Acolytes of Cthulhu

NIGHT BUS

BY DONALD R. BURLESON

I CAUGHT MY MIDNIGHT BUS FOR BRATTLEBORO IN A QUIET, nameless town in northern Vermont, at one of those typical little ramshackle bus stations that deepen one’s sense of vague depression at traveling alone at night, with their dull-eyed and incommunicative ticket sellers, their dingy rows of well-thumbed magazines and tabloid newspapers beneath bare lightbulbs, their dirty floors, and their faint odours of perspiration and urine. The air was still and humid, and as I stood with my valise among nondescript people, I sighed at the seemingly frozen clockhands on the wall over the ticket counter. It was with some relief that I finally saw the bus pull up and stop in front of the station. I got in line, handed my ticket to the driver, and boarded the bus, which already carried a number of passengers; I was able, however, to find a seat all to myself on the right-hand side of the bus near the back, and no one sat next to me. I leaned back in the cushioned seat, knowing that I had never been able to sleep on a bus, but hoping to get some rest during my four-hour ride, which I knew would be interrupted by unwelcome stops at other colourless little terminals along the way. Soon the bus had pulled out of the station, and dark, low hills were slipping by in the night outside the window, slipping by like amorphous and evanescent thoughts.

I stretched and tried to relax. The bus had no sooner found its stride on the road, however, when the driver slowed suddenly and stopped to pick up a straggling passenger who had waited on the side of the road. I could see his form only dimly in silhouette while he fumbled for money to pay the driver and then picked his way back among the seats as the bus jolted into motion again. He paused a couple of times, but, to my displeasure, finally chose the seat next to me and dropped into it.

My sidelong glances in the near-dark gave me no favourable impressions of this new fellow-rider, nor was my olfactory assessment of him any more promising. He seemed to be a gaunt, elderly man, though I could not clearly see his face, and his clothes were tattered and musty. He exuded an odour which I found difficult to characterize, but decidedly unpleasant, and this impression grew in potency as the minutes wore on. I had the vague sense that he was ill with some obscure and detestable malady, and this feeling in me was not diminished when he cleared his throat with a sticky-fluid sound that made me shudder. When I reflected on the prospect of a long night’s ride next to this repellent companion, my mood grew ineluctably sombre.

After a while I managed, staring out the window at the dark, domed hills gliding by, almost to lose him in the dreamy tangle of my thoughts, though his offensive odour was still such that I breathed shallowly and would have kept my face averted even if there had been no window to look out upon the night. But I was brought sharply back to awareness of him when, as I think I had unconsciously dreaded, he actually spoke to me.

“Gonna meet my wife jes’ this side o’ Akeleyville.”

“Hm,” I replied, with a slight nod, trying to convey a tone which neither seemed rude nor particularly invited further conversation. His voice had had a repulsively liquid quality almost like an articulated gargling. Turning my head to glance at the man, I received impressions in the dim, sporadic flashes of light, from passing autos, that were not reassuring at all. The man’s face, only glimpsed momentarily, seemed to have an odd greyness about it, an unclean quality that heightened, or was heightened by, the ghoulish way in which his lips seemed drawn back from his stained teeth, and the way in which his eyes peered hollowly out at me from deep, tenebrous sockets. The face was not unlike a death-mask, and when a passenger two seats in front of me flicked on an overhead reading light, I was startled to see in the dim peripheral glow of the bulb that from the stranger’s eyes there welled a trickle of some yellow, pus-like fluid. I shuddered anew; I felt, indeed, almost choked by the proximity of this loathsome wraith, and only a curious sort of dullness in my muscles kept me from rushing up to the driver and demanding to be let off the bus at once.

A seemingly endless stretch of time ensued, during which the man, I could see from the corner of my left eye, turned to look at me from time to time. As the minutes passed, the stench of the man grew well-nigh intolerable, and the thought crossed my mind that only the fact that the immediately adjacent passengers were asleep could have kept them from noticing it; I wondered that the man with the reading light, though two seats away, had not caught the odour, if indeed he had not. As I struggled to keep the smell from invading my nostrils, I could not help trying at the same time to place it; and it gradually dawned on me that it was very much like the odour of organic decay—like rotting meat neglected in a kitchen.

“Say.”

The word came at me with a sibilant rush of foetid breath that very nearly made me retch. I turned with the greatest reluctance to glance at him as he spoke again.

“We’re gettin’ near Akeleyville. I’ll be biddin’ ye good night in a minute or two.”

I smiled wanly and hoped that my sigh of relief was not noticeable. Then, just as he began to rise from his seat, he sent a thrill of ineffable horror straight to my bones with his next, last words to me.

“Ya know me, don’t ye? Wal, it’s true—I ain’t like yew, young feller. Yew’re still among th’ livin’. But it ain’t so bad—my wife is like me. Keeps a body from bein’ too lonely.”

Just as he turned to stand up in the aisle, a quick flash of pale light revealed him to be scratching his cheek with a scaly and malodorous hand, and I saw that pieces of flesh were coming off in a rubbery, sliding cascade as his fingers seemed to slip into his face. It took all the fortitude I had, then, to keep from vomiting, but I only moaned as he turned and was gone, picking his way back up the aisle to the front of the bus and gesticulating with the driver, apparently to be let off on the road.

As the bus disgorged this revolting creature, I caught sight of another figure waiting for him on the side of the road, illumined faintly by the lights of autos that had stopped behind the bus, evidently unable to get around because of traffic in the other lane. She was as tattered and loathsome of aspect as he, with a face that, like his, was a death-mask now burned dreadfully into my memory. They embraced loathsomely as the bus pulled away, and they were grinning cadaverously at each other as the night swallowed them up again. Would to heaven that I had taken my gaze from them a moment earlier—in the dark I might not have noticed. Oh God, I might not have noticed!

I might not have noticed that the woman, in all her charnel ghastliness, was obviously eight or nine months pregnant.