He emerged into the light with a thumb tilted up. A long dark coat and an umbrella in hand, his silhouette cast along the pavement a frail figure. He had perfected the pose of a wounded animal; the shrunken shoulders, the umbrella as crutch, the thumb shaking ever so slightly against the light. It was the lure of mortality, as he called it. The bait to tempt that dreadful part of the brain which bleeds sympathy.

The driver gazed upon such weakness with relish. He had learned to spot it, that mortality we leak; each aching muscle, each quivering limb, each staggered breath from crooked lips. It gave him light. He had described his sight to a colleague once who remarked that he must have the eyes of a healer. He couldn't have agreed more.

The hitchhiker crumpled into the passenger seat with feigned agony. His body had grown around him. He knew as a child he inhabited the unseen space within it, the void which was everything and nil, which could seep into all of his being and shape it to his will. He twisted himself into prey, into the withered, into the snare once again.

The driver did not speak, did not need to. He knew all was said from the light cast by the opening of a door. The weak, they seek nothing more than a lantern in the dark. He knew it to be true. It wasn't a moth being tempted by flame so much as the light we're told envelops us at the end of the tunnel. Our bodies, they know. Long before us. They bring us to the tunnel whether we're ready to cross through it or not.

The car slowed. Into the umbrella he reached. His hand gripped the blade with a strength his broken body disguised. Deep within himself where he hid he could feel nothing but the cold of that lovely metal that he touched. That cold he lived for.

The car stopped. His hands let go of the wheel and reached deep into the darkness, the light guiding his fingers to clutch his knife. His scalpel, as he saw it. He could always find it even when he could not see. Those eyes of a healer.

Both brought the blades against the other. The cold. The light.

The hitchhiker no longer feigned his pain. A blade in his chest, he lost control of his body. It twisted on its own and he grew deeper into himself until he was all and all was none.

The driver watched his own breath bleed out of punctured lungs. His eyes, those healer's eyes, could see it all. They dimmed as he searched for the light.

The car stood in the night. The bait had lured. The trap had sprung.