Work Text:
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[A muffled sneeze. A whispered curse.]
VOICE, MUFFLED
Shit. Dusty fucking boxes – Ah.
[Papers shuffling. Plastic on wood, dragging, scraping. A sigh.]
VOICE, CLEAR
Eager, today. Didn't even have to power you on. Was going to record a different statement, but... Guess you found your preferred meal? Alright. I'll read this one.
[A chair squeaks across a wood floor. A throat clears.]
VOICE
Statement of Song Mingi, regarding... Hm.
[Paper shuffles. A sharp intake of breath.]
Statement of Song Mingi, regarding repeated encounters with the entity that tormented him during his employment with Lotte Department Store in Jamsil, and his subsequent... Declaration to –
Regarding a series of strange encounters at work.
Statement dated November 10th, 2011, Jung Wooyoung, senior research assistant at [unintelligible, static] recording. Statement follows:
VOICE OF JUNG WOOYOUNG, STATEMENT
I never wanted to work in a department store. I mean who does, really? I guess that sounds shitty of me, because plenty of people make a career out of it and I'm not putting down retail workers, not by far.
It's just...
Retail is, for most people, somewhere that you end up. Not somewhere you aim for. It's a means to an end. A rest stop on a longer trip to somewhere else. A blip on the radar before moving on to bigger and better things.
And that's what it was, for me. What it tried to be. What I wanted it to be, I guess.
I was a dancer. Am a dancer? Not a dancer. Is a dancer still a dancer if they forget the steps? I haven't danced in a very long time. Not really. I think my body forgot what it felt like to be free. Dancing used to be an escape. It felt like a purpose. I didn't even need music, I'd just... Start moving. Close my eyes and let my body move. Let the feeling of being nothing but motion and art overtake me. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe I let it become too much of me. Too big a part of the stuff that made me Mingi. Stitched it too deep into the fabric of my being that when the seams came loose and the threads frayed I wasn't left with anything.
Is a person still a person if they forgot who they were supposed to be?
I started working at Lotte as a temp in, uh... September of last year. I was filling in for somebody on maternity leave. I don't remember her name, sorry. I don't remember a lot of things lately.
It was just supposed to be a couple months. I bank some money, catch up on rent, then go back to looking for dance gigs. It was more reliable than bartending at shitty dives and less soul-crushing than theatre ushering, watching the dancers instead of being one. I try not to do too much shift work because it makes me depressed. Wrings me out. I feel like a dried-up dishcloth, just hanging over the faucet, lacking purpose. A tool without a use.
But I was still there. Still am? I won't be for long, I guess, so it's not too bad. But it was bad. For a while. A bunch of people quit over the holidays. Pay discrepancies, or something? Corporate had to clean house of a lot of the old employees. I wasn't involved in whatever shit was going on so I got to stay, and my reward was to do the jobs of three or four or five people every day. It consumed me. I worked doubles, overnights. The pay was great. But I didn't have time for anything else. I stopped seeing my friends, the few I had. I stopped dancing. Sometimes I worry I couldn't dance anymore. My back always hurt, my feet were always tired. I always had a headache. I lost days. Just big stretches of my life consumed by the time clock, just big chunks taken out of the body calling itself Mingi. I was worried there wouldn't be anything left of me soon.
But rent had gone up on my apartment. I couldn't afford to move. I was just a shell, shuffling from work to home and work to home. I felt like a zombie. Hollow. I didn't know myself.
I don't know when the mannequins started watching me. I just know when I started to notice.
I worked nights, a lot. Doing what they called 'visual merchandising'. It was somehow less draining than the day shift. Being in that big store with all the lights off, the music off, not having to put on that happy-go-lucky mask for customers like I gave a shit about my job. Making displays was fun, as far as work went. It kind of reminded me of dance, sort of. It was art, dance was art. The connection was tenuous at absolute best but I held onto it like my life depended on it anyway. I think it did? I think it did. Sometimes it was only the knowledge that I'd get to be by myself in the soft dark of the empty store, the only place I felt like I could maybe try patching up the person I wanted to be, that got me out of bed in the morning. Kept me from nosediving off the nearest bridge.
So, yeah. I didn't notice. Not right away.
It was the feeling I noticed, first.
I was usually the only one in the store that late. I had keys, I did my job, nobody gave a shit how long I was there as long as I locked up after. I was never scared. I liked being alone. Or maybe I was just used to it. Sometimes it's hard to separate complacency and fondness. Point is, even if I heard something weird, or saw a funny shadow, I knew it was just my mind playing tricks on me or something falling over, normal shit like that. I never second guessed it. I was used to it.
My coworkers used to say they never got how I could work so late surrounded by all those creepy mannequins. They all said they made them feel watched.
They never gave me that feeling because they didn't have faces. Just featureless white shells, hollowed out of anything that made them people. I sort of related to them, being stuck up on a display and forced into a role without ever being asked if they wanted to be up there to begin with. I was always gentle when I moved their plastic limbs into place, I went slow when I had to screw an arm or a leg off. I talked to them when I put my hands on their smooth, blank faces, brushed my thumbs over the divots where eyes and a mouth would be if they had one. Told them I was sorry they were stuck here, but I'd try to make it easy for them. I knew those mannequins better than I knew my own face. I had nicknames for every one. I posed them myself, every last one, down to the minute tilt of their heads.
Around March, maybe, when I felt it. Eyes on me when I worked nights. The hairs on the back of my neck would raise as I worked to ease a plastic torso into a swimsuit, and I'd spin around, half expecting to see a shadow disappearing around a corner or some robber holding me up with a weapon. I never did. The only thing I saw were the blank faces of the mannequins, staring into empty space. I did my best to ignore it. I refused to have my one safe place taken from me because I'd suddenly tipped into paranoid delusions.
When Hwanwoong from Electronics – I know you want full names, but I don't remember his family name, sorry – stopped showing up to work, one of the mannequins went missing. I didn't really make the connection until it was time to change the displays and I was down a body. I made do without, that prickling feeling that something wasn't right skating across my skin like a superheated blade. I thought I heard a giggle when I went to close up. I traced it back to the Electronics desk, but nobody was there. When I shone my flashlight around, the mannequins across the escalator bay in Seasonal were staring right at me.
I clocked out early and had nightmares of mannequins with teeth that laughed how a knife feels when it goes in.
They watched me every night after that. I never saw them move. Even now, it does bother me a little bit. They'd be right next to me and I never saw them move. Did they not want me to see? Did they not want me to know? I considered them friends, in a way. And they wouldn't let me see them. It hurt in a weird way I didn't have a name for. Ached in a limb I didn't think I had. I wanted to see them. Wanted to know why they wanted to see me so badly.
I lost another mannequin when Seunghee, uh, Hyun Seunghee, I think, from Housewares stopped showing up for work too. Then another for Shin Yuna in Kids. After that one I couldn't take it anymore. I lost it, a little bit. Knocked some stuff over in the backroom. Screamed. Asked the mannequins why they were leaving me. Did I not make them feel safe enough? Was I not enough? I was crouched on the ground, leaning against a stock shelf, forehead to my knees and feeling sorry for myself. I heard that laugh. Right by my ear, tasting like sour candy burning a hole through my tongue. I felt a hand on the back of my neck, rigid and plastic-slick.
I immediately sat up. Grabbed for the body touching me. I kept my eyes closed. I thought maybe if I didn't see, they wouldn't leave? It made sense at the time. I think it worked, too. My arms closed around a pair of legs, slim and cold, encased in jeans, the denim thick and inflexible. I gasped. Held on tighter. Pressed my face into what I thought was a belly and ended up being a chest – My mannequin was small. They smelled like blood and plastic. I didn't let go. Their hands stroked my hair and they laughed and the sound of their laugh hurt, hurt bad, down to my bones, like I was coming apart.
I tried to talk but I couldn't. I opened my eyes and they were gone. I cried.
I started seeing them after that night. Just flashes. They were playing with me. Making me chase them. Glimpses of bright orange hair flitting through the racks of clothes, the sound of squeaky soles on clean floor tiles, fingers brushing over the small of my back. I started picking up solely night shifts just so I could see them. I caught them, finally, in mid-September. My hand closed around their thin wrist that looked so human but felt so alien, and I asked them what they wanted. They turned their head to me and I fell to my knees when I saw them for the first time.
They were beautiful, in the way the moon would be beautiful if it suddenly fell to Earth, cold and strange and unfamiliar and spelling doom. A wide smile, perfectly smooth peachy skin, pretty bow-shaped lips, dark eyes that lacked any warmth at all and gave me no doubt that what I was looking at was not a person.
It told me it had wanted to wear me. I asked it, had? The feeling that I wasn't good enough for my mannequin to wear struck me like a bullet. I panicked a little. They laughed, that painful apocalyptic laugh, and held my face in their hands, the way I held all its brothers and sisters when I displayed them for the world to see.
They told me I was too good to wear. They liked having me around too much. They wanted to keep me forever. I asked how they would do that, told them I'd help, if I could. My mannequin laughed and told me it would unmake me, and reconstruct me in their image. Take all the chunks out of the body that called itself Mingi. Undo all my frayed threads. Stitch me back together as something new. New, shiny, unreal, all in their hands.
I don't know how to describe the feeling of everything falling into place. How does a bone feel when the surgeon snaps it back into place and sets it after a break? How do the ventricles of a heart feel when they're shocked back into pumping blood by a machine?
I've worked every night for the last month. Not always at the store. Sometimes on my own, getting what Hongjoong needs – A tarp, big canvases, paintbrushes, sharp knives, razor wire. Hongjoong. That's what their name is. They picked it out themselves, but its not the first one they've had. It probably won't be the last one, either. Nameless things change constantly. Names fix them in place like pins. I put a name on this form when I signed in but I'm not sure it's mine anymore.
I can have a new name when I'm remade, if I feel like I need one at all.
When I'm remade I'll remember how to dance. I'll remember how to laugh. I'll remember how it felt to be free. It doesn't matter if I forget who I used to be, because I'll be something new. Something I was always meant to be.
Thank you for listening to our story. I don't think anyone will see me again, not anyone who'll be able to talk about it, anyway. And I wanted to tell you about us. Me. Hongjoong. The dance. The freedom of unknowing. The freedom of unbecoming.
Thank you.
[A long pause. A sharp intake of breath.]
VOICE OF JUNG WOOYOUNG, HIMSELF
...Statement ends.
[A heavy sigh.]
Shit. I... Did not know we had a statement about the Lotte Massacre. I don't even know if anybody's read this until now. I keep finding random statements shoved in the file boxes for unrelated investigations. It's gonna take me months to get this room alone cleaned up... This place is so understaffed.
Sorry. Statement. Yeah. The Lotte Massacre. Pretty much everybody in the city knows about it, even if the company tried to hush it all up. People talk. And it's all over the internet. Isn't everything?
[Wooyoung laughs. There's no humor in it.]
Seven days after giving his statement Song Mingi committed suicide inside his workplace. That's the official story the police go with anyway. No family to follow it up, so...
[Papers shuffling. Mechanical keyboard clicking.]
The CCTV footage from inside the store that night leaked a few days later. It got scrubbed pretty fast, but clips tend to surface every few years on those gore sites, even if they're heavily censored. They show up on 4chan a lot, so I hear. Yunho-ya worked his usual magic and managed to obtain the complete footage from the Seoul PD database. I don't question his methods. That's really not my job, now, is it? Even if I am the closest thing we have to a real Librarian...
Anyway. The footage. The footage is... Well. It's hard to watch. I consider myself pretty desensitized, but... Mm.
[A long pause.]
The full video file is four hours long. I don't think Mingi died until the entity calling itself Hongjoong took one of the scalpels, carved out his heart, and... Ate it. Not even after it had flayed every inch of skin off his body and hung them on the razor wire strewn around the shop floor like they were pinning up their clean laundry. That was the first two hours. The second half of the footage is Hongjoong taking the assembled paintbrushes and using Mingi's blood to do what I can only assume is paint a large mural across the selection of canvases set up against a wall the cameras can't reach.
[A faint click, like a video being paused by hitting the spacebar.]
We've had the paintings in the Relic Vault for a couple years. They're still wrapped up in the cloth and butcher paper they came to us from the cops in, in big wooden crates nailed shut. As far as I know, no one's ever looked at them and that's... Probably for the best?
[Another humorless laugh.]
There's heavy distortion on the last half-hour of the video. I've never seen this part, not even online. In the bits that aren't staticky and fuzzy, it looks like Hongjoong is... Doing something with the skin? They're taking it off the wires. Doing something with it offscreen. Knelt on the floor at times, fidgeting with something on the ground.
The distortion clears up for the last thirty seconds. Mingi is still hanging by his wrists, right in front of the elevators – That's where it could find the most open space, maybe? He's very clearly dead, just... Muscle and bone, like a mockery of an anatomical model. Hongjoong walks near the edge of the frame, and it's not alone – They're holding someone – Something's – Hand. A dark shape crosses the camera, the silhouette falling across Mingi's body. It looks to be about the height of a decently tall man, but something about the proportions aren't quite... Right.
They disappear from view of the cameras. There's nothing for a few seconds and then, spilling over the bloodstained tarp like overturned ink, two entwined shadows can be seen, dancing.
[Another long pause.]
The Lotte Department Store in Jamsil closed three months after the incident. Bad press. Nobody really wanted to shop there after seeing that video. Yunho confirmed the employees mentioned in this statement were all reported missing by their families around the same dates Mingi gives, though the cases are considered cold by now from lack of useful leads. I don't see what further investigation into this case would do other than risk reopening old wounds – Or worse, creating new ones.
I... I need a cigarette after that. And to maybe not work alone the rest of the day.
Recording ends.
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