I work concierge night shift at a residential tower in KL, off Jalan Ipoh. Behind our compound there's a strip of wasteland waiting on a development permit — old kampung land, and yes, there are banana trees. Every Malaysian reading this already knows where the story is going, and I need you to know that I knew too, and it did not help at all.
3:10 a.m., I'm doing the stairwell walk-through we log every two hours. Between the 14th and 15th floor landings I walked into a wall of frangipani scent. Thick, like walking through a funeral wreath. There are no flowers in that stairwell. There are no windows that open. The AC handles that level from a sealed duct.
I stopped on the landing and then I heard it: a baby crying. Very faint. As if it were floors and floors away.
My whole body went cold, because everyone in this country is raised on the rule — loud means far, faint means NEAR. I did not investigate. I am paid nine ringgit an hour; that does not cover investigating. I went down the stairs — walking, praying, not running, taking each step like an exam — and the smell followed me for exactly three floors and then stopped, like a door closing.
At shift end I pulled the CCTV for the stairwell, because we have a camera on every third landing. The 15th-floor camera had eleven minutes of rolling static starting at 3:04. The cameras above and below it ran clean all night. Maintenance found nothing wrong with it, and it has not glitched since.
The compound cats would not use that stairwell for about a week. They're back now, so I go up there again. But I keep a small packet of salt in my uniform pocket — my mother's instruction — and when the wasteland finally gets bulldozed for the new tower, I want to be on leave that month.