Terror Mannequin

by Douglas Hackle

  Other Books by Douglas Hackle

  Clown Tear Junkies

  The Hottest Gay Man Ever Killed in a Shark Attack

  Is Winona Ryder Still with the Dude from Soul Asylum? and Other Lurid Tales of Terror and Doom!!!

  TERROR MANNEQUIN

  Copyright © 2019 by Douglas Hackle

  Cover artwork by Hauke Vagt

  Cover design by Megan Moss

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The exception would be the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  Halloween, 1989

  A security guard named Roy Malloy awoke with a start, arms flailing and nearly toppling out of his desk chair. Mere moments ago, he’d made the mistake of easing back in his chair, locking his chubby hands behind his fat, mostly bald head, and shutting his tired eyes.

  Just gonna rest my eyes for a sec, he’d thought.

  And he’d dozed.

  Now, sitting bolt upright, the guard glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone had entered the small security office, though he knew the housekeeper and cook had left the house hours ago. He was still alone, thankfully, the door still shut.

  Roy turned back to the gloomy monochrome glow of the black-and-white security monitors mounted on the wall above the desk, scanning them for anything out of the ordinary.

  Everything looks okay, he thought, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Arranged in a rectangular array, the monitors displayed camera feeds of the mostly uninhabited rooms, halls, and immediate exterior grounds of the house. The monitor on the bottom right showed the ground floor: a basement-like, open-floor chamber through which a wide stream of water flowed in and out via arched portals in the room’s north-facing and south-facing walls, respectively. Near the center of the room, Roy’s employer—eccentric, retired oil tycoon Silas Amadeus Cruthers XVII—sat in a chair along the edge of the stream, his back to the camera, flanked on each side by a tray supporting a large bowl of Halloween candy as he waited for the next group of trick-or-treaters to float into the room on their canoes, kayaks, or inflated rafts. The room itself was a decorated Halloween wonderland: prop ghosts, ghouls, skeletons, zombies, werewolves, devils, and tombstones arranged throughout a floor blanketed in machine-generated fog that lapped at either side of the flowing water, the ceiling dripping with sheets of cotton spiderwebs dotted with plastic spiders, everything washed in the dim light produced by the purple, red, and green light bulbs that burned in the ceiling’s recessed fixtures, though the macabre mix of color was only visible as shades of gray on the monitor.

  Yep, no harm done, Roy reassured himself. But he really had to be more careful. Falling asleep on the job was a big no-no when you were a security guard. But could anyone blame him for nodding off now and then? CCTV security monitoring in the middle of nowhere at a place like Fallingwater wasn’t exactly exciting work. But Roy knew he shouldn’t complain. There were far worse things in the world than boredom, and this gig sure beat chasing shoplifters at the mall or escorting belligerent drunks out of overcrowded rock concerts.

  By the way, in case you’ve never heard of it, Fallingwater is a home designed by famed architect extraordinaire Frank Lloyd Wright. Built in 1938 in the woods of rural southwestern Pennsylvania, the house was constructed over a natural waterfall along a steam called Bear Run, itself a tributary of the Youghiogheny River. A celebrated example of modernist and organic architecture, Fallingwater is one of the most famous houses in the world.

  Of course I’ve heard of Fallingwater, you stupid, blithering asshole, you might be thinking right about now.

  Oh, yeah? Okay, smart guy/smart girl. But did you also hear that after years of being open to the public, Fallingwater passed back into private ownership when Old Man Cruthers purchased the place from the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy in 1975? Did you hear how the old man subsequently cut off all land access to the house but had the stream deepened and widened for about a quarter mile on each side of the house to make it more navigable by small watercraft, flotation devices, and even swimmers? How instead of tumbling over the fifty-foot waterfall to their deaths, any visitors riding the stream through Fallingwater’s ground floor were diverted away from the falls by a submerged grate and redirected down a 400-foot water slide built into the adjacent hillside, a water slide conceived of and paid for by the old man himself? How this slide delivered small watercraft and swimmers alike swiftly and safely down to a deep section of the creek often enjoyed as a natural swimming hole? How for nearly a decade, whenever the weather was fair, people came to Bear Run from far and wide to enjoy what was essentially an extended lazy river ride that ended with a mildly thrilling, family-friendly plummet down said water slide?

  And did you ever hear how a Halloween tradition developed in Selohssa—the town nearest to Fallingwater—where trick-or-treaters visited Fallingwater as part of their trick-or-treating itinerary, boarding canoes, kayaks, and inflated rafts upstream from the house in order to make the fun-filled trip? How the old man put up legendary Halloween displays every year for his visitors’ enjoyment? How a half-submerged lever-controlled swing gate in the stream temporarily halted traffic in the center of the room, allowing Old Man Cruthers to pass out generous amounts of candy before the gate retracted to let the trick-or-treaters go on their merry way out the other side of the house and down the water slide? How Fallingwater was probably the coolest fucking place in the world to go trick-or-treating??

  No, you’ve never heard of any of that?

  WELL, WHO’S STUPID NOW, HUH?

  Geez!

  Anyhow, Roy turned his attention back to the basement camera feed: Old Man Cruthers reached down to drop candy into three plastic sacks, each already fat with a night’s worth of sugary loot reaped by a small Darth Vader, a smaller Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and an even smaller fairy aboard a canoe, the children’s father seated at the stern, an oar laid across his knees. In the foreground lurked the army of prop monsters, limbs and claws outstretched, frozen in time in their implied march toward the stream.

  Mounted to the exterior wall of the house, another camera showed where the stream split into a manmade fork as it exited the basement, the left side of the fork forming a short, narrow channel that fed into the water slide, the wider channel on the right continuing forward several feet before falling away into the darkness. A steel grate rose about a foot above the water line, crossing the stream diag
onally to prevent anything larger than two-inch square from going over the falls.

  Yessiree. Everything looks A-okay, Roy thought.

  Hm.

  Or does it?

  He turned back to the ground floor feed, leaned in a little closer to the screen, squinting at the somewhat grainy, low contrast picture, watched the canoe resume its trip down the stream as the old man pulled back the lever to open the swing gate, the children and father waving to him before they floated out the arched exit, the old man waving back at them.

  Yet something about the scene was…off. And damned if he could put a finger on what it was.

  Roy studied the monitor for a few more seconds before he finally figured it out.

  That tall figure standing next to the mummy in the rear of the monster horde—Roy hadn’t noticed it before. He used the joystick controller in front of him to pan the camera right and zoom in on it. Except for a pair of pale, spindly legs, the figure was mostly concealed in shadow, its body a top-heavy blob of darkness set against a background only slightly blacker than itself, the direct light from the nearest ceiling bulb not quite reaching the wall by where the figure stood.

  Regardless of whatever the thing was, the basement Halloween display had been up for three days now—so why hadn’t he noticed the figure before?

  The thing executed a wobbly about-face, took two steps forward, slipped out from the shadows into the wan light for the security guard to see it.

  Roy now saw that the bulky top-heaviness of the thing was due to it being four figures rather than just one. The larger of the figures was a pale, unclothed, genderless mannequin. Its left arm was bent at the elbow, the forearm crossing its midriff like a waiter with a napkin draped over the arm. Perched on its forearm like a trapeze artist seated on a trapeze was a ventriloquist dummy. The mannequin’s right arm appeared to support the dummy’s back. On the dummy’s lap sat an antique wax doll, its face misshapen and lop-sided. In turn, a faceless voodoo doll sat on the wax doll’s lap. For its part, the voodoo doll held onto a plain wooden box that rested in its lap. All four of these connected horrors, even the eyeless voodoo doll, appeared to stare up at Roy though the lens of the security camera.

  The image on the monitor dissolved into scrambled, stroboscopic bands of black and white, scrolling vertically and then diagonally across a background of roiling static.

  “Wh-what the fuck?”

  Roy rose from his chair, grabbed the monitor in both hands, shook it before hitting the side of it with the palm of one hand. A beat later, the scrambled picture returned to normal. Roy scanned the restored camera feed, but the mannequin and its uncanny charge were nowhere in sight. Old Man Cruthers remained seated in his chair, his back still to the camera, presumably oblivious to the presence of any intruders.

  Had he just imagined everything? Were the mannequin and its infernal little crew the waking remnants of a dream he’d had during his nap? Only Roy couldn’t recall dreaming at all, certainly not about anything like that.

  Movement flashed on the exterior monitor.

  On the screen, the mannequin emerged outside the house from the exit portal, wading in the two-feet-deep water, the angle of the camera showing an oblique, almost bird’s-eye view of the thing and its smaller companions, its steps stiff but purposeful. It stopped before the mostly submerged protective barrier grate. From this angle, Roy saw that the mannequin’s right hand did not merely support the seated dummy; the end of the arm was inserted into the dummy’s back as if the mannequin were a ventriloquist controlling its mouth and eyes.

  The dummy leaned forward, bent its head down to regard the grate, reached toward it with one hand, palm-side up, stubby fingers splayed. It slowly raised its extended arm, causing the metal grate to levitate out of the water as if it had not been securely anchored to the solid rock of the streambed with dozens of long, large-diameter industrial bolts. The dummy’s extended arm panned left—as it did so, the grate moved too, in perfect sync with the dummy’s motions. In this way, the dummy lowered the grate back into the stream so that it now blocked the passage to the water slide.

  Which meant anyone taking the stream through the room would now plummet over the falls.

  “Fuck!” Roy yelled, spinning around and knocking his chair over as he scrambled for the door. He grabbed the doorknob, twisted, pulled, but the door wouldn’t budge. He yanked harder, shaking the door in its frame, but the thing still wouldn’t open. Roy turned back to the security monitors, his panicked eyes finding the screen that showed a view of the main hall on the second floor of the house. Sure enough, someone—or something—had used what looked like a heavy-duty extension cord to tie the security room door knob to the doorknob of the neighboring closet, locking him in.

  His eyes darted frantically to the exterior monitor. The mannequin remained standing in the same spot, but now the wax doll had begun to move. That’s when Roy saw that the dummy’s right arm reached into the back of the wax doll to control it in the same way the mannequin worked the dummy—the wax doll’s right arm, in turn, was inserted into the back of the voodoo doll. He now realized he was witnessing the organic movements of a single entity, with the mannequin functioning as the center of will and intelligence, passing its commands down a chain of malevolent ventriloquy.

  The wax doll tilted its head back as if to look up at the row of floodlights mounted to the house’s exterior wall just beyond the camera’s view. Its unevenly spaced eyes—one set much lower than the other—began to glow as it reached out toward the lights with its free hand. One by one, the lights brightened, flickered, and winked out until the camera feed went black save for those two eyes of pinpointed hellfire, the deathtrap now completely hidden to anyone approaching on the stream from inside the house.

  Roy turned back to the door, took a few steps back, rammed it with his shoulder a few times, but to no avail. He kicked at the doorknob repeatedly until the thing finally snapped through its bore hole, and the door flew open with a loud crack. He stumbled out into the hall, unbuttoning the holstered S&W revolver on his belt as he rushed down to the stairway. When, huffing and puffing, he reached the bottom of the stairs, he found himself facing yet another locked door. He fumbled with his keys, dropping them once, before he got the right key in the lock. As he did so, muted screams sounded from beyond the door.

  But still the door wouldn’t open.

  He kicked at the knob.

  More screams abruptly tapered off in volume as soon as they began.

  When he finally broke through, sending a chair that had been wedged under the doorknob flying, he stared straight ahead: Old Man Cruthers and his two bowls of candy were gone. The lever for the swing gate was in the open position. His eyes immediately darted to the exit portal, where he caught the confused and disappointed expression of a young boy dressed as Buzz Lightyear who was looking over his shoulder back at Roy from his seat at the rear of a canoe—the boy presumably wondering where on earth Old Man Cruthers was with his candy and why the canoe had not stopped in the middle of the room like it was supposed to—just before the canoe disappeared into the dark of the exit portal.

  “Noooo!” Roy yelled as he charged forward.

  But it was too late. A beat later, the horrible but brief cries of the canoe’s passengers as they plummeted into the darkness assaulted his ears, cut off nearly as soon as they had begun by the unforgiving rocks below.

  He dashed to the stream, knocking several prop monsters down into the scattering fog on his way there. Roy knelt down at the edge, where the concrete floor dropped off to form a canal-like channel for the stream. He grabbed onto the lever, threw it the other way, closing the swing gate. As he did so, he heard a light footfall behind him. Roy sprang to his feet, spun around.

  The mannequin, still bearing its three dreadful companions, stood in a pool of macabre green light spilling down from the ceiling about fifteen feet away. Roy now saw each of them in more terrible detail: the mannequin’s yawning black mouth like that of an elongat
ed tragedy mask, its oversized eyes, painted wide open as if to betray its own horror at learning some terrible secret, as if the thing were terrified of witnessing its own unholy animation—of beholding its own absurd and improbable existence—terrible eyes that also appeared to silently beg Roy to put the thing out of its misery. Attired in a moldering, colorless suit and bowtie like the deathsuit filched off the disinterred corpse of a long-deceased boy, the dummy was no less unwholesome with its grotesque, cartoonish eyes, its bushy, furrowed eyebrows, and its garishly rouged cheeks painted above a hinged, permanently grimacing rictus lined with large, square teeth like the incisors of a horse. Dressed in a dusty, tattered, vintage gown and bonnet, the wax doll’s face was half-melted so that the left half of its rosebud-shaped lips trailed away down to its chin in a dark, runny, tapering smear, its left eye occupying the space a dimple should have held—a pinpoint of fiery orange glowing at the center of each glassy orb. Tufts of Spanish moss poked out through holes in the voodoo doll’s crudely-stitched-together skin of coarse burlap. Roy saw a crank jutting out of the side of the wooden box that sat in the voodoo doll’s lap. One of the voodoo doll’s fingerless limbs rested on the crank’s ball-shaped end.

  A jack-in-the-box.

  The mannequin took a clunky, mechanical step forward. Roy clumsily withdrew his revolver, drawing a shaky bead on the thing’s chest. The mannequin took a second step forward.

  “Not another step or I’ll shoot!”

  When the thing ignored his command, Roy unloaded the revolver into its torso. As each bullet slammed home, the thing was driven back a step, its body and the smaller forms of its connected companions juddering with each impact. But the mannequin did not fall.

  It shuffled forward, returning to its original position. Though unseen by Roy, the mannequin’s right hand manipulated something inside the dummy’s body, inducing it to work something inside the wax doll, which, in turn, spurred the wax doll to move its hand inside the voodoo doll. As a result, the voodoo doll commenced turning the crank on the box, whereupon the traditional music-box melody of “Pop! Goes the Weasel” started playing, the tinny, chime-like notes slightly off-pitch.