🕯️ The Marked: “The Eyes Above Point Pleasant"

---

🎙️ Prologue — The Tattoo: The Invitation

The shop was dead quiet, smelling of ozone and disinfectant. The artist’s needle danced across my skin, a buzzing sound that resonated inside my skull, etching a design that seemed to shift and writhe like a living thing.

He was gaunt, his eyes permanently tired. He didn't ask questions, just murmured,  

> “This ink doesn't sit on skin. It listens.”

He was the only one who didn’t laugh when I explained it. He said the Mothman was a warning, not a monster. A harbinger, not a hunter.

I believed him.

I’d read the eyewitness reports until the paper disintegrated. Memorized the Point Pleasant map like scripture. Traced the Silver Bridge collapse like a chilling ritual.

The Mothman’s wings spread across my shoulder blade — black and sharp, a cold, heavy presence that felt less like ink and more like a grafted piece of night.

I looked at the finished work — the fierce, alien symmetry — and felt a terrifying sense of completion.

People laughed. Said it looked like a butterfly that’d been through a breakup.

They were safe in their ignorance.

I knew the truth.  

I had invited it in.  

The Mothman was real.  

And it was already inside my head, waiting for its cue.

---

🪶 The First Omen: The Echoing Silence

The intrusion began subtly, then swelled into obsession.

It started with the birds.  

Crows — not just a few, but hundreds — flocking together each morning outside my window, painting the sky black.

The sound wasn’t just noise. It was rhythmic. Oppressive. A drumming that echoed in my bone marrow — a complex, non-random pattern.

My neighbors complained about the droppings.  

I complained about the silence.

The moment I opened my door, they would lift — instantly — leaving behind an unnatural, heavy quiet.

I’d wake up to the scent of damp earth and decaying leaves. The air thick with an unsettling presence I could almost taste.

Then came the static.

I’d scroll through social media, and for a split second, the Mothman’s silhouette would flash — wings spread, eyes glowing like coals — a perfect digital phantom.

I convinced myself it was a glitch. A corrupted frame.

Until one night, the static didn’t just hiss.  

It spoke.

It didn’t whisper my name.  

It whispered an unwanted truth I’d buried years ago.  

A secret only I knew.

It wasn’t a voice.  

It was a thought I didn’t think — an intrusion that scraped across my consciousness like rusted metal.

Proof.

The thing that marked me wasn’t just watching.  

It was listening to my memories.

---

🌘 The Bridge: The Point of No Return

I had to see it.  

I needed to see it.

I drove out to the old Silver Bridge ruins near midnight. Fog crawled across the Ohio River like smoke from a dying fire.

The road lines weren’t straight anymore. They converged on a single, invisible point just ahead. I had to fight the urge to tilt my head to make them align.

The trees leaned in — branches like skeletal fingers reaching — but I realized I was the one leaning, drawn by an invisible current.

The tattoo on my shoulder didn’t just itch.  

It burned with a low-frequency hum — a physical vibration that gave me an intense wave of nausea.

Suddenly, I felt the bone-jarring memory of standing on that bridge the moment it cracked.

I looked in the side mirror. The skin shimmered faintly, as if the ink itself were alive.  

I was terrified it was about to speak — to give me an instruction.

I stopped the car. Engine idling — a small, mechanical comfort against the infinite dark.

I felt eyes on me. Watching.  

A heavy, suffocating pressure.

I turned to face the blackness beyond the headlight beams.

> “Show yourself,” I said.  

> “I believe in you. I need you to be real.”

The night answered with a heavy, pressurized silence — like the air itself was waiting for a command.

Then—

THUMP.

Not the sound of an animal.  

A massive, hydraulic displacement of air.

Wings.  

Massive. Leathery.  

Flapping once, twice — shaking the dense trees and sending a shockwave through the ground.

The sound echoed through the fog, making it hard to breathe.  

Pushing the very air out of my lungs.

I stepped out of the car.  

Flashlight shaking violently in my hand.

The beam landed on something tall, crouched on the rusted guardrail.

It was impossibly thin, yet impossibly large.  

Its eyes burned pure, malevolent red.

But what was scarier was the lack of reflection.

They weren’t seeing me.  

They were seeing through me — dissecting every petty fear and failure.

It wasn’t hatred in those eyes.  

It was clinical, infinite indifference toward a thing it was about to collect.

It tilted its head.  

A silent, mocking gesture.

---

⚡ The Chase: A Debt Collected

It screamed — a sound that didn’t belong in this world.

High. Metallic. Wrong.  

Like a rusted machine tearing itself apart.

The noise burrowed behind my eardrums.

I didn’t think.  

I ran.

Branches slashed at my arms.  

The tattoo burned like a brand — signaling my presence.

Behind me, the sound of wings tearing through the dark.  

Faster. Closer.  

Not flying — slicing the air apart.

I stumbled. Fell.  

Skinned my knees on the rough gravel.

I scrambled to my feet, but my legs felt heavy — as if roots were pulling me back.  

As if the ground itself resented my escape.

The wings beat the air, creating a vortex that tore the fog apart.  

I couldn’t stand upright.

I shielded my eyes.  

Gravel bit into my palms.

When I looked up, the Mothman was no longer on the guardrail.

It loomed directly over me.  

Wings unfurled to blot out the moon.  

Its head tilted — the curiosity of a scientist over a specimen about to be cataloged.

---

🔥 The Mark Revealed: The Collection

It leaned closer.  

Its breath cold and rank — the smell of stagnant water and deep cave rot.

I saw it.

Etched across its ancient, leathery chest was a tattoo identical to mine.

The realization hit me like a ton of bricks:

I hadn’t chosen a tattoo of the Mothman.  

I’d been marked by it.  

Collected.  

Chosen.

I was never a devotee.  

I was prey.

The skin beneath the creature’s mark was pale and loose — stretched taut over a cage of bones that looked frighteningly like my own ribs.

The horror wasn’t the monster.  

The horror was its terrifying, ancient humanity.

Every believer was a beacon.  

Every mark, a door.

And now that door had violently swung open.

The last thing I saw were the wings — folding around me like a coffin of leather and bone.

And the final, faint whisper.

It wasn’t on the air.  

It was inside my skull — overwriting my own thoughts with its cold, resonant voice:

> “You believed. Now you belong.  

> You were never going to be saved, only collected.”

As the darkness closed in, I felt the crushing, physical weight of the Mothman’s gaze upon me — a pressure that seeped into my very soul, replacing my terror with its own cold, patient surveillance.

---

🩸 End of Entry: “The Eyes Above Point Pleasant”

> Those who bear the mark never see the dawn.

Stick around. Subscribe. Share.

X (Twitter): @NightlyStoryTel

Instagram: @NightlyStoryteller

Bluesky: nightlystoryteller.bsky.

Email. thenightlystorytellerblog@gmail.com