Hank knew they shouldn’t go back there. Just thinking of the old Hawkins Farm tended to snatch the breath right out of him. For years, on moonlit nights, folks had claimed they’d seen a. misty white figure hovering over Honeymoon Creek not far from the old homestead. It could have been Old Man Crupp’s bull, Lucifer. Or mist floating over the water. Then again, in his heart, Hank knew it was a restless spirit - because he had seen her face.

As usual, it was Clifford who brought it up. "I hear a light goes on every night in the window of that old spook house!" he said to Mary Ethel Freeny, Rosie Morgan, and a few other kids gathered around the liars’ bench in front of Tremont’s Drugstore and Fountain.

"You mean there really is somebody in that old house?" asked Mary Ethel, her auburn eyes magnified behind the thick lenses of her glasses. "I knew that Honeymoon Creek is haunted. But there’s never been a ghost inhabiting that house!"

"Could be the same ghost that’s haunted the creek all these years!" Clifford declared. A foot shorter than most everybody else in the world, Clifford tried to compensate for his lack of height by the sheer output of his mouth. Then again, his mouth was fueled by great excesses of his imagination, often propelling Hank and Clifford on risky adventures. For this reason, Hank was more than a little cautious about getting mixed up in yet another of Clifford’s schemes, especially if it involved setting so much as one foot on Old Man Crupp’s land.

Wide-eyed, Mary Ethel gazed adoringly at Clifford. A girl with spirally red hair and abundant freckles, she said, "I wonder who - or what - could be back in that house."

"Could be criminals. Maybe even murderers," Clifford pronounced with an air of authority. "Yep, that’s it. Criminals who don’t know about the ghost of Honeymoon Creek. Or it could be another ghost that doesn’t know the place is already haunted - or is trying to chase out the original ghost!"

Hank snorted. "Could be nobody."

Clifford swelled up like a bullfrog. "Well, if there’s nobody back there, how come you don’t want to go?"

"’Cause I’ve got too much sense," Hank said right back at him. He and Clifford were complete opposites, which probably explained why they had always been best friends. "What if the ghost caught us?"

Briefly, the two young men glared at each other. Hank never liked to take unnecessary risks, but if caught up in a dangerous situation, he never hesitated to stand up for himself - and for others. In contrast, Clifford was as reckless as he was cowardly, which Hank knew from experience was a volatile combination. A sturdy farm boy, blond and blue-eyed, Hank valued honest labor. Whereas Clifford, who bragged about being an indirect descendent of Myrtle Ricketts, the namesake of Myrtleville, would exhaust every effort to avoid getting within an arm’s reach of anything that looked like work.

"Me and Hank will just have to go back there and check out that light," Clifford said, strutting back and forth like a bantam rooster.

"No way. I’m going to listen to one of Mr. Satterly’s stories, and then I’m going fishing," Hank insisted, his feet planted squarely on the ground. Of course, Hank was also looking forward to spending some time near dark-eyed Rosie, with whom he was head-over-heels in love.

He was already imagining a whole summer of being outside with Rosie, swimming in the crystal water of Honeymoon Creek - on the safe end of the creek, of course, the part that ran through Hank’s farm. He also imagined getting ice cream sodas at the drugstore. And maybe even going to a street dance or two with her.

That is, when he wasn’t working on his family’s farm. He and his friends had just completed their first year of high school. Summer was just starting, but in typical fashion, Clifford was already squirmy and bored. And here they hadn’t even been through a full day of vacation yet.

"You’re scared, aren’t you, Hank?" Clifford taunted.

Hank eyed him. "’Course I am. I don’t know what’s going on in that farmhouse, but I do know some sort of ghost has been howling over the creek, night after night, all my natural-born life. I should know - I live right across the road. If anything, she’s getting worse. The old Hawkins place is on Old Man Crupp’s land, back where that twisted-up creek flows through a pond."

Hank looked right at Clifford. "And you know how crazy Old Man Crupp is - it’s like that ghost has driven him out of his mind. I think that’s why he’s got that bull running loose in the woods - to scare off the ghost. I’m guessing that bull’s not named Lucifer because he’s saintly."

Indeed, the huge white Charlais bull had once gored a man. But instead of getting rid of the animal, Old Man Crupp had fired the hand for not being able to control it. In fact, he let Lucifer run loose to keep young folks like Hank and Clifford from trespassing on his land when he wasn’t able to patrol the woods and fields himself.

But it had always seemed to Hank that the bull and ghost were at odds with each other. They were foes, and strange ones at that. Lucifer had little effect on the ghost of Honeymoon Creek, his solid muscles battling a force as invisible as the very air. Yet it was almost like the essence of the ghost was constantly whistling through the bull’s ears, making Lucifer as mad as Old Man Crupp. Standing out on his porch at home, Hank often heard the white bull bellow with rage in the dark woods across the road.

Thickset, in Oshkosh overalls and white t-shirt, Old Man Crupp was feared by all. He had broad shoulders and forearms like sugar-cured hams. Folks warned that if you didn’t get out of his way when you passed him on the sidewalk, he’d wrestle you into a head lock and snap your neck like a toothpick. He was also bald, some people claiming that he regularly shaved his head, others that he’d once had some kind of rare disease.

But it was his eyes that bothered people the most - that wild, far-off look. Old Man Crupp regularly threatened to shoot anyone who dared set foot on his sprawling farm. As the old men who hung out on the liars’ bench quipped, "You might not be dead after catching some of that buckshot in your backside, but you’d sure wish you was!"

Over the years, Old Man Crupp had amassed a small fortune, mostly from his four thousand acres of prime ground. As Hank’s dad said, "Most places it takes money to make money, but around here you need land to make money." Unfortunately, their part of Indiana didn’t have much in the way of good black dirt like across the Wabash River in Illinois. So folks had to make do with what they could get out of the pale tan soil.

Old Man Crupp worked hard, but he had never shown much sympathy for the hardships of others. Every year he’d bought up more and more of his neighbors’ land, until he was the biggest farmer in the county. He lived alone, just a couple of miles off the Greenfield Slab - a "slab" in local speech was a narrow, paved country road, often just wide enough for a single car. Crupp lived in a huge brick house that was invisible from the road, sunk deeply in the woods at the end of a winding gravel lane.

Some people said Old Man Crupp had been married once but that his wife had run off on him. Others figured he had never been married. "Who’d be foolish enough to marry him?" they said.

And then there were a few folks who claimed he had done away with his wife in some dreadful fashion.

For whatever reason, an aura of mystery swirled over his entire farm: the house, barn, and outbuildings, as well the fields, pasture, and woods. Not to mention over the abandoned Hawkins Farm and that winding portion of Honeymoon Creek that flowed through his land.

Hank was both afraid of the old Hawkins place and drawn to it, seemingly against his will. He had to remind himself that it was a sweet evening in June and a good time to go fishing - or it would have been except for Clifford’s annoying jabber about someone having moved into the Hawkins farmhouse.

"You said the ghost of Honeymoon Creek is a she," Rosie noted. "How do you know it’s a woman?"

"Well . . ." Hank said, reluctant to get Clifford too hopped up. "I’ve seen her."

Clifford scoffed, "You have not!"

Yet the girls seemed impressed. "You’ve really seen her?" Rosie asked.

"Yes," Hank answered, "which is why I don’t want to go back there. Let’s just listen to one of Mr. Satterly’s stories and then go fishing down on the Wabash. I’ve got the worms dug, and I made some doughballs this afternoon."

"Fishing happens to be a complete and total waste of time," declared Clifford, whom folks sometimes called Bug, not so much because he resembled an insect, but because he made such a pest of himself.

Meanwhile, Mr. Satterly, whom everyone called Popper, emerged from the cafe across the street where he regularly ate his dinner. An ancient man with pure white hair and beard, he was dressed in overalls, with a plaid shirt buttoned right up to the wattles on his neck.

Hitching his thumbs in the belt loops of his jeans, Clifford urged, "Let’s beat it before that ol’ geezer gets over here."

Hank stood there like an oak tree rooted deep in the earth.

Clifford grumbled, "In didn’t know better, I’d say you really liked his stories!"

Again Hank did not respond, because that was the purest truth and then some.

Most of the old men who inhabited the liars’ bench - a sagging old bench located in front of Tremont’s store - weren’t unfriendly to young folks. But they preferred to talk among themselves. And they didn’t exactly take precautions about who was standing nearby when arcing a black comet of tobacco juice in the general direction of the gutter. Mr. Satterly was the exception. He took a keen interest in young people.

As the old man tap-tapped his cane toward them, Clifford groaned, "All we ever do is hang around this boring ol’ town, listening to old people. Is that all we’re going to do till we get old and die ourselves? Face it, Hank, we’re not getting any younger. Gosh durn it, unless we get a move on it, what are we going to tell our grandchildren? That we sat around listening to our grandparents’ stories? Here we are almost grown up. And not one thing has ever happened to us in our whole entire lives! Wouldn’t you like for us to have some stories of our own?"

Strangely, for the first time, Clifford Hopkins seemed to be making a bit of sense. Not much, but at least a little. Yet Hank knew better than to admit it. Besides, the two of them had already had more than their share of encounters with ghosts over the past year or so, mostly due to Clifford’s passion for adventure - at least until anything scary started to happen. Then Hank always seemed to find himself suddenly quite alone.

Hank was just about to remind Clifford of that fact when Mary Ethel sang out, "Hey, I know what you guys can do. You can compromise. You can go fishing, but at Old Man Crupp’s pond. That way you can explore the old Hawkins farm, too!"

"Yeah," Clifford agreed, bright-eyed as only a fool can be. "Heck, maybe we’ll end up with a story that we can tell to our grandchildren someday, right here on this very same liars’ bench!"

"It is odd that a light in the farmhouse has just started coming on lately," Rosie observed. "And that nobody knows the story behind the ghost of Honeymoon Creek. No one even knows how that creek came to have such a sweet and pretty name."

Hank knew he shouldn’t be listening to Clifford, not for a single, solitary moment. But Rosie was a different matter. Truth be told, Hank was also curious about what was going on back there. Perhaps it was because his farm was so close by. On their side of the road, the creek ran clear and fresh, but on Crupp’s land, it tore and twisted into one cutbank after another, as if it had lost its way.

Lately, feeling like the tortured part of the creek, Hank likewise had begun to wonder which way to go. He’d always wanted to be a farmer, but in the last few weeks he’d come to doubt himself His family was having money troubles. He might not even be able to live on the land, if his family lost their farm like so many of their friends and neighbors already had.

Some nights, as the wind sailed across the fields, he imagined the ghost howling above the creek across the road was calling him by name. But why? To draw him into her frightening world? Or for some greater purpose? He sensed that he was about to come face to face with his destiny, like a Native American youth going on a vision quest. "All right, Clifford, let’s go," he said.

Clifford got wide-eyed. "You mean . . . you really want to explore that old farmhouse?"

"No," Hank repeated honestly. "But if I don’t go, you’ll just keep pestering me all night like a mosquito, won’t you?" Clifford shrugged. "What else am I supposed to do?" "But you’ve got to lead the way," Hank said.

Clifford was stung, but only momentarily. "Of course, I’ll lead," he boasted in front of the girls. "I always do. Just don’t run off on me, Hank."

"Me run off? You’re the one always turning tail!"

"No, I’m not. You’re the one who always chickens out." Arguing between themselves, they headed to Hank’s pickup.

Rosie called, "You be careful back there, Hank."

"It’s Clifford I’m worried about," he said over his shoulder, although truth be told, he was plenty scared himself.

"Be sure to look after Cliffie for me," Mary Ethel called to Hank.

Whirling around, Clifford pronounced, "What do you mean? It’s gonna be me watching after Hank - as usual!"

Hank sighed, a calm expression on his face, although his stomach was twisting up in knots.

They climbed into his pickup, and down the Greenfield Slab they drove, the trees swirling around them and the low ground filling up with dark.

[First chapter from THE GHOST OF HONEYMOON CREEK, by Raymond Bial, (Face to Face Books, 1999), © Raymond Bial, is used with permission. Further reproduction is prohibited without the written permission of the publisher. For more information, contact Philip Martin, editor, at info@bluehorsebooks.org..]