The Himalayan Demon: A Paranormal Romance | Completed

Chapter-1

Seema peered outside her window and looked at the thing tied to the tree in her neighbour's backyard. It looked like a person but not quiet, a hairless dog perhaps. It was too big to be a dog but it couldn't be a person, could it? She squinted her eyes trying to get a good look but couldn't make out a thing. It was times like this she wished she had binocular so she could spy on her neighbours. No, she wasn't a creep, she was just a curious teenager. Mr. Kumar, her neighbour, was the weird one. No one liked the old man, they thought he was some sort of tantric, performing slaughtering young boys on his property. Talk like that can make anyone curious and having a perfect view of his backyard from her room, surely did perk up her interest.

Seema paused for a moment. What if it was one of the young boys the town people kept talking about? She looked at it again and surely, it looked like a naked person, sitting by the tree, tied to it by a robe. Seema didn't know what to do. She wasn't even sure if she should report to the police.

She could tell her parents, but knowing them, they would probably freak out more than her. They would want to leave this house that they had moved into last month. Seema's family moved to Puri after living in a city for years. Her father lost a huge sum of money in a start-up business. They had to sell their old house in the city and move to their hometown. The place wasn't bad but her father had gotten a bad reputation. He was deemed to be involved with some Chit-fund business when he himself was a victim of it. It was also the reason Seema didn't get any respect in her school. The town people whispered behind their back. There was always the fear of tropical storms looming above their heads. At Least the aesthetics of the place made up for everything. Her house was near the beach, surrounded by thick tropical forest. The town wasn't overly populated but had a decent influx of local and international tourists.

Seema couldn't have her parents packing the bag again. It had taken her way too long to settle down to move out again. She decided she would go to the police by herself. How difficult could it be? She had to be brave. If she could save the boy, she could redeem her family's reputation and maybe her classmates would finally accept her then.

It was dark outside, her parents would be suspicious if she went out right now, so she decided to go to sleep and go to the police tomorrow on her way to school.

She closed her window too scared to keep it open and went to sleep. She woke up to a nightmare where an wrinkly old man was sitting on her chest choking her to death. When she opened the window to get a good look at the backyard in the light of the day, all she saw was the old banyan tree and the vines hanging down the tree like a witch's hair. She had never seen Mr. Kumar in person. She was quite sure, he never spoke to anyone, no one visited him and he absolutely didn't like anyone going near his property. He had a big house, the oldest in their neighborhood. Her parents said it was made during the british rule. It did look like a house that would belong to ancient Zamindar. It was enclosed with an 11 feet tall brick wall and an even bigger iron gate.

A chill ran down Seema's spine even thinking about what evil things might go inside the mansion. She had seen the man occasionally sipping tea on his porch or cleaning his lawn after a storm, nothing out of ordinary but she never thought he could kidnap someone. But he did have a bad reputation, she shouldn't have been surprised..

Seema quickly put on a cotton t-shirt and loose jeans. She needed to see if the person she had seen last night was still there.

"Where are you going?" Seema's mom shouted from the kitchen as she was putting on her sandals.

"I'll be back in 15 min, ma." Seema answered before slowly closing the main door behind her.

Due to the low population of the town, the old man was their only neighbour but they had never spoken to him. As far as she could tell he was hostile towards visitors. The salesman that rang the bell on the old man's gate was chased off with colorful curse words.