John stared at her, momentarily speechless. Before he could figure out what to say, Charlie stood abruptly. “I need to leave.”
“Are you sure? You haven’t even eaten,” he said.
“I’m sorry—” She broke off. “John, it’s so good to see you.” She hesitated then turned to walk away, possibly for good. She knew she’d disappointed him.
“Charlie, would you like to go out with me tonight?” John’s voice sounded stiff, but his eyes were warm.
“Sure, that would be great,” she said, giving a half smile. “Don’t you have to get back to work tomorrow, though?”
“It’s only half an hour away,” John said. He cleared his throat. “But I meant, do you want to go out with me?”
“I just said yeah,” Charlie repeated, slightly irritated.
John sighed. “I mean on a date, Charlie.”
“Oh.” Charlie stared at him for a moment. “Right.” You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. Jessica’s voice echoed in her head. And yet … she realized she was smiling.
“Um, yes. Yes, a date. Okay, yeah. There’s a movie theater in town?” she hazarded, vaguely recalling that movies were something people did on dates.
John nodded vigorously, apparently as lost at sea as she was, now that the question had been asked. “Can we have dinner first? There’s that Thai place down the street. I can meet you there around eight?”
“Yeah, sounds good. ’Bye!” Charlie grabbed her backpack and hurried out the dining room door, realizing as she stepped into the sunshine that she’d left him to clean up their table alone. Sorry.
As Charlie headed across the quad to her next class, her step grew more purposeful. This was a basic computer science class. Writing code wasn’t as exciting as what Dr. Treadwell taught, but Charlie still liked it. It was absorbing, detailed work. A single error could ruin everything. Everything? She thought of her impending date. The idea that a single error could ruin everything suddenly carried an awful weight.
Charlie hurried up the steps to the building and stopped short as a man blocked her path.
It was Clay Burke.
“Hey, Charlie.” He smiled, but his eyes were grave. Charlie hadn’t seen Hurricane’s chief of police—her friend Carlton’s father—since the night they’d escaped Freddy’s together. Looking now at his weathered face, she felt a rush of fear.
“Mr. Burke, er, Clay. What are you doing here?”
“Charlie, do you have a second?” he asked. Her heart sped up.
“Is Carlton okay?” she asked urgently.
“Yes, he’s fine,” Burke assured her. “Walk with me. Don’t worry about being late. I’ll give you a note for class. At least, I think an officer of the law has authority do that.” He winked, but Charlie didn’t smile. Something was wrong.
Charlie followed him back down the stairs. When they were a dozen feet from the building, Burke stopped and met her gaze, as if he were looking for something.
“Charlie, we’ve found a body,” he said. “I want you to take a look at it.”
“You want me to look at it?”
“I need you to see it.”
Me. She said the only thing she could.
“Why? Does it have to do with Freddy’s?”
“I don’t want to tell you anything until you’ve seen it,” Burke said. He started walking again, and Charlie hurried to keep up with his long stride. She followed him to the parking lot just outside the main gate, and got into his car without a word. Charlie settled into her seat, a strange dread stirring within her. Clay Burke glanced at her and she gave a sharp, quick nod. He pulled the car out onto the road, and they headed back to Hurricane.
So, how are you enjoying your classes?” Clay Burke asked in a jovial tone.
Charlie gave him a sardonic look. “Well, this is the first murder of the semester. So things have been going fine.”
Burke didn’t answer, apparently aware that further attempts to lighten the mood would fail. Charlie looked out the window. She thought often of going back to her father’s house, but each time the memory of the place rose up she slammed it back down with almost physical force, cramming it into the tiny corners of her mind to gather dust. Now something was stirring in the dusty corners, and she feared she might not be able to keep it away much longer.
“Chief Burke—Clay,” Charlie said. “How’s Carlton been?”
He smiled. “Carlton’s doing great. I tried to convince him to stay close for college, but he and Betty were adamant. Now he’s out east, studying acting.”
“Acting?” Charlie laughed, surprising herself.
“Well, he was always a prankster,” Clay said. “I figured acting was the next logical step.”
Charlie smiled. “Did he ever …” She looked out the window again. “Did you and he ever talk about what happened?” she asked with her face turned away. She could see Clay’s reflection faintly in the window, distorted by the glass.
“Carlton talks to his mother more than he talks to me,” he said plainly. Charlie waited for him to go on, but he remained silent. Though she and Jessica lived together, from the beginning they had an unspoken pact never to talk about Freddy’s, except in the barest terms. She didn’t know if Jessica was sometimes consumed by the memories, as she was. Maybe Jessica had nightmares, too.
But Charlie and Clay had no such pact. She took in shallow, quick breaths, waiting to hear how far he would go.
“I think Carlton had dreams about it,” Clay said finally. “Sometimes in the morning he would come downstairs looking like he hadn’t slept in a week, but he never told me what was going on.”
“What about you? Do you think about it?” She was overstepping but Clay didn’t seem ruffled.
“I try not to,” he said gravely. “You know, Charlie, when terrible things happen you can do one of two things: you can leave them behind or you can let them consume you.”
Charlie set her jaw. “I’m not my father,” she said.
Clay looked immediately contrite. “I know, I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I just meant you have to look forward.” He flashed a nervous grin. “Of course, my wife would say there’s a third thing: you can process the terrible things and come to terms with them. She’s probably right.”
“Probably,” Charlie said distractedly.
“And what about you? How are you doing, Charlie?” Clay asked. It was the question she had practically solicited, but she didn’t know how to answer it.
“I have dreams about it, I guess,” she muttered.
“You guess?” he asked in a careful tone. “What kind of dreams?”
Charlie looked out the window again. There was a weight pressing on her chest. What kind of dreams?
Nightmares, but not of Freddy’s. A shadow in the doorway of the costume closet where we play. Sammy doesn’t see; he’s playing with his truck. But I look up. The shadow has eyes. Then everything is moving—hangers rattle and costumes sway. A toy truck drops hard on the floor.
I’m left alone. The air is growing thin, I’m running out. It’s getting hard to breathe and I’ll die like this, alone, in the dark. I pound against the closet wall, calling for help. I know he’s there. Sammy is on the other side, but he doesn’t answer my cries as I begin to gasp, choking for air. It is too dark to see, but even so I know my vision is going black, and in my chest my heart is slowing, each pump swelling me with pain as I struggle to call his name one more time—
“Charlie?” Clay had pulled over and stopped the car without her noticing. Now he was looking at her with his piercing detective’s gaze. She looked at him for a moment before she could remember how to answer, and she made herself smile.
“I’ve mostly been focused on school,” she said.
Clay smiled at her but it didn’t touch his eyes. He looked worried. He’s wishing he hadn’t brought me, she thought.
He opened his door but didn’t get out of the car. The sun had begun to set as they drove, and now it was verging on dark. T
he turn signal was still on, flashing yellow onto the dirt road. Charlie watched it for a moment, hypnotized. She felt as if she might never move again, just sit here watching the endless, measured blinking of the light. Clay switched the signal off, and Charlie blinked, as if a spell had been broken. She straightened her spine and unbuckled her seat belt.
“Charlie,” Clay said, not looking directly at her. “I’m sorry to ask this of you, but you’re the only person who can tell me if this is what I think it is.”
“Okay,” she replied, suddenly alert. Clay sighed and got out of the car. Charlie followed close behind him. There was a barbed wire fence all along the road, and there were cows in the field beyond it. They stood around, chewing and staring in the vacant way of cows. Clay lifted the top wire for Charlie and she climbed gingerly through. When’s the last time I got a tetanus shot? she wondered as a barb caught briefly on her T-shirt.
She didn’t have to ask where the body was. There was a floodlight and a makeshift fence of caution tape strung between posts that jutted from the soil in a scattered formation. Charlie stood where she was as Burke climbed through the fence after her, and they both surveyed the area.
The field was flat, and the grass was short and patchy, worn down daily by dozens of hooves. A single tree stood some distance from where the crime scene was marked. Charlie thought it was an oak. Its branches were long and ancient, heavy with leaves. There was something wrong with the air; along with the smell of cow dung and mud wafted the sharp, metallic scent of blood.
For some reason, Charlie looked at the cows again. They weren’t as calm as she’d assumed. They shifted back and forth on their feet, clustering in groups. None of them came anywhere near the floodlight. As if sensing her scrutiny, one of them lowed a mournful cry. Charlie heard Clay’s sharp intake of breath.
“Maybe we should ask them what happened,” Charlie said. In the stillness, her voice carried. Clay started toward the floodlight. Charlie followed closely, not wanting to fall too far behind. It wasn’t just the cows; a weight of something wrong hung over the place. There was no sound, only the shocked quiet that follows a terrible violence.
Clay stopped beside the marked-out spot and ushered Charlie forward, still saying nothing. Charlie looked.
It was a man, stretched in a ghastly posture on his back, his limbs contorted impossibly. In the glaring, unnatural light, the scene looked staged; he might have been an enormous doll. His whole body was drenched red with blood. His clothes were torn, almost shredded, and through the holes Charlie thought she could see ripped-up skin, some bone, and other things she couldn’t identify.
“What do you make of it?” Clay said softly, as if he were afraid of disturbing her.
“I need to get closer,” she said. Clay climbed over the yellow tape, and Charlie followed. She knelt in the mud beside the man’s head, the knees of her jeans soaking with mud. He was middle-aged, white, his hair short and gray. His eyes, thankfully, were closed. The rest of his face slack in a way that could almost have looked like sleep, but did not. She leaned forward to peer at the man’s neck and blanched, but didn’t look away.
“Charlie, are you all right?” Clay asked, and she held up a hand.
“I’m fine.” She knew those wounds; she’d seen the scars they left. On each side of the dead man’s neck was a deep, curved gash. This was what had killed him. It would have been instantaneous. Or maybe not. Suddenly she pictured Dave, the guard at Freddy’s, the murderer. She had watched him die. She’d triggered the spring locks and seen his startled eyes as the locks drove into his neck. She’d watched his body jolt and seize as the costume he wore shot jagged metal through his vital organs. Charlie stared at this stranger’s wounds. She reached down and ran her finger along the edge of the cut on the man’s neck. What were you doing?
“Charlie!” Clay said in alarm, and Charlie drew back her hand.
“Sorry,” she said self-consciously, wiping her bloody fingers on her jeans. “Clay, it was one of them. His neck, he died like …” She stopped talking. Clay had been there; his son had almost died the same way. But if this was happening again, he had to know what he was dealing with.
“You remember how Dave died, right?” she asked.
Clay nodded. “Hard thing to forget.” He shook his head, patiently waiting for her to get to the point.
“These suits, like the rabbit suit that Dave was wearing, they can be worn like costumes. Or they can move around on their own, as fully functional robots.”
“Sure, you just put the suit on a robot,” Clay said.
“Not exactly … The robots are always inside the suits; they’re made of interlocking parts that are held back against the inner lining of the costumes by spring locks. When you want an animatronic, you just trip the locks, and the robotic parts unfold inside, filling the suit.”
“But if there’s someone inside the suit when the locks are tripped … ,” Clay said, catching on.
“Right. Thousands of sharp metal parts shoot through your whole body. Like, well—that,” she finished, gesturing at the man on the ground.
“How hard is it to accidentally trigger the spring locks?” Clay asked.
“It depends on the costume. If it’s well cared for, pretty hard. If it’s old, or poorly designed—it could happen. And if it’s not an accident …”
“Is that what happened here?”
Charlie hesitated. Dave’s image came to her again, this time alive, when he bared his torso to show them the scars he bore. Dave had once survived being crushed like this, though the second time had killed him. Somehow he had survived the lethal unfolding of a costume, a thing that should have been impossible. But it had left its marks. She cleared her throat and started again. “I need to see his chest,” she said. “Can you get his shirt off?”
Clay nodded and took a pair of plastic gloves from his pocket. He tossed them to Charlie but they fell to the ground unnoticed. “If I’d known you were going to stick your fingers in the corpse, I’d have given these to you earlier,” he said drily. He put on a pair of his own and produced a knife from somewhere on his belt. The man was wearing a T-shirt. Clay dropped to his knees, took hold of the bottom, and began to saw through the cloth. The sound of wet, tearing fabric cut through the silent field like a cry of pain. At last he was done, and he pulled back the shirt. Dried blood clung to the fabric, and as Clay pulled it back the body pulled with it, giving a brief, false sense of life. Charlie bent over, picturing Dave’s scars. She compared the pattern to the wounds she saw here. This is what happened to Dave. Each piercing of the man’s flesh seemed like a killing blow; any one of them might have punctured something vital, or simply been deep enough to drain him of blood in minutes. What was left of him was grotesque.
“It was one of them,” Charlie said, looking up at Clay for the first time since they reached the body. “He must have been wearing one of the costumes. It’s the only way he could end up like this. But …” Charlie paused and scanned the field again. “Where’s the suit?”
“What would someone be doing wearing one of those things out here?” Clay said.
“Maybe he wasn’t wearing it willingly,” Charlie answered.
Clay leaned forward and reached for the man’s open shirt, pulling it closed as best he could. Together they got up and headed back to the car.
As Clay drove her back to campus, Charlie stared out the window into the darkness.
“Clay, what happened to Freddy’s?” she asked. “I hear it was torn down.” She scratched her fingernail on the car seat nervously. “Is that true?”
“Yes. Well, they started to,” Clay said slowly. “We went through the whole place, clearing everything out. It was a funny thing; we couldn’t find the body of that guard, Dave.” He paused and looked directly at Charlie, as though expecting her to answer for something.
Charlie felt the warmth drain from her face. He’s dead. I saw him die. She closed her eyes for a moment and forced herself to focus.
“
That place was like a maze, though.” Clay turned his eyes casually back to the road. “His body probably got stuffed into some crevice no one will find for years.”
“Yeah, probably buried in the rubble.” She looked down, trying to put the thought out of her head for the moment. “What about the costumes, the robots?” Clay hesitated. You must have known I would ask, Charlie thought with some annoyance.
“Everything we took out of Freddy’s was thrown away or burned. Technically I should have treated it like what it was: a break in the missing kids case, over a decade old. Everything would have been bagged up and gone over. But no one would have believed what happened there, what we saw. So I took some liberties.” He glanced at Charlie, the suspicious look gone from his face, and she nodded for him to continue. Clay took a deep breath. “I treated it only as the murder of my officer; you remember Officer Dunn. We recovered his body, closed the case, and I ordered the building to be demolished.”
“What about …” Charlie paused, trying not to let her frustration show. “What about Freddy, and Bonnie, and Chica, and Foxy?” What about the children, the children who were killed and hidden inside each one of them?
“They were all there,” Clay said gravely. “They were lifeless, Charlie. I don’t know what else to tell you.” Charlie didn’t respond.
“As far as the demolition crew was concerned, all they’d found were old costumes, broken robots, and two dozen folding tables. And I didn’t correct them,” he said with hesitation in his voice. “You know how these things go. Whether building up or tearing down, it takes time. From what I hear, the storm hit and suddenly everyone was needed elsewhere; the demolition was put on hold.”
“So it’s all still standing there?” Charlie asked, and Clay gave her a warning look.
“Some parts are standing, but for all intents and purposes, it’s gone. And don’t even think about going back there. There’s no reason to and you’ll get yourself killed. Like I said, everything that mattered is gone anyway.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” Charlie said softly.
The Twisted Ones Page 3