TRIGGER WARNING! This book contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, sexual themes, violence, and scenes of child abuse. Future episodes will contain graphic depictions of child abduction, violence towards children and adults, graphic gore violence and explicit sexual content. I am not kidding. This book should probably not be read by anyone.

Five Nights At Freddy's is the creation of Scott Cawthon. The characters of Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Mangle, Toy Freddy, Toy Bonnie, Toy Chica, Mike Schmidt, Jeremy Fitzgerald, Fredbear, Springtrap, Plushtrap, the Puppet, Balloon Boy, and the Purple Guy, as well as Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, belong to him. Everything else is a product of my own imagination and no similarity to actual events, locations, or people is intended or should be inferred. Do not reproduce, repost or copy any part of this story without my permission.

As always, a sincere thank you to all those who took the time to rate and review if you liked it (or even if you didn't like it). If you are interested in my non-fanfiction work, feel free to check out my blog (the address keeps disappearing when I type it here. It's rleesmith dot wordpress dot com) or look me up on Amazon.


CHAPTER FOUR

Ana would have liked to be the sort of person who could storm out of a diner in a righteous fury after an insult like that, but it had been twelve hours since the last time she'd eaten and Mrs. Rutter was already gone. No one was there to watch her be indignant on her aunt's behalf (or demonseed David), so Ana ordered a burger and ate damn near the whole thing, something she usually needed to be high to do. She thought about ordering a second one to take with her, reasoning she'd want something for breakfast and wouldn't want to come back to town, but if the house was anywhere near as bad as she was braced for, she'd burn through the meager cleaning supplies she'd brought and be back to buy more anyway. Besides, an abandoned house likely had vermin of some kind (rats and roaches crawling through Aunt Easter's walls…her heart ached), who would be happy to nibble on anything she brought with her into their territory.

So in the end, she left her last bite of burger, took nothing with her but another cup of coffee for the road, paid her check, and walked out to discover that what had started out as a typical spring storm had become a full-on Biblical event. The sun, low when she'd gone into Gallifrey's, had set behind the storm and Mammon's streetlamps illuminated only patches, but the lightning was coming fast and hard now, as if it wanted her to know just what she'd come back to.

Standing under the eaves, hunched against the wet slap of the wind, Ana could see white caps forming on the water in the road as it blew in waves against the curb, and then over it. Further down the street, the water was already up on the sidewalk, creeping out to fill the parking lot at the Little Critters pet store across the street, whose windows had been perhaps prophetically painted with grinning cartoon fish. Turning her head the other way, she could see a lake in front of the mall where her truck and trailer were now alone, tires half-lost to the tide.

She needed to get gone now.

The GPS came on when she started the truck, still trying to direct her to the title office, but Ana scarcely looked at it. She still knew the way to go: two blocks to Main Street and north until Main turned into Cawthon, which the locals had always called by its old name, Military Drive; four miles out of town, right where you'd miss it if you weren't looking, hook a left onto Old Quarry Road and drive until you went up the mountain, through the woods and came to the long dirt lane with Aunt Easter's house at the end.

She did not so much start driving as set sail, hearing water cut around the tires and feeling the drag of the trailer behind her like an anchor. There was a moment, looking left and right along Majestic before leaving Gallifrey's behind her, that she spied the glowing sign for the Sugartree Motel and thought about just holing up for the night.

Right. Pay sixty bucks to sleep in, at best, the collected sweat and dandruff of a thousand passers-through when she was fifteen minutes from home. Aunt Easter's home, anyway. Which was guaranteed to be in worse condition than the worst hotel Ana had ever stayed at in her life.

Sensibility be damned, Ana had come too far to turn back now, even for one night. She pulled out of Gallifrey's into the river now running through the middle of town and aimed the bow for home.

Confidence kept her company on Main Street. Stubbornness prodded her out onto Cawthon, then bailed on her and let her drive alone with nothing but the rain slamming into her windshield and the howl of water rushing by on every side. She thought again of the Sugartree Motel and kept driving anyway, all the way out to the Old Quarry Road when the familiar landscape took a hard turn straight through a dark glass.

Her foot stomped the brake without consulting the rest of her; the truck skidded, sluicing through two hundred feet and more of road-turned-river with the trailer fishtailing behind her, before she managed to find the traction to stop, inches from the rocky outcropping to the right of the turn she should be taking, the one that was so easy to miss if you weren't looking for it.

Ana wasn't looking for it now. All her attention was fixed on the top of the outcrop, which she and David used to jokingly call Edge of Nowhere. It was the last hill and the last drop before coming into town or the first and easiest of all those they'd have to climb on the way to Aunt Easter's. Its sides were steep, but it was flat at the top and if there weren't any big kids up there sitting around and smoking and ready to pick on little kids, they would sit and look out past the quarry to the distant mountain range and imagine the world that lay beyond it. All the years of her childhood, that outcrop had boasted nothing but rocks and pines and an endless view of more of the same; now, black against the sheets of lightning that lit up the sky, there was a Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria.

It hadn't been there when she'd left. Had it? But no, she was sure of it. Freddy's was back on Circle Drive, smack in the middle of town where she and David had to bike right by the street it was on. There was another one on Mulholland, but all her memories of it were of a building like this one, long abandoned. Now that she thought about it, she could sort of recall cupping her hands around her eyes, trying to see through a wedge of dirty glass where some spray-painted boards had fallen away, but if she'd seen anything on the inside, she no longer remembered what it had been. It had been closed, if not literally all her life, long enough to make no difference. No, the only Freddy's she'd ever known had been the one on Circle Drive. This one had to have been built after she left.

But it was closed now and had been for years. In the sporadic light of the storm, she could see the windows were boarded and the façade facing the highway had blown away, leaving only the F in Freddy's with its distinctive top hat jauntily canted to one side and the RIA of Pizzeria on the other end with part of Chica's waving wing, and nothing in the middle except the jut of rusted supports. She couldn't see an access road from here, so it must be on the other side of the hill, but she didn't need to get right up to it to know it was Freddy's.

Who would build a high-end gimmick restaurant here? Here, at the corner of Cawthon and Old Quarry Road? Neither road connected with any other town or even any other county road. There were a few little dirt lanes branching off Old Quarry, but the road itself went nowhere but right to the source of the stink for which Mammon was known. Kids still went there, Ana was sure, but only until they got old enough to drive, at which time they did their partying out of town, away from the snakes and the smell. As for Cawthon, it cut arrow-straight across the desert to the site of the old military compound, but the base had been shut down something like fifty years ago. Whatever hadn't been brought down or filled in before they'd left had been demolished on the city's dime decades ago. Poking around for souvenirs was or at least had been a teenaged rite of passage, but the road was wrecked, the desert was harsh, and the best possible reward was a snake-infested ruin, covered over by graffiti and sand and stinking of the distant quarry and old piss. In all of Mammon, there was no worse place to build a restaurant and yet, here it was, miles from anyone or anything, set down at the literal Edge of Nowhere and then abandoned.

Freddy's.

She didn't know how long she stared at it, hypnotized, but she didn't snap out of it until she felt, with exquisite clarity, her back tires lift, then the front, and then she was floating gently sideways off the road. Ana slammed the truck into four-wheel drive and tapped the gas, turning the wheel into the current until her tires touched down again and she could find the traction to get moving. She aimed herself at Old Quarry Road where it climbed Edge of Nowhere, stealing glances up its steep side at the building crouched on top as if it would attack the second she gave it a clear shot. The trailer dragged behind her; she could feel it trying to tip, stabilizing only when she pulled it out of the road onto the hill.

It wasn't a tall hill, just tall enough that she couldn't see the nightmare waiting for her on the other side until she was on the top. There, she stopped and considered her options for some time as thunder rolled and the rain washed down.

There was no road at the bottom of the hill. None. A wall of water sluiced out through the pines on the left of where the road should be and after that, there was nothing but a frothy mess, a broad fall, and a muddy lake pouring endlessly away in the direction of the quarry.

She glanced in the side mirror, then rolled her window down and stuck her head out into the storm with her hand raised against the rain to get a better look at the highway behind her, but it, too, was underwater. Not as deep as the Quarry Road, but damn well deep enough and it was twice as far back to Mammon as it was to Aunt Easter's at this point.

Ana stared for a while, the devil on her shoulder whispering that the road was there whether she could see it or not and it was only a few miles more to Aunt Easter's, that this was the lowest point on the trip and once she got through it, she'd be back on high ground, that she could take it slow and easy and be just fine. The angel on her other shoulder just asked if she was fucking nuts.

Ana put her hand on the gear-shift, sat for a minute or two, then shook her head hard and put it in drive. Inches at a time, she eased her way down the hill, nosing into the current and immediately hooking a hard right, cranking the wheel and tapping the gas, hunting for and ultimately finding the access road she knew had to be there. She could feel the cracked asphalt breaking under her spinning tires. Cheap stuff. But the truck caught and pulled her free of the ominous drag of the water. The trailer came after, rocking dangerously even after it was out.

Ana headed for high ground, following the access road as it curved up, up and around the outer edge of the outcrop to the flat top, paradoxically bumpier now that it had been covered over in asphalt and then allowed to break apart. Nothing was left of the boulder that used to be her seat. Nothing was left of the charred ring of stones where big kids used to sometimes have fires. Nothing was here but Freddy's.

Unlike every other place in town, grown smaller after twenty years' absence, Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria was so much bigger than the one she remembered on Circle Drive, just a ridiculous size for a restaurant. The parking lot was a cratered wasteland, seeming to stretch for miles before it touched the drop-link barricade that blocked off the doors. The emptiness, combined with the exaggerated scale of the building itself, made it look to Ana's eyes like it had been designed to hold the entire population of Mammon and, according to the arrows painted on the ground, there was even more parking around back. The access road had brought her in on the south side of the building, right to the front doors and God knew there was plenty of room, but Ana circled around anyway, reasoning that she didn't want to park where she could be seen from the road (the road which was under a foot of water now and where no one else but her was fool enough to go), looking at it all, unable to reconcile the monster squatting here with the nothing she remembered.

Now that she was here, she could see that the southern face of the building, the one overlooking the highway, was in fact the windowed face of a massive indoor gymnasium, its tinted safety glass apparently thick enough that no one had bothered to board it over, and so layered in dirt that her headlights reflected off it no brighter than brick. Kids had been here, but hadn't broken through anywhere she could see, settling instead for writing the usual aimless threats, declarations of love, and other witticisms—Be Polite or Fuck Off, Designated Drug Area, and of course, Freddy Lives.

Behind the gym was an outdoor playground fenced in by chain-link panels, and although it had suffered considerable indignities over the years, it was still a damned sight more impressive than the one at the elementary school, with swings and monkey bars, a chipped and crumbling crawl-through sea monster, two spring-powered riding toys where a row of five had once been, the open grave that had once been a mighty sandbox, and the grand attraction: a pirate ship with a rusted slide, cloudy portholes, splintered hull, and rotted rope rigging climbing up to the crow's nest and the corroded pole a child could have once slid down onto the deck. At one time, a plastic figure, probably Captain Fox himself, had stood watch over the playground, but it had been broken all the way down to its feet and all the pieces scattered or carried away.

Ana followed the fence around the playground until it butted up against the rear of the building, then drove along the back lot, reading the graffiti and smiling at herself when she discovered, after working half her damn life shoulder to shoulder with the blue-collar and blue-talking set, she could still blush and all it took was seeing a spray-painted dick on a spray-painted Foxy. Just why that was so much more shocking than all the grindhouse-inspired slaughter accompanying it, she had no idea, but it was.

She drove slowly, taking it all in (not the best choice of words, considering what Foxy was doing to Chica there), determined to be okay with everything she saw. And she was, for the most part. It helped that it wasn't just the Fazbear Band frolicking up there in their X-rated way. At some point in the past twenty years, Mammon seemed to have acquired a substantial Furry community and they had all come here to play out a perpetual game of Pin the Dick/Tits on the Animatronic. But eventually, they'd run out of wall to draw on and Ana ran out of reasons to avoid parking.

There was no reason to drive back around to the front of the building and, in fact, every reason not to, but she did. There was plenty of space in front of the doors, but traces of blue paint showed on the curb and old habits were strong. She wasn't going to park in the handicapped slot and that was all there was to that. It wasn't like she didn't want to get any closer to the doors. They were locked anyway. What did she think, they'd spring open the second she got near them and drag her in? Did she think Freddy would be there, the way he'd been that day, waving at her from the stage? Did she think she'd see Aunt Easter in her work uniform, pretty and happy and young, her eyes flashing wide with surprise before she smiled and welcomed her in? Did she think she'd see David?

The thought hooked at her. The debt guy could talk all he wanted about ghosts in Aunt Easter's house, but if David was anywhere, Ana knew he'd be haunting Freddy's, waiting for her.

Ana sat in the truck, reading the graffiti splashed across the boards in front of her. When she ran out of graffiti, she read the signs posted by the entrance—No Trespassing, No Loitering, No Posting, as well as others assuring nervous parents that Freddy Fazbear's was Smoke-Free, Drug-Free, Bully-Free and a designated emergency shelter for all conditions, probably up to and including the zombie apocalypse. When she ran out of signs, she watched the rain.

Inevitably, she pulled her day pack over from the passenger seat and dug through it until she found her bag of weed. She took it out, but put it back without opening it, telling herself it was just too dark to try rolling her own joint and had nothing to do with the fact that her hands were shaking. If she was upset about anything at all, and she wasn't, it was residual piss-off about that old bitch Rutter saying she hoped Aunt Easter and David were burning in hell. It had nothing to do with where she was parked for the night, waiting out the storm. This was just an empty building.

Ana felt around in her pack and brought out her cell phone and turned on the flashlight app so she could see the caps on her vitamin bottles. She found the Ecstasy first—E for eggplant, which was the puffy sticker Rider had put on the cap to help her tell it apart from all the others—and held it for a while, then put it back and kept looking until she found the strawberry-stickered Lexotan instead. She just wanted to calm down; she didn't want to go flying. Not here.

She swallowed a little pink pill with the help of one of the bottles of water she always kept in her pack, then found the giant bottle marked aspirin—just the regular stuff, not the extra-strength—and shook out a joint. The flame of her lighter flickered as she chased down the tip. Windy night. She had the windows rolled up, but she guessed it was getting in through the vents. She was not upset. Her hands were not shaking. This was not Freddy's. Maybe it had been once, but not for a long time and she and David had never even seen it built, so what did it matter? Hell, even if it was still in operation, it wouldn't matter. She was a grown-ass woman, getting high in the parking lot just like any grown-ass woman had a right to do, and if those doors were open and those lights were on, she would walk right in and order a fucking pizza like any grown-ass woman would eat. And it would be all goopy cheese and tin-tasting sauce on a soggy cracker of a crust, because that was the kind of pizza kids liked to eat and she was a grown-ass woman now. She didn't even like pizza all that much. She liked Chinese food.

Ana smoked and watched the rain hit her windshield. Now and then, her eyes moved through it to the boarded-up windows, but only because there was nothing else to look at. It was the same reason she kept looking at the doors, which were not only boarded over, but also shut up behind one of those drop-down link-chain barricades. Kids had broken the locking plate, so it was riding up on this end, but the boards were still in place.

Mostly.

A couple pieces had been pulled away from the Out door. Not many. Just enough to let her see that it wasn't a heavy dungeon-door like the ones at Circle Drive, but a standard automatic sliding glass door.

And it was open.

No more than three inches, five at most, but it was open.

Didn't matter. Nothing in there. Just an empty building. More room to stretch her legs, maybe, but that was all.

Ana finished her joint. She started to shake out another, then capped the bottle and shoved it to the bottom of her pack, which she threw against the passenger door. "Let it soak in," she muttered, gripping and twisting at the steering wheel as she stared at that black stripe of empty air between those open doors. "Just breathe deep and relax. You're fine."

She sat.

It rained.

"Oh for fuck's sake," she snarled, yanking back her seat belt. "Just go look around and get it the fuck out of your system! What are you afraid you'll find?"

The rain hit her hard the instant she opened the truck's door, pouring down spring-warm and as heavy as standing in a shower. Heavier, even. The water pressure back at the duplex was for shit. Pulling her hood down for all the protection it provided and aiming her phone's light ahead of her, Ana splashed up onto the walkway and jogged over to the doors.

She tried first to raise the barricade, but only the lowest rungs moved even a little. The rest stayed frozen in their tracks, rusted shut or clogged with dirt or both. Still, she could lift that bottom rung as high as her knees, which was enough to slide under if she could get the doors open. Which she couldn't. Although she could work her hands into the opening, just pulling at them didn't budge them in the least.

Backing off (but not giving up, not yet), Ana worked one arm into the opening and tried to shine her light around, but all she could see was a smallish space, like any foyer in any restaurant, with another Out door dead ahead of her, blocked off with an enormous pile of junk, and part of the wall with a few posters still stuck to it. The opening wasn't wide enough to let her get a better angle and the barricade kept her from getting any closer.

She had a prybar in her toolchest, but that was blocked off even better than that other door was. She might be able to reach it from the truck's cab window, might even get the top drawer open, but there was nothing in there but screws and nails and bolts and shit of that sort. Her serious tools were in the bottom; they might as well be on the moon.

Ana hunkered down to stick an arm under the barricade and tug at the doors some more. Angle was wrong. No leverage. She shifted onto one knee, wedged her other foot between the doors, grabbed the opposite door in both hands and both kicked out and heaved back with all her strength. Her two-day-old tattoo protested, but her efforts were rewarded and the scraping shudders with which the old doors reluctantly prized apart made it easy to ignore something as insignificant as her body's pain.

The doors gave up another foot or so and not one more inch would they release. Between that and the barricade, she'd won herself an opening a little bigger than the average doggie door.

She'd gotten through tighter spaces before.

How bad did she want to see the inside of this place?

"Fuck it," said Ana, getting on her knees. "What's the worst that can happen?"

Hands and knees didn't get her low enough. Ana dropped all the way to her belly, and as much as she thought she was braced against the immediate sluice of stormwater pouring down her shirt and up her pants legs, for a moment, she was right back on the seat of her mother's car—not thinking about, right the fuck there—with the water up to her chin and creeping higher and she, terrified, kicking and kicking at the window, feeling it break at last and all the river come pouring in, taking that last gulp of air before the river pulled it all out—

Ana squeezed her eyes shut, breathing in the grounding smells of wet concrete beneath her and the black reek of mildew and rot blowing out through the pizzeria's open doors. She was not in the car. She was wet and she was high and that was all. She was fine.

With the added leverage of pushing from below, she got the gate to move another handspan up in its rusted track and then, with her back against one sliding door (her tattoo really did not like that) and both arms pushing straight out on the other, she managed to open it up enough to work her head and shoulders through. Releasing the barricade allowed it to drop its full weight on her, but although it was heavy, she could still move. She rolled onto her belly and up onto her elbows, breathing hard (and she could breathe just fine. There was plenty of air. She was not pinned, she was not trapped, she was not in the car), and shone her phone's light around.

The first thing—the very first thing—her light hit was a pair of bright green eyes staring back at her. Her heart lurched, then fell back into sheepish rhythm. Plastic eyes. Of course. Set in a plastic face, attached to a plastic body that had once been covered in white fuzz, but that had molded to a blotchy greyish-black. One of the animatronics, she thought at first…but which one? She knew them all and knew with surety this was not one.

It was a rooster, of the Foghorn Leghorn variety, so much so that Ana wouldn't have been surprised if it was a copyright violation that got this place shut down. Big body, anthropomorphic wing-hands, full floppy coxcomb and wattle, grinning beak full of teeth. It had been positioned sitting on a plastic stump with plastic hay bales behind it, one knee kicked over the other in a casual manner, its stripped metal hand clutching the broken neck of a banjo while the other hovered eternally over absent strings. Across one of the hay bales, just at little-kid-eye-level, was a pitted plastic sign with the name BREWSTER ROOSTER.

But there was no Brewster Rooster at Freddy's. She had never been in person, but through Aunt Easter's tapes, she had visited the pizzeria a thousand times, ten thousand, and there had never been a rooster. Granted, that had been the pizzeria over on Circle Drive. Maybe the cast of characters changed from place to place?

Sensible. Logical. Yet oddly offensive.

The water spilling across the walkway was damming up against her side. She couldn't lie here all night. She ought to go back to the truck, wait out the storm in the cab, change into the clothes she kept in her pack and just enjoy being dry for a goddamn change. Light up another joint. Breathe deep, as Rider would say. Relax.

Ana didn't budge. Her light's beam crawled over the animatronic's features. Not even an animatronic, she decided, but just a statue, sort of. There were joints at the elbows and around its beak to indicate some kind of movement, but its left leg was molded to the stump it sat on and the right leg was molded to the left almost to its jointed knee. Clearly this thing never got up and moved around like the real animatronics. There was another sign, though. She could just make it out on the other side of the thing and it had a lot more writing on it than just a name. She had no reason to be here and every reason in the world to leave, but all reason aside, nothing in the world was as important in this moment as reading that sign.

She slithered through the sliding doors with the barricade pinching her to the ground the whole way, a tight fit lubricated by an inch and a half of muddy water, and promptly cut herself on a stray shard of glass. Swearing, she picked it out, then scanned the floor ahead of her and discovered a veritable minefield of glass under the camouflaging grime. Pulling her hoodie's sleeve over her hand, she swept it aside and crawled in out of the worst of the weather, already twisting her entire body to see around the rooster without getting any closer to him.

Meet Brewster! invited the second sign. One of the new faces of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria! Brewster loves music and has always dreamed of playing in his favorite group, the Fazbear Band! He's come all the way from the Rockin' Barnyard to meet them, but this is his first time in the big city. Will you be his friend?

"Jesus, Brewster," Ana breathed. "How backwoods are you that Mammon is your idea of the big city?"

Brewster did not answer.

New faces of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria…? Freddy Fazbear was the face of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria! It didn't need another face and even if it did, it had Chica's and Bonnie's and Foxy's! Who the hell thought a plastic poser like Brewster could replace any of the real animatronics? He wasn't even playing a real banjo. It was just a speaker shaped to look like one.

Did that mean…?

No. Even if it had been years since Ana had last seen one of Aunt Easter's tapes and even if she had just been a little kid when she'd watched them, she had never been imaginative enough to just pretend she'd seen Freddy and the gang walking around the pizza parlor. They were real—well, real animatronics—and when they played in the band, they played real instruments. Okay, so Chica might be faking it on the keyboard, but it was still a real keyboard even if she was only twiddling her fingers above the keys while the demo tracks played, and Bonnie could slam out She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain like a rock star.

But it was such a long time ago. Had she ever seen Bonnie play the guitar or had she just seen some robot strumming on a guitar-shaped speaker just like Brewster's crappy banjo, and let David convince her he could play? Had there even been animatronics at all? Maybe they were just people in suits.

She shouldn't be here. She should leave now, before she saw anything else. Memories were such fragile things and she didn't have so many good ones that she could afford to shatter them now.

But she was here. She was finally here. How could she leave until she'd seen it all?

Ana took her light off Brewster and looked around the rest of the entryway. Standing here in front of the exit door, she could peer through the pane of glass at her left into the dark hall that ran up the length of the building, but the layers of grime that caked the glass made it impossible to see very far. Neither could she barge rebelliously through the Out door ahead of her and check out the hall on foot: a tangle of broken tables and chairs and other random chunks of metal, plastic and wooden debris had been wedged together in a massive barricade, blocking off the Out door from wall to wall and at least five feet deep. On the other side of the foyer, where the entrance to the pizzeria didn't even have a door to help contain it, the mess was even worse, completely filling the U-shaped queue that wound back and forth in front of the cashier's station. The only clear space was the spot right here where Ana stood. And to judge by the scratches and cracks in ol' Brewster's fake plastic body, the area hadn't always been cleared. At some point in the past, this entire foyer had been hip deep in junk.

The more she studied this tangle, the odder it seemed. It wasn't the sort of thing someone would do as part of locking up the restaurant and it was equally out of character for vandals. There was something so deliberate about it all. If someone had just thrown shit in a heap, it would have more of a sprawling look. Instead, someone had built this blockade, brick by brick so to speak, wedging each piece into place before applying the next one. In fact, the longer she studied it, the more obvious it became that whoever the builders had been, they must have started at the Out door, which had the tallest and densest barricade structure, and worked their way around the U-shaped foyer, then past the cashier's station, where their building materials petered out.

There, at what was arguably the weakest spot, the barricade was shot through with jagged metal and broken lumber sticking straight out like spears, angled so any future trespasser attempting to climb it was one loose handhold away from a sharpened chair leg through the throat, belly and/or balls. They'd been serious about it, in other words. But someone had gotten in despite it, Ana saw, and the proof was more than just the little clearing in which she stood.

Behind Brewster, the foyer wall was covered in posters and newspaper clippings, and lots and lots of photos of little kids enjoying the shit out of their day at Freddy's, but the area on this side of the wall had a display window built into it that opened on the gift shop, because capitalism is king and what better way to stand in line than to do it with a bunch of kids whining for a Foxy plushie or a Freddy hat? What hadn't been scavenged out of the gift shop had just been thrown around and left to rot, but it wasn't the stuff Ana was looking at. The window showing it all off had been broken out—the source of all the glass on the floor—and there was a countertop right on the other side. She could get in that way. If she wanted to get in. Which she didn't need to do.

It was funny, though. The way the window was broken made it look like someone had broken out, not in.

Ana kicked at the glass scattered over the floor, stirring up eddies of stormwater and the dirty white corner of something else, invisible under the sediment of who knew how many years. When she tried to pick it up, she pulled easily six feet of banner out of the water, although most of it was buried under the heap of crap at the other end of the foyer. Grand O, it said.

Ana let the banner drop again and stood for too long, watching it float on the surface of the water that was still seeping in from outside. She didn't know why it should seem so much more sinister that the restaurant had closed so soon after its opening that the celebratory banner had still been hanging in the foyer, but it was. She didn't like looking at it, so she looked at the wall instead.

Among the photos, drawings and newspaper clippings were posters, glamor-shots of each of the animatronics. There were no names, but that was all right. Ana didn't need them for the real animatronics and didn't care who the fake ones were. Freddy and his friends didn't look quite the way she remembered from the tapes she'd watched as a kid, but weirdly, it wasn't because her grown-up eyes now saw them as fake. If anything, they looked more like them, if that made any sense, which only made the new ones look even phonier.

And there at the top, as was his due, Freddy himself, impeccably dressed in silk top hat and black bowtie. He was made of circles—a round face with little round ears on either side of his hat, big round unbearishly blue eyes, a small round black nose at the blunt tip of his fat round muzzle, full of blunt, white, kid-friendly teeth. If this new version were anything like his previous incarnation, he would also be round in the belly, yet broad through the shoulders—a teddy rather than a grizzly, maybe, but still a bear. He had his signature microphone in his hand and his mouth open, either singing or chatting up the crowd or maybe just showing off his smile, and through some trick of the camera, he seemed to be looking right at her. Come on in, he seemed to be saying. You finally made it. You're finally here. Come on in and sit down. Let me tell you a story and sing you a song. Have some pizza. Have a drink. Smoke 'em if you got 'em, kids. Come on in and welcome to Freddy's.

The pot must have been working, because she lost track of the time, studying that picture as if it hung in a museum and not on this mildewing, waterstained wall, and when she moved on, it was only as far as the other animatronics she remembered from Aunt Easter's tapes and David's many stories.

First, Bonnie the Bunny, who was single-handedly responsible for that annoying flutter of confusion that followed Ana through life when she found out the entire rest of the world seemed to think Bonnie was a girl's name. He was in three-quarters profile, one long ear straight up and the other crooked as a wink, giving the camera the kind of smirking sidelong stare that suggested he could see down the front of her shirt from his vantage up there. The neck of his guitar was visible on the poster and his three thick fingers were posed over the strings as if he were not only ready but anxious to get playing.

Under him, Chica, a bright blue ribbon tied around the three plastic feathers on top of her yellow head, her orange beak open to display her pearly white teeth to their best advantage. She was holding up a birthday cake whose sprinkle-dusted frosting mirrored her confetti-printed bib; both said Let's Eat! in rainbow letters.

Below Chica was Captain Fox of the good ship The Flying Fox, forever moored in Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. His long, thin muzzle was open to show each pointed tooth and he was using his hook-hand to pull the brim of his plumed pirate hat low over his eyepatch so that he looked just as fearsome and piratey as possible. And beside Foxy was a stranger—a white wolf or maybe even another fox, obviously female, with lipstick ridiculously applied to the very tip of her muzzle. One eye had been heavily made up with purple shadow; the other was covered with a pink eyepatch.

And of course, there were five more new faces on four other posters: Brewster the rooster, an alligator or crocodile or possibly a dinosaur, a black cat, a freckled pig in long looped braids, and two nearly identical rodent-looking things sharing one poster whose headshots made it impossible to determine their exact species, and frankly, Ana found it difficult to care. They were, every one of them, plastic, inert and just plain dumb. Of them all, only the lipsticked piratess next to Foxy looked real, although the longer Ana stared into her single long-lashed eye, the more uneasy she felt.

Of the hundreds of photographs and newspaper clippings that filled the space between the posters, creeping mold had blackened some and time washed out others, but a few images remained and Ana paid them her respects as well. They certainly went back, some of them all the way to black-and-white dads in hats and moms in Stepford dresses. So many happy kids. She looked at them—eating pizza, blowing out candles, posing with Freddy, hugging Chica, rocking out with Bonnie, swordfighting with Foxy…a wall full of the best days ever. And there, right in the middle—

Her heart stopped again. This time, it broke.

Here he was and hadn't she just been thinking she'd find him here? How could he not be? He'd all but lived at Freddy's. They were his friends. They were his second family.

David. He was wearing a paper Freddy-mask that only showed the lower half of his face, but it was David. She knew that haircut, knew that Captain America t-shirt, knew that wicked gap-toothed grin. Aunt Easter was there with him in her work uniform, her arm around his thin shoulders the way Ana's own mother had never hugged her, and she was laughing with him at whatever wonderful thing was happening out of frame. David. It was almost like he was alive.

Almost.

She reached with one hand to take the photo down, but didn't. She had no pictures of David, no proof apart from her own unreliable memories that he had ever existed, but this wasn't hers. She wouldn't steal it. She was in Freddy's house at last; she wouldn't rob him.

But if ever there was a moment when she might have just turned around and left, it ended there. Now she had to see it. She had to see it all.

Ana hupped herself through the gift shop window and climbed down from the countertop onto a layer of moldy shirts. Picking her way across a sea of broken and decayed toys, one hand covering her mouth and nose as a laughable defense against the stink she released with every step, she made her way out and into the dining room.

This was it. Freddy Fazbear's. The place was in a sorry state, even considering how long it must have been shut down. The roof was going, clearly. She could hear the wet smack of water dropping into puddles and see the shine of the pervading damp anywhere she turned her light. There wasn't much to see. At one time, this room had been filled with long tables and chairs, but most had been crammed into the foyer. Now only three remained, shoved out of alignment across the middle of an empty floor. Black mold grew on the ceiling and white mold bloomed like flowers on the walls. The smell of time gone to rot was everywhere, but it was Freddy's and yes, it felt like coming home.

How long Ana stood there in the corner of the dining room, just drinking that fetid/welcoming sight in, she didn't know, but at last she pushed nostalgia aside and got her bearings. The gift shop was to her right; the exit door and its blockade, behind her; to her left, a swinging door that reluctantly opened on a hall that ran the length of the building, all boarded windows on one side and closed doors spotting the other, and at its very end—

What was that?

She blinked and looked again, shining her tiny light for all it was worth and trying to listen past the drumming of rain on boards. She had not seen movement, she decided. She had not heard footsteps. There was another of those fake animatronics at the end of the hall and it had been a trick of the moving flashlight and swooping shadows that made her think she'd seen something else duck away.

All the same, she did not head down the hall to prove herself right. When she started walking, it was deeper into the dining room.

It was very different from the one at Circle Drive, even if she had only known it second-hand. There was no arcade and no Pirate's Cove, just a big brick of a room. The stage on the east end was its dominant feature—a half-circle pushing out from an angular tri-jointed wall—and of course, it was empty. At one time, there had been a curtain, but someone had torn it down and now it soaked up rain and sprouted unwholesome-looking fungi on the floor. The backdrops she remembered from Aunt Easter's tapes—smiling sun, puffy clouds, crescent moon and twinkling stars—were either stuck to the wall by years of damp and dirt, or had rotted into shreds on the floor. Colored stagelights had been smashed and the glass left to litter the ground. Bonnie's guitar was leaned up against the corner in his end of the stage, stringless, with cracks in the body and chips in the paint, but Bonnie himself was nowhere to be seen. Freddy's microphone stand lay on the floor before the stage, but Freddy was gone. There was no sign at all of Chica's keyboard, or of Chica herself. The show was over; the players were long gone, probably rusting out in some scrapyard or collecting dust in someone's basement or wherever it was old animatronics went to die, and this was just what she'd expected to see, so why was her heart breaking? Why was she still moving forward, still looking around? What did she think she was going to find?

Past the stage, in the northwest corner, was a dark opening, the mouth of a hall, leading deeper into the pizzeria and just begging to be explored. The north wall was featureless apart from old posters and blooms of mold, but there were two swinging doors hung in the middle. Rather, there had been two swinging doors. Now there was one door, no longer swinging but not quite closed, and another door, thrown out twenty feet or so into the middle of the dining room.

Moved out, Ana corrected herself, but she didn't believe it. Even from here, she could see the twisted points of the hinges and the craters in the jamb where they'd been torn out. Someone had ripped that thing off like a wing off a fly. Someone had thrown it. And not even at the obvious target, she thought, now shining her light into the northeast corner, where there was a small tray return window, a couple upended trashcans, and another fake animatronic. It was the alligator, definitely an alligator now that she could see the whole model, pot-bellied and long-bodied, with plastic textured to look like a straw hat molded to his head and a red plastic bandana molded to its neck. He was even holding a giant plastic jug with three honest-to-God X's on the side. Someone had torn his eyes out—or blown them out with firecrackers, to judge by the blackened spiderweb of cracks and smoke burns radiating out of the sockets—but the rest of him was surprisingly intact. It looked like his head could turn and his arm could move enough to either let him have a swig from his moonshine jug or maybe blow on it (or pretend to blow, rather, since the jug was as fake as the animatronic), but otherwise, he was fixed in place and immobile. SWAMPY GATOR said his name-plaque. You can find this good ol' boy in the Bayou, his informative sign added, playing with the Backwater Band, but he just loves jamming with his big city friends!

Honestly, Ana could not imagine having a door in her hands and not flinging it straight at that damn thing.

But even as this thought flitted through her brain, she had to ask herself why? What made these things—Brewster and whats-his-redneck-butt Gator so offensive to her eye, but Freddy and the rest so sacred? What was the difference?

She didn't know, but there was one.

She was being silly.

No, she really wasn't. Maybe it wasn't fair, but it was true. There was a difference. If Freddy and the rest were here and she could do a side-by-side, she might even be able to pinpoint just what that difference was, but on the other hand, it was a good thing they weren't. Because it would be awful to see them now, here, left to rot in this horrible mess.

Never mind, plenty else to see. Against the southern side of the room were a few booths where parents uninterested in the adventures of the Fazbear Band could sit in relative seclusion but still watch over their kids. On the other side of the booths, Ana could glimpse the tip of the junk pile blocking off the cashier's station and the foyer beyond. The western end of the dining room opened on a wide hall, with the bathrooms situated at the center. A cartoony picture of Chica was holding up a sign on one that said Girls while Brewster represented the Boys. Above them, obscuring Brewster's stupid face, hung a helpful double-headed arrow that had snapped all but one wire. At one time, it would have directed her to the gymnasium or playground; now it could only show her the distance between heaven and hell. And set in the wall between the bathroom doors was a shadow box of some sort with what looked from here like…shrunken heads?

Ana moved closer and closer still, then gave up and went all the way over, leaving the safety of the gift shop and its promise of a quick escape to discover, not shrunken heads, but a trio of white mice dressed up like Old West dancing girls, caught mid-can-can and frozen forever. When Ana tapped the glass, they all dropped their left leg a hair, but that was all. She guessed when this place had been open, they danced. Above this defunct display was a cleaner squarish space, so Ana looked around for the fallen sign and found it facedown and blacked over with grime. She wiped it off on her thigh, which was plenty wet enough to use as a wash-towel, and read Millie, Tillie and Hillie at Miss Kitty's Sarsaparilla Saloon! Visit Gallup Gulch!

Gallup Gulch? Was that like Pirate Cove? Ana looked back into the dining room, but couldn't even see a separate stage for Captain Fox, much less another one dressed up like a saloon. Come to think of it, what about Swampy and the 'bayou' he supposedly hailed from? What about Brewster's barnyard? The building was huge for a restaurant and the dining room was only a piece of it, but there couldn't be room enough for all these places.

A roll of thunder made her start enough to drop both the sign and her phone. She recovered the latter, left the former, and shone her light up and down the hall, but the doors at each end had been blocked off with more tables and chairs and racks and what looked like pizza trays and pieces of industrial steel shelving. It could all be moved, she supposed. None of it looked very heavy or very sturdy, but why bother? Did she want to go back out in the pouring rain just to look at the playground some more? Or worse, bust her way into the gym and find out what kid-pee smelled like when it had baked in the Utah heat and then got wet under a leaky roof for a few years?

Ana turned around and damned if her light's beam didn't do that swoopy-shadow-trick again, this time over by the kitchen door.

Which was moving, just a little, as if someone had brushed it as they'd gone by. Even as she watched, its small swaying slowed and stopped.

There was a draft, she told herself, and there was. Plenty of wind was getting past the boards that covered over these broken windows. There was a draft, for real. She could feel it raising the chillflesh on her arms even now.

She thought of her truck and especially of the knives she kept in the toolbox and the glovebox and under the driver's seat. Then she went over to the kitchen doors, cell phone firmly in hand, and peeped in.

A kitchen. Just a kitchen. All stainless steel surfaces, rusted and filthy, stacks of decaying pizza boxes, dishes, pots, pans, plastic tubs, and signs reminding employees to wash their hands. There was another door, though. Not just the cooler or the freezer, both of which she noted, but a door in the far end of the room, by the sinks on the other side of that tray return window. The only question here was, did she want to open that door?

No, she did not. And not because she was scared of finding someone. She wasn't. Although the restaurant had been long abandoned and the local hooligans knew it, no one was living here. No one was cooking in this kitchen, not dinners and not meth. No one was bringing food back here to eat out of Mammon's infrequent yet torrential rains and throwing the wrappers on the floor. She saw plenty of vandalism, but only the kind that came with breaking in and breaking out again, running away fast and laughing about how scared someone else had been. Of broken windows, broken lights and broken fake animatronics, there were signs everywhere, but of empty bottles, old needles and soggy condoms, there were none.

No, no one else was here, but once she started looking, she'd never stop. Pot didn't make her paranoid too often, but the potential was always there and this place was too big, too dark and too long abandoned. There'd always be shadows at the corner of her eye, always weird sounds half-heard under the storm. She wouldn't find anything—there was nothing to find—she'd only end up giving herself the heebie jeebies. This was no place to get the heebie jeebies in sober, let alone high.

Ana backed out of the kitchen rather than turn her back on that innocent door. She stood for a moment on the threshold, then turned fast and aimed her phone's light down the dark hall.

Another fake animatronic, maybe sixty feet away, in the rounded juncture of three hallways. A signpost had been set up, with arrows pointing in all directions, and this new animatronic-that-wasn't stood next to it. It was the pig, wearing bib overalls cut short at the knees to show off her shapely gams and pink-painted hooves. With freckles on her snout and her hair done up in hooked braids like a porcine Pippa Longstocking, she could not have screamed 'hayseed' louder than if she had one stuck between her teeth. Like Brewster and Swampy, the pig was fixed in place, forever posed in a jaunty hi-there with one fist on her curvy hip and the other hand raised and splayed. That elbow, and that elbow alone, was jointed, suggesting she could either wave or maybe point down one of the many halls that terminated in this hub if a kid too young to read asked her for directions.

The pig's introductory sign had fallen off the hay bale to which it had been affixed, but Ana did not head over to investigate. There was a lot left to this place she hadn't seen (and deep in her heart, she still hoped to find the real animatronics, not the New Faces) but in spite of all her internal scolding, she had begun to feel uneasy. She didn't want to lose sight of the exit. More, she didn't want to let someone-who-was-not-there get between her and the only way out.

"It's not the only way out," she told herself and she knew she was right. She'd seen other doors on the exterior of the building as she'd circled around. Granted, they might also be blocked off with crap, but even if so, a busted chair or a table-leg made a pretty good weapon in a pinch. Not that she needed to be thinking of weapons. Honestly, that roof was far more likely to kill her tonight than any phantom stalker watching her from the shadows.

And no one was here. That was the most important thing of all. No one was here but her.

Ana headed down the hall toward the signpost, already squinting to try and make out if any of the arrows pointing off from the pole said Pirate Cove or Gallup Gulch or anything like that. As it was, the only one angled so she could read it was the one that said Security. Was there a police station stage? She couldn't imagine a pizza parlor needing all that much security, but then again, after James Joyce Reardon, maybe the owners decided there was no such thing as too much security.

Just clear of the dining room, however, the wall abutting the main stage opened up into a niche of sorts, just perfect for someone to lurk in and leap out of, so when she caught a glimpse of pale color out of the corner of her eye, she swung hard in that direction. If her phone was a spear, she could have killed it.

And she'd have felt pretty silly, seeing as she'd have killed a cardboard standee with a poster of…

"Freddyland?" Ana read aloud.

The pig, the roof, and the possibility of skulkers in the kitchen forgotten, Ana moved the rotting velvet ropes keeping customers at bay aside and got right up in that niche.

Freddyland, said the banner in letters four inches high, like it was something to be proud of. The map beneath was cartoonish, oversimplified and out of scale. It looked like an island, surrounded on all sides by an artificial moat in which several ships crewed by anthropomorphic animals sailed. The fact that they were drawn to look like animatronics, with jointed jaws and elbows and glassy-wide eyes only made them more creepy, not less.

Across the bridge into Freddyland was the main street, lined with shops, because capitalism was king and how better to enter a themepark than with a thousand screaming kids whining for a Foxy plushie or a Freddy hat? Main street branched off into a tangle of interlocking paths that led to and around various themed hollows, each with their own band of featured animatronics. There was Swampy's Bayou, Gallup Gulch and Brewster's Rockin' Barnyard, as well as Fairy Tale Forest, the Monkey Kingdom, the Bunny Patch and at least a dozen others. And of course, there was Pirate Cove, where kids with parents willing to pay extra could join the animatronic crew of either the Flying Fox or the Lion's Pride and help Captain Fox and Captain Blackmane chase each other around the entire island. If the animatronics weren't enough, there were also roller coasters, tilt-a-whirls, swinging hammers, threading needles, flying carousels and every other kind of ride guaranteed to threaten life and limb. Carnival games? Hell, Freddyland boasted the largest boardwalk arcade in the world and tickets were as good as cash at any of the gift stands. There was something for all ages at Freddyland: a butterfly garden, a petting zoo, a gondola ride, a monorail, a water park area, mini-golf, a haunted castle, a dinosaur dig, and junk food, junk food everywhere. Dead center of this, like the iris of an unblinking eye, was the Grand Pavilion Hotel where Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica had center stage, smiling and waving.

It shouldn't have been awful, but it was, and the longer she looked, the more sinister it seemed. Why, for God's sake? When she was a kid, wouldn't she have died to go someplace like this? Hell, she'd have died just to go the pizzeria, but a whole park? Freddy's and Disneyland rolled into one, not just four animatronics, but a hundred of them. A dream come true, right?

Why then, did it feel so much like a nightmare?

Well, it had never happened. And never would, if the condition of this place were any indication. The plans, like the pizzeria, had been left in the dark to rot.

Still, she stared, loathing it but unable to look away…

…until the deafening drumming of the storm slackened and she heard the footsteps.

Not her imagination. Not the rain. Scraaaape-thud, scraaaape-thud, slow but inexorable, spiking out the fine hairs all over her body.

It came from deeper in the hall, from the dark beyond the pig and the signpost. She knew this and could have run the opposite way, back through the dining room and out the gift shop window into the rain. She didn't have to look and see what hideous, rotting zombie-thing was coming for her, hungry. She didn't.

Ana turned and raised her phone.

Its light hit Freddy in the chest, illuminating his filthy, mildewing, plastic body and the rotted remains of his black bowtie, still neatly knotted around his neck. She didn't have to raise it any higher. His eyes lit up, flashing through the layer of dust and grime, and from somewhere deep inside him, music began to play (not a nursery song, although she was connecting it on some weird level with cartoons). In one hand, he gripped his microphone, but the other was empty and reaching out from clear back there to grab her.

"HEY KIDS," he said, picking up one rotted-fur foot and putting it down ahead of the other, steady as Poe's pendulum. "TIME TO PLAY."

She did not startle. She'd heard Freddy say those words a thousand times on Aunt Easter's tapes. And it was the same voice, deep but friendly, fundamentally bear-ish, even if the speakers weren't up to snuff anymore. Time had corroded something in there, but it only gave his voice a little rumble, which was fitting for a bear. If it wasn't for the circumstances, it wouldn't even sound all that creepy.

No sooner had that thought flitted through Ana's mind than a new voice chirped out, "I LOVE TO MAKE NEW FRIENDS!" way too fucking close.

Ana jumped back, her light jerking aside, and here came Chica, her sunny color dulled out to dead-canary yellow, eyes lit up and shining over a beakless black hole filled with teeth. "I'M HUNGRY," chirped a happy girlish voice, rendered tinny through an old speaker. "LET'S EAT!"

No, not creepy at all…if this were still a pizzeria. If it were daytime and if they weren't broken down and filthy. If. But in the middle of the night, as spoken by an animatronic zombie—fuck that, time to go.

Ana spun, but it was too late. At the other end of the hall, arms out to block escape, was a huge, greyish-purple hulk. Long, jointed bunny-ears swayed and dipped at every lurching step. His eyes…his eyes were two red dots deep in the cavity that had been his face. His lower jaw hung by a single screw, the fur rotted out so that his peg-shaped teeth dangled across his chest like a necklace. All the rest was hanging wires, bent framework, and the grinding of gears.

Ana's breath hitched in and left her in a hoarse, horrified, "Bonnie?"