Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes(3)
Before she stood, she noticed something shiny, half hidden under the rim of the locked middle door. She leaned forward to pick it up: it looked like a broken-off piece of a circuit board. She smiled slightly. Nuts, and bolts, and scraps, and parts had turned up all over the place, once upon a time. Her father always had stray parts in his pockets. He would carry something he was working on around, set it down, and forget where it was, or worse, put something aside “for safekeeping,” never to be seen again. There was also a strand of her hair clinging to it; she unwound it carefully from the tiny lip of metal it was stuck on.
Finally, as though she had been putting it off, Charlie crossed the room and picked up Theodore. His back had not faded in the sun like the front of his body, and was the same rich, dark purple she remembered. She pressed the button at the base of his neck, but he remained lifeless. His fur was threadbare, one ear hanging loose by a single rotting thread, and through the hole she could see the green plastic of his circuit board. Charlie held her breath, listening fearfully for something.
“I – ou – lie – ” the rabbit said with a barely audible halting noise, and Charlie set him down, her face hot and her chest pinched tight. She had not really expected to hear her father’s voice again. I love you too.
Charlie looked around the room again. As a child it had been her own magical world, and she was possessive of it. Only a few chosen friends were ever even allowed inside. She went to her bed and set Stanley moving on his track again. She left, closing the door behind her before the little unicorn came to a halt.
She went out the back door to the driveway and stopped in front of the garage that had become her father’s workshop. Half-buried in the gravel a few feet away was a piece of metal, and Charlie went to pick it up. It was jointed in the middle, and she held it in her hands, smiling a little as she bent it back and forth. An elbow joint, she thought. I wonder who that was going to belong to?
She had stood in this exact spot many times before. She closed her eyes, and the memory overwhelmed her. She was a little girl again, sitting on the floor of her father’s workshop, playing with scraps of wood and metal as though they were toys blocks, trying to build a tower with the uneven pieces. The shop was hot and she was sweaty, grime sticking to her legs as she sat in her shorts and sneakers. She could almost smell the sharp, metallic odor of the soldering iron. Her father was nearby, never out of sight, working on Stanley the unicorn.
Stanley’s face was still unfinished: on one side white and shining and friendly, with a shiny brown eye that seemed almost to see. The other half of the toy’s face was all exposed circuit boards and metal parts. Charlie’s father looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back, beloved. Behind her father, in a darkened corner, barely visible, hung a jumble of metal limbs, a twisted skeleton with burning silver eyes. Every once in a while, it gave an uncanny twitch. Charlie tried never to look at it, but as her father worked, as she played with her makeshift toys, her eye was drawn back to it again and again. The limbs, contorted, seemed almost mocking, the thing a ghastly jester, and yet there was something about it that suggested enormous pain.
“Daddy?” Charlie said, and her father did not look up from his work. “Daddy?” She said again, more urgently, and this time he turned slowly to her, as though not fully present in the world.
“What do you need, sweetie?”
She pointed at the metal skeleton. Does it hurt? She wanted to ask the question, but looking into her father’s eyes she found she could not. She shook her head.
“Nothing.”
He nodded at her with an absent smile and went back to his work. Behind him the creature gave another, awful twitch, and its eyes still burned.
Charlie shivered, and drew herself back to the present. She glanced behind her, feeling exposed. She looked down, and her gaze fixed on something: three widely-spaced grooves in the ground. She knelt, thoughtful, and ran her finger over one of them. The gravel was scattered away, the marks worn heavily into the dirt. A camera tripod of some sort? It was the first unfamiliar thing she’d seen. The door to the workshop was cracked open slightly, inviting, but she felt no desire to go inside. Quickly, she headed back to her car. Settling into the driver’s seat, she stopped. Her keys were gone, having probably fallen out of her pocket somewhere inside the house.
She retraced her steps, only glancing into the living room and kitchen before heading up to her bedroom. The keys were on the wicker chair, beside Theodore. She picked them up and jangled them for a moment, not quite ready to leave the room behind. She sat down on the bed. Stanley the unicorn had come back around to the bed before stopping, as he always did, and as she sat, she patted him absently on the head. It had grown dark while she was outside, and the room was now cast in shadows. Somehow, without the bright sunlight, the toys’ flaws, their deterioration, were thrown into sharp relief. Theodore’s eyes no longer shone, and his thin fur and hanging ear made him look like a sickly vagabond. When she looked down at Stanley the rust around his eyes made them look like hollow sockets, and his bared teeth, which she had always thought of as a smile, became the awful, knowing grin of a skull. Charlie stood up, careful not to touch him, and hurried toward the door, but she tripped on the tracks and fell sprawling on the floor, her foot catching on the wheel beside the bed as she went. There was a whir of spinning metal, and as she raised her head, a small pair of feet appeared under her nose, clad in shining patent leather. She looked up.