"He"s here." Veronica intoned while looking at a distance somewhere behind where the Caravan stood."Who?" I asked while pulling my sleeve to check my watch. It"s already getting quite late.
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Now that she had mentioned it, I could hear a little of something, the subtle noise of pitter-pattering limbs. .h.i.tting the surface of wet ground. It"s similar to the sound of many people punching and slapping the surface of a damp pillow rapidly.
"Ah..." I sighed. "This is probably the first time I"ve ever stayed this long," I mumbled as I tried my hardest to hide my discomfort.
"I noticed," Veronica said without turning his head towards me, still looking at the presumed origin of the sound. "This is probably the first time I"ll see you meeting the Janitor again."
"Not that I mind." I rechecked my watch as I heard the sound of limbs. .h.i.tting the surface of what I think is mud while whispering. "I can probably stay to watch the cleaning."
"Yeah, but it"s kinda boring, though."
I nodded with a shrug. "True."
"Why are you staying so late, though? Don"t you have an appointment for your post-grad research?" Veronica said, finally turning her head towards me.
"How did you know that?" I said with a raised eyebrow.
"You told me last week. This is your fifth paper, right?"
"Sixth, actually." I sighed. "Luc said he"s gonna tell me something; he asked me to stay."
"Ah." Veronica nodded, which showed her understanding of my dilemma. "I can just tell him that you"re busy, you know? You have more pressing matters to do; he"s gonna understand."
"I guess?" I said while scratching the back of my head. "I"ll watch the cleaning, but if he"s still not done after that, then I"ll ask you to tell him I"m already gone. Don"t want to bother him while he"s selling the goods. Hope you don"t mind."
"Yeah, I don"t mind. It"s a bad idea to meddle with his c.r.a.p while he"s doing business."
While we"re talking, I noticed that the people around us seemed to have started hearing the distinct sound coming from afar by the way their faces light up a bit. It sounded like the sound of a giant centipede walking towards which would scare some people away, but no one seemed bothered by it. They even looked slightly elated.
The Ringmaster did not acknowledge the presence of the sound, though. He remained busy with all the customers he"s serving outside of the van. After a few moments, the thing causing the jittering sound finally revealed itself when it entered the large door behind the Caravan and behind the ring.
"Hi, hi." A man said without looking at anyone or without even waving his head. He just entered the ring while saying his greetings as if it was something he just has to do, but he doesn"t really want to do it. "I"m here for the cleaning." He mumbled, putting great emphasis on every syllable he uttered by prolonging the amount of time it takes for him to say every vowel.
Everyone looked at him momentarily, but they all just diverted their gaze away from him by the time they saw him. None of them replied to him, and the Janitor wants it that way.
The Janitor entered the way he usually does: unappealing, uncharismatic, unimportant, and almost unseen. He gives off the kind of vibe of a person who"s only here because he has to do what he got to do. However, his pa.s.sion had already ceased from his life if there was even an ounce of it within him from the beginning. I understand his sentiment well regarding the fact that he only seems to be dragging himself to the routine of the corporate world. Still, this man doesn"t even put on the effort to make people think he has a sliver of care for whatever it is he"s doing. I need not ask for me to know that he hates his job more than anything the world could offer.
He"s holding a moldy vacuum insulated tumbler without the top lid in sight as he made his way towards the platform in the middle of the ring without batting an eye on anyone around him, let alone give a word of greeting to the people looking at him in either awe or fear. He yawns, which were a small gesture telling people around him that he"s not in the mood to talk. However, if anyone dares to strike a conversation with him, all of us know that he will never shut up even after closing time; that"s why everyone just goes out of his way in fear that he might talk to them. This was not at all a gesture that we hate him; we just don"t want to talk to him enough because he will only tell people how miserable he"s feeling and how much the Janitor loathes every single day he spends doing his job. I know this for a fact because when I first met the Janitor when we first did one of the entertainment murder portions of our yearly meeting. He started talking about how much he liked the filet mignon he ate that day. Somehow the conversation turned into how much he hates his job. Then I finally realized that we"re already talking about the Bobo Doll experiment conducted by Albert Bandura until Lucas finally told him to leave me alone, which allowed me to curry away from him. Before I left the ring, I saw that the Janitor was then conversing about something I probably don"t know of with the clearly distraught and disappointed-looking Ringmaster. Now that I had thought about it now, I think he was talking about his hatred towards the fashion trend around the early 1990s, which made me wonder how the conversation turned into that direction.
Speaking of fashion, let"s talk about his. The Janitor is wearing a dark gray hoodie, but I had noticed that he had torn the hood off of it, which I always find weird. Why doesn"t he just wear a normal jacket? I could have just asked him about it, but I know he"s just going to start talking about his life in chronological order and how this job was the fruit of his lack of a concrete dream when he was younger. Sometimes I feel like he"s wearing a light gray jacket, but since he"s too miserable to do simple laundry work, it just turned into a darker shade of gray. He"s wearing black jeans and miserable-looking rubber shoes that had seen better days with all the torn, scratches, and tears all over it. He"s also always, always wearing a black backpack with so many pockets. Apparently, he had filled his bag with all sorts of "treasure" he had found in his lifetime of being the company janitor, which then inflated his bag because of a great deal of trash he"s carrying. Other than that, there"s really nothing else to talk about his looks. Well, he has long, black hair that always makes him look like he had just gotten off the bed, and a thick layer of eye bogs bellow his large, brooding eyes. He also has a carefree smile on his face, although he only talks about his depressing life like he"s the only person in this world who had felt such emotion before.
He"s also wearing... a mask? I say the term "wear" loosely because he is literally just holding a bond paper with two holes on it, and whenever someone is looking at him, he would place the piece of paper in front of his face with his eyes peering on the holes of the paper.
The only highlight of the Janitor"s entire career is two things.
One of these exciting aspects he has is his means of transportation. He is the only janitor in the entire company, so he"s always moving around the Organization"s facility, or else there would be no end to his nagging about the misery of walking. You see, the Janitor is sitting on top of two people back bending in a rather inhuman way as they walk around in that same position while carrying the weight of the Janitor on their stomach. Bear in mind that they are crawling everywhere the Janitor goes while he sat on top of them without a sign of complaint. The only difference is that they are crawling while back bending, which then made their body form the shape of an arc. The Janitor never steps out of his two little arching slaves every time, and they are all doing so without a hint of complaint. Not like they can complain, to be honest, they don"t have a mouth; nay, they don"t have a face! They don"t have hair either everywhere in their bodies, not even genitals. We also noticed that they don"t have a pair of nipples, and there is no hole in their a.s.ses. We know this because they are naked all the time. In place of everything missing in their body is just skin; there"s only skin on the chest and between their legs.
I"m not even sure if they"re even human... They look weird. Every time they crawl around, they produce this disconcerting squishing sound like the sound of people stepping on a puddle of mud, which comes from all over their bodies. Not to mention, they don"t use their entire limbs whenever they crawl; they"re only using their fingers while most of their body remains unmoved most of the time. Thus, their hands are in the shape of a claw, and their feet look like that of a ballerina, tip-toeing for balance. They also have the habit of scratching everything their fingers touched, so they produce a scratching sound while the squishing sound was coming from all over their body echoes together like a poorly synched song.
I heard from someone that the Janitor was once a murderer, which I highly doubt seeing just how much of a, forgive me for uttering this word, loser he looks like in real-time. Either way, rumor has it that the people he"s sitting on is all the remaining flesh of his former victims meshed together inside of one singular body to form a human-shaped meat doll. However, the Janitor had killed so many people that he had to divide his flesh dolls into two because he wanted them to have the perfect curvy shape. Apparently, the Organization helped him animate this flesh doll of his as long as he agrees to give them skin, and the Janitor complied, but the product they used to make them move and give them a new set of skin is relatively new. Because of this, we can still hear the sound of flesh inside of that makeshift human he made, making the compressed human pile of meat to give off a squirming and squishing sound every time they move. Meanwhile, they move so abnormally precisely because they used a defective product on them. It"s basically a failed beta test, which further shows just how much the Organization cares for this guy.
How do I know about this? Well, he told Veronica everything about it last year, and she told me everything about it afterward. Frankly, I don"t believe him, but the man is notoriously honest, so you know, what can I say? Maybe he"s stating facts, and it"s big if true. He has some refined taste, not gonna lie, and the product that can make things move on command, and the product that can the surface of a hard object a skin are both real products.
Usually, they would be naked, but right now, both of his human carrier—which both moves in sync with each other—are wearing masks. The mask in question is just a cheap plastic mask of a clown he probably got from a thrift shop outside of the ring minutes before coming here.
It"s... Well... He did his best to be creative, at least.