Rain Streaked across the window of my grandmother’s old sedan. I silently chuckled to myself as I remembered the rain races that I used to coordinate and be an audience for when I was a child. Our car rolled along the uneven rural road and hit a pothole, causing me to lose track of all of my racers.
“You know when I was a kid, we all used to have this legend.” my grandmother said suddenly, jolting me out of my bookie work.
“Huh?” I responded, only catching some of what she had said.
“Right up here, we’re coming up on it in just a bit, when I was a kid there was a legend about a kid that died at this intersection while driving, and then he haunted it and caused other people to get in wrecks.” Her voice rose towards the end adding an air of theatricality, it made me laugh. “Yeah, Luke… Luke the Spook is what we called him. Because you’d be driving at night and he’d jump out and spook ya and make you crash.”
I lazily looked out at the vast deciduous green that surrounded us on the flat two lane road before responding. “Well was it bull- f-fake, was it like a real thing?” I caught myself before I swore. She didn’t seem to mind but I hadn’t seen her in a while and didn’t want to seem rude.
“Oh yeah, we lost quite a few teens on it when I was growing up,” she said as we pulled to a stop, “But teenagers are bad at driving, and there was other things to consider”
“Is this the intersection?” I said, pointing to the lights in front of us.
“Yep! This is where ‘ol Luke used to hang out,” she laughed to herself. “Of course, later on they had some people come out and look at it all and they said that the visibility was really bad here, and not being able to see is what was causing all the crashes.”
“It was that bad?” I said, surprised. She carried on as though she hadn’t heard me, she was getting old. “So they peeled all the vegetation back and then the accidents stopped”
“It doesn’t look like they did anything around here,” I said looking out the window, “I mean the grass is at least seven or eight feet high and that doesn’t include the trees.”
“Yeah well, with roads this bad do you expect them to worry about an intersection? They can’t even do one job, let alone all the other things they need to do. But you be careful on this road if you’re ever driving. I just got you back, so you gotta stay safe.” She looked at me softly. something the driver of a car should not do, so she was one to talk, but I understood.
“Okay nana,” I said with a smile, “but you should look at the road t–
She suddenly slammed on the brakes causing me to lurch forward. I felt the straps of the old sedan squeeze into my ribs and shoulder.
“Ope, sorry” she said nonchalantly, “If luke don’t get you, Nana might!” “That’s not funny!” I said as we both started laughing.
**
I ruffled around my clothes trying to find another gym shirt and shorts, or joggers, or something. I found a shirt but no bottoms so I grabbed some Joggers out of my hamper. “No one’s gonna know” I said assuaging myself as I slipped the joggers on.
I looked outside to see the sun setting over the other houses in the complex. It had been about a week since my conversation with my grandma, and I was headed to the gym for my nightly workout. Having recently moved here I was trying to stay in shape, and given my grandmother was trying to make up for all the time that she hadn’t gotten to shove food down my throat, it seemed she had a different shape in mind.
These nightly gym visits were for more than that though. They let me get out of the house and have some space to think.
I felt a twinge of guilt at that thought.
I grabbed the keys off the living room table as I went to head out the door.
“Be careful,” a voice called from her bedroom.
“Always am,” I said in response. With that, I headed out into the humid night air.
The drive to the gym was about 20 minutes, and it passed right through Luke’s old stomping grounds. Each time I passed the intersection I thought of the story that my grandmother had told me. Not in a way that creeped me out, but in a way that made me conscious of what I could and couldn’t see. What was worse was that after 10 the light turned into a caution light, which made me feel even more unsafe. My worry was unfounded, however, and I soon arrived at my destination. I stepped out of my car and walked to the gym. As I reached the front door the purple lights of the building engulfed me. I felt something wet hit my head, and then put out my hand. It had started to sprinkle.
**
That sprinkle had turned into a downpour by the time I finished my workout. I laughed and ran to my car trying to not get too wet. Once inside I turned on the heat and put on some music. I pulled out and started to drive home. The rain had made it hard to see, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from making it home.
The old sedan sped across the uneven rural road. I saw Luke’s baleful yellow light in the distance rapidly approaching.
Someone appeared in the middle of the road.
“Holy Shit!” I shouted before swerving off the road right before the intersection into the tall grass. The sedan pitched forward and those seatbelt straps groaned and complained under my weight but held until the sudden stop rocketed me back into the seat. Simultaneously I heard the rev of a motor and the flash of lights blitz through the perpendicular lane. Exactly where I would have been if I hadn’t decided to go offroading.
Pain exploded in a line diagonally across my chest as the shock of the initial impact wore off. I swore and sat there for a moment trying to remember how to breathe. I saw something lumber into the grass to my right, something large and human shaped.
Terror gripped me as I remembered that dark silhouette in the middle of the road. Had this been their goal? Was I going to suddenly be attacked by some madman? Then I froze remembering which intersection I was at. I trembled as I tried to rationalize what had just happened. I wasn’t one to believe in ghosts, but perhaps that was a preferable alternative to someone trying to scare me off the road. The fire of injury and the ice of fear battled across the space that held my heart as I tried to regain my composure.
If I was stuck here for a minute, what if whoever or whatever that was came back, I thought. I wasn’t in a position to fight it. I thought about trying to get my keys in my hand to function as some sort of makeshift stabbing device but the comfort and security the lights provided was something I wasn’t willing to give up. I just had to wait for my body to catch up with my mind.
Nothing came back out of the bushes. Soon I was able to move again, albeit with some difficulty. But as I had sat waiting for my untimely demise the thought occurred to me that if that thing hadn’t been in the middle of the road, I would have been T-boned by that car. Whatever had ran me off the road had given me what was probably a few cracked ribs, but it had also saved me.
I got out of the car and surveyed the damage, there wasn’t anything broken, on the car at least. And aside from some mud and grass stuck in the front of the car you couldn’t tell anything had happened. I reversed the car out of the grass and went back to pull the grass out of the hood and clean it off the best I could. I bent over. I realized that bending over was a mistake. I did what I could before wiping my hands on my joggers (they were dirty anyway), and getting back in the car.
I drove home carefully and pulled into the driveway of my grandmother’s house as quietly as possible. Gently getting into bed because I was feeling a little sore after the events of the night. In the morning I’d wake up and get out of bed before my grandma and finish cleaning off the front of the car.
**
I woke to the midday sun filtering through my window. “I overslept!” I thought with a start, bolting upright.
I was dying. My chest exploded with pain. Reassessing, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get out of bed today.
“Jacob” my grandma called from outside my room “are you awake?”
She must have woken me up.
“Yeah!” I spat through gritted teeth.
“Well could you come out here?”
Great.
“Yep, just give me a second.” With herculean effort (or at least what I would consider such) I managed to get out of bed and move into the living room.
“Did you crash the car?”
That Obvious, huh? I thought to myself before responding with “Oh I kind of lost control of it last night and it went off the road, but I’m fine.
I don’t know if it was my grandmother’s instincts or the fact I was half bent over in pain but she could sense that I was not fine. She forced me back into bed and then tried to get me to go to the hospital. I refused, which may have been a bad idea but I figured that they can’t fix ribs and if it was more serious than that I probably would have died while I slept.
After a few days I was able to start moving around the house gingerly as my bruises started to heal. I slept a lot, but I also started to formulate a plan. And after a couple weeks of rest, I enacted it.
**
I pulled up to Luke’s intersection with a bunch of gardening supplies I had borrowed from my grandmother’s shed. It was the dead of night. To my understanding citizen led city maintenance was illegal and nighttime was my best shot to do this without getting caught. I wasn’t scared of whatever was out there. I knew that it had saved my life, and I knew that it wasn’t going to hurt me. I could feel it. I fired up the weedwacker and got to work.
The work was agonizing, especially with my ribs, and the swathes of grass and other greenery seemed to fight against the machines that bit into them. I had to stop several times to catch my breath and sharpen whatever blades I was using. It was a temporary fix, but I’d be back once I was more healed to see if I could make it permanent. Whenever a car came by I’d duck into whatever grass I hadn’t cut yet and turn off a machine if I was using one. After a few hours I was exhausted and in a lot of pain, but you could see each road on the intersection.
I got back to the car and saw something on the hood. As I approached I realized that it was a message, put together with small sticks. “THANK YOU” it said, and there was a small keyring with what looked to be a couple wedding rings on them. I was astonished and looked up and out to the now far receded grassline.
“Luke!” I called out into what could have been an empty field. “Was… Was this you?” Silence followed for a couple minutes, and I thought that maybe I had in fact been talking to an empty field when I noticed the grass rustling.
Out stepped a figure. About 5’10”, it regarded me silently.
“Luke?” I said, after it made no further motions.
It made what I thought to be a nod.
“Thank you for saving me.”
Luke didn’t respond.
“You didn’t have to get me these, where did you get them anyway?”
He stood for a moment before generally gesturing around at the grasslands.
I laughed, He seemed to make what I thought was a laughing motion too.
It was corny, but I thought of TV and how spirits hang around places because they have a reason to. I know I’m not some sort of expert in the paranormal but I thought maybe I could repay what he had done for me. “Is there anything else that I can do for you?” I said, immediately asking myself what the hell I was doing having a conversation with a potential ghost.
I saw what could have been his eyes glinting in the moonlight and he took a step towards me. He made some sort of sound that sounded like wind passing through the leaves, some sort of sigh.
I took a step towards him, and then another.
“Fa- Fal… Fala-” Luke tried to formulate sounds he probably hadn’t made or thought about in a long time.
“Fall?” I asked quizzically as I walked slowly towards him.
He made quick nods, I could see more of him now that I was getting closer. “Oh.” “fall… oh,” he said to me.
“Follow? Follow you?” I said with an air of fear creeping back into my chest.
Luke got excited at his ability to communicate what he wanted. I could see him fully now. He looked less like a man and more like an amalgamation of the grass and roots that surrounded us. Like a scarecrow made of and stuffed with live plants. His eyes were the only thing that remained human. Two piercing blue orbs socketed into a face of roots.
The sight of him was off putting, and I was afraid to follow a ghost, or a plant person, whatever this thing was. But in the same token I knew that I could trust him. That I should trust him. He had saved my life, and now I had the opportunity to repay him. I nodded and followed him as he gestured deeper into the grass and started moving into it.
We walked for probably another 10 minutes before he stopped. He turned to face me.
“Here?” I asked.
“Deep.” he gasped out.
I understood.
I started tearing out the roots of the grass with Luke.
While working, I noticed the grass that Luke pulled out bound itself to him and wound itself around his arms and chest. I realized he was making a pained but angered panting as he vigorously tore at the roots. Grass seemed to squeeze and cut into his arboreal flesh and some sort of sap-like substance started to ooze out of him. He looked up at me and saw that I had stopped working. He urgently pointed his gnarled hand down at the grass while grunting.
“They’re hurting you!” I exclaimed, confused.
He made an exasperated noise as he looked to me and then down at the ground before going back to pulling out the roots, they once again began wrapping themselves around him, and soon they began to constrict his movements. I could see them cut into his skin and I could hear the frustration and heartache in his voice as he struggled in vain against the grass that would not let him through. The grass began to bind around his neck and seemed to choke him as he tore at it. He started to make rough choking sobs as he tried to make headway. Tears flowed from his eyes and I could hear him crying.
I gingerly reached out to touch his shoulder. He looked up at me, with a pleading expression. “I can do it. I can do it, you don’t have to try and do it anymore” I said.
We took each other in for a moment before he nodded and moved to the side so I had more room.
I was absolutely exhausted and my back and side were on fire but I knew that whatever was in this spot was important to Luke, so I started to work twice as hard for both of us. Luke sat on the edge of the hole we created and watched me while I worked.
After a few more hours of manual labor I had made a pretty decent sized hole when my hand reached something hard. It was bigger than the small rocks I had moved out of the way, and I had to work to wiggle it loose. As I was working I realized that the sun was starting to lighten the sky above me, providing me with more light to see. The sun would rise in about an hour. The rock finally came loose and I pulled it up and set it to the side. I was about to go back to digging when Luke made a noise like he had found something he’d been looking for.
I looked back at the rock and jumped back in shock. It wasn’t a rock at all, it was a small human skull. I looked at Luke as he made his way over to it and cradled in his arms.
“Luke, what the hell?” I said, wondering if I had misjudged what I thought were good intentions.
“Thank… you,” he responded with a tired sigh. “Po… Po…”
“The Police? Call the police?” I said, definitively not needing to be told twice.
Luke nodded and gingerly placed the skull back in the hole.
I called the police and told them I had found a body. After giving them my location, they said they’d be there in 20 minutes.
Luke and I waited in silence for a few minutes regarding one another. I knew that whatever the situation was Luke likely wasn’t going to be able to explain it to me, and I had to get going to meet the cops.
“I have to go meet them,” I said reluctantly.
He nodded in agreement. “Thank you… Happy,” he said to me before offering his hand out to shake.
I took his rootbound hand and shook it. Some grass and dirt sloughed off into my hand. He looked at me with his piercing blue eyes and nodded. With that I set off to meet the police, leaving him alone there by the hole.
I knew I was going to look incredibly suspicious, given that I had committed the crime of some hours worth of yard work on a public road and then coincidentally had found a body, and there wasn’t much I could do to cover it up. I could put my things, and the rings, back in my car though.
I was sitting on the hood of the car when the officers arrived, and I led them to the body that Luke had brought me to. Luke seemed to be gone by the time we got there. As I gave one officer my statement and the other called for backup and a crime scene unit, I could see two people behind the first officer. Two boys. One in his late teens, one that was 10 or 11. They smiled at me and waved before disappearing in the grass.
**
Luke Reynolds Hadn’t been driving that night. He’d been looking for his younger brother Bobby Reynolds. Bobby was filed as a missing person and Luke was sure that this road had something to do with it. He’d been hit when someone turned a corner going too fast, because of the poor visibility. The truth was Luke was right, that road did have something to do with it. The body that I had found was Bobby’s. The police suspect that Bobby had suffered the same fate as Luke and whoever had killed him had moved his body into the tall-tall grass and dug a hole far down enough that no one could find him. The police suspect it was the Teller boys, teenagers and neighbors of the Reynolds. The height of the bone damage on Bobby’s body is consistent with the type of truck that the teller boys drove, and their alibi for the night Bobby went missing was that they were out trying to catch frogs, though they were never considered serious suspects. Given that it was so long ago, both of them have died, and so there’s no way to verify that theory. Over time the local story changed to where Luke was driving and got into an accident which killed him.
The police obviously weren’t thrilled about the suspicion surrounding my involvement with the case but given that it happened over 60 years ago there wasn’t really a chance I could have been involved. They let me go with a warning about cutting grass on land that wasn’t my own but put in a word to hopefully get the issue permanently resolved. I hope that happens, especially now that Luke isn’t there to save people.
My grandma was confused and unhappy about everything that happened and my involvement with it, but was more worried about me doing so much work with my ribs, which was fair, because my sudden interest in gardening added 4 more weeks to my recovery time. She did start to suspect though, and one day asked me if I had seen Luke on the road that night that I had crashed the car. I told her that I had seen him, but that he was looking out for me. That seemed to be enough for her.
I don’t know what Luke was, or why it was me that had these experiences, but I’m glad that I was finally able to put Luke the Spook to rest.