Author: Sam

Story: Halloween in Hazzard: 3 of 10

Series: n/a

Characters added: none added

Note: My Mom and Uncle lived through this encoounter. Thus, Mom wrote up the facts for me and handed them over, insisting I write it accurately.

Feedback: Yes, please? Especially constructive. samwise_baggins@yahoo.co.uk

Webpage: http://www.geocities.com/samwise_baggins/index.html

When the cork compass came to point to Daisy Duke, she lightly slapped a man’s shoulder. “Give a lady a chair?” Her sweet smile belied her womanly curves and sassy manner, but the combination was enough to almost always get her whatever she wanted. In this case, three separate men stood to give her their chairs, including her cousin Luke, who could often be counted on to act gentlemanly, especially if reminded. Luke got lucky, as she took someone else’s chair instead, throwing him a smile of thanks anyway. Adjusting the long cat tail she was wearing, Daisy finally looked up and flashed another smile, then she leapt right into her story.

“Well, after hearing the other tales, I’d say Black holler Road is definitely some place haunted. Me, I never have been scared on that road, and don’t think I ever will be. Instead, I got the scare of a lifetime on the other end of Hazzard County. “I was over on the back roads with Luke, and we were going to be watching the meteor shower they’d mentioned on the radio.”

Daisy wasn’t disappointed to see a small grimace on Luke’s face at his recognition of the story she had chosen to tell. She watched him squirm down in his chair, headless of the pointed tail he was sporting, but still careful of the fiddle he’d borrowed, whether by choice or coincidence wasn't evident. Well, she couldn’t really blame him for how uncomfortable he seemed to be; it seemed Luke’d had more than his fair share of unnerving encounters on the back roads of Hazzard County.

"In August, me and Luke, my cousin, decided to watch the Persied Meteor Shower.

I drove Uncle Jesse's truck out to a deserted, dead end road. It was very dark because there were no street lights. There was a house in the distance across a field. There were very few trees or bushes in the area so we had a good view all around us. The sky was full of stars.

Luke lay down on his back in the road and I stood leaning against the driver’s door of Jesse's truck looking up at the sky. We saw a few meteors flashing across the sky and we were talking to each other about the meteors. Luke was about twenty feet away from me, in front of the jeep.

Suddenly we heard a very deep menacing growling. It was coming from directly over top of Luke.

He said “Daisy, can you see what it is? It’s right over me.” I eased open the truck door and hit the lights. Luke was clearly illuminated in the headlights, laying on the ground in front of the truck: there was nothing there! We still heard the loud growling coming from over top of Luke.

Bo frowned. He hadn’t heard of this adventure of Luke’s and Daisy’s, and wondered just what he’d been up to during the meteor shower to miss out. Instead of asking that, though, he prodded, “Well? Daisy, ya can’t leave us hangin’! What happened?”

She smiled, savoring the moment and Bo’s anxiety. Finally, she responded, “He got up slowly and headed for the truck; I jumped into the driver’s side and shut my door just as Frank jumped into the passenger side and slammed his door. I backed down the road aways before I turned to head back the way we came. We still heard the growling but we saw nothing."

By then, Luke had one hand over his face, bent over in his chair. Daisy ignored this display of either humility or mirth. She ended with a flourish, “I went back in daylight but found nothing.” Daisy folded her arms triumphantly over her chest.

The crowd started murmuring, but immediately hushed when Luke uncovered his face, proving he hadn’t been laughing one bit. He looked straight at his cousin and said, “Daisy, I didn’t tell you the worst of it.”

“What’s the worst of it?” The woman frowned, wondering just what Luke had held back, and how it could be worse than a floating dog that wasn’t there.

Luke never broke eye contact as he softly said, “The next day I was looking at a county map and found where we were; it was marked as Devil’s Half Acre.”

A scream broke the intense moment, sending people into action, getting water and fanning poor Lulu Hogg. As men ran to fetch and help, and Daisy’s jaw dropped in total disbelief, Luke sheepishly looked anywhere but at his cousin. Bo gave a whistle, down low on the scale, and shook his head.

Daisy finally let loose a huge shudder and shook her head. “No wonder you never wanted to go back there to hunt up those wild dogs!” Her voice, however, was almost faint.