Terror Mannequin
A new short novel from weirdo-bizarro-absurdo author Douglas Hackle
Forty-year-old Glont Lamont is a longtime employee of Fun 4-Life Corporation, where he gets paid good money to play videos games, watch TV, get drunk, get high, devour pizza, ride the company roller coaster, take long-ass naps, and toss off like a madman in an insane asylum. There’s only one problem: Glont’s sick of his job! Nowadays, all he really wants to do is work long, gruelling shifts 7-days-a-week doing any sort of awful, backbreaking, tedious, demoralizing, soul-crushing, severely under-compensated labor.
But with Halloween just a few days away, Glont has more important things to worry about than his workplace woes. Namely, he must take his two “freak” nephews out reverse trick-or-treating, which is a form of annual ritualistic tribute whereby the cruel townspeople force his nephews to walk door-to-door on Halloween night to hand out candy to people instead of receiving candy themselves.
And this year, the last stop on the trio’s reverse trick-or-treating itinerary is Fallingwater—built on a natural waterfall, Frank Lloyd Wright’s world-famous architectural masterpiece is now closed to the public and allegedly haunted by an evil supernatural entity known as TERROR MANNEQUIN…
Early reactions to TERROR MANNEQUIN:
“Very weird, very gory, and very funny. Douglas Hackle has written the literary equivalent to The Toxic Avenger, a blood-soaked, genre-defying, anti-horror novel.” – Danger Slater, author of Impossible James
“If you want a Halloween read unlike any other, you’re gonna wanna pick this one up.” – Gregor Xane, author of Brides of Hanover Block
“Not only does he [Hackle] have an utterly unique ability to reach for the ridiculous, but the way he thwarts the reader without alienating us is really entertaining. It’s as if he has an instinctual understanding of where the boundaries are and how far they will bend before they break. All of that is just to say that Hackle is enormously fun to read, and TERROR MANNEQUIN is no different.” – Amy M. Vaughn, author of Skull Nuggets
Excerpt from the Prologue of TERROR MANNEQUIN
…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 elongated 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.
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 nursery 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!
Terror Mannequin
Forty-year-old Glont Lamont is a longtime employee of Fun 4-Life Corporation, where he gets paid good money to play videos games, watch TV, get drunk, get high, devour pizza, ride the company roller coaster, take long-ass naps, and toss off like a madman in an insane asylum. There’s only one problem: Glont’s sick of his job! Nowadays, all he really wants to do is work long, grueling shifts 7-days-a-week doing any sort of awful, backbreaking, tedious, demoralizing, soul-crushing, severely under-compensated labor.
But with Halloween just a few days away, Glont has more important things to worry about than his workplace woes. Namely, he must take his two “freak” nephews out reverse trick-or-treating, which is a form of annual ritualistic tribute whereby the cruel townspeople force his nephews to walk door-to-door on Halloween night to hand out candy to people instead of receiving candy themselves.
And this year, the last stop on the trio’s reverse trick-or-treating itinerary is Fallingwater—built on a natural waterfall, Frank Lloyd Wright’s world-famous architectural masterpiece is now closed to the public and allegedly haunted by an evil supernatural entity known as TERROR MANNEQUIN…
You can buy Terror Mannequin from Amazon UK & Amazon US
Douglas Hackle
Born with one extra finger and two extra toes (like, for re-al), Douglas Hackle received a B.A. in English Literature from John Carroll University, abandoned academia to take a writing-intensive job in the business world, and lost a few marbles somewhere along the way. He lives in Northeast Ohio with his wife, son, and two dogs. He is also the author of the novel The Hottest Gay Man Ever Killed in a Shark Attack; the Wonderland Award-nominated short story collections Clown Tear Junkies (Rooster Republic Press) and Is Winona Ryder Still with the Dude from Soul Asylum? and Other LURID Tales of DOOM and TERROR!!! A selection of his short fiction is featured in The Bizarro Starter Kit – Vol. Red (Eraserhead Press).
Follow Douglas in Twitter @DouglasHackle
You can find out more about Douglas by visiting his official website douglasshackle.wordpress.com
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