Destination Unknown
By Hope Dowsett, aged 11

"It's the bus Grandad!" I said. "It's coming."
"About time too," grunted Grandad. "Any longer and we'd have cobwebs dangling from our ears." From the top of the hill, we could see the trail of dust as the bus trundled along the road that snaked across the hazy landscape. Chug, chug. We could hear it now, clanking gears as it struggled up the hill. "Must be a run on buses for the summer," said Grandad. " Just our luck to be lumbered with a pre-historic standby."

Sure enough it was a pretty antique bus that pulled up. The door slid open and we got on. The passengers wore weird, old-fashioned clothes. Silent, staring people watching Grandad and me. The door slid shut and the bus gathered speed. Suddenly Grandad clutched my shoulder.
"Ouch!" I said. "Grandad..." I stopped when I saw his white, frightened face.
"Stop!" he cried. "We've got to get offl"

The driver turned and smiled. Brown teeth. But his eyes...her eyes were those of my dead Grandmother. How was I sure? When my Gran was born, way back in 1915, the iris inside one of her eyes was orange. Not a walnut-coloured, dull, almost-brown orange, but a bright, blinding orange. Just like an eye of a cat. The mystery of why she had an eye this colour was never solved, even after my Gran had died in 1983. But creepier than this, is that my Gran had died through being run over by ...a bus.

"Hello, Fredrick," said the driver. " How are you keeping after all these years?"
"Katherine!" squeaked my Grandad. "You're...you're...you're alive!"
"Yes, so I am, Fredrick, in fact, very much so," said my supposed-to-be Grandmother. " This is the bus that killed me, Fredrick. These are the passengers that were in the bus at the time." My grandmother made a gesture at the people who were sitting in the seats. "I thought I'd come back to do a little haunting, you know, wave to some of my old friends, that sort of thing, when I saw you waiting for a bus. So I thought that I better pick you up, seeing as you're so impatient."

I sat my Grandad down, just in case he fainted. He had sweat running down his forehead. Cold, 1 imagine. Not only had his wife, who had supposed to have been dead for the last 20 years, had picked us up by the vehicle that had ran her over, but she was now driving as though she was Michael Schumacher. I'm not surprised that my Grandad and her divorced before she died. You see, my Grandad is a slow, steady person. He does not like to rush. This woman looked like she liked to do things at a record speed.

I looked around. Everybody on the bus, except for Grandad and me, looked as though they were stuck in an 80' s time warp. Coming to think of it, they probably were. Lots of the women were wearing HUGE hats, and most of the men seemed to have BIG hair. Lycra tracksuits also looked popular.

All of a sudden,my Grandad found his voice. "Katherine! If you don't slow down right now, we'll all get killed!!!!!!!!!!! You must be going at least 100 mph. You are putting your life in danger!" he squealed.
"Actually, I'm not", said my Gran as calmly as if someone had asked her what she'd like from the fish and chip shop. " Remember, I'm dead. And I will not slow down; I'm just getting started. This is nothing." My Grandad went from pale to white. I'm pretty sure I did, too. Call us wimps if you want, but if you were put in our position, you'd probably feel the same. And the worst thing was, I couldn't do anything. I just had to sit tight, cross my fmgers and WAlT.

Hours seemed to go past, but when I looked at my watch, only a few minutes had gone by. All I could feel was a mix of emotions- anger, fear, sadness. What had I ever done to deserve this? And all the time, that little voice inside my head was saying, "You are in trouble. YOU are in trouble. YOU ARE IN TROUBLE." Death had to be better than this. All I wanted was for something to happen. And then, something did.

My Grandmother spoke up. "Right, it's time for some fim. I think I'll do some stunt driving." That was it. The bus started swaying and shaking, turning and looping. And then
A jerk
A clink of brakes
And... AND... All I could hear was silence.

I opened my eyes. My Grandmother, and all the other passengers apart from Grandad and me, had vanished. I suddenly felt a surge of pain from my head. There was somebody else, too. A person in dark green overalls. A paramedic. She came rushing over to me. "Are you alright?" She asked. She had a soothing voice, which made you feel as though you were in safe hands.
" I...I think so," I said.
"My name's Maggie. I'm a bit worried about your Grandad. He says he has a sore leg. We're going to take him to hospital and do some checks. He seems quite muddled up. Oh, and he keeps on muttering about someone called Katherine. Do you know why this might be?"
"No," I answered. I was muddled up myself.

***

After a few tests and X-rays, I found out that my Poor Grandad's leg was broken. He would have to stay in hospital for a few days, but he' seemed OK. Once all the doctor's had given my Grandad a plaster and all that, I was allowed to talk to him.

At first, we just stared at each other in silence. Well, what would you say after you'd just been in a bus crash with a ghost driving? But then my Grandad clapped his hands. "Well, I think you have to admit that that was quite an ordeal!" He said. We both started to laugh. I gave my Grandad a hug. Had what we had both just experienced really happened? Or was it just a figment of our imaginations? Well, whatever happened that day had brought us together to be more than just Grandfather and Granddaughter. It had made us true friends.