The Silver Bridge (10 page)
Authors: Gray Barker
“I know you’re awake,” he told her, “and I’m troubled. I want to tell about Mr. Cold. I don’t mind people laughing at me, but it’s you I’m concerned about. What do you think about having a crazy man for a husband?”
“This Mr. Cold,” she whispered, without answering his question, “are you certain he said he would be back?”
“I’m positive.”
“Do you think he really will be back?”
“I don’t know. I hope not. I wouldn’t want him to. But I’m afraid that he will.”
She grew silent again, and he sensed that this time she had actually dropped asleep. Woody shifted in bed, turned toward the wall and buried his face in the pillow.
Did he want Cold to come back, or not? Of course not. The visitation had not really been terrifying, but he sensed that it might bring a change into his life, and interruption of the happy existence he now shared with his family. If Cold returned, things surely would never be the same. But there had been that feeling of fascination. He confessed to himself that he had been strangely drawn to this unusual man. He had hoped Cold would approve of him, would perhaps tell him more about his strange craft and possibly invite him inside to look at it more closely.
While his better judgment told him he didn’t wish Cold to return, he was quite sure he would see him again. He would ask him exactly where he came from, what he was doing here. Maybe he could get to know this strange visitor better.
J
immy Jamison sat up in bed and cautiously opened the window curtain.
The outside scene was one of the same terrifying splendor. The trees on the hilltop, sharply outlined in the bright moonlight, turned into their familiar shapes: faces, dragons, devils, and another kind of thing that had defied conventional terminology. In his arbitrary nomenclature he had called it a “flinderation”. It writhed and undulated in the winter wind.
After he stared at the hilltop, his eyes passed, with some relief, to the tall oak tree about a hundred yards from his window. There, five nights previously, the day after he heard about it in school, had perched Mothman, gazing toward his window with blazing hypnotic eyes.
Jimmy liked this house better than the last. He enjoyed the farm and the view from the window, especially the spectral trees—which, when spring came, he fancied, would leaf out, and his familiar friends, the monsters, outlined in the barren trunks and branches, would be gone and dead.
He was supposed to be asleep, for his new parents had imposed a 9:00 bedtime, a part of his rehabilitation, they said. Tomorrow he would go to Sunday school, then sit through a long sermon by his new dad.
Jimmy’s last home had been in Parkersburg. He had tried to be a good boy, and his parents there had been kind to him. But an urgent impulse to slip away, and again wander the back streets had overtaken him, and he had opened his bedroom window and escaped. What a sweet, wonderful time it had been! He had talked to a man who had been around the world, who called him “son”, and had warned him about the evils of drinking. Slumped in the doorway with the finally empty bottle, the man became drowsy and ceased to be a companion, collapsing into a sleazy snoring.
“Wake up! Wake up!” Jimmy cried; then, giving up, he ran off among the back streets. A dog took up with him, and they gamboled through the dark alleys. Running onto a main street, chasing an old can Jimmy threw, the dog disappeared under the wheels of a noisy car with older boys in it.
Jimmy ran. The buildings became a blur. Finally, out of breath, he crumpled and sat on the sidewalk and kicked at it. A chunk of the decrepit curb gave way. Jimmy took it in his two hands and weighed it, swinging it back and forth. Then, with all the strength he could muster, he hurled the concrete through the window of the main reception office of the Department of Internal Revenue.
And so it was, off to new parents. He liked the new school in Ripley, especially the counselor, who, as his parents put it, “took a real interest in him and had been out to the house”.
He fingered the warm bed clothing, and in the darkness tried to follow the random patterns of the “crazy quilt” which served as a comforter. He dared not turn on the light, for it would reflect outside and they would see it. He hoped he would not start shaking again. When this happened, and he cried, his mother would come into the room and comfort him, but with the adjuration that he was a big boy now and should not be afraid of the dark—which he wasn’t anyhow. He loved the darkness, for in it he could think.
It had been as big as Mothman, but not quite like the newspaper accounts the science teacher had read. The red eyes were there, but there were no feathers and he could not believe it to be a bird.
That night, unable to drop asleep at the prescribed time, Jimmy had again taken to fantasizing about the trees. He pulled open the curtain and looked, but instead he had seen the terrible thing.
There, limned in the bright moonlight, and perched on the huge horizontal branch of the oak tree, was a bone-chilling creature. It seemed to grasp the branch with claw-like feet, like an immense, overgrown parakeet. Its head was set low between the apex of a huge set of wings, folded around it. But here the resemblance to a bird ended. Jimmy could see the rough outline of a man’s torso. It reminded him of the picture of his real father, who, at one time, had been a carnival performer. His picture showed a handsome young man, with bulging muscles displayed under the tights and blouse of a trapeze artist’s costume.
As terrifying, somehow, as its red hypnotic eyes, was its stillness. It didn’t move, except to sway up and down with the branch in the winter wind. Jimmy must have stared back at it for some time, for he remembered the darkening and lightening of the creature, as high, fast-moving clouds obscured and revealed the moon.
Jimmy screamed. His parents ran in, and he sobbed out his story to them. His father jerked back the curtain which Jimmy had closed in terror.
“See! You’re imagining things. There’s nothing out there!” There was strong displeasure in his voice.
“God does not permit such things.” And his father sat down, took the bible from the table and read him a passage of scripture about how Jesus had said to suffer the little children to come unto Him. His mother lingered, however, hands on his bed, after her husband departed. She took the bible, which had been roughly thrust into the child’s hands, and closed it. She smoothed back his hair which had fallen into his eyes. She bent down and kissed the forehead the mop of hair had hidden, then suddenly departed silently from the room.
Ever since that night Jimmy had lived in the terror that Mothman might return. He was certain that the next time, Mothman would fly to the window, break it open, enfold him in those huge wings, hold him in that inescapable grasp and peck at him with his long, sharp beak.
So each night, before he finally fell asleep, Jimmy had to reassure himself that Mothman was indeed not there, perched upon the horizontal limb, and that only his familiar monsters, and the flinderation, haunted the darkness.
Despite the absence of Mothman, Jimmy pulled the crazy quilt over his head and lay there half-dreaming. By this time his parents had gone to bed, and from the next room he could hear the muffled but recognizable sounds of sex.
They were somewhat like the sounds he had known, made by the stranger, with the greying hair which receded from a balding hairline. They had been whispered, and reassuring, mixed with the smell of foot powder and cologne. A worn, one dollar bill had been the only evidence that, for him, had separated this real experience from fantasy; and he still had it, folded upon fold and hidden where it would never be discovered, in a remote corner of his dilapidated billfold.
Jimmy liked going to sleep, once he could really get started. For the real world dovetailed into one that was unreal; and in that half-lit country he could feel warm forms engulf him and a babble of voices which praised him, lifted him from one to the other as he ran a corridor of smiling, faceless people, swimming with him through pleasant vapors.
But this half-world departed and again Jimmy was awake. The sounds in the next room had been supplanted by a familiar ritual, a reading of scriptures in the deep voice of his foster father, sometimes responded to by the soft, almost unheard voice of the woman. Tonight these took on a hollow, reverberating, unreal sound.
Again, Jimmy felt he must reassure himself. He moved in bed toward the window, and with a hand trembling, half from the cold of the room, half from fear, jerked back the curtain with a swift, concise movement.
There lay the scene, cold, austere, with the moving shadows of the high, fast-moving clouds. There were the familiar trees on the hilltop. There was the great oak tree with its horizontal limb.
He fixed the limb in his stare, trying to reconstruct just how Mothman had stood, rigidly and motionless on it as it had moved up and down in the winter wind. He tried to envision just how tall the creature had been, and how long it had stared at him. Without closing the curtain, Jimmy fell back from his sitting position and turned onto his stomach, kicking at the mattress with wildly flaying feet.
“Mothman!
“Please come back, Mothman!
“Mothman! Mothman! I love you, Mothman!”
‘A
h- Mr. Flame—there you are at last!”
The phone had been ringing for some time, and my key had stuck in the door as I tried to get inside to answer. I was just returning from out of town, and tripped over a box of books while reaching the phone.
“No, Jim,” I countered; “this is Mr. Tailfeather and I just went for a tailspin getting here before you would hang up.”
Of course I knew that James W. Moseley was exercising his usual sense of humor. He probably was calling up to hear what I had found out about the latest Mothman cases, in which he was deeply interested. Jim, then the editor of
Saucer News,
earlier had made a joke, terming my interest in Mothman as similar to the fable,
The Moth and the Flame.
Lately he had been addressing me as “Mr. Flame.”
“I’m calling,” he continued, “because there’s a man coming down there to see you. Don’t get me wrong. He’s one hell of a fine fellow, and you’ll enjoy talking with him. Still, however, he says he’s new to UFO research and would like to ask you some questions. One odd thing, however, is that despite his newness in the field, he
knows too much
about it—as much as you or I, and possibly even more.”
“Who is he, anyhow.”
“John Keel. You likely have heard of him.”
“Yes, you mentioned him last week when I talked to you from Point Pleasant.”
Then I thought of a book I had read about six months previously.
“Now I place him,” I told Jim. “I read a book of his, one heck of a book which Randy Parks recommended to me. In fact I couldn’t get rid of the thing until I finished it, and as a result of staying up the most of the night I missed two appointments the next day. I forget the title—some sort of strange name.”
“Jadoo
is the title. I haven’t read it but I intend to.”
I recalled the strange, compelling volume. Keel had spent a great deal of time in the Middle East, with the intention of exposing many of the miracles claimed by mystics and holy men there. He did expose some of them, but also encountered many mysteries he couldn’t fathom. Not only had the events been fascinating, but they had been described by a fluency of writing style that could come only from a highly talented author.
“Maybe Keel’s just a better researcher than we and has covered a lot of ground in a short time,” I said, referring to his apparent wide knowledge of the UFO field.
“That’s entirely possible. But maybe it’s just the general aura of mystery he carries with him. He has a full, black beard, and a very striking general appearance. Or, maybe it’s because he gives you the impression of not only knowing as much as we about Flying Saucers—but actually knowing a lot
more—a lot that he is not telling.”
Some beeping sounds and then a series of clicks temporarily interrupted our conversation.
“There’s The Silence Group again,” I joked; then I told him, in an exaggerated manner, that I had just discovered the “secret” to the Saucer Mystery and planned to announce it the next day. I also threw in details about some bridges I planned to blow up.
“You shouldn’t bait the Men In Black in such a cavalier manner,” Jim warned with mock seriousness.
I knew that, despite our kidding, Jim, as I did, took some of the new cases involving threats by strange visitors very seriously. He had long been plagued by threatening telephone calls, and by annoying noises on the line. I had been receiving similar calls, but privately felt that if I expressed fear, the situation might get worse. So I had bugged the callers by giving them some funny business, and laughing into their ears. The calls had decreased in frequency.
As Jim hung up and I was replacing the receiver I heard a deep, baritone voice on the line.
“Hello! Hello! Gray Barker?”
I put the receiver back to my ear and answered.
“This is John Keel. Say, are you psychic? You answered the phone before it rang!”
