I Became a Professional Horror Story Cleaner

“It’s me. Kim Hanmu. Yesterday, at Hwaae High School……”

Then Jeong Dohyeon opened his mouth as if he had just realized something.

“Ah, you’re Kim Hanmu.”

“Don’t you remember me?”

“Hmm……”

Jeong Dohyeon tapped his lips a few times with his index finger, as if thinking.

Was this really the Jeong Dohyeon I knew?

Now that I looked at him more closely, he wasn’t wearing his thick-framed glasses, there were piercing marks on his ears, and his hair was neatly parted.

I had no idea whether he simply looked different while working and while off duty, whether he had a split personality, or whether some anomaly caused by the horror story had happened to him.

“The Team Leader actually said you’d ask about me. He asked me to pass this along to you.”

The Team Leader?

Jeong Dohyeon cleared his throat with an “Ahem” and deliberately lowered his voice.

“He said, ‘The rookie is going to ask about Dohyeon, right? Then tell him to come have breakfast. I’ll explain when he gets here.’”

What kind of person does that?

He knew I was going to ask, and he still just told me to come have breakfast?

“Is that all? Is he hurt?”

“Hmm… Yeah. I don’t know. Why don’t you go ask him yourself?”

“What the hell happened yesterday?”

“Who knows?”

The more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed.

But even when I stared at him, he merely lowered his eyebrows and shrugged.

Well, I supposed I’d find out what happened even if I had to grab Team Leader Yong by the collar.

“Understood. Do I have to go right now?”

“Yes! I was actually on my way to your room to give you the message.”

“Thank you.”

I dipped my head in thanks and was about to run off in the direction he had come from when Jeong Dohyeon stopped me.

“Wait, wait! Do you even know where you’re supposed to go?”

“Isn’t it the company cafeteria? I saw it yesterday.”

“That’s exactly why I called you back. It’s not there. Here, go to this place.”

What he handed me was a note.

There was an address written on it.

He could’ve just sent it to me in a message……

Ah.

He didn’t have my number.

“Thank you.”

“Eh, it’s nothing. See you later, okay? Thanks for yesterday.”

He left me confused right up until the end.

Did he remember yesterday or not?

What the hell was going on with him?

The address he had given me was in Seoul.

Wait.

You could leave this company?

After stopping another employee to ask for directions, I took the elevator and finally managed to make my way up to the lobby.

‘It really is a lobby.’

Since there were dormitories and even a cafeteria inside the company, I had assumed it was the kind of company that locked all its employees inside and made them work without ever letting them leave.

When I opened the door and stepped outside, I found myself facing a main road.

Across the street was a bank, beside it a department store, and even a subway station.

To top it all off, it was an area I knew.

‘What kind of horror-story company is located next to a subway station?’

It was so absurd that I could hardly believe it.

But after walking a few steps and looking back, the place that had undoubtedly been Daecheonmyeong’s lobby had transformed into a completely ordinary building, like any of the countless others found throughout the city.

Still feeling as though I were dreaming, I went down into a completely ordinary subway station, took a completely ordinary subway train, and emerged onto a completely ordinary street.

‘I think it’s this way. But why this place?’

The location displayed on my phone’s map was so unexpected that it made me wonder whether this could really be my destination.

Even so, I had no choice but to keep walking.

“Oh, you’re finally here. What took you so long? The sun’s already up.”

“That’s why I told you I should go get Boss myself.”

Apparently I had come to the right place, because some familiar faces greeted me.

Team Leader Yong, Myeong Haebin, and……

“Why are you here? How did you get here?”

Jeong Dohyeon.

But this one had his hair neatly combed down, wore thick-framed glasses, and kept his pale lips firmly pressed together.

“I came with the Team Leader…… Ah, they already told me. I heard you had a pretty rough time yesterday.”

The polite way he nodded was completely different from the man I had just seen.

What the hell was this?

The Truman Show?

I was so confused that I couldn’t even shake the hand he held out to me.

Then Team Leader Yong slapped me on the shoulder.

“Hahaha, you saw him, didn’t you? You really did!”

“Team Leader. Don’t tell me……”

“No, it was funny! Besides, we had to call you over anyway!”

Was I the only one who had no idea what was going on?

My fingers twitched restlessly, itching to grab Team Leader Yong by the collar right then and there.

Jeong Dohyeon sensed my mood and hurriedly clarified the situation.

“I’m sorry. It seems my brother and the Team Leader decided to play a prank on you. The person you saw earlier wasn’t wearing glasses, right?”

“Your…… brother?”

“Yes. I have a twin brother. The person you met is Jeong Dohan. I’m Jeong Dohyeon.”

Jeong Dohyeon took my hand, clearly embarrassed and genuinely apologetic.

A twin brother.

That had never even crossed my mind.

No wonder his personality had seemed so different from the Jeong Dohyeon I knew.

“I was really worried about you. I had no idea what happened to you after you left early.”

“Well, I was immediately expelled from the horror story. I got lucky. I couldn’t get back inside afterward either, so I waited for quite a while…… Ah, I was the one who took Hanmu back to the company yesterday. Don’t you remember?”

Yesterday?

No.

I didn’t remember anything.

I had completely passed out before I could even finish watching the sun rise.

Team Leader Yong, without the slightest hint of shame, threw his arms around Jeong Dohyeon’s and my shoulders.

“Hey, sorry, sorry. I’m buying today to make up for it!”

Well.

What mattered was that no one had died or suffered any serious injuries.

All three of them looked just as completely recovered as I was.

Even Team Leader Yong’s hands were completely healed.

But the place where he was supposedly treating us to a meal was nothing more than……

“If we were going to eat at Kimbap Heaven, you could’ve just called me to the company cafeteria.”

“It’s the only place open at this hour. There isn’t even a hangover soup restaurant around here. What’s wrong? Are you a picky eater?”

And he had the nerve to act offended.

Well, since I’d come all the way here, I could at least accept the meal he was paying for.

As soon as we settled down together by a window overlooking the street outside, Team Leader Yong raised his hand.

“Boss! Four servings of jeyuk over here!”

“We don’t even get to choose what we eat?”

“Our Team Leader is always like this. Haha……”

“I apologize for him, Boss!”

The other two seemed completely used to Team Leader Yong’s behavior and tried to placate me, while he simply laughed as though he had expected exactly that reaction.

“So, what did you think?”

“About what?”

“You survived and came back from a horror story. And on top of that, you completed it on your first try? I’m telling you, that’s not easy even for a veteran.”

“I think even if our team had gone in, it would’ve taken us at least three or four days.”

Really?

Ahem.

Team Leader Yong’s words weren’t always exactly the most reliable, but if even Jeong Dohyeon was saying it……

“Do you always end up this badly injured?”

“Well, yeah. This time was pretty mild.”

“Besides, there were quite a few opportunities to escape. You could leave early, and there were also two opportunities during dismissal time.”

Now that I thought about it, that was true.

If I hadn’t insisted on cleaning the horror story and had simply focused on escaping from it, maybe holding out until school dismissal wouldn’t have been that difficult.

Come to think of it.

“I mean the injuries from yesterday. They were completely healed. Is it always like that?”

“To be exact, it happens when you sleep in a ‘company dormitory bed.’ There was even someone who tried to dismantle one of the company beds and sell it.”

“Did he succeed?”

“Of course not. They say he didn’t even manage to get it out of the room before he was caught.”

What nerve.

Trying to drag an individual king-size bed down that incredibly long hallway and get it out of there.

“Well, there are cases where even the bed can’t heal everything, but you don’t have to worry about that for now.”

“Anyway, as long as you don’t die, everything will be fine. Even your arm grew back in an instant, Boss.”

I see.

No, wait.

Being surrounded by these people was starting to make even me lose my sense of danger.

“I doubt ‘as long as you don’t die, everything will be fine’ is a normal way of thinking.”

“It’s fine. Once you’ve worked here for a while, you’ll get used to it too.”

What kind of people were these?

“Here are your four servings of jeyuk~!”

“The food’s here. Take it.”

As we talked, true to Kimbap Heaven’s speed, four plates of rice topped with freshly prepared jeyuk were placed in front of us one after another, still steaming.

The taste was fairly ordinary.

But it was hot, sweet and spicy, and above all else, it was normal food.

That alone was moving.

‘It’s delicious.’

Unable to withstand the hunger that had suddenly hit me, I was devouring the rice with nothing but my spoon when a thick hand lightly tapped the table in front of me.

“You asked why I made you come all the way here, right? Look over there.”

Team Leader Yong pointed out the window.

Across the street stood an old building made of brick and concrete, beside an open iron gate.

And the name of the building was written there.

Yes.

It had been strange from the beginning.

From the moment I entered the address Jeong Dohan had given me into my phone, I had wondered why Team Leader Yong had insisted on calling me specifically here.

It was a place I didn’t want to return to of my own free will.

[Hwaae High School]

Apparently, it was right around the time students arrived for school.

Students in uniform entered the school laughing, complaining, or fooling around with their friends.

It was completely different from what I remembered.

It looked like nothing more than a perfectly ordinary scene of students arriving at a perfectly ordinary school.

“What do you think? It’s different at night, isn’t it? If we’d left that horror story alone, it would’ve kept growing stronger until it eventually devoured even students who knew absolutely nothing about it.”

“When you say it would’ve devoured them……”

“One day, they would’ve woken up and felt that something was wrong with the school. They would’ve wandered around without understanding anything until they died. And no matter how many dozens or hundreds of missing-person posters were put up, no one would ever find them, so in the end, they would’ve been written off as runaways.”

Just hearing about it was horrifying.

That school wasn’t a place where a human being could survive.

Much less someone who ended up trapped there without knowing anything at all.

“Boss, isn’t that Seryeong over there?”

Myeong Haebin pointed somewhere on the other side of the window.

There was Lee Seryeong, the same girl we had seen inside the horror story, entering the school beside another student wearing a name tag that read [Im Jinseo].

Her face wasn’t pale or shrouded in shadows, nor was she trembling with fear.

It was a face full of life and warmth.

She looked like a completely different person from the student we had seen inside the horror story.

“So she really was a real student.”

“I’m sure she doesn’t even know. She has no idea what consequences that game of hide-and-seek alone caused.”

Those students would never know.

They would never know how dangerous their school had become or how much blood had been spilled to return it to normal.

“They don’t need to know.”

After all, they say ignorance is bliss.

Seeing the real Lee Seryeong alive and smiling without knowing anything at all gave me a strange feeling.

It was something I had never felt in my entire life……

Satisfaction, perhaps?

“There are other reasons, of course, but this is what makes working here worthwhile. Right? Huh?”

“I see.”

“What a dry guy. You’re that… V?”

“You should ask him if he’s a T, Team Leader.”

“Yeah, that.”

A meal after work, watching peaceful everyday life unfold as the morning sunlight streamed in.

Maybe this company wasn’t so bad after all.

“All right.”

***

“You go on ahead. We have to head in the opposite direction.”

“Aren’t you coming back with us?”

“We still have a few things to take care of outside. See you at the company, Hanmu.”

After finishing breakfast, we split up at the subway station, and only Myeong Haebin and I returned to the company.

We had entered through the door of a completely ordinary building that people were constantly passing through, but Daecheonmyeong’s lobby appeared before us.

“How strange. From the outside, it looked like a completely ordinary building.”

“That’s because you have your ID card. If you lose it, things get veeeery complicated. Want to know what happens?”

“No.”

I had absolutely no intention of going looking for trouble.

Come to think of it, I had been following Myeong Haebin as though it were the most natural thing in the world, but……

“Where are we going now?”

“To our office! Do you remember what I told you before?”

Before going to orientation with Team Leader Yong, I vaguely remembered Myeong Haebin mentioning in passing that our office wasn’t ready yet.

She had also said something similar in that cafeteria.

“Is it finished now?”

“Yes! Now we have our own space too! Although for the time being, we’re the only employees.”

How strange.

Still, a new office had to be much better than an old one.

Myeong Haebin walked down a hallway where there was hardly anyone around and stopped in front of an iron door.

“Hmm… Don’t be disappointed, okay?”

“What reason would I have to be disappointed? It’s not like an office is that important to us anyway.”

After all, we cleaners mainly worked out in the field.

We weren’t going to spend all day sitting there, so there was no reason to be disappointed.

Creeeak.

The door opened with a squeal of hinges that completely contradicted the claim that everything was ready.

A moment later, the fluorescent lights flickered on all at once and illuminated the place.

“……It’s spacious.”

“Haha. Right?”

Extremely.

At one end of the office were a few lockers and some shelves stocked with cleaning supplies that didn’t require electricity.

And that was it.

There was absolutely nothing else.

No desks.

No chairs.

No, there was simply nothing.

That was why it looked so spacious.

I was starting to feel like taking back what I had said about this company maybe not being so bad.