Read Online The Silver Bridge by Gray Barker - Free Book Online Page B

could never find evil in anybody. That probably was why he had been such a good school man. He was widely known, respected and loved in the community.
    In fact, neighbors had even made jokes about his high regard for his fellow men. A story had gone around in connection with a most wicked man of the city, who finally had passed away, somewhat to everybody’s relief. For he had been widely feared and hated. Ben had been one of the few townspeople who attended the funeral. After the service, some of his neighbors crowded around Ben, for they had made a wager that he would be unable to think of anything good to say about the man. They purposefully started a conversation about the departed.
    “This man…” mouths widened and ears tuned; and then Ben allegedly said, “…had the most beautiful set of teeth I’ve ever seen in a man’s mouth.”
    I doubted the story and had never asked Ben about it. Besides I remembered hearing a variation of the same anecdote in another city some years back.
    “I don’t know,” Ben continued as we drove along, “but I have the distinct feeling Mothman was trying to tell those boys something. Just what, I don’t know.”
    He continued his thoughts at the restaurant.
    “Those two boys. I’d believe them on a stack of bibles. I had both of them in school, and they were really good boys. One of them did at one time get discouraged and decided to drop out, but I talked him out of it. I certainly hope they get some work soon. They’re good workers—I’ve heard that from their former employers.”
    “You’re an educated man,” I told him. “You’re also a professional magician and probably have studied the history of magic. Surely you’ve read about the ancient rituals whereby black magicians were said to summon up devils. Do you connect Mothman with such an idea?”
    “First of all (and Ben chuckled), I assume you understand that as a stage magician, I perform only white magic— simple feats of illusion to entertain audiences. This is much much different from the black magic of antiquity.
    “And I really don’t know for sure that the so-called ‘black magicians’ were as deeply black as they were pictured by our superstitious ancestors. I have a rare old book I’d like you to read sometime, Jules Michelet’s Demonology and Witchcraft. I’m afraid our popular conceptions of witches and warlocks, for example, come from Montague Summers, a cleric who wrote and translated several books on the subject, such as The Witch Hammer and A History of Witchcraft. Apparently he was somewhat too credulous and believed everything he heard about the ‘black powers’.
    “The Michelet work points out that our modern systems of science grew out of the experiments of the ‘black magicians’. For instance, I’m sure you know that alchemy, the system which strove to turn base metals into gold, was the father of modern chemistry.
    “The witch,” he told me, as we drove back toward Point Pleasant, “was probably the first physician. She has been pictured gathering the deadly nightshade, the wings of bats, and other gruesome ingredients to boil in her terrible cauldron. In reality, the things she gathered on the lonely heath were healing herbs, to ease the pain of those who fearfully sought her out. But the public, as it does today when it encounters something it doesn’t understand, vilified her, libeled her as an ugly crone, and even burned her at the stake. But her science would not die, as knowledge and truth never really does.
    “She would metamorphose into the midwife, and finally she would be remembered only in the woman and in the mother, practicing, to this day, her intuitive magic, as she heals her child’s suffering, not with medicines she has gathered, but with a secret little song.”
    I had never known Ben to speak so eloquently, or with such insight. But the moon suddenly was broken by the giant and ugly hulk of the Silver Bridge we were approaching. Traffic was still