Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 186
“What did this supposed shark look like?” Gordon asked.
“Supposed?” Dirk ground his teeth. He could feel his shoulders rising up to his ears, and he forced them back down.
Gordon shrugged.
Dirk gave Gordon a scathing look and said, “Felix was kind of bluish-gray, about six feet long. He was a shark. You know what a shark looks like. He was animatronic. He opened his mouth. He looked around. He swam. Just like a real shark.”
“Wouldn’t a real shark eat you?” Leo asked.
“Sharks don’t eat humans!” Dirk said. “Sharks don’t even like the taste of humans.”
“Tell that to the surfers who’ve been attacked by sharks,” Gordon said.
Dirk shook his head. “When a shark attacks a human, it’s usually because it’s confused or curious. They basically take a test bite to see if we taste good, and unfortunately, that bite can be fatal or can at least remove parts people would rather keep. But really, humans are far more dangerous to sharks than they are to us. Think about it. Humans hunt sharks for everything from shark fin soup to lubricants to health supplements.”
“Well, we can always count on Dirk for useless trivia,” Gordon said.
Dirk ignored him. “Felix was a programmed shark and obviously, they didn’t program him to eat the kids who got in the tank with him.”
“That would be bad for business,” Jenny said.
Leo tried to contain a giggle by scribbling something down in his notebook.
“But did he have teeth like a shark?” Wyatt asked.
Dirk nodded. “Sure.”
Gordon shrugged. “Well, I can think of at least a dozen ways an animatronic like that could go wrong.”
Jenny nodded. “I agree.” She looked at Dirk. “You do realize how crazy dangerous what you’re describing would be? I can’t even imagine how they could safely build such a thing, especially back then. And for little kids? Even without the shark, the swimming tube would be a horrible idea for kids. We’re talking liability issues galore.”
Of course, you’d go there, Dirk thought. The twins’ parents were both attorneys.
“I’m not making it up,” Dirk insisted.
“I don’t think you’re trying to mess with us,” Jenny said. She screwed up her face. “I just—”
“So, you’re saying little kids, like five years old, like you were, wanted to get in this enclosed tank and swim with a big robotic shark?” Gordon asked.
“Yeah,” Dirk said in a what-of-it tone.
Leo looked up from his notebook. “That would be scary as hell for a little kid.”
“Never mind a little kid,” Jenny mused. “I’d be terrified now being in an enclosed thing of water like that with a shark swimming with me. I wouldn’t care if it was animatronic. And I know what you said, Dirk”—she smiled at him—“but sharks are just plain scary.”
“Felix wasn’t scary,” Dirk objected. “You could see in his eyes that he was friendly. I mean, he was programmed to be friendly. I liked Felix. I have good memories of him.” Dirk felt himself getting choked up, and he cleared his throat. “I thought of Felix as a kindred spirit. We were both outcasts, both misunderstood. Not wanted.”
Dirk pressed his lips together and blinked so he wouldn’t get teary. He lifted his gaze and looked at Jenny. She bunched up her eyebrows. “Maybe Felix was your childhood way of creating an ally when you didn’t have one.”
“I think Jenny has a point,” Wyatt said. “It sounds like your subconscious made up this character to help you cope. It makes sense. Our minds do incredible things to get us through life.”
“My subconscious mind did not come up with Felix!” Dirk shouted.
For several seconds, no one said a word. The music on the stereo continued to play some rock band wailing about love. The fire continued to dance in the fireplace. A log shifted, and it hit the bottom of the grate with a thump and several pops and cracks. Dirk could barely hear these sounds, though, because blood was rushing through his head so quickly it sounded like a fast-paced version of Felix’s swimming tube.
“So, none of you believe me?” Dirk asked. Because everything seemed muted, he spoke loudly.
He looked at each friend in turn, starting with Jenny. She frowned and looked away. Beside her, Gordon crossed his arms and shook his head. Dirk wanted to punch his friend in the nose. The guy who believed the creator of Freddy’s invented an android army refused to believe Dirk’s story? Yeah, that made sense.
Dirk looked at Wyatt. Wyatt’s smile was still in place, but it looked a little wilted. He gave Dirk an apologetic shrug. “Maybe if you could remember where the Freddy’s was. I mean, Fazbear Entertainment came up with some pretty cool things. It’s possible one of their pizzerias had the moat thing you’re describing. You really have no idea where it was?”
Dirk shook his head, and his shoulders slumped. Then he straightened them. “But that’s one of the reasons I wanted to start this club. If you help me, I’m sure we could find all the old Freddy’s locations, and we could track down where Felix was.”
He waited for his friends to tell him what a great idea that was.
No one said anything for a couple seconds. Then Leo spoke up. “That sounds kind of like tilting at windmills or searching for Atlantis, dude.”
“Yeah, it’s just like that treasure hunt you wanted us to go on last year,” Gordon said. “Would have been a lot of work for nothing.”
Dirk looked at his other friends. “No one wants to help me find Felix?”
Jenny sighed. “No one wants to look for something that probably exists only in your imagination.”
“You do have a great imagination,” Leo said. “I can work Felix and the moat in to my latest story. I’d give credit to you, Dirk, obviously.”
Dirk didn’t respond, but Leo went on, “Maybe we can sit down together and you can tell me how you envisioned the moat thing.”
“I didn’t envision anything!” Dirk bellowed.
That was it. He was done.
Dirk went to stand up and realized he was already standing. He’d never sat back down. Good. That meant he could leave faster.
Dirk swiveled and strode away from the game table.
“Dude!” Gordon called. “Where’re you going?”
“Maybe to find Felix. I don’t know!” Dirk flung over his shoulder.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so outraged. He felt totally and completely dismissed. He hated that feeling!
Dirk charged across the basement, grabbed his coat from the bench by the door, and reached for the doorknob.
“But I wrote a new character for the game,” Leo called out. “If you leave, we can’t use it.”
Dirk didn’t even bother to answer. He just flung open the door, dashed through it, and slammed it behind him.
When Dirk got back to his pathetic garage-apartment, there was no warm glow in the windows. No one was ever waiting at home for him.
Dirk stepped out of his old, battered car. The driver’s door squeaked when he closed it.
He wanted to slam the door, but when he slammed the door on his temperamental compact sedan, it tended to stick. He wasn’t in the mood to crawl back in to his car from the passenger side tonight … because he was going back out as soon as he could pack a bag.
Unlocking the door, Dirk stepped in to his place. He called it an apartment, but that made the space sound fancier than it was. It was just a square room with a tiny bathroom stuck in the back corner. His “kitchen” was a sink, a small fridge, and “counter” made from an unfinished door, set on sawhorses. A hot plate on a tile on one end of the door’s surface was his “stove.”
Dirk’s whole place still smelled like the eggs and bacon he’d made for breakfast that morning. The digital clock next to his sofa bed told Dirk it was only 8:35 p.m. On Saturday evenings like this one, he was never usually here at this early hour. He was always at Gordon and Jenny’s place.
Dirk hadn’t had a home, a real home, well … ever. Sure, his aunt had tried to give him a home, but she wasn’t cut out to raise a kid. She’d always been distant and formal with him. In the nine years he’d lived with her, he’d always felt like a guest; he lived in fear of breaking one of her knickknacks or staining her upholstery.
And before that, when his parents had still been alive? He’d never had a home then, either.
None of Dirk’s friends knew about his past, and he wanted to keep it that way. It was too weird.
Dirk’s mom and dad had put together a magic act before Dirk was born. They’d run away from home together right after high school graduation, and they’d supported themselves by doing magic shows all over the country. When they had Dirk, they weren’t about to let a baby hold them back. They just included him in their show, and that’s when they started making really good money. People flocked from all over to see the “Amazing Disappearing Baby” and later the “Amazing Disappearing Toddler.”
All was going well until a social worker took exception to five-year-old Dirk being sawed in half. Child Protective Services got involved, and his parents took him out of the act. From that point on, they’d started leaving him with either his aunt or some babysitter while they did their thing. They’d probably still be on the road if it wasn’t for a blown tire. Their car had gone over the side of a long drop-off, and this time, Dirk’s parents were the ones who did the disappearing. Dirk had never forgiven his parents for going back on the road without him. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have died and left him alone. He’d never gotten over his belief that their magic act was more important to them than their son.
Dirk knew he’d let this belief pretty much run his life. He was self-aware enough to realize his past fueled his need to be right all the time. He also knew that spending his formative years in a magic act was responsible for his obsession with puzzles, mysteries, and the unexplained. It was like he was a magnet for the bizarre. Maybe that was why he’d loved Felix so much. And now his need to be right, his interest in mysteries, and his love of Felix was sending him on another journey.
Dirk opened the rickety fake wood cabinet that served as his closet. Pulling out a canvas duffel bag, he crossed the green indoor-outdoor carpeting covering the garage’s hard concrete floor. At a small desk on the opposite side of the room, he set down the duffel and opened the top drawer. He pulled out a ledger-type leather book. He put that in the bottom of the duffel bag and packed what he’d need for a couple weeks’ travel. When he finished packing, he dug out the shoebox he kept his savings in.
A quick count of his money came up with just over a couple thousand dollars. It sounded like a lot, but gas and food and motel room costs could add up fast. He’d have to be careful.
A few moments later, he began gathering some other things—his sleeping bag, a jacket, a hat and gloves, a flashlight and batteries, and his phone. Once that was done, he stuffed in a grocery bag’s worth of munchies like crackers, chips, nuts, and dried fruit.
Dirk looked at his packed duffel bag and the stack of supplies next to it. He glanced around his place one more time. His gaze landed on a framed photo of his parents, sitting on his desk. He stepped over and picked it up.
He snapped his fingers and opened the chest that sat under his only window. Lying on top of a pile of games and old toys, a matted and threadbare plush blue-gray shark with a limp dorsal fin lay on its side. Dirk picked it up and tucked it in his duffel.
He was ready. He would find the Freddy’s that was home to Felix the Shark.
Dirk was hesitant to tell his friends for fear of opening up the wounds from his childhood, but he already had a few good guesses where Felix could be. He’d been using good old-fashioned research to retrace his parents’ travels for months now, ever since he started having dreams about Felix.
Dirk wasn’t sure why the dreams started. Was it because he was becoming more and more aware of how stuck he was in his life, how he was going nowhere? Had that made him want to go back to his origins for some reason?
Whatever had caused the dreams, at one point he’d gotten out the box that contained the few things his parents had left to him. Under his dad’s goofy top hat, a small jewelry box filled with his mom’s costume jewelry, and a couple of warped, yellowing photo albums, he’d found a ledger that kept track of their performances. That was the leather book he’d already put in his duffel. It was filled with lists of places and dates.
He was pretty sure he’d been five when he swam with Felix, but he might have been a year or two younger or maybe a year older. Not any older than that. He remembered the last two years of his time with his parents pretty well, and Felix wasn’t one of those memories. So, he figured he had a three-year window to look in, and in those three years, his parents had performed in seventeen states.
He booted up his ancient computer and ran a search of the Better Business Bureau’s record of Fazbear Entertainment. These resources gave him a list of every Fazbear Entertainment venue—restaurant locations and manufacturing and distributing locations—but they didn’t reveal what attractions or animatronics were at those locations.
Dirk turned his attention to online forum posts by former employees of the company, to see if any could remember which franchise had an animatronic shark, but he only found a handful of posts, and none of them mentioned Felix. Thanks for nothing.
He really only had one option left—retrace his parents’ steps. Thankfully, he had a way to do that.
This whole thing felt like the worst rejection of his life. Dirk was telling the truth, and he knew he remembered correctly what had happened. It infuriated him to be disbelieved.
He had to prove that he was right.
Using his mom’s performance records combined with the research he’d done on Fazbear Entertainment, Dirk was able to confine his search area to a handful of towns. It was a matter of overlapping the bubbles. The towns that had a Fazbear franchise were in one bubble. His mom’s performance dates were in another. Thankfully, only seven towns were in the overlap.
Today marked the eleventh day Dirk had been on the road, and he was heading in to his sixth town.
Because he had just two towns left to visit, Dirk was getting a little nervous about his overlapping bubble theory. It would only work if he had complete lists. If he didn’t have all the Freddy’s locations or his mom had left a stop off her list, he was screwed.
His spirits were a little low.
But that might not have had anything to do with his search. It might have had to do with the depressing places he was visiting. Take the town he was closing in on now, for instance.
Forkstop—which amazingly wasn’t on the list of worst town names ever (Dirk had checked)—was once a booming community built around the manufacture and sale of farming equipment. Although it sat in the middle of the country, surrounded for endless miles by nothing but farmland and empty fields, it apparently used to have one claim to fame: It had been the birthplace of an infamous outlaw who had terrorized the Midwest in the late 1800s. The guy, Floyd Crawberry, had been no Billy the Kid, but he’d apparently done some heinous things. So, the town had tried to create a tourism industry based on him when demand for Forkstop’s farming equipment dwindled. This had worked to an extent, but developers tried to go too far, too fast. Driving through, most of the Crawberry attractions were as defunct as the manufacturing plants.
However, knowing the history hadn’t prepared him for how much despair radiated from Forkstop. He started feeling it before he even got to the city limits.
Forkstop was unlike the last few towns Dirk had driven through. Those had been surrounded by sprawling farms preparing for the fast-approaching winter, their rolling dry hills dotted with tidy small homes and barns of various sizes. Forkstop didn’t have any farmland close to its boundaries, just empty buildings.
Dirk dutifully let up on the accelerator as he passed a low building with a caved-in roof and a REDUCE SPEED AHEAD sign by the road. He was a stickler for speed limits. The cost of fines for speeding wasn’t in his budget.
As he slowed to the limit set on the next sign, he noticed that the dilapidated buildings had a sort of phalanx feel to them. Three rows of abandoned buildings flanked the road leading in to town, as if they were set up in formation to protect the town from invaders. As he passed the weathered, graffiti-covered structures, he half expected an army of android troops to start pouring out of them. He could picture the lurching, robotic soldiers descending on his poor little sedan, ripping off its doors, and pulling him out on to the pavement.
Dirk shivered. “Get a grip,” he told himself. “You’ve been listening to too many of Gordon’s stupid theories.”
Maybe it’s the weather, he thought. Today, in addition to heading in to a dying town, Dirk was feeling crushed by a gray sky that seemed so low, he could actually feel it pressing down on him. Or at least, he thought he could.
On top of the intrusive heavy gray above, a stiff wind was blowing. Leaves and twigs and trash blew across the roadway at regular intervals. The wind buffeted Dirk’s little car, and the gusts’ high-pitched whistle slithered in around the door seals, giving Dirk the willies. He couldn’t wait to find a motel and get inside a nice quiet room, away from his car and the melancholy weather. In the last two towns, Dirk had slept in his car, just outside of town, because the motel rates had been too high. He wanted to sleep in a real bed tonight, and he needed a shower. He hoped a run-down town like this would have some old place with cheap rates.
Dirk reached Forkstop’s city limits and passed by a faded WELCOME TO FORKSTOP, POPULATION 4,251 sign and began looking around. Usually budget motels are right on the outskirts of these old towns—
Dirk hit the brakes and took an abrupt right turn.
Tucked in behind what looked like an empty warehouse, a neon sign with a blinking arrow announced, otel cancy. Figuring that a hotel with a broken neon sign wasn’t going to charge big bucks, Dirk aimed his sedan toward the sign and saw that the arrow pointed to a small roadside motel called CRAWBERRY CRADLE ROADSIDE INN. It had maybe a dozen units in a building that appeared to be in dire need of renovation. This was Dirk’s kind of place.
