A New Mannequin Arrived at Work

I work in a store that deals in selling children's toys and clothing. Dotted around the store are a bunch of mannequins wearing either fashionable clothes with children’s characters on them or costumes to be like their favorite characters.
Every few weeks, the store changes. Literally, nothing stays in the same place for more than a month. The dolls can take up an entire section of a wall in one month and then occupy a small freestanding fixture the next. This means that the mannequins move around all of the time too.
One night, about a month back, we broke two mannequins. Much to our dismay, and our boss's, we needed to buy a couple of new ones. Our boss was livid with us because apparently, those things cost about two grand each. Two fucking grand for a fake kid.
Anyway, the two new ones arrived a few days later along with one of our deliveries for the week. I carefully picked up one of the mannequins and took it to where it would be put on display the next morning and asked one of the girls I was pulling the delivery in with to grab the other one. When I returned, I saw she was dragging this other new mannequin across the floor while still wrapped in a protective bag.
“What are you doing? Just pick it up, it’s not that heavy,” I said, mockingly.
“Oh, yeah? You try!” she said with a wisp of bite to her words.
I gladly swooped down and picked up the mannequin, although it was not with the ease with which I first assumed I would pick it up. This thing weighed a lot… a lot more than the first new mannequin. It was so heavy that I had to lift the thing up onto my shoulders just to spread the weight across my body enough to carry it the whole way. I carefully lowered it back to the ground and propped it up against the wall with the other new mannequin.
Oddly, this new mannequin didn’t have detachable extremities. Usually, they all come with two detachable arms and one detachable leg in order to dress them easier. I always had found that a little creepy too. They all have eyelashes. This one didn’t though which, looking back, seemed a bit odd, but I never gave it a thought at first.
I left a sticky note on the thing saying to install that new mannequin first when the morning team arrived for work and that it would be at least a three-person job due to the weight and the height it needed to travel. I even questioned whether or not our glass shelving would be able to withstand the weight or not on the note.
That day was one of my days off. I got a text from one of the guys helping out that morning that read as follows:
“You weren’t kidding about that mannequin being a three-person job… it took two ladders and four people to get that thing secured in and up there. What’s that thing made of, iron?”
I sent a reply giving them all props for even getting the thing up there.
So, a few days went by and everyone forgot about the mannequin situation… that was until I noticed the shelf it was standing on. The glass shelf, which is safety glass, so it’s thick, and the two metal arms holding it up, were beveling under the weight of the thing. How had no-one noticed that? I immediately told my manager and he said that it should be fine until we close, then we could take it down.
When the time came, he entrusted me to do this alone. I showed him the text I received from one of the guys who installed the damn thing and he just looked at me as if to question my masculinity. Yeah, my manager was a “men should be men and women should be in the kitchen,” type of arsehole. Watching him talk down to people always riled me up but when he did it to me I had to heavily suppress the urge to flat-out punch the guy.
So, he’s cashing up, one of the girls I work with is tidying the store and I’m trying to take this mannequin out of the wall, and fuck me, was I struggling. I couldn’t even detach this thing from its metal holder never mind take it down.
After what felt like an hour, I managed to lift the thing up and I immediately became teetering on the ladder. Even with my colleague holding the thing still, the weight of me and the mannequin seemed too much for the top of the ladder and physics wanted to kick me in the nuts that day. We both went flying from the top of a nine-foot ladder. There was a comedically loud slam on the ground and I blacked out for about two seconds. I was brought back around by the shakes from my colleague.
I was able to stand up and when I did, I noticed two things. Firstly, my head was killing me and felt like I’d just gone three rounds with Brock Lesnar in an octagon. Secondly, there was blood on the floor. My colleague told me to stoop down to her level so she could check my head for any wounding. There wasn’t anything there. That was until we saw the that the blood on the floor was still pooling and that pool was getting bigger by the second. The blood was coming from inside the mannequin.
“What the fuck?!” we both said in unison.
I flipped the mannequin into a face-up position on the ground and surveyed it. There was a big hole in its head now and looking inside I can only describe what I saw as a mixture of flesh, bone and brains. I started picking at that cracked hardened plastic around the face and, when I did, my suspicions were confirmed.
Underneath the mannequin's face was the face of a person. Not just any person… a fucking child. I and my colleague recoiled in horror and she ran to tell the manager. He came over and looked like he’d just seen a ghost. His reaction was the most flamboyant I’ve ever seen come from him.
He said he was going back to the office to call the police. After fifteen minutes of standing around with the dead body of a child encased in plastic on the floor, I went to the office to check on him. Through the little window to the office, there was no sign of the manager. I ran around to the back door to find both of the double doors swaying in the wind, and the space in which his car occupied was no longer filled. The manager had fled.
We then called the police, fearing that he hadn’t, and they arrived within minutes. We gave our statements and went home. I have yet to find out anything that’s happened and it’s been a month. The only thing I was told by the police though, was that my manager still hasn’t been found, and after searching his home it’s clear that this man was twisted enough to kill a child and then display the body like a trophy.
In fact, there were targets listed on his walls.
Keep your children safe, people. And next time you look at a mannequin on a shop floor or shop window. Look extra close… it might not just be a big hunk of plastic. Inside could be a whole other level of twisted.
Category:Disappearances
Category:Items/Objects