I Guess It Doesn't Matter Any More

by Jordan179

First published 31st of July, 2016

Hitch-hiking can be dangerous. Picking up hitch-hikers can be even more dangerous. Even if all they really do want is a ride.

On the outskirts of the Everfree, interstate trucker Long Haul picks up a strange young woman and gives her a ride across the river.

Very much inspired by Blackmore's Night's "I Guess It Doesn't Matter Any More," a song about a Hitchhiking Cute Ghost Girl; and -- of course -- by Story of the Blanks.

Now with an entry on TVTropes.

Chapter 1: I Believe Some Things Can't Be Explained

Long Haul was bobtailing through the evening as the Sun set behind the western hills and day faded away into night. He was glad of the lack of a semi-trailer, as the road was narrow and poorly-lit, and though paved was prone to partial washouts when it rained -- which it was doing right now.

He had driven it by daylight two days after it had rained hauling a semi-trailer and had not enjoyed the experience, in fact he had been forced to swerve while turning because part of the hill above on his right had blocked his lane; if he hadn't been very careful turning back he probably would have jack-knifed, and it was a two hundred foot slope down to the river on his left side then. He'd come out of that with no damage but to one tire, which hadn't been blown or deflated, but he'd also come out of that clutching the wheel white-knuckled, having just seen the whole forty-five years of his life flash before his mind's eye; and he'd had nightmares about that moment for weeks afterward.

He hadn't talked about it to anyone, save Rose Brew at the diner on I-20 at the Rimegold Truck Stop, Rose Brew who was his on-again off-again lover, and whom he was much sweeter on than he let her know, because he didn't like to talk too much about his feelings. He might have married her if things had been different, but neither of them were the marrying kind: he was just happy to have an understanding friend. She held him and soothed him afterward, and he was more grateful to her than he would ever tell her.

He'd also done it once by night, also pulling a trailer, that time it was high summer and the asphalt was bone-dry. The main problem then was that the road was narrow and most of it unlit; but hey, that's what All-Father (or, more likely, Spark Bulb and Black Tee) had made headlights for, right? He'd cruised steadily though carefully; there were old truckers and bold truckers but no old, bold truckers, and Long Haul was in it for what his name said, thank you; he'd had no real problems.

Now he was driving in actual rain, and an increasingly serious one, the silver droplets merging into vertical lines and spattering against his windshields. He had the wipers going, but visibility was still way down and he noticed that a fog was rising up from the Motherwater on his left. Just great, he thought. Abso-tively great.

He did not want any sort of accident here, because there was nobody to help him. He had his cellphone, but no service, out here driving with the huge uninhabited mass of the Everfree National Forest on his right, like some great shaggy green beast rearing over the hills. There were stories about that forest, each story more unsettling than the last; it was not a place Long Haul wanted to hike through in the dead of night in a driving rainstorm.

Then there was his CB radio, but he couldn't count on that still working, if he had a real crash. And the weather interfered with transmission. Heck, his reception wasn't even all that good right now -- there were spots by the Everfree where radios just didn't work all that well, and he was passing one. He switched his FM radio off as the nearest local station, which hadn't been all that good to begin with, faded out into a snarl of static.

He was also coming up on a landmark in a few more minutes. An old Esshell gas joint; no service or point in stopping there, it had been abandoned for decades. It remained standing mostly because somewhere, some owner must be thinking of selling it, but there really wasn't much traffic on this road anyway. It may have served some town that was now also defunct; a lot of the towns out here had died when the interstate took the northern route; which was a pattern in the Everfree.

One of the unsettling stories, he remembered, was of an old town about thirty miles on, located miles into the forest between the Freestream and the Avalon. Something about it all being cursed and the inhabitants turned into ghosts or vampires or something of the sort. There was even an old song about one of the vampires: a strange golden-eyed girl who met a wandering musician.

He'd heard it once. "Wraith-Kissed," something like that. All he could remember was the chorus ...

He shivered. Not something of which he cared to think, when he was coming up on that very same legend-haunted stretch of woods, in just an hour or so, depending on the visibility and road conditions. All just myths, of course, but still cold comfort to a trucker on a long and lonely stretch of highway.

Then he rounded the curve and saw the Esshell station, and all this was driven out of his mind, because the station was lit up, glowing brightly through the cold rain, and right under the main light was standing a woman in a long white dress. At the sight of his semi-tractor, she looked directly at him, and her thumb went up.

A hitch-hiker? Long Haul thought, astounded. Here? There was nothing else along this road for many miles in either direction, and behind the Esshell station was nothing but an old dirt road leading into what was now the National Forest.

It was cold and wet, though, and she was a woman alone. Common decency told him that he should stop and give her a lift, to at least the next town, which would be North Riverbridge, on the other side of the Avalon. He certainly couldn't just leave her to shiver in the driving rain.

Long Haul was no fool, though, and he could see the obvious danger. There were sometimes hijackers on the road, and this would be a perfect lure with which to trap a trucker. So, as he slowed to a stop, he took out of his glove compartment the .45-caliber automatic pistol he had brought back from the Blackstoner Wars almost two decades past, slipped the magazine into place, and shoved it into the inner pocket of his brown, travel-stained leather jacket. If there were thieves out there, he'd be a tougher customer than they were counting on.

The tractor bumped over the pavement of the gas station, which had not been properly maintained for decades. There were potholes and cracks aplenty, worn both during the time the station had been opened but failing, and by weather in the years since then. The big tires splashed water as the weight came down again, but Long Haul was careful not to splash his potential passenger. Surely she would be wet enough already.

As he stopped he could now see the girl quite clearly. She was gray-skinned, which was a fairly normal coloration for North Amareicans, and had long blonde two-toned orange-and-yellow hair. The light illuminated her quite brightly, despite the mist and rain, and he was struck by the curious fancy that it was not the electric roadlamp overhead, but rather the girl, who was glowing, a diffuse and beautiful golden glow which lit the whole station and the cab of his semi.

Keeping the motor running and the driver's side door locked, Long Haul leaned over to the other side and opened the passenger door.

She looked up at him, and he was struck by her golden eyes. For a moment, he thought that they were glowing, like those of the vampire ghost from the old song, but then the moment passed and he realized that they were merely reflecting the radiance of the street light.

"Need a ride?" he asked her.

She smiled at him and nodded, and he revised her estimate of her age downward a decade. She looked healthy and well-built, fairly tall and muscular, and he might have thought her a woman in her twenties, were it not for a certain softness about her features and innocence about her expression that spoke to him of a girl in her teens, probably no older than fifteen or sixteen. He could see her Dream-Mark, embroidered over her hips -- a magnifying glass.

He glanced around for a moment, and saw no hijackers. Of course, there were lots of places for them to hide, not the least of which was around his own semi, but if he didn't wait too long they wouldn't have that option.

"I'm going to Canterlot," he said. "Through North Riverbridge. If that suits you, hop aboard. No strings -- just a ride."

She smiled at him again, and started climbing up to the cab.

Or did she? As Long Haul slid back over into the driver's seat, he thought that she almost seemed to be floating, rather than climbing, up to and through the passenger door. The impression was so pronounced that for a moment he groped inside his jacket for the butt of his pistol -- after an exceptionally-strange incident in the Babylonian desert, he'd had a local mystic bless the very same ammunition he was still carrying, and the old Shemite had claimed that with it he could drive off even evil spirits -- but then he realized he was just imagining things, for her weight pressed down on the seat cushion as she got into the seat beside him in a very normal and non-phantasmal manner, and he relaxed.

She was just a teenaged girl, nothing more. No threat to him. He needed to calm down. He'd seen some scary things in Babylonia, that was all, and he had to be careful not to bring those ghosts back home.

As she came in, the cold mist entered with her, so much so that Long Haul shivered even through his leather jacket and sweater. The poor girl was chilly and drenched -- when Long Haul took her hand to help her to her seat, he noticed that her skin felt both almost freezing cold, and the water almost streamed from her dress onto the seat cover. Indeed, even after Long Haul closed the door, the cab was icy cold, and he immediately turned up the heater, even before fully resuming his own seat, which helped a little.

"Brrr," he said conversationally. "That's one mean night out there. Wonder if the rain'll turn to snow?"

She smiled and shrugged.

"Well," Long Haul continued, releasing the parking brake and shifting into drive, "the sooner we get you out of this cold night the better." He let the semi slide out of the Esshell station and onto the road; he didn't expect any other traffic but he was still careful to watch for it.

As he pulled out onto the road, he saw something strange in his rear view mirror.

The lights at the Esshell station were off again, leaving it dark and silent as the grave.

Long Haul continued along down the lonely road with his strange passenger.

He tried talking to her a few times, but she would not speak in return, simply giving him more or less friendly smiles in reply, to show him that she was not actually offended by his attempts at conversation. He wondered if she were actually mute, or simply very shy. She might be intimidated by his size and sex, and the loneliness of the situation; he certainly did not want to frighten her further.

The obvious thought, that she might have been traumatized by an assault, occurred to him. She had some sort of mark, like a scuff or bruise, on her left temple. But her clothing did not appear disarranged or torn, and when he asked her directly "Did someone hurt you?" she shook her head vociferously, then softly giggled.

Another obvious possibility was that some S.O.B. had taken her out for a night-time drive, he'd gotten a bit too fresh, and she'd either been expelled from or stormed angrily away from the car when she wouldn't give him what he wanted. She seemed a nice girl -- though very strange -- and the scenario quite plausible, but given her unwillingness to speak, he could not confirm it.

It also occurred to him that she might be a runaway. Some men would have taken her in to a police station, but Long Haul didn't think that was a good idea unless he knew just from what -- if anything -- she was running away. He knew that some runaways were fleeing real abuse, and it would be doing her no favor to turn her back over to the ones who might want to hurt her.

Really, he didn't understand enough of the situation to know the right course of action. That left simply taking her down the road and letting her off where she wanted to go, which had the virtue of being what he'd told her he would do, and hence probably the best way to treat her straight. Maybe he could check in later, find out if she were all right, what happened to her.

The Esshell station was now miles behind them, the big semi-tractor splashing along in a slow and steady cruise down the road. It was just two lanes -- one in each direction -- but that didn't matter much given the complete absence of any other traffic on the road. His headlights cast cones of raidiance through the night and into the mist; he could clearly see the shape of his lights on the fog droplets. His tires plashed through puddles and hissed on the wet blacktop between them.

The girl began to relax -- Long Haul supposed it was because he hadn't proven a bad person. Really, hitch-hiking alone was dangerous, especially for a young woman. He wondered what her family was like, and if they had any idea where she was, and if they were worried about her. Long Haul did not to his knowledge have any children, of either sex, but he couldn't imagine parents not worrying about a teenaged daughter in this kind of situation, especially on a night like this.

As she relaxed, so did Long Haul. Though the girl still did not speak, and he gave up attempting to induce her to conversation, a certain friendly feeling grew between them. They were two beings cruising together through the angry night rain, sharing shelter and basic human trust. As always in such situations, either friendliness or hostility will build; and neither of them was feeling hostile to the other.

Though, physically that cabin air remained unwontedly cold, no matter how high he turned up the heater. It was as if a cold wind blew from the passenger side -- though a brief stop and quick check showed him that both door and window on that side were tight shut -- and the trucker wondered if something were wrong with his cab's HVAC system.

He was heavily clad, but she just had that white dress, wet and somewhat sheer from its drenching, something he realized when he bent over her to check the door; he could directly see her underwear, and noticed in passing that it was quite conservative; the sort of heavy brassiere and concealing underpants common a half-century or more ago. Kids these days and their retro styles, he thought wryly. When he was her age, teenage girls wouldn't be caught dead in anything that old-fashioned.

He also noticed that she was still very cold.

Both for the sake of her dignity and to avoid her suffering from exposure, he offered her a blanket from the sleeper behind the seats, and finally prevailed on her to wrap it around herself. That must have both warmed and somewhat dried her, and the glitch in the heating system may have also cured itself, because it started to get warmer in the cab. She obviously appreciated the loan of the blanket, anyway, because she smiled warmly at him when he did that, a look of gratitude in her golden eyes.

They drove on a while longer.

He had the music off, so he could hear distinctly when she started humming to herself.

It was a haunting tune, and one which seemed strangely familiar to him, though he couldn't quite place it. He was sure that he had heard it before.

He was coming up on the Freestream now. Despite its name, it was actually a small river, spanned by a steel box girder bridge on concrete pilings. There was no real clearance problem; he'd crossed the Freestream Bridge hauling a trailer before, and he had none now. But it was raining hard, and as he approached the bridge he could see that the river was running high, foaming about the concrete supports on which the bridge stood.

He slowed as he did this, peering into the area illuminated by his headlights to make sure that there was nothing wrong with the bridge. This would be a bad night for a swim in the river. He could see no apparent problems; just a sturdy bridge over a river that was high but not actually flooding. As he looked up from this, he glanced over to the girl, and saw that she was clutching at her seatbelt and part of the door fitting, white-knuckled and grimacing in obvious fear.

Oddly enough, at that moment the malfunctioning heater filled the cab with what smelled very much like burned meat. Long Haul wondered briefly if a mouse had crawled into his engine and died somewhere near the radiator and air intakes. He'd found the corpses of less likely things in his cab before.

"Don't worry, kid," he told the girl. "It's safe. I'll have us across before you can say jack ... um, jiminy cricket," he quickly concluded, not wanting to use bad language in the presence of such a tender young thing. He smiled at her reassuringly.

She smiled back, uncertainty obvious in her eyes, and nodded.

Long Haul gunned his semi forward. Now that he'd seen no damage to the bridge, he'd rather take this fast than slow, as lingering too long might put too much pressure on the stressed structure, and he wanted the advantage of momentum to carry him past any dubious spots.

Just as the front tires slapped onto the bridge, he suddenly recognized the tune she'd been humming.

It was 'Wraith-Kissed.'

Author's Notes:

The tale of the Ghost Girl Hitch-hiker is very old, long predating motor vehicles. In the earlier versions, the helpful traveller may be driving a carriage or wagon, riding a horse, or simply walking when the Ghost Girl asks for his escort. In many of the variants, the Ghost Girl travels with the helpful man until she disappears when either (1) he crosses running water or (2) reaches her destination (generally either her former home or the graveyard in which she lies buried).

My version combines the running-water obstacle and trying-to-get-home themes, and gives Ruby a good reason to hitch a ride -- Long Haul can help her cross the running water. It owes a lot to this song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfqDjDoppSA

Among other things, it gave me the outfit for Ruby Gift, which you will notice is dressed as described in the song, not the cover picture.

The Ghost Girl Hitch-Hiker is almost always a Friendly Ghost, and generally a sympathetic character. It makes perfect sense to put Ruby Gift in the role.

---

A "jack-knife" is when a tractor-trailer truck skids in such a way that the trailer skids around toward the tractor, which can very rapidly render the whole mass uncontrollable and in a very hard position to recover from. A crash is quite possible. Assuming that you haven't wrecked either element, or the fifth wheel connecting the two elements, in doing so. Having this happen on a narrow road with a cliff dropping away from one shoulder would be ... bad. It's understandable why the incident shook up our hero.

---

Long Haul doesn't really believe in vampires, or ghosts, or wraiths, at the start of this story. Though he saw some strange things, and heard of still-stranger ones, in the Blackstoner Wars. He doesn't expect to run into them back in the North Amareican Federation, anyway.

Anyone familiar with the location of ancient Babylonia will be aware of what the Blackstoner Wars are a Fantasy Counterpart. It's my go-to source for young to middle-aged combat veterans, who may be a bit tougher than they look. The Humaniod Piercing Gaze is another one of them. If this story were set thirty years earlier, as it well might have been given that Ruby and her family are Undead, I would have used the Annam War instead, with similar characterization.

---

Ruby is dressed very appropriately ... for the 1920's or 1930's. From her POV, she's keeping up with the styles pretty well. She thinks in terms of centuries, anyway. Back in her breathing days, "appropriately" would have mean petticoats -- and no underpants at all.

She has a huge number of styles to apply to her Aspects, back in the Teenage Girl Bedroom of the Damned. Yes, there's one in this Universe. I think there's one for every worldline in which there's a Ruby Gift who had that final fatal quarrel with her father.

This of course suggests that Hasbro really needs to make a Ruby Gift fashion doll.

I want to see the playset for Ruby's Sanctum!

---

Yeah, Long Haul, you've got a malfunctioning heater. The corpse of something unlikely in your cab. Better call in some professionals to fix your problem for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMmam5i03Vs

Chapter 2: They Are Hidden in the Mist ...

Things happened very fast.

The truck shot forward completely onto the bridge and over the waters foaming by beneath.

And, right at the edge of Long Haul's peripheral vision, he saw the girl's form flicker.

That was the only way to describe it -- she flickered like a video screen rapidly changing channels. Different clothes, different hairstyles, a quick succession so dizzyingly fast that he could see none of them clearly, though for a moment he saw her lovely young form nude -- the blanket had fallen through her. Then, in the next moment, she was not quite so lovely.

It was just a brief glimpse, but it was a shape out of nightmare, though horribly in her exact proportions, making it obvious that it was still the girl. It was a fleshless horror of naked, black-charred bones, from which rose greasy smoke, filling the cab with a nauseous stench of burned flesh. The skull turned to regard him, orbs of golden flame flaring in its empty sockets, jaws gaping open and the back of one hand covering the mouth in a parody of a frightened woman's gesture, the exposed carpals failing to completely cover the mouth.

He shouted in startled shock, and then in an instant the horror was gone, to be replaced by a tracery of lights in the abstract shape of a humanoid female, from within which shone a golden glow so beautiful that he was seized by a wave of wonder as extreme as the horror he had felt before. He felt in the presence of some great good, something as comforting as the previous form had been terrifying.

Then the semi-tractor was past the bridge, and there was only the girl there, looking at him in utter dismay. She winced back and buried her head in her hands ...

... and Long Haul's road-awareness, the map that he made in his head of any road he was running, warned him urgently, and he turned his eyes front just in time to turn with the road instead of running up on the hilly right shoulder, and probably wrecking. Still, he could not forget that quick impossible series of visions. His skin crawled, as he wondered what she was doing, what she was looking like right now, though his peripheral vision was good enough that he would have known if she was surging toward him in any sort of atatck

As soon as he was onto a long straightaway, he turned back to regard her. "What the --" he still felt an aversion to swearing at her, for she still seemed a teenaged girl for all of her previous transformations.

She looked up, and her expression was so apologetic and woeful, that, despite all he had just seen, he could not remain at all hostile.

There was an obvious, impossible explanation for everything he'd seen that night, of course. One that he'd heard before in folktales, the ones where strange girls picked up on the road after dark vanished when the driver took them to their destinations -- or when he took them across running water. But he wasn't about to say it. He wasn't about to flat out ask the girl "Are you a ghost?"

Not so much because he feared that he'd offend her. Nor even that he feared she'd lie.

It was more that he feared she'd tell the truth.

He didn't know if she was dangerous. She was certainly uncanny, but in the hitch-hiking ghost stories, the spectral travelers were usually friendly ghosts. All they wanted was to get to their destinations. Very well, he'd take her to her destination.

In "Wraith-Kissed," the ghost girl had maimed the narrator by sucking out some of his life when he kissed her on the lips. Stole the kiss, actually, in the song -- its details were rapidly coming back to him.

Very well. He wouldn't kiss her. He hadn't been planning to do so, in any case.

Briefly, it occured to him that he was lucky he wasn't the sort of guy who would try to molest a young woman hitch-hiking, and he quirked a small smile at that thought.

He glanced over at the (ghost?) girl, and noticed that she was relaxing, starting to smile again. He wasn't sure if that were a good or a bad thing, but at least she wasn't draining out his life at the moment. And life was basically a series of moments, and if you were living through this moment, you were still in the game.

He'd learned that with the Army in Babylonia, and it was just as true back home in the Federation. Just maybe not normally so dangerous. Except at times. And this seemed to be one of those times.

Perhaps a time when the living and the dead might be at truce.

So Long Haul's semi-tractor ghosted on through the night, driven by a living man and bearing a woman who might have been undead.

There was something surreal in that long lonely drive. Long Haul had driven this way before; remembered the road and its landmarks. But the other two times he'd driven this road, he had been a man who knew that the dead didn't get up and walk -- he still wasn't sure what those ghoul-things at that ancient city lost in the Babylonian desert had been, but they hadn't been dead; the way they bled and fell to small-arms fire proved it.

This time he was a man who knew that sometimes the dead did get up and walk ... and hitch-hike ... and that made all the difference.in the world. Long Haul was alive and real, he could hear his own breath and feel his own heartbeat. The semi was real; he could feel the steering wheel in his hands, the irregularities in the road jouncing him in his seat. He could hear the motor driving them forwarad, the tires rolling over the slick asphalt, the wipers laboring against that damnable rain, made silver by his headlights, spattering angrily against his windshield.

But was the girl real? And alive? He feared that the answer to at least one of those questions was 'no.'

He looked at her again, and she gave him a little smile, and he felt a strange sympathy for her. She seemed a perfectly nice and sweet girl, nothing much wrong with her --- if you discounted the fact that she was probably dead. She should be going to school, being asked out by boys, planning for college and a career, maybe marriage and children.

He greatly doubted that any of those things lay in her future, if 'future' in that sense was applicable to the undead. She seemed young enough -- around fifteen or so -- to be his daughter, if he'd had a daughter, and he imagined that was the age she'd been when she died. She would have had a lot of life still ahead of her, which she would now never know.

The air became friendlier once again in that little moving space. Though still cold. And now that Long Haul suspected that he was giving a ride to a ghost, he somehow knew that there was nothing wrong with his heater.

Her silence didn't bother him any more. He knew that it was because he knew he would probably not like the secrets she was keeping, the thoughts she might be thinking behind those lovely, strange golden eyes. The living should not learn the mysteries of the dead.

So it came as a surprise to him when she finally spoke.

"Here," she said. Her voice was soft and sweet, and as lovely as her face. "Prithee please, good drayman, pull off the road here. We are upon mine own home."

He nodded. "Sure thing, darlin'," he replied, trying to keep his tone calm and cheerful. He eyed the road's right shoulder, saw a place where it widened, turning into a dirt road that snaked up and into the depths of the Everfree.

He took the turnoff, driving slowly and carefully, his wheels splashing through deep mud-puddles. The dark branches of the trees closed over the roof of his cab, sometimes slapping against it. He slowed further. The last thing he wanted to do was drive headlong into a bog. This did not seem like a good place to get stuck.

"How far do you want me to go in?" he asked.

There was no reply.

He turned to the passenger side ...

... and she was gone.

It would be false to say that Long Haul was entirely surprised by this developent. Mysteriously disappearing was what the ghost girl usually did at the end of a story such as this. Nevertheless, uncanny a companion though she had been, Long Haul felt obscurely cheated by the outcome. He had hoped to have the chance to ask her who she was, where she was from. Now he would never know the rest of her tale.

Moved by his frustrated curiosity, he stopped the semi, shifting into park and pushing home the parking brake, but leaving the motor running. He double-checked gear and parking brake, donned a leather cap, and stepped down from the cab into the cold night outside. Despite his cap and jacket, the cold rain sleeted down heavily upon on him, and he was swiftly drenched. He knew that he wasn't even taking the full force of the rainstorm: he was partly protected by the dark and gnarled branches of the trees that met overhead, covering the dirt road like the roof of a tunnel.

His headlights made a cone of light, which was swiftly swallowed up by the thick and drifting mists. He had a sudden, strange fear: what if only he and his semi were real, and the road and woods all some strange illusion, intruding from some monstrous half-world to engulf them? He laughed at his own thought -- clearly he'd read one too many weird tales -- but the laugh seemed hollow even to himself, and despite scoffing at the idea, still he kept close to the big comforting metal bulk of his vehicle. He still had that irrational fear that, if he stepped beyond sight of the semi, he would be lost -- in more than one sense of the word.

He walked around the front to the passenger side, his boots splashing through puddles, and in places squelching into inches-deep mud. It was very obvious to him that this road was neither used very often, nor maintained very well. It was a poor road for heavy traffic; though of course his semi had big wheels and a lot of extra power when not actually pulling a trailer, and hence was a better all-terrain vehicle than one might have expected given its designed environment of well-paved roads.

He would not have liked to try to pull even a single semi-trailer down this road, though, and tacking a full trailer on behind that would have been asking for serious trouble. It made the two-lane blacktop from which it sprang look like a superhighway by comparison. Where ever the ghost girl lived -- or, more properly, had lived -- was probably some little farm on the edge of the Everfree.

He knew from the stories that if he found that farm, he would probably meet some old couple who would tell him how their daughter died on the main road decades ago, struck by a truck when hitch-hiking at night, and yet still kept trying to get home. They probably were just a little ways down the road ...

... But it was a dark, cold and foggy night. In the rain, the narrow dirt road might wash out or flood or bog, trapping him here until at least the end of the storm. And visibility was so bad that he could easily miss a nearby farmhouse, especially if its lights were off. Wandering around these back roads under these conditions to find a place he had never been before and with whose appearance he was unfamiliar would be a seriously stupid plan.

He was now standing before the cab's passenger door. Here the only real illumination came from backscatter from the headights and tail lights off the mist. He needed better than that for even a cursory examination, so he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small flashlight. It was but a wan radiance compared to the mighty power of his headlights, but he could direct it closely at anything he wished.

He looked down at the dirt beside his right running-board. There were no footprints, not even the small ones that a young woman might make in the mud.

He hadn't really expected to find any. For at no point could he remember the girl opening the passenger side door to exit. She had left the cab by some method far stranger than simply opening the door and stepping down the running board.

He shone the light up at the passenger side door. Something shimmered back at him, more brightly than could be explained by rain on metal. Curious, Long Haul climbed up to have a look.

There was a viscuous silvery fluid glistening on the door, around the level that one would expect if someone had ... well, floated out through the door, without opening or damaging it in any manner. He remembered that a power often attributed to ghosts was the ability to pass through solid walls. Sometimes, when they did this, they supposedly left behind a ... residue.

Ectoplasm, he thought. Is this ... ectoplasm? He ran his finger experimentally along the substance. It stuck slightly to his fingertip, feeling cold and nasty and ... slimy.

She slimed me! he thought, and chuckled at the concept. No, he corrected himself. She slimed my truck. Which would annoy me more, I guess, if this whole situation weren't so damned strange. Is 'damned' the right word? I don't know -- she seemed too nice to be really evil. Probably just some poor girl who died out on the road, on a dark and stormy night very much like this one.

He spoke to the night. "Who were you? How did you die?"

And the night answered him, in a voice that whispered on the wind. It really does not matter any more. There was a pause, then: Now go, good drayman! This is not a safe place for mortals to linger, and I would not see thee suffer for thy kindness to me!

The voice was so strange -- was it really a sound, or a presence in his mind? -- that for a moment Long Haul was uncertain whether or not it had been only in his imagination. Then, he fully registered what he had heard.

It was a warning.

That warning, on top of what he had recently seen, galvanized him into action. He bolted around the front of his semi and clambered up the driver's side. The seat of his jeans squelched as he sat on the seat covers, and he knew from the way that water was streaming off him that both sides of the cab were now thoroughly wetted.

As he closed the door he took a look over at the passenger's seat side. There was a lot of that silvery ectoplasm, or whatever it was, on the inside of the passenger side door. There seemed to be a lot more of it there, and covering a much wider area, then he had seen outside. Probably because the rain's been washing it off outside, he reasoned.

The dirt road was really too small to turn around on, and given the ghost girl's warning, he was not inclined to run forward along an unknown road in the fog to find a wider patch, nor risk running onto possibly boggy shoulders and getting stuck. No, there was but one thing for it. Gazing into his rear-views, he shifted the semi into reverse, then backed away slowly down the side road toward the main one.

He shivered as he did so ... it had gotten really cold in the cab, just as it had when the ghost girl had been in the passenger seat. He figured this was the combination of the cold spot she had left behind her with the effect of his wetting by the rain. The heater didn't seem to be doing a very good job fighting it.

There ... he could see the end of the muddy dirt road behind him ... in less than a minute he would be back on the main road, heading for the Riverbridge and leaving this whole weird night behind him. His encounter with the strange ghost girl would be yet another story to tell, late at night, to a disbelieving audience. Another thread woven into the tapestry of the Phantom Hitch-Hiker legends.

Murky red light flared from his right, and for a moment all he could think was RPG! For a horrible moment his mind flashed back to urban fighting in Babylonia, rebel Basers and an APC getting hit. Then the wash of displaced air hit him, and it was not the heat of a rocket-propelled high-explosive anti-tank warhead penetrating his vehicle, but rather cold and clammy and charnel, reeking of death, something he had first smelled in Babylon and which he would never forget. His head whipped round to the passenger seat, half-expecting to see the ghost girl returned, but what he saw was no ghost girl.

At least, it was no girl.

He beheld a big burly middle-aged man, a bit taller than himself, perhaps a bit fatter as well, though he seemed plainly well-muscled under the fat, a classic biker build. His skin was a darker gray than was the girl's, while his hair had probably once been jet black, but now had salt shaken into the pepper. His eyes were coal-black.

The expression on his face was incredibly friendly and jovial.

"Well met, stranger!" the big gray man said to him, laughing cheerfully. "Or should I name thee friend, as thou hast safely returned mine own daughter Ruby unto me." He smiled broadly. "Come into our humble little town, that we may feast thee properly in return for thine own kindness to Ruby!"

Oh, crap, Long Haul thought, there's a whole nest of them, but he smiled back at the stranger. "Gee, I'd love to, but I have to get my semi into Canterlot by 4 am, you know what it's like, life of a trucker." He unobtrusively increased his pressure on the accelerator, rolling faster in reverse to the main road. "And there's no need to throw some sort of party just for me. Any decent guy woulda helped out the kid."

"Oh, we were going to have our revels in any case," the man assured him. "And I do insist that thou attend. We will feast thee, and thou mayest remain with us for a time. A long time." His grin grew wider. "But, my manners. I am Grey Hoof, celebration planner extraordinaire. And you ... you are well come to Sunney Towne." His grin grew wider still. His lips seemed to draw back way too far from his teeth, which were suspiciously many and long and sharp.

And Long Haul knew he was in real trouble.

Author's Notes:

Long Haul is Genre Savvy. Unfortunately, he's not considering the question of just what sort of ghost story he's in.

Or that, while the Ghost Girl Hitch-Hiker, is generally herself a friendly ghost, she might hang out with some other ghosts who most definitely aren't.

Hey look! It's Worst Party Person!

And Long Haul is, indeed, in serious trouble.