Chapter 3: The Ghost Ambulance

Chapter 3: The Ghost Ambulance

The echo of the horn faded into a ringing silence, leaving us in a vacuum more profound than before. We were alive, but the air in the car was thick with the ghost of what we’d seen. Every shadow that danced at the edge of the weak moonlight was the Bāgha Bhūta, ready to reform and finish its game. My father’s desperate gambit had worked, but it had come at a cost. The car was now utterly, irrevocably dead. He tried the ignition once, a futile turn of the key that yielded nothing but a dead click. The last spark of life had been spent screaming into the void.

Hours crawled by. The initial adrenaline of the encounter drained away, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion and a gnawing, icy dread. We huddled together for warmth, the car's interior turning into a cold metal tomb. My father, his bravado shattered, stared grimly out the windshield, his face a mask of failure. My mother’s prayers had ceased; she now just held a sleeping Priya, rocking her gently, her eyes wide and vacant.

“No one is coming,” Dad finally whispered, his voice cracking. The statement hung in the air, an admission of a truth we had all been fighting. Serpent’s Pass had swallowed us whole. The stories were true. The road bites, and it had bitten deep.

Despair was a physical thing, a cold weight settling in my chest. My logical mind, which had rebooted after the initial shock, was useless here. There was no algorithm for surviving a ghost tiger. There was no scientific principle that explained the intelligent malice in its eyes, or the way it had dissolved into nothing. We were beyond the reach of the modern world, stranded in a place ruled by ancient, hungry things. I felt a hysterical laugh bubble in my throat. My biggest worry this morning had been a pending coding assignment. Now, I was worried our souls were about to become a late-night snack for a mythical beast.

Just as the last sliver of hope was about to extinguish, a pinprick of light appeared far down the winding road behind us.

At first, I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, a phantom image born of desperation. I blinked, rubbing them hard. It was still there.

“Dad,” I breathed, my voice hoarse. “Look.”

He followed my gaze, and a collective gasp went through the car. It wasn't a flicker. It was a steady, singular light, slowly growing brighter. A motorcycle? A lone traveler? It didn't matter. It was life. It was a connection to the world we had left behind.

The single light became two. Headlights. A car was coming.

Relief washed over us with the force of a physical blow. My mother began to weep, quiet, grateful sobs. My father’s shoulders, which had been slumped in defeat, straightened. He fumbled for the door handle, ready to flag down our saviors. The vehicle drew closer, its engine a low, steady hum that was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. It rounded the final bend, and its form became clear in the gloom.

It wasn’t a car. It was an ambulance.

A wave of confusion warred with my relief. An ambulance, out here, in the middle of the night? It seemed impossibly fortunate, a miracle plucked from a nightmare. The vehicle slowed, its headlights bathing our dead sedan in a clean, white light. It pulled up alongside us, its engine idling with a quiet, almost imperceptible purr.

The driver’s side door opened, and a man in a paramedic’s uniform stepped out. He was silhouetted against the headlights, a figure of authority and salvation.

He took a step into the light, and my father choked out a name. "Roshan? Roshan-dai?"

The man smiled, a broad, kind grin that instantly dispelled the last vestiges of our fear. It was Uncle Roshan, my mother's cousin. A distant relative, yes, but a familiar, friendly face we saw at every major family gathering. He was a paramedic, based in a town a few hours away.

"Bhuvan-bhai! Radha! What in the world are you doing out here at this hour?" His voice was exactly as I remembered it—warm, cheerful, and full of an easy confidence. He seemed completely unfazed by the situation, as if finding relatives stranded on a haunted mountain pass was a nightly occurrence.

"The car… it just died," my father stammered, scrambling out to meet him. "We've been here for hours. Roshan-dai, you have no idea how glad we are to see you."

"Of course, of course," Roshan said, clapping my father on the shoulder. "The old beast finally gave up, eh? No matter. This road is no place to be after dark. Come on, get the kids. There's plenty of room. I'll take you all to the village."

The relief was so absolute it made me dizzy. We stumbled out of the car, Priya now awake and blinking in the bright headlights. We left everything behind—the luggage, the snacks, the dead shell of our car—drawn toward the clean, white ambulance as if it were a holy shrine.

As I helped my mother with Priya, a strange sensation pricked at my skin. The night air was cold, but the air around Roshan was colder. It was a deep, still cold, like the air in a cellar, a chill that seemed to emanate from him directly. His smile was warm, his eyes crinkled kindly at the corners, but when he guided me toward the side door of the ambulance, his hand on my shoulder felt like a block of ice through my hoodie. I shivered, but dismissed it. We were on a mountain, after all. It was supposed to be cold.

The inside of the ambulance was immaculate, the metal surfaces gleaming under a soft interior light. It was an older model, I noted absently, but it was spotless. There was a faint, clean smell, not of antiseptic, but of something else… something like ozone after a thunderstorm, or the crisp air of a winter morning.

We all piled into the back. My father sat up front with Roshan, their conversation a low, comforting murmur. My mother settled in the back with Priya and me, her body finally relaxing, the tension of the last few hours melting away. Priya was already asleep again, her head on Mom's lap.

"You're a lifesaver, Roshan," my father's voice floated back to us. "What are the chances? What were you even doing on this route tonight?"

Roshan chuckled, a sound that seemed a little too loud in the quiet cab. "Just a late transport. You know how it is. Lucky for you, I suppose." He shifted the ambulance into gear, and we pulled away smoothly, leaving our dark, abandoned car behind on the shoulder of Serpent's Pass.

The ride was unnervingly smooth. The ambulance glided over the pockmarked road without a single jolt, its engine a barely-there whisper. Outside, the menacing forest slipped by, its power broken by the sterile safety of our rescue vehicle.

I leaned my head against the cool glass of the window, watching the trees pass. The terror of the Bāgha Bhūta already felt like a fever dream, a hallucination brought on by exhaustion and fear. Seeing Uncle Roshan, so normal and cheerful, had grounded us, pulling us back to reality. My rational mind, desperate for purchase, clung to this new, simpler truth: our car broke down, and our cousin rescued us. It was a simple, logical sequence of events.

Yet, I couldn't shake the chill that had settled deep in my bones. It wasn't just the cold from Roshan's touch. It was a feeling of profound strangeness, a sense that this perfect, miraculous rescue was… too perfect. Too easy.

Roshan started humming a jaunty, old folk tune, his fingers tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel. My father was laughing at something he'd said. My mother was dozing. We were safe. We were saved.

So why did I feel like I had just willingly climbed into a ghost story of a different kind? I looked at the back of Uncle Roshan's head, at his familiar silhouette, and a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature traced its way down my spine. We were numb with relief, blind to anything but our salvation, and in our desperation, we hadn't stopped to question the miracle. We had just climbed aboard.