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eBook Category: Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: Mrs. Linden had seen a murder committed, right in the street, right before her very eyes ... only no one would believe her.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Small Press Writers Showcase Issue 1, 1980
Fictionwise Release Date: March 2003

22 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [58 KB], eReader (PDB) [26 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [13 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [12 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [64 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [85 KB], hiebook (KML) [57 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [39 KB], iSilo (PDB) [10 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [14 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [41 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [21 KB]
Words: 3770
Reading time: 10-15 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Past midnight, the sky has not reached for dawn.

Dampness claims the streets of Stuttgart. A leaden cloud quilt lowers on rows of street lamps, white melons in the falling mist, and Tour Bus 43 is five hours behind schedule and lost. It trundles by buildings anonymous in shadow. Through flecks of rain its twin headlights catch colorless stone, the slickened tires of parked autos. Mrs. Linden, frantic insomniac, third window from the rear, watches it all slipping by.

The entire tour has swung radically from disaster to tedium and back again with no sane ground between. Mrs. Linden had hoped Europe would provide her with a sense of history. Instead it has only made her cling more fiercely to the ruins of her own past. About her in the half-empty bus the other passengers sleep. Mrs. Linden tries in vain to pretend she has joined them. She imagines she is at home in Baltimore, dreaming, her missing husband Jonathan curled by her side. She conjures from memory, room by room, detail by detail, the house they once owned. As this illusion is nearly complete, down to the cat's paw distortion in the lower right pane of their bedroom window, its complexity overwhelms her and she is left staring at the droplets gathered on the window glass of the bus.

Each time she allows herself to drift toward sleep, Mrs. Linden becomes conscious of the darkness moving outside, the interior of the bus mostly dark, and she begins to feel the night. It closes in upon her, bearing a raft of images. It is a weight heavier than her own stifling her with cloth, a great braid of hairy rope wound about half the earth. It is the junkman from her childhood, old bugaboo with a clacking wagon who lived beyond the foundry and the slag heaps. For seconds at a time, as the bus lumbers onward, she fears she may become hysterical.