It had been quite a surprise to Mr. Henry when the Highway Patrol van showed up at Mr. Henry's door the previous day with a very dusty Guillermo the Bull in the back.
The local news crew after "local color" was an even bigger surprise, and well, Henry had to admit, a runaway animatronic that he'd seen put in storage years ago along with the other units from the late 1980s on the advice of Wolfrum and Hart, only to learn that it had been dancing along the freeway towards his house, was about locally colorful as you could get.
Colorful or not, he called Mr. Raus to clear any filming with him and FazCorp's silent partners first. Publicity was publicity, but some publicity FazCorp could do without, like the bite of '87 and the following shitstorm.
Wolfrum and Hart, FazCorp's new backers, immediately stepped forward, whisking Mr. Afton, Henry's neighbor turned business partner back east to some place called Arkham to recover from his breakdown after finding little Zachery Afton half-dead of a severe head injury in the jaws of Fredbear, with little Sammy Henry disappearing the same day. The parents of the party crashing teenagers who caused the horrible accident were discreetly dealt with, as was the media – but they never found Charlotte's missing twin.
Henry would have shut down FazCorp and moved his wife and remaining child back to the Midwest, maybe taking up that robotics professorship at the University of Rolla he'd turned down before the whole nightmare began. However, somebody had to support Mr. Afton's family – FazCorp was all Henry had left; he felt responsible for the whole horrible situation even if it had been a group of teenagers who weren't supposed to be in the building who'd caused the death of a little boy who loved Fredbear almost as much as he loved watching "The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" every morning before school with fellow TMNT fanatic Sammy over a bowl of Cheerios even if Sammy was only four.
Henry soldiered on, despite Afton's brief return and disappearance months later, only to lose Vinnie, and several child guests without a trace, of losing Mrs. Henry to suicide, all of it adding to the dull ache in the background that seeing Guillermo in his workshop this morning suddenly made sharp.
Mr. Raus, their liason with Wolfrum and Hart for FazCorp, who'd tidied up this horrible mess as if it never happened, didn't answer his phone. Perhaps he was in a meeting. Reluctantly Henry dealt with the camera crew himself, an ordeal for a man more comfortable among children, animatronic rabbits, and precision calipers than adults with their impatient demands.
Wolfrum and Hart handled Maggie— he'd found her frail body with its candy-pink hair in his workroom beaten to death clutching a handful of yellow fun fur a week after losing Vinnie, Mr. Afton again, and the others. Maggie, who calmed Vinnie down amazingly so that he proved an invaluable assistant in Henry's workshop, had been a rare find, a schoolmate of Vinnie's whom Vinnie had brought over one afternoon. The shabbily dressed little girl who reeked of stale cigarette smoke had shyly shown him the drawings in her battered sketchbook at Vinnie's enthusiastic urging; drawings which gave him new ideas beyond copycatting the designs of his and Afton's children's favorite stuffed toys. Mrs. Henry, realizing what Maggie's home life must have been like hired her to help take care of the twins when she wasn't helping in Henry's workshop – anything to keep her out of that mess of too many babies, revolving-door boyfriends, and domestic abuse. When her body in the pretty dress he and Mrs. Henry had given her for her birthday washed up on the other side of L.A. in one of the concrete trapped rivers, Raus took care of that, too, though in his heart, Henry knew she'd deserved better.
Wolfrum and Hart also dealt with Maggie's mother's boyfriend of the moment who, when the child failed to show up at home for more than a week, tried to make money from it.
Yes, indeed, the partners handled all the messy details. No glitches. No interruptions. No public scandals that would destroy the business he and Afton had slowly built together on a shoestring before his partner decided that if they wanted to go beyond renting Henry's slowly growing collection of animatronics out on the weekends for yuppie kid's backyard birthday parties, they needed a backer with the cash and pull to get them a permanent home for Henry's toys.
Charlotte, the missing Sammy's twin sister shooed the local news reporter away by helping Henry throw a tarp over Guillermo where he stood on their front porch and plugging his power unit into the outside outlet that Henry installed for outdoor parties, giving the prototype animatronic enough juice to walk into Henry's cluttered garage workshop, where he now stood, outer fur suit stripped off, titanium endoskeleton exposed and gleaming under the powerful shoplights.
How Guillermo got loose, Henry had no idea – the bull had been an experiment, a prototype that had been mothballed about the same time as the animatronics which had been in service when Zachery met his end and later when seven children and Afton vanished during a birthday party when electronics all over the building went crazy.
Mr. Afton had come back from Arkham… different.