There is an old graveyard behind my former secondary school. It is situated atop a small hill, and from the windows of my old classroom, the remnants of granite tombstones peeking out from beneath the weeds and tree roots can be seen during the day. Some rumours have it that the cemetery was a mass grave for victims of the Japanese occupation; others say it was built when the British invaded and set up a colony here; and yet others claim that they saw tombstones inscribed with dates from the Ming Dynasty.
Up till recently, we all thought that the cemetery was abandoned. No one had tended to the graves in decades, and every year during Qingming (Tomb-Sweeping Day), we even had an unspoken tradition where the graduating Form Six students would visit the hill and tidy up the overgrown cemetery. Some of us would also burn incense when the Ghost Month came around, praying for the usual things like good results and lasting relationships.
The cemetery also became somewhat of a study spot after school. Not only was it a quiet and tranquil place, the numerous ancient trees scattered around the hill provided a good amount of shade from the sweltering tropical heat unlike anywhere else on the school grounds. Many also believed the location of the cemetery to be auspicious (in Chinese beliefs, burying the dead in an inauspicious place will curse the entire family). Allegedly, a classmate who topped the level during my Form Three year had studied for the finals in front of a large ancestral tomb, and he diligently lit three joss sticks on the tomb for one month straight after the results were announced as thanks to whatever spirits which had blessed him.
Of course, there were some who were on the sceptical side, and others like me who were more or less indifferent to the cemeteryʼs supernatural legend. But all of that changed when four days ago, our classes were suddenly interrupted by the clanging of gongs and sombre choruses of suonas from the hill.
“Look, thereʼs a funeral procession happening outside!”
“Eh? I thought no one used the cemetery anymore?”
“You know, I heard from some others that the coffin being buried looked smaller than usual…it is a child who died, I think.”
“Oh my god, I canʼt imagine what the parents are going through now…”
“Hey, do you want to go and see it?”
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, surprising me. I turned around to see my good friend, Sam. “See what?”
“The grave, duh,” he said. “Some of us are curious and have nothing else better to do, like usual. Iʼm tagging along, do you want to come too?”
I didnʼt have anything else to do at the moment, so I accepted his invitation to join the excited group of students gathered outside the classroom. It wasnʼt difficult at all to find the new tomb—white joss paper had been scattered all over the site, and the heavy smell of incense lingered in the still afternoon air long after the burial was over. Out of respect, we lit joss sticks and silently prayed to the grave, and those who had brought offerings carefully laid them out on the tomb’s altar.
While waiting for my joss stick to smoulder, I sneaked a surreptitious glance at the tombstone. It was made out of solid granite, which was polished so thoroughly I could almost see my reflection in it—clearly whoever was buried underneath belonged to a wealthy family, I thought.
“Here lies Soh Wen Shin, female, aged eighteen years and four lunar months,” Sam murmured, reading the columns of characters inscribed on the tombstone. “Huh, neither the dates of birth nor death are written here—but there is some weird text engraved below her name.”
I didn’t dare to look at the tombstone directly, so I asked him if he was able to understand it.
“Um, let’s see…” Sam frowned as he leaned in to study the characters. “Her family regrets that their child passed away before her appointed time…may the Jade Emperor (Yudi) forgive her sins, may the King of Hades (Tai Su Yeah) acknowledge her deeds, and then shall the Black and White Impermanence (Heibai Wuchang) grant her safe passage.”
“Wow…that’s kinda creepy,” another student remarked, and some of the others gave silent glances of agreement.
“Doesn’t that mean she did it?” a girl whispered to her friend anxiously.
“Shh! Don’t say such things in front of the dead…”
The atmosphere got a little tense, and most of our group looked uncomfortable as they hurriedly finished their prayers and left. After I was done placing my joss stick on the tomb, I turned around to ask Sam if he was ready to leave—but to my confusion, he was staring fixated at the tombstone, the joss stick in his hand still unlit.
“What’s wrong?” I poked him lightly in the ribs and joked, “are you seriously daydreaming in such a place now?”
He didn’t immediately react or move; it was only when I waved my hand in front of his wide eyes that he blinked and staggered away from me in visible shock.
“Hey, you alright?” I asked, starting to feel concerned about his strange behaviour. “Why were you staring at the grave like that?”
“I-I was just looking at her portrait,” Sam mumbled, shaking his head as if he was trying to get something out of his mind. “Her smile…it felt like she was looking at me…u-uh, sorry, ignore what I said just now.”
I gave him a look of bewilderment, but Sam had already walked past me towards the tomb.
“Here, you can use mine,” a girl said, passing him her lighter. He fumbled with it and started flicking the flint wheel—but for some strange reason, the flame abruptly went out each time he tried to light his joss stick.
“Ah, it must have ran out of fluid. I’ll get you another one…” The girl borrowed another lighter and gave it to him; yet just like the first one, it mysteriously failed when it had been working perfectly moments ago.
“It’s okay, I will just pray without the joss stick,” Sam said, staring blankly at the tombstone inches away from his eyes.
After he was done with his prayer, everyone went down the hill and quickly returned to class. I still couldn’t shake off the weird feeling I had about Sam; but when I approached him again after school, he seemingly had no idea what I was talking about and laughed it off, so I thought nothing much of it too.
The next day, Sam was late for school—something he had never done before. Concerned, our teacher Mr. Tan asked him if he had accidentally overslept in the morning.
“No, sir,” Sam muttered, massaging his shoulders tenderly. “I suddenly had a serious back pain on my way to school, so I had to keep resting along the way to recover.”
Mr. Tan quickly asked if he wanted to report sick at the infirmary instead, but he shook his head and trudged towards his seat one row before mine.
“Are you sure you’re all good?” I whispered as he sat down heavily with a tired sigh.
Sam turned his head around very, very slowly, before giving me some semblance of a reassuring smile. Yet, the intense dark eye circles around his glazed eyes were alarmingly obvious.
“It’s nothing much. I just didn’t manage to get much sleep last night, that’s all,” he said. “Don’t you feel that last night was especially hot and stuffy too?”
I blinked, completely at a loss for words. “There was a thunderstorm yesterday night, you know? I had to even use a blanket to keep myself warm…”
“Oh…that’s strange, isn’t it?” With a weak chuckle, he turned back around and faced the blackboard.
It was a strange conversation, but as class after class passed by, I quickly forgot about it in my mind. By the time the last period had ended, I was more than ready to just go home, turn the air-con on and lie flat on my bed for the rest of the day.
“Sam, are you going home now?” I asked as I packed my bag.
“I…have something else to do, sorry,” he muttered, his insipid gaze seemingly wandering to the hill outside the classroom windows. “You can go home first.”
I didn’t see Sam in school the following day, which was yesterday; according to Mr. Tan, he had suddenly caught the flu and was running a high fever in the morning. It sounded pretty serious, so after school, I thought I should drop by his house and give him a get-well-soon gift—but a commotion in the classroom caught my attention instead.
“Did you hear? They say that the new tomb on the hill is apparently cursed!”
“For real? Why would her family do such a thing to their own daughter??”
“Hey, you guys! Weʼre gonna go check it out for ourselves, anyone else interested in coming along?”
Somewhat morbidly curious, I followed my classmates up the hill to the tomb, where some students from the other levels had gathered and were whispering among themselves. One classmate asked them what they were looking at so intently, to which a Form One girl nervously gestured at two weeping trees growing directly behind the tomb mound.
“Those two trees you see over there…we think thereʼs something wrong with them,” she said in a hushed voice.
I turned to look at the willowy trees, but there was nothing off about them that I could immediately sense. Everyone else also murmured their confusion to one another.
Upon seeing our bemused expressions, the girl hastily explained, “those are scholar trees, you see. In Taoism, scholar trees are believed to carry a lot of negative yin, and planting them on oneʼs final resting place means you donʼt wish for the dead person to reincarnate or enter purgatory—basically, youʼre condemning their soul to remain in the mortal realm forever. Yet despite holding a Taoist funeral, I noticed that the grieving family planted a scholar tree over where the coffin was buried…I already had a bad feeling about this grave from the start, but to think that another scholar tree would appear out of nowhere…”
After hearing what she said, the pair of scholar trees suddenly seemed ominous. However, there wasnʼt much we could do, so we offered our prayers to the tomb before quickly going back to class to warn everyone else about the cursed grave.
“Y…you mean a tree just sprouted and grew on the tomb overnight?”
“No way, is such a thing even possible?”
“Wait, guys, listen—” a guy suddenly spoke in the midst of the panicking classmates “—I saw Sam going to the cemetery alone after school yesterday, and he was carrying something that looked like a seedling inside a bag of soil. Isn’t that right, En?”
His friend nodded his head without hesitation. “We were wondering what the hell was he up to, but it wasn’t anything outright illegal, so we just let him be…”
Hearing this, our class chairman Lim immediately approached me and gestured for me to follow him out of the noisy classroom.
“Hey, you are good friends with Sam, aren’t you?” he whispered after making sure that the coast was clear. “Did you notice anything weird about him recently?”
“Oh, now that you mention it…” After I briefly explained Sam’s behaviour for the past two days, Lim’s face silently twisted in a grimace. He hesitated for a moment before telling me that Mr. Tan had requested for him to pay Sam a visit and check on his condition; he wasn’t quite prepared to make the trip alone, so he asked if I could come along as well. I was worried about Sam too by then, so I instantly agreed to accompany him after school.
We reached Sam’s single-storey house in a matter of minutes, since he just lived down the street from our school. I lingered by the open gates while Lim knocked on the front door.
“Hello, we are Sam’s classmates from SMJK Hua Zhong,” he said loudly. “Is anyone home?”
After waiting for a bit, no one answered, which I thought was strange; I knew that Sam’s mother was a housewife and at this time, she would usually be busy hanging the laundry out to dry or preparing dinner in the kitchen. Was she out of the house at the moment? I told Lim my suspicions, and he frowned.
“Then, shouldn’t Sam be still inside?”
I shrugged, telling him that I had no idea where he was or what he was up to at the moment. Suddenly, we heard a loud knocking sound come from one of the windows—and for some odd reason, my gut immediately knew that it was coming from Sam’s bedroom.
We rushed over to the source of the noise and sure enough, I recognised it to be his bedroom window. Lim frantically knocked on the window while calling out his name, yet there was still no response.
“D…do you think we should call an ambulance?” Lim asked, more frightened than concerned about Sam by this point.
“You do that,” I said, stepping towards the window. “I’ll try to see what’s going on inside his bedroom.”
The window panes were folded shut, so I tried to pry them open by squeezing my finger into a gap in the window and pushing the panes open.
Imagine my surprise when my fingers brushed against cold air inside the room. It didn’t feel like the typical chilly air associated with an air-conditioner—the air was downright frigid, too cold and too heavy. If Death itself had a sensation, I was sure that this was what it would have felt like.
Lim jumped in the midst of his call when I yelped and pulled back my fingers. “W-what’s wrong??”
Before I could even open my mouth to describe what just happened, I thought I heard Sam calling my name from behind all of a sudden. Without thinking, I turned my head to look back over my shoulder; yet, there was no sign of him anywhere, to my utter bemusement.
“Lim, did you hear Sam just now?” I said, still looking around to try to figure out where his voice had come from.
“Uh, no?” Lim shook his head as he hung up his call. “I don’t think I heard anything…”
We waited for the ambulance and Sam’s parents to arrive before going home. Apparently his mother had gone to the temple to pray for her son’s health, and as the paramedics stretchered him into the ambulance, she kept shaking her head and muttering some sort of prayer to herself. That night, I learnt that Sam had fallen into a coma due to his illness, and that the doctors weren’t too sure when he would fully recover and regain consciousness again.
This morning, I called the school to inform Mr. Tan that I would not be attending classes today. I was planning to visit Sam in the hospital later…but for some strange reason, my back has been aching since I woke up—as though something heavy is weighing down on my shoulders…
---
Comments