CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Riley Hill wandered through the twisting funhouse halls of Freddy's and thought it was kind of funny, how much he didn't want to be there. It wasn't even like the place itself was scary. Riley had always kind of liked abandoned buildings and this one was even cooler than most, like a cross between a restaurant and an amusement park. Everyone seemed to think it was so weird that Ana was living here, but Riley understood. And with the situation at Bats's house getting worse every day, this place was looking pretty good to Riley, creepy talking animals and all.
And there were a lot more talking animals this time. The statues that had all been broken before were now fixed: the eyeless rooster strummed on its plastic banjo, the alligator had whole conversations with people who weren't there, the pig waved and told jokes, and even the one at the end of the hall that didn't have a head would talk to you if you came close enough. Riley hadn't seen the yellow duck or the purple bunny, but he hadn't been everywhere yet.
When he'd been here before, he'd pretty much only seen the dining room, which was fairly normal, but once he left the dining room, he found it surprisingly easy to get lost. Yes, he was high, but he wasn't that high. It was almost like the pizzeria had been built to fuck with a person's mind. None of the rooms seemed completely square; the halls zigged and zagged so that you could walk right past a door without seeing it only to turn around and have it pop up out of nowhere. Once he was away from that front area—the safe area—there were no windows, no visible connection to the world outside, and only the storm to even prove there was still a world beyond this one.
Occasionally, there were glowing things on the walls, like there'd been in the pirate room, but there were no real lights and Riley hadn't brought one. He didn't even have a phone. All he could do was blunder around in the dark, trying to listen through the rain and the thunder to something that might lead him back to the others. Now and then, he heard things—faint music, footsteps, metallic voices, and once, a gust of wind that made a sound like a man screaming—but he couldn't tell where any of it was coming from and only got more lost trying to follow it.
At one point, he came back to the same room six times and it didn't seem to matter which of the three doors he left by or how long he wandered in the halls, every door he came to just kept opening on the same room. He had actually begun to be a little scared, but then Jack found him.
Jack was not in a good mood to begin with and finding Riley instead of the dope he'd been looking for did not make him any happier, but Riley stayed with him after that anyway. Jack told him to fuck off once and then just let him tag along. Although Jack might pretend to be pissed off, Riley could tell that this place was getting to him, too.
And that was still weird, because this place was awesome. Riley could see the awesome, even sort of daydream just a little bit about how it might have been if he'd never come here with Bats and Dentist and those other guys, but instead just showed up to say hi to Ana. And maybe they'd have gotten talking—she hadn't done a lot of that when she'd been working for Mace before, but this was his daydream and he didn't know what else to do with it—and he'd have said, 'Hey, you mind if I crash here for a while?' and she'd have said, 'Sure, why not?' and that would have been cool.
But not anymore. Now it was all wrong. And yeah, he was a little high, but he'd been way higher than this before and had never felt a feeling this strong. He felt like the whole building was alive, that he had not entered it but been swallowed. For the most part, the animals were still pretty neat, but the pirate fox had kind of given him the creeps; the pig and the alligator had looked around while they told jokes too, but the fox's eye movements were not the same. The fox had not 'looked around.' It had looked at them. And Riley still hadn't even seen the duck or the bunny at all. It was as if they were hiding.
Jack told him he was being a stupid fucking pussy when he tried, once, to talk these vague misgivings out, but while Riley had agreed out loud and laughed along at his stupid pussiness, the feeling remained and only grew stronger. In fact, if he thought he could sneak away without anyone noticing, he'd be happy to leave, even though it meant walking all the way back to town in the pouring rain. He had no good reason to think so and he knew it, high or not, but nevertheless, he felt uneasy. Not just like he was exploring a creepy building, not even like he was trapped in one, but like he was about to die in one. Like maybe he already had.
But then Jack brought him back to the signpost where the giggling pig was, which was itself just a short way down an almost-straight hall from the dining room, where the building was still sane and safe. A couple of the other guys were there, sitting on the hay-bale on either side of the pig and smoking, but they got up fast when Jack walked up, looking nervous until they got a better look and realized he wasn't his brother.
"Where was she?" Jack asked. "I mean, I assume someone found her, right? Since you guys wouldn't be fucking around here if she was still—"
"You want to suck my dick, Jacquelina?" one of them interrupted. "No? Then shut your fucking mouth."
"Yeah, you're the one who ought to be worried," the other added. "If we don't find her, you're the next best thing we got to pussy."
And they both walked off down the hall toward the dining room.
"Fuck you," Jack said, very quietly, long after they were gone. He glanced at Riley, flushed and scowling. "What the fuck are you looking at?"
Riley fixed his gaze on the peeling posters on the nearest wall and pretended to be reading them.
"Come on," Jack said, heading off down the hall in the other direction, so Riley followed.
After walking a while, deeper into the building where the halls got twistier, Jack found a door and opened it. Riley wasn't sure what sort of room it was, although it didn't really look like the sort of room that ought to be in a pizza parlor. There was no stage, just a couple tables and kid-sized chairs. One of the walls had been opened up to show the studs and all the rest looked like the walls in a kitchen, with counters and cupboards and drawers, only without the refrigerator and oven and cooking stuff.
Jack started opening cupboards, pulling out a few plastic bottles and tossing them out into the room. Riley didn't bother to pick them up. They weren't like pill bottles or food bottles, but like school stuff. Glue and paint and shit like that, the contents dried up so that they rattled when Jack shook them instead of sloshing.
"This is fucking crazy," Jack muttered, taking a handful of popsicle sticks out of a jar and throwing them blindly behind him. "Where the fuck is she hiding the stuff?"
"What stuff?"
"Don't be a fucking moron, man. What does she do, huh? What is Ana fucking Stark's sole reason for even being back in town?"
"Her mom died," said Riley. Even if he was an out-of-towner himself, he hung out at the Kellar house enough to pick up townie gossip, and Jack's mom sure had plenty to say about Ana.
"Her aunt and that's not what I fucking meant. I meant, why did her guy send her to go work for Mace? She builds labs, man. She probably cooks, too. That's what she's doing here," Jack declared. "Trying to fuck us over, put us out of business."
"Maybe she just lives here," Riley suggested, opening a few more drawers to prove he was still looking too. All he found was crayons and rat shit.
"At Freddy's? God, you are so stupid. She's got a place to live and besides…What's that?"
Riley followed the beam of Jack's light and saw another door, tucked over on the other side of the room. "I don't know."
"I know you don't know. I ain't even asking you."
"Who are you asking?"
"Shut up." Jack pushed open the door, but had only just started to sweep his light around when he suddenly let out a yell and jumped back. Riley fumbled for his knife, already scrambling backward, bumping into shelves and cupboards and kicking old pizza trays over the tiles, but now Jack was laughing.
"What is it?" Riley whispered, ready to laugh along or start running, whichever way Jack bent. This place was getting to him in a big way. He wanted to leave. He'd never wanted anything as much as he just wanted to leave. Even if Jack turned on that light and showed him a roomful of rocks, he couldn't possibly want it as much as he wanted to just leave.
"It's Freddy," said Jack, leaning aside so Riley could see the huge furry face far back in the hall, looking back at him in the circle of the flashlight's beam. "It's fucking Freddy Fazbear. God damn. I didn't know these things were still here."
"Yeah," said Riley, rubbing nervously at his arm. "There's a duck and a rabbit, too. And a fox. The pirate-fox."
"I know who the fucking mascots are. And it's a chicken, not a duck, dumb-ass. But what's he doing back here? Where are the others?"
"I don't know. They walk around."
Jack turned all the way around and stared at him, grinning in a wide disbelieving way. "Are you serious?"
Bewildered, Riley nodded. "You didn't know?"
"I know they used to." Jack aimed his flashlight back at the bear, moving its light up and down over the plastic body. "I figured they'd've broke down by now. I don't know," he added, now in a doubtful drawl. "I was just a kid the last time I been to Freddy's. Kids are stupid. They were probably just guys in suits the whole—"
The bear's eyelids shifted to a slant, like angry eyes on a cartoon character.
Jack jumped back, bumping hard into the back end of the oven. He fumbled his flashlight, nearly dropping it several times before catching it in both hands and yanking it back up, shining a now shaking circle of white light on the bear's muzzle.
The bear's head turned and tipped so that its eyes, rather than its mouth, were in the center of the flashlight's beam. It looked straight at Jack, opened his muzzle enough to show the lower row of its blunt, rusted teeth, and uttered a low, broken grunt of sound. It began to walk toward them. The sound of whatever mechanisms were needed to make this happen was very loud in the close air of the relatively narrow hall.
"It's moving," said Jack hoarsely, wide-eyed and no longer grinning.
"Told you," said Riley and backed up as the bear's eyes moved to him. "I just saw the fox and it's, like, singing and stuff."
"How the hell can they still be moving? It's been years."
"Maybe Ana fixed them."
"Maybe." As if reminded of their reason for being here, Jack turned the flashlight out on the room again, examining the wall that had been opened up, exposing the frame. "She was pretty good at—"
The bear's eyes lit up suddenly, like twin flashlights of his own, keeping Jack steady in his sights.
Jack broke off his next words before they were all the way out of his mouth and stared at the bear some more.
The bear stared back at him, not smiling, not laughing. Just walking. When it reached the doorway, it stopped, looking at Jack, then looking at Riley across the room…and then looking at the other door, the open door, and the dark hall beyond.
"What's up, Freddy?" Jack asked, lopsidedly smiling.
The bear did not reply.
"Do they still talk?" Jack asked, turning his head slightly toward Riley, but not taking his eyes off the bear. "I don't mean the stage act. I mean do they still talk to you? Like a conversation?"
Riley could only shrug. "I only heard them do the singing and jokes and stuff, but I don't know. Bats and CJ said they've been here lots of times and—"
"Yeah, right," said Jack with undisguised scorn. "CJ's never been in here. Even when we were kids, he never went to Freddy's. He'd about piss himself if you even mentioned the place. He believes all that shit they say about how they come to life—"
The bear's head tipped slightly and it raised both arms, sort of like it was offering a hug…or silently saying, 'Come to life? Like this, asshole?'
"—and eat people," Jack finished after a small pause. "CJ's a fucking tool. And Freddy's a fucking joke."
The bear's eyes narrowed.
"Yeah, I mean you, Fazfuck." Jack glanced at Riley, then got a little closer and said, loudly, "Take a bow, Freddy!"
The bear jerked backwards hard enough to throw his arms and head slightly forward, like he'd been hit with an invisible wrecking ball. His friendly blue eyes flashed, the lids slanting downward for an instant before they snapped fully open. He stepped forward and bent low over one knee, sweeping his old hat off his head in the same motion and holding it out, pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
Quick as a flash, Jack darted forward and snatched it away, retreating to a safe distance as he crushed it in his hands, then threw it on the ground, stomped it flat, and kicked it at the bear's feet. "How do you like that?" he challenged. "Yeah? And your pizza tastes like shit!"
After a long, silent stare, the bear picked his hat up. He tried to uncrumple it, but in the attempt, he actually tore part of the brim off. He stared at that for a long time, plastic eyes unblinking and expression unchanging, as the sound of his inner works took on a new force, like a laboring engine. Music began to play somewhere inside him, just a few notes, cartoony and cheerful—da DA da DEE dum—and stopped. He looked up, looked just at Jack, and reached for his own stomach. It opened like a little door, reminding Riley of a locker or maybe a little jewelry box, to judge by the glimpse of shiny stuff he saw on the inside. The bear put his ruined hat into the empty space inside himself, then put his microphone in with it and closed his stomach. He took a step forward.
"Oh, it's on, is it?" Jack laughed again, a distinctly brittle sound, although he backed away. "You see that shit, Riley? Fucking Freddy Fazbear is throwing down."
Riley managed an obedient little laugh.
The bear's eyes moved left to right, looking at Jack, looking at Riley. He came shuffling into the room, all clanking metal and wheezing hydraulics. When he moved to one side of the long table that squatted in the middle of the room, Riley and Jack both moved back, Jack to the wall and Riley against the cabinets. The bear paused as if assessing this development, then stepped back and came around the other side of the table, cocking its head when Riley shuffled further away. It took another step—Riley moved closer to Jack—then turned around and went to the other door.
Jack watched him go, smirking, then continued investigating the cupboards. Only Riley noticed that the bear didn't actually leave; it only went as far as the doorway, briefly searching the hall outside before it turned around and looked right at him with those glowing eyes. Riley backed up without thinking, and it wasn't until he bumped Jack that he realized how effectively, how deliberately, the two of them had been herded together.
"Jack," he said, groping behind him.
But Jack had been climbing onto the counter to look into the overhead cupboards, so that rather than catch at Jack's arm, Riley instead patted his ass. His heterosexuality thus challenged, Jack leapt down with a yelp and instigated a brief flurry of slaps and curses that Riley weathered out with stammered apologies and explanations, and by the time they had everything straightened out between them, the bear had shut the door and was once again walking toward them.
"HEY KIDS!" he boomed in a goofy teddy-bear voice. "IT'S TIME TO PLAY. IT'S TIME TO START THE SHOW! IT'S TIME TO SAY GOODBYE."
"Shut the fuck up, Freddy." Unimpressed, Jack gave Riley a final shove and went to the narrow hall where he'd first seen the bear, shining his light out into the darkness. "Hey, Stark! Come on out! We just want to talk! You here?"
"Is she?" Riley asked hopefully, watching the bear watch him.
"Maybe. This place is a fucking maze," he said with sudden angry heat and hit the wall. "This is retarded. We'll never find her like this. We ought to set the fucking place on fire. That'd bring her out."
The bear looked sharply at him, its plastic eyelids slanted angrily inward again. Riley edged further away while its attention was diverted. The thing seriously creeped him out, even though he knew it was just a robot or whatever. It always seemed to be…thinking. And right now, what it seemed to be thinking the most was that if it could get his hands on Jack and Riley both at the same time, it would drop the friendly bear act in a second and clap them together like the cymbals in a wind-up monkey's hands.
Riley shivered and put a lot more space between him and the bear.
"You hear me?" Jack called, sweeping his flashlight back and forth over every shallow shadow. "You hiding? You go on and hide, but you're only making it harder for yourself! So you better come out and say you're sorry while that's still an option, because once Mason really loses his temper, it's gone for good. You better be listening to me, bitch! Right now, all you got coming is a night's hard fucking. You keep this shit up and you're going to die! Hear me? Huh? Fuck," he concluded, picking up a bag of ancient googly eyes from the counter and throwing it at the bear. "Where is she?"
"Maybe she left," said Riley, backing toward the other door, but keeping his eyes on the bear, whose glowing eyes shifted back and forth between Jack and Riley and the widening space between them. "There's lots of doors. Maybe she got out."
"Doors are all locked."
"Maybe she's got keys," Riley suggested in the hopes that, if the pursuit were declared pointless, they could all leave.
"Nobody's got the keys to this place, dumbass, it's been abandoned for fucking years."
"I don't know, those doors look pretty new."
"Shut up, you don't know anything." Jack tossed a crayon at him and kept searching cupboards. "Anyway, Mason's got guys watching her truck, so even if she got out, she's not getting away."
"KNEE," said the bear.
They both jumped a little and looked at him.
"THERE," said the bear after a momentary pause.
Jack forced another laugh and glanced at Riley quizzically. "What's he doing?"
"ARE." The bear took a step closer; both boys backed away, but Jack hit the counter and Riley bumped a chair. "YOU."
"What?" Jack kept laughing, just like it was Mason calling him a useless piece of shit who couldn't wipe his own ass without washing away half his brains. "What the fuck? What is he saying?"
"Neither are you," said Riley.
The bear's gaze locked with his briefly, then went back to Jack.
"What?"
"He said, 'Neither are you.' You said the girl's not getting away and he said neither are we."
"That's retarded," said Jack after a long, stifling span of seconds. "He never said that. You're high. And anyway," he went on, laughing as he aimed his flashlight at Freddy's big goofy head. "Who's gonna make us leave, Fazfuck? You?"
"NO." The bear's head tipped to the side and his eyes did a weird thing, the black dots seeming to grow, almost swallowing up the whites before they shrank down again. His voice did something even weirder, skipping like a scratched CD from word to word, all different pitches and tones and emotions jumbled together to form: "I. WON'T. MAKE. YOU. LEAVE."
"Damn right, you won't."
But Freddy wasn't done. He took another step forward, saying, "I. WON'T. LET. YOU. LEAVE. NONE. OF. YOU. ARE. LEAVING."
That was both ominous and oddly specific and Riley didn't think it was just because he was high. He looked at Jack, whose lips were moving slightly as he ran that string of disconnected words together a few more times before he gave up.
"Fucking thing is broken," he told Riley, going back to looking in cupboards and drawers. "Find the bitch so we can make Mace happy and get on with our fucking lives."
"Maybe we should just go, man. She's obviously not here. She…She must have ran off into the woods."
"The woods," Jack said derisively. "There's, like, four fucking trees in the whole town. She's gotta still be here. Where is the fucking stuff? And where the hell is she?"
"I don't know."
"I know you don't know, dumbass. Ask Freddy."
"Huh?" Riley looked around and was uneasily alarmed to see the bear nearly in arm's reach and still wheezing steadily closer foot by shuffling foot. He put a little more distance between them, realizing only after he'd done it that in doing so, he'd backed away from the open hallway into the corner of the room, from which there was no easy escape. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, ask Freddy. How much clearer do I need to be? Hey, Fazfuck!" Jack shone his light at the bear, who halted his advance on Riley and turned his head to look at him. "You seen a lady running around today?"
The bear merely looked at him, his expression seeming to change subtly from menace to scornful curiosity, prompting the fog in Riley's brain to briefly bubble up into words: Dude, do you really expect me to answer that?
"My mom is missing," said Jack in a loud, clear voice. "Have you seen my mom?"
Something clicked hard inside the bear's body. "WHAT D-D-DOES SHE LO-LOOK LIKE?"
"Bout five-eight, long dark brown hair, really blue eyes, skinny, nice tits. Have you seen her?"
That clicking again, even louder. Its head began to twitch, as if it were trying to turn away and couldn't. "Y-Y-Y-Y-YES-S-S-S-S."
"I fucking knew it. Where is she?"
The bear's whole body jerked. The clicking intensified, almost like something catching inside him. Its arm shivered, then rose and pointed behind it. "P-P-PIRATE C-C-COVE."
"And that's how you talk to them," said Jack smugly, heading out. As he passed the bear, he reached out playfully and patted its cheek.
The bear's eyes flashed and the lids came down at a furious slant. "RULE NUMBER SIX," it said, its robotic voice rising to an ear-splitting, unreal level of loud, loud enough to make the hidden speakers inside it squeal with feedback like a second, demonic undervoice. "DON'T TOUCH FREDDY!"
"Fuck you," Jack said and poked the bear in the nose. It made a sound like a puppy's chew toy.
In the next instant, the very next, the bear's still-pointing hand snapped closed into a fist. Its arm drove forward and suddenly Jack's head was folded in around the bear's wrist, Jack's body was hanging from its arm, Jack's flashlight was falling from his twitching fingers and clattering away from his kicking shoes.
The bear's head turned. As it looked at Riley, it brought its other hand up and shoved Jack off with a wet sucking sound onto the floor: ssshhhhhluck-thud.
Jack's face was gone, transformed into a great cave with hair on top. There was surprisingly little blood, just what had squeezed out from Jack's ears in a gluey pink-red paste. Riley laughed, because that had been the last command his brain received—Jack had booped the bear's nose and it was funny, so he should laugh—and then he screamed and then he ran.
He had never run so fast in his life. He went a million miles an hour from one end of the hall to the other, careening around the first crooked corner and straight into the hard fuzzy chest of the purple rabbit. The rabbit tipped back and even over the death-metal drumming of Riley's heart, Riley heard the thing distinctly say, "Fuck," right before it fell over. Its legs kept making walking motions, rocking the thing back and forth on the ground like an upended turtle with Riley on top of it, human limbs tangled up with plastic ones, hearing nothing but footsteps, slow and heavy but still coming, and the whirr-clack-click of the rabbit's inner works as it tried to right itself. In a dumb panic, Riley flailed, beating and kicking at everything in reach as the rabbit floor-walked and giggled and spat, "W-W-Watch the f-f-fucking face, asshole! Freddy! I'm d-d-down! Come g-g-get this little sh-sh-sh—SURE IS A GREAT DAY FOR PIZZA—shit!"
At last, Riley's feet found the floor instead of more rabbit, and he was up, up and away, hurtling into the dark and bouncing off the walls like a pinball to avoid coming within grabbing range of the pig, who only giggled and waved when he ran by. He could hear the bear and the rabbit clanking heavily along behind him. Their footsteps grew less and less distinct, but they were still coming. They'd find him. He had to get out and he had no idea where he was.
Riley stumbled blindly down one arm of the intersection, plunging through the first open doorway he found, and into the old arcade, where his foot came down immediately on a flashlight. The flashlight rolled; he skidded comically across the floor, both feet pedaling and arms flailing, before inevitably going down. The flashlight spun away. Before it hit something and shut itself off, he caught a glimpse of Bats on the ground just like him, all wide eyes and open mouth.
"Bats!" Riley whispered, almost sobbing with relief. "Bats, where are you, man? Bats, they got Jack! You gotta get me out of here, man!"
Bats did not answer, not even to tell him to shut up.
Riley crawled along in the dark, slapping at the floor and finding only broken tiles, until his palm splashed down in something warm and wet. He recoiled, wiping spastically at his chest and scrambling back until his foot bumped something light and plastic. The flashlight. He groped for it, found it, and switched it on.
Its beam struck two vertical orange pipes dead ahead of him. Not pipes. Legs. Two legs, standing over Bats, whose body was lying a little ways from his head, still staring at him. Riley began to laugh again, or maybe cry, it was hard to tell. His flashlight beam shook as he lifted it past the knobby knees of those orange legs, past the cracked and dingy yellow casing of an animatronic body, past the stained white baby-bib partially obscured by great wet clots of red, past the plastic beak with metal teeth drooling blood and matted with strips of Trigger-Man's Marilyn Manson shirt, until he could see the plastic eyes staring down at him. Seeing him.
"I'M HUNGRY," said the chicken. "LET'S EAT!"
Riley screamed.
The chicken stepped over Bats and came for him.
Riley leapt up and ran back into the hall, dodging the rabbit's grasping hand with the grace and finesse of pure, dumb panic. The rabbit caught him by the shirt, but Riley stripped out of it without stopping or even slowing down, sprinting away like his life depended on it because it did, it absolutely fucking did, and even if it wasn't all that great a life, it was the only one Riley had and he'd never wanted it so much as he did in that moment when he really and truly believed it was over. So he ran, and as he ran, without warning, there was light.
White light, blindingly bright. It fell on him in a tight cone, shining down not from heaven, but from a camera mounted above one of the doors. It turned as Riley raced by, keeping him in the spotlight so that all the animals could see him, but maybe it was from heaven after all, because in turning, it showed him the door. He couldn't read the word on the sign above it, but he knew what the color and the shape of it meant and it meant EXIT.
Riley threw himself at it, his feet hardly hitting the floor, and just before his reaching hands could hit the push-bar, the door opened. He couldn't stop, could only throw himself out with his last burst of speed and hope for the best. He caught a glimpse of a glowing plastic eye—just one—and the glint of metal through the mangled carapace that was this thing's body, and then he was flying past it, exploding out into the rainy afternoon, and there was Mason's car and it was ten running steps at the most, at the very fucking most, so in ten running steps, Riley would be in that car and safe. Nothing could get him in the car. All he had to do was hole up and wait for help. Someone would come. Someone would—
Pain, stabbing down into his shoulder and out his back. Riley's feet kept moving him forward, but the pain yanked him back, snapping his body like a towel in the locker room, and Riley screamed because it hurt and screamed again because the car was right there, ten running steps too many, and then he was back in the pizzeria and the emergency exit door whoofed shut and quietly closed.
The pirate fox walked fast up the hall, dragging Riley with it. He tried to struggle, but could find no hand to grapple with where he was held, no fingers to pry loose from his burning shoulder. He had seen the pirate fox onstage, but he still didn't fully understand. It took seeing the fox raise its hand up for shade against the camera's light for Riley to realize that he had not merely been caught, but hooked.
"Aye, enjoy the show, ye son of a b-b-b—BILGERAT," the pirate growled as the camera swiveled to track him.
Was that Ana, then? Was she watching? Riley wanted to say something—sorry or something, anything that would make her let him go, but the intersection was just ahead, with the rabbit and the bear and the bird all standing together and waiting, so Riley grasped at the last straw of hope he had left. He closed his eyes and let his head loll. He played dead.
"THERE'S. OTHERS. OUTSIDE," the bear said as the pirate's rapid stride slowed. "GO."
"Already-dy-y got 'em." The pirate shoved Riley forward, shaking him off his hook onto the floor.
Riley fell limp and lay still, keeping his eyes shut and taking shallow breaths when he breathed at all. Even when one of them—the chicken, by the feel of the foot—gave him a testing nudge to the ribs, he didn't move or make a sound.
"But I m-m-made a hell of a mess out there," the pirate was saying. "Three men—ON A DEAD MAN'S CHEST—lying out in the g-gr-great wide open, with all their bits and puddles for any 'n all to see, but that'll k-k-keep. How many d-d-did ye get?"
"Where's Ana?" asked the rabbit.
"WHEN YOU TRACK IN MUD OR SPILL YOUR CUP, IF YOU MAKE A MESS, THEN CLEAN IT UP!" sang the chicken. "DON'T WAIT FOR LATER, DO IT NOW! THEN YOU'LL HAVE A HAPPY HOUSE!"
"Never mind that-t-t," snapped the rabbit, mechanisms whining with sudden movement. "Where's Ana? Did you leave her? How c-c-could you leave her?"
"Calm yerself, Bon. She's tucked away in me cabin, safe as houses. Hold-d-d—FAST TO THE RIGGING—hold up," the pirate said sharply as heavy footsteps rushed away. "I said what's the t-t-tally here?"
"Who c-c-cares? What, are we k-keeping-ing-ing score now? Let go!"
"Look, mate, I heard one o' em say there were six-t-teen, and I'd just as soon know if we g-g-got 'em all before I gets t-t-too comfortable. How many?"
"I g-g-got four," the rabbit said, subdued.
"THREE," said Freddy.
"WOW, ME TOO! ONE-TWO-THREE!"
"And I got-t-t three outside and another in the C-C-Cove," said the pirate, and now he gave Riley a kick. It hurt a lot more with his metal foot, but Riley rocked with it and did not make a peep. "And this sorry shit. We're still m-m-miss—MIZZENMAST—missing one."
"OUTSIDE," ordered the bear. "BONNIE. CHECK. THE. PLAYGROUND. CHICA. THE. KITCHEN."
Just as he said that, came Mason's distant yell: "I'll kill you for that, you cunt!"
The pirate spun around—the sound of its metal feet skidding on the tiles was unmistakable—and ran, faster than Riley ever could. The others followed in their own shambling, clunking, wheezing speed. The light stayed on him; Riley could see it, red behind his eyelids; he could hear it, tiny whines and whirrs as the camera watched him. He lay still until all their footsteps were lost, just in case one of them looked back, and soon heard a shrill metallic shriek and then a human one and then nothing.
'Now,' he thought. Now, while they were distracted. While they were…eating.
He lifted his head, but some part of him must have already known, because he kept his eyes squeezed shut, like not seeing meant it wasn't there. Tears squeezed out anyway. Snot ran hot and salty into his mouth as he whispered, "Please go away, okay?" and then dropped his head into the shaking cradle of his hands and began to cry.
The tinkling toy-box notes of some happy little song sounded as the bear bent, creaking and wheezing, and put a hand on Riley's throat. There was still blood on it and pasty chunks of stuff that was probably Jack's brains. Riley could feel these clots squirting out between the bear's fingers and dribbling down his neck. He struggled, but although the bear's fur was patchy and his plastic skin was cracked, the strength of his grip remained unbroken.
"Please just let me go!" brayed Riley. To the bear. To the camera. To the God it was not too late to believe in, if only he got away. "Please, man! Please! I won't do it again!"
"YOU. ALWAYS. SAY. THAT," said the bear, lifting him by his neck. The weight of his body was enormous, not like he was hanging but like he was being pulled in half. "YOU. ALL. ACT. LIKE. IT'S. JUST. A. JOKE. LIKE. IT'S. NOTHING." The bear's eyelids slanted down with twin wheezing sounds. "MY. HOME. MY. FAMILY. MY AN-N-A. IT'S. ALL. NOTHING. TO. YOU."
"I swear, man. I won't…I won't ever talk to her again! I swear!" Riley tried to look at the camera, but with his neck in the bear's grip, all he could manage to do was roll his eyes. "Please don't let him hurt me!"
The camera's lens whined, zooming in close, hungrily watching.
"WHY. NOT. YOU. CAME. HERE. TO. HURT. HER." That music began to play louder somewhere inside the bear's head. Happy music, tinkling, an almost familiar cartoony song. The bear's eyes flickered in time with the sounds. "JUST. A. FUN DAY AT FREDDY'S! SIXTEEN. YOU. HAD. TO. BR-R-R-ING. SIXTEEN. MEN. TO. HURT. AN-N-A. FOR. NO. REAL. REASON. JUST. FOR. FUN." He shook his head. "AND. YOU. THINK. I'M. THE. MONSTER. WELL. YOU. KNOW. SOME. THING." He leaned in a little, his mouth opening to show the blunt pegs of his teeth. "YOU'RE. RIGHT."
The bear's gaze shifted to look at the camera down the hall. The music played faster. The pupils of his eyes grew, swelling from the inside out until his eyes were entirely black, except for two pinpoints of white light at their centers. "I. KNOW. YOU'RE. WATCHING," he said, speaking slower and with an increasing sense of difficulty. "I. HOPE. YOU'RE. LISTENING. I. WANT. YOU. TO. KNOW. THAT. I. AM. THE. MONSTER. NOW. AND. YOU'RE. THE. BROKEN. TOY. AND. AN-N-A—" The bear raised its free hand and knocked it hard on its cracked chest. "—IS. MY. FAMILY. DO. YOU. HEAR. ME. MINE." Static erupted from its speaker, louder and louder, until it suddenly washed out and in the silence, the bear said, clearly, "NO. ONE. FUCKS. WITH. MY. FAMILY."
The bear raised Riley higher, showing him to the camera. His fist, already a collar, clenched.
Riley felt the pop. Everything went numb all together, all at once. In that last endless moment as he died, he smelled pancakes, the kind Bats's mom made. He tried to hold onto that, because it meant he was sleeping over at Bats's house right now and dreaming all this, and if that was true, he could wake up. He could go upstairs and Bats's mom would be making breakfast and she'd give him some, warm from the pan just like a TV mom. He'd offer to mow the lawn for her and she'd say not today because it was Sunday and then ask him if he wanted to go to church with her and maybe…maybe he would. It wasn't too late. He could still wake up. Go upstairs. Eat pancakes in a sunny kitchen. It would be a beautiful day. All he had to do was wake up.
The last things he saw—bear and camera and walls and floors—spun around him as Riley was thrown away. He could not breathe, but needed to. His eyes burned, dry and throbbing, as his sight filled up with dark spots. Snot and tears trickled sideways across his cheek; it itched. The bear left, heavy footsteps receding, fading more like smoke than sound. The camera watched it go, then moved back to Riley, then shut itself off and let Riley die alone in the dark.
After Foxy left, Ana opened her eyes and got to work loosening her bonds. Foxy made a pretty good pirate in his stories, but it was apparent he'd never been a real sailor; he tied a lousy knot. Once she was free, Ana helped herself to another sword from the drawer where he kept them—dull as a spoon, but better than nothing—and left the cabin.
She did not think about this decision. She couldn't have, even if she wanted to, but she didn't really have to. Foxy's ship was no more a ship than he was a pirate. His cabin had not been designed around a living person's comforts. It was not safety, only a damn small area with no hiding places and only one way in or out, which meant that if Mason came in, she was not getting out. She was in no condition to fight even in the open, let alone in this coffin-sized closet. She did not believe she was asleep and she knew she couldn't be high, but something was for sure wrong. Her body felt thick, slow to respond. Her skull was splitting open from the inside; the slightest sound struck with almost paralytic force, which ironically made it hard to hear, and she couldn't seem to make sense of the things she did hear. True thoughts were too complicated, like beautiful birds full of feathers diving together in a senseless display. Ana's thoughts were more like worms, already cut in half, writhing in response to only the most basic stimuli. The cabin was not safe. She did not see the risks and weigh them; she absorbed them through her aching skin and crawled away.
She didn't go far. Once on the deck, she could see she was on the ship, and although she knew it wasn't a real ship, her simple wormy reasoning told her that where there was a ship, there was a sea. If she was in no condition to fight, she was for damn sure in no condition to swim.
So she crawled over to the bow of the ship (her hands slipped in cool wetness that had puddled on the deck; her eyes registered the color red; she did not notice the blood). Squeezing herself small in the pointed prow with her sword in her hands, she waited either for Foxy to come back or to wake up in Bonnie's arms back in her own bed in the party room.
Time is different in the dark, not just on the outside, but on the inside as well. Pressed into the bow of the ship, made small and helpless, alone, Ana was a child again, cramped and terrified, waiting for something bad to happen. But discomfort and darkness and even the goddamn threat of death were no match for the inexplicable hangover she had and incredibly, she began to nod off.
She fought it, but her eyes would close and open again with no way of knowing how long she'd been out or even if she'd been out at all. She could hear nothing, see nothing. Her legs were dead; everything else hurt. All her senses were reduced to the ache in her joints and the coppery taste of old panic in her mouth.
And then she heard Tux's bright, plummy voice: "WHY, HELLO THERE! YOU LOOK LIKE AN INQUISITIVE CHAP! HOW CAN I HELP YOU?"
Tux, like all the fake animatronics, had a number of preprogrammed fidgets that he cycled through when not directly interacting with someone, but unlike all the others, his fidgets were quiet ones. He brushed at his lapels, adjusted his gloves, flicked the pins where his ears used to be…but he did not talk. He only ever spoke when someone was right in front of him.
Ana listened, but heard nothing more.
And then, just as she'd decided whoever it was had gone, she heard footsteps. Not the heavy lurch and drag of Bonnie or Freddy and not the quick, heavy clank of Foxy, but someone relatively light. Someone in shoes, crunching over broken glass on the carpeted upper level, then coming down the steep amphitheater steps.
Ana shifted, but she was wedged in so tight to the prow that even that little movement made a scraping sound against the wooden slats. She held her breath, but now could hear nothing past the pounding of her heart. Where was he? Coming to the stage or just heading for the other door? She didn't know and couldn't know…until she heard the heavy flap of the curtains shifting and saw a circle of light sweep across the cabin of the Flying Fox, briefly returning to the octopus before moving on, exploring every shadowed corner big enough to hide in and resting at last on the closed cabin door.
Ana listened.
Whoever it was listened, too.
The next thing she heard was the unmistakable sound of someone climbing onto the stage, checking out the ball-pit, circling the ship once before coming straight up the gangplank.
Ana watched, eyes wide and legs numb, as Mason boarded the Flying Fox. He had a flashlight in one hand and her own ballpeen hammer in the other. If he'd turned just a little when he reached the deck, he wouldn't have been able to miss seeing her. But the octopus was glowing, pink and orange and purple lights moving outward from its bulbous body and down its many arms, and that took all his attention. Mason looked at it, touched the dark spots that had splattered over and dripped down its silly, smiling face, then ducked through the doorway and shone his light around the cabin.
This was the only chance she was going to get. Ana rocked forward onto her fingertips, letting her legs free to fill with the leaden heat of blood-starved muscle coming back to life. As soon as she trusted herself not to fall over, she readied her sword, gritting her teeth against the pins and needles sensation even the slightest movement provoked and praying he noticed the slightly out-of-place panel on the back wall that was the concealed door to the parts room backstage. Trying to figure out how to open that might keep him occupied long enough for Ana to sneak off the deck, if only as far as the Treasure Cave. She knew she couldn't outrun him, but if she could get enough of a head-start, she could change the maze around her and maybe fool him long enough to get away for real…
Mason looked behind the door, under the captain's table, even in the booty trunk, but the backstage door was damned near invisible and he never even saw it. He paced once around the table, hit one of the fake flickering candles with the hammer, and then he came right back out. His flashlight's beam hit her dead in the face.
Ana's legs remained stubbornly dead. She leapt, an ungainly froggy bound that carried her only midway across the deck, but was enough to startle him into jerking back instead of bringing that hammer down. He hit his head on the cabin's door-frame, giving Ana the split-second distraction she needed to throw herself forward and swing her sword with all her strength at his knees. The sword was dull, but solid. He staggered, falling through the open door and backward onto the table, and she hit him again—whap-whap—aiming for the face to make him put his arms up before bringing the sword down hilt-first with all her might on his balls—whump.
His body closed up like a clam, folding over and falling sideways, raking his shirt up and scraping his back bloody on the rough edge of the table as he hit the floor. His face turned purple, neck bulging, veins visibly throbbing. Ana made a grab for the hammer, then had to leap back as he swung it at her, instinctively attempting to parry with her stupid toy sword.
The blow numbed her hand all the way up to her elbow. She dropped the sword and did not attempt to recover it. Scrambling away, her legs still heavy and only half-there, useless as the tail of a mermaid, it was all she could do to keep ahead of the whack-whack-whack of the hammer chasing after her.
"I'll kill you for that, you cunt!" he roared, and dove after her.
She rolled and kicked again, both feet hitting his chest and throwing him backward. If she'd hit a little harder or even if he'd hit a slightly different way, she could have sent him right over the rails and into the ball-pit. Luck wasn't with her this time, but at least he was disorientated and off his feet.
Ana flipped over and crawled on her arms for the gangplank, slither-dropping onto the stage below, and finally got her legs under her. She fell on her first running step. If she hadn't, the hammer he threw after her would have cracked her skull for certain. As it was, it whipped overhead and hit the curtains, sliding down where she could grab it. Now she had the hammer, and as he thundered down the gangplank at a limping run and leapt at her, she rolled onto her back and swung for all she was worth.
He was fast, but not fast enough to avoid the blow completely. He caught it on his arm, howled and leapt back, then kick-stomped at her several times in rapid succession. He got her in the ribs twice; she hit him with the hammer once, right on the knee. His leg folded up. He fell back and she scrambled away, now almost running, and fell off the stage. Her left ankle and right wrist twisted when she landed. She dropped the hammer, had to grab it with her dumb hand, where it was next to useless to her, and scrambled away as fast as she could go. She knew she'd never make the door, so she aimed herself at the Treasure Cave, hoping to lose him in the maze.
She made it three lurching steps before he slammed into her back, knocking them both to the ground. No hope for it. Face-down, no leverage, no rescue. Mason had her. It was all over but the bleeding.
Ana threw the hammer away into darkness, surrendering her weapon to rob him of it. He grabbed after it, swearing, then seized her by the hair and slammed her face into the floor—once, twice, three times. Long-buried instinct helped her neck go limp, helped her tuck her chin on the downswing each time so that she hit mostly with her forehead and not her nose or jaw, but stars exploded behind her eyes even so and her hearing buzzed out to a drone. He rolled her over, yelling into her dazed face, then punched her.
She rolled with it, unable to fight back, just hoping to mitigate as much of the damage as possible as he hit her over and over. Now she could see him, see Mason's features contorted with that ape-rage that said he wasn't stopping until she was dead, but even as she recognized this, she still didn't know what it meant that she could see him, not even when she heard that shrill metallic scream and saw the flash of steel slice through the black and hit his arm as he raised it for another punch. His hand seemed to pop right off and tumble away, leaving blood like a fountain going up and splashing down, hot, over her face.
Mason jerked back, blinking at his handless wrist with an expression of comical frustration, as if his hand had jumped off on its own, leaving him in the lurch right when he needed it most. Like, who could you count on, right? But he could only blink the once, because before he could blink again, the hook swept in from the left, punched in under his jaw and came out his cheek, and his weight was gone just that fast.
Ana breathed through a mouthful of blood, staring up into the darkness, listening to the hack and grunt and splatter that surely meant something, just…not right now. She summoned the last of her strength and rolled onto her side. She breathed a little more. She was sleeping, that was all. She was dreaming and adrift again in the red, red waters. Maybe Mason was really here and maybe he wasn't, but she was for sure sound asleep, and whatever consequences must follow would just have to wait until she woke up in Bonnie's arms or…or did not wake up at all.
Ana drew up her legs, folded in her arms. She closed her eyes and pretended she was sleeping. She pretended until she was.