Fragezeichen

“How about we do something fun instead?”

Previously.

---

(Originally posted on the Unerklärliche Begegnungen [translated: Unexplained Encounters] discussion board of UnsereGeistergeschichten.com [translated: OurGhostStories.com] forum by user [REDACTED], 04/10/2005 05:17:59 UTC)

Your story reminds me of my own. I don't tell most people, hardly anyone, but, for you and everyone else here, I will share it. It’s easier to tell a story like this when no one knows who you are.

I lived then, as I do now, in Bavaria. This was before Reunification, back in the early 80’s. A lot of people, especially younger ones, seem to not remember or are maybe just not ever told that, during that time, the relationship between NATO and the eastern Warsaw Pact countries were as close to as bad as they ever got. I suppose it might be easy to forget in hindsight, even for those of us that lived through it, but it was no exaggeration to say that it was effectively a second Cuban Missile crisis when the Americans started shipping missiles to Germany to counter Soviet missiles in Eastern Germany. I can’t say that I remember it feeling as if we were on the brink of World War III, but tensions were high, and the anxiety was palpable. Men sat in the bars with worried, sullen expressions. Women chattered in hushed tones in the supermarkets and on the sidewalks. People always seemed nervous and jumpy. They were uneasy times. I remember sleepless nights, laying awake, staring at the ceiling and wondering if some idiot in Washington D.C. or Moscow was going to try and call the other’s bluff and, as a result, we’d all go up in flames. When I did sleep, my dreams were fevered and strange, and when I’d wake from them, I’d feel as exhausted as I would if I hadn’t slept at all. There was this terrible apprehension lingering in the air like smoke from a forest fire.

But, whether or not the world is teetering on the edge of nuclear catastrophe, a man must still report to work in the morning, regardless. I remember thinking to myself that, even if bombs fell on Bonn or Frankfurt or Berlin, I’d still be getting a call from my boss asking me when I was going to come in for my shift.

At the time, I worked for a taxi service that mostly covered the rural areas around Munich. Most of our work was shuttling clients from their houses in the outlying villages and towns to the old Munich-Riem airport and vice versa, but we also got a lot of calls from drunks at payphones requesting a ride home since the laws around drunk driving were getting much stricter around that time. It wasn’t work that would get you rich, but the money was decent, and, as I always told my friends, it was more fun than working in an office or digging post holes. It was the kind of job where you got to meet some very interesting people. And I wouldn’t use the word interesting as a compliment in some of these cases, either.

It had to be December of 1983 when I met the most interesting individual I’d ever drive. I remember the time so specifically because it was shortly after Nena had released the song ? (Fragezeichen), and I kept my radio tuned to a local station that played it the most just to hear it as much as I could. The band had been putting out great music, but I won't lie to you - I thought Nena herself was the best looking woman in Germany at the time.

I was had just taken someone from the airport to their home in Erding when I got a call from our dispatcher over the radio that a customer was looking for a ride. Their location was at a gas station in a tiny village out in the countryside that I'd never been to and only ever seen on some out of the way street signs. I didn't really want to take the job. I didn't really now how to get to the place and it was getting late, so by the time I finished the job, my shift would most likely already be well over. But, since I was closer than all the other drivers out at the time, I didn't have the luxury I'd declining.

Reluctantly, I followed the dispatcher's directions to the village. Even if I did name it, I guarantee you would have never heard of it. It was barely a village at all, and more like a small collection of old homes sitting in a field with one little gas station at the very edge, right off the lonely stretch of road that served as the one way in and out of the place.

I had to wonder what kind of person would be calling a taxi in a place like that so late at time. It wasn't somewhere you'd expect anyone trying to get in or out of at that time of night. There was nothing to do there, nothing to see, so small that there wasn't even a local pub. There weren't even any street lamps on the road, which made the ride through the fields feel long and dark. After a while, I began to believe I'd missed the road I was meant to turn off, or that I'd never been going the right way to begin with. I felt as if I'd driven right out of the world itself and into some endless void consisting of one single road with no end, lined on either side by fields that simply ended where my headlights stopped.

I became so convinced that I’d lost my way that I tried to reach dispatch and tell them I’d made a mistake. When dispatch replied, it was scratchy and grainy, cutting in and out so badly that their answer was unintelligible. The car radio, too, began to sputter. This didn’t seem right, since I’d listened to that particular station while driving all the way to Stuttgart before and never had any issues. With my frustration mounting, I committed to driving until I saw the next sign, pulling off, and checking the map I had in my car to find my bearings. No sooner had I started cursing under my breath did I see the very sign I’d been looking for materialize out of the darkness, bearing the name of the seemingly nonexistent village. As relieved as I was to find it, I was a bit disappointed I now had no excuse to continue my assignment rather than just give up on it and return home. I pulled off onto the road at the junction and continued. Even though I was heading back in the direction of Munich at this point, the radio reception was only getting worse. Dispatch tried to reach me again, but they must not have been hearing anything I said as they continued to hail me as if I hadn’t been answering. In frustration, I turned the radio off.

Ahead, I could see a few lights coming from the scant few homes where people were still awake, and before them, the gas station in question. It was closed by that time of night, with the only lights being the harsh white lights beneath the awning that stretched over the pumps. The telephone booth the customer had used was attached to the side, the transparent glass walls streaked with water stains and clouded with grunge that made the ugly, orange light coming from inside look cloudy and murky. Cold as it was that night, I expected to see the customer who’d called for a ride waiting inside of it to stay warm, but it was empty. I didn’t see anyone. A twinge of anger ran through me as I thought that perhaps they’d given up on waiting and left of their own accord, meaning that I would have driven all that way for no reason at all. It would have been foolish to walk anywhere on such an inhospitable night, and so late, at that, but if the person was drunk, as I assumed them to be, I wouldn’t put it past them to make a bad decision. Still, I pulled into the gas station, half-expecting them to suddenly appear, half-expecting them not to show up at all. I parked the car and told myself I’d only wait for a few minutes and, if they didn’t come, they didn’t come, and if my boss had a problem with it, he could come out and pick the passenger up himself.

I sat in silence with only the drone of the car engine to listen to. As I did, an uneasy feeling began to creep over me. I decided that it was simply the isolation and the darkness playing with my senses and that there wasn’t anything to worry about in such an out-of-the-way place, but, despite thinking logically, I couldn’t shake the sensation that I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been.

So, when I heard someone try to open my passenger door, I nearly jumped out of the roof of my car. I’d been looking out my own side window, towards the gas station, so I never saw them approach. Looking back, I think it’s quite odd that, given the way I was parked, they would have had to have walked out of the darkness, where the gas station backed up to a field. Standing by the passenger door, to my surprise, was a woman. I had to assume that she had been the one to call for a ride, though I had been completely expecting it to be a man.

She was wearing a drab olive peacoat, the kind that men were issued in the military during the winter months. Strange, but I figured that perhaps she’d stolen it from the closet of a boyfriend, or maybe her father. Her hair was long and black, straightened and with bangs cut so low I couldn’t see her eyebrows. I couldn’t see much of her face, really, given the way the shadows fell over it. She motioned for me to unlock the car door, pointing down to the handle with one hand while keeping the other fixed in a coat pocket. As I would do to any stranger that came knocking on my car window at night, I didn’t. I only lowered the window a bit and asked if she had called for a taxi. She nodded and asked me to unlock the door, adding that she was cold.

Even though she was who I’d come to pick up, I still found myself hesitant to let her in, if only because of the odd circumstances. When I did, she invited herself to sit in the passenger’s seat without even asking if it was alright to do. She wasn’t the first passenger I had to welcome themselves into the passenger’s seat of my car, but it wasn’t very common for anyone to sit there in a taxi. When it did happen, the person who did it was usually too drunk to think better about just assuming that I wanted them to sit there. It was a move I thought was as bold as it was rude. Given the way she moved and spoke, I didn’t think she was drunk. Still, I didn’t say anything about it and just let her take the seat.

Once she was sitting across from me, I could see that she was younger than I’d first thought. She had to be in her mid-twenties at the oldest, and she smelled as if she had just finished a cigarette. Despite the cold, she was wearing a black skirt that only just came down to her knees, with only ragged, hole-filled tights on underneath. Stranger still, she was wearing a pair of jackboots, again not unlike what I’d been given during my time in the military, that were nearly laced up to the knees.

One of the first things I noticed that there was a thick darkness all around her eyes. At first, I thought it was just unusual and excessive application of eye-shadow, but I quickly realized that it was not cosmetics, but rather dark bruising, not black but wine red and violet in color.

When I had been in the military, there had been a training accident where another soldier had accidentally smashed me in the face with the butt of his rifle, breaking my nose quite badly. I remember being confused when, afterwards, I looked as if I’d been punched in both of my eyes. When I realized that the bridge of her nose was off-kilter, my mind began to put together pieces that weren’t entirely there. Immediately, I assumed that she must have been someone who’d been battered by her partner and was making an attempt to get away. The thought occurred to me that there was a real possibility that the person who’d broken her nose had been a disagreeable customer rather than a romantic partner.

I recall our conversation remarkably well.

The first thing I asked her was, “Are you alright?”

She only shrugged, unconcerned, and replied, “I’m fine. Why? Do I not seem alright?” I remember that her voice was very raspy and harsh for someone her age, like she’d been smoking cigarettes from birth.

“Well, it’s just…” I found it difficult to state the obvious and just gestured to my nose. “How did this happen?”

She seemed surprised, as if I’d pointed out nothing more than a minor blemish she’d forgotten about and not a busted nose.

“Oh? This?” She pointed to her nose. “I just had a disagreement with an old friend. That's all. It's nothing to worry about. If you think I look bad, you should see the state she's in right now!”

She started laughing. I didn't even bother to crack a grin and pretend I was amused. Her laughter was, simply put, awful. It was screechy and nasal and, I can't really explain how, but it sounded distinctly cruel. I felt as if her amusement was not innocent or harmless, but rather dark and sadistic, the way some sick child might laugh as they watch an injured animal writhe in pain. Worst of all, her lips curled in such a way that her crooked nose wrinkled and forced her eyes into a sinister squint. Her face got all pinched and revealed a mouthful of broken teeth. Every one of her teeth were chipped or uneven or damaged in some way that made it difficult to look at without feeling phantom pain in my own mouth.

I really should have kicked her out of the car right then. I'm still not entirely sure why I didn't. I figure I must have felt as if I'd come to far to not finish the job, or perhaps it was just a sense of male chauvinism and I didn't want to leave a young woman alone and stranded on such a cold night, even if she was noticeably and visibly unwell.

I'd already forgotten where I was supposed to take her, so I asked where it was she wanted to go. She told me to take her to Munich, which was further than I wanted to go. I asked where exactly in Munich. She told me that just Munich, as if it wasn't a big city with many different parts and neighborhoods. I asked her if it would be alright if I dropped her off in Bogenhausen, since it was the closest part of town to where we were and I didn't want to drive into the city center if I could help it. Again, offering no help, she just said, “I guess.”

I realized, then, that what I’d thought was a simple speech impediment caused by her messed up teeth, since she spoke German as fluently as a native speaker, was actually an accent. What kind I couldn’t tell. The first thing I asked her as I began to drive away from the gas station was, “Are you from Germany? You speak German well.”

She answered, “No.”

I waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.

“Where are you from, then?” I asked.

“A little bit of everywhere,” she said. “A little bit of nowhere, and all places in between.”

She pulled a bug-eyed face that betrayed the fact that she wasn’t being serious and had no intention to be. I decided that any further conversation with her was pointless. She clearly wasn’t taking me seriously, so I didn’t feel the need to take her seriously, either.

If you’ve ever sat in the car with someone you either didn’t know or didn’t like, you know the powerful urge that overcomes someone looking to fill the silence with anything that isn’t their own voice. I turned on the radio, hoping that whatever had been going wrong with it was now as inexplicably fixed as it had gone inexplicably wrong. To my relief, the radio once again played as normally as it ever would. As if someone had answered a prayer I had been giving without my own knowledge, the Nena song I mentioned was playing, which went a long way to restore some sense of normalcy to the night.

She reached into a coat pocket and fished out a pack of cigarettes. She put on one in her mouth and sparked up a lighter, only to pause and look at me out of the corner of her mouth.

“I guess I should ask if this is okay, shouldn’t I?”

“It would be polite,” I told her. I’ve smoked for nearly as long as I’ve lived and I never cared if anyone smoked in my car, but passengers did usually have the decency to ask if it was acceptable before getting their cigarettes out.

She hesitated a moment. “Well… is it?”

“I don’t care,” I said.

She started laughing again, and I wished I’d just told her to put them away. The smell of tobacco smoke sparked my own urge to light up, so I asked her if she’d share. Given how she’d acted, I expected her to say no. She did, surprisingly, share, albeit with a sigh. The nicotine helped calm my nerves some, and by the time we reached a main road, I felt much less anxious than I had when I picked her up.

Out of habit of making conversation with passengers, I asked her, “What have you been up to tonight?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the young woman offer another shrug.

“Oh. You know.” She turned to look at me, the cigarette hanging limp from her lips. “From going to and fro on the Earth, and walking up and down upon it.” She took a drag on her cigarette, lazily slumped in her seat, and added, “I usually get around on my own, but, tonight… I’m feeling lazy.”

How lucky for me, I thought.

“And what about you?”

“Me?” I asked.

She nodded, smiling with her lips closed tight. “Mhm. What have you been doing tonight, hm?”

I gestured to the car dashboard and stated the obvious. “Working.” I was beginning to regret my choice of opening a dialogue with her.

"All day?” She sounded surprised.

“That tends to be how employment works, yes,” I said.

“And they still have you working this late at night, huh?”

I didn’t reply. Instead, I grit my teeth and tightened my grip around the steering wheel, since otherwise, I would have said something like, “Yes, I’m working past the end of my shift, driving idiots like you around.”

She clicked her tongue and said, with a false note of sympathy, “That’s no good.”

Unprompted, my passenger sat up in her seat and placed both of her hands on the center console, staring at me with a smile on her face that made me deeply uneasy. I was about to demand that she sit back down, but she was able to speak faster.

“How about we do something fun instead?”

I balked at the suggestion. “Do you want to get to Munich or not?”

She made a coy face. “I’m not in a rush.”

“Well, I am. I’d like to get home, so, I’ll pass, thank you.”

“Are you sure?” I saw her bat her eyelashes. I remember thinking that it was rather presumptuous of her to think that she looked like a tempting prospect with her nose clearly busted and a mouthful of jagged teeth.

“I’m not interested,” I told her. “Please, sit down.”

She put on a fake pout. “You don’t even know what I have in mind.”

To the contrary, I had a rather good idea of what she had in mind when she said something fun. I’d decided that, clearly, this deranged young woman was a working girl that was eager to get one last client for the night, or had perhaps called for a taxi for the specific purpose of getting one after her last job had fallen through. Even if I’d been the type of person to pay for that sort of thing, she was the last person I’d be interested in receiving that kind of service from.

“I said I’m not interested,” I repeated. “Now, please. Sit down.”

I struggled to keep one eye on the dark, winding road ahead of me and the other on her in case she tried to do something stupid. I could see her squinting, studying me, trying to figure me out so she could say the right thing to get my attention before her eyes went wide with an epiphany.

“Oh. Oh. You must think I’m one of those girls, don’t you?” She leaned a bit closer over the center console.

“Sit down.” I wasn’t asking at that point.

She started smiling again, showing off all those awful, broken teeth. “C’mon. Just hear me out, why don’t you? That’s not what I’m about.”

“Sit down already.”

She tried to say something else, but I interrupted her.

“Sit down or I’m pulling over.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her snarl. She said something, but I don’t remember what. I was too busy reacting to her reaching out for the wheel. Her fingers managed to brush it just before I slammed on the breaks. I didn’t do it hard enough to send her flying through the window, but just enough to knock her off balance and bash her against the dashboard. I pulled over on the side of the road as she tried to sit up. She was cursing and swearing over the music as it continued to play, pulling hair of her face and kicking the roof in a tantrum.

I jumped out of the car before she could kick me in the face. I went around to the passenger’s side and threw open the door, feeling certain that the only way I’d get her out of the car was if I physically removed her. Given that I was in my late twenties, in good shape, and taller than her, I didn’t think I’d have much trouble. I knew that, on a moral level, it would be wrong to toss a girl out on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere on a cold night, but I would have rather been safe than ethical.

Standing behind the door for my own safety, I told her that she had one chance to get out by choice. To my surprise, she tumbled out onto the pavement in a heap. She squirmed until she was on her hands and knees, fresh blood pouring from her nose and splattering onto the pavement like it had just been broken again.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked not because I expected or even really wanted an answer. it was more of a knee-jerk reaction than anything. It was stupid of me to not just get in the car and leave her there because she was on her feet before I could even react. She moved so fast that I didn’t register that she was up until she had already closed the distance between us and pushed me into the beams of the headlights. By the time my brain caught up to my body, my back was on the asphalt, I was breathless, and this lunatic was on top of me, throwing fists against whatever part of me she could hit with more force than someone of her size should have been capable of exerting. She was vicious and strong beyond her years, batting my hands away like she was the man and I was a child. I heard a sickening crack as she gave me a broken nose to match her own.

I managed to grab hold of her arm. Her knuckles were split and bleeding.

It was a mistake. I heard her growl just before I felt her teeth dig through the skin of my forearm. Have you ever been bit by a person? Not like how a child or someone who’s only playing might. When I say bite, I mean that they clamp their teeth around your flesh and apply all the pressure their jaw can muster with a genuine intention to harm you. I’ve been bitten badly by a dog before and I can tell you that it’s a different experience entirely. For someone to reduce themselves to such a feral state, abandon all human pretense and resort to using the most primitive, animal tool at their disposal to inflict damage - it’s a horrifying thing.

I’m not really sure what all happened next. The struggle is mostly a blur in my mind. I know that I buried a knee in her stomach as hard as I could, forcing her to roll off. With the adrenaline in my system, the bite wound didn’t hurt as much as you might think. Not until I made the mistake of looking at it and saw the gouge left behind from where she’d taken a chunk of my flesh with her teeth. I rolled onto my knees, bracing myself with my uninjured arm. Everything hurt. Even breathing. My stomach roiled as I felt the raw meat on my arm prick and sting as it was exposed to the open air. I could see the girl in a similar position, maybe a foot or two away. She was hunched over with her spine arched like an animal.

When a human is scared or incensed or otherwise rushing with adrenaline, the pupil dilates in size, growing bigger to take in more light. In a fight, even the aggressor’s eyes get wide and frantic.

She was staring at me with pupils the size of pinpricks. Tiny specks of pure black, surrounded by bulging whites so bloodshot they looked red.

She could have attacked me. Pounced on me, like a cat leaping on a mouse. She’d been so unnaturally strong that I feel as if she could have killed me, if she’d wanted to. But she wanted me to see her grinning with her shattered mouth. She wanted me to see her broken teeth pink and wet with my blood and bits of my body still trapped between them. She wanted me to see her swallow the part of me she’d ripped out.

I only got to my feet, threw myself back into the car, and sped off only because she allowed it. She’d gotten what she’d wanted out of me. If she went any further, she wouldn’t have gotten it. A corpse can’t get scared. She stepped out of the path of the car and let me drive away so I could see her in the rear view mirror. I can see her, even now, standing in the middle of the road, illuminated red by the tail lights, painted in my blood and hers and her eyes gleaming bright in the light a way that human eyes don’t. I knew then what she’d had in mind when she’d been talking about fun. She waved goodbye until I couldn’t see her anymore, thanking me for the good time I’d just given her.

I was lapsed Catholic at the time. Once I was an adult and I didn’t have to go to church with my family, I didn’t. But what I saw that night put me in a confessional booth for the first time in years. I still attend Mass, every Sunday, without fail. There’s a silver, ragged patch of scar tissue on the back of my right arm, roughly the size of a human mouth, papering over a deep divot in the flesh. Every time I look at it, I have all the proof I’ll ever need that demons do exist.

Be careful out there.

---

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 99 Luftballons is one of the best songs of the early eighties, but you must understand that Nena released other songs. I’m not saying Fragezeichen is better, but the sax solo that fills the last third? Immaculate. Listen to it. This is not a request.