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On a cold October night, the Knight Bus trundled along in Muggle London, dodging passing cars and clumsy-footed pedestrians as the rain beat a tattoo above it, a steady plink-plink on its aluminium roof. No one outside saw the Knight Bus, for it was skilled at avoiding the eyes of those who weren’t looking for it.
Inside the bus, Stan Shunpike slept on.
Stan Shunpike wasn’t good with people. That was what they told him, at least, and he supposed they would know.
This didn’t bother him, however. It was just one of those unremarkable constants of existence, something Stan accepted without question but rarely considered fully. Just as Stan knew that the texture of damp paper towels irritated his skin, making it itch all over, just as he knew that there was no greater joy than sinking his teeth into a freshly unwrapped Cauldron Cake, Stan knew he wasn’t good with people.
Ever since he had been a small child, he had found other humans inscrutable and, what was more, largely uninteresting. Other people had emotions, of course, but they didn’t show them in a way that made sense to him. Their happiness didn’t ever seem as large and joyous as Stan’s own was. Other people might smile, sometimes, or even laugh when they found something pleasing, but they didn’t throw their hands together in transports of delight or rock backwards and forwards on their heels when they saw something lovely that lit them up inside. Not the way Stan did. Joy never seemed to bubble up inside other people and spill out, not the way it did for him. But he supposed other people just weren’t as happy as he was, and he pitied them for that.
He pitied, too, those so-called inanimate objects around him, for people didn’t understand them any more than they understood Stan. Didn’t other people see the expressions in the constant rush of oncoming cars? Didn’t they notice the way the distant trains huffed and puffed when they were tired or beamed brightly with their headlights when they were pleased? And yet people thought them soulless, emotionless.
But then again, Stan reminded himself, most people were unable to see what was right before their eyes. They just didn’t know how to look.
The Knight Bus leapt across the country, planting itself down indiscriminately on well-loved dirt roads, bustling freeways, and even rarely-visited country lanes. Each time it switched locations, a resounding bang would echo through the Knight Bus’ three levels, knocking drinks about and sending the passengers’ beds rolling across the bus’ length.
And still Stan Shunpike slept on.
Stan wasn’t lonely for himself.
He liked his quiet life. He liked his job, the way it brought strange people across his path before they went their separate ways. And Stan never had to pretend with them, for he knew what to say — welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard — and everything felt safe and lovely like that, his conversations falling within the comfortable confines of his script.
Stan rarely saw the same person twice, but this didn’t trouble him. He liked the novelty of meeting new people, sure, but he relished the relative safety of his routine. He had an easy, charming routine, spending his days journeying across the wild, windswept roads of the countryside, listening to the rush of crashing thunder cascading overhead as the bus rushed across sprawling cities, catching glimpses of bright sunlight when the bus dashed through sleepy, sun-soaked seaside towns to fetch its passengers. And every evening, when his body grew weary with tiredness, Stan would take his spot on the topmost level of the bus and let the easy rumble of distant cars lull him to sleep.
Stan wasn’t lonely for himself, though sometimes other people assumed he must be. But other people never understood, not really. It wasn’t their fault; other people were just not very good at seeing.
But sometimes — and Stan had never before told another person this — when he passed a night on the Knight Bus, with the bus winding its solitary way through the city streets, Stan felt a special kind of loneliness creeping inside his body and nestling itself right around his heart.
He was lonely for the Knight Bus.
Something had startled Stan awake. He blinked rapidly, trying to understand what had awoken him, for he knew it couldn’t be the movements of the bus. Stan was used to the Knight Bus’ strange zigzagging paths, the way it jumped across lanes of traffic and leapt through the country to land in far-flung cities or remote towns.
It was something outside the bus, then, that had snuck into his dreams and called his name, jolting him awake in the darkness.
Stan blinked again as he looked out the window, willing his eyes to adjust to the inky blackness of the night outside. They were driving down a dark country lane, without even a single lamppost to illuminate the road ahead, but some ways off in the distance, something was gleaming in the darkness.
It was moving at exactly the same pace as the Knight Bus, which was nearly unthinkable. No other vehicle could keep up, not when the Knight Bus’ speed was unmatched by even the newest and quickest high-speed Muggle train. But it was matching the Knight Bus’ pace so perfectly that Stan wondered if it could see the Knight Bus, like some strange nighttime creature whose eyes could cut through the darkness without difficulty.
As a matter of fact, it resembled…
Stan shook his head, trying to force his eyes to see sense. The distant light moved on, matching the Knight Bus’ progress perfectly, in exactly the same way the moon followed Stan steadfastly on no matter where his nighttime journeys took him.
And a strange, impossible thought flitted across Stan’s mind, the way such thoughts often do at nighttime: it was a cat.
Not an average cat, either, like the charmingly dim-witted orange cats of Stan’s childhood or the tabby cats he saw slinking around bins in alleys. No, this was an enormous cat, and — stranger still — it was also a bus.
There wasn’t even a road there — how could he be seeing a bus? Now that he had seen it, he couldn’t unsee it. Those strange distant lights belonged, unmistakably, to a bus.
And what a bus — the likes of which Stan could never have imagined. Not a cold, mechanical creature, built from men’s unfeeling hands, but something soft, organic. As he watched the bus’ progress, Stan could have sworn that it was breathing.
These two concepts — cat and bus — should not have melded together so easily in Stan’s mind, and yet he accepted the bizarre sight easily. Other people might never have noticed, but Stan was the kind of person who saw.
“A Catbus,” Stan said aloud, though no one was around him to overhear. “Of course.”
The Catbus might otherwise have stopped to stretch, to roll around luxuriously in the smooth evening shadows, to sniff at a nearby field of flowers, but it didn’t pause. It was matching the Knight Bus’ path, shooting the triple-decker bus interested glances every so often.
It wasn’t the first time it had caught sight of that fascinating purple bus, but it was the first time it had been bold enough to allow the Knight Bus to notice it in return.
When the Knight Bus vanished, the Catbus didn’t despair. It, too, knew the secrets of the road; it vanished and appeared, a split-second later, in the twisting, rain-swept roads of the foothills.
There the Catbus paused only so long as to shake off the first cascade of rainwater, then took off at a run, racing the Knight Bus through the darkness.
Stan had worried, momentarily, that the Catbus wouldn’t be able to follow the Knight Bus’ strange path through the countryside.
He needn’t have been concerned, for the Catbus had followed without difficulty. He wondered how long the Catbus had been travelling with the Knight Bus — how had he never noticed it before? — and realised, from the friendly lights that the Catbus flashed as it jumped through puddles and across low hills, that the Catbus not only knew the Knight Bus, but that it knew the Knight Bus intimately.
And the Knight Bus was pleased. Stan could feel it through his whole body: the way the bus shuddered with excitement whenever the Catbus appeared in a new location, the increased pace, as though the Knight Bus was delighted to be travelling with a friend, the low purr of the bus’ engine — no doubt matching the Catbus’ purrs of joy.
Stan thought of the buses’ parallel lives, the way they moved together in the same direction as the night sky overhead grew steadily brighter. He thought of the way no one else — not Muggles, certainly, and not even wizards — had seen the buses, though they could clearly see one another. And what a gift it was, Stan reflected, to be able to observe what was right before your eyes. He felt indebted to the Catbus for letting him tag along.
Stan thought, too, of the way the Catbus’ headlights had flared as it jumped through puddles, almost like a lone driver in the night signalling to someone going the opposite way. That quick flash of the light was more than mere acknowledgement, though. It was a smile. Other people might have thought the buses incapable of such complex emotions. They were inanimate objects, for one thing, and they could never touch — for contact would surely mean collision, disaster.
Another person might not have understood, but Stan did. Stan knew that a person’s emotions were real, even when they didn’t express them in the same way as other people did, even if no one else in the world could recognise them. He knew, too, that love was much deeper, much more complex, than mere physicality.
And after all, Stan thought, with the comfortable certainty that comes with such realisations, wasn’t that all love was? Parallel lives, loving someone — or something — enough to journey forward in the same direction with them?
As the Knight Bus pressed on through the crushing velvet blackness outside, Stan rocked backwards and forwards in his bed, beaming, his eyes fixed on the distant gleam of the Catbus’ warm, bright eyes.