Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes(38)
John came up the stairs behind her quickly and set the sign down carefully by the door, and they went inside. The door swung open easily. Light streamed in through the windows on all sides, revealing emptiness and decay. Unlike Freddy’s, this place had been cleaned out. The wooden floors seemed intact, but were warped from weather. Sunlight was streaming in, unobstructed, and went where it wanted without furniture or people to block its path. Charlie looked up at the ceiling fan: it was still there, but one of its blades was missing.
There was a double door to their right with circular windows. Unlike the dining area, which was breached with sunlight and the sounds of the outside, the room behind the double doors was still pitch black. John was more interested in this than Charlie, and he carefully peered into one of the windows, obviously tempted to nudge it open and see what was inside. Charlie left him to his curiosity and walked further into the dining room, which she only knew as the dining room through memory. Now it was a vacant and lonely room, stretching long and narrow: at least fifty feet, growing darker as it went. There was a slightly elevated stage at the end of the room, and Charlie realized as she looked around that the place had probably once been a dance hall, and the long desk by the entrance that her parents had used for a cash register had probably been a bar. She went over to it and saw that she was right: there were even grooves and scratches in the wood floor, where barstools had once dug their feet. She tried to picture it, a dark bar with a country western band playing on the stage, but she could not.
When Charlie looked at the stage, she could still see two animatronic animals in shadow, moving in unnatural twists and turns. She could hear echoes of carnival music, and distant laughter. She could still smell the cigarette smoke in the air. She hesitated before going further, as though the ghosts she remembered might linger on the stage. She tried to catch a glimpse of where John was. He finally had the door to the kitchen half-open and was sticking his head inside. Charlie turned her attention back to the stage and walked toward it across the creaking floor. Even the smallest sound was deafening, accompanied by faint whistles as the wind slipped through cracks in the windows and walls. Strips of wallpaper had peeled down and hung flat against the wall, inert until a breeze lifted them up, and they wagged like thin fingers pointing at Charlie as she walked.
Charlie stood at the base of the stage, studying the floor carefully for traces of what might have stood there before. All that remained were holes where bolts had once been. The corners looked blackened, with the shapes of coils and wires etched into dirt and wood.
Everything is gone.
Her head jerked toward the corner to her right; there was another door. Of course there is another door. This is why you are here. She stood still, looking at the door, but not ready to touch it. She was grasped with a strange and illogical fear, as though spiders and boogeymen might come rushing out.
The door was ajar. Charlie looked back toward John again, hesitant to go on without him. As though he heard her calling to him, he leaned out of the kitchen door with a wide-eyed expression. “This is really creepy.” He was obviously enjoying himself, like a kid in a haunted house.
“Can you come with me?” Charlie’s plea came as a surprise to John, who seemed pleased but irritated at the same time, having been enjoying his own adventure on the other side of the building. “Two seconds,” he promised, then disappeared again.
She rolled her eyes, disappointed but not surprised that his childish curiosity would take priority. She rested the back of her hand against the aged wooden door and gently guided it open, bracing herself against whatever might be inside.
Whatever she had been expecting, this wasn’t it. It was a closet, the inside extending off to her left, about eight or nine feet into darkness. There were horizontal poles mounted along the walls where hangers had once been. Square shapes imprinted in the dust filled her mind with images of boxes, maybe speakers.
As she stepped inside, she pushed the door open all the way, trying to let in as much light as possible. As she walked further in, she let her hand drag along the wall. Although nothing was there now, she could feel heavy cloth, coats and sweaters hanging.
No. These were costumes.
Costumes had hung here in the dark, hiding their colors but allowing themselves to be felt by every cheek and small hand that passed through. Rubber padded palms and fingers swayed this way and that. Reflections on false eyes passed overhead.
Charlie reached the end and turned to look back. She crouched down, looking up at the empty space. It didn’t feel empty. She could still feel the costumes; they were hanging all around her. There was someone else in the closet with her, kneeling down at her own height. It was her friend, the little boy.
My little brother.
They were both playing and hiding together as they always did. This time was different. The little boy looked up toward the door suddenly as though they had been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. Charlie looked up as well. There was a figure in the door. It looked like one of the costumes was standing on its own, but it was motionless, so still that Charlie wasn’t sure what she was seeing.
It was the rabbit, the yellowish brown rabbit they loved, but it did not dance or sing, just stood there and stared at them, unblinking. They began to squirm under its gaze, and the little boy screwed up his face to wail, and Charlie pinched his arm, seized with an instinctual sense that they must not cry. The rabbit looked back and forth from one to the other with those all too human eyes, ponderous, as though weighing and measuring them in some way that Charlie could not understand, as though it were making a momentous decision. Charlie could see its eyes, its human eyes, and she was cold with terror. She felt the fear in her brother as well, felt it echoing between them, reverberating and growing because it was shared. They could not move, they could not scream, and finally the creature inside that patchwork, ragged yellow rabbit suit reached forward for the boy. There was a moment, one single moment, when the children still clung together, gripping hands, but the rabbit snatched the boy to his breast, yanking them apart, and fled. From that moment the entire memory shattered with piercing and unrelenting screams, not her brother’s, but her own. People rushed to help, her father picked her up and held her, but nothing could console her; she screamed and screamed, louder and louder. Charlie snapped back from her dream, the sound still high and painful in her ears. She was crouched down in silence; John stood at the door, not daring to interrupt.