He leaned up against his own shadowy reflection, and fell suddenly into sleep. All around him was a spaceless void, and in it a shrieking figure, dancing in disorienting shadows, hiding behind dazzling headlights. It continually ran from his grasp, wailing in some hollow void, and he chased after the figure, endlessly, his body engulfed in a thick black mud, before the lights gave way to a rupturing, plagued sky of jagged clouds. He climbed up a rugged slope that stretched out before him, pushing in front of him heavy lumps of mud like some pathetic, grief-stricken, sub-human Sisyphus, before his crawling led him finally to a meadow of dead, wretched trees that stood solemn in the dark like graves. There was a pool of water in the heart of this meadow, and he saw heavy footsteps before him that led to the water, the parting mud exposing splintered bones that jutted out of the miasmic mud. He stumbled forth as hateful daggers of lightning plunged from the brooding sky, flashing white light over the grayscale horizon. He waded into the water and trudged onward as the bursts of lightning illuminated his path. However, something rose out of the water to greet him. It was the stained skeleton of a long dead corpse, wrapped in tendrils of grass and reeds. He knelt down to touch the skull, yet he instead found himself reaching down through the vertical tunnel of a ghostly well that stretched ever downwards, and beads of sweat and dripping mud from his own skull whistled and rang down this endless tunnel and rippled the water far below. As it did so, the skeleton began to sink back into the water. He saw however that the bones were not stained or discoloured. No, they were…rusted. The metal skull slid beneath the water’s surface, to reveal a floating dagger of glass, and, as he made this out in the water that rushed towards him up through the well, the lightning screamed out from the sky once more, and in the dagger he saw for one brief instant his own pale, bloodshot eye, staring back at him, and even as the thunder scraped at his ear drums, in the one final moment before he woke, he could hear the frantic, fluttering beating of his own heavy heart.

It was a phone call that pulled him out from the dream-puddle, of which he had the increasing fear of being drowned in. He knew not how long he had slept on the bus, and since the windows were blacked out, he had no reference point. The phone that rang was the one he had found on the bench. He held the phone to his ear without hesitation, and the call began automatically, yet all he could hear was echoing, cryptic garbles, like that of a computer. It stung his already sore eardrum merely to listen to, but the more he listened, the more he thought he could make out words. They were not words directed at him, but from conversations, near and far, and the more he listened to them, the more he was given a sense of space, and a vision of whom he was hearing, as if the phone itself was gifting him echo-location. Over his phone call he flew through all sorts of incoherent mutterings across the city, from apartment to apartment like an electric ghost, and even swooped downward into the underground nightclubs and concert halls, where the pained reverberating moans of tormented rock-stars made him dizzy and disoriented, and though he heard the words, he could not understand them, as if they were of a foreign language. However, as he listened more intently, the static and white noise faded away and the words grew clearer - though still near impossible to understand - and intimately nearby. He turned gingerly to his side, peering tentatively towards the passengers behind him. The voice grew more distinct, and he knew what he was looking for was indeed with him inside the vehicle. Many passengers were asleep as he once was, cloaked in ragged garments like cocoons, sickly and ravished with ailments of the flesh, some reeking with a queer stench, others possessing some wound or deformity of some odd, unfamiliar sort. However, there was one who was awake - a frail, sweating, nervous, fidgeting man in a stained black trench coat whose face was heavily bandaged but whose eyes flickered around frantically, and who was breathing harsh, hoarse whispers into his own phone. They were pleadings, riddled with anguish. He examined the man like an abstract painting, stimulating his mind on every gesture and fidget of the eyes of the subject, listening to his most immediate instincts as they arose…

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…This man has a guilty conscience, a desire for escape…. He seems in trouble, mentally… he has troubled someone, physically… Disappointed someone…

With this, he turned away from the man and hid the phone in his pocket. He sighed in elation, feeling more awake than he had in what felt to him like years. Despite what he had just learned and what it entailed, he nevertheless eased himself. For he now knew what to do.

As he stood to leave the bus, knowing not where it would drop him, he briefly glanced back at the other passengers, to see each and every one of them awake, glaring back at him with a fixated stare, and he could not say if they were confused, vaguely frightened, or if they were even indeed awake. Puzzled, he hastily made his way to the door, and as he rushed by he could have sworn that there was never any driver at the wheel at all.