Midnight is when the city's streets begin to lose their soul. As an online taxi driver, I've gotten used to this silence. That night, the drizzle had just stopped, leaving behind wet asphalt that reflected the streetlights in a yellowish glow.
Just as I was about to turn around and head home, my phone app chimed. A request came in from the outskirts, asking for a pickup near the old toll gate. Without a second thought, I headed straight there.
At the side of the deserted toll road, a man in a neatly tailored suit stood waiting. His face was pale beneath the streetlight, and he carried a small black suitcase. Once he got into the back seat, he didn't say much. He gave me only one destination: an old residential area at the edge of the city.
Throughout the drive, the atmosphere inside the car felt incredibly cold and stiff. The man stared straight ahead through the window without moving a muscle. I tried to make small talk, but he only answered with a low murmur that was almost impossible to hear. I felt uneasy, but figured it was normal since it was so late.
Finally, in the middle of a dark stretch of toll road surrounded by enormous trees, the man suddenly tapped the back of my seat.
“Let me out here,” he said in a hoarse voice.
I pulled onto the shoulder. The man paid with exact bills, then got out of the car and hurried into the darkness beyond the toll-road barrier. I let out a relieved breath, put the money in the center console, and continued driving home.
The next morning, I woke to the ringing of my cell phone. A fellow driver called me in a panic and told me to turn on the TV. The screen showed morning news about the discovery of a neatly dressed man's body beside the toll road—in the exact same spot where I'd dropped off my passenger the night before.
What made my blood suddenly run cold was the report's claim that, based on the condition of his body, the man was believed to have been murdered “three days ago.”
Panic slammed into my chest. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. If he'd been dead for three days, then who had I picked up and carried in the back seat of my car last night?
With trembling hands, I hurried to my car parked in the garage. I opened the door, took the memory card from the dashcam, and inserted it into my laptop. I had to watch the footage to prove that I wasn't hallucinating or having a nightmare.
The laptop screen lit up. Wide-angle video footage began to play. I watched my car drive through the night. Streetlights passed one after another.
My heart pounded as the video timeline approached midnight—the time I'd picked up the man at the toll gate.
On the screen, my car appeared to pull over. The back door opened, then closed again. But when the interior dashcam showed the view toward the back seat... my breath caught in my throat.
The back seat was completely empty.
There was no man in a neat suit. No black suitcase. In the footage, I was driving alone, talking to myself toward empty air, and even reaching out to accept money from thin air.
I stared at the laptop screen with my eyes wide, while the air inside the garage suddenly felt ice-cold. If I'd been driving alone last night, then who had really been sitting behind me... and who was still watching my every move tonight from behind the rearview mirror?