The Night Cleaner's Tales · Brian Bridges

S1 E13 | "Sabbatical"

October 27, 2020·24 min·2 clips

Veronica and Louis realize they've been dosed with something, sparking terror and confusion.

The episode opens with the recurring night cleaner narrator discovering mushrooms sprouting from a leaking pipe in a morgue back room and joking about sampling them. He launches into a story about four friends — Brandon, Louis, Maya, and Veronica — hiking to a cabin in the woods, debating hallucinogens, shamanic ritual, and the nature of consciousness along the way. Louis recounts a vivid and disturbing dream about finding his father dead in a flood of black goo, mirroring a real midnight call from his grandmother two nights prior — though the real event turned out to be his father sick with flu eating chicken noodle soup. The group debates whether the dream was prophetic or coincidental, touching on confirmation bias, empirical evidence, and truth versus fact. At the cabin, Veronica begins serving a special tea she claims will align chi and bring about catharsis, which some of the group accept after initial resistance. Shortly after, several members become dizzy and nauseated, and it becomes clear Veronica has dosed them without full consent — possibly with mushrooms or ayahuasca. Brandon and Maya descend into the basement and stop responding normally. One by one, group members begin repeating the phrase 'come and see' and urging Ronnie toward something they have discovered below. Ronnie recognizes that the people speaking to her are not behaving like themselves. When a voice claiming to be Lewis tells her she is beautiful and says 'I love you,' she rejects it because Lewis would never say that directly to her face. Ronnie refuses to follow them, someone collapses, and Brandon calls for an ambulance. The episode closes with the night cleaner returning to the mushrooms, accepting a dare to eat them, and requesting his toe tag be written like a thrift store price sticker at four dollars and twenty cents.

As heard by us

A crude workplace tale that turns plumbing trouble into a sickly, funny drift toward dread.

"Sabbatical" runs on a rough, funny charge, with a leaky back room, mushrooms in the clutter, and a repair talk that keeps drifting into paranoia.

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Why you'd press play

Play this for a leaking pipe, a patch of mushrooms, and a bad omen that keeps mutating in the back room.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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