The Ghostly Hitchhiker

The Ghostly Hitchhiker

By Joseph Rubas







“Hey,” Kenny said over the rim of his glass, his brown mongoloid eyes sparkling in the last weak orange of the day, “I know what we can do tonight.”

I finished off my soda with a sigh and sat the can back down onto the scarred kitchen table. Behind Kenny, who sat hunched childishly in his flimsy chair, gloom was quickly gathering in pools of dark shadow. The small window above the crowded sink, framed with the swaying multicolored leaves of autumn, showed the sky to be a poetic mixture of pink and bloodless orange.

“What?” I asked Kenny, who grinned like an idiot peering through a woman’s bedroom window. His gaunt face and his messy black hair further lent him an insane air. He was probably thinking of promiscuous coeds or of toilet-papering the Dean’s house.

“We take a ride,” he said, “and look for that ghost on 45.”

Though Kenny and I were of vastly different intelligence levels and of wholly different backgrounds, we both held a strong love of the occult and the macabre in common. When our classes at the university were finished for the day, we usually set out to “explore” one haunted venue or another. We had recently visited a cave south of town reputed to be haunted by vampires, a legend dating back to the mid-1880s. We found nothing even remotely supernatural.

The ghost to whom Kenny was referring was the White Lady, said to haunt a lonely stretch of wooded Route 45 after dark. She had supposedly died in a car accident on a rainy night back in the seventies, and was still trying to make her way home. Some of the old farts in town even claimed to have given her lift; upon reaching her obviously abandoned former dwelling, she was always gone. I had told Kenny that that was nothing but a local rehash of an old urban legend that went back a lot further than the seventies, but he refused to believe me.

“We won’t see anything,” I predicted.

“Sure we will,” he retorted confidently, “she’ll be out tonight if she’s out any night.”

I shrugged one shoulder. “I’m telling you, Kenny; she’s not real.”

“Whatever, dude; Bill Gates ain’t real, either.”

“Okay,” I grunted. Despite knowing that the search would be in vain, I would happily go. It didn’t seem right sitting around and reading or watching movies on a Halloween night; that one night above all called for occultic action, even if said the action was lackluster and pointless. Riding the road was better than sitting in front of the TV.

We waited a bit longer before we piled into my Isuzu Trooper. The “ghost” was not on a definite time schedule, but it seemed inappropriate to start our rounds until true night had descended. We caught the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, and left at 5 'till eight, too eager to stall further. I shut the movie off just as a pack of cannibal corpses smashed into a

black-and-white farmhouse, and we hurried side-by-side down the flagstone walk which led to the sloping street. Laughing children in sheets and cheap masks ran crisply up and down the leaf-strewn sidewalks with their subdued parents trudging behind.

Kenny slid into the passenger side and I climbed behind the wheel. For a moment or two we sat as a gaggle of pubescent girls too adult for costumes yet too childish to resist free candy, squeezed between the Trooper and the rusted hunk of an Impala which occasionally suffered our Costello-sized shut-in of a landlady. Kenny lit a cigarette, and I fished my own pack from my breast pocket.

“You finished with that damn book yet?” Kenny asked to break the silence. Never a reader before we had met and decided that our one driving interest bonded more than our many other differences repelled, Kenny now found pleasure in reading some of the newer horror works. I was currently rereading The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition, which Kenny yearned to tackle despite its massive length of over a thousand pages.

“I’m on 855; maybe the day after tomorrow.”

“Okay, just hurry the hell up; you read like an old woman.”

“Me?” I asked. “Okay, whatever, “Two-Week.”

“Shut up,” Kenny replied. I called him that because it took it that long to finish Carrie by Stephen King, which weighed in at the astonishing length of 150 pages. “I have other things to do with my time; I can’t sit around all day like a bookworm.”

Without further reply I started the Trooper, filling the dim smoky cab with the sounds of the Monster Mash, which I had heard played several times on 98.3 that day. I glanced at Kenny’s sharp face, bathed a ghastly orange in the spill of one of the many lamps lining the sloping street, and he smiled. “Turn around and get us going, man. I got the money for gas, don’t worry.”

“No you don’t,” I said sharply. I paid for our nocturnal rambles.

Once creeping out of town, Kenny and I lapsed into silence. As the radio played one spooky song after another, and as the hour grew steadily later, we cruised the same silent stretch of wooded road between Fredericksburg and Bowling Green, meeting nothing but the occasional glare of headlights carrying happy and sated trick-or-treaters home. On seeing this I knew that it was at least 9:30; kids were hell to pull away from the lure of abundant sweets, and many parents just let them go until they collapsed.

At 10:30 the last Halloween song faded from the radio and we once again reached the dim outskirts of Fredericksburg.

“Just one more,” Kenny pleaded, “then we’ll stop.”

I turned around in a brightly-lit Fasmart parking lot, and once again roared into the silent black of the wilderness. We passed the same tired decaying roadside barns, the same shutdown mom and pop stores, and the same forlornly lit homes that we had all night; I wanted to at least take another road, but God knows that Kenny would have thrown a hissy fit.

Hard Luck Woman by Kiss came on the radio and I turned it up; Kenny’s entire face squinted as if he had just sucked a lemon. He liked rap.

“Why do you listen to eighty-year-old music?” he asked, “you’re such a nerd.”

“This isn’t eighty-years-old; this is the good stuff, unlike…”

My head being turned toward Kenny, I was in position to see a white blur as the Trooper sped by empty country. A cold jolt of panic impaled my heart and cast it rudely into the pit of my stomach. I trailed off and Kenny, inferring that something was amiss from my no doubt pale and slackening face, spun around in his seat. Slowing, I craned my neck around to look through the back window: in the outer edge of evil red taillight glare a tall figure in white stood high and erect on the shoulder of the road.

No, this is impossible; the White Lady isn’t even real!

“Stop!” Kenny cried, “there she is!”

I hit the gas.

“Go back!” Kenny wailed, kneeling in seat and peering into the darkness behind us like a child bidding a grudging goodbye to Disneyland.

“Nah,” I breathed, “screw you.”

“Go back! What are you, a bitch?”

My icy hands were trembling on the leather wheel, and I could barely hear the music above the roar of my pounding heart.

“Go back!”

I slowed and we halted with a jerk. Kenny was looking at me as if I were a stern parent who had taken something from him. “C’mon, man, what’re you doin’?”

I licked my dry lips; I was out of cigarettes.

“Go back and pick her up; you can’t just drive away after all we’ve been through.” Kenny’s face was pleading, his eyes shining with a familiar fire that I had only before seen in the mirror. “We’ve been waitin’ for this kinda thing for a minute, man. Now here it is, the real deal; you just gonna dip, really?”

Slowly calming from the initial shock, I took several more deep breaths and steadied myself. No, I wasn’t going to “dip”, I had wanted and waited too long to experience something extraordinary for myself, like a man who has read longingly of Hawaii and decides that the time has come to visit it in person. I had spent many anxious and fruitless hours in old decaying houses and ancient legend-haunted cemeteries awaiting the appearance of one alleged supernatural being or another. I had spent years yearning for something from a gothic novel to happen to me, and here I was, finally; fleeing was simply not an option.

“Okay, you’re right,” I said levelly and, with an unconscious shudder of both dread and exhilaration, spun the wheel and aimed the nose of the Trooper back down the empty highway.

“Alright,” Kenny drawled excitedly, rubbing his hands crisply together, “let's go. Wonder what ghost butt feels like?”

“Probably like thin air,” I guessed slowly, caught off guard by his bizarre question, “maybe be warm air, but air nonetheless.”

“I’ll climb in back and lay my hand on the seat…”

“No you won’t,” I snapped, “you stay where you are and keep your mouth shut.”

“Alright,” Kenny grudgingly conceded, “don’t poop yourself, pops.”

In the headlights the ghost was still there, her thumb thrust casually into the air.

I pulled to the side, crunching gravel under the tires. The girl was about our age, with long straight raven’s hair and a thin, pale face. My heartbeat quickened as I watched her glide liquidly around the front of the car and toward the door behind Kenny. She climbed silently in, bringing with her the sweet smell of flowers; my stomach turned upon speculating their nature.

“Where you going?” I stammered as I fought against my persistent eyes, which longed to study the ghost as a scientist might study a new species of beetle.

“825 Monmon Drive in Bowling Green,” she said hollowly, her voice sending a shiver down my spine. My resolve almost crumbled then, but I kept a tight rein on my emotions. And had I not it wouldn’t have mattered; she was already sitting within, stonily and dreadfully quiet like a grotesque statue escaped from Satan’s personal collection.

I once again spun the Trooper around and shot off into the night, the back of my head tingling as if expecting a blow.

“So, you haunt the highways often?” Kenny asked through a stupid grin, sending an electric jolt of fearful shock into the depths of my soul. I backhanded his scrawny chest as hard as circumstances allowed, which wasn’t hard enough by far.

“What?” he asked innocently.

“Sorry about my friend,” I smiled, looking into the rearview mirror, “he’s an alcoholic.” The only thing that I could see in that tiny strip of glass was grainy darkness. Were

ghosts like vampires when it came to reflections? Had she already gone?

A tiny judgmental sounding hmm alerted me to the fact that the White Lady was still in our presence, invisible or not.

“I’m weir’ for beer,” Kenny said with a smile, “and I say lets toast in honor of our new friend, the…”

“Shut up or I’ll kill you,” I hissed; I halfway meant it.

Kenny smiled back mockingly, as if daring me to lunge for his throat, which I would have loved to do.

The ride thereafter was a frightful misery. The girl in the backseat spoke not a word, but was tomb silent. I was the whole way aware of her thick, darkly imposing aura; the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stood rigid, as if in preparation for escape should the old legends of ghosts being harmless were horribly mistaken, and my skin crawled as if covered in graveyard maggots. My breath came in short hot gasps; sweat coated my feverish forehead; and my heartbeat hammered dangerously. For the first time in my life I felt the cold hands of claustrophobia caressing my soul. I drove a bit over the speed limit.

When we found the unlighted section of Monmon Drive on which the ghost said she lived, I at once saw that the house she pointed us to was in the same state as a neglected toy left out in the elements by a careless toddler. It was a small, dark two story box covered in a film of grime; what white paint was left was peeling off in strips, revealing dull gray beneath like a bad memory not quite forgotten.

I drove up the bumpy gravel driveway wondering if the ghost had vanished from the backseat yet. Would her seatbelt still be fastened as if she were still there? would something of hers be accidently left behind, say a shoe? would the sickly smell of flowers linger after she had gone?

While looking at the old deserted house with a mixture of dread and parched wonder, the cloying stench of flowers enveloped me like a funeral shroud. I felt something firm and slightly slimy press against my cheek, and shuddered. I forced myself to turn, and saw the ghost pecking Kenny’s cheek, corpse green in the dash glow.

“Happy Halloween, guys,” she chirped and climbed out of the Trooper. She bounded across the shaggy front yard and up the warped wooden stairs just as a porch light came on. The girl was met at the flimsy screen door by a tall stern-faced woman in a pink bath robe.

“Son of a…” Kenny drawled slowly, his shocked mouth agape.

Both women disappeared into a lighted front room, the mother giving us a stiff and tentative wave.

“There’s your White Lady,” I chuckled, cleansing relief and burning shame at my own gullibility washing over me, “and past her curfew, too.”

“Shut up,” Kenny mumbled.