Shadow of the Moth-man

By Charles Justus Garard

It doesn't appear in only one place. Not only in West VIrginia at Point Pleasant and not only in northern Illinois where a young man is carried several yards by a hawk-like creature. He is also seen near Atlanta where a colleague of cryptozoolist and investigator Nick Sterns is driven off into a ravine at night. Because of concerns by a former school buddy Corey Braedon in Warrick, Illinois, where the flying creature, also called a kaiju, has been spotted near the Mississippi River, Nick takes a flight back to his former hometown.

In Warrick, he learns about the disappearance of two young people -- one who is later found in shock -- and meets other local residents, some of whom have spotted the kaiju on the shore of the river, on the farm of Cooter Lewis, on the roof of the closed movie theatre owned by Corey's father, and at night when a confrontation takes place between Cooter and the jealous husband of Selena Herrmann.

The problem is trying to figure out whether or not they are in danger from this kaiju creature or are being warned about unusual occurrences, such as the appearance of Nick's Japanese therapist in Atlanta who materializes inside the Warrick movie theatre.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Justus Garard
• Release date: Jun 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201550646

Book preview

Chapter One

~

I was thinking of Illinois, Nick Sterns wrote in an IM sent to Corey at McAbee University, after I saw these stories about sightings. In Northern Illinois, a giant bird picked up a teenaged boy and carried him about 50 yards. He was ridiculed by his friends because of this and his hair, in a short time, turned grey. Recently, a large bird picked up a girl child and carried her a short distance.

Fiction, Nick, Corey wrote back to him in Atlanta, Georgia. You’re just interested because you’re a home boy.

Do you think that this is only fiction? I suppose you think that the moth-man sightings in West Virginia and Chicago were also fiction.

Of course. But if saying that they really exist up here will get you to fly up here for a visit, I’ll say that they do.

Most of the time, Nick typed, according to the reports shown on Yahoo News, people just see huge shadows on the ground until one of them picks up a piglet from a farmyard.

***

The phone jangled.

Where was the button? Okay. There. Stretch for the phone perched next to his books on the shelf of the flip-top desk. Press. Hello?

He waited.

The voice: Nicolas Sterns?

Ah. Misato Tochigi, the hospital staff therapist.

This’s me.

How you feel?

He had never been called before by a therapist here in Atlanta, even his last therapist he had stopped seeing years before because he had shifted his attention, and his expenditures, to physical problems—stress, hypertension, and blood sugar levels. He had required an interior revocation of his body’s architecture.

Just woke up.

Good. You got some rest.

I was recording some notes about what was supposed to be a dream, although I am not convinced that that is all it was.

’Not convinced?’ Professor? I mean, Nick?

Yes.

Why?

Yes. I told you about those dream memories before.

You don’t believe memories could be dreams?

Not these, he said.

Misato was not a regular RN or even an NP. An RN would be clueless. An NP would just ask pro-forma questions and tick off a list. But Misato, originally from Osaka, Japan, was not merely an NP.

Don’t worry. I promise I won’t attack anyone.

Soft giggle on the line. You won’t insult the psychiatric service assistants?

"I did that?"

You shout at them.

Bullshit. I raised my voice because I was impatient. I apologize. Can you or someone bring me my cellphone?

You want to talk to someone in your—

Dream world, he completed. That what you were going to say, yes?

When Misato snickered, she was childlike, but not in an unappealing way. Her behavior had little to do with her intellect. She was an educated and trained professional analyst who resembled the gorgeous Japanese nude model, Mei Matsumoto. He knew that he could explain the situation for her without resorting to technical jargon.

I have my mythological creature who guides me, he continued.

She sighed on the phone but did not respond.

He was not surprised. It’s a long story. I’ll try to explain it to you sometime. He, unfortunately, was neither an analyst nor an electronics geek.

I’ll have someone bring your mobile phone to you, she said.

Thanks. If you bring it yourself, I might want to pull you into bed with me.

The quiet giggle of her Asian voice was enough to illuminate his heart, he told himself. Rarely did she ever utter a sound that was not pleasant to hear.

Sorry, he said. He paused for effect. I don’t want your husband to come after me with a samurai sword. I’ve grown kind of attached to my balls.

He would not care too much, her voice said with a serious tone.

Nick knew why. Her Japanese husband was apparently getting a little yakitori elsewhere.

~

Anyway, Nick told Misato, I sometimes hear in the morning when I am not quite awake a loud hissing in one ear and voices in the other ear that sound as if they are coming from radio stations in the other ear.

What? she frowned. Radio?

I feel like I hear overlapping voices as if two radio stations were awfully close together and sending a mixed signal. It’s just a jumble of voices from somewhere, but I don’t know where.

And the hissing sound?

Earl told me that he thought I was hearing my blood rushing through my veins.

Wow.

I know. The sound is much too noisy for that.

She stared at him for a moment.

Okay, okay. Look, Ms. Tochigi. I can guess how that sounds to you.

No. No problem, she said and scribbled something down. Your head becomes like a receiver of a signal – or signals – transmitted from somewhere.

At least you use a Ticonderoga pencil and not a mechanical device.

Yes. I’m not really a high-tech person.

Nick grinned at her. I thought that the Japanese were way ahead of us westerners when it came to technology.

Can’t address that. Maybe some are.

Nick frowned. As he looked past Misato at window, he saw red eyes staring in at him in the late afternoon light.

He reached for her arm. Stop!

Jolted, she looked up from her notetaking on her desk. What?

He waited. Staring. His heart pounding.

Nick? Stop what? As people in this country sometimes say, ‘you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

He nodded. That’s pretty close to the truth.

You want to tell me what just happened?

I understand, he said, how this must sound to someone in a psych ward. But sometimes I see images that seem to be more than dreamlike.

You are not a patient in this...psych ward, as you call it.

True. The East Atlanta Medical Outpatient Clinic was merely where Misato’s office happened to be located.

Mei Matsumoto, Nick called her to himself. One of these times, he would have to share that with her.

He looked again toward the window and saw a ray of light from the setting sun – not a hazy version of light from a world where there would probably never be pure sunlight.

Pure?

He chuckled at himself. When had anyone since the Nineteenth Century seen pure sunlight?

He tugged at his over-sized blue t-shirt with the Black Rock Mountain State Park sunset and full moon image and pulled it down over his knee-length denim shorts.  This combination, he had decided, went well with the Birkenstocks.

Can you say anything about your last dream?

Are you a dream interpreter as well as a therapist now?

Smiling, Misato said: I have background in....

All sorts of areas, right? Oh. Didn’t mean to complete your sentence for you. Bad habit of mine.

Her smile lingered. Yes. Maybe.

He waved that he was sorry, a slight but effective gesture. My dreams run the gamete from invisible doors to other dimensions to childhood experiences that I wish I could rewrite.

You said something about your brother coming up here from Florida to visit you.

Yes, he said. I thought about asking him to come here with me for one session, but I wanted to get your permission first.

She glanced down at her notebook, flipped one page, then flipped the page back to the first. Absolutely. It might help me get a better....

Perspective?

Oh oh. I just did it again.

Yes. Thank you. A better look at your family background.

Of course. I know that English is your second language, but you’re doing an excellent job.

Her cheeks became pink for an instant.

***

Nick observed the Japanese therapist as she smiled to herself. She now sat opposite his brother, Earl, at the table in the infirmary annex.

Did you, Earl faced Nick, tell Ms. Misato about your Thunderbird?

Thunderbird? Nick barely glanced at his brother but kept Misato in the corner of his eye. You mean legends and myths from different cultures: Garuda bird, Thunderbird, Piasa bird like in Alton, Illinois—

Yes, said Earl. You know what I mean.

I also admit to a fascination for years with things extraterrestrial. He pointed to his own skull. But Misato is interested in what’s going on now. . . up here.

I know, his brother told the therapist, Mom made fun of his drawing comic books as a kid, particularly those with space creatures and flying saucers.

Space creatures? Misato frowned.

Well. Giant flying creatures like Mothra and Rodan.

"Oh-hh. Japanese Kaiju."

True. Nick had, as a kid, drawn his own comic books about Japanese monsters like Godzilla. He nodded and smiled. I asked Earl Grey here when he heard from Mom again.

Earl Grey? Misato echoed.

My favorite kind of tea, Nick explained.

Stop it, Nick. Earl flashed him an impatient look. Grow up.

Why start now?

You two, Misato said and smiled: One can tell that you two are siblings.

Silence from both.

Misato’s pen hovered about the lined, yellow paper attached to the clipboard. What about Earl’s comment...about your mother and your science-fiction comic books?

He’s right. She liked belittling me at times. But then... so did Dad.

What about hearing from her again, as you said you asked Earl?

Neither of us had been living with her when she died. I was teaching English in the Philippines, and Earl was here in Atlanta. She was alone with her latest husband.

Latest?

She was married four times, said Earl.

I see.

She was embarrassed about that because she thought that people might think badly of her.

Did they?

Earl glanced at Nick but looked quickly back at Misato. Not that anyone ever told her.

No one would dare to, Nick added.

Earl emitted a half-laugh. Nick was married three times, so he’s trying to catch up with Mom’s record.

Very funny, Earl.

Are you married now, Nick? the therapist asked him.

Nick paused before answering. He tried not to appear embarrassed. No.

No?

Married and divorced three times. That’s enough.

I understand. Misato smiled.

A long silence followed.

Misato adjusted her tight skirt with the slit at her thighs as she shifted leg positions.

Both brothers saw her.

I have a question, Earl said, if you don’t mind.

Misato appeared to be curious. What is that?

I don’t want to sound rude, but is it true in your country, in Tokyo, that strangers often feel up women on the transit trains?

Maybe. The trains are often very crowded with standing room only.

This is just what I saw in movies, so maybe it isn’t real. But sometimes they show women not complaining about it.

Earl! Nick blurted out.

It’s okay. Misato gave Nick a side wave and smiled at Earl. Yes. I guess that happens too. Some girls don’t get much attention in Japan....

Except from their bosses at work? Nick injected. In the office, they might be compromised by the boss or worked almost to death from exhaustion.

She stared at Nick for a long moment as if not knowing how to respond. She just shook her head and returned to Earl. I can’t speak personally about those matters – trains or offices.

Earl nodded that he understood. "I guess we don’t have that problem very often since most people can sit down, like with MARTA here in Atlanta or JTA Skyway in Jacksonville."

That did happen in the Philippines, said Nick. I remember being seated near the driver while some girls stood in the aisle close to me. My knee was pressed against one girl’s crotch. She could not really move away, but the train shifted sometimes, and I felt the material of her jeans as she rubbed against me. I often wondered since then what she felt.

Earl shifted awkwardly in his chair. Did you really have to bring that up?

Misato grinned.

You brought up the train bit, brother, Nick said.

Yeah, but not about a girl maybe getting turned on by rubbing against my knee.

***

Chapter Two

~

Rose Weiss descended the wooden steps of her back porch. It was chilly, so she tucked the ends of her dark hair into her fur-lined coat collar.

She looked around at the nearest window of the one-and-a-half story house with the brown, imitation-brick siding, and green trim. No one, as far as she could see, was watching, so she continued along the weed-lined walk. She stopped next to a rusted, long-out-of-use well pump that leaned to one side like a limp flower stalk and extracted an object that she had hidden among the chunks of concrete. The cool air was stirring, as if announcing that something was coming.

Rose held the object against the front of her tight jeans as she moved away from the house.

Positioned on both sides of the walk were four rusted-metal poles. Originally, they had been erected to serve as clothesline poles, but she and her brothers had stretched a net for badminton between two of the poles and worn away circles in the lawn by playing the game.

The walk itself, pieced together by worn bricks, led to the garage of large cement blocks flanked by three metal trashcans. An orange sticker had been pasted to the side of the first can. Like all the garages on this street, the garage belonging to Rose’s family faced away from her house.

Rose reached the end of the walkway and the edge of the driveway next to the garage. As she crossed in front of the closed garage door, she shifted the position of the book and held it against her thigh. Across from her was an open field, and the only movement was a bee zipping around a dying flower stalk. What was it doing there this late in the season?

Sometimes, to find a quiet place to study – her house was often a blizzard of noise with her brothers watching baseballs games and her mother watching sitcoms and raucous game shows – she walked through the weeds of that field. She thought about going over there, and maybe she would have to if people started appearing with any regularity on this back street. Now, however, she was apparently alone. She opened the book and thumbed through it.

What was she looking for? No idea of what she would find. However, Patty must have had some reason for giving it to her and for telling her to keep it away from any members of the Ruffcorn family.

Patty had got the idea of keeping a journal not from a writing teacher but from a television series about a girl who disappeared into another dimension populated by frightening creatures. It was a modern version of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Patty had loved the series –as had many fans across the country –and she had walked around quoting lines from it.

Rose had chided Patty for imitating a popular series on cable TV, but Patty thought it romantic to pattern her life after a fictional girl who, even though the show involved weird characters, was popular because she slept around, and whose diary was of monumental importance to her friends after she vanished.

After the popular series left the cable network because the show was supposedly too expensive to produce, Patty stopped behaving like the fictional girl. However, she continued to scribble down her experiences into the journal.

Rose found and leaned against the concrete blocks of the garage where she kept her Kia, propped her foot up on one of the lidded trashcans, and reread the last page of the entry about Patty’s sexual experiences with Crandall Lewis. She had also written a long passage about Rose and her boyfriend, Gordy. Nothing too revealing. Just speculation.

Maybe another entry provided a clue regarding why Patty ran away from home, which is what most people believed. Probably the journal gave no clue at all, but she could not convince herself of that until she read the rest of it. Some of it contained Patty’s attempts at poetry, fragments of short fiction, and notes for school projects taken at the HC3 library – which is why Patty had called it a journal instead of a diary. A diary sounded girlish, and Patty preferred not to be thought of as a young girl.

What if someone found this book? It was not likely, but it was possible.

***

By 1:30 in the morning, the wind which had intensified into a storm swept over west-central Illinois, the nose of the state that met the lower tip of Iowa and the upper border of Missouri. Its violence was somewhat abated by then, but enough fury remained to knock out power lines along the Warrick Bottoms.

Despite the shaking of tree limbs scraping against the roof of the mobile home, Selena Herrmann had decided to use the time to read her old notes. She certainly could not sleep with the erratic disruptions continuing.

Brent had gone stumbling off into the dark, looking for his long-necked flashlight. He now raided the tiny refrigerator, fumbling for another beer and using a fork to fish the cold meatballs and black olives out of the spaghetti sauce she had made for their supper many hours ago. Their daughter, Selena had determined before returning to her tine bedroom in the metal domicile, was still asleep.

Anyone who had been raised in the mid-west, as Selena had been, was accustomed to abrupt climatic shifts. It was as if nature in the central states was more temperamental and capricious than elsewhere in the country, serving up unannounced for those who continued to live here dishes of contrasting flavors. If you get bored with the weather in western Illinois, farmers muttered to anyone who listened, wait fifteen minutes.

Sometimes Selena liked these changes; they matched her own temperament. Brent had quickly discovered this, and she had once told him that he need not point out her own contradictions. She liked weather changes as much as she liked the sun appearing after a ferocious rainstorm to make the street glisten with golden reflections. She enjoyed the feel of the wind before a storm, the smell of the moist air and loamy earth after a deluge, and the sight of snow flickering against windowpanes before it packed itself into the corners of the window frames.

Like most western Illinoisans, however, she hated the suffocating, humid summer days and equally wet, bitter-cold winters. She had been caught in freezing rains that could, in no time, glaze streets and highways until they became perilous sheets of ice. She had watched the swirling of black clouds in gray and pale-green skies that telegraphed an approaching tornado. And she had been stranded in her car when rain slanted at an almost horizontal angle and the winds sculpted the landscape into temporary works of art.

The flame had burned deep into the candle that sat on the nightstand next to Selena’s head. From the hollowed-out valley of wax, the pale flame threw a circle of light onto the ceiling, but onto the pages where her eyes tried to hold tightly to the notes, it threw only a crimson glow.

Crandall, or Cooter, Lewis had asked her questions about learning disabilities and the year-by-year decrease in the reading comprehensive ability of many of his students at the Henderson County Community College east of Warrick. He had wanted to know whether there existed a higher number of disabilities or disorders among students who came from dysfunctional families, and she had been able, even by candlelight, to find the files of research material she had used for her master’s thesis.

Whatcha doin’?

Selena looked up to see the half-naked figure in the bedroom doorway, hunched slightly forward like a football player in the line.

You are reading at this time of the morning?

Selena sat up in bed, determined to keep the conversation as reasonable as possible with a man who had been drinking steadily for hours. I’m looking at the research I did for my Master’s. She glanced at him warily. Cognitive skills in children from alcoholic families.

Brent lurched toward the bed. Now?

I can’t sleep, she told him. Does it matter?

He took one of the print-out pages from her, scrutinized it in the dim illumination until the lost-little-boy expression transformed his face, and shoved it back at her. That’s what I thought. This MA crap. What good did it ever do for you?

Selena took the pages and threw them angrily onto the floor. I wrote this. I worked hard on it! If you wanted a moron for a wife, you should’ve married one of those bowling alley babes with the padded bras and the horror-movie eye makeup.

At least one of them might care about her family.

Brent, they probably can’t even spell the word ‘family’. Selena knew it was senseless to try to talk to him, to try to reason with him, but her anger fed her. You’ve thrown that at me before. Give it a rest.

Shit! You—

You don’t want me to have friends of my own. You think I should just talk to yours. But I must live for myself too, Brent. There is more to this world than sports and TV. You want me to sit around like most wives we know, wishing I were somewhere else or with someone else?

You saying you don’t do that now? Brent ran his thumb along the elastic of his underwear. You don’t have it as bad as you think.

Brent. Go to sleep. Let’s talk about it later.

When? You’re always busy when I come home. Talking to your mom. Talking to Cooter Lewis. Talking to that screwed-up blonde broad.

Patty ’s had a rough family life. Leave her out of this.

Yeah. Well. She’s not your student anymore.

I know that.

And you’re not her psychiatrist.

I just try to help her. It helps me to talk to her.

"You talk to her. Right. But not to me."

I don’t like to talk to you when you’ve been drinking. We’ve tried it. It doesn’t accomplish anything.

I’m not drunk.

Go to bed, Brent. You’ll wake up Daphne.

He stared drunkenly toward his daughter’s bedroom, then at the empty space beside Selena. Goddammit, you’re not my mother.

"Then