It was already fairly late in the afternoon when I headed home with a friend. Since our houses were in the same direction, we usually walked together as far as the intersection before going our separate ways.
That day, the rain had just stopped.
The streets were still wet, and the sky was beginning to darken, even though it wasn't actually that late yet.
Partway there, we saw a minibus stopped in front of a bus stop.
“Let's take it,” my friend said.
I nodded.
We got on and sat in the middle.
The minibus wasn't very crowded. There were only a few passengers in the front and a woman sitting alone in the very back row.
I didn't pay much attention to her.
The minibus started moving.
For the first few minutes, everything seemed normal.
Until I started noticing something.
The woman sitting in the back kept staring in our direction.
At first, I thought it was just my imagination.
I tried not to pay attention to her.
But several times, when I looked through the window, I caught a glimpse of her face turned toward us.
My friend eventually noticed her too.
“She keeps looking at us, doesn't she?”
I just nodded. After that, we chose not to talk about it anymore.
A few minutes later, the minibus stopped.
One passenger got off, then another. Eventually, only my friend, the driver, the woman in the back, and I were left.
I started feeling uncomfortable.
My friend then whispered,
“Maybe we should get off up ahead.”
We got off several stops before our usual destination.
As soon as our feet hit the pavement, I glanced back.
The woman was still sitting there.
She hadn't gotten off.
The minibus started moving again and disappeared at the end of the street.
My friend and I continued on our way.
A little while later, my friend suddenly stopped.
“Hey.”
“What?”
He pointed toward a convenience store across the street.
Several people were gathered in front of it.
I didn't pay much attention until we heard them talking.
“That poor thing...”
“I heard she fell earlier.”
“Inside the minibus?”
My friend and I looked at each other.
We approached out of curiosity. It turned out they were talking about a passenger who had just been in an accident.
The minibus they were talking about...
was the one we'd just been riding.
I immediately felt uneasy.
“Where did the accident happen?”
Someone pointed toward the road we'd just come down, but we didn't see anything. Maybe they had already evacuated the victim.
We eventually went home.
The next day, I tried to find out more about the accident. I wanted to make sure everything was all right.
It turned out the accident had happened just a few minutes after we got off.
The driver and passengers were injured, but no one died.
I felt relieved.
At least the woman had survived.
But when I told a neighbor who happened to take minibuses in that area often, his reaction only confused me.
“The woman sitting in the very back?”
I nodded.
“Yeah.”
He was silent for a long time before asking,
“What color clothes was she wearing?”
I told him what color the woman's clothes had been.
His face immediately changed.
“That can't be.”
“Why not?”
He told me that several months earlier, a woman had died in a minibus accident along the same route.
And according to the people who had witnessed it...
she had been found in the very back seat.
I didn't know whether to believe it. Maybe there had been two women who happened to be wearing similar clothes. Maybe the person we'd seen really had been an ordinary passenger. Maybe the story about the earlier accident was just a coincidence.
But from that day on, every time I rode a minibus and saw the back row...
I always remembered one thing.
The woman sitting there that day had never gotten off.
And stranger still—
there wasn't a single person on that minibus whom I had seen board before or after us.