"Charlie!"
John crawled through the rubble toward the place where she was, choking on some dust. He tripped over a block of concrete, scraping his hands as if they were stripped down with a flint knife. He clenched his teeth, the pain was unbearable. John reached the place where she had been, and he could feel her presence beneath him. He grabbed the block of concrete, mustering all of his strength to lift it up and move it aside.
"Charlie!" John cried her name again as he shoved another block of concrete away. "I'm coming, Charlie!" He was gasping for breath, moving the remains of the house with desperate strength, but his own strength was running out fast. His hands slipped as he attempted to lift the next block of concrete. He realized his hands left streaks of blood wherever they touched. He wiped his hands on his jeans, clenching his teeth in immense pain, but putting up with it. He tried again, and this time the broken concrete moved. He took several steps back, then dropped it, watching as it crashed into pieces and dust filled the air. Beneath the sounds of broken debris he heard a whisper. "John ..."
"Charlie," John's heart stopped beating. Again, the rubble moved underneath his feet. He fell down hard, landing on his back. He struggled to breathe, his lungs failing to work. After a good minute, he began to breathe again. He sat up lightheaded and saw what the collapse had revealed. He was in the hidden room of Charlie's childhood home. Before him was a smooth metal wall. At the center was a door.
It was only an outline, without any hinges or a handle, but he knew what it was because Charlie told him.
"... John," she whispered his name again. The sound seemed to come from everywhere—and nowhere. He stood up and put his hands on the door; it was cold. He pressed his face against it just as Charlie had, and it grew colder as if it was draining the warmth from his skin. John pulled back and rubbed the cold spot on his face, watching as the door as the shiny metal began to dull out. Its color paled and the door itself began to thin out, beginning to look like frosted glass. John saw a shadow behind the glass, the figure of a person. The figure stepped closer, the door still thinning out until he could nearly see through it. He moved closer, studying the figure on the other side.
The figure had a face, sleek and polished, its eyes like a statue's, sculpted but unseeing. John peered through, his breath clouding the near-transparent barrier, then suddenly the eyes snapped open, fixed on nothing. They were dead eyes. Someone laughed, a frantic laugh that echoed in the small and sealed room. John looked around for the source as the laughter grew in pitch, ringing louder and louder. He covered his ears with his bloody hands as the piercing noise became unbearable. "CHARLIE!," he cried out again, this time without response.
John awakened, his heart racing. The laughter went on, following him out of the dream. His eyes wandered around the room, then landing on the TV, where a clown's painted face filled the screen, laughing. John sat up up, rubbing his cheek—the same one that he pressed against the door in his dream. He checked the time, then he sighed in relief. He had just enough time to get to work. He lied back, taking a moment to catch his breath. On the TV screen, a news interviewer was holding a microphone up for a man dressed up as a clown one would see in a circus, complete with a painted face, and red nose. He was wearing a full yellow clown suit.
"So tell me," the interviewer began with a bright attitude in his voice. "Did you already have this costume, or did you make it exclusively for the grand opening?"
John turned the TV off and went off to take a shower. He got up from the couch, walking towards the hallway. He noted the lack of any real decorations, he never found any interest in putting them up anyway. He walked straight through the hallway, and at the end was the bathroom. He stepped inside, turning on the lights. He closed the door behind him. John looked into the mirror, seeing a young and beaten man. John began to undress himself, placing a towel on the floor next to the shower entrance. He placed his clothes inside the laundry basket inside the closet. He grabbed a washcloth and stepped inside the shower, closing the doors behind him. He turned on the water, and tested it to make sure it wasn't too hot or cold.
He was in the shower for twenty minutes. The last half of it he spent trying to figure out what had happened the other night, neglecting the fact that he could be late for work. He had replayed the scene in his mind over and over again, and yet he still couldn't make heads or tails of it. It had to be an animatronic, but it was one he had never seen before. It was almost human, but not quite. It was eerie to him, perhaps a model in which other animatronics could be built on. The speculation continued in his head for minutes.
Once finished with his shower, he stepped outside, wrapping a towel around himself. After a good minute, he went into his room, putting on a pair of shorts and a tee shirt. After adjusting his clothes, he walked back inside the bathroom, hanging the towel back up. He looked into the mirror, seeing his hair soaking wet while his clothes didn't quite fit him. John decided to ignore it as he turned off the light and walked away.
John stepped back into the living room, rubbing his eyes. He shivered as he walked towards the kitchen. He was starving, and though he kind of wanted to have a fancy breakfast such as eggs or a bagel, he knew that he would be going right to work afterward and there was no time to cook anything. He was late to work once in the past, he would not want to have another strike. He decided to go for making a sandwich. He opened the fridge and got out a slice of bread. Getting a knife from the drawer, he cut the bread in half. He took a few thin slices of ham and put them between the bread slices. He closed the refrigerator door as he walked over to the kitchen, taking a bite out of the sandwich.
John sat down at the table. He looked up at the ceiling—at the spinning fan. He stared at the fan for a while, occasionally taking bites from his sandwich. He was procrastinating, lost in thought once again. He wanted to believe that Charlie was out there. Hell, he heard her voice the other night, yet he also witnessed her get crushed by many springlocks. How she could have survived that was beyond John's understanding.
John took one last bite from sandwich, finishing it. He didn't get up afterward, instead he just lied back down on the couch. He couldn't muster the energy needed to go to get up, and even so, he didn't want to. He scratched his head, very distressed. There were many bad events that have happened over the past few days, but Charlie dying takes the cake.
John, fearing being even more late, got up. He walked over to the counter and grabbed his keys, along with his wallet. He stuffed his wallet inside the pocket to his jeans, and he walked out the door. He closed the door and locked it behind him, putting his keys away and going to his car.
He had been working all day, but the noise was still unbearable. Rattling, clanging, and other sounds produced by jackhammers and various machinery, along with intermittent shouts. John squeezed his eyes shut to try to drown out the noise, but the vibrations pulsated against his bones. Amid the noise was the desperate sound of laughter, which rang in his ears. The figure from his nightmare came to him again, just out of sight, and he felt as though if he turned his head the right way, he could see the face from behind the door ...
"John!"
John's eyes shot open as he quickly turned around, nearly cracking a bone in the process. Luis was standing a meter away, giving him a confused stare. "I called you three times," he said. John shrugged at the chaos around them.
"Hey, some of the guys over here are going out after this. You coming?" Luis asked.
"I can't," John hesitated.
"Come on, it'll be good for you. All you do now is work and sleep." He laughed and placed a hand over John's shoulder.
"Right, good for me." John smiled back, then looked at the ground as his expression began to fade away. "I have so much going on personally, I will have to pass." He tried to sound convincing, though he really just feared talking to anyone he didn't know outside of work.
"Right, lot's going on. Just let me know if you change your mind," Luis said. He patted John over the shoulder again, and headed back to the forklift. It hadn't been the first time John turned them down, not even the third. It occurred to him that they would eventually just stop trying. 'Maybe that would be for the best,' John thought.
"John!" another voice shouted.
'Now what?'
It was the foreman, shouting at him from the door of his office, a trailer that has been brought onsite for the duration of the construction. John took a hike across the construction zone, going through a vinyl sheet in the trailer's doorway. After a few moments, he found himself standing across a folding table, with the foreman on the other side.
"I've got a few workers telling me you're distracted."
"I'm just focused on my job, that's all," John said, forcing a smile and trying to hide his personal issues. Oliver smiled, not convinced in the slightest.
"Focused," Oliver repeated John's statement. John's smile faded away, startled. Oliver sighed. "Look, I gave you a chance because your cousin said you worked hard. I glossed over the fact that you walked right out of the last job you had. You know I took a risk on you?"
John swallowed hard. "Yes, sir, I know."
"Cut it out with the 'sir'. Just cut the crap and listen to me."
"Look, I do what I'm told. I don't understand the problem."
"Your reactions are slow, you look like you're daydreaming out there. You're not much of a team player these past few days."
"What?"
"Say 'what' again. This is an active construction zone. If you're in la-la land, or you're not thinking of the safety of other workers out there, someone could get hurt, or even worse, end up dead because of your carelessness. I'm not saying you have to share secrets or braid one's hair, I'm saying you have to be on the team. They have to trust that you're not going to let them down when they need you the most." John gave him an understanding nod. "This is a good job, John. I think these are good guys out there, too. Work isn't easy to come by, especially in these days. I need you to get your head out of your ass, and in to the game. Next time I see you in the clouds ... well, just don't put me in that position. Understand?"
"Yeah, I understand," John mumbled. He didn't move, he stood on the brown carpet as if he was waiting to be dismissed from detention.
"Okay. Get out, and go back to work." John walked out. This little talk had taken up the last few minutes of his work day. He helped Sergei put away some of the tools and equipment.
"Well, I guess this is it for today," John mumbled just loud enough for Sergei.
"Hey, have you thought about the offer Luis gave you?" Sergei asked.
"I ..." John waned off, spotting Oliver out of the corner of his eye. "Maybe next time," he said. He knew that there wasn't going to be a 'next time', he was just pushing them back. He knew they'd quit eventually.
"Come on, it's my little excuse to avoid that new kid's place—my daughter's been pressing me to go there for the past week. Lucy is gonna take her, but those robots they have, they creep the life out of me."
John paused, his heart nearly stopping as the world grew silent around him. "What place?," John said in a slightly fearful and angry tone.
"Wow, it's not that terrible. Do you have a problem with kids places or something?," Sergei asked.
John took a few steps backward. "No, and I don't want to talk about it."
"So, you coming?" Sergei asked him again.
"Maybe another time," John said. "What place?" he asked, this time in a much more friendly tone.
"It's called Circus Baby's Pizza World. I honestly don't know how they came up with the name, like Circus... Baby?"
John shrugged. "When I was a kid, they had a place called Freddy Fazbear's Pizza."
"Well, I can see some resemblance there. I mean the robots at the place, they're creepy. Not creepy in any scary form of way, it's just uncanny."
"What do you mean by uncanny?" John asked.
"Like, they look so real, so fluid in their movements. Their speech is so precise, so well done. It's honestly impressive how they got those things to walk around, serve pizza. I mean one of them can even inflate balloons from their fingertips."
John raised an eyebrow. "Well, that's certainly impressive," he said. "What's so creepy about them?"
"Well, they're pretty real. But, not quite real. I think they call it the uncanny valley, but I'm not too sure. Every time I go there, I feel like I'm about to puke."
"Bad atmosphere? I've been there before, trust me," John assured him.
"No, not that. Not smells, those are fine. My ears are always ringing when I'm in there, of course I don't hear it because of all the other noise, but it gives me there horrible headaches."
John's blood froze. For a moment, time stopped. His mind flashed back to his experience with the "twisted" animatronics weeks earlier. He recalled how the illusion discs present in those animatronics caused him to see things that weren't there. Perhaps, modifying the look of the animatronics. When he was exposed to these discs, he had a very similar experience to what Sergei stated.
John came back to reality when Sergei was right in his face. "You alright? It looks like you just saw a ghost," he said worriedly.
"I'm ... fine. I just need to go home," John said. He turned around and bolted to his car, not even turning back. He wanted to get out of the construction zone as quickly as possible, and go home. The car was a old and brownish-red, something that might have been cool back in middle school or high school. 'Wait, I can't even have a car in middle school,' John remarked in his head, embarrassed. Now it was just a reminder that he was still a kid that hasn't moved on with life, a mark of status that had become a mark of shame in less than a year. He opened the door and sat inside. His hands were shaking. "Get a grip." He closed his eyes and clutched the wheel, trying to limit his movements. "This is life, you can deal with it," he tried to motivate himself. He then opened his eyes and sighed. "That's probably something lame my dad would've said." He turned the key, and changed the gears of the car. He turned to his left, realizing he hadn't closed the car door. He closed it, and looked to the road. He backed his car out of the "parking lot", if it could even be called one. He turned to the road, and drove away.
The drive home should have been ten minutes, but the route he took was more like a half an hour, as if he avoided going through town. If he didn't go through town, he wouldn't run into anyone he didn't want to chat with. 'Be a team player.' He couldn't muster any practical resentment toward Oliver. He wasn't a team player, not anymore. For the past few months, he'd been coming and going from home to work like a train on a track, stopping to buy food and other items now and then. He only spoke when needed, no eye contact of any sort. He was always startled when people talked to him, whether they were coworkers, or strangers asking the time. He made conversation, but he was better at speaking while walking away. He was always polite, while also making it clear he had places to go. Sometimes he felt like he was fading away, and it was jarring and disappointing, to be reminded that he could still be seen by others.
He pulled into the parking lot of his apartment complex, a two story building not really meant for long term tenants as concluded from its size. The apartment complex itself was very similar to Jessica's, and he wondered if they were built by the same team. There was a light in the window of the manager's office on the second floor. He had tried for a month to keep track of the hours they were open, but concluded that there was no pattern to it at all.
He grabbed an envelope from the glove compartment—a check for his rent. He walked towards the door and knocked. There was no response, though there were sounds of footsteps inside. After a second knock, the door opened partially. An old woman with the skin of a long time smoker peered out at him. "Hey, Delia." John smiled, but she did not smile back. "Rent check." John handed the envelope to her. "I know it's late. I came here the other day but nobody was here."
"Was it during business hours?" Delia peered into the envelope suspiciously, as if she was expecting something other than a check inside.
"The lights were off, so ..."
"Then it wasn't during business hours." Delia bared her teeth, but it wasn't much of a smile. John knew she had tried to smile. "I saw you hung up a plant," she said out of the blue.
"Oh yeah." John looked out the window toward his apartment, as though he may be able the plant from where he stood. Of course, no dice. "It's nice to take care of something." He tried to smile again, but he quickly gave up. "That's allowed, right?"
"Yes, you can have a plant." Delia took a step back inside and looked prepared to close the door. "People don't usually settle in here, that's all. Usually there's a house, then a wife, and then the plant."
"Right." John looked down at his work out shoes. "It's just been a rough year for me, and especially my family," he said as the door closed in front of him. He sighed, and then he headed to his apartment at the side of the complex, now his own for yet another month. It was a single bedroom studio apartment with a full bath and a small kitchen. He kept the blinds up while he was away, to show he had nothing. The area was prone to theft, and it seemed a good idea to show there was nothing to steal.
Once inside, John locked the door and carefully slid the chain in place, trying not to snap it. These chains themselves were not very tough, and it certainly wasn't comforting to him that the only thing between him and a burglary was a weak old chain that could easily break. He wondered why he even bothers. The apartment itself was cold and dark, and really quiet. His headache was still there, but he has been getting used to them. He always wondered why he couldn't just get some imitrex tablets, since they haven't costed much, especially considering how sparsely populated the area was.
The place itself was barely furnished. The only thing that he added to it was four cardboard boxes full of books. He glanced at them with a familiarity, having read almost all of them. He walked over to his bedroom and sat down on the bed, the springs creaking slightly. He didn't bother turning on the light, since there was enough daylight coming out from the window.
John looked toward his dresser, where a familiar face looked back at him—a toy rabbit's head. Its body was nowhere to be found.
"What did you do today?" John said, looking into the plush rabbit's eyes as if it might recognize him. Theodore just stared back blankly, his eyes lifeless and dark. "You look terrible—worse than me." He stood up and approached the rabbit, grabbing it by the ears. 'Time to throw you away.' He considered it every day. He clenched his jaw, not wanting to look at it anymore. It reminded him of Charlie.
John wanted to forget Charlie. While there was still a shimmer of hope that she was out there, he felt almost hopeless to it. He felt empty many times. He would mindlessly walk miles of road until late at night, returning home and trying to read, or just staring at the wall for hours. The familiarity was annoying for him.
He grabbed his pillow and walked back to the living room. He lied down on the couch, swinging his legs over the arm so that he could fit inside the small couch. The silence in his apartment made his ears ring. He grabbed the remote on the floor and turned on the TV. The screen was black and white, the reception was terrible. He could barely make out faces through the static, but the chatter of a talk show was rapid and charming. He turned down the volume low, and dozed off.