Headless Sculptures

Headless Sculptures (首のない彫刻 Kubi no nai choukoku) is the sixth story in Flesh-Colored Horror . It was originally published in Monthy Halloween in July 1995.

Plot

Shimada and Rumi belong to the art club at school. Their teacher, Mr. Okabe, is a sculptor preparing for an exhibition of his work - all headless statues. Shimada and Rumi agree to stay late to help, but when Rumi is teased about the possibility of posing nude for Mr. Okabe, she gets angry and leaves. The next day, she goes to get Shimada to walk to school, but he says he's ill and can't go.

When she arrives at school, she discovers Mr. Okabe has been murdered. He had been killed at around midnight and decapitated, just like his statues. Rumi doesn't want to get Shimada in trouble so she doesn't tell anyone that Shimada stayed to help Mr. Okabe. When Shimada returns to school, he's wearing a surgical mask and his winter uniform, even though it's summer.

Shimada denies killing Mr. Okabe.  He takes Rumi for a walk and says that Okabe is really alive, he just had to hide out due to personal problems. Rumi asks who the body was and Shimada offers to show her. They go back to the art block and Rumi finds that it is open - she is unaware that two girls broke in because they had left their books there.

All of Mr. Okabe's statues are missing except one, and only the stands are there. Rumi also notices that the room smells of something rotting. Shimada locks them in the room and removes his mask, showing that he is heavily bleeding from the mouth. He ignores Rumi's concerns and pulls off the cover over the only remaining statue, showing that Mr. Okabe's head has been attached to it. Shimada now wants to replace Okabe's head with Rumi's for the statue. She tries to run and slaps Shimada when he reaches for her; but knocks his head off his body, revealing that he too is a statue.

Rumi destroys the statue when she tries to fight it with a chair, causing the statue to trip and shatter. However, the other statue pursues Rumi with a meat cleaver, wanting to take her head. More statues then appear. Rumi runs from them but then encounters the headless bodies of the girls who broke into the art room. 

The statues fight over the two heads they had taken from the girls. The heads are able to see Rumi, and the statues chase after her, with the girls saying that Rumi is pretty and they want her head to replace theirs.  They capture her in a room, and the statue armed with the meat cleaver breaks in through a window, all three arguing over Rumi and grabbing at her head.