The Silver Bridge

by Gray Barker

  CHAPTER 15

  THE DOG THAT SAW MOTHMAN

  ‘Yes, Maynard he saw Mothman, and you ask him, Old Pronto was nearly scared to death. You can ask the kids how he still sneaks under the bed.”

  The woman ushered us into the three-room shack. Ben Franklin and I had again driven out to the remote area where we had heard of the flying saucer report which vied with the ’60’s in sophistication: a frightening contraption shaped like a Volkswagon!

  The house was not dirty, but it was unkempt. Tattered articles of clothing were scattered about; childrens’ cutouts from mail order catalogs covered much of the floor, and the room had the appearance of general disorganization. We had been brought into a combination living room and bedroom, obviously where the three children slept in a dilapidated two-tiered bunk-type bed.

  “This is Joe,” she introduced a boy of ten or eleven in bibbed overalls; “and this is Helen,” and she identified a scraggly, dirty little girl, with long, stringy hair, her bangs cut straight across. As the two children regarded us, evidently with some awe, the mother pointed to another girl, a large, overweight child of perhaps sixteen, her hair cut like that of a boy, and dressed in ill-fitting pants and shirt, probably her father’s.

  “This is Emily. She isn’t too bright—so don’t expect her to be civil to you. Emily! Sit down there! But first go wipe your face (she referred to a dribbling from her nose which had accumulated on her upper lip)!”

  Emily did not move from the corner into which she had retreated, but a wide smile came over her face. She suddenly sprawled down onto the floor, and from that awkward position continued to watch our every movement with large brown eyes, which despite her obvious mental retardation, nevertheless appeared bright and alert.

  “You’ve missed Maynard. He’s at the ADC office, seeing about going to night school. The State is going to educate him, they say, and pay him for going. The ADC, that means the Aid for Dependent Children, is really going to help us out, and goodness knows we need it. As I tell Maynard, I don’t know how we’re going to get through this winter. It’s taken two loads of coal so far, and now we have to see about getting another load. I can’t keep this house clean, with the kids traipsing in and out through the mud. The more I tell them not to, the more they keep doing it!”

  Knowing we were running late, and that Ben had an appointment back in town. I asked her to relate, even though second hand, just what her husband (and the dog) had witnessed.

  “Well, I’ll tell you just what he told me. Him and Bill Singleton were over there to Apple Grove, and on their way back they had car trouble—Emily! Go into the kitchen and wipe off your face! How many times do I have to tell you!—and as I was saying, Emory—Clarence—Joe (she recited three other first names before pronouncing that of her husband, a conversational trait I had noted among other people of the area)—I mean MAYNARD, saw this thing like a Volkswagon right smack in the middle of the road in front of them. Emily! Be quiet! Don’t you know that I’m talkin’!”

  The girl, who previously had contented herself either by watching us or carefully examining a broken piece of bric-a-brac, a plaster-of-Paris bird of the type one sees at a circus or carnival booth, had suddenly stolen the limelight. She chanted, in a sing-song minor key, and somewhat out of tune:

  “O the hammers keep a ringin’

  On somebody’s coffin…

  Way over yonder…

  Way over yonder…”

  “SHUT UP, BEFORE I KNOCK YOUR HEAD OFF!” the mother shrieked (although she constantly warned the children, she did not carry out any of her threats, and they no doubt were accustomed to the violent adjurations).

  She continued her narrative. Apparently either wishing to stretch it out, or conforming to a style of verbalizing indigenous to the small community, she constantly interrupted the story with minor details unrelated to the report we had come to hear.

  My attention strayed to the dog, which supposedly figured in the story, for it had a habit of riding in the truck with the father and therefore also had witnessed the strange object. It was a fat, aged, white-whiskered creature, and it lay with its face near the pot-bellied, coal-burning stove, the small door of which had been opened to decrease the chimney draft and reduce the temperature in the overheated room.

  Suddenly the dog awakened, whined and pawed its face spasmodicaly.

  “Old Ponto’s got too hot!” the boy explained.

  “You lay so close to that stove, no wonder!” the mother cried out at the dog.

  The boy and girl, apparently seizing an opportunity to gain attention, lifted the heavy animal and carried it to a rocking chair. Sitting side-by-side, they pulled Ponto onto their common lap. The annoyed dog did not appear to appreciate the rough handling, but nevertheless lethargicaly accepted the circumstance.

  “Did you know,” Helen addressed us, “that Old Ponto has one more toe than any other dog?”

  At the same moment she smiled impishly, and her brother turned his earnest face toward us with such a pitiful expression that we could not ignore the question. Anyhow, the mother’s narrative had been so often interrupted by various conversational sidetracks, such as referrals to the government, bad weather, and the neighbors, that the riddle the children imposed afforded a welcome relief.

  “No, I didn’t know that. Why is that?” Ben obligingly asked.

  “Why, because of his name. You know he has ten toes, like any dog, And there’s his name: #8216;Pon-TOE’!”

  Joe’s face broke into a smile, and both children shrieked and giggled.

  “We fooled old Squint Eyes Fletcher on that yesterday!” they triumphantly added.

  “Well, as I was telling you-LET ME TELL THIS OR THE OLD SCRATCH WILL GET YOU (the mother shouted at the children)! When George—Ed—I mean MAYNARD, saw this thing like a Volkswagon, only it wasn’t a car at all for it took off straight up in the air-JOE, DON’T POKE THAT FIRE! IT’S TOO HOT IN HERE NOW! They killed the engine, or rather this thing must have killed the engine, and they just stopped dead there. Maynard’s first thought was that this was one of them Air Force experiments, and that maybe he had seen something he wasn’t supposed to see; and I guess they were getting scared, too. Now Maynard isn’t afraid of anything, I’d say; but when he came home that night I’ll swear he was white as a sheet. That Ponto was scared too. He ran in the door like a streak of lightning, and ran under that bed right there, and I’ll swear he wouldn’t come out and wouldn’t come out, not even when we tried to feed him his supper.”

  A frying and hissing noise interrupted her.

  “Oh my lord, my meat’s boiling over!” she exclaimed as she ran into the adjacent room.

  “There’s just too much for one woman to do around here,” her complaining voice continued from the kitchen, as she remonstrated how her husband “just never comes home and dolesses* around”.

  The two children in the rocker took their mother’s absense as an opportunity to regain our attention.

  “We’ll ask Old Ponto if he saw Mothman. Poor Old Ponto, poor old dog.”

  They patted him, with such a heavy barrage that his sleepy head moved up and down with the rough caresses.

  Now, Ponto, didn’t you see Mothman?”

  They abruptly ceased the patting, but the sleepy creature continued to nod its head, in synchronization with the now absent strokes.

  *A local term, obviously a contraction of “do less,” and pronounced “DOO’-less.”

  CHAPTER 16

  BARBARA HUDSON

  Barbara Hudson looked down past the rusting catwalks, the abandoned boilers and the maze of rooms gutted of their machinery. Except for the lively conversations below, it could have been a place far from human inhabitation or concern. Broken glass from the windows spread across the floor, and she looked out the empty panes, past the dead trees of winter, toward the Pleasant Point Resort, which was about a mile away.

  Ever since she had seen the skyline of New York stretch long, then pass from view on the New J
ersey turnpike, she had been in what seemed to her a new world. Since her early childhood in North Carolina, she rarely had an opportunity to leave the city.

  “We’re going to a ‘mini-convention’,” Jim Moseley had phoned her.

  “A what?”

  “It’s really what we call a ‘Mothman convention’. Instead of having a big UFO meeting as we did in New York, where thousands of people came, Timothy Green Beckley, Mark Samwick and myself have decided to spend the weekend at Point Pleasant, mainly just to relax, but also to investigate first hand some of the Mothman cases there. We’ll meet Gray Barker, and a few other UFO buffs there, and have a real get-together. We thought you might want to join us. There will be plenty of room in the car.”

  Mary Hyre had guided the small party to the old abandoned T.N.T. plant. Even in the daytime, it looked spooky and foreboding, with its broken windows, cluttered grounds, and empty smokestacks standing as if in a “freeze frame” in an otherwise moving picture.

  She wondered why she had left the luxury and comfort of the beautiful resort to come here to this rotting old building. And as she had seen its immense hulk loom up in the distance, she believed she would be afraid to go near or enter it. Although it had now been more than a year since the bird creature had been seen here, she was apprehensive that it might select that particular time to return, and that it might be hiding in there.

  But now, after she was inside, she was less frightened of the building. It was like a vast, empty house, and she liked to imagine what kind of people had once been there. She enjoyed climbing, and soon had followed the flimsy catwalks to the very apex of the cavernous structure.

  From there the conversations and shouts from below took on a hollow, muffled, unreal quality, as voices reverberated through the empty vastness. Looking downward, the interior was to her a marvel of light and darkness. The slanting and unusually intense winter sun shone through the broken windows, falling on the junk-strewn floors, making strong visual contrasts.

  Such a shaft of light now caught two people on the landing two floors below. They were Ben Franklin and Ralph Jarrett, the latter a Charleston, W. Va., mechanical engineer. They appeared as if a spotlight had caught them on the stage of a darkened theatre. Jarrett advanced across the landing, holding two stiff wires, improvised from coat hangers. As he walked, the wires slowly spread apart, and she could see Franklin engaging him in animated conversation about the phenomenon. Jarrett had tried the same experiment outside, terming it a form of “dowsing”, and explaining that the wires parted because of certain magnetic influences present in the area.

  Behind some debris in a darkened corner, a pair of luminous eyes watched her movements, as she picked up something and screamed.

  “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” she cried, as she made a perilous descent down the rusting ladders as fast as she could.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” Ben Franklin told her. “Child, I know you would like to find some real evidence of Mothman, but this is only an ordinary feather. It is the feather from a pigeon. After the Mothman scare here, these pigeons, which used to live here in great numbers, suddenly abandoned the place. Lately, I’m told, they’re beginning to return. There, for example…”

  He pointed to a corner. There, in a circle of feathers, were the decaying remains of one of the creatures.

  “This one probably was attacked by something, likely a wild animal.”

  She turned and ran, as fast as she could while avoiding stumbling over the debris. On the ground floor she looked up, and could scarcely imagine that she had been brave enough to climb so high. She shuddered. What if she had fallen?

  There was much that fascinated her, though something that depressed her about the empty powerhouse. Somehow it reminded her of the building in which she lived. Here, of course, there was only a physical emptiness; but she could imagine that many happy people once worked here and filled it with the noises of their conversations and industry. Where she lived, the building was even taller and more vast than this, and it was filled with living people instead of ghosts. They laughed, they quarreled, they lived and died. But still there was that emptiness, the breath-sucking vacuum, and a loneliness even greater than in this old T.N.T. plant.

  The Recorder hid behind one of the old acid storage sheds. Although he, himself, had not seen Mothman, he believed that other people had sighted the creature; nevertheless he did not expect the great bird to show up in broad daylight.

  He had brought his equipment to the acres of abandoned government-owned property which had contained the great munitions manufacturing complex during World War II. He had come there not with the hope of obtaining recordings of Mothman, but with the thought of getting down on film and tape the people who sought out the strange flying thing.

  But the area, the atmosphere, in itself, had fascinated him. Somehow it was depressing, but compelling and exciting at the same time.

  Because explosives had been manufactured here, the buildings, with their many separate functions, had been located widely apart over the vast acreage. The vestiges of once well-traveled roads still wandered through the old industrial complex.

  As he had driven into the area and tried to find his way among the maze of decaying roads, he had first been impressed by the immense skeletons on the skyline—the steel and concrete frameworks of buildings, standing there like the ruins he had once seen in Peru. Like the lost cities, they held a certain kind of sadness: of loneliness, of emptiness, of one’s wondering where all the people who had lived and toiled there had gone. It might be like this, all over the world, he thought, should there be an atomic war.

  He made up and hummed music to accompany the panorama. He grabbed the movie camera, locked it in “on” position, and set it on the dashboard, to record the passing ruins as he drove. Later he would project this film and hum the same theme.

  His reverie was interrupted by a new black Cadillac, parked partly on the roadway, the first signs of any human inhabitation. He intended to wave and smile at the occupants, but as he swerved around them he noted that the two people, a man and a woman, were huddled low in the vehicle, as if hiding. With surprise he saw they were naked, and greatly agitated as his observance of them. He stepped on the accelerator and hurriedly moved on.

  He drove close to one of the vast skeletons, parked, and walked among the ruins. It reminded him of a movie he had seen about the lost city of Angkor Wat, eaten up by the encroaching jungle after its people had mysteriously disappeared. This ruin, too, was being taken over by a jungle of undergrowth, trees and weeds. The concrete floor split as a plant, though delicate in appearance, thrust its way upward through a jagged crack it had made.

  Set low among the trees, and almost hidden by underbrush was another building he wished to explore. He picked his precarious way through the thick bushes and peered into the black doorway. Then he ventured inside. His eyes were now adjusting to the darkness, and he could pick out shelves and compartments marked with various numbers and designations, but all of them empty. A sign outside had identified the structure as Acid Shack No. 3. But, so far as people were concerned, all was emptiness, except for signs of later interlopers, evidenced by the graffiti on the walls.

  He heard noises from outside, and he was glad. His patience had almost run out. Except for the couple in the car, he had recorded nobody who might be looking for Mothman. But this was a wild cacophany of shouts, giggling and loud discussions.

  Having cautiously moved through the darkness to a vantage point where he could look out the brightly illuminated doorway, he could now see the source of the confusion. A half dozen bedraggled children paraded on the road. They likely belonged to poor people of the neighborhood, for they wore obviously cast-down adult clothing, which, on them, produced a macabre effect. One of them had donned a tie, grotesquely and loosely tied around his neck, reaching almost to the ground. The tatterdemalion throng made up for its unattractiveness with its enthusiasm. The children were having a great time, as they l
eft the roadway and gamboled among the ruins. One of them had a toy, make-believe camera, which he occasionally pointed at the others. Whenever he did this they would stop, make faces and contort their bodies, then continue clambering over the ruins, taunting each other.

  Some of them ran into one of the buildings that yet claimed walls and set up a cry, greatly amplified by echoes:

  “Mothman! Where are you!” they yelled; then they began a loud moaning, which, augmented by the reverberations from the concrete structure, resulted in terrifying sounds. It would have frightened the Recorder, had he not also been saddened by it.

  Only one girl was among them. More reticent than the rest, she hung back, as if afraid she actually might see the monster the others so bravely challenged and mocked. Finally she retired completely from the group, plucked the frozen seed pod of a once existent flower and examined it.

  The children were now moving to another area, and the Recorder remembered the deep, uncovered well in that vicinity. What if they were to stumble into it? He estimated it had a drop of fifty feet to the water level, and was much deeper than that. When the property had been abandoned, these wells should have been covered, he reasoned.

  Perhaps he should run outside and warn them, even if it might involve revealing his identity.

  Barbara Hudson observed the utter sameness, as the miles of the Pennsylvania, then the New Jersey turnpike flashed by. The quiet farmlands of Pennsylvania had gradually dissolved to growing urbanization and industrialization as they progressed. Traffic grew heavier. Each trailer truck they now overtook became a repetition of the hundreds they had passed earlier. The rumble of the car, the harsh roar of air over the cracked side vent, and the cacophany of the rock and roll station on the radio grew to a hypnotic monotony, until the Pontiac seemed to stand still and the scenery rush toward and around it, reminiscent of the simulator employed in a driver’s education class she had taken in high school. There, a projector had thrown a moving scene onto a wide angled screen, as the student reacted to the various hazards artificially approaching him by making correct driver responses.