The Lanterns of Jalan Besar

The first time I noticed the wrongness was in the market. I was buying jackfruit for my mother, who was bedridden with a fever that had lasted three weeks. The stall owner, an old Hokkien woman with a face like crumpled paper, handed me the fruit wrapped in banana leaf. As I turned to leave, she grabbed my wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong, and her eyes were milky with cataracts. “Girl,” she said, her voice a low rasp, “you smell like the burning paper. You been to the temples?” I shook my head, confused. She leaned closer, her breath sour with betel nut. “Then why you got the smell of the hungry ones on you? They follow you. They think you one of them.” I pulled my hand free and hurried away, but her words lingered like a cold draft.

That night, I dreamed of the house again. But not the house as it was when I was a child—this dream showed it decayed and abandoned. The buttercup yellow walls were stained with black mold, the windows cracked, and the floorboards sagged. I walked through the empty rooms, my bare feet leaving prints in the dust. In the kitchen, the old gas stove still stood, but the pots were rusted and full of holes. On the counter, a bowl of rice had been left out, and the grains had sprouted thin, white tendrils that reached toward the ceiling like hungry mouths. My mother’s voice drifted from the bedroom: “Don’t open the door.” But I wasn’t near any door. The voice came from the rice bowl. It was her voice, but distorted, as if swallowed by water. “They’re coming through the stove,” it said. I woke with a gasp, my heart pounding. The room was dark, and I could smell smoke—not from incense, but from something burning, like plastic and hair.

A week before Ghost Month began, my mother took a turn for the worse. The doctor said it was dengue, but the fever had spread to her lungs. She was admitted to the hospital, and I was left alone in the apartment. That night, I decided to clean out the storage room to distract myself. The room was stacked with old boxes, some from our move from Queenstown to Toa Payoh when I was ten. I found a box of my father’s things—he had left us when I was eight, and I had not thought of him in years. Inside was a jade pendant shaped like a frog, a stack of letters tied with twine, and a photograph of him standing in front of a shophouse on Jalan Besar. On the back, in his handwriting: “This place holds secrets. Burn it if I die.” The jade felt warm in my palm, almost alive. I put it on, thinking it might protect me.

On the first night of Ghost Month, the city changed. The streets were lined with paper houses and cars, burning in small braziers outside every home. The air was thick with incense, and the acrid smell of burning joss paper clung to my clothes. I walked to the hawker center to buy dinner, but everything seemed wrong. The lights flickered, and the faces of the other diners were too pale, their movements jerky. Atone stall, the vendor was scooping rice into a plastic bag, but his hands moved too slowly, and the grains fell through like sand. When I paid him, he looked at me and said, “You shouldn’t be out tonight. You have the mark.” I thought he meant the jade pendant, but his eyes were fixed on my forehead. I touched my skin, and it felt cold and clammy.

I hurried home, but the streets had become a maze. The familiar shops were replaced by blank facades, and the sound of a Chinese opera drifted from somewhere, but the music was warped and dissonant. A paper lantern hung from a lamppost, its light casting shadows that danced in impossible directions. I saw a figure standing at the end of the alley—a tall, thin man in an old-fashioned white shirt, his face hidden under a wide-brimmed hat. He was burning a stack of paper money, and the flames were green. As I passed, he turned his head, and I saw that his eyes were empty sockets. He spoke in a voice that was not a voice but a vibration in my bones: “The frog is the key. Open the stove, and let them in.”

I ran until I reached my block, but when I entered the apartment, I realized that the jade pendant was gone. I must have dropped it. The lights were off, and the air was cold despite the tropical heat. From the kitchen, I heard a sound: the clatter of a pot lid. I crept forward, my hand on the light switch, but when I flicked it, nothing happened. The kitchen was bathed in a sickly green glow from the window, and the stove was open. Inside, where the oven should have been, was a dark void, and from it, a whisper rose, like the rustle of paper: “We are hungry.” My mother’s voice came from the void, but clearer now: “Don’t open the door.” But I had no door to open. Instead, I saw the rice bowl from my dream sitting on the counter, filled with fresh rice and topped with a pair of chopsticks pointing upward. The incense was burning in a small altar, and the photograph of my father was propped against the wall, his eyes scratched out.

I understood then. My father had not left us—he had been taken. The frog pendant was a mark, a signal. The hungry ghosts had been waiting for me to bring them their door. I stepped closer to the stove, and a hand emerged from the void—not a skeleton hand, but a hand of smoke and shadow, reaching toward me. I remembered the stall owner’s words: “They think you one of them.” And I realized that the jade pendant was not a protection but a sign of belonging. I had been chosen, or maybe I had always been one of them. I thought of my mother in the hospital, her fever burning, and I knew that the only way to save her was to give the ghosts what they wanted: a living body to feed on.

I reached into the void, and felt my hand pass through the cold, and something grabbed it. I was pulled forward, but as I fell, I saw the rice bowl tip over, and the rice spilled onto the floor, forming a line that led away from the stove. I landed in the void, and I was in the hallway of my childhood home, but the walls were paper-thin, and beyond them, I could hear the sound of a thousand hungry voices. I walked toward the bedroom, where the buttercup yellow was now black, and I saw my mother lying on the bed, but she was young, and her eyes were open, and she was whispering: “You found the door. Now let them through.” I knew then that I had always been the missing piece. The ghost month was not a time of fear but of hunger, and I was the food.

I woke up in my own bed, sticky with sweat. The hospital called at dawn: my mother’s fever had broken, and she was asking for me. I went to see her, and she smiled weakly. “You did good, girl,” she said. “You gave them something to eat.” I looked down at my hands, and they were covered in fine ash. In my pocket, I found the jade frog, but it was cracked, and the frog had lost its eyes. On the nightstand, next to my mother’s bed, was a small altar with a paper house, and inside it, a tiny figurine of a girl. The face was mine.

The ghosts are not hungry anymore, but I am. I have taken their hunger into myself. And somewhere, in the hidden rooms of the city, they are waiting for the next month, when I will open the door for them again.