Jeani Rector's
The Bus Station
The Bus Station
by Jeani Rector
How many ghosts haunt the bus station?
The Bus Station
by Jeani Rector
I’m not going to tell you who I am.
At least, not until you read my story first.
Because if I tell you who I am up front, you would put this paper down and walk away in disgust. You wouldn’t give me a chance to tell my side of the story at all.
But bear with me, because I promise: if you read this account, all of it, then I will tell you who I am at the end.
And maybe by the time I am done telling you my side of the story, you could understand it enough to believe me.
* * * * *
I woke up because I felt a gun poking into my ribs. Confused with sleep, I was bewildered as to where I was. Then I remembered: I had been hitchhiking and this was my ride, and now the driver of the old Pontiac was sticking a gun into my ribs.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Whaddya think,” he said, “gimme your money.”
I looked at him. The original unease that I had felt getting into this car was proving to be right. The driver seemed hyped up; his dirty hair was matted with sweat and his eyes almost glowed from either drugs or insanity.
And I instinctively knew: the minute I handed over my money, he would kill me.
Without thinking, I took advantage of the driver’s attention to the road and pushed open the passenger door. “Hey!” the driver cried, but the surprise caused his reactions to slow.
I didn’t know how fast we were going, but I judged it couldn’t have been too bad since it was a country road. I had no other option. I curled into a ball and launched myself out the car door.
The flight through the air seemed endless, but I knew it was probably just seconds. The ground came up at me hard, and I rolled, jarring and scraping until I finally came to a stop. The old Pontiac gunned it and barreled away into the night, leaving nothing behind except me and the smell of exhaust.
I lay on the old country road in the dark, groaning, and moved slowly to check and see if anything was broken or otherwise badly injured. I gave thanks that I was a young man, sturdy and strong, and realized that I would survive this without more than a few scrapes and bruises.
But all of my belongings were now headed off into the night inside the crazy-man’s Pontiac. My backpack held all my clothes, and that was long gone in a cloud of exhaust fumes. Fortunately, my wallet held my money and ID, and the wallet was still safely tucked into my back pocket.
And then there was the other issue. It was the middle of the night and I had no idea where I was.
I picked myself off the ground and dusted off my jeans. Then I took in my surroundings. Apparently the crazy driver had taken a detour while I was asleep in his car. Which made sense to me: if you plan to murder someone, you want to do it in a lonely location. I ought to know. Wait, I don’t want to give you any clues as to my identity yet.
Anyway, I knew I was lost, but there was nothing else to do but walk. And so I did; I walked down the lonely country road in the night.
The full moon vanished and reappeared as clouds crept across its surface, creating shadows that danced in the night. The dampness in the misty air caused dew to sparkle on the roadside weeds, and the trees overhanging the road seemed to be ever so slightly moving and rustling in the cool, soft breeze. Crickets chirped merrily away, and a screech owl shrilled as it hunted in the darkness. The sounds of toads and frogs calling from either side of the road created a musical opus, and every so often I could hear rustling sounds within the roadside bushes, as though creatures of the night were stealthily traveling through them.
I kept walking, putting one foot in front of the other, not sure if I was going in the right direction; I wasn’t even positive that there was any right direction. It was unnerving to be so incredibly lost. And what if the crazy Pontiac man came back?
Relax, I told myself. This is America, and sooner or later there will be a town. This isn’t some Australian outback wilderness where I’d starve to death before anyone found me.
But in the meantime, my surroundings looked like something out of a horror movie. The mist swirled up from the ground, the moon was full, and it was easy to imagine Bela Lugosi creeping through the vapor with his cape half covering his face. Long, twisted tree limbs seemed everywhere, and the full moon’s light shined upon those trees, creating shadows that were stripes across the road in front of me.
Suddenly I felt a hand grasp my shoulder from behind.
I screamed and dropped to my knees in fright, shutting my eyes. My heart was pounding against my ribcage and I just knew it was the crazy Pontiac man, back to kill me.
“Don’t yell!” a woman’s voice said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
I opened my eyes and looked up to see an attractive, slender girl who was dressed like a hippie; she was very retro from the 1970s. She looked to be in her early twenties.
I got off the ground, but I could barely speak, because I was still trembling so violently from the scare. I managed to get out, “You surprised me. What the hell are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“Well,” said the girl, “I could be asking you the same thing.”
Despite myself, I grinned. It was true. It wasn’t normal for anybody to be in the middle of nowhere at night. “I’m lost,” I told her.
“Me too,” she said.
Amazed that two people could be lost on the same country road, I asked her, “How come you’re lost? I was hitchhiking and this is where I got let out.” I didn’t want to go into details. I figured telling her about the crazy Pontiac man would frighten her.
“I’m lost because I haven’t been found yet,” she said.
“What?”
“My body. I’m over there.” She jerked a thumb to the side of the road. “In the bushes. But you know about women like me, don’t you? Want to see what we look like after we’ve been discarded?”
I couldn’t have heard her right. My jaw was open because I was so dumbfounded. Was she another crazy person?
Crazy! Everyone was crazy. What was it about this particular night that brought out the insane?
And then suddenly the young woman began to shake and tremble violently, and then her eyes rolled upwards until they appeared completely white. The skin on her face began to slide, falling off her face towards his chin. Her hair began to fall out as her scalp began to disintegrate into patches, allowing the calcified skull to shine through in the moonlight. The orbs of her eyes shriveled, dried up and fell back into her head, and her nose began to crumble. Her teeth gleamed as the surrounding lips disappeared.
The hideous transformation continued, and spread to the body. She fell to the ground, and from out of the bushes leaped a coyote, who grabbed the young woman’s arm in his mouth. The coyote yanked the arm free and instantly disappeared with it, once again swallowed by the foliage next to the road.
The outdated clothes on the body began to seem too large as the flesh shrunk away to leave only the structure of the skeleton. The heap of bones lay upon the road, and the clothes upon them began to visibly fray and tear. A strong breeze suddenly blew, picking up the lighter, smaller bones of the remaining hand and the feet and scattering them into the bushes.
The whole thing took only seconds, almost too fast for me to react. I threw my hands up to cover my eyes. “No!” I screamed to the night. “This isn’t happening! Please, make it go away!”
I took my hands away from my face and looked.
Nothing.
There was no dead girl decaying in front of me, or decaying anywhere else. There was no girl. There never had been.
For the second time that night I sank to my knees on the lonely country road. I was horrified and exhausted. Why had I imagined such a terrible thing? Could it be my conscience haunting me?
But if it had been only my conscience, then why had it seemed so real? It had seemed so horribly real. I was baffled and still terrified.
I stayed on my knees for a while, trying to collect my wits. And when I finally stopped trembling, and my legs stopped feeling rubbery, I decided to deny the incident.
It wasn’t real, I thought. I’m tired and lost and my mind played tricks on me. Maybe I was even sleepwalking. Yeah, that’s it. I hear that people sleepwalk all the time.
And so I stood back up. And I started walking again.
Eventually the dirt road opened into one that was paved; it was no less lonely, but at least it appeared more civilized.
After walking for about an hour, I came upon a sign that read Greyhound Station, Quarter Mile Ahead. I was never so glad to see anything in my life as I was to see that sign.
Reaching the Greyhound Station, I saw what a small building it was. But of course it would be; this was the country where no one seemed to live, and frankly I was surprised that there would be any bus station at all, way out there in the sticks.
Pushing the front door open, I walked inside. It was a very small station, the smallest I had ever seen. Blue plastic chairs were bolted to a horizontal metal bar. The linoleum floor was faded, scratched, and dirty. The walls were painted a dull gray-green, and one wall held a rack of travel brochures.
I stepped up to the clerk’s cage to buy a bus ticket, only to find it empty. A paper sign said Be Back At and underneath it showed a clock saying Ten O’Clock. I looked at my watch. It was already quarter after ten.
Turning around, I saw a young woman sitting on one of the plastic chairs. At first I was startled, thinking she was the dead girl on the country road, but then I shook my head. I would not think about the other girl; it had been a hallucination caused by exhaustion and fear. I was not going crazy, no, I was not crazy. This girl in the bus station was real.
Assessing her, I figured her to be a traveler just like me, because she had a dirty backpack on the floor in front of her. She had long dark hair and wore a fuzzy-looking jacket, but I knew from the tight jeans showing off her long legs that the jacket was hiding a magnificent figure underneath.
Was she all alone? There seemed to be no one else in the entire station.
Oh hell, after all that had already happened, what was one more adventure?
I strode over to her and asked her if I could sit next to her. She looked around at all the empty chairs in the Greyhound station, then looked back to me. “Why?” she asked.
I sighed. “I’m tired, and I could sure use the company.”
She giggled. “Yeah, look at this dump. It’s not exactly hopping. What a way to spend Halloween, huh?”
I took that as an invitation and sat next to her. And then what she said hit me. Maybe that could explain the weird events of this evening. “It’s Halloween?”
“It sure is. You didn’t know? Where’ve you been all month?”
I didn’t want to tell her where I’d been, so I changed the subject. “Where’re you headed?”
“Chester Depot,” she said. “Population seven hundred. My name’s Mandy, by the way.”
“I’m Floyd,” I told her, and shook her hand. It felt so soft and inviting.
“Floyd? That’s kind of an old fashioned name, ain’t it? I mean, even for Vermont’s standards.”
“Tell it to my Ma.”
“So, where’re you headed?”
“Wherever the next bus is going.”
“Well, ain’t you the mysterious one? The next bus means you’ll be riding with me to Chester Depot,” she said. “Happy Halloween on a Greyhound. Hey, have you heard the Halloween ghost story about this bus station?”
“Nope. Remember, I’m the one who didn’t even know it was Halloween,” I reminded her.
She used a hand to brush the hair from her face, and I was stimulated. Her face was almost pretty, with unusual gray-green eyes. I’d let Mandy talk about anything she wanted if it would give me a chance to get close to her.
“Well,” she began, “a few years ago, there was this girl waiting for a bus, just like me. Then wham! Some stranger walks in and blows her away with a shotgun. Now the dead girl haunts this bus station once a year, every Halloween night.”
“Imagine spending an eternity out in the sticks, stuck here in this Greyhound bus station,” I said.
“You don’t believe me,” Mandy accused.
“Well,” I said, “Tonight is Halloween, and I don’t see any ghosts, do you? Besides, I’ve heard scarier stories than that one.”
“So tell me a scarier story.”
“How about a guy that travels around the country killing people?”
She scoffed. “You ain’t very original, are ya? I can read that kind of stuff in any newspaper.”
Ignoring that, I looked around the empty bus station. “I have to admit, it’s kind of spooky here. Good thing you have me to protect you from the so-called Halloween ghost.”
“Yeah, but who’s gonna protect me from you?”
I swung my gaze away from the room to study her face. Did she know? Of course not. This was a very trusting girl. My kind of girl.
She started laughing at her own joke, and I relaxed. “I’m harmless,” I told her, hoping she would believe me.
Her gaze drifted, and then she turned around to look at the clerk’s cage, still empty. “I wonder when that clerk is supposed to come back so I can buy my bus ticket.”
“It does seem like a pretty long break, doesn’t it?” I agreed.
We became quiet as an uncomfortable silence settled between us. Then Mandy said, “Did you hear that?”
I looked at her. “What?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “it sounded like something outside the station. Maybe the clerk is coming back.”
The front door burst open, and Mandy screamed with surprise. A man stepped inside, carrying a shotgun. Raising the gun, he shouted “Trick or treat!”
I had an eerie feeling of being caught in slow motion, like someone had slowed down some sort of recording device. Seconds seemed to stretch like rubber bands. I had an out-of-body sensation like I was a third party watching from afar. It seemed so unreal.
I knew who he was.
And I knew I was about to die.
The man with the shotgun seemed hyped up; his dirty hair was matted with sweat and his eyes almost glowed from either drugs or insanity. I recognized him to be the crazy driver of the Pontiac.
He had tried to kill me once, and I had gotten away. Now he was back to finish the job.
The crazy man advanced, aiming the shotgun.
“Why are you doing this?” Mandy screamed at him, but I held my tongue. I knew there was no reasoning with a madman.
“It’s Halloween and you’re supposed to give me candy,” the man said as he continued to approach us. “That’s my treat. Got no candy, and I’ll give you a trick. Now gimme your wallets. Throw ‘em down on the floor.”
“The Greyhound clerk is coming,” Mandy tried.
“No he ain’t,” the crazy Pontiac man with the shotgun said. I didn’t ask how he knew no one was coming. Instead I thought to myself, So that’s why the clerk never came back.
Mandy dug into her purse for her wallet and I retrieved mine. We both threw the wallets on the floor. I was watching the crazy man’s eyes, and I understood that he would hurt us after all; yes indeed, wallets or no wallets.
You need a lonely spot to murder people, I thought. With the clerk dead, there is no spot lonelier than a tiny bus station in the middle of nowhere.
The man cocked the shotgun.
It was now or never. My mind screamed NOW!
I rushed at the crazy man, throwing myself, aiming for his legs, wanting to knock him down. Fear gave me power and adrenaline gave me strength. The crazy man’s utter surprise made him hesitate and that provided me with an advantage.
I wrestled him to the floor. He still grasped the shotgun and I knew my only hope was to take it from him. Sweat poured into my eyes and I tried to blink it away. I couldn’t let my vision blur. This was life or death.
I tried to hold the man down with one hand while at the same time, I reached for the gun with the other hand. He writhed, twisted and lurched underneath me like a bucking bronco. I couldn’t get the gun; he kept jerking it away. I couldn’t reach it…wait, where was Mandy?
“Mandy!” I yelled. “Help me! Get his gun!”
I could hear her coming. I couldn’t look at her because I was still fighting the crazy man on the floor. But my heart leapt with hope…with Mandy, it would be two against one!
And then the shotgun went off. BLAM!
The sound was deafening and my ears were ringing. Thank god, I thought, it wasn’t me. I wasn’t shot!
An extra burst of energy seemed to come from nowhere. Perhaps it was the gun going off; perhaps it was the idea that I had come so close to dying that I had nothing left to lose. I don’t know where my strength came from, but it did. I shoved the crazy man against the floor, and wrenched his gun arm so hard that I could feel something inside it snap. The man roared with pain and I used that to my advantage.
I grabbed the shotgun.
Jumping to my feet, I swung the gun around and cocked it. I didn’t think twice; didn’t hesitate for even a moment. Aiming the gun at the crazy man’s face, I pulled the trigger. Both barrels blasted and the man’s face exploded into fragments, splattering everywhere.
I stood above the desecrated man for a moment, studying the damage, morbidly fascinated at the after effects of a shotgun blast to the face.
“Trick or treat,” I said to the dead man. “It’s your trick and my treat.”
And then I remembered Mandy.
I turned around. She was lying on the floor, her arms and legs crossed in an unnatural position. Her face was unrecognizable. Blood poured from her head, creating maroon puddles upon the floor.
So the crazy man’s shot had been an accurate one after all.
I sighed sadly. Now there would be two ghosts to haunt this bus station every Halloween night. Three, if Mandy’s ghost story was correct.
Then I picked up my wallet from the floor of the bus station, and put it back into my pocket. Stepping over the two bodies, I headed for the door. Maybe I would have better luck with hitchhiking than I did trying to catch a Greyhound bus in the middle of nowhere on a Halloween night.
For a moment I questioned myself. Shouldn’t I be feeling more emotion after everything that had happened inside that bus station? Instead I felt numb. Maybe I was in shock.
Or maybe I was just glad that the crazy Pontiac man was dead and unable to threaten me anymore.
The girl out there on the country road was dead too, a voice spoke in my mind, and she came back. Hadn’t she looked familiar?
“No!” I shouted out loud. “There was no girl on any road! The only dead girl is Mandy! And she’s real! And the crazy Pontiac guy is real too! And he’s just as dead as Mandy is! And none of it is my fault!”
With that, I started walking back to the road, feeling glad it was paved. If the road was paved, that meant civilization was close by.
I wondered about the time. Checking my watch, I saw it was quarter to twelve. I felt a wave of superstition pass through me; it couldn’t be a good thing to be lost at midnight on Halloween night.
I began walking quickly in the direction away from the Greyhound Station. The darkness had become dense because clouds were covering the full moon. The wind was mild, but an occasional gust suggested a pending storm. The air was unseasonably warm for October, a drastic change from the previous week, but it was humid and thick with moisture.
A rumbling sounded in the distance, reverberating softly across the land. I could smell rain, and I hoped it wouldn’t arrive until I got to wherever I was going.
I noticed something in the road ahead. It looked like a dead deer on the road. Somebody must have hit it with a car, I thought. Maybe the crazy Pontiac guy hit the deer. No, he’s dead.
Well, whatever it was, I would be seeing it up close soon. I rapidly approached the thing, and a feeling of apprehension crept up on me. The hairs on my arms stood up in the follicles, and I felt a tingling in my fingers.
And then I was close enough to see what it really was. This was no deer.
A man was lying in the middle of the road, wearing a Greyhound uniform. Suddenly he sat up and said, “You want to buy a bus ticket to Chester Depot? That’ll be forty dollars one way.”
I could feel my eyes bulging. I threw my hands over my face and screamed. No! This was not happening! The crazy Pontiac man had killed the clerk! The clerk was somewhere back at the station! No one was here on the road but me; no one had ever been here on the road but me!
Reluctantly I took my hands away from my eyes. The road was empty. There was no Greyhound clerk lying there, and there never had been. Was I going crazy? Of course not. I was just feeling overwhelmed. I had just witnessed shotgun killings back at the bus station. That would be enough to shake anyone up. And I was feeling irrationally superstitious on a Halloween night. I just needed a good night’s sleep.
Probably Mandy’s Halloween ghost story set my imagination off, I thought. Soon, if I keep walking, I’ll find a town and then all of this will be over.
And when I finally found a town, I checked myself into the cheapest motel I could find. I used my real ID. And I slept a deep, dreamless sleep.
Until the next morning when the cops banged on my motel door.
* * * * *
So now you see what went down on that Halloween night. I didn’t kill anyone. At least, not that night.
The prison psychiatrist is telling me otherwise. He is telling me that there was no crazy man driving a Pontiac. He is telling me that I manifested the phantom “crazy man” as a delusion because I was unable to accept that it was me who murdered the clerk and the girl in the bus station. He is telling me that I invented a scapegoat to take the blame because I could not face my own wrongdoings.
When I went to court, they had all this evidence against me for Mandy’s death. The clerk’s death too. It was truly baffling. I just cannot figure out why they never found the crazy Pontiac man’s body there in the bus station.
Okay. Now I am ready to tell you who I am.
I wanted to tell my story first, because I want you to understand it all.
You see, I cannot believe that the psychiatrist thinks I would have felt any guilt over a dead clerk or a girl at a Greyhound bus station. Let me tell you why.
My name is Floyd Tapson. Yes, that Floyd Tapson. I’ve murdered three girls in three different states, before I ever met Mandy. I was a traveler, and sometimes the urge would become so overwhelming….it would build and build until I felt compelled to act it out.
So, shouldn’t I know who I killed and who I didn’t? God, it’s so confusing. The cops say it was my shotgun that Halloween night. What’s so ironic is that I’m in prison for two people I didn’t kill, and nobody knows about the three that I did kill.
Either way, I’ll bet there are ghosts haunting a little, out-of-the-way Greyhound Bus station in Vermont. If you ever find yourself there on a Halloween night, can you write me a letter and let me know if the one of the ghosts is the crazy Pontiac man?
“No!” I screamed to the night. “This isn’t happening! Please, make it go away!”
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