The Skull’s Revenge

The Skull’s Revenge

Ghulam Murtaza Alvi

BY:Khan

Fifteen years ago, when Asif and Rizwan were medical students, their lives were ordinary until an alarming announcement changed everything. Their anatomy teacher told the class, “After the two holiday days, I will test you on the entire human skeleton.” Panic spread through the room. Asif and Rizwan were far from confident; the names and structure of the skull’s bones blurred when they tried to study from textbooks.

One evening, while poring over their notes, Asif suddenly suggested, “If we could get hold of a real human skull, we could learn everything much faster. Holding it in our hands would make the bones unforgettable.” Rizwan was skeptical. “We can just pull images from the internet,” he said. Asif shook his head. “Screens only show so much. A real skull in your hands — that’s different. We’ll pass that test if we study it properly.”

They decided to find a graveyard caretaker who might help. Asif knew a man named Qamr Din who worked at a cemetery outside the city. After convincing him the skull was only for study and offering him money, Qamr Din agreed — for an additional fee — to open a neglected grave and bring out the skull that night.

At ten o’clock under a stormy sky, the three of them entered the graveyard. Lightning flashed, and the graves cast long, unnatural shadows. Rizwan felt fear as if the cold wind pushed at his spine, but he swallowed his dread and kept walking. Qamr Din led them to a neglected grave and, as instructed, they kept the single flashlight trained on that plot.

The grave was opened. Qamr Din’s spade bit into the damp earth and, after a short while, he pulled free a human skull and wrapped it in a dark cloth. The skull looked, to Rizwan, like a melon — pale, hollow-eyed. When Asif picked up the wrapped object, a strange warmth seemed to press against the back of his head, as if something living had settled onto his shoulders. The feeling passed, but it left both students unnerved.

They paid Qamr Din and rode home with the skull tied to the side of their motorcycle. Asif insisted Rizwan lock it in his cupboard — his own wardrobe lock was broken — and Rizwan obeyed. He ate, washed, and went to bed uneasy, but convinced the skull’s presence was only a scientific tool.

Later that night, a horrible scream split the silence. Rizwan rushed out to find his nephew, who had been playing in the courtyard, bleeding from a wound on his head created by a falling chunk of cement from the eaves. The child survived after hurried treatment by a local doctor, and Rizwan, sleepless and shaken, began to wonder whether they had brought some curse home with them. He told Asif about his fear: “Maybe the dead are taking revenge for what we did.”

Asif laughed it off, scoffing at ghosts and curses. He said a modern student shouldn’t be frightened by old superstitions. “If anything’s going to be harmed, let it be me,” he joked. The two arranged to study with the skull the next morning and Asif promised to come to Rizwan’s house at ten.

But fate had other plans. That night, sometime before dawn, a ceiling fan fell in Asif’s room and crushed him while he slept. He was found dead beneath the broken fan, his skull fractured. When Rizwan learned that the funeral would be held at the very cemetery from which they had taken the skull, shock drove him nearly to collapse. He insisted on seeing his friend’s body, though the face was too mangled to recognize. Asif was buried in the same row of graves where they had, only days before, dug up a skull.

Grief and guilt warped Rizwan’s world. He could not eat or sleep. After a few days, when his nerves steadied enough, he retrieved the skull from his cupboard. To his horror, a dim light seemed to leak from its empty eye sockets — as if something watched him through the hollow spaces. Panic seized him. He rode to the cemetery, planning to return the skull and beg Qamr Din to place it back.

Qamr Din listened and accepted the money with a knowing expression. He agreed to replace the skull in the original grave that very night and promised to send a photograph as proof. Rizwan felt a fragile relief as he handed the bundle over, as if sheathing some guilt into the ground again.

When he turned to leave, Rizwan saw a fresh tombstone nearby. On it, in black letters, was Asif’s name and the chilling date: the very night Asif had died. It was the most brutal confirmation Rizwan could imagine — that their reckless act had been met with swift and terrible consequence.

In the days that followed, rumors spread. People said the fan had fallen by coincidence; others said a curse had followed the boys home. For Rizwan, coincidence no longer offered solace. He would sit on Asif’s grave at night, reciting prayers until the first birds announced morning, trying to undo something he had never fully understood. He had learned his lesson the hardest way possible: some boundaries are not meant to be crossed, and respect for the dead is not merely tradition — it is, perhaps, a safeguard against forces that patience and money cannot tame.

Years later, the memory of that hot, stormy night in the cemetery remained as sharp as a bone. Rizwan became a careful man, his medical studies shadowed by a lifelong wariness: knowledge, he learned, has consequences when it strips the living of reverence for the dead.