The Tannery Shift

In the humid sprawl of Kuala Lumpur, every able-bodied man knew the weight of national service, though our conscription was shorter, a mere two years. I was posted to the Selangor State Police, specifically to the Rural Operations Division, a unit that dealt with the backwaters and their myriad of problems. My name is Danial, and this happened almost a decade ago, during my final year of service.

Our training was grueling, but the most dreaded part was the ‘jungle survival’ exercise in the dense peat swamp forests of Sabak Bernam. On the third day, I came down with a fever that left me shivering in my hammock. The medic, a wiry man named Encik Rahman, declared me unfit for further training and assigned me to the Opposition Force, or OppFor, the bunch tasked with simulating enemy tactics for the other trainees. My role was simple: play a lone deserter hiding in the abandoned factory that served as our mock village.

The factory had been a tannery in the 70s, processing leather from the nearby cattle farms. It had been closed for decades after a scandal involving tainted hides, and the locals whispered that it was cursed. The building sat at the edge of the swamp, its corrugated iron roof rusted and pocked, and its interior stank of chemicals and decay. I was to remain there for 48 hours, ‘resisting’ capture.

On the first night, the silence was oppressive. The chorus of frogs and insects was muted, as if the air itself was heavy. I sat in a corner of the main processing hall, my torch off, letting my eyes adjust to the gloom. The moonlight filtered through broken skylights, casting pale shafts onto the concrete floor where old machinery stood like hunched beasts. I heard a sound, a rhythmic scraping, coming from the direction of the old drying racks. I froze, my heart pounding. But it stopped, and I chalked it up to rats.

By the second day, my fever had spiked again. I was delirious, seeing shapes in the shadows. I decided to explore the deeper parts of the factory to find a better hiding spot. I found a stairwell leading down to a basement, which was odd because the building seemed too small for one. The steps were slick with moisture, and the air grew cooler, stale. At the bottom, a heavy steel door stood ajar. I pushed it open, and a foul stench hit me, like rotting flesh mixed with ammonia.

Inside, the basement was vast, far larger than the footprint above. It was filled with massive vats, big enough to hold a person, each crusted with layers of old grime. Some had lids, and I had the absurd thought that they were like sarcophagi. I walked among them, my boots echoing on the concrete. I noticed that one vat had a fresh-looking scratch on its rim, as if something heavy had been dragged over it recently. And then I saw the inscriptions.

Carved into the floor around the central vat was a circle of symbols I did not recognize, but they seemed to writhe in my fevered mind. I knelt to look closer, and I saw dark stains, not rust, that had been scrubbed but not fully removed. I touched one, and it felt sticky. I drew back, terror clawing at me. I wanted to leave, but my legs felt like lead. A low humming began, emanating from all directions, and the air grew thick, like before a thunderstorm.

From the corner of my eye, I saw a shape move, too large and too fluid to be human. It was draped in what looked like black leather, but it seemed to shift and ripple. It had no face, only a smooth, featureless head that turned toward me. I froze, and it took a step closer. The humming grew louder, and I felt a pressure in my skull, as if my brain was being squeezed. It spoke, but not with a voice; the words appeared directly in my mind, like a cold whisper: ‘You should not have come.’

I screamed, but no sound came out. The thing reached out a hand, and I saw that its fingers were too long, with too many joints. I scrambled backward, my feverish body finding sudden strength. I stumbled up the stairs, crashing through the door, and ran out of the factory into the night. The OppFor training officers found me an hour later, raving and covered in scratches I didn’t remember. They thought I had hallucinated from the fever, but I knew what I saw.

I was discharged from service a month later on medical grounds. The psychiatrist called it a severe febrile episode, but he couldn’t explain why the scratches had the distinct pattern of claw marks, or why, to this day, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night convinced I hear that rhythmic scraping, and see the black figure in the corner of my room, waiting for me to return to the tannery’s basement, where it still hums and calls.