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Harvey Rodenburg sat on his front porch in the warm summer moonlight, watching clouds pass in front of the stars. Crickets chirped, cicadas droned, and every once in a while you could hear the rustle of some critter scampering through the underbrush. His feet ached from running around Marietta with a briefcase of samples all day. His back ached from the long car ride back home. His beer gathered condensation that dripped down through his fingers and made lopsided rings and splotches as it soaked into the wood grain of his chair’s armrest. His children slept upstairs in their beds. His wife sat inside and leafed through the barely off center pages of a pulp novel.
He didn’t see the smiling man appmroach. Didn’t notice him until suddenly he was there, climbing the stairs, crossing the creaking floorboards, leaning against the railing and staring out over the night. He stood just out of reach of the light shining from the window, shadowed and glinting.
Harvey Rodenburg said nothing. He took another sip of his beer. It wasn’t good beer. Harvey couldn’t remember when drinking it had stopped being something he and his friends did to seem grown up and had become something he actually enjoyed. He wasn’t always sure he did enjoy it. Wasn’t sure if what he enjoyed was the actual taste or if it was just the familiarity of a long entrenched habit. He looked up at his visitor, raised an eyebrow at him, though the light was likely too weak for the man to see and he was facing the wrong direction anyhow.
“No, thank you. I think I’ll stand.” The man lilted in a strangely pleasing voice, responding to an offer Harvey had been about to make. Harvey let out a small chuckle and took another sip of his beer.
“It’s been a while, Mr. Cold,” he said, an easy smile warming the edges of his words. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten about me.”
Indrid Cold laughed. “Forgotten about you?” He asked, airily serious. “Oh Harvey, I could never.”
The problem was that Mr. Rodenburg was unflappable. Entirely. Could not be flapped. No matter what Indrid said or did, he could not get a reaction out of that man. It made him confused. It made him annoyed. It made him unsettled. It made Indrid feel the way that he usually made other people feel, although he did not quite have the awareness to realize this. All he knew was that he did not like it.
It made him reckless. It made him tell Harvey the truth, and more of it than he usually shared. It made him show Harvey who he really was. It made him stand in front of good old Harvey Rodenburg, disguise off, glasses in hand. His wings fluttered and mandibles clicked as he wove stories about a life on Sylvain that he’d never experienced and visions of his future that had blinked out decades before when he’d first crossed over to Earth. And Harvey Rodenburg had looked at the horrifying man-moth in the middle of his driveway and nodded solemnly, like a very kind accountant had just told him how to correctly file his taxes. And then he asked if perhaps Indrid would like to come inside out of the fog and the rain. And would he maybe like something to drink? A beer or a lemonade or maybe a cup of hot tea?
Indrid Cold sighed and slipped the glasses back on his face. He was at a loss for words, at a loss for dramatics. Harvey Rodenburg didn’t want to play the game the way it was supposed to be played. He didn’t want to cower in fear. He didn’t want to flinch from Indrid’s unnatural knowledge and unique talents. He did not even want to ask questions that Indrid could vaguely and cryptically non-answer. He wanted to invite Indrid in out of the cold. He wanted to give Indrid a drink. Indrid didn’t know what to do with this new script he’d been handed. He didn’t know how he was supposed to respond.
But a lemonade did sound very refreshing.
“Why do you like chasing cars so much, Mr. Cold?”
It was another warm night on the porch. Indrid had been listening to the far distant yipping of a coyote. He’d known a few coyotes back in Sylvain, a family a few generations in. The parents switched easily between two and four legs and their drawn out words were sometimes hard to understand. He’d told their youngest daughter that she would die in the darkness that would swallow the world and that her wedding would be a beautiful disaster. She’d thanked him with all the politeness his title required.
He turned to Harvey, glasses like bright red eyes in the darkness. “I’m… not sure what you mean, Mr. Rodenburg.”
Harvey stared out at the sunset punk peeking through the trees. He took a sip of his drink. “I’ve been talking with Mr. Lockwood. You know Mr. Lockwood, don’t you, Mr.Cold?”
Indrid did not answer.
“He’s been writing a book about you, about what you were doing over down in Point Pleasant. Been working on it for years.”
“Is he?” Indrid asked, his voice just this side of chill. Harvey nodded and said nothing else. Indrid frowned and eyed the man suspiciously. “I certainly hope you aren’t telling him things he shouldn’t know.”
Harvey continued admiring the sunset and somehow his artistic appreciation did not ease Indrid’s suspicious nerves. “You know,” Harvey finally drawled, “Mr. Lockwood is a reasonable man.” He paused, as if that was a complete conclusion. As if that was enough reassurance. “He’s a smart man, too. He puts things together. But he doesn’t have all the facts.” Indrid felt his jaw clench. “He doesn’t have your side of the story.”
Mr. James Lockwood. Journalist and cryptozoologist and bane of Indrid Cold’s existence.
“He doesn’t need my side of the story.”
James Lockwood didn’t want to play the game either. He wanted to dig into the wrong things, build up the wrong theories, explain the irrelevant events. He didn’t want to interpret Indrid’s warnings and solve his puzzles and save the day. He wanted to get to the bottom of the mysterious phone calls and discover who or what the Mothman really was.
“Well, if you don’t give it to him he’s just gonna dig up his own ideas,” Harvey sighed. “And you might not like what he finds.”
Harvey wasn’t wrong. He usually wasn’t wrong. But that didn’t mean that Indrid liked what that meant. And it didn’t mean he would follow Mr. Rodenburg’s advice.
“Have you ever chased a car before Mr. Rodenburg?”
“Can’t say that I have Mr. Cold.”
“It’s fun.” Indrid said. “It’s just… a bit of fun.”
Harvey’s book didn’t sell well, but in a way he never meant it to. It was enough to unburden himself of the truths he’s been told, to let go of this Knowledge he’d stumbled into learning. And to be fair, there was a lot that he held back. He did not include the Mothman’s secret identity, didn’t hint that the glasses might be a disguise.
Still, it was enough to set a few more investigators on Indrid’s tail. Enough to give him visions of capture. Enough to send him into hiding for a few years, dodging phantoms in black suits and windowless vans. Every night sent him reeling into visions of capture, torture, inevitable exposure and everything else that would happen when they realized he wasn’t actually (never had been) human.
Indrid never really forgave Harvey for that. But he couldn’t bring himself to hate him for it either. After all, he knew why he’d done it. Every clacking key on Harvey’s type writer was driven by the same impulse that made Indrid flip through phone books at 3 am. Every edited and re-edited page reflected a cryptic message left on a stranger’s answering machine. Late nights at messy counters, trying to find the words to convince someone of the Truth they held and could not prove.
Indrid cannot really blame him for that.