Things happened very fast.
The truck shot forward completely onto the bridge and over the waters foaming by beneath.
And, right at the edge of Long Haul's peripheral vision, he saw the girl's form flicker.
That was the only way to describe it -- she flickered like a video screen rapidly changing channels. Different clothes, different hairstyles, a quick succession so dizzyingly fast that he could see none of them clearly, though for a moment he saw her lovely young form nude -- the blanket had fallen through her. Then, in the next moment, she was not quite so lovely.
It was just a brief glimpse, but it was a shape out of nightmare, though horribly in her exact proportions, making it obvious that it was still the girl. It was a fleshless horror of naked, black-charred bones, from which rose greasy smoke, filling the cab with a nauseous stench of burned flesh. The skull turned to regard him, orbs of golden flame flaring in its empty sockets, jaws gaping open and the back of one hand covering the mouth in a parody of a frightened woman's gesture, the exposed carpals failing to completely cover the mouth.
He shouted in startled shock, and then in an instant the horror was gone, to be replaced by a tracery of lights in the abstract shape of a humanoid female, from within which shone a golden glow so beautiful that he was seized by a wave of wonder as extreme as the horror he had felt before. He felt in the presence of some great good, something as comforting as the previous form had been terrifying.
Then the semi-tractor was past the bridge, and there was only the girl there, looking at him in utter dismay. She winced back and buried her head in her hands ...
... and Long Haul's road-awareness, the map that he made in his head of any road he was running, warned him urgently, and he turned his eyes front just in time to turn with the road instead of running up on the hilly right shoulder, and probably wrecking. Still, he could not forget that quick impossible series of visions. His skin crawled, as he wondered what she was doing, what she was looking like right now, though his peripheral vision was good enough that he would have known if she was surging toward him in any sort of atatck
As soon as he was onto a long straightaway, he turned back to regard her. "What the --" he still felt an aversion to swearing at her, for she still seemed a teenaged girl for all of her previous transformations.
She looked up, and her expression was so apologetic and woeful, that, despite all he had just seen, he could not remain at all hostile.
There was an obvious, impossible explanation for everything he'd seen that night, of course. One that he'd heard before in folktales, the ones where strange girls picked up on the road after dark vanished when the driver took them to their destinations -- or when he took them across running water. But he wasn't about to say it. He wasn't about to flat out ask the girl "Are you a ghost?"
Not so much because he feared that he'd offend her. Nor even that he feared she'd lie.
It was more that he feared she'd tell the truth.
He didn't know if she was dangerous. She was certainly uncanny, but in the hitch-hiking ghost stories, the spectral travelers were usually friendly ghosts. All they wanted was to get to their destinations. Very well, he'd take her to her destination.
In "Wraith-Kissed," the ghost girl had maimed the narrator by sucking out some of his life when he kissed her on the lips. Stole the kiss, actually, in the song -- its details were rapidly coming back to him.
Very well. He wouldn't kiss her. He hadn't been planning to do so, in any case.
Briefly, it occured to him that he was lucky he wasn't the sort of guy who would try to molest a young woman hitch-hiking, and he quirked a small smile at that thought.
He glanced over at the (ghost?) girl, and noticed that she was relaxing, starting to smile again. He wasn't sure if that were a good or a bad thing, but at least she wasn't draining out his life at the moment. And life was basically a series of moments, and if you were living through this moment, you were still in the game.
He'd learned that with the Army in Babylonia, and it was just as true back home in the Federation. Just maybe not normally so dangerous. Except at times. And this seemed to be one of those times.
Perhaps a time when the living and the dead might be at truce.
So Long Haul's semi-tractor ghosted on through the night, driven by a living man and bearing a woman who might have been undead.
There was something surreal in that long lonely drive. Long Haul had driven this way before; remembered the road and its landmarks. But the other two times he'd driven this road, he had been a man who knew that the dead didn't get up and walk -- he still wasn't sure what those ghoul-things at that ancient city lost in the Babylonian desert had been, but they hadn't been dead; the way they bled and fell to small-arms fire proved it.
This time he was a man who knew that sometimes the dead did get up and walk ... and hitch-hike ... and that made all the difference.in the world. Long Haul was alive and real, he could hear his own breath and feel his own heartbeat. The semi was real; he could feel the steering wheel in his hands, the irregularities in the road jouncing him in his seat. He could hear the motor driving them forwarad, the tires rolling over the slick asphalt, the wipers laboring against that damnable rain, made silver by his headlights, spattering angrily against his windshield.
But was the girl real? And alive? He feared that the answer to at least one of those questions was 'no.'
He looked at her again, and she gave him a little smile, and he felt a strange sympathy for her. She seemed a perfectly nice and sweet girl, nothing much wrong with her --- if you discounted the fact that she was probably dead. She should be going to school, being asked out by boys, planning for college and a career, maybe marriage and children.
He greatly doubted that any of those things lay in her future, if 'future' in that sense was applicable to the undead. She seemed young enough -- around fifteen or so -- to be his daughter, if he'd had a daughter, and he imagined that was the age she'd been when she died. She would have had a lot of life still ahead of her, which she would now never know.
The air became friendlier once again in that little moving space. Though still cold. And now that Long Haul suspected that he was giving a ride to a ghost, he somehow knew that there was nothing wrong with his heater.
Her silence didn't bother him any more. He knew that it was because he knew he would probably not like the secrets she was keeping, the thoughts she might be thinking behind those lovely, strange golden eyes. The living should not learn the mysteries of the dead.
So it came as a surprise to him when she finally spoke.
"Here," she said. Her voice was soft and sweet, and as lovely as her face. "Prithee please, good drayman, pull off the road here. We are upon mine own home."
He nodded. "Sure thing, darlin'," he replied, trying to keep his tone calm and cheerful. He eyed the road's right shoulder, saw a place where it widened, turning into a dirt road that snaked up and into the depths of the Everfree.
He took the turnoff, driving slowly and carefully, his wheels splashing through deep mud-puddles. The dark branches of the trees closed over the roof of his cab, sometimes slapping against it. He slowed further. The last thing he wanted to do was drive headlong into a bog. This did not seem like a good place to get stuck.
"How far do you want me to go in?" he asked.
There was no reply.
He turned to the passenger side ...
... and she was gone.
It would be false to say that Long Haul was entirely surprised by this developent. Mysteriously disappearing was what the ghost girl usually did at the end of a story such as this. Nevertheless, uncanny a companion though she had been, Long Haul felt obscurely cheated by the outcome. He had hoped to have the chance to ask her who she was, where she was from. Now he would never know the rest of her tale.
Moved by his frustrated curiosity, he stopped the semi, shifting into park and pushing home the parking brake, but leaving the motor running. He double-checked gear and parking brake, donned a leather cap, and stepped down from the cab into the cold night outside. Despite his cap and jacket, the cold rain sleeted down heavily upon on him, and he was swiftly drenched. He knew that he wasn't even taking the full force of the rainstorm: he was partly protected by the dark and gnarled branches of the trees that met overhead, covering the dirt road like the roof of a tunnel.
His headlights made a cone of light, which was swiftly swallowed up by the thick and drifting mists. He had a sudden, strange fear: what if only he and his semi were real, and the road and woods all some strange illusion, intruding from some monstrous half-world to engulf them? He laughed at his own thought -- clearly he'd read one too many weird tales -- but the laugh seemed hollow even to himself, and despite scoffing at the idea, still he kept close to the big comforting metal bulk of his vehicle. He still had that irrational fear that, if he stepped beyond sight of the semi, he would be lost -- in more than one sense of the word.
He walked around the front to the passenger side, his boots splashing through puddles, and in places squelching into inches-deep mud. It was very obvious to him that this road was neither used very often, nor maintained very well. It was a poor road for heavy traffic; though of course his semi had big wheels and a lot of extra power when not actually pulling a trailer, and hence was a better all-terrain vehicle than one might have expected given its designed environment of well-paved roads.
He would not have liked to try to pull even a single semi-trailer down this road, though, and tacking a full trailer on behind that would have been asking for serious trouble. It made the two-lane blacktop from which it sprang look like a superhighway by comparison. Where ever the ghost girl lived -- or, more properly, had lived -- was probably some little farm on the edge of the Everfree.
He knew from the stories that if he found that farm, he would probably meet some old couple who would tell him how their daughter died on the main road decades ago, struck by a truck when hitch-hiking at night, and yet still kept trying to get home. They probably were just a little ways down the road ...
... But it was a dark, cold and foggy night. In the rain, the narrow dirt road might wash out or flood or bog, trapping him here until at least the end of the storm. And visibility was so bad that he could easily miss a nearby farmhouse, especially if its lights were off. Wandering around these back roads under these conditions to find a place he had never been before and with whose appearance he was unfamiliar would be a seriously stupid plan.
He was now standing before the cab's passenger door. Here the only real illumination came from backscatter from the headights and tail lights off the mist. He needed better than that for even a cursory examination, so he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small flashlight. It was but a wan radiance compared to the mighty power of his headlights, but he could direct it closely at anything he wished.
He looked down at the dirt beside his right running-board. There were no footprints, not even the small ones that a young woman might make in the mud.
He hadn't really expected to find any. For at no point could he remember the girl opening the passenger side door to exit. She had left the cab by some method far stranger than simply opening the door and stepping down the running board.
He shone the light up at the passenger side door. Something shimmered back at him, more brightly than could be explained by rain on metal. Curious, Long Haul climbed up to have a look.
There was a viscuous silvery fluid glistening on the door, around the level that one would expect if someone had ... well, floated out through the door, without opening or damaging it in any manner. He remembered that a power often attributed to ghosts was the ability to pass through solid walls. Sometimes, when they did this, they supposedly left behind a ... residue.
Ectoplasm, he thought. Is this ... ectoplasm? He ran his finger experimentally along the substance. It stuck slightly to his fingertip, feeling cold and nasty and ... slimy.
She slimed me! he thought, and chuckled at the concept. No, he corrected himself. She slimed my truck. Which would annoy me more, I guess, if this whole situation weren't so damned strange. Is 'damned' the right word? I don't know -- she seemed too nice to be really evil. Probably just some poor girl who died out on the road, on a dark and stormy night very much like this one.
He spoke to the night. "Who were you? How did you die?"
And the night answered him, in a voice that whispered on the wind. It really does not matter any more. There was a pause, then: Now go, good drayman! This is not a safe place for mortals to linger, and I would not see thee suffer for thy kindness to me!
The voice was so strange -- was it really a sound, or a presence in his mind? -- that for a moment Long Haul was uncertain whether or not it had been only in his imagination. Then, he fully registered what he had heard.
It was a warning.
That warning, on top of what he had recently seen, galvanized him into action. He bolted around the front of his semi and clambered up the driver's side. The seat of his jeans squelched as he sat on the seat covers, and he knew from the way that water was streaming off him that both sides of the cab were now thoroughly wetted.
As he closed the door he took a look over at the passenger's seat side. There was a lot of that silvery ectoplasm, or whatever it was, on the inside of the passenger side door. There seemed to be a lot more of it there, and covering a much wider area, then he had seen outside. Probably because the rain's been washing it off outside, he reasoned.
The dirt road was really too small to turn around on, and given the ghost girl's warning, he was not inclined to run forward along an unknown road in the fog to find a wider patch, nor risk running onto possibly boggy shoulders and getting stuck. No, there was but one thing for it. Gazing into his rear-views, he shifted the semi into reverse, then backed away slowly down the side road toward the main one.
He shivered as he did so ... it had gotten really cold in the cab, just as it had when the ghost girl had been in the passenger seat. He figured this was the combination of the cold spot she had left behind her with the effect of his wetting by the rain. The heater didn't seem to be doing a very good job fighting it.
There ... he could see the end of the muddy dirt road behind him ... in less than a minute he would be back on the main road, heading for the Riverbridge and leaving this whole weird night behind him. His encounter with the strange ghost girl would be yet another story to tell, late at night, to a disbelieving audience. Another thread woven into the tapestry of the Phantom Hitch-Hiker legends.
Murky red light flared from his right, and for a moment all he could think was RPG! For a horrible moment his mind flashed back to urban fighting in Babylonia, rebel Basers and an APC getting hit. Then the wash of displaced air hit him, and it was not the heat of a rocket-propelled high-explosive anti-tank warhead penetrating his vehicle, but rather cold and clammy and charnel, reeking of death, something he had first smelled in Babylon and which he would never forget. His head whipped round to the passenger seat, half-expecting to see the ghost girl returned, but what he saw was no ghost girl.
At least, it was no girl.
He beheld a big burly middle-aged man, a bit taller than himself, perhaps a bit fatter as well, though he seemed plainly well-muscled under the fat, a classic biker build. His skin was a darker gray than was the girl's, while his hair had probably once been jet black, but now had salt shaken into the pepper. His eyes were coal-black.
The expression on his face was incredibly friendly and jovial.
"Well met, stranger!" the big gray man said to him, laughing cheerfully. "Or should I name thee friend, as thou hast safely returned mine own daughter Ruby unto me." He smiled broadly. "Come into our humble little town, that we may feast thee properly in return for thine own kindness to Ruby!"
Oh, crap, Long Haul thought, there's a whole nest of them, but he smiled back at the stranger. "Gee, I'd love to, but I have to get my semi into Canterlot by 4 am, you know what it's like, life of a trucker." He unobtrusively increased his pressure on the accelerator, rolling faster in reverse to the main road. "And there's no need to throw some sort of party just for me. Any decent guy woulda helped out the kid."
"Oh, we were going to have our revels in any case," the man assured him. "And I do insist that thou attend. We will feast thee, and thou mayest remain with us for a time. A long time." His grin grew wider. "But, my manners. I am Grey Hoof, celebration planner extraordinaire. And you ... you are well come to Sunney Towne." His grin grew wider still. His lips seemed to draw back way too far from his teeth, which were suspiciously many and long and sharp.
And Long Haul knew he was in real trouble.