I Became a Professional Horror Story Cleaner

Along with the pungent smell of decomposition beginning to set in, I was suddenly hit by an intense scent of blood that I hadn’t noticed before.

‘Do these hands attack?’

That didn’t seem to be the case.

They were simply the hands of dead people, swaying irregularly more or less at eye level.

“Hanmu! What are you doing in there?!”

Above the swaying hands, I briefly caught sight of Jeong Dohyeon’s face.

Jeong Dohan was there too.

I asked Jeong Dohan.

“Why did you come this way? Why didn’t you go through the staff door?”

“You said you were going to give us the sticker. Obviously, I had to follow the guy who said he was going to give me something, right?”

“My brother is talking nonsense. That door wouldn’t open. It seems there’s some condition for being able to enter.”

Considering Team Leader Jo and Seo Gitae had gone in through there, there was clearly some method.

But we, who had no information, had no choice but to enter the exhibition hall.

“And why are you in there?”

“I’ll find my phone and come right out.”

Where did it go?

I thought it would be easy to distinguish because it was black, but since they all had similar shapes, it was difficult to find.

Outside the exhibit, the docent and Jeong Dohan were arguing.

“He says he lost something inside the exhibit. Shouldn’t you help him find it?”

“Human Exhibition: On the Infinity of the Human Body is an exhibition that explores the theme of ‘the infinity of humanity’ and expresses it through art.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Our exhibition primarily uses human men and women between the ages of twenty and thirty, with the goal of pushing the beauty of the human body to its limits…….”

It didn’t seem possible to have a normal conversation with him.

Jeong Dohyeon seemed worried because I was inside the exhibit.

“Hyung, this isn’t going to work. I’ll go in and quickly find Hanmu’s phone.”

“Hey, Jeong Dohyeon!”

At that moment, one of the hands touched my shoulder.

‘No way. They were all at eye level…….’

When had they lowered themselves?

Like spiders descending on their threads, the hands had lowered themselves to shoulder height.

Ignoring Jeong Dohan’s attempt to stop him, Jeong Dohyeon entered the exhibit to help me and pointed in one direction.

“The hand from before was black, right? I think I caught a glimpse of it over there.”

“……Dohyeon. I think you’d better get out.”

It was an instinctive bad feeling.

“But Hanmu’s phone is over there. Aren’t you going to take it back?”

I turned my head toward where Jeong Dohyeon was looking.

The black hand, as if realizing it had been discovered, jumped to the floor.

“Shit!”

Forgetting my bad feeling, I took a step toward the center of [Ten Thousand Left Hands] to retrieve my phone first.

At that instant, the ‘hands’ grabbed hold of me.

Stiff joints, bones, and flesh completely devoid of body heat began feeling my face.

Callused fingertips brushed across my eyelids before sliding down my cheeks.

‘Disgusting!’

The more I tried to force my way forward, the worse the situation became.

The hands, carefully arranged to fit within that supposed work of art, began pressing down on my shoulders and wrapping around my waist, immobilizing me with brutal strength.

“Give me back my phone before you run away!”

I knew shouting at a thief to return what it had stolen was stupid, but it was the only thing I could say while those hands kept me trapped.

“I’ve got it!”

Jeong Dohyeon, who was less restrained than I was, lunged at the black hand.

The black hand, trapped between his hands, writhed like a fish freshly pulled from the water, trying to escape.

“I only need the phone. Just the phone!”

“This hand is stronger than it looks…….”

Slip.

The moment Jeong Dohyeon let go with one hand to try to snatch the phone away, the black hand escaped his grasp.

And as if that weren’t enough, it shot out of the exhibit without even looking back.

“Sorry.”

“……You have nothing to apologize for, Dohyeon.”

It was my fault for stupidly letting my phone get stolen in the first place.

After the black hand disappeared around the corner of a tall partition, the threat surrounding us became much more obvious.

“We’d better think about how to get out of here.”

Although we were already right in the middle of [Ten Thousand Left Hands], with dozens of hands gripping us so tightly that we couldn’t even move our feet.

Outside, the docent continued explaining details about the works to Jeong Dohan that no one had asked about.

“The hand you are currently observing belonged to a thirty-four-year-old man who managed a chicken restaurant.”

“The hand on the left belonged to a twenty-one-year-old woman. If you observe the gel nail polish on her fingertips…….”

Explanation?

Although I had barely had time to read them, I remembered the app’s instructions.

It is recommended that you listen carefully to the audio guide and appreciate the works according to its instructions.

The audio guide.

If there were works on display, there had to be one somewhere.

I twisted around, trying to shake off even one of the hands clinging all over my body, and shouted to Jeong Dohan.

“Dohan! Do you see an audio guide out there?”

“You mean the QR code? This?”

Jeong Dohan pointed to a metal plaque embedded in the floor.

Beside the plaque bearing the name [Ten Thousand Left Hands], there was an engraved QR code.

“Is that the audio guide?”

“I think so! Urgh!”

Jeong Dohyeon answered with difficulty while dodging a hand that was trying to latch onto his face.

As if I had ever gone to an exhibition before to know how those things worked.

However……

“It says the device isn’t compatible!”

Jeong Dohan tried scanning the QR code with his phone and ended up turning the screen directly toward me to show it.

Why?

Was there some special condition for using it?

Or had we gotten it wrong?

With half his face covered by hands, Jeong Dohyeon seemed to remember something.

“Hanmu, before going through the turnstile…… didn’t Team Leader Jo grab something?”

“Wasn’t it the key to enter the staff area?!”

He had taken something out of the ticket booth, and when I checked it afterward, there had only been an empty basket……

……Ah.

“I don’t think they would’ve left a key for accessing the staff area just lying around in the ticket booth.”

What if what was supposed to be inside that basket wasn’t a key for opening the staff-only entrance, but an audio guide capable of recognizing those QR codes?

“Wow. So he took the audio guide. On purpose. To stop us from being able to keep up with them.”

Jeong Dohan let out an incredulous laugh as he realized it.

Those bastards weren’t satisfied with doing just one thing.

“They completely screwed us over.”

I couldn’t pry away the hands that continued stubbornly feeling all over my body.

Shit.

If I had [Dictionary], I could at least look up this work and try to find some way to clear it.

At that moment, the docent outside made Jeong Dohan an offer.

“Do you require a paid guide?”

“A paid guide?”

“Yes. If you pay a small fee, we can provide you with a much more detailed explanation of the works.”

The exhibit, which had been slowly descending as it felt around my body, eventually reached my hand.

Its fingers traced the outline of my nails and the veins on the back of my hand, felt along my joints, and then shamelessly intertwined its fingers with mine.

Squeeze.

I felt a slight pressure around my wrist.

One of the thin wires supporting [Ten Thousand Left Hands] had hooked around my left wrist and was beginning to tighten around it.

It was as if it were very slowly sawing through it.

So this was how they had been cut off.

“Urgh……!”

I already knew the pain of losing a wrist.

They say a pain you already know is even more terrifying.

Just as the saying went, my left hand began trembling uncontrollably.

“Hanmu! Your wrist!”

Jeong Dohan, whose gaze had been alternating between the docent and me, finally shouted.

“Yes! I need it! I need the paid guide!”

The moment he accepted the offer, the docent extended his palm toward Jeong Dohan.

“The fee for the paid guide to [Ten Thousand Left Hands] is one tooth. Payment must be made in advance.”

What?

At that absurd demand, Jeong Dohan clenched his fist.

“These creatures always pull the same shit.”

There was no time.

The flesh of my wrist, unable to withstand the wire digging deeper and deeper into it, began to split open.

However, for some strange reason, not a single drop of blood fell.

Even so, I couldn’t exactly tell Jeong Dohan to just rip out a damn tooth and hand it over.

He had no reason to go that far for me.

But Jeong Dohan looked directly at me and smiled.

“Hanmu, you’d better give me that sticker. Got it?”

I watched as Jeong Dohan turned away and brought his thumb to one of his lower incisors.

Crack.

It was the sound of the tooth, firmly held in place by the gum and root, twisting as it was forcibly ripped from its socket.

When I realized what he had just done, my mouth fell open on its own.

‘……He’s insane.’

Had he just ripped out a healthy tooth?

By himself?

The ivory-colored piece of bone that Jeong Dohan had torn out by twisting it, still with bits of flesh attached, fell onto the docent’s palm.

“Give me the paid guide.”

Jeong Dohan’s lips were completely stained red, and blood was running from his mouth.

However, the docent didn’t seem to care and slipped the incisor into his pocket.

“Would you like to begin the paid guide for [Ten Thousand Left Hands]?”

“Yes!”

“[Ten Thousand Left Hands] was created using the upper limbs of an unspecified number of people. In order to display the unique aesthetics of each hand, we are constantly collecting new hands.”

“Is that all?”

“[Ten Thousand Left Hands] does not use hands that lack artistic value.”

Artistic value?

Was there anything artistic about cutting off ordinary people’s hands, cleaning them up until they looked nice, and hanging them all together?

What fucking insanity.

But we had no choice but to cling to that clue.

The hands also began descending along Jeong Dohyeon’s arms.

“Hanmu, don’t worry about me!”

“How am I supposed to not worry?!”

By what criteria did they determine that ‘artistic value’?

All the hands displayed in [Ten Thousand Left Hands] had been amputated extremely cleanly and probably belonged to dead people.

What else did they have in common?

‘Maybe……?’

I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t about to hand over my hand to this damn exhibit without at least trying something.

With my hand still trembling, I rummaged through the bag of cleaning tools.

It wasn’t easy because the hands from the exhibit kept grabbing me to restrict my movements, but I finally managed to pull out a metal scraper.

Then, the docent who had been standing in front of Jeong Dohan silently approached me.

“It is a work of art. Please treat it with care.”

He was telling me not to damage the exhibit.

“Don’t worry.”

I had no intention of doing something as insane as damaging a work of art in the middle of an exhibition.

Instead of attacking the hands holding me captive, I aimed the sharp edge of the scraper at the back of my own left hand.

Slash!

Had I misjudged the amount of force?

The skin on the back of my hand split open until the bone was nearly exposed, and blood gushed from the wound.

Then, as if they had just witnessed something disgusting, the hands clinging to me began slowly pulling away.

‘It worked!’

Another characteristic they all had in common.

Not one of those hands had any wounds or blood.

If you couldn’t even sell damaged fruit, how could they use a horribly split-open, blood-soaked hand as a work of art?

“Dohyeon! I think I found the solution!”

It was better to suffer a cut than lose a hand.

Surely Jeong Dohyeon would understand―.

Hmm?

“How did you do that?”

The hands were also pulling away from Jeong Dohyeon on their own, even though only moments ago he had been receiving the exhibit’s enthusiastic attention alongside me.

“I have an idea why……. But let’s get out first.”

The hands no longer showed any interest in us.

Perhaps they had been feeling us all over precisely to determine whether or not we possessed artistic value.

We pushed aside the hands that no longer seemed to welcome us and managed to escape the exhibit.

Jeong Dohan was waiting for us with his arms crossed and a triumphant expression.

“See? I told you it was dangerous to go alone.”

“I don’t want to hear that from someone who still has blood dripping from his mouth.”

“But you got out thanks to me. Aren’t you going to thank me?”

“……Thank you?”

While Jeong Dohan complained that he practically had to force me to thank him, Jeong Dohyeon pulled his mouth wide open.

“Say ah.”

“Wait, wait! It hurts!”

Ignoring Jeong Dohan as he jumped around in pain, Jeong Dohyeon took out a handkerchief and stuffed it into the gap left by the incisor.

I only caught a glimpse of it from the side, but it looked like he had pushed the incisor inward until he forcibly snapped it out, tearing his gum in the process, so it was bleeding quite a lot.

“Hanmu, is your hand okay?”

“I can use it.”

The truth was, it was bothersome.

The area around the cut was beginning to swell and throb.

Even so, it wasn’t pain I couldn’t endure.

For something like this, tearing up a disposable cloth and wrapping it around the wound was enough.

“At least I’m glad you’re unharmed, Dohyeon. Although I don’t know why you didn’t end up becoming a target.”

“Well, I guess he got lucky~. Right?”

Jeong Dohyeon glared at his brother and raised his left arm.

“I probably didn’t meet the requirements. I barely have any strength in my left hand.”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you like to take a closer look at my left hand?”

Looking at it carefully, I noticed that the part of his palm corresponding to the area between his middle and ring fingers was especially thin.

Jeong Dohyeon slowly closed that hand and opened it again.

“It’s a rare disease. It looks normal from the outside, but the muscles in one arm gradually atrophy.”

Ah.

I had thought it was strange that he had let go of the black hand so easily earlier.

Was that why?

At the vending machine in Hwaae High School, even while working together with Myeong Haebin, he had struggled to properly restrain Team Leader Yong.

“Bah, it doesn’t cause me too many problems in everyday life. And thanks to that, that thing couldn’t catch me, right? Right?”

“……Yes.”

As expected of his twin brother, Jeong Dohan already knew and didn’t seem to think too much of it.

The docent caught up with us at his characteristic pace, neither too fast nor too slow, and spoke in his usual neutral voice.

“What a pity. [Ten Thousand Left Hands] is a magnificent work.”

Magnificent, my ass.

We still weren’t finished with Exhibition Hall 1.

And I still hadn’t recovered my phone.

As I scanned the hall, something caught my attention.

“Sorry to interrupt your harmonious family conversation.”

“Hmm?”

“Can we go look for my phone?”

Black stains, like traces of soot shed by the black hand, formed a dotted trail leading away through the hall.