You Know How the Story Goes
By Thomas Olde Heuvelt, first published in Tor.com
A hitchhiker has a near death experience with a ghost driving a car and begins to see that there is a string of similar accidents all across the globe.
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Plot Summary
A man tells a ghost story he has heard about a driver picking up a woman hitchhiker late at night. The woman says she is cold and so the driver gives her his jacket. The woman then disappears suddenly. The next day the driver gets a call about his jacket being found draped over the gravestone of a woman who died recently.
The man doesn't really believe in ghost stories, but begins to tell his own ghost story that he experienced.
The man lives in Croatia and goes out one night to a bar. He sees a pretty girl at the bar and decides to let his ride leave without him in an attempt to sleep over at the girl’s house. However, the girl turns him down and the man, who is drunk, decides to try and walk home in the dark. It is very cold and eventually he sticks his thumb out as a car drives up. The driver stops and it is a student who takes him to a gas station. The student tells him that he needs to get a ride through a tunnel under a mountain range called Ucka. The man stands near the road for a while, but no one stops for him.
He looks across the street as it gets silent and feels something watching him from the dark. In an instant a blue Prius pulls in front of him and a languid hand ushers him into the car. He gets in and sees a woman who has no defining facial features. He talks with her as they drive away and she tells him that she can hear a constant ringing in her ears and that she doesn’t like driving alone at night. The car is very cold and the man tries to get her to notice, but she begins talking about how she is visiting a man named Udur. She says that Udur is not a good man and that he left his dog in the rain and it was eventually eaten alive by maggots and so he had to put the dog out of its misery.
The man notices that they are picking up speed and also that it seems the woman is very tall, though he had not realized this before. He asks to get out of the car, but she doesn’t let him out and begins to accelerate even faster as they approach the tunnel. There is suddenly a baby in the back seat and he becomes frightened as it seems the woman is of a massive size and her fingers are very long and nailless. She tells him that he is going to join her in seeing Udur and then suddenly she disappears from the driver seat. The man reaches over and barely misses a concrete pillar and then slowly pulls the emergency break as the car enters the tunnel.
He gets out of the car when it stops and sees that the baby is gone too. He recognizes the car from a car accident in the paper that killed a student where a random baby was in the back and the driver was gone. Suddenly the man realizes that there is something behind him and he sees the tall lady who has filled up the tunnel behind him. He runs and cannot remember what she looks like completely. He eventually gets his father to pick him up. He is only able to muster up the courage to return to the tunnel five months later, but doesn't see anything inside. However, he still sees the tall woman everywhere he goes.
He writes his story online and shows how there is a string of accidents where a blue Prius crashes and kills the passenger, but never has a driver. The man warns never to hitchhike at night because the woman driving doesn’t like driving alone at night and she will take the hitchhiker to see Udur.