Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 101
Then he realized he was wrong. It had nothing to do with Andrew!
“Andrew,” Jake said. “There’s something else in here with us.”
“It’s him!” Andrew cried out. He sounded terrified.
Jake focused harder on his memory: He ate a hot, salty peanut, and he looked into his dad’s warm, happy gaze.
* * *
Larson couldn’t move. He was mesmerized by the compacting junk … and by the inexplicable light rising from it. What was that?
He realized he was still aiming at the crumpling, deconstructing Stitchwraith and holstered his gun. He rubbed his eyes. Was he seeing things? It looked like a faint aurora borealis was rising up from the convulsing junk.
* * *
“Yes!” Jake cried.
Andrew was breaking loose!
Then, out of the nearly fully compressed junk, the contorted but identifiable shape of what looked like a burned skeletal man thrust upward. With ashy, see-through skin that revealed dried-up but still quivering organs, the man-thing looked like a creature from hell. Its limbs broken and bursting through the cracked skin, its face misshapen, its torso twisted—the creature took shape while Jake watched.
When Jake saw the man’s bones crack, fold, and reshape into what appeared to be rabbit ears, he yelled, “Andrew, come on!” Rabbit ears unfolded from the back of the creature’s skull and stretched upright, and the creature heaved itself toward Andrew. Jake had hold of Andrew, and he was sure all but just the tiniest amount of Andrew’s essence was in his grasp. But the creature was trying to keep hold of his friend.
“No!” Jake shouted.
Jake focused again on his good memory, but this time, it didn’t loosen Andrew anymore. It just started taking Jake away from Andrew.
Jake couldn’t let that happen—he wasn’t going to allow Andrew to be hurt anymore. Jake had to stay and fight!
Blocking out anything good he’d ever felt, Jake anchored himself back into the animatronic. He faced the enemy in the compactor.
As soon as Jake released his memory, the creature shifted its attention to Jake. Jake felt the creature claw at him. It felt like he was being mauled and pummeled by a force filled with a never-ending need to inflict pain.
But he didn’t give in to it. Throwing everything he had into his effort and drawing on the power of his memory, Jake turned himself into a massive bat of intention, and he swung away, knocking Andrew loose from the evil that held him.
Andrew, suddenly free, was sucked away; and he vanished.
Jake, however, couldn’t untangle himself from the relentless rabbit creature. He fell back into the seething junk and was engulfed in blackness.
* * *
The trash compactor opened, and Larson watched it tip upward and disgorge its flattened mass of broken animatronic and robotic pieces. From above the compactor, what looked like a dying ember fizzled and fell back into the compressed junk.
“What just happened?” Larson asked the room.
It didn’t answer.
Larson shook his head and looked around. His gaze landed on a pot with two red flowers shaped like starfish. It sat at a tilt against the upper lip of the compactor, unaffected by the pressure that had just smashed through the rest of the bizarre debris the figure had collected.
Larson thought about going down the stairs to poke around the compressed junk, but he didn’t see the point. Whether he was right or wrong about what had just happened, it was done. So he turned and headed back to his sedan.
There, he dropped the trash bag he’d carried inside onto the floor next to the sedan. He wasn’t sure what to do with it. He’d planned on using it as a way to communicate to the Stitchwraith, but now …
He leaned into his sedan and pulled out a mini tape recorder.
“The, ah, Stitchwraith appears to be dead,” he said into the recorder. He felt like an idiot. Dead wasn’t the right word for what he’d just witnessed, was it?
And what exactly did he see? He took a breath and spoke into the recorder. “I saw an animatronic endoskeleton with a doll’s head and some kind of battery, wearing a hooded trench coat putting stuff in a trash compactor and pulverizing it. It also destroyed itself. I think the stuff in the compactor came from the Fazbear Entertainment Distribution Center and also from the site where the serial killer William Afton, the one notorious for wearing a rabbit costume, died.” He stopped the recorder and thought for a second.
Oh, what the hell. He started recording again. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but after what I just saw, I’m not so sure about anything anymore. I mean, from where I stood, I swore it looked like the Stitchwraith was an animatronic contraption—and there was some kind of supernatural light coming out of it. Like, a ghost? Like the animatronic was haunted by ghosts. Maybe the ghosts were kids Afton killed? Or maybe it was Afton himself.” He stopped the recording and sighed.
Who was going to believe any of this?
Tossing the recorder in his sedan, Larson turned his back to the inner part of the factory and looked out through the exterior opening to the lake. The sky above the mountains was tinged with the faintest hint of pink.
Maybe he should take Ryan hiking the next time he got to spend time with his son.
* * *
Behind the unsuspecting Larson, the compacted trash began to move. Making a quiet rustling sound Larson didn’t hear, the junk rose from the trash compactor and began to arrange itself into an upright being.
As it began to assemble itself, the being sucked in all the remaining junk and debris in the factory. However, it also rejected some of the waste. Just as it started to form, the vaguely man-shaped structure of trash shuddered for a second, and then it ejected part of itself. A mutilated mass of robotic endoskeleton and crumpled fabric spewed through the air and landed several feet away. When the rejected detritus hit the concrete, it lay still.
The rest of the trash from the compactor continued its transfiguration.
It formed itself out of animatronic body parts, but not in any logical way. They were joining all haywire. Heads were being used as joints, arms as legs, and legs as arms. A torso formed from the hips and chest and belly of three animatronics, but each part was put in the wrong place. Hands were inserted at random all over the structure. Woven through all these misplaced pieces were wires and gears, which created a labyrinthine circulatory system connecting hinges to gears and screws and nails to eyes and noses and mouths.
With each additional piece clamping into place, the miscreation stood taller and taller until it was nearly fifteen feet tall. Then, looming over the detective, it leaned to the side and lifted a macabre head up to a neck made from shins.
The head, like the rest of the being, was made from animatronic parts—fingers, toes, wires, hinges. Within those parts, two gaping black holes looked out at the world with pure malevolence. And from the top of the unnatural structure, what looked like two rabbit ears made of even more animatronic parts unfolded and canted forward. They were aimed right at the detective.
Title Page
The Cliffs
by Elley Cooper
The Breaking Wheel
by Andrea Waggener
He Told Me Everything
by Elley Cooper
Tyler knocked his sippy cup off the kitchen table. Again.
“Careful, buddy,” Robert said, picking it up and setting it in front of his son. Robert tried to feel relieved that his already-well-worn copy of How to Handle the Toddler Years, which he jokingly called “the owner’s manual,” assured him that it was perfectly normal for toddlers to knock over cups, throw food, and demonstrate an often-overwhelming amount of emotional instability. But just because it was normal didn’t mean it was easy.
“Play phone?” Tyler said, eyeing Robert’s phone on the table.
Robert set a bowl of cereal and bananas in front of Tyler. “It’s not time for you to play with Daddy’s phone. It’s time for you to eat your breakfast and get ready for day care.”
Tyler, distracted by his bowl of Cheerios, sliced banana, and sippy cup of milk, began happily eating.
That’s another thing about two-year-olds, Robert thought. Their emotions can turn on a dime. When Robert had last taken Tyler to the pediatrician, he had unloaded on her about Tyler’s wild mood swings.
The pediatrician had just laughed and said, “Welcome to parenthood.” She had then promised him, as she always did, that the task of parenting would get easier as Tyler got older.
But when would it get easier? When Tyler was three? When he was old enough to start school? When he was in college?
Robert knew that for him, the hardest thing about parenting was that it was something he had to do alone. He had never planned to be a single parent, but he had no choice now that Anna was gone.
Robert had met Anna his junior year in college. He had never believed in the “finding the one” theory of romance—surely there wasn’t just one person in the whole world who was right for you—and yet his and Anna’s connection was immediate. They loved the same books and movies, and when they started having more serious conversations, they discovered that they shared deeper values, too. They dated through the rest of college and got engaged right after graduation, agreeing on a one-year engagement to give them some time to get used to being real grown-ups with real jobs before they got married.
Robert settled into a steady but not terribly exciting job with a local lifestyle magazine, and Anna got a position as a first-grade teacher. They got married barefoot on the beach, and both sets of their parents chipped in to help them out with a down payment on a house. Their little bungalow had seen better days, but it still had plenty of charm, especially for young, energetic first-time homeowners who were willing to put some elbow grease into renovating it.
The only downside, as far as Robert was concerned, was the house’s location, right next to the town’s most notorious geographical feature: the Cliffs. Although these rocky outcroppings possessed a rugged beauty, they also had a grisly history. The highest of them was nicknamed “Jumper’s Cliff” by the locals because it was a common site for suicides over the generations.
It seemed that everyone knew of someone who had chosen to end it all at the Cliffs. The jilted high school homecoming queen from Robert’s mother’s generation, the businessman who lost all his money due to bad investments, the grandmother with a terminal cancer diagnosis. There were stories about the Cliffs that were fact, and stories that were fiction, but true or not, these tales made people look at the geological features with a mixture of fear and awe, especially Jumper’s Cliff. Teenagers gathered there and creeped each other out with scary stories. Younger kids whispered that the ghosts of the departed still haunted the place where they had chosen to make that final leap.
Robert had grown up hearing those stories, and the Cliffs creeped him out. Anna insisted that, while the suicides themselves were sad, the Cliffs were just rocks; they didn’t really mean anything. Besides, the house’s proximity to the Cliffs was why it had been such a steal. Attributing any dark meaning to the Cliffs was nothing short of superstition.
Robert knew she was right. And once they moved into the house, he was so happy with his new wife and his new life that he hardly thought about the Cliffs at all. When he looked back on it, the first year of their marriage was a blissful blur of love and laughter.
In his mind, he could play out scenes from that first year like a montage in a romantic movie: the two of them riding bikes together, cooking dinner together, cuddling in front of the TV with a big bowl of popcorn between them. Sure, one of them would sometimes have a bad day at work or come down with a cold, but these problems were minuscule compared to the happiness they took in each other’s company.
Although the first year of their marriage had been great, the happiest time in Robert’s life had come when Anna was pregnant with Tyler. They had been married two years when they found out she was pregnant, and they were both over the moon with delight. There was something about the idea that they had created a new human being because of their love—it seemed almost magical. As happy as they had been as a couple, they knew they would be an even happier family.
Throughout Anna’s pregnancy, she had glowed like some kind of ancient mother goddess from mythology. Robert had glowed, too, so full of love he didn’t know what to do with all of it. He massaged Anna’s feet when they were sore after she came home from teaching all day. He went out to fetch her mint chocolate chip ice cream when she said it was the only thing in life that could possibly satisfy her cravings. They were in perfect harmony during her pregnancy, two dedicated gardeners growing their baby together.
But then things went wrong.
Two months before the baby was due, Anna started complaining of swelling in her hands and feet. When she called the nurse at the obstetrician’s office, she had said not to worry about it, that swelling was common among pregnant women, especially in the hottest months of the summer. Reassured, Anna had bought bigger shoes and soaked her feet in Epsom salts and otherwise ignored her symptoms. But when she went in for her regular checkup, her blood pressure was so alarmingly high that the doctor insisted that she be admitted to the hospital immediately.
After that, things were a nightmarish blur in Robert’s mind: all the IV drugs the doctors gave her in a failed attempt to bring her blood pressure down, the decision to deliver the baby early by Caesarean section in hopes of saving her life, the massive stroke she suffered on the operating table that left Robert a single father. For a long time, he was numb. None of it even felt real.
Since Tyler was born early, he was tiny and unable to breathe on his own without exhausting himself. He had to stay in the hospital for a few weeks until he gained weight and his lungs developed more. In a shocked daze, Robert would visit his new baby in the neonatal intensive care unit. He would scrub his hands and put on a face mask before entering the brightly lit white room lined with plastic incubators in which impossibly tiny babies lay. Robert would stand by his own son’s incubator and look at Tyler’s small, skinny body, wearing a diaper the size of a fast-food napkin. The parents of other babies in the NICU always looked tired and worried like Robert did, but they arrived in couples, so at least they had each other.
In horror, Robert would look at his son and think, Kid, I’m all you have in this world.
It was not a good way to start out in life—motherless and stuck with a father who couldn’t eat, sleep, or go a full hour without crying. In his exhausted, grief-stricken state, there were only two facts Robert knew for sure:
He was all that Tyler had.
He was not enough.
Robert had muddled through the last two years, managing to hold down his job somehow and provide Tyler with food, clothing, and shelter. Robert had withdrawn from his friends because he didn’t want their pity and because for a single father of a toddler, grabbing a bite to eat after work with his buddies was not an option. At five o’clock sharp, he had to leave the office to pick up Tyler from day care. After that, it was time to go home and fix his supper. Then came playtime and bath time and—if Robert was lucky and Tyler would actually fall asleep—bedtime. The toddler owner’s manual was clear: Without a regular schedule, life with a toddler descended into chaos. Robert had quite enough chaos in his life, so he tried not to deviate from the daily schedule.
Once Tyler was finally asleep, Robert mindlessly surfed through the channels on TV or played Warriors’ Way on his laptop. Sometimes Bartholomew, the orange cat, sat with him, but most often, he did not. Bartholomew had been Anna’s pet before she and Robert had married, and Anna used to refer to him jokingly as “my first husband” because of the way he guarded her jealously and had never warmed up to Robert. Now, with Anna gone, Bartholomew would accept food or the occasional pat from Robert, but he never gave Robert the impression that he was doing anything more than tolerating him because he was the dispenser of cat food.
Was Robert lonely? Yes, painfully so. But he was also too busy and exhausted to do anything about it. After Tyler’s bedtime, he allowed himself two or three hours of mindless screen time of one kind or another until he fell into bed himself, knowing that he was going to wake up to a day that was nearly identical to the one before, with the type and duration of Tyler’s mood swings being the only wild card.
Right now, though, as Tyler was contentedly picking up Cheerios and stuffing them in his mouth, he was adorable. His hazel eyes—the same shade as Anna’s—were framed by long, sooty eyelashes. His curly black hair surrounded his head like a halo, and his mouth was a cherubic rosebud, also like his mom’s. In fact, Tyler resembled his mother so much that it made Robert’s heart hurt. Looking at his son, Robert felt overwhelmed by love but also by fear. What if he lost Tyler like he’d lost Anna? Over and over, the what-ifs played on the screen of his mind like a trailer for a movie no one would ever want to see.
Even though Robert couldn’t look at Tyler without thinking of Anna, he never talked to Tyler about her. Tyler was too young to understand death, and Robert wasn’t doing such a great job of understanding it himself. In his heart, he knew it would probably be a good idea to start showing Tyler pictures of his mom and telling him little stories about the kind of person she was, the things she used to say and do, how excited she had been about becoming his mommy. But he could never bring himself to take out any of the pictures of Anna hidden in the attic. If he tried to talk about her, the words stuck in his throat and he said nothing. Even saying her name hurt too much, especially because when he looked at Tyler, he was staring into Anna’s eyes.
Like he did every weekday morning, Robert choked back his sadness along with some black coffee and drove Tyler to day care, letting him play with his phone all the way. After he had dropped off Tyler, he went to work, only nodding at colleagues who greeted him with “good morning.” He didn’t want to seem rude, but he didn’t want to get into a conversation, either. His own reactions were too unpredictable. Once he started talking, what would he say? Would he get all emotional in front of someone he didn’t even know very well? Would he break down entirely? And if he did break down, what if he wasn’t able to put the pieces back together?
