Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes(63)
“He’s gone, Jason’s gone,” Marla cried.
“What?” John said.
“He’s gone back to Freddy’s, I know he has,” she said. “He kept saying we should go back, that we shouldn’t just be hanging around all day. I thought he was in another room, but I looked everywhere and I know that’s where he is!” She said it all in one breath and ended gasping, a faint, whining hum resonating under her breathing, a keening sound she seemed unable to stop making.
“Oh, no,” Charlie said.
“Come on,” Marla pressed. She was jittering, vibrating; John put a hand on her shoulder as if to comfort her, and she shook her head. “Don’t try to calm me down, just come with me,” she said, but there was no anger, only desperation. She turned and almost ran to the door, and John and Charlie followed with an apologetic look for the bemused librarian they left behind them.
Chapter Nine
Carlton opened his eyes, disoriented, his head stuffed tight with a massive, pulsing ache. He was half-sitting, stiffly propped against a wall, and he found could not move his arms. His body was covered in little, random places of sharp pain and tingling numbness; he tried to shift away from the discomfort, but he was restrained, somehow, and the little moves he could make just made new places hurt. He looked around the room, trying to get his bearings. It looked like a storage room; there were boxes along the walls, and discarded cans of paint and other cleaning supplies littered the floor, but there was more. There were piles of furry fabric everywhere. Carlton peered at them sleepily. He felt muzzy, like if he closed his eyes he could just fall back asleep, so easily… No. He shook his head hard, trying to clear it, and yelped. “Oh, no,” he groaned, as the throbbing in his head demanded attention, and his stomach flipped. He clenched his jaw and closed his eyes, waiting for the pounding and nausea to recede.
Eventually they did, fading back to something almost manageable, and he opened his eyes again, starting over. This time his mind had cleared a little, and he looked down at his body to see his restraints. Oh, no.
He was wedged inside the heavy, barrel-shaped torso of a mascot costume, the headless top half of some kind of animal. His arms were trapped inside the torso section, pinned to his sides in an unnatural position by some sort of framework. The arms of the costume hung limp and empty from the sides. His legs stuck out incongruously from the bottom, looking small and thin in contrast. He could feel other things inside the mascot’s torso, too, pieces of metal that pressed against his back and poked into him. He could feel raw patches on his skin, and could not tell if the thing he felt trickling down his back were sweat or blood. Something was pressing into the sides of his neck; when he turned his head, whatever they were dug in to his skin. The costume’s fur was dirty and matted, a faded color that might once have been a bright blue, but was now only a bluish approximation of beige. He could see a head of the same color a few feet away, sitting on a cardboard box, and with a flicker of curiosity he looked at it, but he could not tell what it was supposed to be. It looked as if someone had been told “make an animal,” and had done just that, careful not to make it look like any specific type of animal.
He looked around the room, comprehension dawning. He knew where he was. The piles of fabric had faces: they were empty costumes, mascots from the restaurant, deflated, collapsed, and staring empty-eyed at him, like they wanted something.
He looked around slowly, trying to assess calmly, though his heart was fluttering alarmingly in his chest. The room was small, a single bulb overhead lighting it dimly and flickering ever so slightly, giving the place a disquieting impression of movement. A small metal desk fan, brown with rust, was gently oscillating in the corner, but the air it blew was heavy with the smell of stale sweat; costumes left unwashed for a decade. Carlton was too hot; the air felt too thick, like it was not as full of oxygen as it ought to have been. He tried to stand, but without his arms he could not brace himself, and as he moved, he felt another violent wave of nausea, and a sudden, angry surge of the pain in his head.
“I wouldn’t do that,” a raspy voice muttered. Carlton looked around, seeing no one, then the door opened. It moved slowly, and somewhere beneath his terror, Carlton felt a twinge of impatience.
“Who is it? Let me out of this.” He said in panicked desperation.
The door squealed like an injured animal as it glided open, almost of its own accord, the frame empty. After a moment’s pause, a yellow rabbit poked its head around the corner, its ears tilting at a jaunty angle. It was still for a moment, almost posing, then it came in with a bouncing walk, graceful, with none of the stiff, mechanistic movements of the animatronic animal. It did a small dance step, spun, and took a deep bow. Then it reached up, and took off its own head, revealing the man inside the costume.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” Carlton said, his nerves triggering an automatic wisecrack. “Never trust a rabbit, I say.” It didn’t make sense, it wasn’t funny, but the words were coming out of his mouth without any input from his brain. He still felt sick, his head still ached, but he had a sudden, visceral clarity: this is what happened to Michael. You are what happened to Michael.
“Don’t speak,” Dave said. Carlton opened his mouth to answer back, but the smart remark died on his tongue when he saw the guard’s face. He had seemed somehow faded when they met, depleted, ineffectual. But now as he stood over Carlton in his absurd-looking rabbit’s costume, he looked different. His face was the same, technically: his gaunt features and sunken eyes, his skin that seemed to have worn thin, ready to snap from strain, but now there was a mean, undeniable strength in it, a rodentine vitality that Carlton recognized.