Part II: Sister Location (1987)

Chapter 1: Abandoned

I strolled into the 60's-themed diner, scanning the blue-and-pink interior until I found the man I was looking for. He sat with his back to the wall, facing the door, and he recoiled the moment he saw me.

If for that reaction alone, I was glad he agreed to meet me outside Hurricane. We were in neutral territory, not his jurisdiction, though I'd bet my old Foxy mask that he had backup nearby. Most of the sparse patrons hunched over coffee in the twilight hours, armored in flannel and world-weary expressions. Some of them were cops. The rest were probably truckers. Two of the cops twitched at my entrance.

I knew why. At seventeen years old, I'd already made it through puberty, and came out on the other side looking almost exactly like my father.

Under the circumstances, I said nothing about their tells as I sat down to a late dinner with Detective Clay Burke. He'd been an officer four year ago, but he was a detective at least two years ago when he arrested my dad for murder. The charges didn't stick. I rightly guessed that Detective Burke meet me if I called him to say I was worried about my dad.

"Michael?" he greeted, a bit uncertainly, as if he expected me to really be William Afton in disguise.

"It's just Mike."

"Clay," he replied, keeping things informal for now.

"Well, Clay, my dad is missing."

While he stiffened, a perky waitress whisked over to ask, "What can I get ya, hon?"

"Ahh…" I checked the stained menu for the item that would be quickest to grab. "Could I please get a coffee and the soup of the day?"

"You got it."

She was gone again in a heartbeat, but by that point, Clay had processed what I said. "Missing. This is late June."

"You've caught the pattern, too?"

"June 26 was your brother's birthday. That day in 1983, he was bitten by the robot bear that killed him. Around that same day in 1985, your father 'allegedly' kidnapped or killed five children."

"Susie, Jeremy, Gabriel, Fritz, and Cassidy." I was glad I didn't have to explain it all to him.

I couldn't give him all the details. I couldn't say that Dad talked more and more about the Remnant left behind after deep tragedies like the deaths of children. I couldn't say that after the children disappeared in '85, Dad "found" some Remnant to study. I couldn't talk about the message Dad left for me a few days ago. Instead I said,

"I'm worried about what he's going to do, but I can't officially report it as a Missing Persons case. He disappears all the time, and I don't have any reason to think anything happened to him."

"If he abandons a minor, there's a case to be made there."

He was looking pointed, so I asked, "Who, me? I'm an emancipated minor. I don't live with him anymore."

"Really? Since when?"

"June last year. I can get you copies of the papers if you don't believe me."

"No, I…" Clay smiled at the waitress, who returned to bring me watery French onion soup and bitter black coffee. He waved away a refill. After the waitress left, Clay finished, "No, I believe you. I just don't know where to start looking for him. Do you have any leads?"

"I have a hunch. There's a good chance he'll be around one of his animatronic locations. I'll be visiting one soon, but when I'm done there, I wanted to poke around the others. They're always hiring new people. High turnover. If you got me a fake ID, I could get a job as a night guard. That way, I could investigate people, look at the cameras, and ask questions without everyone else seeing me. It's the perfect setup to watch for my dad."

Clay held up his hands. "Woah, there. We don't go dropping civilian kids into dangerous undercover operations. But back up. What Fazbear location are you visiting soon?"

"Actually, it's not Fazbear. Fazbear Entertainment is owned by him and Uncle Henry together. I'm visiting a place owned by Afton Robotics. Just Dad." I could've talked more about the animatronics – how the ones at Afton Robotics were just ones that Dad created, or variations of them. They didn't include the ones that Henry first designed, like Chica. I kept the conversation relevant and said, "He got me a job there for a week so I could fix some animatronics."

"Oh. Do you build robots like your dad?"

"Build them? No. We have enough animatronics in the world. Too many. But I've been learning about how they work. Dad taught me in fits and spurts, but it was never a consistent course of study, so I took classes on the side."

Clay produced a standard black notebook in the blink of an eye. "Where will you be, and when?" He clicked his pen. "I'm going to check in with you every day."

His concern was understandable. "Circus Baby's Entertainment and Rental. They loan out animatronics for parties. I start tonight."

Clay gave a low whistle. "That really is soon. Do you have another job besides that?"

"No, I had been working at Blockbuster, but I quit and moved back to Hurricane for this. It's important." I started working on my soup and slurped between sentences.

He didn't look convinced, but he asked, "Address?" I rattled off the Circus Baby address, and he scratched it down then paused. "Isn't that near your old house?"

"The entrance is. As it turns out, the facility itself is underneath my old house. It's a sort of bunker. It must've been down there the whole time I lived there, without my knowing about it. The elevator down is in a shed on some property that I thought belonged to a neighbor. Not Uncle Henry. A different neighbor. I ran around those woods all the time as a kid, and I even saw the shed, but I never tried to get in." I shook my head, as though regretting the fact that I only trespassed but never tried breaking and entering there.

"This address leads to the shed?"

"Right. There's a dirt road – more of a driveway – that leads up to it. Easy to miss."

"Does anyone else know where you'll be?"

"No. No one else who understands is still around. Uncle Henry left a long time ago, and Mum wasn't long after that. It's just me." My chest tightened with the words, but I kept a straight face. "That's why I came to you. Everyone's gone, but if something happens to me… someone needs to know."

Clay drummed his fingers against the stained table. "I'm not giving you a fake ID," he repeated. "I can only advise you to stay as far away from your father as possible. Assuming you ignore that advice, I'll check in with you, like I said. Before you go, is there anything else you can give us? Do you have evidence connecting him with any criminal activity?"

"No evidence. Sorry."

"Even if he said something suspicious, that could help us."

"There's nothing. If he'd said anything, I would've told you when the kids went missing. Or when Charlie died before that."

He scratched the back of his neck. "Frankly, Mike, this is the most alert you've been in any conversation we've had. People who knew you called you a 'bright kid', but you didn't have much to say before, so I put it down to shock."

I was sure that my teachers or whoever he'd spoken with had added a few more colorful adjectives in there, but I didn't need to know which ones exactly.

"I see," I said. "Well, if I think of anything, or if I find him, I'll let you know. You'll look for him, too, won't you?"

"As much as I can without a case to pursue. We never had enough evidence to make charges stick to your father, so we had to let him go and let it drop. A few members of the department might be willing to poke around off-duty. Unofficially. But that's all I can do."

"It'll have to be enough. Hey, what evidence did you have?"

Clay glanced down at his notebook, as though for reference, though he was still on my page. "It was mostly circumstantial. Security footage showed some of the missing kids walk away with someone in a yellow rabbit suit. That was the one your dad usually wore. Then there was his attitude during interrogation…" He trailed off and shuddered. "But we could hardly bring that to court. We also found stacks of his journals. He wrote a lot about Henry."

Did he write about me? That was the question I wanted to ask. I kept my jaw clenched shut.

Clay went on, "William was obsessed with Henry. His writings went back and forth between jealousy and admiration. There was a lot of anger there, along with the jealousy, and it made me think back to Charlie's death. There was even less evidence in that case, but William had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill Charlie."

"And Sammy," I added idly, stirring some sugar into my coffee.

The cop stiffened. "Who's Sammy?"

"Charlie's twin." Since it seemed Clay hadn't found that trail yet, I briefed him. "Dad and Henry used to be rivals in the mascot-restaurant game. Henry was winning by miles. He had all the animatronic skills back then, while Dad mostly relied on costumes. Henry's place wasn't in Hurricane, which is why you haven't heard of it. It was called Chica's Party World, and it was a little ways away in New Harmony. That's where I've been living. Investigating."

Clay muttered something disapproving about meddling kids investigating murders, but he motioned me to keep talking.

I took a swig of my slight-sweeter coffee. Huh. Now it tasted sweet and bitter at the same time. I went back to the soup and the story. "There was a Halloween party at the restaurant when the twins were three. It's weird to think of them as 'the twins' when I only ever knew Charlie, but anyway… Sammy disappeared that night, and he was never found. Everyone believed that he was dead. Henry's wife left him and Charlie soon after that. Henry… I don't know why he joined up with my dad after that. Maybe he was tired of being on his own."

I stalled, thinking, and Clay prompted, "Is that when they became partners?"

"Right. They used some of both of their characters, but mostly Dad's, and Henry brought them all to life. So to speak. He taught Dad robotics, and you know the rest."

At least, he knew as much as I was willing to say. The rest played in my head as I sipped my soup. It was a message on my phone, which I'd already memorized and deleted:

"Michael," my father's voice said, "I did it. I've isolated the Remnant, and I'm ready to test it out as soon as I have a worthy vessel for something so precious. Once I learn how to give life, I can put our family back together again. You have a part to play in that, too." There was a long pause, and then he resumed, "I need you to find your sister. I need you to put her back together and set her free. She and my other animatronics live together in an underground facility. You'll find a job application under your door. Fill it out. You'll get the job. You'll be a technician for a week at my facility, but be careful. Tell no one about our plans, or they will try to stop you. Be careful, son." Then he rattled off a phone number where I could report to him when I was done.

Sure enough, after that, I found the application with directions to a strangely-familiar place. My mind wandered there now, in spite of the fact that I was still having dinner with Clay Burke.

How could I not picture the woods? The house? The rooms inside?

I wasn't going inside this time. I was going far beneath it.

I didn't know if I would find Elizabeth, like my father hoped, but one thing seemed certain: I was going to find her killer.