1.

Slowly he rubbed the grime away from the glass partition, but the shock of the discovery was too for him, and he staggered backwards and fell headlong down the small staircase to collide heavily with the metal doors.   He lay at the bottom of the stairwell for five minutes before groping his way up the stairs to confirm the dreadful truth: there was no-one in the driver’s seat; the green bus was driving itself!   He knew then that he was doomed, that he would never….

“Hmmph!” said Louisa Roberts, throwing “The Green Bus” into her reject tray.

She picked up a second story, “The Church of the Divine Fastbuck!” by the same writer, and began to read: Looking around the small reception room, with its vinyl-topped desks, laden high with forms and pamphlets, Father Joe felt troubled.   He had failed in his duty; he should have been able to stop the man somehow, should have guessed what would happen.   Now, thanks to his failing, there was a lunatic loose in Melbourne.   A man who was dangerous to himself, dangerous to everyone he came in contact with….

“Him and how many others?” said Louisa.   She skimmed the rest of the story, which was about a defrocked priest, involved in a religious racket, who suddenly found himself confronted with a genuine spiritual problem.Relegating “The Church…” to the reject tray, she picked up the third story by the same writer, “The Scream in the Night”, and began to read: Monty lay back against the pine tree, listening to the breeze wafting through the tops of the trees, and the occasional twitter of a sparrow preparing to bed down for the night.   Eyes closed, arms crossed, Monty was almost asleep, when  the silence of the evening was shattered by a high-pitched woman’s scream.   As abruptly as it started the scream stopped, but only to be replaced by a low gurgling sound; the sound of someone choking to death….

“Hmmph!” said Louisa Roberts again, predicting the ending in advance.   Monty  had become a hobo twenty years earlier, after strangling his lover, Janette Patterson, when she had threatened to “tell all” if he did not divorce his wife to marry her.   Then twenty years later — for reasons that the writer had obviously forgotten to tell his readers — Janette’s ghost had finally returned from the grave to torment poor Monty.