Night of the Mannequins

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I squinted my eyes in pain with him and pulled back harder, let him scrabble at his neck, at his breathing passages that weren’t passing air anymore, his fingernails going deep enough to scratch bright red blood up, the ticket stub fluttering down to rest on the toe of my right shoe.

  In the reflection of his monitor I could see his face, dying, and my balaclava’d eyes above, crying.

  “I love you, I love you,” I said to him during his last few kicks, because I didn’t want him to die any more scared than he had to. My shoulders were shaking, my forearms burning, and if I hadn’t worn gloves, my hands would have been bleeding, leaving every kind of evidence.

  Finally he slumped over, and this was the part I hadn’t been expecting, the part the spy movies never go into. His muscles, without blood flowing through them anymore, I guess, keeping everything in there slick and lubricated, they went kind of instantly creaky, if that makes sense. I could feel them rubbing against each other, I mean, rubbing against each other in a way I could tell was going to lock into place in a few minutes, once the blood pooled in his lower extremities like in all the CSI shows.

  I let go fast and pushed away, suddenly sure that creaking-inside feel was going to rush up from him, get into my muscles, leave me dying as well, or at least kill some important part of me. But I guess it kind of did anyway. I fell back onto his bed, cried the rest of my insides out, almost throwing up from it, then rose, punching his stupid Star Wars pillow, hating Manny for making me do this. It wasn’t my fault, I wanted to scream. I shouldn’t have to feel this, like this. I was the hero here, not the bad guy. I was saving lives. The few I had to take shouldn’t count against me, shouldn’t hurt so much. Not when considered against all the people not dying.

  Finally I started just breathing deep and raspy, really heaving air in and out.

  When I could, I studied Tim dead in his chair, the superhero movie he’d never seen playing right there in front of him.

  Finally, hours too late because I’m not a seasoned criminal, I angled my head up to catch any sounds coming from the rest of the house. This hadn’t been a completely quiet thing, right?

  He didn’t have a dog to bark the alarm, though, and his little brothers slept deep enough to sleepwalk sometimes, and his parents were all the way over on the other side of the house, and Meg, his big sister, was probably at a college party or something, wasn’t even thinking of her family, of this house.

  I came back to Tim, wiped my eyes with my sleeve.

  I couldn’t let him look like he’d done this to himself, I knew. I could at least give him that, or not add that on, whatever.

  To be sure his mom wouldn’t have to carry her son having been this big surprise suicide around with her for the rest of her life, I pulled out the flea market knives I’d brought as backup and used them to pin Tim to the wall like an insect in biology. The hands were easy even if getting him up on my shoulder at the same time wasn’t, but evidently the feet are full of bones or something, not at all like frogs. When I couldn’t get through, even hammering on the butt of the biggest knife with the heel of one of his winter boots, I just pushed the knives through the extra skin of his ankles, jammed the blade tips into the wall as best as I could. It wasn’t structural support or anything, but it had a good enough look, and, with both hands stuck to the wall now, and both feet, no way could Tim have killed himself. He was a victim. And, if I was going to keep on with this, he was a random victim, a big mystery murder, a death out of the blue just like Shanna.

  Kids at school would be talking about him for years. For forever.

  “You’re welcome, man,” I said to him, and touched his chest for probably a long ten-count with my forehead, which felt like a real ritual that mattered, that meant everything, that meant enough, and then I left the way I’d come in, wiping the key shiny clean and tinking it back down the frog’s throat.

  Ten minutes later I had to push my dad’s motorcycle the last twenty yards up to the garage, since I hadn’t built up enough speed to coast all the way in.

  I would remedy that next time.

  I was learning.

  8

  TWO DAYS LATER I called an emergency meeting of those of us not yet dead.

  It wasn’t to poison the punch on them or explode some homemade bomb. That would have saved a lot of grief, don’t get me wrong, but . . . remember about our families? A bunch of kids murdered one by one for no reason anybody knows can pull moms and dads and brothers and sisters together, but four kids playing with incendiary devices down on the curving pier or long dock or whatever it is down behind Twisty Treats during what would have been seventh period on a weekday, that was the kind of needless tragedy that could leave them all shell-shocked, looking for vices and addictions and affairs to fill our missing spaces with.

  I was the first there, but I just watched from the trees in the park, so JR was actually more first.

  I wanted to see if he could feel anything from the water, from where Manny had to be sleeping. I wanted to see if the lake would slosh even higher up the shore, from if Manny was sensing a disturbance in the force.

  JR just peeled up splinters from the boards at the very end of the dock and threw them like wingless paper airplanes out into the water. Or maybe like little pretend spears, I don’t know. He might have been able to see flies or gnats I couldn’t make out from where I was.

  Did he look like a guy who had just lost two of his lifelong best friends?

  I wasn’t sure.

  Did I look like that?

  I touched my face, couldn’t feel my fingertips on my cheeks, on my lips, realized I was still wearing the mannequin mask I’d bought earlier at the dollar store. It was just a blank, Band-Aid-colored face, didn’t even match my neck skin, my big ears.

  I’d bought it for two reasons. The first was that, when Tim had seen me, seen my actual me-face, I’d nearly lost it, nearly quit, nearly had to run away. Second, if I looked like Manny, and if I was doing this because of Manny, then it was really like I wasn’t even doing it, right? It was like Manny was here himself by proxy, me as his mini-avatar, who could fit into the tight, human-sized spaces. Like this, I was an extension of him, doing what he was going to do, just, not taking out half the school to get it done, not flattening a whole church bus or family reunion or funeral.

  But the funerals aren’t yet.

  And I hadn’t meant to leave the mask on for this big meetup, must have forgot I was wearing it.

  I took it off like you take a contact out, grabbing the whole thing at once and both lowering my hand and pulling my head back at the same time, to break the seal as gently and painlessly as possible.

  My face behind it wasn’t even sweating or anything, and my hand wasn’t shaking the way it felt it was.

  What I looked up to was the flurry of whatever JR was doing down at the end of the dock.

  He’d taken his right shoe off, had it hauled back like a baseball from centerfield.

  I stepped ahead fast, alarmed, and he sailed it out into the lake.

  It floated for maybe ten seconds there, like not sure what to do, like asking was this all right, was this on purpose, did anybody maybe want to take this particular action back, but then it took enough water into its padding and tongue that it had to dunk under, gulp down with a hungry bubble.

  JR screamed after it like he was mad at it, then he was hopping, taking his other shoe off. It made him fall down on his ass and he nearly rolled off into the water, but he never stopped pulling on that shoe, finally got it off, threw it like it was on fire, or crawling with red ants.

  Next was his shirt, and his belt, and then he was stepping out of his pants.

  When he threw them they unballed in the air, caught some air and fluttered back, snagging on the side of the dock, one leg wet, one hanging on. He ran to that dry leg like he hated it, lay down to push the pants away, away. Probably somebody driving past on the bridge looked over and then looked over again, to be sure what they were seeing was really
happening.

  “What stage of grief is this?” a voice said from right directly over my left shoulder, practically in my ear.

  Somehow I didn’t flinch, just looked around.

  Danielle.

  Without drawing any attention to it, I pressed the back side of the mannequin mask harder to the front of my thigh, said a prayer that JR, stripped down and crying in a very public place, would be more eye-grabby than anything I might or might not be holding.

  “The third stage?” another voice said, and I turned around to it faster, already grimacing because I’d recognized that cocky, Danielle-kissing voice.

  Steve.

  He tossed his chin up at me in hey, as if we’d been doing this for years in the halls of all the schools we’d both gone to.

  I drilled my eyes into Danielle and she shrugged in a way that told me she didn’t have to explain to me about who she chose to bring to our meetings.

  It’s probably best we were all dying, right? We were falling apart anyway. Too much was changing.

  I looked out to JR with her.

  “It’s the stupid stage of grief,” I said, kind of stating the obvious.

  “Sounds like somebody’s scared,” Danielle said back, and I felt more than saw—though I definitely saw, too—her blue button-up shirt peeling up over her head, the two cups of her lime green bra flashing fast in the sunlight.

  “All passengers keep their eyes in their heads . . .” Steve drooled out special for my ears only, and then jerked forward because evidently Danielle had his hand, was pulling him with her to the dock, her shirt trailing from her other hand.

  On the way, Steve kicked out of his shoes—they were good ones, expensive—and, halfway up the dock, Danielle somehow kept in motion and managed to wriggle out of her jeans.

  Right when JR turned around, hearing them, she tackled him back into the water.

  Steve had to sit down to get out of his socks and pants. He stood in his boxer briefs, looked back to me.

  “It’s a sad day,” he called back. “Anything goes, man.” And then he pushed over the side, careful not to snag his underwear on the splinters, and went under with hardly a slurp.

  I looked past him, past all of them, to the center of the lake.

  Just before Manny surfaced, I knew, there would be a slow bulge out there, like a giant bubble that had been rising for years, was finally, in its ungainly way, coming up to the surface to taste the sky.

  I shook my head no about this ridiculousness but pulled my shirt over my head all the same, careful to let the mask stay inside it, and then I stepped out into the sunlight to take my pants off one slow foot at a time, so Steve couldn’t say anything about me playing chicken.

  To prove I wasn’t, I stepped out of my underwear as well.

  “What the hell is that!” I yelled then, coming up onto my toes to see past them, to the Ferris wheel or wind-turbine blade or whatever that wasn’t actually coming across the bridge.

  When they jerked their heads around to see, I ran for the dock, was in the air by the time they turned back around, cannonballing them before they could think about breathing in, and like that, even with Steve there, it was like all of our summers before, like one last gasp before we went under for good. We splashed each other and sputtered and dove for each other’s feet, and—I guess this is why we were doing this—we even smiled some, kind of on accident, and came as high up as we could to wave at the mom pushing her baby stroller past. With two of your lifelong friends dead, that kind of stuff’s all you’re really looking for, I guess. A moment or two where you forget about being sad.

  When we walked up onto shore a few minutes later—no cops there yet, but they always show up eventually if you swim here—when we sat up on the hot pebbly flatness of the water spout hugging our knees, that was when I started crying. Not JR, not Danielle, me, who had seen Tim dead before his parents, even. Who had had the longest of anybody to deal with it, had the least reason to be losing it. But I guess I was crying for everything I still had left to do, too. Everyone. Swimming with them and then drying out with them, it was the best I could have asked for, but it was also the worst thing I could have done.

  I stretched my chin up, trying to get loose, get control, and then turned away from them, kind of like to see all the way back to our neighborhoods.

  The cops probably weren’t here harassing us because, right now, according to all the hushed telephone calls, they were poring over Tim’s online interactions to find out if he’d been talking to some internet predator, some drug dealer, some catfisher. When they’d asked me who might have had it out for him, I’d shrugged, licked my dry lips, my chin the stupidest prune of a traitor, and then shook my head no, said it was nothing, it couldn’t be him.

  Every flip notebook in the room stretched out the spaces between its ruled lines, waiting to clamp shut on whatever I said next.

  “It was just a prank,” I said, snuffling my nose.

  “A prank?” the detective said.

  There must be some homicide detective seminar where, for six hours, working in small groups and running drills, they learn to always repeat the last thing the interogee said. Just, put a question mark on it, yeah? All right now, one more time, we’re going to get this right before we leave here today.

  I told them about Manny and the superhero movie, told them all of it, even how Manny was gone when the lights came up.

  Was it my way of asking the authorities for help, or was it a smuggled-in confession, some big plea for them to step in, stop me? Either way, they stopped asking me questions and, we all heard later, went and broke up the assistant manager’s court-mandated Sunday with his son. Which I feel a little bit guilty about, sure. But it’s not like he’d had to be such a dick to us, either.

  Really? If he doesn’t come down so hard on Shanna, then we never play the big Manny prank, Manny never wakes up, eats fertilizer, kaijus out, and I don’t have to . . . well, I don’t have to do everything I’ve had to do, right? I don’t have to have all the things in my head that I can’t really stop thinking about, no matter how much I hum in my throat.

  Anyway, there I am crying on the shore of the lake.

  Steve reached his hand for my shoulder but I shook him off, turned away. Evidently there were some coded messages sent through meaningful glances behind my back or over my head, I don’t know, but about a minute later he was crunching away, gone.

  Now it was me and Danielle and JR, like it should have been.

  When JR leaned over to bump me with his shoulder I bumped him back.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone either,” Danielle said, rubbing the underside of her left eye with the side of the blade her hand was, which is how girls do it when they . . . don’t want to mess up their makeup? When they don’t want wrinkles? I don’t know. It’s not like the lake hadn’t already melted her eyeliner and whatever. And it’s not like aging was going to be a concern for her either.

  “Shanna’s gone, too,” I said, and JR nodded.

  His shirt was washing closer and closer to shore. We all watched it.

  “Did you hear it was a devil-thing?” Danielle said to us both.

  JR Jesus’d one hand up like against a wall, a knife through the wrist, then he slapped his other hand up, held it there.

  “Poor taste, J-man,” Danielle said.

  “Tim would have done it himself if he were here,” JR said.

  He was right. What better way to honor him?

  “Who was it who, you know,” I said, edging into it, watching both their eyes at once, “found him?”

  “Draco,” Danielle spat out, like pissed about the injustice of this.

  Draco is what everybody’s been calling Tim’s little brother Drake since his Harry Potter phase. His twin’s Luca, but everybody calls him Luke.

  I nodded about this news, taking it in stride.

  So the little brother I’d been trying to protect, he was scarred for life now. Great.

  He was alive to be scar
red, though, I told myself.

  “Who would do that?” JR said to us both.

  “And why,” I threw in, stealing snapshots of their faces to clock whether my voice was ringing true enough or not.

  “He was just Tim,” Danielle said, her eyes misting up now.

  “And she was just Shanna,” I added, getting suspicious I was maybe the only one who remembered her.

  “She was an accident though,” JR said.

  Her funeral wasn’t tomorrow because, so the scuttlebutt said, they hadn’t been able to rake enough of her up to be sure what was her, what was the two Rottweilers that famously slept on the bed with her.

  “Dead’s dead,” Danielle said, and I nodded with that, couldn’t stop nodding.

  Already, sick as I know it is, already, sitting there with them in some made-up stage of grief called “skinny-dipping,” I was ping-ponging my eyes back and forth between them a little, trying to decide who next.

  It doesn’t mean I’m a good friend.

  What I was weighing, it was if it’s better to be one of two left, or to never have to get to that stage, where it’s feeling inevitable, where you’re seeing a blade around every corner, teeth in every shadow.

  “His service is Wednesday,” Danielle stated, just a fact.

  “Isn’t he evidence?” I asked. “Don’t they need to, like, keep him until they have a suspect or whatever?”

  Danielle looked at me like the weirdo I probably sounded like.

  “Watch SVU much?” JR said, half his mouth smiling.

  “I bet I know what he was watching,” I said then, laying it out there.