The Catherine Lim Collection (33 page)

This was the beginning of a week of strange
happenings, involving several people besides myself. Somehow, I did not relate
these experiences to my colleagues the next morning; I did not want to appear
foolish and above all, I did not care to hear those oft-heard explanations of
overwork and overwrought nerves. I was convinced that there was something
unusual and that I had not imagined anything. The cough, the heavy breathing,
the light brush of fingers – I could not have imagined them all. When one of my
colleagues decided to stay back to finish her work, I, most unaccountably,
offered to stay back with her. Perhaps I desperately needed confirmation of my
experience; perhaps the presence of another person would take away the terror,
would even add piquancy to the experience.

We both settled down to work at our desks
after making ourselves hot drinks; our desks were on opposite sides of the
room. Rose, a very hard-working person who, once she settled clown to work,
unconsciously adopted an austere mien that repulsed every attempt at idle chat,
wrote for a while, then looked up.

“Did you cough? I seem to be hearing a
cough.” I did hear it, and only waited to see if Rose had heard it as well.

“It sounds like a man coughing,” I said. We
both sat up and listened. The cough seemed to be getting fainter, and then it
disappeared.

“Strange,” said Rose, frowning, and then
almost immediately, we heard the sound of footsteps outside our room – the
heavy sounds of hobnailed boots.

We waited for the sounds to die away before
we decided to leave. “Very odd,” said Rose again, and as we were descending the
stairs, she suddenly screamed.

“Somebody touched my face!” she gasped.
Somebody had touched me too; I could feel something like a wet pad slapping
across my mouth.

I told Rose of my experiences the night
before, and we decided not to mention the strange happenings to anyone, sensing
that little good would come from the disclosure. Supposing that I had imagined
the happenings that night when I was alone, and that I had telepathically
communicated my fears to Rose so that she was hearing the same cough, feeling
the same ghostly touch? As long as this was a possibility, we felt we could not
make known these strange happenings to our colleagues, the more timid of whom
were sure to be petrified.

But there was no need for secrecy; soon we
found ourselves talking freely about our experiences, because it suddenly
seemed as if almost everyone had, in the last few days, heard or felt the
presence of this being. A recurring detail in the descriptions was the cough –
a hollow, tubercular kind of cough – and then the sound of boots, and the touch
of fingers.

Nobody ever saw him; nevertheless all were
convinced he was a soldier. Many Japanese soldiers, it was said, preferred
suicide to the ignominy of surrender.

Nobody dared stay till dark any more; as
soon as the shadows gathered in the trees, we left. One of the security guards
claimed to have seen, in the dim light of the moon, a man under a tree near one
of the houses. The silhouette showing peaked cap and gun was decidedly that of
a soldier. When the guard went near with his torch, there was nobody there. The
guard’s subsequent illness (which could be attributed as much to his heavy
intake of toddy as to having encountered a ghost) further contributed to the
tense atmosphere that now pervaded.

Ghosts were no longer a joking matter; the
ghost of a soldier stalked the campus, and had been heard and seen by several
people. The last person to be affected by all the nervousness was Teng, the
artist who produced all the superb illustrations for our children’s stories.
Unperturbed by the mounting tension that was spreading in widening circles in
the campus, he went about his work, sometimes staying as late as nine. He
listened to the stories of the strange presence in a half-amused, half-mocking
manner.

One morning, his colleague found him slumped
over his desk in a state of seeming exhaustion; he had apparently been working
with extraordinary intensity at a piece of artwork which now lay under his
right hand, the drawing pencil still between his fingers. He was helped up, and
the paper gently removed; it showed the face of a soldier, with high
cheek-bones and small eyes.

It was some time before Teng could speak
coherently of what had happened. He said he was doing his work when something –
or someone – seemed to overcome him – he kept describing it as a kind of
‘weight’ or ‘force’ which settled on him, so that he could hardly breathe. When
shown the picture of the soldier, Teng swore he did not draw it, or was at
least not aware that he had drawn it.

For a while, the mysterious picture of the
soldier became the focus of much nervous curiosity or pure terror; nobody dared
remove it from Teng’s desk. Teng’s colleagues watched with apprehensiveness the
artist’s increasingly bizarre behaviour – he was often muttering to himself,
sometimes laughing out loud for no apparent reason. Once when he came to see me
in connection with some illustrations for stories, there was a frighteningly
vacant look in his eyes. Then, one morning, screaming obscenities, he set fire
to the picture of the soldier. There was then no choice but to send him home
for a long period of rest and medical attention.

That was almost a year ago. After the spate
of strange events, culminating in Teng’s wild destruction of the picture,
things quietened down. No other encounters were reported. There had been talk
of getting a priest or monk to cleanse the place and lay the ghost; somehow,
the weeks went by and nothing was done. As the happenings ceased and the terror
subsided, it was assumed that there was nothing more to fear.

Sometimes, I suddenly pause in the middle of
my work because I think there is someone behind me; I turn and invariably there
is no one. Many of my colleagues get this sudden strange sensation of someone
standing behind their chair. Rose never stays in the room alone, not even
during the day; she is continually looking up from her work to ascertain that
there is at least one colleague nearby, and sometimes when she bustles about
and chats with nervous energy, I know it is because she wants to distract
herself from the disturbing recollection of the soldier that stalks the campus.

“I wish I had never seen that picture,” she
says, closing her eyes with a pained expression. “I can’t seem to get it off my
mind.” Rose talks vaguely about a transfer back to school or to Headquarters.
“I don’t suppose he’ll pursue me there,” she says.

I wish I could throw a romantic aura over
this lonely, intense man who has been walking the earth these 40 years, consign
him to the misty world of ethereal beings that mystifies, even charms. But the
soldier seems only to want to terrify. He seems too tangible a presence, too
powerful a force to be coaxed away by prayers and offerings.

A man who claimed to have seen a lot of
ghosts in his time and was not afraid of any, happened to hear of the soldier
from one of my colleagues. He asked and was given permission to stay the night
in one of the buildings.

The next morning, he reported that he had
heard and seen nothing, but conceded that he felt a strange chill lasting for a
few minutes, which could have been the duration of the ghost’s visit.

The campus is strangely hushed in the
evening, except for the chirping of nocturnal insects and the occasional cry of
a bird; this is the time when the soldier emerges to make his rounds, although
nobody sees him now or hears his heavy boots crunching the gravel outside or
creaking the floorboards inside the houses.

Teng has recovered, though still pale and
wan from his illness, and has settled down in another job. Although he never
talks about the soldier, he must sometimes dream of him, as Rose and I
occasionally do. Never pleasant dreams these; for the hollow cough, the
footsteps, the touch in the darkness, through the distorting medium of the dream,
become even more terrifying.

Ah Cheng
Peh’s second wife
returned even before the seventh day,
in fact on the very evening after her burial in the cemetery. The sackcloth
cowls of mourning were hardly removed when somebody saw her standing near the
ancestral altar that held the portraits of two generations of forebears.

She was dressed as when alive – in neat
long-sleeved blouse with a row of jade ornaments for buttons, sarong and
embroidered slippers. She stood there saying nothing and when the person who
saw her quickly signalled to the others to come and look, she was gone.

She appeared once again that evening, to a
different member in the household, and everyone wondered if they had been amiss
in any part of the funeral arrangements, for this return could signify
displeasure. They offered joss-sticks and prayers before the altar newly set up
for her, and waited to see if she would return again on the seventh day.

The floor was strewn with ashes so that if
she came, her footprints would show. Her bed was all in readiness with a clean
bedsheet and pillow-cover, while on the altar were two lit candles and a pot of
freshly cooked rice with a small empty bowl and a pair of delicate ivory
chopsticks beside it. In the morning, the family did find the footprints in the
ash, there was a hollow in the pillow where the head had lain, and when the
cover of the rice pot was lifted, it was found that the cooked rice had been
disturbed a little at the edges with the tips of chopsticks.

After the seventh day appearance, Ah Cheng
Mm never came again, not even in dreams, to her family and relatives.

An old servant of ours, whose husband had
died when she was quite young, said he too had returned on the seventh clay.
The level of the water in the glass left on the altar table was considerably
lower, and the two fish left with the cooked rice bore the imprint of fingers.

There were no such preparations for an
uncle’s return when he died, for by that time, customs such as these had been
left behind. My cousins and I, with the irreverence and brashness of young
people who believed that their education had made them superior to the older people
around them, talked endlessly, on the night after he was buried, of ghosts and
visitations from the dead. What nonsense, said one of my cousins, a young
fellow who prided himself on his knowledge of science,

Superstition. Tricks of the imagination. Auto-suggestion.
We were all in a light-hearted mood most unbecoming of a house of mourning, but
I suppose because we were young and westernized, we were accepted with
resignation by the older members in the family who, in their black clothes and
sepulchral expressions, flitted about in the darkness like so many ghosts
themselves.

We dredged our memories for ghost stories to
share, each story becoming more outrageous than the next. Fancy embellished
memory in the most extravagant manner; I remember I told one tale after another
of ghost lovers, of a dead nun, of a murdered family. I told the story of my
classmate in Primary one, a girl whose name I could not quite remember – was it
Beng Khim? – who had died in a road accident and was seen by some, including our
class teacher – actually sitting at her desk in the classroom.

The principal of a boys’ school that one of
my cousins attended had collapsed at his desk. He died of a heart attack on the
way to hospital and soon after that a teacher, staying back to mark his pupils’
exercises, heard footsteps approaching the principal’s office which could be
seen from the staff room. The teacher turned, saw the back of a man entering
the office, and with thoughts only of nabbing a burglar or intruder, ran out to
accost him. He saw no one; the door to the office was locked, and he was about
to conclude that it had been the work of an over-wrought imagination, when on
impulse he looked in through a small window into the office and saw, sitting at
the desk and writing something on a piece of paper, the principal himself. So
life-like was he – the shirt he was wearing was a favourite grey-striped one –
that for a moment the teacher even forgot that he had attended his funeral only
the week before, so that when he looked up, the teacher blurted out a “Good
evening, Mr Chiam” with the nervous flutter of a schoolboy caught peeping. The
ghost said nothing; he merely looked, unblinkingly, and it was then that the
teacher was overcome by a sense of foreboding.

Making his rounds later in the evening, the
school jaga found him in the corridor outside the office, distraught and
trembling. He was incoherent for a few days and was on sick leave for a
fortnight. When he recovered, he asked to be transferred to another school.

The story of the principal’s ghost was
hushed up by the school authorities for fear of creating fear and panic in the
school, but somehow it spread, in hushed awe-stricken whispers, and a few
others claimed to have seen the ghost of the principal.

A Buddhist monk was called in to perform the
necessary rites of propitiation. He chanted throughout the night because the
ghost was a powerful one and could only be persuaded to leave after sustained
chanting of the special prayers to send it back to its home.

I remember what had struck me most about the
whole incident was not the ghost’s appearance itself, but the fact that a man
who, with his rotundity and loud coarse jokes was the very essence of life and
earthiness, had been transformed into a spirit from the next world, able to
evaporate into grey mists at the crowing of the rooster.