The House Next Door: A Serialised Fiction Project (Chapters 1 and 2)

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 skullcrushing 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 high-backed 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.

Chapter 2: What Dreams May Come 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.

He dreamt of ice-cream.

The idea that he had missed out on dinner came to him through a dense fog of memories and sensations. He could not ascertain if they were things that actually happened to him or just his imagination trying to escape its nebulous cage and exert itself upon reality.

There were only children around him, innocent, wide-eyed little tots no older than six, eating their scoops of different flavoured ice-cream in perfect synchronicity. They were singing, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.”

Jason looked around. He was in what appeared to be an American diner, its pastel walls adorned with posters extolling the virtues of ice-cream. “Drowning In Flavour!” yelled one that featured manic, lip-licking children eyeing a large vanilla scoop.

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.”

There was a bowl before him. It was a Neapolitan with chocolate syrup topped with chopped walnuts – his favourite.

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.” Jason looked at the children. They were faceless now, just taut skin where their features were supposed to be. “I SCREAM, YOU SCREAM, WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE-CREAM!” As one, they stopped eating, and seven faceless children turned to Jason slowly, in unison. They threw out a hand, pushing their respective bowls of halfeaten ice-cream to the floor. The floor was different now: instead of linoleum tiles, it now appeared to have the smooth, polished surface of a bathtub. Seven scoops of ice-cream spilled upon the floor.

They then moved on their own volition, coming together to become a large, shapeless mash of icecream. Then his scoop of ice-cream flew out of its bowl to join this unified body of ice-cream. Soon, the place was flooding with ice-cream, growing and growing as if it were alive.

The ice-cream kept growing, until Jason could not tell if it was a delicious funtime dessert, or a chaotic dairy blob. Jason tried to stand up, to get as far away from this unexpected ice-cream proliferation as possible, but something was pulling him down. He looked; a nightmarish Neapolitan stream of ice-cream as high as his shins had streamed in, gelato-locking his feet in place. He could not move, but the ice-cream was swirling, the brown, pink and off-white mixing into a nightmarish shade devoid of life and light.

And then the strangest thing happened: a million crazed eyes opened at once upon the surface of the ice-cream. Then this monster mass of dessert bubbled, as if screaming at the depravity of its being and existence, as if screaming at whichever mad maker willed it into existence as an unformed, slurry, unintelligible blob. The blob grew a mouth.

It swallowed him whole. *** Jason woke up. Sometimes, he said to himself, ‘it was all just a dream’ endings aren’t really that bad.

He got ready for school.

With the circuit breaker in place, school took place over video conferences. Teachers would welcome their students virtually, before breaking away to powerpoint presentations. That would be the exact same time the students would break away to social media, or YouTube to watch videos on mute, occasionally nodding to feign both interest and understanding in the class.

For six hours, he attended class after class. It was hard to appoint the same gravitas and respect to his teachers when they seemed a whole world away behind the screen.

He went back out to the living room after the video classes ended, hoping to find dinner. He hoped the second time might be the charm, after forsaking dinner the previous night to investigate the weird, unexplainable sounds that came from the house next door. Instead, he found his parents deep in an argument. It was about money, and blame, and the dreams they would have achieved if they hadn’t gotten married. He headed back into his room.

He then sat down on the floor against the wall, and allowed his mind to wander. He sat there, lost in a familiar place, for what seemed like mere seconds as much as it felt like several eternities. *** As the night crept towards the witching hours, there was a knock on his door. Jasmine came in, sat next to her brother and leaned against his shoulder. “You’re the only sane person here,” she said to him.

“Don’t be too sure.”

The siblings talked; they talked about their old life in Les Jardins Residences, they talked about family holidays that felt like memories from a lifetime ago.

“Holidays?” said Jason. “I would kill just to finish a tub of ice-cream as a family. Or two. Or ten.”

“Really? Even after what happened when we were kids?”

“What happened?”

“You emptied ALL the ice-cream in the fridge into the bathtub because you wanted the biggest bowl of ice-cream in the world.”

Jason squirmed uneasily. This was discomforting him to the depths of his being, and he could not figure out why. “What? I don’t remember this.”

“You were like eight years old I think. Mama and Papa were out for date night—back when they used to do those things—and we were left with that lame babysitter…”

Something stirred in Jason’s memories, like a gnarled hand reaching out from the shadows. “Ah Heng! The one whose girlfriend would sneak in after Mama and Papa left.”

“Yeah! I had no idea where he was that night, but I vaguely remember finding you eating ice-cream from the bathtub. I thought you were the coolest brother ever for inventing the bathtub ice-cream.

Then…you tried to swim in it…you really don’t remember?”

“I really don’t.”

“You took off your clothes and you dived in. I wanted to join in, but then you didn’t surface… I was crying on the floor of the bathroom when Mama and Papa came back. How do you not remember this? It was one of the most traumatizing nights of my life!”

“I don’t know what to tell you. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered something like that.” As soon as Jason said it, something from the deepest recesses of his being tugged at him, as if to scream, look at me, I have something truly terrifying to show you.

“All I can say is this: I have the craziest craving for ice-cream right now.”

“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream,” Jasmine sang, recalling a song they knew as children. Both siblings fell into a contemplative silence.

Eventually, Jasmine rose. “Well I better head to bed now.” Jason did not know what to say.

At the door, Jasmine turned around and asked her brother, “What?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Are you sure? I could have sworn you called my name.”

“Of course I’m sure. I’ve only been sitting—” “SHH!” Jason heard it again, the same sounds he had been hearing over the past few days. The inhuman voices, the scratching, the unnatural sounds. He must have learnt to block it out. “Oh you hear it, too? I thought I was going crazy here.”

“Of course I hear it! What is it?”

Jason shrugged. “I tried to find out the first time I heard it, our first night here. You don’t hear it?”

“Sleeping on a futon in Mama and Papa’s bedroom? Between Papa’s snoring and Mama watching Netflix on her phone, I can’t even hear anything if it happened in our living room.

But the house next door is locked shut. The gate is padlocked. The windows are boarded up. There’s no way to get in.”

Jasmine gave her brother a mischievous smile.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Are you going to tell on me?”

“Well, no.” Jason sighed. It felt wrong. Every fibre of his being told him that this was a bad idea. But there was another voice, from the very same pits that held his darker, most repressed memories, that urged him to go.

“Nobody lives there. It’s not like we’re trespassing,” Jasmine pressed on.

“Alright. Let’s do it. But we have to be careful.”

“Careful is my middle name,” his sister said jauntily.

“Sure.”

The siblings crept out of Jason’s room. Their parents were asleep – their mother in the master bedroom, and their father on the floor outside. Seeing his father there made Jason freeze.

“Don’t worry, he’s a heavy sleeper,” said Jasmine.

Jason replied, “That’s not why I stopped,” but his sister was already outside the house. They carefully closed the gate behind them, and crept to the house next door.

The sounds inside had fallen silent. Jason imagined a million scary things, waiting with bated, rancid breath, for the two innocents about to fall into their trap.

Jasmine got to work immediately. She unlocked the padlock with video game ease, surprising her elder brother. She then worked on the gate – within minutes, it swung aside, giving her full access to the door.

The door was a standard HDB-issue white wooden door. The paint was faded and peeling. Jason noticed for the first time carvings at the top right corner of the door. They were symbols that he had never seen before, perhaps the alphabet of an unknown language or runes decipherable to a select few.

Jasmine took longer on the door. Her brother kept a lookout. There were the sounds of commotions from a nearby block, the distant wails of an ambulance, the stiletto click-clacks of a young woman returning from a late night out. But nobody had eyes on them.

The younger Lim sibling finally jerked her hand upwards. There was a loud click, and the door whispered just slightly ajar. There was a faint green glow from within.

“Shall we?” Jasmine asked.

Jason forced a brave smile at his sister. “Let’s do this.”

Jason took a deep breath. With clammy hands, he gripped the door knob and gave it a push.