 |
      |
|
|
|
Wednesday, 10 December 2003
|
|
"They're suffering; from ghosts, no not ghosts, ghoulies really...well something creepy is going on at their place."
"At their flat?"
"Yeah, well next door really. Chee Eng said that Rosie noticed it first. It all started with a faint smell."
"Like a stink."
"Yes, but very faint; something off, and she couldn't figure out where it was coming from. At first she got paranoid about rats. You know how if they die under your floor or something it can be a real nightmare. But with those HDB flats it really could be wafting in from any one of your dozens of neighbours, or up the garbage chute, or on a particularly foul wind.
"But this smell was persistent with the passing days, and if anything it was getting stronger. She enlisted Chee Eng to go on an apartment-wide sniffing session with her to make sure they weren't harbouring a nest of dead animals in the apartment somewhere, but they couldn't find anyone or thing that might have moved in and set up this unholy stink."
"Nothing in the garbage chute? I'm always surprised those don't stink worse than they do. I guess Singaporean prefers tossing rubbish out the window, or leaving it in the lift." Cam opens his Norton Disk Doctor and punches return. When you're clearly in for a long one, its best to let the computer do some work by itself. People don't pay enough attention to their hard disk maintanence. Elle fixates on the spinning icon: the doctor is examining the patient.
"Yeah, well, whatever" her pupils are starting to dilate. "Chee Eng and Rosie's building is pretty good from what I could tell. Only the faintest hint of urine in the lift every so often. And then they get that fantastic view walking into the house. You never think you're near the ocean in Singapore, and then you walk into a client's boardroom, or you're entering your friends' HDB flat, and suddenly you're confronted with this view of enormous sea dotted with little tankers, so clearly etched out against their flat blue background. It always looks like a trick to me, like a backdrop for a stage. Quite fantastically cool really - unrealistic."
"Anyway" she goes on, turning away from Cam's screen, "the smell was getting stronger and stronger with the passing days, and Chee Eng says they finally pinned it down to the flat next door. By this time it was rank, he said, like nothing he'd ever smelled; rotten and fleshy, he said.
"But the creepy part is that once they identified the source of the smell, they started paying more attention to the place, I mean, obviously the question begs itself, why aren't these people occasionally cleaning or deodorising their place? But the thing is that nobody is going in and out of the house anymore. He said they watched the junk mail pile up in the front door grille, and their doormat was kind of rucked up awkwardly - sort of jammed against the door sill, and it had not been moved a bit."
"Maybe an old person was living there and he died, and now there's no one to notice and remove." Cam suggests.
"That's what I thought, but Chee Eng says there was a whole family living next door, and it all really began to get to Rosie, and she wanted to call the police.
"So first Chee Eng crept out into the passageway, pushed up the shutters, and peered through their front window. But it was dark in there and the smell practically knocked him off his feet, over the passage railing and down the 15 storeys to ground level. He said to me 'I'm not kidding Elle, at that moment I was a lot more upset than Rosie. Something had died in there for sure. Maybe they'd all died. I dashed back into the apartment and phoned the police.'
...chapter two
