Rumah seram

I'm not really superstitious. I mean I enjoy a good ghost story now and then, but at the end of the day, they are ultimately just stories, fictitious ones at that. And I do get scared of things that go bump in the middle of the night, but I've always managed to keep my more irrational fears in check. Why am I telling you this? This is why:

Daylight makes everything look safer and nicer. Come visit me during the night!

That happens to be a house that is neighbouring mine, although the actual neighbour had long departed. You can see on the left that a wall had rotted away, and one end of a mattress peeking out from behind. Keep these in mind as they are going to come into prominence later in the story. Looks just like another run-of-the-mill abandoned house, doesn't it? Nothing to shout about. My mother's childhood house also looks somewhat like this. (Weirdly, hers IS creepy. It's right next to a cemetery, and the cemetery sits opposite another cemetery right across the narrow kampung lane) When I first moved to Jeli, I asked my landlord about it.

"Pakcik, what's the deal with that house?"

"Oh, the owner passed and he has no one around to look after the house" he answered breezily.

What do you know? It's even similar to what happened to my grandparents' house. They died and their children are either too busy with their own lives and families or live too far away to bother with the maintenance of a wooden house that was already decrepit to begin with. So I didn't think too much about it and carried on adjusting to my new life in Jeli.

That is until around a month ago. My roommate (yup I have a roommate. I know, I know. I'm lousy with expositions) ; an ustaz one day came home and without any encouragement nor provocation whatsoever, told me something. Now I am not the chattiest person around, neither is he so we rarely speak to one another expect for the customary greetings, pleasantries and the occasional conversations on practical matters. So the eagerness in his eyes with which he told me the following story, I found to be odd and slightly unnerving.

"The neighbours told me something about the abandoned house next door"
"What about it?" I enquired uneasily.

"It is now abandoned after its previous occupant died in it last year. He was an elderly man with no kin, so when he died the neighbours only found out about it after a few days, and that was only because he started to smell"

Fuck. Just my luck. I'm not superstitious, but I'm only human, so learning this definitely upped my fear-o-meter readings. You might ask "what's the deal, you poofter? So a guy died in the house. Big deal, big pussy" The deal is, it is unnerving to me because my kitchen windows face the missing wall of the house, and the mattress I mentioned earlier, which I suspect to have been the elderly man's deathbed. I need to pass through the kitchen every time I go to the toilet, and doing this in the middle of the night is not in anyway fun. 

"Can I come use your toilet? I won't haunt you, promise"

Luckily, all my house windows are of the glazed type, instead of the transparent ones. Whatever on earth or beyond it that appears outside my windows are going to have a tough time making itself apparent to me. Also luckily for me, if anything weird happens in that house, it is nevertheless happening outside of my house. Until the Ju-on inside my in-house well tag-teams up with it and let it in, that is. I'll be royally screwed, then.