The Smile That Kills
The protagonist, therapist Roshni, sees her patient Sneha’s face when she dies with a smile on it, causing Roshni’s world to turn upside down – literally.
Before her death Sneha mumbles about a creature that goes by the name Terror, an evil which has an ability to make people unleash a cursed grin upon them that starts the process of mental decay where the subject is turned into an agent of destruction.
The smile that brought death to Sneha begins to appear in Roshni’s own mirror image. She begins to wonder: Am I next?
Roshni begins to search for answers in the darkest corners of a website and the sound that haunts her from the poster of Terror, like a fog.
It is here that she discovers the destructive potential of the darkness – a force that always goes after the weak, twisting their minds until they are fully consumed by the insanity.
Days turn into nights, the smile becomes more vivid, and one day Roshni must face the horrifying reality of the world of Terror and become a part of it.
But the question remains—will she ever be able to run and free herself or will she ultimately perish behind the perpetual smile?
Terror’s Grip
Desperate, Roshni approaches Aman, a bitter ex-husband and a roughneck detective in charge of her current investigation. Initially, Aman tries to disregard her concerns as mere stress and pay no attention to them.
It seems rather simple at first, but as the peculiar string of suicides continue disturbing the city, Aman finds correlations. Could Terror be real? In their quest for an answer for this paradigm shift, they come across the only known survivor, Robert Talley.
His chilling words send a shiver down their spines: Terror cannot kill those who still feel…
With this ominous knowledge, Roshni flees to a family’s remote cabin in order to be alone. But when the night comes, a silhouette of her mother appears, smiling, a demon with the look of her mother.
The darkness chokes her but Roshni is determined, she uses a silver cross and sends the entity to the abyss giving her a belief that she defeated Terror.
The Smile Returns
As soon as Roshni lets out a sigh of relief, the unforeseeable happens once again. She looks at Aman—and there is that cursed smile, warped and sinister, on his lips.
Violence had been brought back into their lives, with the cold hand of fear grasping it once again. As the darkness encroaches, Roshni speaks the words she’s held inside for so long: “I love you.”
The smile fades away—but the distant, gloomy forest resonates with strange laughter. It is then that Roshni comes to understand that Terror is not an entity that was just vanquished – it is far more terrible than that. It lingers forever and hastens its advances, aiming to capture them both.
The Final Confrontation
Roshni and Aman finally ask Robert for the last clue – Terror can only be defeated if it gets caught in a broken mirror. The mirror is broken, yet its power is concealed in a glen of the woods where the origins of Terror reside.
With only their resolve to guide them, they go down into the depths where time is manipulated, and the very air gives off dark apprehension.
In the cave, horror is at its fullest, and the smiling mechanical terror is but the representation of the evil in a human heart. Roshni, the embodiment of love’s power goes up against Terror in a visceral fight for the soul.
Finally, the light blinds everyone, revealing lasers piercing through the cave, and the entity then crumbles—but to what end?
A Smile That Lingers
This is followed by moments of silence, which can be deafening. At the end of the game, Roshni and Aman think that they have triumphed but the victory that has been achieved feels rather uneasy.
There are accounts of more people going missing, more corpses discovered with the same sinister grin. Terror is not gone. It is still watching, still waiting, and the dead spirit still haunts the walls.
With the next face-to-face snapping into place between Roshni and Aman, a cold, knowing laugh echoes out through the trees, a deadly presence that can only be heard in the dead of night.
-Swadheeka Pradhan
