Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes
Scott Cawthon
Chapter One
He sees me.
Charlie dropped to her hands and knees. She was wedged behind a row of arcade games, cramped in the crawlspace between the consoles and the wall, tangled electrical cords and useless plugs strewn beneath her. She was cornered: the only way out was past the thing, and she wasn’t fast enough to make it. She could see him stalking back and forth, catching flickers of movement as he passed before the gaps between the games. There was scarcely enough room to move, but she tried to crawl backward. Her foot caught on a cord and she stopped, contorting herself to carefully dislodge it.
She heard the clash of metal on metal and the farthest console rocked back against the wall. He hit it again, shattering the display, then attacked the next, crashing against them almost rhythmically, tearing through the machinery, coming closer.
I have to get out, I have to! The panicked thought was of no help; there was no way out. Her arm ached, and she wanted to sob aloud. Blood was soaking through the tattered bandage, and it seemed as though she could feel it draining out of her.
The console a few feet away crashed against the wall, and Charlie flinched. He was getting closer; she could hear the grinding of gears and the clicking of servos, ever louder. Eyes closed, she could still see the way he looked at her, see the matted fur and the exposed metal beneath the synthetic flesh.
Suddenly the console in front of her was wrenched away and toppled over, thrown down like a toy. The power cords beneath her hands and knees were yanked away, and Charlie slipped and stumbled, almost falling. She caught herself and looked up, just in time to see the downward swing of a hook…
Welcome to Hurricane, Utah.
Charlie smiled wryly at the sign, and kept driving. The world didn’t look any different from one side of the sign to the other, but she felt a nervous anticipation as she passed it. She didn’t recognize anything. She had not really expected to, not this far at the edge of town where it was all highway and empty space.
She wondered what the others looked like, who they were now. Ten years ago, they were best friends. And then it had happened, and everything ended, at least for Charlie. She hadn’t seen any of them since she was seven years old. They had written all the time as kids, especially Marla, who wrote like she talked: fast and incoherent. But as they grew older they had grown apart, the letters had grown fewer and further between, and the conversations leading up to this trip had been perfunctory and full of awkward pauses. Charlie repeated their names as though to reassure herself that she still remembered them. Marla. Jessica. Lamar. Carlton. John. And Michael… That was the reason for the trip after all, Michael. It was ten years since he died, ten years since it happened, and now his parents wanted them all together for the dedication ceremony, all his old friends there when they announced the scholarship they were creating in his name. Charlie knew it was a good thing to do, but the gathering still felt slightly macabre. She shivered, and turned down the air conditioning even though she knew it was not the cold.
As she drove into the town center, Charlie began to recognize things: a few stores, and the movie theater, which was now advertising the summer’s blockbuster hit. She felt a brief moment of surprise, then smiled at herself. What did you expect, that the whole place would be unchanged? A monument to the moment of your departure, frozen forever in July, 1985? Well, that was exactly what she had expected. She looked at her watch. Still a few hours to kill before they all met up. She thought about going to the movie, but she knew what she really wanted to do. Charlie made a left turn and headed out of town.
Ten minutes later, she pulled to a stop and got out.
The house loomed up before her, its dark outline a wound in the bright blue sky. Charlie leaned back against the car, slightly dizzy. She took a moment to steady herself, breathing deeply. She had known it would be here. An illicit look through her aunt’s bank books a few years before told her that the mortgage was paid off, and Aunt Jen was still paying property taxes. It had only been ten years; there was no reason it should have changed at all. Charlie climbed the steps slowly, taking in the peeling paint. The third stair still had a loose board, and the rosebushes had taken over one side of the porch, their thorns biting hungrily into the wood. The door was locked, but Charlie still had her key. She had never actually used it. As she slid it into the lock she remembered her father putting its chain around her neck. In case you ever need it. Well, she needed it now.
The door opened easily, and Charlie looked around. She didn’t remember much about the first couple of years here. She had been only three years old, and all the memories faded together in the blur of a child’s grief and loss, not understanding why her mother had to go away, clinging to her father every moment, not trusting the world around her unless he was there, unless she was holding tightly to him, burying herself in his flannel shirts and the smell of grease, and hot metal, and him.
The stairs stretched straight up in front of her, but she did not move directly to them, going instead into the living room, where all the furniture was still in place. She had not really noticed it as a child, but the house was a little too large for the furniture they had, and so things were spread out too widely in order to fill the space: the coffee table was too far from the couch to reach, the easy chair too far across the room to carry on a conversation. There was a dark stain in the wooden floorboards, near the center of the room, and Charlie stepped around it quickly, and went to the kitchen, where the cupboards held only a few pots and pans, and a few dishes. Charlie had never felt a lack of anything as a child, but it seemed now that the unnecessary enormity of the house was a sort of apology, the attempt of a man who had lost so much to give his daughter what he could. He had a way of overdoing whatever he did.