The above video is the account of Corbin Weckhardt. Selected from Annex: IB-TM.
The story below is the continued account of Corbin Weckhardt. Selected from Annex: IB-TM. Looking for the audio version? Click here!
The human brain is not so good at seeing things that should not be, which is exactly how the mannequins manage to so easily sneak up on Corbin as he idly sits on the edge of a fountain in the center of one of the mall’s many large rotundas, finishing recording his audio diary. Mannequins aren’t supposed to be independently mobile beings. The idea of a mannequin that can move and walk of its own accord simply isn’t RIGHT. It is, if nothing else, an egregious affront to the way things are supposed to work, an inconvenient distortion of reality that Corbin’s mind is all too happy to ignore or write off as a trick of the ceaseless, flickering lights that illuminate the Mall. It’s an unconscious psychological survival instinct, really, his brain’s attempt at staving off the blinding fear that would surely accompany the realisation that the mannequins are in fact moving, following, watching, and waiting.
Such an instinct is of little use, however, when the reality of the situation at least rears its ugly head. The mannequins are on him before he could have ever hoped to react, a whole swarm of them, bearing down on him like murder of angry ravens, silently clobbering him with their stiffly falling hands. He barely has time to get his phone back in his pocket before they knock him off his seat on the edge of the fountain and into the softly bubbling waters below, his yelps quickly turning into gurgles as dozens of the stiff, single-jointed arms of the mannequins hold him beneath the surface of the water. He thrashes against their rigid plastic arms, but there are just too many, and the shock of getting jumped by a dozen mannequins was so great that he pushed most of the air out of his lungs in surprise right as he hit the water. His arms reach out to the side, grasping for something, ANYTHING, that could give him purchase against the onslaught of the man-sized plastic dolls, but all he manages to grasp is a handful of coins, no doubt tossed in the fountain by other lost souls wishing to find their way home. His vision begins to blur, and he screams, releasing the last of the air from his lungs. The last thing he sees as the world fades to black is the distorted, blank faces of the mannequins, unflinching as they drown him in the fountain.
Corbin wakes up soaking wet and immediately gasps for breath, sucking in with all the might he can muster. He coughs violently instead, hacking as his heaving chest expels the lightly chlorinated water currently saturating his lungs. He doubles over, nearly falling out of the chair he’s been seated in, and wheezes as his blurred vision begins to clarify. He’s alive, he realizes, and seated in a cushioned chair wrapped in fading red velvet with golden trim. His first thought is “This looks like the chair that Santa sat in at the mall I went to growing up.” His second thought, as he raises his head and looks around, is “Holy SHIT.”
The chair he is sitting in is elevated above the surrounding rotunda, another meeting point of four intersecting mall wings, and he is surrounded by dozens, no HUNDREDS, of mannequins. The crowd stretches out around him, wall to wall as far as he can see, their eyeless faces fixed in his direction. He gasps and scoots back in his chair as though trying to escape, and a whimper escapes his lips. How are there so many? Where did they come from? And most importantly…
“WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” he half yells, half screams, his voice breaking under the pressure of the sheer insanity of his situation.
In response, there is movement from the horde of mannequins. A lone dummie totters forward and stands at the front of the silent mass. More movement as something is passed from the back of the crowd all the way forward to the one now standing with an air of authority in front of the rest. It’s a hat, Corbin sees - a large purple suede hat with an absurdly long white feather protruding from the side. The hat floats from plastic hand to plastic hand, from mannequin to mannequin, until it is placed (with no small degree of ceremony) upon the head of the lone figure standing at the head of the massed horde of dummies. A large whiteboard covered in magnetic letters also appears, passed from the side and into the hands of the apparent leader. Slowly, painstakingly, the appointed communicator shuffles and rearranges the letters, only stepping aside when a sentence has been formed. Corbin leans forward, squinting as he reads the tiny words that have been spelt out:
YOU HAVE BROKEN THE ONLY RULE OF THE MALL
NO SHOPLIFTING
YOU MUST PAY FOR THE SNACKS YOU HAVE TAKEN AND LEAVE THE MALL
The mannequin wearing the hat removes all the letters and begins to replace them, another five-minute process. When it’s done, the whiteboard reads:
OR DON’T PAY
AND DIE
THERE ARE MORE VIOLENT THINGS THAN US IN THIS MALL
THEY WOULD BE HAPPY TO DO US A FAVOR
Corbin doesn’t even need to check his wallet to know that he’s screwed. He never carries cash or even a credit card - when he entered the mall, he had been hoping that whatever fast food place he found would accept tap to pay.
“Do… you guys accept tap to pay?” He asks meekly.
The mannequin in the hat removes the letters from the board and replaces them with two more:
NO
Beads of sweat begin to run down Corbin’s forehead. He looks out at the horde of mannequins, and for a brief, delirious moment, believes he can escape them with a single mad dash through the middle of the crowd. Then he remembers how few of them it took to nearly drown him in a fountain, and thinks the better of it. Perhaps he could fight them? They’re only plastic. He’d only have to wrench one of their arms off before he would have a weapon, something he could clobber the rest down with. But there are SO many… he instinctively clenches his fist as he looks out at the sea of potential adversaries, wondering which he should rush first… and then he feels something in his palm. Not just a thing, but things - a small cluster of cold, thin, and circular objects, still wet in the folds of his clasped right hand.
He opens his fist and looks down. Coins. It’s a pile of coins from the bottom of the fountain that the mannequins nearly drowned him in, coins bearing faces and letters completely unfamiliar to him. He tries not to think about it and instead holds out his hand and drops the coins on the ground in front of the mannequins.
“Is that enough?” he asks.
The mannequin in the hat stares at the pile for a little too long, then finally rearranges the letters on the board one more time:
SURE WHY NOT
EXILE IT IS
Quite suddenly, the placid mass of mannequins is roiled with motion, as the stiff figures begin to move toward Corbin from all sides. He yelps involuntarily in surprise and curls deeper into the chair.
“Wait! Exile to where? What do you MEAN?” he yells.
But no answer comes from the silent horde, save for the cacophony of clacking as their hard feet cross the linoleum floors and climb the stairs towards him. Before he knows it, he’s being lifted over their heads and carried down the stairs, then passed around the corner and ferried atop a flowing river of plastic clothes dolls through the mall.
“This has got to be the weirdest and most uncomfortable crowdsurfing experience of all time.” Corbin thinks as he instinctively grabs at his phone in his pocket. “But at least I’m finally getting the hell out of this mall.”
He is carried through wing after wing of the mall by the mass of mannequins for what feels like forever, until suddenly, unceremoniously, he is being dumped on the ground in the center of another rotunda - this one containing a massive playground instead of a fountain. He gets to his feet and gazes up in disappointment at the tangled maze of plastic tubes rising before him as the crowd of mannequins once again fills in around him.
“I don’t understand!” He yells. “This isn’t the exit! I just want to go HOME!”
The hat-wearer moves to the front of the crowd again with its whiteboard in tow. It rearranges the letters, and Corbin’s confusion is only deepened as he reads what the letters spell out.
LEAVE OUR MALL
DOWN THE SLIDE
LEAVE OUR MALL
DOWN THE SLIDE
He looks from the board up towards the tube maze. It’s just like the one that used to be behind the chain burger restaurant he went to as a child, only MUCH larger. There’s a set of child-sized stairs leading into the play structure, all the way to its top. At the very zenith of the tangled tubular behemoth, Corbin can see the stairs leading to the entrance to a massive, spiral slide that appears to descend down a long and winding arc through and around the entirety of the structure before presumably spitting him out somewhere on the other side. It’s the kind of thing that would look like a lot of fun if not for the sheer madness of the current situation. Slide aside, however, Corbin still doesn’t see how this will get him OUT of the mall. He turns back to the hat wearer, desperation plain on his face.
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
In response, the hat wearer reaches out with a stiff arm and taps the whiteboard four times, once at the end of every spelt-out line.
LEAVE OUR MALL
DOWN THE SLIDE
LEAVE OUR MALL
DOWN THE SLIDE
After it taps the fourth line, it goes back to the top and begins again - but this time, every mannequin joins by stepping with their feet advancing one stride forward, one at a time, for every tap.
LEAVE OUR MALL
DOWN THE SLIDE
LEAVE OUR MALL
DOWN THE SLIDE
Corbin steps back instinctively as they advance. Slowly, steadily, they force him toward the play structure, advancing in unison as though choreographed. Before he knows it, he’s backing up the stairs, turning around, and climbing into the tube maze as the taps continue rhythmically and incessantly outside. It takes him longer than he would have thought to reach the top. The path of the stairs winds and weaves throughout the structure, forcing him through ballpits, over trampolines, and down smaller slides before they at last carry him to the top. As he climbs the final stairs towards the entrance of the slide, the tapping of the mannequins outside quickens in pace. He takes a moment to look out at the sea of strange, somehow living things surrounding him, before finally scooting his butt into the tube and letting gravity take him away.
He can still hear the tapping as he whips down the slide, hurtling around the tight corners and through the spiral spillways faster than he thought would be possible. The stairway that led to the entrance of the slide followed the general path of said slide through the rest of the play structure, and as he slips down and through the maze, he catches glimpses of the ball pit, the mannequins, and the mall through small, clear plastic cutouts built into the side of the slide. As he passes the trampoline that was at the top of the first set of stairs, he rolls his eyes, certain that his journey is about to be over as he comes out on the other side. What will the mannequins do then, he wonders? Will they demand that he go down the slide again? Will they “reset” and forget he was ever their enemy? Was this just an elaborate lead-in to some sort of ritualised execution? Or, most likely of all, will he emerge to find the mannequins don’t exist, and were some twisted product of his mind all along? He ponders these questions for what should have been the last moments of the slide, until he realises with an unsettling jolt that he’s STILL sliding. He can’t hear the tapping of the mannequins anymore, and it has quite suddenly gotten very, very dark.
His panic rises with his speed as the pitch of the slide suddenly steepens considerably. Where is he GOING? Does the slide go underground? Into some deep, dark pit below the endless mall? He gazes desperately out of the clear plastic cutouts as he races past them, attempting to discern any mote of information about what lies outside his high-speed plastic tube, which he now suddenly fears could become his coffin. Yet all he sees is darkness, and the occasional flash of color or light. He tries multiple times to stop himself, but it’s far too late for that. So he slides, down, down, down, for SO very long, for so many uncounted hours that he becomes uncertain his descent will ever end. It isn’t long before hunger, thirst, and fatigue begin to wear him down, sapping him of the will to try and understand the impossibility of his situation before finally sending him into the blessed abyss of unconsciousness. And still his body continues to slide, ever downward, ever faster, even when he at last awakens from his stupor, certain that it must have been over by now.
It isn’t, no matter how much he may wish it were. The slide pays little heed to the needs of his body and mind as he continues to hurtle downward, weeping and shouting and laughing all the way. Down he goes, on and on, sliding into the abyss without end for a very, VERY long time - until quite suddenly he is hurtling out of the mouth of the slide and into an enormous ball pit. He thrashes and sputters, fighting his way out of the pit, hurling balls left and right, eyes wet with relief as he comes to accept that he is FINALLY out. As he pulls himself out of the pit, however, that relief quickly sours as he looks around and sees no escape - just an endless, labyrinthine expanse of plastic tubes and playground equipment stretching as far as he can see, in every conceivable direction.
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