The world was always dark. The sun had long since vanished, taking with it any trace of light. People lived underground, huddled in the cold earth, sheltering from the horrors above. The dark was alive, a choking void where monstrous things waited. No one dared to go up to the surface unless they had to. Most didn't come back.
Markus wasn't the first. He wouldn't be the last.
He had gone up. Again. A routine for someone like him, but every time, it became a little harder to leave the comfort of the tunnels. The people beneath the ground understood the need. Food didn't grow there.
Water didn't flow. Supplies ran out. Someone had to venture out, step into that suffocating, endless dark, and make it back. The others kept their heads down, always waiting for a return that never came.
The last time Markus went up, he told them he'd be back. He was only supposed to get a few things: canned food, some medicine, a couple of tools. A short trip. He hadn't been gone long enough for anyone to worry yet. Not at first. He would return, they all assumed. Like everyone else who had gone up, he'd return. No one ever considered that the world above could keep someone for good.
Markus was different. He wasn't scared like the others. Or, if he was, he hid it better. He came from a line of people who had been leaving and returning for years. It was just what you did. That's what they all told themselves.
When the days passed and the food ran out, they knew something had happened to him. The dark above swallowed everything. It took the people who dared to cross it. A few brave souls tried to go after him. They never came back either.
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It had been weeks since Markus left. His family waited in the cavern, just like everyone else who had someone above. There was nothing left to do but wait. But waiting was a slow death. You could feel it in the air, how the days stretched longer, how hope turned into something less defined, less real. The people would say his name, and the echo would fade in the distance.
A woman, pale and thin, stood near the entrance to the tunnels. She clutched a picture of Markus, his face frozen in time. Her eyes had that look in them now—the look of someone who knew the truth but couldn't accept it.
The same look the others wore when they'd lost someone. She couldn't even remember how long it had been since she last heard from him. Days? Weeks? Time had a way of slipping away when you didn't have much left to mark it.
The tunnels felt empty these days. Their walls closed in tighter with each passing moment. The silence weighed heavy, a constant reminder of how fragile they all were. But the mannequins in the dark… They were the worst of it.
People didn't talk about the mannequins much anymore. They didn't need to. Everyone knew. They were the things you didn't speak of, the figures that moved when your back was turned, the ones you'd never see coming. Those who returned from the surface… if they returned, if they came back at all… were never the same. The mannequins had a way of leaving marks.
And yet, they still went up. Again and again. They always did.
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The first time Markus saw the mannequins, he thought they were just that—things left behind by someone. In the dark, it was hard to see anything clearly. They had no faces, no eyes. But they looked human, at least.
The shapes of people, standing in place, unnaturally still, as if frozen in time. Some were perfectly formed, others twisted in ways that made no sense, their limbs too long, their torsos too short. In the distance, they were just figures, vague and distant, barely noticeable. But the longer you stared, the more they seemed to get closer.
That's when the fear set in. It started slow. He had been trained to ignore the things that moved in the dark. The creaks. The sounds in the distance. The whispers you swore you heard but never remembered later. But these mannequins were different. They weren't just things you ignored. They were things you had to see, whether you wanted to or not.
He told himself they weren't real, that they couldn't be. There was no way. But the further he walked, the more certain he became that they were following him. Watching him. The mannequins weren't just inanimate figures.
They were alive in ways that didn't make sense. He had no way of knowing for sure how many there were—every time he looked away, there were more. Always more. A hundred. Two hundred. It felt like a thousand were standing there, waiting. When he turned his back, they moved closer. Sometimes he'd turn back, and they'd be gone. But they were still there. He could feel them.
They knew what he feared.
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It wasn't the mannequins that were the worst, though. It wasn't even the fear of being caught by something you couldn't see. The worst part was knowing you couldn't leave once you went in. The world above, the place where the sun had died, was a maze. There was no sense to it. It twisted and turned in on itself. And the more you ran, the deeper into it you sank. There were no shortcuts. There was no escape.
Markus had learned that the first time he went up. He had known enough to leave a trail of marks, scratches on the walls, something to find his way back. But the mannequins had a way of erasing everything.
Every mark he made, every direction he thought he was heading, was wiped away when he wasn't looking. There were no landmarks, no guideposts. The surface had a way of swallowing everything. And the mannequins didn't care.
Markus didn't even know how far he'd gone. How long he'd been up there.
The woman still had his picture. But there was no way of knowing whether he was alive. There was no way of knowing if he was still out there, somewhere, running from the mannequins that followed him wherever he went.
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Markus didn't come back.
The first sign was the smell. The others didn't say it, but they could smell it. It was faint at first, but then it grew stronger. Something rotten, something in the air that clung to the walls. Something inescapable. They waited, but it was already too late. The mannequins had their hold on him.
Weeks later, they found his body.
His arms were twisted at impossible angles. His skin had been peeled off in places. His eyes… They were gone. His face was a mess of blood and bone, a twisted mask that didn't belong to a person anymore. His legs, his hands… nothing had been left untouched.
But that wasn't what was strange. What was strange was what was left behind. The mannequins were always hungry. They took everything, took the body and soul, until there was nothing left. But when they found Markus, the mannequins hadn't taken his body. They had left it for them to find.
He wasn't just dead. He wasn't just lost. He had been turned into something else.
The mannequins had given him a new face, a new body. But they hadn't finished yet.
And in the darkness, it waited.