The Howling Silence

by Catherine Lim

One night I woke up screaming from a dream. I was in the funeral parlour looking upon the dead body of Samuel in the coffin. It was a young, handsome, whole Samuel. Then I saw the handsome face distort before my eyes, swell into the horribly bloated, bruised, discoloured face I had seen that secret night of our daring deed in the funeral parlour, saw one half of a jaw crack open to become a gaping cavern of blood and broken bone, saw one eye dissolving in a mess of blood and torn tissue. I saw the head slip from the broken neck, saw the horrendous result of the careless mortician’s work that had not ensured a proper re-attachment. It was when I heard Samuel say from his coffin, in a clear voice, “Ariadne, I will not forgive you for doing this to me,” that I woke up panting, bathed in sweat.

  None of the others had had any dreams of Samuel or heard any words of reproach. Why had I been singled out? It did not seem fair. Whatever the reason, I would seek Samuel’s forgiveness at once and alone.

  When alive, Samuel had practiced some kind of religious eclecticism, going to midnight mass every Christmas eve in a Catholic church, accepting an invitation to speak at a Bahai gathering, joining in some Buddhist cleansing ritual, visiting a Hindu temple. I went to all the churches and temples I had known him to visit, sitting quietly in a corner as he had done, and saying to him from my heart, “Sam, if you happen to be here now, please let me know you have forgiven me.” Could one soothe the mortified feelings of a vain ghost by assuring it that one would always remember its beauty? I tried. “Sam, I will always remember you as you have always been to us – Adonis.”

  Samuel was clearly not appeased. There was another dream. This time he sat up in his coffin and thrust his shattered, monstrous face into mine. “You want to remember me like this?”

  I did not mention my dreams to any of the others. The ardent Mabel had gone into a year of self-imposed mourning. She had Samuel’s photograph set in a beautiful silver frame and placed on a bedside table. She said she could feel Sam’s presence on certain nights, giving her a sense of ineffable peace. I envied Mabel.

  In my desperation to make peace with Samuel, I did something I would never have thought possible. I consulted a medium who was supposed to be able to contact the dead, take messages to them, convey messages from them, speak on their behalf. He was a middle-aged man, dressed in white, speaking in a low, sepulchral voice. I was totally unimpressed, indeed impatient with his vague generalisations and deliberately undecipherable utterances. Then I heard about a much acclaimed psychic from Australia who was on a visit to Singapore; she was supposed to be able to look back into the past, interpret the present, predict the future with astonishing accuracy, as well as communicate with the dead. It was a very expensive consultation and once again I left unimpressed by what I thought was a great deal of psychobabble and gobbledygook. Both the medium and the psychic had described Samuel’s spirit as being troubled and confined to some grey, misty area. But it was slowly making its way into a region of soft radiant sunshine, peace and joy, guided by his friends’ prayers and love for him. Soon the grey mists now enveloping him would evaporate.

  I didn’t pay a few hundred dollars to hear about troubled spirits, grey mists and radiant sunshine. I wanted to hear Samuel’s voice, recognise his mannerisms of speech, react to a specific message, whether of forgiveness or continuing displeasure. I wanted some real proof.

  One morning, about six months after Samuel’s death, I had a call from one of his family members. While going through his possessions, they had found a little piece of paper, with an address written on it, in between the pages of a memo pad on which Samuel used to write down every night the things he was supposed to do the following day. (Samuel was a very systematic and organised person, always making checklists like that.) Since the piece of paper bore my name, he must have intended it for me. Would I go to pick it up?

  I hurried over breathlessly, in a mixture of excitement, puzzlement and trepidation. An address? Of whom? Was it someone that Samuel had wanted me to meet? Something he had wanted me to do for him as a favour? A sudden thought struck me. Could it be a message from beyond, and could it be Samuel’s answer to my anguished pleas for forgiveness and an end to those horrible dreams?

  It had an address that was totally unfamiliar, of a flat in an HDB block of flats in an old district in Singapore. There was no telephone number with the address, but the initials ‘E.V.’ scribbled in the corner of the piece of paper, with a small question mark over it. ‘E.V.’? Was it the name of the person residing at the given address? Who was he/she? Or was it a mere random scribbling, unrelated to the address?

  Then I remembered something. One evening over coffee – it must have been at least a year before the accident – Samuel and I were talking about spiritualism, mediumistic trances, spirit writing, the entire range of paranormal phenomena. When I expressed interest in going to a spiritualist just for experience, Samuel suddenly remembered a friend telling him abut a certain woman medium in Singapore, one of the best, who had impressed many of her clients by giving detailed descriptions of their deceased ones, and conveying information which at the time seemed puzzling but later proved amazingly accurate. E.V. – I remembered Samuel had mentioned an Evelyn Voon or Emmelyn Voon, a woman of mixed Chinese, Thai and Dutch parentage, who clearly had remarkable powers.

  I lost no time in contacting E.V.

  As had happened on that awful night when we opened the coffin and peered into Sam’s face, I regretted, with all my heart and continue to regret to this day, the decision to track down the address on the piece of paper found after Sam’s death, and handed over to me as if Sam wanted me to lift the veil of death’s mystery and peer into his face in the shadowed realm of his new abode.

  I found the address easily. It was a small flat on the sixth floor of a drab block of flat that would soon be pulled down to make way for a gleaming condominium. E.V. – Mrs Emmelyn, not Evelyn, Voon – was very old, white-haired, frail-looking woman with pale skin and light brown eyes. I had eerie feeling, as she opened the door and silently led me to a small sparsely furnished, darkened room at the back, that she had been expecting me.

  I had only wanted to use Mrs. Emmelyn Voon’s mediumistic powers to say sorry to Samuel, to avow everlasting affection and to hear from him what he wanted me to do by way of more expiation for my act of gross insensitivity. I got much more than I had bargained for. Mrs. Voon went into a gentle trance; her head dropped over her chest, her eyes closed. She seemed to be drifting into sleep when suddenly she began to speak. It was the distinct voice of Samuel. Samuel’s slight lisp, his habit of rolling his r’s, the staccato whenever he got carried away in an argument – all these came through Mrs. Emmelyn Voon’s slightly open mouth, as she lay slumped in her chair. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “Sam, please forgive me.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “Sam, I love you.”

  “Adonis loves you too.”

  “Sam, is there anything you want me to do?”

  “Nothing, Ariadne.”

  Adonis, Ariadne. The proofs I needed, coming in quick succession, were truly amazing. I wish it had ended at this point. Then there would have been no regret of the visit, no troubling puzzlement that continues to this day.

  I was staring at Mrs. Voon. Slowly, her features were changing before my eyes, melting, then re-configuring, as in a horror movie. She was taking on the appearance of Sam’s face in the coffin. I saw the bloated, discoloured face, the shattered jaw, the head almost falling off the neck.

  In my shock, I must have blacked out for a few minutes. When I opened my eyes again, I saw Mrs. Voon looking silently at me, her old frail face even paler, her light brown eyes tinged with a gentle melancholy.

  When I got up to leave, I stammered, in the hope of a confirmation from Mrs. Voon, “My imagination played tricks on me just now. I saw your face change into my dead friend’s.”

  Mrs. Voon said, “It wasn’t your imagination,” and showed me to the door. She died two weeks later.
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br />   I don’t understand the logic of it all. Sam had, with those frightful dreams, punished me but not any of the Sextet who were equally culpable in that sacrilegious act on the last night of the wake. Yet it was really less an act of sacrilege than of love, and Sam would have been the first to realise this. The dear friend who in life had shown warm appreciation for gifts selected with great thoughtfulness and care, had in death punished me for wanting to place in his coffin a gift I had selected with the greatest care of all. Sam, through Mrs. Voon, had told me he had forgiven me, had indeed reciprocated my professions of affectionate regard, yet had chosen, through the same Mrs. Voon, to reinforce the image he had never wanted me to see in the first place.

  It is all very bewildering. I don’t understand the logic of it all. Perhaps in that mysterious world of the dead that Sam has gone to, in the howling silence he is now part of, the normal rules of our logic don’t apply.

  A drop of semen, a handful of ashes. Beyond that, is the mystery even bleaker and sadder?

  The Gift

  My cousin Joon Hong, who is a marketing executive, sees ghosts. At least, he claims to. I believe him. Because it is a claim never made with bravado but with great reluctance, even a little resentment. Also because I have seen him, when we are out together, stare at something, give a little start, then quickly give me a sideways glance, as if to ascertain that I have been spared the startling vision. Joon Hong is thirteen years my senior, and has taken the role of a protector and mentor. He says his experiences with the world of the supernatural are not exactly pleasant ones, and does not wish me to share them. I ask him to tell me about them. Sometimes he is willing, at other times extremely reluctant, as if the telling would result in harm to himself or me.

  Once we were walking past the void deck of a block of HDB flats in Ang Keng Road, on our way to visit a friend in a neighbouring block. A wake was being held on the deck. From where we were, we could see the upper half of the face of the dead man as he lay in his coffin, surrounded by wreaths of orchids and chrysanthemums mounted on wooden stands, and tall, flower-bedecked crosses which, together with a large crucifix hanging on the wall behind the coffin, pointed to the dead man’s Christian faith. His large framed photo was set on a small table at the foot of the coffin and was flanked by white candles. It showed a middle-aged man with thinning hair and heavy black-rimmed glasses, a man who is immediately identifiable as a civil servant or business executive. Facing the coffin were rows of chairs which were already beginning to be occupied by visitors in sober shades of black, grey and blue, in preparation for some ceremony about to be conducted by a white-robed priest seen talking to one of the visitors. A tired-looking middle-aged woman in a white blouse and black skirt, presumably the widow, was receiving a stream of visitors, accepting their condolences and donations with a brave, weak smile.

  We saw all of this as we walked past. I noticed Joon Hong pause suddenly to stare at something. I followed his gaze which was fixed on a spot to the right of the coffin. I watched Joon Hong watch whatever it was for a full minute. Later he told me it was the ghost of the dead man. The ghost looked much older than the man in the photograph; his hair was much thinner, his face more gaunt. He was wearing not the formal suit and tie of the corpse laid out in the coffin, but maroon cotton pyjamas with some kind of white or greyish embroidery on the upper shirt pocket.

  “If I go up and asked the widow what he was wearing when he died,” said Joon Hong, “I’m sure she’ll give exactly this description.”

  “Will you?”

  “Never! Are you mad? Always let ghosts alone. The dead and their survivors – leave them alone.”

  “What was the ghost doing?” I wanted to know.

  “Nothing much,” said Joon Hong. “Just looking at the visitors with a mixture of mild curiosity and puzzlement. Maybe he doesn’t even realise he’s dead.”

  “Were you scared?”

  Joon Hong has seen too many ghosts to be scared. But there was one ghost that terrified him. He seldom has nightmares about the ghosts he encounters, but this one rampaged through his dreams for three successive nights.

  He was on a golf course with his friends, enjoying a much deserved respite from the increasing pressures of work as a result of a new promotion, when he suddenly felt someone staring at him and turned round sharply to see a woman under some trees, a short distance away. She looked dishevelled; her clothes were torn and her long hair, which was wet, was plastered in strands on her face, neck and shoulders. Her eyes were wide open with terror; so was her mouth, opening and shutting in some desperate wordless communication. She moved slightly under the trees, and it was then that Joon Hong saw, to his shock, that the wetness of her long hair was the wetness of blood.

  The ghastly apparition lasted only a few seconds. Joon Hong told me he could not continue playing after that, but stumbled away in a daze, to the astonishment of his friends, making straight for the clubhouse to get a drink to steady his nerves. He later found out that in 1985, a woman had been murdered and her body found in exactly that spot under the tree. The poor woman had been raped and her throat brutally slit.

  Joon Hong vaguely remembered reading a report in the Straits Times, when he was still an undergraduate, about a naked mutilated body of a young woman found dumped in some undergrowth near Serenity Hill, which was later developed as a golf course. He took trouble to go to the offices of the Straits Times to look up that back copy, nearly fifteen years ago, and managed to find the report. The woman was a Theresa Mah, aged twenty-eight, who had held a number of jobs, including that of bar waitress. Her murderer was never found. The photo accompanying the report matched the apparition, in every detail.

  “Was she the most frightening ghost you’ve ever seen?”

  Joon Hong will not tell me about his most frightening experience which involved an old woman, a caretaker in a temple, who went mad one day, then hanged herself from a tree in the temple grounds.

  “That was thirty years ago, but she’s still around,” says Joon Hong with a shudder.

  “Tell me,” I persist. But Joon Hong shakes his head. He is being protective. He knows I have a fervid imagination that will make me experience his encounters vicariously and populate my dreams with his ghosts.

  “No way,” he says.

  “It’s a gift,” I say with real envy. “To be able to see things that other people can’t must be a gift. Makes life more interesting.”

  My closest brush with the supernatural was hearing some strange, ghostly wails one night when my classmates and I were camping on St. John’s Island, which I later discovered to be a clever hoax perpetrated by a rival group of campers determined to oust us from the best camping spot on the island.

  “I would like to see a ghost. A real ghost,” I say wistfully, “I wish I had your gift, Hong.”

  “I was ill for a week after that encounter on the golf course,” says Hong. “A gift? I’d say to whoever gave it to me, ‘Please take it back.’”

  Tribute

  At the height of his prosperity – he had just opened the tenth Chwee Neo Roast Duck Eating House – Tan Tua Bah wept. At the precise fulfilment of the fortune-teller’s dazzling prediction that he would one day own a house bigger than any that those rich neighbours and relatives who had looked down on his family could ever dream of – he had just acquired a six-million-dollar bungalow in Chester Park, which he was presently renovating to rent to the American ambassador to Singapore – Tan Tua Bah felt a sadness in his heart.

  The sadness was on account of his mother who had died more than fifty years ago, at age thirty-four, when he was only a small boy. Hers was the classic story of the courage and endurance of a young widow, with no education or resources other than fierce determination to bring up her children and see them succeed in the world. This, together with a sturdiness of constitution inherited from peasant ancestors way back in China, enabled Chwee Neo to go through those cruel years.

  They were years of unremitting toil. She would get up
at four every morning – “even before cock-crow,” she used to joke – and worked till midnight, cleaning, cooking, washing, mending at home and going to the town some distance from her small kampung to do, for a pittance, odd jobs such as grating coconut, chopping firewood, slaughtering fowl for wedding or temple celebrations, in order to scrape together enough food to feed her four sons, clothe them and see them through school. Poor Chwee Neo’s overworked body gave way at last. Even when ill with some strange illness that was eating up her liver and other internal organs, according to an old relative, she struggled to keep the family going.

  The mere mention of his mother brought tears to Tua Bah’s eyes. The bitterest regret in his life was that she never lived to enjoy the good life that his three brothers and especially himself would have so joyfully given her. He was the most successful of them all, though the least educated, having left school at Primary Three. The thought that one of his brothers, who actually went to college, could never have a fraction of his wealth gave him an immense secret satisfaction. During the Chinese New Year, Uncle Tua Bah’s ang pows were always the biggest, at least one hundred dollars, compared to their ten or five, so that his nephews and nieces never failed to visit him on the first day of the New Year itself.

  There had been an article in the Straits Times on those Singaporeans who had been born into stark poverty but made good in a spectacular way. He was one of just a handful identified by the newspaper and had been interviewed at length by the reporter, an enthusiastic young lady named Amanda Goh. In his best shirt, wearing one of his three Rolex watches and an enormous lucky jade ring that he had bought in Hong Kong for ten thousand dollars, Tua Bah was posed by Miss Goh for a photograph beside his tenth and newest Roast Duck Eating House. He had been particularly pleased that the reporter had made much of his grateful naming of every single one of the eating houses after his dead mother. He was a little upset, though, that she had under-reported the amount spent on the major renovation of a row of four old shophouses to make his latest eating house the best and largest in Singapore, but was too polite to call her and request a correction of the inaccuracy.