TRIGGER WARNING! This book contains strong adult themes, including adult language, drug and alcohol references, graphic depictions of child abduction, violence towards children and adults, graphic gore violence and explicit sexual content. You have been warned.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The hall bent to the left not long after Ana and Mike passed the restrooms (someone had spraypainted a monstrous Freddy, big enough to cover both doors, with a dead little boy in one clawed hand and a dead little girl in the other), and right where it bent, there was a door. No gold star and top hat insignia here, just a few stark signs reading Employees Only, No admittance beyond this point, and Parts and Services. It had been locked at one point, but someone had kicked it in. Nevertheless, Mike stood in the hall a long time, searching every inch, every dark corner, and especially the air vents in the ceiling before he took his first steps inside.

"The Toybox opened in 1981, under Erik Metzger's management," he said. The walls caught his voice, made it echo unpleasantly, muted and distorted, as if some Other were slyly mocking him with his own words. "The kid wanted nothing to do with the place. At first, it was assumed it had to do with some legal trouble he was in—the whole Fredbear and Friends thing—but even after—"

"What Fredbear and Friends thing?"

"Not relevant. We've got a lot to cover tonight, can we just—"

"You brought it up," she pointed out.

Mike looked at her, then sighed a little and said, "Fine. Bare bones, no questions. Remember I said when the Flagship opened, it opened as Fazbear Entertainment, Inc? Well, when the kid was securing all his intellectual property, he forgot to include Fredbear's Family Diner. With the roaring success of Freddy's, it was inevitable some gold-digging asshat should come along. In '78, that asshat arrived in the form of a man named, honest to God, Malice McGee."

"No fucking way is that a real name."

"I know, right? Sounds like a Bond villain. Anyway, McGee opened a themed diner called Fredbear's in Salt Lake City, using animatronics on stage and people in suits on the floor, and from what I've seen, they were substandard even for the time. He modeled his animatronics after the Flagship group, with some slight color changes, and even claimed to be a 'sister site' to the pizzeria. He probably thought the kid would never hear about it, but he did and he sued the everloving shit out of everyone involved. McGee retaliated by adding a bunch more animatronics and suits, using other animals and color schemes, and argued that the kid didn't have a monopoly on the concept of a singing animal band. Since the kid had failed to trademark Fredbear's, McGee went ahead and did that too, although he did ultimately add 'and Friends' to further distance himself from the name he was obviously trying to cash in on."

Mike paused to check his watch, visibly reined his reporter's instinct under control, and went on, "After years of lawsuits back and forth, suddenly, one afternoon in 1983, a real prize of a kid and his prize friends grab said kid's little brother at the little brother's own birthday party, and haul this terrified, crying child up to the main stage to give Fredbear a kiss. Right as they lift him up, Fredbear throws back his head for a laugh, then snaps forward and somehow catches the kid's head between his jaws."

"Jesus."

"But he's not one of Faust's animatronics. He's just a machine and that machine keeps going with its program. It takes six minutes to shut it down and in the meantime, it's singing, it's telling jokes, and with every word, it's crunching away on that poor kid's skull. Kid was in a coma about a week on life-support before he finally died, and McGee got hit not only with the family's suits, but a class-action suit from every other family that had been there—and probably a few that hadn't—claiming emotional damages. Understandably desperate, McGee offered to sell the legal rights to the name Fredbear back to the kid, but the kid wouldn't buy. His reputation and finances in ruins, McGee struggled through six more months in legal battles before eating a bullet. Rumor has it, he climbed into one of his totally-not-a-Freddy-Fazbear costumes before he put the gun in his mouth, but I don't know. That sounds a little too poetic, even for a guy named Malice.

"Anyway, all this gave the kid a great reason not to go to work, but McGee killed himself in 1983 and even afterwards, the kid stayed away. In the whole time the Toybox was open, he only ever came here once and it wasn't to fix anything. So although the old animatronics were brought here, ideally to be fitted out with the new technology, they never were. Foxy was the only Flagship animatronic that moved on to the Toybox and even though he got some…" Mike paused for a pointed, unexplained snort. "…shall we say, upgrades, they were mostly cosmetic."

"And the significance of this is?"

"My own personal bullshit theory is Erik fixed Foxy up himself, but he lacked the motivation, not to mention the skill, to fix the others. As for the rest of the Fazbear Band, they were left in the back and used as parts, stripped down for wires and joints and whatever it took to keep the Toys running. Erik did that, too, and not very well, frankly. He was considered to be something of a genius when it came to computer programming back in those days, but he wasn't very good with the hardware end of things. You may have noticed Bonnie's always got his guitar up like he's ready to play it in all these posters. Take a good look and you'll notice—"

"His left arm is way longer than the right one," Ana said, nodding. "Yeah, I noticed."

"That's because it's Gen-1 Bonnie's arm. The whole arm. Erik just pulled it off, removed the fur, painted it blue and slapped it on Gen-2's torso."

Against her will, Ana found herself staring at the worktable in the middle of the room, only she was picturing it more as the Pull-A-Part table in Kiddie Cove, with two Bonnies locked into restraints, side by side—a blue Toy Bonnie and a purple Bonnie, her Bonnie. She imagined Erik Metzger in surgical scrubs, bright purple of course, laying out the tools for operation: a welder's torch, wire clippers, maybe a chainsaw.

"Erik probably wasn't expecting so much trouble with the parts," Mike was saying, bringing her out of this dark little fantasy before the first cut could be made. "The old animatronics needed surprisingly little maintenance and the ones that came later needed even less, but the Toys were breaking down practically from the get-go. You see, the kid had built them only as a joke, for the Disney guy, for that one party. They were never intended to last any longer than that and certainly never intended to get out in the public. They had…secrets."

"Worse than the biting?"

"You tell me." With a final sweep of his light across the vents and high shelves, Mike left the Parts room. He didn't turn around; he backed out, pushing Ana out behind him.

"We are alone here, right?" Ana asked, watching him.

"As far as I know."

"Then why are you—"

"I may not know everything. Just stay close and keep your eyes open for any kind of…movement."

They walked on. This leg of the hall was wider than the first and lined on both sides with the remains of posters that showed each member of the new Fazbear Band—Waddles, Hotpants and Blue—their faces washed out to leers, but their eyes somehow still bright, seeming to stare right at her and to follow as she passed. It was difficult not to look at Bonnie's left arm or the deliberate way Blue kept himself turned and the guitar positioned to hide it as much as possible, no matter how he posed.

There was no door at the end of the hall, merely an opening into a small room, but there were doors on the way there, four in all, two on each side, and Mike opened each one. They were all the same, more or less. Different color schemes, but the same layout. Two long tables and a few chairs, no windows, and lots of open space, especially when compared to the general squeeze of the rest of the place.

"Birthday rooms?" Ana guessed.

"Party rooms, anyway. Not so much for birthdays."

"Four of them?"

"Yup. This was the Toybox's real money-maker. The pizzas sure weren't paying the bills, but for a hundred bucks, you could rent one of these rooms for an hour. And for two hundred bucks more, you could rent any one of the animatronics you liked to give you a private performance."

Ana gave him a moment or two, then sighed and said, "I know you're trying to tell me something—"

"They were made as a joke, you see. Just for the Disney guy, who made such a point of calling Faust's animatronics ugly and not very kid-friendly. And Disney, as you may know, has a long history of slipping sex into their cartoons."

"Yeah." Ana laughed. "I had the VHS tape of The Little Mermaid. First dick I ever saw, in fact. But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China, as someone or another once said?"

"The Toys had an unusual design feature: Hidden compartments that allowed them to be kid-friendly in the dining room and very, very adult in private. You mentioned Freddy looking fat in his Toy skin? That's because they needed the extra room. I understand he was hung like a fire hose."

Ana stared.

"Each of the Toys had a different design and different programming that allowed them to cater to different interests, but by far the most popular floor show was Foxy and Foxanne. I admit three hundred bucks is a pretty steep price, but this was before the internet put boobs in every growing boy's easy eye-reach. If you got enough kids to chip in, it wasn't impossible. And if you had enough time and didn't mind your friends watching, you could join right in."

"You're…You're saying…"

"I'm saying Foxanne was first mate to a lot of the boys who grew up during the Toybox's run."

"Horse. Shit."

He took out his tablet, brought up a video and held it out.

She did not reach for it.

"This was filmed in 1987," he told her. "It may have been Foxanne's last party. Kind of makes me wonder what else was going on that day, because they were usually pretty paranoid about cameras. Justifiably so."

Still Ana didn't take the tablet.

Mike set it on the closest table and walked out. "I'll be in the security room," he called. "You don't have to watch the whole thing if you don't want to. But you do have to watch. Some things…need a witness."

She listened to him walk away as she stared at the tablet, the video screen open to featureless black with that white arrow waiting in the center. She didn't need to touch it. She didn't want to see. She didn't believe it anyway.

She picked up a chair and sat down and from that point on, even if it took several minutes to actually touch that stupid arrow, she knew it was going to happen.

She watched.

They were kids, that was the first thing. The oldest of the group might have been eighteen, the youngest, maybe fourteen or even a very tall twelve. They all had that brash, bragging manner of boys who had grown up in Mammon acting like they knew anything at all about mean streets. The camera was hidden, some spycam from the Stone Ages, probably hidden in a fake book or something equally innocuous. They all knew it was there. As they settled around the room, laughing and bullshitting each other, their eyes kept going to the lens and they giggled, high and shrill, just boys. They giggled again when Foxy and Foxanne came in and then got quiet when they were joined by another man.

A man in a purple security uniform. Erik Metzger.

"Good evening, boys," this man said and once again, that feeling of déjà vu swelled in the black space of Ana's un-memories. She knew that voice, could almost hear it singing to her, actually singing. "Is this your first time in a party room?"

A short chorus of grunts.

"Well, here at Freddy's, we have a few rules. The rules are for your safety, so please pay attention. The animatronics are here to perform, so it's okay to touch them." A pause. A smile. "But don't do anything to upset their balance. If you want them to stand or…position themselves in a certain way, just ask them. Don't try to move them yourself."

"Do they bite?" one kid asked and laughed when some of the others looked at him. "Someone told me…you know…they can bite."

Foxanne turned her head and stared at him with her black, empty eyes.

"They certainly can," said the purple man, smiling. "But they shouldn't while they're in the party room. Their programming is very specific to this location. Of course, if you're nervous about it, you can hold their mouths shut like this." He reached up and squeezed Foxanne's narrow muzzle in his fist. She tried to shake his hand off twice, then just stood there and waited it out. "They can't open their mouths as easily as they can close them and it's really for the best if you're not…nervous…around them." He smiled. "Any other questions?"

Apparently not.

"Okay, so have fun! Watch the light over the door. It will start flashing when you're down to ten minutes and turn red when your time is up. Their programming is very specific to this location," the purple man said again, smiling even wider. "And when your time is up, the animatronics…don't always play nice."

A few of the boys laughed. Only a few.

The purple man left.

Ostensibly, this was a party. Ostensibly, there would be a performance. But Foxy did not greet the audience. He did not launch into one of his terrible pirate jokes. Didn't sing. He stood in the center of the room, his eyepatch up and ears flat to his plastic skull, saying nothing. Foxanne paced around him, restless, her eyes gone black and empty as she stared at them, these boys. And when they were done laughing and drinking and pretending to be bored, one of those boys turned to the others and said, "Want to see 'em fuck?"

Ana stopped the video, but even as she did it, she could feel disbelief like a second skin over every part of her. She didn't believe it. She had to see it. She had to and so she pressed play again.

"Do they actually do it?" a kid asked curiously, moving close to pull the top of Foxanne's blouse away from her body and peek at her plastic chest. His attention thus diverted, he did not see the way her head cocked and her mouth opened, inches from his bent head. She trembled, but did not, could not, bite.

Ana wondered if Foxy would have stopped her that time. He was watching, but he didn't say anything.

"They do it," the first boy assured them all. "Take your clothes off."

Foxanne made one of those familiar clicking sounds, twitching hard, then looked dazedly around. When she saw Foxy silently shrugging out of his captain's coat, she plucked once or twice at her corset and then just stood, her arms dangling, staring. Foxy unbuckled his belt, took off his hat, stepped out of his boots, and then wordlessly turned and unclasped the fastens of his first mate's corset. The blouse and skirt came away with it, just one piece, like a cheap Halloween costume, exposing the pink plastic heart of her ruff.

Foxy glanced at the boys.

"All the way off," the first boy said, nodding, and then turned to his friends with a grin. "Check this out."

Foxy pressed on the top of Foxanne's heart and dug his hook in at the bottom. The heart lifted off with a dull popping sound, exposing her perfect white plastic tits, complete with perfect pink nipples.

"Yeah, but how's he going to do it without a dick?" one kid wanted to know.

"Pull it out, Foxy."

Ana couldn't see what Foxy did, but he reached down and did something that made a distinctive, flat click, and all the boys suddenly hooted together and started laughing in that high, excited way.

"Holy shit! Nice one, Captain!" one of them said, slapping Foxy on the back.

Foxy's eyes went briefly skull-socket black and came slowly, slowly back to white.

"All right, get in there. Fuck her like you're getting paid."

At this witticism, the boys all laughed again.

"How?" asked Foxy, and sure, he was an animatronic and sure, he didn't have feelings, but in that one word was more hate and rage and shame than Ana had known in her entire miserable life.

There, in that moment, Ana Stark believed all at once and without reservation what she had stopped believing nearly twenty years ago—that he was real, he was alive, he understood everything that was happening and everything he was about to do. She could feel it swelling inside her until her heart wanted to split open from the awful weight of it, and then it sank back down and was buried, not because she was thirty-for-crissakes-years old and he was just a giant toy, but because she couldn't see a way to believe in this without believing all of it. And she couldn't go home to him tonight believing that.

"How do you think?" the boy was saying now, leering as his pumped his narrow hips at the air to make his friends howl. Life of the party, this kid. "Foxy-style."

Ana paused the playback and sat with her hands pressed over her eyes a long time in the dark, a long time. It was this room. She knew it even without looking up to see the color of the trim that lined the walls. Mike would only have brought her to this room because he'd seen the video. And he hadn't wanted to see it either. She knew that without needing to ask. He'd watched and he'd probably watched more than once, and every time he'd seen it, it had made him sick, but he'd watched because, like he said, some things demanded a witness.

Ana started the video again.

The camera was not in a great place for spying and the boys were…excitable. One of them bumped the camera just as Foxanne bent over, so that all Ana could see was her head and shoulders and Foxy's hand gripping her upper arm. She could hear, though. Plastic tapping together. Servos and gears whirring, mostly. The rhythm of it, so loud. The silence, even louder. And the boys, loudest of all, telling him to go harder, harder, make her feel it, and laughing as Foxanne whined.

The thought came again that these boys were grown up now, older than Ana. They had wives who kissed them when they left for work in the morning. They had kids whose hair they tousled when they came home. They were grown men who never spared a thought for this scene, beyond maybe a vague dread of finding it splashed across RedTube someday. Certainly they would not consider themselves bad men or even bad boys back then. It wasn't like they were hurting anyone.

The video was fifty-five minutes long. Ana could stomach just ten. She waited until she was sure she was all right and then she took the tablet and went to go find Mike.

The security room was not large. The desk that was its main feature took up most of its space, leaving just enough room to walk all the way around it. There was a chair, aimed so the guard whose office this was could see down the hall. The walls were lined with more of those posters as well as crayon drawings done by Fazbear's youngest patrons under the printed byline: My Day At Freddy's! Most of them showed happy children, but more than one showed sharp teeth on smiling bears and bunnies, looming claw-handed puppets, and stick-figure children pouring tears.

"This is the security room," Mike said, sitting in the chair and putting his feet up on the desk, one at a time. "Notice anything missing?"

She looked around. The party room video made it hard to feel anything at the moment, curiosity least of all. She wanted to leave and whatever it took to make that happen, she'd do, but she didn't care. "I don't see monitors, but surely they'd have taken them with when they closed up."

"You think so?"

"Or someone stole them. They were TVs."

"Oh, they were better than that." Mike lifted one leg and thumped his heel down on the desk.

And up from the middle of the desk, like a rabbit from an old silk hat, came a panel. Slowly. With a wheeze of effort that told her the years had not been kind to this particular rabbit, but it still opened.

"1981," said Mike. "The first commercially available flip-form laptops were still two years away, but Faust had one built into his desk, where his security guard could flip through the feeds from each of the twelve cameras, wirelessly. Oh, and did I mention this was a color monitor in 16:10 resolution? In 1981."

"This is an awful lot of security for a pizza parlor."

"It sure is. What do you suppose they used it for?"

"Knowing what went on in those party rooms, I'd have to guess they were recording blackmail fodder."

"Good guess, but you'd be wrong. The cameras weren't set up to record here, not even in the dining room."

"Then…they were here to keep an eye on the kids."

"Doubt it. Here." Out came the black binder, and from it, a sheet of paper with simple shapes in black and white showing a floor plan with the locations of cameras marked with hand-drawn eyes in red and thumbnail screenshots to demonstrate the direction of their gaze: One on the show stage; one aimed at the puppet's box; one pointed at a corner of the arcade where a life-size poster of Foxanne waved, her chest and abdomen casings removed and all the parts within helpfully labeled…

Mike caught her staring. "We'll get back to that, but not yet. Keep looking and tell me when you see it."

See it. See what? A camera aimed at the rest room doors. A camera in the parts and services room. One in each of the party rooms. And two off in shaded areas to either side of the security room. The images accompanying them appeared to show the interior of crawlspaces or airducts. Ana looked at the walls and sure enough, there were vents, half-hidden behind stacks of broken, rotten boxes. Vents, not high on the walls, but low to the floor. Very low. And very large.

"That's not it," Mike said, interrupting her thoughts. "But we'll get back to that, too. I'll give you a hint. You ever work a register?"

"Sure, a hundred t—"

And again, a double-take as she realized there were no eyes in the sky keeping unscrupulous hands from dipping into the till. And for that matter, no cameras in the parking lot, watching over the customers' cars. None in the kitchen, making sure employees weren't screwing on top of the pizzas.

"I don't get it," Ana said at last. "What were they watching?"

"What do you think?"

She shook her head, shook it again, and said, "You want me to say it's to watch the animatronics. But that's…that's crazy."

Mike pulled his feet off the desk, closing the panel in an absent manner as he stood. He went to the vent on the left side of the room and moved the boxes blocking it.

"Oh hell no," said Ana.

He got on his hands and knees, put his penlight in his mouth and crawled in.

"Oh hell no," Ana said again, scowling, but she was already hunkering down. Spider webs everywhere. Rats and roaches and God knew what. Fuck, no.

She crawled in.

The duct ran maybe twelve feet and turned sharp right, following the perimeter of the lower left party room. Party Room 1, it had said on the floor plan. Mike was waiting about five feet up after the bend, just staring at the inward wall.

Not at it. Through it. One of the black tiles making up the checkerboard runner on the wall had been replaced with black mesh, easily seen through. A spyhole.

Mike was crawling on, leaving her to stare in horror, not at the empty room, but at the thought that the vent served no other purpose but to spy on that room. Which meant the party room had been built for no other purpose but to host the events that needed spying on. This entire restaurant…the Toybox…had been built around these rooms and the games that went on inside them. The pizza was nothing but a cheap costume, like Foxanne's one-piece blouse and corset, to wrap around it.

Mike stopped at another point long enough to show her the spyhole into Party Room 3, and then he was moving on, all the way to the end of the duct, where he slid a panel aside and let himself out. Into the parts room, she saw, and no, there was no door. The moving panel had been designed not to be seen. A secret fucking passage. A secret fucking door.

"The other vent?" Ana asked.

"Peeps on the other party rooms. Also on the carousel, the arcade and the dining room."

"Jesus. And you think the animatronics were using it—"

"Not for spying. No, that was someone else, someone human. Mostly human. But they were definitely built for the animatronics to use, or they'd be a lot smaller. The Toys were smaller than the Flagship models, but they were bigger than people and not as maneuverable."

And she didn't believe it, she absolutely did not, but still she thought of that ductwork at her Fazbear's, those ducts that were way too big and way too sturdy…and where she had once heard something moving around now and then…something she knew damned well wasn't really a raccoon, no matter how many times she told herself it was.

But it wasn't an animatronic either, she told herself now. She could account for all of them.

She could account for the ones she knew of, that little voice whispered. But clearly, there were a lot more animatronics in the history of Fazbear's than just the ones she knew.

"Look, I don't know what you're trying to do here," Ana said, "but I have reached the point where I need you to just tell me what the fuck is going on."

"I'm not trying to be mysterious for the fun of it, lady. But the truth, or what I believe is the truth…it's not something I know how to just say."

"Try."

He glanced at her, then looked away at the empty room and nodded. "Erik Metzger was the security chief here. And he assembled a team. Now, it's impossible to know for sure how many security guards worked at the Toybox, because companies get a week or so to file 10-40s and, according to the tax records from the years between 1981 and 1987, only six employees ever worked the night shift long enough to need to turn one in."

"You think Metzger killed them all?"

"No, not the guards. But I think he had these vents built to spy on the customers so he could see which of those he wanted to hunt. The guards, those were a completely different game."

"Game," Ana repeated. She meant it to sound derisive and perhaps a bit impatient, a tone calculated to make him stop this stupid film script and just tell her what he was thinking, but as soon as the word was out of her mouth, she knew it was the right word. It was a game. She didn't know the rules and didn't want to know the goal, but she was standing on the game board sure enough.

Mike started walking back to the security room. Ana fell into step without comment and he took up his narrative again like he'd never stopped.

"During the years the Toybox operated, there were no more abandoned cars along the local roads and only a relative handful of kids went missing."

"How much is a handful?"

"Twelve."

"Big hands," Ana remarked.

"Compare that with the number of security guards. A lot of them ran away. For real, I mean. But these days, ten seconds on Google can find a lot of folks, provided they only disappeared themselves, and I found most of them, alive and well. A few of them even talked to me. But a lot of them were never seen again."

"How many is a lot?"

"A hundred and three."

"A hun—? That's…That's one every month!"

"Give or take."

"And nobody looked into that? Seriously?"

"Ask anyone around here why and they'll probably tell you they didn't know it was happening. It wasn't in the papers. It was never on the news. And that's half the what-the-fuck right there, that silence. That's the kind of silence that suggests everyone knew, but no one wanted to be the first to say out loud that Freddy Fazbear was singing happy birthday by day and eating people at night. And as much as I'd like to, I can't really blame them for that. If this was a book or a movie or a video game, not only would everyone believe you, but you'd probably have a priest, a cop and a vigilante mob outfitted with torches and pitchforks on your lawn after the fourth or fifth dead kid, but here in the real world, the guy insisting that the animatronics are not only alive but evil are usually wearing straightjackets. Or will be soon."

"So what shut this place down? Another body?"

"No. There wouldn't be another death officially connected with Freddy's until James Royce Reardon in '93, in spite of the fact that kids were disappearing here on an obscenely regular basis. In fact, Owen Cooke and his twin sister, Erin, disappeared out from under the noses of their grandparents just two days before the Bite of '87. It seems someone borrowed…you know what? I'm going to let this one speak for itself." He took the tablet, loaded up an audio file and started it playing.

The sound of a phone ringing was interrupted by a man's harried, "Hello? Hello? Uh, what on earth are you doing there? Uh, didn't you get the memo? Uh, the place is closed down, uh, at least for a while. Someone used one of the suits."

Ana looked at Mike, who continued looking straight ahead as he lit another cigarette.

"We had a spare in the back," the voice on the phone was saying. "A yellow one. Someone used it…now none of them are acting right. Listen, just finish your shift. It's safer than trying to leave in the middle of the night. Uh, we have one more event scheduled for tomorrow, a birthday. You'll be on day shift. Wear your uniform, stay close to the animatronics, make sure they don't hurt anyone, okay? Uh, for now, just make it through the night. Uh, when the place eventually opens again, I'll probably take the night shift myself. Okay, good night and good luck."

The call cut itself off and the playback ended.

"A yellow suit," repeated Ana. "One of the springtraps?"

"That's my bullshit theory, but when the place was investigated, no trace of a suit, yellow or otherwise, was ever found. Neither was Owen or Erin. Eventually, it was decided—"

"They ran away."

"Well, they weren't happy about having to spend the summer with their grandparents in Mammon while their folks went on a cruise, that's for sure. And they weren't local, so who cares, right? It's a tragedy, but it was someone else's tragedy." He took a deep drag, tapped ash on the floor and said, "Anything else about that call seem strange to you?"

"Yeah, almost all of it. Like, how were they 'not acting right' and why would it be 'safer than trying to leave'? 'Stay close'. 'Make sure they don't hurt anyone'. 'Make it through the night'? These are things you say to someone guarding, like, tigers or something. Not a singing robot band at a pizza place."

Mike nodded. "Glad to see you can appreciate that. Makes me feel like I may not be entirely wasting my time tonight. To answer your first question," he went on before she could begin to bristle too much, "the Toys were apparently acting more aggressive as the years went by. They'd be okay with the kids, more or less, but when it came to the staff and even some of the parents, they'd just…" Mike shrugged. "Stare. Or laugh. Or both. Worse, some of the old gen-1s were caught walking around and they weren't supposed to even be able to do that. Chica allegedly wandered out into the hall with her head hanging half off and wires sticking out of her arms where her hands used to be, and scared the literal piss and metaphorical bejesus out of a whole herd of kids. The place was still trying to deal with the fallout from that little stroll when the Bite of '87 happened and shut the place down, at least for a little while."

"Is that when Blue took the arm off that one kid?"

"Naw, that was in '84. But in November of 1987, the Toybox hires a kid named Jeremy Fitzgerald for the night shift. That phone call we just heard was meant for him. Jeremy was not an imaginative kid, but he had a few things to say about the conditions after dark, specifically, about the animatronics walking around and trying, as he put it, to 'get' him. Now, talk is talk and this wasn't the first time that particular story had been told. Like I say, if you were a teenager in Mammon, sooner or later, you were going to hear about some kid who'd tried sneaking into Freddy's after dark or do it yourself. But Jeremy didn't say it to other kids." Mike slowed and finally stopped walking, there in the doorway of the security office. He started to speak a few times, shook his head, then turned to her with an air of determination and shame in equal measure and quietly said, "He told me."

"Why you?"

"I wasn't local. If I had to guess, I'd say that was the first thing. My school newspaper had a kind of thing going with the Hurricane Watch…that's our quaint small-town paper, by the way. So I had a byline now and then in fluff pieces. I was a reporter, in his eyes, but I was a kid too. Trustworthy. Approachable. He called me up and said he had a story. We went to the Gallifrey's on Majestic Ave," he said with a bitter smile. "He told me everything, gave me recordings he'd made of all his so-called training calls, told me all about the animatronics and how they were at night. I thought he was nuts, frankly. I shook his hand and got in my car and he got in his and the next day, he went back to work at his new position on the day shift. His first job was at a birthday party, kind of running interference, keeping the kids back from the animatronics. He did keep them back. But in keeping them back, he got too close."

Mike started to say more, but shut his mouth and went on over to the desk and his black binder. "It's amazing," he said, taking out a photo for her, "what the human brain can do without a frontal lobe."

It was a long time before Ana could bring herself to look down.

Even knowing Fitzgerald was old enough to hold a job, the boy in the hospital bed looked like he was twelve years old. The bandages wrapping his head were huge, slumping down over one eye like a cartoon mummy costume.

"It was Foxanne, in case you were wondering. Foxy was in the parts room that day, getting cleaned. The kids didn't like that. Foxy was always everyone's favorite and no one ever really took to the Toys except the kids who were 'playing' with them in the party rooms. I understand they were booing her. Throwing food. You know how kids are when they're sugared up and the mommies don't rein 'em in. And Foxanne…"

"She's a biter."

"Yeah. She is. You know, looking into all this when I finally got around to it, I heard so many crazy things. That it was Foxy, jumping off the stage to bite half the head off some little girl. Or Toy Freddy, biting some kid who everyone swears had to wear a helmet the rest of his life because his skull never grew back. Or it was old Chica pecking a hole through an employee's head while they were salvaging parts off her. Or Toy Bonnie, who ate the kid's whole head in bites, like he was eating an ice cream cone, singing the Yum-Yum Song the whole time. So many stupid stories, when the truth sure as hell wasn't that hard to find, and the truth is, it was Foxanne and she bit Jeremy Fitzgerald, crushing a large portion of his skull and penetrating the brain in six places. It didn't kill him and it sure didn't carve out a chunk of his head like the stories go, but it did enough. He was in a coma for weeks on life-support, with Fred Faust paying his medical bills and Fazbear Entertainment Inc. settling the lawsuit out of court."

"Three weeks…and then he died?"

"No, he woke up. If you can call it that. His eyes opened, anyway, but he had massive brain damage. He stayed on life support another month. With therapy and surgery, he was eventually able to be released to some…I don't know…care facility?" Mike took his photo back. "But as far as I know, he never said a sensible word again. And it was all for nothing. The Bite of '87 closed Freddy's down for about a month, so the animatronics could all be maintenanced, they said, but whatever. When the doors opened again, there they all were. Most of them. Pirate's Cove was gone. Foxy was gone. Out of order, they said, to the great disappointment of all those kids."

"And Foxanne was gone," Ana guessed.

"No, she was still there. As an attraction, a kind of build-and-take-apart thing. They put her in the corner where the pirate stage used to be. Called it the 'Kiddie Cove'."

Ana looked sharply around at him.

He nodded, holding her gaze. "Every morning they'd strap her to the wall—you know, her wrists, her ankles, her neck—and let the kids pull her skin off. Pull her arms and legs out of their sockets. Get their grubby hands all over her inner works. And put her back together, with the help of the diagram you saw back in the security room, like a giant 3D puzzle. Take her apart, put her back together, over and over, until most of the pieces were lost or destroyed and she was nothing but an endoskeleton and a head with hands and feet and bits of that fucking parrot attached. Once her cooling system broke down, all the other systems overheated and shorted out until literally nothing worked anymore but the battery that kept her alive. And her speaker, I guess. Sort of. She didn't talk anymore, though. If the employees forgot to turn her voice off, she'd just stand there and scream, this endless mechanical static-filled scream. You want to talk nightmare food. Pull-Apart-Foxanne was only an attraction for the last month or so of the Toybox's run, but it's the one thing everyone remembers, even though hardly anyone I talked to remembered her name. Even the old employees just called her the Mangle."

"Jesus."

He cocked his head to look at her, but not in a curious way. "You feel bad for her?"

"Well…I mean…"

"She bit Jeremy Fitzgerald's fucking brain. Bit him until he needed a machine to breathe for three months. Until he couldn't button his shirts or tie his fucking shoes. Until he forgot how to piss in a fucking toilet. He was seventeen years old."

Ana said nothing. There was nothing to say.

"I am ashamed to admit I lost track of him. I didn't even know he'd been bit until I came across his name in the morgue at the Deseret Truth. I looked for him, of course, but his trail went cold the second he left the hospital and it had been six years by then." Mike's gaze dropped to the binder in her hand. He opened it for her, flipped down through papers until he touched the one with Jeremy's name on it, but he didn't pull it out, didn't even look at it. "I can't imagine he's still alive. And there is not a day goes by that I don't wonder if I could have stopped…changed…done something. But I didn't. Jeremy Fitzgerald died because I didn't want to be the one who said the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria were killing people."

"But they don't really."

He looked at her.

"Metzger's killing them. I mean, okay, maybe the animatronics were programmed to get people…hold them for him, but they weren't—"

"Lady, a lot of this stuff I'm telling you is coming second or third or tenth-hand, but I can tell you this much myself: those things kill people. All of them. From first-gen to last, they kill people." He stared her down a few seconds, then turned deliberately away to fetch his tablet. "But don't take my word for it," he said, tapping up a new video. "Listen to Nate Donahue. He was the one who did what no one else had the balls to do. He told the truth."

He held out the tablet.

"I don't want it," said Ana.

"He told the truth," Mike said again, taking Ana's wrist and forcing the tablet into her hand. "And you are going to listen. Not another goddamned word do you have to hear out of me, if that's what you want. But you listen to this man. All of it." He released her trapped wrist with a shove and turned around. "I'll be in the car."

Ana watched him go until he turned the corner at the end of the hall and blackness closed in on his wake. Then she sat down in the security guard's chair. It felt time-stiff and unpleasant under her. She looked at the tablet, the black block of the screen, the white arrow. The time stamp at the bottom said it was eighteen minutes long. How bad could it get in just eighteen minutes?

She'd only lasted ten of the last one.

Well, she didn't have to watch the whole thing. Just get the gist of it. Mike Schmidt would never know.

Except he would. Of course he would. He'd only have to look at her and he'd know.

She started watching.