7
Lying awake in his bed, waiting for his alarm to go off, Mike stared at his bedroom ceiling in deep though about the past and the recent events that only he seemed able to witness. It had started on the day of his first interview at Freddy Fazbear's all those years ago. It was Chica, he remembered, who was the first to see him—to really see him in a way that made his stomach lurch and his heartbeat quicken. It happened as he was exiting the building just after he had gotten the job and was walking out with mixed feelings about the sudden night shifts that he was scheduled to do.
During his time there—only three weeks—the animatronics slowly took more of an interest in him. They realised that it wasn't just that he could see them, it was that he was receptive to them in a way that all of the other night guards hadn't been. The restaurant was known locally for the surprisingly high turnover position of night watchman, and rumours and speculations would crop up as to why that was. It was true that the animatronics had been originally programmed to roam the restaurant between songs and serve the customers food from big plates, but since the events of 1987, their programming had been altered to restrict them to the stage during the day. Between midnight and 6:00am however, they were free to wander the building as they had always been programmed to do to keep them from seizing up.
Over the eight years of this type of operation, many night guards had come and gone from the position. Some couldn't handle the hours, but most were spooked by the uncanny behaviour of the characters and how they seemed to try to get into the office at night. A theory arose amongst the other guards that at night they didn't recognise the night guard as a person but rather an unclad animatronic and were therefore dangerous to them and would try to drag them to the back room to remedy the situation. The graphic imagery that this story presented leaned heavily to the far-fetched and fantastical and was most likely a joke story made to scare the new guys, though over time everyone seemed to believe it.
Mike's new theory was different. Since Chica had looked directly at him on that first day and was subsequently the first animatronic to try to approach him during his shift, he had the idea that they were more than just advanced puppets. They were real. They were alive and they were trapped in those suits, begging anyone who could hear them to be let out. After many years and many night guards, Mike was finally the one who could actually hear them.
They told him, in whatever way they could, of the horrors that befell them. They showed him the crayon drawings, they showed him the springlock suit operation manual, and they quietly spoke to him in his mind. He finally came to the conclusion that the four animatronics needed to be opened to free the souls that were trapped inside. In his attempt to open Freddy, his hand slipped and one of the springlocks snapped shut again, causing a chain reaction along the torso as each lock snapped back into place. Mike had hurt it and all of the animatronics went into a rage. They believed that he wasn't actually trying to help them, that he was the same as the man who had put them there in the first place, and that he delighted in their pain.
Mike had been right. Though he never had the chance to prove it, he had been right the whole time about the four missing children that were hidden in the suits. A fifth child, murdered in the same way but a few years before, had come to him as an apparition of a much older character. A yellow bear, one he hadn't seen or heard of since. It was the same colour of yellow that the rabbit they had just received had been. Mike never knew what happened to that child in particular—that forgotten fifth victim—but he never forgot the nights when it appeared to him.
This ability to hear the lingering dead had been dormant over the years but had come rushing back to the surface that night when the twisted Funtime Freddy had arrived at the restaurant. He wondered why he hadn't felt the three beings tangled together while it was still in the crate, but then he realised something. He realised that he could hear them not because he took notice of them, but because they took notice of him. It had been the same for the old yellow rabbit. The crate had just been a crate until it was opened. What bothered him now was the fact that he could still feel the twisted Freddy in the building long after it had been shipped away and wondered if the same would happen with the rabbit when it would presumably be sent off. The thought of the Purple Man being a recurring event was too much to think about.
Another thought had occurred to him over the weeks. If what was trapped within the animatronics sent from Afton Robotics was aware of him and knew that he could hear them, then what did they want with him? What did they need him to do? Could he help them, or were they simply the tortured remains of minds long since ripped from their bodies?
The alarm next to his bed rang loudly, startling him out of his train of thought. Mike rolled over and turned it off, then swung himself up into a sitting position. It was time to get ready for work.
-xxx-
A week had passed since the arrival of the old yellow 'Bonnie' animatronic. No further apparitions had occurred, but Mike could constantly feel its aimless wandering along with the eyes that watched him as he went about his day. Every time he turned a corner, he expected to find the withered purple being on the floor, waiting for him. Whenever he went to the storeroom to sign off on a new bulk delivery for the kitchen or a crate full of merchandise, he could feel a constant presence lurking in the back room with him. If it weren't for the music and noise coming from the main dining room, he believed that he would have heard voices calling to him. As it was with the Freddy animatronic, the haunting presence of the rabbit didn't leave when they sent it away to head office.
Mike began to look forward to the next late night delivery because it meant that he wouldn't be closing up alone. The next crate that arrived that week was a non-animal character that most people had forgotten about. It was a small human boy wearing a red and blue striped shirt and a matching hat with a spinning propeller on top, holding a large yellow balloon in his hand. His wide, smiling mouth and large blue eyes stared out of the crate past Mike and Tim, and Mike knew immediately that this character was nothing more than an old animatronic. The audio test was completed with no movement detected from the character and they boarded up the crate once more and marked it with a cross. Tim looked around the storeroom, seeing the empty crates against the wall and the various characters that they had received that were now laid out on the table or heaped in a corner. He seemed to be immune to the constant glare that Mike felt from the unseen eyes in this room, though he still felt uneasy about being in there for too long.
"I thought for sure that this one was going to be Baby," said Tim. "I mean, how many more animatronics can there be?"
Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental had in fact been cleared out of all salvageable animatronics and the building had been stripped bare. There was only one crate left to arrive.
The nights were getting longer, and the darkness was creeping over the town earlier and earlier, bringing with it the frosty chill which signalled the end of the warm nights. Mike's car windows were more often frosted over with condensation by the time he finished work at night, and on the night that the final crate arrived, the chill outside would match the one that would rush through him.
As was by now routine, Mike and Tim stood under the roller door watching the truck turn around and reverse towards them to the storeroom entrance. The starless sky was overcast and the only light from the outside world that greeted them was the glowing taillights of the truck as it neared closer, staring at them like eyes in the dark. The rear tailgate lowered with a mechanical drone and the driver climbed up to retrieve the crate. After wheeling it out onto the platform, the man lowered it to ground level, the hydraulics hissing softly as they worked. Mike signed the paperwork and lowered the roller door as Tim wheeled the upright crate into the building with the pallet jack and grabbed the crowbar from the bench.
Mike's heart thrummed in his chest. He almost wanted to stand to the side so that whatever was inside wouldn't see him. He was fully aware that even though these deliveries contained nothing more than old, forgotten-about animatronic characters from the 80's and 90's, he knew that some of them were more than that. The question that kept him awake at night was just how many there were.
The sound of splintering wood cracked through the concrete room and the white foam balls spilled out onto the ground, cascading down through the gaps like icy waterfalls. Tim stared as the animatronic within was slowly revealed.
It was a little girl.
Her red, pigtailed hair matched the small red dress that she wore, and the frilly sleeves at her shoulders matched the flared skirt. She held a microphone, which in the business of animatronic entertainers meant that she was the star. The face of the company. Her bright green eyes gleamed out from under long eyelashes and dwarfed her red, blushing cheeks on either side of her wide smile. Mike stepped towards the front of the crate to get a proper look but stopped in his tracks when he saw it.
It was a strange feeling that he got from it. It felt empty, like a black void in the universe contained within this character. Mostly, it was like someone wearing a costume and holding completely still, pretending that they weren't real until they had everyone fooled, then they would jump out for their scare. It felt like it was hiding.
"Circus Baby," said Tim as he read the e-mail on his phone. "The main mascot of the sister franchise. This has gotta be worth something."
Tim had pulled out his phone and opened the e-mail related to it and opened the file attachments. It was the usual three sound clips. The sound of party music and children playing, the next one which was louder and more intense with the children screaming close to the point where it was recorded from, and the one of what sounded like a lone child crying in a room while a party carried on beyond a wall. None of the audio clips elicited a response from the animatronic girl.
Though its eyes never moved and not a twitch was detected from it, Mike was unnerved by it. It didn't just feel empty—it felt like the absence of anything altogether. It simply felt like nothing. It was a nothingness that watched him back from the corner of its eye as he stared at it, though it appeared to be looking past him. Tim was unperturbed as he typed out his response e-mail to head office, telling them that they had received the crate and he was marking it with a cross. With the e-mail sent, the two men worked to put the lid back on the crate and to nail it back shut.
They were done for the night, and Mike didn't want to hang around.
-xxx-
Before there had been Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental, there was a restaurant in the eighties called Circus Baby's Pizza World, though it never did officially open to the public. Baby herself had only ever been up on stage once and it was a night that ended in tragedy. Before opening night, a private evening was arranged as a showcase to the shareholders and board members who had funded the endeavour. Everything had been set up perfectly. Everything was just right. The food was cooked and brought out in a timely manner and the quality was of a standard reserved for gourmet restaurants. The lights shined, the music played, and the new Funtime animatronics did their performances for the people. Everything had gone exactly to plan. The small number of children that were brought along were in for a surprise as they approached Baby. She made them ice cream, served directly from her fingertips in a show of William Afton's genius which everyone applauded as they encouraged their kids to go get some more so they could watch.
Faith in Fazbear Entertainment was low ever since the tragedy of 1983 when a young boy, William's own son, was gravely injured by an animatronic after he was lifted up onto the stage by his older brother and later died in hospital. Being a business partner in the franchise, William struggled to find funding for his own company, Afton Robotics, and had worked hard to prove that his own creations were vastly different from Henry's. Many worries were put at ease as William stood up on the stage with them and demonstrated their safety features. Their sensors made them harmless.
Everyone was delighted with the evening and were all leaving through the front doors, crowding around their cars and smiling as they said their goodbyes. Their faith in the company had been well placed and they were excited for what possibilities the future held. It was around this time that William had noticed that his daughter had left his side and had been gone for some time. A grim panic had seized him, and he quickly excused himself from the company of revellers as he dashed back inside the restaurant. Young Elizabeth had been fascinated by Circus Baby and had begged him time and again to let her go play with her. Each time that he refused by saying that it was not safe yet, her resolve to go do it herself grew stronger. After all, hadn't he said that Baby was built just for her, in her image? With all the adults crowding around the entrance, filtering slowly out into the night as they loitered and gossiped, Elizabeth had found her chance.
When William ran back into the restaurant towards the stage, he saw only the animatronics there, standing still. Elizabeth was nowhere to be seen, but he knew in his heart exactly where she was and what had happened to her. Only a single shoe from the girl remained on the spot just in front of Baby, next to a dropped ice cream.
The value had equalled 1.
Circus Baby did not yet recognise Elizabeth as one of the few children that the hidden function was not to operate on. She was not yet safe for Elizabeth to be around alone. There had been no witnesses, and nobody had suspected that anything had occurred that night. Everything had worked perfectly.
William let nothing show. He stared at Baby in the centre of the stage and swallowed, his throat clicking as he did, then turned around and returned to the group of board members, continuing to soak in their congratulations. They would not know about this. They would not pull their funding and shut everything down. Eventually, the last car pulled away into the night and William returned to the foot of the stage. After barely containing a choked breath that hitched in his throat, he tensed his whole body and let out a primal roar of pain and rage before falling to his knees. When he had gone quiet, he looked up at Baby with a curious look on his face. He heard her speak in a voice that he had just thought he would never hear again.
"Daddy?"
The next morning, Circus Baby's Pizza World was closed, and everything inside had been cleared out. The abrupt closure did not go unnoticed by the public due to the hype that had been generated and the unsatisfying reason that had been given for it had been nothing more than a gas leak. The media had run a few stories on it but were unable to secure any solid information from any of the people in charge. William was not available for comment and he and his family were quite reclusive in the face of the media. A few years later, in 1987, the new and improved Freddy Fazbear's Pizza opened and the characters from Afton Robotics were leased out through there under the new company name of Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental.
The business continued to operate in the background, separate from Freddy's and would have gone out of business if the animatronic behind the Bite of '87 had been one of the Afton characters. Since it had been one of Henry's old ones that had been in the back room, it was the Fazbear name which took another hit and fell further out of public favour.
Years went by.
In the mid-nineties, William disappeared, and ownership of the company fell into the hands of his son, Michael, who wanted nothing to do with the company and had put no input into its operation, leaving it to be run as the managers saw fit. Then one day, when Afton Robotics was nearing the end of its life and was facing financial ruin, Michael went to the factory, answering a call he did not yet understand. It was Baby. It was his long departed little sister, Elizabeth. It was both.
For weeks, Michael Afton returned to the old, empty factory, filling the role of a night worker as he tried to leave his old life behind and make this pretend one real. His activities there remained unknown to his family and even, over time, to himself as he strayed further from reality and further into psychosis. He never forgot his baby sister and never got over her death. It had already been his fault that his baby brother had died all those years ago, and escaped punishment as William placed the blame on Henry's defective machines. In an effort to fix things, he had chosen to devote his life to be a good big brother to Elizabeth. When she was taken away not long after, he had lost everything.
His family grew concerned about his late night visits to the factory and when they questioned him about it, they found that he was not the same person he once was. They concluded that his years-long grief still had a hold on him and noted to professionals that he had begun to refer to Circus Baby as Elizabeth, as though the animatronic was his dead sister. When they went to the factory and found what he had done to the animatronics, how he had mangled them together into one larger being, how Baby was propped up against the wall, watching as though surveying everything, he was deemed mentally unfit to run the business and the family sold it to an unlikely bidder, the newly revived Fazbear Entertainment.
Circus Baby was the last animatronic to be crated up and shipped off to Rockstar Pizza, and Afton Robotics ceased to exist.