The Midnight Bus

• 4 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

The last bus from the city to our town left at eleven, and if you missed it you waited until morning.

I missed it.

I was sixteen, I had spent too long at my cousin's, and I came into the bus station at eleven twenty to find the ticket window shuttered and the stands empty and one man sweeping.

He said the same thing everyone says. Next one is at six.

So I sat down on a bench under the yellow lights to wait it out.

The twelfth stand

At about half past twelve, a bus pulled into the twelfth stand.

It came in quietly, which I noticed, because the diesel buses on that route are loud enough to hear from the road. Its board was lit and it had our town's name on it.

I was so relieved I did not think about it. I got up and got on.

The driver did not look at me. There was no conductor. I found a seat about halfway down and the doors closed and we pulled out.

The other passengers

There were maybe fifteen people on that bus and every one of them was facing forward.

Not looking out of the windows. Not asleep. Not talking. Facing forward, straight ahead, all of them, at half past midnight, on a two-hour journey.

I told myself people are tired at that hour.

Then we went under the lights at the toll gate, and the light came through the windows in a long slow sweep down the whole length of the bus.

And every head turned.

Not to look at me. All of them turned to face the window the light was coming through, at the same time, at the same speed, and turned back when it had passed.

I sat completely still after that.

The old woman

There was a woman in the seat across the aisle from me, and she was the only one who had not turned.

She was very old and her hands were folded in her lap and she was looking at the floor.

And she said, not loudly, without moving her head: "Do not get off where they get off."

I did not answer.

"Ring the bell early," she said. "Get off before them. Walk from there."

"Where do they get off?"

"You will know," she said. "Do not be on this bus then."

The stop before

So I counted stops, and about twenty minutes before our town I rang the bell at a place I did not recognise — a stretch of road with a shut petrol pump and nothing else.

The bus slowed and the doors opened.

Nobody looked at me. The old woman did not look at me.

I got off and stood on the roadside and the doors closed and the bus pulled away, quiet, with its lit board and its fifteen passengers facing forward.

I watched it go up the road and round the bend.

Then I walked the rest of the way, which took me four hours, and I got home at sunrise.

Afterwards

Years later I asked my father about that road.

There is no petrol pump twenty minutes before our town, he said. There has never been one. He had driven that road his whole life.

So I went and looked.

He was right. There is no petrol pump on that stretch, shut or open, and no building at all, and I stood there in the daylight on the exact bend I remembered and could not find one thing I recognised.

Except that it took me four hours to walk home that night, and it is a four-hour walk.

So I was somewhere.