CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Ana needn't have doubted herself. All the doors back at the Old Quarry pizzeria were securely locked, and all the windows were boarded over on the outside and blacked off with heavy plastic on the inside. When the sun set, the restaurant's automated power supply system changed from Open to Closed, and most of the ambience—the flashing lights in the arcade, the happy music endlessly looping through the speakers, the glowing stalactites and spooky sound effects in the Treasure Maze—switched off. All the animatronics from Brewster in the front lobby to waving Peggy at her signpost to the crows perched on the back mast in Pirate Cove powered down and were still.
All was silent.
At midnight, the power system's settings changed again, from Closed to Night Shift, and the last lights went out. Throughout the pizzeria, the only sounds were the drumming of rain on the roof, the low hum of the cooler and freezer in the kitchen, and the droning of the fan in the security office that Ana had accidentally left on. Even the cameras stayed dark and still; they could still be activated during the Night Shift, but there was nothing in any of the rooms to watch.
However, it wasn't quite as empty as it seemed. Soft scratching noises could have been heard moving from the crawlway into the air conditioning ducts, if anyone had been there to hear it. Soon after, a long clawed hand snaked out of one of the narrow ventilation pipes and found a gripping place. Something pulled itself out, like a stick figure drawing itself into existence by moonlight, unfolding and contorting until all at once, it became the Puppet, still balanced on one hand with its legs twisted up in unnatural angles, white face turning as it scanned the empty road.
Slowly, it brought its legs down, shifted its balance from its hand onto the footless pegs it walked upon, and stood, scanning the desert and the wooded foothills and the road that separated them, but mostly looking at the rain as it poured in sheets over the Puppet's smooth, black body. It couldn't feel the rain—not the cold or the wetness or the thousand pebbly points of impact—but it remembered how unpleasant it had once been and so it was annoyed anyway. It indulged these feelings for a moment, here where there were no cameras to mistake its sulkiness for defiance, and then it scurried to the edge of the roof and flipped itself acrobatically over, hanging from the eave for a moment so that a drop did the least amount of damage to its splintered wooden legs.
It ran across the parking lot on all fours, like some nightmarish spider that was missing half its legs but was still swift and venomous, stopping twice to try and listen through the wind and rain because it thought it heard something. Not a vehicle and not a person, but more like a radio…or like static between channels, in which the Puppet thought it could hear, if it could hear anything at all, a few words…or humming…but mostly just static.
Or the rain. Just the rain hitting the rocks. The microphones that acted as the Puppet's ears had been top of the line when they were new…fifty years ago. Now they were old, clogged with dust and wet with rain, and maybe rusty. Did microphones rust? The Puppet didn't know.
In any case, there was no one here and it could not afford to be distracted. It had a job to do.
The Puppet ran on.
Although it was not much faster in this body than its last one, it never got tired or lost its breath, couldn't feel the cold or the wind, and was extremely flexible in its own wooden way. Despite having to cut across the desert (everyone in Mammon was probably asleep, but it wasn't worth the risk of being spotted if a car happened by on their way to, say, vandalize an abandoned pizzeria), it reached Old Canyon Road within an hour. From there, it was only a short run to the security gate, where the Puppet easily slipped through the iron bars, and another somewhat longer run to the top of the cliffs, where Faust's glass mansion stood watch over a dying town.
The Puppet approached with caution, staying just outside the effective range of the motion sensors positioned around the house. Many of the floodlights were on anyway, and this gave the Puppet pause. Perhaps they were sensitive enough to be triggered by the storm. Or perhaps they had been switched on?
The Puppet had stolen into this house many times in the last few months and it had always been empty. Not completely empty, not stripped of furniture or possessions, which meant whoever lived there was only temporarily away, or so it was hoped. And the Puppet did hope so, genuinely and not just because the dead man in the rotting rabbit suit hoped so. The Puppet's human consciousness had not been erased or altered in any way when it had been transferred to this body; it had good memories of this place and of the man who lived here. Now, perhaps, that man had returned and even if the Puppet couldn't find the keys it had been sent to retrieve, that would be good news to bring back.
There were cameras attached to some of the lights and, knowing there might be eyes behind those cameras, the Puppet stayed low and well back until it came to a shadowed place at the rear of the house where the master suite's balcony overlooked the grounds. Ana Stark had to climb onto the roof of her truck to reach it, and even then, it hadn't been an easy feat, but the Puppet was much taller, with claws made for catching even the smallest handholds or stabbing in new ones, and springs at the joints of its long limbs for extra flexibility. It could move in ways no human could and it was especially good at jumping. Now, if the door had been locked, that would have presented an insurmountable problem for it, but the Puppet knew this door was never locked. It opened it and crept inside.
The master suite's furnishings had changed since the Puppet had been alive, but the style was very much the same as it had ever been. Despite the urgency of its appointed task, the Puppet lingered for some time, running a claw along the spines of the books that lined the tall shelves, plucking at the broad leaves of a potted plant, inspecting the contents of the medicine cabinet in the adjoining bathroom, and finally creeping up to the bedroom door and stealing a peek inside.
The lenses of its eyes whirred softly, adjusting to the darkness. The bedroom's sole source of light came from the charging pad…and the two phones plugged into it. The Puppet stared at this, then pushed the door all the way open and drew itself up to its full height. Outside, the storm raged on, filling up the adjoining room with flashes of blue-white light, throwing the Puppet's shadow long over the two figures that slept in the bed. The man was a stranger. So was the woman, at a first glance. At a second…
The Puppet moved closer, leaning far over until its cracked face was only inches from the sleeping woman's. Pinpoints of silver light deep in the sockets of its eyes cast dim spotlights onto her tan, lined face, illuminating faint traces of scarring by her eyes, nose and chin where cosmetic work had once been done.
After a long moment, the Puppet drew back, looked around, and leaned out to pick up a tasteful leather purse. It rummaged through the contents, eventually trapping a driver's license between two of its long claws and pulling it out to read it by the faint light of the charging pad. It looked back at the woman, then (rather carelessly) replaced identification in purse and purse in chair before looming over the bed again. It amused itself for some time by tracing the woman's wrinkles in the air just above her face and even if its expression could not change, it somehow managed to project a sense of smugness at every sign of age it found.
At last, the Puppet reluctantly ended its game and withdrew from the bedroom. The hall outside the master suite was empty, if not as dark as it usually was at night. The Puppet tapped a clawtip against a new nightlight plugged into an outlet, then continued on its way, but when it reached the next door, it opened it.
Four young girls slept inside, two sharing the bed, two more in sleeping bags on the floor. The Puppet picked its way carefully across a minefield of glittery nail polish bottles and lip gloss, bowls holding the remains of a midnight sundae party, and an assortment of phones and tablets to reach the first sleeper. It crouched beside her for several minutes in silence, long legs bent around its thin shoulders, before carefully smoothing back the dark cloud of her hair so it could press its gaping mouth to the child's cheek. It left as silently as it had come, leaving no sign that it had ever been in the room, except perhaps nightmares.
It went room to room after that, its mission temporarily forgotten as it took inventory of each guest in this uncharacteristically full house. Most slept through this visitation (although not as deeply as they seemed to; quite a few of the youngest children had the same nightmare of a dark clown with a white face, and once away from their dubious parents, would solemnly discuss the 'ghost' of Grandpa Freddy's house much the same way a young Ana and David had discussed the 'monster' in Aunt Easter's locked basement). There was only one room which the Puppet did not get to explore to its satisfaction, although it did open the door a crack and watch for quite some time as Chad gave Faust's live-in nurse an extensive oral interview.
When the Puppet ran out of rooms to explore upstairs, it made its way down to the ground floor and eventually to the long hall that led to Faust's office and the safe which was the sole reason for coming here, and still it allowed itself to be diverted by every door it passed. In this way, it rediscovered store rooms packed with furnishings and decorations bought for special occasions not celebrated in decades, a coat check room that held coats and luggage for the first time in years, a gentleman's lounge where the drinking cabinet had to be locked (and already secretly unlocked half a dozen times), but when it came to the room Ana had designated the 'orgy room', the Puppet found what it had not been sent to look for but had nevertheless been hoping to find.
An adjustable bed, narrow and new enough that the Puppet would be able to smell the lingering odor of the packing plastic it had been shipped in, if only it had a sense of smell. Toward the foot of the bed, a motorized wheelchair had been parked, angled to allow easy access. Near the headboard was a tall, wheeled table with two drawers and an extendable, angled surface on which rested a closed laptop computer and a small hissing baby monitor. Safety rails flanked both sides of the bed, cushioned to prevent accidental bruising. And in the bed lay an old man, aged face composed and slender hands folded atop the sheet that covered him like a corpse laid out in his coffin.
The Puppet crawled closer, then stood up somewhat awkwardly and walked the final distance. It was not heavy, but the floor was polished hardwood, and the pegs of its legs made a distinct knocking sound. The sleeping man frowned in his sleep, and as the Puppet reached out and slipped its long fingers around the safety rails, he woke.
Lightning splashed across the sky, through the wall of windows that lined the hall, into this improvised sickroom, pooling in the old man's pale blue eyes.
They looked at each other, silent, as thunder shook the world.
When the storm faded again into drumming rain and distant mutters, the old man reached up. The Puppet met him. Their fingers wrapped around one another's hands.
"Marion," he said in a thick, medication-slurred voice. "How…did you…? How…? How…" His eyes clouded, began to close. "How good of you to come," he mumbled and was once again asleep.
The Puppet gently released his hand and brushed its claws once through his forever-flyaway hair. The silver lights of its own eyes dimmed as it gazed at him, then shifted to the steady red light of a baby monitor positioned on the nearby table, and then it dropped back to all fours and crawled away. It shut the door behind it as quietly as it could, then crawled down the hall with no more interruptions to the office at the very end.
Once inside, it opened the secret panel in the south wall right away, but only had a few minutes to tap at the safe's keypad before a bright yellow bar of light sliced in under the office door. The Puppet darted over, not to lock it, but to crack it open and watch a rather anxious and disheveled young lady jog barefooted down the hall and let herself into the old man's room, followed at some distance by Chad, who was also disheveled but comfortably so in a pair of loose-fitting grey sweatpants and nothing more. He paused to look in at whatever was happening in the old man's room, then looked at the door at the end of the hall.
The Puppet gingerly closed the door, then leapt to the other side of the room and pushed the button to seal off the safe again. As the secret panel slid shut, the Puppet ducked under the desk and pulled the executive chair over to further hide it from sight. When Chad opened the door, nothing could be seen of the Puppet except the twin points of its eyes shining out from the shadows, and those were not discernable after he switched on the overhead lights.
He, too, lost no time in opening the secret panel, but, like the Puppet, had no luck opening the safe. After a few minutes, he gave up and came to the desk, pulling the chair out with more force than necessary and dropping into its cushioned seat with a curse. He stretched his legs out, but the Puppet didn't take up much room and avoiding contact wasn't difficult. He rummaged through the desk in the listless manner of a man who knew he wasn't going to find what he was looking for, but didn't know where else to look, and it wasn't long before he slammed the drawers shut.
"Stubborn old fuck," he muttered, kicking back and onto his feet. "Why can't you just die already?"
The Puppet's eyes sparked a little brighter. It waited under the desk for Chad to leave, then crawled out from its hiding place, but if it had ever had any enthusiasm for its mission, that was long gone now. Its fingers played along the handle of the desk drawer without opening it as it stared at the door to the hallway, listening to Chad's voice cajoling the girl away from his grandfather's bed and back into his. The girl protested, and while the Puppet's microphones couldn't make out every word, she seemed to be saying something about the old man and how she maybe should stay with him for a while.
The Puppet looked at the wall with the safe concealed behind it, then moved away from the desk and over to the door, cracking it open for a cautious peek. It was rewarded with a glimpse of Chad just before he walked into Faust's room.
"Don't be stupid," his voice came back. "He's completely out of it. Let's go."
"But he's so restless…What if he tries to get up? He could fall again!"
"Hey, Grandad! I'm going to take Stevie upstairs and rail her until she needs that chair more than you do. Think you can stay in bed for an hour or two until we're done?" Another pause, during which the old man's weak voice could only faintly be heard, then another laugh. "See? He says it's fine."
Chad reappeared in the hall, towing a pouty brunette behind him by the wrist.
"I can't believe you did that!" she fumed. "That isn't funny!"
"Oh, grow a sense of humor. You think he's going to remember any of that in the morning? Hell, I could do you right on top of him and he wouldn't remember it. He's got enough dilaudid in him to drop an elephant."
"I just don't think—"
"Fortunately, I'm not asking you to think. I'm telling you to get back in bed, and to punish you for making me say it twice, you're going to have to take your clothes off right here, right now."
The girl stepped back, blushing, and whisper-hissed, "I'm not doing that!"
"Yeah, you are," Chad replied comfortably, leaning himself against the wall.
"No, I'm not!"
"Yeah, you are. And you better do it fast and get your ass upstairs, because the longer we stand around, the better the odds of one of those snot-faced bastards wandering down for a glass of wa-wa and finding us, and if you say one more word, you're not only going to have to get naked, but you're also going to have to give me a blowjob before I let you go upstairs."
"You going to make me?"
"I don't have to make you. You want to. Yeah, laugh at me," he said as she tossed her hair, "but you know you want to. You strut around in your flat heels and your poly-blend scrubs and your sensible haircut like you're some halo-wearing angel of healing, but we both know the most glamorous part of your job is filling out the paperwork instead of wiping up drool, puke, piss and shit. Which is probably why you let your elderly, invalid client's grandson finger you within an hour of meeting me, and six hours after that, you were jacking me off in the back row of the theater while a roomful of sugared-up kids watched cartoons on the big screen. Admit it," he said, giving the very subdued girl a playful chuck under her downcast chin. "The only reason you waited this long to fuck was so you had a chance to go get that sexy little matching bra and panty set you couldn't wait to show me instead of the sports bra and holey thunderpants I bet you usually wear. So don't give me the prissy princess act now. It's a little too late to pull it off after you've been slutting it up for two days straight."
"Don't…Don't call me that."
"What, a slut? Why not?"
"It's a dirty word."
"So? You're a dirty girl, aren't you?"
"No."
"No?"
"No, I'm not, and I…I don't like it when you talk like that!"
The Puppet rolled the tiny lights of its eyes.
Chad heaved a groaning sigh and turned around. "Okay, fine. I'm not playing this game, Miss Stannick. Bye."
"Wait." She ran after him, catching at his hand only to have him pull away and give her a little shove back. "Wait!"
"For what? I don't need a nurse. I want a dirty girl who wants to be my slut and you don't like that, so—"
"Wait! I can…"
Chad stopped and looked back. "Yeah?"
The girl shifted from foot to foot, avoiding his direct smirking stare. "I can do it."
"Do what? Say it."
"I can…be your…"
The Puppet's fingers flexed impatiently on the door's handle.
The girl finally stopped squirming and whispered, "Slut."
"Prove it."
The girl made uncomfortable noises, but obeyed and soon stood naked in the hall outside Faust's room, blushing as she folded her clothes into neat squares and stacked them together.
"Not bad," Chad said, giving her bare ass a playful slap. "You know, if you ever decide nursing's not your thing, you could probably make some decent bank as a stripper. They got a place a few miles down the road called the Wagon Wheel. You ever been?"
"Of course not!"
"Then I should take you some time. Buy you a lap dance."
"Wh-What? I could never—"
"You want to think before you say 'never' to me. I just might believe you and find some other girl, one who doesn't lie to me about wanting to be my slut and who's actually happy when I offer lessons on how to do it right. Because I like you, Stevie, but I'm not going to waste my time with someone who doesn't really want to be with me."
"I do!"
"Well then, you need to understand what that means. I'm not some clueless old cuck like Grand-dad. I don't have to impress women, I own them. If I want to go out, we're going out. If I want to stay in, we're staying in. If I buy you a neko set, you don't ask me why. You put the ears and the mitts on and show me your ass so I can put the tail in, and then you are my cat-girl until I tell you you're not. If I tell you I like blondes, you don't dye your hair, you go the fuck out and find me a hot blonde, and if you're very good, I'll let you join us. If I do something that embarrasses you or scares you or hurts, too damn bad. I like it when you blush. I like it when you shiver. I love it when you cry. Don't you ever make the mistake of thinking you're the queen just because you're on my arm. You're the king's whore and if you're not happy being the king's whore, there's the door. I can find another one like you tomorrow. Where is someone like you ever going to find another one like me?"
The girl didn't answer.
In the office, the Puppet touched its sexless body wistfully and thought how true that old adage was, that youth was wasted on the young, and life wasted on the living.
"So are you done pouting or what?" Chad asked.
She nodded.
"Smile," he ordered and she must have done it, because he smiled back and kissed her. "Okay then," he said gently. "Let's go."
Off they went, their footsteps receding as they turned the corner at the end of the hall.
The Puppet watched them go, then glanced at the back wall with the secret space behind it. It knew what it should do and it knew there would be consequences for failure, but self-denial had never been one of the Puppet's qualities, even when it had been human. It opened the door wider and slipped out, leaving the safe and its mission behind it. It stopped in again at Faust's room long enough to make sure the old man was comfortable, then returned to the master suite and out onto the balcony, but did not jump down to the ground below. It climbed up onto the roof instead, and when it found the window with the best view of Chad's bed, it settled in to watch.
By the time the show was over, the storm had moved on. Lightning still lashed up the skies far out over the desert's horizon, but here, the rain had slackened and glimmers of moonlight could be seen through the thinning clouds. The Puppet adjusted its eyes to the best of its limited ability and began to make its way down the canyon cliffs. It did not run when it reached the desert floor. It had been sent on a mission and while it knew it had never had much chance of success, it was in no rush to disappoint its master.
The Puppet headed back, wandering from desert to road and back again as its moods took it, walking on two legs more and more often, and occasionally stopping just to look at its hands. The last of the clouds blew away as it walked, revealing a sky that was clear and deep and impossibly full of stars. The thirsty desert drank off the stormwater, leaving nothing but a spectral shine on its surface. To the Puppet, the pizzeria perched atop the bluff it also thought of as Edge of Nowhere looked like a charcoal sketch of an abandoned lighthouse, suspended on a rocky shoal between ocean and sky. There was even a light, small and yellow, that seemed to float above the pizzeria at the top of a vanished tower.
Romantic notion, but the Puppet knew better. It was no ghost-light, just the lamp at the end of the walkway in the front yard of the great stone house where the Puppet used to live. As the Puppet stared at it, thinking nostalgic thoughts of those years, the light went out. The man who lived there now had just shut it off. It gave the Puppet a pang to think of him putting himself to bed after spending the long night pacing in the empty halls, hugging on his plushie bunny for comfort as the thunder raged outside, perhaps even turning on the light in the hopes that the Puppet would see it and come to console him. Maybe tomorrow, the Puppet would be allowed to run to town and bring him presents instead of going off on another pointless excursion to Faust's house, but tonight, it had to get home.
Now that the rain had stopped, the desert was disturbingly quiet, but the Puppet was depressed and distracted and although it had been hearing the faint scratchy pulses of static as it crossed the vast broken parking lot, it hadn't really noticed them. What it finally noticed—and only because it nearly stepped on it—was a large chunk of pink plastic lying in a rain puddle, round at one end and tapering to a sharp point.
The Puppet stared at it for a while, seeing its face reflected in ripples above it, angled almost so that the plastic piece seemed to be floating over its own chest. In its present morose mood, the Puppet thought the piece looked like half a heart…a broken heart.
As the Puppet picked it up, the static it had been hearing for some time, suddenly stopped. Only in its absence did the Puppet finally track the source to a heap of trash nearby, seen, like the static had been heard, but not noticed until now, when it was too late. A white fox head, still impressively intact, lifted itself out of the mess of animatronic parts and wire, rotting plushies and crumpled paper, wet rags and dead animals that was its body and turned until the Puppet could see its eyes—one broken camera and one red desert rock.
A feminine voice, small and scratchy, came from the speaker dangling under the head's jaw. "Foxy? Is that you?"
The Puppet, frozen with fear, did not move.
The head bobbed on its long, snake-like neck. The speaker hissed and crackled for a few seconds before the girl's voice spoke again, scarcely louder than a whisper. "I was bad again…I think. I taste blood…in my mouth. I'm lost. I can't get backstage. I can't see. I'm bleeding from my eyes."
The piece of plastic dropped from the Puppet's unfeeling hand and hit the puddle with a splash.
The broken ears atop the head twitched. The long neck stretched out, dropping crayons and bits of wire and rat bones as the thing pushed her head closer to the puddle, closer to the Puppet. "Foxy, where are you?"
A limb unfolded itself from the ruins of her body and reached out, grasping at the air until it found the ground. Impossible to say now whether it had been an arm or a leg once, or even if it had originally belonged to her. After the Bite of '87, most of her major joints had been replaced so they were all the same size, with a few extra sockets and coupling joints installed around her frame. When the kids got bored with pulling her apart and putting her back together the way she used to be, they could now put feet on her hands, put arms on her hips, plug in a wagging tail on the top of her head…the possibilities were endless. She had three legs now, six arms, two hands, four feet, two tails, and of course, the second head and one flapping wing that was all that remained of the animatronic parrot that used to ride on Foxanne's shoulder, back when she'd been Foxanne…before she'd been broken on the rack in Kiddie Cove, subjected to electric shocks to make her 'dance' on the table, pulled apart and put together and pulled apart again while music played through the speakers and all the children laughed.
A part of her had never left that table. She still lived in those memories, although she would not have recognized the name Foxanne if she heard it again, no more than she would have recognized "Polly Pull-A-Part" or even Nami Taylor, whose last memory—the taste of blood in her mouth as the Devil kissed her to sleep—haunted every moment of this nightmarish life. She had no name now, only the mangle of her mind, full of colors and sounds without sense, incapable of reasoning thought.
Arms and legs coiled around each other with surprising grace as Mangle raised herself off the wet ground. Mangle herself did not consciously direct them. She wanted to move and, like the pili of a unicellular organism, they moved her, sinking the hooked claws that tipped her interchangeable hands and feet into whatever was there, pulling or pushing as necessary while the rest of her body hung suspended at the center of these many limbs. When chunks of the parking lot broke off in her grip, she ate them, metal jaws easily breaking the asphalt down into smaller pieces that tumbled down her throat, plinked musically over her battery case and off her ribs, then either got trapped in the pockets of trash with which she had stuffed herself over the years or fell out from her open belly back onto the parking lot.
Until this point, the Puppet had not moved. It crouched, one hand still raised and curled around the empty space where the plastic piece used to be, watching in frozen terror as Mangle twisted and lurched closer and closer. Mangle couldn't see it, hadn't yet realized it was any different from any other part of the lifeless landscape surrounding her. She couldn't think, didn't know where she was, but whether she consciously knew it or not, her CPU's pathing program registered her position relative to the Parts Room backstage and compelled her to go to the repair dock there and wait for a full diagnostics sweep.
The Puppet should have known all this. If it had been thinking, it should have known that if it just kept quiet and didn't move, Mangle would leave on her own soon enough. But the Puppet wasn't used to doing its own thinking and never had a lot of nerve. As Mangle crawled nearer, the Puppet's paralysis broke. It would have screamed if it still had its speaker, which was the very worst thing it could have done. As it was, it did the next-worst thing.
It ran.
Mangle knew a split-second of confusion and fear as the Puppet sprang away. She couldn't see, could only hear…and remember. The Puppet's legs knocked on the hardtop, but Mangle heard heeled shoes running down a long hall…
(purple shoes brand new bought that afternoon as a surprise because she knew it was his favorite color and they were so new so stiff too tight and the heels were like spikes tall and too narrow she was afraid to walk down the stairs so sure she'd fall and break her ankle but he said if she fell he'd carry her and it was just a little further and there was a special room a special place he wanted to take her and she wanted to be special for him wanted marion to see that she was the special one now she was so special so special and beautiful he told her she was beautiful as he cut the buttons off her dress with his sharp knife and the straps of her brand new bra and the sides of her panties and he kept cutting kept cutting kept cutting but he left her shoes on the stupid shoes the purple shoes she wore just for him purple and red now so red because she was so special and she couldn't run in these goddamn shoes and she probably did break her ankle after all but she couldn't even tell because there was so much other pain so much red so much blood and she could feel the bleeding feel it smell it taste it but it wasn't over wasn't even close he just picked her up like he promised he would and carried her back to his special place with the bed and the heads and the knife)
She did not understand the pictures and phantom sensations chewing up her brain, but some buried part of her knew how it would end and it frightened her. She thrashed, snapping and clawing all around her like these memories were an enemy she could kill, only to lose her precarious balance and fall into a shallow pothole, where she thrashed, churning rainwater into mud. She didn't know where she was. Everything was open and full of sounds she couldn't identify. The world had swallowed her and now it was pulling her apart again, building her back as a person she could not remember ever being, bringing her to life just to kill her again. And again. And again.
Trapped inside herself, Mangle fled the only way she could. She went black.
Instantly, her terrified struggles ceased. Her body righted itself. Her ears rotated, microphones taking everything in and audio program cleaning it up, filtering out ambient noise one by one until all it was left with was the Puppet. Once pinpointed, every surviving sensor in Mangle's system locked on her target. Her speaker crackled once, then blatted out a series of whistles, bells and electronic tones at maximum volume as her hunting protocols booted up and overrode all other directives.
The Puppet saw none of this as it bounded across the lot, but it knew what that sound meant. Panic briefly swelled even larger than before, enveloping her like a second, silent storm, and at its nearly-quiet eye, one thought: It was running the wrong way.
Because Mangle had been between it and the pizzeria when the Puppet had first stumbled across her, running away from her meant running away from the building and instead toward…what? There were a few dozen Joshua trees arranged around the edge of the bluff on which the pizzeria had been built, none of them tall enough to take the Puppet out of Mangle's reach. Most were dead anyway, and unlikely to hold up under even the Puppet's slight weight, let alone the savagery of Mangle's claws. Beyond the trees on this side of the bluff was a fifty-foot drop where a descent meant climbing on wet rocks loosened by heavy rain. Boulders that had already succumbed littered the base of the bluff, and while the Puppet had no bones to break, its body was old, dry wood over an industrial steel frame. Just because it could survive a fall didn't mean it could still run afterwards. And even if it reached the desert floor, where would it go from there? It was faster than it had been in its human body, but not a lot faster, and Mangle was slower now than when she'd been whole, but she was still faster than a human. How much faster? The Puppet didn't know, but it wasn't ready to bet its life on winning this race.
It had been a long time since the Puppet had last thought of itself as 'alive,' but in that moment, all those years were wiped away as easily as a crying face drawn in steam on a window and for one terrifying endless second, it was not the Puppet, but Marion Blaylock, not wood and wire and steel, but flesh and blood and bone. She had a heart and it was racing in terror, had breath hot and sour with adrenaline aching in her breast, had a son who would never see his mother again, and it was that fear that was greatest, that primal bolt of fear-lightning that struck down through the storm of her panic and burned it all away.
She pivoted, legs skidding out in front of her, stripping away paint from her footless heels all the way to her hip on the left side, then scrambled up again and ran for the pizzeria. She tried not to look at Mangle, but the cameras of her eyes brought everything into sharp focus indiscriminately. She could see the bulk of her monstrous body closing the distance between them, gouging up fresh potholes and splashing through old ones, her jaws already snapping in anticipation of the kill. Then Mangle was behind her, close enough that Marion imagined she could feel hot breath blowing on her bare back, imagined she could smell it—the familiar if long-forgotten stink of oil and blood. She had not felt pain in twelve years, but she would feel it next, she knew. Mangle's claws would punch through her skin, hook into bone, pull her back to those jaws. Death would not be quick, unless Mangle bit through her skull and destroyed her CPU. Nothing else could really kill her. Even if her mechanical heart were ripped from her chest and scattered over the ground in front of her, it would take at least two minutes for her CPU to shut down for lack of power.
She knew about time, how it stretches to fill certain spaces. Two minutes could be an eternity when you were waiting to die. She'd died before. She remembered.
Marion had no strength to gather, no adrenaline to fuel one final burst of speed. She didn't even have a voice to utter one last desperate prayer or time to wonder what kind of God would answer it, coming from her. She had only this moment and then it was gone.
She jumped, kicking off from the ground with all the considerable force this body could provide and reaching desperately out for the eaves that overhung the loading dock. An easy jump to make from the roof of Ana's truck if she left it parked here, or from the top of the fence that surrounded the playground if she hadn't, but not one Marion had ever attempted from ground-level.
The very tips of her claws caught the very edge of the rain-gutter, enough to keep her from falling back into Mangle's reach, not enough for a good grip. Instead of flipping acrobatically up and onto the roof as she had done a thousand times before, she swung forward and her lower half crashed into the loading dock door.
Immediately afterward, Mangle slammed into the concrete ledge of the dock, breaking off the weathered safety rail with the force of her impact. She seized it in her jaws, bending and biting at the rusted metal bar while Marion hung by three fingers just above her thrashing body. If Marion could just hold still and stay quiet, Mangle would have surely moved on once she was satisfied that her 'prey' was dead, but seeing the rail crushed and bent in Mangle's jaws, fear overtook her once again. She flailed for a new grip on the gutters, her entire body bucking and clawing…and kicking.
Mangle's evisceration of the safety rail made some noise.
Marion's legs drumming on the loading dock door made even more.
Mangle's ears twitched. Her long neck twisted around and up, a length of rail still pinned between her jaws. Her eyes, one broken camera and one round stone, saw nothing as the Puppet scrambled over the eaves, but she listened.
Mangle's twisted body reared up, tracking the sounds of the Puppet's uncharacteristically clumsy footsteps, and as she did so, her many arms and legs scraped up over the side of the loading dock and found a flat surface. She had no conscious thoughts, but her navigational systems processed this information and rewrote the barrier before her as a platform of finite, undetermined proportions.
While the Puppet paced on the roof, reassuring herself through movement that she had indeed escaped, Mangle climbed onto the dock.
Extending her arms and legs and the twin whip-like tendrils of her tails, Mangle mapped out its dimensions until she discovered the wall. If she had moved a little to the left, or if she could just see, she'd have found the much weaker door instead and its evaluation would have changed dramatically, but the wall was enough to let her reach up along its face.
On the roof, the Puppet had regained enough of her composure to stop her aimless scuttling back and forth. She could hear Mangle moving around below her, of course, but the scratching of Mangle's claws as she moved slowly up the side of the building toward the eaves was quieter, and therefore less worrisome, than the violence of her attack on the safety rail. Her human memories, her Marion-ness, had been too long-buried; the mother in her would have instantly known what it means when something that should be noisy goes suddenly quiet.
But the Puppet didn't think about that. The Puppet checked herself for damage, twisting her long body around in ways only she could, inspecting every new chip and scratch while, behind her, one of Mangle's hands groped up and came down, claws curling around the lip of the gutter. Another gutter would have pulled loose and dropped Mangle to shatter on the concrete block below. Hell, another gutter might not have survived the Puppet's reckless climb, but Ana Stark had installed this one and Ana Stark did not half-ass a job. This roof was built to last another twenty years at least. No cheap vinyl here, no aluminum. This was a stainless steel gutter with roofing screws every six inches anchoring it to the building's frame. It bent under Mangle's weight, but it held her.
The Puppet took off her mask and wiped a blob of mud off its perfect white cheek, oblivious, as one hand after another after another came over the lip of the roof and found a grip. Then Mangle's head rose up on its long neck, the white fox's face broken away in places, exposing the mechanisms beneath. Static crackled from the speaker dangling on wires below her snapping jaws as she turned her head left to right, listening.
The Puppet put her mask back on and turned around and there was Mangle, looking blindly back at her, and after one thousand silent staring years, the race was on again.
The Puppet had only a few seconds advantage before Mangle pulled enough of her dangling body together to manage a chase. No time for finesse. The Puppet dropped to all fours and sprinted for the ventilation pipe she had crawled out of hours ago and dove in. This was a snug fit under any circumstances. The Puppet's shoulders were only two inches narrower than the shaft was wide, which was clearance enough to crawl through, but the shaft made a right angle where it joined to the HVAC duct, and jumping in head-first was the very worst way to approach that bend. The Puppet had only just worked her head and one arm into the much wider air duct when she was yanked violently back. Not far—the same tight squeeze and sharp turn that hindered her now also prevented her from being easily extracted—but before it could happen again, the Puppet planted her long arms on either side of the duct's opening and pulled, kicking with all her desperate might.
It worked. Mangle let go and the Puppet fled to the safety of the deep recesses of the ventilation system. Screaming, Mangle bit at the ventilation pipe, crushing and puncturing it and finally ripping it away. She could wedge her head inside the hole this opened, but no matter how she scratched and heaved, she couldn't go further than her neck would extend, and at last, she had to pull herself free. Her hanging speaker caught on the base fixture and came away. The snaps and pops of static instantly silenced, but Mangle heard it fall onto the roof. She ate it, picked it up where it fell out of her, and ate it again, then lay down as a cat settles beside a mousehole, listening. Without stimulus to retrigger her hunting protocols, she would eventually come out of the black into the blind nightmare of her life. And although she did not know where she was or how she got there, her navigations system would report that she was inside the building's perimeter and within her designated path of operations, so she simply moved to the area directly over the Parts Room and lay down again, patching herself up as best she could and eating the pieces that could not be salvaged.
As for the Puppet, a blind scramble through the air ducts and then the crawlway brought her to the basement seemingly in no time at all, where she swung herself gracefully out only to clatter to the concrete floor. She tried to get up and fell again, this time landing squarely on her face. The mask split in half—it had been broken once before and the glue that held it together had grown old and brittle—but the Puppet didn't immediately notice. As she sat up, the leather strap that formerly held her mask to the front of her head slipped around her neck. It was the sound of the porcelain pieces of her face tapping at her flat wooden chest that made her look down, and such was her confused state of mind that at first she thought she was looking at a bra, even though it had been twelve years and another lifetime ago since she'd last worn one. Belatedly, she felt at her face, her claws sliding over the perfectly smooth plane of the front of her head. She had no nose, no mouth, not even bumps to show where they should have been…nothing but her eyes, glowing out from lidless sockets.
The dead man had been sitting at the security desk—he hadn't left the chair since the power had come on, even now, when there was nothing in the empty building above them to look at—and now he leaned to one side, letting the light from the monitors fall over her.
Now she saw her knee. One of the springs had popped loose. She stared and stared and stared and finally took it and carefully fit the hooked end back into the proper hole on its joint. Then she just sat and held the broken halves of her face in her hands, making no effort to test the stability of her simple repair, because below the knee, there were three painted stripes—white and black and white again—and then an ugly splintered mess and then nothing.
Without a biological system, it was probably impossible to be in shock. Nevertheless, she was in something very much like it, enough that the rest of the world—and the man who had been her whole world since they day he'd first smiled at her—ceased to exist. She was alone with herself and her own broken body until the rusty scream of metal on metal woke her out of herself.
The dead man was going through the drawers of the desk, fighting them open, banging them closed, and eventually coming up with a roll of duct tape. "A temporary setback," he told her, beckoning. "It doesn't matter. You'll be out of that body soon. All you got to do is make it work until Ana's back. Come on, give me your leg and I'll put it on for you. Where is it?" He bent, looking under the desk, then sat up, peering at the opening to the pipeshaft. "You lose it in the maze or…?"
Although it had been months since the Puppet had a voice, she had never lost the habit of speech. She answered, but the words that came so easily to her mind died on the wires sticking out of her throat where her speaker used to be. She clutched at her neck, then began to gesture, making biting motions with her hands and pointing wildly upward.
"What are you saying, something…bit it off? What do you mean? Like a dog?"
The Puppet shook her head, her movements growing more forceful and less coherent until it occurred to her to cover one eye and make a hook-shape with the long fingers of her other hand.
The dead man's eyes sparked. "Foxy? They're back?" He sent a sharp glance at the monitors, which still showed him the same empty rooms he'd been staring at all night, and then a flinch arced through his ears and he looked back at the Puppet, as wide-eyed as his failing facial mechanisms could manage. "Wait a minute, are you trying to say Foxanne? Are you telling me the fucking Mangle is back?"
The Puppet nodded, sagging back into a forlorn huddle and clutching at the stump below her right knee.
"I thought they got rid of her months ago. Where has she been all this time? No, don't try to answer that, I know you don't know. I don't suppose you took her down?"
The Puppet shook her head, making silent excuses with her hands which the dead man impatiently waved away.
"Yeah, yeah, I knew it wasn't likely. Well, where is she now? Back in the crawlway? No? That's a relief. Where, then? Slow down…The roof? Okay…okay, that's workable. Did you get the keys?"
The Puppet had been mute; now it was speechless. It stared at the dead man, arms still raised in its last incomplete gesture, as if it were truly seeing him for the very first time.
One of the rabbit's ears flattened. The other, broken off at the hinge, only twitched. He shoved himself back from the desk and onto his feet, lurching toward her in that zombie walk that still haunted Ana's nightmares after seeing it only once on Mike Schmidt's tablet, months ago. The Puppet shrank back, but did not fight when he reached for her, seizing her by her limp shoulders and yanking her up. She staggered, trying to find her balance on one peg-like leg and when she almost had it, he gave her a single hard shake, so that her leg twisted out from under her and she sagged in his grip, held and supported only by his clenched fists.
"You," he said, speaker crackling with the quiet force of his anger.
The Puppet flinched, covering her featureless face with her claws.
"—are the most important thing in the world to me."
The Puppet flinched again, then slowly spread her claws and peeped between them.
The dead man pulled her roughly closer, inches from the rotted grinning rabbit head that was his face now. "I don't know what I'd do without you," he snarled. "I don't even want to think about that. I need you."
The Puppet shivered. Her hands lowered slowly from her face and came to skittish rest on his wrists.
"You're the only one I have now, the only one I've ever been able to really trust. I can't lose you." He gave her another shake, harder, and released her, letting her spill onto the floor at his feet. "I know Foxanne scares you. You should be scared. She'll kill you and there's nothing you can do to stop her, but I can shut her down. All I have to do is get close enough and I can put her on standby with a voice command. Hell, I can fry her neural net with the right words and if I have to, I'll go face-to-face with the crazy bitch and I'll kill her with my bare hands, because there's nothing I wouldn't do for you, Mare, but I can't do any of it from in here!"
The last word was a roar of feedback and static. The dead man swung around with a blatt of wordless frustration and punched the wall next to the room's only door, careful even in his rage not to hit the keypad—a touchscreen, dark now, and a single star-shaped keyhole centered below it. He stared at this, venting his cooling system in slow, deliberate pulses that were not breaths, no matter how hard he pretended they were. "I'd risk my life for you without hesitation," the rusty speaker snarled, "and if you loved me like you say you do, you'd do the same. You'd risk anything to free me, but instead, you seem to think that this—" He punched the wall again, which had no effect at all on the concrete, but did considerable damage to his fist. "—is okay. That this place, this hell where we're boxed in with those…those walking mechanical abortions is the happily-ever-after that we did everything for! Is that it? Is this what you wanted?"
Silence.
He glanced around.
The Puppet, still huddled on the floor where she'd fallen, shook her head.
"Then you got the keys, right? You'd never come back to me without the keys…right?"
The Puppet drew her long body in a little smaller and did not answer.
The dead man's eyes whined, turning from solid white circles sunk in the head's sockets to white rings around rapidly growing black pupils.
The Puppet raised a hand imploringly, looked around, then lifted off the pieces of her mask and set them aside, upside-down, where the damage wouldn't show. This done, she crawled over to one of the room's few furnishings—a steel table fitted with restraints—and crouched under it. Using the tip of one claw as a pencil (or a nib), she scratched at the floor, where the blood spilled in this room by five lucky golden ticket winners during the Grand Opening's closing ceremonies had dried into a black crust.
The dead man grunted, watching her through his filthy eyes, then jerked his chin in that direction and raised a beckoning arm. "Not you," he snapped as nearly all the servile things occupying this prison with him surged forward. "When has it ever been you I wanted, you useless little shits? Go lie down!" He pointed. "You."
Hiding out of sight of her brothers and sister, trying very hard to be invisible, Peggy Pigtails slowly climbed down off the Press. Her pretty pink and black hooves tapped at the concrete floor as she crept over to the Puppet. "She's writing."
"No shit. What's she saying? Read it out to me."
Peggy switched the lights of her eyes on and bent over to read over the Puppet's narrow shoulders. "Too many…people."
The dead man scowled, his ear lifting up somewhere between curious and furious. "What people? There shouldn't be anyone there if…" Dark emotions shivered through his ear. "Is that little shit throwing a goddamn party? Or…did he sell the house? I'll kill him if he did. Who's living there now?"
The Puppet shook her head again and scratched some more.
"Abby," read Peggy. "And a lot of other—"
"Abby? Who the hell is…wait a minute, my Abby? Abby Mills?"
The Puppet nodded.
"No kidding. Abby. So she finally came crawling back…" The dead man's ear came all the way up and slowly folded back again. "He knew where she was the whole time, didn't he? They've been in contact all these years. Huh." He was quiet for a moment, then suddenly laughed, not hard and not long, but not angrily either, and at the end of it, his eyes were once more little white circles. "How'd she look?"
The Puppet looked at him, then wrote a single word.
"Old," Peggy read.
The dead man laughed again, shaking his head. "Was Randy there?"
The Puppet wrote.
"Didn't see him," Peggy read. "Child…oh. I guess that's 'Chad,' not 'child.' Chad was." She hesitated, then timidly asked, "Who's Chad?"
"No one important. Just a particularly stupid twig on the family tree. Not my side," he stressed. "That's Abby's blood coming through. Nothing good was ever going to come out of Randy. Even the name is stupid," he muttered, rubbing a hand over the rabbit's snout. "Not that I'd want to waste a good name on a dumb kid, but I told her, Alexander if it's a boy…and she told me if I didn't marry her, I didn't get a vote, and let me tell you, if she hadn't been carrying my kid at the time, those would have been the last words she ever said to anyone."
The rabbit's eyes darkened, then flashed pale again as he laughed. "But that's always been my problem, I'm too sentimental. I let her live…and the kid turned out to be Randy, that snot-nosed, mouth-breathing, bed-wetting dimwit." The dead man laughed once, low and bitter, then shook his head again. "I swear there's something in the water around here, something seeping out of the quarry, maybe. I should have had a hundred ankle-biters the way I went at it, but I barely had any and most of them were defective."
The Puppet had no features now, not even the painted ones on her mask, but she managed somehow to look hurt nonetheless.
The dead man glanced at her and his ears rotated out of their black mood into one that was almost as good as a smile. "I said 'most,' didn't I? You grew me a good one, Mare. I just wish you could have grown me a couple more, and yeah," he sighed as the Puppet dropped her eyes, "I know it was hard on you, being so young, and you really scared me there at the end, the way you were bleeding…but I still didn't think they were going to take your works out. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they did! They saved you and the baby and that's all that mattered at the time. I'm just saying…" He raised his arms in an expansive shrug. "You gave me a good one, Mare…but there should have been more."
The Puppet nodded without raising her head, accepting this reprimand without protest.
"At least one more. Like the kings of old would say, an heir and a spare. You know." The dead man turned his head, looking through the agitated figures vying for his attention to the slumped shape in the far corner. Not an animatronic like these others, but another springlock suit. The first springlock suit, even—old Fredbear himself, of Fredbear's Family Diner, or at least it had been, years ago. It hadn't been Fredbear for almost thirty years now. It wasn't much of anyone anymore. "Just in case something happened to the first one."
The suit did nothing.
The dead man started to turn away, only to sigh and walk over. The suit did not respond to his approach in any way, but when the dead man placed one gentle hand on its slumped shoulder, a puff of dust blew out through its joints and the head raised itself off the motionless chest. The speaker set in its neck crackled. A voice, young and tired and confused but still recognizable, whispered, "Mom?"
"Dad," the dead man corrected, and stroked the suit's shoulder as it sagged forward again. He waited, but that appeared to be it. He couldn't say he was surprised. "Whatever," his speaker said as his cooling system vented a long sigh. "It is what it is. And now Abby's back. Who else is there?"
Peggy watched the Puppet write and shook her head. "She keeps pointing at 'a lot,' and now she's saying…Freddy was there."
The dead man turned around, too fast for the suit entombing him. Something cracked inside him. A little fall of bone fragments spilled out and fell around his rusty metal feet. A pair of once-expensive black leather shoes was still strapped inside them, and inside those, another pair of feet. Moving carefully back to his chair at the security desk, the dead man sat so he couldn't do more damage to a body that was already well beyond salvage. "What do you mean he was there? I thought he was…Where's he been all this time?"
"Hospital," Peggy told him, reading. "He…broke his leg or something? He's in a wheelchair now."
"Ah jeez." The rabbit's remaining ear lowered. "He's been gone this long over a broken leg? That's bad. God, I keep forgetting how old he is. We've got to get him out of that body before it's too late, Mare. I'll never understand why he did this," he said, looking around the concrete walls, "but I love the stupid son of a bitch. I understand the feeling may not exactly be mutual at first, but I can fix that in the transfer. I can fix everything…if I had my eyes back, I mean…and my hands…" He looked at them, flexing the creaking fingers into fists, slamming them into the desktop hard enough to leave fresh dents in an already well-cratered surface. "And if I could just get the fuck out of here!"
"She says he woke up when she found him," Peggy read, "and he seemed like he was glad to see her."
"Yeah? Yeah. See? We were always a team. Him and me…and you, Mare. We were family. And we're going to be family again. It's all going to be just like it used to be."
"But he's been gone a long time and now he's home, so…she thinks that's why everyone is there," said Peggy. "The house is full of people and some of them were still awake. Chad was right there in the room with…the safe?"
The dead man nodded thoughtfully, then beckoned, continuing to hold out his arm as the Puppet crawled clumsily over to him and helping her climb up into his lap. He put his arms around her as she snuggled against the rabbit's threadbare chest, stroking his metal fingers down her smooth wooden back. "You did the right thing, Mare. That's not the kind of situation you can just kill your way out of if you're seen. And hell, Freddy hates having people around. Probably just there to welcome him home and see if they can't get money out of him or something. They won't stay long." He sighed, tipping his head back to glare at the ceiling while his hand continued to pet the Puppet. "And now the Mangle's loose again. Things always got to get worse before they get better, huh? But listen…things'll work out for us, baby. You said she's on the roof, right? Not in the crawlway. You can just go out the front door, right?"
The Puppet did not answer, except to hug him a little tighter.
"Yeah, I know you're scared. You should be. She'll kill you if she can and without your voice, you can't stop her. Don't think I don't know that and never think I don't care. But—hey, look at me," the dead man said, hooking two fingers under the Puppet's chin and tipping her featureless face back until the silver points of her eyes had nowhere to go except to him. "But we're not getting out of here without those keys, okay? And you are the only one who can get them, so that's what you've got to do, even if there were a hundred Mangles out there. You don't have to go yet," he said, cuddling her closer. "We'll give it a few days, let Abby play whatever game she thinks she's playing until Freddy kicks her and all his other little well-wishers the hell out of our house. But then you're going to be Daddy's brave baby, right? And you're going to go get those goddamn keys."
After a long, tense silence, the Puppet nodded.
"That's my girl," the dead man crooned. "It won't be much longer, Mare. It's been a long time, but it's really almost over. And once we're out, I promise you, no one will ever lock us up again."
