Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 114
“Sure,” Chris said.
Mr. Little stepped into the cubicle. “How’s it going, Chris?”
“Uh … I’m not sure, to be honest. Am I the last person left?”
Mr. Little smiled. “No, there are a few other stragglers. I’m just making the rounds and checking up on everybody’s progress.” He nodded in the direction of the table. “May I?”
“Of course.” Chris felt nervous for Mr. Little to look at his nowhere-near-finished project.
Mr. Little approached the table and looked at the blob, cocking his head in a way that reminded Chris of the family dog. “Hmm,” Mr. Little said, leaning down and squinting over the petri dish. “Very curious.”
“Did I do something wrong?” Chris asked. He knew where he had gone wrong, even though he wouldn’t admit it to Mr. Little. He should have followed directions and pulled out one of his own teeth on the spot like the rest of the students did. He had taken the easy way out because he was a coward, and now he was reaping the consequences.
“As experiments go, this one is pretty impossible to mess up,” Mr. Little said, rubbing his chin. “You did put one of your teeth in there, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Chris said, not elaborating on the age or origin of the tooth.
“Well, sometimes in science we just have to admit that we don’t know why things are happening as they are. The way I see it, Chris, you’ve got two choices. You can end the experiment and say it just didn’t turn out for whatever reason, dispose of whatever that thing is that you’ve got there, and go home and play video games or whatever it is you do on your own time.” He smiled. “Or you can acknowledge that something interesting is happening here, even if we don’t quite know what it is, and give it some more time to see what happens.”
Chris didn’t have to ask himself which choice a real scientist would make. “I’d like to give it some more time if that’s okay.”
Mr. Little smiled and clapped him on the back. “It’s more than okay! I admire your patience. It’s an excellent quality for a scientist to have. Most scientific endeavors worth doing require a great deal of patience and determination.” He looked back at the blob. “And to be honest, I’m glad you made that choice because I’m pretty curious to see how this turns out myself.” He gave Chris a little two-fingered salute. “I’ll check back later, okay?”
“Okay. Thank you, sir.”
Chris felt relieved. He had made the right choice, and he had received Mr. Little’s approval. Maybe he could be a real Science Club member after all. He sat down to wait because that’s what scientists did.
After a while, there was more movement and rustling, followed by similar words uttered by different voices:
“He told me everything.”
“She told me everything.”
“He told me everything.”
Each time, there was Mr. Little’s approval for the student to leave.
And then there was silence.
Finally, feeling like the last person on earth, Chris called, “Mr. Little?”
“Yes, Chris?”
“Am I the only one left?”
“You are.” His tone was pleasant. “No worries, though.”
“Should I give up so you can go home?” Chris wondered if Mr. Little had a wife and some little Littles waiting on him, wondering why the lock-in was taking so long.
Mr. Little poked his head inside the cubicle. “Of course not! I’ve got no place else to be, and if you’re willing to wait, so am I.” He grinned and gave a thumbs-up. “Patience and determination.”
Once Mr. Little had disappeared from view, Chris felt another wave of exhaustion. Hoping that the energy draining from him was being funneled into the little pink blob, he lay back down on the cot and lost consciousness immediately.
When he awoke, he gasped at the sight on the table. The mass had more than quintupled in size and was now far too large to fit into the biohazard bag. It was still slimy and pink, but it was no longer an inert blob. Shaped somewhat like a limbless human torso, it was now pulsing with life.
Chris felt excited but also a little fearful as he approached his creation. The way it expanded and contracted made him feel like something might jump out of it like a creature he saw in a horror movie once.
He stood over the pulsing mass. Its skin, if you could call it that, was a translucent pink, like a bubble blown from bubble gum. Beneath it was the source of the pulsing, a cluster of baglike structures that were beating to a rhythm that seemed strangely familiar, though Chris didn’t know why.
Chris looked at the tendril, now thicker and stronger, that connected him to the newly formed organism on the table. The tendril pulsed in unison with the strange thing’s organs. Chris gasped when he realized why the pattern of this pulsing seemed so familiar.
The thing’s organs and the tendril that connected him to it were throbbing with the beat of Chris’s own heart.
A shudder ran through him, and he was overcome with a sudden need to empty his bladder. Now that he thought about it, he realized he hadn’t gone to the bathroom for hours, not since right after the school dismissal bell rang. This knowledge increased his sense of urgency.
But how could he manage to go down the hall to the boys’ restroom when he was physically connected to this big, weird, seemingly living thing? He wondered how the other kids had managed it. They probably hadn’t needed to go in the first place because they had completed the experiment so much more quickly than he had. Plus, their experiments hadn’t yielded something so large and unwieldy.
Just as Chris decided that he was desperate enough to call for Mr. Little and make the pathetic confession that he needed to use the restroom but didn’t know how, the pressure in his bladder disappeared. He looked over at the thing on the table, which expelled a large amount of fluid that hit the floor with a splash.
Was that his pee? And what was it doing over there?
Chris knew he should have been embarrassed—he was pretty sure he had just peed on the floor of his science classroom, after all, a big no-no if there ever was one—but mostly he was just confused. Wasn’t his pee supposed to come out of his own body? He looked at the tendril. Now even thicker and stronger, it was a tube connecting his body to the thing, feeding it like the umbilical cord that connects a mother with her unborn baby. Maybe his pee had traveled from him through the tube to be expelled by the thing on the table? But why?
He watched the thing pulse some more. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it, and he didn’t like being connected to it. He didn’t like knowing he was letting it leech his energy so it could grow bigger and stronger while he grew more exhausted and weak.
It was time to cut the cord.
The problem was … he didn’t have anything to cut it with.
He looked around the almost-empty cubicle and spotted the unused pliers. They weren’t as good as a knife or a strong pair of scissors, but they were still better than trying to sever the cord with his bare hands. He would use the pliers to grip and squeeze the cord, then give it a hard yank to tear it apart and break the connection.
He poised the pliers to grab the tendril just above where it connected with his left index finger. Then he squeezed.
It felt like somebody was choking the life out of him. Pinching the tube cut off his air supply somehow, and he fell to the floor gasping, landing in a puddle of what was most certainly his own urine. He released the tendril from the pliers, and his breath started to come back. He was too light-headed to get up quickly, so he lay on the wet floor for a few minutes, panting like an overheated dog.
Was there no way to end the connection between him and the disturbing result of his experiment? Or were he and his creation bound together like conjoined twins who shared a vital organ?
He pulled himself up and willed himself to look at the mass on the table. The torso had lengthened, and small pink buds were visible where the arms and legs should have been. Somehow, while he hadn’t been watching it, a neck and a head had formed.
The head was hairless, featureless, horrifying.
Chris backed away slowly, bumping into the cot. He didn’t want to look at the thing anymore, but he couldn’t look away, either. It radiated a horrible fascination, like a gory accident on the side of the highway. He sat on the cot and looked at it until he realized his vision had become blurry and indistinct. It was strange. He had never had trouble with his eyes before.
He put his hand over his right eye, and suddenly it was like the world had been plunged into blackness. He reached up to put his hand over his left eye, and what he found there made him cry out in terror.
His left eye was gone.
It was impossible, of course. The loss of red blood cells and his level of anxiety must have been disrupting his perceptions, making him paranoid, maybe even making him hallucinate. He reached up for his left eye again, but felt only the gaping, empty socket.
Impossible, he told himself again, but then he looked at the tendril. Inside the translucent tube, an orb traveled away from Chris and toward the evolving pink form on the table. The orb was being pushed along by the tendril’s pulsations. It was the size and shape of a human eyeball.
What the—
Chris’s hand shot up to where his eyeball used to be. There was a popping sound, like a cork being pulled from a bottle, and when Chris looked over at the thing on the table, it was looking back at him with Chris’s left eye. The face was no longer featureless. It was now cycloptic.
Chris knew the creature wouldn’t be content to stay a cyclops for long. It would be coming for his other eye. And for more parts of him as well.
Even without the benefit of having both of his eyes, Chris could see things clearly now. The organs that throbbed beneath the creature’s translucent skin were his organs. Or they used to be.
He was being used as a living organ donor for this thing.
But he wouldn’t be a living donor for much longer. With his vital organs being siphoned through the tube one by one, he couldn’t have much time left.
Chris pulled on the tendril, trying to rip it from his body. But it was connected as solidly as his fingers were to his hand, and gripping the tube constricted it and made him lose his breath. He tried to get up, with a vague, hopeless thought of running to where he could get help, even if it meant dragging the thing behind him like a broken kite on a string. But he found himself too weak to stand.
But he still had his voice, didn’t he?
There was nothing to do but scream.
“Help!” he yelled with a voice that was thinner and weaker than he would have liked it to be. “Help! Mr. Little! Anybody! I’m over here! Help me!”
His cries for help were met with silence. Now that all the other students had gone home, had Mr. Little gone home, too? Would he have left without saying good-bye, without giving Chris permission to leave as well?
Chris could not remember ever having felt so utterly alone.
The yelling had tired him out. Everything tired him out. His muscles felt nonexistent, and his arms and legs were as floppy as overcooked noodles. He sank down on the cot. He needed to think of a plan, a way to escape, but weakness and fatigue overtook him. He didn’t mean to fall asleep, but he wasn’t strong enough to fight the wave of exhaustion that swept over him.
When he awoke, he opened his one eye and saw the thing sitting on the edge of the table across from him.
Except it wasn’t just a thing anymore. It was a boy—a boy who, except for a strangely pink skin tone—looked exactly like Chris. It was Chris’s height and build, with his sandy-brown hair. It was wearing Chris’s clothes and looking at Chris with what had once been his left eye.
Did that mean Chris was naked? He looked down at his reclining body and quickly saw that it didn’t have enough structural integrity to support clothes. Chris’s body was devoid of muscles and bone. He was a mass, a blob. He had no idea how he could still be alive, how he could still be aware with so little of him left. There was no way he could hold out much longer.
Chris understood that he would never see his mom and dad and Emma again. He would never take another bike ride to the Dairy Bar and the lake with Josh and Kyle. Somebody else would have to take Porkchop for his walks and feed him his dinner.
The thing got down from the table and used Chris’s bones and muscles to walk over to the cot.
With his one remaining eye, Chris saw his creation. He saw that this creature looked so much like him that nobody would ever know the difference. It would go to Chris’s house and take its place in Chris’s family. It would sit at the dinner table with his mom and dad and Emma, eating hot dogs and macaroni and cheese. It would play with Porkchop. It would study at Cool Beans Coffee and go to school and Science Club meetings.
Chris saw that his own life was going to go on without him.
Chris struggled to speak. His throat and mouth were as parched as a desert, and he was pretty sure his lips were gone. It was hard to make himself heard.
“Listen.” His voice finally came out as a croak. “My mom and dad—they’re going to love you because they love me. Be nice to them.” He stopped to try to catch his breath. Breathing used to be so easy he never even thought about it. “Be nice to my sister, too. She’s a good kid. A Girl Scout. She’s your sister now.” The words were hard to get out, but he had more he needed to say. “Mrs. Thomas, our neighbor. She’s old. She’s a nice lady. Help her when you can. And play with Porkchop.”
The creature furrowed its brow, looking confused. “I am to play … with a porkchop?”
Chris felt the last of his strength fading. He whispered, “Porkchop is my dog. Yours … now.” Chris felt the tendril that connected him to his life disintegrating. “Take care of him,” he said, but his words came out so softly he was afraid that only he could hear them.
Chris felt a strange sensation of suction where his right eye was, and then everything went black. He listened as his eyeball was sucked through the tube. There were more slurping sounds, too, as other parts of him were drawn up through the tendril. Parts he knew he couldn’t live without. It was like the creature was drinking him, sucking the last of his organs through a long straw, like the dregs of a milkshake, leaving only an empty vessel.
* * *
Chris, as the creature would have to learn to call itself, stood over the shapeless mass of empty flesh on the cot. He opened the biohazard bag and stuffed the fleshy remains of the experiment inside of it. He was surprised that he was able to cram all of it into one bag, and when he picked it up, the contents were surprisingly light.
It left the cubicle and found Mr. Little sitting at his desk drinking from a Styrofoam cup of coffee and munching on a doughnut. “Well, good morning, Chris!” Mr. Little said, standing up and brushing crumbs from his mustache. “You had a long night, didn’t you? But don’t keep me in suspense. Did you finally complete the experiment? Did you get the results you wanted?”
The new Chris’s eyes were wide and full of wonder. Soon he would be stepping out of the classroom and out of the school and into the world for the first time.
Chris handed the biohazard bag to Mr. Little. He looked into the teacher’s eyes and smiled. “He told me everything,” he said.
As Chris walked outside the school building, the sun was warm on his face. The sky was blue, the clouds were white and fluffy, and birds chirped in the trees. Chris smiled. It was a beautiful day.
Larson heard it before he saw it.
And when he did hear it, he couldn’t believe how it had managed to form behind him without him hearing it.
The sounds were ear-splitting.
Larson’s initial thought was that a train was barreling down on him. The clatter, rumble, blast, and shriek that now made him whirl around defied his ability to process the noise.
He had no better success with what he was seeing.
But he couldn’t even try to process that. He just ran.
Barreling out of the shelter of the factory, leaving his sedan and the garbage bag behind, Larson raced toward the dock. Realizing it provided no cover, he veered back toward the building, to the overhang that sheltered an old forklift. Crouching next to the forklift, he peeked into the factory.
Yep. He wasn’t going mad—he’d seen what he thought he’d seen. But it hadn’t started chasing him yet. It seemed to still be deciding what form to take. It continued to coalesce into the most abominable thing Larson had ever encountered.
Transfixed by the strange mass consolidating in front of him, Larson’s feet were rooted to the ground. His awareness, however—honed by years of detective work—reached out beyond the scrap-metal beast. He spotted subtle movement near the trash compactor. It was little more than a twitch at first, but then the twitch turned into a vibration … and the Stitchwraith climbed out of the tight wad of trash.
* * *
Still a little disoriented from his battle with the rabbit creature and his temporarily compressed state, Jake wanted only to curl up and sleep someplace safe. He was so tired.
But he couldn’t rest yet. The man Jake had seen earlier—the detective—was nearby, and he was in trouble.
As soon as Jake climbed out of the trash compactor, he had full awareness of what was going on in the factory. Part of his awareness came from “normal” senses—he could see the trash monster building itself up larger and larger. He could hear the clanking, thumping, and clattering of metal latching onto metal. The rest of his awareness, however, came from something he didn’t understand. He just knew the detective was nearby and was in terrible danger.
Jake also knew something else. He knew he was in danger, too.
Completely against his will, Jake’s metal body began to skim across the concrete toward the trash-being. It felt like Jake was caught in an alien spaceship’s tractor beam … except he wasn’t being towed into the sky; he was being sucked into the horrible metal man-thing.
Jake immediately put all his strength into fighting the pull. After just a few seconds, he was able to stop his forward motion. Around him, animatronic parts and trash whizzed past and glommed onto the massive body forming from the garbage. Jake, though, stayed fast, committing himself to remaining separate from the evil entity. And because he was Jake—a boy who tried to help anyone who needed it—he also extended his intention to the other animatronic debris being vacuumed up by the junkyard fiend. He did all he could to save the other parts from falling under the thing’s control.
