1957. Tan Kim Hock, sixteen and fresh from NS
training at Pasir Ris, returns to his mother’s
thirdfloor flat in Block 43, Kallang Estate,
where the concrete still smells of wet lime and
the neighbours still whisper about the woman who
jumped from the roof during the Occupation. He
brings home a single packet of Maggi, two eggs,
and a receipt stamped with a red handprint — the
debt he owes Ah Ma Lian, the auntie who fed him
during the Japanese curfew, before she vanished
one monsoon night after collecting rent from the
fifthfloor widow.
The rent was never money. It was time. And now,
every night past ten, the stairwell light
flickers three times. He knows. She’s coming.
He sleeps with a salt circle around his mattress,
a trick his grandmother taught him — salt keeps
the hungry ghosts from tasting your breath. But
salt doesn’t work on debt collectors. Not when
the debt is owed to someone who died
midcollection.
On the seventh night, the ceiling above his bed
drips. Not water. Rust. Thick, coppery, like old
blood mixed with iron filings. He touches it.
It’s warm. The next morning, his mother finds a
tin of kaya on the kitchen table — the kind Ah
Ma Lian used to sell at the kampong market —
wrapped in a newspaper dated 1942. No one else
could’ve gotten in. The door was locked. The key
still in his pocket.
The rule: If you owe a ghost rent in an HDB
block built on a burial ground, you pay in flesh.
Not your own. Someone else’s.
Kim Hock doesn’t tell his mother. He can’t.
She’s still grieving his father, taken by the
Kempeitai in ’44. He knows what happens if the
estate hears the truth — they’ll rehouse them.
Break the family. So he walks to the void deck
at 11 p.m., barefoot, carrying a small jar of
ashes from the temple incense. He pours it into
the drain at the foot of the stairs. The smell
of burnt sandalwood rises. The light stops
flickering.
For three nights, silence.
Then, on the fourth, the wall beside his bed
cracks. Not a fissure. A mouth. Teeth of rust. A
voiceless whisper presses against his ear: You
still owe for the widow’s child.
He remembers now. The widow had a boy. Ten years
old. He vanished the same night Ah Ma Lian did.
No one asked. No one dared.
Kim Hock doesn’t sleep. He takes the bus to the
old cemetery near Tampines, digs up a handful of
soil from an unmarked grave — the one the elders
say holds the bones of a child who drowned in
the Kallang River during the evacuation. He
brings it home. At midnight, he presses the
earth into the crack.
The rust stops bleeding.
The light stays on.
In the morning, his mother finds a pair of tiny
sandals by the door. White. Too small for anyone
in the block. They’re still damp.
He doesn’t tell anyone. He starts saving his NS
allowance.
Next month, he’ll pay the rent for the next soul.
The block still stands. The stairs still creak.
And the ghosts? They still collect.
