Here's a March Challenge horror entry. I'm posting it in two brief (honest!) installments on this thread.

A Bridge At Sunset


While photographing the Hebron Road Bridge earlier in the day she observed that the view toward the west promised to make it a good subject for a sunset shot. So Heather had now returned as the sun sank low and the light grew mellow. Earlier the spring day had gotten rather warm. Now she felt the temperature growing milder. It was a fine evening to work.

The bridge was a steel Pratt truss structure typical of back roads bridges of its 1928 vintage. She loved these old webs of rusting girders. Their architecture and shadows made such wonderful black-and-white subjects! Over the last year she had taken so many pictures of old Arkansas bridges that people had taken to calling her “the Bridge Lady.”

She loaded a fresh roll of film into the big Hasselblad camera and mounted it on its tripod. For about half an hour she lugged her gear around the bridge, spotting good shots. In that time she only had to stand aside for one passing vehicle. She and the driver exchanged friendly waves as it slowly klunk-klunked across the wooden roadway.

The clouds were gathering in the west. It looked like a lovely sunset sky in the making. Hours earlier Heather had spotted a small gravel bar jutting into the creek downstream of the bridge. This would serve as her westward-facing vantage point.

To reach it she would need to brave steep, perhaps slippery banks and assorted brush and briars. She had pushed through worse than this before to get a good shot! Heavy camera slung over her shoulder, still mounted on its tripod, a walking stick in her right hand, she carefully picked her way down the bank toward the gravel bar. She managed to get scratched only once. The gravel bar proved firm under her booted feet. She set up her tripod and began to compose her shot.

Abruptly she heard a great chorus of chirping insects and peeping frogs, thousands of them it sounded like. The noise grew with each chirp, until it became so loud she could hardly hear herself think. Then the volume diminished as quickly as it had risen. Within a few moments she could hear nothing but a slight ripple of water in the streambed.

That she had heard the katydids and crickets and all the rest singing did not surprise her. By this time of year it had gotten plenty warm for them. The sudden, sheer volume, the way the sound had risen and then died away again, did startle her. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps the critters knew something that she did not. She chuckled, dismissed the thought and returned to her work.

She soon had what she was sure would prove excellent shots. Everything had come together—the composition, the lighting, the subject matter. The silhouette of the old Pratt truss looked marvelous against the cloudy sunset sky. An exciting sense of a job well done buoyed her footsteps as she hauled her camera gear back up the car.

After stowing everything safely away Heather took her seat and slid her key into the ignition. She paused a moment. Then she got back out of the car. She had done her work and was in no particular hurry to go anywhere else.

She stepped out onto the wooden roadway again. In the middle of the bridge she leaned against the rusty-red railing and gazed down the darkening stream. The still-gathering clouds obscured much of the remaining glow in the western sky. She had just enough light to make out her surroundings. There was not a hint of a sound of traffic or other human activity. All she heard was the gentle lapping of the creek. It felt so wonderfully peaceful out here!

Then the chorus of chirping and peeping began again. As before it swelled rapidly, to a crescendo if anything even more frantic than what she had heard earlier. The familiar night sounds held some eerie quality she could not quite place.

Downstream, in the cool, empty air above the gravel bar where she had set up her camera, a movement caught her eye. It took the form of a kind of shimmer, a rippling in the air that reminded her of heat waves on a blazing summer day. Suddenly where there had been nothing at all there stood…something. It had the height of a man and stood on two legs. But it was not a man. Its limbs had something misshapen about them. And its head…the head was far too large for a man’s, and it had huge bulging eyes, and an obscenely wide mouth. And after looking in her direction it began to move from the gravel bar onto the creek bank….

Heather tried to scream two or three times, managing only tiny sounds that nobody could have heard above the din of chirping and peeping. As the creature slowly moved up the bank toward the bridge she regained her self-control. She turned and ran back in the direction of her car, feet pounding on the plank decking. At one point she tripped where the ends of two planks joined imperfectly.

Somehow she retained her footing and reached the car. She flung open the door and slid beneath the steering wheel. If the key had not already been in the ignition she would probably never have had the presence of mind to find it. As it was she saw the bushes parting on the downstream edge of the road at the moment she started the engine. She had one last, terrifying glimpse of the huge, inhuman eyes and mouth only a few yards away.

Then, with a roar and a spray of gravel she pulled out onto the road and bumped across the bridge at a reckless speed. She did not know how she kept from wrecking on the bridge before she remembered to turn on her headlights a little further down the road. Heather did not stop or look back until she reached her motel in the county seat.


In between nightmare-ridden attempts at sleep it occurred to Heather that she had seen something like the monster once before. The next morning, after a late breakfast (she slept in because she could get no real sleep until dawn), she drove to the county museum in its old railroad station near the edge of town. She was pleased to see when she entered that the chatty curator had stepped out and left a volunteer with whom Heather was not acquainted in charge. Heather had nothing to distract her from finding the display case she wanted.

The case held three rare pottery figurines made by the Caddo Indians who had once called the region home. She was looking for the one on the left-hand side. It depicted a man with a frog’s head. The card for the figure suggested that it depicted a nature spirit or a man in a mask representing such a spirit.

The little figurine had struck her as comic, almost cartoonish when she first saw it not long before. She did not see it that way now. Some of the terror she had felt the night before rose within in her. The pottery figurine looked like a naïve representation of what she had seen the night before, made by some long-deceased Caddo artisan. Either this image had somehow inspired some kind of incredibly vivid and terrifying hallucination the night before—or she had actually seen the thing that it had been made so long ago to represent. She did not know which explanation frightened her more.

The curator soon returned and spotted Heather. “Well, if it isn’t the Bridge Lady! Did you have a good day photographing yesterday?”

“Yes, I…I did,” Heather replied. “I got what should be some fine sunset shots of the Hebron Road Bridge yesterday evening.”

“You were there at sunset? Well, you’re braver than a lot of people around here. Back when I was a girl there used to be stories about how it was dangerous to go around there. People took them seriously, too. No coon hunter would ever hunt in the stretch of creek bottoms around that bridge. I still here people tell stories about it. It’s something the stories that get attached to places, isn’t it?”

Heather could only agree.