It rained the whole day, so I had no option but to stay cooped up in the hotel room. It was unlike any hotel I had stayed at before. On the ground floor of the two-storey building was the dining area for guests. The family that operated the hotel lived in one of the rooms on the ground floor. On the first floor was a wide and open balcony, and adjacent to it was three rooms—two were guestrooms, and one was more of a storeroom that not so long ago also served as a guestroom. But since the village no longer got as many tourists as it once did, the family, I was told, thought it would make more sense to turn the room into a storeroom.

As for my room, it wasn't the kind that you would want to stay in for hours during the day. It was a spartan room. All it had for furniture were two creaky twin beds and a small bedside table. Television and the internet didn't exist in the entire village. If one needed to make a phone call, there was no option but to go to the hillock overlooking the village because that’s the only place where one could get a phone signal, but that too a weak one.

By the time the rain stopped, it was 4 pm, and I decided to go for a walk. I had a numb headache, which I usually get whenever I stay indoors doing nothing for too long.

When the matron of the family that operated the hotel saw me heading out, she asked me where I was heading to. I told her that I was going for a run. I wasn’t going for a run. I intended to go for a walk. I didn’t know why I lied to her.

After I had walked around 200 metres from the hotel, a man in his 60s stopped me and told me that he had seen me dining alone at the hotel the previous night. He told me that his name was Buntung and that his family had recently moved to the village. When I told him that I was heading out for a walk, he offered to walk me to a spot that had great mountain views.

After walking for what must have been almost 20 minutes, we left the village behind and entered a thick pine forest with a narrow single-track trail. He told me that the spot was another 20-minute walk away. It didn’t matter to me. I was just happy to be out of the depressing hotel room. A little while after we entered the forest, Buntung started walking quicker. For the next 20 minutes, the trail meandered uphill and downhill.

Tired from the hike, I soon found myself trying hard to keep up with Buntung's pace. Before a bend in the trail, I asked Buntung to stop and wait for me while I caught my breath. Perhaps he didn’t hear me and went ahead anyway. When I crossed the bend, he was nowhere to be seen. I called his name a few times and even walked ahead for another few minutes. Buntung was nowhere to be seen as if he simply disappeared.

As it was almost 5:30 pm and there was only an hour of daylight before it got dark, I thought it would be best to head back to the village. As I made my way back, everything appeared different. Instead of pine trees, there were many broadleaf trees, and many of them were incredibly tall. Even the sounds of cicadas were gone. They were replaced by all sorts of sounds of insects and birds. The forest sounded more like a tropical forest. As I tried to make sense of what was happening, I felt nervousness and fear settling in my mind. The mental worry soon started taking a toll on my body and left me feeling tired. Each step was a struggle, and it felt like I was walking around with dumbbells attached to my calves. Too tired to walk any farther, I decided to sit down and rest for a while and ended up falling asleep.

What woke me up was the feeling of someone staring at me. When I opened my eyes, I saw a man staring at me. He had Buntung’s face and earnest smile. The only difference was this man was considerably shorter than Buntung. He also had a strange animal with him. It had the face and body of a dog but walked like a cat and had a long colourful tail. I told the man with a strange animal that I had walked with a man named Buntung and that he disappeared in the middle of a forest. He told me he hadn’t seen anyone on the trail and didn’t know anyone named Buntung. I thought he was playing tricks on me and was not in the mood for anything else but to head back to the village. When I asked the man the directions to the village I was staying in, he gave me a blank look and said there was no village of that name in the area.

Trying to wrap my head around what was happening, I checked my watch and it showed 8 pm. I thought to myself that there was no way I had slept for more than two hours in the middle of a strange forest. And what was stranger was even though it was 8 pm, it wasn’t even dark yet. The sun was in the middle of the sky. Seeing me confused, the man offered me a bottle.

"Drink some water," he said.

But when I peeked into the bottle, I saw a strange pink-coloured liquid instead of water. I thanked him for his generosity and returned the bottle without drinking from it.

I asked the man with the strange animal the direction to the nearest village. "The nearest village is more than a week's walk away," he said.

Seeing my worried look, he started laughing. His strange animal stared at me for a few seconds and it also started laughing a human laugh.

Freaked out by all that was happening, I started running in the opposite direction. The man and the strange animal started following me. After running for what must have been almost 15 minutes, the man grabbed my shirt's collar and shouted in my ears that I should not tell anyone what had happened in the forest. As soon as he said it, the ground shook, and everything changed. It was no longer a tropical forest. I was back in the pine forest ringing with the sounds of cicadas, and the man and strange animal were nowhere to be seen. I checked my watch, and it showed 6 pm. It was dusk. A few minutes later, I left the forest trail and reached the village. I headed straight to the hotel and took a long shower. That night, while I ate my dinner, I shared my surreal experience with one of the diners. When I was done, he laughed and announced to everyone present that I had met Buntung. And then he locked his eyes on me and told me that I should have listened to the man’s advice and not told anyone about what had happened in the forest. Angered, I told him that I was going to share the incident with everyone I know.

"You are going to regret this," he said.

That night, a little after 2 am, I heard a knock on my door. Half asleep, I opened the door, and I saw the man from the forest and his strange animal waiting.