The Novella Life of Illuscia Nester Himawari

1. "Some nights, the water would be boiling hot. It's impossible because there are no heaters in our showers."     "Back when I was studying in Banting, there was a bathroom on the third floor which we think is haunted because on some nights, the water would be boiling hot. It should be impossible because there are no heaters in our showers, so the water is supposed to be cold or at least room temperature. So whenever the water turns hot, girls would run out in their towels, screaming.     We heard that apparently, before they built the college, it was a factory that dealt with manufacturing chemicals. There were rumours that many employees died because of some chemicals, including getting burned. Not sure if that's true, they were just rumours.     It doesn't help that in that bathroom, when it's late at night, you can hear sounds of tyres screeching across the floor like there's someone pushing an old trolley or something."     - Lily 2. "...

1. "Someone or 'something' is living in a paper igloo in my sister's classroom."     "This is happening right now, my sister who's a teacher in this kindergarten in Taman Tun just told me last night.     So the teachers just build an igloo made out of paper and cardboard for the kids. Apparently, there's someone or 'something' living in the igloo, because every morning, the igloo end up in a different place in the classroom. It'll move from one corner to another, or sometimes it ends up upside down!     The thing is, it's quite heavy... and no one has admitted to moving it."     - Anis 2. "There's been a few times, when I work OT, that I've seen someone sitting at the same unoccupied cubicle."     "I work OT on certain days, and usually, there's no other person in the office except me when I work late.     There's been a few times, when I leave the office, that I've seen someone sitting on a chai...

    1. The Almost Murder: "Whenever I would balik kampung to my grandmother's house in Penang confirm got incidents happen wan!" "Once, my grandmother and I were chatting with each other in the hall on the first floor when we heard some banging noises from upstairs. We were the only ones in the house at the time. My grandmother told me to ignore it and to just pretend like we never heard anything. I was a bit creeped out but listened to her. The banging sounds got louder and out of nowhere an umbrella came flying down from the second floor and almost stabbed my grandmother in the neck!"     - Siti 2. The Guardian Spirit: "One day, I had a really bad fever so I skipped uni to rest. I was trying to sleep after taking my medicine when I saw a black figure watching me from across the room." "As it slowly approached my bed, I felt colder and colder, despite my fever. I kept trying to move but it felt like something heavy was weighing me down and forcin...

    I was frightened of my grandmother when I was a little girl. Her house lay at the edge of a foul-smelling bog filled with snakes and strange bugs during the day and alien bird cries and flickers of green swampfire at night. My mother would always reassure me that she had grown up there, and while yes, there were some dangerous critters roaming around, as long as I stayed in sight of the house and watched where I put my hands and feet, I should be fine. That eased my fears of the house and yard a bit, but it did very little to help with my fear of the woman that lived there. It wasn’t that she was unkind, and she acted as though she was happy whenever we came to visit, but I still found her off-putting all the same. I’d like to say it was her odd ways—the small furtive movements of her thin lips as she sucked idly on hard candy, her dark eyes darting this way and that as though she was following the invisible motions of some inte...

  I was driving across Virginia last month when I stopped in a town named Sutter’s Mill. The reason for my travels is largely unimportant—I work for a large publishing house planning and prepping sites for book signings and readings for several of their big authors when they have book tours in the eastern half of the United States. I’ve been doing it for five years now, which means I’ve logged a lot of hours on the road. And I thought I had seen just about every small town between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, but I was wrong. The only reason I even took the road that led me to Sutter’s Mill is because of a bad highway detour combined with my GPS crapping out for a good fifty miles. As afternoon began turning into evening, I found myself desperate for a place to stay or at least get gas and some food. So I was relieved when I saw the weather-beaten sign proclaiming I was entering the Town of Sutter’s Mill. It wasn’t a bad-loo...

  I was a reader for two years before I met Elliot Stoffel. A reader is just what it sounds like—I read to the elderly and the disabled several days a week. The pay was never great, but I enjoyed the work and there was no denying it would look good on my applications to graduate school. There was a time that meeting an esteemed sociology professor like Stoffel would have been exciting. We actually used one of his books in an undergrad class I had junior year. But that man, whoever he had been, seemed long gone when I first met the shattered ruin he had become. Stoffel was supposed to be in his early fifties, but this man looked past seventy at least. And while the professor's books and reputation in sociology circles made him out to be a very articulate and intelligent man, the pitiful figure before me vacillated between long bouts of drooling, dead-eyed silence and brief interludes of incoherent screaming and thrashing about at...