8

The camera still wasn't fixed. Since Mike's first day at Rockstar Pizza the one black square on the screen amongst all the other camera feeds had been nagging at him, gnawing at the back of his mind as the one constant annoyance of his job. Every time he brought it up, he was always told the same thing—that he didn't need to worry about the storeroom too much and he should be focusing more on the customers at the front of the restaurant. They would say that they would look into it soon and over time the replies became less courteous and more irritable, but Mike didn't care. He needed that camera to work. He needed to see what was happening back there whenever he heard movement in the walls.

Since Circus Baby's arrival, Mike had noticed a change in the atmosphere of the restaurant at night when everyone had left. The eyes that would watch him—stare at him through the walls—had lost their focus and the voices that would whisper through the vents had gone silent. They were still there—Mike could feel that in the late hours when he paid attention—but they were no longer taunting him. It was as though Baby's arrival had caught their attention and they were now hiding.

While the three voices from Funtime Freddy had gone quiet, the separate, tormented rage of the Purple Man that Mike had felt in the air since the yellow Bonnie had arrived still lingered on. But that presence wasn't interested in him. Since that first encounter with the Purple Man, the entity had been directionless and lost.

Mike didn't understand what was happening to him. It was just like last time, but back then the beings were directly calling out to him. This time he was just picking up on a call which wasn't meant for him, but he was always in their focus because they knew he could hear them. Out of all of the characters that had been acquired from Afton Robotics, only two of them had reacted to the audio tests, earning them a large tick on their crates for the engineer to deal with when he arrived in the small hours of the night to do his work. Those two animatronics—the mangled Funtime Freddy and the old, yellow Bonnie—had been boarded back up in their crates and sent on to the Fazbear Entertainment head office for further analysis. Those were the two animatronics that had felt deeply wrong to Mike, as though their very existence caused a constant stir in the air, filling the atmosphere with an energy that shouldn't be. It should have stopped when they were sent away, but it didn't. To Mike, it felt as though they hadn't left.

Circus Baby was another matter. She felt wrong in a way that Mike had never felt before. The other entities that stirred at night when the building was silent had made it obvious that they were aware of him and knew he could hear them. They were taunting him. Time had proven that those beings were benign. They had never reached him, never attacked him, and he had never even seen them roaming the building. Even the Purple Man had only ever appeared to him that one time. Baby, however, was malignant.

She, like most of the animatronics, did not respond to the audio stimuli and had her crate marked with a cross. Her crate was still there, in the storeroom, and Mike could always feel its deliberate emptiness as he came and went through the day to carry out his duties. He hated that crate. Out of all the colourful characters that filled the storeroom, she was the one that actually felt dangerous. There was an ongoing suppression of her consciousness, and to Mike, it left a negative, black emptiness in the room right where her crate was.

It was always in the dead silence of night when Mike noticed anything unusual. The kitchen was closed, and the cleaner had swept and mopped the floor of the dining room and the bathrooms, leaving a faint scent of ammonia in the air. Tim was in his office typing away on his computer managing the week's budget and advertising, and Mike was in the security office next to his, watching the cameras and going over his e-mails. He turned around and looked at the vent in the wall.

Since Baby arrived, Mike hadn't heard any movement or voices from it and actively tried to forget that it was there. Since it had been so silent, he now thought he could hear a faint, repetitive noise coming from it. He stood up, his chair rolling away from him and spinning slightly, and walked slowly towards it, listening. He was close, but he just couldn't hear it properly. He grabbed his desk chair and rolled it towards the corner of the room, under the vent, and he carefully climbed up on the swivelling seat and steadied himself, then pressed his ear against the vent grate.

It was a repetitive sound, very quiet and hard to determine. It could have just been the endless vibrations of the building's air conditioning system, but the sound that Mike could hear was too long between each repetition. It almost sounded like a quick thrumming sound which went on for ten seconds, then it would stop and be replaced with another, more irregular sound which also went for ten seconds. The second sound was much harder to tune into. At a stretch, it sounded like a murmuring voice, but it had the exact same quality every time it sounded. Mike stood there on his chair for several minutes before a sudden bang from the hallway outside startled him back to reality.

Tim had entered his office, opening the door with unexpected volume and was now standing in Mike's doorway, staring at Mike with a quizzical look on his face.

"Heard something," muttered Mike as he tried to steady himself on his chair as it threatened to roll out from under him. "Must have been a rat or something."

"Yeah," replied Tim. He had not been completely ignorant to Mike's recent stress and was fully aware of his descent at the last job. Now, he was beginning to worry that Mike was descending again. "Well, I'm heading home."

"Yep. I'm not far behind…"

Tim left and for once, Mike was glad to be left alone. He took a few steps towards his computer and turned it off, then immediately climbed back onto the swivelling chair and listened to the vent. After a few more minutes, he still couldn't discern what he was hearing and turned to walk out of the office. He was halfway down the hallway when he heard something loud. Something quick.

Heavy, solid footsteps came from the back room, rushing towards the door. Mike spun around and watched wide-eyed as the handle shook violently in its socket and was then followed by three loud bangs on the door. There was a short pause before more banging came from the room as the roller door was rattled on its rails. Rooted to the spot, Mike was immediately overcome by sheer, primal panic. Suddenly, the loud footsteps moved quickly back down to the end of the storeroom and was replaced abruptly by a thick, dreaded silence.

Mike had to make a choice. Those sounds were real. They were not ones that he could later wave aside as auditory hallucinations from stress and exhaustion. Right now, there was no question that someone was back there, and as head of security, Mike had a duty to inspect the property for any trespassers. More than ever, he wished that the camera back there worked. Or, more likely, that Tim was still there with him. He took the heavy flashlight from his belt and, gripping it like a club, began the long, slow walk towards the back room door at the end of the hallway.

Turning his absolute fear into a temporary rage, he flung the door open and yelled out into the darkness beyond for whoever was in there to identify themselves. Nothing stirred in the silence but he knew that someone was there, hiding—watching him. He reached in and flicked the light switch just to the left of the door, half expecting to see someone standing right in front of him as the light came on. All he saw was the usual storeroom that he walked through every day. Keeping his nerve, he stepped through the doorway with purpose and authority, allowing his footsteps to slap loudly on the concrete floor.

Though the long room was lit, Mike turned on the flashlight with a click and aimed its wide beam towards the far end where he had heard the footsteps come from. All was silent as he moved down the centre of the room, walking between work benches covered in parts, boxes overflowing with plushies, and animatronics lined up against the walls on either side of him, some of them still leaning in their crates like recently opened coffins. All of them stared blankly ahead, their smiles twisted and warped under the harsh strength of his flashlight. Down the end, against the left wall, was the crate that Baby had arrived in. Mike could see the big cross that they marked on the lid, indicating that it had not responded to their test. He also noted its position.

The crate had been closed. Mike was sure of it. Now, the lid rested loosely against the opening as though someone had opened it to have a look inside and didn't close it again properly. Mike stopped and shined his flashlight at each of the characters that surrounded him and instinctively flicked it on and off at each of them. It was a trick from his old job that had come in quite handy a few times. He turned back towards the opened crate and forced himself to step forwards. He had to confirm his suspicions. He reached out to the loose lid and pulled it aside, shining the light at the animatronic within.

There stood Circus Baby, staring directly at him with her large green eyes, her white, laughing face seeming to mock him for his fear of characters that were made to entertain children. Mike felt as though she was watching him, reading his thoughts and invading his mind, until he moved out of her line of sight and saw that she did not track him. With his flashlight raised, he took in her every detail, this clown girl in the red dress and the pigtails, the most advanced of the Afton machines and the former face of the company. He flicked the light on and off a few times and saw no movement. He looked her in the eyes again and whispered to her.

"I see you."

A noise from behind him broke him out of her spell and he whipped around to see what had made it. He was at the end of the storeroom and all that was left to see was the concrete wall. Quietly, he stepped towards it and listened for any sound. As he got closer, he thought he could hear something. Pressing his ear gently against the cold wall, he could just hear a repetitive sound coming from the other side and after a moment, he realised that it was the same sound he had heard from the vent earlier—quiet party music and then a man's voice. Over and over. He pulled away and looked the wall over with his flashlight. It looked like the other grey concrete walls that lined the building, but now that he looked closely at the edges, he could see a thin gap running along it.

Mike stepped towards the edge on the right and pressed his face against the cool, rough surface, listening closely. It was definitely the same sound as before, but he still couldn't quite tell what it was. He pressed his ear harder against the wall, certain that he had heard something move behind it only a moment ago. He didn't realise how hard he was pressing against the wall until he felt it move slightly away from him. The wall was heavy and didn't move much, but it was enough to cause it to make a knocking sound. It wasn't loud, but it was enough to disturb whatever was on the other side.

All at once, Mike felt an incredible sense of impending doom rush over him as a collective consciousness turned its attention towards him. All at once, Mike realised just how alone he was in the back room of this empty restaurant. Frozen to the spot, heart thrumming in his chest so hard he thought it might give out, Mike felt the unseen eyes that watched him turn back away one by one, and he was left standing there wondering if any of what he had experienced just then had actually been real.

Letting out a breath, Mike regained his composure and looked back around the room that he was in. Messy, cluttered, and narrow, it was still just an empty storeroom. There was no-one here and without the camera working, he couldn't even play back the footage to see what had moved so violently in here only minutes ago. He began the long walk back to the door down the other end when he heard a voice speak to him. A voice from the crate that he was sure wasn't opened before. A girl's voice, soft and sinister.

"You have the same name as him, but you are not him. He helped us. Will you help us?"

Mike spun around and waved his flashlight wildly, immediately finding the source of the voice. There was Baby, leaning out of her crate, her head turned to stare at him as he stood partway down the room. Her green eyes were locked onto him and he felt from them an intelligence and an evil cunning that he hadn't felt from any of the others. In his shaky beam of light, he saw her step out of the crate, her face always facing his, and turn towards him. He then saw her move so rapidly that he couldn't quite process what was happening. Instinct took over, and he turned and sprinted towards the door down the other end of the storeroom, heavy footsteps only yards behind him.

Mike didn't quite remember what happened next. There were flashes of him slamming the door and locking it, then he remembered fumbling with his car keys as he sat in the driver's seat trying to start the engine, never taking his eyes off the restaurant doors. But the one thing that he did remember was that he had dropped his flashlight in the storeroom before he ran out of there. He remembered it acutely the next morning when he saw it sitting on his desk as he walked into his office.

-xxx-

Baby's crate was shipped out unexpectedly the next day not long after Mike had gotten into work. As soon as he walked down the hallway to his office, Tim caught up with him and told him of the sudden request to have it sent off to head office. It had just been arranged early that morning—all Mike had to do was see it off when the truck arrived.

The discovery of the false wall at the end of the storeroom played on Mike's mind constantly, though he was beginning to doubt his own memories. The end wall—which he was sure had been bare and devoid of clutter—now had a work bench in front of it with spare animatronic parts strewn out across it and loose wires next to a soldering iron. The bench had shelves on it, covering the whole wall and it was impossible to hear any sound from it during the day with the animatronic band playing their songs just on the other side of the right-hand wall.

Mike never mentioned any of it to Tim. Instead, he pretended that everything was normal and tried to focus only on his security duties. It wasn't worth the scrutiny. As the days went on, he was less certain of what had even happened that night, or if anything had happened at all. After all, he was certain that he had dropped the flashlight on the floor and hadn't left it on his desk before leaving, and he was certain that the end wall had been bare and not full of clutter. He was tired and, once again, was becoming less sure of what was real and what wasn't. It was hard to be certain of anything that had only happened to him when he was alone when he had no proof to back him up.

It had to have been real. Mike couldn't shake that undeniable fear that he felt when Baby had looked directly at him. He couldn't unhear the words she spoke to him. You have the same name as him. He didn't know who she was talking about, but the words had shaken him to his core.

One morning Mike had gotten in early. Instead of walking straight through the front doors, he walked along the side of the building and around to the back. He paced the back wall of the building, counting his steps as he did. By doing this, he roughly measured the length of the back outer wall and later did the same in the storeroom when it was quiet. It was hard to get a precise measure of the inside of the room from one end to the other, but after a few tries, Mike concluded that the inside of the storeroom was a good five paces shorter than the outside wall suggested. There was a hidden space back there. The question was, what was in it?

At night, when Tim had left to go home and Mike was alone in his office, he would climb up to the vent and try to listen to the repetitive sound that he heard only a few days ago. This time as he listened, all he could hear was a rattling of the building's air conditioning unit. He was sure that it hadn't been that loud before. Things were changing around him and he felt more and more under scrutiny until the day came that Tim came and sat with him in his office. On some level, Mike knew that this day was coming. The wellness check.

"Hey, buddy," Tim began, a troubled look on his face. "So, I just got an e-mail from the higher-ups. They want you to take a week off immediately. Something about budget concerns."

"But what about you?" Mike asked, giving him a quizzical look. "You've been here longer than me and I've never seen you take a day off."

"Yeah, they want me to take one day off a week over the next month. They don't want any of us saving up too much leave time. I'm not sure what they're worried about, to be honest. We've been doing great since we opened."

"Can't I just have it paid out? That way I can keep working."

"Look, I'll be honest with you," Tim leaned in and looked Mike up and down quickly. "You look like hell. I really think some time off would do you some good. Unwind a little."

Mike didn't want to press the issue—knowing full well that the decision had already been made—and before he knew it, it was all arranged and the next week would be his time off.

Driving back home that Friday, Mike couldn't help but feel that all of this had been planned by some unknown, interfering third party. Like he was getting close to something that he didn't understand and was being gotten rid of for a while. But the more he thought about it, the more it sounded like a paranoid delusion.

Tim was right. He needed to stop and sort himself out for a while. He needed help.