Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, July 12, 1993                   TAG: 9309030363
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Monty S. Leitch
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GHOSTS!

Nights so hot the magic fairly crackles in the air. Days so hot, sorcery oozes from the very ground.

Last night as I drove home in the dark, huge moths and stone-sized beetles pelted the truck from all sides. They flew like cinders, like meteors through the thick night. They seemed the size of stars that had jumped right out of their heavy sky into the wavering beam of my headlights.

At Simpsons, I rounded a curve and suddenly four hunched witches jumped into sight. They were crouched around a blazing white fire by the side of the road, waving whip-like staffs.

Really, they were only four boys coming home from a fishing trip, carrying a lantern and their tip-curled poles.

But on a night like last night, when even the bugs burned like the stars, they f+icouldo have been witches. For long enough, I thought they were.

On these hot nights, lightning arcs from invisible pole to invisible pole in the sky. (I might have seen it arc from those boys' fishing poles if I'd passed by more slowly. Indeed, it might have been the poles' lights that I saw and not the lantern at all.)

On these hot nights, dew settles. And then wraiths grow out of the grass, twisting away in insubstantial, moon-shot fingers.

Sprites weave across the surface of any standing water. They speak with the eery voices of frogs.

You think you know the physics of fog? Maybe in other weather. On these hot nights, though, it's impossible to say what sizzles across your lawn, your pond, the very next dip in the road, disguised as something familiar, something almost safe.

I crested a hill and slid immediately into a bank of ... something. I called it ``fog.'' Out of habit. Out of fear.

This heat is visible in waves, too - across every hard-surfaced road, along the railroad tracks, just above parking lots and tarry roofs, even along the tips of searing, close-cut grass.

At least, f+isomething'so visible there. Call it ``heat.''

Or call it ``mystery,'' as it is. Oppressive mystery, bearing down, closing its insubstantial, yet absolute, fingers around your face.

This heat will ``break,'' we're told. Like bones? Such heat as we've had might sound an audible crack.

``What's that?'' we'll say, startled. ``Did you hear that?''

``What?''

``That noise. That crack.''

``It's mice in the walls. Don't worry. Go back to sleep.''

From ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties, and things that go crack in the night: Good Lord, protect me.

\ Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.