Night of the Mannequins

by Stephen Graham Jones

  They both looked to me, waiting.

  “That team-up movie,” Danielle finally said. “One we—we brought Manny to?”

  “It’s already posted?” JR said, incredulous. “It’s still in the theaters, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged.

  “Why do you think he was watching it?” Danielle asked, hugging her knees tighter, her chin right on top of them, her hair frizzing all around her.

  “I hope he was, I mean,” I said, looking back out across the water for a wet bulge slowly crowning up. “I never even got to see it that night, did y’all?”

  It was how I was deciding who was next. Whichever of them had, that would be the next victim raising their hand. But neither of them said anything.

  We just sat there like a math problem, like the remainder left over after everything’s gone to hell.

  “I think I’m going to fix up my dad’s motorcycle,” I said at last.

  “I can help,” JR said.

  “Count me in too,” Danielle said, and I pursed my lips in an inside smile, a maybe thankful smile, because nobody lies with better intentions than friends. They each patted me on the shoulder when they left, and Danielle kissed me on the top of the head, and somehow I didn’t catch on fire from all the heat and anger and sadness swirling inside me.

  I just kept staring across the lake.

  9

  OVER DINNER THE NIGHT I was to kill Danielle, my dad told a wandering-all-over story about his dad taking him fishing. He basically has two fishing stories: one is the time a bird dive-bombed the spoon lure he was casting, snagged it in midair, and the other’s this one about him and Grandpa sitting out there on top of the lake at dawn, like two versions of the same person balanced on top of this great cliff of water over by the dam, and Grandpa’s got this deep-sea rig going on that he’d bought at a pawnshop. Because that’s how you pull up the giant catfish that’s supposed to be floating down there like a zeppelin, its whiskers as thick as a man’s arm.

  Spoiler: they don’t catch it this day. Fish stories aren’t about what happened, they’re about what almost happened, what should have happened, what was so close to actually happening that, in the telling and retelling, it sort of starts to happen.

  So me and my mom sat through Grandpa feeling a twitch in that thick line, then the line running out, then Dad scooping lake water up onto the reel, and then Grandpa setting the line, and how it jerked the whole boat forward, as mimed by the dollop of mashed potatoes on the end of my dad’s fork.

  I think he tells that story because he knows him and me are never going fishing like that, but if I can just feel that rush he felt that day the boat jerked with magic, then it’ll sort of be like I was there with them, three generations of us in one tight boat, and like that he’s absolved of having to get up at four in the morning, haul us down to the boat ramp.

  And, really? That’s pretty okay with me.

  This time through the story I was just watching how tight that deep-sea fishing line of Grandpa’s probably was before it snapped. And how it was probably bright green, and how nobody except me would ever know how that mattered, how that matched up with a certain coil of line in my pocket that I kept having to sneak touches down to, to be sure it hadn’t slithered away, to be sure it wasn’t going to go killing without me. Another thing I was the only one to be seeing on continual loop, I’m pretty sure, was Shanna, lying in her bed with her two dogs, and how both of them probably popped their heads up right when those Mack headlights flashed her window into a sun.

  I hope she wasn’t scared, I mean. I hope it was fast.

  Like it wasn’t with Tim.

  But that was my first try. He was practice, he was me finding my feet.

  And what I really hated at the same time I was kind of looking forward to it was that, for Danielle, I was probably going to be better—stronger, faster, less hesitation. I liked it for her, of course, I didn’t like to think about her suffering and being scared, but a thing like I was about to have to do, it should be hard for the person having to do it, shouldn’t it?

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to get better. I wanted each time to be a barely situation, an it’s - not - going - to - work - this - time - I - can’t - do - it situation, a skin - of - my - teeth thing that could go either way, at least until luck or fate steps in, decides it so I don’t have to.

  “Mim lost a whole chicken,” my mom said then, like the most delicious neighborhood gossip, and I kind of heard it on delay, clawing up out of my own head, back to the dinner table.

  “Chicken, hm,” my dad said, trying to tease an overthick slice of bell pepper from his meat loaf and stealthily guide it away from anything on his plate he was maybe planning on eating, him being forever on the team that thinks only meat and breadcrumbs and egg and ketchup go into meat loaf.

  “She doesn’t have a chicken,” my little brother Beanie said, perfectly aping my mom’s out-loud italics.

  “Off her grill, dear,” my mom said. “It was . . . she was—what’s the word, where you spin it like a hot dog?”

  “Ferris wheel?” I tried, providing my usual level of help.

  “Rotisserie,” my dad said sort of with a harrumph, so you could like hear a newspaper page turning loud and crinkly in his hands. Because this is 1950, yeah. But still, I could sort of hear it in his impatient, kind of disgusted delivery.

  “And Dave and LouAnne on the corner,” my mom went on, leaning in and raising her eyebrows because we were so supposed to call bullshit on this, “she was unloading her groceries, and she says one of her bags went completely missing. Just, boop, gone!”

  “She’s the one who can’t keep up with her dog?” my dad asked.

  “Bags of groceries don’t chase after squirrels, dear,” my mom said back to him.

  “Just saying,” he said.

  “Somebody’s stealing this stuff?” I couldn’t help asking out loud. “Like—like, whoever was getting the fertilizer or whatever?”

  “Oh, oh,” my mom said, the underside of her fingers to my dad’s forearm, for his full attention, “if we file a police report, homeowner’s will cover however many bags we say we lost. However many.”

  “Wasn’t me,” Beanie said in his chipper, guilty way, and I considered him and his third-grade self for a moment, trying to figure if he could have been responsible for the rash of nocturnal Miracle-Gro thieveries, if he and his friends could be the ones stealing groceries and opening up backyard barbecue grills like presents.

  No, I decided. No way.

  But did that leave Manny, then? Why would a man made of plastic want human food? And why would he want so little? For his appetite, at the size he was now, he’d have to stride out past the city limits, scoop up a whole herd of cattle, chase them down with a handful of horses.

  More important, how could he sneak into a backyard, open a barbecue? He’d have either ripped the top completely off the grill, or he’d have left some of his melted plastic on the heated-up outside. Either way, Mim would have felt her house falling into a great shadow or something, wouldn’t she have? The streetlights probably would have even come on, with Manny all between them and the sun.

  No, it didn’t make sense.

  And LouAnne on the corner, my dad was right, she was always losing something. Her bag of groceries was probably in the parking lot down at the store.

  So maybe it was Beanie and his buds, I told myself.

  We’d have done the same thing ourselves back then, if we’d have thought of it. Not for the chicken, but just to get away with it. Just for how wide you smile, running away.

  “She probably lost it into that sinkhole,” my dad offered, trying to send this discussion down after LouAnne’s groceries. To him, I guess, if it didn’t involve giant catfish, it didn’t notch high enough to warrant dinner conversation.

  “Sinkhole” opened a whole nother can of worms, though, at least for me. Very interesting worms.

  “A . . . what?” I said, drawing my mom’s hand/mouth motion th
at I know means I’m not supposed to speak with my mouth full.

  My dad darted his eyes up like caught actually saying something interesting, and then, with deliberate slowness, he forked another bite of mashed potatoes in and savored them, making us wait.

  Giving my mom time to cut in, of course.

  “Not the one at Katelyn’s,” she assured me, reaching over to pat the top of my hand like I might be about to explode. Katelyn is her cousin, Shanna’s mom. What was wrong with her lawn, okay, what we’d done that ended her up working at the theater to pay her mom back in the first place, I guess starting all of this? We’d had this plan to make slam dunk videos in her driveway with this new steadicam little handheld thing Tim had for his phone. The idea was he was going to run alongside whoever was dunking, and then fall down and away when we jumped, making it look like we were launching up into the sky. The trick would be keeping the ground out of the frame, so nobody would be able to tell we had Shanna’s rim lowered down to eight feet. Anyway, great plan, kind of bulletproof really, we’d have been instant internet stars, would probably get corporate sponsors and movie offers, had the school renamed after us, all that, but . . . when Shanna spirited Aunt K’s car keys out from their hook so I could back her Tahoe out of the way, well. We didn’t know if putting it on the road was illegal or not out where they live, so I carefully, super carefully backed it over beside the house, did a perfect job of it.

  That lasted for about three minutes of dunking, at which point Danielle had said, in her nervous voice, “Guys?”

  We looked where she was, at the Tahoe’s headlights pointing up at the sky.

  The ass-end of the truck was sinking, exactly like it had just got pegged by a meteorite or something.

  “Oh, oh,” Shanna said, covering her mouth, shaking her head no.

  The Tahoe was parked on the septic tank, yeah. One tow truck and a backhoe later, Shanna got the bill and the judgment from her mom, and all of this started.

  “That’s not a real sinkhole,” my dad said. “More of a shi—”

  Mom cut him off with just her eyes, which is kind of like a mom-power.

  My dad looked down into his plate, came back up looking at me, said, “It’s on Oak, you don’t have to worry about it.”

  “A sinkhole?” I repeated.

  “Right in the middle of the street,” Beanie said with a thrill.

  “Shaped like a car,” my dad added with a shrug, pushing his plate away like he wasn’t going to have to carry it to the kitchen himself.

  I watched his plate and nodded, kept nodding, envisioning this car-shaped crater one street over.

  If scale isn’t a thing, then the outline of a car and a giant foot are about the same shape, aren’t they?

  They are.

  I felt my face going numb, my breath coming in deep and cold.

  What I was doing was imagining Manny walking down the middle of Oak after midnight, casting his painted-on eyes left and right, looking for the next one of us. Only then he steps down onto a part of the street that crumbles under his massive weight, his foot stabbing down ten, twenty feet, unbalancing him, his great arms wheeling around over the houses, the utility-pole-sized dowels in his thighs threatening to let go, spill him down across two or three roofs.

  He gets control though, barely, and hauls his foot up, backs away, ashamed at having broken a people-thing.

  Would the crew tasked with fixing this sinkhole find the asphalt at the bottom of the hole not just fallen in, but crushed down? Would they make the necessary connections, draw the good deduction, save me from having to finish what I’d started?

  I shook my head no, they wouldn’t.

  It takes real imagination to connect the dots the right way. Imagination with a little helping of guilt.

  “Nothing either of you need to worry about,” my mom said to Beanie and me then, about the sinkhole on Oak, maybe saying it because I was shaking my head back and forth real slow. She probably read it as fear, because I was in a delicate state and all, having just lost two friends.

  Moms are so oblivious. It’s like they live in a bubble of wishful thinking.

  Not that my dad really paid enough attention to have to resort to that kind of thinking.

  “Well then,” he said, balling his paper towel up and depositing it on the table, signaling to us this little interlude was over, thanks for playing. Over for him anyway. Not so much for me.

  After dinner and dishes, before I claimed homework and disappeared to my bedroom to crawl out the window, sneak around to the garage, I made sure to corner Beanie away from Mom and Dad.

  “What?” he said, trying to wriggle out of my hold on his arms, probably thinking I was about to hold him down to the carpet, dangle another line of spit over his face while he squirmed, me being a big brother and all, him being mostly a twerp.

  I came down to his level this time, though, looked at him like an actual person.

  “Just—I want to,” I started, not sure how to say this because there hadn’t been any time to rehearse, “if, like, you and your friends, Gabe and Alexa and whoever, if y’all find a mannequin like from the department store, then you know not to play with it, don’t you?”

  He stared at me like waiting for the rest of whatever this was going to be.

  My idea was that the Miracle-Gro, it had to wear off at some point, so Manny could shrink back down to his original size, get found again, start this whole cycle over.

  “It’s a trick high schoolers play,” I told Beanie, making it up as I went. “They catch all the roaches they can, like from a house that’s being gassed, and they cut a hole in the mannequin—”

  “Where?” Beanie asked.

  “The back of the head,” I said, obviously, but also because I know he wanted me to say butt, so he could laugh, picturing it. Like I said: third grade. “Anyway, they fill the mannequin up with roaches, right? And then they tape that hole over, then they leave it there for kids to find. They call it a ‘roach bomb.’ When you move it, bam, roaches all over you.”

  Beanie’s face went slack by bad degrees.

  Roaches have always been his terror. Not because they’re actually mean or anything, but because they’re like dirty bullets with legs, dirty blind bullets always aiming at your feet when you just want to suddenly be able to fly.

  “You know what a mannequin is?” I asked then, and he looked away, his eyes kind of wet because me talking about roaches had already gotten him going, I think.

  Funny what scares people.

  For me, what was a thousand times scarier than a bug was a blank-faced man made of plastic watching a whole movie, then standing up from that movie, walking away into the real world.

  And also having to stab Tim to his bedroom wall, after choking him with a glow-in-the-dark edging line. And Shanna seeing her bedroom window suddenly bright with headlights.

  And thinking about Danielle, later.

  You’re stalling, I told myself.

  It was true.

  I rubbed Beanie’s hair every which way and pushed him away hard like you do when you can’t really hug.

  Thirty-eight minutes later, the garage door artfully left up again, I pushed my dad’s big Kawasaki out, breaking that dusty red laser sensor that clicked the overhead light on, throwing my shadow down in front of me, all stretched out and evil.

  I lowered my head, both hands to the bike’s grips, and stepped into it.

  10

  BECAUSE DANIELLE HAD DOGS the same as Shanna had—just yappers, not killers, but still, loud yappers—I had to catch her away from her house.

  Which? I guess I was saving her dogs too, right? Manny would stomp on dogs as soon as he would crush a family. Maybe even faster, since they’d be sniping in, trying to bite through the hard plastic shell of his feet, get to the pulpy center they knew had to be in there somewhere.

  This is what I do, I save people. And dogs.

  Anyway, catching her away from her house meant catching her on a date with Steve,
one it felt like they were making up as they went along.

  In disguise at the vigil for Tim—hoodie, sunglasses, gloves—I kept two or three car-lengths away from them, which was about eighty or ninety students’ worth of padding. Steve was holding Danielle’s hand like he owned her, like he was being “strong” for her in this painful, tragic time. The flags in front of the high school were fluttering halfway down the poles like, I don’t know, like Tim had been a federal building or something, I guess.

  There was crying and swaying and singing, and then this part I hadn’t expected, where everybody filed past the school mascot, a cartoon ranger, and left roses and stuffed animals and beer bottles and notes folded over three or four times, held down with rocks.

  Tim’s family would have loved it, if they’d been there. But, even not there to appreciate all this love Tim was getting, still, they were one hundred percent alive, I knew. Hugging each other and crying and not having any answers, but Tim’s little brothers, they were going to live, and someday Tim’s mom and dad were probably going to be grandparents, and Tim had been going to die anyway, so it’s not like I even really did anything, right? Anything except save them.

  It was like—I was in AP Physics for a couple of weeks, right? Before the math really started? So, in physics, which is also the world, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Or, that reaction, if you look at it the other way, it has a distinct cause. Them being alive and healthy and grieving and all, that was a reaction to the cause I’d been, to me sneaking into Tim’s room and killing him.

  Just, if I wanted to save everybody else, I couldn’t say any of this out loud.

  Another way to look at that action/reaction thing, it’s that, like that one guy says at the end of the second of those three superhero movies—he’s not even a hero, just a hanger-on journalist writing about all this—Sacrifices must be made.

  In AP English that would be passive voice, which erases agency, hides the actual doer of the thing.

  That’s how I was saying it in my head the whole vigil, specifically because it erased me from the equation: Sacrifices were having to be made. Prices were having to be paid.