“My foot’s stuck,” he said, nodding down. Charlie saw that his foot had gone clear through the wood, and now the jagged edges dug into his ankle.
“Okay, hold on,” Charlie said. She crouched down until she could reach him on the step below her, though the awkward angle made it hard to maintain her balance. The wood was only rotting in some places, while in others it was still intact. She grabbed the smaller pieces and pulled them cautiously back from John’s foot, her hands growing raw with the rough and splintered surface.
“I think I’ve got it,” John said finally, flexing his ankle.
She looked up and grinned. “And you thought I was going to get myself killed.”
John gave her a weak smile. “How about we both make it out alive?”
“Right.”
They made their way up the rest of the stairs much more slowly, each of them testing their weight before they took the next step. “Careful,” John warned as Charlie reached the top.
“We won’t be here long,” Charlie said. She was much more aware of the danger now. The house’s instability grew more obvious with each step they took; the very foundation seemed to wobble from side to side as they moved.
Her old bedroom was on the undamaged side of the house—or the side not struck by trees, at least. Charlie stopped in the doorway, and John came up behind her. The floor was strewn with glass. One window had been broken by something, and the shattered glass had blown into the room.
She took a deep breath, and it was then that she saw Stanley. The animatronic unicorn had once run on a track around her bedroom. Now he was lying on his side. Charlie went to him and sat down, pulling his head into her lap and patting his rusty cheek. He looked as if he’d been torn violently from his track. His legs were twisted, his hooves missing chunks. When she looked around the room she saw the missing pieces, still attached to the grooves in the floor.
“Stanley has seen better days.” John smiled ruefully.
“Yeah,” Charlie said absently, as she set the toy’s head back on the floor. “John, can you turn that wheel?” She pointed to a crank soldered together at the foot of her bed. He complied, crossing the floor agonizingly slowly. Charlie bit back her impatience. He turned the crank and she waited for the littlest closet door to open, but nothing happened. John looked at Charlie expectantly.
She stood and went to the wall where the three closets stood, closed and apparently untouched by the weather. Even the paint was bright and immaculate. Charlie hesitated, feeling as if she might be disturbing something that no longer belonged to her, then forced the smallest door open.
Ella was there, the doll who had been the same size as Charlie when she was much younger. She, like Stanley, had once run around on a track, and she seemed to still be attached to it. She was entirely undamaged. Her dress was clean, and the tray she held in front of her was firm in her motionless hands. Her wide eyes had been gazing into the darkness since the last time Charlie saw her.
“Hi, Ella,” Charlie said softly. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what I’m looking for?” She scanned over the doll quickly and brushed at her dress. “You just want to stay in here from now on?” Charlie studied the tiny frame of the door. “I don’t blame you.” She closed the closet door again without saying good-bye.
“So,” she said, turning back to John. He seemed lost in thought, staring at something in his hand.
“What is that?” Charlie asked.
“A photo of you, when you were no bigger than her.” John smiled and gestured toward Ella’s door, then handed the picture to Charlie.
It looked like a school photo. A short, chubby girl gave a toothy grin for the camera—minus one tooth. Charlie smiled back at her. “I don’t remember this.”
“That doll is a little creepy, standing in the closet,” John said. “I’m a bit on edge, I won’t lie.”
“Waiting for a tea party,” Charlie said acerbically. “How sinister.” She started to leave the room, but as her hand touched the doorframe, she paused. Doors. She stepped back through into her bedroom, and looked for a long moment at each of the rectangular closet doors. “John,” she whispered.
“What?” John looked up, trying to follow Charlie’s gaze.
“Doors,” Charlie whispered. She took several long steps back to study the whole wall at once. The scribbles all over her notebooks had been shaped like dozens—hundreds—of rectangles. She drew them without thinking, as if they were pushing up through her mind, trying to break out of her subconscious. Now they had. “They’re doors,” she repeated.
“Yes. Yes, I see.” John tilted his head curiously. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I mean, I’m not sure.” She ran her eyes over the wall of closets again. Doors. But not these doors.
“Come on, let’s go look at the workshop,” John said. “Maybe we can find something else there.”
“Right.” She gave a pained smile. She looked back once more at the three closets that sat in silence.
John nodded, and they went cautiously back down the stairs, testing each step before they took it. Outside, they stopped by the car. The workshop was invisible from the driveway, hidden behind the house. The backyard had once been surrounded by trees, a small wood that acted as a fence.
“Don’t go into the woods, Charlie,” she said, then smiled at John. “That’s what he always told me, like something out of a fairy tale.” They walked a bit farther, twigs snapping under their feet. “But the woods were only ten feet deep,” she said, still peering into the trees as though something might leap out. As a child these trees had seemed impenetrable, a forest she might be lost in forever, if she dared to wander in. She started toward what remained of them, then stopped dead when she saw where some of the fallen trees had landed.
Her father’s workshop had been crushed. A massive trunk had hit the workshop’s roof dead center, and others had come with it on all sides. The wall closest to the house was still standing, but it was bowed beneath the sagging roof.
It had been a garage when they moved in, and then it had become her father’s world: a place of light and shadow that smelled of hot metal and burnt plastic. Charlie peered down at the rotting wood and broken glass with careful attention, looking for something she might otherwise miss.
“We’re definitely not going in there,” John said.
But Charlie was already lifting a piece of sheet metal that had once belonged to the roof. She threw it violently to the side, and it hit the ground with a resounding clang. John startled and kept his distance as Charlie continued to throw things. “What are you—what are we looking for?”
Charlie wrestled a toy from under the debris and threw it carelessly to the ground behind her, continuing to lift sheets of metal and toss them aside. “Charlie,” John whispered, picking up the delicate toy and cradling it. “He must have made this for you.”
Charlie ignored him. “There’s got to be something else in here.” She fought her way deeper into the workshop, toppling a wooden beam out of her way. Her hand slipped on the wood, and she realized it was wet; her arm was bleeding. She wiped her hand on her jeans. From the corner of her eye, she saw John set the toy carefully on the ground and follow her in.
Amazingly, there were still shelves and tables standing upright, with tools and shreds of fabric where her father had last set them. Charlie glanced at them for a passing moment, then swept her arm across the table nearest her, knocking everything to the ground. She didn’t pause to see what had fallen before moving to the shelves. She began picking things off the nearest shelf one item at a time, inspecting them and throwing them to the ground. When the shelf was empty, she grabbed the board itself with both hands, wrenching at it violently, trying to pull it from the wall. When it didn’t come loose, she began pounding at it with her fists.
“Stop!” John ran to her and grabbed her hands, pinning them to her sides.
“There has to be something here!” she screamed. “I’m supposed to be here, but I don�
��t know what it is that I’m supposed to find.”
“What are you talking about? There’s a lot left. Look at this stuff!” He held the toy up to her again.
“This isn’t about the storm, John. It’s not about happy memories, or closure, or whatever you think I need. This is about monsters. They’re out there, and they’re killing people. And you and I both know that there is only one place they could have come from: here.”
“You don’t know that,” John began. Charlie looked at him with a stony rage, stopping him short.
“I’m surrounded by monsters, and murder, and death, and spirits.” At the last word her fury ebbed, and she turned away from John, surveying the workshop. She wasn’t sure now what damage the storm had done, and what had been her. “All I can think about is Sammy. I feel him. Right now, I can feel him in this place, but he’s—cut off. It doesn’t even make sense. He died before my father and I moved here. But I know I’m here for a reason. There’s something that I’m supposed to find. It’s all connected, but I don’t know how. Maybe something to do with the doors … I don’t know.”
“Hey, okay. We’ll find it together.” John reached out for her. Charlie’s strength gave way and she let him pull her close, pressing her face into his shirt. “I know it’s hard to see everything torn apart like this,” he said. Charlie’s anger drained away, fading into exhaustion. She rested her head on John’s shoulder, wishing she could stay like this just a little longer.
“Charlie,” John said with alarm, and Charlie came back to attention. He was looking over her shoulder, in the direction of the house.
The entire back face of the house had been torn open, as if someone had taken a massive hammer to it; inside was only dark.
“That’s right under your room, isn’t it? We could have fallen through the floor,” John said.
“That should be the living room,” Charlie said, wiping her sleeve across her face.
“Yeah, but it’s not.” John looked at her expectantly.
“That’s not even a part of the house,” she said. A sudden spark of hope revived inside her. Something was out of place. That meant there was something to find.
Charlie approached the chasm, and John didn’t try to stop her as she climbed up several large slabs of broken concrete. John stayed a step behind her, close enough to catch her if she slipped. Charlie turned to him before entering. “Thank you,” she said. John nodded.
“I’ve never seen this room before,” Charlie whispered as she crept into the hollow space. The walls were made of dark concrete, and the room was small and windowless, a box jammed into the house and sealed away between the rooms. There were no decorations, and nothing to indicate what was stored here. Just a dirt floor and three large holes, deep and oblong like graves.
“Those don’t look like storm damage,” John said.
“They’re not.” Charlie went up to the edge of the nearest hole, looking down.
“Were you … expecting to find these?”
These holes were deeper than the ones she’d found at Tracy Horton’s house. Perhaps it was the shadowy room, but these looked like real graves. They were a foot or so deeper than the ones she’d found before and partially filled with loose dirt.
John was standing patiently behind her, waiting for her answer.
“I’ve seen them before,” she admitted. “Behind the house of a dead woman.”
“What are you talking about?”
Charlie sighed. “There was another body. I found her today, in a field. I called Clay, and then I went to her house while he waited for the rest of the cops to show up. There were holes like this in her backyard.”
“That’s what you wouldn’t tell me? Another body?” John sounded hurt, but his wounded expression lasted only seconds before it cleared. He started scanning the room again, his eyes intent on the walls and floor.
That, and the fact that she looked like me, Charlie thought.
“So what do you think the holes are?” he asked finally.
Charlie barely heard him. Her gaze had fixed on the blank concrete wall on the far side of the room. It was empty, whitewashed then left to turn gray with dust and mildew. But something drew her to it. Leaving John alone by the open graves, Charlie walked slowly to it, drawn there by a sense of sudden recognition. It was like she’d just remembered a word that had been on the tip of her tongue for days.
She hesitated, holding her hands out flat, less than an inch from the wall, uncertain what was holding her back. She steeled herself and placed her palms against the wall. It was cold. She felt a slight shock of surprise, as though she’d expected to feel warmth from the other side. John was speaking, but to her it was only murmurs in the distance. She turned her head and delicately placed her ear against the surface, closing her eyes. Movement?
“Hey!” John’s voice broke her focus, waking her as if from a trance. “Over here!”
She turned. John was bent over the mound of dirt next to the farthest grave. Charlie started toward him, but he put up a hand to stop her.
“No, come around the other way.”
She carefully made her way around the perimeter of the little room until she was beside him. At first she couldn’t tell what he was trying to show her. Something was almost visible, veiled in a thin layer of dirt, so that it blended into the ground as if deliberately camouflaged.
But eventually she saw it—rusted metal, and the glint of a staring, plastic eye. She glanced at John, who just looked back at her. This was her territory now. Carefully, Charlie poked the mostly buried head of the thing with the toe of her sneaker, then yanked her foot back. The thing didn’t move.
“What the heck is this?” John asked, glancing around the room. “And why is it in here?”
“I’ve never seen this before,” Charlie said. She knelt, curiosity overtaking her fear, then used her hand to scrape aside some of the dirt, clearing off a little more of the creature’s face. Behind her, John drew a sharp breath. Charlie just stared down. The creature had no fur, and its face was smooth. It had a short muzzle and oval ears sticking out from the sides of the head. It had the general appearance of an animal’s head, though much larger than the animatronic animals from Freddy’s. Charlie couldn’t guess what kind of animal it was supposed to be. Running down the center of its face was a long, straight split, exposing wires and a line of metal frame. A thick plastic material was stuck to the face in large patches. Maybe it had been encased in it at some point.
“Do you recognize it?” John asked quietly.
Charlie shook her head. “No,” she managed to say after a moment. “Something’s wrong with it.” She brushed back more dirt and found it came away easily. The thing had only been partially buried beneath the floor; that, or it had almost escaped. She started digging her hands into the dirt, trying to pry it out of what remained of its grave.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” John groaned as he knelt to help, getting his hands around any part of it he could. In one concentrated effort, they heaved it upward, managing to pull most of the torso out of the dirt. They let it drop, then fell back on the ground to study it while they caught their breath.
Like the face, the body was smoother than the animatronics that Charlie was used to. It had no fur, and no tail or other animal appendages. It was too large for a human being to wear, probably eight feet tall when standing. Still, Charlie couldn’t shake the feeling that she recognized this creature. Foxy.
There was something sick about the creature, a weirdness that gripped her at the most basic, primal level and cried, This is wrong. Charlie closed her eyes for a moment. Her skin felt strange, like something was crawling all over it. It’s just an oversized doll. She took a deep, deliberate breath, opened her eyes, and inched forward to examine the thing.
As her hand touched the creature, a wave of nausea hit her, but it lasted only a split second. She continued. She turned the head to the side, its joints resisting. The left side of its skull had been crushed. Charlie could see
that the insides were broken, half the wires torn out. Just behind the eye, on the side that had been completely buried, a piece of the casing was missing. She could see a mass of plastic with a tangle of wires running in and out of it. Something had melted one of the circuit boards. Moving slowly down the body, Charlie examined its joints: one arm seemed fine, but on the other both the shoulder and elbow joints had been bent out of shape. Charlie looked up at John, who was watching her with a worried expression.
“Anything familiar?”
“I don’t recognize it. It’s not something my dad ever showed me,” Charlie said.
“Maybe we should put it back in the ground and get out of here. This feels like it was a mistake.”
“But on the inside …” Charlie ignored him. “The hardware, the joints—it’s older technology. Maybe he made them earlier? I don’t know.”
“How can you tell?”
“I recognize some of this as my dad’s work.” She frowned and pointed at the creature’s head. “But then a lot of it is foreign to me. Someone else may have had a hand in it. I’m not sure if my dad made it or not, but I have a feeling he’s the one who buried it.”
“I can’t imagine it was designed to be onstage. It’s hideous.” John was noticeably nervous, and now he placed his hand on Charlie’s arm. “Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
“‘Gives me the creeps,’” Charlie said lightly. “Who says that? I’m going to try and get it the rest of the way out. I just want to see …” She moved away from John’s touch, leaning down to dig again by the creature’s buried torso.
“Charlie!” John cried, just as a metal shriek rang out.
The animatronic’s arms lifted, and its chest opened like an iron gate. Its metal pieces slid out of place to reveal a dark, gaping pit where sharp spikes and spring locks were just barely visible. It was a trap waiting to be triggered. Yet, disorientingly, something else about it had transformed at the same time. Its artificial skin took on a luminescence, and its movements were fluid and sure. Its casing suddenly appeared to have skin and fur, though they were blurry, flickering like a trick of the light.
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