The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  Two servants were employed to help take care of the younger grandchildren. One of them was a friendly, big-hearted woman who dropped in at our house quite frequently for a chat. She always came with a child on her hips, and sometimes a bowl of the child’s porridge. And while feeding the child, she would chat amiably with the womenfolk, who were always eager for tidbits of gossip from the Great House.

  This servant, whose name was Ah Chan, had two sons and must have been the envy of the three daughters-in-law. She was now pregnant a third time, and so was the First Daughter-in-law who, after three daughters, felt sure her fourth would be a boy. Her mother had gone to consult a fortune-teller who had told her that this time it would be a son.

  Both Ah Chan and First Daughter-in-law gave birth to sons. While Ah Chan grieved that she still had to wait for a daughter, everyone in the Great House was full of excitement at the birth of the long-awaited first grandson. The old man was jubilant and his wife equally so. The two other daughters-in-law, chagrined that the prize was now lost to them, had to content themselves firstly with the wish that they, too, in the appointed time, would have male children, and secondly, with the observation made only to each other, that the new-born baby was a sickly, puny little thing, quite unlike Ah Chan’s healthy baby son.

  The new grandchild, whose name was deliberated on by at least three fortune-tellers, gave cause for much anxiety for he cried often, drank poorly and did not seem to put on any weight. His mother cried in her anxiety and fretted that she did not produce enough milk for the infant.

  To her, it was the height of injustice that her baby, heir to the rubber and coconut plantations, should be sickly and underfed, while Ah Chan’s baby, one of the hundreds born in her kampong every year and who would probably grow up to be a mean labourer, was robust from his mother’s brimming good health.

  The new grandson, eventually given the name ‘Golden Dragon’, pulled through the first month. There was great, rejoicing. Every family in the neighbourhood received the celebratory yellow rice, red-stained hard-boiled eggs and red-stained bean-cakes.

  The baby boy was brought downstairs for the first time that day, a frail thing decked out in pink clothes, pink woollen cap and pink bootees. The baby’s thin fingers and ankles glistened with gold ornaments, presents from numerous relatives.

  Ah Chan’s son, who had been affectionately nicknamed ‘Piglet’ by her family, had cleared his first month a few days before, but there was no expensive celebration. By the fourth month, Piglet was almost twice the size of Golden Dragon, a fact that the other two sisters-in-law were heard to observe more than once, and twice as rapid in his development, for he could turn over on his side, recognize his parents and smile and gurgle in response to his brothers.

  Golden Dragon continued to be sickly, and in his fifth month was suddenly taken ill. It seemed to be a bad time for infants; Piglet was unwell too, and Ah Chan, who had grown very attached to this third son although she had badly wanted a daughter, rushed home from the Great House every evening to look after him.

  Golden Dragon’s condition worsened visibly; his parents and grandparents flew into a panic and immediately went to consult a temple medium. On the first visit, they secured an amulet which they placed against the baby’s chest. The baby’s condition did not improve. On the second visit, they were told by the temple medium who had gone into a trance that the “Dark Deity of Hell” wanted a boy attendant, had searched for one and had taken a fancy to Golden Dragon. Golden Dragon would die soon.

  A flurry of consultations with temple mediums ensued; thousands of dollars were spent in gifts of propitiation and entreaty to the Dark Deity of Hell, but still he would, according to the temple mediums, have Golden Dragon. However, said one of the temple mediums from his deep trance, the Dark Deity was also considering one other male child, who was born at about the same time and who was also now lying ill. If one of the baby boys died, the other would be spared.

  Here was hope yet, and the grandmother and mother began to fill the baby’s room with all manner of charms and amulets to ward off evil influence and deflect it elsewhere. Ah Chan came to know of the message from the temple medium but by that time, it had been distorted into an accusation. The Dark Deity of Hell had chosen Piglet to be his boy attendant but Piglet deflected the curse which then fell on Golden Dragon.

  Ah Chan, in her simplicity, went tremblingly to her employers in the Great House to beg for forgiveness. The grandmother and the mother of Golden Dragon received her coldly. They were now convinced of the treachery of Piglet, for his mother was now frankly admitting it and

  asking for forgiveness on his behalf. The act of reparation was simple, according to the temple mediums. Ah Chan’s milk would help restore the infant to health.

  Ah Chan was only too grateful for this opportunity to make amends; she came early in the morning, leaving only late at night when she returned to feed her own son. During the day, a relative sometimes brought him to the Great House to be fed by his mother. But the illness had had a toll on him, and he was no longer the chubby, rosy baby he once was.

  Seeing that their baby was improving, although slightly, the grandmother and relative paid another visit to the temple medium to seek his advice about how to expedite his recovery. The temple medium said that the infant’s ‘milk mother’ had to remain with him day and night.

  Ah Chan was thereafter enjoined to stay in the Great House and not to go home. “But what about my baby?” she faltered, for her baby was indeed fretting for her.

  Her baby was brought in during the day; at night, it was no longer possible to do the same, and while Golden Dragon drew nourishment from Ah Chan’s robust body, Piglet declined for the want of it.

  “Please let me go back to my baby,” she pleaded, but Golden Dragon’s mother promised to send someone to bring him, and his grandmother pressed a gift of money into her hands.

  There was the suggestion that Piglet be brought to stay in the Great House with his mother, but the grandmother would not hear of it because the temple medium had said the two babies must not live under the same roof. One would be the means of harm befalling the other. This meant that Piglet could not be brought to the Great House during the day.

  By then, the harassed Ah Chan had entrusted a relative with the care of Piglet, to make sure that he was given his powdered milk regularly throughout the day, but this relative was a dull-witted woman who moved about clumsily and slothfully.

  One night, at about midnight, she went to the Great House, knocked on the door and shouted for Ah Chan. Her baby was very ill. Ah Chan rushed back, but it was already too late.

  The cause of death was later found to be this: the senseless woman had been using an unwashed spoon to stir Piglet’s milk, the same spoon that she had been using to take her medicine for a throat infection. The baby had caught the infection, fretted for two days without anybody suspecting anything, and finally succumbed.

  Ah Chan could not be comforted; she wept for many days, and moaned the sad fate of an infant identified by the implacable Dark Deity of Hell.

  The grandmother hastened over when she heard of the death of Piglet, and pressed yet more money into Ah Chan’s hands.

  Back in the Great House, Golden Dragon’s mother looked at her baby peacefully asleep in its cradle, its cheeks beginning to round up with flesh, and rejoiced that she need fear the Dark Deity no more.

  A Soldier Stalks

  The places that were assigned us were supposed to be the ideal setting for our work of producing innovative materials for schoolchildren – old quaint colonial-type houses in a sprawling campus setting of lush greenery, including very old and rare trees. There were thefriendly, stiff-tailed squirrels in the trees which sometimes ran along the sides of the windows or across our paths; the birds that built nests in the bushes near the outhouses at the back of each building, the occasional vivid-green chameleons that darted across the road and into the roadside bushes before you could draw attention to them.

 
The ideal bucolic setting for the writer, in need of constant inspiration to bring out his creativity; away from the austere formality of the Ministry Headquarters! Only we, ingrates that we were, persisted in seeing the peeling paint of the walls, the creaking wooden floors of the upstairs rooms, the encrustations of dirt in the bathroom that no amount of scrubbing could hope to remove.

  A short time, however, was sufficient to grumble away these annoyances, and then we found ourselves beginning to look around and quite ready to be worked upon by the charming rusticity of our new-environment.

  There was an additional charm: the place had been used by Japanese soldiers during the Occupation, and was said to be full of underground tunnels, all linked together to form a remarkable subterranean backdrop for adventure. Would these tunnels, if we could find them and venture into them, yield skulls and bones? Or hoards of treasure hidden by the Japanese who never managed to secrete them out of the country?

  The intoxication was brief; we soon became too preoccupied with work to give much thought to the tunnels, and except for a story about children discovering a trunk of gold bars in a secret crypt, they were soon forgotten.

  Somebody had said that the houses were haunted; every house, apparently, had been the scene of a suicide, every old tree outside had had a ghost hanging from it. It became a favourite diversion of the more waggish among us to make frightening noises, rap on doors and windows, especially in the gathering dusk, for there were always a few who never went home before seven, when darkness had already settled and wrapped everything in gloom.

  For a time, I joined the small intrepid band whose preference was to stay back and work till dinner than not meet a deadline. It was an unusually dark day. As was my habit, I sat at the typewriter and waited patiently when the lights went off, as they did a few times a day, usually coming on again after a few minutes.

  In the darkness I thought I heard somebody cough; it sounded very near and I gave a start, but when the lights came on again and I saw no one, I concluded it must have been one of the security guards outside making his usual rounds.

  The footsteps of one of the guards on the gravel outside the window were actually reassuring. I continued with my typing, and once again, to my great annoyance, the lights failed. Making a mental note to complain about this to the Administration the next morning, I leaned back in my chair and decided, when the lights came on again, to pack up and go home.

  The lights did not come on for a full five minutes. I sat very still in my chair. I distinctly heard heavy breathing near me; indeed, so near, I could feel it on my shoulder.

  I got up quickly, gathered up my handbag and umbrella, and strode quickly to the door. Remembering that I had not turned off the light switches and that I could not risk having the lights on for the whole night, I turned back quickly.

  As I groped to turn off the switch, I felt something lightly brushing my face. It felt like or it could have been fingers, or a large butterfly, but at this point I could not hold back my terror any more. I tore down the stairs, my heels making such a tremendous clatter on the wooden stairs that one of the security guards out on the road must have heard me. He came quickly, torch in hand, to ask what was the matter. I merely shook my head, not wanting to stop to talk to anyone, and fled.

  This was the beginning of a week of strange happenings, involving several people besides myself. Somehow, I did not relate these experiences to my colleagues the next morning; I did not want to appear foolish and above all, I did not care to hear those oft-heard explanations of overwork and overwrought nerves. I was convinced that there was something unusual and that I had not imagined anything. The cough, the heavy breathing, the light brush of fingers – I could not have imagined them all. When one of my colleagues decided to stay back to finish her work, I, most unaccountably, offered to stay back with her. Perhaps I desperately needed confirmation of my experience; perhaps the presence of another person would take away the terror, would even add piquancy to the experience.

  We both settled down to work at our desks after making ourselves hot drinks; our desks were on opposite sides of the room. Rose, a very hard-working person who, once she settled clown to work, unconsciously adopted an austere mien that repulsed every attempt at idle chat, wrote for a while, then looked up.

  “Did you cough? I seem to be hearing a cough.” I did hear it, and only waited to see if Rose had heard it as well.

  “It sounds like a man coughing,” I said. We both sat up and listened. The cough seemed to be getting fainter, and then it disappeared.

  “Strange,” said Rose, frowning, and then almost immediately, we heard the sound of footsteps outside our room – the heavy sounds of hobnailed boots.

  We waited for the sounds to die away before we decided to leave. “Very odd,” said Rose again, and as we were descending the stairs, she suddenly screamed.

  “Somebody touched my face!” she gasped. Somebody had touched me too; I could feel something like a wet pad slapping across my mouth.

  I told Rose of my experiences the night before, and we decided not to mention the strange happenings to anyone, sensing that little good would come from the disclosure. Supposing that I had imagined the happenings that night when I was alone, and that I had telepathically communicated my fears to Rose so that she was hearing the same cough, feeling the same ghostly touch? As long as this was a possibility, we felt we could not make known these strange happenings to our colleagues, the more timid of whom were sure to be petrified.

  But there was no need for secrecy; soon we found ourselves talking freely about our experiences, because it suddenly seemed as if almost everyone had, in the last few days, heard or felt the presence of this being. A recurring detail in the descriptions was the cough – a hollow, tubercular kind of cough – and then the sound of boots, and the touch of fingers.

  Nobody ever saw him; nevertheless all were convinced he was a soldier. Many Japanese soldiers, it was said, preferred suicide to the ignominy of surrender.

  Nobody dared stay till dark any more; as soon as the shadows gathered in the trees, we left. One of the security guards claimed to have seen, in the dim light of the moon, a man under a tree near one of the houses. The silhouette showing peaked cap and gun was decidedly that of a soldier. When the guard went near with his torch, there was nobody there. The guard’s subsequent illness (which could be attributed as much to his heavy intake of toddy as to having encountered a ghost) further contributed to the tense atmosphere that now pervaded.

  Ghosts were no longer a joking matter; the ghost of a soldier stalked the campus, and had been heard and seen by several people. The last person to be affected by all the nervousness was Teng, the artist who produced all the superb illustrations for our children’s stories. Unperturbed by the mounting tension that was spreading in widening circles in the campus, he went about his work, sometimes staying as late as nine. He listened to the stories of the strange presence in a half-amused, half-mocking manner.

  One morning, his colleague found him slumped over his desk in a state of seeming exhaustion; he had apparently been working with extraordinary intensity at a piece of artwork which now lay under his right hand, the drawing pencil still between his fingers. He was helped up, and the paper gently removed; it showed the face of a soldier, with high cheek-bones and small eyes.

  It was some time before Teng could speak coherently of what had happened. He said he was doing his work when something – or someone – seemed to overcome him – he kept describing it as a kind of ‘weight’ or ‘force’ which settled on him, so that he could hardly breathe. When shown the picture of the soldier, Teng swore he did not draw it, or was at least not aware that he had drawn it.

  For a while, the mysterious picture of the soldier became the focus of much nervous curiosity or pure terror; nobody dared remove it from Teng’s desk. Teng’s colleagues watched with apprehensiveness the artist’s increasingly bizarre behaviour – he was often muttering to himself, sometimes laughing out loud for no appare
nt reason. Once when he came to see me in connection with some illustrations for stories, there was a frighteningly vacant look in his eyes. Then, one morning, screaming obscenities, he set fire to the picture of the soldier. There was then no choice but to send him home for a long period of rest and medical attention.

  That was almost a year ago. After the spate of strange events, culminating in Teng’s wild destruction of the picture, things quietened down. No other encounters were reported. There had been talk of getting a priest or monk to cleanse the place and lay the ghost; somehow, the weeks went by and nothing was done. As the happenings ceased and the terror subsided, it was assumed that there was nothing more to fear.

  Sometimes, I suddenly pause in the middle of my work because I think there is someone behind me; I turn and invariably there is no one. Many of my colleagues get this sudden strange sensation of someone standing behind their chair. Rose never stays in the room alone, not even during the day; she is continually looking up from her work to ascertain that there is at least one colleague nearby, and sometimes when she bustles about and chats with nervous energy, I know it is because she wants to distract herself from the disturbing recollection of the soldier that stalks the campus.

  “I wish I had never seen that picture,” she says, closing her eyes with a pained expression. “I can’t seem to get it off my mind.” Rose talks vaguely about a transfer back to school or to Headquarters. “I don’t suppose he’ll pursue me there,” she says.

  I wish I could throw a romantic aura over this lonely, intense man who has been walking the earth these 40 years, consign him to the misty world of ethereal beings that mystifies, even charms. But the soldier seems only to want to terrify. He seems too tangible a presence, too powerful a force to be coaxed away by prayers and offerings.

  A man who claimed to have seen a lot of ghosts in his time and was not afraid of any, happened to hear of the soldier from one of my colleagues. He asked and was given permission to stay the night in one of the buildings.