The Devil's Curse

Chapter - One

I was sitting on a stout desk one dark summer night. It was not too hot sweating out. The light bulb had been rotten due to the rainwater shredded off. But, a bulb in the room was flashing though I hadn’t turned it on. My friend knocked on the main door calling me outside for a jaunt to a lonely path towards a long distance in between the cemetery situated to be known as the center of paranormal activity among the dark community.

I didn’t want to unlock the door as I was stunned by the curtain moving like someone was standing behind it. ‘What a horrible night?’ I thought. I was the one at home on the right side of the road to a town known for its people being blind in the night with a devil’s curse. A similar curse existed in the town where I was living from the age of three. At first, I believed it was a rumor, but I was wrong and corrected my visit to the town under the night sky on the full moon. My friend Ryan was clapping the hand on the door and I was in the room thinking about what should I say to him for denial walking past the cemetery, quite a place of terrifying anxiety and a deeper sense of fear. I opened the door for him to come in and have a conversation that could dispel my illusion of cowardice: horrified of spirits.

“Shall we go, Percy?” he asked.

“I would not like to go this time if people are still possessed with the schizophrenic episode”, I said.

I loved to read books that uplifted me consciously perpetuating spooky thoughts; gripped the book in my right hand and told him to follow me. We both found this book in a pit near the mounds of those where people battled thousands of years ago. Many people didn’t prefer visiting my town because of the superstitious activities going on. Ryan told me to dig the same pit from where we explored the book of exorcism. Nothing was seen after an hour of struggling with the hard clay and hitting the hammer.

“This book can protect our people from that curse of one hundred spirits coming right from hell sticking to the people on each gloomy night”, Ryan uttered emotionally.

“You, me and a few others are blessed not to comply with those spirits avoiding young boys and girls becoming insane except the people above twenty”, I replied.

I read five hundred-page books the whole night; didn’t understand a single sentence about how to vanquish the curse. Besides, it was a picture of a devil's hand holding a magic wand. The script written in this book was categorically ancient and  no translator was alive to use this script as a healing to our people who had been tolerating the curse since 300 AD. I and Ryan were on the top of a mound hearing the growling screams of people punching on the windows. Every night came like a storm making people excessively mad. Some cried with bloody tears. I saw a woman of forty dying with red tears in the room. Young people handled them crawling out of the window every night from stabbing each other. I had been orphaned at the age of twelve and now I was eighteen. *The mound I was on with Ryan would be the war of people fighting against the devil centuries before. I could feel the presence of evil spirits around me.

Moreover, I heard sounds shuffling from the earth. Ryan explained to me his great-grandfather described his father as a dense cave hidden in the cemetery, all the way to the home of the devil. The devil might be punishing innocent souls even if he had left the people facing the lifetime curse. After death, the souls of those people could have been taken to rattle in hell. Over two thousand years ago, our ancestors died defeating the devil.

Now, I always hallucinated the existence of old spirits. It was a harsh truth and they were not easily released from the trap of the devil. We were still there experiencing the burden on our souls. Ryan pushed me to get off. Living in the town was more of a hell. We returned to the home excluding the risk of entering a dangerous area of dead people. While going back, I stared at a woman standing like a statue. This moment was intolerable to see my people countering the cruelty of the devil’s curse. Ryan had shared a story of an Exorcist who tried controlling thousands of souls. He was retarded in the process of taking off spirits. We would keep looking at the entire town encircling the curse at night. People were dying day after day. One old man said that the devil’s oath was to destroy as many people as possible, putting them into infinite adversaries. I wanted the curse to stop fluctuating normal lives. I  tried crossing the borderline of another town but failed to step one inch away from the line.

If anyone could do it, then he must be from the family of an Exorcist, whereas every single man from the Exorcist family ended their lives years ago. No one knew what the cause of them found snipping on the walls. The devil’s curse was meddling with a stranger’s ability and ended up penetrating the devil's cantonment surrounding thousands of acres. A man contributed electricity to the town after he stole the bulb experiment of a man named Thomas Edison. We were unknown to the outer world. I spent the night reminding Ryan of crying last year about his parent's mysterious death. There was no despair in leaving this world and coming into the free world. I slept throwing the book in a sack; unacknowledged? why the book spoke out and crunched in nights. The soul of a woman sat on the window. She was in pain craving for salvation.

It was unlikely erupting in the future; living life and digging out the truth of this - ‘Book of exorcism.’

I woke up early at five-thirty; and went to the cemetery seeing a man burying the dead bodies. They were so ill that their near ones were neglected joining the funeral process from the hands of an old man wearing a ragged black coat. When he uncovered the face, I vomited there to pity on the dead man having his face paled and the skin becoming green as if a poison was flowing in the body.

“Do you know the removal of devil’s curse?” I asked.

What more do you want to know after owning the book of exorcism, young boy? He exclaimed with a shivering voice.

I was astounded. How did he know I was wandering the book? Talking to me, he said, he was noticing my movements for a month. He dragged me to a cottage where he showed me the devil’s cave; furthermore, warned me not to take one step ahead from burning alive. According to him, it was not dispensable, also impossible to reach out to the devil living in the cave with millions of slave spirits, he told.

I trusted myself meeting the devil to suppress his curse forever on the town and its people. It was not going to happen anymore. However, the future would witness avenging the devil proven guilty on the judgment day. The thunder felt like an electric shock and the clouds burst into rain. An eccentric voice hooted out of the cave – Go away or be ready to die. I chose to die confronting the powers of the devil.