By the time the first bus was due, the depot at Kettering had gone quiet in the way places do when night work has thinned to a few stubborn souls and the rest of the world has gone home to warm beds. The ticket office was locked. The café shutters were down. Beyond the glass doors the forecourt lamps shone on wet tarmac and a row of empty stands, each bay marked with a number that seemed too bright against the dark. Inside, the fluorescent lights made every surface look exhausted.
I was sitting in a plastic chair beside the noticeboard, trying not to doze, with a paper cup of tea cooling in my hand. My shift should have ended at midnight, but two drivers had called in sick and my supervisor, Nadine, had begged me to stay until the dawn service. I had a reason to say yes besides overtime. My rent was due, my mother’s tablets were not cheap, and the mechanic’s bill for her car had landed on me like a threat. The depot was no place to be sentimental about work, but on nights like that I could not afford to walk away from a few extra hours.
At one twelve the first odd thing happened. Bay Four, which should have been empty until the 1:30 service to St Mary’s, showed a destination on its internal panel: LAST FARE FAREHAM COMMON. I stared at it, then at the control console in the office. The panel had no business displaying anything on its own. I went to the window and looked out. A coach was standing in Bay Four where there had been nothing a minute earlier.
It was an old vehicle, not one of ours. Coach, really, not bus, though its shape was so plain it looked almost provincial. Cream paint dulled to the colour of old teeth. Curtains drawn. Registration plates dirty enough to be unreadable. No company logo. No interior lights. Yet the engine idled with a low, patient hum that vibrated through the glass.
I called Nadine from the office phone. She answered on the third ring, thick with sleep. “What now?”
“There’s a coach in Bay Four,” I said.
A pause. “Whose?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t there two minutes ago.”
“That’s not funny, I’m warning you.”
“It’s not funny. It says Last Fare Fareham Common on the display.”
Silence, then a little rustle as if she had sat up straighter. “Stay where you are. Don’t open the bay gate. I’m coming in.”
When I turned back, the coach door had opened. Not wide, only enough for a man to show himself on the steps. He was middle-aged, broad through the shoulders, wearing a dark overcoat and a driver’s cap that looked too neat to be comfortable. His face was ordinary enough in the same way a polished stone is ordinary, except that it lacked the small errors and hesitations that make a human face alive. His eyes were fixed on me with an unpleasant calm.
“Last fare,” he called, as though we were late.
I did not move. “You’re in the wrong bay.”
He looked mildly puzzled. “No. This is the last fare before dawn.”
The phrase struck me as nonsense, yet the way he said it made my mouth go dry. Behind him the coach interior stayed dark. No passengers. No instrument glow. Just the faint outline of seats and, above them, the dim suggestion that there ought to be people there but weren’t.
Nadine came through the side door with her handbag under one arm and her hair half pinned up. She took in the coach, the open door, the man on the steps. Her face changed in the space between one breath and the next. Not fear, exactly. Recognition perhaps, or the nearest thing to it.
“No,” she said quietly.
The man on the steps smiled. It was a courteous smile, and that was somehow worse. “You know the fare is due.”
“I paid it,” Nadine said.
He tilted his head. “Not all of it.”
I had never seen my supervisor lose her temper, but she did then. “Go away.”
The man’s eyes shifted to me. “He can stay. We can make room.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
He seemed almost amused by the question. “Driver, like you.”
Nadine grabbed my sleeve so hard it hurt. “Don’t answer him. Don’t speak to him again.”
She had gone very pale. I had never seen her like that, not even when her ex had turned up drunk and shouting in the car park the previous year. The coach idled with its door open, patient as a waiting animal. The display above the windscreen changed. LAST FARE. Then, after a pause, DAWN.
I made the foolish mistake of looking into the coach. For a second I thought the seats were occupied after all, only the passengers were bent low, as if sleeping. Then one lifted its head. It was not a face, but a mouth opening and closing in slow, wet motions, working as though chewing on something that should not have been inside it. The sound from the coach was not voices. It was a soft, contained gnawing.
I stepped back so fast I struck the counter behind me.
Nadine swore under her breath and yanked the office door shut, fumbling with the lock. The coach door folded in with a hiss. The engine revved once, sharp and offended, and then the vehicle moved. It rolled not forwards towards the gate but sideways, as if the forecourt had become a platform and the coach a toy being slid by a hand underneath it. One moment it was in Bay Four; the next it was gone. No tyre squeal, no blare of horn, only absence.
We stood there in the office, listening to our own breathing.
“Was that a prank?” I asked at last.
Nadine looked at me as if weighing up how much of the truth would break me. “If it was, it’s one I never want to see again.”
She did not elaborate. She made tea neither of us drank and sat at the desk with both elbows on it, staring at the monitor wall. When I pushed for an explanation she said only, “If it comes back, do not let it take anyone. Do you understand? Not for any reason.”
By 2:15 the coach returned.
This time it did not appear in a bay. It rolled slowly across the forecourt, from the service road where deliveries came in, and stopped with its nose almost touching the locked side gate. Its headlights were off, but light moved inside it, a dim amber as though from reading lamps. The destination board now read last fare before dawn in lower-case letters. The driver sat at the wheel, both hands resting neatly at ten and two.
Nadine had gone rigid. “He’s not supposed to come through the side entrance.”
“The side entrance to what?” I said.
She did not answer. Instead she strode to the window, pulled the blind cord down, and snapped, “Nobody looks at him. Not directly.”
“That’s not helpful,” I muttered.
“It’s all I’ve got.”
Something hit the gate outside. Not hard enough to rattle the metal, but with a flat, wet thud, like a heavy bag dropped from waist height. Then another. Then several in a loose, irregular sequence, moving along the fence line as if someone were walking and setting down sacks one by one. Each impact was followed by a quiet dragging noise.
The coach driver got out.
He came round the front of the vehicle and approached the gate at an unhurried pace. In the forecourt light his coat looked damp, though it did not rain. He carried a leather ticket punch in one hand. I could see the brass circle of it gleaming. He stopped just beyond the gate and looked through the bars at us.
“Open for boarding,” he said.
Nadine did not move.
The man raised the punch. “You know the fare.”
“What fare?” I asked before I could stop myself.
His eyes settled on me, and I felt the gaze in my gums, under my fingernails, deep in my stomach. “The one that keeps the rest on board.”
The thing along the fence shifted. I saw a hand then, pale and swollen against the mesh, fingers bending in the wrong direction. Another shape lurched close behind it, pressing a face to the wire. There was no room for detail, only the impression of skin stretched too tightly over bone and a mouth opening in an oval of black.
I stumbled back. Nadine made a small choking sound and darted for the office telephone. I heard her dial emergency services, then stop. The line had gone dead.
The driver smiled again. “No one will answer for you now.”
Then he lifted the ticket punch and brought it down against the gate. The metal bars did not dent. A ringing spread through the forecourt, though the blow had not been loud enough to account for it. The sound went through my teeth. Somewhere inside the depot, cups rattled in the vending machine. The security screen flickered with static. Nadine’s phone slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor.
The shapes outside the fence began to move faster.
I remember lunging for the side door, not because I was brave but because panic made every route look like the only route. Nadine grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise. “Don’t leave the building,” she said, voice shaking now. “If you get in there, he’ll count you.”
“Count me?”
“Just don’t go.”
The fence groaned. A hand came through a gap where the mesh had split. Not reaching, but feeling, groping with blind, bruised fingers at the air inside the compound. The driver stood by the gate, head inclined, as though listening to the way the living made noise when they were frightened.
Then Bay Six’s display lit up. 2:23. LAST FARE. COME ON.
The voice was not the driver’s. It came from inside the depot speaker system, bright and bored, like a station announcement.
Nadine made a strangled sound. “No, no, no.”
The coach had got into the depot.
I heard it before I saw it: the low hiss of air brakes and the soft tread of heavy tyres on wet concrete. It was inside the service lane, where no coach could fit without scraping both mirrors off. I turned and saw its nose sliding past the wash bay door, impossibly close, as though the walls had widened for it. Its side windows were now fogged from within. A handprint slid across one pane from the inside, leaving a clean oval in the mist.
Nadine shoved me towards the fire exit. “Run.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll shut the gate. Go.”
She would have been insane to stay, and yet she was already moving for the control panel. I hesitated only long enough to see the coach door fold open with a dry sigh and the driver step into the depot.
He was not alone this time.
Two figures followed him down the steps, then another, and another. They wore ordinary clothes, coats and trainers and office shirts, but each of them moved with the same wrong deliberation, as though their joints had stiffened into a pattern they were obliged to repeat. Their faces were different, but all of them had the same slack attention, the same empty readiness. One woman had a shopping bag still looped over her wrist. A boy perhaps eighteen stumbled with his head bowed, touching the walls as he passed, not to steady himself but as if checking the surface for something hidden.
I backed through the fire door into the outside lane and nearly tripped over a body lying in the puddle beyond it.
Not a body. A man on hands and knees, vomiting water into the gutter. He lifted his head when I shouted and I saw that his eyes were milk-white, the pupils gone. He groped at the tarmac like a blind person.
“Help me,” he gasped.
I started towards him, then saw the mark on the back of his neck. A neat oval, purple-black, as though the skin had been stamped with a hot coin. The same mark was on the hands reaching through the fence. The same mark, I realised with a sick drop in my stomach, had been hidden under the driver’s coat collar.
I should have run then. Instead I did what fear and indecision together always make a fool do: I looked for Nadine.
The depot office door had slammed behind me. Through the glass I saw her at the panel, shoulders hunched, trying to bring the security shutters down. The coach passengers were already inside the building, though I could not understand how they had crossed the distance. They were spread through the office and waiting area without jostling, a loose herd drawn by a call only they could hear. One had reached the coffee machine and was pressing the button repeatedly with patient fingers, though the machine was unplugged. Another stood by the staff lockers, head cocked, listening to the metal walls as if something moved in them.
And the driver was coming straight for Nadine.
She reached beneath the desk and brought out the depot master keys. For a moment I thought she was going to hand them over. Instead she flung them at the driver’s feet and spun for the side corridor.
He stopped to look at the keys lying on the floor. Something like annoyance crossed his face. “You should not have kept that one,” he said.
Nadine vanished into the corridor that led to the records room. The driver followed at once.
I went after them because if I did not, I would never forgive myself, and because by then the coach passengers had begun to turn their heads in unison towards the fire exit. Their attention felt physical, a pressure on the skin. The one with the shopping bag smiled at me, showing a mouth full of dark, packed teeth, as though something had been stuffed in there to keep it quiet.
The records room smelled of paper dust and mildew. Nadine had wedged the door half open with a filing cabinet. She stood in the narrow gap, breathing hard, a heavy ledger clutched to her chest. The driver was on the other side, one hand on the cabinet, not forcing it but testing its weight with a curious expression.
“There it is,” he said.
I grabbed the cabinet handle and hauled with everything I had. It scraped the floor. Nadine shouted for me to stop, then changed her mind and shoved harder from within. The cabinet shifted a few inches and the gap widened enough for the driver’s fingers to slide through. They were pale, damp, and ringed with the mark at the wrist. He curled them around the ledger.
“Give that back,” Nadine said.
“No,” he replied, not angrily. Simply certain.
I saw then what she had taken from the shelf. Not a spellbook, not some convenient old newspaper file, but the depot’s archive register from years ago, pages filled with maintenance notes and route logs. Wedged between the covers was a torn strip of ticket paper, brown with age. Nadine had set a thumb over it as if to hide the printed route number.
The driver’s eyes fixed on the strip. For the first time he looked less composed than he had all night. His mouth tightened. “You should have burned it.”
“I know,” Nadine said.
He dragged the cabinet suddenly. It lurched towards him and crushed my right hand against the frame. Pain burst up my arm. I cried out and released my grip. The driver pushed the cabinet back with a strength that should not have been possible and stepped into the room.
The ledger flew from Nadine’s hands. I saw the page open at a route history, the same number repeated and crossed out in different inks. LAST FARE FAREHAM COMMON. Departed 03:11. Returned not recorded. Then older entries beneath, each one ending with the same note in red: COUNTED ON BOARD. DO NOT OPEN AFTER MIDNIGHT.
Nadine had lied to me by omission, yes, but not out of malice. Her eyes, wild and wet with fear, told me she had been carrying this like a failing heart for years. “It started before I was supervisor,” she said, voice breaking. “Every few months, when we’re short and someone stays late, it comes. It wants one more. Then it leaves. If you let it count the final fare, it takes the rest.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I watched it happen.”
The driver took one step forward. His shape seemed to extend, not larger but somehow more complete, as if our attention fed him. “And you did not pay your own debt,” he said.
Nadine threw the ledger at him. It struck his chest and fell open on the floor. The torn ticket strip fluttered free. He snatched for it too late. I saw, in a glance, the printed destination: Fareham Common. One way. No return.
He froze. The passengers in the corridor outside had begun to press against the door in silence, their weight dimpling the wood.
Nadine looked at me then, and I understood before she said it. “If it sees the fare marked and boarded, it’ll take the lot. If it thinks the count is wrong, it stalls.”
“You want me to do what?”
“Pay it.”
“I have no ticket.”
She bent, swift despite the pain in her face, and snatched the brass punch from the driver’s coat pocket as he reached for her. In the same motion she thrust the torn strip into my hand. It was damp and papery, smelling faintly of old rain and rust. The driver lunged. Nadine slammed the archive cabinet back with both hands, trapping his coat sleeve in the gap for half a second, just long enough for me to bolt for the office printer.
There was no rational thought in any of this. Only movement, terror and a desperate desire not to become one of the people outside the door. I fed the strip into the printer tray, hit copy, and watched the machine spit out a pale photocopy with the route number blurred but legible enough. The driver’s voice came from behind me, suddenly close and furious.
“No.”
I seized the paper, hurried to the foyer, and thrust the copy towards the bay window where the coach waited with its door open.
The display above the windscreen changed at once to BOARDING.
The passengers inside the depot all turned towards me. They began to smile.
Nadine shouted, “Now, before it marks you!”
The driver appeared at my shoulder so suddenly I smelt wet wool and something metallic under it. His hand closed around my wrist. The skin of his palm was cold and rough, as if lined with old scar tissue. He leaned close enough for me to see that his teeth were not all his own. Some were too square, too uniform, like ticket stubs fitted in a jaw.
“You are late,” he whispered.
The ticket punch was still in my other hand. I drove it into the web of his thumb.
He gave no cry. Instead he opened his mouth wider than any human mouth should, and a rush of smell came out of him: stagnant water, paper pulp, breath held too long in a closed room. His grip loosened. I jerked free and slapped the photocopied ticket against the bay glass, pressing it flat with both hands.
For one impossible second the whole depot sounded like an intake of breath. The coach door folded open wider. From inside came a wet chorus of movement, the passengers shifting in their seats at last, as though some hidden instruction had been given. The display flashed LAST FARE, then DAWN, then blank.
Nadine, moving with a speed I would never have credited her with, smashed the emergency release on the bay gate. It snapped up halfway. The coach surged forward at once, not rolling but dragging itself with violent determination towards the opening. The driver stumbled after it, one hand bleeding darkly where I had punched him. He caught at the door frame and turned his head towards me.
His face had gone wrong. The skin beneath his jaw had split into layered folds, each one stamped with tiny punched circles, as though the inside of him had been ticketed for years.
“You owe the next fare,” he said.
Then the coach hit the half-raised gate and forced through it with a shriek of tearing metal. One of the bay lights burst. The front of the coach lifted, wheel spinning empty in the air, and for an instant I saw the passengers inside clearly: not dead, not living, but crowded shoulder to shoulder, all with the same mark at the neck, all turned towards the driver as if awaiting a count. Their mouths opened together.
The sound they made was not human. It was the awful, collective noise of something large swallowing.
The coach lurched, straightened, and shot out into the forecourt. The driver was still clinging to the side, one hand reaching back for the depot door, but the vehicle gathered itself like a thing that had finally remembered how to run. It smashed through the outer gate and vanished into the dark beyond the forecourt lamps. A moment later there was a distant crash from somewhere down the road, then silence, then nothing at all.
Inside the depot, the passengers collapsed where they stood. Not all at once. One by one, as if the strings had gone slack. The woman by the coffee machine folded neatly to her knees. The boy with his hand on the wall slid down it and did not move again. The office filled with the smell of rain and old upholstery and something meatily sweet, like bruised fruit left too long in heat.
Nadine sank into a chair and began to laugh, then to cry. I sat on the floor, holding my hand, which was already swelling badly enough to make the knuckles disappear. The marks on the necks of the fallen figures faded slowly, not vanishing so much as sinking deeper into the skin until they became stains. By dawn, only three of them still breathed.
Nadine phoned an ambulance, then the police, then the depot manager, and told each of them a different part of the truth. I said nothing at first. I was too busy trying not to vomit. When the paramedics arrived, they found a broken gate, half a dozen shocked staff, three unconscious drifters and no coach. They wanted explanations. They got the sort of ordinary lies people tell when they are exhausted and frightened enough to prefer paperwork to the impossible.
No one asked about the driver. No one found the torn ticket strip. Nadine burned the ledger in the boiler room before anyone else got there. I watched the paper curl and blacken and felt no triumph at all, only the certainty that if anything of it survived, it would come back to the forecourt with the dark.
I never worked a night shift there again. My hand healed crooked. Two fingers will not straighten fully, and in winter the old ache wakes up before the weather changes. Nadine left three months later, saying the depot had become bad for her health. She did not tell anyone else why.
Sometimes, near dawn, I still catch myself listening for a coach that should not be there. The forecourt lights are new now, brighter. The bays have fresh paint. Yet there are mornings when the glass at Bay Four mistes from the inside, and a destination appears on it in damp finger-traces before the system has fully booted.
LAST FARE.
Then, after a pause, another word follows.
BOARDING.
Ghost Stories
