Sorry for neglecting the story. I was unable to post for a while but now I'm back and intend to deliver much more frequent updates.
Chapter Eight: Gnocchi (1985)
Milford awoke with a splutter.
To be precise, a splutter of blood, which cascaded from the tip of his tongue and onto the stony pave beneath his face. His surroundings were dark and foreboding. He couldn't yet recall how or why it might be that he should be awaking in such nightmarish circumstances, as it seemed whatever blow had sent him to the ground had been a hard one. The sticky blood that emerged on the palm of his hand from a reactionary rub of the area served to evidence this further.
Then, the images started flooding back to him. Like a great dam splintering and breaking apart, the part of Milford's mind that had been locked to him, preventing his seeing - perhaps in protection - opened up, and he saw. He remembered.
The giggle from the darkness was the cement that made his fearsome memories into solid concrete. He recalled Golden Freddy – well, to be precise, the intruder who hid behind the yellow bear's friendly attire – taunting him as he raised his foot to his face. It was hardly surprising that such a sinister voice would be partnered with an odious laugh such as the one Milford could hear now, but what was more frightening was how childlike it initially sounded, before a deeper undertone was weaved in.
"Good evening, Milford," the nightmarish voice cackled, as the golden suit walked from the shadows into view, strangely disembodied at first glance, like a suit of medieval armour come to life. Like something out of a videogame.
Milford noticed the crimson red stains on the costume's fabric, particularly evident on the cuffs and neck, and felt bile rising in his stomach, remembering the child's voice that he had heard before he had left the office. With such dark thoughts bobbing in his mind he thought firstly not for himself, but for the welfare of the child.
"What did you do to them?" he growled, voice low but still poised with aggressive intent.
Golden Freddy pulled suddenly into the darkness with his left arm, and Milford saw that he was holding a child tightly by the cuff of their shirt. They did not make a sound, vocal chords likely strangulated by terror.
"No point in starting the fun without you," the ghoulish bear cackled.
It was nigh-on invisible in the pitch black, but Milford could picture the fear in the child's eyes. "Don't touch that child!"
Golden Freddy gazed sideways at Milford, before shrugging with the same kind of theatrical movement as a pantomime horse. The costume sagged, clearly oversized by comparison to its wearer, giving it a creepy, disembodied feel.
"I won't," he said quietly, before pulling out a large knife from concealment and stabbing the child straight through the neck.
Milford tried to scream but the cry was soundless, sucked from his lips by a vacuous fear that overpowered all of his other sensations.
The child dropped limply from the killer's hands, and Golden Freddy moved forward quickly, rounding on Milford before he had even had the time to process the events of the last couple of seconds.
"You weren't supposed to get involved," the murderous costume scolded. "You're going to pay for that."
Freddy grabbed Milford by the front of his shirt, and with an enormous display of brute force, tossed him into the other corner of the room. Milford, paralysed by shock and fear, barely reacted, only registering the sensation of being moved when he hit the ground hard and heard the distinctive sound of bones breaking. At that point, he cried out in pain, and Freddy rounded on him again, kicking him in the head and silencing his pitiful groans.
"Do you know where we are?" Freddy asked, answering his own question without even waiting for a response. "I'm not surprised that you don't. Officially, where we are standing doesn't exist. But… eh, you be the judge. Looks pretty solid to me."
Stooping down next to Milford, who was dribbling blood onto the tiles, he continued; by now, his clown-like, inhuman persona was slowly peeling away to reveal something much more ominous.
"This is the 'safe room.' Ironic name, really, considering the way it's being used, but it's convenient for my purposes. This is the room they don't want you to know exists. It's practically invisible to the untrained eye, but if you have a knack for it, and you've known a place for long enough, you can root these kinds of things out… Like a dog."
Milford must have made a whimper-like sound unbeknownst to himself, for at this point Freddy tutted, and, taking him by the hair, smashed him head-first into the cobbles. Pain ripped across his face; Milford was almost sure that his face was shattered, but only almost, for there was no sensation in his flesh at all.
"Did I say you could talk? No, I don't think so. Anyways, you got the jist of it. Secret room, nobody will ever find you, yadda yadda yadda. But that's not nearly enough for a meddler like you."
Freddy stood up, approaching a silhouetted shape that stood erect nearby. With a big heave of breath and a creaking, grating sound, the costumed killer wrenched the object closer to Milford, where, in his haze of confusion, thought he was looking at a Bonnie endoskeleton. Without considering his actions, he mumbled inwardly "Buh-nah."
Seconds later, his head was cracked against the tiles again. White noise, a deathly silence, followed.
"No, Milford. Not 'Buh-nah.' Not Bonnie, either. This is a special animatronic. Not like the others. His name is Spring Bonnie, and you're going to become intimately acquainted over the next couple of days… If you survive that long…. Springie is known to have troubled digestion…"
Although Milford was almost unconscious by this point, he was aware that he was being moved from the ground, and placed roughly inside the suit which he had seen wheeled out of the darkness. He heard a metallic groan, but was unaware of what had caused it, which was probably for the best.
The Springlock mechanism closed around his body; it was, truly, the spitting image of an iron maiden.
Golden Freddy stepped back to admire his handiwork. The two costumes looked each other straight in the eyes; perhaps, finding some understanding.
And then, Freddy laughed and called out to Milford.
"Goodnight! Don't let the pistons bite!"
Andrew stared at the small object that sat at the door of his opened cell. The small object stared back, with its haunting, vacant eye sockets and sinister curved smile.
It was the marionette. The thing from his dreams.
It was here.
"But… how?" Andrew whispered, pinching his arm hard with the full expectation that he would be yanked out of the waking nightmare he was most certainly experiencing.
But he did not awake, for he was already frighteningly-conscious.
The marionette was sat in a heap, its head at an angle, as though it had been set down by another, unseen individual. But Andrew suspected a much more terrifying cause, for he did not feel the presence of another human being for a wide space around him. No, this puppet had come to sit on the stone tiles outside of his cell all by itself. And, apparently, had levered the door so that Andrew could join it…for whatever sinister purpose.
Andrew was about to slam his cell door shut and run back to his bed when the marionette suddenly twitched, its head raising to look at Andrew. The former janitor trembled, a yelp of terror trying desperately to form in his throat but amounting to nothing but saliva and inhuman burbles.
Unfortunately, the miraculous animation was just the start of the show.
Before Andrew's tear-blurred eyes, the marionette rose from the floor, as though it were attached to a bunch of helium balloons, or it was being orchestrated in an elaborate puppet act. But this was not the case. The puppet rose in a clean line, limbs unfurling but back and head never losing their beam-like straightness. Eventually, when the toy was at human-eye level, it stopped. By this point, Andrew was cowering on his knees, hands over face, fully expecting the end to come.
But it didn't.
The marionette floated silently, not moving an inch. Andrew tentatively looked up, just in time to see it start to hover down the corridor, body still moving at a glacial yet eerily-mechanical pace.
Clearly, it was expecting Andrew to follow it.
Any rational, sane man would have ignored such an expectation without a second thought.
But Andrew was not a rational or sane man. And he was too scared to do anything otherwise.
Time was ticking away at a glacial pace. Each minute felt like an hour, although it was strictly impossible to tell how much time was passing anyhow, as Milford slipped in and out of consciousness, each time awakening in darkness and confusion once more.
The suit prevented any movement of any kind besides blinking and the occasional puff of breath, although for this Milford was glad, for he sensed the truth in the killer's assurances that the mechanism could snap shut and kill him at any time. It was less like an iron maiden on the inside than it was an oversized bird cage, with each holding bar thinner than a rabbit's bone. At one point, a rather too-zealous breath caused the whole mechanism to shudder slightly, and Milford to nearly wet himself in fear.
At some timeless point, the night came to a close, replaced by the shining golden beams of daylight, and Milford heard movement vaguely through the walls. It was James, coming in to open up the restaurant and, presumably, to relieve Milford from his night shift duties. In his state of despair, Milford had forgotten that he had even been on such a shift, and so when James' ever-irritated tones pierced his eardrums, a surge of recognition, and desperate realisation, flooded over him.
He contemplated calling out for help, wondering if the muffled, pithy cries would be enough to agitate the springlocks, or, miraculously avoiding that, James' subsequent exploration of the sounds and ultimate tinkering with the machinery. Either way, it did not seem likely that he would survive such an outcome, and so his lips remained sealed.
The rest of the day ticked past at an infrequent pace. Milford heard the distant rumblings of gas cookers and deep-fryers sizzling meats and doughs, the occasional chit-chat of some of the less-qualified, often-teenaged staff, and, on one very rare moment, the sound of shoes clopping around just outside the safe room. Often the noise from the outside world was more than Milford could bear, and he would simply focus on squeezing his head, as though caught between the pincers of a sideshow crane, to block out the happier, ignorant sounds.
Finally, 5PM came, and the staff filtered out of the restaurant one-by-one, taking their incessant chatter with them. Eventually, only the sounds of the janitors remained, and even they, with their sloshing of water and squeaking of mops, eventually faded out to a vacuum of nothing. For hours then, Milford was in darkness – a void so empty and hopeless he may as well have been dead, trapped in the fields of Asphodel for all eternity, awaiting the end of time.
Then, he heard the sound of the safe room being cautiously and carefully opened, and the muffled footsteps of a person walking lightly – as though in costume.
"Good evening, Milford. Still alive in there?"
Milford did not respond. Not because he didn't want to, fearful of the dainty mechanisms around him or simply defiant of his captor, but because he found himself completely unable. Sensations of life, like breath and speech, no longer troubled him. The quiet pulse of his own beating heart was his only assurance that he was still alive and not trapped in the delirium of some damned afterlife.
The voice continued, chuckling. "Well, whatever. I've brought two new friends for us to play with… What are your names, kids?"
"Danny," came one soft voice, followed soon after by another, more effeminate speaker. "Rachel."
For the first time in countless hours, Milford felt something in his numbed body. It was a tightness in his chest area; a recognition that he was deeply disturbed and frightful by what he was hearing.
"We're just looking for some cake…. Aren't we, guys?"
There was no response from the children, but Milford sensed they were nodding, swiftly and tearfully.
"Well, I don't see any cakes, do you? Guess we'll just have to make some fresh. Let's start with the strawberry jam…"
In the darkness of the suit it made no difference, yet Milford squeezed his eyes shut regardless as the first, terrified screams came out, silenced quickly by a nauseating wet sound, like raw meat being cut with a knife. The second child, to their credit, never said a word to communicate their fear, although Milford was sure that their facial expression would have told the story without need of speech. When it finally went quiet again after the sound of soggy dough hitting a breadboard, Milford opened his eyes at last, a stream of tears coursing out.
"Well, that's that, then," Golden Freddy had said, before the sounds of his scurrying indicated that he had left; presumably, to dispose of the bodies of his victims.
Milford cried for a long time. Tears, like the great, boundless oceans that they are often compared to, did not stop flowing from his eyes for a considerably-longer time than it would seem scientifically possible - for a man who had not drank anything in nearly 24 hours.
He had, by this point, accepted the reality of his grim situation. He was going to die down here. Whether it was malnutrition, suffocation or the piercing agony of a metal endoskeleton caving in around his torso (or perhaps a combination of all three) didn't matter.
Nobody except Golden Freddy knew that he was in here. Perhaps they would find his body in a couple of decade's time, emaciated by the march of time, and finally give his friends and family some closure.
Maybe Bill Murray and his team could even help him find his way back to Jenny.
But it wasn't up to him. Not anymore.
But then, at the breaking point of his own sanity, he heard it. That unmistakable sound.
"In here? Really?"
Somehow - however improbably - it was Andrew.
And the sound he heard next confirmed what he only could have hoped for in his wildest dreams.
He had found the door.
Andrew had been following the marionette for nearly the whole day, when it had finally arrived, riding the air like a limp surfboarder, at his old place of work. Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria.
Only, Andrew had never known it by that name. When he saw the title on the board he was confused, but upon the sight of Freddy's cheerful maw, his eyes lit up with joy.
"Fredbear!" he grinned. "It's you!"
The marionette gazed back to ensure his companion was still following. Andrew, now giddy with joy but still focused on the task at hand, came quickly as the puppet raised both of its wooden palms, and the locked restaurant doors swung open.
It was dark inside the building, but Andrew could still recognise the old layout for what it was, in spite of its obvious redecoration. The tables that he had once mopped down so lovingly, and with such care and attention, still stood gleaming about the floor, ever as majestic as ever. The showstage, now adorned with ribbons and harsh primary coloured paint, still reached out to him with open arms, welcoming him like an old friend.
Lost in his wonderment, Andrew nearly missed the marionette's gesturing at the storeroom door.
"What's in there?" Andrew grumbled, fearful now but with an overpowering curiosity that could not be ignored. Following the marionette inside, he was then faced with a stone wall. Confused as to what he was supposed to see, Andrew opened his mouth to protest, but the marionette cut him off by moving against the brickwork, pushing it back and revealing a secret door that swung open on rusty hinges.
The room inside was dark – nearly impenetrably so- but Andrew could make out a faint shape in the corner. Upon closer inspection, he realised he was looking at a Bonnie costume – only it was green in colour, and strangely bulging, as though it were stuffed with wool or spare parts.
The old janitor nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard a groan emerge from the peculiar costume, and had to swallow the nausea that rose in his stomach as soon as the recognition hit him.
"Milford?" he asked.