Day 642

He always did make the most lifelike of dolls.
From the pores on their skin to the paws he'd sewn them as hands, each detail was perfect.

He tended to them every day, polishing this or resewing that.
Always spraying them with scents too.

He said it was what his wife had done to stop their sawdust insides from smelling odd.
When the dolls were presumed to be made from wood though, it didn't make much sense.

We found out what they were made of when he was rushed to hospital.
He ended up staying there for three months, and the rest of his life he spent in prison.

It happened when a kid knocked one of the dolls off the shelf and it broke upon impact.
The chest and head were damaged beyond repair and definitely not wooden.

He'd always insisted that he used the finest quality materials, never saying which wood he used.
Seems he'd preferred rawer materials for his work.

Where we'd expected to see some kind of wood there was instead something that looked like jerky.
It was a deep mahogany red and smelled faintly of pork.

We didn't quite get it until the kid that knocked it off pointed out the doll's ribcage.
It wasn't another detail that the old man had added, they were actual human ribs.

When the doll was taken apart further in the back room we found that the face had been a mask.
Those perfect features were a mockery of the mummified face behind, frozen in terror.

All of the dolls were like that, children killed, innards scraped out and filled with sawdust.
We'd spent years admiring them, so many had gone to people's homes and children played with them.

As of yet, they haven't been able to identify a single child.
Almost a hundred tiny corpses with no names.