Chapter 5: The Beginning

If Evan's death dimmed and distorted the world around me, Charlie's death sharpened it back into focus.

I showered. I ate. I did the laundry Mum had let pile up. I asked her if I could visit Uncle Henry, and she nodded absently. I biked away from the house as fast as I could, for once whizzing down the road instead of trudging through the woods.

Hot wind threatened to suffocate me, but I coughed and grimly peddled on. Uncle Henry's house was in the same woods that we lived in. He had the next property over, though both his house and ours sat on huge tracts of land and felt like several blocks.

His Buick waited just outside the front door, trunk open and stuffed with cardboard boxes. There were more of these, plus some suitcases, inside the car itself. I didn't hear anything in the house or in his workshop, so I lifted a couple of the box lids. As I should've guessed, books and blueprints were stacked inside.

I trotted up the front steps and rang the doorbell. I held my breath with anticipation, like I was in an episode of Scooby Doo, and the doorbell would trigger a trap door under my feet. For a second, I pictured the sudden drop, and my insides lurched.

I shuffled close to the house and tried the door. It was unlocked, so I let myself in and called, "Uncle Henry?" There was no response, so I tried again, louder.

This time, a muffled sob met my words. I charged up the stairs to Uncle Henry's room, half-expecting to find him hurt or dying.

I barged in without knocking and found him sitting cross-legged on the floor by a bookshelf, with a photo album open in his lap. "Michael?" he asked, confused.

"Sorry, I let myself in. I thought something was wrong." I shoved my hands into my pockets. "Well, something is wrong. I meant something else."

He patted the hardwood floor beside him, and I joined him. "Everything is wrong," he said. "The world is wrong. This world that would leave a poor girl outside in the rain and ignore her while she…" He choked up, wiped away a strand of tears beneath his glasses, and said bitterly, "The police called it a 'random act of violence.' It's their way of saying they're done solving the crime. It's an official shrug of their investigative shoulders. This… this monstrosity has a label, and that's all that they need to satisfy them." His calloused hands tightened around the photo album.

One side of the open book showed Henry and a waifish blonde woman at a park with two toddlers. The grinning kids were trying to squirm away, but the camera caught the four of them together in the nick of time, while the kids were both half-flopped over their parents' arms and straining for something out of reach. The other side of the page had pictures from a restaurant's grand opening. The blonde woman was there, too, spreading her arms to showcase Chica's Party World like it was a prize on a game show. That had to be Charlie's mom, in front of Henry's first restaurant, the one he had before he met dad.

"Can I… do anything?" I knew the answer, but I asked because that's the kind of things grownups say to each other after something bad happens. I didn't know if it brought them any kind of comfort. It sounded pointless to me. I tried something more specific. "Have you remembered to eat and drink today?"

"I'm fine, Michael… But thank you for asking."

We sat in silence, and Henry flipped through pages at random. They weren't in any sort of order, so he jumped around in time, taking memories at random and lingering over some. He froze at a fuzzy Polaroid of a restaurant interior, strewn with cobwebs, spiders, and other Halloween decorations. His wife, in a puffy pink princess dress, held the twins, one on each hip of her pale skirt. Mike couldn't tell which was which, but one baby was sucking on a tiny fist while the other tugged at the woman's hair.

"This was the last day we were all a family," he whispered. "Now it's all over."

I wondered if he was right. Two families had lost four children between them in just a few years. The word "random" didn't sit well with me, either. "What will you do now?"

"Your dad and I are closing this branch of Freddy's, so we're both going elsewhere to manage different locations."

That was news to me. I wonder if Dad had told me or not. I probably wouldn't have remembered.

"We probably won't see each other for a while, Michael. I'm glad you stopped by. You're the last… Well, never mind. I'm glad you're still here."

He snapped the photo album shut and nodded with sudden finality. A burst of words spilled out of me in response. "Before you go, I need to know something. I know you probably don't want to think about the animatronics right now, but it's really important." He scrunched his bushy eyebrows together but nodded, so I went on. "Was there something weird about Circus Baby?"

"Circus… Baby?" He looked baffled as he repeated the words, but then understanding dawned. "She was going to be the face for Circus Baby's Pizza World – a place fully designed by your father and Afton Robotics." His mouth twisted around the company name. "He patented the designs for those animatronics himself, so I never saw the plans. The restaurant closed for good just after its grand opening because of the gas… Well, it was because your sister died there, but William told the public there was a gas leak."

He plumbed the recesses of his memory. "Now that I think about it, some board members asked me about Circus Baby's design, but I can't remember what they said."

"Where is she now? Still at the restaurant?"

"No… I think she's in storage. Your dad talked sometimes about renting her out, along with some of the other animatronics. For parties or deliveries or something like that. The idea never got off the ground."

"Oh. Okay." My head drooped. "It's just… Evan thought there was something wrong with her, and I can't exactly ask my dad."

"No, I expect not." He struggled to his feet and tucked the photo album under his arm. I sprang up and helped tug him up. "Let's go outside, shall we?"

"Sure." I walked him to his car then solemnly extended my hand, which he shook. "Goodbye," I said.

"Goodbye, Michael." He turned from me, closed up his car, and drove away.

I biked behind him for a while, but eventually he pulled out of sight. I made it back home and told Mum, "Uncle Henry left."

"I'm not surprised." Her face was bathed in the off-color glow of the television and didn't even twitch.

"Want me to make dinner?" I asked, realizing we'd run out of sympathy casseroles. A pile of empty dishes waited to be washed before they could be reclaimed. I'd have to tackle that next.

"Do you know how?"

"I can figure it out."

She accepted, and after some thought, I assembled sandwiches, microwaved frozen vegetables, and resolved to crack open some cookbooks after today.

It was a short meal and a long cleanup, and I retreated to my room to collapse when it was all over. Fredbear wasn't at my window, but the Fredbear plush waited on my bed. I shifted him onto a nightstand, wondering for the first time why he was so heavy.

I poked and prodded at his solid insides and scrunched up my forehead. I turned him around in my hands, feeling the weight shift. It felt like metal. Had Fredbear been a little robot this whole time?

I found a pair of scissors and snipped at one of the bear's seams. I didn't find any real robot parts, not like the metal endoskeletons inside the animatronic suits. Instead, Fredbear concealed a battery pack that was connected to a small speaker and to a video camera that ran to one of his eyes.

I shivered.

Someone was watching Evan and talking to him. That day at the hospital, I thought I'd heard Fredbear talking.

Instead, the person who gave it to Evan had been talking.

That person barreled into my room at that moment to snap, "Put that down! What are you doing?"

I glared up at my father, who was wild-eyed, unkempt, and reeking of sweat and beer. "What were you doing?" I countered, gesturing to the bear. "You were spying on him."

"I had to keep an eye on him somehow, and I couldn't be with him all the time." To my surprise, he sounded defensive. It was almost like I had the upper hand in the conversation for once.

"Were you watching all of us? How many more cameras are in this house?"

"Enough that I've heard your mother call her friends and tell them she's leaving us."

"What?"

And just like that, he regained the upper hand. "Enough that I've seen you sleepwalking at night."

I hadn't realized I'd been doing that, but I wasn't surprised, either. I also didn't care after the first thing he said. Was Mum really leaving? Had she finally had enough?

"Enough," Dad continued, "that I've seen you successfully reattach some of Foxy's parts. You're growing up, Michael, but I still need to keep you safe. You wouldn't begrudge me that, would you? After everything this family's been through?"

"After everything we put them through, you mean?" Dad cringed, and I took a wild swing at the truth. "Evan saw Circus Baby kill Elizabeth," I said, with a show of confidence.

"I never realized," he murmured, looking far away, "but I should have suspected."

"Well, you knew who did it, which is why you shut down Circus Baby's restaurant. You feel guilty looking at her, because it's your fault she killed Elizabeth, just like it's my fault Frebear killed Evan."

All trace of softness vanished from William Afton's appearance. His wan, sleep-deprived face sharpened. Quick as lightning, his hand shot out to seize my chin. He turned my face this way and that in examination, as though he were seeing me for the first time or discovering a new type of animatronic.

I squirmed, but couldn't pull back entirely until he released me. His eyes looked shrewd. He patted me on a cheek in a gesture that felt more threatening than parental, and then he said, "With all that time you spend with your idiot friends, I was beginning to underestimate you. Sometimes I wondered if you were even my son."

"They're not my friends. Not anymore."

"Good. Friends will make your job harder."

This man and this talk felt out of place in my bedroom, which was covered with symbols of childhood and innocence. And a few vampire figures, but these were just as childish now.

All the same, Dad pointed to a poster of Frank Langella as Dracula and said, "You know, these movies you like got one thing right: Death isn't the end. People can continue on in some form even after their bodies die." He waited, gauging my reaction, but I kept my face animatronic-blank.

"I saw it first with Sammy," he said, and I sucked in a sharp breath between my teeth. "Oh, yes, little Sammy. You never met him. Did you hear about him from Henry? Or Charlie?" He rambled on without me answering. "Well, I saw it next with Elizabeth. Then Evan. Then Charlie."

I wanted ask what happened to Sammy. I wanted to ask what happened to the little son of his then-rival at the Halloween party years ago. But Dad wouldn't say anything more than he meant to say. Besides, the sickening picture was already forming in my mind. Instead, I asked, "Are you saying they're all still alive?"

"More or less. Their bodies are dead, but the thing that makes them… them lingers on. The Remnant of the children is now inside other things, and those inanimate objects have changed. They've become alive." I shivered, and he nodded and rubbed his hands together. "Yes, it's thrilling is it? I've stumbled across the most important scientific discovery of our lifetime – maybe in history. It far outstrips anything Henry has done with his animatronic work – moving jaws to sing and limbs to dance. It all looks impressive, and I've learned a lot from him, but now everyone will learn from me."

If he was right about dead people living on in inanimate objects, then he was right about how big of a discovery that would be. But I wasn't convinced he was right. "How do you know?" I asked carefully. It was a reasonable scientific question.

"Circus Baby started with blue eyes, but they turned green like Elizabeth's when the two of them joined together. Fredbear started wandering around on his own and visiting our house. His tracks were outside your window. You saw him, didn't you?"

"I followed him to Evan's grave." My voice was small.

"Finally, there's Charlie. She ended up in the Security Puppet that failed to protect her. It had a blank white face before, but now that face has streaks of tears."

I didn't know anything about the puppet. Baby's eyes could've been a matter of him forgetting what color he painted them. Even Fredbear could've had a rogue programming glitch that made him visit me.

But two words still echoed in my head: IT'S ME

I hadn't heard those words. I'd felt them. Was that my brother reaching out to me?

"I'm going to learn about those children, Michael. I'm going to uncover the secrets of their Remnant. It's going to take years of research and study, but the answers are within my grasp. And I have a role for you, too. Will you help me save them?"

Did Dad really want to save them? I wasn't sure. But I did want answers, and Dad was my best shot at getting them. I tightened my jaw and nodded.

I would learn from him. I would learn about him. I would keep my mouth shut and my ears open. I would save any children that were around to be saved.

My brother and sister were gone. My mother was going. My father was a monster. I had nothing left in my life, so it was time for that old life to end – the one that had been filled with laughter and games.

"Of course I'll help them."

"Very well," he said. "Then, welcome to my quest. To my purpose."

I returned his insincere smile with one of my own. And with that, my new life began.