REVENGE OF THE GREEN BUS (2025 Edit)

Editor, Louisa Roberts, is haunted & trapped by characters from stories she has rejected

1.

Slowly, he rubbed the grime away from the glass partition, but the shock of the discovery was too much for him, and he staggered backwards and fell headlong down the small staircase to collide heavily with the metal doors. He lay at the bottom of the stairwell for five minutes before groping his way up the stairs to confirm the dreadful truth: that there was no one in the driver’s seat; the green bus was driving itself! He knew then that he was doomed, that he would never ....

“Hmmph!” said Louisa Roberts, throwing “The Green Bus” into her reject tray.

She picked up a second story, “The Church of the Divine Fastbuck!” by the same writer, and began to read: Looking around the small reception room, with its vinyl-topped desks, laden high with forms and pamphlets, Father Joe felt troubled. He had failed in his duty; he should have been able to stop the man somehow, should have guessed what would happen. Now, thanks to his failure, there was a lunatic loose in Melbourne. A man who was dangerous to himself, dangerous to everyone he came in contact with ....

“Him and how many others?” said Louisa. She skimmed the rest of the story, which was about a defrocked priest, involved in a religious racket, who suddenly found himself confronted with a genuine spiritual problem.

Relegating “The Church...” to the reject tray, she picked up the third story by the same writer, “The Scream in the Night”, and began to read: Monty lay back against the pine tree, listening to the breeze wafting through the tops of the trees, and the occasional twitter of a sparrow preparing to bed down for the night. Eyes closed, arms crossed, Monty was almost asleep when the silence of the evening was shattered by a high-pitched woman’s scream. As abruptly as it started, the scream stopped, but only to be replaced by a low gurgling sound; the sound of someone choking to death ....

“Hmmph!” said Louisa Roberts again, predicting the ending in advance. Monty had become a hobo twenty years earlier, after strangling his lover, Janette Patterson, when she had threatened to “tell all” if he did not divorce his wife to marry her. Then, twenty years later -- for reasons that the writer had forgotten to tell his readers -- Janette’s ghost had finally returned from the grave to torment poor Monty.

“Not to mention tormenting Poor Louisa!” said the young editor running a hand through her long blonde hair, then continuing down to rub at her forehead, which ached from the strain of having to read hundreds of second-rate horror stories in a bid to find eighteen or so stories good enough for her employers, The Australian Filmways Cinema, to begin shooting the first (and Louisa, now hoped last) series of their proposed half-hour Australian Horror Series.

A long-time lover of horror and fantasy, Louisa had jumped at the chance to select the stories for the series when the job had been offered to her eight months ago. But now, fifteen hundred hack stories later, with only twelve of the required eighteen stories selected so far, she was not sure if she could ever bring herself to read another horror story.

Relegating “Monty” to the plastic reject tray at the front of her paper-laden desk, Louisa picked up the fourth story by the writer, Robert Robinson, and began to read: Randy Miss Mandy, the doll for all occasions. She cums complete with three working holes. Take Miss Mandy wherever you like, whenever you like, through whichever orifice you like. As she cums, Miss Mandy shrieks, “Fuck me, stud! Fuck me!” All this for the special after-Christmas sell-out price of only $49.95! Cum and get it while she’s hot! Hot! Hot!

Rubbing her forehead to relieve the throbbing, Louisa struggled through the five-thousand-word story, “Randy Miss Mandy”. A tale about a pervert who buys a plastic sex doll, then becomes so infatuated with it that he fantasises that the doll has come alive. At first, he treats her like a flesh-and-blood lover, but finally, as -- exhausted from too much “sex” -- his stamina gives out, he imagines that Miss Mandy is a sex-vampire who draws the energy out of her victim, by literally fucking him to death.

Placing “Randy Miss Mandy” into the reject tray, Louisa said, “My God, how many times has that been done in one guise or another? It started with Gerald Kersh’s film, “The Horrible Dummy” about the ventriloquist who fantasises that his dummy has come to life, then Danny Kaye’s “Knock on Wood”. And how many remakes has it gone through since then, before ending up as a pervert molested by his sex doll?”

2.
One month later

Sitting upon his unmade bed, Robert Robinson yawned widely, then wiped the sleep from his eyes. Glancing across at the clock on his desk, he saw that it was nearly noon.

Most people would have been out of bed hours ago. But as a freelance writer, Robert was able to set his own hours and chose to write throughout the night, then sleep from breakfast till tea time. But today he had been awakened by the persistent rapping of the mailwoman at the front door.

Glancing down at the large pile of manila envelopes and two parcels on his lap, he thought, It never rains, it only pours! He yawned again, then thought, The most frustrating thing about being a freelancer isn’t the hundreds of rejection slips for every story that finally gets published, but rather the editors who won’t send back your stories promptly when they can’t use them. Instead, they hold on to rejected stories for weeks or even months before finally returning them. So you can go a month or more without a single letter, then suddenly find yourself with twenty-odd stories returned to you on the same day. As had happened to Robert.

Placing the stack of mail onto the bed, Robert went around the bed to his writing desk, a small, four-drawer desk with two shelves for reference books overhead. Taking the bottom drawer out of the desk, he returned to his bed to sort out his mail.

Opening the envelopes, he placed the rejected short stories together, ready for sending out again, then placed the rejection slips into the drawer. Over the last twenty years, since writing his first short story (which much later had been rewritten to become “The Scream in the Night”) way back in February 2005, he had collected nearly three thousand rejection slips, ranging from some hardly bigger than matchbox covers, right up to multi-page letters.

Robert had started his writing career at age twelve, writing song lyrics. He had written hundreds of lyrics since 1998; however, none of them had ever been recorded or published, since he could not write the melody, and did not know of anyone who could write it for him. When he sent his lyrics to record studios asking if they knew of any melody writer he could pair up with, they blandly replied, “We have enjoyed your lyrics very much; however, it will be necessary for you to send us a tape of the music before we can proceed with any plans to record them.”

At thirteen, Robert had written his first short story, although he had continued to write song lyrics and had penned nearly a thousand lyrics to date. At fourteen, inspired by a favourite English teacher, he had taken to writing poetry.

He had turned out fifteen hundred poems, ranging from three-line haiku through to twelve-page mini-epics, before giving up poetry at age twenty, after the editor of a New Zealand poetry magazine had advised him, “We are unable to use any of your so-called poetry!”

Throughout his poetry writing years, Robert continued to write short stories. And had been writing at a frantic pace for two years. Then, at twenty-two, he had been advised by an editor that since his best stories were mainly dialogue, he should try his hand at writing plays. He had done so for three years, turning out seven full-length plays, none of which had ever been performed. However, at twenty-five, his best play, Working Class -- Stiff! about youth unemployment had been read out at the National Theatre in St. Kilda.

After applauding throughout most of the reading, the audience then picked the play to pieces in the question period, claiming that it glorified the unemployed, while making the CentreLink officers look like sadists. In frustration, Robert had given up writing plays and had spent a year converting Working Class -- Stiff! into a full-length novel, The Working Man.

At twenty-five, despite having only ever had one short story published, he retired from his job in the public service to support himself as a freelance writer, confident that his $50,000 life savings would support him until his writing was able to do so.

Over the next five years, he had written three more novels and nearly two hundred short stories, which he sent out regularly to editors -- although it cost him $2,000 a year in photocopies and postage alone. However, he still had only five short stories published, although the best of them, a vampire story called “The Gift”, had been published four times.

Finally, at age thirty, Robert was down to his last few hundred dollars and would soon have to face the decision of starving or going back to a non-writing job, knowing that it would mean the end of his writing. He had been working two jobs ever since his twelfth birthday and no longer had the heart to do so.

Yet Robert still clung to one vain hope, which allowed him to keep his spirits up as he opened his mail, sorting out the bills from the rejected stories. He knew (not felt; knew) that at least one or two of his short stories would be accepted for the thirty-minute horror series.

“Then I’ll be laughing all the way to the bank!” he said aloud. He yawned again, then opened the last envelope.

“Dear Mr Rodgers,” he read, “I loved all four of your short stories; you certainly know how to create mood and atmosphere. Unfortunately, none of your stories are quite what I am looking for, for the Australian Horror Series.”

Clamping his eyes shut, Robert began to breathe deeply, determined to keep calm, not to scream (or cry) as he felt like doing.

“Eighteen years wasted!” he said aloud. He knew that he could not keep on writing now; he would never make it as a writer. But he could not bring himself to give it up and settle down to make a career of anything else.

Dropping the pile of stories into a brown paper supermarket bag (which he used as a rubbish bin) at the end of his bed, Robert Robinson went across to his writing desk, sat down and slumped forward, his head against the typewriters where his latest story, “The Witch hunt”, sat finished but only half typed.

After struggling for a few minutes to fight back the tears, sighing deeply, shoulders heaving, he picked up a blue pen and crossed out part of the manuscript, wrote in one word, “Louisa”.

Then, he picked up a sharp pair of scissors and, biting back the cries of pain, began to slash at his left wrist.

3.
Five hours later

Walking along crowded Collins Street, Louisa Roberts did her best to keep looking forward, ignoring the impulse to look back over her shoulder. For the last ten minutes, since leaving her office, she had had the feeling that she was being followed. Hell, of course I’m being followed, she thought, it’s peak hour, and there must be at least a thousand people behind me. But the logic did not dispel the discomfort that she felt.

Driven to the point of distraction, where she was almost colliding with the people in front of her, Louisa conceded defeat and stepped across to a large flower box near the edge of the pavement and quickly turned around, startling a few people immediately behind her. As well as someone half a dozen people back, who seemed to duck deliberately behind the next flower box. The box held a thick hedge-like shrub, so Louisa was unable to see her pursuer -- if he was following her? -- and she felt stupid just standing near the gutter, so she started back into the mainstream of the crowd.

Quickly looking back over her shoulder, she saw the man come out from behind the flower box and sighed in relief, thinking, Just an old derelict! There was hardly a street in Melbourne that did not have its own “dero”; they proliferated almost to the same extent as the buskers, so Louisa thought: Obviously, the old man wasn’t following me at all! Just staggering along behind me -- that’s probably why my ears picked him out; his staggers were out of sync. with the measured steps of the rest of the crowd.

She continued along, half of a mind to take advantage of the late-night closing to do her weekend shopping, so that she could sleep in on Saturday; half of a mind just to hurry home. Louisa stopped for the lights at the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets, still undecided whether to start down Swanston Street to do her shopping or to continue up Collins toward Russell Street.

As the lights turned green, she felt someone crash into her back. Looking around, she saw the old dero -- “Hobo!” a little voice inside her head shouted -- standing right behind her. Expecting him to apologise or simply stagger around her, she was surprised when he stepped back a few paces and just stood in the middle of the oncoming traffic, seemingly waiting for something.

Shrugging, Louisa started across the road and immediately heard the dero’s staggering footsteps behind her again. She glanced back and saw that he had started after her again. Sighing in frustration, she thought, Enough is enough! and headed off into the middle of the intersection to speak to a young policewoman directing traffic.

“What hobo?” asked the young policewoman.

Looking back, Louisa saw that there was no sign of the old man, although he had been just behind her. He could easily have run up Collins or Swanston Street; however, his dirty, burlap overcoat should have made him stand out like a beacon amid the crowd of smartly dressed office workers.

“Well, he was just behind me,” insisted Louisa. “He’s been following me for at least fifteen minutes.”

“Did he try to attack you?”

“He followed me!”

“But did he touch you, or attack you in any way?” asked the policewoman.

“No, but he was following me for fifteen minutes! Isn’t that enough?”

“It might be if you could prove it, but how do you know that he was following you? He might have just been part of the peak hour crowd.”

Frustrated at hearing her thoughts thrown back at her, Louisa insisted, “But can’t you arrest him for loitering?”

“Not any more. John Cain abolished the law against loitering in Victoria when he was first elected Premier back in 1982.”

Seething with frustration, Louisa started back across to the footpath, then found that the lights had changed, so that she had to stay in the middle of the intersection until they changed back again. Finally, she managed to cross and headed back up Collins Street, deciding that she was too angry to do any shopping.

Louisa had hardly gone more than a dozen paces, however, when she heard the shuffling footsteps behind her again. Oh no! she thought, close to panic. Glancing back, she saw that the derelict was keeping an even three paces behind her now. Well, he can’t do anything while we’re in the crowd, she thought, trying to hurry her footsteps. Then, finding the incline up Collins Street too steep, she settled back into a leisurely walk.

Eventually, she reached the corner of Collins and Russell Streets and turned right into Russell. At last, he was able to run down Russell Street toward the 252 bus stop near the corner of Russell and Flinders Streets.

As Louisa approached the bus stop, however, she saw the derelict already standing there, having somehow passed her. The little voice inside her head said, “Hobo” for the second time, and Louisa remembered the story of Monty the hobo, who had strangled his lover, Janette Patterson.

Looking down at the hobo’s hands, Louisa saw that they were almost supernaturally large and seemed to be dripping with blood. Although no one else in the crowd seemed to be able to see the puddle of blood at his feet, and common sense told her that strangling someone would not get blood onto your hands.

The hobo -- Monty? -- leant against the metal post of the bus stop. Seated on a wooden bench near him were two elderly women and a young blonde, whose head lolled at a strange angle, so that it looked as though she were resting her head upon her own shoulder.

The 252 bus approached the stop, however, with the hobo -- Monty? -- and the young woman -- Janette Patterson? -- waiting near the doorway, Louisa could not bring herself to walk passed them to board the green bus. Instead, she turned and started to walk back up Russell Street, intent upon walking up to the next bus stop.

She had only taken a few paces, though, when she was accosted by a survey taker. Normally, Louisa brushed such people aside contemptuously, but now she thought, This will fill in a few minutes and let the hobo -- “Monty!” the little voice insisted -- get aboard his bus and disappear.

For five minutes, Louisa answered questions such as “Which is most important to you, financial success, business success, marital success, or personal happiness?” Then, seeing to her dismay that Monty and Janette Patterson had not boarded the bus, which had long since departed, Louisa allowed herself to be led into the “surveyor’s” temple -- having just found out that the “survey” was conducted by a religious sect, whose name she did not quite catch.

As she entered through the doorway, Louisa glanced up at the sign above the door and read, “Church of the Divine Fast...” Fast what? she wondered, then had to place a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter as she thought, Church of the Divine Fast Food?

After being seated at a small table in the book-lined “temple”, Louisa was browbeaten for nearly ten minutes by a “Priest” who called himself Father Joe, and who tried to force her to buy a copy of their spiritual guidance manual, A Dynamic Way To Spiritual Health!

Finally, in disgust, she pushed back the chair and stormed out of the “temple”, with the “priest” chasing after her, waving the book at her and shrieking that her soul would be damned to hell without their help. As she headed up Russell Street, Fr. Joe finally gave up the chase and shouted out after her, “Cheap bitch!”

Startled, Louisa looked back and saw the words, “The Church of the Divine Fastbuck” over the temple doorway, and thought, That can’t be right! Even a pseudo-religion wouldn’t be honest enough to call itself that!

She started up Russell Street again, but then Louisa suddenly remembered where she had heard the term, “Church of the Divine Fastbuck” before. It was the name of a short story that I read, she thought. Then she recalled that it had been by the same writer who had sent her the story of the murderous hobo. It was the story of a retired government physicist who built an atomic bomb in his backyard. But in the story, Father Joe was the hero! she remembered.

Turning to look back, Louisa was shocked to see that the “temple” seemed to have vanished. In its place, there now stood a small record shop -- William Hanna’s Import Music Store.

Almost without realising that she was doing so, Louisa began to slowly walk back to the temple-cum-record shop. It was only after she opened the door and placed one foot inside the shop that she realised that William Hanna had been the name of the nuclear physicist in the short story. She started back out of the record shop, then, seeing Monty and Janette Patterson still watching her, Louisa stepped inside.

“Kill all the teachers ….

“Kill all the parents ….

“Kill all policemen …

“Kill small babies …

“With a Bowie knife …

“Now let’s rap!”

Kill small babies! by the Psycho-Rappers was playing in the CD player behind the counter, although no one appeared to be tending the shop. Louisa walked toward the back of the shop, ducking her head occasionally, to avoid T-shirts and jeans which were suspended from the ceiling. She thought, Give me the good-old-days when record stores only sold records. At the back of the store, she saw a life-size cutout of Kanye West, advertising his latest multi-million selling album, and wondered whether she should buy a copy for her niece, Joanna, who was about to celebrate her fifteenth birthday.

Behind her, the CD player suddenly began to play another record (to Louisa’s horror, since there was still no one behind the counter):

“Randy, Miss Mandy,

“What a bottle of Joy;

“Goes out on the town,

“Making lots of noise;

“Not out with the girls,

“Oh no! She goes out with the boys --

“Randy, Miss Mandy, oh boy!

“Oh boy! Oh boy! Oh boy!”

Louisa almost fainted, as she realised that the trite lyric came from a third story by the same writer. A story about a vampire sex doll named Randy Miss Mandy. But how could I be haunted by works of fiction? wondered Louisa.

“Are you all right?” called out a voice from the record counter. Looking up, Louisa saw a short blonde with startlingly pale pink skin staring at her. At the same instant, she realised that the CD was actually “Boys”, an old song by the Beatles.

“Yes, thank you,” said Louisa, trying to recover her composure as she walked across to the counter to ask about the Kanye West CD.

As she approached the counter, Louisa was amazed at the size of the other woman’s breasts. They seemed almost like inflated balloons, and she tried to reassure herself, There are plenty of huge-breasted women in the world, as she suddenly remembered that in the story, Randy Miss Mandy’s measurements had been given in inches as 44-26-38 -- a seemingly impossible hourglass figure, which the flaxen-haired sales girl appeared to fulfil.

“Could you please tell me...?” began Louisa. She stopped as she noticed the name Mandy on the woman’s name tag, at the same instant that she saw the smooth, plastic-like appearance of the girl’s skin. Looking up into Mandy’s eyes, Louisa shrieked as she saw the lifeless blue beads of badly painted plastic!

Running from the record shop, her heart pounding in her chest, Louisa was relieved to see a number 252 bus pull up at the stop, and even more relieved to see there was no sign of Monty or Janette Patterson. She had to wait in line to board the bus, then was surprised when she finally got aboard to see that there was no driver. He must have got off through the back door to buy something, she thought. She sat herself in the seat directly opposite the driver’s seat.

Hearing footsteps to her left, Louisa looked around and was horrified to see Janette Patterson and Monty boarding the bus.

Looking around to see if she could escape through the rear doors, Louisa gasped as she saw Randy, Miss Mandy and Father Joe sitting together on the seat directly behind her. She was not sure which was the most shocking, being surrounded, or the thought of a priest casually sitting next to an inflatable sex doll.

Almost too afraid to look back toward the front of the green bus, Louisa saw Janette Patterson sit directly opposite her -- sitting facing the front, but with her broken neck twisted to the side, lolling on her shoulder so that her blue eyes glared menacingly toward Louisa. Then, to Louisa’s horror, Monty climbed into the driver’s seat, flipped the switch to close the doors, and then drove the bus away from the footpath.

As the green bus started up, Louisa remembered that there had been four stories sent to her in the package, which had included “The Scream in the Night”, “The Church of the Divine Fastbuck”, and “Randy Miss Mandy”. The fourth story had been called “The Green Bus”. But so what? thought Louisa. Most of the buses in Victoria are green! “The Green Bus” was probably written in the early 1980s, when the government considered replacing the green buses with orange ones.

Seeing the lights at the corner of Bourke and Russell Streets were red, Louisa wondered whether she could make her escape when the bus stopped for the lights. But to her horror, the bus continued through the intersection, headed on a collision course with a floral tourist tram.

“Oh God, we’re going to crash!” shouted Louisa. She covered her head with her hands and clamped her eyes shut, wishing that she were at the back of the bus.

For nearly two minutes, Louisa cringed before realising that somehow the collision had been avoided. Looking up again, she expected to find the bus somewhere near the corner of Latrobe and Russell Streets. Instead, they seemed to be driving through some strange circular tunnel, whose sides shimmered luminously, flashing from red to green, to blue, to orange, and so on through the colours of the light spectrum. Occasionally, the walls of the tunnel seemed to bulge inwards alarmingly, as though made of rubber.

Overhead signs whizzed past them, though Louisa could not understand why there would be signs in a tunnel. However, as the strange tunnel seemed to go on forever, out of boredom, Louisa began to look up each time that an overhead sign approached.

At first the bus was going too quickly for Louisa to read the signs, then after a while they seemed to move along with the bus so that she was able to make them out: “The Scream in the Night”, “The Church of the Divine Fastbuck,” “Randy Miss Mandy”, Louisa managed to read off three signs, which seemed to vanish into thin air after she had read them. “The Green Bus”, “The Bird-Eater!”, “The Glen Hartwell Horror”, “The Day the Terror Came”, Louisa read aloud. She recognised the first four titles, but without understanding what they were doing on street signs -- Tunnel signs? she thought, becoming increasingly alarmed as she started to look more closely at the shimmering, dream-like quality of the tunnel wall.

Looking up again, despite her determination not to, Louisa read, “The Revenge of the Green.” But then the titles on the signs were replaced by a more alarming message, which read: “She knew then that she was doomed! ... That she would never ... escape alive from the green bus....”

Recognising the words as coming from the story, “The Green Bus”, Louisa shouted out, “No, no, not she; he. He knew that he would never escape alive ....”

But her words were drowned out as Monty, Janette Patterson, Randy Miss Mandy, Fr. Joe and the other passengers aboard the green bus began to chant, “She knew then that she was doomed, that she would never escape alive. The green bus was not a bus at all, but rather the entrance to a time warp, a fault in the fabric of time itself. A new line on the time-space vector, which would take Louisa backwards or forward to who knows what time and place? Or what planet! Perhaps to Venus, where it rains sulphuric acid twenty-four hours a day, and the temperature never drops below nine hundred Degrees Celsius? Perhaps to Yuggoth, where gigantic, insectile monsters shamble across the barren plains, while elephantine shoggoths wing overhead, swooping down onto unsuspecting prey below? Perhaps to ...?”

4.
A fortnight later

“My God!” said one of the two young police officers, as they walked along the concrete landing outside the small flat in Glen Hartwell.

“This is the place all right,” said his partner, wrinkling up his nose in disgust. “There’s something dead in there for sure.”

“Who lives here?” asked the first officer, taking the pass key from the teenage boy whose parents were the live-in caretakers of the apartment block.

“A weird guy named Robert Robinson,” said the teenager.

“What’s weird about him?” asked the policeman as he unlocked the door.

“He writes short stories for a living.”

“You know him, then?”

“Not really, my mum won’t let me go anywhere near him. She reckons there has to be something wrong with a bloke who writes fiction at all hours of the night, instead of getting himself a real job.”

Doing their best not to vomit at the smell of decaying flesh, the two police officers worked their way through the small flat until they found the body of Robert Robinson slumped across his typewriter.

Glancing down at the half-typed short story, one of the officers incorrectly read out the title as “The Witch Hut”.

EXTRACT FROM THE WITCH HUNT:
Esmeralda held the carving knife in her right hand, raised tentatively toward her left wrist. Afraid of hurting herself, she looked again at the text of the famous Malleus Maleficarum (commonly known as The Witches” Hammer, penned by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer, and Jakob Sprenger, and read aloud:

“The American Indian ceremony of cutting your palm to mix your blood with that of another, to become “blood brothers”, is probably a dilution of the Celtic blood magic ritual used to kill your enemies. First, write your enemy’s name on paper, or even in the dirt, then, while reciting, or even thinking, their name over and over again, lightly slit your left wrist, and allow the blood to flow over the written name of your intended victim. Within twenty-four hours, he or she will be dead, or else cast forever into the bottomless void of timeless, dimensionless space!”

Steeling her shaky nerves, Esmeralda lightly slit her wrist, and let her blood run across the name of her enemy, Miranda, which she had written in flour on her kitchen table ....


Except that Robert Robinson had crossed out the name Miranda and had replaced it with Louisa. And it had been his blood, not Esmeralda’s, which had flowed across the name, as he had thought Louisa Roberts’s name over and over again, while he had slowly bled to death!

THE END
© Copyright 2025 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia