Submitted for the October 2023 prompt: Machine in the Ghost 

When he was a teenager, Roosevelt Bailey had learned Just keep going. Never get sidetracked. Don’t be afraid.

 

Fear was always a test. Now his fear became a girl, visible on the side of the road, wearing a white dress and holding herself against the night rain. Here the road crossed a little brook and curved behind a row of trees.

 

She was impossible. She could not be here again, thirty years later, in this same stretch of dark road. But she would be a test for him.

 

They say she just wants a ride.

 

The rain on his windshield blurred her image.

 

For generations teenaged boys and young men had passed around the story: If you see the girl in white looking for a ride by the bridge, don’t stop for her. Just keep going. But he had stopped once, in that last summer before his plans unraveled and his life turned, and now he knew that he would be stopping again because fear made him weak.

 

Things had changed for him since then. He made things now, useful things that other people wanted. He had computers in his car and satellites to track him. Everyone told him that he worked too hard, but he had no excuse for wasting time on the backroads this time. And besides: people were expecting him just on the other side of this forest.

 

She was waiting on the far side of the bridge now. (Again.)

 

Roosevelt slowed and pulled over to the edge of the bridge, his hands shaking. Between the swipes of the wiper blades, he saw the girl approach the passenger side window, the thin metal bracelet on her wrist shiny in the rain. He caught his breath.

 

Would it be better or worse if she recognizes me?

 

He fumbled with the button that lowered the window. Her face was beautiful and sad, just as it always was in his nightmares. He remembered how innocent her eyes had been and how weak he had felt when she had spoken.

 

“I need a ride home,” she said. He was sure she had said something else the first time, but now he only heard the lashing of the rain.

 

“I need a ride home.”

 

Roosevelt was prepared for the strange anguish of all those years ago. He had replayed it in his mind but instead he heard something else in her voice that he didn’t recognize from before.

 

“I need a ride home. I need a ride home.”

 

Roosevelt fumbled with the door, just as he had done when he was a boy. He remembered feeling both childish and experienced at the same time. You are too young to be seeing this. That had been the test. Now that he was thirty years on he still felt that guilt, in fact craved it as punishment for all his shortcomings as an inventor and as a family man.

 

He worked too hard. They were expecting him on the other side of the forest, but he was stopping here, wasting time.

 

“Yes,” he said, “I’ll take you home,” even though this time he knew that he could not take her home. She would direct him again to the dark graveyard on the hill. She had been gone when he turned back to her. Just an empty back seat. But it would be different this time because this time he cared.

 

“I need a ride home. I need a ride home. I need a ride home.”

 

What Roosevelt remembered as an almost erotic sadness was now a muffled rage. The longing in her eyes was gone, and instead they showed a red hatred slowly building and aimed at him. He felt himself failing this test, and now he attempted to pull the door closed again. The girl had begun to force herself in, however, and she was clawing her way forward toward him, her knees on the passenger seat and her white porcelain arms scrambling at his face,. The silver bracelet on her wrist jingled.

 

Roosevelt pressed down on the accelerator as hard as he could, and the car lurched forward. The girl, half in and half out, attempted to continue her compulsive progress into the car. Frustrated and scared, Roosevelt tried to reach past and close the door upon her. The car veered, glanced off a tree, and suddenly the lower half of the girl was wrenched away. Her head and arms and torso remained in the car, still reaching for him, and an oily smoky haze began to rise up from the tangle of tubes and wires and transistor parts that protruded from where her abdomen had been.

 

You are too old to be seeing this.

 

Roosevelt slammed on the brakes. The half of the girl still with him toppled forward and then fall back into the passenger seat. Her arms stopped moving and something in her eyes settled.

 

“I need a ride home.”

 

The electronic parts spilling out from her, now exposed to the rainwater, sputtered and popped. There was a spark, and then a darker smoke.

 

The arm that was closest to him dropped, the bracelet jingling a final time.

 

“I need...” Something crackled inside her. A tiny flame appeared and suddenly burned out.

“... a ride.”

 

Then she was still, something white and ghostly but now, up close, plastic and metal and broken.

 

“I know,” said Roosevelt. “Home.”

 

The metal bracelet glittered, and Roosevelt saw the words there, Roosevelt Bailey Laboratories Patent 5454, wet with rain. He touched the bracelet and felt his fear ebbing.

 

He made a mental note again that the latest generation of prototypes needed to use other people’s memories and not his own. His were not to be trusted. He had failed his test and they would have to start over.

 

And he was late for the press conference that would announce a successful test.

 

He worked too hard, but he was expected.