I Became a Professional Horror Story Cleaner

“Damn it. It keeps getting more fucked up.”

“Uh…… yes?”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

I lightly waved my hand at Park Hyeonho, who had turned toward me as if he thought I was referring to him.

I was talking about this park.

At first, only minor anomalies occurred. Things like something watching us or visual changes taking place.

But now they were blatantly interfering with us and getting on our nerves. Just a moment ago, a fishing line had shot out from the path, which had turned into a muddy mess, and wrapped itself around my ankle.

I had just gotten it off.

The fishing line had cut my ankle and it was bleeding, but the wound wasn’t too deep. Just enough to be annoying.

“Mr. Park Hyeonho.”

“Yes?!”

Why did he jump so much just from being called?

There was only one thing I wanted to ask him.

“When did you hurt your foot?”

Since he was walking behind me, it had taken me a while to notice.

The back of his right sneaker was covered in dried blood.

“Ah, this……. It was because of the duck.”

“Did it bite you?”

I didn’t remember it having the chance to do that. When I frowned, Park Hyeonho flinched and hurriedly waved his hands.

“No. It wasn’t that……. When I stepped off the stones. I backed away because the duck startled me, and I think I got caught on something.”

“Can I see it?”

Park Hyeonho nodded somewhat awkwardly.

The back of his sneaker looked as though a chunk had been bitten off, leaving a deep cut, and there was a torn wound on his heel.

“Didn’t it hurt?”

“A-A little…… I guess. I’m fine. It was because I wasn’t careful……. I’ll be more careful from now on.”

Given the location of the wound, it would probably come into contact with the water every time we crossed the stones, but there was nothing we could do about it.

There was something capable of cutting through a sneaker in an instant.

The pond was definitely dangerous.

“Ah, one more thing.”

“Yes.”

“When you entered this park, did anything strange happen?”

I had been thinking about it for a while.

Until they found us, those two hadn’t even considered that this place might be a horror story. They had simply thought they had taken the wrong path.

“You mean us getting lost?”

“No. Other than that. There should have been something like an environmental campaign.”

Park Hyeonho finally seemed to remember.

“You mean the booth we passed earlier?”

“Yes. It should have stopped you.”

“Uh……. Nothing special happened.”

Was it because they had entered in the middle of the loop?

Until now, I had considered the lap where the booth appeared to be lap zero, the one that showed the park without any anomalies.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you seem to be very lucky.”

“……You’re joking, right?”

Had I put my foot in my mouth?

Telling someone who had just lost his friend that he was lucky……

But Park Hyeonho was still alive. Wasn’t that enough?

Even amid that thick fog and all the anomalies, the store was still open as usual.

“We’re here, but aren’t we unable to buy anything?”

“I thought of something. For now, grab a few things. But not too much.”

“Then what should I……?”

“Sit quietly here and don’t cause any trouble.”

I pointed at the bench in front of the store, and Park Hyeonho obediently sat down without protesting.

Since we didn’t know what the creature would demand in exchange for the products, we decided to buy only the bare essentials and in minimal quantities.

“Three sports drinks, three breads, one bag of candy……. Why did you put in candy?”

“You said your blood sugar was low. Those are the best for that.”

There was nothing I could do in the face of Myeong Haebin’s completely innocent gaze.

“……Fine.”

One bag of candy shouldn’t drastically change the price.

Without even a basket, I loaded my arms with the products and placed them one after another on the counter in front of the container’s bars.

Something with intensely red eyes murmured from behind the bars.

“What is it saying?”

“I still can’t understand it.”

I had expected as much, so I didn’t even feel disappointed.

“Is there any difference from last time?”

“Uh……. No. I think it’s exactly the same.”

Last time, we had brought one bread and one bottle of water.

If it was still saying exactly the same thing now, with more than three times as many products, did that mean it didn’t matter how much we took?

To check, I tried opening the door of the nearest refrigerator, but it didn’t budge an inch.

The same thing happened with the small snacks lined up there. It was as though they had been glued down.

“Looks like we can’t buy anything else besides these……. Then maybe we can buy something else?”

“What?”

Myeong Haebin tilted her head, curiously watching me move back and forth.

“Ask the owner if we can also buy the way out of here.”

Myeong Haebin didn’t even have to ask again.

The intensely red eyes staring directly at me gave a small nod.

“■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■?”

“What the owner is saying hasn’t changed from before, right?”

“Uh…… Yes! Although I still have no idea what it’s saying anyway…….”

“I think we can decipher it.”

I had been thinking about it ever since Myeong Haebin tried to repeat it and said it sounded like an alien language.

If the store sold products, that meant its owner had to be speaking.

If it weren’t selling anything, it would have no reason to speak.

“Ask again.”

“But I already told youuuuuuu…….”

“I know. I know it sounds strange. It doesn’t matter if it takes a while. Try repeating it to me slowly, one part at a time.”

I sat down on the ground beside the store container and picked up a branch I had broken off earlier.

Myeong Haebin pouted, but soon tried communicating with the store owner again.

“Excuse me. Could you repeat that one more time? What do we have to do to buy these products and also the way out of here?”

“■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■?”

Myeong Haebin concentrated so hard that she practically pressed her nose against the bars.

“Karah…… ya…… eoreonreung…….”

I wrote down on the ground exactly what she pronounced, and the result was as follows.

[How many steps must the customer take to complete one full lap around the park?]

Park Hyeonho, who had been sitting on the bench, slowly came over and looked at the words written in the dirt.

“Can I ask what this is……?”

Instead of answering him, I asked Myeong Haebin.

“Were there spaces between the words?”

“Why are you suddenly asking about spa……?”

“Yes! There were! How did you know?”

Myeong Haebin interrupted Park Hyeonho’s question.

I found it.

“There was one here. And also here, and…….”

He drew lines to mark each separation.

[Phrase distorted using the inversion system]

Only then did Park Hyeonho, who was looking at the letters from the other side, seem to realize something.

“This part here…… is it made up of inverted characters?”

“Exactly.”

The clue had been there from the very beginning.

The gate opposite the West Gate was the East Gate, and the strange name we had seen until now was nothing more than ‘East Gate’ written using that inversion system.

“Even so, there are still a lot of parts that don’t make sense.”

“It’s not simply a matter of reading it backward.”

Although the distorted name for ‘East Gate’ was short, certain rules were applied even to it.

The order of the phrase is reversed, from the end to the beginning, and letters whose strokes allow it are also flipped vertically.

Letters that become unrecognizable when flipped are left unchanged.

In Korean, if you first reverse the order of the two syllables that make up ‘East Gate’ and then flip the components that allow vertical inversion, you get that strange word that appeared on the signs.

Some Korean consonants retained a valid shape after being inverted, while others stopped resembling recognizable characters and therefore remained unchanged.

Those were the rules of the language used by the store owner.

“So, if we apply those same rules to the beginning of the sentence, we get this.”

[The customer]

The letters I traced on the ground had turned into a word with a perfectly clear meaning.

“That really turns into that? ……You’re not actually a cleaner, are you?”

“I am. Are cleaners supposed to be idiots?”

“Ah, shit. I didn’t mean it like that…….”

Park Hyeonho scratched his head awkwardly.

“Then let’s finish deciphering it.”

Beneath the sentence I had written first, I began transcribing the message rearranged according to those rules.

However, the farther I got, the deeper my frown became.

[How many steps must the customer take to complete one full lap around the park?]

“That question doesn’t make any sense.”

It was Myeong Haebin.

She seemed to have realized it too.

“You can walk slowly, run, and there are also the stones for crossing the pond! It doesn’t give us any conditions and just asks how many steps it is! How are we supposed to get it right?!”

In other words, it was an absurd question.

Or maybe not?

I got up from the ground and stood in front of the bars.

“Four thousand one hundred and twenty-four steps.”

With a rustle, the objects we had piled up transformed and appeared inside a black plastic bag.

The payment had been accepted.

“You got it right? How?”

Myeong Haebin opened the bag in confusion and, after confirming that it contained the three drinks, three breads, and the bag of candy, looked at me.

“I counted them.”

“Counted what?”

“The steps.”

“When?!”

“When we were doing laps earlier.”

The question didn’t provide any conditions.

So I thought maybe it was asking for the actual number of steps I had taken to complete one lap around this park.

Well, if that wasn’t it, we were screwed.

“That makes no sense! You said yourself that this park was almost three kilometers!”

“And how do you think I knew it was three kilometers?”

None of the signs in the park indicated a distance of three kilometers.

The truth was, even while I was doing it, I thought it was crazy, but I never imagined it would end up being useful.

I rummaged through the bag.

Only the products we had bought were inside.

More precisely, only the things that had a physical form were there.

“Haebin…….”

I was about to ask another question for Myeong Haebin to relay when a hand suddenly reached through the bars and grabbed my wrist tightly.

That hand seemed to be made of condensed smoke and possessed an icy temperature impossible for a human being.

Then it spoke clearly enough for me to understand.

“It’s already too late.”

‘It’s already too late?’

“You mean there’s no longer any way to get out?”

“You must throw away the trash to escape.”

I blinked.

“Can we eat this?”

I looked away from the container.

The one who had spoken was Park Hyeonho.

When I hurriedly turned back toward the container, the window was firmly shut, as if it had never opened in the first place.

“Hey. What did you mean by what you just said?”

I struck the bars, but there was no sign of them opening again.

“What’s wrong? Didn’t we already buy everything?”

“No. That creature just…….”

“What did it say? I couldn’t hear it clearly.”

I stopped and thought for a moment.

In this repetitive loop, there was only one indicator that could determine whether it was already too late.

The water-level gauge that kept rising.

‘This horror story is Grade 5. Before the water-level gauge rose, there must have been a simple way to escape, but now that method is gone.’

There was no point telling them that now.

“No. It was nothing.”

Instead, I shifted the conversation toward Park Hyeonho, who was holding a bottle of sports drink.

“You can drink that.”

It should be fine.

After all, we had bought it legitimately.

Knowing nothing about any of that, Park Hyeonho drank the sports drink.

“It’s warm, but well…….”

“Wow, Boss! Looks like we can actually drink this!”

“What do you mean, this? You guys…… did you use me to……?”

“Nothing happened to you, so it’s fine, right?”

And so we reached a conclusion.

The products bought at this store could be eaten and drunk.

Considering that it would have been impossible to even make it this far if we hadn’t deciphered the meaning of the inverted ‘East Gate’ and, above all, if we didn’t have Myeong Haebin acting as a sort of creature translator, it was quite a valuable discovery.

I took the bottle of sports drink Park Hyeonho was holding and poured its contents down my parched throat.

It had that slightly viscous texture and sweet scent characteristic of sports drinks, but I could feel vitality returning to my entire body.

‘I feel like I’ve come back to life.’

Seriously.

That was how comforting it felt.

“Uwaaah, I’m so happy…….”

Myeong Haebin had tears welling in her eyes after completely draining the remaining sports drink and stuffing a huge bite of a peanut butter sandwich into her mouth.

“I-Is it really that serious?”

Park Hyeonho looked bewildered.

Hmm.

Maybe I could tell him now.

“I lied to you earlier. This is our seventeenth lap.”

“Seventeen……. Seventeen……. 51 kilometers?!”

Leaving the completely pale Park Hyeonho behind, I stuffed a peanut butter sandwich into my completely empty stomach.

It was moving.

“Why did you lie?”

“I thought you’d panic.”

“Then why are you telling me now?”

“So you can prepare yourself mentally.”

No one knew how much longer this loop would last.

But I thought it was better to make it clear now than to have to listen to him complain every lap, asking how much farther we had to go.

After thinking for a moment, Park Hyeonho asked cautiously.

“……I saw Minhyeong’s body disappear. Will we be able to find her again?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Ah, no…… it’s just that you seem to know quite a lot about this…….”

I looked him straight in the eyes.

There was desperation in them.

I could also see that he was doing everything he could not to fall apart.

I wasn’t used to horror stories either, but I did know the answer to that question.

“Mr. Park Hyeonho…….”

I remembered the things we had left behind in the horror stories we had gone through.

The people who had been trapped in those places, which had now disappeared as though they had never existed in this world.

“You’d better focus only on getting out of here.”

“……You’ve walked 51 kilometers too.”

“We’re getting out. That’s exactly why we’re recovering our strength.”

The achievement in the app hadn’t changed, but neither had my attitude toward Park Hyeonho.

He was an ordinary person who knew nothing and who could even be a hindrance at times.

But that didn’t mean he deserved to die.

Park Hyeonho watched me for a few moments, then put the bread he had been about to open back into the black bag.

“Aren’t you going to eat it?”

“We’d better save it just in case.”

Those words sounded as though he was saying he wanted to live.

I stuffed the last of the four peanut butter sandwiches into my mouth and stood up.

“Let’s go.”

The truth was that the amount of food had been terribly insufficient.

We had barely refueled the bare minimum.

But at least we had been able to refuel.

“Boss, are you sure you don’t want to eat more? Really?”

Myeong Haebin, whose cheeks were also puffed out as she chewed the last peanut butter sandwich, asked me with unclear pronunciation.

“We don’t know what kind of question it’ll ask us next time.”

This time, we had gotten lucky and it had asked us something I had already figured out, but we had no idea what would happen next time.

However, on the next lap, we discovered there was no need to worry about that.

“Uh, this…….”

“Closing the store is cheating! Is it really not opening? Ah, seriously!”

The store had closed.

The products had been covered with a waterproof tarp, and although Myeong Haebin shook the container window, there was no sign that it would open.

‘Good thing we saved some food.’

But……

Two bottles of sports drink, two breads, and one bag of candy.

How much longer could we hold out with that?