Ramli bin Rahman was tired. His legs felt leaden as he lifted them one after the other, and even though he was barely thirty, he actually felt out of breath climbing the stairs. Like his late father, he had a stout frame. He had kept himself fit and strong, but fatigue had conquered him this night.
Making his way up the stairs, Ramli had noticed that there was very little sound in the estate. He glanced at the fitness tracker on his wrist. The display lit up and told him that it was 11.15 pm. Not far from midnight as he had guessed. On days like this, he regretted becoming a police officer. It often felt like a thankless job. The old man who scolded him today underlined that feeling. It was not as though Ramli could bring the dead back to life.
If it had not been his father, Ramli would have taken a different path. He had very much wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a religious teacher. However, the late Mr Rahman had stressed that Ramli needed to do something different with his own life. And serving as a police officer would allow him to help people and also give him a legitimacy he would need. Ramli never learnt what the old man meant about legitimacy.
He still remembered the day his father had collapsed suddenly while they were having dinner. Heart attack, the doctors said. The man was barely sixty. Ramli missed him. The memory weighed on him as he ambled onto the corridor. His thoughts were interrupted by a a familiar but annoying sound.
For about a year, Ramli had noticed an uptick in the sounds of crickets and grasshoppers in the neighbourhood. The shrill, high pitched cry of the insects reminded him of his childhood visits to his mother’s kampung in Johor. There was something different about the cries he had been hearing though. The falsetto whistling seemed to pierce his skin and riddled his spine with fear. Ramli tried to pinpoint when exactly he had begun to notice an uptick in the insect calls. He thought that it might have been just before his father’s passing. He wondered if his annoyance was due to him subconsciously linking the sounds to the death. But it was ridiculous and he knew it. Worse still, it was superstitious. His father would have been disappointed to see him indulging in such madness.
Nevertheless, more than once Ramli had been sufficiently irked by the calls that that he had ventured out to the surrounding greenery to see if he could detect an infestation. He had come up empty to date. What was perplexing was that he always heard the insects but he had yet to see one. Ramli wondered if anyone else in the block was as perturbed as he was by the creatures. He had not seen any signs of increased fogging or other pest removal measures being carried out.
Ramli keyed in the code at his front door and stepped into the apartment. The lights were off, which was normal for the time of night. But there was an odor permeating throughout the apartment. A sour, unpleasant stench which Ramli recalled from attending to reports about dead animals. Ramli began to imagine the worst but also hoping his mother was unhurt. He reached for the light switch on the wall but as he was about to flick it on, he froze as he heard a loud piercing cry ring through the room. It was one of those damned insects. And it was coming from somewhere… inside the apartment.
The thought made Ramli’s blood boil. Having the damned pests invade his house was a step too far. He momentarily forgot the smell which had bothered him and turned on the lights.
And saw his mother pointing a knife at him.
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