Read Short Horror Stories :: The Mannequin

He thought it was a prank at first.

The new department store he’d started working at had been like a dream. They paid well, they had good hours, the people who worked with him had been amazingly cool about him being trans when he outed himself by accident. (He’d gone to work in the trans flag tee he’d been wearing the night before.)

The only thing he could think of that he actually disliked about his job was the mannequin.

There was a mannequin that was always moved just a step closer to the office he worked in for most of his shifts. There was no one else around to do it. He worked night shifts and was the only person working on that floor during his shift, but somehow, even when he moved it back, it was always one step closer to him.

(He could handle a creepy mannequin for a well-paying job, right?)

He thought it was some of the people on the day shift at first. They were nice, but pranksters. But he had access to the security cameras, so he was able to rule them out pretty quickly.

(It was odd that the camera never caught anyone near the mannequin he thought.)

He had to figure out who was doing it quickly, if he was correct in another few days the mannequin would be outside his door. He was lucky enough to have gotten a job that mostly required him to watch monitors but he was starting to think it wasn’t worth it. Yes, the pay was amazing but was it worth being terrified because of a mannequin?

Whatever his decision he’d need to make it quickly. The mannequin was barely even a step away from being in his office already.

He had asked around, on the rare days he got assigned to a day shift, but no one had even noticed that there even was a mannequin there.

(He thought that it was odd that he was the only one that noticed the mannequin, but figured that they would be occupied with customers. The department store was a busy one after all.)

It was a day shift. He had checked upstairs, to see the mannequin, but it wasn’t there. He didn’t know what was happening. He thought the mannequin was right outside the office door…

He went to his office to see, but the office he usually worked in wasn’t where he thought it was. He decided to chalk it up to lack of sleep, he had been sleeping less than three hours a night, if he was lucky he got three and a half hours.

(It definitely had to be the sleep deprivation, right?)

When he tried to bring up the mannequin to his boss he got laughed at so he figured he’d arm himself with a bat.

He went to sit in the office. The mannequin was right outside the door.

The mannequin was pretty distinguishable, what with the red eyes he figured a younger person had drawn on the mannequin while bored on a shift. Come to think of it, the mannequin hadn’t looked quite so human his last shift had it? The mannequin had looked less eerily real, and human the first night shift he worked. Why did it look so human now? And did it have words that he couldn’t quite distinguish on its arms yesterday?

He was glad he only had a short shift today. It meant he could go home and rest for a few hours before he had to go back to his university for the early classes he foolishly thought he could handle.

The mannequin was gone. Where was the mannequin? Somehow the mannequin being gone was worse than the mannequin being right outside his door.

He entered the office.

There was a mannequin leaning against the wall.

He didn’t exit his office.

There was a bat found in his office when the morning came.

(Had that mannequin been there in that spot yesterday? They could have sworn it wasn’t there yesterday.)