Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes(8)

“You really don’t know what happened to it?” She asked Carlton with more urgency in her voice than she intended, and he stopped talking, surprised.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry, I didn’t meant to interrupt you.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “But yeah—or no, I really don’t know what happened.”

“How can you not know? You live here.”

“Charlie, come on,” said John.

“It’s not like I hang around that part of town. Things are different, the town has grown.” Carlton said mildly, seeming unruffled by her outburst. “And I honestly don’t look for reasons to go around there, you know? Why would I? There isn’t any reason, not anymore.”

“We could go there,” John said suddenly, and Charlie’s heart skipped.

Carlton looked nervously at Charlie. “What? Seriously, it’s a mess. I don’t know if you can even get to it.”

Charlie found herself nodding. She felt as though she had spent the whole day weighted down by memory, seeing everything through a filter of years, and now she felt suddenly alert, her mind fully present. She wanted to go.

“Let’s do it,” she said. “Even if there’s nothing there. I want to see.” They were all silent, then John smiled with a reckless confidence.

“Yeah. Let’s do it.”





Chapter Two


Charlie pulled to a stop, feeling the soft give of dirt under her tires, and turned off the car. She got out and surveyed their surroundings. The sky was a rich, dark blue, the last trails of the sunset streaking off to the West. The parking lot was unpaved, and before them lay a sprawling monster of a building, a rising acre of glass and concrete. There were lamps in the parking lot that had never been used; and no lights shone out onto the lot. The building itself looked like an abandoned sanctuary, entombed in black trees amidst the distant roar of civilization. She looked at Jessica in the passenger seat, who was craning her neck out the window.

“Is this the right place?” Jessica asked.

Charlie shook her head slowly, not quite certain what she was seeing. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

Charlie got out of the car, and stood in silence as John and Carlton pulled up beside her.

“What is this?” John stepped out of the car cautiously and stared blankly at the monument. “Does anyone have a flashlight?” he looked at each of them.

Carlton held up his keychain, and waved around the feeble glow of a penlight for a minute.

“Great.” John muttered, walking away with resignation.

“Hold on a sec.” Charlie said, and went around to her trunk. “My aunt makes me carry around a bunch of stuff for emergencies.”

Aunt Jen, loving but severe, had taught Charlie self-reliance above almost anything else. Before she let Charlie have her old blue Honda she had insisted that Charlie know how to change a tire, check the oil, and know the basic parts of the engine. In the trunk, in a black box tucked in next to the jack, spare tire and small crowbar, she had a blanket, a heavy police issue flashlight, bottled water, granola bars, matches, and emergency flares. Charlie grabbed the flashlight; Carlton grabbed a granola bar.

Almost by silent agreement, they began to walk the building’s perimeter, Charlie holding up the light in a steady beam in front of them. The building itself looked mostly finished, but the ground was all dirt and rock, uneven and soft. Charlie shone the light on the ground, where grass had grown patchy in the dirt, inches long.

”No one has been digging for a while.” Charlie said.

The place was massive, and it took a long time to circumnavigate. It wasn’t long before the rich blue of the evening was overtaken by a blanket of scattered silver clouds and stars. The surfaces of the building were all the same smooth, beige concrete, with windows too high up on the walls to see inside.

“Did they really build this whole thing and then just leave?” Jessica said.

“Carlton,” said John, “you really don’t know anything about what happened?”

Carlton shrugged expansively.

“I told you, I knew there was construction, but I don’t know anything else.”

“Why would they do this?” John seemed almost paranoid, scouting the trees as though eyes might be looking back at him. “It just goes on and on.” He squinted, gazing along the outside wall of the building that seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance. He glanced back to the trees as if making sure they hadn’t missed a building somehow. “No, it was here.” He placed his hand on the drab concrete facing. “It’s gone.”

After a moment, he gestured to the others, and began to walk back the way they came.

Reluctantly, Charlie turned back, following the group. They kept going until they could see their cars again up ahead in the darkness.

“Sorry guys; I hoped there would at least be something familiar,” Carlton said exhaustedly, looking back to make sure they hadn’t missed anything.

“Yeah.” Charlie said. She had known it would be, but seeing that Freddy’s had been razed to the ground was still a shock. It was so paramount, sometimes, in her mind, that she wanted to get rid of it, wanted to scrub the memories, good and bad, from her head, as if they had never been. Now someone had scrubbed it from the landscape, and it felt like a violation. It should have been up to her. Right, she thought, because you had the money to buy it and preserve it, like Aunt Jen did with the house.