Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 176
Nope. Joel couldn’t risk “finding” Caleb.
Instead of doing something that could throw his life away, Joel took that shower his mom kept going on about. When he was done, he thought about messing around with his drum pads, but he really was wiped out.
Joel, in just his boxers—cool drummers didn’t wear pj’s—sat down on the edge of his bed. He turned on his bedside lamp. It immediately illuminated something that shouldn’t have been there.
He gasped and jumped up. What the hell?
Joel gawked at the little plastic yellow figurine that stood next to his digital alarm clock, propped up against the base of his lamp. It was the figurine from the Fazcrunch box—that creepy little kid-shaped figure with its empty black eyes and its flag-at-attention warning, KIDS AT PLAY.
Joel had tossed that aside. When was that? Yesterday? Seemed like a month ago. Yeah, it was yesterday.
How did the figure get in his room?
Joel didn’t have to think hard on that question. His mom probably found it and brought it up here to make a point. She hated when he left things lying around. When he was a little boy, she’d pick up after him. When he got into high school, though, she started just putting his stuff in a bin in the garage. He’d have to go out there and dig through the pile to find things like his softball glove, his Rollerblades, his sunglasses, or his earbuds.
Wait a minute. Yeah. Usually, she puts his stuff in the garage. She never brings it up to his room. So why would she have brought this up?
Maybe his dad did it?
Whatever. It didn’t matter how it got here.
Joel reached out and snatched up the figurine. As he stared at it, his muscles tensed. And suddenly, it felt like an ice cube was skittering down his spine. He shivered.
All the Kids at Play figures he’d seen today, that weird plastic clicking sound in the hardware store, and now this—it felt like he was being haunted by his conscience. Do the right thing, it was telling him. Go back and save the kid. Save Caleb.
Joel closed his hand over the figurine. He held it so tight that its edges cut into his palm.
The problem was that “the right thing” was right for Caleb, but it was wrong for Joel. If Joel went to the kid, whether Caleb was dead or alive, Joel could get in the kind of trouble that would mess him up for the rest of his life.
Really, the whole thing came down to the boundaries of life here that Joel so hated. If he was going to be free of them, he couldn’t go check on Caleb. Doing that would not only keep Joel stuck in this town, it might literally put him in a jail cell. He wouldn’t be able to survive that. Keeping quiet was a matter of self-preservation.
He shook his head. No way. He wasn’t going to sacrifice his future for one stupid little kid who shouldn’t have been running around in the dark in the middle of the night. Who lets their kid do that? Joel thought. He tried to tell himself it was only a matter of time before the kid got hurt. It just so happened to be that Joel was the unfortunate bystander who hit him. Really this was on the parents for not locking up the house or keeping an eye on their son.
Dropping the figurine onto his navy-and-beige Turkish carpet, Joel stomped on the ugly little dude until it broke into multiple pieces. When he noticed the KIDS AT PLAY flag was still unscathed, he reached down, picked it up, and snapped it into three pieces. He gave it one last look, ignoring the way the hair bristled at the back of his neck. Then he turned away from it.
He took a deep breath and let it out. For the first time all day, he felt relaxed. He’d made his decision, and he was okay with it.
Calmly getting into bed, Joel closed his eyes. Tonight, he wasn’t tormented by doubt or by questions of right and wrong. He was perfectly satisfied that he’d done what he needed to do to look out for himself.
He went right to sleep.
* * *
Joel’s eyes shot open. He blinked and looked around.
He’d been dreaming about the stupid little toy from the Fazcrunch box. But why had he awakened?
Joel rubbed his eyes and turned to check his bedside clock. It read 2:00 a.m. Exactly. That was weird. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d woken up and the clock was right on the hour. It was …
Joel sat up.
Okay, that was really weird.
He hadn’t planned on sitting up. He’d planned on closing his eyes and going back to sleep.
He didn’t have to pee. He wasn’t thirsty. He was still tired. Why would he sit up?
Joel threw back the covers and stood.
What the hell?
He didn’t want to stand up. Why was he standing up?
Joel stood, ramrod straight and looked around the room as if his neck was on hydraulics. His head movement seemed stiff and jerky. What was wrong with him? His neck felt bizarre.
Come to think of it, his whole body felt off. It felt locked up and unyielding.
When Joel had been about eight, he’d gone out on a boat with Wes and his family, and he’d gotten badly sunburned. Not only had the burn hurt like crazy, it had made his skin so taut that he couldn’t move properly. He felt a little like that … but worse.
It wasn’t just his skin. His joints didn’t feel right either. They felt like they did when he worked out too hard without warming up.
Joel’s head turned to look at his chest of drawers. Now why was he looking over there?
Joel’s leg lifted, and he took one step toward the chest. He tried not to. He had no reason to go over to his chest of drawers. He wanted nothing that was in it. Not right now. What he wanted was to go back to bed and sleep.
Instead, he took another step toward the chest.
He felt like his body wasn’t his anymore.
He took another step. And another. And another. Soon, he stood in front of his chest of drawers, and his arm lifted. His hand grasped the bronze knob on the drawer, and he pulled it open. He reached in and grabbed a fresh pair of jeans.
Every motion he made felt stiff, as if his joints had seized up and needed to be oiled so he could move properly. He was surprised he didn’t creak or whir as he moved. His movements felt like those of the clunkiest of old-school androids.
No. His movements were even more basic than that. They didn’t remind him of an old robot. They reminded him of a puppet, one of those wooden ones, with the strings attached to the joints. His motions weren’t his own, like his body was being forced into motion. He could even hear his joints crack as they moved, as if they were protesting the directives being given to them.
As his hand closed the first drawer and opened the second to pull out a T-shirt, Joel concentrated hard on resisting his body’s actions. He wanted to go back to bed! He imagined himself doing that, but imagining was all he could do.
Instead of going back to bed, he got dressed. Then he reached out to open his bedroom door.
The hall outside his room was dark and silent. The clock in his mother’s office, a big grandfather clock she said was a family heirloom—like he cared—ticked loudly. From behind the closed door at the other end of the hall, his dad’s snores attempted to drown out the clock’s even rhythm.
Joel thought about calling out to his parents. Maybe they could snap him out of whatever was going on with him. But he couldn’t make a sound.
He walked, stiff-legged, down the hall to the top of the stairs. He then began a descent so awkward that several times he thought he was going to topple forward and fall, end over end, down the stairs. It wasn’t that his body was moving wrong, it was that it was in such a state of resistance—his own body’s will versus that of some outside force he didn’t understand—that he was totally off balance.
Somehow, he reached the base of the steps. At this point, his body turned and pointed itself toward the kitchen. It made its way to the back door. There, using an arm that felt like a stone appendage, he brought up his hand to grab the knob.
Joel stepped off the back porch. He headed around the house toward the driveway.
He felt like he’d become a small version of himself and he was now trapped inside the large version. He was being taken for a ride by this big Joel creature who had an agenda little Joel knew nothing about.
Every time Joel swung a leg out, it felt like his leg belonged to someone else. Each time he planted his foot, he felt like his foot was in a cement shoe. But he kept walking; he strode, totally against his will, down the driveway to the road in front of his house.
The night was cooler than usual for this time of year. A breeze was coming down off the mountains, bringing with it the hint of a frost. Fragile spring green leaves fluttered on tree branches near the road. Fallen blossoms whispered as they skimmed over the pavement.
The night sky was similar to that of the previous night. Stars twinkled above, like all was right with the world, and an ever-so-slightly thicker wedge of moon sent pale rays of white light down to illuminate the cement in front of Joel. Even without the warm yellow glows reaching out from porch lights and lampposts in the yards along the street, he’d have been able to see just fine.
Not that it mattered what he was seeing.
Joel was pretty sure that even if he’d gone totally blind, he’d be moving along the street without a problem. He wasn’t the one calling the shots. So why did he need to see anything?
His legs pivoting sluggishly at his hips, their rigid extensions lifting ahead of him like horizontal pistons, Joel headed down the street. After just a few steps like this, the creaking he’d thought he should hear when he was in his room actually began. Every time his leg raised out ahead of him, his joints rasped and groaned. It sounded like his joints were rusting. He’d heard lesser creaks from ancient oxidized gate hardware. The garden center had a gate with hinges like that. The sound they made was straight out of a horror movie: cree—aaa—rrrr—eeek. That’s the way Joel’s joints sounded as he walked.
But it wasn’t the way his body sounded that concerned him. It was the way it felt.
Leaving aside the terrifying fact that he was no longer in control of his own movement, his body was starting to feel as unyielding as the granite up in the mountains that overlooked the town. Unfortunately, though, it didn’t feel as strong as the granite. It felt, well, fragile. He felt like instead of being made of rock, or even wood, he was made of some kind of hard plastic.
And he felt like he was fragmenting, disconnecting from himself.
Joel didn’t know how long he’d been walking because looking at his watch wasn’t something his body wanted to do. However, given that he was now leaving his neighborhood, he guessed he’d been on this hijacked journey for at least ten minutes.
During whatever length of time he’d been out here, though, he’d noticed his body was starting to feel strained, as if it was reaching some sort of breaking point. He was starting to hear cracks interspersed with the creaks in his movement.
Were his bones fracturing?
He wasn’t in horrible pain or anything. He just felt … wrong. He no longer felt like him, like a human. He was feeling more and more like a thing.
He was also feeling more and more panicked.
The panic rose as it became clear where his body was taking him.
When big Joel had gotten to the turn out of his neighborhood, he’d veered left on the cutover road that led to Glenwood Fields. Joel was heading back to where Caleb—or where Caleb’s lifeless body—lay in a ditch.
Joel screamed in his mind. His mouth could no longer make sounds. It couldn’t even open. It felt like it had been welded shut.
And it was just one of the systems in Joel’s body that was shutting down.
In spite of the fact that Joel’s movement had been labored, he couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t sweating, at all. Nor was he breathing heavily. He was scared, more scared than he could ever remember being. And yet, his heart wasn’t racing. In fact, he couldn’t sense any heartbeat. Usually, if he concentrated, he could feel his pulse. Not anymore. When he put his attention on his neck or his wrists, he felt nothing.
And now, as his panic began to morph into despair, he realized he couldn’t generate tears either. He could feel that his face was an expressionless mask that in no way reflected how he felt on the inside. Anyone observing him would think he was perfectly calm.
Was anyone observing him?
Joel wanted to look around, to see if anyone was looking out their window at the freakish figure lumbering by. But did he really look freakish? Or did he just feel that way? He couldn’t see himself, of course, but given how he felt, he didn’t think that anything he was doing would look normal. He felt as if he was moving like a flash-frozen zombie. His surroundings seemed to shudder as he looked at them.
In spite of all the systems in Joel’s body that were outside his control, his eyes were still his to use. He couldn’t turn his head to look around, but he could see whatever was in front of him. And there, just a couple hundred yards away, were the entrance stones to Glenwood Fields.
Shaped vaguely like angel’s wings, but dingy gray instead of white, the entrance signs were far grander than anything within the subdivision. Joel had always thought the houses in this area were pathetic—shallow-roofed structures shaped like Ls, with simple siding and plain small windows. Houses like these deserved a flimsy wood sign, not an elaborately carved set of huge stones.
As Joel got closer and closer to the stone markers, he noticed that they looked more like gravestones than entrance signs. That seemed oddly appropriate now, given that they marked the spot where Caleb likely lay dead.
Joel’s mind offered up an image of a child’s dead body, its face waxen, its eyeballs eaten by scavengers. As soon as this horrific visual flashed through his brain, his thoughts screamed, just as he would have if he’d seen something like that in real life.
Was he about to see something like that?
His feet, which he could no longer feel, were crunching through the gravel on the shoulder of the road by Glenwood Fields’ entrance. He was no more than a couple yards from where the kid had been standing in the road when Joel had hit him. If Joel could have turned and taken two or three steps to his left, he would have been able to reach the edge of the ditch. He might have been able to look down the steep embankment to see whatever was lying in the narrow rocky bottom of the ditch. He would have been able to see for himself, finally, whether Caleb was dead.
But Joel couldn’t turn, and he couldn’t go anywhere he wasn’t being compelled to go. He was not much different than a toy figurine at this point, subject to the whims of whoever or whatever wanted to position him.
And apparently, this was the spot.
Joel stopped moving. For several long seconds, Joel was still.
He could tell he was just off the pavement, right where he’d hit Caleb. He could even see the black snakelike track of his skid marks on the gray street.
Joel wondered if this was it. Would he be released now that he’d been brought to this point? Had the whole purpose of this body snatching been to get him where he’d refused to go?
Joel didn’t get much of a chance to ponder this question before the answer revealed itself.
No, this was not it. His ordeal was not over.
In fact, it was about to get much, much worse.
Joel felt an ache begin in his mouth, at the roots of his teeth. It was a dull pain, but it was noticeable. What did it mean? What was happening in his mouth?
Jake was now so terrified that he felt a scream climb up his throat and into his mouth. But it didn’t come out. It couldn’t. Joel wasn’t able to control his vocal cords.
Joel did, however, open his mouth for the first time since he left his house. Apparently, it wasn’t welded shut because he could sense his lips hinging apart. He even heard the opening. A little smack and suctioning sound preceded the sensation of air moving against his gums and his tongue. That sensation was barely noticeable because of how much the pain in his teeth commanded his attention, but he knew it meant his mouth was open.
Suddenly the pain in his teeth stopped, and he felt something different. He heard something different, too.
The sound he heard was a quiet clicking, a faint intermittent tapping like the sound of pebbles dribbling to the ground. It felt like pebbles falling too … in his mouth. Small hard bits were dropping onto his tongue and tumbling past his lips.
No. Not small, hard bits.
Teeth.
One of the bits rolled across his lower lip in a way that allowed him to feel the smooth surface on one side and the rough surface on an adjacent side. He also felt the triangular shape of the end of the bit. It was a tooth. The sound he was hearing was his teeth landing among the small, jagged rocks that made up the gravel beside the road.
While Joel tried to make sense of this inexplicable event, he felt one of the bits fall back, down his tongue. It lodged in his throat, and he felt like he was gagging. He wanted to—needed to—cough up the tooth and spit it out, but he couldn’t control his neck muscles any more than he could control any other part of his body. All he could do was imagine himself choking to death while the tooth stuck to his throat.
Crazed with disbelief, Joel’s inner voice shrieked and shrieked and shrieked. But his inner voice had no volume. No one could hear him because he made no sound.
His sight, his hearing, and his ability to feel pain were the only things Joel had left. He was pathetically grateful for these small gifts … until his eyes showed him what was happening next.
A tuft of black hair fluttered out in front of Joel’s vision. It got caught on a current in the night’s breeze, and it wafted away. Another tuft followed the first. Then a third, then a fourth. Then chunks of hair started dropping in front of his eyes. He felt more hunks slip down the back of his neck. Joel’s hair was falling out.
His silent shrieks turned into wails.
Joel’s consciousness, trapped within his traitorous body, could do nothing with the outrage and despair that strangled him from within. Every reaction he was having to the unspeakable things happening to him was being consumed by the black void of whatever controlled him.
