The Silver Bridge Read Free Page A

told it. His fellow human beings, he thought, through prejudice, ignorance or fear, would be his persecutors.
    He had seen a strange ship land and a man get out of it. The man had talked with him, though he spoke no words. Through a process which somebody described as “mental telepathy” he had apparently conversed with a being from a strange world, whose cities were called “gatherings,” and where visitors were known as “searchers”.
    Derenberger held no fear of Indrid Cold, which the man called himself.
    “I mean you no harm. I come from a country much less powerful than yours,” Cold had assured him.
    And in Ripley, midway between Point Pleasant and Parkersburg, Mr. Universe forged his golden ball. He plunged it into the searing heat and drew it out again; then he tempered and retempered it. As he carefully and lovingly polished it, the noise of the forges subsided and he could hear substituted the sounds of laughter and great sport. He could almost see it glistening in the November sun as it was hurled in friendship and good will.
    But in the eyes of man, it would inspire only briefly the wonder of an otherworldly origin, and he would soon test it, drill into it, and lock it in a bank vault for its lucrative value, snatching it from the children of Earth, for whom Mr. Universe had intended it.
    As to the flying creature, Newell Partridge had probably seen it first; rather its eyes, one should say. The fictional protagonist in Edgar Allen Poe’s classic, The Telltale Heart, might have expressed the same fear. “I think it was his eye,” he explains, when he tries, maddened by the telltale beating, to explain why he murdered the old man.
    The eyes glistened like bicycle reflectors from the vicinity of the abandoned barn. Partridge’s German Shepherd dog, “Bandit”, rushed at the eyes as he had often charged wild game. But he encountered something from the unknown.
    Two young couples, Mr. and Mrs. Steve Mallette and Mr. and Mrs. Roger Scarberry, were the next to see it, and the fiery eyes would be forever implanted in their memories. The old T.N.T. plant, with its black windows, like blind eyes staring at them through the darkness, would help set the eerie, almost unnatural scene. Mothman would follow them as they fled homeward. And even after the creature itself went away, its invisible spectre would continue to haunt their lives.
    It was the younger, almost boy-like image of Jesus which Mrs. Ralph Thomas fixed in her mind when she knelt and prayed—not for her personal safety, but for the evils of the world, on Nov. 16, 1966. She first thanked Him for the gift of prophecy which she felt had been bestowed upon her unworthily. Through this gift she had predicted the war in Viet Nam, had accurately foreseen what man would photograph on the moon, and had apocalyptic views of the future, of dire and cataclysmic nature.
    The other image of the Christ, which hung in the small ante room, was older and more severe. Although His visage there carried the benign promise to save mankind, it also suggested an avenging power, the idea that Man, however holy, is still born in sin, and must repent of it with penance and suffering.
    “Dear Jesus,” she implored, “forgive us for our terrifying sins, for we are not perfect. And further, in Thy infinite mercy, forgive us for those greater and perhaps more terrible sins, those of omission, committed against God and His Holy Son!”
    It had been the material world which had intruded the preceding Monday. When Mrs. Thomas finished her housework, putting the large eight-room home in neat shape, it was her custom to kneel silently in the kitchen, where, surrounded by her accoutrements of housewifely arts, she would move her lips in a prayer of thanksgiving for her many blessings. Since she could not often remember any common sin she had committed (she was known throughout the neighborhood as an almost saintly person who was the first to comfort a grief or nurse an illness),