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She stared at them with a sensation of déjà vu: they were important. I don’t remember drawing that, she thought uneasily. Then, It’s just doodles. Everybody doodles.
When she got to the door, she stopped, her guts twisting. There’s something wrong. She hesitated, her hand suspended in the air, as if something was blocking her path.
It was a woman. Charlie’s eyes went first to her clothing. It was ripped up, just like the dead man Clay Burke had shown her. She leaned over to check the woman’s neck, though she knew what she would find. There were deep, ugly gouges from the spring locks of an animatronic suit. But before she could examine them closely, Charlie stopped, horrified. She looks just like me.
“Why did you go to check?” His eyes were hard, and Charlie felt a trickle of fear. Surely Clay didn’t suspect her. Why wouldn’t he? she thought. Who else would know how to use the spring locks? I bet he could come up with a million theories about me. Twisted girl avenges father’s death. Acts out psychodrama. Film at eleven.
Something had been hidden there, under the ground. The air is growing thin. I am running out of oxygen, and I will die like this, alone, in the dark.
had a nagging feeling there was something she was forgetting about.
The costumes had been disturbed, and the creaking noise was so faint and careful she scarcely even heard it. Charlie looked up from her game: there was a figure in the door.
Be honest, her inner voice said harshly. You know what kind of creature is doing this, and you know who built it. Stay focused.
Dad, what did you do?
The impulse to guard her father’s reputation from what was coming was visceral, but it was also nonsensical.
“You have some weird stuff out here; you wouldn’t know by looking at it.” He studied the countryside for a moment.
He looked as if he’d been torn violently from his track. His legs were twisted, his hooves missing chunks.
Ella was there, the doll who had been the same size as Charlie when she was much younger. She, like Stanley, had once run around on a track, and she seemed to still be attached to it. She was entirely undamaged.
Doors. But not these doors.
Charlie wrestled a toy from under the debris and threw it carelessly to the ground behind her, continuing to lift sheets of metal and toss them aside. “Charlie,” John whispered, picking up the delicate toy and cradling it. “He must have made this for you.”
“I’m surrounded by monsters, and murder, and death, and spirits.”
Just a dirt floor and three large holes, deep and oblong like graves.
She steeled herself and placed her palms against the wall. It was cold. She felt a slight shock of surprise, as though she’d expected to feel warmth from the other side.
Like the face, the body was smoother than the animatronics that Charlie was used to. It had no fur, and no tail or other animal appendages. It was too large for a human being to wear, probably eight feet tall when standing. Still, Charlie couldn’t shake the feeling that she recognized this creature. Foxy.
“The hardware, the joints—it’s older technology.
“But then a lot of it is foreign to me. Someone else may have had a hand in it. I’m not sure if my dad made it or not, but I have a feeling he’s the one who buried it.”
The animatronic’s arms lifted, and its chest opened like an iron gate. Its metal pieces slid out of place to reveal a dark, gaping pit where sharp spikes and spring locks were just barely visible.
“It’s like there’s some horrible smell in the air, but without the smell.” Charlie held her finger to her ear, listening. There was a tone in the air, so high-pitched and quiet it was almost imperceptible. “I think something is still … on,”
The illusion of fur and flesh was gone. It was nothing more than a broken robot with unfinished features.
Before their eyes, the fractured and worn face became fluid and smooth, warping into something lifelike.
“You stripped the house for parts, I get it.” John laughed as he picked up Theodore’s severed paw and considered it for a moment. “Even your favorite toy? Don’t you think that’s a little … heartless?”
“I took Theodore apart because I wanted to understand him, John. Isn’t that the most loving thing there is?”
Charlie picked up the corner of the map and her heart skipped. It was another drawing of a rectangle. She didn’t remember making it. It’s a door. But what door? She stared down at it.
Charlie couldn’t take her eyes off the paper. It felt a little like she had drawn the path to her own death.
The crude metal frame was covered with a layer of gelatinous plastic, giving it an organic appearance, almost embryonic.
It was a strange variation, into which her father had never breathed life. But William Afton—Dave—did.
The children murdered at Freddy Fazbear’s had lived on after death, their spirits lodged somehow inside the animatronic costumes that had killed them. Could Sammy’s spirit be imprisoned somehow, behind a large, rectangular door?
But the thing that tried to kill me—tried to envelop me—it was designed to kill. There could be anything buried down there, waiting for nightfall.
“It changes our perception of what they look like,” Charlie corrected.
“In class we learned that when the brain is overstimulated, it fills in gaps for you. So, say you pass a red hexagonal sign on the road, and someone asks you what words were on it. You’d say ‘STOP.’ And you’d imagine that you saw it. You’d be able to picture that stop sign the way it should have been. That is, of course, if you were properly distracted and didn’t notice an obviously blank sign. This thing distracts us. Somehow it makes our brains fill in blanks with previous experiences, the things we think we should be seeing.”
How the robotic "cloaking" device works
“It’s a pattern. Sort of.” Charlie leaned back, letting her arms relax, the device cradled in her hands. “The disc emits five sound waves that continuously vary in frequency. First they match one another, then they don’t; they go in and out of harmony, always on the edge of forming a predictable sequence, then branching away.”
“It’s not, but that’s the whole point. It almost makes sense, but not quite.” Charlie paused, thinking for a moment. “The tone fluctuations happen so fast that they’re only detected by your subconscious. Your mind goes mad trying to make sense of it; it’s immediately overwhelmed. It’s like the opposite of white noise: you can’t follow it, and you can’t tune it out.”
“To lure kids closer,” Charlie continued. The car got quiet.
FNaF:SL SPOILERS
Second refernece to something similar to Sister Location. Dragging people into their cavity (adults die because they are too large perhaps or maybe the cavity in SL is similar). Now, we are focused on the luring and awareness. Remember, Baby counted kids and that is how Afton's daughter ran into issues.
“All hours of the night. It’s not healthy. You’re obsessed!” “You’re as consumed by your work as I am. It’s something we have in common, remember? Something we love about each other.” “This is different, Clay. This worries me.”
A wolf’s mane ran over the top of its head and down its back. It was stooped over, one arm twisted downward while the other flailed up. Perhaps its control over its limbs was uncertain. It was looking at Charlie, and she met its eyes: they were piercing blue and self-illuminating. Yet while the eyes held a steady light, the rest of the creature was in flux, morphing in a disorienting fashion even as she watched. One moment it was a groomed and agile figure covered in silver hair, the next a tattered metal framework, partly coated in rubbery translucent skin. Its eyes were stark white bulbs.
...more
She had never seen it before, and it worried her. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza didn’t have a wolf.
Charlie had a near-photographic memory, she’d realized last year.
there. My father was pragmatic, she thought. Parts were expensive, and he didn’t waste them on things that didn’t work.
The creatures had been buried in a chamber like a mausoleum,
the creature in the tomb,
the rest of the book was a mess of mechanisms and monsters.
She opened her book again, to the page where she’d spent her test time scribbling. There, staring back at her, were the faces she understood: the faces of monsters and murderers, with blank eyes that pierced right through her, even from her own sketches.
It felt as though she were saying good-bye to a chapter of her life, another passage that would become nothing more than a haunting memory.
“Have you seen my duffel bag?” she asked the dismembered toy. “Maybe under the bed?”
“But I have to do this. Afton made them. And Afton took Sammy. When I was with John, I could feel … something in the house. It had to be him; it was like the missing part of me was there, closer than it had ever been. I just couldn’t quite reach it. And I think those monsters are the only things in the world that might have answers.”
