The Silver Bridge (20 page)
Authors: Gray Barker
“I had just fallen asleep, when, I swear, a voice with a very odd accent boomed into my room, saying,
'What do you want?’
I sat up wide awake, turned on my light, and looked at my dog to see if he was aware of anything. He was still asleep.
“I lit a cigarette, and was thinking it must have been a dream, or that I had too much to drink, or that my imagination was playing tricks on me. After a few more drags on the cigarette I became convinced of this.
“Then, booming through the entire upstairs floor, the voice, still with the odd accent, said:
'Have you called us? What do you want?’
My first reaction was that I should say, ‘Shh, you’ll wake up the whole house!’ Again I looked at the dog which was still asleep; then (forgetting the reason I had wanted to see or talk to them) I replied:
“ ‘WHAT ELSE HAVE YOU GOT BESIDES FLYING SAUCERS?”
“I waited in vain for an answer, and deeply regretted my crude remark. Finally, I got up and wrote this down on paper, but it was really unnecessary. I should have made some notes on the
accent
, for the next morning I remembered everything else except the odd accent.”
‘Y
es, 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.”
B
arbara 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 Jersey 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.
