I didn’t expect anything unusual that night. It was late, the kind of late where the city feels half-forgotten, and I was running on muscle memory alone—same bus stop, same route, same tired thoughts looping in your head. The rain blurred the streetlights into soft halos, and the bus arrived right on time, groaning as it pulled to the curb. I boarded without thinking. That’s the dangerous thing about routines. They teach me when not to pay attention. They convince me that nothing bad can happen in familiar places, that horror needs shadows and warnings and sharp turns. Sometimes, it just needs me to stay on the bus one stop too long.