Fitting Room Six
The mannequins at Corliss & Wren department store were ordered in 1961, eleven of them, all from the same catalog, all with the same blank oval where a face should be. By 1987 only nine were left. Nobody remembered the other two being removed, and nobody could say where they'd gone. The inventory sheet still listed eleven.
Night security guard Wade Talbert first mentioned it in his log on February 9th: "Mannequin in window display #3 facing wrong way at start of shift. Corrected. Facing wrong way again at 2 a.m. walkthrough." He noted it twice more that week, each time with the same flat, procedural language, as though writing down the temperature.
By the 20th his entries had changed. "They are not in the positions I left them. I have started marking the floor with tape. The tape does not match in the morning." On the 27th: "Count is off. I have counted nine three times tonight. There should be nine. I keep arriving at ten."
Talbert's final entry, timestamped 3:14 a.m. on March 2nd, reads only: "One of them is warm." His time card was punched out at 6:00 a.m. as usual. He was not seen again. His car remained in the employee lot for eleven days before it was towed.
When the store finally closed in 1994, the fixtures were auctioned off in a single lot to a buyer who paid in cash and gave no forwarding address. The receipt, kept in the store's archived records, lists the quantity sold as eleven.