The adrenaline from the encounter at the window didn't fade; it soured into a cold, paralyzing dread. Arjun didn't sleep. He sat on the edge of the iron cot, the springs creaking with every rhythmic tremor of his body. He kept the Maglite switched on, the beam cutting a yellow swath through the shadows that seemed to grow thicker, hungrier, as midnight approached.

  By 3:00 AM, the wind died down, leaving a silence so absolute it felt heavy. That was when the smell hit him, not the damp pine of the forest, but something metallic and cloying. The smell of raw copper and old, stagnant water.

  He stood up to check the door's bolt for the tenth time when he saw it through the gap in the heavy velvet curtains.

  At first, he thought it was a discarded cigarette butt (end) glowing in the dark forest. But it was too high up, nearly seven feet off the ground and it wasn't flickering. It was a steady, low wattage pulse of crimson.

  Arjun crept to the window, his breath fogging the glass. He wiped a small circle clear with his palm.

  In the crook of an ancient, lichen covered Dhupi tree (Black Junifer ), something was perched. It wasn't the headless boy. This was larger, broader, its silhouette jagged and indistinct against the grey bark. The single red eye didn't blink. It sat there, a burning ember in the skull of the forest, fixed directly on Arjun’s window.

  He reached for his camera, his movements slow and deliberate, fearing that any sudden jerk would draw the thing closer. He didn't use the flash this time. He bumped the ISO (The number is which represent how sensitive camera is to light) to its maximum, his eyes glued to the digital viewfinder.

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  As the camera struggled to find focus in the low light, the red orb shifted. It didn't move like an eye in a socket; it drifted horizontally, followed by a second twin spark that ignited beside it. Two unblinking, lidless pits of fire.

  Then came the sound.

  It wasn't a whistle or a gurgle. It was a vibration, a low frequency hum that Arjun felt in his teeth before he heard it with his ears. It sounded like a swarm of bees trapped inside a wooden box.

  The "eyes" began to descend the tree. They didn't climb down; they slid, the dark mass behind them unfolding like a wet umbrella. A pair of elongated, spindly limbs gripped the trunk, the claws clicking against the wood with a sound like breaking bone.

  Arjun backed away from the glass, but he was mesmerized. As the creature reached the forest floor, it stepped into a sliver of moonlight that managed to pierce the canopy.

  It wasn't a ghost. It looked like a biological error. Its skin was the color of a drowned man bruised purple and translucent, tightly stretched over a frame that was far too thin for its height. It had no nose, no ears, just those two burning apertures and a slit of a mouth that remained perfectly horizontal.

  The creature didn't walk toward the house. It began to circle it.

  Scratch... scratch... scratch.

  The sound of long, calcified nails dragging against the stone foundation of the rest house echoed through the floorboards. Arjun realized with a jolt of horror that the thing wasn't looking for a way in but it was marking its territory. It was physically restricting him.

  He looked at his phone. No Service. The "Death Road" was a mile away through pitch black woods, and this... thing... was between him and the only way out of Kurseong.

  Suddenly, the scratching stopped right beneath his window. The low hum intensified until the glass in the room began to sing. Arjun watched, petrified, as a long, grey fingers four joints long and ending in a hooked black nail slowly rose above the windowsill, tapping gently against the glass.

  Tack. Tack. Tack.

  The same rhythm from the tape recorder. The same rhythm of the headless boy.

  It wasn't two different hauntings. They were working together.