The Devil's Promenade Part II

“You do know people live out here, right?” Dan said.

“Okay, then where’s the person?” Summer shot back.

The glow from the orb brightened from yellow to orange and moved toward them without casting light upon the road beneath it. Dan reached for the ignition and turned the key. The engine turned over but didn’t start. Just then the light stopped as Summer’s hand found his.

“Try again,” she whispered and he did. The starter groaned and the engine coughed once, then went silent. As the couple watched the light, they saw it divide. Two amber orbs now hung above the road. One remained motionless while the other drifted toward the southern tree line. Summer opened her door.

“Wait! What are you doing?” Dan demanded.

“I think it wants us to follow,” said Summer.

“How do you know what it wants?” Dan asked.

“Well, it’s the Spook Light and that’s what we do - we follow it,” was all Summer said as she stepped out onto the road. Dan quickly followed after her, leaving the Ford behind. Gravel shifted under his shoes as he caught up and took her arm. The moving light seem to wait near the woods.

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“What are you thinking, Dan said. “You can’t chase every strange thing you see,” he said.

“I am not chasing it,” Summer said.

“Well then what would you call this?” Dan queried with a deep frown. Summer looked at him calmly and said.

“I’m Choosing.” The light retreated among the trees and the couple followed it down a narrow track scarcely visible beneath fallen leaves. The moon shone through the bare canopy in broken fragments as small, thorny branches tugged at Summer’s coat, and briars caught Dan’s trousers.

The orb remained twenty or thirty yards ahead, always bright enough to see but never close enough to touch. After several minutes, the woods opened at the edge of a deep embankment and the light vanished.

Below them, was the silhouette of a black pickup truck caught between two trees. Summer drew a sharp breath.

It was a 1949 Ford.

The windshield was shattered. The hood had folded upward, and the passenger side was crushed against the trunk of an oak. Steam—or something resembling steam—rose from the wreck despite the cold stillness surrounding it.

“Th-that’s impossible,” Dan whispered. Summer moved passed him and descended the slope.

“Wait!” Dan shouted and followed behind her, sliding through wet leaves until he reached the wreckage. The license plate was coated in mud, but Dan wiped it with his sleeve. He recognized the numbers - They were his own.

“What? No,” he said. “It’s impossible!” Summer stood beside the passenger window. Her face had gone pale.

“Dan,” she said almost whispering. He did not want to look, but he still crossed to her side. He looked in and saw two figures sat inside. The young man behind the wheel wore Dan’s brown jacket. His head rested against the glass, his eyes closed. A narrow line of blood ran from his temple. Beside him sat Summer. Her red coat was torn. Her face was turned toward the driver, and one lifeless hand lay over his. The living Summer staggered backward.

“This is a warning,” Dan said. “We have to go.”

Summer stood transfixed, staring into the wreck.

“What if it isn’t?” she asked.

“What do you mean,” Dan said. “What else could it be?”

“Maybe a choice,” came Summer’s reply. Dan seized her shoulders protectively.

“Summer, we’re going back to the car. I’m taking you home,” said Dan.

“And tomorrow?” asked Summer. “What then?”

“Then you’ll go to Wichita,” said Dan. Summer’s eyes filled with tears.

“Is that what you want?” quipped Summer.

“Of course it’s not what I want,” said Dan. “But I want you alive!”

“Okay, so you think those are the only choices I have? Leave you or die with you?” she said.

“I don’t know what I think!” came his reply. His voice echoed through the hollow. And somewhere above them, the light they came to see flickered between the trees. Summer touched his cheek.

“Listen,” she said, maybe the light showed us what happens if we choose wrongly.”  “It didn’t tell us which choice is wrong.”

Dan looked again at the crushed Ford. The image inside it had begun to fade. The dead lovers became transparent and then disappeared, leaving the seats empty.

Summer slipped her fingers through his.

“We can still go west,” she said. “Not because we’re afraid. Because it is what we want, right?”

Dan thought of his father waking to an empty room above the garage. He thought of Summer’s family searching the train station. He imagined a highway unrolling before them, hundreds of miles long, carrying them toward a future neither could see. Then the second light appeared behind them. It floated near the road, glowing softly among the trees. Dan nodded.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.” They climbed from the hollow hand in hand. Back at the Ford, the engine started with the first turn of the key.

The strange light drifted westward along the gravel road. Dan followed it until they reached an intersection where one road turned back toward Miami and the other continued deeper into the countryside. The light hovered above the western road. Summer leaned close and kissed him.

It was not their first kiss, but Dan would remember it as the only one that mattered. It tasted faintly of cherry lip rouge and tears. When she drew away, she rested her forehead against his.

“Drive,” she whispered. With that, the Ford rolled forward. Behind them, the road toward Miami disappeared into darkness. For several miles, the light guided them. Sometimes it floated above the road. Sometimes it vanished behind a rise and reappeared among distant trees. Dan kept the car at a cautious speed, watching every turn.

Then, without warning, the glow suddenly flew straight at them.

“Dan!” cried Summer. He punched the brakes. The light burst across the windshield, filling the car with blinding orange radiance. For one impossible moment, Dan saw not the road but a dozen different futures.

He saw Summer boarding the train.

He saw himself standing at the station, hidden among strangers.

He saw her years later, married to another man, carrying a child through a Wichita snowstorm.

He saw himself alone in his father’s garage, older, stooped, still listening whenever an automobile slowed outside.

And he saw a little white house somewhere beyond Oklahoma, where Summer stood on the porch calling him home before a summer storm. Then the darkness returned and Dan felt the Ford sliding sideways. The rear tires left the road and Gravel sprayed against the undercarriage. Dan turned the wheel, but the car had already crossed the ditch and begun descending the embankment.

Summer did not scream, but instead reached for him.

The oak tree appeared in the headlights and came straight at them. The impact sounded like the earth cracking open. When Dan opened his eyes, the engine was no longer running. His chest pressed against the steering wheel. Warm blood covered one side of his face. He tried to move, but pain held him in place. His first thought was Summer and the vision they had seen in the ravine earlier

“Summer?” he said, “are you okay?”

There was no answer. He turned toward her. The passenger side had struck the tree, and Summer lay motionless against the door, her red coat darkened at the shoulder.

“NO!” Dan whispered. He reached across the seat and touched her wrist. Nothing. “Summer,” he called again. Outside the broken windshield, the Spook Light hovered among the trees. Dan stared at it through his tears.

“How can this be?” he asked. “You showed us! You showed us, and I still did it. What are you?” Why would you do this?” The light moved closer as Summer took a breath. It was the faintest sound Dan had ever heard, but it was there and that was all he needed.

Excruciating pain tore through his ribs as he forced himself away from the wheel. He pushed open the driver’s door and fell onto the leaves. The light retreated up the embankment.

“Help me,” Dan begged. It waited. Dan pulled himself upright and stumbled around the wreck. The passenger door would not open. He reached through the shattered window and touched Summer’s face and he saw her eyelids flutter. It wasn’t much but it was a glimmer of hope that she would be okay.

“Dan?” Summer said weakly.

“I’m here, baby,” he said. “I’m right here.”

“I’m cold,” she said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Dan replied holding back the tears. “We lost control of the truck on the gravel road.”

“Did we make it?” she asked. Dan looked toward the top of the embankment, where the light glowed like a lantern held by a patient traveler.

“Almost,” he said.

Using a length of pipe from the pickup bed, Dan bent the door frame until he could pull Summer free. She gave a kind of soft "yelp" once freed and then went limp in his arms. He carried her toward the slope.

Each step was agony. Twice he fell to his knees. Each time the light descended a little closer, illuminating the area around the two. At the roadside, Dan laid Summer upon the gravel.

The light began floating west, evidently trying to get Dan to follow it. But Dan wasn’t in any shape to be traveling.

“No,” he said. “You caused this, now you need to bring someone here to help. Please!” The light continued away from them and Dan understood. This is what this light does. It wants people to follow it.

“I get it,” said Dan. “You want me to follow, right? But my ribs are busted and I can barely walk, let alone carry another person. Why am I even talking to freakin’ Spook Light anyway? Especially one that blinded me and caused me to run off the road and crash!” Dan’s thoughts turned overwhelming at this point. “How could I have been so foolish?” he thought. Just then the light paused as Dan summoned all his remaining strength and lifted Summer once more and, through the intense pain, he began to walk.

He carried Summer for nearly a mile without stopping because he was afraid that if he did, he wouldn’t be able to pick her up again. Later, a farmer named Samuel Rusk would tell the sheriff that he woke shortly before two in the morning because an orange light shone through his bedroom window. It hovered above his pasture gate, brighter than any lantern. When he went outside, it drifted down the road. Rusk followed it and found Summer lying near the ditch.

She was alone.

The farmer carried her into his house and called for help. By some miracle, she survived the night, though her injuries kept her in a Joplin hospital for almost three months.

Searchers found the ruined Ford the following morning.

They did not find Dan.

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There was blood on the driver’s seat and a trail leading up the embankment, but the footprints ended in the middle of the gravel road. Volunteers searched the woods, fields, mine shafts, ponds, and creek beds.

No trace of him ever appeared.

Summer never went to Wichita.

She became a schoolteacher in Miami and refused every proposal of marriage. On certain October nights, she drove to the border country and parked on the old road near the Devil’s Promenade. She would sit with the windows down and wait in the darkness.

Most nights, nothing happened.

But occasionally, a light appeared.

It came from the east, glowing faintly between the trees. It moved toward her car and stopped beyond the reach of her headlights.

Summer always stepped outside.

“Dan?” she would call.

The light would brighten.

For a few moments, she could almost see him standing beneath it—the boy in the brown jacket with grease beneath his fingernails, smiling as though no time had passed.

She would take one step forward.

The light would retreat.

Then Summer would remember the broken automobile, the tree, and Dan’s last labor of love. She understood that if she followed, he might lead her somewhere from which neither of them could return.

So she remained beside the car.

“I’m still here,” she told him.

And the light remained with her until dawn.

Summer Thomas died in October 1998, forty-one years to the night after the accident. A nurse at the Miami hospital said that shortly before Summer’s passing, a warm orange radiance appeared outside her window where no streetlamp resided.

Summer opened her eyes and smiled at someone the nurse could not see.

“You took your time,” she whispered.

The light disappeared just before Summer’s heart stopped.

People still travel the backroads near the Oklahoma–Missouri line hoping to glimpse the old Spook Light. Some see a single orb floating in the distance. Others insist that two lights sometimes appear together—one golden and one tinged with red.

They drift side by side above the gravel, passing beneath the trees and across the lonely fields. They no longer separate when automobiles approach. They no longer flee from those who follow.

They simply move together through the border darkness, beyond the old mining country and all its abandoned places, searching for the road west—the road they once failed to find, and perhaps, at last, the road that will carry them home to a little white house somewhere beyond Oklahoma, where Summer stands on the porch calling Dan home before a summer storm....

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