The Silver Bridge (7 page)

I am a school equipment salesman, and for three years have driven out of Clarksburg each Monday to call on clients throughout the state. I usually listen to the station as I go, for the Clarksburg signal remains strong for about fifty miles, and John is always pleasant to listen to as he occasionally injects subtle wit into his announcing. I don’t know how he got the idea for “Whistle Stop”, but I think I heard the first broadcast of the unique five-minute show.

Apparently John had become bored with the usual fill in.

That morning he began the segment with some patter, pretending he was the proprietor of a small “whistle stop” railway station.

In the background a sound effect record provided the faint whistling of an approaching train. The whistling grew in volume, as John turned up the gain, until it became evident that the recording featured an old fashioned steam locomotive. The whistling and noise grew still louder. In a frightful puffing, clanging of bells, and rattling of wheels, the train noise welled to a crescendo, then began to diminish.

“Well,” John said, “she went right on by!—like a big fat bird this morning!”

Then he announced, “Let’s turn up the radio and hear a musical selection.” The patter and sound effects had consumed enough time so that he could fill the remaining time with just one record. I took to listening to the short show with a peculiar enjoyment I couldn’t explain. It was something different, I suppose—though repetitious, for the train never stopped at the small and apparently nondescript station of John’s living imagination.

His handling of the short show probably expressed his rebellion at the management which never bothered to remedy the faulty scheduling.

When the station went “all country”, the scheduling still was not remedied, and John still rebelled. While he had previously played pop recordings, now he played a short classical selection in the midst of the wailings of the preachers and the voices of Nashville.

As I steered my Ford wagon toward the Ohio valley to interview the Mothman witnesses, Woodrow Derenberger, and to try to track down the golden ball Mr. Universe had forged, John’s station still came in loud and clear, though now beginning to suffer interference from faulty electrical transformers along the road as the signal weakened.

On that morning I heard the train come in, and I listened for the familiar wheels to clang past the station. But I had a real surprise. John must have found a new sound effects record.

The train, though gaining its usual momentum with its whistle running wild, suddenly decreased in its cacophany. There was a hissing of air brakes and a creaking of slowing wheels. Couplings rumbled as the engineer tried to orient the passengers cars to the platform. Finally all was quiet, except for the “Shine! Shine! Shine!” of the steam locomotive’s air compressor.

“O-hooo! She stopped!” John announced. “Now that IS something. Let’s see who is getting off! O-hooo! We see and are we edified! It’s a group of little green men, and O-hooo, there is a great bird with them, and they’re marching, and marching, with their little drums, around and around the station…”

I gathered he was playing a record backward, probably at an exaggerated speed. It sounded like Oriental music, with bingings of cymbals, and drums sound mixed with a mad piping. I could almost see the little men marching, along with a huge ungainly bird.

After about a minute of this, John hit the mike button to remark that a huge shipment of bird seed was being loaded aboard the express car. There was a slow, then a fast puffing, as the drive wheels spun on a wet track. Gradually the train got going, with shouts of encouragement from the announcer.

John was evidently doing a satire on the Mothman reports. The short segment had been a work of radio art the quality of which was seldom heard in the local area, containing not only humor but a great deal of creative fantasy. I wondered if I were also getting involved in fantasy and if I were on a wild goose chase—or a wild Mothman chase!

But the apparent truthfulness of Newell Partridge, and the sad eyes of the child who had lost his dog, still convinced me that the Ohio valley reports were worth full investigation.

And later, as I sat around the table with Ben Franklin and the two young couples, their sincerity, also, would be impressive.

At the National Guard Armory the lights of the city of Point Pleasant begin. At that point Mothman, according to the wives, made a final pass at the car, and they could hear its wings flapping. Apparently afraid of the lights and avoiding the populated area, the terrifying nemesis gave up the chase.

Not until they approached their familiar stopping place, Dairy Land, did they feel the pall of fear lift. They drove in and parked. They wondered if they should tell the couple in the next car, John Perry and Ellen Lund, about it, and decided against it. They sat there and tried to collect their wits.

One anomaly of their experience had been as strange as the thing itself. Mothman, as frightening as it had been, and as hypnotic as its strange red eyes had been, displayed yet another inexplicable characteristic. It was, it seemed, both real and unreal; both frightening and compelling; both repelling and fascinating.

None of them knew why they suddenly developed the urge to once again face the unknown thing. The event had been so unreal for one thing, that they could hardly believe they had experienced it. Part of their fascination may have been the attempting to prove to themselves, as they later would try to prove to others, that it had all been real.

Or it might have been some inexplicable archetypal urge, as incomprehensible as the instincts of Arctic lemmings which periodically commit mass suicide as thousands of them hurl themselves over cliffs into the ocean?

And it may be that such urges are those illustrated in old prints which picture the damned souls of Hell, charging willingly into the immense opened jaw of a dragon which spouts venom and flame.

Mary insisted they call the city police and ask them to go with them.

“They’d never believe us,” Roger reasoned.

“It would have been like the time the old Adams house burned down,” he told us. “We called the police and they thought we were pulling their legs. They said, ‘Spit on it, but don’t throw any of that booze on it or you’ll start a
real
fire!”

The Lewis Gate is not some sophisticated geographic landmark, but it is widely referred to among the younger set of Point Pleasant. To them, driving their circuitous routes out of, then back into town, it is an important location. For a mile or two on Route 62 there is no place to turn a car around. But at the Lewis Gate, an old farm gate at the Lewis place, there is a spot beside the road wide enough to turn with only one back-up.

“At the Lewis Gate,” Roger told us, “we were getting away from the lights of town, and the darkness made us ‘chicken’ once again. The girls once more insisted that we should report what we saw to the police. By that time Steve and I also were thinking better of our actions. We didn’t want to be chased by that thing again, so I broke the tie and created a majority for turning back.”

As they approached the gate, Roger hit the left turn signal and eased the car into the familiar turn pattern.

“What is that!” Mary cried out.

Roger had eased the car to a stop, close to the gate; for to make the turn with only one backup (a miscalculation, and two backups could lose a Point Pleasant teenager much prestige), one had to be precise. He leaned over Linda and looked at the thing lying at the side of the car, now almost undefinable after the headlights had left it.

“Get the flashlight,” Steve yelled, “Maybe somebody’s hurt!”

Roger reached over Linda and withdrew the flashlight from the glove compartment. Nervously he shined it at the object.

It was a large dog, a hound of some sort, they gathered from their quick inspection.

“Oh, that poor thing,” Linda sympathized. “Somebody’s hit it and it’s crawled off the road to die.”

“Get out, Steve,” Mary begged, “and see if it’s hurt badly. Maybe we can take it to a veterinary.”

“It’s dead, I can tell,” Steve said as he shined the light on it again; “dead as a doornail.”

“Then, from behind a tree, or from the ditch,” Roger told us, “this thing came out and jumped over the car. We got a good sight of it running through the field, still staggering sidewise like a crippled chicken!”

Again shaken, and their anti-phobic urges dispelled by the third sighting of the creature, the men assented to their wives’ request and decided to drive back to the police station.

“We first went to Tiny’s Drive-in. I suppose we did this in order to get Gary Northup’s reaction to what we had seen. We’ve always admired him. As we arrived, he and two employees were leaving, but we blew the horn and stopped him and told him about it.

“ ‘Are you kids drinking?’ he asked. Then, looking at the girls, then back at us, and seeing how pale we were, he apologized: ‘I’m sorry. You look all shaken up!’ Then he went into the Drive-In and called the police.

“The cops told us to drive back up the road and that they would follow us. We stopped at the Lewis Gate to show the officers the dog carcass, but it was gone! About a mile up the road we saw this thing again, on the left side of the road in the field. We stopped, but when Gary’s car, ahead of the police, caught up, the thing suddenly disappeared.”

The police parked in the T.N.T. area and invited Mallette to get in and sit with them. But no Mothman. Occasionally a dark shadow would come over the building. This puzzled the officers because they couldn’t determine the source of the shadow.

Although the obvious skepticism of the officers had never been well hidden, Steve noted a discernable change of attitude, and, for the first time, a suggestion of fear in the men, when the sergeant began sending a radio report back to the dispatcher at Point Pleasant.

During the dispatcher’s first response a strange transmission, apparently of great power, completely blotted out most of the reply.

“What did this transmission sound like, or what did it say?” I asked Steve.

“It didn’t say anything. It was a high-pitched noise, kind of like, I’d say, a record playing at a fast speed, but still not distinct. You couldn’t distinguish any words or anything. I heard something like that on the Adams Family TV program (he referred to a humorous horror TV series which utilized weird music and sound effects).

“It was also like when you run under a power line that’s leaking, when the noise blots out the car radio—only in this instance the squeaky sounds came through.”

Roger interrupted: “Have you ever heard a mouse squeak?”

“I think so,” I replied.

“But really loud and strong, but still like a mouse?”

“Would it be like a transistor radio squeal, when it isn’t functioning correctly?” I countered.

“Yes, but this wasn’t like a radio, either. I just can’t describe it. We were parked near the cruiser and everybody in my car heard it.”

The strange transmission ceased, and was not repeated. After half an hour the police decided to abandon the vigil, and everybody drove back to town.

“When we were going to bed that night,” Roger continued, “I swear that I heard that squeaking sound again, right over the trailer. In fact it had been hard for us to go to sleep ever since all this happened. Linda gets so frightened in the middle of the night. Sometimes she’ll get up and it will be half an hour before she gets settled down again and goes to sleep.”

“I still get the feeling that it’s around,” Steve added. “It’s just a feeling, but sometimes you almost know it is there. You can’t see it, but you know it’s around, and that it’s watching you from the darkness!”

The next day, still shaken by their experiences, but again strangely compelled to revisit the scene, the two couples decided to return to the T.N.T. area and investigate.

Steve entered the old power plant building through a decrepit door, sagging on rusty hinges. He heard a loud clang. He started, then surveyed the interior. One of the large boiler doors was open.

Aside from that noise, the interior was strangely quiet. Then he noted the reason: the large flock of pigeons that previously had occupied the building and filled it with flappings and cooings were no longer there. He wondered why. Could Mothman have frightened them away? The creature probably was using the building as a hideout.

He heaved at one of the other large boiler doors. It was rusty and didn’t give easily. Finally the complaining hinges gave way and the door swung open. As it opened, Steve once again experienced that compelling fear of the previous night, and felt he should get out of there.

Then, suddenly in the cavernous darkness of the immense boiler, a large dark form seemed to flutter by. Steve stumbled out of the building, white as a sheet.

“It’s in there! It’s in the boiler!”

They wondered what they should do. But none of them could summon enough courage to re-enter the building.

“Hey, look at this,” Roger shouted, bending near the ground. “I think we’ve found its tracks!”

They examined the important finding.

“They aren’t bird tracks, that’s for sure!” commented Steve. “They’re more like horse tracks.”

Impressed in the coal dust was a series of broken ovals, somewhat horeshoe-shaped, but only about three or four inches in diameter. Roger put his foot beside one of them and bore his weight down. But the Mothman track remained much more deeply impressed.