Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
The Dog That Waits at the Wrong Stop
A bus driver on the night route notices a grey terrier waiting every evening at a stop that was removed years ago, and the dog always looks disappointed when the bus does not stop for it.
- perspective: first
I drive the 17 night route out of the depot at Kestrel Road, a loop through the tenth ward and back past the old tram sheds, and I have done it for six years. It is quiet work. Most of the passengers are shift workers, a few drunks, the occasional lad going home from a party with his shoes in his hand. I know most of them by sight. I do not know their names, and they do not need mine.
The dog started appearing in October.
It was a grey wiry terrier with a torn ear and a bright collar, and it sat at the stop by the old bakery on Gold Street, the one the council took out in 2011 when the road was widened. The pole is gone. There is only a square of pale paving where the shelter used to be, and a faded blue line on the kerb. The dog sat on the paving every evening at about half past eleven, facing the road, its ears up and its tail still.
I did not stop the first night. There was nowhere to stop. But I slowed, because the dog looked so intent, and I saw its head turn to follow the bus, and then its ears drop a little, the way a dog's do when it has been let down.
The next night it was there again. And the next. By the end of the month I had started to watch for it, and to slow the bus a little more each time, so that the dog could see me coming and know I was not the one it was waiting for.
Maureen, who sits in the front seat with her knitting and rides the route twice a week, asked me one evening if I knew the dog. I said I did not. She said she had seen it before, years ago, at the same stop, when she used to ride the 17 to the hospital every Tuesday to visit her husband. The dog had waited for the bus then too. She said the driver had always stopped for it, and that it had jumped on, and sat in the empty seat at the back with its chin on its paws, and got off at the hospital gate with the rest of them, and waited there for her husband's ward to open.
"Did your husband come out?" I asked.
She looked at her knitting for a while and said he had died in the spring of 2009, in the same ward, and that she had stopped riding the 17 after that. She had not seen the dog since.
I drove the route the next night with a sick feeling in my stomach. When the bus reached the old bakery, the dog was there. I did not slow down. I could not bring myself to. I watched it in the mirror as the bus pulled away, and it stood up on its hind legs and watched us go, its front paws against the empty air where the pole used to be.
The depot manager said I should put in a report about the dog, in case it was a stray and somebody was looking for it. I did. Nobody came. The council has no record of a shelter ever being at the stop after 2011.
I still drive the route. I still see the dog most nights. Last week I did something I had never done in six years. I stopped the bus, opened the doors, and waited. The terrier looked up at me. Its head tilted, as if it were trying to remember a face. Then it turned, very slowly, and looked back at the empty paving, and sat down again to wait, and the doors closed on the quiet street, and the bus went on around the loop without any passengers at all.