Bus 217 Only Takes Passengers It’s Willing to Erase

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The wheels of the overnight bus humming beneath my seat, a deep vibration that kept shivering

through my bones no matter how many times I brace my feet against the floor. My name's Kull,

just Kull, for anyone listening and what got me on this ride isn't something I can explain

without sounding as paranoid as the people I've been recording for years. The darkness pressed

in close outside the window, the rolling feels broken only by the flicker of the distant highway

lamps in the odd farm-sid porch light, orange and stubborn against the void. I fumbled with my

little handheld recorder, turning it over in my hand. The red LED winked at me, recording,

always recording, just in case. It was a habit by now. Most nights, it helped me sleep,

the steady click and software of table all in a world thick with rumors and silence.

Tonight, the sound vanished inside the bone rattle of the bus engine,

folding in with the shuffle of shoes and recessed cuffs. What brings, anyone to board a bus

halfway through the night, leaving a dead end city behind while most souls were safely tucked in bed?

Some of us are chasing something. Others are running. I counted myself among the first group

before the rumours started chasing me. That's when everything got tangled, a story passed across

a bar counter in late July, a cousin of a friend gum missing after a minute bus ride, a reference

in a foreign post about a rouse meant for passengers who don't want to be found. Eventually,

everything pointed to this bus 217, the indoor city run whose official end and beginning were

never quite the same on any schedule you could find. A few seats ahead, the drivers face kept

surfacing in the warp rear view and readable under the jaundice dome lights. The bus shifted in

and out of gravel ruts, rattling along back roads I'd only ever seen trace in red and can

the oldest maps. I thought about all the warnings about how 217 at night is just a story,

and yet here I was and spooling my nerves on this length of blacktop. The ticket in my pocket

felt heavier than it showed, as if the ink weighed more than the card itself. I leaned into the seat,

remembering those awkward minutes at the terminal how everyone managed to both fill the waiting

area and leave entire rows empty the way luggage was stacked against the wall like fortifications.

The overhead light kept flickering, and only two people used the small vending machines, a stoop

man in brown polyster and a gallant and uncertain shade of green, hair combed flat to her skull.

We boarded in near silence. My footsteps echoed hardly anyone spoke. The only sound aside from

taking a stubbed creasing and duffel bags half in onto shells was the mechanical voice announcing

a route 217 now boarding, all stops, all scheduled and scheduled destinations. He didn't make sense.

At the time I didn't ever think it. Halfward down the row, I nearly brushed past a woman in her

fault as her fingers nibbly twisting the tab on a paper cup. Her glancing goad on me,

trailing with a mixture of hope and warning. When the bus slouched into motion, I found myself

beside her. She introduced herself, Maryne voice off, words tumbling out a bit too quickly.

Can't sleep on buses, she said, her fingers folding and refolding an old receipt.

Never could, where are you headed? There was a challenge in her question, a little warning underneath

the politeness. I shrugged, giving her a name of a townmiles down the line, even as I watched a

deep friend gather on her bra. Sometimes it's not about where you're getting off, but where you

sit, she murmured at the corners of her mouth tightening. You get attached to your seat,

people notice if you move, choose carefully all right. Her advice clawed at me, but the engine

is drone-prested aside. The ride rolled on, headlights sweeping and broken black. Maryne

bizzied herself with a crossword, but I could see her attention flickering recessly across the

aisle. And I, or later, the bus creaked to a sudden halt at a low on his stretch just a surre-dium

lamp and about a trash can marking the stop. The air outside was thick with mud and dry grass.

Maryne's hand tightened around my wrist. No one else moved. Wee switch seats with me,

she asked urgent. I forgot something by the back, please, just for a minute. Confused but compliant,

I shuffled back, sliding into her still warm seat as she ventured on the demile. The lights hummed,

and the driver watched her reflection move past in the mirror. She didn't return.

Hasenches on either side shifted one, a pay-a-man with heavy brows, glanced at me, a younger woman

on the opposite side of the aisle held her backpack tighter. No one spoke Maryne's name. Her

crossword lay abandoned, the pencil shore into a stub. The bus rumbled back onto the road,

sleeping off his metal hide. I raised the recorder to my lips, whispering false and tracking the

ambient hush, but the mic only picked up engine and static, the emptiness heavy as lead.

Once the ride stabilized, I re-opened the recorder to review Maryne's earlier words.

The file blipped and stuttered, and when it finally played back, her warning about seat and choices

was gone, replaced by dull burst of rude noise. Sitting where she'd been just moments before,

my own voice seemed out of sync, a second behind the events I remembered. When pressed hard against

the glass, distorting the faces in their reflections, making everything seem more temporary. It was

less than two I was in, and already, something had shifted inside the story I thought I was collecting.

At before this journey began, before bus 217 was anything more than folklore and the underside

of my mind in my life followed simple patterns. Most nights, my apartment buzzed with a blue

cold of computer monitors and the low rust of city traffic several floors below. A part-time

freelancer was mess, left of reticodes, dacks of yellow legal pads, audio recorders plugged into

a total ray of power strips, always blinking red. Sometimes I'd sip with his phones,

piecing together stories for clients or obsessing over fragments of unsolved interviews.

The kind's no editor would buy, but which refused to leave me alone. I had routines that kept me

insulated, calls it editors, notes stacked in collocative files. A different life from bus

terminals and hushed warnings and cold night air, but under the surface, I grown addicted to what

gets left and said in corners. My sister used to call me a professional ghost hunter for facts.

It wasn't wrong. But it made everything else harder, the bills, the sleep, the feeling of being

known by anyone except the stories themselves. Still, I was good at the small rituals.

In the months before I booked my ticket on 217, I let the room of the bus slip into my veins,

watched it take root. A news clipping surfaced in a closed forum, vanished after last bus.

Then another, on a conspiracy subreddit. I started calling the numbers listed in the obituaries,

tracing forum handles to real people. Most hung up quickly, others said it was a hoax.

One woman, the uncle of a missing passenger, broke down on the phone five minutes in.

I know you think it's just a story, she whispered. But the police didn't call back,

and when I found his voicemail that night, it sounded like he was underwater,

repeating a stop I'd never heard of. I posted anonymous flies and bus terminals around the city,

mostly at dawn, phone number written in block capitals.

Sometimes, the replies would come in the wee ire of static, heavy breeding,

once a series of short turns that mashed no known ringtone or emergency code.

I spent whole afternoon scrolling through ticket sale websites,

cross-checking names and dates, using burner addresses to order routes I would later cancel.

I pieced together a spreadsheet of missing persons which to my noyons,

included small handful with absolutely no recorded departure.

They'd been awaiting for the late bus, and then nothing.

The terminal security footage was grainy and started late, no glimpse of them boarding.

A catalogued contradictions, dead end by dead end.

The deeper I went, the less I wanted to tell anyone. I still tried.

My neighbor, Celaine, caught me once in the landing outside the apartment, my bag slung

over one shoulder, already half lost in headphones, leaving again as she asked.

Her eyes flicked past me, searching.

Here chasing something. It's just work.

I tried to say it lightly, but something in her frowned.

If they don't let it take you, she said at last, voice resigned.

She offered no further details, but left a small packet of Camel T outside my door the next morning.

Hacking for the troop if you could call it that was more reflex than anticipation.

Three shirts, two pairs of jeans, the handheld recorder, and a battered laptop.

I took the Polaroid of a childhood birthday into my case, not for luck, but because I hated

thinking it might get thrown out by mistake. I went to her last, feudal ritual,

walked the length of my apartment, making sure every light was off, then pressed my palm

to the glass and walked to the city chimbleau. Outside, the avenue was blue and empty.

I counted five steps to the curve and told myself quietly, as though promising someone else I'd

keep my promise this time. Observe a record, but don't get involved.

Missing people make bad company obsession worse.

The first bus terminal at 2.19am looked as I expected plastic chairs yellow to ivory,

the floor pocketmatch by a user spilled coffee and rests as feet.

The counter window shone a weird, artificial brightness that didn't reach the corners.

I waited with my duffel, noting which regular side newcomers and which held themselves

apart shoulders hunched, one hand always on the back. The man at the ticket counter thundered

my printout twice, weighing it as if expecting it to change my scan. His eyes darted up,

wide, then low, as if he might say something. He didn't. With a mechanical motion,

he slid the stub under the plexed glass, fingers lingering for an instant longer than

protocol required. The bus logo a wing wheel and faded purple wind from the side of the vehicle.

There was no enthusiasm among those who boarded, the process had the rhythm of awake,

shoes scuffing and faces mostly hidden by headphones or hair. Everyone seemed to track

the faces of them familiar. It left me hyper-aware of my own every step, every pause.

I found my assigned seat, but only after making an awkward loop through the narrow aisle,

twice blocked, first by an elderly woman digging for a lost coin, then by a teenage girl

gripping a grocery sack in her lap. Maybe it was nothing, but her glare followed me the rest

of that night. The first iron on board, nothing stood out except the almost religious

haste that overtook the bus at the start of each trip. But it didn't last long. Patons started

hinting themselves into view, as though the bus itself operated by secret overalls.

Some passengers, especially three, I recognized from the terminal boarded and arranged their

belongings with military precision. They always sat in the same seats, falling into ritualistic

postures, hats tilted, arms crossed, guessfixed head. Three rows from the back, the teenage girl,

who glared at me earlier, claimed a double seat and arranged plastic bracelets along the

windowsill. No one challenged her space. People glanced, but the seat beside her stood stubbornly

empty after two stops. The spot in front of her rotated, each new passenger would hesitate,

look uncertain and shrink toward the front again. The rest stops weren't what I expected.

At each one, there was always a seat left and filled when we pulled away, although an empty seat

should have been difficult to come by with the way we boarded. The driver, a huge man and a

navy windbreaker, would announce destinations with a practiced air, all scheduled stops,

and summons scheduled, please don't ask about the latter. If he caught you looking at his clipboard,

his smile faded quick. On the second rest break, an elderly man shuffled down the aisle carrying

a battered duffel. He gave nothing away, not even a glance, as he wordlessly exited into the night

while the rest of us seemed to collectively ignore his departure. I caught a glimpse of the

driver making a quiet note and a faded ledger three quick marks, then a line drawn through one.

When I checked the aisle, his seat was already wiped down, luggage soared away, as if the man had

never been on board. The bus rumbled back onto the road, every face tense somewhere. My own stub of

a ticket its date and time in faded blue, didn't match what was in my log.

Comparing the two, I discovered an accounted for transfers on my segment places I'd never

got enough, times the no longer made sense. My seatmate this time, a pale kid in a hoodie,

leaned over and whispered, some seats don't fill up twice. Before I could press him,

he climbed up, eyes drawn to the driver. I started tracking the bus radio off as drifting in during

stops, never at any schedule of rest point. Snapshots of static came layered with what could have been

clip voices, snatches of song, but nothing lasted long enough to capture. By how'd it, I fed everything

into the recorder, even then I knew enough to check what survived after the engine had drawn the

rest out. The mystery drew me down miles of unfamiliar stretches, but it never showed itself all at once.

Every night bled into the next, I woke up with crooks in my neck, the imprint of the seats full

leather etched into my cheek, and fragments of faces surfacing in blurry recollection as the bus slowed

into the door. To make a pattern clear, I rode different segments each night, boarding and

rebording at towns whose names seemed built mostly of consonants, the welcome signs weathered

to legibility. I rotated my seat one night far forward, listening to the hiss of the brakes as

the driver scanned the road for wildlife, another, tucked behind the rear wheel well, where vibrations

twisted the static of my recorder into rough, throbbing bass. Each loop produced confusion. Old faces

seemed to return briefly, then vanished, when I least expected. My notes filled up, but their

evidence was thin. Only the regular's built up over time, and even then, sometimes one disappear

for three days' stretch, making me start and reject my files. Once, for passenger, I'd recorded

in detail more above the left eyebrow, freed University of Alberta Hoodie Vanished between towns.

No record remained on my notes, but I found a trace of his voice caught a single second of static,

barely audible and already half gone. Some nights, I pressed him a questions on the regulars.

Most merely blinked and turned away. At a tiny up was north of the river, I huddled in a seat

next to a college aged guy whose shoes had been freshly polished unusual for a bus rider.

He flinched when I introduced myself, but later, in the soft glow of a rest stop lamp, he leaned

closer. My cousin took this bus last spring, he matter of chewing at his fingernail.

He never called back. Dad says he ran away, but nobody runs from home without their wallet.

I pressed further, and he only repeated. There are always open seats, some you don't fell,

not twice. There was an old man too, thick neck and restless hands, who took turn dying

anybody who talked to the driver. I made the mistake of sitting near him once. He drew me close

with a question. Why are you here? When I dimmered, he shook his head, saying,

there are rules on night buses. You don't report what you didn't see. That's how you make a home.

You understand.

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance

with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first day?

Oh no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together.

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Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways.

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I spent days cross-referencing lists coming through bus manifests mailed by a cryptic contact at

a news group archive. Dades was scratched over, names inexplicably absent.

The paper trail bent subtly away from any coherent pattern.

On the phone with the bus company, the line would click dead after the first mention of

missing or unaccounted for passenger. When the conversation did continue, it became circular,

all purred calls followed, privacy laws prohibit details, all routes end on schedule.

Nothing more. Stopover Tans offered little solace.

At one point, I ducked into a backstreet diner to gather myself.

I found a bullet in board near the bathroom with cracked, rain warped missing flyers,

updated then stripped away week by week.

When I asked a waitress, her eyes flaked in my voice recorder.

She poured fresh coffee and leaned close.

Some of her stay missing, others know how to disappear the right way.

You want a vice, get off that bus. Out on the street, flyers,

lingered for up to three days before vanishing overnight.

I leaned against light posts and frozen dawn to record notes hoping to hear something I'd missed.

My knees ached. My breath became white and jagged in the scarf.

Exhaustions dot me, a lost track of days, the sun seemed to rise later on every segment of the

road. My dreams turned circular, endless I was struggling through freezing rain,

bus stations flickered by with unreadable signage vacant seats endlessly trading places.

Late one night, frigid and half lost, I replayed my notes, only to catch

echo of my own voice in them familiar phrasing, you were never here.

The words scraped raw against everything I tried to collect.

I'd never recorded that phrase.

The bus carved lines into my memory that refused to connect.

Sometimes, when a trip finished, I found myself staring at my notes,

unable to remember if the face next to me had been a real person or a trick of exhaustion.

At the back of one schedule, beneath the scroll's signature I didn't recognise,

someone had carved the same words with a key on knife, you were never here.

One night, fatigue dragging every muscle, I pressed into the cold seat just as the sky

decided to crack open with driving rain. The bus windows puckered with watery veins.

This time, I settled near the rear of sliding inside a woman whose hands clutched a

withered purse tied to her chest. She caught my eyes and pressed her lips together,

as a folding back truce that threatened to spill out.

A night thickened, the driver's announcements grew quieter,

and when we left a nameless hamlet, the engine didn't angle for the main road.

Instead, a veer of without warning onto an even gram,

a tire squalching through wet leaves and mud. An unscheduled stop was called by name one

not listed on any scheduled stall and from a terminal or found online.

The bus hiled on the shoulder nearer dark cops of trees.

Two regular's a man in walk boots in a sharp faced woman in a rink of frozen

the doors creaked open. Neither looked at the driver.

Instead, they glanced back at the rest of us, their faces bloodless beneath the

weak dome light. Ahosh fell as they stepped off, moving with an awkward determination into the

Mr. Trees. I strained to see where they went, but the night devoured them instantly.

For the first time, the driver's quiet voice carried back. You know the way. Don't get lost.

I raised my recorder, desperate to make sense of it all, but as I played the tape,

a peculiar echo filled the file of feedback loop that warped every voice,

even my own, for several minutes straight.

Called seat from the empty seat beside me, it felt momentarily as though someone

and scene had paused, pressing their palm to my shoulder before vanishing back into the gloom.

Trambling, I dared a question of the woman next to me. What happens to people who get off at

the unscheduled stops? Her reply was a whisper almost too low to catch. Those who get off

here aren't supposed to be remembered. That's the rule. Her eyes dug at mine with raw and

filtered fear. As the bus rumbled away, slick with rain and unspoken history, I flipped

through my notebook for solace. It fell open on a pair of blank, torn out pages.

Worched inside, a polaroid I didn't remember taking, a dark path winding into trees,

two retreating silhouettes swallowed by fog. I don't know how that picture came to be between

those pages what was meant not to be seen. Only that's something, or someone expected me to look.

The rumbling bus, the entered seat beside me, and the blank pages in my notebook thickened

the tension I'd only begun to trace. The rules were changing. And for the first time,

the boundary between witness and participant between hunter and hunted felt dangerously thin.

The rumbling bus, the emptied seat beside me, and the blank pages in my notebook thickened

the tension I'd only begun to trace. The rules were changing. And for the first time,

the boundary between witness and participant between hunter and hunted felt dangerously thin.

The rest of the journey blurred under the rain smeared window. My fingers toyed with the polaroid

tracing the glossy surface as if I could pull clarity from the milky edges of the photograph.

In the image, the pass wallowed by fog suggested a death that the camera shouldn't have captured.

There were no faces just the silhouettes, grainy, and spectral.

I tried to remember holding the camera, framing that shot, but nothing surfaced,

but a nervous tremor running along my spine. The bus rolled on. Every few minutes the wind

chilled wipe is shrieked, scraping rain away just long enough to reveal a slip of black top

and obsessive for a petition of passing reflectors. My seat may stay dead ahead,

Joe flexing, as if resisting the urge to turn and confess everything or nothing.

I stared at my own hands. I tried to remember Marion's advice, choose your seat carefully.

Other next time, my attention was threadbare. Each top, now teetered and the edge between

the routine and the forbidden. We dropped off three, picked up on a grizzle man who took his seat

without a word, scanning the rest of us like he was cataloging through its rather than strangers.

As the door has shut behind him, I listened from Marion's voice in the war of my recorder,

as if she might have somehow returned, but there was only wind and static.

At one point, the driver's crackling voice over the PA drew all heads higher.

If you're restless, now's your chance. We'll be here briefly, and then it's a long haul.

The stop was such a whisper of a town that no name marked the peeling sign,

just two yellow street dance flickered by the gas station,

their lighter warning more than a welcome. A handful of passenger shuffled off to smoke

or stretched their legs. I considered following, but something held me in the seat

the dull ache of caution where curiosity should have insisted. Instead, I changed tactics.

I'm clipping my badge from my coat pocket, I tucked it discreetly into the interior lining.

If pressed, I could say I was a graduate researcher. Maybe I was. His sounded better than

obsessive of the tape recorder. Then, taking the opportunity while the bus was empty,

I drifted down the aisle, glancing at seat backs for further clues.

Woh six and nine, identical receipts tucked into the gap between cushion and plastic frame,

faded a nearly tissue thin. I collected each, careful not to draw the eyes of the few remaining

passengers. Someone, maybe the same someone, had marked a looping spiral with a blue ballpoint

on both, a simple, a doodle perhaps a code. I slit them into an envelope, then leaned over,

pretending to be concerned about the seat's adjuster lever, while I checked the carpet for

anything else a key, a scrap of paper dropped at ease. Nothing. Returning to my seat,

I glanced again at the woman beside me. She was breathing for her nose, shallow and careful.

You ever see her again? I'd loaded before I could restrain myself. The woman who went to the back

I think her name was Marion. Her response was the faintest shake of the head,

lips barely parting. It doesn't matter once they're not here, that's how it goes.

Back in the road, every bounce enswerve seemed to carry fresh freight. My neck cramped.

My eyes burned. I forced myself to take stock, which fellow travellers had I seen before.

Who got on? Who got off? And who slipped away without quite being noticed?

I began drawing a crude map of the route, circling places where seat had emptied

without explicit explanation, adding dates. Rough times, descriptions fountall shirt,

hobnail boots, tinkling charm bracelet. One pattern emerged, the same handful seats in the back

third of the bus, especially on the left remained conspicuously empty after someone disembarked at

night. Replacements would approach, hesitate, then settle elsewhere. At least two, maybe three

regulars engaged in a silent choreography, has flitting from new arrivals to the empty seats,

shaking their heads. In my notes, I labeled these forbidden seats. I was starting to believe it

wasn't just superstition. Next, rest, stop our wayside diner. The rain lit up, air thick and

full of petrature. I slipped out, ordered coffee I didn't want, and left my recorder in my

cup pocket set to voice activity. The waitress tall and boned tire were a faded name badge,

Lucia. I tried a neutral opening. Bus got in late tonight. She studded my face. That time of year.

An older man at the jeep looks looked up as I asked what it was like, working nights along the bus

route. Everyone comes through here, he said, but didn't elaborate. His gaze drifting right past

my face, as he spoke. I toned to Lucia. Ever meet someone you knew wouldn't leave again,

someone who stayed behind. Her hand stilled at the dish rack. He should ask the fucks out back.

Been here long enough. They'll tell you what happens if you stay too long.

She didn't say it with malice or just resignation. I left a tip collect to my cup and waited in

the vestibule as the driver leaned against a gum machine, thumbing through his ledger.

I feigned looking for change, craning to see names or details, but he snapped the bookshop before

I could make anything out. His expression was not hostile just finished with fresh faces.

By the time we were rolling again, a strange numbness had spread from my scalp down my shoulders.

I wondered if the coffee had even tasted like coffee, or if it too, was simply an echo of a thing.

Out of sheer stubbornness, I popped open my laptop and crossed reference to seat numbers,

passenger descriptions, and time of disappearance. My spreadsheet didn't balance. There were

extra stubs, disappearances with no corresponding name and time stumps that reversed themselves overnight.

Once, a name I remembered copying from a Facebook memorial page was missing deleted as if I'd never

typed it. The chill of paranoia stalked me even back on the bus as I watched the windows reflect

only partial faces mine blurred with marians. I wanted to ask someone anyone if they remembered her,

but my throat closed. A teenage boy, maybe 15, caught me looking his way.

He clutched his phone tightly as if it could anchor him to the surface world.

Quietly, as the bus drifted through another name as town, he leaned over.

You shouldn't try to track it, he said, voice barely audible above the hump.

The more notes you keep, the easier it is for them to notice, paper-tip, all of it it should go blank

after a while. I almost laughed, but the tremble in his voice carried something sharp or a warning

or a memory. He twisted the cord of his ear buds and faced forward again, shrinking from my gaze.

An eye or later, the bus turned onto gravel row, dipping beneath the arch of trees black and by rain.

This was not on any official map, I was certain. I marked the time stamp on my recorder 3-17am,

a time when little is awake except regret or dread. The driver stopped with that preemble.

This time, no one announced a break. Instead, one passenger after another rose gathered their

things unactited, leaving only half a bus filled when we finally continued. I tried to photograph

the departures, but my phone glitch, camera lagging, each attempt producing blurry and

decipherable smudges. I grew more reckless, desperate for a crack in the surface. At the next

break, I cornered the red haired woman who always sat too behind a driver quiet tense presence

who kept her hands folded. You've seen people disappear right? I asked,

voice low, as I returned her forgotten umbrella at the door. She didn't deny it.

Don't make yourself a patent, she murmured. Once you do, it's easier for this place to decide

your part of the story, too. She closed her umbrella, brushed past, and stepped off into the dusk,

never looking back. Still, I pressed on. The next small turn off at the outline of a story I

hiked, shivering, to the old bust-eeper, drawn by a decade's old mural of the first bus across

the county's batons. As I waited for my ride to continue, I found a graying man mopping near the

restrooms humming off-key. I tried something different. You work here a lot of years. He didn't stop,

didn't even raise his head, but his voice drifted over. They make a sweep the seats twice every night,

empty ones in the ones that fell, never talked to the empty ones. That night, my dream snap would

distortion. I saw the inside of the bus seats running on forever every window looking out on

the same painted lines, the same vanishing horizon. People walked the aisle and dissolved as they

stepped away, their faces stretching into grey mist. Morning came. I bolted up her at hand to

throat, half-expecting to see those missing faces beside me. The bus had pulled over beside a

gas station, and for once, Dell summarized grey blood through the windows. In the half-flight,

my nose had changed to dates crossed out, times replaced by nuts and scribbles, a spiral

symbol inked from the page coroner, identical to the ones I'd found tucked in empty seats.

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on

car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date?

Oh no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together.

We're married. Need a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your leg anyways.

Only pay for what you need at Liberty Mutual.com.

Checking my phone, I saw a voicemail from a block number. When I played it, I heard

little beyond a flood of static until for a moment a voice hissed, you were never here,

clear than distant. I could almost have believed there was my own,

played back at some unnatural speed. My log from overnight had gapsires lost,

as if the record button had gone dead or the file over it in itself.

The more I tried to recall, the less sure I became whether I'd ridden through

the heart of the night or simply drifted along circuits of memory, the physical bus of rumour,

the rodent spooling and dreams. Exhaustion hollowed me out.

Each night, new obstacles. In one town, police tape cordoned off a terminal entrance,

the soul employee refusing comment beyond, just routine maintenance, bus still runs fine.

In another, a sheriff with a grey mustache kept his hand above his holster as I drifted too close,

his eyes unreadable in the light from inside his car. Yet the bus ran every night,

grimly punctual. It dropped me at its its where no cat waited, then accepted me again

I was later. Five built up, audio logs tangled with interviews and

fragments that never seemed to stitch together. When I returned one loop, so drained I only wanted

a shower and back out curtains, I found my own faded flyer in a trash bin outside the station,

my cell number crossed out, the word no return scrolled underneath. That shook me harder than I

expected. At the furthest northern point, frost clinging to the windows, the driver paused as

I boarded. He was sticking around, he commented, eyes like wet asphalt. For the first time,

his mouth thin at the corners. Some folks say until there's nothing left to go back to, watch

you us off. In that moment, my determination bent teetering into something darker. Was a

chronicler or soon to be chronicled. I thought of Marion's face, the regular's glances,

and the weight of the empty seat beside me. The next night, my plan's not tight as the cabin air,

I would plant an extra recording divisor pennell microphone inside my jacket sleeve,

a camberly visible in my phone case. Any proof, no matter how flawed, was better than nothing.

If the pattern wanted to erase itself, maybe I could catch the moment it did pin the shadow to

the wall. When I reborded, everything felt subtly off. The regulars arranged themselves in the

usual choreography, but their expressions were tense hostile, even. The woman with the weather

per studded me and looked away as a fimmergret. The driver flipped through manifest quickly,

as radio hissing and clipped bursts at intervals he alone seemed to mark.

As we left the city limits, falling into the darkness that had become more familiar than day,

I told myself to breathe to stay sharp, but adrenaline only goes so far.

Every house we passed, every closed gas station, was a place I could have chosen instead.

I pressed the button on my sleeve, felt the live charge of recording and blunder,

if I vanished tomorrow, whether anyone would notice, or if even my devices would turn up blank.

The next one's scheduled stop-loon is the final test. I tightened my coat faking nonchalance.

Every movement now felt fraught, I caught the teenagers eye again,

saw in his gaze the resignation of someone who stopped hoping for rescue.

The bus load, engine grinding into neutral. The woodster which we roll were blacker than

pitch, broken only by the windshield's faint beam. The regulars grew restless one

murmur to another, hands twitching as if to ward off something. At last the door gathed open.

This time, no one volunteered to rise. Instead, two of those I'd begun to think of as

for in-harbingers, a man with fog glasses and a woman with eye and gray hair stood together.

They didn't hurry, but neither did they pause.

Asking me, the man's coat brushed my knee, it was incredibly cold, almost impossibly so.

As they exited, the driver's voice floated under his breath, you know the way, don't get lost.

I pressed the phone camera to the window, tried to snap a texture of the departure,

but again the image blurred, a screen flickered, and when the photo saved, it showed only static,

fractured white streaks against a black field. We pulled away.

Silence rained until the next stop, when the teenager pressed his hand to his eyes and muttered,

less of us now, won't take long. I scribbled everything in my log.

When I tried to play back the audio recording later, the device jerked, skipped,

and a deep echo roared beneath my words, wiping out tall minutes of dialogue and a wave of thick

distortion. My own seat felt cold, slippery, with the residue of something I couldn't name.

The notebook in my lap looked thinner than I remembered, the polaroid tucked inside feeling

almost hot to the touch. Checking my page, I found not words but not of frantic lines feverish,

spiraling marks like those from the forbidances. I'd ifte tount me, one last slip of paper fell

from the crease. On it, in the same blocky hand as the no-returned scrolled on my discarded fly,

a single instruction, don't try to leave a mark. The road ate it, my will. I looked into the window,

met my own face refracted and doubled the watcher becoming a ghost in someone else's story.

Each sign, every deeter, every brush glance hinted that what mattered wasn't just that people

vanished, but that nobody, nowhere, wanted to remember the tones of their goren.

And even as I tried to scribble a final description for the night's something,

anything, to fix my memory in place I heard, caught in the half broken hum of the bus radio,

a quick flicker of my own voice, already fading into static.

Staring at the spiral marks etched into the notebooks page, I fought to steady my breathing.

The last Irish heron of unscheduled stops, thaves and faces, ruined audio, honoured me,

threading every sense with a tartness that no amount of rationalizing hallucin.

The bus's engine droned, carrying us deeper into a blackness and yielding except for the flare

of passing mile-puss, seven digits wiped away by ray and then gone. My hands shook as I thumped

through the rest of the notebook, desperate to retrieve the lost words, the careful chronology,

the faces that weren't settled in memory. I found myself counting, how many stops since

Marion disappear? How many since the twin departures of the Ironhead woman and her shadowy

companion, the axle of their absence now radiating out in silent consequences I could not pass?

Around me, tension shivered through the remaining passengers. The teenager, with the earbuds

called close to the window, profile ghosted in the reflection, lips drawn tight.

The woman with the weathered purse avoided my glance now, as if even acknowledging my scrutiny

might draw a tension that neither of us could afford. My coat felt heavier,

so in despite the force that I cut in through the aisle. I wiped dampness from my brow and tried

again to raise my recorder. It's red LED blinked erratically, sputtering off whenever I press play.

I shifted, listened for conversation, anything to ground myself but where,

earlier, the busted buzz with low whispers or the rustle of snacks, now only the hum of the tires and

the muted cuff of the driver sounded in the gloom. My own reflection interrupted itself in the glass,

a jittery pale figure haunted by night. I wanted to ask anyone, even the regulars what was

happening behind these rituals, how the spiral symbol kept migrating from seat to seat.

But when I opened my mouth, the words thickened and died on my tongue. The driver's eyes,

catching mine in the mirror, blocked any impulse to risk it. A fresh wall of rain spattered the

windows, the sudden clamber making me flinch. The sound felt like static, carrying with it memories

of the warp tape, marion's plea, marion's absence, and the tonal void where her warning should have been.

In that silence, I pressed my head against the seat and forced myself to recall what

our new names faces, seat numbers. This bond, loose as beats on an unstrong chain. When a regular

short, heavy set, and perpetually glancing at the aisle behind him stood up at the next rest stop,

I tracked him with furtive hope. He didn't look back as he stepped into the rain,

duffle back swinging, but the driver again made a single tick in his battered ledger.

The door closed, hissing defeat. As the bus pulled away, that seat remained empty.

No one remarked, not even in a glance. I checked my phone no signal. My backup recorder,

almost out of storage, flashed its warning. I hit stop and rewind, letting the tapes

bin under my thumb. What came back was a sputtering, hollow version of my own voice,

distorted enough to raise the hair on my neck. Be count the faces, keep your seat, remember

who you aren't here. Another five miles, and both the teenager and the post-clutching

woman stiffened as the bus jolted. A scheduled stop. No announcement this time, just a bus

outing, headlight swallowed by a stand of trees. I leaned forward, hot ramping, and caught the drivers

I long enough for him to offer a thin lip smile. The regular's looked away as I tried to catch

their attention. The only acknowledgement was the iron head woman's empty seat left as a warning

I didn't know how to interpret. Resisting exhaustion, I pressed my palm to the glass,

purring out into the mist. Nothing but dripping branches and the reflected bulk of the bus.

My sleeve frickle was cold. When I glanced down, the spiral from my notes now seemed to shimmer,

and possibly in the condensation on the window. I recoiled only for the teenager to look up,

catching my reaction. He mowed, account, and pressed a trembling hand to his seat belt as the

bus rolled on. That word it dug at me. Count the seats, stops the missing. My head filled with

lists, all incomplete, each one to remind of my own helplessness. The cost of being a witness here

was becoming clear. You tried to document only to lose track. You tried to follow only to fold.

The bus was different now, every sound shopper, the light harsher, shadows deeper.

If there were rules before, I sense they had shifted. As the mile slipped by, an illicit panic began

to mount not just in me, but among the others. We were not stopped, but neither were we simply moving.

The next scheduled stopper legitimate small town station came a moment. No one boarded.

There's left in the bus exchanged where he looks. The silence crew thicker, stretching almost

until I imagined it snapping. The driver's next announcement broke the pole, all passengers,

keep your seats until further notice, next and to falls longer than usual. Pay attention.

No one moved, not even to visit the restroom. I tried to focus on the sharpest of the seats

that burn in my thighs, a shiver in my hands. But my mind kept drifting to the spiral,

the empty seats, the torn pages in my notebook. The spiral I realized now repeated in my dreams

and the scribbles at the margins and the warp photos that registered nothing but static.

I tried to review my photos for clues anything missed but found more glitches.

The faces of those who left with streaks, mere shadows, or washed up smudges.

My phone vibrated and died, it's battery dropping from 40% to empty in space of a single minute.

I turned to the regulars for help, but they looked through me, as though my presence was

unknown variable that long since decided not to acknowledge. Paranoi press close,

had I imagined my own arrival. Was that substitution for a vanished rider? My own follow

already walked and were written by this route. The next rest stop, again unnamed, arrived with no

warning. The bus idled under a door orange glow. The driver unlocked the door and a sharp

face man the same as before, I was sure exited, glancing at the ledger as if for permission.

The regulars tense numerous times now, each departure a roll of loaded dice.

At the mirror in a cramped laboratory, I splashed water on my face and met my own and even gays.

A strange numbness spread along my jaw, my pulse a doll, wrong pattern. When I lean forward

checking for spirals, I may be just for evidence that I still cast a reflection I saw,

faintly another figure at my shoulder. It resolved into nothing with a jerk.

Returning to my seat, breath shallow, I caught the teenager stirring at me again.

You keep in track. His voice was flat, soft, almost older than it should be.

I nodded, hesitating.

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on

car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date?

Oh no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together.

We're married. Ah!

Meet a human, him to a bird.

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways.

Only pay for what you need at Liberty Mutual.com.

Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.

Trying. Stop, he said, looking away.

Or you'll be next. Despite myself, I scribbled his words into my notes.

As I did, the pen falter, ink stuttering across a line already written my own words over written,

looping into eligibility. Us my anxiety spiked, a message appeared,

it's called in the spiral margin of my notebook in a hand that was mine,

do not attempt to record this ride. The warning sent a shock through me.

It felt not only like advice, but as if it were a trigger.

I tried to remember what Marion told me at the beginning. Her message was in distinct

choose your seat carefully, don't move once the ride begins. Somehow, I knew I'd already broken

the rules and the consequences were closing in. Every mile, the bus felt colder, the lights

and familiar repetition of the ordinary mate sinister by endless permutation.

I feverishly checked old logs and new recordings searching for a sound, a voice,

anything interrupted. File stuttered, overlapping in impossible ways.

One, meant to be an ambient note of highway noise, replayed Marion's whisper walk by static,

you'll lose your seat, they'll write you out. As shivered. My hands clumsied,

called drop the recorder onto the seat. It rolled and landed in the aisle, where it abruptly ceased

to function, tips pulling out with defendous send of ozone and burnt plastic. I fumbled to

retrieve it as the bus hit another rut. In that instant, two figures the teenager and the new

rival an older man with his guard jaw whispered rapidly the voices hitching over key words.

Don't let him ask you the teenager said to the other. He's trying to map where they set,

that's how it comes for you. I interject it desperate. What does it want? The bus, the company,

the driver. The older man's jaw ticked. Company just lets it run, you got to make a deal sometimes,

that's all anyone learns. The teenager bristled. Don't talk about it, not now. But the older man

persisted, fixing me with bloodshot eyes. If you're not gone by daily, it means you're part of it,

that's dead, that's trade. The word trade ran in my mind like a bell. I stared at my hands at a

pile of failed evidence. Why me? His shrug was fatalistic. You're still here to ask, most don't

get that far. I felt a cold wind from my bones. Something had changed again, the balance of risk,

the direction of attention. The bus felt smaller, the world closeted tight. The driver called over

the intercom, voice roar, there was only one more scheduled stop before the trades began again,

be ready. No one stood. The engines hung rose, and the air compressed as if each breath cost

more, each minute risked being the last. Alone with my fear, I realised the only way forward

was through the heart of the process. I would have to confront the bus and its rules head on,

whatever the cost. I returned to my seat, and we'll intercede ground, and tried to piece

together the last shirts of logic as a rain chute at the glass. My own voice, distant, seem

to echo back at me a warning, a plea of forgetting. I stared at the spiral. The only way out,

it seemed, led through the centre. The bus engine coughed as we shuddered past another

black stretch of highway, every light outside, bending eerily through the fog at windows.

My teeth ate with the cold, but I wouldn't give in to sleep. If this place fed on distraction,

a mindless drift through night I would stay awake, would try to see each passage and transaction

with open eyes. It was a frail plan, but it was mine. As the next miles crawled,

and the regular was pressed closer to one another, a shift overtook the atmosphere of anticipation

knotted with dread. I caught scraps of mud and conversation between two older women.

Low and urgent, he's getting close. Not yet, but soon. If he asks your name, don't give it.

To my left, the space where Marion had once sat and now seemed to flicker at the edges of my

vision, docker, and somehow deeper than the rest. In a sudden spasm of defiance, I leaned toward

the driver, raising my voice just enough to test the bounds, or you required to keep a record,

manifest, names all of it. The bus jerked as the driver's eyes met mine in the shallow reflection

of the mirror. There are two records he said speaking to the glass rather than to me,

one for the company, and one for us. When I press, he didn't elaborate, but a hush-ledified

behind me, an admitting of a truth I sense but could not yet see. A younger woman in a faded

raincoat turned to me now of desperation all over her face. They told me to switch places,

just for a minute she choked. I lost something at the back, but when I tried to come back,

my seat was full and I couldn't remember why I got on, I couldn't even, she sobbed covering

her mouth. Comfort was pointless, all I could offer was prisons. I saw it happen, you're not alone,

I whispered. She shook her head. I can't leave, nobody leaves once they trade this seat.

She said it as if courting scripture. Around us, regular speared over seat backs, measuring my reaction,

gauging the risca foreign body disrupting the unspoken accord. Outside, another astound of trees

bled into the road cyclone. The bus low, doors hissing open where there should have been nothing but

dark. The driver called, half-song, half-command, if you're not staying, step out now.

No one moved to get the cold sharpened. Meanwhile, beside my jacket, the sun in my vibrated

as if nudged. I twisted it discreetly hoping the battery would outlast the rest of the ride.

The spiral in the condensation thickened then vanished. In its place, a cluster of fingerprints

too small for any present hand appeared briefly. My breath hitched every nerve wired for flight.

I realized no one was getting off anymore. This time, the rule was to stay.

It was time for revelation. The driver let off the brakes, rolling us forward.

His voice, again, he growl now less call, next breaks the one you don't come back from.

Passengers braced, some gripping the sides of their seats with wet knuckles, others reciting half

remembered prayers under their breath. The air pressed closer. When we stopped again, not at town,

but a desert across in flant by broken posts and remnants of faded tape, the regulars began to

shift with a purpose that made my heart thump. It wasn't just random exodus, now it was selection.

Herrings and small groups exchanged subtle signals, nods, clanses, cover hand off of a plastic

token or a slip of what looked like a bus transfer. Two at a time, the rows are moved toward the door.

The man with the scarred jaw blocked the aisle behind them, while the driver remained impassive

behind his partition. From the opposite row, a woman her eyes read, lipped pressed to a cracked

photo caught my gaze and jerked her chin toward the door. You have to choose, she breathed though

her words seemed echo backwards as if delayed by seconds or years. Choose what?

My voice cracked. The boy in earbuds, visible now with one removed, said,

who's written down? Who's not? The currents went through the bus, pressure, accusation,

a fearful calling. The scarred man advanced eyes on me. You're the one who collects the

stories, your seats not yours. It was happening. I felt, in that slow, stretch moment, the entire

architecture of the rut rearranged itself to focus on me. The regulars gaze, the empty seats,

the largest silent marksaw coalesced. I was no longer an observer. It was my slot to fill,

my name to erase, my debt to pay. They hind me, the driver called, the deal stands, one goes,

one stays, choices aren't made twice. Something shifted. The window beside me crackled

heat, then cold, that a rush of static like a shout beneath the wind. My hands frozen,

trembling closed over my notebook and phone just as both screened, went black,

it ate a white, every word and sound rendered nothing. Others in the aisle crowded nearer.

In a kind of terrified chorus, voices overlapped. He wrote it down, that's how they know.

Trit only worker for name is lost for every name saved. Never let your seat be counted.

I felt sick as if I had crossed an invisible boundary I could never cross. The door open,

drawing mist and the suggestion of voices from the trees. Someone has to leave the driver

and honed. I realized, in that moment, that the only escape it was designed to be a forgetting.

The choice offered was as real as a story that ends mid-sentence so release if I surrendered my

own evidence to the system for erasure if I refuse. The regula is parted, framing a corridor

straight to the exit. My heart batted itself against my chest as the cold mist rose from the open

door, culling over shoes, swallowing out the bottom steps. I rose in slow defiance fingers cold

but steady on the notebook by one shield, my curse. As I took a step toward the aisle,

the teenager's hand shot out, grabbing my arm, eyes frantic. It's not worth it, don't make the

tree just sit, act like you never left. I should come off, voice shaking. If I stay, I become part

of the forgetting, if I go, will anyone remember? No one answered. The spiral pressed at the edge

of my vision, vortex of loss and mourning. The driver stowed, closing the ledger, eyes hard.

He get the choice, record nothing, or walk out and lose the rest, decide now. I hesitated,

notebook held close. The pressure of expectation became almost physical, I could feel the shape of

hundreds of forgotten stores, some like marines, pressed down into the seams of these cushions,

the bones of these seats. Let him go, someone whispered. It's his turn. My knees shook as I

forced myself forward, through the corridor of regulars toward the source of the cold.

Fog invaded the aisle, thinning the air, erasing all color. My wild narrowed to the spiral,

and my palm, the blank faces on either side. At the door, the driver silent and plackable

waited, ledger balanced on his thigh. If you leave, you take the silence with you, he warned.

I felt the weight of the bus behind me, all its debts and paid, its ledgers unbalanced.

And then, through the fog, Eglim's marion, her forearm translucent, wearing that same haunted

expression from our first meeting. Her mouth moved, forming words without sound. Though I couldn't

hear, I felt the shape in my mind, don't let go. Tears pulled in my eyes hard against the cold.

The drivers with pressed in, walk out, and the ledger closes, including your name.

For the first time, I realized there would be no record, no trace, if I went.

Everything would be wiped my notes, my tapes, my own memory, perhaps. The demand was stark,

trade one erasure for another, legacy for oblivion. The only thing I still possessed

was the power to decide what, or who, would be remembered. I looked down at the polaroid clutch

in my hand. It was fading already losing shape, the solwits dissolving into mist. The bus, the

regulars, the ledger, the sights of trades all of it perched on the brink of blankness. My final

act had to matter. Suddenly, the ledger's nap shut. The driver's glare grew fierce.

Choose now, he said, Vos like gravel. Bo this ride never ends. A raining rose in my ears.

I drew a quivering breath in, with a branch of wool, jammed the ruined recorder,

notebook, and polaroid deep into the seat cushions, tearing the seam wide open with my nails.

If the bus wanted oblivion, let it have the objects not the memory. Then I spun, lunched down

the steps out into the fog. A rush of icy air hit me, visions whirling. For a moment, the world

fractured bus lights trishados, ledger spiral flickering like broken film. My legs pumped down the

stretch of broken pavement blind and aimless, since as fairly. All around, the sound of the bus

folding up behind me, door hissing, engine idling, a mantra, never here, never here. As I

collapsed into the mud beyond the reach of the headlights, my head split with pain then the world

narrowed and faded, and dug. There's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone

customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at

a comedy show. Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date?

Oh, no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together.

We're married. Need a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways.

Only pay for what you need at Liberty Mutual.com.

When I surfaced again, no idea how long after I was lying on the crack shoulder near a decommissioned

stop sign, morning just beginning to bleed into gray clouds. My hands were empty. No notebook,

no phone, not even a stub of the ruined recorder. My jacket was turned inside out, pocket's empty,

spiral symbol written faintly on the line. I stumbled to my feet shivering uncontrollably and

staggered along the roadside until I reached a town whose name I'd never heard spoken

aloud. No one greeted me. The face in the diner mirror was my own, but drawn shallow,

as if I'd lost years at a single night. In the weeks after, I hunted for clues.

The local authorities denied the midnight bus ran the far north. The company listed no route

number 217. My contact at the archive previously so eager now said nothing, but out of office

replies. Familiar flyers appeared in new places, always ripped away the next day. Of those

I'd interviewed, none answered calls. Numbers were disconnected or routed to voicemail.

The emails bounced, subject lines were written as error codes. No one seemed willing or able to

remember my face. Attempting to reconstruct the journey, I found every file corrupted,

every back blank. The photos had erased themselves, overwritten by gray, spiral pat and pixel wash.

At last, in a hollow of a non-script motel room shivering under a humming radiator,

I confronted the only evidence that remained a half gone spiral drawn against my will in the

centre of a fresh notebook. From then on, my sleep filled with the sound of bus wheels on endless

asphalt, the sense of eyes watching from empty seats, the shiver of cold as doors opened in fog.

I woke each day unsure if I belonged in the world I returned to. When I caught my reflection,

sometimes, for a split second, Marion's face flickered back. I made my choice the record was gone,

but I remembered at least a piece enough to warn. One evening, sorting through the one bad left

me a discovery. Tucked in the side pocket, a bus ticket stubbrowed 217, no date, no destination,

only a faint penciled spiral on the back. It felt as heavy as a promise.

I placed it on the table and pressed record on my new voice device, a fresh tape, just to prove

something still stuck. The machine-word. At first, only an ambient hand the radiator,

the faint tap of rain at the window. Then, underneath, almost too quiet to notice,

their mistakeable rumble of a bus engine, voices ghosted through static, one after the other,

like an echo pull from miles of blacked up. At the very end, before the tape ran out,

I clipped static lace fragment to my own voice, dragging the words from somewhere not entirely my own.

In our boardings. In the moment the tape fell silent, I realized I would always carry the

emptiness of that cold dial, the ledger's shiver, the spiral's gripper reminder that somewhere

the route never ends, and someone always counts the seats. I quietly reached over,

flicked off the recorder, and listened to the rain. I quietly reached over,

flicked off the recorder, and listened to the rain. Outside,

dust pressed its chill against the windows. I hadn't moved in iris, just perched

on the thin edge of the motel bed. She was still damp from the russet, the spiral mocked up

coiled between my fingers. My skin still prick with the call from that final night,

my ears strummed in the silences, as though the bus engine still idled somewhere nearby,

purring a lawn or rudder could no longer trace. As darkness settled, I cycled through every

folder and voiced no-died managed to salvage. Each file glitched, time-stemped by corrupted data,

content dissolving into static. Where once there had been fragments of marines warning,

now only pauses, a muffled gas, a surface tension that threatened to snap at any word not chosen

with the greatest care. My written logs, what remained of them offered no comfort.

Some engines appeared to be in another hand, some were blanks safe for a penciled spiral press

so hard to tore the page. My gut still chowned from the last moments in the bus. When I tried to

replay the sequence to fix each detail in place I found myself snouted by gaps. I remembered the door

opening, the passenger forming a corridor with the tin stairs, the driver's ledger slamming shut.

Then the sprint through a fog so dense it collapsed the night into fragments of sound and smell,

diesel and melty mud cold up past my ankles, the taste of adrenaline and tear.

But what came after? How I'd made it to safety, my jacket empty, my mind just clear enough to

fumble out of the darkness and into town. Each time I pressed against those memories,

they seemed to retract fluttering back into the spiral at my palm. I stared at the ticket-stub

tracing the spiral markets grooves fend under at the part of my thumb. Sometimes when I focused,

the leap seemed almost to pulse, hinting at things and done, a cycle unfinished.

I shivered and let it fall to the covers. That night brought no real rest. My dreams were

rubbed to the highway to the cold aisle and the empty seats. Marion's face flickered at the

edge of sleep, her mouth forming silent words on the other side of the bus window. In between flashes,

I caught sight of my own reflection and, sometimes, the teenage passengers, faces that blowered

and reformed. Always a new seat and a new ledger, the spirals reappearing in dust or condensation

are the worlds of the bus ceilings' cheap plastic fans. When the sun finally bled through the

thin curtains, I rose hollowed by insomnia and a hunger I couldn't name. On the nightstand,

the recorder and stub-weighted inert. An impulse drove me, I had to know if I had really a

skit or if the ride was still happening somewhere behind my eyelids. The town outs I gave nothing

away. People milled along cock sidewalks, headed for shift work or half-lit laundromats.

I walked up and down the length of the main drive twice, dodging the gaze of the lone patrol car

parked by the diner. I ducked into the little bus station just a windowed kiss can three plastic

seats bolted to the fore hoping for any sign of an official manifest, any schedule that might pin

the route, turn rumoured to evidence. Behind Plexiglass, the clerk glanced at my ticket stop,

her expression going hard and polished. That route doesn't run anymore, she said,

voice flat. I searched her eyes, press, you ever see people bored? Never come back?

She tapped her pen jawline tense. If they did, it's not my business some rides you don't talk about.

I left feeling the static coil again between my ribs. The ear held the hush of secrets of people

playing by rules learned the hard way. I tried calling my old contact at the news archive,

the line mind to a tone that wasn't standard to some blend between an error and a warning I couldn't

pass. I texted to Teenage's number, saved in my phone on instinct, but the screen flash failed to

send. Each ally each voice from before it vanished returned away, leaving behind only the

outline of a network faint like footprints just before Rainer races them. Back in the motel room,

my coffee cold at the windowsill. I watched droppers chase each other down the pain, feeling time

atle again. I opened my email to draft article sat on send, flagged by the system as insufficiently

substantiated. Attached was green shots, each fussed by a compression artifact or glitched

into the spiral motif, names in the text order corrected to blank spaces or strange strings

of punctuation. The world was winnowing the record, brushing away my attempt to capture what I'd

seen. Exhausted, I lay back and let the drone of the radiator fill the silence. But a chill crept

up my spine, as if the bus itself reposed beneath the skin of reality, idling just past the edge

of my perception. Each time a truck passed on the highway, I have expected to hear the hiss of

breaks to see a dome-life flicker through the curtains. How many others had been left in this day's

evidence erased, voices harsh, stories deleted at the root. I tried to recall faces.

Marien, the teenage boy, the ex-cop with his thousand yard stare, the iron-haired woman,

the regular as whose patterns I'd map but whose names I'd never secured a nink.

My mind skipped, resisting clover. Maybe the spiral was not just a warning, but a mechanism

every time I traced it, I lost another detail. Maybe the only way out was to stop remembering

to let the patterns pull and curl back into itself. A tap at the window brought me upright heart

jolting. Just a tree branch, shuddering in the gust, but the shock lingered. I kept the curtains

drawn for irres. The town remained silent on the subject of the bus. At the diner, the waiters

refilled my mug with a side-long glance. Stormcoming, she said, looking at my hands rather than my face.

Some nights, fucks just don't come home right. You know what I mean. I nodded, unable to

summon words. She wiped the formiker in slow, looping motions as spiral traced and consciously

as she turned away. Paranoid thickened. I watched faces at the windows, convinced that if I lost

myself in any one expression looked too closely or too long, I'd see a familiar absence.

It wasn't just that people were being erased. They wanted to disappear, or were being nudged

to accept it, or had given up fighting the current that drew them away. Perhaps, I thought,

survival meant learning to pastor a notice, to let the spirals into droids circle closed and walk

away before her own name bent and broke. But something resisted. Each moment the spiral faded,

as scribbled a description in my new notebook short, clipped stubborn. Route 217, no map, the ledger

with named cost out, passenger, marine, middle age, last scene asking for seat trade, the warning,

never keep track of more than you can forget. With every entry, I half expected the lions to vanish,

in clifting off the page like condensation of cold glass. Yet they remained for now stubborn mocks

against the void. The bus, the spiral, the ledger, the fading faces the precedent the edges of my

thoughts. They thought, night, a hum of traffic on the highway dwindled to nothing. The motel radiator

ticked uncertainty. I powered up my recorder, pressed play, and set the stub on the shelf beside

me. Thottness killed at the corners of the ceiling. And then, through the static, a sound the bus

engine, distant but distinct. Voices layered inside the hump, reciting patterns, negotiating trades,

whispering secrets just out of reach. My own voice murmured on the tape the memory of boarding,

of marians warning, of the door closing on fog and fear. I listened, held for at, but the echo of

my own investigation looped back on itself. As the tape word, I realized that the voices

went only strange as they were versions of myself flickering through the sequence of vanish seats,

recorded and erased in tandem with everyone I tried to remember. My throat tightened around a horrible

thought, no matter what route I rode, I would always circle back to this witness to disappearances,

agent of forgetting, participant in rituals older than tickets or transfers. My ledger, too,

could be closed at any moment, the choice might not be mine at the end after all. A little knock at

the door. I startled, nearly dropped in the recorder. Tearing through the peephole, I saw a

figure hunched against the rain, face bloated by the security glass. They left after a moment,

but on the welcome out, I found a blind piece of printer paper. Drawing with a finger to trace

and do, the spiral, ghostly and insistent. No signature. No instruction. Defeated, I returned

inside, flicked on the lamp and watched the spiral evaporate. I realized that the bus line would

keep running, would always find new riders, and that a cost of knowing would always be a risk of

sea-traded, a ledger marked for name struck from the record of who returned. For one desperate second,

I wanted to burn the stop and no book, the tape. But I held back. Maybe some remnant of the story

would call around, would survive inside a warning, a late-night story shared over coffee a passing

mention in an old article's comments. Maybe the spiral could end with me. As the clock ticked toward

dawn, I faced the window tracing the pattern of the rain. The highway called, faint but steady,

a line I would not travel again at least not as a passenger. The spiral, the ledger, and the

empty aisle haunted the edges of sleep. All I could do was refuse to forget, even if the world

itself conspired to brush my memory away. In the earliest haze of mourning, as a rain-slackened,

I knew I'd been marked. The feeling with fade perhaps disappeared. But tonight, as dusk fell in

the first bus engines rumble beyond air-shot, I would remember the price of the trade, and the

lesson the spiral taught, some rides off a no-return. With a steady a hand and I expected, I

logged at one last entry, a spiral of words that refused to vanish, however many times I checked.

That was all the survival I could claim. The highway would eat its own, I would let it,

and move on, or so I told myself. But I went to sleep with the still press beneath my pillow,

listening for the next echo from a night that never ended. And that is the end. Thank you for

listening, and I will see you in the next one.

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on

car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date?

Oh no, we help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together.

We're married. Ah!

Meet a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your league anyways.

Only pay for what you need at Liberty Mutual.com.