Chapter 23.3: The Home Where I Died

  “Shuai Ge! What are you doing here so late at night?” Dante could hear Auntie Chen at least a hundred meters away. She was the oldest and longest-serving coffee lady, often looking out for her patrons. If things could not get any worse, she lived directly above him. This translated to random visits where she would make up the excuse that she had cooked too much food and wanted to share it with him.

  Furthermore, Dante felt that she often stuck her large nose in the wrong places. All he wanted that night was to have a cup of coffee peacefully and minimise interaction. He did not want the hassle of taking it away in a small plastic baggie and drinking it in a dark corner of the car park.

  “Have work. Night shift,” Dante replied stiffly and ordered a drink. “Kopi-O, having here.”

  Dante found a seat and started scrolling through his phone listlessly. He had been residing in Singapore for the past eight years, living an aimless life, working in whatever jobs piqued his interest.

  Auntie Chen set down his drink and two soft-boiled eggs. “I did not order this,” he said flatly.

  “I treat you. Remember you helped to look for my daughter’s cat that day? That kid, always letting the cat run loose then coming home and crying about it!” she said. “How did you find it?”

  “It was nothing,” Dante said, unwilling to divulge the truth about how he found the missing cat fighting with Nova in his apartment. He slid her the cash for the eggs, but she pushed it back.

  “I say already… It’s my treat,” she insisted.

  Dante sighed. He would find a way to sneak it in later.

  “You know it’s quite surprising that an expat like you would be living in an HDB,” Auntie Chen remarked, sitting down opposite him. “Eh, I heard from A-Bing that you are still single. True or not?”

  “I am not looking for a partner.” That was the default answer to questions like this. It was bad enough that he stood out in the neighbourhood and automatically became the neighbourhood aunties’ favourite topic of discussion since day one. The reason why he stayed in that neighbourhood was that he had chanced upon a property that had been on the market for years but had no buyers. The ‘bad aura’ was simply caused by a squatter phantom that decided to make the vacant house its home.

  The phantom was exorcised with a single whip, and Dante paid for the apartment in full with cash. In the first days of moving in, there was already a gaggle of snooping middle-aged ladies trying to check out the new owner.

  “Aiya, there are a lot of people queuing up for you,” Auntie Chen said. She always said that.

  Dante simply nodded along.

  “You don’t want to…”

  “No,” Dante responded without hesitation, knowing what she was going to say. Oh, that came out too quickly.

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  “You’re not getting any younger! You really, really, don’t want to start a family?”

  “No,” Dante answered. Families were a waste of time and an unnecessary burden.

  “Is it because you didn’t have luck in finding a girlfriend? I heard your house had a bad past.” Middle-aged Singaporeans had a high tendency to conflate two unrelated things together.

  Dante did not respond to Auntie Chen’s remark. Feeding into her superstitious beliefs would only make his life more tedious; refuting it meant more questions, which he was desperately trying to minimise.

  “Eh, I say all this is for your own good. Recently heard from my husband that there’s some incident at Mandai and the security guards are resigning left and right.” The way Auntie Chen changed topics boggled Dante. Perhaps she was perceptive enough to pick up the fact that he was losing interest in the conversation, or she was just a chatterbox. “My husband’s friend said that they found a dead body, but the police didn’t make the report public. Said that he died from unnatural causes. Wah, I had to go to the temple to get talismans for my husband. He works the night shift, so I'm scared for him.”

  Finally, a topic of interest. Dante looked up from his cup, looking expectantly at her. There was only a few days’ worth of lapse, and the phantom has grown exponentially in ferocity.

  “Auntie,” Dante said quietly and retrieved a few tiny red envelopes from his blazer's inner pocket. “Give this to your husband and his friends. It is a talisman.”

  The talisman was merely a scrap of paper from a yellowed notebook with an array scribbled on it. If worn on a person, the miniature whorl talisman would be able to amplify even a drop of Essence lost in the heat of fear to repel phantoms.

  “Did you get this from the temple?”

  Dante nodded. Whatever made his life easier, he nodded to.

  Auntie Chen thanked him profusely, promising to repay him with home-cooked meals. He quickly slurped up his eggs and drained his coffee. Half-boiled eggs were a pain to eat as they would leave a sticky residue on his lips. “Aiyo, look at you,” Auntie Chen fussed over him. “Eating like a child.”

  Dante stuffed his left hand deep in his pocket in search of his tissues, only for something to snag on the strap that secured his glove. He pulled at it, and with a ‘pop,’ he pulled out his bare hand. The skin was riddled with scars reminiscent of flesh forced through a grinder and stitched back together again.

  Auntie Chen’s eyes snapped towards his hand and widened ever so slightly. “Eh? What happened to your hand?”

  Dante pulled down the end of his sleeve, shielding his left hand from Auntie Chen’s prying eyes. “Work accident.” He hardly bothered with sounding truthful. He wanted out.

  Slamming the money for the eggs down on her tray, Dante made a break for it. His temples throbbed, as though someone was pressing their thumbs into them. He buttoned his blazer and pulled up the collar of his turtleneck, clutching his hand close to his chest. Don’t think about anything. Empty your mind, a little voice droned in his head. Stupid ring, can't keep a stupid glove on.

  Dante’s breath hitched in his throat as he reached his motorcycle, which was parked in a dimly lit corner of the car park. He leaned his weight against the wall and groaned, making sure to tear his eyes away from his hand the whole time. That darned glove refused to come out, no matter how hard he yanked on it.

  Queasy, maggots under the skin, dizziness. Dante’s eyes twitched as he tried to undo whatever tangle this glove was stuck in and was making worse with his jumpiness. “Scarlet!” he cried out, and the glove finally broke free.

  Dante hastily gloved up his hand. The contrast in skin tones between his two hands was a stark reminder of how long he had covered it up.

  Upon examination, a loose thread loop in his pocket turned out to be the culprit, leaving him with a big hole in his pants and a head that felt like lead.