Always Tip the Taxi Driver

Twelve seconds. That was all it took, and he shrank back inside the taxi with all the grace of a drowned rat and cheeks as ruddy as a spanked bottom.

“Jesus Christ!” He gasped, slamming the door with fervent finality. His patent leather loafers squeaked and squelched as they rubbed against the mat, where a small pond was already accumulating, complete with leftovers of the local wildlife that had hitched a ride on his heels. “It’s pissing the polar icecaps out there! Where are we? The universe’s backstreet urinal?”

“The scenic side of it, you might say.”

Scenic? He glanced out the window, flicking locks of dripping hair from his eyes, but beyond his own bedraggled reflection there was really nothing to see. It was like someone had pasted greaseproof paper over the glass, and no amount of squinting or smearing it with a sodden sleeve would clear it away. It took him a moment to realise that it wasn’t the window at fault, but the air itself.

“Did you get any signal?” The driver ventured with the resigned sigh of someone who already knows the answer. He held up his mobile by way of reply; it was leaking worse than the Niagara Falls.

“It seems that they weren’t designed to withstand drowning.” Neither was his suit, as it happened. Or his hair. It had cost him over one thousand for both combined, but it was his ego that took the brunt of the damage. There’s no insurance pay-out for pride. He scowled, tossing his useless tech onto the neighbouring back seat and his hands into the air. “It’s mid-July! It’s supposed to be summer! But I take one step outside and my testicles have taken a goddamn retreat to Tahiti!”

He had the mind to do the same. It was as good a place as any, after all. Better, in his opinion. Classy, too—and most importantly? Warm. He hadn’t felt his toes since Tuesday, and his mind was growing just as numb with each day it sulked without sunlight. He was almost certain it was growing fungus, yet he doubted that even mould would enjoy this perpetual dankness. Indeed, anywhere would have been better than here.

But no, those lovesick sickos had to stumble upon a sleazy ad and set their sights on Scotland of all places. It’s perfect, they said, it looks stunning, they cried. The only thing to stun him since stepping off the plane had been the price of an airport cappuccino, and as for the sights, well—he’d yet to see any evidence that the country even existed past all that dreary, greasy grey.

He rubbed his eyes and shrugged irritably at the chaffing charcoal fabric of his three-piece Oxxford suit. The entire Atlantic Ocean seemed to splosh in his shoes, but maybe it was just his tears.

“A wedding, was it?” The driver volunteered by way of small talk, valiantly steering it in a less seedy direction. She eyed him carefully through the rear-view mirror. “I sure hope it isn’ae outdoors…”

“It’ll be hosted at the bottom of the loch at this rate. Grab your phone and see if you have any more luck, will you?”

As she began rifling through the glove compartment, he sat back and snaked his arm along the window ledge, rapping his fingers to the restless patter of the tinny roof. A noxious hiss had hounded them like static since crossing the bridge to Skye, prickling the still lochs and lakesides until they seemed to shimmer and steam; but now that soft backdrop had sunk aside, dragged under and drowned by thundering pops and perilous pangs as drops the size of lead pellets began pelting the roof like machinegun fire. He shifted uneasily, peeling at the opaque shirt that insisted on clinging to his sides like a second skin, and pressed against the window to peer ominously upwards.

Static. It was like staring at an old TV screen that had lost its signal, only it stretched on and on and seemed to descend to swallow him whole, or suck him into the timeless sky. A breathless chill whispered down the back of his shirt and he curled in on himself, shuddering.

“Nope,” she said. He snapped back to earth with a jarring jolt, where his morbid mood was waiting for him following a brief span of disorientation.

“Fantastic,” he groaned and plucked back his sleeve, glaring at his watch. The face was steamed like the windows, and he had to rub it with his thumb. The hands struck one forty-seven p.m. The ceremony had started fifteen minutes ago. He pursed his lips peevishly and sucked on his teeth. “How far is it to the castle?”

The driver drew in a breath, tipped her head from side to side like a set of scales, let it out all at once. “I’d say seven miles, more or less.”

“And the last hotel we passed? How far was that?”

Another pause. “Five, at a push.”

“Now how long would it take to walk it?”

He caught a glimpse of a neatly cocked brow in the mirror, then the full view as she swivelled in her seat to face him through the Perspex screen. She held his gaze. She pointed out the window:

Either they had broken down on a fairway, or those weren’t golf balls sailing from the sky.

“Holy shit,” he gaped.

“D’you want to ask me that again?”

“Are we safe in here?” He gulped, cringing away from the windows with a bloodless mien. This wasn’t a country—this wasn’t even earth! This was bloody purgatory!

“Safe?” She shrugged flippantly and turned away. “Och, aye. There’s not been any murders reported around here since January.”

“I was referring to the celestial missiles sent to… Back-up—since when?”

At that moment they were interrupted by a particularly loud bang that transported him back in time to his school days, and his art teacher’s traumatic habit of slapping her desk fast enough to break the sound barrier (and every student’s eardrums). His teeth were still rattling from the whiplash when the driver gave a short, high whistle.

“Ooh, that was a good one,” she commentated, no less relaxed than if she’d been cracking open a cold one by the telly and watching the game.

Good Lord, he’d taken a taxi with a maniac.

“We can’t stay here,” he fretted, by which he really meant: ‘I can’t stay here’. He snatched up his phone and angled himself for the door, though he had no intention of using it. “We can’t just sit here, we—"

“What is that?”

He hesitated, half off his seat, and followed her finger with a nervy frown.

A short way down the road—perhaps five meters or so—was what he assumed at first glance to be a very large goat, or even a stunted cow. It moved with a hobbling, lopsided gait closer to a shuffle than a stride, and indeed swayed along to the melancholy clatter of cowbells, though he saw nothing of them past all the matted fur that shrouded it like a walking laundry heap. The nearer it drew, though, the more surely he came to realise that it was not a goat, nor cow, nor any sort of local livestock, but a person. Piled high with sopping pelts, they teetered along the verge side like some sorry pack mule, so heavily burdened that it was a surprise it hadn’t weighed them six feet into the sucking mud.

He found himself leaning unwittingly towards the window for a better look, his phone forgotten as his fingers pressed against the grimy glass, but quickly recoiled. As the oily curtain parted to let her pass, he was horrified to identify the traveller as a little old woman, limping all alone.

This would be a good time to tell you that our dear protagonist absolutely despised the elderly. In his words, children weren’t much better, but there was something about geriatrics that utterly repulsed him. Maybe it was their smell—like gas-station restrooms or a 1940’s perfume parlour, with no middle ground—or maybe their gummy grins and shrivelled, rheumy glares? Or perhaps it was the lurking realisation that, one day, he would also end up as a pruned, ugly vegetable with less hair than he had remaining teeth, and it truly terrified him. Sure, he didn’t really believe that he could ever become something so revolting as those things that goggled him from ‘care home’ high-security prisons, but the squeaking sounds of their approaching wheelchairs would haunt him nightly.

It was why he almost wailed, by mindless impulse: “Quick! Get down before it sees you!”

Instead, he said: “Crap! Lock the doors!”

“Ha ha, very funny.” The driver was shaking her head with a dramatized roll of her eyes, already opening the door. He sure as hell wasn’t laughing. “It’s a wee old lady! We can’t just leave her out there in this. She’s likely to get a concussion!”

She gestured at the apocalyptic purge that was taking place around them, and then at her head. He was about to make a convincing point to the contrary, but she had already ploughed on regardless.

“Plus, she might know someone nearby who could lend us a hand. You never know.”

“Or she could be the living embodiment of death and drag us into the depths—there’ll be a missing persons report come tomorrow morning, and the murder count will reset to July.”

But his mutters went unheeded as his driver turned her zip hoodie over her head and deftly ducked out the door, kicking it closed behind herself with a creaking jolt before jogging briskly through the deadly summer shrapnel. He sank into his seat in brooding silence, fingers clutched tight about his clammy phone, his brow furrowing deeper than the plunging valley. At length, he let his eyes drop to the screen and tried again for a connection: nothing. Either the phone was dead, or the battery was. He clawed a hand over his face with a cloying grimace and pinched his eyes tight shut with an icy thumb and forefinger.

“Please don’t smell like toilets, please don’t smell like toilets…”

He forced his eyes open and blinked wearily through the bleary windows, out at the pressing murk. To his great surprise, the heavenly assault seemed to have eased off a little, the unearthly clatter receding to a rumbling death-rattle. He even fancied that he could see a hilltop jutting some way in the distance, highlighted by the faintest hint of golden thread—but its shoulders were still swathed in a thick, cottony shroud of clinging cobwebs that seemed older than the mountains themselves, and the glimpse was gone in an instant. The loch—whatever it’s unpronounceable name—was much closer than he had imagined, and its still, silvery edges reached right up to the road.

The two women were nowhere to be seen.

He straightened with a faint prickle of unease, craning to see out every window and half dreading the hag to turn up at his own. But there was no sign of her; no sign of either of them. It was if, in that brief glimmer of clarity, they had faded like the haze over the fens. Now it was back, heavier than ever.

…But not the women.

The cab door screeched gallingly as he stepped miserably outside, shoulders hunched against his stinging ears as the cold already set him to shivering and rivers streaked down the anxious crags of his face.

“Hello?” He hissed, spinning on the spot, fending off potential bruises to his face with a thick fist robbed of feeling. “Hello?”

The lonely echo of his call was swallowed by the ever-present sound of static. He shuddered again, blinking water from his eyes, and tucked his hands under his armpits with gritted teeth. He glanced back at the cab with a stab of longing, daring to hope that they had passed him by obliviously, but the faded black shape of the car was unaccompanied by any other. He squinted around, then back at the cab, its edges blurred and bleeding into the surroundings like smoke.

He cursed his driver and her senseless sentiment, then struck off down the road in what he recalled being their general direction. Gravel crunched and slurped at his soles as he trudged along until even the car had become engulfed by the sticky, streaking gauze. Then, before he knew it, the loch was right at his toes. He swore again, stepping straight into it before stumbling back, short a shoe—and directly into another puddle. His toes marinated in the stinking slop of slick mud and socks for all of two seconds, and that was the final straw.

“That’s it!” He snarled at the distended sky. “That is it! I’m out of here! God help me, I’m leaving right now and I’m going to—”

Twelve seconds. That was all it took.

He never did get to Tahiti.