In Continuum.

The Rubbish Chute Horror

It's true what I tell my friends about my army life. I've done pretty much everything there is to do on land in the army, everything a normal soldier in the army would have done, and probably a little more than that of course. Every guy who is going through the army or has been through the army is going to have a bunch of stories to tell, and they are usually the stories we share over social gatherings, or dinner tables when they are appropriate enough to be told. Of course, some censorship needs to be imposed, at least for my experiences with the rubbish collection point in my camp, and the incident with the maggots. Those stories shouldn't be told unless necessary, but everything else almost always garners the attention of the listeners, because army stories are almost always funny in a painful way. You look back at what you went through and laugh about it, and you tell these stories to your friends so that they can laugh over it. Pretty much like all bad experiences that we go through in our lives, they are always nicer to tell than to relive all over again.

A lot of things happened during my one year hiatus in the year of 2005, a lot of adaptation occurred in those dreadful days, since it was my first year in the army. Everything was a little new, and a little more dreadful since the halfway make was nowhere in sight at that point in time. It was probably why I was reluctant to blog about the events that went on in life, thinking that the regimental life dulled my senses and killed my love for writing - which was contrary to my beliefs in the second year, when I realized that I wrote the most when I did nothing at all, ironically. Anyway, a particular event happened in 2005 that I believe, hasn't made an appearance on this blog just yet. It was brought to my attention yesterday while the group of us were talking about our supernatural experiences in the lounge, and I shared my own experiences in the army - which turned out to be more like jokes than eerie encounters since I seem to have the uncanny ability to make everything serious, not serious. My tales of ghosts and spirits, hauntings and other horrors turned out to be pretty funny, and I guess if there is a genre of books I shouldn't write, it would be the genre of horror.

I am not sure if it is a requirement of all army men, but FIBUA was mandatory for my vocation in the army. FIBUA stands for 'Fighting in Build-Up Area', which is a different game arena altogether in relative to fighting in the jungles as we were so skillfully trained to do. The rational behind it was that because of the threat of terrorism these days, it is important for us to know how to fight in urban areas, or basically anywhere other than a jungle with man-made structure. The game rules are completely different, because the way buildings are build allows you to do more and less things at the same time in contrary to the setting of a jungle. That is why, we were put through a series of tests and trainings just so that when terrorists do come to Singapore for a vacation, we'd be able to tackle them in shopping malls and office buildings alike. It is easy if you want to train a bunch of army boys to fight in the jungle, because all you need to have is a giant stretch of land with a whole bunch of trees and bushes. That is not the same for FIBUA training, because you need to have an urban setting without anybody freaking out in the middle of the night to the sound of explosions and gunshots. So the army found this abandoned HDB estate just outside our usual training grounds, an estate which was used to house foreign workers in the past.

You know how it is with a place you've never been to. You step into this foreign environment and you immediately know if this place is - well, right. Sometimes you just feel claustrophobic in an open space, or that suffocating feeling when you are in a room. Whatever that feeling may be, you know if there is something amiss in that place, something that makes you feel unsettled and queasy. The HDB estate was that sort of place, with its broken windows and abandoned homes. Most of the walls have been knocked out, leaving behind old tiles and strange markings on the walls. It looked pretty much like an ordinary estate from afar, but when the bus pulled up into the car park there was just something strange about that place. We got off the bus and was ushered into what looked like a neighborhood marketplace, or a hawker center that was situated in the middle of the four blocks that surrounded us like walls. The empty houses were dark from the inside even though we arrived at that place at noon, broken windows too were like dark pools of eyes looking down at us. We felt watched even though there were no one in the vicinity save for ourselves, and the railings along the stairwell were rusty and old, some of them were even broken in some places. The place felt old, but yet not old enough to make myself feel young. To me, the place looked like a corner of a war torn country, bombed ceaselessly by air raids and artillery shells. It was a scene out of a holocaust movie, the residences being pulled out and replaced by the smell of dust in the mornings and the quiet darkness in the lonely nights.

So the trainings started, and like any other military trainings, we had a day shoot and a night shoot. We were all armed with our blanks, shooting each other in the empty estate like nobody's businesses. It was fun to creep around corners in a stairwell, fearing the presence of an enemy waiting upstairs. But it was still fun to be moving around like some special forces, trying to clear the building of terrorists, very much like Counter-strike, the computer game. In the day, the boys had a lot of fun running around the empty corridors, kicking open doors and shouting "Clear!" at the top of their voices, pretending to be elite forces in some Hollywood summer blockbuster. I was one of those idiots, running around with my rifle and pretending to be all heroic and such. Of course, in the daylight everything was more interesting. It was alright for us to stay alone in an empty room for a long time, playing the roles of the enemies because the windows didn't have glass panes. They were just holes in the walls, and sunlight streamed into the empty rooms and revealed the graffiti written on the walls. Some of them were obviously left behind by peers, writing about their ORD dates, while others wrote about their dissatisfactions about the army. There were phone numbers as well, asking for sex in all kinds of positions and prices. Whatever was written on the walls, they entertained the boys to no end as we remained in the broken living room and had our lunch there, not knowing what the night would bring soon after sun down.

The night came, and the dark eyes of every broken window in the estate looked even darker. They became more sinister, like every empty corridor and every empty room. Every window ledge threatened to reveal a ghostly figure, every corner hinted the presence of a dead body. Imaginations ran wild that night, at least the imagination in my mind. Every echo in the empty rooms became the footsteps of some supernatural presence, some kind of spirit trying to snatch my soul. But we were in groups, separated into our sections to clear floor by floor. There were about seven or eight of us, and we were all squeezed into the narrow corridors before going through the houses in groups of two or three at a time. At any one time, there'd be someone with you, so the darkness didn't get to us just yet. Besides, the constant sounds of guns behind fired and the explosions kept our minds off the darkness that threatened to devour us all. But that fun soon ended when my section became the enemy, and we were supposed to station ourselves in different rooms - alone.

You see, we took turns to be the enemies, and the enemies would hide in different houses on every floor for the others to attack. Each house had two of us, and each of us would be assigned a room. It was like those reality shows you see on television, putting a contestant in a haunted room and leaving that person there through the night. That was what I went through when my sergeant led me into an empty house with my friend, and he pointed into a dark room and said "You take the kitchen". The kitchen was small, but probably big enough for a single worker to use. It was like an ordinary kitchen, but without the necessities like a table or a stove. The window on the wall was a hole like any other rooms, and everything was just pitch black. I was asked to hide in a corner where the invaders won't spot me immediately, but it was just a room with four corners - a hiding place would be pretty difficult to find. That was when I found a corner with my torchlight, a corner bordered by a broken wall next to the window. Just when I was about to make myself comfortable in that corner, I realized that there was a rubbish chute right on top of where I intended to hide. The rubbish chute didn't have a lid on at that time, it was probably plucked off by somebody or something, and the hole stared back into me with much menace that I had to turn away. For some reason, I expected a head popping out of the hole to stare at me, a pair of eyes in the darkness like those dreadful Japanese horror movies. And the thought that I had to hide under that damn rubbish chute was probably the scariest idea ever.

But that was exactly what I did that night, squatting under the opened rubbish chute, fearing for my life. My sergeant left the room soon after, and I was left alone in the room, with my thoughts bouncing off the four walls. My imaginations ran wild as the silence settled in, and the sound of people talking in the corridors quickly disappeared. I couldn't hear anything more than my own heartbeat and breathing, and perhaps the sound of crickets in the bushes six floors below. It was just me in the kitchen, hopefully. Thoughts about rotten hands grabbing my face from the rubbish chute quickly took over my mind, and the possibility of some dead body being trapped in the chute also invaded other unwanted thoughts. I tried to call out to my friend in the other room, but he couldn't really hear me since we weren't supposed to make any noises. At least I'm sure he didn't have any broken rubbish chutes in his room, and one was right on top of my head at that time. It was petrifying, and my thoughts were running at a hundred miles per hour. I wished for my enemies to come soon, and it mattered little who the eventual winner was. I wanted the war game to be over, and I wanted myself out of that damn kitchen.

Soon enough, my platoon mates came in and stormed the kitchen. I think I must have been shot about twenty times, I'm not sure. But I guess my friend must have mistook me for some dead spirit of a foreign worker. I would have done the same actually, if someone jumped out from behind a wall all of a sudden. I needed to get out of that place, and I was thankful enough to know that the night was drawing to an end. We were gathered in the empty hawker center while we waited for the bus to pick us up that night. I do remember the sight of the estate as we drove away, the way the empty swings in the playground swung slowly in the wind. Not to mention the faces of those plastic elephants and horses in the playground suspended on a spring, the way they were peeling off one by one. The dark eyes from every broken window still stared at us as we left, as if to say goodbye in their horrible and creepy ways. It is definitely a place I wouldn't want to visit ever again, at least not that kitchen with the rubbish chute. Not for a million dollars - OK, maybe a million dollars. But not anytime soon, not anytime soon.