The Silver Bridge by Gray Barker Page B

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