Still holding his spent, smoking handgun out before him, Roy gawked in slack-jawed horror at the harrowing vision before him, his eyes trained on the box. In those last seconds, as the nursey rhyme melody moved inexorably toward the “Pop!” note, Roy’s gut instinct told him to look away or to at least close his eyes, but curiosity got the better of him.
Pop!
The security guard collapsed to his knees, the pistol dropping from his hands and bouncing off the concrete into the stream. He thrust his palms out before him as if to shield himself from whatever it was he saw, his entire body convulsing. In a matter of seconds, twin rivulets of blood sprung from his bulging eyes to leak down his ashen, blood-drained cheeks. The man’s heart collapsed in on itself as if crushed by an invisible fist that had reached into his ribcage before transforming into a biologically useless Totino’s pizza roll.
Yeah, you read that right.
At the same time, Roy’s brain metamorphosed into dogshit—dogshit crawling with plump maggots and fat worms.
Yeah, you read that right, too.
A beat later, the security guard’s eyes, now swollen to the size of baseballs, exploded in two pink-red splats. In their wake, the maggoty, wormy dogshit that had been Roy’s thinking gray matter only seconds ago extruded slowly out of his ruptured eye sockets. His body pitched forward, his dogshit-oozing face thudding sickly against the damp concrete.
Yeah, yeah, I know Roy’s death sounds ridiculous, absurd, and completely made-up, but that’s what really happened. In fact, the next morning, after the Fayette County Coroner performed an autopsy on the security guard’s body, the cause of death shown on his report read as follows:
“CAUSE OF DEATH: Heart turned into a motherfucking Totino’s pizza roll and brain turned into dogshit. WTF, bitch?!?!!!”
And yes, the usually extremely professional Fayette County Coroner, a respected member of both the local medical and law enforcement communities and summa cum laude graduate of George Washington University’s prestigious Department of Forensic Sciences, actually wrote “motherfucking” and “WTF, bitch?!?!!!” in his report!!!
***
In the approximate minute and a half, the gate had been open, Old Man Cruthers along with seventeen people—most of them children—had plummeted over the falls to the rocks fifty feet below. No one survived. In the recorded surveillance video from that night, shortly after the voodoo doll started turning the crank, static inexplicably engulfed the footage, presumably at the exact moment the box’s lid popped open.
After the static cleared thirty seconds later, the footage showed the security guard’s toppled dead body, but no sign of any intruders. Aside from the grainy surveillance video, the authorities never found any other evidence of the mannequin or its accomplices in or outside the house.
***
In the subsequent settlement of Old Man Cruthers’ estate, an unknown beneficiary inherited Fallingwater. As the old man had no surviving relatives and no known friends, people could only guess this person’s identity. Later that year, a barbed wire fence, punctuated every fifty feet with signs warning people to keep out, appeared around the perimeter of the 1,500 wooded acres surrounding the house. And where the fence ended on either side of the stream, its three parallel strings of barbed wire continued over the water, strung taut between two end posts lest anyone attempt to enter the property via the water. What’s more, a couple dozen signs prohibiting swimming, kayaking, and canoeing sprouted up along the banks of Bear Run at the point where the stream widened just outside Fallingwater’s now-conspicuous property line.
Yet despite these security measures, no one appeared to move into the house following the old man’s death. A new owner was never spotted entering or leaving the property, either by land or stream, nor was a lighted window ever observed at the place at night.
Over the years, the house went to seed. With workers no longer called in to perform the routine cleaning and preservation maintenance needed to protect the house from the elements, and with no one hired to prune back the surrounding woods, a verdant veil of mildew, moss, creeping ivy, and crawling vines soon overtook the structure’s distinctive asymmetrical stone and concrete exterior, making the house less and less visible from all directions. Thus, it came to pass that nature began to reclaim a house that had been designed to conform and harmonize with nature.
Almost immediately following the tragedy, the locals began to tell stories about ghostly figures haunting the woods around the house—the spirits of those unlucky trick-or-treaters who’d fallen to their deaths on that infamous Halloween night. Some people claimed to behold the spirit of Old Man Cruthers himself. And, of course, people told stories about the monster many believed still lurked at Fallingwater and its grounds: a pale mannequin holding a ventriloquist dummy holding an old wax doll holding a voodoo doll holding a wooden box. Some claimed to see this horror either skulking about in the woods or else seated behind one of the high windows of the house looking out, the voodoo doll’s stub of a hand always poised on the box’s crank, ready to turn it and release whatever horror lay inside back out into the world.
Over the years, the mannequin and its little troupe of connected, nightmarish accomplices came to be known collectively as TERROR MANNEQUIN.
Chapter 1
Thirty Years Later
F orty-year-old Glont Lamont stepped out of a revolving door into the lobby of the Fun 4-Life corporate office building in downtown Selohssa, Pennsylvania, briefcase swinging at his side. Somewhat long and severe in the face and narrow in the shoulders, his dark hair pomaded in a Don Draper side part, the clean-shaven beanpole of a man was attired in a conservative charcoal-gray business suit and looked something like a cross between H.P. Lovecraft, Pee-wee Herman, and George McFly.
And today the dude looked pissed.
“Good morning, Glont,” Jill said from her seat behind the gigantic reception desk. In contrast to Glont’s good grooming, the young woman was still in her Hello Kitty pajamas and rocking a bad case of fuck hair. As it was two days before Halloween, her desk and the wall behind her were bedecked with paper pumpkins, bats, witches, Frankensteins, and sundry other seasonal decorations.
“Bah!” Glont grumbled. “What’s so good about it?”
“Uh-oh!” the receptionist teased. “Sounds like somebody’s a big grumpola this morning. Hey, what’s with the monkey suit? Did somebody die or something?”
“It’s called wearing the proper attire to the workplace, Jill,” Glont said as he shuffled past her and headed for the elevators. “Maybe you should try it sometime.”
“Yeah, right!”
Glont took the elevator up to the fifth floor in the company of a middle-aged woman in a bathrobe smoking a fat blunt, two old men wearing nothing but black leather thongs and matching studded collars, three cosplayers—one dressed as a Xenomorph alien, one as Nintendo’s Mario, and one as Antonio Salieri from Amadeus—and a short, bespectacled, mousy, librarian-like woman who, despite refusing to make eye contact with anyone, wore a t-shirt with these words printed on the front:
My great-great-grandparents chomped ass like Pac-Man chomps dots.
My great-grandparents chomped ass like Pac-Man chomps dots.
My grandparents chomped ass like Pac-Man chomps dots.
My parents chomped ass like Pac-Man chomps dots.
Now I chomp ass like Pac-Man chomps dots.
“Wanna puff?” the bathrobed woman asked Glont, proffering him the blunt when the elevator dinged as it reached the fifth floor.
“Bah!” he said with a scowl, clutching his briefcase to his chest as he shoved his way out of the elevator car.
Glont walked the circuitous route to his workstation, which was located somewhere in the middle of the sprawling cubicle maze that was the fifth floor of Fun 4-Life’s corporate and operational headquarters. As it was only a quarter past ten in the morning and employees at Fun 4-Life could pretty much come into work whenever the hell they wanted, most of the cubes he pas
sed were still unoccupied. However, some early birds were already “hard at work” at their workstations.
For example, an unshaven twenty-something man naked but for a grubby pair of SpongeBob boxers was kicking back in a leather recliner playing Grand Theft Auto 5 on Xbox, a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, his head cocked and chin held high to keep the smoke from burning his eyes. All Fun 4-Life cubicles were equipped with such recliners, as well as 43-inch flat screen TVs/monitors, high-end gaming PCs, Blu-ray players, all the popular newer and retro gaming consoles, fully stocked bar shelves, refrigerators filled with food and beer, microwaves, and comfy fold-out beds, just to name a few of the standard amenities. A few cubes down from the guy playing GTA, a similarly ensconced thirtyish dude watched SportsCenter while sipping from a pitcher of margarita. Just past him, a fiftyish woman was binge-watching some trendy, must-see TV show, while the fortyish dude in the cube across the aisle from her was busy playing some old school Nintendo.
In the time it took him to get to his cube, Glont also passed a few people sleeping off hangovers in their beds, a man taking a break from working on a 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle to take a pull off an antique Chinese opium pipe, a handful of people swiping idly at their smart phones, and even a few cubes with curtains drawn across their entrances, behind which people were either fapping off to porn videos playing on their big flat screen monitors (judging from all the moaning, grunting, and fleshy slapping sounds), or, if they were lucky, engaging in actual sex. Everyone he passed was either dressed super-casually, ridiculously, scantily, or not at all.
“Hi, Glont,” Amanda Baker—the new girl hired not three weeks ago—said to him, her pretty, downturned face slightly blushing. She stood just outside the entrance to her cube, almost as if she were waiting for Glont to walk by, a tall coffee mug grasped in both her hands. (Psst!—as the omniscient narrator of this narrative, I’ll have you know that she was waiting for him to walk by!)
Amanda had the hot nerd chick thing going on: big round glasses, long black hair streaked with purple highlights and braided in tight pigtails, pleated plain jane skirt, green Chuck Taylor low tops, and a tight-fitting Children of Dune t-shirt that did little to conceal the two prodigious, ripe, jiggling, grapefruit-like orbs aching to burst out of the tight prison that was the lacy, black Victoria’s Secret bra barely containing those bad boys. Like all women in the world, Amanda was more or less constantly aware of her breasts, just as she was also more or less always aware of the way her frilly, silky, Victoria’s Secret panties enveloped the supple curvature of her smooth, tanned, unblemished, heart-shaped ass, just as she was pretty much perpetually cognizant of the somewhat pleasantly agonizing sensation of emptiness in her currently unfilled vagina and rectum as they both ached to be filled—a cognizance that was itself just one facet of a more general, distinctly feminine, physical-sexual hyper-self-awareness that also extended to parts deeper inside her body—to, for example, the erotic plumpness of her ovaries, the sexy twists of her fallopian tubes, and the sensual smoothness of her myometrium (whatever the hell that is).
Also, like all other women in the world, Amanda had a small rainbow in her stomach that absorbed all the solid foods she consumed, distributing ingested nutrients to other parts of the body while annihilating all solid and gaseous waste products, which, of course, is why women don’t poop or fart. (And should my knowledge of female anatomy and sexual self-awareness and stuff like that not be perfectly accurate—man, I dunno—just deal with it, I guess.)
But where was I? Oh, Amanda just said hi to Glont.
Glont paused only to scowl at the woman and utter, “Bah!” before trudging away.
Lastly, he passed his own cubicle neighbor, one Sam Henderson, dressed in full clown gear and busy bouncing on the trampoline that occupied the center of his cube.
“Hey, Glont,” Sam said.
“Bah!” Glont said, stopping only to shake his fist at the bouncing clown before ducking into his own cube. Setting his briefcase on his desk, he plopped down into his recliner.
After logging into his computer, Glont pulled up his calendar to see what was on his schedule. He saw that before he clocked out for the day, he was supposed to play video games for at least two hours, watch TV for another two hours, spend at least an hour fucking around on the Internet, and play with his Star Wars figures for at least half an hour. He was also scheduled to get at least mildly drunk and/or high at some point during the day (or all day long, if he so chose), toss off to Internet porn with the ferocity of a madman in an insane asylum at least twice, devour a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs like a pig at a trough (no utensils or hands allowed), and visit the day spa on the first floor for a sauna bath and full body massage. What’s more, he was also scheduled to ride (at least twice) the awesome indoor/outdoor rollercoaster that ran through and wrapped around the Fun 4-Life office tower.
Of course, these activities were all merely suggestions: employees at Fun 4-Life could pretty much do whatever the hell they wanted so long as they showed up at the office once or twice a week to log in a least a couple hours of, well, basically anything. If you did at least that, you were guaranteed your base $85,000 annual salary. However, if you followed the company’s suggested schedule of daily “work assignments,” you earned bonuses that could easily bump that eighty-five grand to well over a hundred grand by the year’s end. What’s more, Fun 4-Life offered its employees 401(k) plans with 100-percent employer matching, pension plans, health insurance, vision and dental, short- and long-term disability, full tuition reimbursement, and maternity and paternal leave—all of it free. Furthermore, short of tossing your boss out the fucking window, getting fired from Fun 4-Life was nearly impossible.
Glont turned from the TV screen, clicked open his briefcase: it was stuffed with Star Wars figures and nothing else. “Bah!” he grumbled, his face still contorted in a deep, boohoo grimace. He stared down at the figures for a moment before grabbing the briefcase and flipping it up in the air, the figures raining onto the floor around him.
“Whaddya go and do a thing like that for, Glont?” Sam asked. Glont glanced up to his left to catch Sam’s painted clown face peering over their shared cubicle wall as the clown reached the apex of his bounce before his head dipped back down out of sight.
“None of your damn business, Sam. And stop spying on me!”
Sam’s face rose one more time above the partition, his mouth agape in a mock-offended “o” shape, before disappearing again.
Glont sat on the edge of his recliner, elbows on his desk, hands steepled and resting against his lips, trying to think of something to do.
A-ha! he thought.
After rising from his chair, doffing his suit jacket, and rolling his shirtsleeves up past his elbows, Glont left his cube and took a stroll over to the utility closet, where he grabbed a spray bottle of window cleaner, a sponge, and a squeegee. He then walked over to the north end of his floor and commenced cleaning the windows.
Not twenty minutes later, Marty Strokeoff—the floor manager and Glont’s immediate supervisor—approached Glont as he wiped assiduously at a window that did not need wiping. Marty was a middle-aged, heavyset man with a bristly, orange-red neckbeard flecked with gray. As was his habit, Marty was dressed in nothing save a big, safety-pinned cloth diaper and an oversized baby bonnet. He halted a few steps behind Glont, crossed his arms under his sizable, hirsute man boobs. In one hand he clutched a big-ass fucking baby rattle.
“Whaddaya think you’re doing, Glont?” he asked.
Glont paused to cast a sharp glance over his shoulder, but immediately turned back to his work. “What does it look like, Marty? I’m washing the damn windows.” In front of him, the company rollercoaster zoomed by the window in a rumbling blur.
“We have a cleaning crew to take care of that.”
“Yeah, well maybe they missed some spots. A window can never be too clean.”
“We need to have a talk, Glont. Follow me, please.”
Glont shook his head and spiked the squeegee down on the floor before following his boss down the hall. Marty opened the door to his office, motioning for Glont to enter first. Marty closed the door behind them.
“Have a seat, Glont.”
“Aw, man. Do I have to? Can’t I just stand?” In Marty’s office, “having a seat” meant mounting one end of the seesaw attached to the middle of the floor, and the last thing in the world Glont felt like doing was riding a fucking seesaw.
“I insist,” Marty said, gesturing to the seesaw.
“Bah!” Glont sat down on one end of the seesaw, grabbed the handle. Marty mounted the other side, lifting Glont into the air as he did so. The two men commenced taking turns pushing themselves off the floor with their feet.
“Are you unhappy here, Glont?”
“Why do ya ask that?”
“Well, lately you’ve been showing up to work in a suit and tie when you know doing so is not only unnecessary but discouraged by management. Instead of engaging in fun, recreation, and indolence like the rest of us, you’ve been making helpful yet unrequested software and hardware updates to everyone’s computers, vacuuming the carpets, taking out the garbage, cleaning the toilets, watering the plants, patching the drywall in the men’s room, and now you’re washing windows. And you’re grumpy as hell to boot. And what’s with saying ‘bah’ all the time? Like, who even says ‘bah’ except for stooped-over old men and characters in Dickens novels?”
Glont sighed. “I’m bored, Marty. I used to love it here. But I’ve been at Fun 4-Life for fifteen years now. Over the years, I’ve come to discover that you can only play videos games, watch TV, jerk off, get drunk, get high, eat pizza, and take long naps for so long before it starts to get old, before a desire to do real work gets ahold of you, ya know?”
Terror Mannequin Page 2