(“Tuut nuut nuuk”—neither whistle nor word, it was simply a noise Mad Lucas had invented. People say it would drift across the village green before he appeared. Once you heard it, though, you paid attention. It meant Lucas was close, and that something unpredictable and violent might follow.)

Mad Lucas was born to my grandfather’s older sister in the stubborn gloom of postwar Britain. His mother was a woman with thick, fiery hair and a notorious temperament. Her husband, Lucas’s father, was a war veteran with a wooden leg. This earned him little sympathy from his extended family, who instead christened him “Uncle Peg Leg,” regarding him as more curiosity than casualty.

Their son Lucas was born healthy, with a slathering of his mother’s red hair. But as a toddler, he contracted meningitis. That detail never gets left out, though it moves around depending on who’s telling the story. Sometimes it comes first; sometimes it’s added later, once everyone’s laughed a bit too freely. It explains enough to feel necessary, and not enough to feel reassuring. Suffice to say, Lucas was not the same afterward.

One of my dad’s earliest memories of him is brutally short.

“I was five. He was nine,” he says. “And he punched the fuck out of me.”

No argument or warning. Just Lucas deciding, in that moment, that punching my father was exactly the thing to do.

Another story is more well known, having happened in full view of adults and children.

My father was five or six, playing in the school playground, when someone noticed Lucas standing on the village green with a crate of milk bottles he'd stolen from a milk truck earlier that day. He called out to the kids, asking if they wanted some milk.

They did. Of course they did.

Bottles smashed across the playground—“Here's your milk!” Lucas shouted gleefully, launching them like missiles—glass skidded everywhere, and milk exploded on the concrete. Kids went screaming and running while Lucas stood there grinning, clearly pleased with himself. He'd offered milk, after all. This was milk.

“Tuut nuut nuuk, tuut nuut nuuk,” he squealed.

After that, the kids learned to run.

They still played on the green, roamed the village. But when that haunting “Tuut nuut nuuk” was heard, games ended; fleeing became instinctive.

Leaving school was cause to perennial dread: Mad Lucas—who followed a different educational path given his condition—would be waiting on the green for the youngsters to emerge, ready to begin his afternoon of mindless physical attacks.

My father recalls leading his classmates in a full sprint across the green, eventually piling into his house—twenty-odd winded children huddled behind a bolted door, peering through windows—as large stones were hurled at the walls, and repeated attempts made to smash the door down.

Then there was the afternoon he stole all those cigarettes.

He’d broken into a garage—a storage building attached to the village shop—smashing a side window and stealing several cartons. Guiltily disturbed by his own actions, he fled north through the village before deciding he needed to clear his name.

The closest house where he knew the inhabitants happened to be that of my grandparents on my mother’s side.

He knocked on my grandmother's door to report the crime himself.

“Mrs. Whitley, Mrs. Whitley, someone has robbed the shop.”

When she asked him what they'd taken, he said, “They stole all the cigarettes.”

“How do you know that's what they took, Lucas?”

She rumbled him instantly. His coat and jeans bulged so conspicuously that it barely counted as a disguise. When my 8-year-old mum appeared at the door to see what was going on, she poked Lucas in the belly out of curiosity. A cascade of cigarette packets spilled out from under his overcoat and onto the ground.

Besides that vatic “Tuut nuut nuuk,” Mad Lucas’ other tell was a bright yellow bicycle, a chopper, in that inimical 1970s style. To its back Lucas had duct-taped a meter-long antenna, the kind that used to be found on the backs of automobiles. You'd be right to infer that he'd snapped it off some poor devil’s car and kept it for his own.

There was a valid reason for his petty misdemeanour, though: the antenna would enable him to access government radio frequencies and communicate with extra-terrestrial life.

However, his walkie-talkie was a little different than most. In fact, it wasn't one at all but, rather, an electric razor, with the same brick-like shape as those old-fashioned walkie-talkies.

Of course, Mad Lucas's antenna wasn't hooked up to any transmitter either, it was simply taped to his bike. That would not deter him.

He'd cycle past muttering “Copy, copy,” then suddenly shout threats at figments and shadows that only he could see; always, always convinced he was being answered back.

So invested would Mad Lucas be in speaking to aliens, he would often accidentally cut his top lip on the whirring shaver as it buzzed in his hand, his face dripping in blood, horrifying other children, particularly during those times he smeared his vital fluid over his unwitting victims.

After Lucas’s teeth had rotted to blackness, he decided to dye his newly grown beard the same color. The darkened lower face stood in sharp contrast to the flaming copperhead atop his dome.

Children—my young mum among them—were playing innocently on the village green when that bright yellow bicycle appeared at the top of the road: Mad Lucas. Their survival instincts kicked in and everyone ran toward an old church graveyard up the hill, emotions see-sawing between laughter and fear.

Assuming he was behind them, they stopped to catch their breath and, turning around, asked “Where's Lucas?”

Surprise, surprise: he was already there.

He'd laid himself down in an open grave underneath a large tombstone and covered himself with a white sheet. As they stared, mystified, trying to work out what they were beholding, he jolted himself erect: “I'm not Lucas, I'm a ghost. Boo boo.”

Then he chased them, wailing “Tuut nuut nuuk, Tuut nuut nuuk!” all the while. The schoolgirls ran into the church screaming. One, in a panic, jumped on the organ and started climbing the pipes, metal clanging as she scrambled upwards. Others hid in pews. Lucas followed them in, ginger hair flying, beard jet-black, sheet dragging behind him as he shouted that he was going to get them all. They were finally rescued by a boy who distracted Lucas by stealing his bicycle and leading him across the village. That boy got his comeuppance: he got the shit kicked out of him.

His teenage years saw a growing passion for pyromancy.

The village’s British Legion—a veteran’s association—was a popular spot for cheap pints and cheaper cigarettes. Behind it stood a corrugated green building that had once been a Baptist chapel and then, for a few years, had been nothing at all. It wasn't abandoned so much as ignored—the kind of place that becomes invisible through a combination of disuse and familiarity.

One summer’s evening, the dour revelers, puffing away, noticed that there was a lot more smoke in the building than usual. Soon enough, everyone to noticed that the old chapel was ablaze, with plumes of smoke wafting through open windows, choking everyone inside.

Mad Lucas, reeking of petroleum, then entered and casually asked the barman for a pint. It didn't take long for people to put two and two together. Soon after this Mad Lucas went missing from the village for a time; no one really knows where exactly, though they all surmised it was somewhere to help treat his deteriorating mental state.

Mad Lucas fell out of everyone’s head for a time, and life went on in the village as it had since time immemorial. Peace reigned for several years until my father was in his mid-twenties, commuting and working in London. Having just returned from work, he was crossing the green when he heard a familiar voice calling from under a large oak tree.

Here was Mad Lucas, back after years away. He asked how my dad was, then he asked if he and my dad's sisters wanted to go out and play.

“We don't go out and play anymore, Lucas,” he responded. “We go up the pub.”

So Lucas went to the pub too.

As it happened, it was fancy dress night at the pub. Lucas had to improvise. Thinking fast, he put on his red balaclava and turned it the wrong way round so that his face was a sea of red fiber.

“He'd come as a match,” my father clarified. It made sense; he was an expert in striking them, after all.

He didn't speak to anyone, although he did need some attention after he almost choked himself trying to drink beer through the wool—an unwitting act of self-waterboarding.

When the night ended, Lucas left, still dressed as a match.

And because matches are rigid and can't bend, Lucas reasoned the correct way home was in a straight line. He walked straight across the road, over the tops of parked cars—hood to roof, roof to hood—without hesitation, following the internal logic of the costume rather than the layout of the world.

Some time after his return, it became clear that village life had changed for Mad Lucas. His old peers were now older and working; there was no one left he knew of to torment, and so he fell in with a rougher crowd.

There were other small changes, details which upset his expectations of the environment in which he had grown up.

One such change was the introduction of a budgie, which sat in an old lady’s front window on Pembroke Road. This road had been, for as long as Lucas remembered, budgie free. The bird would often squawk at people walking by, but when Mad Lucas walked by, he took personal offence.

Egged on one night by his new trouble-making associates, Mad Lucas broke into the old lady's home to steal the budgie and shut it up for good.

Creeping into the living room, he grabbed the budgie from its cage, which pecked his hand, leading to an outcry of “Tuut nuut nuuk.” The slumbering old lady upstairs had been disturbed.

Panicked, Mad Lucas did the only thing he could think to do: strike matches and toss them around the front room. He left the house and darted down the road to rejoin his hooligan compeers.

The fire spread quickly, incinerating the budgie and burning down the old lady’s home.

Thankfully, the pensioner managed to escape the flames, but—with outright murder on the horizon—things had clearly gone too far. Two days later, while strolling across the village green, Mad Lucas was surrounded by police officers in a pincer-like movement and apprehended.

After much physical resistance to the restraining efforts of authority, Mad Lucas was finally subdued.

This was the last time he was ever seen: bundled into the back of a police car.

No one knows where he went, or whether he's still alive. Rumors swirl but no resolution.

All that is left is the memory of him, and of the “Tuut nuut nuuk” sound that so often augured mayhem, pain and fire.