Mannequins | completed

Eleven

WE HEADED STRAIGHT to Marty's Motel, using my car as our source of transportation. Marty's Motel wasn't far, but it wasn't near either so the drive wasn't exactly the shortest, which meant that there was a lot of time to converse. So I decided to ask Callum the questions I've been wanting to askhim, while at the same time hoping that even if I would predictably sound curious, I wouldn't sound incredibly nosey.

"When did you find out about the mannequins?" I asked. The mood in the car quickly turned from light to serious; it shifted as quickly as Callum's emotions usually did.

Callum didn't look at me when he answered my query. Instead, he was looking out the window, observing the trees and structures as we passed by them. He looked like he was in a sad music video of some sort.

"About four months ago, I think," he stated. So he had found out about the mannequins before I even started working at C'est La Vie three months ago. "I don't normally watch the news, because I find it boring, but one night I did, and the first thing on the news was about the massacre. Julie Sanders went missing and it was suspected that she was also included in the massacre, and, well, a few days later I found out that the suspicion wasn't wrong.

"I was in C'est La Vie, working as usual. I was entertaining customers, working behind the counter, etcetera. It seemed like such a normal day because I was doing what I normally did. But I came to learn it wasn't much of a normal day because it was the day I found out about the mannequins. The big revelation, I call it."

"There was a little girl who entered the shop with her mother. She was small, so she was able to tightly grip onto her mother's leg. It almost looked like she was crushing her mother's leg. She kept on saying to her mother, "I'm scared, I'm scared, I'm scared, I want to get out of here. Her mother looked at me, sheepish on her daughter's behalf because her daughter was quite loud and seemed to be disrupting the other customers in the shop with her obnoxiousness."

"I shook my head and said it was okay. Then I walked to the little girl, crouched in front of her and asked her what she was scared of. I was honestly curious. The shop covered in pink and full of frilly crap, it was every little girl's dream. So I didn't see why she was scared or what she was scared of.

"The little girl then informed me that she was scared of the mannequins and I told her that she shouldn't be because they weren't alive and couldn't hurt her. She argued with me, saying that they looked real and alive. All I did was laugh in response—I found her cute—then I proceeded organizing a set of clothes that were hung on a rack by size and style."

"Later that day, when I was closing up the shop I remembered what the little girl said about the mannequins, about how they looked real and alive. So before I closed up the shop, I took a look at the mannequins."

"I was surprised to see that the little girl was right—the mannequins did indeed look real and alive. Obviously, they weren't alive so perhaps a better term to use was human; the mannequins looked undeniably human."

"As a person who never took time to closely inspect a mannequin, the things I found out when I did surprised me. Besides the fact that the mannequins looked human, another shocking thing I found out was that one of the mannequins looked exactly like Julie Sanders."

"I ignored it at first, but then I got really intrigued by the material of what I thought was a mannequin. I thought that the material of the mannequin was exquisite, because it was able to make the mannequin look human. Thus I decided to take a piece of the mannequin's skin, which wasn't a difficult task to do. All I had to do was dig my nail into its skin and pull the skin off."

"Since I was a pre-med student and all, I had access to the labs in the university I studied in. I went to one of the labs and examined the mannequin's skin. At first I thought the skin was some kind of special plastic, but when I examined it I found out it was dead human skin. This freaked the hell out of me, but on the other hand, it also made me curious, so I examined all of the other mannequins' skin. All my examinations had the same result; the mannequins' skin was dead human skin. I also tried examining the other parts of the mannequins, the hair, the nails, etcetera, and they all had one thing in common: every feature was completely human.