Shadow of the Moth-man
by Charles Justus Garard
Copyright © 2021 By Charles Justus Garard
_______________________ “He mentions a spirit world where inhabitants of another dimension, invisible to us, may live. He thinks that so-called, red-eyed moth man may come through to our world.” “Dimension?” “A fourth dimension, Nick says.” _________________________
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 is 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 else.
~
“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 are 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.”
As Nick 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 above 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.”
***
This is Chapter One . . . only the beginning before the terror arrives.