Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes(61)

“Charlie, look,” he said, suddenly excited. She took it from his hand.

It was her father, in his workshop. He was wearing the yellow Freddy Fazbear costume; the head was tucked under his arm, staring sightlessly into the camera, but Charlie’s father was smiling, his face pink and sweaty as if he had been in the costume for a long time. Beside him was a yellow Bonnie.

“The yellow rabbit,” Charlie said. “Jason said there was a yellow rabbit.”

“But your father is in the bear costume.”

“The rabbit must be a robot,” Charlie said, “look at the eyes, they’re red.” She peered closer. The eyes were glinting red, but they weren’t glowing, and in a moment she saw why. “It’s not red eyes, it’s red-eye! There’s a person in there!”

“So who…?”

“… who is in the suit?” Charlie finished the question for him.

“We have to go to the library,” John said, jumping to his feet. Charlie stayed where she was, still staring down at the picture.

“Charlie?”

“Yeah,” she said. He held out a hand to pull her up.

As they descended the staircase, John hung back briefly, and Charlie did not turn around; she knew what he was seeing in his mind, because she was seeing it, too: the stain on the floor, darker than before.



Charlie drove fast to the library, a grim urgency hanging over her. The promised storm was in the air, the smell of it rising like a warning. In a strange way, the worsening weather satisfied something in Charlie: storms inside, storms outside.

“I’ve never been this eager to get to the library,” John joked, and she smiled tightly, without humor.

The main library in Hurricane was next to the elementary school where they had gone for the memorial ceremony, and as they got out of the car Charlie glanced at the playground, envisioning children screaming and laughing as they ran circles, immersed in their games.

We were so young. They hurried up the few steps to the library together, a square, modern brick building that looked as if it had come paired with the school beside it. She only remembered the library vaguely from her childhood; they had gone infrequently, and Charlie had spent all her time there sitting on the floor in the children’s section. Being able to see over the information desk was slightly disconcerting.

The librarian was young, Charlie thought, an athletic-seeming woman in slacks and a purple sweater, with short, bright pink hair and a glittering stud piercing her eyebrow. She smiled brightly.

“What can I do for you?” She said. Charlie hesitated. The woman was maybe in her late twenties; Charlie realized that ever since she returned to Hurricane she had been paying attention to age, scrutinizing each face and calculating how old they had been when It happened. This woman would have been a teenager. It doesn’t matter, she said. You still have to ask. She opened her mouth, to ask for information about Fredbear’s, but what came out instead was:

“Are you from Hurricane?”

The librarian shook her head. “No, I’m from Indiana, I moved here a few years ago; my son Aiden goes to school there,” she pointed in the direction of the elementary school, even though they were indoors. Charlie felt her body relax. She wasn’t here.

“Do you have any information on a place called Fredbear’s Family Diner?” Charlie asked, and the woman frowned.

“Do you mean Freddy Fazbear’s? They used to have one of those here, I think,” she said vaguely.

“No, that’s not the one,” Charlie said, ready to be endlessly patient with the librarian, who was, blessedly, probably the only person in town who was somehow unaware of her history.

“Well, for town records, things like incorporation and licensing, you would have to go to city hall, but it’s—” she checked her watch. “It’s after five, so not today, anyway. I have newspapers all the way back to the 1880s, if you want to look at microfilm,” she said eagerly.

“Yeah, okay,” Charlie said.

“I’m Harriet,” the woman said as she led them to a door at the back of the building. They recited their names dutifully, and she chattered on, like a child about to display her favorite toy.

“So, you know what microfilm is, right? It’s because we can’t keep stacks and stacks of papers here; there’s no room and eventually they would rot, so it’s a way to preserve them, they take pictures and save the film. It’s almost like a movie reel, you know? Very small. So, you need a machine to see it.”

“We know what it is,” John cut in when she paused, “we just don’t know how to use it.”

“Well, that’s what I’m here for!” Harriet declared, and threw the door open. Inside was a table with a computer monitor, the monitor sitting on top of a little box with a small wheel on each side. Two handles stuck out in front. Charlie and John looked at it bemusedly, and Harriet grinned.

“You want the local paper, right? What years?”

“Um…” Charlie counted backward. “1979 to 1982?” She hazarded. Harriet beamed and left the room. John bent forward to peer at the machine, rattling the handles a little. “Careful,” Charlie warned jokingly. “I think she might be lost without that thing.” John lifted his hands to his shoulders and stepped back.

Harriet reappeared with what looked like four small movie reels, and held them up.