"Be Careful Whose Messes You Clean Up" (Creepypasta)

when I was 20 I took a job to earn pocket money well making up for my earlier under achievements at the local community college my new employer was one of those full-service residential cleaning companies I won't say which one so to protect the innocent let's just call it clean bro I was one of two types of people who worked the mops for clean bro 20 year old punks who had spent highschool in the bottom of a bomb with myself and 40 year old losers who didn't care how dirty they got during the day so long as they could afford to wash themselves off in cheap beer at night there were also plenty of upstanding folks in the profession but they tended to sign on with companies that cared more about their employees work ethic unless about the kind of documentation that came standard with being born here unlike the competition clean bro exclusively hired dropouts and burnouts because we worked for peanuts and because corporate seemed to have a knack for attracting government scrutiny for both groups then cleaning up other people's messes was something to do while running away from our own everyone came to the job from somewhere a less than ideal and most folks left it for pastors that were no greener cleanup jobs came in a pretty wide variety the most common one was picking up after a kitchen fire some sleep-deprived stay-at-home mom would put dinner on the stove and then nod off on the couch the smoke alarm would blare and give the kids a good fright but everybody would make it out safe the fire department would hose it all down with grey water leaving behind a colossal mess of smoke stain ceilings waterlogged drywall shattered drinking glasses and smashed dishware once the claims adjuster had taken his luck the homeowner would call clean bro and I'd roll up in my company van and company overalls to spend the day scrubbing son off windows prying up cracked tile sucking ashes into the world's most powerful shop vac next day carpenters would swoop in and put the whole thing back better than new with the insurance payout half these houses had nicer kitchens by the time all was said and done and I usually got a pretty good tip for my trouble some of the cleaners refused to work anything worse than a fire rehab or flood restoration but as a young fellow I liked to think that I could stomach anything so I ended up taking a lot of the worst jobs - for example every couple of weeks clean bro got called to work a suicide scene now it's not as bad as you think by the time I pulled up in the van the coroner had picked up the body the cops had asked their questions the forensics team it scraped together whatever evidence they were going to at that point the homeowner was usually left with little more than some bad memories in the sting it was my job to scrub out the stain the more considerate ones left hardly any mess at all choosing the bathtub for their final resting place before cutting their wrists or swallowing a handful of pills sometimes there would be a dark ring revealing the tubs last high-water mark but usually there was no sign at all of what had happened there still the homeowner would normally have me pull out the tub entirely leaving behind a hole that they'd fill with something new I guess they didn't like the idea of taking a shower or bath in the same place wrote love one where a loved one lay dead and decaying for hours days maybe even weeks before being discovered they hired me because in my area a lot of regular contractors can't touch a tub that's had a dead body in it owing to occupational health regulations but as a clean broke cleaner I had all the necessary training and safety gear to touch dirty things some of the dead were less polite though folks who went in bed which included a lot of elderly types taking the natural way out left behind a pretty big mess on the sheets and mattress from the various liquids that tend to exit the body upon death blood and vomit were pretty common editions from the cutters the overdoses respectively the cleanup involved little more than wrapping everything in plastic and hauling it out for a proper biohazardous waste disposal a service clean bro provided for a reasonable fee then there were the really rude people the ones who decided to swallow a bullet because it's quick they tended to take the longest to mop up I'll spare you the details beyond that worse than the mess itself was the thousand-yard stare on the face of the spouse or parent who had the misfortune of discovering the body and seeing that loved one in that state you just knew that those people would never be the same inside again now if I will that makes you reconsider your professional choices for a career in cleanup duty perhaps you'll think again when I tell you this I had been working at clean bro for about a year when I got sent on a job early one morning my boss didn't give me any details just the address and a work order with the phrase basement deep clean telling me someone would explain it to me when I got there vague instructions were always a bad sign I picked up one of the boxy clean bro vans with the full set of gear then headed out the place was hard to find tucked off a back road in the woods at the edge of town satellite navigation was barely a thing yet let alone GPS enabled smartphones after making a few wrong turns I figured I was in the right place when I spotted one of my fellow cleaners Kurt waiting in a driveway by his beater Civic it wasn't unusual for folks to get called in straight from home to work a rush job on their day off Kurt was that other kind of clean broke cleaner the 40 year old burnout fortunately he was reasonably reliable preferring to stay sober at least until the job was nearly done he was smoking a cigarette while some slick 30-something in a suit holding a binder was shouting and waving excitedly at him I recognized the guy a real estate agent for a local bank that often hired clean bro to make foreclosures presentable before putting them on the market those jobs were some of the worst even though there was rarely any blood or gore instead we had to deal with the knee-deep residue of evicted hoarders or work without lights and running water we're drug addicts had ripped out wires and plumbing to self ascribe or risk getting shot by a disgruntled ex homeowner looking to exact revenge on whatever poor schmuck was standing on his property at the behest of that bank I was almost relieved when I recognized the house as a different case entirely about six months earlier it came to light that a bunch of disappearances throughout the state had been the work of some local psycho was using his basement as an abattoir the evening news had run a shot of the killer's house to introduce a couple weeks of nightly updates on the story such a normal fellow his neighbors had told the cameras so clean they said I had been with clean bro for a few months at that time and the reports made me wonder if I had learned enough about removing stains to make a murder scene vanish completely but by now I was a pro maybe this wouldn't be such a big job after all besides they'd already found the guy hanging from this basement ceiling so at least there was no chance of being the next lucky contestant in this game the cops had gotten a break in the case when a student at the college dodged an attempted kidnapping they released a pretty good sketch to kick off a statewide manhunt the police had gotten some leads in the area convenience store clerk Sue's stories were backed up by a grainy security video they started canvassing the area someone found a front door standing open and nobody at home I imagine they started peering through windows until they spotted some probable cause once they realized what they stumbled across the cops must have figured their suspect opted for a literal news over the figurative one that was drawing tight around him the real estate agents spun around when he heard my van pulling up the secluded driveway flashed a look of relief before turning Redick in an agitation he was already yelling at me before I had the van in park squeezed between Kurt's Civic and a silver coupe that screamed a self-indulgent prick I calmly stepped out walked to the back of the van and began unloading the gear while he blathered something about having booked us weeks ago something about an open house in two days something about lawsuits in something about hard-working red-blooded Americans instead of lazy goddamn immigrants got here as soon as I was called sir we'll work as quick as we can pal way above my paygrade guy go yourself I didn't say the real estate asshole led me Kurtz in our gear up the masonry exterior steps through the front door down a hall and into the kitchen where the entrance to the basement was he tried the knob which turned but of course the door was stuck I could tell that this guy really didn't want to be here and I couldn't wait to see him go either I was about to volunteer to try when Kurt spoke up let me see if I can open that for you sir he said in that way a lifelong service slob like Kurt could be literally respectful while applying the deepest loathing imaginable the agent seemed inordinately relieved as he stepped back all the way to the entrance to the kitchen as if ready to sprint back to his body I instinctively braced myself as Kurt gave the door a single sharp shove in just the right spot popping it free and releasing the most unholy smell imaginable I reeled backward my eyes watering my stomach and my throat fighting over which direction my half-digested breakfast was meant to go I kept it down and blinked away the tears as I heard Kurt wheezing for breath through his tobacco stained lungs for a moment I envied his burned out sinuses since he seemed only barely fazed while I was on the verge of passing out before I could recover fully I heard the agents snap that we had to be out by tomorrow at 10:00 in time for the house stages to arrive to turn the basement cesspit into a cozy game room or some and then with the audible bark of four turbocharged cylinders the real-estate asshole was gone Curt and I put on our masks which helped enormously with the smell the HEPA filters pulled anything biohazardous out of the air although you could still tell something had died down there I descended the narrow basement steps and found a pole chain dangling from the ceiling I gave it a tug and was disappointed with how little affected had the killer had apparently decided to do his part to save the earth by installing one of those new helical compact fluorescent light bulbs the kind that take a while to warm up in its weak greenish light combined with the dim morning Sun filtering through a row of six inch high basement windows the room looked like a pretty unremarkable basement a gray concrete rectangle with a few round steel posts supporting the joists above Curt awkwardly passed a heavy lighting rig down the stairs to me and I plugged it into an outlet on the wall pumping 2,000 watts of halogen glory into the concrete room I immediately wished I hadn't under the dim fluorescent light the floor had just been a grape lane and the room was full of shapeless gray furniture our artificial Sun had revealed that I was in fact standing on a pool of dried blood that was nearly the size of the houses entire Foundation and there were tables and power tools around anything too big to fit in an evidence bag that were equally coated in what I could only guess were tiny bits of human remains again I'll spare you the details suffice to say I was glad we had full body plastic suits to wear for this kind of job takes a long time to make a mess this big Kurt muttered as he reached the bottom of the stairs turned slowly to take in the view Kurt and I got to work him after a little while I barely even noticed the noxious smell leaking in through my mask we laid out drop cloths to avoid tracking gore around we wrapped the soiled furniture and tools in plastic to haul away we found the bulkhead door up to the back yard but it was padlocked shut so we broke our backs pulling things up the narrow steps to the kitchen looking like germaphobic movers as we emptied the basement onto the front lawn the day wore on and as we took our lunch break a clean bro disposal truck stopped by to pick up the large bio contaminated debris the driver was a friend and I picked up some subs for us on her way over Kurt's scarfed down baloney and American cheese on white but I didn't have much appetite for my chicken parm when he'd finished eating Kurt lit a Marlboro red from his bright orange Zippo and was in a surprisingly cheerful mood despite this being by far the nastiest call I'd ever worked he told me all about his less than illustrious career and clean up how he'd been cleaning for 20 years worn the overalls of half as many different companies throughout the region a number of nostalgia and his voice making the biggest messes disappear gave him a kind of satisfaction that I at the time couldn't quite muster I'd never seen Kurt so chatty but I was content to let him talk himself out before returning to the task at hand we hit things hard after that hoping to finish the job without having to come back as early the next morning to make our deadline our boss at clean bro always showed appreciation when we made one of our bank clients happy since they offered plenty of the toughest but most lucrative jobs all the big stuff was out and the layers of caked on blood were starting to wear away under the industrial solvents we had deployed between opening the basement windows and setting up a massive industrial fan blowing down from the top of the steps we'd managed to clear the worst of the fumes the mopping was sweaty work in full hoods and masks and I was starting to feel weak from skipping lunch so we decided to take them off and risk the air the smell was now entirely tolerable although I did catch the occasional whiff of death as the afternoon wore on the Sun was setting as we started to wrap things up thanks to chemistry mops and old-fashioned elbow grease the concrete floor was clean enough that you could eat off it assuming you had no idea about the horrible crime that had been committed there anything else that had been soiled was either off the property or in the back of the van Kurt and I nodded agreement at a job well done men just as I turned to halt the first load of cleaning equipment back up the narrow basement steps I heard a sharp pop above my head I had clipped the fluorescent bulb with a mop handle shattering it into a fine silver powder that drifted down like snow working under the glow of our industrial lamps I had completely forgotten it was there now as if there aren't enough reasons to hate those compact fluorescent bulbs the damn Pink's have mercury in them that gets out as dust and vapor when they shatter most people just vacuum up the dust and broken glass without a thought which is a great way to spread the poison around your house as a certified cleanup professional I had both the training and the sworn duty to do the right thing in this situation even if it kept me from going home for an extra hour Kurt smirked at me shaking his head as he pulled this hepa mask back on that's all you he said grabbing the shop vac and hauling it up the stairs I followed him back to the van with a half-empty bucket of solvent n' that - sticky lint roller a fine broom and dustpan in a jar intended for hazardous chemical waste Curt packed the rest of the equipment into the van while I performed the delicate duties of saving the world from a thousandth of a gram of mercury loading in and out were my least favorite parts of the job and even though it was Friday nights I didn't have much to go home to so it was pretty slow about it a time bit slow it finished just as there was nothing left but the lighting rig and that was the only thing keeping the darkness at bay now the Sun was gone I swept the final flakes of CFL dust into the jar then reached up to unscrew the wrecked bulbs base from the fixture just in time I remembered to tug the pull chain and switch it off first I was sealing the jars lid when I heard the snap of Kurt's Zippo I was about to admonish him for smoking in a client's house when I saw he was using it's like to get a look at something against the wall outside the searing beam of our flood lamp the better prepared cleaners carried a pen light with them but Kurt was more of a travel light kind of guy he was poking at some antique furniture that had witnessed the basements horrors and escaped unstained it was clean enough to sell the some depraved collector of serial killer memorabilia which meant we weren't supposed to touch it it's bad form for a cleaner to snoop through a homeowner's property but I guess the poor dead psycho who wasn't going to mind looks like the cops missed one Kurt said letting out an amused whistle as he stared into a drawer he'd opened in direct contravention of clean bro policy what I asked not sure I wanted to know Kurt held up a severed finger in his nitrile glove hand giving me a glimpse of it before dropping into a small bag for bio hazardous waste that he'd already pulled from a pouch on his plastic bodysuit I guess when the killer is dangling a few feet above a stack of his own victims the forensics guys feel free to phone it in shaking off my mental image of the spare finger I brought the jar of mercury kissed glass shards out to the van securing it in a chest reserved for the deadliest of deadlies I wasn't allowed to carry anything else when transporting something so very dangerous you gotta love policies created solely for corporate liability ass-covering I'd left her behind figuring he could bring the lighting rig out when he was done collecting souvenirs he was taking his time and I remember just how unwieldy the rig had been when he handed it down to me so after hanging at the van for a few minutes I locked its doors another inane hazardous chemical waste policy and went back into the house to check on him descending the basement steps one final time I took a deep breath and druing the smell of victory absolutely nothing then like the killer who comes back for one last swipe at the hero a gust of putrid wind hit me in the face I blinked the tears from my eyes again to see an odd shadow on the wall tracing the outline of a tall slender figure its torso spread to the ceiling and its legs stretching across the floor the whole shape swaying unnaturally I was still reeling from the unexpected lung full of noxious air which was cleared by a chill draft wind blowing through the concrete room my pulse quickened as my gaze swept across the space scanning for some demonic intruder but saw nothing there instead I spotted a nitrile glove draped over one of the bulb enclosures of the lighting rig two fingers dangling in front of the beam and fluttering slightly in the draft the glove was just starting to melt in the searing halogen glare so I yanked it away before it glued itself to the metal frame a red smear across the gloves palm turned out to be a message thanks it said Curt what the I yelled cleaners pranked each other all the time on the job but this had crossed several lines I scanned the shadows again expecting to see him doubled over and suppressed laughter but I was alone then I noticed the cool breeze was drifting down from the open bulkhead door up to the backyard how did you get that open I asked the empty room but no reply came come on man I whined hoping Curt would return to help me after a few seconds of silence I pulled out my tiny a a cell mag lightin unplugged the halogen flood lamps leaving myself standing in near total darkness I held the flashlight in my teeth as I hosted the lighting rig with both hands wondering how I was going to get this piece of clean bro property back to the van without adequate light or help it wasn't exactly afraid of the dark but I did feel kind of vulnerable trying to hold that rig around an unlit basement / Murder factory on cue my imagination maybe it was an empty stomach supply - spooky noise which got me moving toward a shaft of moonlight without help hauling the lighting rig out via the broad bulkhead door was easier than squeezing it up the kitchen staircase and with a job done and no other working lights in the basement I figured there was no point going back inside I slammed the bulkhead shut and lugged the rig around to the front of the house just in time to see Curt's Civic backing down the driveway pivoting and disappearing into the night it was past our usual clean broke lockout time and my meticulous mercury cleanup procedure had probably made him late for a date with a bottle but I cursed his ass for leaving like that I suddenly felt very alone as I ascended the front steps one last time walked to the front door and talked to the key into the wok box hanging from the doorknob there were no exterior lights on and the neighborhood was sparse and mostly dark finding it entirely too quiet my imagination provided more Creepshow soundtrack and in a moment I was in the back of the van reversing up the drive at a dangerous clip given how he'd left me like that I was almost glad when curtain no-showed for a fire rehab job a couple days later instead the office called in a pretty hot redhead girl who was new to the cleaning game and was happy to show her the basics now it's not unusual to work with a bunch of different cleaners over the course of a month but after a few weeks I noticed I hadn't seen Kurt since that basement job he hardly seemed grossed out by it so it didn't make sense that he would have thrown in the towel like I'd seen so many newbies do on their first suicide call usually if you walk off the job you walk off before you start not after you're done I started to wonder if Kurt had seemed a little too happy with that particular cleanup he'd been more amused than disgusted by that finger he found and come to think of it he couldn't have tossed it in with the other bio waste in the van since I had the keys the Freak must have capped it maybe even used it to write his fucked-up glove note I started to figure that either I'd witnessed the inspiration of a brand new psychopath or I'd been the sole ghast of his retirement party is 40 something burnout --look did bear a passing resemblance to that police sketch my suspicions grew when a couple months later some detectives came to visit me about a fraud investigation centered on Kurt they told me something about closing his bank account the day after I'd last seen him something about maxing his credit cards buying easily pawn jewelry something about abandoning his car at a park on the other side of the state and something about a lack of friends or family to question couldn't have been much cash officer gold chains weren't Kurt's style detective no idea where he could be heading sir maybe Kurt's a serial killer I didn't suggest the house sat on the market for several more months to refuse stagings and open houses but thanks in no small part to my efforts it sold the sum family who needed room for all their kids and couldn't afford a place with a zero body count in a good school district I guess there's no such thing as ghosts though because they stuck around I stuck around too after I'd worked a few more years at clean bro they had a scandal with a crew of cleaners who used small jobs to case for burglaries and big jobs as their roving drug lab it took the cops long enough to figure out that by the time they were busted everybody in the region knew somebody who'd been burned by the clean broke bandits the supply of calls dropped off a cliff and rather than wait for the axe to fall on me one of their most reliable workers at that point I used what I'd learned in my Community College business classes to put out my own shingle and built a solid local brand doing the same work as ever I still had to put in long hours and get my hands dirty a national corporate presence in a cushy executive office suite was still a long way off but at least I was getting paid more than nine bucks an hour for my trouble I actually started to like the work watching the worst day of somebody's life vanish into a hefty bag swirled down a drain business boomed the town grew and the woods were chopped down to build suburban subdivisions in corporate office parks the whole thing with Kurt disappeared into distant memory never to be resolved like so many of life's weird coincidences that's what I thought for the past two decades anyway a few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk when I received an odd call the kind where the home owner doesn't want to give any details over the phone just an address a bashful caller is always a bad sign I recognized the street name and decided to check it out for myself before fobbing it off on one of the twenty-year-old dropouts or 40-something burnouts that ride my payroll on their way from making whatever mistakes they're trying to outrun to those mistakes catching up with them it was the same house ride last worked with Kurt after two decades working in the region I found it pretty easily even without my GPS enabled smartphone the neighborhood had grown up around it and with new windows and a fresh coat of paint yeah I would never have guessed it was the kind of place a serial killer had called home the current homeowner was the oldest child of the couple that had bought the house so many years ago he was in his 30s now and had kids of his own living there most people had forgotten the places reputation but something had come to light that would certainly jog folks memories if it got out he couldn't afford to dump the house and move I didn't want to stir up anything that would cause trouble for his kids at school or lead them to discover they were growing up in a slaughterhouse basically he'd been in the basement one day poking around some old furniture that had been there as long as he had thinking he'd turned the place into a cozy game room or some he pushed aside a wardrobe from its spot against the concrete basement wall and revealed a steel door behind it secured with a padlock with a healthy curiosity and a pair of bolt cutters he got it open without stopping to consider the basements dark legacy until it was too late a quick glimpse was enough to send him running to call the police the cops found a mass grave in there sealed up airtight for more than a decade by now the coroner had hauled off all the bodies the detectives had asked their questions of the dumbfounded homeowner as well as his parents siblings and life and the forensics team had scraped out a bunch of evidence but they all seemed to be phoning it in again mold spores and decay patterns indicated the small room had been sealed since before the family had moved in and these were almost certainly the uncounted victims of the homes previous resident nobody wanted to face the embarrassment of having overlooked this much the first time there were two funny things about it though if your sense of humor can abide a stack of corpses entombed and was now cookie-cutter suburban development full of smiling children and friendly dogs most of the victims have been loaded dead and dismembered but the one on top had been hit on the head and sealed inside alive left to suffocate on a stack of rotting bodies over the course of several hours a fate surely worse than death followed by death even stranger the cell had contained an empty bucket of emergency rations that had once held enough packaged food to keep a person alive for almost half a year the home wouldn't let me down into the basement where an unholy smell awakened some long-buried memories in the back of my mind the sense of smell is said to have a direct line to memory and this stench forced me to recall an entire day spent down here mopping up the leavings of some Psychopaths extended wet dream under the weak bluish glare of the basements bare LED bulb the homeowner pointed out the shape of a wardrobe by the wall and my heightened memory instantly recognized it it was sitting just a few feet to the left of where it had been when Kurt and I had cleaned this place out in its old spot cut into the concrete wall there was a steel door standing slightly ajar and wafting the stench of Hell itself into the room oh god I forgot how bad it is down here the homeowner said retrieving to the kitchen and leaving me alone at the bottom of the steps a lengthy career of solvent fumes and suicide cleanups had left me reasonably immune to the worst effects of bad smells but I almost followed him anyway god I wish I had just followed him and called in Braden and Malik to do the dirty work my curiosity got the best of me I pulled out my heavy decel mag light from its loop on my utility belt gripping it for safety against I don't know what walked over to that steel door I checked out the Wardrobe first saving the worst for last my mind flashed from the image of Kurt pulling a severed finger out of one of its drawers with one hand lit by the flickering glow of a lighter in his other hand the Wardrobe looked heavy with broad solid feet and it probably would have taken a three-man team to pick up and move then I spotted the tell-tale tracks of Castor's cut into the decades of dust that had fallen since Kurt and I had cleaned this place looking back I realized that there had been no dust to speak of even when we'd started after the house had been supposedly unoccupied for six months I gave the Wardrobe a nudge and it was clear the hulking thing had hidden wheels so it could be slid around easily and with it no longer flush against the wall I could even see a small handle bolted into its back I turned my attention now to the steel door cut into the concrete wall standing about four feet tall in the corner there was a brown smear which I recognized as all blood as if someone had hit it or been hit by it very hard a streak about the width of a fingertip have been smeared through it when it was fresh but no real attempt had been made to clean it off I inhaled deeply through my mouth tasting that familiar reek and held my breath and pulled the handle inside was exactly what I'd imagined plenty of caked on congealed decaying blood and little bits of nondescript debris coating the stone walls and floor of a four foot square cell but nothing that was still shocking after so long on the job the space was tucked under the house's front door landing and easily missed protrusion from the otherwise rectangular foundation I leaned in with my flashlight and looked closer certain there was something to find something to understand brown smudges on the walls could have been illegible writing or feeble attempts to shift the stones someone had spent their last moments awake and alive in here the final moment in the madman symphony suddenly that was all I wanted to know I let out my breath with a sigh and started to pull back and that's when my thousand woman's of maglite brilliance caught something bright in the corner of the concrete cell tucked in by the jamb of the door I focused my beam on it taking a moment to resolve the soft edged rectangular shape and recognize it for what it was it was an orange Zippo lighter its lid singed with soot from burning until it ran out of fuel

Channel: KingSpook

Views: 106,996

Rating: 4.9080067 out of 5

Keywords: Be Careful Whose Messes You Clean Up, forensic creepypasta, janitor creepypasta

Id: pjJA_TnC75c

Length: 36min 9sec (2169 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 03 2016