What's The Worst... Chapter 08

The bus swung into the stop, first the brakes hissing and then the hydraulics of the lowering front suspension.

Dorothy wasn’t alone at the stop so she held back to let the younger, faster and more intolerant folk jostle their way forward.

As she waited, she looked up at the top deck windows and was surprised to see a face that seemed sort of familiar. There was no point waving as the face was looking ahead rather than down.

Dorothy boarded the bus, carefully presenting her bus-pass to the driver; he scrutinised the document equally carefully before nodding his assent that she be allowed to proceed.

Normally she would have made straight for the first available seat, but her curiosity had been piqued and she made for the stairwell instead. As soon as she put her foot on the first step she felt the bus begin to accelerate away from the stop; so much for the driver making sure that all passengers were safely seated. In parallel she could hear Ira’s voice in her head “Go steady, no jumpin’ on or off the bus while it’s still movin’...” She grasped the hand rail firmly and continued her swaying ascent.

As she reached the top of the stairs she could see the dark haired girl in profile listening to the fairer one. From this angle the face seemed less familiar, but there was still something...

Dorothy decided not to introduce herself, she chose to sit a couple of rows further back and rack her brains for a name.

As usual, Clare was chattering on and Trisha was only occasionally adding a gentle and irregular commentary on the stream of consciousness assaulting her ears.

They’d been friends for years and in all that time Trisha couldn’t honestly remember Clare ever being quiet for any considerable period, and certainly never at a loss for words in a conversation.

Sometimes this had been a little problematic, especially when teachers had placed an unreasonable demand for silence upon her. Invariably Miss Smith and Miss Hathaway had assumed that Trisha was equally complicit in the oral rebellion and consigned them both to detention.

On the whole though it was a good relationship, both of them shared a high degree of empathy with their fellow man, or woman; and Trisha was a more reserved sort of person, happy to listen to those around her, providing they weren’t talking ‘Henry-speak’.

Henry-speak was characterised by a number of things; it mainly involved a single subject… Henry, it generally described events with dubious fidelity, it was punctuated by an inappropriate honking, snorting laugh and it generally repeated after about a half dozen anecdotes.

Dorothy couldn’t quite make out what the girls were talking about but that probably wouldn’t have helped anyway.

The “Bus Stopping” light came on; Dorothy decided that if the girls got up she would say something; but they both appeared oblivious to anything but each other.

Dorothy rocked back slightly in her seat as the bus accelerated again; she was convinced that she never felt the motion this much on the lower deck.

As the bus rolled around another corner the sun swung from coming in through the side windows to coming through the front window, and then there was shadow. As this shadow fell across the girls Dorothy gasped and froze in her seat.

In that instant of relative darkness the fairer one turned, still apparently talking to her friend, and stared directly at Dorothy; dark blood bubbled from her grinning mouth, her eyes rolled back in her head and sank into their hollowing sockets, and her skin turned a deathly pale and sagged from brow, cheek and jaw.

The sounds of the day were drowned out; all Dorothy could hear was the whispering of a thousand silent voices and a distant screaming.

Dorothy could feel fear and panic rising in her mind; this was not like seeing; this was something else entirely; this was ‘connected’. The world around the grinning death mask before her started to darken further, to lose cohesion, to fall away. Dorothy could feel her grip on herself begin to loosen...

The bubbling mouth fell wide open and began to scream, not an incoherent utterance of pain but a phrase,
“HELP ME!!!!!!!!!!”, repeating it over and over again... and as recognition dawned Dorothy’s world went dark.