Kiong was the one who brought it up during one of our many late-night chats.
“I had a run of shit luck on my previous shift,” he grumbled as he lit a cigarette with his lighter. “Some pretty girl flagged my taxi down along Jalan Besar after midnight, and just as I thought that I could earn back my fuel money with the fare, she just straight up vanished in the middle of the ride.”
Chewing on a mouthful of nasi lemak, I swallowed and took a sip out of my coffee. “Vanished? What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said.” He put the cigarette in between his teeth, but did not puff it immediately. “I stopped at a red light, and then I heard the rear passenger door lock click open. By the time I turned my head around to glance behind me, the bitch had gone ‘poof’ like magic!”
“So, she’s a fare evader,” I said with a wry laugh. “Not common, but it’s not like they don’t exist either. Why didn’t you chase her down or call the police?”
“Are you even listening? I told you, she just straight up disappeared,” Kiong insisted. “I swear I only stopped the car for three seconds at most. But when I checked my surroundings, it was completely empty! I was the only person in the entire intersection, you know.”
I was going to crack a joke, but I knew Kiong long enough to know that he wasn’t the type of man to embellish his tales with such dubious claims unless he was going insane.
“Are you sure that you didn’t see her running off somewhere?” I asked. “Have you checked your dashcam?”
“I really—” He suddenly paused and slammed his hand against the table in an “aha!” gesture. “That’s right, the dashcam! Only a smart one like you will definitely come up with such an ingenious solution!”
“That’s just common sense…” Drinking the remaining coffee in my cup, I scraped the last bits of rice on the oil paper into my mouth and tossed the wrapper into the bin. “Come on, let’s go to your car.”
“Huh? What for?”
“The dashcam, have you forgotten?” I sighed. “You should be thankful that I helped you install one last month, or else you’d really be shit out of luck in this case.”
“Aiya, this kind of thing, only you youngsters will know how to operate them anyway,” he quipped as we walked to his taxi. “My generation where got such thing one? Just turn the key in the ignition, press clutch and shift gear only…”
As Kiong rambled on in between drags on his cigarette, I fiddled around with the dashcam until I managed to pull up the most recent footage on the tiny screen.
“What time did it happen?” I asked, pressing the button to fast forward the video.
“Hm, around twelve-fifteen, twelve-twenty in the morning? It happened soon after I picked her up, I think.”
“So…it should be recorded in this part, then.” I clicked the ‘Play’ button, and with Kiong leaning over the window to peek at the dashcam screen, we watched the footage play out.
A road lined with parked cars and shophouses, lit only by the occasional yellow glow of street lights.
At the next intersection, there was a figure waving an outstretched hand slowly towards the approaching taxi.
“There, that’s her!” Kiong remarked.
“Let’s see what happens next…”
“Miss, where to?”
“Zzzt…meras.”
I frowned. “What is with the static noise?”
“Rosak already?” Kiong suggested.
“I bought it brand new, no way it’ll be broken this fast…” I paused the video. “Where did she want to go, anyway?”
“Jalan Chemeras,” he said calmly.
“What—you mean the cemetery? In the dead of night??” I gave him an incredulous look. “You’re brave for picking up such a passenger in the first place.”
“Qingming [Tomb-Sweeping Day] is coming soon, so it is not surprising for people to go to the cemetery to tend to their family graves,” he pointed out. “Besides, I wear an amulet around my neck all the time, so no evil can ever harm me.”
Shaking my head, I resumed the video.
The sound of the accelerator being pressed, accompanied by the faint cackle of static that wasn’t present before.
“Are you doing prayers for your ancestors, Miss?”
“I—” A burst of static cut off her reply.
Silence for the next couple of seconds. Then, the sound of the blinker as the taxi approached an empty intersection.
“S…ry…can you g…straight?”
“Eh? But Miss, we’ll reach Jalan Chemeras faster if we take the road to the left.”
“P…ase, go str…ght…”
The sound of the blinker stopped just as the light turned red. The taxi rolled to a stop.
“By the way, Miss, are you going alone? That’s a little dangerous, you know, especially when the area isn’t well-lit. You should at least wear an amulet to protect yourself, like me.”
Suddenly, a click sounded as the door lock was released.
“Miss? What are you…” The sound of a door being frantically opened. “Miss? Miss, where did you go?!”
“See, do you believe me now?” Kiong asked, pointing at the screen. “There’s only wilderness at that junction, where can a person run to?”
I pursed my lips in thought. “If you had gone straight all the way, wouldn’t you have gone onto the highway?”
“Uh-huh.” He shrugged. “I’m charging by the meter anyway, so it doesn’t matter as long as the fare is paid at the end. But I’m telling you, this passenger makes my blood boil! Young people like her think that we old taxi drivers are fools that can be…”
Thankfully, I managed to stop Kiong before he embarked on another tirade. “She seems to know this area well, there is a good chance that she’s a local. I’m sure that soon enough, either you or I will meet her while on the job. We can confront her together if that happens.”
“Hmm, I can’t argue with that logic. That’s a deal then.” Kiong patted me on my back and pulled the door open. “Now, will you please get out so that I can start my shift?”
“Hey, I’m also delaying my own shift by doing this…”
-
I had said the part about meeting the mysterious fare evader soon and confronting her together to calm Kiong down, but as fate would have it, it was my turn to run into bad luck on the very shift after my chat with Kiong.
“Strange, what day is it today?” I muttered to myself under my breath as I drove along the deserted main street of the strangely-quiet city. “Not a single person walking on the sidewalks, not to mention any passengers…”
My voice trailed off as my headlights illuminated a humanlike figure doing a familiar slow wave of her hand at the intersection up ahead. Instinctively, I glanced at the glowing green digits on the dashboard clock.
00:04
I hesitated for just a split second before slamming on the brakes. After three nerve-wrecking rings, Kiong finally picked up the phone.
“Yes?”
“I should probably touch wood, but I think I found the lady you’re looking for.”
The next moment, there was the sound of tyres screeching in the background.
“Where are you? You pick her up and I’ll tail you. Drive straight to the police post if she gives you any trouble, got it?”
I relayed my location to him, and keeping him on the call with his voice muted, I slowly inched towards the waiting passenger.
No wonder Kiong described her as a “pretty girl”—that was my first impression as I stopped the car and rolled down the passenger side window. Soft, hazel-coloured hair that fell in silky waves down slender shoulders. A pair of dark brown, almost black eyes met mine with the faintest of smiles that made my heart flutter.
“Miss, where are you headed?” I asked, my throat suddenly feeling a lot drier than usual.
Her unblinking eyes stared back at me silently. Then without warning, she opened the passenger rear door and sat on the backseat in a smooth motion.
“Thean Hou Temple,” she said in a voice bordering on a whisper.
“O-okay…”
I shot a glance at my phone, making sure that my call with Kiong was still connected. At the very least, the temple wasn’t far from the main street—and though I wasn’t really the superstitious type, I was definitely relieved to be staying in the city instead of driving to the cemetery on the outskirts of town.
“Sorry, but can you go straight instead?”
Her whispery voice startled me.
“Straight?” I looked at the approaching intersection. “But Miss, I have to make a U-turn to go to the temple.”
“I’ve changed my mind…please, go straight.”
I gripped the steering wheel tightly.
“Miss, I’m telling you that…”
It was as if I had abruptly lost control of the car at that moment. I blinked in surprise, and the next thing I knew, we were already past the intersection and driving out of the town center.
“?!”
Barely able to register what had just happened, I frantically glanced at the rear-view mirror—and stared right into the lady’s unmoving eyes.
“M-Miss, we have to turn back…”
“Please, go straight,” she repeated, her pale lips hardly moving as she spoke.
A shiver ran down my spine, and to my fright, my foot stomped on the gas without warning. We flew past the next few intersections, all of them turning green in my favor eerily at the same time.
Within less than a minute, we were reaching the T-junction at the end of the road, and the sign for the highway appeared in the fast-nearing distance.
“Miss,” I managed to utter in between panicked gasps as I looked at the rear-view mirror again. “W…we can’t go straight any further!”
She didn’t reply, but her head was twisted to the right as if she was craning her neck to catch a glimpse of something along the highway running perpendicular to the road.
“I guess we’re turning r-right, then…?”
An invisible pressure pressing upon my body released its chokehold at that moment, and somehow I was able to control the steering wheel and brake just enough to make a wide right turn onto the highway.
“Driver,” the lady’s voice spoke into my ear all of a sudden.
“What the—” I flinched, and the car nearly drove over the median before I wrestled control over the steering wheel again.
She gave me a look of disapproval, of all things.
“When you see a fallen telephone pole along the road, please pull over and stop the car immediately ,” she continued, her voice fading to a bare whisper. “I’m counting on you…to find…”
“Miss? Sorry, I couldn’t catch what you—”
I glanced up at the rear-view mirror one last time, and just as Kiong had described, the lady was gone without a trace. One hand gripping the steering wheel tightly, I quickly unmuted the call on my phone.
“Kiong, did you catch that?!”
“Hah? Catch what?” he shouted back. “All I could hear for the past five minutes was static! Where are you now?”
“Uh, it looks like I’m on the highway heading towards Gua Musang…”
“The highway??”
“Yeah…w-wait a minute.”
Catching sight of a telephone pole which had collapsed into a ditch by the roadside, I quickly switched on my hazard lights and pulled over. This far out from the city, there were no street lights along the road, so I had to rely on my car headlights and the screen of my phone to navigate my way to the edge of the ditch.
“Huh, what’s that on the ground…”
I froze as the light from my phone shone upon a smashed car bumper.
“Kiong, can you hear me?”
“What’s wrong?”
“W…w-we need to call the police.”