Dating : Ghost of Independence (CursiveVerses 6/28/19)

The road goes over a creek and under the tracks. That’s where it’s haunted, you see.

Why it’s haunted depends on who tells the story. A kid drowned in the creek. A man hung himself from the trestles. It was a soldier from way back who used to live in Independence, and his house was torn down to make way for the bridge.

It didn’t matter.

What’s important is, at midnight, you park under the bridge, turn off your engine and lights, and you won’t be able to restart it. It must be exactly midnight for this to work.

So we sat, the four of us in my old Nissan Sentra, no engine running, no lights on, that summer night. Fortunately, there was no traffic on the road, which wasn’t really a concern to four teenagers who had spent the evening bored.

I watched outside, to a degree, but mostly I watched my companions. I’d met two of them that night, and would never see them again. Over the years, their names have faded, blown away like the fog coming off that steamy creek.

The other is still a friend, still a free spirit, and still had a hair that’s a shade of sunrise and eyes like the warmest ice you’ve ever seen. I watched her the closest — she was genuinely frightened.

The clock ticked. I turned the key.

The engine stalled.

Screams from the back seat. A thump outside the car, on the rear passenger side. It was followed by three additional thumps, softer and close together. Something moved outside my friend’s window, and it was time to go.

With a muted curse, I turned the key again, pumping the clutch, trying to get it to catch.

After seconds that stretched to eons, the engine turned over. I gunned the engine, and almost jumped the creek, I slammed the gas pedal so hard. It took a few seconds to remember the lights, and those turned on just in time.

Headlights were coming towards us, and that driver saw the lights in time to slow and move right. We careened past the other vehicle, which could have been a dump truck, a Panzer tank, or the starship Enterprise for all the attention it was getting.

There were screams from the other three seats in my car, and the adrenaline was pumping in mine.

We made it a couple miles up the road, and pulled into an all-night gas station. Everyone was talking all at once.

“Were you doing that on purpose?” my friend asked.

“No, I just stalled the car,” I said. It was true — I wasn’t terribly proficient with the stick-shift yet.

“What was that thump?” someone asked.

“I thought it was one of you,” I said.

They all denied it.

We wandered inside to get drinks and snacks. I was the last one out, and saw the other three gathered around the rear passenger side of my car.

No one was speaking.

“What’s up?”

“Is this from you?”

There, just past the door handle, was a handprint, clearly defined in the fluorescent light.

My brow furrowed as I held my hand out towards it.

“Nope, too big to be my hand,” I observed.

No one spoke for a spellbound moment.

“That thump was right there, it’s where I was sitting,” my friend said, the little color she had draining from her face. She looked pale, almost ghostly herself.

“Come on, it’s just an urban legend,” I said.

But I knew I was wrong.

You see, the ghost wasn’t a soldier, and it wasn’t a kid, and the man who’d left it hadn’t hung from the bridge. The ghost was from a man who had been killed a couple hundred yards away, fishing at night in that creek. He’d been shot for trespassing by a raging alcoholic, and he’d been a shade for only 15 years at that time.

That thump was my uncle’s knock, and even though I’d been at that funeral, 15 years prior, I remembered it well. He made sure I’d remember. He’d been just a bit bigger than I was, fully grown now, with the large, strong hands of a catcher.

The others finally calmed, and to them, I’d never shown fear.

But then, why would I?

My uncle would never hurt me, and it had been good to hear from him again.