novelraw Chapter 252: The Mothman
Chapter 252: The Mothman
After determining that Upton, the seemingly down-and-out engineer, was one of their keys to unlocking the secrets of the Aether Tower, Lin Jie and Ethan immediately sprang into action.
They did not choose to infiltrate or kidnap him under the cover of night.
They were well aware that in this city already thoroughly penetrated by the eyes of the Brotherhood of Light, any overly outrageous actions would only expose their presence prematurely.
They opted for a more civilized and identity-appropriate method of contact.
The next morning, a brand-new "Studebaker" four-wheel carriage bearing the license plate of the British Embassy came to a gentle halt amidst crisp clattering hooves, stopping right in front of a luxurious Beaux-Arts style apartment building on Fifth Avenue.
Stepping down from the carriage were two British gentlemen who, from any angle, could be considered "paragons of high society."
One was Ethan, dressed in an exquisitely tailored and immensely valuable wool three-piece suit handcrafted by a top Savile Row tailor from London, his golden pocket watch chain gleaming with understated yet luxurious brilliance in the morning light.
His handsome face bore a perfectly measured aristocratic reserve and courtesy.
The other was Lin Jie, who had also changed into a scholar-style tweed jacket and wore a pair of plain gold-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose.
These glasses not only effectively concealed his overly sharp black eyes but also lent him an additional air of scholarly refinement, as if from Cambridge or Oxford University.They also carried a briefcase made of fine calfskin, containing various precision drawing tools and academic papers.
For now, their identities were two young visiting scholars from the "Institution of Electrical Engineers" with a keen interest in alternating current technology.
The purpose of their visit was to call upon that senior figure in the American scientific community who had publicly published articles supporting alternating current and was highly controversial—Mr. Francis Upton.
This was a flawless, perfect script from every conceivable angle.
The apartment building's doorman, upon seeing the carriage bearing the "Diplomatic Immunity" plates, didn't dare ask a single question and respectfully opened the main door for them.
They smoothly rode the latest hydraulic elevator invented by the Otis Elevator Company, which required a dedicated operator, up to the penthouse apartment where Upton resided.
However, when they stood before the apartment door.
Their "perfect script" encountered its first, and most unexpected, obstacle.
"Knock, knock, knock."
Ethan reached out and knocked on the door with a force that was neither too light nor too heavy, in keeping with aristocratic etiquette.
There was no response from within.
Only utter silence.
Ethan frowned, increased his force slightly, and knocked again.
This time, there was finally a faint stirring from inside.
It was an extremely subtle sound, like something heavy being dragged, slowly scraping across the wooden floorboards.
A moment later, a hoarse voice, tinged with wariness, extreme fear, and sounding almost like sleep-talking, came from behind the door.
"...Who is it?"
"Are... are you sent by him?"
"...Go away! All of you, get out! I know nothing! And I'll say nothing!"
The voice was hysterical.
"Mr. Upton?" Ethan called out clearly towards the door panel, "Hello, we are visiting scholars from the Institution of Electrical Engineers. We have read your great paper on alternating current in *Scientific American* and deeply admire your foresight and wisdom. We have taken the liberty of visiting in the hope of engaging in a purely academic exchange with you."
Yet, his well-intentioned words only provoked even more intense fear.
"Alternating current? Paper?" The voice behind the door grew sharper, "No! There is no paper! I've written nothing! It's all lies! It's... a trap!"
"You're in league with him! You're all devils! You want to lure me out!"
"I won't be fooled! I will never... never leave this room again!"
Accompanied by the loud crash of furniture being forcefully shoved against the door from inside.
The voice from within the apartment vanished completely.
Leaving only Ethan, his hand raised in readiness for a handshake, awkwardly frozen mid-air.
"...Well then," he lowered his hand somewhat helplessly and shrugged at Lin Jie beside him, "This genius's mental state is worse than we imagined."
Lin Jie nodded, stepped forward, and gently pressed his ear against the door panel.
Then he closed his eyes.
The symbiosis with the White Vulture's Mark had rendered his five senses, especially his hearing, exceptionally sharp since then, to an almost inhuman degree.
When Lin Jie focused all his attention on his ears.
The world behind the door, which sounded utterly silent to Ethan, unfolded before his ears as an exceptionally clear and terrifying "soundscape painting"!
He could hear a heavy breathing sound about three meters away from the door panel, belonging to Upton.
Lin Jie could also hear Upton's heart beating like a war drum, and the sound of his throat swallowing nervously.
But these were still within the normal range.
What sent chills down Lin Jie's spine was another sound he had never heard before!
It was a very faint yet seemingly omnipresent anomalous noise.
It sounded as if countless invisible termites were tirelessly gnawing with their tiny mandibles within the door panels, floorboards, walls, and even the crystal chandelier on the ceiling!
"Skritch-skritch, skritch-skritch..."
They seemed to be gnawing at the wood fibers!
Gnawing at the plaster structure!
Gnawing at the metal lattice!
And amidst this background noise of decaying sounds, another clearer and more unsettling murmur was interspersed.
It was sleep-talking from Upton himself.
"No, don't come closer... those... those red eyes..."
"An omen of doom, another omen of doom, the bridge... the bridge is going to break..."
"It's not my fault... not me, I didn't betray him..."
"...Get away! All of you, get away!"
Lin Jie straightened up. "It's not that his mind is broken," he said gravely to the bewildered Ethan.
"There's something."
"Something that is 'dismantling' his house, and likewise 'dismantling' his sanity."
"And it's almost succeeded."
Back at the safe house in the Lower East Side, Lin Jie immediately shut himself in an intelligence analysis room piled high with various files and documents.
He wrote down the chaotic fragments of Upton's speech he had just eavesdropped on, word for word, on a large blackboard.
"Red eyes..."
"Omen of doom..."
These two seemingly unrelated yet mystically tinged words became his only clues to solving the puzzle.
Lin Jie began frantically consulting all the sighting files on North American indigenous UMAs that Phineas had prepared for him.
He skipped over the conventional UMAs known for "physical attacks" or "mind control."
He had only one target.
To find an entity directly linked to all three keywords: "doom," "omen," and "red eyes"!
Time passed minute by minute, second by second.
The sky outside the window shifted from light to dark, then from dark to light again.
Lin Jie combed through the I.A.R.C. North American branch's massive, ocean-like UMA files from top to bottom.
Finally, just as he was feeling dizzy and about to give up, a yellowed sighting report from over twenty years ago caught his attention.
That report was from 1866, from a small town in West Virginia called "Point Pleasant."
The submitter was a local cemetery caretaker.
He recorded a bizarre sighting of his own with horrified strokes of his pen.
"...It was a black monster as tall as a man. It had huge moth-like wings on its back. It had no discernible head, but on its chest were a pair of disproportionately large, ominous red-glowing eyes!"
"It just flew silently over my head. But the very next day after it flew over, the newly built Silver Bridge in our town suddenly collapsed. Forty-six people fell into the icy Ohio River and never came back up..."
Attached to the end of the report was a UMA sketch drawn by the eyewitness himself.
The strokes were crude, but they outlined a terrifying, bone-chilling image.
A monster with a humanoid silhouette, moth wings, and huge red compound eyes!
And below that sketch, the I.A.R.C. archivist had annotated this unclassifiable UMA with a temporary codename in red ink.
"Mothman."
"Mothman"!
Looking at this familiar name, Lin Jie immediately searched at top speed for all subsequent files related to Mothman.
And then he discovered an utterly terrifying pattern!
Since that first sighting in 1866, Mothman had appeared over a dozen more times in various regions across North America.
And every single time it appeared, it corresponded precisely with a major, high-casualty disaster.
In 1871, before the Great Chicago Fire, someone saw those ominous red eyes in the sky above the city.
In 1886, there were sighting reports before the Charleston earthquake as well!
It was like a messenger from hell, a walking calamity itself among men!
Every appearance foretold death and destruction!
Yet, among all the related research reports, not a single document could explain its method of killing.
It never actively attacked humans, nor did it ever make any form of contact with humans.
It simply appeared, and then disaster followed.
This terrifying, almost law-of-causality-like ability left I.A.R.C. scholars at a loss.
They could only classify it as the most dangerous and incomprehensible conceptual-type UMA.
"No, that's not right."
Lin Jie's brows furrowed together.
There is no causeless effect in this world; every effect must have a cause that can be explained.
If Mothman itself is not aggressive, then those disasters must have another cause!
And it is merely a trigger, or a catalyst.
With this new line of thinking, Lin Jie re-examined those long-dusty case files.
This time, he no longer focused on the subjective eyewitness descriptions.
Instead, he concentrated all his attention on the technical investigation reports of the disasters themselves.
Sure enough, Lin Jie discovered a common point that all previous researchers had overlooked.
Whether it was the collapse of the Silver Bridge, the spread of the Great Chicago Fire, or the Charleston earthquake.
All the post-disaster technical reports without exception mentioned one point.
"...The steel cables of the bridge lost over ninety percent of their ductility within just a few days..."
"...The brass gears inside the fire department's water pumps showed large areas of corrosion resembling that caused by strong acid, leading to their collective failure..."
According to the records, the metal structures at the disaster sites all exhibited abnormal structural fatigue and accelerated corrosion.
A logical chain approaching the truth began to rapidly construct itself in Lin Jie's mind!
He swiftly wrote down his deductions on the blackboard.
"First, make the boldest hypothesis: Mothman is not an omen of disaster, but a special UMA related to metal."
"Second, if it merely passively waits for disasters to happen, its feeding efficiency would be too low. As a species that has survived for who knows how many years, it must have evolved a means to 'ripen' its food."
Lin Jie's pen tip tapped heavily on the blackboard with a sharp "tap."
"It most likely has the ability to actively accelerate the process of structural fatigue and corrosion in metal components!"
"This perfectly explains why those disasters occurred so suddenly, so unexpectedly—Mothman itself significantly advanced that critical point of collapse!"
This might be the possibility closest to the truth.
Finally, Lin Jie's gaze fell on that newspaper clipping about Upton's "carriage accident."
He discovered a detail he hadn't noticed before: the freight wagon that collided with Upton's carriage was fully loaded with steel at the time.