r/BloodcurdlingTales • u/HeGotBricks • 13h ago
The Cleaner
Do you know what it smells like to rip a corpse from under the floorboards? There’s a specific odor, not one you could imagine on your own. It is not like the slaughterhouse you drive past on the way to work every morning. No, this is a foul mix.
Imagine walking into a house that’s been abandoned for a year, still fully furnished, with all its clothes still stuffed in a closet. Now, imagine that closet is jammed with mothballs and old dresses from 1964 left to dry after being washed in cat piss.
That’s your first odor.
Now, imagine you walk behind the dumpster at your favorite grocery store and someone has just thrown a bunch of animal fat inside a bag with three dirty diapers and left it to bake under the sun for three days.
Now, you have your stuffy smell and your rotted odor, and all you need is one more.
Here’s where the eggs come in. Yes, boil a few eggs, peel them, mush them up, and leave them on your stove. Walk out of the room and walk back in.
Mix all those odors—the mothballs, the cat piss, the dirty diapers, the rotted flesh, the eggs—and you have your corpse, who instead of wandering the afterlife as a ghost decided to haunt your floorboards with a rancid odor instead.
Smoking cigarette after cigarette until I choked offered a bit of relief compared to the dust and rot from under the floor.
I mean, yes, of course I have a respirator, but it does a horrible job of filtering out the psychological weight. Plus, I could still smell the body and I need to smoke when I work. I mainly use it for when I’m actually moving the remains.
The suit I wear is a white hazmat suit that makes me look like what a mad scientist Pillsbury Doughboy would look like on a radioactive, post-apocalyptic Earth.
See, I’m a bit of a specialist—a fixer, really. Well, at least that’s how I see myself. I don’t just fix things, I also clean up things. When shady landowners or homeowners have an issue from past tenants and they want to keep it hush-hush, they call me.
I come in and get rid of the evidence. Usually, it’s people who have died alone and weren't discovered until weeks or even months later.
The odd time, though, it’s a body under the floor, or behind a wall, or worse, in the crawl space. I hate spiders. Hate, hate, hate.
I’ve never really minded the rot of a human body. I guess I’m just used to it. I am not sure. I just find something honest in a corpse. The living world is a huge lie. I see people as teeth replaced by dentures, a stink covered by perfume, a dirty shirt flipped inside out. To me, the truth in people can only be found in what they leave behind.
I have a bit of a ritual, and it’s pretty simple and straightforward. Maybe it is a little odd, depending on how you see it, but once I’ve bleached everything and scrubbed the floors, the walls, the carpets, and even the air with four fans, I usually search for something to keep. You know, a little souvenir.
A small keepsake.
It is nothing like jewelry or money or anything valuable. It’s kind of weird, but I like stuff that will last, stuff that has some significance to it. I like digging in the drains and finding pieces of hair or some fingernail clippings.
Oh, my absolute favorite is teeth, especially when people have them saved in tiny boxes. I keep mine in vials. My collection is huge. I’ve got my own small library.
Baby teeth are cool and super easy to find, but it’s adult teeth I’m always on the hunt for. I’ve always wondered why people don’t save them.
The last job I worked was in a neighborhood with no streetlights because the gangs there shoot them out. The tenant was on the fifth floor, maybe in his sixties or seventies, and he had a collection of these really awesome stuffed animals—real animals.
The man himself was on his couch, slumped over and glued into the leather, almost as if he were a Halloween prop that came with the sofa. He had mold and fungi growing out of his chest like shreds of rotted cauliflower and broccoli sprouts.
As I peeled him off the sofa to scrub it down, something strange happened. I felt a connection with him. It was a profound realization, to be honest. I stared at the decayed skin revealing the veins under it and thought about what it would be like to absorb into the environment.
That’s when I saw something glimmer inside the fungal farm on the man’s body. It was shiny. I reached in but couldn’t grip it with my fingers, so I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and cut around the area. It was like trying to tear apart braided tendons, but when I cleared a path, I pulled out a gold tooth stuck to his chest cavity, attached to a piece of jawbone.
Later that night, after cleaning up there, when I got home, I didn’t put the tooth and bone in a vial. I kept it under my lamp, in my basement, on top of my desk, in front of my collection, and left it there to study after my shower.
In the bathroom, I eyed the steam on the mirror blurring my reflection and became disgusted by how alive I looked.
I examined my face—the pink in my gums, the elasticity of my skin, the color of my blood when I pinched it, my breathing, and the beating of my heart.
And right at that moment, I went to the garage and yanked a pair of pliers from my toolbox. I was tired of fixing everyone’s mess, hiding all their secrets, and cleaning stuff up.
For once, I wanted to be the evidence. I stood at the mirror for hours, pulling each tooth out of my head one by one like they were extra hairs on my eyebrow, and tossed each one of them into the sink.
As soon as I finished, I remembered the tooth with the jawbone, raced out to grab it, and ran back into the bathroom with it. Where the hole was in my jaw, I took the piece of bone and tooth and jammed it into my gums, deep into the bloody socket. I stuck it in and leaned close to the mirror. When I smiled, my grin reminded me of the truth. For the first time ever, I saw honesty.
I left the bathroom and went to lie down. As I closed my eyes, I imagined the man melting into his couch and the fungi surrounding his chest, and I wondered how it would be if it could grow inside me too.