The Twisted Ones

by Scott Cawthon

“Your eyes deceive you every day, filling in the blanks for you in a world of sensory overload.”

“When I say ‘sensory overload’ I mean that quite literally. At every moment, your senses are receiving far more information than they can process all at once, and your mind is forced to choose which signals to pay attention to. It does that based on your experiences, and your expectation of what is normal. The things we are familiar with are the things we can—for the most part—ignore. We see this most easily with olfactory fatigue: your nose ceases to perceive a smell when you’ve been around it for a while. You may be quite thankful for this phenomenon, depending on the habits of your roommate.”

“Your mind creates motion when there is none. It fills in colors and trajectories based on what you’ve seen before, and calculates what you should be seeing now.” Another image flashed onto the overhead screen. “If your mind didn’t do this, then simply walking outside and seeing a tree would consume all your mental energy, leaving no resources to do anything else. In order for you to function in the world, your mind fills in the spaces of that tree with its own leaves and branches.”

“It’s why when you enter a house for the first time you experience a moment of dizziness. Your mind is taking in more than usual. It’s drawing a floor plan, creating a palette of colors, and saving an inventory of images to draw on later, so you don’t have to go through that exhausting intake every single time. The next time you enter that same house, you’ll already know where you are.”

The paper in front of her was covered in formulas, notes in the margins, sketches, and diagrams.

Sometimes, it felt like she’d seen him yesterday, as if the last year hadn’t passed. But of course it had, and everything had changed for Charlie once again.

Charlie was long accustomed to nightmares, the worst moments of her past forced up like bile, into twisted versions of memories already too terrible to recall.

He never answered. She would drop to her hands and knees, feeling her way through the dark, letting his presence guide her until she came to a barrier. It was smooth and cold, metal. She couldn’t see it, but she hit it hard with one fist and it echoed. “Sammy?” she would call, hitting harder.

By now, Charlie was old enough to understand that Jen had meant it as a gesture of respect, a way to reassure Charlie that her father wouldn’t be forgotten, that she would always be his child. But at the time it had seemed like an admonishment. Don’t expect parenting. Don’t expect love.

Because that’s where I lost him. Because I need him more than I need you.

She packed a bag, feeling as if she had somehow diverged from reality, into an impossible parallel world. Then she got in her car and drove away. She didn’t tell anyone she was going. Her friends here were not close friends; there was no one she owed an explanation.

When Charlie got to Hurricane, she’d intended to go straight to her father’s house, to stay there for the next few days until Jessica arrived on campus. But as she reached the city limits, something stopped her. I can’t, she thought. I can’t ever go back. She turned the car around, drove straight to St. George, and slept in her car for a week.

Math had always been straightforward, functional, sort of like a game to Charlie;

She hadn’t meant to imply that she and John were a couple but she didn’t know how to correct him. She couldn’t explain who John was to her without telling Arty far more than she wanted him to know.

“I’m sure people ask you about it all the time, but come on—you can’t blame me for being curious. That stuff about the murders, it’s like an urban legend around here. I mean, not just around here. Everywhere. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza—”

the thought that made her ache in ways for which she had no words, sorrow filling her as if it had been wrought into her very bones. She and Sammy, her other self, her twin brother, were playing their quiet games in the familiar warmth of the costume closet. Then the figure appeared in the doorway, looking down on them. Then Sammy was gone, and the world ended for the first time.

Two mechanical faces were held upright on metal structures and attached to a length of board.

Jessica gasped and took an involuntary step back.

Jessica watched as Charlie replaced the pillowcase lovingly over the faces, as if she were tucking a child into bed.

It wasn’t just a mess; it was a chaotic tangle where you could lose anything. Or hide anything, she realized, with a pang of guilt at the thought.

“I took him apart to study; I’m using some of his parts in my project.”

Oh, Charlie, what’s wrong with you?

Charlie looked away and stared fixedly at Theodore’s head, facedown on the floor. You mean, get over it? How do I even begin?

“You look exactly the same, though,” he said with a puzzled smile.

“Your dad’s house, it was one of the ones that got hit,” he said.

“No, it’s still there, just damaged. I don’t know how much; I just drove by. I didn’t think I should go there without you.”

Like I have another self: someone who’s a part of me and is always with me. I’ve had these feelings before, but they came and went, and I didn’t pay much attention to them. I didn’t know they meant something. Then when I learned the truth, and those memories started coming back to me—John, I felt whole in a way I don’t even know how to describe.”

Like he’s in a box, or I’m in a box. I can’t tell.”

“Charlie, we’ve found a body,” he said. “I want you to take a look at it.”

A shadow in the doorway of the costume closet where we play. Sammy doesn’t see; he’s playing with his truck. But I look up. The shadow has eyes. Then everything is moving—hangers rattle and costumes sway. A toy truck drops hard on the floor. I’m left alone. The air is growing thin, I’m running out. It’s getting hard to breathe and I’ll die like this, alone, in the dark. I pound against the closet wall, calling for help. I know he’s there. Sammy is on the other side, but he doesn’t answer my cries as I begin to gasp, choking for air. It is too dark to see, but even so I know my vision is going black, and in my chest my heart is slowing, each pump swelling me with pain as I struggle to call his name one more time—

“Everything we took out of Freddy’s was thrown away or burned. Technically I should have treated it like what it was: a break in the missing kids case, over a decade old. Everything would have been bagged up and gone over. But no one would have believed what happened there, what we saw. So I took some liberties.”

“What are you talking about?” Charlie took a step back toward the car. “It was, like, costume blood, or movie blood. It was pretty convincing, though. We didn’t realize it was fake until the crime lab looked at it under a microscope.”

Now Dave’s eyes came to her, the look of shock just before he fell. Charlie could feel the locks in her hands, feel them resist, then give way and snap. That’s what happened. That’s what I did. She swallowed, and slid her hands down to her throat.

Not a cared-for or protected child, but one who was vulnerable and unmoored. A child who had looked under the bed and seen the monsters.

Enough room, that’s it. She closed her eyes, concentrating on the image in her head. The wounds were slightly larger and more spaced out. The suit he was wearing was bigger than the suits from Freddy’s. The man was probably five foot ten or five foot eleven, which means the suits must have been at least seven feet tall.

As she stared, puzzled, a baby began to cry.

The two faces looked suddenly more human, and more childlike.

Took him apart. Using his component parts. That sounds rational.

“I’ll put you back together when I’m done.” Right.

It’s something I’m experimenting with: they listen all the time, they pick up everything that’s said around them, but they’re just collecting data, not interacting with it.

“I doubt there’s much left, anyway,” she said. “I just want to walk through and remind myself that—” “That it’s really over?” Jessica finished. She smiled, and Charlie’s heart sank. It’s really, really not over. She forced a smile. “Something like

The deathly quiet she remembered, the overpowering sense of dread, was gone.

She hurled herself at the console, and somehow, it was enough. It wobbled on its base, then fell, knocking Foxy to the ground and pinning him there. She ran, but he was too quick: he caught her by the leg and ripped his hook right through her; she screamed, staring down at the snapping, twisted metal jaws, and the burning, silver eyes.

It was the plastic eyeball of some unknown animatronic mascot.

A face lurched out of the darkness, two gaping eyes swinging forward. Jessica screamed and fell backward. Charlie recoiled. The masked face hung lifelessly from a rotted fur costume. An entire mascot suit was inside, crammed into a space much too small for it.

“It’s him.” Charlie looked at the dried blood soaked into the mascot’s fingertips. “The spring locks might not have killed him right away, but this is where he died.”

The locks had been driven so deeply into his skin that the bases of each were flush against his neck; they looked like part of him.

The suit’s fabric was stiff with blood, too, yet the man didn’t seem to have rotted, despite the year that had passed.

“It’s like he’s fused with the suit,” Charlie said. She tugged at the mascot head, trying to pull it off, but gave up quickly.

While he never told her what had happened, it must have been an accident. He used to wear those suits all the time.