Cedar Collection

HDB

The house was standing still. At the end of the corridor it lay, shadowed. Even without the light touches of the sun in the morning or the perpetual dry spell in the afternoon, it remained still and silent. Even a house needed to be watered, the hinges to be lubricated with the flow of activity passing in and out of its doors. And yet without the blistering heat, would have made a normal abode damp and rank- the house was dry.
There was not an ounce of humidity to be found in the deepest crevices of the house. One would have wondered whether moisture itself was the very bane of the house’s existence, for it to be so strongly rejected in such a way.

Joycelyn had stayed there, in the house, for a very long time.

She was peculiar. Very, very strange indeed. The woman had an emancipated look, and a strange aura and odour emanated from her very being. The stench of death surrounded her, invisible to human eyes. But the house spirit felt it. It was repulsed by the woman- no, by the creature, for she had ravaged eyes and a thin, brittle lip quivering, uttering soundless wrath and despair.
It was something that could not possibly belong to any human.

The house had been here for all of it, all the traumatic events that had taken place under its roof. And the house was prepared to tell its tale.

*
“Open the door, sweetie. Open the door. If not, I will do it myself. It’s much better that way. Open the door.” She raised her voice on the last sentence, and for a second it cracked like a scratchy record player, rusty from disuse.
The door did not budge a single bit, but this time hushed whispers could be heard from inside, followed by the amused gurgling of a tap.
The mother would not be ridiculed.
The air stills, seemingly stagnant.
Voices come to a halt beyond the door.
And the world was concentrated on that single corridor in the HDB flat.
The mother stepped back;
cleared her throat curtly and politely.
Her hands stilled, and no small tremor betrayed her silent contemplation.

“Hey. Do you need some help?”

Just then, a man emerged from the opposite side of the corridor and saw her struggling with the groceries. By the goodwill of his heart, he stepped forward to offer a hand. The mother tensed and then turned around ,
“Thank you, kind sir. It is wonderful to have a neighbour nearby who’s so helpful. Feel free to come and visit any time, it will not be an inconvenience. You can see my children, too. They must be very eager to see you.” She says unfalteringly, gesturing around, to the doorway of her house, putting on a sunny smile.
The force of it evaporated the smile right off his face.

“I’ve got… to get going. Sorry. I’ll… see you around?” He mumbles awkwardly, forcing out a laugh. As soon as he has excused himself and dashed down the HDB staircase, she shakes her head.

Her smile was off now, crooked at the edges. It was a peculiar smile, only to be described as ugly. It was as if it was not her own, like someone had forcibly lifted the sides of her face. How frightening it was!
It was a carved smile, twitching and tearing at the seams at which they had been sewn upon. It bled crimson down her face, oozing shame and resentment, corrosive to the house behind her, and the two children walled behind.

She knew that at that moment, the walls were transparent, and they could not shield her from the humiliation and pain. She could hear them! She could feel their judgemental gazes upon her like cheap perfume clinging to her skin. The words that had been flung at her, how they burn!
She saw the image in her mind’s eye, a death totem. Dangled from a bamboo pole hanging off the balcony of the flat, vultures circling the sky. They waited to feed upon her dried corpse. She flinched despite herself, and scratched at her neck surreptitiously to dispel the invisible itch.
The mother calmed herself again. She would be better, she vowed. She would be good, so perfect that no one could reject her again.

The smile was back on her face, tranquil and calm. The edges were smooth again, but she could still hear their voices, even as she closes the door of the house behind her.

***

“Why did you invite that man in?” A harsh voice emerged from the red-tinted interior of the house, lit only by a spinning red plastic top with a faded picture behind it. It let out an electric hum every few seconds, an ever monotonous but mournful xinyao song to accompany the picture. The sound effectively dispelled any trance or ethereal peace of the place. Cookie tins arranged themselves neatly in rows behind the photo frame, supporting it. A few joss sticks stuck in ancient rice puffs haphazardly, there more for decoration than worship.
Joycelyn turned around. Her daughter, Lee, stood there, hidden by shadow. The illumination from the red light cast orange-red flickering light down the planes of her face, shifting and glitching in a repeating pattern, much like the swaying of a flame.
“Lee,why did you not listen to mommy? When mommy says open the door, you do it.” she started, but was interrupted by the emergence of another figure, gliding in gently this time, without the imposing aura of her sister. Yet it still was unnerving, to say the least.

“Mommy, you really shouldn’t have done that.” Sai says, a high, almost amused lilt to her voice.

Lee’s voice takes on another tone, one that was of a harsher consistency, almost like a whiplash. “Sai, get the fuck back to your room. I told you to stay inside.” She said.
The little girl freezes, then soundlessly glides back into the depths of the house.

Her blanket catches on a tray and it topples over as she leaves, spelling scented oil over the ceramic tiles. They sink in through the cracks, the first drops of moisture that has touched the House since its construction. It is the force that pushes the metaphorical ball gently off the slope. From then, it will start to gather momentum, going faster and faster until it ignites. Like a meteor passing through the atmosphere, with infinite destructive opportunities. The beginning of the inevitable end.

Mother hesitates for a few seconds, and speaks patronisingly. “Lee. Why do you talk like that and use such foul, vulgar words in front of your mummy?”
Lee stares at her with empty eyes. “I know who my mummy is, and it is not you.” She strides away. The house flares its red glow defiantly, a gentle pulsing rolling through the walls. It seemed to heave, as if taking in a deep breath for a bellow.
Mother does not notice, even when the room’s temperature rises a few degrees.

The fuse has been lit, and the House was angry.

***

Lee recalls her mother- her real mother, laughing heartily at the dinner table one evening.
She had a bruised nose that was propped up with tissue, and a swollen eye. A result of the battle in the school backyard that day.

“You’d better have beat them up good, Lee.” Her mother quirks an eyebrow at her, visibly amused despite the deep circles under her eyes and a cut on the forehead herself.

“If not, they’ll go and spill to all those other little kids. I don’t want to deal with all those little bastards, so take care of your own shit.” She continues fondly, chuckling a little. Lee remembers her voice. That strong, hard voice with all those little cracks like static in between.

“Is that what Dad did to you?” Sai says softly, the muse settling heavily in between them.
Goddamned Sai. That sly little vixen rarely talks, but every word that came out of her mouth hurt hit home, and they hit hard.

“Did what, Sai?” Mummy said heavily at the same time Lee had snapped “God, shut up, Sai!”

“Beat you up good so you wouldn’t spill to all those other people.” Sai said, voice steady but curious.
Oh, that sadistic girl.

But before Lee could holler at her, mother raised a hand.
A deathly silence settled in the room.
“We fight, yeah, but isn’t that what all families do?” She chuckles, voice slightly strained with the effort of keeping her tone light and dismissive. Lee knew that her mother hadn’t denied Sai’s statement, but did not probe further. If there was one thing her mother was ashamed of, it was her own weakness.

Lee didn’t think that her mother was weak. She had never been weak, compared to all the other mummies who gave their little girls tablets and phones and cooed soft words to keep in line the bullies in the playground beside the void decks.

It was just that her father was too strong, too brutal, had spit too many harsh words, many of them directed at her mother.

The last thing Lee remembers from the conversation had been her mother letting out a little scoff, ironic and deprecating.

***
The last thing Lee had ever saw was her mother bleeding out on the tiles floor of their living room, throat split open. Lee hadn’t seen anything like that. Blood spilt out, bubbling like a leaking hose, and there was no stop to it. She stood there, helpless, and watched her mother bleed crimson out of her body.
Lee had thought that it would be a clean cut, but she could barely see past gnarled and ragged strips of skin, torn open with little care. It was a bloodied mesh of skin that she hadn’t anticipated. Her throat looked like it had been roughly sawed open, a crude back-and-forth motion that cut through muscle and sinew and layers of skin.
A bloodied kitchen knife lay beside her.
Lee identified it as the blunt one, the one that mother would always threaten to use on Lee’s father, but never had.
The force of the knife, Lee observed with revulsion, had been rammed up in rage through her mother’s throat when it had failed to fully saw through her windpipe, and nearly penetrated to the back of her throat.

She never sees her mother’s face.

But she does see her mother move. Just twitch, in the slightest bit. Lee sees her sit up, her neck tearing open a little further with the strain of lifting her head. Her mother clasped a shaking, bloodied had to her throat, and Lee had wanted to scream. But she didn’t, because Sai was sleeping and Sai must never see this. She must protect Sai from this.
Her mother smiles and speaks. It comes out as a gurgle, but still was decipherable nonetheless. Lee made herself forget those words, foggy and blurry in her memory.
At that moment- she knew that her mother would never be back. Something else had come into existence, something so hideous and dark that it would be burnt by the light of day. And she so wished to have the strength to plunge that knife back into her mummy’s throat.

But Lee never did. She resumed her life with her new ‘mummy’, and resigned herself to this fate. Until seven months later.

***

Sai hears little, hushed whispers in the wall of the house tonight. They were… speaking to her.

“Lee, come over. I think I hear something.” Sai shakes Lee awake.

“You’re always hearing things. It isn’t real.” Lee mumbles.

“No, this is real, Lee! Come on, listen.” Sai argues, tugging the blankets off her sister.

With a huff, Lee sits up, presses her ear into the wall. Sai sees the exact moment Lee hears the voices.

“I can’t hear it very clearly though,” Lee says quietly, detaching from the wall.
Sai bends down, pressing her ear to the wall. It was warm, and an almost… hot, searing sensation tickling at her earlobes.

“What do you hear?” Lee asks urgently. Sai hushes her.

They both lapsed into silence for a while.

“The house says that she is bad,” Sai says.
Lee scoffs. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“The house says that we must kill her with fire,” Sai whispers eventually.

They were both silent at that.

Sai watches the lights- fading to orange, now- gently peeking under the doorsteps, where their mother was outside somewhere. Listening. Always listening. Like a curious child who wanted to get in and play.
She doesn’t let it in, because it inexplicably frightens her. It feels all too similar, like a feeling of deja vu. Like a two-way mirror, almost. The red-glow stares at her, and the intensity conflicts with the nonchalance of which she gazes at it. She almost allows herself to wonder if she would be as appalling to the red-glow as it was to her. If her impassive, unseeing gaze meant to appease would provoke the red-glow into a primal, sadistic compulsion of malice and further amplify its fury.

Hopelessness surges up into her soul, filling it with red-hot licks of flame, boiling the thick sludge that had dredged its way up from her stomach into her throat.
Sai feels acid when she swallows, and it burns. Everything burns, and even though shadows obstruct the red glow beyond the door, the impulse comes.
She had to get to the red light. She was burning up. Burning like there were tears in her eyes, burning on her cheek from a harsh slap, burning like her throat when she threw up. The acrid smell crept into her nostrils and seared her skin.

Kill her with fire.

Sai flexes her fingers, and imagine them wrapped around someone’s throat.

“You never let me see mother when it happened,” Sai says, redirecting the topic. She was referring to that day, seven months back.

“You’ve seen it afterward.” Lee deflects.

“Only when you called the police and they took her away for assessment. And even then I didn’t see her throat. Why didn’t you get an ambulance, Lee?”

“Because she’s dead. She was dead seven months ago, she’s dead now.”

“Don’t you think that there’s still a chance that she’s really our mother?” Sai ventures, with just that last iota of hope she had been saving up.

“She’s gone, Sai! You’ve not seen it, you’ve not seen how she died, but I have.
I have seen how she died, and let me tell you, it was ugly. And when she rose up, it wasn’t as glorious as you thought it would be, -all angels and heavenly chorus, the revival of the dead? She was hideous, Sai. She was hideous. I couldn’t look at her. My eyes burned when they saw her.” By the end of that, Lee was panting.

“You sound like you want our mother dead.” Sai made a quiet observation.

“Oh, and guess what? I do want her dead, Sai! Because this isn’t her. That thing that lives inside her, I don’t know what it is, but it definitely isn’t our mother. I wished she’d lay there cold and still and stiff and dead because so help me God, I do not want to kill her by my own hands!”

“You’re going to kill her.”

“I’m saving her. From herself. And I’m saving us. From this nightmare that lasted seven months because I was too much of a coward to do it myself in the beginning. I’m saving her.” Lee repeated again. “She would make a much better figure when she’s burning.”
Sai thinks of it. She didn’t know what gave her the thought. It was just one that manifested, popped up all of a sudden. And however preposterous and ludicrous notion was, it was undeniably within reach.

“You’re not killing her.”

“What part of that do you not fucking understand, Sai? You want to keep your hands clean? Fine. But I need to do this. It’s simple. A lighter. And toss it.”

Sai suddenly notices the options. There were so many ways to do it, to do the exact things that the house had wanted them to do all along. It was utmost euphoria, the moment she realised what she could do.

“I said we weren’t the ones killing her, I never said I was against it.”

The whispers have gotten louder, and Sai could hear them when her ear was just an inch away from the wall.

“Just a match. A single match. Or a lighter. And then the house says that it would do the rest.” Sai whispers gleefully and nodding at Lee. A maniacal glint had seized her eyes, and perhaps her very soul at the moment.

“I meant- we won’t be the ones doing it- the house will kill her. For us? It was an accident. Just an accident.”

They share a conspiratorial look, and both of them nod.

***

Lee sat at the table the next night.

Mommy was there too.

“You’d better behave, Lee. And you too, Sai. You are all wonderful children, aren’t you? Don’t make mommy worry about you.”

Lee and Sai, they smiled.

“You won’t have to, mommy,” Lee says, and she intertwines her finger over Sai’s, her other finger drawing circles over the switch of the lighter.

“We’ll be just fine.” Sai continued.

Sai clenched her fist around her fingers, tight enough that she could hear bones grinding.

She flicks the switch.

From outside the corridor of the flat, there was no sound. No crackling of the fire, no roaring of flames. Then the screaming began.
When the flat was laid to waste, it was glorious. Every inch of the rooms were covered in black, heavy soot and dusty, light ash that fell from the ceiling like snow.
And seated around the rectangular table in the center, three charred corpses. It was a silent rendition of the Last Supper, a beautiful picturesque framed painting.

The House chortled silently to itself, whispers ceasing from within the walls.

The House was all dry, in the end.