Horror Stories(Creepypasta)

87✴The Crying Room

The end of the hall finally arrives, and on Todd’s left a door marked 129. The keys jangle as he spins them idly on his finger like a gunslinger just after the kill; then he notices the grimy film coating his fingers from touching the key ring. One more thing nobody bothers cleaning.

Todd slides the key into the door handle. The lock snaps back like cracking vertebrae, and behind it is a sound like a gasp or sob inside the room.

Todd hesitates, listening. The entire building is silent as if it were abandoned. He pushes the door open and flicks on the light, maybe a little hastier than he’d admit.

Standard room. Small table by the window. Wooden vanity with a cracked mirror. Small entertainment center with television set and videogame console. Queen size bed with green comforter (read as, mite nest), which Todd promptly tears off the mattress and tosses in the corner. Bathroom so claustrophobic the door almost touches the toilet bowl when it opens. The one thing giving it personality is the presence of the missing author’s things — mostly textbooks and notebooks — which haven’t been moved or claimed yet. The bedside clock reads 9:31 P.M.

The room is quiet.

Todd closes the door with his foot, tosses the key on the vanity. He pulls a packet of bleach wipes from his back pocket and begins wiping down the doorknobs, the TV remote, and the faucet handles. He takes twenty minutes to wipe down the toilet’s seat and lever.

*

Todd Kline maintains the most abysmal rooms at the Nimbus Hotel. He used to clean the cadaver room at the university, so the eerie and the disgusting have little effect on him.

He’s lost track of how many years he’s been a room attendant there, but it’s been long enough to know the hotel should be shut down and the building condemned. The shit he’s seen would turn tourists off of hotels forever. The beds are a vast culture of germs and dust mites: attendants don’t wash the comforters between tenants unless they’re visibly stained on both sides. The bathrooms have such thick layers of fecal particles that tenants ought to be showering with their shoes on. And God knows what’s crawling around in those “clean” drinking glasses.

That’s all standard fare for a veteran hotel worker, though. It’s the special, gruesome little touches that make Nimbus stand out from the other germ bordellos.

Last year he cleaned a handsome spread of gooey feces out of the bathtub in 222. Gladys, Dave, and Bernie all refused to touch that one. They wouldn’t touch the crusty clumps of God-oh-God-please-don’t-be-semen in 114’s comforter, either — stone solid like petrified gum. It was a miracle Todd managed to scrub it all out.

The same year as the tub-shitter and the bed-gum, a lady got scabies from sleeping in room 313. Gladys checked the bedspread and found it swollen full of mites, fleas, and ticks. Todd had to ball it up, stuff it in a garbage bag, take it to a stretch of desert highway and burn it. The lady got reimbursed for her stay. Todd got seven or eight fleas.

All of that still doesn’t top the crown jewel from two years ago, when they got a complaint about a sweet and sour stink in Room 106, and found the source — stuffed between the mattress and the bed frame — was a dead hooker. Todd was the only one who didn’t puke when the body was found, so Todd got to sanitize the room after the police hauled it off.

Somehow the Nimbus Hotel is still in business, boasting that “A stay in a Nimbus Hotel is like sleeping on a cloud!”

A cloud of shit-caked fleas that feed on dead hookers.

All Todd’s jobs at the Nimbus Hotel are dirty jobs. When the other attendants refuse to clean the filthiest of filth from the bedsheets, bathtubs, or TV remotes, Todd has to drop whatever he’s doing and go take care of it. He’s the only one who’s ever had the guts or the know-how (and you can bet he won’t let anyone forget it). Nothing scares or even discourages him, however weird or gross.