Short Scary Stories

The Passenger.

"So...." The voice paused. "What exactly happened here?" The rain had been beating down all day long. It was late by now and the weather reports had said that there was no sign of it stopping any time soon. Not only was it late, it was also wet and cold, and if those weather reports were to be totally believed, it was about to get a whole lot colder too.

There was just the deafening sound of the rain beating down and no answer to the question. "What happened here?" Again, there was just the sound of rain, if it wasn't for that sound there would have been nothing more than a dramatic silence as the young woman looked up. In front of her was a tall man in his 40's. He looked friendly enough. But it was hard to tell in the dark, in the rain and with only the light from his car headlights behind him illuminating him like something from a bad science fiction movie.

She had been sat at the roadside in half in the car, sat on the passenger seat with the door open, her feet on the tarmac partly shielded by the roadside and the metal barrier alongside the car, elbows in her lap almost hugging herself and her head bowed forward, her hair soaked by the relentless rain, droplets and streams of water trailing down her face, her makeup smudged and running down her cheeks. But now she was looking up, squinting into the light, against the water in her eyes, shivering and murmuring softly under her breath.

"I wasn't there...I don't know" Over and over.

He couldn't be sure if she was talking to him, herself or if she had lost her mind. "Hello?" He said, almost asking if she was there in the same reality as him. She looked up again, shuddering as though she'd been slapped and bought back down to earth. She just stared at him through panda like blackened eyes, soaked and obviously distressed. There was that silence again, broken only by the rain, and as if by a strange coincidence a faint rumble of distant thunder.

She blinked a few times and gave a seemingly inquisitive "hmmmm?"

"So, what happened?" He asked again, his tone of voice was still friendly and warm. "Are you...."He paused before adding the word "hurt?" There was another crack of thunder. It made him jump a little and showed him to be not so much vulnerable but to at least have some humanity about him. He looked up and around himself and sighed at the weather. It had been raining like this all day long, and it had been a long day, uneventful and monotonous. It always was in this area, not quite the town, not quite the countryside but still within easy reach of those pounding nightclubs and the middle of nowhere. He wanted to get back home to his house, his dog, his TV to check on the football results as he'd missed yet another match due to work commitments. But it was just typical that the evening would get interesting right at the end of his working day. A working day that had seemed to last around 30 years.

The car she sat in was pretty much wrecked. It was an old blue Fiesta that probably should never have been on the road. And other than it's now wrecked state it wouldn't have taken Jeremy Clarkson to spot this car had seen better days. It was mostly still on the road, but was entangled in amongst a roadside barrier and a speed camera's pole. Its distinctive yellow box looking very sorry for itself, scratched and scuffed on the road's surface, just by the driver's side of the car. It seemed this car had been travelling too fast and had taken out the camera designed to deter the boy racers that used this stretch of road regularly at night. He smiled at the thought of this, these cameras were

the bane of his existence as a taxi driver, and he tried to talk to the girl again. "I was never a big fan of that thing." He motioned towards the sorry looking device, before looking at the girl again. She seemed not to notice his attempt at jocular conversation.

"I wasn't there....."She said, this time loud enough to hear over the rain.

The taxi driver sighed as she said it. To most it wouldn't have made sense, but in his line of work he'd seen a lot. He'd seen different people from different walks of life, in different states of intoxication, inebriation and much, much worse. It seemed tonight was going to be longer than he necessarily wanted it to be.