Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Part 3: Testing In Bennington


December 23rd, 1949


The snow was coming down thick and wet, and Marcy could hear the windshield wipers struggling with the weight of it. She was sitting in the third row back from the front of the bus, her Christmas presents perfectly wrapped and stuffed tightly in an unromantic sack wedged between her knees. It hovered above the floor, which was slick and muddy from the wintry detritus.


Initially there were only a few other people on the bus, but by the Rutland stop there were at least a dozen. Marcy had boarded at St. Albans with a clean-shaven man in his early thirties. They had been cordial as they waited for the bus, him sucking on a cigarette and her fussing with her holiday satchel. They had been making small talk, discovering they were both headed to Bennington, when the bus pulled up and, with a curt nod, Marcy lugged herself up the steps.
She looked over at the man now. He was sleeping, his head resting against the frosted window. Bunching up her scarf, she formed a makeshift pillow and closed her eyes. She had an anxiety dream: waking in her father’s office, no idea how she had gotten there, she began walking home only to realize she was completely naked. The rest of the dream involved intricate pathways between cubicles, avoiding staff and attempting to cloak herself in items that seemed to shrink once she grabbed a hold of them.


Marcy jolted awake in time to see Bennington’s old welcome sign coming up alongside her on the left. Gathering her things as excitement began to rise in her throat, she offhandedly looked toward her St. Albans companion’s seat. The man was obscured somehow and, for a split second, she thought she saw his face before the image clouded again. Crediting the mirage with her waking state, Marcy tried rubbing the sleep from her eyes before looking again and realizing that the man was gone entirely. Perhaps he got off at an earlier stop after all that? She mused, not really caring.


Her eyes lingered over the place the man had been, noticing something off before realizing that all of his bags remained in the abandoned seat.


***


The story didn’t appear till a few days after Christmas, when the reports had been filed. The hair on Marcy’s arms raised as she stared at the paper:


BENNINGTON, VT-A gentleman living in the Soldier’s Home in Bennington disappeared on a bus traveling from St. Albans to Bennington. The fourteen other passengers all said that the man, James Tetford, was sleeping in his seat. When the bus arrived in Bennington, Tetford’s luggage and bus timetable were still on board, but Tetford was nowhere in sight. Police continue to investigate Mr. Tetford’s disappearance as a missing person’s case and anyone with knowledge of the incident or Mr. Tetford’s whereabouts should call the Bennington Police Station at…


Marcy’s hands shook as she raised her coffee cup to her mouth. She would be boarding the bus back to St. Albans this afternoon. She wasn’t afraid of the trip, per se, but instead of that last hazy glance of the man’s face before it slipped away.

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