In a town that people forget about the minute theyve left it, there is a facility. Some people call it a museum, despite the operators best efforts to discourage that. But its not surprising. If you went in without knowing what it was, you might think it was a museum of some sort. People in town call it the showroom though.
In the showroom there are nearly 100 exhibits. They all, more or less, are the same thing. Giant tanks of an unidentified liquid with a large humanoid figure suspended in it. These figures arent human. Just humanoid. Most of them are about twelve feet tall, drab grey skin, and extra features that set them apart not just from humans, but each other. Every single one of them is different.
This showroom has been here for generations. The current owner lives in a city some 300 miles away, running the facility remotely via their manager, a woman in her 50s, Deborah, who has been there since she was a teenager. Alongside her is her is her assistant, a man in his late 30s, Andreas, who has also been there longer than he would care to admit.
For the longest time, its just been the two of them. Running a forgotten display of forgotten bodies in a building that needed more than a little maintenance. But now, out of nowhere, the owner has hired a third person. Its hard to tell how old he is; sometimes he looks 40, others he looks like a teenager. Neither Deborah nor Andreas like him, but soon after he started working there, business started to pick up. For the first time in a long time, there are people excited to step foot into the showroom and to remember what had been stored here.
“Listen up, folks,” the new guy said.
Deb said his name was Tex, or something dumb like that. I didnt listen, because I didnt think hed last this long. But here he was, going over his little spiel again.
“The creatures youre going to see on this tour are real,” Tex continued to the small family who stood before him. The young boy looked moderately interested, but everyone else looked bored as all hell. “They arent models or faked. My grandfather would tell me stories about how he went out when he was your age,” he pointed to the little boy. “And how he would try and catch them. One of them here might just be one of the ones he caught!”
“How does an eight year old boy catch a giant?” the boys sister asked in that older sibling voice.
“Shut up, Tessa,” the boy said. “We can if we want.”
“Exactly!” Tex shouted, making everyone jump. “You can if you want! Now, follow me as we start our tour of the wonderful gods that used to call this part of the world home.”
I yawned in utter boredom as Tex led the four of them through the plastic curtain and onto the tour track.
“Do you ever wonder they we did catch them?” Deb asked from behind me. I turned and eyed her. “Ill get you one day,” she said after I gave her no reaction to her sneaking up on me.
“Nope,” I said, answering her question. “I havent learned anything this far in, Im not going to now.”
“I know,” she said. “Its been on my mind since he arrived though.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Why did Melissa hire someone without my input?”
“Replacing you?”
“Ill take you down with me,” Deb muttered.
“I am irreplaceable,” I said with fake pride. “Who else is going to clean down the tanks each night?”
“Reminds me,” Deb said, snapping her fingers. “Need you to work over the weekend. Clean out the whole place. Melissa is coming and we should make the place presentable.”
“Nah,” I said. “Not just because I dont want to either, got things on already.”
“This place is a trash heap though,” Deb whined. “I cant do it myself.”
“You shouldnt leave it to the last minute to ask then,” I replied, shrugging. “Cant be helped if I make plans for my days off.”
“Ugh, you owe me.”
“The hell I do. Besides, she knows its just been the two of us. If she wants this place cleaner, she should hire a cleaner.”
“You are a cleaner,” Deb said. “You clean the tanks.”
“The exhibits, yes,” I knew I was using a banned word but it had been so long since anyone cared about that sort of thing. Least of all either of us. “Not the rest of it. Bring it up with her when shes here if it bugs you that much.”
“Oh I have a list of things to bring up with her,” she said and wandered off.
I watched her leave and shrugged. I walked out from the shadowy spot where I had been hiding and I followed Tex and the family around the tour.
Tex was standing between two of the bigger tanks. Inside were the two prizes of the collection. Nearly complete bodies. Like all the specimens, they had bits chopped off of them. There was no known complete body in the entire world.
“These guys are the biggest in our collection, and theyre the most complete. This one,” he indicated the one on his left, “is just missing both his lower legs. The other,” he indicated the one on his right, “is missing a leg at the hip and an arm at the wrist. Now, these may seem like pretty big losses, but unlike every other one in our collection, these two have the entirety of their internal organs still inside them. As we go through, look at the abdomen of all the others, youll see a big scar on each of them where people had cut them open to dissect them.”
“Gross,” the young boy laughed.
“Why?” the girl asked. She was grossed out too, but didnt want anyone to see.
“Why?” Tex repeated.
“Why did they get dissected?”
“Ah,” Tex’s eyes lit up and he leaned into the young teenager. “For science,” he said conspiratorially. “Most of the time, we cut them open and used their organs for study. To see if we can learn anything from them. But sometimes,” he said, trailing off.
“Sometimes what?” the boy said.
“Oh no, its far too gross to say,” Tex said.
“Tell us,” the boy begged. “Please? Mom? Dad, make him tell us?”
The boys parents, already knowing how this played out smirked at the boy and directed his attention back to Tex who was leaning on a divider grinning.
“Theyre taken for luck,” Tex said. “For souvenirs. Their bodies are cut open, bits taken and the rest left. We have nearly 100 bodies here,” Tex said, gesturing around. “But underground, in our storage area where you are definitely not allowed, we have drawers and cases of bits of bodies from nearly another thousand.”
“Wow,” the boy was awed.
“Another thousand?” the girl scoffed.
“There were a lot of them,” Tex said sadly.
“Werent some of them used as magic curses?” the father asked. “My grandfather would tell me stories. They were butchered, cut all to pieces and then-”
“Theres no such thing as a curse,” Tex laughed. “But youre right! They were taken because those people thought there was a curse in each body part. Youll see, as we carry on, that most of them are missing their hands and feet. Others, mostly the female ones, theyre missing their breasts. All of them are missing their genitals. Except these ones here, thats why they have their little cloths on.”
“Have you put any back together?” the boy asked.
“Oh no,” Tex said. “That would be impossible. Far too many pieces are missing and owning those pieces is illegal now. People arent ever going to give them back.”
“You just said you have some,” the girl said, trying to catch him out.
“Were allowed,” Tex said. “Were a specially licensed facility.”
“And we cant see this collection?” the father asked, disappointed.
“Sorry, mate. Im barely allowed down there, cant imagine what they would do if I let you down there. Just know that none of the pieces down there belong to any of the bodies up here.”
“How do you know?” the boy asked.
“Magic,” Tex winked and jumped down from his little platform and continued the tour.
I followed the tour at a small distance. None of them heard me, but Im sure Tex knew I was there. He seemed to have a sixth sense about those sorts of things. I tried not to let him know that I knew that he knew I was there.
At about the half way mark, I ducked behind a display case – a smaller female body, missing half of her face, most of her internals and all four of her limbs – and went up to a hidden door that said AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY in red ink on it and scanned myself in. Deb would see me go in here from her office and would ask about it later, but hearing Tex talk about ‘the collection’ got me curious. It had been a while since I went in this room. I had to see it for some reason.
While Tex had been correct in that we had a lot of ‘spare parts’ as we liked to call them, he was not correct in saying that we were allowed to have them.
In fact, I was not aware that he knew about this room. It took me a full five years of working here before Deb showed me that it even existed, and then another three before I could go inside.
Now that I was in here, I was reminded about how creepy it was. Dull red lights lit up the room, keeping the few pieces that Deb had out for preservation work in one piece.
I wandered through the drawers and plexiglass cases for a small while before I found myself on the other side of the room and another identical door that led back out to near the end of the tour track.
I could hear Tex still doing his thing for the family, all of whom were now fully engaging with him.
“Why did we do all of this?” the mother asked. “Catch them, I mean. Kill them.”
“They were different,” Tex said. He spoke with a sadness that I could never. A knowledge that he seemingly had that no one else did. “Some of them were a threat.”
“They had powers,” the father interrupted. A myth I knew well.
“Allegedly,” Tex winked at the man. “But no, it was just their size. They towered above us in some cases.”
“Some people thought if they took body parts from them, they would gain those powers,” the man said, ignoring what Tex had said.
“That is the story, yes,” Tex replied. Now he sounded impatient, not that the family noticed. But I did. “But its just a story. There is no power, magic or otherwise, in the body parts of these creatures.”
I turned and walked back through the room full of preserved body parts. In the gloom of the red light, its not hard to trick yourself into thinking some of them were moving.