Chapter Text
They say that on dark, lonesome roads, it’s easy to pick up Passengers. Not hitchhikers, those are different, you can see those. You only ever feel a Passenger. They might feel nice or mean, hot or cold, but you’d best not acknowledge them too much; Passengers don’t seem to like conversation. I tried once, when I was a younger, more naive fellow. I like to think I’m a nice looking guy, and I like to think I’m a good talker, and I once thought that there wasn’t nothing in the world that couldn’t be sat down and chatted with until everybody was friends. Well my first Passenger disagreed with me on that point, and the scratches on my right arm didn’t stop bleeding until I crossed state lines. That arm still itches whenever I’m in New Jersey. I try not to take jobs that take me to New Jersey if I can avoid it, and when I can’t avoid it, I set the teddy bear my little girl gave me in the passenger seat. If you can’t interact with physical objects, you can’t steal the seat from the bear, see? So I always put something or other in my passenger seat, when I gotta drive at night or in bad weather.
Well one day, see, I was riding down I-39, and it was an afternoon clear as a bell, so imagine my surprise when I finish fueling up and look over to see someone floating around my cab. Literally floating, and partly see-through to boot. The ghost of a little girl about my Sabrina’s age - though they’d probably both object to me calling them little, at that age - with a black outfit and white hair. She looked right at me. “Excuse me, which way are you going today?” she asked, polite as can be.
I probably made some very dumb-sounding noises at that point, but give me a break. I didn’t think ghosts were real (Passengers are different, Passengers don’t seem like they were ever human to begin with) and here one was, asking me about my route. I told her I was going south to St. Louis, and she asked if she could please have a ride, once again as polite as could be. Whoever raised that girl, whenever that was, sure taught her her manners. I couldn’t say no. Part of me categorized her as a Passenger and therefore somebody I ought to appease, the other part of me saw a kid who needed a ride away from God-knows-what. So I left with a girl in my passenger seat.
I had learned my lesson back in the day in Jersey, so I tried to keep myself to myself. It seems, however, that kids are kids, and before long she was asking about the pictures and trinkets I keep in the cab, and about places I’ve been and how the CB radio worked. Kids are always interested in the radio. I suppose there is something sweet about “running into” old acquaintances on the airwaves. I learned her name is Danielle, but she’s sort of a tomboy and likes Dani better; she learned that my name’s Henry. She had some sort of relative in a town called Amity Park; my family’s outside Nashville. It was getting dark while I was explaining to her how to tell where we were on the paper map. (The only thing scarier than Passengers is getting lost with no signal, thank you very much.) After that, I couldn’t help wondering when Dani’s ride would be over. Most Passengers, they show up when they show up, and they leave when they leave. The only warning you get is the hair on the back of your neck, but here was this little phantom with all the pleases and thank yous anybody could ask for. I didn’t ask, it seemed untoward. So we chatted about sights to see around the country, and she played with the radio some more, and it was alright. I’m a night owl by nature, I like to wake up at noon and then drive into the wee hours of the morning (and the bosses like that I’m so happy to make five A.M. deliveries), so I was still wide awake when a great old thunderstorm rolled in a few hours after dusk.
I was wide awake enough that I should have known better than to just follow the lights in front of me. Other drivers are morons , especially in heavy rain that breaks the light into a million little pieces. I still don’t remember what happened to make the truck in front of me stop so suddenly, but I remember that little girl’s eyes glowing green, and her standing up in the cab without taking off her seatbelt. Then I remember my mama calling me to dinner.
I remember my mama calling me to dinner, and I was getting up from lying in the backyard. Why was I lying in the backyard? I was probably trying to make friends with the raccoons under the deck again. I was always trying to get mama to let me have a pet, and she was always scolding me for feeding the wildlife. So I was getting up and going to dinner, and then I remember this little girl grabbing me by the wrist.
“My mama’s calling me,” I told her, pointing to my back door. “I gotta go.”
The little white haired girl - where did a kid get white hair from? The little white haired girl looked where I was pointing, and then looked back at me with the biggest, saddest eyes in the whole world. “You can’t,” she said.
“If I’m not at dinner-”
“You can have dinner with your mama another day, Henry. But not now, it’s not your time yet.”
The house, and the raccoons, and the backyard all disappeared at that point. There was a road now, and two big rigs all twisted up in each other, and a lot of rain. The little girl was still there, and there was a man laying at her feet. I recognized the man’s face - I saw it in the mirror every morning!
Oh. That was my body, and I wasn’t in it. Mama always liked reading stories about out of body experiences, she liked the idea that she would still exist after she died, so she could look out over me and my brother. My body was at the feet of a ghost, and my mama’s house stood behind her. “Am I dead?” I asked. The back door cracked open an inch.
The girl, Dani, shrugged. “Yes, no, maybe so?” She grinned a little, like she was having a private joke with herself, and then her face hardened. What happened to make a little girl look so old and serious? “But you’re not all the way dead yet ,” she declared firmly. “You need to pick a side, Mister Henry, and you need to pick the living side.”
“I’d like to see mama. I miss her a lot,” I admitted. I was crying a little, I missed my mama more than anything I had ever missed in my whole life. The door behind Dani opened a bit further, and I heard something sizzling on the stove, unless it was just the rain.
Dani took both my hands in hers and shook her head. “I know you miss your mom, but you can’t see her today. You need to stick around for your daughter, you can go see your mom as much as you want once your daughter’s all grown up, okay?”
Sabrina. My baby girl. She would miss me as much as I missed my mama, wouldn’t she? She was still too young for boys to go breaking her heart, especially not her own dad. “I need to stick around for my daughter.” The door to my mama’s house closed, and something in me knew it would stay closed for a good long time. I looked down at my body. It wasn’t in good shape. My skin was ashen, and my left leg looked pretty much done for. My eyes stared up into the rain, and there wasn’t any light behind them. “Is it gonna hurt? Getting… back in?”
Dani shrugged again. “I don’t know. But… I’ll help, okay?”
“Okay.”
When I woke up at the hospital, it was three days later. I had been in a coma the whole time, partly of my own accord and partly with drugs so I wouldn’t wake up while the doctors did surgery on me. They wrote an article about the crash. Two big rigs and a sedan all hit each other, and nobody died, that was a newsworthy miracle. The other truck driver said he saw flashes of green light like a science fiction movie. The driver of the sedan said she felt a pair of hands grabbing her by the shirt and pulling her out of her car, even though all the doors were pretty much welded shut by the accident. The paramedics claim they found the crash site extra easy because there was a human figure standing in the middle of it, glowing bright as a beacon for them. The figure - the ghost - disappeared as soon as the medics approached.
I’m retired now; I drive the school bus these days. I don’t have to reserve my passenger seat anymore. But I still keep in touch with my old buddies. Rumor has it that a little white haired girl has been seen all over the country. She stopped a truck from running off one of those demonic twisty mountain roads in Colorado, and dragged a suicidal person out of the road before he could actually be hit, and helped a lady driver hide from some creep. The nice newspapers aren’t talking about it, the rag newspapers are calling her the Road Wraith. I don’t have to reserve my passenger seat anymore, but if Dani is ever passing through my neck of the woods, I’d happily save her a seat at my table. Maybe, in some Other Place, my mama would too.