of a spot near the T.N.T. building where something had just stood and clawed up the ground.”

  They also checked at the Thomas residence the next day, after the thing had dropped into the yard the night following the initial sighting. They found only one track, but the ground was very solid there.

  “You know,” Roger added, “I don’t know whether it was really trying to get us or not. I believe it could have got us if it had really wanted to. Sometimes I get the impression it might have been trying to communicate, and that would be why it chased after us. But instead it scared us.”

  “Are you saying you think it might be friendly?” Ben Franklin asked.

  “I don’t know. It might be. I only wish I knew.”

  Ben and I drove over to the Ohio side, rather than stopping at the nearby Gene Ball’s restaurant, and we needed some time to collect our thoughts after the amazing interview. Both of us, usually garrulous, had grown silent as soon as we had left the witnesses.

  “I believe it wants to tell us something!”

  Ben blurted this out suddenly and loudly, breaking the silence.

  Of course I knew Ben might not be too objective about Mothman, for he was a man who could never find evil in anybody. That probably was why he had been such a good school man. He was widely known, respected and loved in the community.

  In fact, neighbors had even made jokes about his high regard for his fellow men. A story had gone around in connection with a most wicked man of the city, who finally had passed away, somewhat to everybody’s relief. For he had been widely feared and hated. Ben had been one of the few townspeople who attended the funeral. After the service, some of his neighbors crowded around Ben, for they had made a wager that he would be unable to think of anything good to say about the man. They purposefully started a conversation about the departed.

  “This man…” mouths widened and ears tuned; and then Ben allegedly said, “…had the most beautiful set of teeth I’ve ever seen in a man’s mouth.”

  I doubted the story and had never asked Ben about it. Besides I remembered hearing a variation of the same anecdote in another city some years back.

  “I don’t know,” Ben continued as we drove along, “but I have the distinct feeling Mothman was trying to tell those boys something. Just what, I don’t know.”

  He continued his thoughts at the restaurant.

  “Those two boys. I’d believe them on a stack of bibles. I had both of them in school, and they were really good boys. One of them did at one time get discouraged and decided to drop out, but I talked him out of it. I certainly hope they get some work soon. They’re good workers—I’ve heard that from their former employers.”

  “You’re an educated man,” I told him. “You’re also a professional magician and probably have studied the history of magic. Surely you’ve read about the ancient rituals whereby black magicians were said to summon up devils. Do you connect Mothman with such an idea?”

  “First of all (and Ben chuckled), I assume you understand that as a stage magician, I perform only white magic— simple feats of illusion to entertain audiences. This is much much different from the black magic of antiquity.

  “And I really don’t know for sure that the so-called ‘black magicians’ were as deeply black as they were pictured by our superstitious ancestors. I have a rare old book I’d like you to read sometime, Jules Michelet’s Demonology and Witchcraft. I’m afraid our popular conceptions of witches and warlocks, for example, come from Montague Summers, a cleric who wrote and translated several books on the subject, such as The Witch Hammer and A History of Witchcraft. Apparently he was somewhat too credulous and believed everything he heard about the ‘black powers’.

  “The Michelet work points out that our modern systems of science grew out of the experiments of the ‘black magicians’. For instance, I’m sure you know that alchemy, the system which strove to turn base metals into gold, was the father of modern chemistry.

  “The witch,” he told me, as we drove back toward Point Pleasant, “was probably the first physician. She has been pictured gathering the deadly nightshade, the wings of bats, and other gruesome ingredients to boil in her terrible cauldron. In reality, the things she gathered on the lonely heath were healing herbs, to ease the pain of those who fearfully sought her out. But the public, as it does today when it encounters something it doesn’t understand, vilified her, libeled her as an ugly crone, and even burned her at the stake. But her science would not die, as knowledge and truth never really does.

  “She would metamorphose into the midwife, and finally she would be remembered only in the woman and in the mother, practicing, to this day, her intuitive magic, as she heals her child’s suffering, not with medicines she has gathered, but with a secret little song.”

  I had never known Ben to speak so eloquently, or with such insight. But the moon suddenly was broken by the giant and ugly hulk of the Silver Bridge we were approaching. Traffic was still rather heavy, and two trailer trucks ahead of us slowed our pace, as we traveled up the incline of the arched structure. The bridge shook and swayed.

  “I always tell people that this old bridge is going to go down some day,” Ben said: “although I suppose it must be safe or they’d close it. It has a unique suspension structure—there are only two others like it in the world—and it is supposed to give with the weight, I understand. Still, it gives me the creeps when I’m on it in heavy traffic.”

  I knew I must get up at six the next morning to fulfill an early morning school appointment, though I wasn’t sleepy, even at 10:00 p.m., my usual bedtime. I wondered if I were keeping Ben up too late and asked him if he were tired.

  “Goodness no. I’m a night owl since retiring from the school business. I got in the habit of staying up to hear the Long John Nebel program on WNBC, New York, which begins at midnight, and it just sort of stuck.”

  “Let�
�s drive out to that place where the fellow is supposed to have seen a weird flying saucer that looked like a Volkswagon—and whose dog hid under the bed for days after.”

  “That’s a remote area, but let’s go. And it’s a good excuse to continue our conversation.”

  We rehashed the interview with the young couples as we drove. We swung off the main road onto a narrow strip of blacktop. I remembered the area vaguely, for I had once driven through it to demonstrate the uses of an overhead projector to teachers in a small, two-room school.

  “You’re getting into real back country here,” he told me. “We constantly tried to get these people to let us bus the children into town, for the facilities we could give them out here were limited. But these people stick pretty much to themselves and insisted on hanging onto their small community school. It was difficult to get teachers to come out here. It is difficult to get to during the winter, and the people are quite backward and superstitious. At one time they raised quite an outcry because evolution was being taught. I think the school board finally gave in and gave them pretty much what they wanted. Most of the kids quit school once they can legally do so at 16. Goodness knows just what they live on out here. I suppose some of them are on relief, but many of them are fiercely independent and won’t accept help. They probably barely subsist from truck farming, or finding occasional and temporary jobs in town.”

  We drove by one of the dilapidated houses. The frame dwelling had long ago deteriorated almost into a sagging ruin. An old car, propped up on stilts, stood in the yard, with one of the wheels off. From the inside came a dim source of light, probably from an oil lamp. Passing another similar house, I saw a furtive movement at the window, and I thought I could see a small girl peeking out. Coal smoke from a chimney blacked the immediate area.

  Around the bend streamed lights from a very small church, with no bell tower, and identified only by its bright white paint and the suggestion of arches in its windows. A few cars were parked outside.

  I slowed the car, stopped and regarded the edifice. From inside we could hear a rousing singing. It was an old song I half remembered from my rural childhood:

  “O they tell me of a land

  Far beyond the skies;

  O they tell me of a home far away…

  O they tell me of a land

  Where no storm clouds rise;

  O they tell me of an unclouded day!”

  “O that land of cloudless skies!

  O that land of the unclouded day!

  O they tell me of a land

  Where no storm clouds rise;

  O they tell me of the unclouded day!”

  “Although the song is familiar, within the context of this evening it sounds rather strange,” I said; “as if they were singing of another planet—though I suppose they’re singing about heaven.”

  “An unclouded sky likely would be Mars,” Ben ventured, seemingly caught up in similar fantasy. “Maybe they’re singing about some kind of racial memory—about where they may have come from…”

  I turned up the car radio and automatically jabbed at the button which would identify my friends from the Clarksburg radio station. I had got up very early and hoped to make it back home by the time the office opened. John Peters was just finishing the news, and was ready to go into his short “Whistle Stop” segment. I wondered if he had dreamed up another fantasy for today. I really hoped the train would stop again, and that I would hear another imaginative drama.

  The train noises grew in the distance, welled into a loud whistling and clanking of wheels. The railroad cars sped by, with a click-click-click as they depressed the rail joints.

  “Well,” said John, “she went right on by…”

  Then he added the climatic touch he had always employed, even before the advent of Mothman.

  “…LIKE A BIG FAT BIRD THIS MORNING!”

  CHAPTER 5

  MR. UNIVERSE

  Mr. Universe toiled among the eternal fires. His muscles rippled and glistened with sweat. His handsome countenance reflected the red light from the forges and furnaces, and his demeanor grew almost jolly.

  From the fires he withdrew the ball, red hot and smoking. As it cooled, the base metal grew black and ugly.

  Then he added a gleaming outer covering.

  When it had cooled, he looked at it and saw that his work was good.

  As Mr. Universe balanced his golden ball in one muscular hand, he was particularly proud of this accomplishment. This was a concession to his inner nature, a hiatus from routine.

  On the outside there raged fires of even greater dimensions, and within them terror, for they were the furnaces of Hell—as beings struggled madly with each other in unconscionable and inexplicable acts of physical and mental violence. Oftimes his physical forges raged and burned to contribute to that diabolic outside scene.

  Today, however, he had rebelled at those things he loathed, and forged a golden ball for the children of the world.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE SEARCHERS

  On the evening of Nov. 2, 1966, Woodrow Derenberger was in a good mood. It was just as his boss had told him many times—now it had come true.

  “Don’t be discouraged, Woody. You’re new at selling. There’s nothing so bad for a salesman as working for a few days without a sale. But there’s also nothing so good for him as making that big sale.”

  That day Woody Derenberger had struck pay dirt. In his pocket was a signed order for a color TV set, a $500 stereo, and some appliances. The hard sales ground work he had done was beginning to pay off.

  Woody had taken the sales job as a temporary measure to support his family, a wife and two children. The plant where he had been a long-term employee had been on strike for six weeks, and his savings were diminishing. Somewhat shy at meeting people, he had experienced misgivings about the job when it was offered; but he had tried unsuccessfully to obtain others. It seemed no employers wanted to take on striking employees, who would work only temporarily until the wage dispute was settled.

  The job had been less painful than anticipated. After a few calls he gained confidence, and began to enjoy meeting the people whom he called on, door-to-door.

  The fruition of his past three weeks’ effort added to his confidence and feelings of well-being. He could hardly resist telephoning his wife before he got home, for she would be happy to hear the good news. She had been encouraging him, day to day.

  “I think you’re a masterful salesman, Woody,” she would tell him. “It just takes a while to get started.'’

  As soon as the time payment contracts were bought by the bank he would get the commissions. He would pay off his most urgent bills and then take the family out to dinner.

  Derenberger had swung off the local streets of Marietta, onto a short, newly completed section of Interstate 77, which would end at Mineral Wells, south of Parkersburg, where he rented a large, somewhat isolated, two-story farmhouse.

  He took the Ford van up to sixty, and noted the 70-miles-per-hour speed limit sign. Making the limit in the van was uncomfortable, for at that speed the imbalanced wheels set up an unpleasant vibration. Besides, it was raining, and visibility was not good. But tonight he felt daring and confident—like a little boy, taking home a good report card. He revved it up to seventy, then to seventy-five, where the vibration stopped.

  “They can’t get you for five miles over the limit,” he told himself. “Anyhow, there’s not a car of any kind, let along a cop car, in sight.”

  Near the exit for Route 47, the road to Glenville, he took some solace in the fact that another driver was more reckless than he. A Ford with the trim removed, about a ’52, he would guess, buzzed past him, doing 80 or 90. “Some crazy teenagers,” he thought; “next thing they would be trying to scrape them off the road.”

  Woody let up on his heavy foot. That could have been a cop car instead of a teenager. He had a perfect driving record, and should slow down. Besides, there was another car approaching him from behind, this one
strangely without lights, appearing as a dark hulk in the rear view mirror. The police had been cracking down on speeders on the novel, new road, and there had been some talk of “unfair trickery” they had been employing.

  Instead of passing, the dark hulk suddenly rose and passed over his van. It descended directly in front of him, its narrow outline turning into a wide, elongated object, blocking both lanes of the Interstate. Woody braked automatically. The thing, whatever it could be, was slowing down!

  His first pump at the brake had been instinctive and violent. The tires screeched, and the brakes “led” toward the left lane. As he got the van under control he realized that the object was forcing him to stop, but it Was matching his speed and bringing him to a gradual, safe halt.

  The object was now closer and catching the light from his dimmed headlights more fully, and Woody began to take cognizance of its incongruity. It looked like an old-fashioned globe from an oil lamp, yet with that general shape the resemblance ended. It appeared to be metallic, but in color it was between a dark gray and a black. It was dark and eerie, without the trace of a light. Whatever the thing could be, it was quite enormous, probably 25–30 feet long, occupying completely the two lanes of the road.

  By this time the thing had come to a complete halt, though still hovering a few inches above the pavement.

  A cold chill gripped at Woody’s entire body, as he waited to see what would happen. But as his body adjusted to the heavy secretion of adrenalin, and he began to evaluate his predicament, he suddenly took comfort in the lights of a car approaching from around the bend. Maybe the driver would see what was happening and go for help. But the oncoming driver apparently didn’t see or take note of what was taking place in the opposite two lanes. As he rounded the curve, his lights veered and did not catch the huge object in their glare. The driver, doing the limit, displayed no reaction, passed in a rush and sped on down the highway toward Parkersburg and Marietta.