Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. The wheels of the overnight bus
hummed beneath my seat, a deep vibration that kept shivering
through my bones, no matter how many times I braced
my feet against the floor. My name's cowled, just col
for anyone listening. And what got me on this ride
isn't something I can explain without sounding as paranoid as
the people I've been recording for years. The darkness pressed
and close outside the window, the rolling fields broken only
by the flicker of the distant highway lamps. In the
odd farm said porch light, orange and stubborn against the void.
I fumbled with my little hand held recorder, turning it
over in my hand. The red aledy winked at me, recording,
always recording, just in case. It was a habit by now.
Most nights it helped me sleep. The steady click and
soft wor of table lull in a world thick with
rumors and silence. To night, the sound vanished inside the bone,
rattle of the bus engine, folding in with the shuffle
of shoes and restless coughs. What brings anyone to board
a bus halfway through the night, leaving a dead en
sseise city behind, while Moss, also safely tucked in bed.
Some of us are chasing something, others are running. I
counted myself among the first group, before the roomors started
chasing me. That's when everything got tangled. A story passed
across a bar counter in late July, a cousin of
a friend go missing after a minute bus ride. A
reference in a foreign post about routs meant for passengers
who don't want to be found. Eventually, everything pointed to
this bus, two hundred seventeen, the inter city run whose
official end and beginning were never quite the same. On
any schedule, you could find a few seats ahead. The
driver's face kept surfacing in the warped rear view and
readable under the jaundice dome lights. The bus shifted in
and out of gravel, rats rattling along back roads I'd
only ever seen trace and red ink and the oldest maps.
I thought about all the warnings about how two hundred
seventeen at night is just a story, and yet here
I was and spoiling my nerves on this length of
black top. The ticket in my pocket felt heavier than
it showed, as if the ink weighed more than the
cart itself. I leaned into the seat, remembering those awkward
minutes at the terminal, how everyone managed to both fill
the waiting area and leave entire rose empty. The way,
luggage was stacked against the wall like fortifications. The overhead
light kept flickering, and only two people used the small
vending machines, A stooped man in brown polister and a
gull and an uncertain shade of green hair comb flat
to her skull. We boarded in near silence. My footsteps
echoed hardly anyone spoke. The only sound aside from ticket
stubbed creasing and duffelbacks half in onto shells, was the
mechanical voice announcing about two hundred seventeen now boarding all stops,
all scheduled and scheduled destinations. It didn't make sense at
the time, I didn't overthink it. Halfway down the row,
I nearly brushed past a woman in her forties, her
fingers nimbly twisting the tab on a paper cup. Her
glanceling goed on me, trailing with a mixture of hope
and warning. When the bus lurched into motion, I found
myself beside her. She introduced herself, marin voiceoft, words tumbling
out a bit too quickly. Gance leap on buses, she said,
her fingers folding and refolding an old receipt. Never could
Where are you headed? There was a challenge in her question,
a little warning underneath the politeness. I shrugged, giving her
a name of a ten miles down the line, even
as I watched it. Deep friend gather on her brow.
Sometimes it's not about where you're getting off, but where
you sit, she memo at the corners of her mouth, tightening.
You get attached to your seat. People notice if you moved,
choose carefully, all right. Her advice clawed at me, but
the engines drone pressed it aside. The ride rolled on,
headlights sweeping unbroken black. Marian busied herself with a crossword,
but I could see her attention flickering restlessly across the aisle.
An hour or later, the bus creaked to a sudden halt.
At alone is stretched just a sodium lamp and about
a trash can, mocking the stop. The air outside was
thick with mud and dry grass. Marion's hand tightened around
my wrist. No one else moved. We switched seats with me.
She asked, urgent, I forgot something by the back, please
just for a minute. Confused but compliant, I shuffled back,
sliding into her still warm seat. As she ventured down
the dim aisle, the lights hummed and the driver watched
her reflection move past in the mirror. She didn't return.
Passengers on ear the side shifted one a paal. A
man with heavy brows glanced at me. A younger woman
on the opposite side of the aisle held her backpeck tighter.
No one spoke Marian's name. Her crosswood lay abandoned the
pencil shore into a stub. The bus rumbled back onto
the road, sleepinging off its metal hide. I raised the
recorder to my lips, whispering thoughts and tracking the ambient hush,
but the mic only picked up engine and static. The
empty and as heavy as lead once to ride stabilized,
I reopened the recorder to review Marian's earlier words. The
file blipped and stuttered, and when it finally played back,
her warning about seat and choices was gone, replaced by
dull burst of rud noise. Sitting where she'd been just
moments before, my own voice seemed out of sink, a
second behind the events I remembered, when pressed hard against
the glass, distorting the faces in their reflections, making everything
seem more temporary. It was less than two I was in,
and already something had shifted inside the story. I thought
I was collecting that before this journey began, before Bus
two hundred seventeen, was anything more than foulkhor, And the
underside of my mind and my life followed simple patterns.
Most nights, my apartment buzzed with the blue cold of
computer monitors and the low rusp of city traffic. Several
floors below. A part time freelancer is mess leftover takeouts,
stacks of yellow legal pads, audio recorders plugged into a
tot array of pouse strips, always blinking red. Sometimes I'd
sib with his phones, piecing together stores for clients, or
obsessing over fragments of unsolved interviews, the kinds no editor
would buy, but which refused to leave me alone. I
had routines that kept me insulated, colser editors, notes stacked
in color coated files, A different life from bus terminals
and hushed warnings and cold night air. But under the surface.
I'd grown addicted to what gets left and said in corners.
My sister used to call me a professional ghost hunter
for facts. It was wrong, but it made everything else harder,
the bills, the sleep, the feeling of being known by
anyone except the stores themselves. Still, I was good at
the small rituals. In the months before I booked my
ticket on two hundred seventeen, I let the room of
the bus slip into my veins, watched it take root.
A news clipping surfaced in a close forum, vanished after
last bus, then another on a conspiracy subordatet. I started
calling the numbers listed in the obituaries, tracing forum handles
to real people. Most hung up quickly, elders said it
was a hoax. One woman, the uncle of a missing passenger,
broke down on a phone five minutes in. I know
you think it's just a story, she whispered, But the
police didn't call back, and when I found his voicemail
that night, it sounded like he was under water, repeating
a stop I'd never heard of. I posted anonymous flies
and bus terminals around the city, mostly at dawn, phone
number written in block capitals. Sometimes the replies would come
in the wires, static heavy breathing, once a series of
short tones that mashed no known rington or emergency code.
I spent whole afternoon scrolling through ticket sale websites, cross
checking names and dates, easing berner addresses to order routes
I would later cancel. I pieced together a spreadsheet of
missing persons, which, to my annoyance, included small handful with
absolutely no recorded departure. They'd been a waiting for the
late bus, and then nothing. The terminal security footage was
grainy and started late, no glimpse of them boarding. I
cataloged contradictions, dead end by dead end. The deprot went
the less I wanted to tell any one. I still tried.
My neighbor Selene, caught me once in the lane outside
the apartment. My bag'slung over one shoulder, already half lost
in headphones, leaving again as she asked, her eyes flick
pass me, searching. You're chasing something. It's just work. I
tried to say it lightly, but something in her frowned.
Don't let it take you, she said. At last, Boyce resigned.
She offered no further details, but left a small packet
of camwhil tee outside my door the next morning, packing
for the trip, if you could call it, that was
more reflex than anticipation. Three shirts, two pairs of jeans,
the hand held a corridor, and a battered laptop. I
chucked a polaroid of a childhood birthday into my case,
not for luck, but because I hated thinking it might
get thrown out by mistake. I went to a las
feudal ritual, walked the length of my apartment, making sure
every light was off, then pressed my palm to the
glass and watched the city trim below. Outside. The avenue
was blue and empty. I counted fast steps to the
cove and told myself quietly, as though promising someone else,
I'd keep my promise this time. Observe Ecker, but don't
get involved. Missing people make bad company obsession worse. The
first bus terminal at two nineteen a m looked as
I expected, plastic chairs yellow to ivory, the floor pock
mutch by years of spilled coffee and restless feet. The
counter window shone a weird artificial brightness that didn't reach
the corners. I waited with my duffel, noting which regulars
eyed nucomers, and which held themselves apart, shoulders hunched, one
hand always on the back. The man at the ticket
counter found my print out twice, weighing as if expecting
it to changement scan. His eyes darted up wide, then low,
as if he might say something he didn't. With a
mechanical motion, he slid the stub under the plux glass,
fingers lingering for an instant longered and protocol required the
bus logo, a wingwheel and faded purple wind from the
side of the vehicle. There was non viusism among those
who boarded. The process had the rhythm of awake ashoe scuffing,
and faces mostly hidden by head fronds or hair. Everyone
seemed to track the faces of the unfamiliar. It left
me hyper aware of my own every step, every pause.
I found my assigned seat, but only after making an
awkward loop through the narrow aisle twice block, first by
an elderly woman digging for a lost coin, then by
a teenage girl gripping a grocery sack in her lap.
Maybe it was nothing, but her glare followed me the
rest of that night. The first ire on board, nothing
stood at except the almost religious has that overtook the
bus at the start of each trip, but it didn't
last long. Pattens started hinting themselves into view, as though
the bus itself operated by secret overalls. Some passengers, especially
three I recognized from the terminal, boarded and arranged their
belongings with military precision. They always sat in the same seats,
falling into Richuales's depostures, hats tilted, arms crossed, gaze, fixed head,
three rows from the back. The teenage girl who glared
at me earlier climed a double seat and arranged plastic
bracelets along the window sill. No one challenged her space.
People glanced, but the seat beside us stayed stubbornly empty.
After two stops, the spot in front of her rotated.
Each new passenger would hesitate, look uncertain, and shrink toward
the front again. The rest stops weren't what I expected.
At each one, there was always a seat left unfilled
when we pulled away, although an empty seat should have
been difficult to come by with the way we boarded.
The driver at a huge man in a Navy windbreaker
with enounced destinations with a practice air All scheduled stops
and summoned scheduled, Please don't ask about the latter. If
he caught you looking at his clipboard, his smile faded quick.
On the second rest brake, an elderly man shuffled down
the aisle carrying a batter duffel. He gave nothing away,
not even a glance, as he wordlessly exited into the night,
while the rest of us seemed to collectively ignore his departure.
I caught a glimpse of the driver making a quiet
note in a faded ledger, three quick marks, then a
line drawn through one. When I checked the aisle, his
seat was already wiped down, luggage sewed away, as if
the man had never been on board. The bus rumbled
back onto the road. Every face tensomewhere my own stub
of a ticket, it's date and time in faded blue,
didn't match what was in my lock. Comparing the two,
I discovered and accounted for transfers on my sigmented places
I'd never gotten off. Times there no longer made saints.
My seat mate, this time, a pail cat in a
hoodie leaned over and whispered, some seats don't fill up.
Twice before I could press him, he clammed up. I
was drawn to the driver. I started tracking the bus,
radio offers drifting in during stops, never at any scheduled
rest point. Napshots of static came, layered with what could
have been clipped voices snatches of song, but nothing lasted
long enough to capture I had it. I fed everything
into the recorder, even then a new enough to check
what survived after the engine had drawn their rest out.
The mystery drew me down miles of unfamiliar stretches, but
it never showed itself all at once. Every night bled
into the next. I woke up with crooks in my neck,
the imprint of the seats full leather etched into my cheek,
and fragments of faces surfacing in blurry recollection as the
bus slowed into the dawn. To make the pattern clear,
I rode different segments each night, boarding and reboarding at
towns whose name seened, built mostly of consonance, though welcome signs,
whether to legibility. I rotated my seat one night far forward,
listening to the hiss of the brakes as the driver
scanned the road for wild life. Another tucked behind the
rear wheel well, where vibrations twisted the static of my
recorder into rah throbing bass. Each loop produced confusion. Old
faces seemed to return briefly, then vanished when I least expected.
My notes filled up, but their evidence was thin. Only
the regulars built up over time, and even then sometimes
one disappeared for three days stretch, making me start on
a che my files. Once a passenger i'd recorded in
detail molib of the left eye brow Fred University of
Alberta hoodie, vanished between tams. No record remained on mine notes,
but I found a trace of his voice, caught a
single second of static, barely audible and already half gone.
Some knights oppressed him at questions on the regulars, most
merely blinked and turned away. At a tiny alp was
north of the river, I huddled in a seat next
to a college aged guy whose shoes had been freshly polish,
unusual for a bus rider. He flinched when I introduced myself,
but later, in the soft glow over rest stop lamp,
he leaned closer. My cousin took this bus last spring.
He mattered, chewing at his finger. Naire They never called back.
Dad says he ran away, But nobody runs from home
without their wallet. I pressed for the and he only repeated,
there are always open seats. Some of you don't fell
not twice. There was an older man too, thick neck
and restless hands, who took her and dying anybody who
talked to the driver. I made the mistake of sitting
near him. Once he drew me close with a question,
why are you here? When I had demurred, he shook
his head, saying there are rules all night buses. You
don't report what you didn't see. That's how you make
at home, you understand. I spend days cross referencing lists,
combing through bus manifests mailed by a cryptic contact at
a newsgroupbakov dates were scratched over, names inexplicably absent. The
paper trail bent subtly away from any coherent pattern. On
the phone with the bus company, the line would click
dead after the first mention of a missing or unaccounted
for passenger. When the conversation did continue, it became circular.
All protocols followed. Privacy laws prohibit details. All routes end
on schedule, nothing more. Stop over tans offered little solace.
At one point I ducked into a back street diner
to gather myself. I found a bullet impoored near the
bath room, with cracked rain, warped missing fliers, updated, then
stripped away week by week. When I asked a waitress,
her eyes flaked my voice recorder. She poured fresh coffee
and lean clothes. Some of us stay missing, Others no
how to disappear the right way? Ye want of ice?
Get off that bus out on the street. Flies lingered
for up to three days before vanishing overnight. I leaned
against light pers and frozen on to record notes, hoping
to hear something I'd messed. My knees ached, my breath
became white and jagged in the scarf. Exhaustion stopped me.
I lost track of days. The sun seemed to rise
later on every segment of the route. My dreams turned circular, endless.
I was struggling through freezing rain. Bus stations flickered by
with unreadable signage, vacant seats, endlessly trading places. Late one night,
frigid and half lost, I replayed my notes only to
catch the echo of my own voice in the familiar
phrasing you were never here, The word scrape row against
everything I tried to collect. I'd never recorded that phrase.
The buscarve lines into my memory that refused to connect. Sometimes,
when a trip finished, I found myself stirring at my notes,
unable to remember if the face next to me had
been a real person or a trick of exhaustion. At
the back of one schedule, beneath the scroll's signature, I
didn't recognize some one had carved the same words with
a key or knife. You were never here. One night,
fatigued dragging every mussel, I pressed into the cold seat,
just as the sky decided to crack open with driving rain.
The bus windows puckered with watery veins. This time I
settled new the rear of sliding in beside a woman
whose hands clutched a withered purse tid to her chest.
She caught my eyes and pressed her lips together as
a folding back truce that threatened to spill out. As
night thinking, the driver's announcements grew quieter, and when we
left a nameless hamlet, the engine didn't angle for the
main road. Instead, a veered without warning on too uneven ground,
the tires squelching through wet leaves and mud. An unscheduled
stop was called by name. One not listed on any
scheduled stall, and from a terumnal or found online. The
boss idled and the shoulder nearer dark corps of trees.
Two regulars, a man in work boots and a sharp
faced woman in a ringcooked froze as the doors creaked open.
Neither looked at the driver. Instead, they glanced back at
the rest of us, their faces bloodles. Beneath the weak,
dumb light. A hush fell as they stepped off, moving
with an awkward determination into the mist trees. I strained
to see where they went, but the night devoured them instantly.
For the first time, the driver's quiet voice carried back,
you know the way, don't get lost. I raised my recorder,
desperate to make sense of it all, but as I
played the tape, a peculiar echo filled the file of
feedback loop that warped every voice, even my. For several
minutes straight, cold seeped from the empty seat beside me.
It felt momentarily as though someone had seen had paused,
pressing their pump to my shoulder before vanishing back into
the gloom. Trembling a dared question of the woman next
to me, what happens to people who get off at
the und schedules stops. Her reply was a whisper, almost
too low to catch. Those who get off here aren't
supposed to be remembered. That's the rule. Her eyes dogget
mine with braw and filtered fear. As the bus rumbled away,
slick with rain and unspoken history, I flipped through my
notebook for solace. It fell open on a pair of blank,
torn up pages watched inside a polaroid. I didn't remember
taking a dark path, winding into trees, two retreating silhouettes
swallowed by fok. I don't know how that picture came
to be between those pages all what was meant not
to be seen, only that something or someone expected me
to look. The rumbling bus, the entered seat beside me,
and the blank pages in my notebook thickened the tension.
I'd only begun to trace. The rules were changing, and
for the first time, the boundary between witness and participant,
between hunter and hunted felt dangerously thin. The rumbling bus,
the emptied seat beside me, and the blank pages in
my notebook thickened attention. I'd only begun to trace. The
rules were changing, and for the first time, the boundary
between witness and participant between hunder and hunted felt dangerously thin.
The rest of the journey blowed under the rain smeared window.
My fingers toyed with the polar or, tracing the glossy surface,
as if I could pull clarity from the milky edges
of the photograph. In the image, the paths swallowed by
fog suggested to death that the camera shouldn't have captured.
There were no faces, just as the laytes grainy and spectral.
I tried to remember holding the camera framing that shot,
but nothing surfaced but a nervous tremor running along my spine.
The bus rolled on every few minutes. The windshield wiper shrieked,
scraping rain away just long enough to reveal a slip
of black top, and the obsessive for a petition of
passing reflectors. My seat made stead dead ahead, joel flexing
as if resisting. They urged to turn and confess everything
or nothing. I stared at my own hands. I tried
to remember Marian's advice choose your seat carefully. By the
next hour, my attention was threadbare. Each stop now teetered,
and the edge between the routine and the forbidden we
dropped off three picked up on a grizzled man who
took his seat without a word, scanning the rest of
us like he was cataloging for its rather than strangers.
As the door had shut behind him, I listened for
Marian's voice in the whirr of my recorder, as if
she might have somehow returned, but there was only wind
and static. At one point, the drover's crackling voice over
the pier drew all heads higher. If you're restless now,
as your chance will be here briefly, and then it's
a long haul. The stop was such a whisper of
a town that no nay marked the pealing sign. Just
two yellow street lamps flickered by the gas station. Thou
light a warning more than a welcome. A handful of
passenger shuffled off to smoke or stretched their legs. I
considered following, but something held me in the seat, the
dull ache of caution where curiosity should have insisted. Instead,
I changed tactics, and, clipping my baths from my coat pocket,
I tucked it discreetly into the interior lining. If press
I could say I was a groudget researcher, maybe I
was it sounded better than obsessive for the tape recorder.
Then taking the opportunity, while the bus was empty, I
drifted down the aisle, glancing at seat backs for Photoiclues
six and nine, identical, with seats tucked into the gap
between cushion and plastic frame faded a nearly tissue thin.
I collected each, careful not to draw the eyes of
the few remaining passengers. Some one, maybe the same, some
one had marked Loupin's spiral with a blue ball poent
on both a simple, a doodle, perhaps a code. I
slipped them into an envelope, then leaned over, pretending to
be concerned about the seats adjuster lever while I checked
the carpet for anything else. A key, a scrap of
paper dropped at e nothing. Returning to my seat, I
glanced again at the woman beside me. She was breeding
for her nose, shallow and careful. You ever see her again,
I blurted before I could restrain myself. The woman who
went to the back I think her name was Marian.
Her response was the faintest shake of the head, lips
barely parting. It doesn't matter once they're not here, that's
how it goes back in the road every bound since
were seemed to carry fresh freight. My neck crempt, my
eyes burned. I forced myself to take stock which fellow
travelers had I seen before, Who got on, who got off,
and who slipped away without quite being noticed. I began
drawing a crude map of the route, circling places where
seats had emptied without explicit explanation, adding dates, rough times, descriptions,
fannel shirt, harbmail, brutes, tinkling char embracelet. One pattern emerged.
The same handful seats in the back third of the bus,
specially on the left, remained conspicuously empty. After someone disembarked
at't I, replacements would approach, hesitate, then settle elsewhere. At
least two maybe three regulars engaged in silent choreography, has
flitting from the arrivals to the empty seats, shaking their heads.
In my notes, I labeled these forbidden seats. I was
starting to believe it wasn't just superstition. Next forrest stop,
a wayside diner, the rain let up, earthick and full
of petrature. I slipped out, ordered coffee I didn't want,
and left my recorder in my coat, pocket set two
voice activy. The waitress, tall and bone tire, wore a
faded named badge. Lucia. I tried a neutral opening buscot
in late to night. She studied my face that time
of year. An older man at the jew books looked
up as I asked what it was like working nights
along the bus route. Everyone comes through here, he said,
but didn't elaborate, his gaze drifting right past my face
as he spoke. I toned to Lucia, ever meet someone
you knew wouldn't leave again, someone who stayed behind her
hands stilled at the dish rack. You should ask the
folks out back. Been here long enough, they'll tell you
what happens if you stay too long. She didn't say
it with malice, just resignation. I left a tip, collected
my cup, and waited in the vestibule As the driver
leaned against a gum machine, thumbing through his ledger. I
feigned looking for change, craning to see names or details,
but he snapped the bookshop before I could make anything up.
His expression was not hostile, just furnished with fresh faces.
By the time we were rolling again, a strange numbness
had spread from my scalp down my shoulders. I wondered
if the coffee had even tasted like coffee, or if
it too, were simply an echo of a thing out
of sheer stubbornness. I popped open my laptop and cross
reference to seat numbers, passenger descriptions, and time of disappearance.
My spreads shee didn't balance. There were extra stubs, disappearances
with no corresponding name and time, stumps that reversed themselves
over night. Once a name I remembered copying from a
Facebook memorial page was missing, deleted as if I had
never typed it. The chill of paranoise stalt me even
back on the bus, as I watched the windows reflect
only partial Face's mind blurred with mariannes. I wanted to
ask some one, any one, if they remembered her, but
my throat closed. A teenage boy, maybe fifteen, caught me
looking his way. He clutched his phone tightly, as if
it could anchor him to the surface world. Quietly, as
the bus drifted through another name as town, he leaned over.
You shouldn't try to track it, he said, voice barely
audible above the hum The more notes you keep the
easier it is for them to notice paper tape, all
of it. It should go blank after a while. I almost laugh,
but the tremble in his voice carried something sharper, a
warning or a memory. He twisted the cord of his
earbit and face forward again, shrinking from my gaze. An
hour or later, the bus turned onto gravel road, dipping
beneath the arch of trees blackened by rain. This was
not any official map, I was certain. I marked the
time stamp on my recorder. Three twenty seven a m.
A time when little is awake except regret or dread.
The driver stopped without preamble. This time, no one announced
a break. Instead, one passenger after another rose gathered their
things unnoucted it, leaving only half a bus filled. When
we finally continued, I tried to photograph the departures, but
my phone glitch, camera lagging each attempt, producing blurry in
the cipherable smudges. I grew more reckless, desperate for a
crack in the surface. At the next break, I coined
the red haired woman who always sat two behind a driver,
quiet tense presents, who kept her hands folded. You've seen
people disappear right, I asked for slow as I returned
or forgotten umbrella at the door. She didn't deny it.
Don't make yourself a patent, she murmured. Once you do,
it's easier for this place to decide you're part of
the story too. She closed her umbrella, brushed past, and
stepped off into the dusk, never looking back. Still, I
pressed on the next small town off at the outline
of a story. I hiked shivering to the old bus depot,
drawn by a decade's old mule of the first bus
across the country's badens. As I waited for my ride
to continue, I found a graying man mopping near the restrooms,
humming off key. I tried something different. You work here
a lot of years. He didn't stop, didn't even raise
his head, but his voice drifted over. They make us
sweep the seats twice every night, empty ones, and the
ones that fell never talked to the empty ones. That night,
my dream snapped with distortion. I saw the inside of
the bus, seats running on forever, every window looking out
on the same painted lines, the same vanishing horizon. People
walked the aisle and assolved as they stepped away, their
faces stretching into gray mist. Morning came. I bolted up right,
hand to throat, half expecting to see those missing faces
beside me. The bus had pulled over beside a gas station,
and for once, dull summersed gray bled through the windows
in the half light. My nose had changed, the dates
crossed out times replaced by nonsense gribbles, a spiral symboling
from the page corner, identical to the ones I'd found,
talcked in empty seats. Checking my phone, I saw a
voice now from a block number. When I played it,
I heard little beyond the flott of staticcuntail. For a moment,
a voice hissed, you were never here, clead the distant
I could al must have believed there was my own
played back at some unnatural speed. My log from overnight
had gap sire was lost, as if the record button
had gone dead or the file overridden itself. The more
I tried to recall, the less sure I became whether
I had ridden through the heart of the night or
simply drifted a lawn. Circuits of memory, the physical bus
of rumor the rod unspooling in dreams. Exhaustion hollowed me out.
Each night neew obstacles. In one town, police tape cordoned
off a terminal entrance, the soul employee refusing comment beyond
just routine maintenance. Bus still runs fine. In another, a
sheriff with a graying mustache kept his hand above his
holster as I drifted too close, his eyes unreadable in
the light from inside his car. Yet the bus ran
every night, grimly, punctual. It dropped me at it s
it's were no cat waited, then accepted me again. Hours later,
files built up, audio looks tangled with interviews and fragments
that never seemed to stitch together. When I returned one loop,
so drained, I only wanted a shower and black up curtains.
I found my own faded flyer in a trap beIN
outside the station, my cell number crossed out, the word
no return scrawled underneath. That shook me harder than IX's.
At the furthest northern point, frost clinging to the windows,
the driver pause is aborted. He is sticking around, he commented,
eyes like wet asphalt for the first time, his mouth
thin at the corners, some folks say, until there's nothing
left to go back to watch yourself in that moment,
my determination bent teetering into something darker. Was a chronicler
or soon to be chronicled. I thought of Marian's face,
the regulars glances, and the weight of the empty seat
beside me. The next night, my plant snat tied as
the cabin air, I would plant an extra recording to
visipinol MIC's son inside my jacket's sleeve, a camera barely
visible in my phone case. Any proof, no matter how flawed,
was better than nothing. If the pattern wanted to erase itself,
maybe I could catch the moment at dip pin the
shadow to the wall. When I reboarded, everything felt subtly off.
The regulars arranged themselves in the usual choreography, but their
expressions were tense, hostile. Even the woman with the weather
purse studded me and looked away as a firm regret.
The driver flipped through manifest quickly, as radio hissing and
clip burst at intervals, he alone seemed to mark. As
we left the city limits, falling into the darkness that
had become more familiar than day, I told myself to breathe,
to stay sharp, but adrenaline only go so far. Every
house we passed. Every close gas station was a place
I could have chosen. Instead, I pressed the button on
my sleeve, felt the life charge of recording, and wonder
if I vanished to morrow, whether any one would notice,
or if even my devices would turn up blank. The
next one scheduled stopped loom as the final dust. I
tightened my coat, faking nonchalants. Every movement now felt fraught.
I caught the teenager's eye again, saw in his gaze
the resignation of some one who stopped hoping for rescue.
The bus load engine grinding into neutral. The woods through
which we roll were blacker than pitch, broken only by
the windshull's faint beam. The regulars grew restless, one murmur
to another, hands twitching as if to ward off something.
At last, the door gasped open. This time no one
volunteered to rise. Instead, two those i'd begun to think
of a string harbingers, a man with fogged glasses and
a woman with iron gray hair, stood together. They didn't hurry,
but neither did they pause asking me. The man's coat
brushed my knee. It was incredibly cold, almost impossibly so.
As they exited, the driver's voice floated under his breath.
You know the way. Don't get lost. I pressed the
foreign camera to the window, tried to snap a texture
of their departure, but again the image blurred. A screen flickered,
and when the photo saved, it showed only static, fractured
white streaked against a black field. We pulled away. Silence
reigned until the next stop, when the teenager pressed his
hand to his eyes and muttered, less of us now,
won't take long. I scribbled everything in my lock. When
I tried to play back the audio recording later, the
device jerked, skipped, and a deep echo roared beneath my words,
wiping out whole minutes of dialog in a wave of
thick distortion. My own seat felt cold, slippery, with the
residue of something I couldn't name. The note book in
my lap looked thinner than I remembered, the Polaro tucked inside,
feeling almost hot to the touch. Checking my page, I
found not words, but not of frantic lines, feverish, spiraling
marks like those from the forbidden seats I lift to
taunt me. One last slip of paper fell from the
crease on it, in the same blocky hand as the
no return scrolled on my discarded flyer, a single instruction,
don't try to leave a mark the road eight at
my will. I looked into the window, met my own
face refracted and double, the watcher becoming a ghost in
someone else's story. Each sign, every eater, every brush glance
hinted at what mattered. Wasn't just that people vanished, but
that nobody nowhere wanted to remember the tones of their going.
And even as I tried to scribble a final description
for the night, something anything to fix my memory and place,
I heard caught in the half broken hum of the
bus radio, a quick flicker of my own voice, already
fading into static, stirring at the spiral mark sesshed into
the notebook's page. I fought to steady my breathing, the
last iro a churn of unscheduled stops, the absent faces,
ruined audio hun on me, threading every sense with the
tautness that no amount of rationalizing colusen. The buses engine droned,
carrying us deeper into a blackness and yielding except for
the flame of passing mile pusts seven digits wiped away
by rain and then gone. My hands shook as I
thumbed through the rest of the notebook, desperate to retrieve
the lost words, the careful chronology, the faces that weren't
settle in memory. I found myself counting how many stops
since Marian disappear? How many since the twin departures of
the iron haired woman and her shadowy companion, The axle
of their absence now radiating out in silent consequences, I
could not pars around me. Tension shivered through the remaining passengers.
The teenager with the ebers curled close to the window,
profile ghosted in the reflection, lips drawn tight. The woman
with the weathered purse avoided my glance, now as a fever,
acknowledging my scrutiny might draw attention that neither of us
could afford. My coat felt heavier, sullen, despite the forest
are cutting through the aisle. I wiped dampness from my
brow and tried again to raise my recorder. Its red
eledy blinked ratically, sputtering off whenever I press play. I shifted,
listened for conversation, anything to ground myself. But where earlier
the bus had was with low whispers or the Russello snacks,
now Only the hum of the tires and the muted
cuff of the driver sounded in the gloom. My own
reflection interrupted itself in the glass, a jittery, pale figure,
haunted by night. I wanted to ask anyone, even the regulars,
what was happening behind these rituals, how the spiral symbol
cap migrating from seat to seat. But when I opened
my mouth, the words thickened and died on my tongue.
The driver's eyes, catching mine in the mirror, blocked any
impulse to risk it. A fresh squall of rain spattered
the windows, the sudden clamor making me flinch. The sound
felt like static, carrying with it memories of the warp tape,
Marian's plea, Marian's abstinence, and the tonal void where her
warning should have been. In that silence, I pressed my
head against the seat and forced myself to recall what
a new names faces, seed numbers, they spawn loose his
beats on an unstrong chain. When a regular, short, heavy set,
and perpetually glancing at the aisle behind him, stood up
at the next rest stop, I tracked him with furtive hope.
He didn't look back as he stepped into the rain,
duffleback swinging, but the driver again made a single tick
in his battered ledger. The door close, hissing defeat. As
the best pulled away, that seat remained empty. No one remarked,
not even in a glance. I checked my phone, no signal.
My backuper corridor, almost out of storage, flashed its warning.
I hit stop and rewine, letting the tapes spin under
my thumb. What came back was a sputtering, hollow version
of my own voice. To store it and not to
raise the hair on my neck. But count the faces.
Keep your seat, remember who you aren't here. Another five miles,
and both the teenager and the post clutching woman stiffened
as the bus jolted a scheduled stop. No announcement this time,
just a bus sighting headlights swallowed by a stand of trees.
I leaned forward, hot ramping and caught the driver's eye
long enough for hint off or a thin lip smile.
The regulars looked away as I tried to catch their attention.
The only acknowledgment was the iron haired woman's empty seat,
left as a warning I didn't know how to interpret.
With resisting exhaustion. I pressed my pond to the glass, pouring
out into the mist, nothing but drooping branches and the
reflected bulk of the bus. My sleeve frickle was cold.
When I glanced down, the spiral from my notes now
seemed to shimmer impossibly in the condensation on the window.
I recoiled, only for the teenager to look up. Catching
my reaction, he mowed a count and pressed a trembling
hand to his seat belt. As the bus rolled on
that word, it dug at me, count the seats, stops,
the missing. My head filled with lists, all incomplete, each
one the reminder of my own helps the cost of
being a witness here was becoming clear. You tried to document,
only to lose track. You tried to follow, only to fold.
The bus was different now, every sound shopper, the light harsher,
shadows deeper. If there were rules before I since they
had shifted. As the miles slipped by, an illicit panic
began to mount, not just in me, but among the others.
We were not stopped, but neither were we simply moving.
The next scheduled stop, a legitimate small town station, came.
Moment no one boarded, there's left in the bus exchanged
where he looks. The silence grew thicker, stretching almost until
I imagined it snapping. The driver's next announcement broke the poll.
All passengers keep your seats until further notice. Next intervals
longer than usual, pay attention. No one moved, not even
to visit the restroom. I tried to focus on the
sharpest of the seats that burn in my thighs, a
shiver in my hands, but my mind kept drifting to
the spiral, the empty seats, the torn pages in my
note book, The spiral, I realized now repeated in my dreams,
in the scribbles, at the margins, in the warp for
to us that registered nothing but stat I tried to
review my photos for close anything missed, but found more glitches.
The faces of those who left were streaks, mere shadows,
or washed out smudges. My phone vibrated and died, his
battery dropping from forty percent to empty in the space
of a single minute. I turned to the regulars for help,
but they looked through me, as though my presence was
a known variable they longed since decided not to acknowledge.
Paranoid pressed close, had I imagined my own arrival was
a substitution for vanish strider. My own fowl already walped
and were written by this route. The next frest stop,
again unnamed, arrived with no warning. The bus idoled under
a dull orange cloth. The driver unlocked the door, and
a sharp faced man, the same as before, I was
sure of exited, glancing at the ledger as if for permission.
The regulars tensed numerous times now, each departure, a roll
of loaded dice at the mirror in the cramped lavatory.
I splashed water on my face and met my own
uneven gaze. A strange numbet spread along my jaw. My
pulse dol wrong pattern. When I leaned forward to checking
for spirals, or may be just for evidence that I
still cast a reflection, I saw or faintly another figure
at my shoulder. It resolved into nothing. With a jerk.
Returning to my seat, breath shallow, I caught the teenager
staring at me again. You keep in track. His voice
was flat, soft, almost older than it should be. I nodded, hesitating,
trying stop. He said, looking away, or you'll be next.
Despite myself, A scribbled his words into my notes As
I did, the pen falter and stuttering across the line,
already written my own words, overwritten, looping into elegibility. As
my anxiety spiked, A message appeared, scrawled in the spiral
margin of my notebok, in the hand that was mine,
do not attempt to record this ride. The warning scent
shock through me. It felt not only like advice, but
as if it were a trigger. I tried to remember
what Marian had told me at the beginning. Her message
was indistinct, to choose your seat carefully, don't move once
the ride begins. Somehow I knew I'd already broken the rules,
and the consequences were closing. In every mile, the bus
felt colder, the lights and familiar repetition of the ordinary
mate sinister by endless permutation, I feel he virtually checked
old logs and new recordings, searching for a sound, a voice.
Anything incorrupted. Files stuttered, overlapping in impossible ways. One meant
to be an ambient note of highway noise replay, Marian's
whisper warped by static. You'll lose your seat, they'll write
you out. I shivered, my hand's clumsy coll drop the
recorder onto the seat. It rolled and landed in the aisle,
where it abruptly ceased to function, tapes pooling out with
faint acent of ozone and burnt plastic. I fumbled to
retrieve it as the bus hit another rut. In that instant,
two figures, the teenager and a new arrival, an older
man with his guard jaw whispered rapidly, their voices hitching
over keywords. Don't let him ask you, the teenager said
to the other. He's trying to map where they set.
That's how it comes for you, I interjected, desperate. What
does it want? The bus, the company, the driver, The
older man's jaw ticked. Company. Just lets it run. You
got to make a deal sometimes, that's all anyone learns.
The teenager bristled, don't talk about it, not now, But
the older man persisted, fixing me with bloodshot eyes. If
you're not gone by daylight, it means you're part of it.
That's debt, that's trade. The word trade ran in my
mind like a bell. I stared at my hands at
a pile of failed evidence. Why me A shrug was fatalistic.
You're still here to ask most don't get that far.
I felt a cold wind for my bones. Something had
changed again, the balance of risk, the direction of attention.
The bus fell smaller, the world closeted tight. The driver
called over the intercom voice Row, there is only one
more scheduled soot before the trades begin again. Be ready.
No one stood. The engines hum rose, and the air compressed,
as if each breath costs more each minute risk. Being
the lass alone with my fear, I realized the only
way forward was through the heart of the process. I
would have to confront the bus and its rules head on,
whatever the cost. I returned to my seat and woll
interceed ground and tried to piece together the last shirts
of logic. As a rain shewed at the glass. My
own voice, distant, seemed to go back at me, a warning,
A plea are forgetting? I stared at the spiral. The
only way out, it seems, led through the center. The
bus engine coughed as we shuddered passed another black stretch
of highway, every light outside bending airily through the fogged windows.
My teeth ached with the cold, but I wouldn't give
in to sleep. If this place fed on distraction, A
mindus terrift for a night I was stay awake, would
try to see each passage and transaction with open eyes.
It was a frail plan, but it was mine. As
the next miles crawled in the regular press, closer to
one another, as shift overtook the atmosphere of anticipation, knotted
with dread, I caught scraps of muttered conversation between two
older women, low and urgent. He's getting close, not yet,
but soon. If he asks your name, don't give it
to my left, the space where Marion had once sat
now seemed to flicker at the edges of my vision,
docker and somehow deeper than the rest. In a sudden
spasm of de fance, I leaned toward the driver, raising
my voice just enough to test the bounds or he
required to keep a record, manifest names all of it.
The bus jerked as the driver's eyes met mine in
the sallow reflection of the mirror. There are two records,
he said, speaking to the glass rather than to me,
one for the company and one for us. When I press,
he didn't elaborate, but a hush solidified behind me, and
admitting of a truth I sensed but could not yet see.
A younger woman in a faded raincoat turned to me,
now of desperation all over her face. They told me
to switch places, just for a minute, she choked. I
lost something at the back. But when I tried to
come back, my seat was full, and I couldn't remember
why I got on. I couldn't even she sobbed, covering
her mouth. Comfort was pointless. All I could offer was prisons.
I saw it happened. You are not alone, I whispered.
She shook her head. I can't leave. Nobody leaves once
they trade the seat. She said it, as if cording scripture.
Around us regularly peered over seat backs, measuring my reaction,
gaging the risk of foreign body disrupted and unspoken accord. Outside,
another stand of trees bled into the road cycloom the
bus low, doors hissing open where there should have been
nothing but dark. The driver called, half song, half command.
If you're not staying, step at now. No one moved
to yet the cold sharpened. Meanwhile, inside my jacket, the
son and might vibrate it as if nudged. I twisted
it discreetly, hoping the battery would out last the rest
of the ride. The spiral and the condensation dicken, then
vanished in its plays. A cluster of fingerprints too small
for any prison hand appeared. Briefly. My breath hitch, every
nerve wired for flight. I realized no one was getting
off any more. This time the rule was to stay.
It was time for revelation. The driver let off the brakes,
rolling us forward, his voice again, A girl now, last call,
next breaks, the one you don't come back from. Passengers braced,
some gripping the sides of their seats with wet knuckles,
others reciting half remembered prayers under their breath. The air
pressed closer. When we stopped again, not at a town,
but a dessert, a cross in flat by broken posts
and remnants of fat tape. The regulars began to shift
with a purpose that made my heart thumb. It wasn't
just random exodus now it was selection. Herrings and small
groups exchanged settle signals, nods, glantzes, covert hand off of
a plastic token, or a slip of what looked like
a bus transfer. Two at a time, they rose and
moved toward the door. The man with the scar jaw
blocked the aisle behind them, while the driver remained impassive
behind and his partition. From the opposite row, a woman,
her eyes red, lips pressed or crat photo caught my
gaze and jerk chuchin toward the door. You have to choose,
she breathed, though her words seemed to echo backwards, as
if delaid by seconds or years. Choose what. My voice cracked.
The boy in earbands, visible now with one removed, said
who's written down? Who's not? The current swept through the
bus pressure, accusation of fearful calling. The scarred man advanced
eyes on me. Ye had the one who collects the stores. Yer,
seat's not yours. It was happening, I felt, in that slow,
stretched moment, the entire architecture of the rout rearrange itself
to focus on me. The regulars gaze, the empty seats,
the ledge asilent marks all coalesced. I was no longer
an observer. It was my slot to fill my name,
to erase my debt, to pay. Behind me, the driver
called the deal stands, one goes, one's stays, choices aren't made.
Twice something shifted the window beside me. Crackled heat, then coal,
that a rush of static, like a shout beneath the wind.
My hands frozen, trembling, closed over my notebook, and phoned.
Just as both screened went black, they ate a white
every word and sound rendered nothing. Others in the isle
crowded nearer in a kind of terrified chorus, voices overlapped.
He wrote it down. That's how they know. Strait only
work if a name is lost for every name saved.
Never let your seat be counted. I felt sick, as
if I'd crossed an invisible boundary. I could never uncross
the door opened, drawing mist. In the suggestion of voices
from the trees, someone has to leave the driver and honed.
I realized in that moment that the only escape was
designed to be a forgetting. The choice offered was as
real as a story that ends mid sentence. So release
if I surrendered my own evidence to the system, or
erasure if I refuse. The regulars parted, framing a corridor
straight to the exit. My heart battered itself against my
chest as the cold mist rose from the open door,
culling over shoes, swallowing out the bottom steps. I rose
and slow, defiance, fingers cold but steady on the notebook
by one shield my curse. As I took a step
toward the aisle. The teenager's hand shot out, grabbing my arm,
eyes frantic. It's not worth it. Don't make the tree.
Just set act like you never left. I shook him off,
voice shaking. If I stay, I become part of the forgetting.
If I go, will anyone remember? No one answered, The
spiral pressed at the edge of my vision, fortics of
loss and warning. The driver stowed, closing the ledger, eyes hard,
he get the choice recked. Nothing will walk out and
lose The rests decide now. I hesitated, notebook, helt close.
The pressure of expectation became almost physical. I could feel
the shape of hundreds of forgotten stores, some like marians,
pressed down into the seams of these cushions, the bones
of these seats. Let him go, someone whispered, it's his tone.
My kniee shook as I forced myself forward through the
corridor of regulars, toward the source of the cold. Fog
invaded the isle, thinning the air, erasing all color. My
world narrowed to the spiral and my palm, the blank
faces on either side. At the door, the driver silent, implacable,
weighted ledger balanced on his thigh. If you leave you
take the silence with you, he warned. I felt the
weight of the bus behind me, all its debts paid,
its ledges imbalanced, and then through the fog a glimpse
of Mary in her form, translucent, wearing that same haunted
expression from our first meeting. Her mouth moved, forming words
without sound, though I couldn't hear. I felt the shape
in my mind. Don't let go. Tears pulled in my eyes,
hot against the cold. The driver's voice pressed in walk out,
and the ledge of closes, including your name. For the
first time, I realized there would be no record, no trace.
If I went, everything would be white, to my notes,
my tapes, my own memory. Perhaps the demand was dark,
trade one rasure for another, legacy for oblivion. The only
thing I still possessed was the power to decide what
or who would be remembered. I looked down at the
polaro clutched in my hand. It was fading, already losing shape,
the soul wits dissolving, and to mist the boss, the regulars,
the ledger, the sights of trades, all of it perched
on the brink of blankness. My final act had to matter. Suddenly,
the ledger's knap shut. The driver's glare grew fierce. Choose now,
he said, voice like gravel. By this ride never ends.
A raining rose in ears. I drew a quivering breathen
with every ounce of welt, downed the ruined recorder, notebook
and polaro deep into the seat cushions, tearing the sea
wide open with my nails. If the bus wanted oblivion,
let it have the objects, not the memory. Then I
spun lunged down the steps, out into the fog. A
rush of icy ere hit me, vision swirling for a
moment the world fractured, bus lights, tree shadows, ledgers, spiral
flickering like broken film. My legs pumped down the stretch
of broken pavement, blind and aimless since his faiy all around,
the sound of the bus folding up behind me, door hissing, engine, idling, Amandra,
never hear never hear it. As I collapsed into the
mud beyond the reach of the head lights, my head
split with pain. Then the world narrowed and faded. When
I surfaced again, No idea how long after I was
lying on the cracked shoulder, nearer decommission stopped sighing morning,
just beginning to bleed into gray clouds. My hands were empty,
no note book, no fun not even a stub of
the ruined recorder. My jacket was turned inside out, pockets empty,
spiral symbol written faintly on the lining. I stumbled to
my feet, shivering controllably, and staggered along the roadside until
I reached the town, whose name I had never heard
spoken aloud. No one greeted me. The face in the
diner mirror was my own, but drawn shallow, as if
I'd lost years at a single night. In the weeks after,
I hunted for clues, the local authorities denied. The midnight
bus ran the far north. The company listed no route
number two hundred seventeen. My contact at the archive, previously
so eager, now said nothing but out of office replies,
familiar fliers, repeered in new places, always ripped away the
next day. Of those I had interviewed, none answered calls.
Numbers were disconnected or routed to voicemail. The emails bounced,
subject lines were written as error codes. No one seemed
willing or able to remember my face. Attempting to reconstruct
the journey, I found every file corrupted, every back blank,
The photos had erased themselves overwritten by gray spiral pat
and pixel wash. At last, in the hollow of a
non script motel room, shivering under a humming radiator, I
confronted the only evidence that remained, a half gone spiral
drawn against my will in the center of a fresh note.
But from then on my sleep filled with the sound
of bus wheels on endless asphalt, the sense of eyes
watching from empty seats, the shiver of cold as doors
opened in fog. I woke each day in sure if
I belonged in the world I returned to when I
caught my reflection, sometimes for a split second, Marian's face
flickered back. I made my choice. The record was gone,
but I remembered at least a piece enough to warn.
One evening sowing through the one bad left to me,
A discovery tucked in the side pocket, A bus ticket
stepped out two hundred seventeen, no date, no destination, only
a faint penciled spiral on the back. It felt as
heavy as a promise. I placed it on the table
and pressed record on my new voice de Ice, a
fresh tape, just to prove something still stuck. The machine word.
At first, only an ambient hammed the radiator, the faint
tap of rain at the window, then underneath, almost too
quiet to notice, the unmistakable rumble of a bus engine.
Voices gusted through static, one after the other, like an
echopole for miles of black up at the very end
before the tape ran. Now, I clepted statically, as from
my own voice, dragging the words from somewhere, not entirely
my own, in our boardings. In the moment the tape
fell silent, I realized I would always carry the emptiness
of the coal dial, the ledges shiver, the spiral's grip,
a reminder that somewhere the route never ends, and someone
always counts the seats. I quietly reached over, flicked off
the recorder and listened to the rain. I quietly reached over,
flicked off the recorder and listened to the rain outside.
Dust pressed its chill against the windows. I hadn't moved
in Iris, just perched on the thin edge of the
motel bed. She is still damp from the roussa. The
spiral marcks up, coiled between my fingers, my skin still
pricked with the coal from that final night. Myas thrummed
into silences, as though the bus engines still idled somewhere nearby,
purring along or roud. I could no longer trace as
darkas settled. I cycled for every folder and voice note
I'd managed to salvage each file, glitched time stemp by
corrupted data content to solving into static. Where once there
had been fragments of Marian's warning, now only pauses, a
muffled gasp, a surface tension that threatened to snap at
any word not chosen with the greatest care. My ridden logs,
what remained of them, offered no comfort. Some entriest appeared
to be in another hand. Some were blanks, safe for
a penciled spiral press so hard to toward the page.
My gut still chrown from the last moments in the bus.
When I tried to replay the sequence to fix each
detail in place, I found myself snout by gaps. I
remembered the door opening, the passenger forming a corridor with
their tin stairs, the driver's ledger slamming shut, Then the
sprint through a fog so densely collapsed, the night into
fragments of sound and smell, diesel and melty mud cold
up past my ankles, the taste of adrenaline and tear.
But what came after? How had I made it to safety,
my jacket empty, my mind just clear enough to fumble
out of the darkness and into town. Each time I
pressed against those memories, they seemed to retract, fluttering back
into the spiral. At my palm, I stared at the
ticket stub, tracing the spiral, markets grows, fainted under the
pad of my thumb. Sometimes, when I focussed, the leap
seemed almost a pulse, hinting at things, and dawn, a
cycle and finished. I shivered and led it fall to
the covers. That night brought no real rest. My dreams
were roped to the highway, to the cold eye well
on the empty seats. Marian's face flickered at the edge
of sleep, her mouth forming silent words on the other
side of the bus window. In between flashes, I caught
sight of my own reflection, and sometimes the teenage passengers
faces that blurred unreformed, always a new seat and a
new ledger, the spirals reappearing in dust or condensation, or
the wells of the bus ceilings cheap plastic fans. When
the sun finally bled through the thin curtains, I rose,
hollowed by insomnia and a hunger I couldn't name on
the night stand, the recorder and stubweighted inert. An impulse
drove me. I had to know if I had really escaped,
or if the rive was still happening somewhere behind my eyelids.
The town outs I gave nothing away. People milled along
cockside walks, headed for shift work or half lit laundromats.
I walked up and down the length of the main
drag twice, dodging the gaze of the lone patrol car
park by the diner. I ducked into the little bus station,
just a windowed kiss and three plastic seats bolted to
the four, hoping for any sign of an official manifest,
any schedule that might pin the route turn rumor to evidence.
Behind plex glass. The clerk glanced at my ticket stop,
her expression going hard and polished. That route doesn't run
any more, she said, voice flat. I searched her eyes.
Press you ever see people board never come back? She
tapped her pent jowl eyed. Hence, if they did, it's
not my business. Some rides you don't talk about. I left,
feeling the stat a coil again between my rips. The
ear held the hush of secrets of people playing by
rose Land the hard way. I tried coal in my
old contact at the news archive, the li mind to
atone that wasn't standard, to some blend between an error
and a warning I couldn't pass. I texted to teenage's number,
saved in my phone, non instinct, but the screen flask
failed to send each ally, Each voice from before it
vanished or turned away, leaving behind only the outline of
a network, faint like footprints just before rain erases them back.
In the motel room, my cuffee called at the window sill.
I watched droppers chase each other down the pane, Feeling
time muttle again. I opened my email. The draft ottica
sat and send, flagged by the system as insufficiently substantiated.
Attached was greenshots. Each was by a compression artifact or
glitched into the spiral motive names in the textile to
correct it to blank spaces for strange strings of punctuation.
The world was winnowing the record, brushing away my attempt
to capture what I'd seen. Exhausted, I lay back and
let the drone of the radiator fill the silence, but
a chill crept up my spine, as if the bus
itself were poised beneath the skin of reality, idling just
past the edge of my perception. Each time a truck
passed in the highway, I half expected to hear the
hiss of brakes, to see a dome life flicker through
the curtains. How many others had been left in this
day's evidence, erased voices, hush stories, deleted At the root,
I tried to recall faces, Marian, the teenage boy, the
ex cop with his thousand yards stare, the iron haired woman,
the regulars whose patterns I'd mapped, but whose names I'd
never secured. An ink my mind, skit, persisting cloder. Maybe
the spiral was not just a warning but a mechanism.
Every time I traced it, I lost another detail. Maybe
the only way out was to stop remembering, to let
the patinance pool and cull back into itself. A tap
at the window brought me a bright heart jolding, just
a tree branch shuddering in the gust, but the shock lingered.
I kept the curtains drawn for iyeurs. The town remained
silent on the subject of the bus. At the di
know the waitress were filled. My mug with a sidelong glance.
Storm coming, she said, looking at my hands rather than
my face. Some nights folks just don't come home, right,
Ye know what I mean? I nodded, unable to summon words.
She wiped them for mickenslope looping motions as spiral traced
and consciously as she turned away, paranoia thickened. I watched
faces at the windows, convinced that if I lost myself
in any one expression, looked too closely or too long,
I'd see a familiar absence. It wasn't just that people
were being e RaSE. They wanted to disappear, or were
being nudged to accept it, or had given up fighting
the current that drew them away. Perhaps I thought survival
meant learning to pass her unnoticed, to let the spirals send,
to draw its circle closed, and walk away before her
own name Bentenbrook. But something resisted. Each moment the spiral faded,
I scribbled a description in my knee notebok short clipped
stubborn were out two hundred seventeen, no map, the ledger
with names crossed out. Passenger marin middle aged, last scene,
asking for seat trade, the warning never keep track of
more than you can forget. With every entry, I expected
the lines to vanish, in, clifting off the page like
condensation off cold glass. Yet they remained for now, stubborn
marks against the void, the bus, the spiral, the ledger,
the fading faces, the pressed in at the edges of
my thoughts lay that night, the hum of traffic on
the highway dwindled to nothing. The motile radiator ticked uncertainly.
I powered up my recorder, press play, and set the
stub on the shelf beside me. Darkness curled at the
corners of the ceiling, and then through the static as
sound the bus engine. Distant but distinct voices layered inside
the hump, residing patterns, negotiating trades, whispering secrets just out
of reach. My own voice murmured on the tape, the
memory of boarding, of Marian's warning, of the door closing
on fog and fear. I listened, held raut by the
echo of my own investigation loofed back on itself. As
the tape word I realized that the voices were only strangers.
They were versions of myself, flickering through the sequence of
vanished seats recorded and erased in tantem with everyone I
tried to remember. My throat tightened around the horrible thought.
No matter what route I rode, I would always circle
back to this witness to disappearances, agent of forgetting participant
in rituals older than tickets or transfers. My ledger, too,
could be closed at any moment. The choice might not
be mine at the end, after all, a low knock
at the door, I startled, nearly drop in the recorder.
Peering through the peephole, I saw a figure hunched against
the rain, face blowed by the security glass. They left
after a moment, but on the welcome out I found
a bland piece of print of paper, drawn with a
finger to trace and dew the spiral, ghostly and insistent,
no signature, no instruction. Defeated, I returned inside, flicked on
the lamp, and watched the spiral evaporate. I realized then
that the bus line would keep running, would always find
new riders, and that the cost of knowing would always
be a risk. As Sea traded, a ledger marked the
name struck from the record of her returned. For one
desperate second, I wanted to burn the stub in note book,
the tape, but I held back. Maybe some remnant of
the story would color round, would survive inside a warning,
a late night story shed over coffee, a passing mention
in an old article's comments. Maybe the spiral could end
with me. As the clock ticked to work dawn, I
faced the window, tracing the pattern of the rain. The
highway called faint but steady, a line I would not
travel again, at least not as a passenger. The spiral
of the ledger in the empty aisle haunted the edges
of sleep. All I could do was refuse to forget,
even if the world itself conspired to brush my memory away.
In the earliest haze of mourning. As the rain slackened,
I knew I'd been marked. The feeling would fad, perhaps disappear,
But to night. As dusk fell in the first bus
engines rumble beyond earshot, I would remember the price of
the trade and the lesson the spiral taught some rides
off for no return. With a steadier hand than I expected,
I load at one last entry, a spiral of words
that refused to vanish. However many times I checked that
was all the survival I could claim the highway would
eat its own I would let it and move on,
or so I told myself. But I went to sleep
with the still press beneath my pillow, listening for the
next echo from a night that never ended. And that
is the end. Thank you for listening, and I will
see you in the next one.