Using the old name because of the age of the protagonist. I also have another Pere Fouettard story in the works but ran out of time today! Like many of my stories, this one has been kicking around my head in one form or another for a few years. Hope you enjoy!

Pt 1

Dinah stood behind the glass, looking out at the sea of faces peering at her and wondering if she should wave or just stand stand still and let them look. The pretty, olive-skinned nine year old who had long dark hair, big dark eyes and was just on the right side of chubby had visited this museum many times in the past, like everyone from her town and others near by, and had spent a fair amount of time looking through this very glass. Just never before from this side, and never before in the nude!

Given the almost total lack of other attractions in the town and the relatively broad scope and low entry cost of the museum, it had been the location of nearly every school trip and bad-weather family outing she could remember. Whatever they had officially come to look at, no visit was complete without a trip to the display for which their strange little local museum was nationally famous.

Lined up, behind thick glass, as they had been for over a hundred and fifty years, were twelve naked, human figures, six male, six female, arranged in pairs according to age and intended to show the physical differences at different stages of development. The first two, on a raised platform, were very young babies, almost new-borns. Next was a pair of young children around the age of four or five, then a pair just before the onset of puberty, aged somewhere between nine and eleven, then a pair in their mid-teens, a pair of young adults, maybe nineteen or twenty years old and finally a middle-aged couple. Such displays were not, in themselves, so unusual. The Natural History Museum in London had one similar with single-colour, anatomically correct mannequins and similar displays could probably be found in museums of a scientific inclination all over the country but there was one thing that made the display in Dinah’s local museum totally unique.

Instead of mannequins and wax-works, the figures were the preserved and mounted skins of real people, their skeletons displayed behind them so their inner structure could be compared with the outer. A plaque by the side of the babies, bearing the official story behind the figures, explained that the people who had been stuffed were cadavers purchased from among those who died at the local work-house by a public-spirited local businessman, keen to advance the knowledge of science and human biology among the working classes. There had been rumours for and speculation for many years, however, fuelled by the occasional report of the discovery of a diary, account books or a death-bed confession and mostly prompted by the generally healthy appearance of the specimens that they had not simply suffered a fortuitously coincidental collection of accidental and natural deaths but rather that living people had been purchased from the Workhouse authorities before being killed and skinned to create this famous display. It was observed by those who speculated that this would be consistent with the way the upper echelons of Victorian society viewed those beneath them.

For her part, it had never really occurred to Dinah to engage in such speculation and, like most girls of her age had spent most visits simply giggling at the willies on the male figures, especially that of the teenage boy which was surprisingly small compared to the young man and made even funnier by the confidence of his pose. She knew most of the boys liked to look at the boobs on the teenage girl and young woman and that everyone laughed at how saggy the middle-aged woman’s were, since she had borne several children. When she was very little, she had thought they were real, living people just standing very still, much like she was doing now, and wondered if they ever got hungry or bored and if they minded being looked at with no clothes on. As she grew older she had come to understand that they were dead people by how they had died or why these particular people had been chosen had never really bothered her. After all, they had been dead a very long time so did it even really matter?

There had been some restoration work on the figures over the years, of course, and it was part of the museum volunteers’ routine to gently dust them off and check for any damage or deterioration but there was never anything that significant. Until the day that a certain infestation of some kind of black fungus was found on the back of the leg of the pre-pubescent girl. At first it had simply been scraped off but when it returned only a day or two later, the infected patch of skin was carefully removed and filled in with soft wax. But no more than a week later, the fungus appeared on her back and then, over the next few days, her chest, neck, arms, face and almost every other part of her body. There were attempts to treat the taxidermy chemically but to no avail. The fungus began to eat away at the up-until-now preserved skin, leaving large sections looking as if they had been raggedly torn out. Eventually, after removing the figure from the display and isolating it for a few days, it was decided that it must be destroyed to prevent the spread of the fungus to the other figures. To the sorry of everyone who knew it was happening, the stuffed Victorian girl was incinerated.

This left the museum and indeed the whole town with a problem. Were they to simply leave the display incomplete? Replace the lost girl with a picture or waxwork? Various suggestions were put forward, these along with others such as paying live girls to stand in the place of the figure, were dismissed as either impractical or against the spirit of the original display. Eventually, to the surprise of the local residents and great interest of the National and even Internation press, it was decided that a new volunteer would be sought to be stuffed, mounted and replace the Victorian girl in the display. At first, it was agreed to wait three months to see if a suitable corpse could be found but, when the end of the waiting period came with no cadaver available, it was finally agreed that a young girl could be euthanised to provide the new exhibit.

That is where Dinah’s involvement in these events began.