A Tale of Mothman, or Perhaps of a Caster Named Indrid Cold
Eliott Bach had issues.
He was actively disliking college—community college came with absolutely no social activities, just classes and schoolwork and pointless anonymity among people significantly older than him—and he was considering dropping out and asking Mr. Antonio to make him full-time at the Piggly Wiggly. There was even talk that it could go union, like the Piggly Wigglys in Wisconsin. Of course, no college would mean moving out or paying his parents rent. And he’d never get a girlfriend if he spent all day, every day at the store to afford bills.
However, he suspected his issues didn’t compare to the one he could see “Holy Holden” had taken on since high school.
Brett and Russell, both home for spring break from college, noticed Holy Holden at the same time as Eliott did, and for a hot minute, he wished they hadn’t. Holden was seated in the bookstore’s café, wearing an oversized suit that was definitely secondhand and a garish tie that would’ve looked better on a corpse, and he was scribbling furiously in a nicely bound leather book. Every few seconds, he’d look up, scan the bookstore’s customers, and make more notes in his book. The store was busy, and Holden looked both out of place and strangely predatory. His eyes seemed to move independently of one another trying to take everyone in.
“Isn’t that Caulfield?” Brent said.
“Oh, yeah. Holy Holden. That’s the son of a preacher man,” Russell half-sang. “The only one who could ever reach me.”
Great. Now we gotta mess with him, Eliott thought, glancing at Brett and Russell. He sighed. He wanted to believe that after a year out of Point Pleasant Junior/Senior High School, things would’ve changed, but they actually hadn’t. The cliques were still the same. The pecking order was still the same. The only thing that seemed to be different was how he felt about things still being the same.
“Hey, Holy Holden,” he said from across the café. His tone cued Brett and Russell to action; they clearly hadn’t picked up any better manners during the first semester at their Ivy League schools. They slapped their magazines back on the racks in random places and giggled, whispering to each other like gossiping girls.
Holy Holden looked up at them, and Eliott Bach was taken aback
(taken a-Bach, Brett the Idiot would have said, and taken a-bawk, bawk BAGAWK! Russell the Moron would have clucked)
to see real fury in Holden’s eyes. A dangerous fury that didn’t diminish in the least once he realized who was calling him. The corners of his mouth twitched as if he might smile at whatever black thoughts had just crossed his mind, and Eliott felt a thick lurch of fear ball up just above his gut. What he was seeing in Holy Holden was what he’d seen in the eyes of the Johnsons’ pit bull next door before they had it put down two summers ago.
It was a look that said, I could kill you if I wanted to. I just haven’t decided yet if I’m going to.
And as Eliott’s mom had said to him a hundred times, quoting some poet she loved, When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
“You know, we can just go,” he said aloud to his buddies. “He’s not doing anything.”
“But he’s probably writing about us,” Russell said.
“Hey, I don’t want anybody writing about me,” Brent added.
The two of them were already moving across the café, so Eliott had no choice: he fell in line and took the lead. He knew the more he let others decide for him, the less likely he’d get to decide for them again anytime soon.
Holy Holden didn’t move as they encircled him, nor did he resist when Brent reached out and took his book from his hands. Russell picked up a satchel from the floor beside the chair, and again, Holy Holden didn’t resist. Eliott felt a moment of disgusted anger.
Tell us to get away and keep our hands to ourselves, he thought.
He said, “In that suit, you look like you’re in the funeral business now, Holden.”
“Not only is my name not Holden, it never has been.” Holy Holden steepled his fingers as if he were preaching to the choir, like his father used to do before he died. “It’s Indrid Cold now.”
Something in Holy Hol—Indrid Cold’s—tone made Eliott catch and hold his breath. It sounded just like Cold’s look: I just haven’t decided yet if I’m going to kill you.
“I changed my name, too,” Brent said from behind him. “People call me Joe Cool these days.”
Russell said, “And I’m called Luke. Luke Warm.”
“Okay, well, this was fun. Old times and all that crap. Let’s just go, guys,” Eliott began, but Indrid Cold—the former Ian “Holy Holden” Caulfield—cut him off. Eliott suspected this moment had played out in Indrid Cold’s mind a thousand times up to now, every possible variation of it, and he wasn’t going to back down now that it had finally arrived.
He’s been waiting for this, he thought. And he’s got an ace in the hole just for this confrontation. Now he doesn’t have to wait anymore.
“I heard you were called Stu and Jack now,” Indrid Cold said. He smiled and held out a hand for his book. “So nice to meet you again, Mr. Pitt and Mr. Hoff.”
Eliott got it before Brent and Russell did. He was trying one more time to steer them out of the café, out of the bookstore, out of the line of sight of Indrid Cold when a furious blur shoved him aside. Cold was out of his chair, a whirling dark suit that seemed to be empty, and he snatched his book out of Brent’s hands. There was a flash of blood—Indrid Cold’s fingernails raked one of Brent’s palms, leaving four jagged slices that bled immediately.
“What did you do, man?” Brent cried out in pain, clenching his fist and pulling it back with a thud against his chest.
Russell lunged at Cold, but the suit was already out the emergency exit, sounding an alarm that turned heads. Russell went after him, Brent close on his heels, snarling threats. Eliott hesitated—that knot in his gut had turned loose and light, the helpless fear of taking a curve far too fast in the dead of night and knowing the car was about to leave the road. But his inner voice from years past insisted, I’m still in charge of our gang here. They’ll do what I tell them to. They’ll stop this if I say so.
But by the time he made his decision and went after them, it was already beyond stopping.
The empty parking lot between the bookstore and the thrift store on the corner was dark and wet—it had rained a few hours earlier, and the pole lights reflected off the damp pavement. With no cars and no other signs of life, it seemed to Eliott like a moonscape—except for the dull sounds of Brent and Russell punching Indrid Cold.
In fact, he no longer seemed like the menacing Cold he’d just been; he’d gone back to being Ian Caulfield as he dropped his book and fell on top of it with a wet thud. His forehead struck the blacktop when Brent kicked him in the back.
“Do you see what you did to my hand?” Brent shouted. He kicked the sprawled figure again, which prompted Russell to do the same. Caulfield groaned; Eliott could see blood on the side of his face.
“Somebody probably called the police,” he said, grabbing Russell and shoving him behind him. “You want to go to jail for the rest of spring break? Come on. This is done.”
Russell was easy; Brent was harder. He kicked Caulfield two more times, once in the head, before Eliott could pull him off. He cursed and spit at the prone boy, who lay still and silent now. When Eliott directed Brent away from the incriminating pole lights and toward the darkness of the neighboring streets, Brent finally came back to himself. Eliott could tell because Brent suddenly began to cry—stuttered gasps and suppressed groans.
“What the hell just happened to you?” Eliott said, feeling his hands begin to tremble. “Everything’s wrong now. We were going to hang out at the bookstore tonight. Drink lattes. Look for girls. An hour ago, nothing was wrong. Now nothing is right.”
“I want to go home,” Russell said in a quivering voice. “In the morning, this won’t even be real. Here.”
He thrust something at Eliott in the dark. Eliott took out his phone, turned on the flashlight, and shone the beam on the object: a canvas satchel. Ian Caulfield’s satchel. Indrid Cold’s satchel.
“I don’t want this, man. Look, we need to take it—” Eliott began, but Russell was already jogging away, disappearing into the ocean of black night as if he’d been drowned in it.
Eliott turned to Brent. “You believe he’s just going to leave?”
But Brent had run off, too.
***
Eliott was less than halfway home when his phone buzzed in his pocket. In the three-way chat they’d been using to set up tonight, Brent was texting. Russell had already read it, the text notification said.
I came back to the parking lot. EMTs are here. I think he’s dead.
Eliott resisted the urge to scream at the sky and then resisted the urge to curl up into a ball on the sidewalk and wait for someone to come along and fix this. He put down Indrid Cold’s satchel in the grass so he could use both thumbs to text back.
Don’t text ANYTHING else. Meet on Silver Bridge at midnight. DELETE THESE MESSAGES.
His first thought
I never even touched him
was quickly superseded by
We gotta get our stories straight
and the immediate, desperate desire to get rid of the satchel—the evidence. The Ohio River wasn’t more than fifteen feet deep in town, he knew, but maybe the current would carry it downstream as far as Louisville before anyone went looking for it, or maybe they could weigh it down with something to sink it to the bottom. But neither of those seemed secure. He just couldn’t think straight right now.
How did this happen? We’re not bad guys.
He started walking, deciding he’d hide down the hill from the bridge, in the trees along the river’s edge, until it was closer to midnight. He could watch traffic and make sure it thinned out—the last thing they’d want was someone going by at fifty-five miles an hour to see and remember them later on. They’d have to be fast if they wanted to get away with this.
When he heard his name whisper-called from the trees once he reached the bridge, he slid down the hill and sat down in the darkness next to Russell, whose eyes were so wide his eyelids had disappeared.
“I can’t believe we killed somebody,” he groaned.
Eliott hit him on the shoulder as he started to dig around in Cold’s satchel. “No. We didn’t kill anybody. This’ll be okay.”
“For you, maybe. I go to Yale. This’ll look really bad on my transcripts.”
Eliott ignored him. He found and pulled out a small batch of cards—they looked bigger than the average playing cards but smaller than the tarot cards his mom sometimes played with—but they were blank. Under these was a book called Nowhere to Hide, which looked like it was about monsters. A couple of pages were bookmarked.
Where are you?
His and Russell’s phones buzzed a few seconds apart. Brent again. Eliott responded:
WILL YOU STOP TEXTING?
“He’s up there,” Russell said, pointing. When Eliott looked, he could just make out Brent’s silhouette moving in and out of the light of the streetlamps that spanned the Silver Bridge. There was no traffic, thankfully, but Elliott knew that couldn’t last.
“Come on,” he said, stuffing the book back in the satchel and grabbing Russell’s arm. “Brent’s trying to get us arrested.”
“He doesn’t have to try too hard,” Russell groaned, but he obediently followed as Eliott pushed through the tall damp weeds.
The climb up to Silver Bridge wasn’t especially steep, which told Eliott that Russell’s hyperventilation was panic. This actually helped him clear his own head—somebody had to be in charge, just like it had always been, and it was him, just like that had always been, too. But as his focus returned, so did his perception. As he and Russell stepped out onto the concrete of the bridge, the figure waiting for them wasn’t Brent. It was too thin. It was too relaxed, leaning against the pedestrian railing. And when the figure looked up into the sky, Eliott naturally looked, too—and saw something up there, in the blackness, something that breathed deeply while it waited. Something that was a shadow cast on darkness. Something that made Indrid Cold grin insanely as he waved Brent’s phone at them before tossing it over the railing into the hungry Ohio River below.
The questions piled up in Eliott’s mind like a massive interstate accident. Where’s Brent? What do you want? What’s UP THERE? But the one that emerged from the wreckage was the one that he wished there was a different answer for.
He asked, “You didn’t die?”
Indrid Cold lifted his chin high and scratched his throat, his eyes staring down the length of his nose at them as he did. Eliott could see the purple bruise on his forehead and another one, thick and raw, on his temple. He had dried blood on his lips and at both corners of his mouth. He stood like a scarecrow in his suit, fragile and poorly assembled, and he looked wrong. But that grin remained like a Cheshire Cat’s, even as the rest of him seemed to be fading away.
“Who says that I didn’t?” Indrid Cold said, his voice a rasp.
Russell let out a scream. When Eliott glanced over at him, he was staring up into the darkness above the bridge where that shadow lurked. He backpedaled, tripped on the bridge’s pavement, and found his feet again to flee.
“Russell, wait,” Eliott said, reaching after him.
Indrid Cold raised his hands, and in them was the book he’d had at the bookstore. He opened it with both hands, holding it as Eliott remembered Pastor Caulfield doing at the pulpit, and Eliott no longer thought saving Russell was so important. Cold’s eyes were reptilian, yellow and dilated. Eliott let Russell escape and instead lowered his head to stare carefully at the man he was pretty sure was going to kill him.
“I should have stopped them,” he said. “If I say I’m sorry, does it matter?”
“You have something of mine,” Cold said. He looked down at the spread pages of his book, then toward the edge of the bridge, then up into the night sky, and finally back again at Eliott’s face. His head twitched each time like a bird’s. “Kindly return it.”
Eliott swallowed and held out the canvas satchel Russell had stolen.
Cold’s grin expanded impossibly wide until Eliott had a vision of it dividing Cold’s head in two and the top part falling off, leaving behind lower teeth and a flat bloodless surface like a birdbath. Cold said, “Good. Inside are cards. Help yourself to one. Yes, one of those. Place it in your breast pocket. Just like that. Good. It’s a gift. From me to you. Just as you are a gift to me.”
Once the card was in his pocket, Eliott again extended the satchel, but Cold didn’t reach for it. Instead, he gestured, and the thing above them fell out of the night and wrapped savage talons around Eliott’s arm.
“Please don’t,” he heard himself beg as he looked up at the owl-like nightmare dragging him skyward. Its humanoid body belied the thick feathers that shrouded its form, and the head that swiveled toward him at an impossible angle had pupilless black pits for eyes, pits that stared down at him as if he were prey. His feet left the bridge, and the terror that choked anything else he might say was akin to missing a stair in the darkness without having any idea how far you have to fall before you’ll find another stair. If ever.
He heard Indrid Cold’s voice, a buzzing gnat that passed by one ear, and whatever he said, it made the owl horror let go.
Eliott fell. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly and waited to feel death when he struck the bridge. It was going to hurt. It was going to drive his leg bones up into his pelvis, into his organs. He hoped it wouldn’t hurt for long.
But instead of concrete, water rushed up to meet him. He knifed feet-first into the river, his arms above his head, and though every muscle in his body knotted up at once and tightened, shrinking him into himself until he could hardly move from the biting cold, he felt mud and rocks and branches beneath his feet, and he was able to kick. The movement made his leg joints ache, and he moaned—only to choke on water. He shoved off from the river bottom, but he choked again. He couldn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t close his mouth. He couldn’t remember his name.
Something grabbed him a second time, heaving him out of the water.
He gasped and choked, water clogging his throat and nostrils as he struggled for air. Powerful arms had a grip on him, and he felt as if he were rising into the sky again, cradled in someone’s security. He expelled a great gout of water and took a deep breath. His eyes refused to open, but he could will his voice back.
“Thank you,” he whispered.
He was dumped unceremoniously onto the bridge’s unyielding surface, and he felt his nose break. His front teeth bit the concrete pavement. His eyes watered. He tried to put his knees under him and sit up, only to be knocked down again as a massive shape brushed by him. His shoulder throbbed from the impact, and he was certain it was dislocated.
He raised himself on the other arm and watched the Mothman stalk across the bridge toward Indrid Cold.
Eliott squinted, shook his head, gagged again. Mothman. Everyone in town knew its shape—there were statues and hoodies and plush dolls and “Mothman for President” t-shirts and even Mothman wine. There was a museum. But it was all in good fun. It was to sell pressed pennies and Mothman Brew at the Coffee Grinder on Main.
But this was not in good fun. The monster moving away from him, towering easily four feet taller than Indrid Cold, had a threatening, furious aura. Its nails clicked on the pavement. Its wings expanded and tightened as if it might launch itself. And when it spoke, Eliott could not tell if the sounds it made were on the bridge or in his head or both.
Don’t throw your garbage off my bridge, it said in a voice so deep, the words almost slurred together.
Eliott got to his knees, but a dizziness kept him from getting all the way to his feet. Mothman stood just feet in front of Indrid Cold, who looked up at it with his snake eyes squinted as if looking directly into the sun. He still had his book open in both hand, and Eliott saw Cold’s gaze shift to him.
“Still have my card?” he called and touched something in the pages of his book.
Something bright and dazzling burst all around Eliott, placing him at the center of a surreal spotlight, momentarily blinded. He could no longer see Mothman or Indrid Cold behind the monster. He could no longer even see his feet. The glare then moved, leaving him blinking away its contours as it formed a rectangle that moved quickly away from him, over Mothman, and to Cold. When it reached Cold, it disappeared, leaving the bridge in the muted, dull lights of its streetlamps once again. Cold snapped his book shut.
“Done,” he said.
Mothman said, or perhaps thought, I’ve tracked down Casters before for this. I’ve made Casters very sorry before for this.
Cold took a wide berth around Mothman as he approached Eliott. The owl-thing was nowhere to be seen, though Eliott secretly wished it would return and fly him out of here before either Indrid Cold or the monster he was antagonizing thought to deal with him. As he thought this, Cold knelt down in front of him and easily plucked the card from Eliott’s shirt pocket. He only caught a glimpse of it as it disappeared between the pages of Cold’s book, but what was once a blank card now had an image on it that he was certain was Mothman.
“I would not challenge that assertion,” Cold said, rising and turning. He stood between the monster and Eliott like a guardian, and Eliott felt momentarily safe, even as Mothman turned to face the two young men. Its eyes were red and featureless, like an insect’s.
There’s a killer on this road, Mothman said.
“And his brain is squirming like a toad,” Cold said almost gleefully. “I love that song, too.”
When Mothman said nothing but took another dangerous step toward them, Cold held up one hand.
“You see,” he went on, “I’ve recently been reading about you, and I know your secrets. A few of them at least. And I know about something you dearly want, something I can get it for you. And that’s why I’m here to find you.”
Mothman stood stock-still—like its statue on 4th Street, Eliott thought stupidly—and seemed to be waiting. Indrid Cold looked around at Eliott, his former bully, now his staunch ally if Cold could keep the monster at bay, and then he looked back at the monster he’d apparently known was below the bridge all along.
Elliott thought, I’m not sorry after all.
And Indrid Cold said to Mothman, “First, however—how indignant would you feel about throwing garbage off the Bartow Jones Bridge?”
***
Editor’s Postscript: I found no obituary for Eliott Bach, but I did discover a cold case report that the young man had gone missing. Both the Ohio River and the Kanawha River, which the Bartow Jones Bridge crosses, were dragged, but nothing was discovered. There was a modest reward for information leading to his return. The reward has not been claimed.
I did, however, find an obituary for Ian Caulfield, twenty years old at the time of his passing. He is buried in Kirkland Memorial Gardens in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Allegedly.
