The rain didn’t stop for seven years. It fell in
sheets that turned streets into rivers, then
choked them with silt. The last working power
grid died in ’58. Now, the HDB blocks stood like
broken teeth along the coast, their concrete
cracked by salt and time. People lived in tiers:
those on the ground floor cooked over charcoal;
those above traded rice for news from the radio
towers.
The channel was always dead. But every third
Thursday, a single broadcast crackled through —
a voice reading numbers from a list sealed since
1946. No one knew where it came from. No one
asked. You just listened. If your name was
called, you went to the old community centre at
Upper Changi Road.
Grandfather Lai had been forgotten. His son
vanished during the Occupation. His wife drowned
when the sea breached the causeway. He lived
alone in Block 17, Level 2, windowless, lit only
by kerosene. He’d stopped answering the door
when the ration checks came.
Then the broadcast played his name.
He stood in the doorway, barefoot, rain dripping
from his sarong. The system had not been updated
since the Fall. Yet here it was — Lai Ah Seng,
Level 2, Block 17. A number drawn from a dead
era.
He went.
At the hall, the air smelled of damp cloth and
burnt wire. Six others stood in silence. All
elderly. All from preOccupation neighbourhoods.
A red lantern hung above the stage. No one spoke.
A man in a grey uniform handed him a ticket.
“You have until dawn,” he said. “The prize is
not money.”
The lottery win wasn’t gold or food. It was a
memory.
It summoned the ghost of his neighbour, young
Muthu, who’d died saving him during the 1942
fire. Not a spirit. A loop. A repeating moment —
Muthu screaming, hand outstretched, face
blackened, dragging Lai through smoke.
The system forced him to relive it every time he
closed his eyes.
No one else saw it. Only Lai. Only the memory
was real.
The rule bit: if he tried to flee the building
before sunrise, the walls would seal shut. If he
stayed past six a.m., the ghosts would take his
place in the living world.
At 5:58, Lai stood at the stairwell door. Rain
howled outside. The lantern flickered.
He opened the door.
Not to escape.
To let Muthu pass through — once, for good.
The wind died. The ghost stepped forward.
And Lai, still standing in his doorway, did not
move.
By sunrise, no one remembered his name.
But someone found a note taped to the wall:
“Tell them I’m sorry I left.”
The block remained silent. The lottery stopped.
No one won again.
