Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes(59)
The whole book was like that, the first memories of a happy family who expected there to be many more. They were not arranged chronologically, so Charlie and Sammy appeared as toddlers, then as newborns, than at various stages in between. Except on formal occasions when Charlie was put into a dress—of which there seemed to be few—it was impossible to tell which baby was which. There were no traces of Fredbear’s Family Diner.
Near the back of the book, Charlie came to a Polaroid of her and Sammy together, infants bright red and squalling on their backs, wearing nothing but diapers and hospital wristbands. On the white space below the picture, someone had written: “Momma’s Boy and Daddy’s Girl.”
The rest of the pages were blank. Charlie went back again, opening at random to find a strip from a photo booth, four shots of her parents alone. They smiled at each other, then made faces at the camera, then laughed, missing the chance to pose and blurring their faces. Last they smiled into the lens. Her mother was beaming happily at the camera, her face alight and flushed, but her father was staring into the distance, his smile fixed on his face as if he had left it there by mistake. His dark eyes were intense, remote, and Charlie resisted a sudden urge to look behind her, as if she might see whatever it was he was looking at. She peeled back the cellophane from the album’s page and took the strip out, then folded it in half, careful to place the crease between pictures, leaving them intact. She slipped the pictures into her pocket, and looked at John, who was watching her again, as if she were some kind of unpredictable creature he needed to be careful around.
“What?” She said.
“Charlie, you know I don’t think he did it, right?”
“You said that.”
“I’m serious, it’s not just what Carlton’s dad said. I knew him, as well as a kid can know some other kid’s dad—he wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t believe it.” He spoke with calm certainty, like someone who believed that the world was made out of facts and tangible things, and that there was such a thing as truth. Charlie nodded.
“I know,” she said. She took her next breath slowly, gathering the words she would speak with it. “But I might.” His eyes widened, startled, and she looked up at the ceiling for a minute, briefly trying to remember if all the cracks had been there when she was a child.
“I don’t mean I think he did it; I don’t think that,” she said. “I don’t think about it at all, I can’t. I shut the whole thing off in my mind the day I left Hurricane. I don’t think about Freddy’s; I don’t think about what happened; and I don’t think about him.”
John was looking at her like she was monstrous, like what she was saying was the worst thing he had ever heard.
“I don’t understand how you can say things like that,” he said quietly. “You loved him, how can you even consider the possibility that he would do something so terrible?”
“Even the people who do terrible things have people who love them.” Charlie was looking for words. “I don’t think he did it, I’m not saying that,” she said again, and again the words hit the air as flimsy as paper. “But I remember him dressing up for us in the yellow Freddy suit, doing the dances, miming along with the songs, it was so much a part of him. He was the restaurant, there was no one else. And he was always so distant, like in that picture; there was always something else going on beneath the surface. It was like he had a real life, and a secret life, you know?”
John nodded and looked about to speak, and Charlie rushed on before he could.
“We were the secret life. His real life was his work; it was what mattered. We were his guilty pleasure, the thing he got to love and sneak away to have time with, something he kept hidden away from the dangers of what he did, of his ‘real’ world. And when he was with us, there was always a part of him that was back in reality, whatever that was for him.”
Again John opened his mouth, but Charlie snapped the photo album shut, stood up, and left the room. John didn’t follow right away, and as she traversed the short hall to her father’s bedroom she could almost hear him making up his mind. Not waiting for him, she went to the bookshelf, wanting to get the book out of her hands, like maybe if it were closed up and put away, her mind, too, would return to its normal order. It would not fit, and she dropped to her knees to get a better angle, trying to jam the thing back where it belonged, get it out of her hands. The shelf seemed to have shrunk, sunk down while she was gone, so that it could never be returned, never put right.
With a cry of frustration, Charlie shoved the photo album in as hard as she could. The shelf rocked back and then forward, and a sudden mass of papers and file folders tumbled from above her. Charlie began to cry as pages drifted down around her, covering the floor like snow as she wept. Swiftly, John was there.
He knelt down with her in the delicate wreckage, clearing papers away as quickly as he could without tearing them. He put a hand on her shoulder carefully and she did not move away; he pulled her close and held her, and she hugged him back, gripping so tight it she knew she must be hurting him, but she could not let go. She sobbed harder, as if being held, being contained, had made it safe to let go. Long minutes passed; John stroked her hair and Charlie still cried, her body shaking with the force of it, shuddering like she was possessed. She was not thinking of what had happened, not flitting from one memory to the next to mourn for them all—her mind was all but blank. She held nothing, was nothing, but this feeling of wracking sobs. Her face was sore with tension, her chest hurt like all her pain was being forced out through its wall, and still she cried as if she would cry forever.