As long as humans and bodies of water have existed within the same space as one another, bridges have been a natural response to their union. Needing to get to one side of the water from the other always becomes a challenge that must be confronted and surmounted, so inventing ways to achieve that goal has become a repetitive undertaking throughout the annals of history. Some of the particularly inventive ones have survived for centuries, still silently performing their duties of taking people to and fro from one land mass to another. Wood and stone, metal and glass. Many materials can be found being put into use for crossing water.
At first it was a simple fallen tree creating a crossing over chasms or crevices filled with water at their hearts. Once the other side was achieved, an easier mode of travel between the two points was dreamed. Later it became stone, pressed together to create a solid passage. In later years, bridges were even used to cross other paths beneath them as the two paths intersected like pretzels across the landscape in the form of highways or interstates. Bridges were indeed necessary for smooth travel to where we want or need to go.
The particular river in our story, known as the Shawny River on the edge of a small town named Milton has been crossed by men since before they had wheels to ease their travels. One one side of the river is a rich, flat landscape where trees grow prosperous, and fields heave with the bounty of harvests. On the other side is the gateway to the Atlantic Ocean where the fish are immeasurable and the horizon has always held its temptations. So it was that the two-legged animals of this corner of the earth found themselves needing to cross the Shawny. As it sits today, there is a major highway 3 miles east of the bridge related to our story. It connects to a suspended metal bridge resembling geometric spiderwebs of steel and concrete, and keeps people moving by the millions over the flowing waters of the Shawny as it cuts its way through the valleys of Harkness County. It’s nearer to the city than our bridge, so its the natural place to carry the bulk of any given day’s traffic.
If you were to venture out into the county, though, there is another bridge. It was built long before the aforementioned Silver Beltway bridge to the north. This one began before the surviving printed word recalled it, and originally was constructed of rough hewn timber. It was later bulked up as the newspapers that could be found indicated and widened to fit the bourgeoning prevalence of the automobile. When the rivers flooded in the early 1900s and washed away the wooden structure it was replaced with masoned stone. Cool and jagged, the rock was harvested from the local flagstone mines and hauled to the site several miles away. In the end, a smoothly curved archway was constructed over the river at one of its more narrow points. The brilliance of the original designers, or more likely the long since dead people who first crossed the river needing an easier path, was that it took less material to construct a bridge at this pinch point in the flowing water. It had been standing for over 100 years, and aside from a not too often repaving with fresh tar and gravel when the county has a few dollars left at the end of the year in their budget coffers, it still looked remarkably the same way that it did when it was first opened in 1912. Sure it had some mossy growth on its surface on the north side where the sun never met its rocky face now, and it did have the remnants of years of graffiti in the form of spray painted crude gestures or teenage proclamations of love marking much of its surface, but its bones were still there standing the test of time. It had seen the first cars, and now it was leading a young man back to a place that he only held in memories from his childhood.
It was on this bridge that Seth Handley stood on a cold October twilight looking over the rail and marveling at the speed that the water ran under the arched bridge. He can remember doing the same thing when he was young making a game of throwing sticks and other floating things into the river on one side, then running to the other to see it rush out from under the bridge and then be whisked off down the Shawny River. He hadn’t considered it when he was a child, but now he realized that the water moved so swiftly because of how narrow the river was here being forced into its man made funnel. Compared to the width of the river several miles upstream where the newer Beltway crossed it, it was nearly a quarter mile wide. Here at the old rock bridge it had been reduced to a width of about 300 feet.
The constant white noise generated by the rushing water was hypnotizing. The sound and the speed at which the water moved, never really allowing your eyes to adjust to its rapid eastern travel as it rushed by. The water moved so swiftly that one could feel a cool breeze emanating from the its surface generated by the passing by of gurgling water. He was mesmerized and allowed an untold amount of time to pass by, idled by thoughts of his childhood before the flicker of a bobbing single headlight heralded in the staccato horn honk on this otherwise silent night. The rusty pickup truck rumbled by, revving its engine in irritation at the fool young man who stood gobsmacked by rushing water. It really was quiet here when you got away from the constant din that a city produces. He didn’t mind that at all.
Having been startled out of his pseudo hypnosis, Seth kept walking into the town square that was only one quarter mile from where the rocky “Crybaby Bridge” stood. He didn’t know if that was its actual name, but there were local legends that coined it as such and it seemed to stick. The bus couldn’t cross the narrow old bridge to bring him into town, so he had walked over a mile to get here from the bus stop off of Highway 15, and he was finally almost there. The town was quiet again, with no other traffic passing him since the rude and rusted pickup had announced its presence. The town looked sleepy. He would’ve imagined that it was in a coma if it wasn’t for the flickering dusk ‘til dawn lights that lined the road until they abruptly ended at the lawn of the white wooden courthouse. The bulbs inside of the streetlights would shine an odd orange hue, never fully warming up before they flickered out in a seizure of failing light. Like most things in this town as he remembered it, they were past due maintenance.
He was irritated not finding anything in this town that seemed to be open as he had been hungry since 4pm and now there wasn’t anything edible that was open that he could see. Not a fast food billboard in sight, and the only thing that could be described as a diner was closed and dark on the interior. Ethel’s Diner hadn’t changed one bit since the last time he was here, and he presumed that it still housed groups of old men stuffing themselves with fried food and coffee every morning just like it always had. Ethel must not believe in after dark patronage, because in the now extinguished light of the cloud filled evening it looked as dark as a cave. Great. Stupid small towns. That irritation was only a cover for the real reason that was driving him into a sour mood. Well, other than the hungry part being real. He had been summoned here, to the middle of Bum Fuck Egypt out of some sort of legal obligation. A fax or an email wouldn’t do, even though he attempted to get out of the trip multiple times using those forms of communication. He had been contacted by a lawyer several weeks ago, and he was insistent that the papers must be signed in person. He must have thrown away whatever letter the lawyer had alluded to in his phone call proclaiming that he had tried to get in touch with him for weeks regarding the matter. So much junk mail on a daily basis makes one numb to plain white envelopes. It was only because it was a local area code on the unknown number that made him answer his phone the day that he had called. Right about now he was wishing that he hadn’t answered, as a cold drizzle had started falling from a puckering sky as he walked into the middle of town as his stomach grumbled in protest. Double great.
His Uncle Roy had apparently died back in June, and for some reason he had been left his old house and property on the edge of town in his will according to the nasally voice of one Mister Grundige on the other end of the phone. No mention of his brother John, or his sister Mary, but only of him the lawyer had said when he asked. For some reason the old man had only written his name on the yellow notebook paper that he filed at the County Clerk’s office 7 years before he had died calling it his last will and testament. How old had Roy been anyway? He seemed ancient even when he was a child visiting him with his mom and siblings, so must have been well past the status of octogenarian at this point.
He had fond memories of Roy, make no mistake, but inheriting whatever property he had possessed at the time of his passing was still an unwelcome surprise. Seth was of the age where every day seemed pressing for time that he didn’t have. After getting a rough estimate of the value of the place via the internet, he knew that he was either going to have to sell it for pennies, or spend some time trying to increase its value in the eyes of the real estate market. Neither of which were on his agenda as ‘things he’d like to do for 500 Alex’. In fact, the more the rain intensified as it fell from the sky, the more that he had wished that he had stayed on the Greyhound when it stopped at the lonely bus stop outside of town. Pursing his lips and pulling the hood of his cotton sweatshirt over his head and trying to hide behind it, he thought of Roy while the lawyers office loomed in the distance, supposedly on the street behind the courthouse proper. If you could call a building that looked like a repurposed stable painted white out of an old western ‘proper’ that is.
Roy had never married. He was always an odd character, but he could tell a helluva tale, and the kids loved it. “Come sit down and I’ll spin you a yarn!” He would proclaim after dinner, easing into a wooden rocking chair. He and his siblings would sit on the coarse round rug at the foot of the rocker and listen to all manner of stories that he always proclaimed were true. It wasn’t until he had gotten older and gone to visit on some holiday or another that he realized that old Uncle Roy had likely never owned a television. It must have been Thanksgiving since Seth starkly remembered being upset that he wouldn’t be able to watch the football playoffs on a television that didn’t exist. But he did have fond memories of a jovial uncle, all too happy to make up lies to please the children that had come to visit. Seth couldn’t ever remember the man being mad.
His tennis shoes had begun to squish with every step when he finally reached the corner of the courthouse and peered down the street that ran behind it. Sure enough, just as Grundige had said on the phone, there was a squatty brick building sitting on the same block across the road from the back entrance of the white building. Seth smirked as the thoughts running through his head opined that there must be good business in being conveniently located across the street from where people always found themselves needing a lawyer. There was a decal of the Scales of Justice on the door window and text that he couldn’t quite make out underneath it. He assumed judging by the size of the little brick building that it alluded to the sole proprietor of one Mister Grundige. Sure enough, when he got close enough it read “Martin Grundige, Attorney at Law” with a phone number underneath that. Thankfully the lights were on inside of the building. If they hadn’t been, he wasn’t beneath breaking into the office just to garner some reprieve from the thunderstorm that he now found himself walking within. A smarter man would’ve packed a rain coat.
Pushing the glass door inward yielded no result, so he pulled the handle and was greeted with the tinkling of a bell as the door struck it its way to granting him entry. It sounded strangely like a cowbell. The office smelled musty, like the closet in his grandmother’s house. Fake wood paneling adorned the walls that were littered with multiple crooked frames containing diplomas and business licenses. The floor was carpeted aside from the first two feet inside of the door which was clad against incoming wet feet in only the finest of outdated linoleum. Seth stepped inside, taking a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the newfound electric light that wasn’t flickering in protest of working like the ones that lined the street.
Looking to his left he could see a desk littered with haphazard paper and empty Diet Coke cans that was helmed, albeit with his back turned toward him and away from the desk, a gigantic lump of a man. He wasn’t huge as in tall and broad, but huge in the way that someone who had never missed a fried meal at Ethel’s would be. His mass crept past the edges of his vinyl covered desk chair, billowing over the arms of said chair like mashed potatoes would if they were placed into a bowl in which they wouldn’t fit. The man tensed a bit having heard someone enter his place of business and responded with a greeting of “Be right with you” in a familiar nasal tone. “Just finishing up this last draft so it can be mailed off tomorrow….” his words lingered in the air, the final ‘o’ in his word dragging out as if it were a warped record. “Oooooaaaaand done! Gotta give the devil his due!” He smacked his hands on the surface of the away facing desk that he must have been writing on, as Seth herd the clatter of a pen rattling on a hard surface. His chair creaked and squeaked in protest as he swiveled it around toward him.
“Ah, you must be Mister Handley!” His entire face shifted upward in a smile as he made eye contact. “Yes sir, I..” He was interrupted before he could finish his sentence as he held out his hand. “Martin Grundige at your service, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you. You’re a hard man to get a hold of, I’ll tell you what!” The giant man began laughing at himself threatening to spill the proverbial potatoes from the bowl. The chair squeaked with every boisterous chuckle. Seth had taken his hand when he offered it and his laugh was interrupted by a cackling diatribe of conversation without skipping a beat. “I tried and tried to send you a letter and never got a call. Finally looked your mama Tammy up on the internet and got your phone number from her. She was always a sweetheart, assuming she still is! I can remember way back when, her always brightening up a room when we were back in school. Such a gem of a woman! Was nice catching up with her!” He started laughing at his own self perceived joke again just as Seth was beginning to feel uncomfortable with how long his hand had been clutched in a handshake at this point. He gave a little resistance, trying to reclaim his hand as his own when the attorney finally relinquished and let go while spilling into another bombardment of speech, blending with his softening cackle of laughter. “Aaaaanyway, hope you made it in okay, looks like you got a little wet! Never heard of an umbrella?!” And he was laughing again. Seth’s brain had started adapting to this man’s style of conversation and he was becoming irritated with it quickly.
“I’m fine. I have some dry clothes in my backpack to change into. Sorry I’m so late, the bus was running behind.” Seth was looking at the chair sitting opposite of the lawyer, a rickety old thing that looked to be surplus from a closed down school or similar. Well used and second hand. Old wooden chairs like that reminded him of getting yelled at by a teacher for dozing off in the middle of a lecture. “Oh please, please! Have a seat of course! Don’t mind my manners! It’s just that you look just like her. Your mom that is!” Laughter. Again. Seth slung his backpack off of his shoulders and pulled the hood off of the top of his head. Completely soaked just like the rest of him. He reluctantly sat down in the chair across from Massive Mr. Chuckles. The chair groaned as he settled into it and he could imagine how much chewing gum must be stuck to the underside of it.
“Now lets see here. Ah yes, here it is! Mr. Grundige pulled at an envelope from the bottom of a leaning stack of papers. The awry stack began to waiver as he gave the envelope one final tug, sending the stack of papers tumbling to the floor. “Ah Hell’s Bells!” He proclaimed in irritation as the papers fluttered and crashed off of the surface of the desk and scattered across the brown carpet. “This damned desk never has enough room. The Devil’s work always crowding me out and never seeming like it’s completely done! Never enough room! Anyhow, don’t mind that, I’ll get it later.” he stated while pushing a far too small pair of glasses to the end of his nose. Seth didn’t mind at all, he had no intention of cleaning up that self imposed mess. “Seems like Old Roy must have liked you quite a bit..” He said while pulling a folded yellow legal pad sheet of paper from within the wrinkled white envelope. “He was short and sweet in his wishes, he was. Says right here and stamped by Stacey, err that’s the county clerk ya see, as being perfectly legal. ‘To whom it may concern, I hereby leave all of my possessions to my nephew Seth Handley. I wish for him to retain my property and guarantee its safekeeping at the time of my absence.’ Signed Roy Lewis Martin and stamped approved in 2012 then sealed. So it looks like you’ve gotten yourself a new house Mister Seth!” And the infuriating chuckle boiled up from his considerable chest and emanated into all out laughter once again.
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The house had been sitting vacant for almost 8 months the first time Seth had stepped foot into it after taking possession. He felt bad that his storytelling uncle had died with such a lack of fanfare that he wasn’t even aware of it until long after it had happened. The house looked like it had been sitting. It was dusty and stale, and the lawn was unkept and wild. The house itself was a hodgepodge of a cabin that had taken on several additions as the years had gone by. The exterior and the interior decor and construction, while sound, didn’t exactly match. He was sure that the building materials had been chosen for their bargain rather than their looks. Part of the house was log, part of it was shiplap, and there was another section that was clad in corrugated metal. The door creaked and stuck closed when he turned the knob to open the red painted wooden door. A homemade broom hung from a nail, swishing to and fro as he tried to gain entry. It had been there as long as he could remember, and it was the homemade sort, constructed of reeds and grass tied together. Fighting the resistance of the door, he finally put his shoulder into it and eventually it relinquished its hold on the threshold and swung inward toward the entryway of the house with a cartoonish haunted house-like creak.
It was dark in the interior of the house. Thankfully he had driven up here from the town square in a rented car. It was an older sedan but he was thankful not to be walking. He had gotten a recommendation from the lawyer from one of his local friends who owned a secondhand car dealership. ‘Brucey’ had been glad to rent him a car for $200 and seemed downright gleeful when he handed over enough cash for 4 days. The car had to be jumped off and was covered in tree sap and dirt, obviously not a prime candidate for a prompt sale. Seth had visited the utility board and had the electricity reactivated, again on Mr Grundige’s recommendation. They had pulled the meter after Uncle Roy had died, not wanting to supply power to a vacant house. He noticed however that the round socket for the meter still stood vacant on the nearby service pole before he went inside. It was going to be dark, but at least he had the return of the midday sun on his side instead of the storm clouds of yesterday.
Navigating into the room using the light coming in through the newly opened front door, he pulled back the curtains inside of the room on the 3 large windows and the room gained several levels of luminance compared to the dark and dismal state of rest that it had been in for a while now. Dust motes danced through the streams of light now forcing their way into the darkened interior of the room. It was like looking at an old family photograph, everything still in its place as it had been for the 40 some odd years that he had been aware of the place. The same plaid furniture, the same crooked end tables, and the same well worn rocker sitting by the fireplace. Seth noted that there was still no TV to be found.
He completed the ritual of opening the windows in all of the main rooms of the house that he may need in the near future like the bathroom and kitchen, and within a short amount of time he was navigating the home that was stuck in time as if he had only been there a few days prior. However, it had been years. How many, he was ashamed to try and count. The refrigerator stood with its door ajar, someone having cleaned it out before the power was turned off, but the dishes and other appliances still stood in their respective places in the old kitchen as if standing sentry or awaiting their owner to return. The house smelled of old things, but to be fair it always did. It was missing the tinge of wood smoke in the air that he had come to associate with Roy’s home. The man had refused to have central heating installed proclaiming simply that “it didn’t heat as well as good ol’ wood”. Seth tended to believe that, but the long autumn days spent attempting to operate a pitch and maul with Roy’s instruction put him firmly into the ‘fuck that’ category. It was a lot of work, much more work that adjusting a thermostat.
The house felt cold. Not the temperature, but just the overall aura of the place. Roy had been such a warm and kind personality, Seth assumed that his absence had left the home in a state of emptiness and grief. When a man inhabits a place for a large portion of his life, the sudden disappearance of that person must be a shock to the roof and the walls. All of the life was sucked out of here in Roy’s absence it seems. He was feeling guilty for not making more time to visit. The last time that he had been here was when his mother was back in the country for a few weeks for a visit and they made a miniature family reunion out of things. His sister Mary had been there with her now husband as had his brother John. They both lived about as far away from here as possible and still be in the same mass of land, but they had made it. That had been seven years ago by Seth’s count. Might as well have been a lifetime as much as he and the world had changed since then.
There was a stack of old candles in a catch-all kitchen drawer, as any good kitchen should have, and with the waning light of the day, Seth placed them around the house in preparation for the oncoming darkness. He hadn’t rented a hotel room, thinking he would just sleep here for the duration of the trip, but he hadn’t taken into account that the power would be off and the leisurely nature of things out in the rural areas of the country would delay the utilities companies for who knows how long. He wouldn’t have been able to stand it if it had been later in the year, but the early autumn temperatures were merely cool and not cold. He often wondered how Roy had survived so many cold winters out here all alone with nothing but his wood stove. He was heartier stock than he was for sure to use one of his lines.
The day turned into dusk and Seth made himself another peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the paltry supplies he was able to get from the general store on the way out here and pulled another can of beer from his styrofoam cooler which he acquired from the same place. Every corner store sold them for the fishermen who left theirs at home. The one he bought was covered in a layer of dust stacked near an ice cream cooler with a “Night crawlers – a buck a bucket!” sign taped to its exterior. Bait and coolers, peanut butter and bread. And really bad cheap beer. Nothing imported to be found but cases upon cases of the domestic swill that he was now, after being 6 or more deep, was happily drinking tonight.
When Seth got the keys from Mr. Grundige, he had included a second set of keys. Having checked the barn and the few outbuildings and finding nothing but rusty lawn mowers and faded plastic gas cans, he had determined that there was still one key that he had found no matching lock. It was his current goal to find said lock in his state of warm and fuzzy near tipsiness. He had found an old candlestick holder and was wandering around the house feeling like he belonged in a movie set in colonial times. The flickering candlelight was a little hard to adjust to, and the cheap Pilsner wasn’t helping, but he managed to wander into Roy’s old library room. The shelves were packed with everything from giant atlases to a full set of door to door salesman encyclopedias. At the far end of the room was an ancient looking roll top desk with the top closed. Approaching the desk, the candlelight flickered off of a brass keyhole at the base of the slatted wood cover.
Smiling at himself and feeling clever, he situated himself into the roll around desk chair that sat in front of the desk and pulled the key ring from his pocket. He tried to raise the rolled wooden cover but it was of course locked. It wouldn’t do for it to be unlocked when he had a mystery key that was looking for its home. The one remaining key that he hadn’t used to open the other padlocks and doors on the property was skeletonized and old looking, but the brass was shiny from use, much like the keyhole on the desk. Smiling he inserted the key into the brass socket. A perfect fit. With a click the lock opened and he pushed the desktop open.
He didn’t know what he had expected to find, but it wasn’t what he was seeing. There were pictures, some old and some new, some from newspaper clippings, and some cheaply copied or printed out on printer paper, but all strewn across the surface of the desk. They were mostly women with a few young men strewn in seemingly spanning several decades judging by the hairstyles and outfits that they were wearing in the photographs. These photographs had no symmetry in the sense that they weren’t all portraits. Some of them looked like they were cropped from larger group photos, and others looked as if they were candid and taken of the subject performing some task or another. They were all black and white, whether from age or printer format. They weren’t stacked neatly, they looked to be strewn askew unintentionally. There was a yellow legal pad sitting amidst the images. It was well used and full of markings and drawings. The top pages were folded over and on the piece of paper that he could see was a sketch of Crybaby Bridge. It was crudely drawn, but was easily recognizable. He had been standing on this bridge just last night as he was coming into town. He felt suddenly thankful that he didn’t have to spend another evening on the worn out couch in the back room of a lawyer’s office.
Underneath the sketch of the bridge were the words “The Key” scrawled in full capital block letters. His curiosity piqued, Seth picked up the notebook and began flipping through the pages. There were many names and dates. Jess Mueller, 1964. Robin Burroughs, 1955. Eric Wheatley, 1981. There were ages listed by some of the names but they had no congruence to them. They ranged in age from 16 to 80. Some of the names had footnotes like “Harkness County High School yearbook” or “Obituary, 1970, May 14th newspaper”. Roy looked to have been scrying the notebook for answers as he wrote out in pencil in the ledger questions like “How could they have just disappeared?”
As the pieces came together and Seth started piecing together what Roy had been discovering with every flip of the yellow papered notebook, he came to the realization that these people had all gone missing or died in one way or another. And the deaths weren’t just deaths. The ones that he had found that had been confirmed as deceased had all seemed to have committed suicide. At least that’s what the official records (of which there were many photocopied examples of on this very desk) stated. It looked as if Roy was playing armchair detective and trying to determine a common thread between all of these monochrome characters strewn across his old wooden desk. Having a corresponding spark of thought, he pulled the envelope containing Roy’s makeshift will from his back pocket and took the yellow papered letter of intent out. Unfolding it, it was obvious that it was written from this same legal pad.
Seth sat the letter down and rocked back in the desk chair. His beer buzz was all but sobered from the rapid onslaught of new information that the desk had provided over the last minutes post discovery. He had watched enough true crime on television to know that some people in their own boredom or obsession would begin pouring over cold cases trying to discern clues that law enforcement may have missed. He assumed that Roy had been doing the same. Looking through the notes again, there were 23 names, all from Harkness County, all missing or dead. Uncle Roy was clearly trying to determine why they were related. Looking again at the final page and seeing the sketch of the bridge being declared “The Key”, Seth took himself back a few steps and realized he was allowing himself to get sucked into a mystery that wasn’t his.
He walked back to the candle lit living room after retrieving another cold beer from the ice filled styrofoam cooler. He was startled when The lights hummed to life in the house and a radio started playing. Looking at his watch he noted that it was 8PM. The utility company was out late this evening, but he wasn’t complaining. You never realize how prevalent electricity is in your life until you’re without it for a while. Elvis crooned over the radio waves, and the irony wasn’t lost on him. It was like a bad trope in a made for TV movie as he sang the words “…well it took my baby, but it never will again.” Seth couldn’t help but chuckle as he stood up and went around the house extinguishing the candles before he fell asleep and forgot about them. The adjacent room with the desk in it was saved for last considering it was on the far end of the house. Reaching the doorway of that room, he heard the hiss of a speaker with no sound playing through it emanating from within accompanied by a steady “click click click’ sound. When he walked into the room he discovered the source of the sound. What he couldn’t see before in the dark was a large tape reel machine. Now that the power was restored to the house, the reels were spinning with the end of one tape flopping around on the right hand reel. It was connected to a singular speaker which was producing the hiss.
This sparked memories of childhood like so many other things in this house. When they came over for Thanksgiving every year with his mother, Uncle Roy would always play Christmas music over the old reel to reel machine. Antique Christmas music. Something that reminded him of the background music in World War Two documentaries. He only had 3 tapes, but it was never too early to start the holiday music for him. He waited all year to break them out when the family got together, and his giddiness was palpable. He had to wonder why he had been playing Christmas music in the last moments he spent in this house. By his calculation knowing that he had died 8 months ago it would have been the middle of February the last time this player had produced sounds for him. It occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t Christmas music at all, and maybe there was another reel that he had never heard here. With that he spent the next few minutes swapping the reels around and trying to remember how to get the machine working again. After a bit of trial and error he pressed play on the machine and the tape started feeding onto the receiving reel and a hiss began coming through the speaker.
What he heard next wasn’t music at all, but it was the voice of a woman. “The water is calling. I can hear it in my sleep. I can hear it everywhere. It’s calling me. The water is calling. I can hear it in my sleep…” and this continued for several minutes before the voice just stopped. The tape hissed and clicked and the next thing Seth heard was the sound of water bubbling and rushing. Then click. Hiss. The hiss continued and he rewound the tape playing the same thing over for a second time. The same thoughts came through, a woman who sounded distant with the echo of tape hiss accenting her statements. It made him feel uneasy, like he was reading a diary that wasn’t intended for him, but he didn’t know why. He stopped the tape and glanced over at the photographs strewn across the desk surface. He felt it in his gut that there was likely a correlation, but he of course didn’t know what it could be.
Seth pressed play on the machine again and it continued with its sibilant hiss. After a few moments had passed a male voice, out of breath emanated from the speaker connected to the machine. “The gateway arch will take you home. Home is in the water. Hope is in the water. They’ve known it for years. It’s there for everyone. One step, maybe two and you’re home. Two steps and you’re free.” There is a period of heavy breathing as the tape hissed forward. “Follow the map, it’s right in front of you. Babies cry no more.” More heavy breathing and hissing from the ancient recording. And Seth swore that he heard an infant crying. It made his blood run cold. He rewound the tape and listened a second time. He heard the same muffled cry. Seth had no idea how old this was, or what it was alluding to. He knew that it gave him the feeling of itching under his skin to hear it. It was abstract and obscure and he had no idea what it meant, but his discomfort was palpable. His heart rate had even increased listening to the displaced voices among the faded tapes on the reels. It might as well have been ice water when the baby mewed in the background. He stopped the tape and scanned the desk for something that might provide some answers to the questions that he had never asked for but now couldn’t ignore in his head.
The gravity of this entire experience suddenly seemed to snap into focus. His uncle who he hadn’t seen in years had died. He then left him his house, specifically asking him to take care of it in his stead. Nobody had ever mentioned a funeral or arrangements. His mother hadn’t even called to inform him of of those grim tidings. They were only children in a family of four. They were close, so why hadn’t he heard from her about Roy’s passing? Letters and phone calls were enough to get his proverbial wheels moving in the direction of this place, but the lack of corroborating information was now rooting itself as anxiety in his belly. He was so very tired now. It hadn’t hit him until just this moment as he was rifling through newspaper clippings strewn amongst the myriad of photographs of strangers. In frustration he sat back in the chair again as he haphazardly swiped at the collection of papers and pictures and documents flew away from the sweep of his hands in an arc, causing them to float to the floor and become even more disheveled upon the desk’s wooden surface. He had raised his hands to rub his eyes, reflexively trying to stave away the onslaught of fatigue. When his hands drooped back down to his sides a newspaper headline in a clipping caught the corner of his eye. “Milton: America’s Ghost Town” the header read.
Picking up the clipping, he began to read. It explained that due to the isolated location in the county, and no longer having the nearby mine to support the local economy, people had slowly drifted away from the town of Milton. First it was a few leaving in search of work, then it was the elders dying off. Eventually the town was vacant. Seth read the short 5 paragraph article several times. It was concise and to the point leaving not much room for questions or doubts. But it told him nothing. He was in Milton. Sure, it was sparse and quaint here, and everything seemed to be stuck in time, but he had seen people albeit very few of them. It had been that way since he was a kid. In fact he can remember Uncle Roy allude to that being the reason that he stayed here for so long when he came to visit. He liked the peace and quiet, and his retirement had granted him the ability to not want for much in his waning age. He had been a postmaster in this very town for decades and seemed happy here. But to read this article, there had been no one to deliver mail to since…1959. He found the date of the publication on the back side of the newspaper clipping. Something was wrong. He could feel it in his gut.
Stepping out of the house, he looked around and realized that as deep into the woods as he was here, there was no metric in which to gauge his surroundings. He went back to the sofa and grabbed the keys to his dirty rental car. Starting the car, which shuddered with the musings of a near dead battery, he got it running and maneuvered out of the driveway and headed back toward town. Rounding the bends in the dirt road, he was seeking answers to a question that he didn’t know how to ask. Before he could make sense of the roads he was traveling in the dark, his headlights bobbed up and down as they cascaded the bumps in the road and settled on a lone monolith in the distance. It was Crybaby Bridge. That was impossible, however, since you had to pass through town to get to it. He stopped in the middle of the road, looking back over his shoulder where the town square and the courthouse should be, but there was nothing but darkness, nothing but the sound of chirping crickets. Nothing but the sound of the water of the Shawny River taking its perpetual journey under the belly of the bridge.
This was impossible. He was getting tired of telling himself those words as they were trending toward a theme for the evening. How had he missed the town completely without seeing it at all? As far as he knew, there was only one way in and one way out of Milton, and that bridge was it. Granted, he wasn’t completely familiar with this area, but it wasn’t like there was a plethora of roads around here to get lost on. He remembered looking at it on a map when he was assessing property value for his uncle’s home and noting that the entire town of Milton was one tiny rectangle in the sea of surrounding cities and towns. With the endless forests and fields behind it, he knew of nowhere to go but in and out once you were here. That instinctual reservation was bubbling in his gut, feeling like everything had gone awry.
He turned the car off but left the headlights on by which to see with and he walked toward the bridge. It was quiet and there were no lights, but it was unmistakable. The same staggered flagstone adorned with barely legible graffiti. The same rushing water that had been running under it for over a century could be heard increasing in volume the closer he got to the bridge. Feeling his heart skip, he swore that he heard a baby wailing somewhere in the distance. This trick of the wind must be how the bridge got its nickname. He increased his pace until he was standing in the middle of the bridge, craning his ears and staying his breath, trying to catch another aural glimpse of what he was attempting to convince himself that he hadn’t heard. Nothing but rushing water. He walked to the railing of the bridge and looked over the side. It was dark, but the bubbles churned by the rushing waters could be caught in the moonlight occasionally as he looked into the depths of the Shawny.
That water was moving so fast. The water rushed with an intensity that reminded him of the sound of a waterfall the few times he had been privy to be near one. It was so dark he could hardly see where the air between him and the water stopped, and the surface of the rushing water began. “The Key” he remembered from the crude sketch of this bridge in Roy’s paperwork. Nonsense to him, a key to what? A rumble could be heard in the distance and as he looked up he saw a rusted pickup truck stopped on the far side of the bridge, one headlight out and its lack of mufflers making it hard to miss. There was a dark figure standing next to the open driver’s side door. Seth called out. “Excuse me!” No answer, no movement. He said it louder “EXCUSE ME! MA’AM OR SIR!” Again no answer, so he started walking toward the rumbling truck.
He didn’t remember the bridge being this long the last time he walked over it, the lone headlight didn’t seem any closer so he started at first jogging and then burst into a full run, the tar and gravel crunching under his feet. He was out of breath in a short amount of time, but he pushed forward, the headlight never getting any closer. In frustration, he screamed out again “HEY YOU IN THE FUCKING TRUCK!” Again no answer, and he was no closer to reaching the opposing side though it only looked to be 50 yards away. Looking back over his shoulder his rental car was sitting in the middle of the road illuminated, its incandescent bulbs in a duel with the competing single headlight of a pickup truck that revved at him the first day that he had arrived in this god forsaken town. He screamed an illegible scream and bolted for the truck again, and again he was denied any progress toward reaching its side. Now exhausted and out of breath he walked back to his car. He sat down in the drivers seat noting that the interior lights seemed less vivid than they had before. For several moments the whir of the starter protested its increased duty in trying to start a vehicle that was refusing to run. The starter noises slowed the more he tried, and the interior dome light began to flicker in tempo with the struggling machine. Then the tell-tale ‘click click click’ of a dead battery announced its unwelcome presence.
In frustration Seth screamed again while banging his hands on the wheel. Nobody but the shadowy figure, still standing by the door of the rumbling pickup was there to hear him. In the fading dim light of his struggling headlights he saw the figure still standing there, unmoved from where he was when he tried to run toward him. Seth got out of the car and slammed the door of the car, marching in its direction once again. He made it to the middle of the bridge, the rushing water sound drowning out the crickets and barely allowing the rumble of the pickup’s engine to bleed through its din. Seth was no closer to reaching the truck than he was before despite how hard he attempted to reach him and no matter how many steps he took in pursuit of that task. He didn’t understand what was going on, and his mind was reeling in confusion.
He walked to the edge of the stone bridge, looking once again over its edge. The water noise was deafening in the silence of the evening. Again, the blackness of the view greeted him as he peered into the depths of where he knew the water should be, some 25 feet below the surface of the bridge. The foam sparkled again in the moonlight and in Seth’s fractured sanity he swore that he could see something under the surface. It almost looked like a face, and the absurdity of that notion wasn’t lost on him as fear and confusion began to cloud his thoughts. He heard the baritone words of a man echo in his right ear as he was crinkling his brow, trying to focus on the water. “One step, maybe two and you’re home.” He jerked his head in the direction of the figure. He was still standing sentry in the same spot by the opened door of the pickup. He wasn’t sure with the deafening rush of water under his feet whether he was manifesting his imagination into reality and he reflexively replied “Wh-What did you say?!” There wasn’t an immediate reply, and against the bright single headlight he couldn’t make much out on the far side of the bridge other than the silhouette of a rusty pickup truck and the outline of a figure standing there. Glancing back toward the water tepidly and without thinking his periphery caught again a face. It was pale, the color of moonlight behind wispy clouds, but there was no denying the telltale features. Being 25 feet away, that’s all he could be sure of. Then another appeared, and another. All eyes closed, faces pointed toward the heavens, the moonlight glinting across the water that was covering them. The faces were in the water unmoving but drowned.
“One step, maybe two and you’re home”. He heard more clearly this time. He could hear the figure still breathing heavily. “Two steps and you’re free.” Suddenly Seth felt the fatigue of the evening wash over him like a cup of warm water. The heavy breathing was accentuated by the rush of the river. The faces in the water ebbed and flowed, pulsating like fireflies. Seth’s heart was pounding as he grimaced against the darkness, trying to determine whether it was madness or reality, peering at him from the depths below. “Two steps…”. Then the white noise rush of water. The faces were somehow getting closer, he could almost make out their features now. He recognized them. The faces from the photographs on Roy’s desk, they were all here, looking at him from just below the surface of the water in the rushing Shawny River. They looked as if they were sleeping soundly, content. He heard a baby crying and then hushed by the lull of the water. The baby had become pacified it would seem. As he glanced to the left, Seth saw Uncle Roy’s face in front of him smiling, bathed in the same pale moonlit aura. He felt the cold water quench the warmth of his fatigue as he was sucked into its depths. “…and you’re free.” The black figure got into his truck, and drove into the night.
—————
“As long as humans and bodies of water have existed within the same space as one another, bridges have been a natural response to their union.” The article had started in the Saturday Morning Post. “This particular bridge has been crossed for the last time by a person who once called Milton Home. It has been vacant for nearly a decade now. This is the story of the now ghost town of Milton. Once a quaint town in the heart of Harkness County, this quaint flagstone bridge, picturesque in its construction against the backdrop of the Shawny River, seems to have seen its last resident since the retired Postmaster Roy Lewis Martin has passed away and the county took control of the land here.” December of 1959.