THE REVENGE OF THE SNAKEHEAD - The Cutting - Horror bengali ghost story (part 3)

 

THE REVENGE OF THE SNAKEHEAD - 

The Cutting - Chapter (5 -6-7)

The housekeeper was not a superstitious woman. She had worked in the homes of others her whole adult life. She had cleaned fish and vegetables and cut up meat and never once encountered something she could not explain. She took the snakehead to the kitchen sink, laid it on the board, and picked up her knife. The fish moved. Not the reflexive twitch of muscle that sometimes happened with very fresh fish — a final electrical shudder as the nerves forgot to stop. This was purposeful. The fish turned in her hands with a force that was wrong for something that had been out of water for hours. She tightened her grip. It thrashed. Her hand slipped. The knife came down at a wrong angle. She gasped and pulled back, pressing her bleeding palm against her apron. For a long moment, she stood there, breathing hard, looking at the fish on the cutting board. It had gone still again. But its eye — the single red eye visible from where she stood — was watching her. She picked up the knife with her uninjured hand

Even after the head was separated from the body — a clean cut, definitively final — the fish continued to move. The severed tail curled. The gills pumped. The red eye, now detached from any living anatomy, still seemed to focus. The housekeeper recited a prayer under her breath and did not stop until the movement finally ceased. It took longer than it should have. Omar Faruk's wife cooked the fish beautifully — the way she always did, with cauliflower and the particular blend of spices her mother-in-law had taught her. The kitchen filled with warmth and the smell of cumin and turmeric. Omar arrived home at noon, calling out as he came through the door: "Where is it? My fresh snakehead? Hurry — I could eat the whole kitchen, I'm so hungry." His wife laughed and brought it to the table.

He ate every bite.

Chapter Six

It was well past midnight when the screaming began. Omar Faruk was pulled from sleep by a sound he had never heard before — high, desperate, belonging to a register of terror that a human voice only reaches when something inside it has broken. He sat up in the dark, heart slamming, and turned to his wife. She was not in the bed. She was on the floor. On her back, arched, her fingers clawing at the tile, her heels drumming a frantic rhythm. Her eyes were open but the whites had turned up and her mouth was working without making sense. Omar dropped to his knees beside her. He grabbed her shoulders. He shouted her name. She did not respond

He had studied the Quran since childhood. He had memorized it, recited it, lived within its words. Now, for the first time in his adult life, those words came not from discipline but from pure, animal fear — he began to recite Ayat al-Kursi, the Throne Verse, the single most powerful protection in Islamic scripture, in a voice that shook but did not stop. Slowly — too slowly — his wife came back. Her body relaxed. Her eyes focused. She looked up at him with an expression he had never seen on her face before: absolute, primitive terror. "Save me," she whispered. "They want to kill me. He says — he says that everyone who wronged him will pay. That he will spare no one."

They sat together on the floor until the call to Fajr prayer came with the dawn. Neither of them slept again. It was worth noting: Omar Faruk's wife was pregnant.

Chapter Seven - The Scholar

The alim arrived after Asr prayer, as promised. He was a learned man — not a performer of mystical theatrics, but a genuine scholar who had spent decades studying the texts and had arrived, through that study, at a careful, empirical attitude toward the unseen world. He sat across from Omar Faruk in the small sitting room and listened without interruption as the entire story was laid out before him

Then he said: "I understand. This is not random. Someone with a deliberate purpose has been following you — and that purpose is not benign. Before something irreversible happens, we must act." He gave Omar a set of daily recitations — specific verses, specific times, specific numbers of repetitions. He left a bottle of water that he had blessed with prayer. He promised to return the following day with more information.

That night, Omar Faruk's wife observed a voluntary fast — it happened to be Thursday, and she was a woman of regular devotion. She broke her fast at Maghrib with a single glass of water and two dates. She was not well. The weakness she felt went beyond hunger. They prayed together. They performed the alim's prescribed recitations. They went to bed. Omar lay in the dark, watching a shadow move back and forth along the far wall. It had no source. No logical origin. The window was closed, the curtain drawn. The shadow moved with deliberate, almost contemplative slowness — back and forth, back and forth, as if it were thinking. He recited quietly until it stopped. In the morning, he found his wife sitting motionless in the chair by the window, staring at nothing, not responding to her name.