Five Nights at Freddy's Fazbear Frights Collection, page 73
The perky gray-haired woman leaned over and whispered, “The secret is cinnamon and vanilla, but don’t tell anyone I told you.” She grinned and bustled off.
Breakfast was being served in the main dining room, which, like the main lobby of the lodge, had a vaulted log ceiling and golden log walls. Bob appreciated that the room was filled with dozens of round tables so families could eat together instead of being forced to join everyone else at long communal tables. The only long table was the one at the front of the room, and it seemed to be reserved for the Camp Etenia staff.
Bob took another bite and watched his kids eat. Aaron and Tyler were stuffing as many pancakes in as they could, acting like they’d never have another chance to eat, ever. Cindy had both pancake and syrup smeared adorably all over her face.
Around them dozens of conversations filled the room with a lively hum that blended with the clinks and clatters of silverware and stoneware. The air was sweet with the aroma of maple and butter.
“Excuse me! Excuse me!” The loud tink, tink, tink of a spoon hitting the side of a glass lowered the decibel level in the room partway.
“Could I have your attention, everyone?” Bob and his family, and most of the other diners, looked toward the staff table. In the middle of it, a tall, tanned man with a beard waved at everyone. “Over here,” he called. Bob recognized him from the picnic and the campfire the night before.
Talking died down. A few more rustlings and murmurings gave way to silence. Everyone looked at the man.
“Remember me from last night? I’m Evan, the owner of Camp Etenia, and your host. I hope everyone had a good first night.”
Bob tensed but kept a smile on his face. Most everyone else cheered.
“Good, good,” Evan said. “Okay. A few announcements.”
Bob prepared to zone out. He figured Wanda would let him know whatever he needed to know.
“First,” Evan said, “regarding the Bunny Calls.”
Every cell in Bob’s body went on high alert. He tuned in.
“My apologies to those who signed up for a Bunny Call,” Evan said.
They should apologize, Bob thought.
“The Bunny Calls couldn’t be done this morning because the counselor who usually does Bunny Calls overslept. Ralpho wasn’t able to make his rounds today.”
Bob stared at Evan.
“These are really great pancakes,” Wanda said. “Aren’t they, Bob?”
You’re so lucky. You just get to sit around and play video games all day.”
If Matt had a dollar for every time someone had said this to him, he actually could sit around and play video games all day instead of going into the office and working on developing the things.
Game development was harder than people thought. It was a great job—the job Matt had always dreamed of back when he was a kid pretending to be sick so he could stay home from school and make simple games on his family’s home computer. But there was a huge difference between working on games and playing them. Many parts of the process were exhilarating—that first burst of inspiration when an idea came to you, the triumphant moment when you saw all of your plans come to fruition. But between first inspiration and final fulfillment, there were lots of opportunities for head-banging frustration and punching-a-fist-through-the-wall rage. One small programming error could mess up a whole game, and backtracking to try to identify such an error was incredibly tedious. People who loved to play games often thought their skills in gaming gave them the skills to design games as well, but this wasn’t any truer than thinking that since you knew how to read a good book, you also knew how to write one.
For now Matt was eating, sleeping, and breathing his job. He had landed the role of creating and refining the AI in Springtrap’s Revenge, a new cutting-edge virtual reality game that was to be the next installment in the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s series. It was the most high-profile game he had ever worked on, and he knew it was going to be a tremendous hit. How could it not be, with the exciting combination of virtual reality and the established Five Nights at Freddy’s characters that gamers already
loved to fear? The early glitches of the game had been worked out, and now Matt was about to do what nongamers assumed the only part of his job was: he was getting to play-test the game.
Matt secured the VR headset over his eyes and made sure the whole device fit him tightly. He was going in.
There was a wall on either side of him. These walls formed the dark hallway that was the entrance to the maze. At this point Matt could only see down the hall straight ahead; no entrances to the left or right were visible yet. Just as he was about to move forward, he saw his creation and his adversary—a large green rabbit—appear at the end of the hall and then exit to the left.
Just because it was a rabbit didn’t mean it was cute. Matt had always found humans in rabbit costumes creepy, as was evidenced by an old picture his mom had taken of him when he was three years old, screaming bloody murder on the lap of a blankly grinning Easter Bunny at the mall. Springtrap, the rabbit in the game, was even scarier than the uncanny–valley–dwelling mall Easter Bunny. Its costume was so tattered that some of its mechanical parts were visible beneath the fabric, and the better part of one ear was missing. Its eyes were evil orbs that glowed green when it spotted its prey, and its grin was wide and ghastly. It was definitely nightmare fuel, which was absolutely what Matt had intended for it to be.
Matt was especially proud of his titular character. He wanted to make Springtrap the kind of horrifying character who would endure, who would visit people’s nightmares for generations to come. From Dracula to Hannibal Lecter, there was a kind of immortality in a truly horrifying creation, and somehow a bit of this immortality touched the creator as well. Matt had done an exhaustive amount of research in developing the murderous rabbit. He had watched dozens of classic horror movies, studying the personalities of their cold-blooded killers. He read books and articles on serial killers, about how their appetite for violence could only be sated for a little while … until they had to choose another victim.
The more Matt watched and read, the more he understood. For the killers who lived on in people’s imaginations, murder was a source of joy, a means of self-expression, like painting for the artist or playing an instrument for the musician. Matt wanted Springtrap to show this kind of joy, this kind of deep self-realization, in the art of killing.
He had wanted to create a character who could open your jugular with the same happy excitement as a kid opening a birthday present.
Matt was no murderer, of course. If he were, he wouldn’t have had to do so much research. But Matt knew what it was to feel rage—to feel so wronged, so ill used, that he burned with the desire to destroy, to smash, to teach the people who had wronged him a lesson they would never forget. During the game’s development, Springtrap became the place Matt could put all these feelings, a repository for all his destructive urges. Springtrap was the child of Matt’s rage.
The goal at the beginning part of the game sounded simple: find your way out of the maze before Springtrap can kill you. But the maze was absurdly difficult, made even more so by the first-person perspective that the VR necessitated. Springtrap was both swift and stealthy and was able to appear seemingly from nowhere and kill you before you knew what hit you.
Matt made his way to the end of the entrance hallway and decided to turn right since it was the opposite of the direction he had seen the rabbit choose. He ended up, as he knew he would, in a large, square room with four closed doors. Three of these doors led to new passages in the maze. One led to Springtrap and certain death. Because of the way the game was programmed, Matt didn’t have any more idea of which door hid Springtrap than any other gamer would. Which door should he choose?
After a quick round of eeny-meeny-miney-mo, Matt chose the door that was straight in front of him. He stepped toward it, turned the knob, and pushed the door open. The soundtrack emitted a deafening screech, and the bunny lunged at him, its arm outstretched, slashing at him with a big, shining knife. The VR made Springtrap’s attack feel disturbingly realistic. The knife slashed what felt like dangerously close to his eyes, and when Springtrap lifted the knife high and plunged it downward, Matt couldn’t help bracing himself as though he were about to experience real physical pain. Then the perspective shifted to third person so that Matt could see the corpse of his avatar sprawled facedown on the floor. Springtrap, showing the twisted joy that Matt had intended, smiled with a look of true bliss. He knelt beside Matt’s avatar and used his knife to slice off Matt’s ear. Springtrap held up the blood-dripping ear, a trophy commemorating his achievement. The words GAME OVER appeared on the screen.
Matt was furious at himself for choosing the wrong door, furious at his rabbit creation for taking such obvious pleasure in his defeat. He didn’t even remove the headset to take a break. He just restarted the game and ran down the hallway until he was in the room with the four doors again. He had a gut instinct that the door on the left was the one to pick.
He approached the door, turned the knob, and pulled it open.
Springtrap lurched out at him with his jaws open wide. There was the soundtrack’s screech, followed by a gruesome snapping sound. Matt flinched because it felt for all the world like Springtrap was a split second away from biting his face off. Matt’s avatar’s corpse once again lay facedown (what was left of his face, anyway) in a fresh pool of blood. Springtrap grinned at his victory, his teeth stained red. He slowly licked the blood from his lips. The words GAME OVER filled the screen again.
Matt cursed, tore off his goggles, and threw them down on his desk. He should probably have been more careful with the expensive equipment, but he didn’t care. Why did he keep losing to Springtrap? Why couldn’t he win a game he had largely designed? He paced and cursed, then picked up a coffee mug and threw it. The mug smashed into tiny pieces and left a brown splatter on the clean white wall. Good, Matt thought. All of his thoughts were destructive.
There was a gentle knocking on the door, accompanied by the spoken words “Knock, knock.” Why did people do that? Wasn’t just knocking on the door enough?
“Yeah?” Matt snapped, not wanting to be bothered.
The door cracked and Jamie from the cubicle closest to his office peeked in. She was one of those women who looked like she hadn’t changed her hair or clothing style since third grade. Her bangs were cut straight across her forehead, and she appeared to be wearing a jumper. “I heard noises and wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m fine. At least I was before you interrupted me,” Matt snapped. Everybody in the office seemed to love Jamie. They raved about the homemade banana bread she’d leave in the break room and about how she was always willing to help out with a problem, whether professional or personal. But she didn’t fool Matt. He knew Jamie was a busybody. It was like she was a vampire who fed on office drama.
“Sorry. I guess those were just the sounds of the creative process I was hearing?” Jamie quipped, crinkling her nose as she smiled. It was a cowering, ingratiating smile, like a dog wagging its tail when you had caught it peeing on the carpet.
“That’s right,” Matt said, not smiling back. What was he supposed to say—that he got mad because the big bunny had killed him twice in a row? That he had thrown his coffee mug against the wall because he couldn’t handle the fact that he was losing to his own creation? Matt was starting to feel like the video game developer version of Dr. Frankenstein.
“Well, good luck. See you later,” Jamie said, giving a little wave with just her fingers. “You want me to close the door back?”
“I never wanted you to open it in the first place.”
He was going to go in again. This time he would make better choices. He would get past the murderous rabbit. He would lay to rest the nagging suspicion that this was a game he couldn’t win.
Sometimes Matt felt like life was a game he couldn’t win. Sure, he had all the trappings of a happy existence. He had graduated from a good school and married Hannah, his college sweetheart. He had gotten his dream job, and he and Hannah had bought a pretty four-bedroom house with ample room for her home office, his massive video game collection, and, Hannah had hoped, a growing family.
Back in college, Matt had enjoyed the excitement of pursuing and eventually winning Hannah. He had met her in a killer chemistry class freshman year, where she had an A average and he was struggling. He asked her to be his tutor, and they met twice a week. They worked on chemistry, but they also talked and laughed a lot. Finally, he had asked her, “Would you be willing to go out on a date with somebody who is way worse at chemistry than you?”
She said yes, and they soon were inseparable. Once they were really dating, she didn’t even mind letting him copy down her problem sets. It gave them extra time to spend together doing other, more fun things. Their “meet cute” story was a big hit whenever people asked how they got together. They always said, “We had chemistry.”
After graduation, Matt had loved going after and getting his dream job, hunting for and acquiring the right house. But once you won the prize, there was nothing to do but maintain it. And maintenance wasn’t as interesting. The dream house had extensive plumbing problems, so many that it seemed like they should just ask a plumber to move into one of the extra bedrooms. The job was great sometimes, but there were also countless boring meetings during which people who knew much less than he did talked on and on about insignificant details, and he was expected to listen to them respectfully, which wasn’t always possible. How could it be, when he clearly had the best ideas in the room?
And then there was the problem of maintaining a marriage. When they were dating, Matt had been so preoccupied with winning Hannah’s love that he never thought about the cost of that prize, namely that he was committing to spending the rest of his life with one person and one person only. It had gotten boring quickly. The endless nights in, the same conversations about their days, the same chicken breasts and green salad for dinner and the same TV shows afterward. Hannah was still pretty and smart and nice, but the novelty had worn off her, like when you buy a new car and it’s exciting at first but then it just settles in to being your car, reliable and useful but no longer a source of excitement.
There had been other problems as well. Hannah had wanted to start a family right away, and Matt hadn’t. In fact, the more tedious the day-to-day grind of marriage had become, the less he had wanted to add kids to the equation. The whole prospect of parenting yawned before him as a string of unpleasant responsibilities stretching out for decades: the feedings and diaper changes and sleepless nights of infancy, the endless ferrying of school-age children to school and lessons and practices, the drama and rebellion of the teen years. All that, plus the stress of having to pay for college. Who needed it?
Apparently, Hannah had needed it. Or anyway, she had thought she did. Every Friday night when they would go out to the Neapolitan, their favorite Italian restaurant, she would wait until Matt had been softened up by a couple of glasses of wine and say, “I think it’s time.”
Matt would always say, “Time for dessert?” even though he knew good and well that tiramisu wasn’t what she was talking about.
“Time to start a family,” she would inevitably say.
He had tried to put her off in a variety of ways. He had said they still needed a few years to focus on their careers, but Hannah had said that since she ran her graphic design business from home, she could balance it with parenting now.
Once, Matt had suggested that, if she wanted something to take care of, they should get a dog instead of having a baby. That tactic hadn’t gone over well.
The worst, though, was when he tried to argue that pregnancy and motherhood would ruin Hannah’s petite, attractive figure. That time, she had called him shallow, thrown the contents of her water glass in his face, and stormed out of the restaurant.
The fact that Hannah wasn’t willing to listen to reason about having a baby had definitely put a damper on their marriage. And then there was the matter of the harmless little friendship Matt had struck up with Brianna, a server at the restaurant where he frequently had lunch. It wasn’t anything serious and it certainly wasn’t any of Hannah’s business, but she had gotten all upset when Matt had left his computer open and she saw that Brianna had sent him a picture of herself in a bikini. He had no idea why Hannah had been so unreasonable. Friends did that kind of thing all the time.
Hannah had suggested that the two of them get marriage counseling, but Matt had refused, and their marriage had ended in divorce shortly after their one-year anniversary. Since then, Matt had had a string of girlfriends, the first one being Brianna from the restaurant. None of these relationships had lasted over three months, and Matt was always the one who got dumped. This string of breakups was a major contributor to the rage Matt was able to summon in creating Springtrap.
Women were crazy, Matt had decided. And not worth the effort.
To combat his loneliness and frustration, Matt had thrown himself into the design of the VR game even more obsessively than usual. It was the cruelest of ironies that the game—much like his relationships—seemed to have turned against him.
But this time, he was going to outsmart the rabbit and get out of the maze alive.
Matt ran down the dark hallway and turned right into the room with the doors. He looked around and chose the door behind him. When he turned the knob and opened the door, the entrance was clear.
He walked down another dark hallway. There was no sign of Springtrap. He made a left into the hallway that led to a hall of mirrors. He knew his way through, of course. The trick was making sure he wasn’t being followed. He moved his way past the panels of glass, each one identical. He was maybe twelve steps from the exit when he felt the presence of something behind him. In a mirror, he saw the reflection of the big green rabbit standing behind him. The rabbit grabbed him by the hair and raised a gleaming knife to Matt’s throat.
