This one isn't a case file. Case files have an outside; this story only works from inside the room. So: second person, closing time, and no dates.
You close the store at nine. You have closed it two hundred times, and the routine is a loop your body does without you: lights, registers, gates, the fire doors checked last. The mannequins are not part of the routine. That's the first thing to understand. Nobody puts the mannequins away. They stand where the displays put them, all year, in every season's clothes, and you have stopped seeing them the way you've stopped seeing the fire extinguishers.
They face the aisles. All of them. This is normal, this is merchandising, a figure should face the customer, and you have worked here long enough that you would notice only if one faced the wrong way, which is the trap the whole story sits in: the wrong direction is the only direction you'd notice, and by then noticing is not useful.
Here is what you learn in year three, from a coworker who has been there longer and speaks in the lowered voice people reserve for things that are neither jokes nor problems. The overnight stockers have a rule. They don't work the floor alone. Not because of anything. Because of the counts.
The counts: the store received forty-one display figures. The inventory system, which counts everything, counts forty-one. A night manager with nothing to do one December counted the figures on the floor and got forty-three. She counted again and got forty-one. She never counted a third time, and she transferred in the spring, and the position was filled by someone who doesn't count.
You will count. Everyone counts eventually, once. It's the aisle at the back, sportswear, where the light comes from two directions and the fixtures make shadows that move when yours do. You'll walk it at nine forty with your keys in your hand, and the figures will be facing you, and you'll do the arithmetic without deciding to, because a person alone in a big room counts the things that could also be people. You'll reach forty-one, and then you'll reach a forty-second figure, and the time between those two numbers is the story. In it, you will not run, because running requires deciding, and deciding requires admitting what the count means.
The trick of it, the thing that makes this store's version worse than the urban legend, is that nothing ever happens. No night guard is found dead. No figure is ever missing in the morning. The security footage shows aisles. The forty-one figures stand where they stood, facing the aisles, and the store orders three new ones in spring because corporate wants the displays refreshed, and the inventory system counts forty-four, and nobody counts the floor.
You keep working there. That's the ending, and it's the worst one available. The figures face the aisles, the counts stay uncounted, and you learn to walk the back aisle at nine forty without looking up, the way you stopped seeing the extinguishers, and the store keeps its number to itself.
I told a version of this on a call once and it spread, which figures do.