Ghost Rider: Revelations


Pt. 1

It had become her custom, on summer evenings after the family’s cycle shop closed, to take the Vee-Seven out for a little spin. This evening she spun quite a bit farther than usual—all the way to the church cemetery where Mama and Daddy were buried. She had spent a while standing before the dual stone that read “Craig “Crash” Simpson, 1921-1972 Mona Kale Simpson, 1924-1966.”

She and Dad had “visited” Mama often. Now, for going on a year, she had been “visiting” them both by herself. For almost a year she had been an orphan—an adult orphan quite capable of making a living and taking care of herself as a certified mechanic at her uncles’ shop, but still an orphan.

It was getting along toward dark when she started out for home. The cool of the evening turned the slightest bit chilly in the slipstream as she road along the quiet country roads from the church. It got just a bit chillier when she reached the secondary state highway and picked up speed.

Then the bike started coughing on the right lung. The power dropped, and she found herself unable to go much better than she had on that little Honda Cub she had learned to ride on as a girl. With a sigh she pulled over onto the shoulder.

A sister Moto Guzzi rider had once told Roxanne that Italian motorcycles were like Italian guys—good-looking and fast, but temperamental and not always reliable. For her part Roxanne had always been quite content with her Guzzi V7. She’d bought it used with her own money four years earlier, when she turned eighteen. It had been her first grown-up bike. She loved the styling, she loved the speed, she loved having a bike that wasn’t just like everybody else’s. And it had performed well for her.

Roxanne started doing a check for obvious problems. The day before she had thought she had noticed some noise in the valves. That might be the problem…. But she didn’t have a good selection of tools handy, and the engine was too hot to work on, and it was getting dark. It was only a few more miles into town. She’d just have to putt-putt home as best she could and then try to deal with it.

As she reached for her helmet she realized that a car had been approaching up the empty highway. It had almost reached her…and it was slowing. Roxanne groaned. If there was one thing she hated it was being parked on the side of the road, taking a little break or admiring the sights, and having somebody pull up and ask whether she needed help. Or worse, trying to hit on her. Or some combination of the two. She wished now that she’d had time to put her helmet on and get her hair covered. In helmet and leathers she was tall enough to pass for a guy to the casual passing observer. People didn’t often stop for male bikers on the side of the road—they usually avoided them. But a lone biker chick drew attention….

She turned to face the car as it pulled over onto the shoulder behind her. It was a big sedan—a Ford, probably an LTD. It was hard to tell in the waning light. She would flash her best confident smile…say good evening…no, she wasn’t in trouble, didn’t need any assistance, thanks for stopping anyway.

The first sign that something was wrong came when three of the car’s doors opened. And three guys got out. They were all young guys, in slovenly jeans and shirts. They didn’t look like they came from her side of the tracks.

“Hey, little lady, you having a little trouble there?” the driver said. He had a dark mustache, and one of those mullet haircuts so many guys had nowadays.

Inwardly Roxanne bristled. She hated being called patronizing things like “little lady.” It annoyed her even more than when somebody commented on her height. Oh, to be merely medium-sized! Her annoyance tamped down the rising tide of nervousness she felt. Facing three guys on a lonely road, with the sky getting nearly dark—this was bad news.

She gave the patented confident smile. “Oh, I’m fine. My bike just burped on me a little. I was just getting back on my way.”

“You sure about that?” the driver asked. “I mean, we’d hate to think about you out here all by yourself like this in the middle of nowhere.”

“She said she don’t need help, Tony,” the guy who had been riding shotgun said. “Get back in the car, man. We got to go.”

“Aw, come on, Wade, we’re fine. Nothing to worry about any….”

From the direction from which the car had come Roxanne heard the faint sound of a siren. Where they stood they could see down the road for a straight, though hilly, stretch of better than a mile. In the distance blue lights flashed.

“Wade” shot Tony a look that could have killed if any look could have. “Get in the car!” he shouted. He turned and started toward Roxanne. “You too!”

If she had turned and made a run for it immediately she could probably have gotten into the woods alongside the road and evaded Wade for the few moments it would have taken the police to arrive. As it was the shock caused Roxanne to hesitate just too long. As she turned to run Wade bounded over to her and seized her arm. He nearly pulled her shoulder out of its socket as he dragged her over to the car.

“Get her in, Don!” Wade shouted to the third man. “Don,” a heavyset with some of the bushiest eyebrows Roxanne had ever seen, roughly shoved Roxanne through the open back door and across the seat. He and Wade climbed into the car. Tony was already back in the driver’s seat and had gotten the engine started. Tires screeched as the car pulled onto the road. The flashing blue lights were still on the other side of the nearest hill…too far away for Roxanne.

Pt. 2

Roxanne sat in shock as the car roared along the highway. This could not be happening….

Wade had turned to watch the pursuing police cruiser. “Come on man, drop the hammer!” he yelled at Tony, the driver.

“I got the pedal to the metal!” Tony protested. “I can’t beat his speed!”

“We’ve got to lose him!” Roxanne could hear the fear in Don’s, the guy in the back seat with her, voice.

“We’ll lose him!” Tony said. “I been down this road before. There’s an intersection coming up. Everybody hang on!”

A moment later Tony abruptly hit the brakes. The car rocked dangerously as it dropped much of its speed. Then Tony threw the car into a sharp left-hand turn at what was still far too great a speed for safety. The force of the turn threw Roxanne against the left-hand side of the car, and the heavy Don against Roxanne. For a moment she felt him almost crushing her. Then Don was thrown back across the car as Tony frantically corrected to keep the car on the road. He had just nipped down a side road to the left-hand side of the highway they had been on—and had somehow gotten away with it.

“I think that did it, man!” Wade said. “Looked like the cop went off the road back there.”

“Told you we’d lose him! I’m a good driver, you know?”

“I know you nearly got us caught pulling over to flirt with that chick! Now we got us a hostage. I didn’t want no hostages. They complicate things.”

“So we’ll dump her in the middle of nowhere and be in another state by the time she get’s somebody to listen to her story.”

“She’s seen our faces. She might be too dangerous to let go.”

Now Don joined the conversation. “Man, don’t talk like that. We weren’t supposed to hurt anybody.”

“All I’m saying is we gotta be prepared to do what we gotta do. Maybe that’s what we gotta do.”

Roxanne caught the drift of what they were saying. Dead women tell no tales…. They thought she knew too much—but she didn’t know anything! All she knew was that she’d had a little bike trouble. She’d seen these guys she’d never met and didn’t want to. The police had showed up, and then they’d grabbed her, and now they were talking about maybe killing her….

“I see a light coming up behind us in the rearview mirror!” Tony warned.

Wade turned to look again. “Is it that cop back on the road? No, it’s a motorcycle. Maybe a motorcycle cop. He’s gaining fast. Step on the gas again!”

Roxanne heard the engine roar as Tony complied. Over the noise of the car’s engine she heard another sound. It sounded like a high-performance engine, the kind of engine you heard at formula car races. But no, that was definitely a motorcycle headlight behind them. Now it was catching up to them…drawing alongside them….

Through the window Roxanne saw a large, dark motorcycle ridden by a rider in dark riding leathers. It wasn’t the bike or the leathers she noticed, though. It was the rider’s head.

He didn’t have a head. He had a skull—a skull that blazed with an unnatural flame. The skeletal hands that gripped the handlebars blazed with the same flame.

Tony saw him too. “Holeeee!” he cried.

The start the driver had experienced caused him to lose control. The car began lurching violently from side to side. All three guys were screaming. She heard her own voice screaming as well. It would be okay, she told herself. Even if she died she’d just go to see Mama and Dad and the others who’d gone before her….

Somehow the car came to a stop in a shallow roadside ditch without crashing or flipping. The motorcycle pulled to a stop in front of it. The spectral rider dismounted and strode slowly through the glare of the headlights toward the car. Through the windshield Roxanne could see him approaching, bigger than life. She had heard stories before about a phantom biker on the county’s roads. He was called the Ghost Rider.

The three thugs all bolted from the car. Roxanne saw Wade draw a pistol. The apparition gestured in his direction. A blinding flash of flame spurted from his hand. Wade screamed and dropped his weapon.

“Fool!” the Ghost Rider admonished, in a hoarse and strangled voice. “You would match your puny mortal might against the bite of my hellfire?” He seized Wade’s shirt in the bony fingers of his left hand. The right hand struck him full in the face, knocking him backward across the car’s hood.

Tony tried to flee. The Ghost Rider was on him before he had gone half a dozen steps. Roxanne felt the car rock as the Ghost Rider slung Tony hard against the side.

That left Don. The heavyset thug with the bushy eyebrows stood paralyzed. “Please!” he begged in a strangely small voice. “Please don’t….”

“Garbage such as yourself is not worth dirtying my hands,” Ghost Rider said scornfully. “In a moment the police will arrive. You will all give yourselves up peacefully. And you will spend your time in prison thinking of this evening, and of the fate that awaits you if you do not change your ways.” The blazing skeleton laughed. “An eternity spent with the likes of me!”

Roxanne heard approaching sirens. In the car’s headlights Roxanne could see Ghost Rider mount his bike. The engine caught up with a noise like the buzzing of a gigantic hornet. Ghost Rider swung the bike onto the road. Roxanne heard the phantom bike’s buzzing rise into that high-performance-engine whine she had heard before.

And then the Ghost Rider disappeared into the night.

More to come.

Pt. 3

The next couple of hours passed in a kind of daze for Roxanne. The police arrived within a couple of minutes of Ghost Rider’s departure. Wade, Tony, and Don made no effort at resistance as the officers took them into custody. They appeared as shocked and disoriented as Roxanne felt.

One of the several officers who reached the scene was an old family friend, Jack Kuhn. His daughter, Myra, had been a classmate of Roxanne’s. He recognized her and vouched for her when she mumbled her incredible story about her abduction. It was Jack who took her to police headquarters. She felt most thankful to have somebody she knew on hand at that point.

At headquarters they took Roxanne’s statement regarding what she had witnessed and experienced. In return she learned about the three hoods. It seems that that afternoon they had robbed a bank two counties over. Somehow they had showed sufficient cunning to convince the police there initially that they had headed in the opposite direction. A bit later the police had recognized their mistake and extended their alert bulletin.

A state trooper in the area got the description of the vehicle by radio very shortly after watching it pass by. He had taken off in the direction in which he had seen it go in hopes of catching up with it. Before he did, the guys had stopped—apparently on a random whim of their driver, Tony’s—and started harassing Roxanne. Then when they had seen the police coming their way they had panicked and impulsively seized Roxanne with some idea that she was either a witness who needed silencing or a potential hostage. “Bank robbers aren’t usually your smartest criminals,” one officer observed.
The state trooper who had begun the pursuit had, fortunately, not been seriously injured when he had run off the road. He had already radioed for backup. That explained how the police had arrived so quickly upon the scene after Ghost Rider had stopped the car.

They questioned Roxanne closely about Ghost Rider—and told her what they themselves knew. “We’ve been getting reports about him for months,” Jack Kuhn told her. “Before tonight he’d already intervened in two police pursuits. Guy must have a police scanner. Doesn’t narrow it down too much, what with Citizens’ Band radios getting so popular. He also broke up an illegal biker rally a month or so back. And he’s scared the fool out of several speeders.

“Guy’s obviously one of those `superhero’ vigilantes. Must think he’s Batman or the Justice League of America or something. Wish he’d get smart and knock it off. One of these days he’s liable to get somebody killed. Might’ve gotten you killed this evening!”

“And he might have saved my life, too,” Roxanne said quietly.

“Well, you’re safe and sound now, Rocky.”

“Rocky…that’s what Daddy used to call me….”

Officer Jack rubbed his eyes wearily. “We’d better get you home, young lady. Let me call one of your kinfolks to come get you. Or I can run you by somebody’s house.”

“Just drop me off at Mama and Daddy’s…my place. I’ll be all right. I just want to be alone right now.”

“Suit yourself. A good rest is probably just what you need. But listen: don’t wait too long about talking to somebody about this, okay? When something like this happens to a person he’s got to find somebody to talk to it about.”

When they got to her house Officer Jack waited in his police cruiser until she had unlocked the door and let herself inside. It was a good thing she had kept her house key and motorcycle key on separate rings. The motorcycle key was still back on the side of the road with the Guzzi. Where anybody could come by and try to run off with it. Oh well…if anybody did try to steal the Vee-Seven they wouldn’t get far with it in the condition its engine was in! She’d have to go out there tomorrow with a motorcycle trailer to fetch it back.

Roxanne sat down on the couch and put her head in her hands. She felt so drained…. The nearest clock read just after eleven. Even so, she did not know whether she would be able to sleep. Whenever she closed her eyes she saw things. That big blue Ford. Those guys. That horrible apparition called the Ghost Rider. That motorcycle.

Yes…that motorcycle the Ghost Rider had ridden. She had not gotten that good of a look of it in the headlights of the hoods’ car. But she had noticed something about it. Something that got the wheels in her mind turning.

She rose from the couch and took the key to Dad’s pickup truck from the key board in the kitchen. She could not rest yet. There was somebody she had to see.

Conclusion

The house just outside of town wasn’t really that isolated, but it was out of sight of the nearest neighbor. Johnny had started renting the place last year, after he had gotten on full-time as a mechanic at the Simpson motorcycle dealership. He liked the place because it had a shop building he could use.

Roxanne was not surprised to see lights on in the shop at this late hour. Johnny took paying work of his own on the side and sometimes put in late nights. When he would yawn at work the others would comment about how he’d been out partying again. It was a joke—everybody knew that Johnny Blaze was no party animal.

Roxanne had known him off and on since middle school. Though Johnny wasn’t exactly unsociable, he was inclined to keep to himself a lot. She had spent a good bit of time with him now and then, and even gone out with him some. That had perhaps been a bit of a mistake. People had been calling him her boyfriend since high school. That sort of talk annoyed her sometimes, for some reason.

Tired as she was, Roxanne still noticed the stricken expression that momentarily crossed Johnny’s face when he saw her in the open doorway to his shop and surprised him as he worked on somebody’s Honda. He wasn’t just startled to see her. There was some other feeling showing on his face as well. A frightened feeling.

As she entered the shop and said hello Johnny dropped what he was doing and hastened to wipe his greasy hands. Johnny’s CB radio crackled out police calls over in one corner of the cluttered shop. He had it tuned to the police band. That wasn’t too unusual—she knew a couple of people with CBs who did that in the evenings.

“Roxanne! I heard over the police scanner that something had happened to you tonight. You…you were kidnapped by some bank robbery suspects or something. “I’m…I’m so glad your okay. It had me so worried! I wondered if I should go by the police station, but I wasn’t sure….”

“I’m okay, Johnny. The Ghost Rider rescued me. After nearly getting me killed!”

“You…want to talk about it?”

Roxanne struggled to say what she had to say. “Yes. I would like to talk about it. I found out something about the Ghost Rider tonight. Besides the fact that he exists, I mean.”

“Wh-what’s that?” She had never seen Johnny so nervous before. Not even when they had gone on a date together.

“I found out the Ghost Rider rides a Suzuki GT-750.”

“You’re telling me the Ghost Rider rides a Water Buffalo?”

“Yes. You know what they sound like. That huge two-stroke engine screams like a banshee and runs like a haint. I also got just a good enough look at the bike to see that it had a liquid-cooled engine.”

Roxanne took a deep breath. “You’ve got a GT-750, don’t you Johnny?”

Johnny was sweating now. “Well, yeah. But it’s just a project bike I got a while back and never had much chance to….”

“I want to see it.”

“It’s not worth looking at. It doesn’t even….”

“I want to see it, Johnny!” Most people thought of Roxanne as a soft-spoken sort. Her parents had always encouraged her to speak softly. In fact she had a very strong voice—strong enough to scare people when she really raised it. She raised it now.

The voice did the trick with Johnny. “Okay, Roxanne. Come with me.”

Johnny led her to the back of the shop, unlocking an inconspicuous door that opened into a little lean-to addition. Inside sat a dark-painted GT-750, complete with the distinctive liquid-cooled radiator that gave it the Water Buffalo nickname. Roxanne could tell immediately that it was in excellent condition.

“I might as well show you everything,” Johnny said.

He opened up a locker and brought out a set of dark riding leathers…a helmet with a skull design painted on it…a pair of gloves with a likeness of skeletal hands. In the light of the little room it all looked like Halloween-costume stuff. When Johnny momentarily turned out the lights they glowed with a vivid phosphorescence. “Seeing that at night, when you’re not expecting it, really does something to people. It makes their eyes play tricks on them.”

“Yes. I know,” Roxanne said coldly.

Johnny brought out a strange little dark-colored gadget that he slipped over one sleeve. “This is my `hell-fire’ shooter. I won’t demonstrate it in here—might be gasoline fumes around. It puts out a tremendous flash. But it’s so short-lived and burns so cleanly it won’t really burn you. It just scares bad guys and makes them feel a little scorched.

“You can see from the antenna on the bike that I’ve got a radio built into the panniers on the back. I can keep up with what the police are doing. This evening I heard that they were looking for those bank robbers in the area. It was just about to get dark enough for me to do my act, so I headed out. I’ve got a kind of a hood I can pull over the skull helmet so I can ride without it showing and glowing. When I heard that trooper saying he had seen a suspicious car I was near enough to intercept.

“So…I did. I’m telling you, I had no idea you or anybody else besides the bad guys was in that car!”

“I know, Johnny. But I was. You almost got me killed…but you might have saved my life. I don’t know what to think.” Roxanne struggled to maintain her composure. Suddenly the feelings she had kept locked down all evening were in danger of getting the best of her.

“Are…you going to tell anybody about me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to. But you’ve got to think about what you’re doing. You could get somebody killed. You could get yourself killed! Is this really what you want to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ve kind of gotten a kick out of being Ghost Rider. But after tonight…maybe Ghost Rider needs to take a holiday, at least.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” The tears were starting to pour down her face. Oh, how she hated crying where anybody could see her…she’d been trying so hard to keep from doing that this past year, with Dad gone! She could feel herself trembling. Oh, she was starting to make a spectacle of herself!

“One more thing, Johnny.”

“What?”

“Thank you.” She started sobbing now. “Thank you for being there tonight.”

Grreat story, Daphne.

Thanks, Kevin! I enjoyed writing it.

If anybody's interested, this is what a classic Water Buffalo looks and sounds like (You can get the idea in the first 1:30 of the video, but it's fun to watch the whole thing). Note the radiator. My Kawasaki looks a lot like this--but it has nowhere near the performance!

And Roxanne's Moto Guzzi would have looked much like this: