Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 35
Wait. She’d woken at 1:35 a.m.
She’d set the doll’s alarm for 1:35. What if she’d missed the a.m./p.m. settings? “Oops,” she whispered. “Sorry, Ella.”
Delilah thought about going outside to retrieve the possibly-still-working doll, but she was too tired. She’d look in the morning.
Delilah snuggled under the covers and went back to sleep.
“You threw it away?” Harper drew in her chin, raised an eyebrow, and quirked her mouth in her “What were you thinking?” expression.
“I thought it was broken.”
“Yeah, but it could be a collectible. It could be worth something.” Harper’s huge blue eyes lit up at the idea of dollar signs. Delilah could almost see a calculator totaling imaginary amounts in Harper’s mind.
Delilah and Harper sat at an elevated round table in Harper’s favorite espresso place. Delilah sipped cinnamon tea. Harper was drinking some kind of fancy quadruple espresso. Harper was addicted to coffee.
The espresso place was a brick-walled narrow space with lots of stainless steel and chrome and very little wood. At just before 11:00 a.m., it wasn’t very crowded. A dark-skinned woman with pigtails sat at one table concentrating on whatever was on her laptop, and an elderly man munched on a muffin while reading the paper. Behind the counter, machines fizzed and spit.
“Haven’t I taught you anything?” Harper asked. “Always try to sell it before you toss it. Remember?”
“I was late for work. I was a little stressed.”
“You need to learn to meditate.”
“Then I’d miss work because I got lost in meditation.”
Harper laughed. And everyone in the place turned to look at her. Harper’s laugh was like a resounding sea lion bark. You could tell how funny she thought something was by the number of barks. Delilah’s comment warranted just one.
“How do you like the new play?” Delilah asked.
“It’s yippy skippy fun. My lines are all crap. But I love-love my character.”
Delilah smiled.
Harper had been Delilah’s best friend for almost six years, ever since the two girls landed in foster care together. Determined that the foster home would be their last, they’d teamed up to help each other survive the regimented structure imposed by Gerald, the ex-military husband of the couple who’d taken them in.
Whenever Gerald admonished them for not adhering to his schedule, reminding them that this had to happen at 0500 and that had to happen at 0610, Harper would mumble something like, “And you can jump off a cliff at oh-screw-you-hundred.”
She made Delilah laugh, which helped her survive.
Complete opposites in both looks and personality, Harper and Delilah probably would never have been friends if they hadn’t been thrown into scheduling hell together. However, they made their friendship work. When Harper announced her mischievous plan for getting a famous playwright to cast her in his plays, Delilah just said, “Be safe.” When Delilah said she was going to marry her knight in shining armor and have babies, Harper just said, “Don’t sign a prenup.” Harper followed Delilah’s advice and had the grace not to say, “I told you so” when Delilah failed to follow hers.
“I think you should look for her,” Harper said.
“What?”
“Ella. I think you should look for her.” Harper toyed with one of the dozen or so blonde braids she had coiled around her head. Wearing heavy colorful makeup and a skintight green dress, she had an exotic Medusa look going on.
“Because she might be worth something.” Delilah nodded.
“It’s not just that. You said she looked like the baby you thought you were going to have. That’s a pretty bizarre thing, don’t you think? That you’d find a doll that looks like this imaginary baby? What if she’s some kind of sign?”
“You know I don’t believe in signs.”
“Maybe you should.”
Delilah shrugged, and they spent the rest of their visit talking about Harper’s play and Harper’s latest boyfriend. Then they reminded each other, as they always did, of the hell they’d escaped.
“No, you cannot use the bathroom. Not until 0945. That’s your scheduled time to urinate,” Harper intoned. She did great impersonations, and she had Gerald nailed. She could also, eerily, mimic the alarm Gerald had used to signal every scheduled event in the household. The alarm was a sort of cross between a ring, a buzz, and a siren. Delilah always covered her ears when Harper felt compelled to impersonate it.
Richard once asked Delilah why she and Harper needed to relive their past regularly. She said, “It reminds us of how good things are now, even when they seem not so good. Anything is better than living with Gerald.”
As it always did when Delilah and Harper were together, time disappeared. When Delilah went out to her car, she realized she barely had time to get home and get changed before her shift.
“Why are you being so nice to me?” Delilah asked Nate when she arrived for her two to ten.
She stood in front of the schedule posted on the bulletin board in the employee break room. Nate had scheduled Delilah for the two-to-ten shift for a full week in a row. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worked the same shift for a week. And this shift was especially good right now because as long as she went to bed within a couple hours after ending her shift, she’d wake up in plenty of time for work. She wouldn’t even need an alarm clock. She could put up with the evening rush in exchange for decent sleep.
Nate looked up from doing his daily paperwork at the round table by the bulletin board. “It’s in my best interests. I like it when you show up on time for work.”
“Well, it’s easier to show up on time to work when my body can figure out what time it is,” Delilah said.
“Wuss.”
“Slave driver.”
“Whiner.”
“Meany.”
Delilah started her shift as close to happy as she’d been in some time. Work was going well. When Nate teased, Nate was happy. When Nate was happy, things ran smoothly.
Delilah had such a good time at work that she came back to the apartment in a good mood. She ate meat loaf and broccoli in a good mood, and she went to sleep in a good mood. The good mood disappeared, though, when she sat up in bed, her muscles rigid, listening.
Who was whispering?
Someone was whispering. Delilah could hear indecipherable sibilant words coming from—from where?
Wide awake, she looked at her clock. It was 1:35 a.m.
Again?
Delilah strained to understand the whispers. But they stopped. Now all she could hear were cars on the road.
Where did that whispering come from?
Ella!
It had to be.
Harper was right. Delilah should have looked for Ella. She should have checked, not because Ella might have been valuable or because she was a sign but because apparently her alarm was still going off at 1:35 a.m. But Delilah hadn’t had time before she went to work. She’d check today for sure. She couldn’t believe Ella’s alarm was so powerful she could hear it from here, but then again, wasn’t Mary’s singing enough painful proof of the apartment’s thin walls?
Delilah lay back down and closed her eyes. Ella’s face filled her inner vision. Delilah opened her eyes. She sat up again.
I’m not going to get any sleep until I find her, she thought.
Delilah got up and pulled on sweats. Stuffing her feet in a pair of slip-on clogs, she reached in her nightstand drawer for a flashlight. The dumpsters were well lit, but if Ella was partially buried, Delilah might have trouble spotting her.
Throwing on an ugly multicolored cardigan Harper had crocheted for her, Delilah left her apartment, went down the silent hallway and stairs, and exited the building. Outside, the air was chilly, but the sky was clear. A few stars even managed to shine through the frothy glow of the urban night.
Delilah paused just outside the building and looked around to be sure she was alone. She was.
Padding around the building, she headed for the dumpsters. The yawning green trash bins sat ugly and under the spotlights of the streetlamps and the diner’s floodlights. One of the two that had been open before was closed, and the one that had been closed was open. They all looked a little askew, like they’d been moved around.
Great. If they’d been moved, finding Ella would be like playing a game of hat trick. This might take longer than Delilah had envisioned.
Glancing around again, Delilah shrugged. She might as well get it over with.
Approaching the middle dumpster, the one she thought she’d thrown Ella into, Delilah lifted the lid, stood on her tiptoes, and shone the light down inside. The light landed on a mound of plastic garbage bags, a ratty old blanket, a smattering of takeout containers, and a sprinkling of empty cans. Her light didn’t reveal the obnoxious smell of dirty diapers that Delilah’s nose discovered as soon as she opened the lid. Delilah gently closed the lid, careful not to let it clang shut. If Ella was in this dumpster, she was buried.
Delilah decided she’d rather check the other two dumpsters first before diving into any of them. So she did her tiptoe-light-aiming routine first at the open one that she thought had also been open when she chucked Ella into a dumpster. The only thing that set this dumpster apart from the first one Delilah looked at was a couple dozen old paperbacks cascading over the piles of stuffed garbage bags. Delilah was tempted to take one of them, a murder mystery, but it had a suspicious red stain on it. She didn’t want to know what the stain was.
The last dumpster Delilah checked was the one she was pretty sure had been closed when she’d tossed away Ella. So she wasn’t surprised to find more of the same kind of trash and no sign of Ella.
Stymied, Delilah turned off her flashlight and thought for a moment. Did she really have to get in these dumpsters and dig for Ella? She didn’t know for sure that it was Ella waking her up. For all she knew it was Mary singing some dumb middle-of-the-night song or a cat in heat.
Yeah, but why did she get awakened precisely at 1:35 a.m. both last night and tonight? Coincidence? It was possible, wasn’t it? Harper once went through this period when she kept waking up at 3:33 a.m., and then she saw 333 everywhere for a couple months. Harper researched the number and found out it was some kind of spiritual sign.
What if 135 was a spiritual sign just for Delilah?
She snorted and turned her back on the dumpsters. Now she was just being silly. She headed back to the front of the building. She’d stick with the coincidence theory for now. It was easier and less smelly than assuming Ella was the problem.
The coincidence explanation got strained when Delilah awoke at 1:35 a.m. for the third night in a row. This time, she was sure there had been a sound against her window. Had it been a scratching sound? A tapping?
Whatever it was, it had been ominous enough that Delilah immediately grabbed her flashlight and aimed it at her blinds. Then after staring at her unmoving blinds for a minute, she got up the courage to tiptoe across the room and look behind them.
Nothing was at the window. And down below in the parking lot, the dumpsters hadn’t moved from the positions they’d been in the night before.
Delilah blew out air. She was going to have to search every one of those dumpsters.
Should she wait for daylight? That would make it easier, wouldn’t it? And if someone asked what she was doing, she’d answer truthfully that she threw out something she shouldn’t have thrown out.
Delilah left the window and took a step toward her bed.
She stopped. What day was it?
Working all sorts of weird shifts, Delilah rarely knew what day of the week it was. She thought for a second. Wednesday.
“Well, crap,” she grumbled.
The dumpsters were emptied on Thursday mornings, early. If she waited, Ella would be gone.
But wait, that was a good thing, right? If Ella was gone, her alarm couldn’t go off and wake up Delilah. Delilah didn’t think Ella was worth anything, and she was sure Ella’s resemblance to Emma was a fluke. There was no reason why Delilah should have to climb through stinky trash. She could just let the garbage truck take her problem away.
Delilah smiled and got back in bed.
Thursday night—or rather, Friday early morning—Delilah’s eyes opened to see 1:35 a.m.… again. She was immediately fully alert. Her heart beat loudly, fast and steady like a driving beat on a timpani. This manic pace wasn’t caused only by the time. It was also a reaction to Delilah’s disturbingly strong feeling that something was under her bed. Something was moving under her bed.
But that couldn’t be.
Could it?
Delilah listened. She didn’t hear anything at first, but then she wondered if she was hearing a scuttling sound on the carpet under her bed.
She sat up and started to swing a leg over the side of the bed. She stopped. What if something was under there? It could grab her foot!
Quickly pulling her foot back under the covers, Delilah reached out and turned on her nightstand lamp.
As soon as her room was lit, she leaned over and checked the floor all around her bed. She saw nothing but the tan-and-cream-colored carpet she’d gotten at a yard sale.
She’d just imagined the sound.
Or something was still under her bed.
Delilah reached for her nightstand drawer. She grabbed her flashlight, turned it on, took a deep breath, then hung over the bed and shined the light beneath it. Nothing was there.
Okay, this was getting crazy. It was four nights in a row.
It had to be Ella.
But the dumpsters had been emptied.
Delilah crossed her legs and rubbed her arms. They were covered with goose bumps.
What if the trash collectors didn’t completely empty the dumpsters? Or what if Ella fell out as the bin was being emptied?
Delilah had to check, and she had to check now. She needed to know.
So repeating her steps from two nights before, Delilah went out to the dumpsters with her flashlight. Tonight, they were all closed. They usually were after trash pickup on Thursdays.
Delilah approached the dumpsters in order, from right to left. She lifted three lids and shined her light into three nearly empty bins. All she found were two bags of household trash, a bag of dirty diapers (and its corresponding nasty odor), a broken lamp, and a sad pile of old men’s clothing. The only thing that could have hidden Ella was the pile of clothing, so Delilah, holding her breath, hung over the edge of the dumpster that had the clothing and used her flashlight to poke around in the pile. The only thing under the clothes were more clothes.
Delilah picked her way between the dumpsters and around the area surrounding them. She shined her flashlight into every dark nook or cranny she spotted. No Ella.
The doll was gone. For sure. She wasn’t here.
She couldn’t be what was waking Delilah up at 1:35 a.m.
So what was?
Delilah woke at 10:10 the next morning, and the first thing she did when she got up, besides covering her ears so she wouldn’t hear Mary singing about dusting books, was call Harper and ask her to come by. She woke Harper up, but Harper never let stuff like that bother her.
“Sure, I’ll be there in a bit,” she chirped.
When Harper arrived, she dropped her voluminous sack-style leather purse on the floor, flopped onto the love seat, and said, “What’s the problem?”
“How do you know there’s a problem?” Delilah sat down next to her.
“You don’t normally ask me to come over.”
Oh yeah. Delilah had basically summoned her friend. That showed how rattled she was.
“I have a question,” Delilah said.
“Must be a good one.”
“Did you rescue Ella from the dumpster yesterday?”
“What?”
Mary sang out, “Because I feel fizzy yey.”
Harper grinned. She liked Mary’s songs.
“The doll. Ella. Did you get her out of the dumpster?”
Harper ruffled her eyebrows. “Why would I do that?”
“You said she could be worth something.”
“Well, she could, but she’s your doll. Not mine. If I was going to look for her, I’d tell you.”
Delilah rubbed her face with her hands. Yeah, she should have known that.
“Why are you asking? Did you look and not find her?”
“Yeah, I looked, sort of. I didn’t dig through the trash. But then the dumpsters were emptied.”
“Okay. So Ella is gone. What’s the big?”
Delilah hadn’t told Harper about being wakened at 1:35 a.m. every morning. She’d just told her about finding the doll and throwing it out when it didn’t work. She couldn’t think of a way to tell Harper about waking up at the same time four nights in a row without sounding like she was overreacting. Besides, Harper would just talk about signs again if Delilah told her.
“Since I’m here, you wanna go get some lunch?” Harper asked.
Delilah waved good-bye to Harper with relief. She was glad the lunch was over because in the middle of it, she’d come up with an idea. Now, she could finally act on it.
Pointing her car in the direction of the newer neighborhood with the runty cherry trees, she went in search of the house where she’d found the garage sale … and Ella. She planned to get some answers about the doll from the doll’s previous owner.
Without signs to direct her, Delilah missed a turn and had to backtrack. Eventually, though, she pulled up in front of the Spanish-style house where she’d met Mumford, the friendly Chihuahua.
But Mumford wasn’t home. Nobody was.
Even though Delilah could see from the street that the bare windows revealed vacant rooms in the house, she pulled into the empty driveway and got out of her car.
Inhaling the still, humid air, she wrinkled her nose at a smell that reminded her of rotting leaves. The neighborhood was unusually silent. The only thing she heard was a lone dog barking in the distance.
This was the house, wasn’t it? She studied it, then turned and looked at the surrounding houses. Yes, this was it.
