Short Ghost Stories: The Man with the Axe in his Back

TROMP.

An army boot landed on top of a gravestone, a shower of dirt falling from its rubber sole.

TROMP TROMP TROMP.

More scuffling noises followed, as a multitude of army boots landed on a flat marble memorial to someone long forgotten. A stern voice hissed for quiet, and the boots complied. They continued their long run through the Standard Obstacle Course, a night-time training session that had them chart part of their path through an old, abandoned cemetery.

First Sergeant Chun led the way as he always did, while Second Sergeant Tak followed up the rear. Between the two of them, fifty young men jogged at various distances from each other, all identically clad in their standard-issue army uniform and with dog tags around their necks. A few were fit and strong, with biceps bulging as they ran, while others tottered on their feet, heaving and gasping for breath.

This was one of the SAF’s Basic Military Training Centres, located on an island off the eastern coast of Singapore. It was a small army camp used for training conscripts, with programs teaching field craft, survival skills, weapons maintenance, live-firing and grenade throwing.

Military training was mandatory for all young Singaporean men over the age of 18, and every Spring, busloads of pale young men would arrive, dazed by the sudden removal of their internet access and video games. They would stand blinking in the sun, staring at the plain concrete walls where they would spend the next three months, sleeping in shared dormitories by night and participating in grueling physical regimens by day.

Right now, they were on their mandatory midnight run. It was a 30-minute jog that was highly-unpopular, not because of what it demanded of the young men, but because of the path they had to take. At least ten minutes of the jog involved a cemetery, requiring conscripts to skirt around long-forgotten headstones, statues of weeping angels, and crumbling mausoleums thick with cobwebs. All around them, the steamy jungle oppressed, a litany of creeping vines and grasping branches pressing in to overwhelm them.

The run led through the cemetery purely due to location and proximity, but it was pointless explaining that to the recruits. Year after year, ghost stories would proliferate at the camp, painting what was essentially a routine army training session into something ghoulish and frightening. The same stories were always circulated, usually by the same types of kids, to the point where it had long become a part of conscript lore.

It was something First Sergeant Chun had little patience for.

In fact, so irritating did he find it, that a single ‘window-rapping ghost’ story is cause for a session of early-morning toilet-cleaning as punishment.

With a toothbrush.

*****

The group of fifty conscripts and their two supervisors finally arrived at their destination—the concrete courtyard outside the mess hall, also their point of origin. Wire fences surrounded this small yard, and like most army training facilities, it was devoid of colour save for the camouflage green of the recruits’ uniforms. Large floodlights shone onto the small area, so bright they almost banished the night.

The boys silently filed into five rows, one after another, something they’ve done every night since the start of training. Their two supervisors stood in front, facing them with a critical eye.

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