Dr. Arvind Roy was known far and wide as a skilled physician, compassionate and courageous, unshaken by the horrors he encountered in his daily work. It was this reputation that had brought him a bride from a remote village near Kolkata, a place he had never been, yet he had heard mysterious whispers about from his patients and colleagues. The villagers had spoken of it in hushed voices, calling it a land cloaked in fog, where the sun seemed never to shine.
Accompanied by three of his closest friends, Arvind set out on the journey to his bride’s village in the dead of night. The path was treacherous and eerie; dense forests flanked them on both sides, and the air was thick with the scent of wet earth and something else – something faintly metallic and sinister. Despite his friends’ nervous murmurs, Arvind was steadfast, chalking it up to the fears of traveling unfamiliar terrain.
As they approached the village, an unsettling quiet took hold. There were no sounds of birds, no wind rustling the leaves, not even the familiar hum of crickets. Instead, the silence was oppressive, almost as though the air itself was holding its breath. The friends exchanged uneasy glances but pressed on.
Upon entering the village, they were greeted by villagers dressed in old, tattered clothing, their faces pale and devoid of expression. Their eyes held a strange, lifeless quality, and their movements seemed unnaturally slow and deliberate. But they spoke in soft voices, welcoming Arvind and his companions, gesturing them into the village square where the wedding preparations were supposedly underway.
The bride, Aparna, was beautiful but in a way that felt haunting. Her skin was pallid, her gaze intense yet empty, and as she greeted Arvind, her smile seemed stretched, more like a mask than a true expression of joy. Her family and other villagers gathered around them, speaking softly but always looking at Arvind with those blank, dead eyes.
As the night wore on, Arvind and his friends noticed other strange things. They were served food, but it was cold and flavorless, as though it had been cooked long ago and left to rot. The villagers would drift in and out of the dimly lit houses, but their movements seemed mechanical, as if they were bound by some unseen force to repeat their actions. The friends whispered among themselves, wondering why the villagers seemed so detached and peculiar, but they chalked it up to local customs.
However, as midnight approached, things took a darker turn. Arvind’s friends noticed that some villagers were silently gathering in a shadowed corner of the village, their eyes trained intently on the newcomers, as if observing their every move. Aparna, too, seemed distracted, often staring into the distance with an unnerving focus, her face expressionless.
Then, one of Arvind’s friends, Raghav, wandered off to explore, intrigued by a distant flickering light. Moments later, they heard his scream – a gut-wrenching, blood-curdling cry that echoed through the silent night. Arvind and his friends rushed toward the sound, only to find Raghav sprawled on the ground, shaking with terror.
“They’re… they’re all dead!” he stammered, his voice barely a whisper. “The villagers… they’re not alive. I saw them… they’re decaying… they’re…” He choked on his words, horror overtaking him.
It was then that they realized the truth. In the dim moonlight, Arvind saw what he had missed before – the pallor of the villagers’ skin wasn’t just from poor lighting. It was the color of death. Their skin was marred by patches of rot, their clothes tattered not from poverty but decay. The villagers were dead – the entire village was a gathering of the undead.
The friends, gripped by terror, attempted to flee, but the villagers blocked their path, surrounding them with empty eyes and outstretched hands. Aparna, too, stood among them, her eyes a hollow abyss, her lips twisted into an unnatural smile.
Arvind, desperate to save himself and his friends, called upon his medical knowledge. He noticed that the villagers’ movements grew sluggish and more decayed as the night deepened. Realizing that these creatures might still retain some semblance of humanity, he concocted a plan.
Through his work as a doctor, Arvind had experience treating people in trance-like states, and he theorized that the villagers might be under some form of spell or ancient disease that brought them back from the dead. He instructed his friends to help him gather herbs and medicinal plants he recognized from the forests surrounding the village. With hurried hands, he mixed a potion and forced it down Aparna’s throat, hoping it might bring her back.
To his shock, the potion worked – Aparna’s eyes flickered, and she looked at him with a spark of life, albeit faint. She gasped, tears streaming down her face, as she remembered fragments of her life. She told Arvind that the village had been cursed generations ago, a curse that had trapped them between life and death. They had to continue their daily routines eternally, doomed to repeat them until someone found a way to break the curse.
But Arvind knew he couldn’t save them all. With no time to lose, he carried Aparna in his arms, half-conscious and still fighting to retain her humanity. The remaining villagers began to awaken from their trance, their eyes now filled with anger and bloodlust, their dead faces twisted with hunger.
Arvind’s friends fought off the advancing zombies as best as they could, but the numbers were overwhelming. They barely made it to the edge of the village before the undead swarmed around them. In a desperate bid, Arvind poured the last of his potion around them, creating a protective circle of herbs and medicine that kept the undead at bay, giving them a small window to escape.
They ran through the forest, not daring to look back as the howls of the undead filled the air, echoing through the night like a chorus of despair. By the time they reached the outskirts of Kolkata, Aparna was fully conscious but deeply scarred by the memories of her time among the undead.
Arvind’s friends, forever haunted by the horrors they had witnessed, vowed to speak of it to no one. As for Arvind and Aparna, they returned to Kolkata, but neither could ever forget the village of the dead, where an entire community was trapped in eternal torment. Though he saved Aparna’s life, Arvind was haunted by the faces of those he could not save, and each night, he could feel the eyes of the undead upon him, waiting, as if they would one day return for him.
The legend of the village lived on, whispered among travelers and villagers who avoided the cursed land at all costs, fearful of the place where the living met the dead.
