The Kelalong Boundary Invoice
The canopy didn’t just block the sun; it swallowed the afternoon entirely.
I had shifted the J&T van’s gear down to crawl speed, the gravel of the Mile 12 Kelalong Dam road crunching under the heavy tread of the tires. On a normal day, a delivery out to the deep reservoir area was just a long, boring drive off the Bintulu-Miri highway. But today, the further I drove, the more the silence began to curdle.
The landmarks I had passed along the way felt completely wrong in the midday light. First came the modern rumah panjang, its concrete and zinc structure looking perfectly normal, except for the total lack of life. Vehicles were parked outside, but not a single soul walked the veranda. Next was the lonely brick house, then the quiet two-house neighborhood—all of them closed tight, curtains drawn, as if the residents were hiding from the very air outside.
Then came the massive, fenced-up compound right before the final stretch. The solid corrugated iron sheets were too tall to see over, a blank, metallic wall that muffled any hint of what lay behind it. No dogs barked. No wind rustled the leaves.
By the time the road narrowed into a tight corridor of dense, suffocating secondary forest, my temples were already throbbing. It was a dull, localized spike of pain right behind my eyes that grew sharper with every meter. The jungle on both sides of the gravel track didn't look green anymore; the shadows between the thick trunks were heavy, greasy, and completely black, leaning inward until the branches scraped against the van's side mirrors like fingernails on glass.
When I finally reached the main entrance of the Kelalong Dam, the iron gates were chained shut. The small security shack sat to the side, its windows coated in thick dust. On the surface, the whole facility looked completely abandoned, but I knew there were shift workers somewhere deep inside the water treatment grids.
I looked down at the J&T scanner app. The parcel was a high-end 5G rugged smartphone, but the delivery name on the digital airway bill was bizarre: Subject\_09. According to the app’s localized Bluetooth tracker, the customer’s device was active within five meters of the gate.
"Hello? J&T Express!" I called out, stepping out of the van. My voice didn't echo. The thick, humid air seemed to catch the sound and smother it instantly. The absolute silence of the forest mutated into a sharp, high-frequency electronic ringing that vibrated right inside my skull. The headache exploded into a blinding migraine.
Click.
The heavy metal door of the facility control building slowly swung open.
"Encik? Someone needs to sign the terminal," I stammered, my voice dropping to a nervous whimper as a thick wave of river mud and old copper odor hit the air.
A figure stepped out from the shadows of the doorway. It wore a clean, crisp facility uniform, and at first glance, its physical shape looked entirely human. It didn't look dead, and it wasn't rotting. But as it glided across the concrete path, the sheer, impossible smoothness of its movement made my breath catch violently in my throat.
It didn't have limbs that bent or shifted. Its body moved like a single, solid statue sliding effortlessly across ice, its boots never actually generating the sound of footsteps on the gravel.
Then it looked up, and the true horror of its anatomy paralyzed me.
The entity had no facial features at all. Where its eyes, nose, and mouth should have been, there was only a perfectly smooth, continuous sheet of pale skin. Yet, even without eyes, it was staring. The blank flesh of its face pulsed rhythmically, the skin stretching tight as if a pair of massive, unblinking eyes were trapped just beneath the surface, frantically rolling around from behind the opaque membrane, trying to push through.
The psychological terror of that featureless, shifting face was an immediate, crushing weight. It didn't make a sound, but the sheer atmospheric pressure around the gate dropped instantly, causing a thin, warm line of blood to leak slowly from my left ear.
Suddenly, the skin on the center of its blank face didn't split open—it rapidly thinned out until it became completely translucent, revealing a chaotic, pixelated sequence of glowing digital static humming violently beneath its flesh. It vibrated with a high-frequency mechanical frequency that vibrated right through my teeth, mimicking the deep, internal drone of a massive water turbine buried deep underground.
I dropped the scanner, scrambled back into the van, and slammed the door shut. My hands shook so violently I could barely turn the ignition, but the moment the engine roared to life, I threw the vehicle into reverse and slammed on the gas, tearing away from the gate as fast as the narrow road would allow.
They found my delivery van crashed into the ditch near the Mile 12 junction an hour later.
I survived the impact, but the physical and mental toll was absolute. Both of my eardrums had ruptured from the sudden internal pressure changes during the encounter, and the doctors at the hospital said the capillaries in my eyes had completely shattered from intense cognitive strain. I haven't spoken a word since that afternoon.
When the J&T recovery team went back to retrieve the scanner from the gravel path at the Kelalong gate, the digital parcel records had already been automatically updated by the network. The signature field didn't have a name or a digital scratch. It contained a corrupted, pixelated graphic string that formed the neat, chilling shape of a perfectly blank, smooth oval.
The box was gone, replaced only by a cold puddle of river clay sitting undisturbed at the entrance. The road to the reservoir is still there, but some boundaries are meant to be left completely undelivered.
Area: Bintulu Batu 12 for reference