Chapter 3. The Thing Above the Ceiling
Chapter 3. The Thing Above the Ceiling
The manager told me to make the report.
Something about how the person who discovered it first should be the one to call it in.
As always, it felt like our manager lacked a basic understanding of what his role actually was.
But I didn’t complain. I immediately called 112.
For a moment, I hesitated—was this a 112 call or a 119 call? But 112 felt right.
(Translator’s Note: In Korea you call 112 to report a crime to police or 119 to request ambulance service from the fire department or a medical emergency center.)
When I got through and reported that someone had hanged himself to death, they asked what his condition was.
I replied that he seemed to have been dead for a while and that I was reporting it without going in. They said they understood and would dispatch.
The police and firefighters arrived in less than five minutes.
Even the nearest local police substation would have trouble responding that fast. I was honestly amazed they got here so quickly.
The police went straight into the room as soon as they arrived. Only one officer stayed behind to ask me questions, and contrary to what I expected, he didn’t ask much.
I stated that a man had checked in alone around 10 p.m. on Thursday, extended his stay by one more day yesterday, and that today he didn’t answer calls, so I opened the door and found him hanging with a cord tied to the window handle.
In movies and dramas, the police interrogate the discoverer aggressively, but in reality, the officer just wrote my statement in his notebook and that was it. They recorded the CCTV footage of the guest arriving and entering the room using their own phones.
Then a vehicle from the forensics unit arrived. A few officers in white entered the room, stayed briefly, and brought the body down on a stretcher.
The cleaning team, who had been rotating through rooms, saw police walking around the 3rd floor and panicked, fleeing to another floor. Our cleaning team feared the police more than anything because they were undocumented.
The police stayed at our motel for under twenty minutes.
I was glad it was handled quickly since it was checkout time, but it felt too quick.
I stopped one officer who was about to leave—the same one who had taken my statement.
“Is everything finished? What about the room? Can we clean it?”
Saturday was a day that was basically supposed to be full by default.
On a day like today, we had to sell every room.
“Yes. The forensics team says it’s clearly suicide… and we’ve confirmed all necessary evidence, so you can clean it.”
He spoke in a purely businesslike tone and left. He looked like he had even less empathy than me, a psychopath. Had he seen so many cases like this that he’d become numb?
Or was he the same type as me?
I was thinking that when I remembered: the man from Room 310 had hidden something in the ceiling inspection opening.
The owner usually combed through surveillance footage carefully when he came in, but the manager only skimmed it for show. And since the owner hadn’t come in yesterday or the day before, I was the only one who knew about it. The footage didn’t properly capture him hiding something in the inspection opening. On screen, it only showed him setting a chair and checking the opening.
That meant the item the man had placed in the inspection opening on the 3rd-floor hallway was probably still there.
Tonight, after the cleaning team finished, I should take a look.
The manager was on the phone with the owner, spraying spit as he bragged and exaggerated his “heroic tale.”
It sounded like the owner was somewhere far away.
He was lying, claiming the police had made unreasonable demands because of the suicide, but that he had dealt with them firmly so business wouldn’t be disrupted. Listening closer, he was even making up stories about how he had calmed down the cleaning team—and even the counter staff—so they wouldn’t panic.
That man really should’ve been a novelist.
Fortunately, neither the guests nor the cleaning team ran into the body being carried out, so they didn’t know someone had died in a room.
Now, as long as the manager kept his mouth shut, there wouldn’t be any rumor spreading that someone had died at our motel…
But he was absolutely going to gossip about it to the entire neighborhood.
“Chief Kang, why did the police come earlier?”
It was lunch, and Auntie Sookhee, who was about to go eat, asked me.
The cleaning aunties called me and Chanhyeok “chief.”
Our motel didn’t have an official title for me or Chanhyeok. The owner and manager called us by name or just “counter staff.” But I’d heard that other lodging places called every-other-day workers things like duty lead, chief, or assistant manager. The aunties said they’d been called that elsewhere too, so they called me Chief Kang.
“It’s nothing. You don’t have to worry.”
To Auntie Gyeonghwa, who was testing the waters, I answered with a bright smile. She looked like she wanted to ask more, then shut her mouth and left.
2 p.m.
After checking the rooms that had finished cleaning, I prepared to start proper business operations.
As I passed the 3rd floor, I checked the CCTV camera covering Room 310.
From the current angle, it only showed half of Room 310’s door area.
If the camera angle dropped just a little more, Room 310 wouldn’t be visible at all.
When I returned to the counter, the manager was gone—who knew where.
When I inspected and prepped rooms like this, he was supposed to watch the counter, but since the owner wasn’t here, he was slacking more than usual today.
Since it was Saturday afternoon, short-stay guests started flooding in.
Our motel had forty rooms total.
On weekdays, we got under forty short-stay guests, so the full set of rooms didn’t even complete one full rotation.
But on weekends, it averaged over eighty—more than two rotations.
From 2 p.m. to midnight, for ten hours straight, rooms stayed fully occupied. The moment a room opened up, cleaning finished immediately, and it was sold to waiting guests right away.
I enjoyed these chaotic, nonstop moments.
I called rooms whose time was up, and the moment they left, the cleaning team went in. In between, short-stay guests who were told there were no rooms either waited or left to find another motel.
The parking lot filled quickly too.
Room status, waiting guests, cleaning team movement, parking lot situation—I checked everything constantly.
Whenever there were calls asking about overnight stays, I answered that all reservations for today were full.
Normally on weekends, we didn’t accept overnight guests before 10 p.m., but if we told callers that overnight stays were only available from 10 because of short-stay turnover, it usually turned into an argument. So telling them “we’re fully booked” was the official manual response.
7 p.m.
The cleaning team rotated one by one to eat dinner quickly, and I ordered a bowl of black bean noodles to get by.
On a busy day like this, the manager should’ve been helping beside me, but he had gone somewhere during the day and still hadn’t returned.
10 p.m.
Today’s short-stay count: 113.
A shame.
If only eight more had come in, we could’ve hit three full rotations…
In five years of working here, we’d only exceeded 120 short-stay bookings on a weekend three times. The cleaning aunties had done over 150 cleanings total today between short-stay and overnight rooms. On camera, they looked visibly exhausted.
I felt a faint itch in my chest. Maybe this was what people called feeling sorry for someone.
Strictly speaking, I wasn’t a psychopath who felt nothing at all.
I was just more numb than ordinary people and found it hard to empathize.
When I was young, my parents—who were now dead—took me to hospitals frequently and always told me this:
My problem could be overcome through social training, so I should always observe the people around me and behave similarly to them.
Up to today, I had followed their teachings well.
Their advice was valuable and important.
Thanks to it, I had adapted to society and lived well.
Then the phone rang.
The caller ID showed the manager.
“Yes, sir.”
“Hey, Chan. Everything fine? I’m just heading home today.”
“Yes, nothing happened. Get home safely.”
“Alright. Work hard. Good job.”
His tongue was slightly slurred—he’d clearly had quite a bit to drink.
If the owner caught him, he’d get chewed out hard…
No.
Maybe after what happened this morning, normal people calmed their nerves by drinking like this.
Maybe I was the abnormal one for being so calm.
After midnight, once the aunties had clocked out, three rooms remained for me to clean:
Room 505, Room 302, and Room 309.
I intentionally left Room 309 uncleaned.
Carrying a black bag and a supplies basket, I went up to the 3rd floor and entered Room 302 first.
As I entered Room 302, I lowered the camera covering Room 310 using telekinesis.
Later, it would look like the camera had loosened and tilted downward on its own.
After finishing Room 302, I opened the door of Room 309 wide.
Now the area in front of Room 310 became a perfect blind spot from the hallway camera.
I lifted my body into the air with telekinesis and checked inside the ceiling inspection opening.
There was a backpack inside.
I pulled it out and opened it. It was stuffed with transparent plastic bags filled with white powder and dozens of bundles of 50,000-won bills.
Cash and drugs.
I’d thought there might be something, but this was unexpected.
The man who killed himself had probably brought this backpack inside the large hiking backpack he’d carried.
The police had taken that hiking backpack in the morning.
I hesitated.
How should I handle this?
I didn’t want to report it to the police.
If I kept it, wouldn’t it cause problems?
With high probability, it would cause problems.
Then was it worth taking that risk?
The drugs were useless to me, but the cash was different.
The value was more than enough to take the risk.
After thinking for a moment in Room 309, I decided.
I put the backpack into a black trash bag and headed to the 5th floor.
Pretending I was going into the 5th-floor storeroom, I went up to the rooftop dorm and placed the backpack inside the wardrobe. When I passed the cleaning aunties’ dorm, the smell of meat drifted out—they must have been cooking.
I went back down to the 5th floor, finished cleaning Room 507, and returned to the counter.
3 a.m.
The motel was full, so I turned off the sign.
As usual, I sat in the counter chair and started training.
Then on the monitor showing the road outside the motel, I saw two black vans approaching.
They tried to come in, but the parking lot was packed, so they parked at the entrance.
Men in black suits poured out of the vans.
I knew this would happen, but I thought it would be in two or three days. This was faster than expected. I reduced the pressure on my wildly pounding heart, relaxed my muscles, and steadied my breathing.
As I stood up, the entrance doors were shoved open roughly and more than ten men flooded in.
When they filled the space in front of the counter, the small lobby became packed.
“This guy came here yesterday, right?”
Pushing through the group, a solid-built man in his thirties held up a photo and asked.
It was the man from Room 310—the suit-wearing suicide victim they had carried out as a body that morning.
“Yes. He stayed two nights. This morning I found he had hanged himself.”
I answered politely, smiling.
“This bastard… why the hell are you smiling?”
The man stared at my face with an incredulous expression, then raised his hand to slap me.
I grabbed his heart with telekinesis.
“Kh… kgh.”
He clutched his chest, his face turning bluish as he gagged.
This was only 20% of the intensity of the cardio I’d been doing moments ago, and he was in that much agony.
“H-hyung… boss, what’s wrong?”
The big men who had been glaring at me aggressively panicked and held him up so he wouldn’t collapse.
“My… my heart… kgh…”
He clutched his chest and foamed at the mouth.
“Hey. Hurry, to the hospital—now!”
They hauled the man—face blue, froth at his mouth—back toward the vans.
I twisted one of their ankles with telekinesis and took him down. That made three or four of them tangle together and crash down as well.
By then, they didn’t even look at me anymore. They scrambled into the vans and sped away.
Telekinesis was an extremely convenient tool for solving troublesome problems.
If they came again, I should sever a cerebral blood vessel next time.