Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes(60)

But forever was an illusion. Slowly her breathing calmed, and finally Charlie returned to herself, and pushed away from John’s shoulder, exhausted. Once again John was left with his arms partially suspended in the air, caught off guard by their sudden emptiness and tried to move out of the awkward pose without calling attention to himself. Charlie sat back against the side of her father’s bed, leaning her head against it. She felt wrung out, stretched thin and aged, but she felt a little better. She gave John a tiny smile, and saw relief pass over his face at this first sign that she might be all right.

“I’m okay,” she said. “It’s just this place, it’s all this.” She felt silly trying to explain, but John scooted back to sit with her.

“Charlie, you don’t have to explain. I know what happened.”

“Do you?” She looked at him searchingly, not sure how to put the question. It seemed too crude, to graphic, to say it outright. “Do you know how my dad died, John?” He looked immediately nervous.

“I know he killed himself,” he said hesitantly.

“No, I mean—do you know how.”

“Oh.” John looked down at his feet, as if he could not meet her eyes. “I thought he stabbed himself,” he said quietly. “I remember hearing my mom and dad talk, she said something about a knife, and all the blood.”

“There was a knife,” Charlie said. “And there was blood.” She closed her eyes and kept them shut as she talked; she could feel John’s eyes on her face, watching every movement of her face, but she knew if she looked at him, she would not be able to finish.

“I never saw it,” she said. “I mean, I never saw the body. I don’t know if you remember, but my aunt came to get me at school in the middle of the day.” She stopped, waiting for confirmation, her eyes shut tight.

“I remember,” John’s voice said from the darkness. “It was the last time I ever saw you.”

“Yeah. She came and got me, and I knew something was wrong; you don’t go home from school in the middle of the day because everything’s fine. She took me outside to her car, and we didn’t get in right away. She picked me up and sat me on the hood of the car, and told me she loved me.”

“I love you Charlie, and everything is going to be okay,” Aunt Jen said, and then she destroyed the world with the next words she spoke.

“She told me that my father had died, and she asked if I knew what that meant.”

And Charlie nodded, because she did know, and because with an awful prescience, she was not surprised.

“She said I was going to stay with her for a couple of days, and we would go get some clothes from the house. When we got there she picked me up like I was a little kid, and as we went through the door she covered my face with her hand so I wouldn’t see what was in the living room. But I did see.”

It was one of his creatures, one she had never seen, and it was facing the stairs; its head was bowed a little, so Charlie could see that the back of its skull was open, the circuits exposed. The limbs and joints lay bare, a skeleton of naked metal strung with twisting wires to connect it in a bloodless circulation, and its arms were outstretched in a lonesome facsimile of an embrace. It was standing in the middle of a dark, still pool of something liquid that seemed, though it must have been imperceptible, to be spreading. She could see its face, if it could be called a face; its features were scarcely formed, crude and shapeless. Even so, Charlie could see that they were contorted, almost grotesque: the thing would be weeping, if it could have wept. She stared at it for ages, though it could have been less than seconds, no more than a glimpse as Aunt Jen swept her up the stairs. Yet she had seen it so many times since then; when she slept, when she woke, when she unguardedly closed her eyes it would appear to her, the face pressing its way into her mind as it had pressed into the world. Its blind eyes were only raised bumps like the eyes of a statue, seeing nothing but its own grief. In its hand, almost an afterthought, was the knife. When Charlie saw the knife, the whole thing snapped into focus; she knew what the thing was, and she knew what it had been built for.

John was staring at her, horror creeping in.

“That’s how he…?” He trailed off.

Charlie nodded. “Of course.” He made a move to comfort her again, but it was the wrong thing to do; without thinking, Charlie moved slightly, slipping out of reach, and his face fell.

“Sorry,” she said quickly. “I just—sorry.”

John shook his head quickly, and turned to the jumble of papers on the floor.

“We should look through these, see if there’s anything here,” he said.

“Sure,” she said brusquely, dismissing his attempts at reassurance

They began randomly; everything had fallen in such a mess that there was no other way to begin. Most of the papers were engineering blueprints and pages of equations, all incomprehensible to them both. There were tax forms, which John took up eagerly, hoping for information about Fredbear’s Family Diner, but he gave up with a sigh after fifteen minutes, flinging the papers down.

“Charlie, I can’t figure this out. Let’s check through the rest, but I don’t think puzzling at it is going to turn us into mathematicians or accountants.”

Stubbornly, Charlie kept picking through the pile, hoping for something she would understand. She picked up a sheaf of paper, trying to straighten the next stack, and a photograph fell out from the pile. John snatched it up.