The Silver Bridge by Gray Barker Read Free Book Online

somewhere,” he repeated, over and over.
    As they talked, Mary became imbued with the same excitement that evidently was affecting the men. After their weddings, which took place only two months apart, they had suddenly effected a more “adult” outlook on life. They stopped turning up twice each week at the drive-in hamburger stand, and were no longer known in the teenage community as the draggers who would never be called “chicken”
    For Roger and Steve, their self-imposed “grown-upness” had climaxed in their seeking employment at the new plant and being turned down. Roger had collected a $4.00 debt, bought that amount in gas, and was determined to “celebrate” their misfortune and disappointment.
    Excitement welled up in Mary. It was during such an adventure when she had first looked at Steve with a strange new feeling, one that she did not understand. Impulsively she had grasped his hand, something she seldom did, and held onto it tightly. He had suddenly returned the grip. He grew silent. Then he said, “I want to marry you, as soon as possible.”
    Although her marriage to Steve had lost little of that excitement discovered in that dark, parked car—just as tonight, with Roger and Linda in the front, she had the feeling that tonight she might recapture that haunting, indescribable emotion she had experienced the night Steve proposed.
    So she applied makeup; Steve tossed on a sweater and grabbed his jacket from the closet, and they got into the back seat. Then the ritual began: the ride up Route 62, and the peregrinations in and out of the non-patrolled roads in the lonely T.N.T. area.
    They drove around and around, “burning rubber” on the graveled roads between the main drags. But that night the area was deserted. They encountered no other cars, except old Mrs. Henry, sitting stiffly in her anachronistic, yet gleaming Model A Ford and gazing with disapproval at all drivers whom she met or who passed her.
    “Gee, I wonder where all the kids are?” Roger remarked as he made a skidding left into the T.N.T. plant grounds. Completely abandoned since World War II, the old munitions complex loomed huge and ghost-like. No longer did the owners, whoever and wherever they were, bother to lock the gates to the property, and it had become a favorite parking ground for young lovers, and stag groups who threw stones at the remaining glassed windows.
    “Maybe we’ll catch somebody at it,” remarked Steve, and Roger laughed.
    “Steve!” Mary shouted in disapproval.
    “You were young once yourself, old lady,” Steve rejoined, “don’t be so blue-nosed.”
    “But we never…”
    Steve grasped her hand, and she grew silent.
    Roger halted the car in front of the powerhouse. A bright moon outlined the vast, ghostly structure. The broken windows stared like blind eyes at them, as clouds, caught in high winds, threw intermittent pools of shadow on the lonely place. The blustery local winds shook loosened parts of the powerhouse while wailing through its empty blackness.
    And there in that dark setting, lurking close to the cadaverous structure, Mothman came to Point Pleasant.
    “Rog, look! Look at those eyes!” Steve yelled.
    “Then I too saw them,” Scarberry told me.
    “Those eyes. It was like they were staring at me, like they were looking inside me, and through me!” he continued.
    “You couldn’t draw away from those eyes. I don’t know if they were hypnotic or if it was the shade of them. It was a different color, you know, kind of red; they just glowed and lit up when light hit them (actual words from tape recording).”
    Benjamin Franklin IV, retired school executive, an apt professional magician (and a direct descendant of the noted ancestor), sat with me and four witnesses around a table in a relative’s kitchen, as the story of their wild flight from the T.N.T. area, and from Mothman, unfolded.
    When Steve saw the eyes, his reaction marked the beginning of a miasma of fear which would