A few months ago, I had an experience that has stuck with me. It wasn’t a paranormal experience or particularly unusual. In fact, it was rather mundane, but the effect it’s had on my mental state is comparable to that of a nightmare. The difference being that nightmares terrify through irrationality and symbols. This experience was grounded in plain, everyday reality. On the surface, there was really nothing scary about it all, but underneath—underneath is where the dread resides.
It was an early weekday evening and I had decided to go out for groceries. I don’t have a car, so I got on the bus, did the shopping and was heading back to the bus stop, holding four bags of groceries, when it started to rain. Only a light rain, but one that hadn’t been in the forecast.
People were still getting off work at the time, so quite a few were already waiting at the stop when I got there.
The bus arrived on time, but it was packed. Rather than get on only to stand with my grocery bags for the entire ride, I decided to wait for the next one, but because sitting around makes me restless, I left the bus shelter and started walking down the street towards the next stop.
I had my earphones in. Music was playing. It was nice despite the rain.
The music drowned out the noise of the street.
The darkness was soothing.
I passed one stop and kept walking.
Suddenly the rain started coming down harder, and I picked up the pace, hoping to get to the next bus shelter before I got drenched.
There was a little plaza up ahead, and a few cars had lined up to turn from it onto the street, but the first had inched too far forward and was blocking the sidewalk. It was a grey SUV with tinted rear windows, and as far as I could tell there was only the driver inside.
I could see him looking at me.
I looked at him too. He was in his 50s, grey-haired and wearing a baseball cap.
I figured he was feeling bad for blocking my way.
As I got level with him, I saw his driver’s side window slide down, and he said something to me that I didn’t hear because of my earphones. I took one of them out—being returned abruptly to the noise of the street, cars and harder-falling rain—and he said, “Horrible weather. I can give you a ride if you want.”
He smiled, and as he did I felt a chill pass through me.
At the time, I rationalized it as caused by my being wet in a summer wind that had turned colder, but even then I noted the weird contrast between his mouth, which had curved into a grin, or at least the appearance of a grin, and his eyes, which were deep but vacant, blank. It was as if his smile had been disconnected from his eyes. This wasn’t friendliness but an impression of it.
The inside of the SUV was well lit.
Beside the man I saw the passenger’s seat covered in a clear plastic, on which rested what looked like a toolbox. “Let me just move my things,” he said, still maintaining the same synthetic facial expression, reaching for the box. I caught just a glimpse of metal as he moved it onto the back seat. “It won’t be any trouble.”
I clutched my groceries tighter. “Thanks, but I’m good,” I said, squeezing between the front of the SUV and rushing traffic.
The world seemed somehow darker contrasted with the SUV’s bright interior lights, as if night had fallen— and kept falling.
Cars drove by uncomfortably close to me.
Looking inside the SUV as I passed, I noted that it was impeccably clean for a vehicle carrying tools, although the toolbox itself had also been clean. Unused, perhaps. The man, too, seemed almost sterile in his cleanliness. Why was there plastic draped neatly over the passenger’s seat, I wondered, and my mind provided dozens of possible answers.
We’re trained to do that, aren’t we? To come up with explanations of why our instincts are wrong.
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Guard against bias. Guard against stereotypes.
If he were a woman, would I still be scared? my mind asked.
No, was the answer.
My heart beat in tune with the precipitation and the music still playing in one of my ears.
Thump, thump, thump, went the SUV’s windshield wipers.
There was nothing ostensibly wrong with this pleasant-seeming man, who was merely doing good by offering me a ride home in the pouring rain, yet instinct told me, Don’t get in the SUV. Keep walking and don’t look back.
“You sure?” he asked.
“Thanks, I’m good,” I said, soaked by now and barely registering any sound except the blood coursing through me.
“No worries, friend.”
The words blended with the rain.
I walked a dozen long steps, looked back and saw that he had turned his head to look at me through the passenger’s side window.
Traffic was heavy and he was still waiting to make his turn.
Thinking about it now, if I could have reduced my instinctual unease to a single word, it would have been superficiality. Everything about him was surface. A filthy surface scrubbed spotless. He was an approximation of a human. His smile, his clothes, even his age. Only his eyes had given him away, portals into a devouring nothingness.
I had never, and haven’t since, experienced eyes like those.
When I was little, my parents used to say that most people were generally good but some were tricky. That evening was the first time their description had hit home. We keep our eyes open for tricky people, they would tell me—to avoid them.
When I got to the bus shelter, I didn’t care how wet I was or whether my groceries were ruined. All I wanted was to get home and feel comforted, so I was beyond relieved when I heard the bus approach. I got on, fell into an empty seat and decompressed.
As the bus pulled away from its stop, the SUV was still waiting to turn.
Nothing had happened, but I spent the bus ride shaking, head down and watching drops of rainwater gather and fall to the floor.
Moving lights from the outside spilled eerily into the bus.
Shadows crawled across them.
About forty minutes later I got out at my usual stop, consoled by the familiar sight of my apartment building and feeling I had let my imagination get the better of me, when I noticed that just behind the bus was a grey SUV.
My heart almost stopped.
Was it the same one—had it followed behind the bus all the way here? I was too far away to see inside. I hadn’t memorized the license plate. But it felt like the same one.
I turned toward home.
I ran.
My grocery bags swung wildly at my sides.
Even before gathering the courage to glance back and see, I knew: the SUV followed.
Menacingly, it rolled slowly alongside the cracked sidewalk, down which, having dropped my groceries, I darted toward my building.
A few people stared from the other side of the street, but I didn’t care.
Cutting across the building’s grassy front lawn, I slipped but didn’t fall, using my hand to keep upright, reached and pulled open the front doors. I could barely breathe. I knew it wasn’t my imagination urging me forward now but survival. Fiddling for my keys, I said a prayer I hadn’t said since childhood, and holding the keys in both trembling hands got the electronic fob close enough to the wall-mounted sensor to open the lobby doors.
Sluggishly—excruciatingly—they opened.
I went through.
And, agonizingly, they closed.
I pressed the button to call the elevator maybe ten times, kept looking back: seeing nobody, seeing nobody, seeing someone approaching the apartment building.
The elevator dinged.
I jumped in, frantically pressed the button for my floor, and watched as the figure passed from outside to inside. It was definitely a man, and he was wearing a cap. He was definitely wearing a baseball cap.
In a final burst of clear thinking, I also pressed all the other buttons. I didn’t want him to see what floor I lived on. I wanted the elevator to stop on every single one.
The elevator ride took forever.
Finally I arrived on my floor, attacked the lock with my key, entered my unit, locked the door, pulled closed the security chain and slumped against a wall. Breathing, I listened.
Stale existence and the monotonous buzzing of air conditioners.
I got up, switched on a few lights.
I didn’t know what I expected to find, but I went through the apartment just to make sure I was alone.
I was.
I closed the blinds in the living room, waited and pulled two of them apart to peer between them into the parking lot below.
No sign of an SUV.
The world appeared peaceful, yet my nerves remained frayed, and my mind in a state of existential unease. I called a friend, who immediately heard the fear in my voice. “What happened?” she asked.
Nothing.
Nothing happened.
The uneasy feeling stayed with me for weeks, although as if migrating from my head deep into my guts.
I stayed at home most of this time, dreading every sound in the hallway, every knock on the door, every unexpected whine of the water pipes.
I had almost rid myself of the unease completely when I came upon a news story about the police finding a body—mutilated, dismembered and encased in concrete blocks—within a few kilometres of where I lived. The victim was more-or-less my age and had gone missing the day after my encounter with the grey SUV.
I had nightmares.
Despite trying to follow the police investigation, news of it eventually died away. There were no leads, no updates.
The status remains ongoing.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to open my news app and read about how the police are looking for a suspect in his 50s who wore a baseball cap and drove an SUV. At least then I’d have something on which to hang my instinctual certainty.
Two feelings in particular continue to haunt me.
The first is the feeling of escape: of waking up with my head on the guillotine, feeling my heart in my mouth as I push myself up—as the killing blade drops. While this should be a good feeling, it comes at a cost, which is knowing that no one can truly escape fate, and because once I evaded death, it must soon return for me.
The second feeling is guilt.
I feel overwhelmingly responsible for the death of the actual victim.
I was his first prey.
If I had accepted his ride, she would still be alive.
On some nights I have dreams from which I wake sweating and sensing, for a fleeting moment, the weight of concrete on my limbs, the disconnection of my body, and I know it should have been me under his tools. It should have been my blood on his plastic sheet.
On the surface, nothing happened.
I go about my life.
What I can’t express to anyone, what no one understands, is that below,
below: he lingers.