Uncanny

Simone waits for the man to get in the car. He’s making his way slowly down the short steps at the front of the building, not seeming to care about the way the rain drenches him. She’s not sure whether he could get any wetter, and then realises he’s going to be sitting in the back seat, and all that water will seep into the upholstery. Whoever she picks up after this trip is going to feel it, and they’re going to give her a bad rating for it, and there’s nothing she can do about that right now.

The man has finally made it to the bottom of the stairs and walks towards the car, still moving slowly. She can’t see through the rain, but she thinks he must be old to be moving so slowly. A pang of guilt in her chest. Maybe she should get out to help the guy. Or maybe he should’ve brought an umbrella.

She drums her fingers against the wheel, impatient to get going. He’s almost at the car now, reaching out for the handle. But he misses it completely, his hand thumping into the window instead. Maybe his eyesight was going as well. The man didn’t need an Uber; he needed a nursing home.

He reaches for the handle again, his movements jerky and imprecise, like an infant just learning they can control their arms and legs. But this time he manages to actually touch the handle, and he pulls the door open with even more irritating slowness. Thick rain cascades over the interior of the door. Simone can see the edge of the seat already starting to soak.

‘Need any help?’ she asks, more out of obligation than any desire to get out and help him.

The man shakes his head but doesn’t say anything. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed hat, seemingly to keep the rain from his eyes, but it also works to keep his face hidden. Like his movements with the door handle, the way he moves his head to shake it seems odd to Simone. She catches a glimpse of his face, and a wave of dread rolls over her.

Don’t let him in the car.

She’s not sure where this thought has come from. She’s no stranger to these kinds of intuitive feelings; its part of how she survives. One time she was driving in the early hours of the morning, accepting jobs from drunk people trying to get home from the city after a night of partying. He was going to be her fourth or fifth passenger that night, but when she pulled up and saw his face she drove off and cancelled the trip. Her rating took a hit and the app didn’t give her any more jobs that night, but at least she was still here. Something in her mind had roiled at the sight of the man’s face, the strange look in his eyes. She’d never know for sure, but she suspected that if she’d picked the man up that night, something awful would have happened to her.

She tries to push that feeling away now. Things were a bit more desperate than they had been that night. Back then she’d been driving to get herself through university; now, she’s driving full-time to keep food on the table, and the app was giving out less and less for each trip. She can’t afford to cancel on him and possibly lose out on the rest of the day’s jobs. Besides, it was only a ten-minute trip down the Terrace and off towards the river. She’ll be done in no time, and then she can move on and forget about it.

So she lets the man get in her car, watches as he drips all over her seats, and she tries to ignore the warning in her head that isn’t going away.

Traffic isn’t moving. It’s hard to see even a few meters in front of her. It feels as though there’s a firehose pointing down from the sky directly at her car, though she knows it’s just as bad everywhere else in the city. They’ve been stuck on the Terrace for several minutes now, waiting for a break in the rain before even daring to move. She can just make out the traffic lights through the watery haze; they’ve changed several times since the rain had started bucketing down but it’s just too dangerous to move.

And through it all, Simone has never completely forgotten the man’s presence behind her. He hasn’t said a word, and she isn’t going to try to engage him in conversation. Not only because talking to a passenger who doesn’t want to talk tends to bring her rating down, but also because she’s afraid of what he will sound like. She has this terrible feeling that she wouldn’t like his voice.

The man keeps his face down so his hat obscures his face, and while Simone is grateful for this, it also unnerves her. Without seeing his face, she has no hint as to what he’s thinking. And he still looks wrong somehow. Every time she glances back, a wave of revulsion hits her, but she doesn’t understand why. He looks perfectly fine in an objective sense. Old and spindly, but nothing that screams out wrongness to her. It’s something about the sum of it all, the way the individual pieces like head and arms and less all come together that make her want to open the door and leap out into the rain.

Uncanny. That’s the word that comes to mind, and it fits perfectly. She remembers it from one of her classes she’d done at university, meaning strange or mysterious in an unsettling way. The topic had been about the uncanny across ancient and modern literature, and the lecturer had started with a quote that she just can’t remember right now. Something about evolutionary biology, which had struck her as an odd way to start a lecture on literature. But it’s the word that comes to her now, and it’s apt. The man is uncanny.

It isn’t even nine, the sun barely a third up the sky, and she’s already so tired. She’s tempted to drop this man where he needs to be and then log off for the day. She knows she won’t, but the thought is nice. Hell, she’s tempted to drop the man off right here and find a new job altogether. She just wants it to be over.

‘I know the quote.’

Simone freezes, her blood seeming to come to a sudden stop in her veins. The man has just spoken, and just as she’d feared, his voice is as unsettling as his appearance. It sounds like several difference voices at once, layered over the top of one another.

‘I know the quote you’re thinking of.’

She can’t breathe. What the fuck is he talking about? And why does he sound like that? She wants to turn, to look at him and tell him to get out of her car, or to ask him what he means, or to finally scream out the terror that has been building in her chest since she first saw him coming down the steps.

But she doesn’t do anything.

‘The quote you’re thinking of goes like this: “The existence of the uncanny valley implies that at some point there was an evolutionary reason to be afraid of something that looked, but was only pretending to be, human.”’

Simone feels the thing’s hand touch her shoulder, the thin fabric of her shirt doing nothing to protect her against the wrongness of that touch. A primal revulsion runs through her. She turns her head to see what she has let into her car, wanting and not wanting to see at the same time.

Her screams, when she sees it, are drowned out by the sound of the rain.