Creepypasta Stories

The Last Bus

By: Woundlicker

The first time I caught the night bus was pure chance. I'd heard the legends of course, we all had. Urban legends are a big thing where I live. I suspect its partly because I hail from an unremarkable and frankly dull provincial city that has little else going for it. Kids growing up around here don't have much to do and so their imaginations tend to run wild, with escapism being all the rage.

My friends and I were obsessed with urban legends during our formative years, gobbling up the tales whispered in the playgrounds and later posted by anonymous posters on online forums. We found the legends both frightening and exhilarating, bringing excitement to our otherwise boring lives.

It would be fair to say that I was quite naïve back then. Some of my friends were more cynical, but I truly believed them all – the Vanishing Hitchhiker of Spencer Street, the South Side Troll Man, and the White Lady of Croft Manor were a few of my favorites. My friends and I took on the role of amateur sleuths, investigating every site and searching for any evidence of these legendary cryptids and otherworldly entities.

To my extreme disappointment, we found nothing...no ghosts or ghouls, no monsters, and no signs of anything out of the ordinary. Eventually I too became cynical, concluding that all such legends were just childish nonsense, and I was wasting my time pursuing them.

The last bus was another of the local myths that we'd heard growing up and I'd assumed it was bullshit like the others. But now I know better. Officially, the last bus out of the city centre leaves at a quarter to midnight from the bus depot on High Street. That's the bus which sensible people catch if they want to get home safely after a night out on the town.

The pubs and clubs close at 1 am, and the crowds of drunken revelers pile onto the streets; fighting over taxis, queuing up for late night kebabs, attempting a last-minute hook up, or calling up friends in search for all night house parties. It's the same chaotic scene every Friday and Saturday night. Usually there are a couple of punch ups and a few people who'll injure themselves by falling over drunk on the pavement. It's all depressingly predictable.

The police will be called out, as will the ambulance crews, and eventually the crowds will disperse, as an eerie silence returns to the darkened streets. Then we enter the twilight hours when all sensible and law-abiding citizens are at home, safely tucked up in their beds. After hours, the streets are left to the vulnerable; like the homeless with nowhere else to go, forced to seek shelter in shop door fronts, wrapping their cold bodies in old sleeping bags and praying that they make it through the night.

And then there are the predators – the ones that your mother warned you about. The gangs of thugs who patrol the streets, their blood up as they search for a victim to violently attack. And the predatory men who lurk in the shadows, watching for vulnerable women who they can prey upon.

On a Monday morning you'll read the stories in the local newspapers; the homeless man beaten to a pulp, the young girl sexually assaulted in a back alley. Police will open investigations and appeal for witnesses. Sometimes they'll catch the perpetrators, other times they won't. You'll have sympathy for the victims, but secretly feel relieved that it didn't happen to you or somebody you know.

But in these cases the culprits are human monsters, made of flesh and bone, and not the otherworldly fiends I tried to chase. During my cynical years I believed these human predators were the worst thing out there, that they owned the twilight hours before the dawn. But I was wrong, and now I know the truth. There are far worse things that lurk in the shadows.

The first occasion I caught the night bus came during a difficult time for me. I'd just turned 21 and had split up with my partner of two years. Looking back, I now see how the breakup was the best thing for both of us, but at the time I was devastated and so angry.