The Artist’s Curse: A Tale of Demonic Possession

1. The Quiet Before the Storm
Five years have passed since Robin was brought back. Time is a wonderful healer. Those harrowing nights in the Sundarbans are now dull memories, which they no longer discuss. Robin is now a respected ecotourism guide in the Sundarbans. He shows tourists its beauty, but the path of that cursed creek is one he carefully avoids. Rally is busy with his family and corporate life. Amber is an established wildlife photographer; his pictures are now printed in international magazines.
And Dipu, his friends believe, is now a celebrated name in the Kolkata Art Circuit. His paintings have a strange depth, a melancholic play of light and shadow that fascinates the viewer. His last solo exhibition, ‘Source of Light,’ was a massive success. His friends thought they were finally free from the circle of the curse. They had all moved on with their lives.
But some wounds, though healed, leave scars. And some signatures wait silently for the right time to reappear.
The trouble begins with Dipu’s new series. He started working for his next exhibition, the subject of which was ‘Memory and Oblivion.’ But slowly, his art began to change. On his canvas, bright colors were replaced by murky greens and dark blues. The faces he painted began to show an abstract pain, a silent scream in their eyes.
It was Amber who first noticed it. One day, he went to Dipu’s studio and saw him standing transfixed before a huge canvas. It was a desolate landscape, much like the Sundarbans. But deep in the jungle, under the trees, Amber could clearly see two blinking eyes. The same eyes he had seen for the first time through the lens of his camera—eyes that were overwhelming, eternally hungry.
“What are you painting, Dipu?” Amber asked carefully.
Dipu looked back. His eyes were red, his face etched with fatigue. “I don’t know, Amber-da. Sometimes it feels like the brush isn’t in my hand. Like someone else is painting through me,” he said, trying to laugh it off.
But Amber knew this was not just the result of overwork.
2. The Unraveling
A few weeks later, the situation worsened. Dipu became a recluse, barely leaving his house. He stopped answering his friends’ calls. His behavior grew irritable. The door to his studio was almost always locked.
One day, Rally and Amber forced their way into his studio. The sight inside made their blood run cold. The room was littered with numerous sketches and small canvases. Each one depicted the same thing—the broken temple, the mangrove jungle, and various forms of that horrible, formless entity. And the huge canvas in the middle of the room was almost complete. The dim form in the jungle was now clearer, more defined. It wasn’t just a picture anymore; it felt alive. Looking at the canvas made one’s head spin, as if one’s mind was being pulled into an abyss.
“Dipu, what are you doing!” Rally shouted in horror.
Dipu was huddled in a corner of the room. He spoke mechanically, “He must be given fullness. The story has to be finished.”
Amber’s chest tightened. He remembered the last words of Damodar Ojha, spoken to Robin— “My Lord will find his completion.”
A horrible thought struck Amber. He ran home and took out his grandfather’s old diary. He had previously missed a line, written carefully in the margin of a dusty page.
“The curse does not just seek a carrier; it also seeks a vessel. When a carrier is freed, the power is drawn to the most vulnerable soul nearby. It can be expelled by the force of friendship, but in that moment, it leaves a signature on another.”
Everything became clear to Amber. That night, in the temple ruins, when they had embraced Robin with all their strength and friendship, the evil entity was expelled from Robin’s body and found its new vessel. And that vessel was Dipu—the one who was most afraid to enter the temple, whose artistic soul was the most sensitive. The victory of their friendship had, unknowingly, sealed Dipu’s fate. The curse wasn’t over; it had just changed carriers. And for five long years, it had been growing silently in the depths of Dipu’s being, devouring his art.
3. The Last Fight, The Last Signature
“We can’t lose him, Amber-da,” Rally said, his voice filled with despair. “We have no Damodar Ojha. We have no other way.”
“There is a way,” Amber said, his voice calm but firm. “Back then, we feared it, then we fought it with rituals, and finally, we fought it with friendship. But this time, we have to fight it with its own weapon—with art.”
They told Robin everything. Robin, who had lost a part of his own life to the curse, didn’t hesitate for a moment. The three of them were together again, to bring their friend back one last time.
They reached Dipu’s studio. Dipu was standing before the huge canvas, adding the final brushstrokes. His eyes were no longer his own; they glowed with a green light. The eyes on the canvas burned with the same eerie light. A low humming sound had begun to fill the room. The canvas was no longer a picture; it was a living doorway.
“Dipu!” Amber shouted. “Come back! That’s not you!”
The entity wearing Dipu’s face smiled back at them, a soundless laugh that seemed to echo off the walls. “It’s too late. He is mine now. Through his art, I will be made whole in this world.”
But Amber didn’t give up. He pulled something out of the bag he had brought. They were Dipu’s old paintings—his first watercolor of a butterfly, a portrait of his parents, smiling sketches he had made of his friends.
“Look at these, Dipu,” Amber said, holding the pictures up in front of the cursed canvas. “This is your art. Your light. You don’t paint darkness. You are an artist of life!”
Robin stepped forward and placed a hand on Dipu’s shoulder. “I don’t remember much from that time, Dipu. But I know I wouldn’t have come back without you. Today, it’s our turn to bring you back.”
Rally opened the catalogue from Dipu’s ‘Source of Light’ exhibition. “Think of your inner light, friend!”
The words of his friends, their memories, their touch—it all began to break through to Dipu’s consciousness. His hand started to tremble. A single tear rolled from his eye, extinguishing the green light for a moment. His own self began to fight back desperately.
He looked at the canvas. A terrifyingly beautiful artwork made by his own hands, one that could have given him immortality but was costing him his soul.
For a moment, everything stood still. Then, Dipu let out an inhuman scream—a cry of pain, of liberation, and of intense rage. He grabbed a bottle of turpentine from the nearby table and threw it at the greatest artwork of his life.
The colors began to melt. The eyes of the entity on the canvas dissolved in agony. The canvas shuddered violently. With a final, sharp shriek, all the lights in the room went out and then came back on.
Everything was quiet. Dipu was slumped on the floor, crying. In front of him was the ruined canvas of his wasted dreams.
Conclusion
Dipu could never paint that picture again. For months after the incident, he didn’t pick up a brush. His hands would tremble at the thought. But his friends never left him alone. They came to him every day, sat with him, and slowly brought him back to life.
After a long time, Dipu started painting again. But this time, he didn’t work on large canvases. He painted small watercolors—the smiling faces of children, the light of dawn, the petals of a flower. There was no deep melancholy in his art anymore, only a quiet, gentle light. He turned his studio into an art school, where he taught street children how to paint.
One afternoon, the four friends were sitting in the garden of his art school. Amber framed a picture with his camera. In the photo were four middle-aged men, with the lines of age on their faces and the weariness of their struggles, but a deep tranquility in their eyes.
Amber looked at the picture and smiled. The curse of the Sundarbans may have taken much from them, but it had given them an invaluable understanding in return. Victory doesn’t always mean wiping out the darkness completely. Sometimes, victory means choosing the path of light even while carrying the scars of darkness, and spreading that light to others.
Their fight was over. The echo of the curse was finally silent. All that was left was the story of four friends, their unbreakable bond, and their survival.