He considered it. “I can hear your mind better than most. Perhaps it is the solitude of the woods, with no other minds nearby, but I think it is more.”
I nodded. I figured that whatever made me able to talk to the dead, and have other equally irritating experiences, had probably upped the broadcast signal of my thought waves. I didn’t consider it a blessing.
“But although I hear you … I do not often hear the single thoughts of one of your kind. Your minds are too small for me to see within, and you live for such a little time. But sometimes when a great many minds are all wishing for the same thing, their thoughts become strong enough to reach me.”
“Uh-huh.” I didn’t appreciate that remark about little minds, but I decided to let it go. “Did the first people here wish for anything in particular?”
“Long ago they feared monsters in their land, and as a gift to the people I killed them all.”
I had a pretty good idea of what those monsters would have been: saber-toothed tigers, American lions, mastodons — and with all my heart I wish he had left them alone, but it was about ten thousand years too late to quibble about it now. I tried to keep my voice steady. “Did they ever wish for anything else?”
He nodded. “Strange new people came into their land. Not so many at first … Just enough to build a fort out of dead trees and clear some land by the great river to grow crops. The forest people knew that if all went well with these people, many more would come. They wished them gone.”
I only remembered it because it had happened in Shawnee territory, which is a particular interest of mine. In 1775, just before the American Revolution got going, George Washington himself had sent a group of settlers out to colonize some land he owned at the very end of what was then Virginia. The future president bought up some land grants from veterans of the French and Indian War until he had accumulated about thirty-five thousand acres out there, right on the Kanawha River, in addition to all the other territory he owned farther east. He personally selected that land, and planted some oak trees there, so I reckon he liked the look of it, but somebody should have told him that the Shawnee name for the Kanawha River is Keninsheka, the River of Evil Spirits.
I took a long look at my visitor sitting on the log there in front of my cabin. I guess the Shawnee were acquainted with him, all right.
Washington figured on setting up his own little colony out there in the back of beyond, so he sent James Cleveland and William Stevens out there leading a collection of families into the wilderness to start a settlement, and, sure enough, they built houses, and cleared enough land for fields and orchards, and things seemed to be going along pretty well. But then the Revolutionary War broke out, and nobody had time to worry about a little group of settlers on the other side of the mountains. George Washington got busy. You know how it is.
So from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, everybody just went on with the war, and left those colonists out on the Kanawha to fend for themselves, and the next time anybody had any spare time to check on them, they discovered that the entire settlement had vanished. I mean:
People have always blamed the Shawnee for the disappearance of Washington’s West Virginia colony, and I thought that still might be the case, but I was beginning to think that they didn’t do it in the usual way: attacking the fort and killing the inhabitants and burning the village. No … I think the Shawnee just …
The garuda was nodding. Apparently, he had been tuning in to my thoughts again, which saved a lot of backstory and chitchat, and made him a tolerable companion, except that I thought he might be a dangerous friend to have. At least when you say things out loud, you can be sure that people heard what you intended to say. Or maybe not, what with semantics and all.
“The Shawnee wished the colonists would leave, didn’t they? All of them wished that, as hard as they could, all at once?”
“This is so. And they made offerings to me and sent up prayers. I liked that. I thought perhaps these beings in their wooden walls were nagas in another form, and so I saved my forest people from them. I made them gone.”
I wondered where he had spit the bones that time.
“And then you took a nap for a hundred and ninety years or so?”
“A short sleep, yes, but when I awoke again my lands had changed. There were still forests and mountains, but now there were many minds, and many wooden walls. Great cities.”
“Did you like the new people?”
“They loved the land. Because of that, they belonged. They had forgotten me, though. So I appeared once or twice to remind them who guarded their land.”
“Yeah. They noticed.” I thought about the terrified young couple in Mason County, West Virginia, who had reported seeing a huge birdlike creature chasing their car down a country road. Or the ones who lived near the abandoned army facility who had caught him on the porch, peeking in the windows. I’m sure that prayers and offerings to the creature were the last things on their minds.
“They did not understand my presence. I thought to do a great deed for them so that they would know who I was.”
“So you looked around for some nagas, I bet?” I had begun to see that garudas were really very limited in the miracle-working department. They couldn’t — or wouldn’t — make you rich, or improve your health, or clean up the polluted air. All they were good for was killing. As guardians go, West Virginia could do better, but it did make me thankful that the garuda hadn’t picked Washington, D.C., to call home. The wishes of the folks there would make your hair curl.
“Okay, tell me about the bridge,” I said. That’s almost all anybody remembers about Mothman: that in December 1967 he was seen in the vicinity of the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, and that a short time later, the bridge collapsed, killing forty-six unfortunate people whose cars had been crossing over it at the time.
“It was a small gesture,” said Mothman.
Well, I guess it was, compared to wiping out dinosaurs and sending the Ice Age mammals into extinction, but I was still wondering why he’d pick on a bridge.
He heard my question in his head. “Because … that bridge led to a land of nagas.”
Oh. Right. Sure, it did.
He nodded. “I felt the same thing in the minds of these people that I had known in the old ones of the forest: the wishing away of an enemy.”
I expect he did hear a lot of exasperation in there. West Virginians get pretty tired of the sneering jokes Ohioans tell about them, and they highly resent their overlooking the physicists and the millionaires, and thinking that the place is composed of rustic poor people. The worst, though, is when those well-meaning, fluff-brained do- gooders in Ohio load up all their old clothes in a van and go barging across the river into West Virginia to inflict charity on people who mostly don’t want or need it. I think I’d rather live across the Kanawha from nagas, myself.
Mothman was nodding. “Just so,” he said. “But my new children were helpless to destroy that enemy, and so I did a small thing for them. I did not destroy all of their tormentors, because these new people did not show the proper respect for me. But I let them see my power.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
After a long pause, the garuda said, “They turned away from me. I will not help them again. Or perhaps I will give the creatures in this land one last chance. Is there some enemy that threatens my people here? I could remind them again who guards this land.”
I thought about it, and to be honest, I was spoiled for choice. Who would I like to see attacked by Mothman? The mountaintop removal people? The retired snowbirds holed up in their new gated communities, gentrifying the mountains with million-dollar “log cabins”? The oxycodone pushers who prey on the poor in spirit?
I was tempted, but I didn’t want quite that much havoc on my karma, and I reckon garudas are all about karma. So I leaned in real close to the red-eyed creature, and said, “Over in the next holler, there’s a feller making a movie about monsters.
“I think you should audition.”
