The Red Ledger in Flat 9

By the time Mara found the red ledger, she had already been in Flat 9 for three weeks and had begun to understand the building’s moods.
It was one of those old apartment blocks in the older part of Singapore, where the corridors were open to the air and the paint peeled in long, salt-white curls from the concrete. The lift shuddered. The stairwell always smelled faintly of damp laundry, frying oil and bleach. There were no children in the building, only a handful of old people, two exhausted young families, and the sort of tenants who stayed briefly and did not introduce themselves twice.
Mara had moved in because it was cheap and because, after the divorce, cheap was what she could afford without hating herself. Flat 9 was on the fourth floor, at the end of the corridor, and had a view of a neighbouring block so close it seemed placed there for surveillance rather than daylight. The landlord, a thin man with a comb-over and a habit of smiling without showing his teeth, had called it “cosy”.
“It was last occupied by a single auntie,” he told Mara, while signing the tenancy agreement on a plastic garden chair outside the flat. “She passed on. But good unit. Very quiet.”
Quiet, as it turned out, was not the same as peaceful.
The first week, Mara noticed that things had a way of appearing where she had not left them. A spoon on the draining board when she was sure she had put it in the drawer. Her umbrella propped by the door when she had brought it in dripping and hung it in the bathroom. Once, a glass of water on the bedside table. She lived alone. She kept telling herself she was tired, distracted, grieving in the ordinary messy way people grieve a marriage they did not want to admit had rotted long before the end.
On the eighth day, after a rainstorm that turned the corridor dark and slick, she returned from work and found a notebook in her kitchen.
It was not hers. She owned no notebooks, only a work laptop and a stack of receipts shoved in a biscuit tin. This one was old-fashioned and hard-backed, bound in red leather that had gone almost maroon with age. Its corners were worn pale. The clasp was broken. On the first page, in precise black handwriting, was a name and a date.
MRS LIM SOO ENG
Moved in: 17 March 1998
Below it were neat columns, headed in the same hand:
Item
Amount owing
Date settled
Mara stood staring at it with the refrigerator humming behind her. The pages were thick and slightly greasy to the touch, as if the ledger had been handled in a kitchen for years. Every page listed something different. A sack of rice. Four eggs. A packet of incense. A taxi fare. Then, with the same accounting calm, stranger entries began to appear.
One pair of dentures.
One watch, gold-plated.
One rabbit, white, deceased.
One lamp, ceramic, cracked.
One child’s shoe, left.
One favour.
At the bottom of several pages, the same note was repeated in various forms:
Do not take without writing it down.
Mara laughed out loud, though it came out thinly. Some sort of hoax, she thought. A leftover prop from a previous tenant, perhaps from a theatre student or someone with a flare for the dramatic. She shut it in a drawer with a mild feeling of irritation and then, because the irritation had grown a small hook of dread, she took it out again and read the first three pages more carefully.
The entries became less normal as the dates advanced. The handwriting changed slightly around 2001, then reverted. One line read:
One month’s silence, received from Flat 9. Settled by loss of hearing in right ear.
Another:
One grandchild, promised. Settled by stillbirth.
Mara put the ledger back and went to bed with the light on.
In the morning, she woke to find the notebook on her pillow.
This should have been enough. Most people, if they are sensible, stop here. They call a friend, or the police, or at least the landlord. Mara did none of these things. She had the professional stubbornness of someone who worked with contracts and invoices all day, and the private embarrassment of a person unwilling to admit fear over a battered notebook. She took it to the office and showed it to her colleague Adeline over coffee.
Adeline, who was practical and amused by almost everything, thumbed through it with a wrinkled brow.
“Old tenant’s account book?”
“For what?”
“For whatever old people in old blocks account for. Funeral offerings, grocer debts, borrowed sugar, cursed goats.” She grinned at Mara’s expression. “Relax. It’s probably some memorial thing.”
“Does it look like a memorial thing to you?”
Adeline turned another page and frowned. “No. It looks like someone kept score.”
They both looked at the line about the child’s shoe.
“Don’t bring it back to the flat,” Adeline said, suddenly serious.
Mara considered telling her that the ledger had already come back on its own. Instead she tucked it into her bag and went to lunch. By evening she had decided that, absurd or not, it was just paper. Old paper could not hurt anyone.
That night she heard footsteps in the corridor outside her door.
The building was noisy at the best of times, and the corridor carried sound in the way tiled bathrooms do. The footsteps were slow, deliberate, stopping outside her flat, then moving on. She held still on the sofa, phone in hand, listening. After a minute there was a soft knock.
She called, “Who is it?”
No answer. Another knock. Three light taps, then silence.
Mara went to the door and looked through the peephole. The corridor was empty except for the yellow bulb over the stairwell and a folded newspaper lying on the floor. She opened the door carefully. The newspaper had been wrapped around something rectangular. Inside was the ledger.
This time it was open at a page she had not seen before.
A new entry had been written at the bottom in the same old hand:
MARA TAN
Item received: silence
Amount owing: one voice
Her throat tightened. She slammed the door, bolted it and stood with both hands pressed to her face until she realised she was shaking.
It is difficult to say what convinced her the ledger was not merely a trick. The details did it. The page smelled faintly of tobacco and old coin. On the back of the cover, just beneath the leather grain, there was a dark patch that looked like dried blood but did not flake. Most of all, there was the persistence of it. Whatever she did, the ledger returned.
She threw it in the communal rubbish chute. The next evening it was on her kitchen table.
She took it downstairs and left it in the recycling cage. It was back on her sofa by midnight, with rainwater beading on the cover as if it had been carried through a storm.
At last, because panic eventually makes a superstitious person out of even the most secular mind, Mara started asking around.
The old man in 8C, who fed stray cats and watched Malay dramas with the volume too high, looked at the ledger and muttered, “Aiyo. Don’t keep this, lah.”
“What is it?”
He pulled the notebook closer but did not touch it. “Long time ago, one family in this block had a business. Lend things. Small things at first. Rice cooker, fan, chairs. Later money. Then favours.”
“What favours?”
He gave her a look that was almost pity. “People like us. Always wanting something. They write everything down. If you cannot pay, they say they can wait.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
He waved a hand. “The auntie from Unit Nine. Long dead already.”
Mara asked the landlord next. He went pale the moment he saw the ledger.
“You found that?”
“Why does everyone react like that?”
He wiped his hands on his trousers though they were dry. “There was a tenant before the old auntie. And before that, her brother. They used to take in boarders, run money, do all sorts. People say the auntie kept records.”
“So what happened to the ledger?”
He did not answer at once. “When she died, her nephew cleared the flat. Then he said there was nothing there except rotten furniture and this book. He threw it away. It came back.”
Mara stared at him. “You’re joking.”
“I am not joking. I told him to burn it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He looked offended by the question, as if moral blame was a small luxury he had not budgeted for. “You didn’t ask.”
After that, she was unable to stop herself from reading it. Each time she opened it, she found another added line in the ledger of her own life. One jar of coffee. One haircut. One night of sleep. One call unanswered. The amounts owing were never in money. They were in pieces of things she still had.
Then came the entry that frightened her properly.
One photograph of Daniel, aged six.
Item received: protection.
Amount owing: sight in one eye.
Daniel was her nephew. He lived in Perth with his mother. Mara had not seen him in months, though she spoke to him on video calls when he was in the mood. She rang her sister immediately.
“Is Daniel all right?”
Her sister sounded annoyed. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Has he had any accident?”
“No. He’s been fine. What’s going on?”
Mara swallowed. “Nothing. I was just checking.”
That night, her sister sent a message. Daniel had slipped at school and hit the corner of a desk. Nothing serious, but he needed stitches. Mara sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the screen until the room seemed to tilt.
The next morning, she found a new page in the ledger.
One fear confirmed.
Amount owing: one debt transferred.
She closed the book so hard the clasp snapped.
After that, events quickened.
Her kitchen tap ran black for thirty seconds before clearing. A photograph of her parents, which had sat on the shelf since they died, cracked straight down the centre overnight. She woke to find a damp handprint on the inside of the bathroom mirror, small as a child’s. At work, while filing invoices, she heard her own name spoken from the empty meeting room at the end of the corridor. No one was there. The air inside the room had turned cold enough to mist her glasses.
She stopped sleeping. When she did sleep, she dreamed of a ledger room hidden somewhere behind the walls of the flat, with shelves and shelves of the same red books stacked like organs in a body. Someone, or something, sat inside it writing with patient relish while she stood in the doorway unable to move. The voice would call out, not in words but in the feeling of a debt remembered.
At the end of the second week, she tried to destroy the ledger.
She took it to the service alley behind the block after midnight, where the smell of bin juice and wet concrete was strongest, and soaked it with lighter fluid from a hawker stall and a little bottle of ethanol from her bathroom cabinet. She lit it with trembling fingers. The flame took beautifully. The red leather blackened and curled. Mara watched the pages shrivel. Then the fire went out.
The ledger was warm, smoking, but intact.
The first line on the new page was written in wet ink.
Attempt received: burning.
Amount owing: one witness.
Behind her, something moved in the alley.
She turned and saw no person, only the shadow of the block above, cut by laundry poles and drainpipes. Yet she was suddenly aware of being observed from all directions. The alley seemed fuller than it should have been. She ran upstairs and locked herself in the flat until dawn.
At work the next day, she told Adeline everything.
To her surprise, Adeline did not laugh.
“My grandmother used to say some things keep count,” she said quietly. “Not just ghosts. Certain money. Certain gifts. If you accept them, it is not free.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Yes,” Adeline said. “But you’re telling me your nephew’s injury and your dreams have improved your scepticism?”
Mara rubbed her face. “What am I supposed to do?”
Adeline hesitated. “Find out who owned it. Then return it, properly. If it’s a debt book, maybe it has an end.”
That evening, Mara returned to Flat 9 and examined every page carefully. Near the back, in faded ink almost lost to time, she found a name that was not Mrs Lim Soo Eng’s. It had been written in a different hand, older and shakier.
CHAN AH LOK
Flat 9
Received: one ledger
Amount owing: unspecified
Underneath, in the same handwriting as the first pages, a note:
He brought it home from the void deck after his wife died. Said it was a bargain book from someone in the market. Said it helped keep the house.
Mara sat very still. The void deck was the covered ground floor common area beneath the block, where old furniture and bicycles were abandoned and neighbours left offerings on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month. She had seen old boards, broken cabinets, a child’s tricycle rusting in one corner. But a bargain book? She knew then, with a certainty that chilled her more than fear, that the ledger had not been found by chance. It had been taken because someone wanted to use it.
And now it was using her.
The final entries came in a rush.
One voice.
One witness.
One fear confirmed.
One debt transferred.
One name written in full.
MARA TAN SIM.
She had never used her full name in the flat. Her identity card lay in a drawer. Yet there it was, in careful black strokes, as if some clerk had looked through her life and copied the exact details.
Below it was a fresh line.
Amount owing: one departure.
A noise came from the bedroom. Not a footstep. The sound of wood ticking softly against wood, as if a drawer were opening.
Mara backed out of the kitchen and into the narrow hall. “No,” she whispered, though she did not know to whom.
Something in the bedroom drew the curtain aside an inch. Not a hand. Not a face. Only enough movement to prove she was not alone.
She did the only thing she could think of. She grabbed the ledger, the apartment keys, and ran downstairs to the old man in 8C.
He opened his door in his singlet and stared at her wild-eyed face. One glance at the ledger, and he stepped back.
“You must not bring it to me,” he said.
“Then tell me what to do.”
He looked over his shoulder, as if expecting to be overheard by the walls. “In the old days, people make a return. Not throw. Not burn. Return.”
“To whom?”
He swallowed. “To the source.”
“What source?”
He pointed a shaking finger down the corridor to the stairwell. “Void deck. The first place the book was found. There’s a locker under the stair landing. Old thing. Nobody uses. Put the ledger inside and leave something owed.”
“Owed what?”
He did not answer. His eyes had gone wet with remembered terror.
Mara had enough sense left to realise he was frightened in a way older than her own. She took the lift to the ground floor and crossed the void deck under the humming fluorescent lights. The rain had started again outside, a hard tropical downpour that rattled the gutters like pebbles. The open space smelled of mildew and the floral soap from the wash bay.
Under the stair landing was a metal locker bolted to the wall. It had no handle, only a dented door with a keyhole blackened by age. She had seen it a hundred times and never thought about it. Now it looked waiting.
The ledger in her hands was warm.
A rusted key lay on the floor beneath the locker, as though placed there for her. She picked it up with numb fingers. It fitted.
When she opened the door, the locker was empty except for a strip of newspaper on the bottom and a thin layer of dust. On the inside of the door, scratched into the metal, were names. Hundreds of them. Some had been crossed out. Some were written over others. Some were so old the corrosion had blurred them into wounds.
She saw Chan Ah Lok’s name near the bottom.
She saw Mrs Lim Soo Eng.
She saw, with a lurch of horror, her own full name already scratched in among the rest, not fresh but old, as if it had been waiting there longer than she had lived in the flat.
The ledger began to twitch in her hands.
Not violently. Like a living thing waking under a blanket.
Mara stumbled back, almost dropping it. From somewhere in the dark under the stairwell came the dry scratch of pen on paper.
She looked down.
The page had opened by itself. New writing spread slowly across the white space.
Return received.
Amount owing: settled by substitution.
Behind her, the building door banged open. Footsteps entered the void deck. Then another set. Then another. Not one person, but many. She turned and saw figures standing under the fluorescent lights. Some were familiar from the block, some not. The old auntie from the second floor. A woman in work clothes carrying shopping bags. A boy with a school uniform shirt stained dark at the collar. They stood too still, their faces blank with the patience of people waiting to be counted.
At their centre was a woman in a faded house dress, small and severe, her hair pinned back with a comb. Mara knew her instantly from the ledger photo, though she had never seen her alive.
Mrs Lim Soo Eng held out her hand.
“Please,” she said, in a voice that sounded exactly like a pen scratching across paper. “You borrowed.”
Mara could not say why she obeyed. Perhaps because every part of her was already tired. Perhaps because the alternative was to run into a crowd of things that were not alive but were no longer dead in the proper way. She placed the ledger in the woman’s hand.
Mrs Lim opened it once, scanned the final pages, and nodded as if satisfied with an invoice. Then she turned the book over and wrote something inside the front cover with a black pen she seemed to have produced from nowhere.
Mara felt a sudden tug behind her eyes, sharp as a thread pulled through cloth. For one terrible second she could not remember her sister’s face. Then her own childhood bedroom vanished from memory, leaving only the shape of it, not its colour. Panic rose. She understood then what the book had been taking. Not blood, not years, but the small internal weights that made a life recognisably hers.
“No,” she said, reaching for the ledger.
Mrs Lim stepped back. “Settled.”
The figures behind her began to move. Not towards Mara, but towards the locker. One by one, they leaned in and left something inside. A pair of spectacles. A cracked bangles, a key, a dental bridge, a child’s plastic whistle, a little paper packet of rice. Offerings, or payments, or both. The locker filled with the smell of old paper and damp earth.
Mara backed away until her shoulders hit the pillar. The void deck lights flickered once, twice, then held.
Mrs Lim closed the ledger and looked directly at Mara.
“You brought a debt into the house,” she said. “You may leave, but the house keeps ledgers.”
Then she, and the others with her, were simply gone. No fade, no dramatic vanishing. One blink and the space under the lights was empty again.
Mara stood there for a long time, unable to trust her own breathing.
When she finally went back upstairs, the flat door was open. Inside, the bedroom curtain hung still. Nothing had been disturbed. On the kitchen table lay the red ledger.
It was smaller now, thinner. Its cover had lost some of its colour, as though much of its substance had been spent.
Inside the front cover, written in Mrs Lim’s precise black hand, was a final entry:
MARA TAN SIM
Status: uncollected
Below that, in a different handwriting, much newer, almost childish:
Do not take without writing it down.
Mara did not sleep in Flat 9 again.
She packed a suitcase before dawn, left the key on the kitchen table, and moved in with Adeline for three weeks while she looked for somewhere else. The landlord never answered her calls. By the time she went back to collect the rest of her things, another family had already taken the unit. The corridor outside was freshly repainted. The lift no longer groaned the same way. When she asked the new tenants whether they had found anything odd when they moved in, the woman at the door gave her a polite smile and said no.
Mara never mentioned the ledger to anyone after that, not even Adeline.
But sometimes, in the late evening when she is alone in whatever flat she happens to be renting, she will hear the soft scratch of pen on paper from the room next door, though there is no one there.
And once, only once, months later, a plain brown envelope arrived with no return address. Inside was a single torn page from a red notebook, old and stained at the edges.
One line had been written across it in neat black ink.
Item settled: one voice.
Amount owing: pending.
On the back, in her own handwriting, though she has no memory of writing it, were the words:
Do not leave a ledger open.