The Toll Collector
It was one of those cloudy nights with a biting chill in the air. Pitch dark. Walking to work at 1 am might be considered odd, but for the toll collector it is the time when his shift starts. He has been doing this for 3 years and despite being given the option of switching to a sane hour, he chooses the night shift because of the insomnia.
He hasn’t been able to sleep at night ever since he came back to an empty house that fateful Friday night. No it wasn’t Friday the thirteenth, yet it was the strangest night of his life. They never did find his wife and his daughter. Not a thing was touched in the house; the door was locked from inside, all windows closed, no sign of forced entry or theft, and no note saying goodbye. Yet they were gone. Vanished. So he had decided he never wanted to come back home at night. There was something so scary about the eerie silence of that empty house that night, that he had booked himself into a motel for 4 days. And even then he could only come back, because he was out of money and there was no other place to go.
He still hadn’t gotten used to the emptiness, but had somehow accepted its presence like an entity that’s always with him even in a crowded street or the toll booth filled with four people when it’s meant for only two. But he goes on living his life. A life with no purpose, except that of being alive; for what reason, he cannot fathom. He only knows he can’t end it, not because he is afraid to die, but because he unconsciously still believes that they will come back. And then the silence, the emptiness will go away.
Now, walking towards the highway, through the dark empty streets, he could almost hear the silence breathing on his neck. And then he heard it. In the middle of the murky gloom, “Frank…..Frank”. He didn’t feel scared; he had nothing left to fear. Yet it was strange for two reasons; first, the voice, which was almost a child-like whisper, seemed to be coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and second, his name wasn’t even Frank. Had the spirits of darkness, as he pictured them, mistaken him for someone else. Because, there was no one else in the streets as far as he could see, to whom this voice could be calling out to. And it definitely was calling out to someone. Maybe it was some supernal conversation he was hearing. Maybe the silence was getting to him. But he was sure he had heard it and not imagined it. Since there was nothing else to do, he didn’t even know which direction to call out and ask who it is this voice was looking for, so he decided to continue on his way.
On reaching the highway, he waited for someone to give him a ride till the toll booth as was his usual practice. It usually was a truck that he managed to get a ride in at this time of the night. And so he waited. It was taking longer than usual for any vehicle to come along. He must have drifted off somewhere in his mind, because the next thing he knew was that a truck had stopped in front of him with the passenger door open. It was a guy he knew. Used to pass his toll booth every other week and provided those couple of minutes of interesting conversation and gossip during an otherwise mundane shift.
“You okay man? You looked completely out of it standing there on the curb. One suggestion though; wave, if you are looking for a ride. Now get in, it’s chilly out there tonight.”
“Thanks. Don’t know what happened. Sure is a strange night this.”
He tried to recollect, what it was that he had been thinking standing there. Nothing at all came to mind. Not even a recollection of how long had he been standing there. It must have been close to 15 minutes, he guessed looking at the time, and yet it felt like he had just reached there.
And so his shift started. Another night in the toll booth; atleast he wouldn’t be home. A few cars and trucks passed through within the next two hours. Some he had seen before, while others he hadn’t. The new ones always gave him a breath of fresh air. A new face to say hello to. He liked to guess what these people were doing on the road at this time of the night.
The young musician coming from some club where he performs to stay afloat, the doctor who got late yet again because of some emergency, the undertaker coming from the morgue after embalming someone for the early morning funeral, the old man going to some cheesy motel room with the hooker he picked up on the way back from work, the two patrolmen doing their rounds.
No one drove through for the next half an hour, and he started thinking. About the whisper on the street, the lost fifteen minutes which he couldn’t recall. His reverie was broken by a knocking on his booth window. It jolted him into consciousness because it wasn’t supposed to be happening. No one ever knocked on the window. There never was anyone to knock on it. Yet there he was; tall, extremely thin, a shallow complexion and steely grey eyes, which pierced right through him. He was wearing a cream colour blazer and looked to be in his late thirties, probably touching forty.
The man knocked again because the toll collector was still staring at him with an incredulous expression. It took the toll collector a few seconds to realise why he was so shocked. There he was, this man, standing outside his booth, without a vehicle in the vicinity. And there was nothing for miles on either side of the toll booth. He seemed to have come from nowhere and looked to be in a frantic state of despair and stress.
The toll collector finally realised he should say something. “Hello….er…..can I help you?”
“I’ve had an accident a couple of miles down the road, and my daughter is still stuck in the car. I think she is unconscious. Can you call for help? I don’t know how I could do this to her. Please…please help us.” He was almost choking on his tears, but tried to maintain his composure.
“Yes yes, I got a radio here. I will call for an ambulance. Now it will probably take some time for them to get here, so I will go and try to help your daughter. You wait here for the ambulance and bring them to your car, soon as they arrive here. And try to relax, you don’t look so good. It’s going to be okay.”
The toll collector rushed out of his booth leaving the man behind. He ran like he had run that night from his to house to his garage, to the basement, to the garden and to every neighbour’s house to look for them.
He finally spotted the broken railing on the curb. The car had driven off somewhere in the bushes. He was just looking for it when the cloud cover broke for a split second, and he spotted the red sedan in the pre dawn twilight. The car’s bonnet had smashed into a tree and almost every window was shattered, the chassis completely out of shape. He rushed over, expecting the worst. But what he saw chilled him to the bone. There he was, the man in the cream blazer, his head an ugly shape, slumped forward in his seat. The toll keeper didn’t need to check whether he was alive. He already knew the answer to that.
He finally saw the baby girl, still strapped in her car seat in the back. He opened the rear door, and carefully checked the girls pulse and breathing. Yes, she would live. He saw the dead man's wallet on the passenger seat. His name was Frank Goodman.
He could hear the ambulance approaching.
The sun came up as he carried her back to the highway. It was going to be a new daylight.