The Silver Bridge

by Gray Barker

  I then asked about the rumor, passed on to me by Hugh McPherson, about Jones’ disappearance. At first Jarrett seemed reluctant to answer, then did admit that the witness had indeed vanished, along with his family, apparently in the middle of the night—for the neighbors had not seen them move out.

  “But there really were some other circumstances,” he hesitatingly added, as if pondering whether he should continue.

  “Do you mean those notes which were stuck under his door (John Keel had told me about this)?”

  “Oh, that. I took John Keel to see Tad, while Keel was here to investigate the case. We concluded, however, that they were written by a prankster, in the same manner that the boys at the plant play jokes on me.

  “Those notes were hand printed, with charcoal, I would guess, on pieces of cardboard about four by eight inches. They had been deliberately burned around the edges. I don’t remember exactly what they said, only something like, ‘You have been warned! Do not talk about this further!’ and so on.

  “They were worded much like the prank telephone calls I’ve received now and then. But, of course, there was this one occasion I’m not sure of—the morning the story about Jones appeared in The Charleston Gazette.

  “At the time I hadn’t yet seen the paper, for this was before breakfast, and I was in the bathroom. I hadn’t begun shaving, however, so I went into the bedroom and picked up the extension. I heard a very clear ‘beep-beep’ sound.

  “ ‘Ralph, what is that?’ my wife, who was on the phone downstairs, asked me. ‘I don’t know—it’s very strange,’ Itold her.

  “The beeping continued for about two, maybe three minutes. Then the phone went dead and the dial tone came on. I’ve heard all sorts of code transmissions on short wave, but nothing quite like that.”

  I gathered that the “other circumstances” Jarrett mentioned earlier had nothing to do with the threatening notes, for he had ascribed little importance to them. I asked him if he was withholding something—information that might explain Jones’ flight from the Charleston area.

  Beyond a few generalities and hints, Jarrett gave me little additional information. He had promised his secrecy to Jones, in exchange for the information, he finally explained, terminating his discussion of the case.

  Jones, I reasoned, had not been unduly alarmed by the thing on the interstate highway, nor by the threatening notes. What had happened to him, to frighten him into leaving the area?

  Trying to construct a theory from my notes of my conversation with Jarrett, I confess I cannot come up with much. But this does certainly involve some incredible occurrence on a dark, rainy night, during which Jones was driving north to Ripley.

  I can envision a light following his car, a fog enveloping him, and his being lifted, lifted, into a wild, horrible phantasmagoria. He returned from it, but somehow he felt that a Something, somehow, somewhere, still held onto a part of him.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE MEN IN BLACK

  In the shadows, the Men In Black had long lurked, biding their time, waiting. Here and there, now and then, some people thought they had seen them, but they weren’t quite certain; perhaps they more sensed than actually regarded them.

  Fourteen years earlier, the shadowy visitors had shown themselves openly. Then they had descended upon flying saucer buffs, threatening and terrorizing them, hushing them up.

  Al K. Bender, a UFO researcher, had been the first known victim, in 1952. He was turning a certain theory over and over in his mind. He thought he had some hard evidence about the origin and purpose of unidentified flying objects. Then one day he performed a certain experiment, and the lurking horror came. It began with glowing blue lights. Then came the stranger with the luminous eyes in the darkened theatre, and later on the dusky street. It culminated when the men in black, three of them, paid him a visit.

  Bender gave up his predilection with the UFOs; and the men indicated they would go away.

  In Canada, and even Australia, they showed up. They were deeply tanned, mysterious and threatening. Some people thought they were Government Men, though most UFO researchers agreed that they were emissaries from outer space (or even from the Inner Earth)! Their mission appeared to be quite simple, however: they wished to silence those people who had found out too much about flying saucers.

  The visitors, usually in groups of three, gave but one concession to civility. They dressed in neat black suits, and wore black, somewhat conservative hats.

  No doubt the men in black had also received undue credit for acts they had no connection with, as rumors have a way of growing—such as the instance of the researcher who claimed to have been pushed off balance on an escalator by invisible forces, and to have suffered serious injuries. No doubt many UFO enthusiasts, reading of the men in black, picked up their telephones and rang up people who they knew were frightened by the idea, and spoke dire warnings to them in assumed foreign accents, usually German.

  In the fifties there had been a brief flurry of other shadowy terrorists, including the International Bankers, pictured not as an ordinary group of financeers, but as an alien, interplanetary organization, in one instance said to be headed by a notorious Otto Von Mobile, from a distant planet in the Orion galaxy.

  The Bankers had even dared to mail letters, written on formal, engraved stationery, threatening the cleansing of Earth, set to “the marching music of explosions”.

  But now, for more than ten years, the men in black had been absent from the ufological scene. Bender said they had left this planet, in a vast mother ship they had concealed in Antarctica, after their work on Earth had been completed—though their phantoms continued to haunt him because of the tiny and undiscoverable instrument they had planted in his brain. He knew they were gone, however, because the small disc they left with him had one day suddenly crumbled into dust, accompanied by an abominable sulphurous odor.

  With the three men apparently gone, and now only a legend, saucer buffs turned, not to a new, but to an ancient device for personifying and thus exorcising their fears. As mankind reacts to sex, death, inmates of asylums, autocratic rulers and other little-understood matters, they employed an ancient device, and they laughed. They giggled in uncontrollable spasms, and put on their own black suits and shouted, “Boo!”

  Bender warned that the three men might return, and he was correct—if they were the same persons—many doubted that they were. Although, like history, they were to repeat themselves, they were to do so in somewhat different character.

  So in November, 1966, for reasons known only to themselves, they decided that the time for their reappearance was at hand.

  In wild, undignified behavior, like lunatics following some mad piper, they paraded in the crazy crippled chicken tracks of Mothman, following the great bird into Point Pleasant, and the Ohio valley.

  Mary Hyre

  The Athens Messenger, a daily published in Athens, Ohio, enjoys a Point Pleasant circulation that rivals the local paper. In the northern part of Mason County it even exceeds the popularity of the latter.

  The competition will tell you that the demand for The Messenger is due to the reporting skill of one individual, who, some years ago, began to send local news items to the out-of-town paper.

  Soon Point Pleasant people began reading the items and buying the Athens publication. The reporter had a true “nose for news”. She could uncover local items people really cared about, and little daily personal things about their lives, and insignificant but popular items, such as the one about a muskrat seen on the street at midnight, and which walked to an intersection and waited for the traffic light before crossing.

  Births, christenings, graduations, marriages, and the daily obituaries—she chronicled all of them. Local circulation grew and West Virginia side advertisers began inquiring about rates. Finally the Ohio paper opened a local office, with a direct teletype wire back to Athens.

  Mary Hyre put down the phone. Mrs. Adkins had just been taken to the hospital. But she had got throu
gh to the head nurse, and it was nothing serious: a mild case of flu. She dialed the fire department to check on the latest run, having heard a siren a few minutes previously.

  “False alarm, Mary,” Ted Jenkins told her; “Old Mrs. Cleveland’s cat was up in a tree and afraid to come back down. Casualties: one fireman scratched. Damages: We hit a chuck hole and busted a spring. Over and out, honey.”

  Mary scribbled some notes. To Ted, the fireman the run had been a wild goose chase, but she quickly sensed it would make an excellent feature story. Mrs. Cleveland was well liked, although some people thought she was a bit “off”, because of her propensity for taking in all the stray dogs and cats that came to her place (for some unexplained reason, possibly by sixth sense). She provided a private animal shelter, caring and finding homes for the creatures. Why had she never thought of writing a story about the eccentric but benign woman?

  But she would have to put it aside, for the story she was working on intrigued her more greatly; in fact she was beginning to feel it was growing into an obsession.

  Mary Hyre seldom had difficulty composing a news account, and rarely needed to do a rewrite. With only a few scribbled notes she could sit down at the teletype and transmit a complete story, ready for the linotype; though sometimes journalism students of Ohio University, who did actual practice at the Messenger office, would tear off the copy at the other end and rewrite it, “flowering it up”, as Mary described it.

  “Actually,” she told me, “those kids always improve my copy; and they never bother the really important stories, such as court reports and board of education meetings.”

  Mary was having trouble with the story, she reasoned, because she had been personally involved with it. But it boiled down to her difficulty in describing one important fact: THOSE EYES!

  She hadn’t seen the creature itself, only its hypnotic red eyes which flashed for a brief second or so in the darkness of the lonely T.N.T. area. Why had the eyes impressed her so deeply? Why was she obviously so emotionally involved in the experience?

  She looked out the steamed office window into the cold November drizzle. Although it was the noon hour, very few people were in the streets, and those huddled under great black umbrellas as they hurried briskly for shelter from the inhospitable exterior. Through the misty window they took on distorted shapes in a macabre parade. She caught herself wondering if one’s entire life might represent a distorted mummery, watched upon by some even stranger Reality, as It was alternately amused, bored and apathetic.

  The previous night now was reminiscent of the almost unreal scene outside—the crowds of people filling the grounds of the abandoned T.N.T. powerhouse; the long-haired teenagers bantering the two young couples; a holiday mood, but one with a tenseness; the crowd fearing, and possibly even hoping that the creature would return and show itself.

  She first got the lead from her daily look at the city police blotter. It was a terse report of a frightening creature sighted by the Scarberry and Mallette couples. She had phoned them and soon learned that their story involved far more than a crackpot account. She filed a brief report on the teletype, and soon the machine began to clatter out a return message.

  “Get more on the monster,” it ordered. “We gave your blurb to AP and they want more.”

  The phone rang. It was Channel 13, Huntington, whose news editor had already seen the brief AP item, and was trying to get the whole story. They carried the “Batman” TV show, and had coined a name for the bird-like creature, as a promo for the series. They thought “Mothman” might be a good appellation.

  The night following the initial appearance of “Mothman” at the old plant, Mary joined the throng which drove to the area after hearing the news report. Despite the seriousness with which many seemed to be taking the matter, a holiday mood prevailed, and there was a great deal of laughter and good humor. One preacher, however, of a local minor sect, had ensconced himself on top of a car and had managed to attract a small group around him. His fierce eyes gleaming, he shouted in choked phrases, punctuating each statement with an “Uh!”

  “If you want to go to heaven, Uh! Repent, Uh! Cast away these evil spirits, Uh! Cast away, oh brothers and sisters, these worldly things, Uh! The indecent lipstick and the rouge, Uh! And the beer gardens, Uh!.”

  Then apparently connecting recent events with a biblical account, he quoted the Book of Ezekiel. He read it slowly but stentorially, temporarily losing the speech impediment.

  “ ‘Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces.

  “ ‘The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel’“

  Punctuating the reading with an admonition that the bird creature was a sign sent by God, he continued by describing how the strange beings in Ezekiel’s vision “ 'went upon their four sides: and they turned not as they went.’“

  At this point, as Mary was walking away, the speaker suddenly repeated the phrase, “and they turned not as they went”. Then he repeated it over and over, his manner becoming frenzied. The small group of followers responded at each repetition with “Amen!” To her the statement was meaningless.

  Suddenly she had a compelling impulse to look toward a spot beyond and to the right of the powerhouse. There she glimpsed the red, glowing curiously reflecting eyes—for a fleeting instant.

  At that moment she knew the two young couples were telling the truth, and that they had indeed seen something very much like the thing they described.

  She reviewed her notes again. Perhaps she should try first to type out the story, and then edit and redo it—though she was so accustomed to the electric keyboard of the teletype that she could not type well on the manual office typewriter.

  So occupied was she with the dilemma of composing the story, she had not heard the front door, that faced the street, open and shut.

  Perhaps it had been her involvement with the outre events, or failing to note the man come in until she suddenly saw him standing in front of her desk, that startled her (she has since wondered if the man had indeed entered through the door, for it had noisy, oil hungry hinges—it had swollen, and had to be forced, and was generally noisy when it was opened).

  There, before her, stood a man, who by conservative explanations still could be described as “weird”. He was not tall, about 5’1”, she later conjectured. He wore no coat, only dark blue or black trousers, and a blue shirt. His garb gave her the impression of its being a uniform, and had he worn a cap he might have been mistaken for a policeman. He had blonde hair, combed straight back on his head.

  It was the man’s eyes, however, that disturbed her, after she had recovered from her initial shock of suddenly seeing him standing there. Or was it his lack of eyes? He wore glasses with very thick lenses that disclosed the eyes only as a blur. Still she could sense somehow that the eyes never moved nor diverted from her as would be normal. She knew they were constantly riveted upon her.

  The man, in a halting, sing-song voice (sounding as if it were recorded), asked her the directions to Welch, a mining town in southern West Virginia. As she reflected on the best route, he explained that his car was there; and he extracted a bill of sale from a pocket and held it briefly before her eyes. It was written to some person with a long and undecipherable last name.

  Except for proffering the document, which he hastily withdrew, the man did not move, standing there like a statue, still (again she more fancied than observed) holding her in the gaze of the immobile eyes.

  Gathering her wits, she began giving him the directions to Welch; but he seemed to be disinterested in the information. Making his only movement to that moment, he put his two hands on the desk and leaned toward her. She noticed his hands were very white, with neatly manicured nails.

  “My family,” he told her, “live in Grundy, Virginia. My truck broke down
in Detroit, and it was very cold there.”

  The last statement was most contradictory. For he wore no coat at all, only the uniform-type shirt.

  As he continued failing to be interested in or responding to the directions, he again leaned closer, and she fancied the blurred eyes behind the thick lenses were beginning to affect her hypnotically.

  She grew more frightened. She had a feeling that the man was trying to envelop her, or merge with her. How was she to get out of the situation? She knew: she would call the police! But she dare not ask them to come, or it was hard to tell what the man might do. She would call on the pretense of asking directions, and they would know by the tone of her voice that something was wrong, and they would check. She hoped to God they would!

  She dialed the number, explaining, “I can get you better directions to Welch.”

  The secretary answered. All of the officers were out to lunch or on outside duty; then she continued to give Mary explicit directions for reaching Welch, without understanding the clue about her predicament.

  Mary again stalled by giving him an alternate routing, but when she looked up he was again much closer. Without any explanatory remark, he suddenly withdrew the glasses. They had covered and disguised what were only eye-like openings. If indeed he did possess eyes, they were sunk far back into the apertures! She felt herself going limp.

  Then noises from behind reassured her. Bob Rickard, director of a local Office of Economic Opportunity project, who had an office adjacent to hers, separated only by a locked door, was returning from lunch early. Recovering her composure, she dashed to the door, pulled the latch, and called to him. He entered, surveyed the visitor, who by that time was backing away from the desk and showing visible signs of discomfiture.