Overhead signs whizzed past them, though Louisa could not understand why there would be signs in a tunnel.   However, as the strange tunnel seemed to go on forever, out of boredom, Louisa began to look up each time that an overhead sign approached.

At first the bus was going too quickly for Louisa to read the signs, but after a while they seemed to actually move along with the bus so that she was able to make them out: “The Scream in the Night”, “The Church of the Divine Fastbuck,” “Randy Miss Mandy”, Louisa managed to read off three signs, which seemed to vanish into thin air after she had read them.   “The Green Bus”, “The Bird-Eater!”, “The Glen Hartwell Horror”, “The Day the Terror Came”, Louisa read aloud.   She recognised the first four titles, but without understanding what they were doing on street signs — Tunnel signs? she thought, becoming increasingly alarmed as she started to look more closely at the shimmering, dream-like quality of the tunnel wall.

Looking up again, despite her determination not to, Louisa read, “The Revenge of the Green.”   But then the titles on the signs were replaced by a more alarming message, which read: “She knew then that she was doomed!   That she would never escape alive from the green bus….”

Recognising the words as coming from the story, “The Green Bus”, Louisa shouted out, “No, no, not she; he.   He knew that he would never escape alive….”

But her words were drowned out as Monty, Janette Patterson, Randy Miss Mandy, Fr. Joe and the other passengers aboard the green bus began to chant, “She knew then that she was doomed, that she would never escape alive.   For the green bus was not a bus at all, but rather the entrance to a time warp, a fault in the fabric of time itself.   A new line on the time-space vector, which would take Louisa backward or forward to who knows what time and place?   Or what planet!   Perhaps to Venus, where it rains sulphuric acid twenty-four hours a day, and the temperature never drops below nine hundred Degrees Celsius?   Perhaps to Yuggoth, where gigantic, insectile shoggoths shamble across the barren plains, while elephantine Night Gaunts wing overhead, swooping down onto unsuspecting prey below?   Perhaps to…?”

4.

A fortnight later

“My God!” said one of the two young policemen, as they walked along the concrete landing outside the s flat in Glen Hartwell.

“This is the place all right,” said his partner, wrinkling up his nose in disgust.   “There’s something dead in there for sure.”

“Who lives here?” asked the first officer, taking the pass key from the teenaged boy whose parents were the live-in caretakers of the apartment block.

“A weird guy named Robert Robinson,” said the teenager.

“What’s weird about him?” asked the policeman, unlocking the door.

“He writes short stories for a living.”

“You know him then?”

“Not really, my mum won’t let me go anywhere near him.   She reckons there has to be something wrong with a bloke who writes fiction at all hours of the night, instead of getting himself a real job.”

Doing their best not to vomit at the smell of decaying flesh, the two police officers worked their way through the small flat, until finding the body of Robert Robinson slumped across his typewriter.

Glancing down at the half typed short story, one of the officers incorrectly read out the title as “The Witch hut”.

EXTRACT FROM THE WITCH HUNT:

Esmaralda held the carving knife in her right hand, raised tentatively toward her left wrist.   Afraid of hurting herself, she looked again at the text of the famous Malleus Maleficarum (commonly known as The Witches” Hammer, penned by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer, and Jakob Sprenger) and read aloud:

“The American Indian ceremony of cutting your palm to mix your blood with that of another, to become “blood brothers”, is probably a dilution of the Celtic blood magic ritual used to kill your enemies.   First, write your enemy’s name on paper, or even in the dirt, then, while reciting, or even thinking, their name over and over again, lightly slit your left wrist, and allow the blood to flow over the written name of your intended victim.   Within twenty-four hours he or she will be dead, or else cast forever into the bottomless void of timeless, dimensionless space!”

Steeling her shaky nerves, Esmeralda lightly slit her wrist, and let her blood run across the name of her enemy, Miranda, which she had written in flour on her kitchen table….

*      *      *

Except that Robert Robinson had crossed out the name Miranda, and had replaced it with Louisa.   And it had been his blood, not Esmeralda’s, which had flowed across the name, as he had thought Louisa Roberts’s name over and over again, while he had slowly bled to death!

THE END

(c) Copyright 2011

Philip Roberts, Melbourne, Victoria