The Way, The Truck, and The Life

In our first-ever script swap, we bring you our original take on one of Octoberpod's spookiest stories!

Transcript

By now you had it memorized. This thing, whatever it was, always began its journey somewhere around the kitchen window. When it was feeling vindictive, it might knock over any glasses of water you left soaking near the sink. It always happened at night, but it didn’t seem to be bound by any specific time. It’s only pattern seemed to be that it wouldn’t operate when the sun was out. Sometimes it would knock things over downstairs for a bit, sometimes it came straight up the stairs. Honestly, half the time you slept through it. You’d come to an understanding that you, and this ghost, both had to share the same space. It left you mostly alone, so you tried to return the favor. It was quieter than usual tonight. You really only heard it because you’d been having trouble sleeping. You listened to it creak through the kitchen, then make its way up the stairs. You appreciated the ghost keeping it down for once, you had a big day tomorrow. You always slept with your door open, you only had one vent in your room and if you didn’t, you’d either be freezing or sweating depending on the time of year. Sometimes the ghost nudged your door open even more as it came in and this was one of those nights. You listened to it creak across your floor as you watched the rain fall outside. But soon the pitter patter of raindrops was joined by a new sound. You heard a noise that your ghost never makes. You heard the sound of breathing. And all at once you realize that tonight instead of a ghost leaving peacefully out your window, someone else might be making their escape. Someone freshly bloody. As you try and turn around, ripping off your blankets is; the Podcast Inside Your House. 

THE WAY & THE TRUCK & THE LIFE

by John Eiger

This story was originally adapted especially for Octoberpod

Don't let anybody tell you there's no such thing as ghosts. They're real, and they're all around us ... but maybe they're not quite what we think they are. This thing that happened to me ...gosh, it had to have been 20 years ago. Probably more...back before streaming services, and before everyone had a digital camera in their pockets. I was an undergrad and had convinced myself that I wanted to get an MFA in film. So I tried to get jobs at movie theaters and video rental stores during breaks as a way to build up a resume for a budding career in film that never got off the ground. There were a half dozen video stores in town: a Blockbuster, a crappy shop inside the Food Country, and 2 or 3 mom and pops.

I got a gig as a clerk for Interstate Video right next to the old Big Lots in my town. Now, this store had a videography side business: which meant they'd go and videotape your wedding, graduation, bar mitzvah... whatever, and give you a professionally edited video of it. I told the boss about my film school aspirations and talked my way into a side gig as the junior videographer. It was fun work. But I had to attend so goddamn many weddings! I can't tell you how many times I filmed a bride dancing with her father to the song Butterfly Kisses. Gross. My job was to basically shoot B roll. My partner, an older guy named Donnie, the senior videographer, shot all the A list footage and then edited the tapes from our two cameras together, in the backroom at Interstate Video.

And so this fucked up thing happened at a wedding we videotaped one August. The wedding ceremony was held at this Lutheran church on the edge of town. It was funny, it felt like we were far out in the country...out in the middle of nowhere. But we were, in fact, just 1 block over from the town's busy historic main street. A street festival was in full swing, tourists were everywhere and the streets were clogged with pedi-cabs giving sightseeing tours. But you'd never be able to tell from the wedding venue.

It was a beautiful church...esp. compared to some of the po-dunk old churches we usually covered...or that one wedding we did that was held in a bingo hall. The church was on a lot adjacent to a historical site (civil war battlefield or something) that had been converted to a memorial park with a big pavilion on it. So when the ceremony was over, everyone just walked over to the pavilion for the reception. 

So where was I? Oh yeah, beautiful church. So whenever I shot video I'd take every opportunity to show off my skills, in case Donnie would notice during editing. I love the films of Mario Bava and--God this is nerdy--Bava would do this thing where he'd zoom into an object that catches the light...like a candle flame or chandelier...and then dial down the focus until the light becomes fuzzy abstract shapes before dissolving to the next shot. And I was messing around with my camera's manual zoom and manual focus before the ceremony. I was trying to replicate the Bava zoom/dissolve effect on a stained glass window that was backlit by the sunlight and glowing really nicely.

In the process of doing that, I noticed 2 things. The first was some fancy old English lettering on the back wall of the sanctuary. It said "I am the way and the truth and the light". Except the lettering they used was so ornate that the word "truth" looked more like "truck"

And this cracked me up until I noticed that second thing. It was a very thin person all dressed in orange from head to foot with a hood pulled down to cover most of their face. Whatever they were wearing, it was so loose and baggy on them that it resembled a ceremonial robe ... or a shroud. At first I thought it was someone very old because of their...I guess hunched over posture. And although I couldn't see this person's eyes...I could still tell that they were staring at me. It was ... creepy. (PAUSE) And then Donnie tapped me on the shoulder and we started setting up our shots for the ceremony. And I forgot all about it...

So the beautiful wedding was beautiful. Truly. It was maybe the nicest, sweetest wedding I'd ever shot. The reception was cool too. The groom and his mom danced to The Rainbow Connection... which was really cute. The bride (who looked positively luminous) and her father danced to What a Wonderful World by Louie Armstrong ...a refreshing change from Butterfly Kisses. The wedding cake was lemon chiffon. The grooms cake was red velvet and decorated to look like a giant Ruben. I stole a piece of both. Both were delicious.

It was right at sundown and the reception started winding down so that everyone could throw birdseed at the bride and groom as they ride off into the sunset. Now I'd shot a lot of weddings and seen newlyweds drive off in limos, stretch limos, party buses, horse drawn carriages, classic cars, a firetruck, and (once) in a canary yellow monster truck called Big Skillet. But this couple drove off in one of those pedi-cabs from main street.

They're also called cycle rickshaws ... but pedicab sounds, I dunno, less cringe. If you've never seen one it's just a little open top carriage (or wagon) usually big enough to hold 2 people on a bench seat ... and it's pulled by a bicycle. This particular one could hold 4 passengers facing each other. Now this presented a technical challenge for us, because they wanted us to video their pedicab ride down mainstreet (which was, as you will recall only a block over). Even tho it was a 4 seater, it was too tight for 4 people plus bulky camera equipment. So Donnie told me to stay behind and shoot the departure from outside the pedicab and he'd shoot it from the inside. This was all cool to me because that meant I could hang back, pack up our gear and maybe scavenge some cake and some of those little bite-sized ham biscuits.

The pedicab wasn't gone more than 5 minutes, and the wedding guests left behind started to thin out. I remember I was alone and hauling gear on the shaded pathway between the pavilion and the church. I remember the setting sun was burning up the sky with bright streaks of orange and the horizon had gone ash gray.

And then ... I can't explain it ... It was like a wind swept its way towards me ...but not a wind made of air, a wind made of nervous energy and dread. None of the wedding guests were near me, but after a while it seemed that they all started to murmur...and then pack closer to one another...and then they were all around me.

And before I knew it I had moved as part of the crowd of wedding guests like driftwood on an ocean wave and then we were on the sidewalk on main street amidst a lot of shouting and weeping and somewhere a little ways off the groans of people in pain and now the fire and rescue vehicles were arriving and with them the horror of shrieking sirens and a confusion of objects lit up with alternating red and blue lights now bodies being pulled from twisted metal and pavement and strapped onto gurneys and pushed into an ambulance.

So what happened was this. The bride and groom's pedicab left the venue and pulled onto main street. I don't know who was at fault (that's been hotly discussed in the civil suits that

would follow) ... But whatever. A large pickup truck--a Ford F150 or something like it--swerved out of his lane and struck the pedicab from behind. The truck wasn't even going fast, but it didn't need to be. The driver of the truck would later say in a deposition that he'd swerved to avoid hitting a pedestrian in a University of Tennessee hoodie. No one was able to back that statement up tho. From what I understand, the passengers were all catapulted out of the cab. Donnie and our camera equipment were tossed onto the pavement. It destroyed his leg. I'm not sure how many surgeries and pins and plates he would need to put his leg back together ... but Donnie walks with a pronounced limp to this day. The pedicab driver got off easiest with a broken collarbone and some bumps and scrapes. The bride and groom weren't so lucky. People who'd been there to see the accident happen, said that those two went sailing through the air. The groom struck his head on a parking meter. He would be pronounced dead an hour or two later after being med-flighted to a head trauma unit. The bride landed on a parked Volkswagen and suffered a fair amount of damage to her spine and broke about every bone on one side of her face. I mean ... what can I say? It was a horrible tragedy! I spent the rest of the evening feeling like I'd been punched in the stomach.

I made it back to the wedding venue with the rest of the wedding guests. I remember there was a lot of sobbing ... But I had a very practical problem on my hands ... I was stuck there! Donnie had been my ride to the wedding, but HE was being rushed to the ER ... presumably with the keys in his pocket. I had to call my Dad to pick me up ... and I was the last one to leave ... so I had a lot of time to contemplate mortality, and fate, and the whole magilla while sitting on the steps of a church that became creepier and creepier as the sun sank beneath the horizon.

Over the remainder of the summer, Interstate Video became lawsuit central. It seemed like every day someone new came in asking questions about the accident. Many of them came in requesting copies of Donnie's video. Yeah, I forgot to mention that in addition to Donnie's leg ... all of our camera equipment got destroyed. The camera Donnie was using to shoot the pedicab ride what broken into a dozen little pieces, but somehow the S-VHS cassette he'd been recording on was undamaged & had recorded the whole accident. Lawyers for the truck driver wanted to examine the video to try and locate the person in the UT hoodie that the truck had swerved to miss. And representatives from the bride's family, the deceased groom's family, and even the pedicab company came for their own copies of it. I remember Donnie came to the store one day (he was in a wheelchair) and went into the back room where he played the tape of the accident for our boss and another of my coworkers who'd swung by to pick up her paycheck. I left the room and stood behind the front counter because I couldn't bear to watch it ... I could still hear it tho. The screaming and the sounds of people moaning in pain. It was like listening to a snuff film. I guess in a way it WAS a snuff film.

Well ... the summer ended & I left town when my Fall semester started back up. When I came back home for winter break, I pulled a few shifts at Interstate Video because they needed some seasonal help & I needed some cash. One day--it must've been between Christmas and New Years--I opened up the store and saw that Donnie had left a note for me saying that someone would be by to pick up a wedding video that he'd left behind the counter. Donnie didn't say that the video was from "the truck crash wedding" (as people around the video store began to call it) but when I saw the person coming to get it ... I KNEW what she was coming for. It was the bride from the accident ... though she was unrecognizable. Her face was badly scarred and malformed on one side. Her posture was stooped and twisted, and she was struggling to walk with a tripod cane. She was having SUCH a difficult time walking, that I wondered how in the world she was walking around alone without someone to help her. She was wearing an orange

hooded sweatshirt from her alma mater, the University of Tennessee, and matching orange sweatpants. But she'd lost a lot of weight and her clothes were hanging from her twisted frame ... almost like ceremonial robes or an orange shroud. I know you won't believe me ... but I swear in the name of Jesus that she WAS the same figure in orange I had seen when I was looking at the funny writing on the wall at her wedding ... the writing that I thought had said "I am the way and the truck and the life" The vacant expression in her eyes as she stared at me from beneath the orange hood ... the way she stooped and hobbled about ... the loose drape of her clothes. It was HER! What I had seen at the wedding was this same, broken woman. But how was that possible?

We didn't really speak much ... only saying what was necessary to hand over the videotape that she'd come to pick up. And then she was gone.

But I swear to Christ, I'd seen her before. Had I had a premonition of the accident while we were setting up for the wedding? And what about the guy who'd crashed the truck into the pedicab? He said he'd swerved to miss a pedestrian in an orange UT hoodie ... I rushed into the back room where Donnie edited videos, and rummaged around until I found the tape from the accident. I slid it into one of the store's Super-VHS editing decks and queued it up to the accident. Donnie had captured the moment the truck made impact. It was hard to make out any details, esp. among the crowds on main street … because as soon as the truck hit, the camera went flying. I ran it back and replayed it several times until, finally, at the edge of the frame ... I saw (or thought I saw) the twisted blur of a thin woman ... in a baggy orange hoodie.

Until next time; keep your ears to the ground, and preferably on your body too. You never know when the universe is trying to tell you something, and you need to be ready to listen.