The Silver Bridge (21 page)

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 left 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.

“That was a great meeting,” Timothy Green Beckley broke the silence. “I really didn’t expect to see the creature, but after all, we talked with a lot of people who did see it.”

“Yes,” agreed Jim Moseley.

“I liked the way the people there were so friendly,” Mark Samwick added, “and I also liked the old factories, what there was left of them.”

“Here’s where Long John started out,” Jim reminded the group (he referred to Cartaret, N.J., the site of the WOR-Radio transmitter, from which John Nebel began his famous all-night all-talk show).

The earlier talk and gaiety of the beginning of their homeward trek had worn off. All three appeared to be very tired. They probably were looking forward to getting home, and catching up on their sleep.

Barbara then saw the beginnings of the city. The skyscrapers. The factories. The apartment houses, row on row. The suffocating sameness. The crowded madness.

She sat back and closed her eyes. Once again the spectre of the vast abandoned powerhouse came into her mind. She had feared its emptiness then. She had worried that the Mothman might jump from the cavernous depths of a rusting boiler. In her memory she was once again inching her way through the glut of broken window glass on the floor.

She unclasped her black hand which had secretly held the object for most of the twelve-hour trip, and looked at it again. The others would not notice this small idiosyncracy for they had taken to “acting the fool” (as they would say in North Carolina) again. Two of them parodied the old “Batman” television theme song, substituting and singing, “Mothman! Mothman! Mothman!” One of them discovered an inch of liquid in the wine bottle, and waved it high.

Barbara opened her hand wider to look more closely at the feather. It was white, mostly, with grayish tinges. When she held it at an angle it took on a metallic sheen. It was strong, yet delicate. Once home, she would put it away, and could take it out and look at it whenever she got into one of these moods.

She began humming. For the first time she could remember some of the melody the strange, gaunt man was singing. She had chanced to peer into a darkened corner of the old abandoned power plant and had seen him hiding there. He hadn’t seen her, she was certain, for he had been busily regarding the others on a lower level.

As he watched them, he quietly hummed and half sung the tune, which sounded something like the
Gone With The Wind
record. She couldn’t catch any of the lyrics—he sounded as if he were singing, “Loo-loo-loo,” instead of words. He was weeping, why she did not know.

CHAPTER 17

PSEUDOTRITON RUBER RUBER

T
he compelling visage, with its penetrating eyes, and a batrachian-like opened mouth displaying large teeth, confronted me in the darkness.

I let out a cry and fell backward into the water. My two nephews retreated wildly, then prepared for a counter-attack. Holding their battery powered lantern in front of them, they advanced, while chanting a song I confess I had made up and taught them:

“Dracula, Count Dracula
You’re only a big bat!
Once we say the magic words,
You’ll run just like a rat…

Joey and Donny stealthily approached, heroically to my rescue. I had thought up the little song when the children, aged 8 and 10 respectively, had been frightened by an old Universal horror film potboiler on TV.

Already a gaunt man, with a commanding and almost croaking kind of voice, had grasped me and was helping me from the stream, amid many apologies.

“I assure you, my friend, I am
not
Count Dracula. I am a professor, sir, at one of the leading colleges in a neighboring state. I am Professor Gross, and I am extremely sorry to have discomfited you!”

The bait hunt had for me come to an undignified end. An older brother had promised the two children a trip to the Sutton reservoir the next day, and they had enlisted me to help them seine for minnows and crawcrabs.

The watery search, in the small tributary of Cedar creek, had been delayed until after nightfall by the sudden arrival of another relative and the screening of some home movies I had at last remembered to bring from Clarksburg to my brother’s home in the country.

“And what are
you
seining for?: I finally got around to asking Professor Gross, who had sat down on the creek bank with us and was searching through a container.

“Pseudotriton ruber ruber,
and I have found him!” he replied enthusiastically. He displayed a small salamander which looked just like so many of the small creatures we found in our bait.

“A
what?”
I asked.

“That’s just a salamander,” Joey corrected. “That’s no ‘roobey roobey’ stuff. But that sounds real groovey!”

“Pseudotriton ruber ruber,”
Professor Gross repeated. “Oh yes, my dear young fellow, you are correct: this
is
a salamander, but a comparatively rare salamander for this area. I am doing research on the distribution of this particular species through West Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and…(he paused) I’m sure this is utter nonsense to you and probably to most everybody.

“Maybe it’s just that I’m—to use a term my students employ—'hung up’on salamanders. Or maybe I should say that it’s ‘my bag’. Anyhow I’m not as far gone as a colleague of mind, who discusses what he calls the occult tradition of salamanders when I bring up the general subject. He calls the salamander an elemental, or a god of the flame. Sometimes I think I should have stuck with my minor field, ornithology.”

We invited Professor Gross into the house for some coffee while I dried out. Taking a lead from the mention of his friend who evidently was interested in offbeat subjects, and his own interest in ornithology, I asked if he had heard of the Mothman stories, and indeed he had.

“What about the West Virginia University professor—I believe he is Dr. Robert Smith,” I inquired, “who said that Mothman was probably a Sandhill crane?”

He remained silent for many seconds, as an ecstatic smile softened his hard facial features.

“Ah, a most beautiful bird, indeed!”

The batrachian voice took on a muted quality, as he described the creature:

“It stands almost as tall as a man, with its feathers a slate gray. Yes, I suppose it might be mistaken, in the dark, for a monster of some sort. But that is not likely. The bird is rarely seen east of the Mississippi, except in Florida. It breeds and lives mainly in Canada—though I do hear now that the population is increasing in the Midwest. They would not winter here of course; instead they would go to a warm climate. Their winter habitats are mainly reported in Southern California, in Mexico, and along the Gulf Coast, in that order.”

“What about the red, hypnotic eyes the witnesses reported?” I asked him.

“Oh I don’t know about ‘hypnotic’. That might be the imagination of the witnesses. The crane’s actual eyes are not large, but there is a large, bright red fleshy ring around them, something like a turkey gobbler’s snout. I suppose that car lights shining on the bird could reflect from the big red circles around the eyes. They wouldn’t necessarily be reflective, but still this could be misinterpreted by a frightened person.”

Although the Sandhill crane flew at a relatively fast rate of speed, the professor pointed out that it certainly couldn’t approach the speeds reported in some of the Mothman accounts he had read.