Hungry Ghost Part 1

Written by Holly Wilcox Routledge

TW: Paranormal, mild allusion to injury

Every August since I left that place, I have had the same strange dream. 

I find myself back in my hometown—wandering through my old neighbourhood, on a loop that takes me through its back alleys, roads and bicycle pathways. It must have been at least a decade since I left that place, and yet it looks exactly the same as it did the last time I was there, untouched by the passing of time or weather. The houses are free of mold, the walls clean, the windows unshattered, the doors still whole, without age’s dark splinters running through the wood or cobwebs spanning over handles and letter box openings. The only signs of life are the lights that shine in every room, but no shadows pass by them or appear silhouetted against the windows. Bars of light stream over gates and fences, spilling into the roads themselves. 

The mountains are deep and dark and humid; even in my dreams the humidity is still there, cloying and thick enough to clothe me as I walk through the night. But the traffic mirrors remain empty as I pass them by. It shows only the streets, the houses, and the lights emanating from the windows. They don’t even show the stars. 

I walk around the neighbourhood—along empty pedestrian paths, over roaring storm drains, passing by the houses at the very edge of the block. And yet, for some reason, no matter where I go, what it is I intend to find; no matter my desire, sooner or later, over the course of the night, I find myself walking along the main road, leading out of the neighbourhood centre, directly towards the pathway that covers the largest storm drain, separating my neighbourhood and the one behind us. My trainers tap against the asphalt, loud in the still night, the lamplights pulsating above my head—

And then, he appears. 

He arrives as suddenly as the dream itself begins. A spark of green fire, directly in the middle of the pathway, the water that flows below momentarily becoming luminescent. There’s a brightness so powerful, it exposes the stubbled walls and strands of weeds that flow with the current rushing unseen beneath the concrete. His body emerges in pulsating tongues of fire, thread of scarlet intermingling with the limbs of his body as he comes into existence. I’ve seen him before, I think. Somewhere. I know it—as clearly as I know that he is a he—intrinsically. He never speaks beyond the words he utters, never anything more, never anything less. 

His figure begins to materialise—dark green against the light of the fire. The handle of his sword grows between his fingers as the flames slowly cleave away from him. His robes unfurl until he stands fully formed, floating inches above the bridge’s concrete His hair dances in the wind, his robes pulling away from his body to reveal the black characters painted across his legs, chest, arms, and head. 

Everywhere but the small space between his throat and jaw.

It takes his head a few extra seconds to turn to face me, his body moving separately. The wound gapes, and sometimes, if I look closely enough, I can see the first knob of his spine, ghoulish green amongst the plundered flesh. His mouth is wide, his lips full, and his eyes are a pale, misty white, devoid of pupils. When he speaks, his voice reverberates in sync with my heart beat, booming through my body, down to the marrow itself. 

“The mountains suffocate me,” hesays. “The earth weighs my throat. I’ve been sleeping for so long—youyou must free me. Free me.”

Every year, one night in the middle of August, I go to bed and have the same dream. And every morning for an exact month, I wake up entwined in my bedding, sweat pooling in my collarbones. TheAC whines in endless rotation above my head, the first strips of tender sunlight peeking through the blinds. 

*** 

Dreams are surprisingly quiet in Singapore. I thought the dreams would be louder here—catastrophic—in the way I thought all big cities tended to be. Hundreds of people crammed into apartment blocks and four bedroom sharehouses, chasing something or someone, desire and want fuelling their every hour, awake or asleep. Literal and physical, stacked up and exploding over bedroom windows and doorways. Like water in an overflowing bath, across the tiles and into the drain, gurgling, dripping, running. Flowing. It was like that in Tokyo; flowing over balconies and out of office blocks, flashing in time to the signage in the night. Narita, too. 

But Singapore was surprisingly quiet, contained within itself. Every now and again, a dream would streak by as I passed a block of HDBs, silver against the night skies, or flash like neon in a curtained upstairs window as I made my way home. Some nights when I clocked out at 11pm, I’d hear them trickling down the corridors and stairway of my hotel—English, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Tamil, Urdu characters unfurling against lobby wallpaper like moths. 

Everything was so compartmentalised here. Perhaps, purposefully so. In the same way that they wrapped banyan trees with black and white cloth when their leaves started to reach for the ground, drew designs in rice powder outside doorways to new houses, and pinned red packets to door frames for lions to pick off.They did something to soothe dreams, settle them here. In this go-between for humanity, jumping off-point for anything, it took a lot to settle wild dreams. 

I saw it, sometimes on manhole covers, or painted on the concrete walls of storm drains—the aura of a seal, magic spanning the island, clamping down on the sheer weight of energy generated. It was stronger near Chinatown, Little India, Arab Street, the bigger temples, and shrines—the accumulated weight of people living, of the others who walked through them and saw it, tried to soothe it as best they could. There were probably home-grown wards, spells tacked down to keep households safe and stable, dreams picked up off the floor, folded up and tidied away in bedroom wardrobes and cupboards. Every now and then, I’d see someone making their way down a road, on the MRT, sitting on the pavement outside a 7-11 drinking a bottle of Milo, condensation running down their wrists—the flicker of magic just beside it. Charms. Sutras. Power, pulsing through them with every casual second. 

There were always certain times I could sense it grow island-wide, other times dimming to a weak flutter. But it was always there. Always a wave of strength, fighting back against the pressure of it all. I guess in almost two hundred years, humanity didn’t change that much. Offerings, chants, lanterns, shrines, and now, even now—setting out plastic chairs before empty stages, laying long dining tables with every nicety but food, getai singers crooning to nobody the living can see. 

I like watching the getai when I come back from late shifts on August nights. Peking opera has always struck a tender chord with me. I stand at a distance, watching them perform, sing, to the rows of seats before them. Not for me, of course. Never for me, or the others I stand shoulder to shoulder with.

They sing for the ghosts. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised. He started to appear once I arrived in Singapore.Perhaps he lingers here alongside his dreams. Or is it his dreams I see? A desire for the future and past—of being so far away from home yet never leaving?

I’ve never found it does well to dwell too much on the focus point of other people’s dreams. Dreams are cravings turned inward, pressed heavily down within ourselves like flowers, the pressure growing and growing until the only outlet for them to escape comes when the body relaxes and the mind is left to wander. Cravings linger in buildings, in some cities, to the very brick and mortar, long after they were generated, their owners passed on from this heavenly place to the next life; or into another cycle in Samsara. Dreams tend to linger sometimes. The bad ones, mostly. 

And always, every August, when the gates of hell are thrown open, the bad ones rise to the surface, as fast as fish, as eager as daggers, coating themselves along temples, tarmac, and roads. And always, every August, when I go to bed and close my eyes to the aria of a getai, I return home, and a ghost tries to live once more.