The House Next Door: A Serialised Fiction Project

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

by Suffian Hakim

Chapter 1: The First Night The final thing Jason Lim put upon his desk was a leather-bound tome that had the weight and skull-crushing density of a brick. Sprawled across its front in a tall, rigid serif font were the words ‘The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft’. It was one of two things he had kept from his old life. The other, next to his desk, was a highbacked Herman Miller chair, a gift from his father for his birthday last year to keep him studying at his desk ahead of his ‘O’ Levels this year. Everything else had been sold before they arrived at their new old Yishun flat.

The 16-year-old got out of his room to see if his parents or his sister needed his help unpacking. The mood was somber. Nobody spoke to one another—none of them had anything to say. Everything had already been said and shouted in a whirlwind family discussion the week before. Back then, his mother was hysterical.

Today, she was quietly placing tableware into the kitchen cabinets. Jason’s father had been unable to be physically near his wife over the past week. He, too, was quiet as he hung work shirts in the master bedroom. Jason’s father had tried to be optimistic last week, talking in clearly forced excited tones about the fact that they got their new place for next to nothing. It was that statement that drove his mother to hysterics.

Jason walked over to his 13-year-old sister Jasmine as she was cutting open a particularly large box in the living room. “Need help?”

“No,” she replied curtly, eyes fixed on the box. Her cheeks were crusted with dried tears.

Jason returned to his room and slammed the door behind him. Just last week, walking to his room meant stepping on fine marble imported from Greece before arriving to the aircon-cooled spacious extension of his self. His old room was at least three times as big as his current one. But then the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and his parents’ travel agency began hemorrhaging money. Eventually, they had to sell their condo and live among people of much lower socioeconomic status. He didn’t know if he should blame his parents, but he did so nevertheless.

Jason sat down on the dusty faux marble floor, and found his mind wandering to his old life. If there was one positive thing about this place, it was quiet and peaceful. There were two other empty units on their floor. The unit at the far end of the corridor, his father had told their family a tad too excitedly earlier that day, belonged to a triad member hiding from rival gangs in Indonesia. The unit next to theirs had strangely never been purchased. “I think it’s being set aside to meet the racial quota,” said his father. “Or, it’s haunted!” None of the other members of the Lim family were impressed.

Eventually, the sun surrendered its benevolent rule over the day, and moonless darkness spread its tendrils over the land. Sitting alone in his room and left to his own thoughts, Jason did not even realise the passage of evening. He climbed atop his bed, and let slumber take over.

Jason opened his eyes again. He reached for his phone. Even today, on the day of their move, there had been no messages of sympathy from his friends or relatives.

The time was 2:17 a.m.

The boy tended to be a heavy sleeper—something had woken him. The old wall fan’s rattle droned on in the dark.

Jason tried to close his eyes but could not.

He got out of his bed, headed to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk.

The house was so quiet it should be the headquarters of the International Pin Dropping Association. Jason snorted. Nobody would want this place to be the headquarters of anything. He took a sip of milk.

Then he almost choked on it. There was a voice coming from his room. It did not sound like anything he had ever heard. It had the patterns and cadence of a language, but it was a language he did not understand. More importantly, it did not sound human. The words were growled, escaping from a throat not designed for the pleasantries of human communication.

“Hello? Jasmine?”

He placed his glass on the counter and approached his room.

“Hello?”

The voice paused. It returned something short and harsh, an obvious response to Jason.

The boy reached his room, and flicked the lights on. There was nobody in his room. The voices, however, continued. They seemed to be coming from behind the walls of his room. That was particularly weird, because that fact should mean the voice would be muffled. But it came to Jason, clear as waves crashing against the shore.

A second sound began to accompany the voice. This one was organic, like two heavy slabs of organic matter squelching against one another. And then a third: another voice, singing in some obscure, ancient tongue.

“Hello?” he called again. The sounds stopped abruptly.

Jason shook his head, as if to dislodge the very memory of what he had heard. He exited the house and walked down the grey corridor to the adjoining house. Its windows had been boarded shut. The gate was chained and padlocked. For a wild moment, Jason wondered if it was to keep anything from getting out, rather than to keep anyone from getting in. He looked for cracks among the boards to get a peek in, but the planks were tightly packed.

Jason sighed. He turned back home and went back to bed. This time he could sleep.

It wasn’t a restful sleep, though. The nightmare that came would feel so real.