The hope of the universe had lain with the Red Brain.
And the Red Brain was mad.
The Phantom Bus
by W. Elwyn Backus
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.