Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/zpd6im/maintaining_the_madness_1/
Hey all, Justin here from Country Manor Maintenance. Let me start out by saying, that was one helluva week we just had here at the apartment complex. You think you’ve seen it all, and then you spend the better part of half a day chasing a little gnome-like creature around in this old lady’s apartment, it’s high-pitched laughter mocking you everytime he slips through your fingertips. I ALMOST got him this time too. I was SO close.
It’s always the same call, from the same resident. Mrs. Baxter will call the office and put in a work order about there being rodents in her kitchen. The first time it happened, I arrived with an assortment of mousetraps and poisons- ready to deal out vermin genocide. I put them in strategic positions throughout the home and baited them with a variety of cheeses and peanut butter. When I went back the next day to check them, all of the spring loaded traps were tripped, the bait missing. I noticed that one of the sticky glue traps was nowhere to be found.
I was busy resetting the spring traps, when something small and obscure caught my eye. It was a shred of paper, small and folded, and placed ideally on top of one of the traps. It was roughly the size of my fingernail, and folded into the shape of an origami bird.
“What the hell?” I thought, as I delicately picked it up by a paper wing. It looked like something was written on the inside of the small page. Gingerly, I unfolded it to reveal a small drawing of a middle finger. Sitting there perplexed, I heard a high pitched laughter coming from above me. I glanced up just in time to see a small humanoid creature on the top of the cabinet giving me the finger.
He was about as tall as a soda can and wearing a tuxedo made of what looked like dollar bills. He looked like a normal person, all things considered, only he was half a foot tall, had a long red beard and he was holding some kind of white square-ish patch looking thing that was as large as he was. It took a moment, but then I recognized it for what it was. The missing glue trap. He mischievously shot out his tongue, and threw the sticky trap, hitting my face. It stuck to my forehead, tangling and sticking to my hair.
It’s been war ever since, between the Tiny Man and myself. In the 3 or 4 skirmishes that we’ve had, he always manages to get away. I don’t know what he is exactly, but he seems to have an uncanny talent for disappearing. He’s a little prick and I hate him. We always end up fighting, Tom and Jerry style. It’s not quite THAT bad, but he did drop a frying pan on my foot that one time.
Anyway, earlier this week I had my most recent encounter with the Tiny Man, and this time, I think I may have actually got the little bastard. After chasing him all around the house, I managed to get him cornered in the kitchen. Little bugger is fast for a pygmy, or whatever in the hell he was. I had him blocked, the only way into the kitchen, was the only way out of the kitchen. Panic overcame his little face, as he realized this too.
Then, quickly he bounds up and onto the countertop and into the sink, half full of dishes on one side. He’s flinging silverware at me. Forks, knives, spoons, he even managed to stab me with one of those corn on the cob holder things. But I was fed up with him and his bullshit by that point, so I kept coming determined to end this. In a last ditch effort to finish things once and for all, I closed in. To get away, he jumps down into the drain. Right where I wanted him. I flicked the small switch on the wall behind the sink. Loud grinding noises flooded the room as the garbage disposal began shredding any and everything that was caught within its chamber.
I let it run for at least 5 minutes straight, frequently flushing down scalding hot water just for good measure. I’m happy to report that since then, we haven’t received a single call about it. Ladies and gentlemen, it would seem that we got him.
According to Jason and The Manual, he was probably a leprechaun. When that old lady moves out one day, we should recommend a kitchen remodel. We might just find some gold.
There was a separate incident later that day, a reoccuring one, that reared its ugly head again. I’m talking about the human shaped holes.
According to the Manual, they first started popping up back in the late 80’s. They occur in short bursts over the span of a couple of weeks, and then, as quickly as they began, they just stop. Then nothing for six years, only for them to return with a vengeance. It only ever lasts for a couple of weeks, but it’s a pain. It’s a regular event, almost even a predictable one, like locust swarms or eclipses.
“It’s human hole season, again” Jason had told me that morning. I merely looked at him perplexed. I hadn’t been working here the last time they appeared, so I had no idea what he was talking about. I have since then been enlightened. It sucks. I couldn’t help but notice that even though this obviously wasn’t new to Jason, the fact still made him seem perturbed. He sulked around all afternoon like somebody had pissed in his cornflakes.
I arrived with Jason at the first one reported in. I had asked him several times what in the hell a ‘Human Hole’ was, but he had kept putting me off with a cryptic “You’ll see, soon enough.” Now I was seeing, and I understood. I mean, I don’t know their purpose, where they come from, what causes them, none of that, but I completely understood why they called them ‘Human Holes’.
In the apartment, on the wall that divided the bathroom with one of the bedrooms, was a hole in the adjoining sheetrock. It was in the perfect outline of a person. It reminded me of that old Looney Tunes gag, where the coyote runs smack into a wall hard enough that it leaves a perfect silhouette of them behind.
Upon even closer inspection, it was a clean hole. No jagged cuts or crumbling of the drywall around the edges to indicate if it were done with any cutting utensils. No, it looked more as if a precision laser or some other such refined technique had been used. There was even an electrical wire and wall studs that crossed that section inside the wall, and examination showed them to be cut as well. A cut so fine that it was damn near surgical.
After seeing it for the first time, I took a cautious step closer to get a better look, when Jason grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me back a step. “DON’T go through” he said in a serious tone. I wasn’t going to, but he hadn’t known that. I gave a nod and he removed his hand from my shoulder.
We photographed and documented the Human Hole, size and orientation and so on, and then began our work of replacing the entire sheetrock segment that it resided within, after replacing the electrical wiring and wall studs of course. One down, plenty more to go by that point, with more getting called in by the hour.
Even odder than the Human Holes themselves, were the attitudes of the residents that resided within the apartments that manifested them. This being my first rodeo dealing with this particular anomaly, I was expecting them to be a bit more concerned about the random man-shaped hole that had appeared in their homes magically overnight. Aside from calling it in to the office initially, none of them spoke a word about it, not to us anyway. I noticed they all seemed indifferent to this oddest of occurrences, oblivious even. I voiced as much to Jason.
“That’s probably because they stepped through” he answered, leaving me only more confused.
“They studied it in depth years ago, back when it first started happening. Apparently all of these people, the ones whose holes we’ll be patching for the next few weeks, well, they’ve been having some pretty weird dreams leading up to this, all with a common thread. In all of their dreams, a disembodied voice tells them to step through. Step through. Step through. Every night, drilling it into their subconscious, step through. Then, whenever these holes magically appear one day, these perfect human-shaped holes, what do you think they’re gonna do? Probably what the voice has been slowly brainwashing them to do, that’s what” he finished. I sat there for a few moments, waiting for more. When it was obvious that it wasn’t going to come unbidden, I figured I’d play my role as the new guy and ask.
“And?”
“Hell if I know. If it does something to them, or changes them in some way, it’s not obvious. Old Mr. Davidson, he steps through every single time. He’s been here for three ‘Human Hole’ events, and he seems fine to me” he shrugged. “I wouldn’t risk it though.”
“If it’s as harmless as all that, why did you look so disturbed about it this morning? It’s just some harmless holes” I asked.
“Because it usually happens every six years. Like clockwork. USUALLY. This time… it’s only been two” was all he would say.
I don’t know what the implications or repercussions of all of this will be. I just try to think of it as job security. There’s always plenty to do here at Country Manor. If not stemming from the odd occurrences and the apartments themselves, then from some of the residents.
That reminds me, I’ve gotta tell you guys about 283. I don’t know the guy’s real name, but we all just call him ‘Teen Wolf’.
They started calling him that last summer, when the outside temperature started rising and he broke out his summer wardrobe, which seems to consist exclusively of ‘wife beater’ shirts and a pair of maroon cargo shorts. The moniker ‘Teen Wolf’ was given when one day Jason saw him in his attire, and he said that was what it reminded him of. He wasn’t wrong, the guy has such thick body hair, Robin Williams would have been jealous. It was so thick, you could barely see the shoulder straps of his shirt, you just had to assume they were under there… somewhere. The hair overflowing from the collar of his shirt was so long, I bet it got tangled sometimes.
Real nice guy, every interaction we’ve had with him went pleasant enough, but we know his secret. He’s at least partially responsible for why we have so many missing pet posters tacked up on the community board in the mailroom.
I was called out late one evening to pour some more holy water in the toilet from hell, that’s the one in apartment 113 that screams sometimes when you flush it, amongst other things. I was walking back to my truck, when I saw a black and white cat prowling around by one of the street lights. The feline stuck out to me, mostly because he had a small splotch of black on his face, like a little Hitler stache. Thinking the nazi cat looked funny and walking over to try to get a picture of it, there was this big hairy blur of motion that came sweeping into the light, and just like that, it was gone. Along with meow-n fuhrer. There one moment, gone the next.
I stood there stunned for several moments, thinking how that wasn’t even the strangest thing I’ve seen all day, but still mighty peculiar, when I heard the poor kitty’s cry coming from the darkness behind a bush.
I probably should have just ignored it. Too much curiosity in a place like this can lead to an early retirement… from your life. Curiosity killed the cat, afterall, and in this analogy I was the cat. The actual cat, I don’t know what he would be, curiosity I guess, or perhaps he was just the thing curiosity was currently gutting behind that bush… Metaphors aside, I did something dumb and potentially dangerous, and crept over to check it out.
Aaaaand it was a werewolf. No doubt about it. Luckily, I didn’t think it had noticed me, so intent and zoned in as it was on disemboweling the poor pet. I can still remember the sounds of the poor kitty’s bones popping and breaking between the lycanthrope’s powerful jaws.
I squatted there in those bushes, not daring to move, when the resident poked his head out of his front door and yelled “Hey the toilet is doing that… that THING again!” out into the street in the direction of my work truck.
This had several effects. The first being me almost shitting my pants. It had drawn the full attention of the werewolf as well, as it immediately stopped in the middle of peeling a muscle away from the now deceased cat’s hind leg. Its huge face shot in the direction of the resident’s shout, its large pointed ears aimed like radar dishes toward the noise.
My first thought was “That guy is sooo dead”. Surely the werewolf, or whatever in the hell it was, wasn’t going to be satisfied with just a cat. That residents yell might as well have been a dinner bell. Any moment now, it’s going to run and pounce on this poor guy and rip his throat out. Better him than me.
Imagine my surprise then when it had the opposite effect. The glint of bloodlust that had been in the creature’s eye morphed into something more akin to fright. It looked scared. I watched it cower lower, then when the resident went back inside, unable to find me, I watched it bolt in the opposite direction.
It’s not everyday that you see a werewolf, even working here. I imagine it’s even more rare to see a werewolf tremble in fear at the prospect of being spotted by something that it could mangle and shred without even breaking a sweat. That’s why when it ran, I saw fit to follow it.
As it navigated between the buildings, quickly and carefully diving from shadow to shadow, I was doing the same. Eventually it came to an open window around the back of one of the apartments. It gave one final cautious glance, scanning the night for any prying eyes. When it’s bestial gaze landed upon me tucked into the shadows, I swear it lingered a moment longer than it had in the vacancy around me. I dared not even to breathe, and had one of the air conditioning units between us not been running, it probably could have heard my heart pounding in my breast. Seemingly satisfied that there were no witnesses, it closed the remaining distance and jumped through the window, slamming it shut and drawing the curtains behind it.
At first, I thought it was going inside to murder whoever resided there, until I realized WHO resided there. That apartment belonged to Teen Wolf.
So apparently, the guy that we joked around about being as hairy as a werewolf, was an ACTUAL werewolf. Good to know. That cluttered community board in the mailroom covered in lost animal fliers started making a little more sense. Shy lycanthrope. Shycanthrope. Better pets than people, I always say. Too bad Barbara wasn’t there to catch it on film.
Barbara is a nuisance, but ultimately harmless. She was in the office the other day going off on Mrs. Tina, the office manager. Threatening to call the Better Business Bureau or the police or the FBI… or SOMEONE. Threatened to sue, to get this place shut down. Surely, we had to be breaking some kind of law or in violation of some statute or ordinance. Best of luck, lady. The guy that owns the place is supposedly some millionaire bigwig across the country. He doesn’t just own lawyers, he owns judges. That’s what they say, at least.
Besides, Barbara was just mad because of what happened to her little dog. It had happened just a couple of weeks after she moved in. She had this little chihuahua. She took it for a walk one day and she ignored the signs over on the edge of the property. She got WAY too close to the pond and what she described as a ‘log with eyes and a mouth’, shot out a tongue and ate her little dog. When she screamed, it turned, and with a pair of gargantuan legs it jumped and disappeared into the murky and muddy waters.
We know how big some of the frogs and toads that live in that pond can get, and have the area posted and fenced off for a reason, hence, the signs. When she ignored them, she forfeited most of her legal standings, and therefore, wouldn’t have a leg to stand on in court. She was clearly trespassing.
She’s had it out for the place ever since, and it hasn’t become an uncommon sight to see her parked somewhere in a rental car with a pair of binoculars and a camera, spying and snooping. Oddest thing about it is that she still lives here so it’s almost 24/7. I imagine that if I hated a place with as much burning passion as she does this one, I couldn’t live there. And because she hated Country Manor with every fiber of her being, that usually meant that she hated us too by extension. I mean, it sucks what happened to her little dog, but it had nothing to do with us, WTF? I guess some people are just like that. They need to have an enemy to justify their righteousness.
Actually, I kinda admire her dedication. I find it hilarious that with all of the crazy and unexplainable stuff that happens here, she never manages to video anything noteworthy. She always shows up right after, being denied her sweet sweet money shot. We’ve been told not to interact with her unless it’s absolutely necessary, and if we do to ‘kill her with kindness’. There’s worse things out here to get killed by, if we’re being honest.
Next week is supposed to be pretty busy, we’ve gotta get four apartments fixed up, painted, and ready to rent for some contracting company that wants to move in some of their employees for a job they’re doing in the area. Between getting that done and the calls we get for maintenance on the day to day, we should keep pretty busy. I’ll update you guys as soon as I can. Until then, Justin from the Country Manor Maintenance Department, clocking out.