The NightMares : Indonesian Urban Legend

The bus left Rian in dust and absolute dark.

10:47 PM. Cikidang Village. Sukabumi.

He remembered this road from when he was ten. Same dirt. Same coconut trees. Different now. The streetlights were gone. Stolen and sold. Only moonlight filtered through the leaves, cutting the road into pieces of light and pieces of void.

His boots crunched on gravel. The sound was too loud. The village had no other noise. No dogs barked. No televisions hummed. Only crickets. Thousands of them. A wall of sound that felt like pressure against his ears.

Grandma’s house stood at the end of the road. A wooden house on stilts. The paint had peeled off years ago. The roof sagged. One kerosene lamp burned on the porch, its flame too small for the darkness around it.

Rian climbed the steps. The wood complained under his weight. He knocked three times. Soft. Precise.

No answer.

He pressed his ear to the door. Silence. Then something else. A sound from above the roof. Not on it. Above it. A slow, wet dragging. A circular motion. Like something large was walking on hands and knees, circling the house.

His mouth went dry.

“Grandma?” The word came out thin.

The door was not locked. It opened under his hand with a soft click.

The air inside was wrong. It was cold, but not the cold of night air. This cold was dense. It pressed against his skin and teeth. The smell was worse. Old cloth. Damp wood. And under it, something sweet and chemical. The smell of protein breaking down.

“Grandma?” He whispered.

She lay on the bamboo bed in the corner. She had shrunk. Her skin was yellow, stretched tight over bone. Her breathing was shallow. A cracked cup of tea sat on the floor beside her. The tea inside was cold. A skin had formed on top.

Rian knelt beside the bed and took her hand. Her fingers were ice. They closed around his wrist before he could withdraw.

“Rian,” she said. Her eyes remained closed. “You came.”

Relief hit him. “Grandma, I’m here. The bus was late. You sound weak. We need to get you to a clinic—”

Her eyes opened.

They were not eyes. They were black. Completely. No white. No iris. Just depth, like looking into a well with no bottom.

“Don’t look up,” she said. Her voice was hers. And beneath it was another sound. Wet. Gurgling. As if her throat was full of mud.

Rian stared. His brain refused to accept what he saw. “Grandma, your eyes—”

“Don’t,” she interrupted. Her grip tightened until her nails broke his skin. “The roof, Rian. Do not look at the roof.”

Wusssss.

The sound came from directly above him. So close that dust fell into his hair. Not cold dust. Warm dust. The kind that falls when wood burns from the inside.

The kerosene lamp on the table flickered. The flame turned from yellow to orange to red. Then it dimmed. The edges of the flame turned blue for one second before it went out.

The smell changed. Sulfur. Scorched metal. And meat. Like pork left on a grill too long.

Grandma’s lips moved. No sound came out at first. Only air. Then she forced the words: “The dukun. He sent it. For me. Because I said no. But you’re here now. It smells our blood. Same blood.”

Rian wanted to stand. To laugh. To call this a symptom of fever and dehydration. “Grandma, there’s no such thing as Banaspati. You’re sick. Let me call an ambulance—”

Wusssss. STOP.

The dragging stopped. Directly above his head.

Silence.

Then the ceiling plank above him began to darken. A circle spreading outward. Brown. Then black. Thin lines of smoke curled down from the wood, like fingers reaching.

The lamp was dead. The room was dark.

But it was not dark.

A red light bled through the crack in the ceiling. Small at first. The size of a coin. It pulsed. In. Out. In. Out. Like a heartbeat.

Rian remembered. He was seven. Grandma telling him stories while grinding spices. Her voice was serious.

“If you ever see Banaspati, Rian, listen. Do not look up. Do not say its name three times. And if the fire goes out, you run. You run and do not stop.”

The red light grew. It pushed against the wood. The plank groaned. Turned black. Then it cracked.

A hole opened.

Fire poured through.

It was not normal fire. This fire was red-orange. The color of molten metal. It moved wrong. It crawled down from the ceiling, defying gravity, and hovered in the air between Rian and Grandma. The size of a large bucket. It rotated slowly.

Inside the fire, shapes formed and dissolved. A screaming mouth. Claws. Then an eye. One eye. It blinked. It looked at Rian. It focused on him.

Heat hit his face. His skin tightened immediately. The hair on his arms curled and blackened.

Grandma’s hand went slack in his. Her head tilted to the side. Her chest stopped rising.

“Grandma?” Rian shook her. “Grandma, no. Grandma!”

The fireball drifted closer. It was twenty centimeters from his face. The air around it boiled. The wood of the table beside him began to smoke, but it did not catch fire. The paint did not bubble. Only the air near the fire was hot.

The eye inside the fire blinked again. And Rian blinked back. Instinct. He could not stop it.

The moment he did, the fire flinched.

Then it vanished.

Pusssst.

No explosion. No sound. Only the absence of heat. The absence of light. Total darkness so complete it caused pain behind his eyes.

Rian could not breathe. He could not move. The only sound was his heart hammering in his chest.

Then a whisper. Right behind his left ear. So close that his earlobe tingled with breath that was not breath. It was hot.

“Got you.”

The voice was wet. It was smiling.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

Three knocks. From the back door. Slow. Deliberate.

Rian did not turn. He could not. His muscles were locked.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

The knocks came again. Louder. The whole house seemed to lean toward the sound.

The red light was gone. But the darkness was different now. It had weight. It had shape. It stood in the corner of the room, where the shadows were deepest.

And it waited.

Outside, something large moved across the roof. Wusssss. Stop. Wusssss. Stop.

The house was intact. The walls were whole. The roof showed no damage.

But the air inside was getting hotter.