Creeps by Night: Chills and Thrills

1

Out of the vagueness of the half-dawn a dark bulk loomed to the accompaniment of a dull rumble. To Arthur Strite, waiting for his regular bus — the big, orange six-forty-five to the city — this nondescript contraption which usually preceded it by a minute or two seemed more like a ghostly coffin than a public conveyance. Its sweating black sides glistened oilily in the gray light as it passed him. A single dim incandescent lamp seen through the windows silhouetted stiffly nodding heads against the background of a dingy interior. Then the black bus was gone, swallowed up in the swirling December mist and fog.

As always, a feeling of odd disquiet possessed Strite with the passing of this conveyance — a fleeting impression of mystery, strangely repellent and defying description; of ill omen. What manner of passengers it carried or whence and whither it traveled, he did not know — and cared less. Yet, queerly enough, the affair had increasingly irritated and disturbed him ever since his moving to Emerymont three weeks before.

“Just an old junk-heap that loops out through Norwood and back over this direction,” a fellow commuter said in answer to his question. Until this morning Strite had refrained from what he deemed the weakness of a query about this thing. For he had hesitated to give definite shape to his senseless disquiet by admitting any curiosity, even to himself. “I believe a couple of death-traps like that one comprise the company’s entire rolling-stock,” his informant finished.

“Oh,” said Strite, mentally categorying the bus line with several that operated a sort of cross-country service between outlying sections of Cincinnati. Of course, he reflected, some concern had to serve this need. But he was conscious of a feeling of relief that he did not have to use that service.

Arthur Strite was boarding in Emerymont with the Ransons, not because of any liking for the make-believes, the rabble of bourgeoisie and scandalmongers that peopled the little suburb, but because he did enjoy the shrubbery and lawns and the quaintly designed houses, despite the crazy butting of garbage-can-studded back yards against living-room windows of adjoining homes. He minded his own business, displaying no curiosity in the neighbors or affairs of the place — which was one of the reasons why he had not discovered sooner the purpose of the bus line mentioned.

The night of the same day he had asked about the bus, he found himself pondering, with some intentness in the midst of an absent-minded perusal of the evening comic sheet, on the dingy conveyance that passed him each morning. Why should that silly bus thus intrude itself into his mind? He smiled self-indulgently and turned over to the sports page. The thing actually was becoming a nuisance! And for no logical reason. What should it matter to him how uninviting, how disagreeable a box on wheels those people rode in every morning?

Nevertheless, he dropped off to sleep thinking about the ghostly bus.

The same thing began to be the rule on the nights that followed. Always that ridiculous feeling of indefinable dread would come over him, would cling tenaciously to his thoughts from the moment he happened to think of having seen the shadowy bus that morning. He had half a notion to hail the confounded contraption some morning and see where it took him, just to dispel all this absurd air of mystery about it which had so unaccountably fastened upon him. Though perhaps there was some reason for his strange obsession after all. Not quite one year before, his fiancée, Doris Tway, had been killed in a terrible bus crash. He remembered the crumpled remains of the fatal bus, which he had seen afterward, vividly. It, too, had been black and shabby. An odd girl — she had always said that if she left first, she would return for him. Her idea of a joke, of course, but unusual.

In spite of his notion about hailing the other bus, Strite did not ride it — not for several weeks anyway, although its daily rumbling and jangling approach, made more eery by the shortening of the days, had driven that impression of weird mystery deeper than ever into his waking thoughts. Waking, because, so far, the dark bus had troubled him only during the evenings before he retired.

However, there came a night when he dreamed that he obeyed an impulse and boarded the strange bus!

He was conscious of a sickly odor as he entered the rickety door, which had slid back with a softness in strange contrast to the outward clatter of the conveyance. The vizor of the operator’s cap was pulled well down over his face as he leaned over his levers. Strite felt the bus begin to move. Oddly, there was no vibration, none of the jarring rattle and bang he had expected. He might have been on a river barge, for all the motion he could feel. Startled more by this unnatural quiet than he could have been by the loudest of banging or jolting, he raised his eyes toward the occupants of the bus. Perhaps it was the strange effort this act seemed to impose upon him; at any rate, he awoke in that instant, seized by unreasoning, incomprehensible terror!

It was an hour before his taut nerves had relaxed enough to let him drop off to sleep — and not before he had vowed to ride that bus in fact the next morning.

2

Strite did not ride the black bus the next morning. It was nearly seven o’clock when he opened his eyes from a troubled sleep. This meant that he would be late to the office where he worked, on the other side of the city. Of course he missed his regular bus, and, with it, the other. Too, the daylight put a different aspect upon things. It would have been ridiculous, after all, to board a bus bound for another part of the city merely to humor a crazy impulse.

Yet, when that night came, Strite hesitated to go to bed. He told himself that he was hopeless, a fool and a coward. Then he undressed and resolutely turned out the light.

His hesitancy had not been unfounded. Again he found himself boarding the mysterious, sweating conveyance with its leaning operator and strange, illusive odor. And again a sudden, agonized awakening.

But this time he saw the other occupants before he awoke. They all — there were six of them — had their eyes closed as they sat nodding slightly with the almost imperceptible swaying of the bus. There was a repellent something about those faces, other than their closed eyelids, that struck a chill into Strite’s heart. He wondered whether they were just weary, like him, or—

A cold finger touched his wrist. He managed to turn and face the operator. The latter, his face still hidden, was pointing to the fare box. Of course, these ill-built, ill-kept buses would reverse things by demanding their fare when one entered. He reached into his pocket for a dime, and in that moment caught sight of a seventh passenger, seated in front on the other side. The operator’s head and shoulders had partly hidden her from him before, despite her slender tallness.

As his fingers found and automatically brought forth a dime, he observed that this passenger’s eyes were not closed like the rest — that they were pale gray and staring at him. They were like — oh, God, it couldn’t be — Doris! But it was — it was! How could he have failed to recognize her sooner, despite her position on the other side of the operator? Now he could understand why this bus had drawn him so strangely, irresistibly.

As he stared back at her, speechless with amazement, her eyes left his face, turned toward the windshield. Her pale lips twitched oddly, as if, mute with fear at what she saw there, she sought vainly to scream.

Then abruptly the spell was broken. She leaped to her feet, throwing one arm across her face in a gesture of one warding off some fearful harm. A shrill, hysterical scream pierced the quiet of that closed space like the stab of a knife!

That cry jarred Strite hack to consciousness with a suddenness that jerked him upright in bed.

As he sat there trembling with the realism of his dream and that agonized scream, he became aware that he held something tightly in one closed hand. A fresh chill passed through his body at the familiar feel of that something. He needed no light to tell him that it was a dime he clutched — the dime he had been ready to drop in the fare box of his dream!

3

Of course he found that the coin evidently had fallen out of his vest when he sat on the bed while undressing. In fact, he usually kept some change in his vest pocket so as to have it handy for tips, newspapers, and such. Perhaps the accidental finding and touching of that coin in his slumbers had even started the train of thought that had made him dream of the fare box — and the other things. But there was no more sleep for Strife. After tossing about for the rest of the night, he got up about five o’clock.

This morning he was determined upon one thing. He would ride the black bus — “the phantom bus,” as he had come to term it privately — this morning, and kill for once and all this persistent subconscious illusion that had taken root in his mind from the seed of his first absurd impression of the rickety conveyance in the eery light of half-dawn.

Once more his intention was to be defeated, however. The black bus failed to appear before the six-forty-five, though he had arrived at its stop more than a quarter-hour before it was due. He even waited for it ten minutes after his regular bus had gone — only to learn later that the other line finally had been discontinued.

His first reaction to this information was an overwhelming relief. No longer would he be reminded by this shadowy, rumbling hulk each morning, of things he wanted to forget.

But on the heels of this thought came the realization that the very discontinuance of the line had removed all chance of his ever killing the illusion if the latter continued to trouble him.

That day at noon as he walked along a downtown street a peculiar odor halted him. There was an illusive, dread familiarity about it. He was before a florist’s open shop, and a great bowl of tuberoses, those once choice flowers for all those departed, was set out in front. He knew now where he had smelled their scent before — on the phantom bus of his dream.

4

Once again Strite was in the phantom bus — in his subconscious mind. This time he knew exactly what was coming. He seemed powerless to change a single detail of it all. The pause just inside the doorway as he forced his gaze up to where the six passengers sat in plain view, their eyes closed, in death-like weariness or worse. The icy touch of a finger on his wrist, the reaching for a coin, and the discovery of the slender, tall girl up front. Doris!

At this point the sequence of events suddenly galvanized him into a feverish alertness for the next thing. As Doris’ hysterical scream rang in his ears, he was abruptly released from the grip of immobility. He turned quickly and looked out of the front of the bus.

What he saw there made him throw up his hands in an involuntary gesture similar to her own instinctive gesture of terror. He heard the brakes squealing shrilly — felt the bus skid on the sleet-covered road even as he caught a side glimpse of the operator’s face — saw with sudden added horror that half the face was missing. Beyond that fleeting glimpse, he had time for no further examination; for just ahead a heavily loaded truck was emerging from a narrow bridge-end, blocking their way. Then a terrific, rending crash...

5

The six-forty-five bus was four minutes late on account of the icy condition of the roads; they had been that way for two days. A little group of commuters on the roadside were talking in subdued tones, for once unmindful of the delay as they waited.

“Personally,” a pompous, red-faced man was saying, “I believe Ranson killed and — mauled— him for attentions to Mrs. Ranson.”

“But Strite didn’t appear to be that type,” objected a young member of the group. “Nor is Mrs. Ranson the sort who would encourage him. Besides, consider the condition of the body. Why, Ranson or no one else could have so mangled another — to say nothing of leaving it in bed and persistently claiming that he didn’t know how it happened, except that he and his wife were awakened in the middle of the night by a frightful cry — and found him that way! No, I say there is some deeper mystery about the affair, the nature of which we haven’t suspected.”

The big, orange-colored bus hove into view at this juncture, interrupting the discussion for the time. Presently they all had boarded it and found seats at various vantage-points. A little distance along the road one of them pointed out to his neighbor a twisted and splintered mass of wreckage at the foot of an embankment of the narrow bridge they were just then crossing.

“Lucky it jumped off when it struck — didn’t even delay us yesterday when we followed a few minutes after it was discovered.”

“Queer thing about how it got there,” said the other. “Nobody witnessed the accident, and the defunct bus company’s officials swear that the last they saw of their ‘death trap’ was when it was locked away in an old garage on the other side of Norwood. Can you imagine any one swiping a can like that for a ride? But the present-day young coke-head will grab anything for a joy-ride.”

“No queerer than that — that mess inside the wreck — as if some one had been crushed like — well, like poor Strite, for instance. Yet they could find no trace of a body!”