CW: implied sexual assault, child death, death.

Haw Par Villa in the rain was a splash of garish color. The dark red footpath, glistening wet. The ornate tiered gate that greeted visitors with a carving of a tiger, etched in gold and blue. The strange and unsettling statues scattered across the park—a woman’s smiling head on the body of a giant crab, a cluster of laughing mermaids with mouths a little too big for their faces. It looked like the set of a period drama filmed in the eighties, flung out of time.

The boy whined. It was hot. The weeping rain made the humidity, ever-present in Singapore’s sticky tropical air, feel even heavier than usual. Moisture clung to the back of his neck. He longed for air-con.

Opening an umbrella over them both, his mother rushed him through the park, barely sparing a glance for the gardens and ponds. She made a beeline for an indoor attraction—the Ten Courts of Hell. The doorway into the gallery was a facsimile of a cave, flanked on both sides by statues of a warrior horse and a warrior bull, standing guard at the mouth of hell.

His mother shook water off her umbrella. “Go on,” she said. She sounded tired. “Go look around.” Her manicured nails clicked against her phone screen as she typed.

The boy looked tentatively into the cave. He didn’t like the look of the statues—their cartoonish faces, almost grotesque. He wasn’t sure he wanted to go in alone. This was supposed to be a family excursion. His parents had talked a lot about how it was a rite of passage for Singaporean kids. Generations of brats had been dragged here by their parents to be frightened by the displays of statues being tortured for various sins. “See, if you steal or cheat, this will happen to you after you die. Better be good, ah boy . . .”

But his father stayed locked in his study this morning, and his mother’s knuckles had been white with tension on the steering wheel, and it no longer felt like fun.

The boy shrugged off his unease and walked into the cave. No one else was around. Not many people wanted to visit the park in this weather, it seemed. He paused to look at the first display: King Qinguang raising his fist in judgment as he presided over souls entering the underworld. The virtuous would be sent across the golden and silver bridges into paradise. The evildoers would descend into the Courts of Hell for punishment.

In front of each tableau of screaming statues was an informative placard which helpfully listed out each crime and its respective punishment. He paused at one warning that the punishment for disobeying a sibling was to be repeatedly mashed up by a large stone. The boy puzzled over that one. Why should he have to obey his teenage sister? Didn’t that mean she had to obey him in return, then? And what if they both failed to obey each other as siblings? Would they both spend eternity being mashed together into an indistinguishable paste? He stifled a nervous giggle.

“Something funny, ah boy? You think these punishments are a joke, is it?”

The boy spun around. “N-no.”

The man was standing half-concealed by shadows. The boy took a step back, his heart pounding. Then he squinted into the darkness and noticed that the man was holding a rattan broom. Not a ghost, just a caretaker. His racing heart slowed, fractionally.

The caretaker grinned. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Yeah right,” the boy muttered. He turned away from the caretaker and pretended to be engrossed in reading one of the placards, hoping the man would go away.

The man didn’t go away. “Hey, ah, you know these displays are just the ones we show the ordinary guests. There are more interesting ones in the basement. Like from old exhibitions, not open to the public anymore. Want to take a look?”

The boy knew that the correct answer was no thanks, followed by a quick retreat to his mother. But he couldn’t seem to tear his eyes away from the caretaker’s face, so weathered and deeply lined that he looked like an old charcoal sketch. His eyes were deep-set and coal-black. The boy didn’t look away.

“My mum’s waiting for me,” he said.

“We won’t be long,” the caretaker said. He reached forward and pulled open a door in the wall. It was made of the same plasticky-fake-rock material as the wall, which perhaps was the reason why the boy hadn’t noticed it before. “Come,” he said, taking the boy by one skinny shoulder and pushing him lightly towards the open door. The boy knew he should break away, run to his mother—but he took one step and then another, and the door closed behind him.

They were standing in a grey stairwell under flickering fluorescent lights. The stairs went down into the basement.

“Come,” the caretaker said again, and the boy followed him helplessly down the stairs.

They emerged in a storeroom. Cardboard boxes were haphazardly shoved onto metal shelves. A darting movement caught the boy’s eye, and he glanced at a corner to see two cockroaches crawling up a stone statue of a man, half-concealed by shadow.

The statue was carved from a rough, rocky material. His arms were raised above his head and bent at several unnatural angles, as though the bones had been broken badly and never set straight. His knees were bent as well, as though halfway to kneeling. His torso, too, was strangely contorted, ribs sticking out where they shouldn’t.

The eyes, though, were what made the boy stumble back. They were human eyes, or at least disturbingly realistic plastic replicas. They stared straight ahead, the whites shot through with red.

“What is that?” the boy whispered.

The caretaker stepped up to the statue, looking directly into its cracked face. “He was a fisherman who once sailed the Malacca Strait. He had a wife whom he loved dearly, and the day their son was born was the happiest day of his life. But as the child grew, he began to feel that something was wrong. The child didn’t learn to crawl and talk like other children did. Little things upset him, and he would take hours to be calmed. His wife refused to bear another child while this one needed every moment of her attention. A thought began to fester in the fisherman’s mind: if their son went away, perhaps their lives would go back to the way it should be. Look at this child, screaming night and day. The child was miserable. The child was suffering too. Maybe he simply wasn’t meant for this world. Maybe it wasn’t murder, but mercy.

“When the child passed away in his sleep from a sudden illness one night, no one in the village questioned it. The thought of poison never crossed their minds, or at least, they chose not to give voice to it. They all whispered that the child had never been right in the head, so it was probably for the best. His mother, who alone had loved him with all her heart, did her best to bury her grief and move on for her husband’s sake. But a suspicion was growing within her. One night, when she could stand it no longer, she took a rowboat out into the mangrove swamps and asked for justice. She did not know who or what she was asking. Nevertheless something in her blood understood that ancient things dwelt in places like these. And to these ancient things she made her plea.

“The next morning, the fisherman woke up with a scaly, grey rash on his chest. His wife rubbed it with menthol balm, and his mother brewed a pail of herbal water for him to soak in, but it spread rapidly. By the fifth day, the grey rash covered his entire body and his skin was so stiff that he could hardly move. He strained against the prison of his skin-turned-stone with all the strength left in his muscles, but instead of bending at the joints, his bones snapped and reformed at odd angles. By the second week, he could no longer speak and his family concluded that he must be dead. No one mentioned that his eyes sometimes still darted from side to side. They told themselves that it was nothing but a trick of the light.

“They did not give him a traditional funeral. The others in the village were too frightened to attend. When his wife asked his brother to help her carry the fisherman’s body into the rowboat one day, he did so without argument. She rowed back to shore without the body, and no one asked questions.”

The boy couldn’t tear his gaze away from the fisherman’s bulging, bloodshot eyes. “How did he end up here?” he whispered.

“This is the museum of hell, boy. The gallery of punished evil. They all end up here, or at least, a representation of them.”

“But he . . .” He can’t have deserved this, he wanted to say, but he was afraid to say it out loud in this place. The fisherman had done something wicked, that was true. But this was horrible. “Will he be like this forever?” the boy asked.

“Oh, no,” the caretaker said. “Fortunately for him, his punishment is only temporary. See?” He pointed at the statue’s hands, and the boy saw that it was beginning to crumble, a few fingers already gone. “When the last part of him turns to dust, his punishment will be over. His soul will evanesce.”

“How long will that take?”

“Just a few hundred years,” the caretaker said. “Not long, really, in the grand scheme of things.”

“I want to go back,” the boy stammered as the caretaker crossed the room to open another door.

“I will bring you back,” the caretaker said. “After.”

The door opened into a long, dark corridor. The fluorescent lights mounted on the ceiling were even dimmer here than in the storeroom. The boy had to squint to make out the end of the corridor.

His eyes fell on a shape lying on the floor at the end of the corridor. The shape was moving . . . pulsating.

He took an alarmed step backward, but then the caretaker’s long, thin hand was on his shoulder again, urging him forward. “Do not be afraid. There is nothing that can hurt you here. Come, take a closer look.”

The boy walked slowly towards the thing writhing on the floor. When he was close enough, he crouched down, staring.

It was an animal of some sort, like nothing he had ever seen before. A little like a deer, but it had six legs instead of four, and too many eyes. Little flowers sprouted all over its body in place of hair—miniscule blossoms, each one a slightly different color, incandescent.

And then the boy looked closer, and recoiled. There were things swarming among the flowers. Tiny bugs, smaller than aphids. The deer-thing was infested with them. The boy stepped back quickly, his own skin itching in sympathy.

“Her name is Aekro,” the caretaker said. “Or at least, that is a close enough approximation of how you might pronounce her name in your language. She is from a world very far away from yours.”

Suddenly the boy could see it in his mind’s eye. A planet, vivid with swirls of green, pink, blue and yellow. Then the view swooped down toward the planet’s surface, into a candy-colored floral forest, where deerlike creatures with six slender legs and too many eyes lay beneath flowers that stretched to the sky.

“It’s beautiful,” the boy whispered.

“Yes,” the caretaker said. “Aekro’s world is beautiful and fertile, teeming with intelligent life. The trees and even the mushrooms are intelligent. Each species has their own culture, their own civilization. Life is sacred to all of them. Their diets are carefully curated to ensure that nothing they consume is sentient. They build no structures, they mine nothing from the ground. Harmony and harmlessness are their highest virtues.

“Aekro’s people live within tight-knit groups of their closest companions, usually a commune of eight or nine. But for Aekro, there was just one other. Her name was Fael. It was unusual to have a commune of just two, but they were happy in each other’s company. But there came a day that Fael grew sick. Aekro knew what it was. It was the shadowing illness. It would turn Fael grey and lifeless in a matter of days. The disease kills almost ten percent of their population every year.

“Years ago, they discovered a cure for this illness in a species of flower that grew in a hidden glade. Consuming the flower was a near-instant remedy for the disease. But their joy turned to horror when they realized that it wasn’t the flower, but the millions of tiny mites living within the flower, that was the cure. Each mite was sentient. Each flower was a little world in itself, isolated from the rest of the planet, even from their own kind evolving in other flowers all around them. Within each flower, empires rose and fell, stories were told, and great loves unfolded. It was an incomprehensible crime to consume these flowers, not just taking a life but eradicating an entire world, an entire history.

“Since that discovery was made, no more flowers were picked. When they grew sick, they accepted death. This is the way of their people. No laws are enforced—they simply follow their virtues.

“But Aekro lay next to her dying companion in the shade of the megaflora, and knew that after Fael returned to the soil there would be nothing and no one left for her. In the final hours of Fael’s life, Aekro made the journey to the hidden glade, picked a flower, and forced it down her beloved’s throat.

“Aekro and Fael were driven away from the herd when their people found out what Aekro had done. They spent the rest of their days on a distant mountain, and they remained, as they had always been, contented in each other’s company. When they were both old, Fael died peacefully in her sleep. Aekro knew she was soon to follow. She lay on the grass, her body pressed against Fael’s corpse, and waited for death to take her too.

“Suddenly Fael’s body twitched, and Aekro looked at her with a wild hope that, miraculously, her companion had been returned to her one more time. Then Fael opened her mouth, and millions of mites poured out. A tidal wave of miniscule bodies surged towards Aekro, over her and into her, until she is as you see her now: a metropolis for mites, a world in and of herself. They are in her blood, in her organs. They feed off her and they keep her alive. It has been centuries.”

“Does it hurt her?” the boy asked.

“Every moment of every day.”

The boy’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Aekro isn’t evil!” he said, his voice cracking. “She just wanted to help her friend.”

“Perhaps,” the caretaker said. “She acted out of love. But nevertheless, she knowingly committed a terrible evil.”

“Will she ever be free?” the boy pleaded.

“Yes. All civilizations die out eventually. When the last mite is dead, Aekro will die too, at last. But think of this. Aekro had a long, happy life with the one she loved. For the countless murders she committed, countless more lives have flourished in her skin, in her bones, in her brain. It is not redemption. But it is a kind of balance.”

The boy scrubbed the back of his hand across his face. It came away wet with tears.

“Let’s move on,” the caretaker said, gently. “I have one more to show you.”

They walked past Aekro, twitching on the ground under the weight of a billion lifeforms. The caretaker opened the door at the end of the corridor. Beyond the door there was nothing but darkness. “Go on,” the caretaker said, and the boy stepped out into the great darkness.

Together they drifted untethered in the void. Eventually the boy began to perceive tiny pinpricks of light against the black expanse. Stars. They were floating in outer space.

“Long ago,” the caretaker said. “There was an ancient civilization that spread across the stars. An empire that ruled every planet in the known universe.”

“Even my planet?” the boy asked.

“This was long, long before Earth, child. Billions of years before Earth was even a speck of dust. It is hard to translate the name of this empire into a word you could say. They didn’t communicate using sound the way you do. You can call them the Conquerors, for that is what they were. They invented a technology that allowed them to jump through vast distances of space, and one by one, they found every inhabited planet in the universe and made it theirs. The native populations of each planet they conquered were exterminated, or enslaved. Some joined them willingly, and became soldiers in their army, just as hungry for conquest.

“I could not begin to tell you about the millions of strange and disparate worlds that they crushed underfoot, or the battles that lit up entire galaxies in vortexes of fire. If I were to tell you even a fraction of the stories I know from that ancient time, that forgotten era of terror, your short life would be long extinguished by the time I finished. Their reign lasted for what you would perceive as a hundred million years, but as I said, all civilizations eventually fall. Stars went supernova, and planets eroded, and now, there is barely even a trace of them left to be found.

“But the evil that they committed, the horrors that they wreaked—that lasts. That does not dissipate in time. And so, they are punished.”

The boy stared at the stars that frosted the darkness all around them. In the distance, there were swirling splotches of prismatic color which he thought must be nebulae. He had seen pictures of them in science class. Then he spotted what looked at first like an oddly-shaped cluster of stars, except they were moving, and coming closer.

“Here they come,” the caretaker breathed. “The Conquerors, fated to wander the universe. Fated to witness the last relics of their glorious legacy turn to dust. Fated to watch the birth and death of planets who were never touched by their crusade. Fated to understand that everything they did and everything they were was meaningless.”

The boy could see them now, an endless convoy of ghosts, slowly drifting through space. He could barely comprehend what the Conquerors looked like. His human mind slid past the shapes and angles of their bodies, like an optical illusion that he struggled to bring back into focus.

“How long will their punishment last?” the boy asked.

“We do not know,” the caretaker said. “Perhaps forever.”

One by one, the pale aliens faded from view, and the stars winked out, and the boy and the caretaker were left in darkness. A faint buzz reached his ears as fluorescent lights flickered on. They were standing in the stairwell, just behind the backdoor that led back into the museum.

“Who decides?” the boy asked. “What counts as evil. What punishments they deserve. Is it you?”

“No,” the caretaker said. “I suppose it is the universe itself that decides. I—and others like me—only watch. We bear witness to justice and injustice.”

“What about me? Am I here to bear witness too?”

“I brought you here to learn, if you can,” the caretaker said. “There are those who believe what I do is foolish. This is the way of things, not just in this world, but in all worlds. But I have always wondered. Are those who would commit evil always fated to do so? Even if they understood the consequences of their actions?”

In that moment, the boy saw something, a hazy image in his mind’s eye, just out of focus. A slick of red across a woman’s face. Mouth open, begging. A smear of black mascara. A man’s fist grabbing at her tangled hair.

“Can they not choose differently?” the caretaker asked, and the boy realized he was waiting for a reply. But the boy couldn’t speak. He could still see that woman’s eyes, wide with terror.

The caretaker nodded slowly. He reached past the boy and opened the door back into the museum.

The boy found his mother still standing at the entrance to the Ten Courts of Hell, her long nails still clicking against her phone screen as she answered emails.

“Did you see everything?” his mother asked.

“Yeah. Can we go home?”

The rain had stopped, and visitors were starting to arrive. Several families were headed towards the Ten Courts of Hell. The boy and his mother walked back to the carpark, and soon they were on the road, driving away from Haw Par Villa.