Point Pleasant (10 page)

“It mostly takes sheep,” Tucker said. “Less inconspicuous, I figure.”

The copy of the morning’s
Gazette
stuck out of the side pocket of Ben’s messenger bag, and he pulled it free. “Have you seen this?” he asked and tossed the paper to Tucker. “They’re saying it’s been sighted again.”

Tucker skimmed the headline and snorted. “Collins just likes to stir the pot. Don’t know why they keep her on. It’s been sighted for years, she’s only just now saying it to cause a panic for the festival. Excites the neighboring counties. Gets extra visitors in who think they’re gonna see E.T. phone home.”

“Sighted for years? Where?”

“Everywhere. Around the forest mostly,” Tucker replied, and he sipped his coffee. “Of course, no one believes you when you say you saw it, so you learn to shut up about it. Saw it last week myself.” His wrinkled brow furrowed as he seemed to consider his words. “It had red eyes. Stared right at me. He saw me just as I saw him. I didn’t see its eyes that morning I shot at it with you and our now-esteemed sheriff.”

Ben blinked at the man’s sarcastic tone. “What?”

“You and the Nolan boy. He’s sheriff now.”

“Nicholas Nolan is sheriff?”

“Where have you been?” Tucker asked with a snort.

“Away,” Ben replied. Nicholas had done very well for himself: he had a wife,
probably
kids, and authority.
It suits him.
“But that makes no sense. In the paper last week, Collins quoted the sheriff saying it was coyotes. And in today’s he blames raccoons. He
knows
what’s out there. It damn near took off with the both of us.”

“He won’t have any of it,” Tucker said. “I tried talking to him about it when my cows went missing. He said it was unfortunate but
explicable
. You ask me, he’s covering his own ass. Young sheriff and all. Big fuss was made when he got the job a few years back. Guess he doesn’t want to give his dissenters just cause. Especially with the council’s plans for the town. They’re all hopped up on modernizing the area to try and land a deal to build a satellite campus for West Virginia University. They figure the grant and the general revenue it’d bring would set the town on its feet for a spell.”

Ben hummed in response, though his thoughts lingered on Nicholas. A hardbound copy of
The Moth Population of West Virginia
was perched on the edge of the table. He picked up the book and waved it at Tucker.

“So what is
it
? Looks like I’ve got some catching up to do with you on the research front.”

Tucker let out a humorless laugh. “It ain’t in no books, son. I’ve read as many as I could find, anything that might be relevant, but there’s no other record of it anywhere else. It made its home in Point Pleasant a long time ago, and it ain’t leaving. I’ve got a few notebooks. They’ve got everything I know. They’re yours if you want ‘em, but only on one condition.”

“What’s that, sir?”

Tucker leaned forward, and Ben noted the way the older man’s features hardened with a seriousness that was almost unsettling.

“I expect you’re gonna want to find it,” Tucker said. “It’d be a right stupid thing to do.”

Ben prepared to smile and nod insincerely. He was sure Tucker was about to tell him to not venture into the forest alone, but the old farmer surprised him.

“You come get me,” Tucker said. “You come get me because I wanna kill it myself.”

Ben considered the man’s solemnity and wondered why Tucker had not gone after it on his own, especially as he seemed so intent to have its head mounted on his living room wall.

“Deal,” Ben said finally.

Fifteen minutes later, Ben loaded a boxful of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and a few books that Tucker cited as particularly relevant into the Camaro.

As he slammed the trunk shut, Ben took in the eerie stillness of the surrounding area. Tucker had spun on the front porch to head back inside. Anxiety ebbed from the tense set of his shoulders.

“Mr. Tucker,” Ben called out. “When did all the noise stop?”

Tucker paused as he opened the screen door, and the squeak of its hinges lingered on the air. “Last week,” he replied, turning to Ben. “When I saw it. When it locked its eyes on me. The whole world just went quiet. I thought I was going deaf.”

Tucker’s rigid posture filled Ben with an unease that made him want to climb into the Camaro and lock both the doors. “I’ll be back in a day or two,” Ben said. “Unless you come into town?”

“I don’t go into town, son,” Tucker said over his shoulder before he disappeared into the house and shut the door behind him.

Ben imagined the man locking the deadbolt, applying the chain, and cradling his Remington in his lap as he returned to his place at the kitchen table. Ben wondered what it would be like to have to sleep next to the forest every night and endure its permeating silence.

Relief washed over him as he drove away from the farm. Since Tucker had provided so much reading material, Ben thought it best to return to Cardinal and go through everything there.

When he passed the Sheriff’s Department, Ben noticed a few uniformed officers standing outside the building. Nicholas was one of them.

Sheriff Nic
, Ben thought. In the morning light, he had a new appreciation for the uniform, but he rolled his eyes at himself, focusing on the road and lamenting the Camaro’s presence. She was hard to miss; the deep rumble of her engine demanded attention. And attention was not something that Ben needed right now, not from the apparent Sheriff of Mason County.

Ben berated himself for neglecting to read the other man’s badge the previous evening. It was dark and seeing Nicholas had been like seeing a ghost, but Ben should have noticed.
Way to be observant, Benji. Way to use that writerly attention to detail.

Back on Cardinal Lane, Ben spent the next four hours poring over Tucker’s handwritten notebooks. The notes, though meticulous in detail, read like the ramblings of a lunatic. If Ben had not known better, he would have thought Bill Tucker was one book short of a full trilogy.

After reading through the notebooks, Ben thought them not unlike Tucker’s personal diaries. There was something intimate about the accounts, and Ben felt like he was intruding as he examined the entries, particularly the ones that charted the man’s slow descent into the role of town recluse. The pages that preceded Tucker’s ramblings about his growing avoidance of Point Pleasant and the people in it had been ripped from one of the notebooks, and Ben could only speculate the cause for Tucker’s withdrawal from the community.

Tucker had been a married man, and the tattoo on his arm was a confirmation that Shirley Tucker had held some precious place in the farmer’s life. Had she left him? Or had their marriage met its end by some other tragic means? Ben could not understand whatever motivation had inspired the older man to give away his private writings, but the final page of the most recent notebook, dated just three days prior, was perhaps an indication.

The entry bore a dark, ominous sketch of the creature from the forest. It was like a scribble gone haywire. Tucker was no artist, but he had used a black pen to present a rough drawing of the thing; it was all wings and long, gangly limbs. The only spots of color were the eyes, which were huge and red against the white page and ink smudges. This visage had locked its gaze on Tucker just one week ago.

The silence had started soon after.

Despite his gruff exterior, Tucker was scared. He had made no mention of having work to tend to even though his farm appeared to be active. He had also seemed wary of straying too far from the shelter of his house and the safety of his shotgun.

Had the Mothman’s appearance served as some kind of threat? Was the penetrating silence of the forest meant to reinforce that warning?

Ben flipped to a page in one of the first notebooks and re-read the story of Silver Bridge, the bridge that connected Point Pleasant to Ohio over the Ohio River. In December of 1967, the bridge collapsed and forty-six people lost their lives. The ones who survived the initial crash had drowned in their cars or froze in the icy water of the river. Ben was familiar with the event but only as a horrible memory from the town’s history.

Tucker’s record of the account differed from the standard version of the bridge’s collapse that Ben recalled from his adolescence. Carol Chapman, a reporter for the
Gazette
at the time, had been out near the bridge at twilight to take photographs of it as it glimmered with Christmas lights. She had snapped several shots before she noticed that there was something off about one of the support towers.

Somehow, Tucker had managed to obtain a copy of one of the photographs. It was a grainy image, but the form was clear. There was something perched atop the bridge. Something with wide, unfurled wings with a span that made it impossible to ignore. It was the creature from the forest. A note beside the photograph revealed that the bridge collapsed an hour after the image was captured. Five years passed before the Mothman was sighted again.

Ben checked his wristwatch and saw it had gone past noon. He could go into town to Duvall’s and have lunch there, but he was in no mood to be around anyone else. He enjoyed eating alone; he was accustomed to the practice.

As he waited for his grilled cheese sandwich to brown, Ben mulled over the photograph of Silver Bridge and struggled to understand how the Mothman could be connected to the collapse. Had it gnawed on the suspension cables? Was it responsible for the devastation, and no one had realized?

The other accounts featured in Tucker’s notebooks were vague and nondescript from farmers and motorists who had seen the creature flying over the forest or crouched by the side of the road in the middle of the night.

Ben was not surprised to find his own story in the pages of Tucker’s writings. The farmer wrote of how sure he was that he had shot ‘the beast,’ but he had been unable to find it during his solo venture into the woods.

What Tucker disclosed in the privacy of his journal, and what he had failed to tell Ben and Nicholas that morning when he had returned to the pickup truck, was that he felt
something
watching him as he wandered through the dense undergrowth. It had unsettled him, but he had kept that to himself. Ben was thankful in retrospect. He was sure his twelve-year-old self would have nosedived right back into panic mode if Tucker had confessed that something had followed him, unseen, and observed him from a distance.

The account also revealed that after Ben, Nicholas, and Mrs. Nolan left the Sheriff’s Department that morning, Tucker had not told Deputy Nolan about the creature. He had been certain that the deputy would have thrown him into the drunk tank.

So Tucker had kept it quiet. After all those years, he never told another soul about the creature he had seen with his own eyes or how he had saved two boys on bicycles from its sharp claws.

Ben understood Tucker’s reluctance. When Caroline and Andrew found out about Ben’s trip into the woods, they had grounded him for the rest of the summer. Ben told his mother about the experience, but he never brought it up with his father. Caroline relayed some of the details to Andrew, of course; she had been concerned that her son had confused the black-and-white horror films he favored with reality. Much to Caroline’s annoyance and Ben’s dismay, Andrew teased Ben for weeks about the ‘batman’ under his bed.

After lunch, Ben left the house again. He drove back to town, parked, and strolled down Main Street with his messenger bag draped over his shoulder. He approached the familiar headquarters of the
Gazette.
Just as he opened the main door to the building, a petite form dressed in a skirt suit barreled out of the entrance and ran straight into his chest.

“Sorry, sorry! Ben!” said the woman, and Ben realized it was Lizzie Collins. Before he realized it, she was hugging him.

“Lizzie,” Ben said as he untangled himself from her grasp and offered a genuine smile. “It’s good to see you.”

Lizzie brushed a hand through her hair, which was dyed black and struck Ben as foreign when he recalled her lank brown hair in high school. She grinned, and the red lipstick she wore complimented her perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth. “You’re not here for a job, are you? We’re not hiring.”

Ben laughed and shook his head. “No, but I am here to see you.”

Lizzie arched an eyebrow and checked the silver watch around her slim, pale wrist. “I was just running down to grab a coffee and a sandwich from the café on the square. Wanna come? I can’t stay for long. Busy day and all.”

“Yeah, of course. I could always use a coffee.”

They walked across the town square to Dawson’s, a new addition to the town that Ben had not yet noticed as it was tucked behind a grouping of trees on the other side of the quad. An elegant sign in the front window boasted: ‘The Best Muffins in Town!’

“I heard you were back,” Lizzie said as they walked.

“News travels fast.”

“You know how it is,” Lizzie snickered.

“Too well,” Ben said. “I read some of your articles. Associate editor. Good for you.”

Lizzie grinned again as she strode into the café. “Yeah, not too shabby for a small town paper, I guess. Nothing like you, it seems. Mae told me about the article you’re writing. What publication is it?”

“Oh,
Jump the Shark
,” Ben lied. He turned to ask the young man behind the counter for a black coffee. A notice taped to the register advertised free Wi-Fi for paying customers.

“I’ll have to look it up,” Lizzie said before she placed her order as well.

Ben paid for his coffee and Lizzie’s lunch despite her protest. “I want to, please,” he insisted and was happy to shift her attention away from his fabricated career as he ripped open packets of Demerara sugar and emptied them into his cup.

Lizzie gestured to the door. “Let’s sit outside. It’s a bit more private.”

Ben followed her outside and took a sip of his coffee when he sat beside her on a bench by the fountain in the center of the square. The area was desolate despite its central position. Most people were at work and kids were in school, but the square was never this empty in Ben’s memory.