The Cleaner's Tale

"The Cleaner's Tale" is a short Cthulhu Mythos story by author Tom Johnstone. It was published in the Matthew Carpenter-edited thematic anthology Pickman's Gallery by Ulthar Press in 2018.
==Synopsis==
An immigrant cleaning lady named Maria Luisa, former employee at a rural New England research facility funded by Arkham's Miskatonic University, relates her story to an investigative reporter.
While performing her duties - largely ignored by the faculty - she overhears two of the senior researchers, men by the names of Marston and Thurber, discuss an old photograph which the latter had in his possession, an image of a strange creature which appears to be some kind of canine-human hybrid. As she is called away, she hears one last fragment: that the men may know of a technological way to replicate the creature in the picture.
Later, Maria Luisa comes across a scene of carnage: one of the restricted sections is awash with blood and human body parts, and one of the experimental machines, a kind of biological 3-D printer, has been destroyed from the inside out. Making an anonymous call to the police, she leaves the facility and never returns, although she later comes to believe that she is being followed by shadowy government agents.
==Behind the Mythos==
Although never explicitly stated, the name of the Bostonian researcher and the subject of the photograph clearly implies them to be the narrator and final image described in "Pickman's Model".
Category:Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Tom Johnstone works