Five Nights at Freddy’s
The Silver Eyes
Copyright © 2015 Scott Cawthon
Chapter One
He sees me.
Charlie dropped to her hands and knees. She was wedged behind a row of arcade games, cramped in the crawlspace between the consoles and the wall, tangled electrical cords and useless plugs strewn beneath her. She was cornered: the only way out was past the thing, and she wasn’t fast enough to make it. She could see him stalking back and forth, catching flickers of movement as he passed before the gaps between the games. There was scarcely enough room to move, but she tried to crawl backward. Her foot caught on a cord and she stopped, contorting herself to carefully dislodge it.
She heard the clash of metal on metal and the farthest console rocked back against the wall. He hit it again, shattering the display, then attacked the next, crashing against them almost rhythmically, tearing through the machinery, coming closer.
I have to get out, I have to! The panicked thought was of no help; there was no way out. Her arm ached, and she wanted to sob aloud. Blood was soaking through the tattered bandage, and it seemed as though she could feel it draining out of her.
The console a few feet away crashed against the wall, and Charlie flinched. He was getting closer; she could hear the grinding of gears and the clicking of servos, ever louder. Eyes closed, she could still see the way he looked at her, see the matted fur and the exposed metal beneath the synthetic flesh.
Suddenly the console in front of her was wrenched away and toppled over, thrown down like a toy. The power cords beneath her hands and knees were yanked away, and Charlie slipped and stumbled, almost falling. She caught herself and looked up, just in time to see the downward swing of a hook…
Welcome to Hurricane, Utah.
Charlie smiled wryly at the sign, and kept driving. The world didn’t look any different from one side of the sign to the other, but she felt a nervous anticipation as she passed it. She didn’t recognize anything. She had not really expected to, not this far at the edge of town where it was all highway and empty space.
She wondered what the others looked like, who they were now. Ten years ago, they were best friends. And then it had happened, and everything ended, at least for Charlie. She hadn’t seen any of them since she was seven years old. They had written all the time as kids, especially Marla, who wrote like she talked: fast and incoherent. But as they grew older they had grown apart, the letters had grown fewer and further between, and the conversations leading up to this trip had been perfunctory and full of awkward pauses. Charlie repeated their names as though to reassure herself that she still remembered them. Marla. Jessica. Lamar. Carlton. John. And Michael… That was the reason for the trip after all, Michael. It was ten years since he died, ten years since it happened, and now his parents wanted them all together for the dedication ceremony, all his old friends there when they announced the scholarship they were creating in his name. Charlie knew it was a good thing to do, but the gathering still felt slightly macabre. She shivered, and turned down the air conditioning even though she knew it was not the cold.
As she drove into the town center, Charlie began to recognize things: a few stores, and the movie theater, which was now advertising the summer’s blockbuster hit. She felt a brief moment of surprise, then smiled at herself. What did you expect, that the whole place would be unchanged? A monument to the moment of your departure, frozen forever in July, 1985? Well, that was exactly what she had expected. She looked at her watch. Still a few hours to kill before they all met up. She thought about going to the movie, but she knew what she really wanted to do. Charlie made a left turn and headed out of town.
Ten minutes later, she pulled to a stop and got out.
The house loomed up before her, its dark outline a wound in the bright blue sky. Charlie leaned back against the car, slightly dizzy. She took a moment to steady herself, breathing deeply. She had known it would be here. An illicit look through her aunt’s bank books a few years before told her that the mortgage was paid off, and Aunt Jen was still paying property taxes. It had only been ten years; there was no reason it should have changed at all. Charlie climbed the steps slowly, taking in the peeling paint. The third stair still had a loose board, and the rosebushes had taken over one side of the porch, their thorns biting hungrily into the wood. The door was locked, but Charlie still had her key. She had never actually used it. As she slid it into the lock she remembered her father putting its chain around her neck. In case you ever need it. Well, she needed it now.
The door opened easily, and Charlie looked around. She didn’t remember much about the first couple of years here. She had been only three years old, and all the memories faded together in the blur of a child’s grief and loss, not understanding why her mother had to go away, clinging to her father every moment, not trusting the world around her unless he was there, unless she was holding tightly to him, burying herself in his flannel shirts and the smell of grease, and hot metal, and him.
The stairs stretched straight up in front of her, but she did not move directly to them, going instead into the living room, where all the furniture was still in place. She had not really noticed it as a child, but the house was a little too large for the furniture they had, and so things were spread out too widely in order to fill the space: the coffee table was too far from the couch to reach, the easy chair too far across the room to carry on a conversation. There was a dark stain in the wooden floorboards, near the center of the room, and Charlie stepped around it quickly, and went to the kitchen, where the cupboards held only a few pots and pans, and a few dishes. Charlie had never felt a lack of anything as a child, but it seemed now that the unnecessary enormity of the house was a sort of apology, the attempt of a man who had lost so much to give his daughter what he could. He had a way of overdoing whatever he did.
The last time she was here, the house was dark, and everything felt wrong. She was being carried up the stairs to her bedroom although she was seven years old, and could have gone quicker on her own two feet. But Aunt Jen picked her up as they stopped on the front porch, and carried her, shielding her face as though she were a baby in the glaring sun.
In her room, Aunt Jen set her down and closed the bedroom door behind them, and told her to pack her suitcase, and Charlie cried because all her things could never fit into that small case.
“We can come back for the rest later,” Aunt Jen said, her impatience leaking through as Charlie hovered indecisively at her dresser, trying to decide which t-shirts to bring along. They had never come back for the rest.
Charlie mounted the stairs, heading to her old bedroom. The door was open, and as she opened it she had a giddy feeling of displacement, as though her younger self might be sitting there among her toys, look up and ask Charlie, who are you? Charlie went in.
Like the rest of the house, her bedroom was untouched. The walls were pale pink, and the ceiling, which sloped dramatically on one side, following the line of the roof, was painted to match. Her old bed still stood against the wall, beneath a large window, the mattress still intact, though the sheets were gone. The window was cracked slightly open, and rotting lace curtains wavered in the gentle breeze from outside. There was a dark water stain in the paint beneath the window, spreading to the mattress, where the weather had gotten in over the years, betraying the house’s neglect. Charlie climbed onto the bed and forced the window shut. With a screech it obeyed, and Charlie stepped back, and turned her attention to the rest of the room, to her father’s creations.
Their first night in the house, Charlie was afraid to sleep alone. She did not remember the
night, but her father had told her about it often enough that the story had taken on the quality of memory. She sat up and wailed until her father came to find her, until he scooped her up and held her, and promised her he would make sure she was never alone again. The next morning, he took her by the hand and led her to the garage, where he set to work keeping that promise.
The first of his inventions was a purple rabbit, now grey with age from years of sitting in the sunlight. Her father had named him Theodore. He was the size of a three-year-old child, her size at the time, and he had plush fur, shining eyes, and a dapper red bow tie. He didn’t do much, only waved a hand, tilted his head to the side, and said in her father’s voice: “I love you, Charlie.” But it was enough to give her a night watcher, someone to keep her company when she could not sleep. Right now Theodore sat in a white wicker chair in the far corner of the room. Charlie waved at him, but, not activated, he did not wave back.
After Theodore, the toys got more complex; some worked and some did not, some seemed to have permanent glitches and others simply did not appeal to Charlie’s childish imagination. She knew her father took those back to his workshop and recycled them for parts, though she did not like to watch them dismantled. But the ones that were kept, those she loved, and they were here now, looking at her expectantly. Smiling, Charlie pushed a button beside her bed. It gave way stiffly, but nothing happened. She pushed it again, holding it down longer, and this time, across the room, with the weary creak of metal-on-metal, the unicorn began to move.
The unicorn (who Charlie had named Stanley for some reason she could no longer remember) was made of metal and had been painted glossy white, and it trundled around the room on a circular track, bobbing its head stiffly up and down. The track squealed now as it rounded the corner and came to a stop beside where Charlie sat on the bed. She got down and knelt beside him on the floor, patting his flank. His glossy paint was chipped and peeling, and his face had given over to rust, so that his eyes gazed lively out of decay.
“You need a new coat of paint, Stanley,” Charlie said aloud. The unicorn gazed ahead, unresponsive.
At the foot of the bed there was a wheel. Made of patched-together metal, it had always reminded her of something she might find on a submarine. Charlie turned it. It stuck for a moment, then gave way, rotating as it always did. Across the room the smallest closet door swung open, and out sailed Ella on her track, a child-sized doll bearing a teacup and saucer in her tiny hands like an offering. Ella’s plaid dress was still crisp, and her patent leather shoes still shone; perhaps in the closet she had been protected from the damage of the damp. Charlie had had an identical outfit, back when she and Ella were the same height.
“Hi, Ella,” she said softly. As the wheel unwound, Ella retreated to the closet again, the door closing behind her. Charlie followed her to the closet wall. The closets had been built to align with the slant of the ceiling, and there were three of them. Ella lived in the short one, which was about three and a half feet tall. Next to it was one a foot or so higher, and a third, closest to the bedroom door, was the same height as the rest of the room. She smiled, remembering.
“Why do you have three closets?” John had demanded, the first time he came over. She looked at him blankly, confused by the question.
“’Cause that’s how many there are,” she said finally. Then, defensive, she pointed to the littlest one. “That one’s Ella’s, anyway,” she added. John nodded, satisfied. Charlie shook her head, and opened the door to the middle closet—or, tried to. The knob stopped with a jolt: it was locked. She rattled it a few times, but gave up without much conviction. She stayed crouched low to the floor and glanced up at the tallest closet, her big-girl closet that she would someday grow into. “You won’t need it until you’re bigger.” Her father would say, but that day never came. It now hung open slightly, but Charlie didn’t disturb it. It hadn’t opened for her, it had only given way to time.
Before she stood, she noticed something shiny, half hidden under the rim of the locked middle door. She leaned forward to pick it up: it looked like a broken-off piece of a circuit board. She smiled slightly. Nuts, and bolts, and scraps, and parts had turned up all over the place, once upon a time. Her father always had stray parts in his pockets. He would carry something he was working on around, set it down, and forget where it was, or worse, put something aside “for safekeeping,” never to be seen again. There was also a strand of her hair clinging to it; she unwound it carefully from the tiny lip of metal it was stuck on.
Finally, as though she had been putting it off, Charlie crossed the room and picked up Theodore. His back had not faded in the sun like the front of his body, and was the same rich, dark purple she remembered. She pressed the button at the base of his neck, but he remained lifeless. His fur was threadbare, one ear hanging loose by a single rotting thread, and through the hole she could see the green plastic of his circuit board. Charlie held her breath, listening fearfully for something.
“I – ou – lie – ” the rabbit said with a barely audible halting noise, and Charlie set him down, her face hot and her chest pinched tight. She had not really expected to hear her father’s voice again. I love you too.
Charlie looked around the room again. As a child it had been her own magical world, and she was possessive of it. Only a few chosen friends were ever even allowed inside. She went to her bed and set Stanley moving on his track again. She left, closing the door behind her before the little unicorn came to a halt.
She went out the back door to the driveway and stopped in front of the garage that had become her father’s workshop. Half-buried in the gravel a few feet away was a piece of metal, and Charlie went to pick it up. It was jointed in the middle, and she held it in her hands, smiling a little as she bent it back and forth. An elbow joint, she thought. I wonder who that was going to belong to?
She had stood in this exact spot many times before. She closed her eyes, and the memory overwhelmed her. She was a little girl again, sitting on the floor of her father’s workshop, playing with scraps of wood and metal as though they were toys blocks, trying to build a tower with the uneven pieces. The shop was hot and she was sweaty, grime sticking to her legs as she sat in her shorts and sneakers. She could almost smell the sharp, metallic odor of the soldering iron. Her father was nearby, never out of sight, working on Stanley the unicorn.
Stanley’s face was still unfinished: on one side white and shining and friendly, with a shiny brown eye that seemed almost to see. The other half of the toy’s face was all exposed circuit boards and metal parts. Charlie’s father looked at her and smiled, and she smiled back, beloved. Behind her father, in a darkened corner, barely visible, hung a jumble of metal limbs, a twisted skeleton with burning silver eyes. Every once in a while, it gave an uncanny twitch. Charlie tried never to look at it, but as her father worked, as she played with her makeshift toys, her eye was drawn back to it again and again. The limbs, contorted, seemed almost mocking, the thing a ghastly jester, and yet there was something about it that suggested enormous pain.
“Daddy?” Charlie said, and her father did not look up from his work. “Daddy?” She said again, more urgently, and this time he turned slowly to her, as though not fully present in the world.
“What do you need, sweetie?”
She pointed at the metal skeleton. Does it hurt? She wanted to ask the question, but looking into her father’s eyes she found she could not. She shook her head.
“Nothing.”
He nodded at her with an absent smile and went back to his work. Behind him the creature gave another, awful twitch, and its eyes still burned.
Charlie shivered, and drew herself back to the present. She glanced behind her, feeling exposed. She looked down, and her gaze fixed on something: three widely-spaced grooves in the ground. She knelt, thoughtful, and ran her finger over one of them. The gravel was scattered away, the marks worn heavily into the dirt. A camera tripod of some sort? It was the first unfamiliar thing she’d seen. T
he door to the workshop was cracked open slightly, inviting, but she felt no desire to go inside. Quickly, she headed back to her car. Settling into the driver’s seat, she stopped. Her keys were gone, having probably fallen out of her pocket somewhere inside the house.
She retraced her steps, only glancing into the living room and kitchen before heading up to her bedroom. The keys were on the wicker chair, beside Theodore. She picked them up and jangled them for a moment, not quite ready to leave the room behind. She sat down on the bed. Stanley the unicorn had come back around to the bed before stopping, as he always did, and as she sat, she patted him absently on the head. It had grown dark while she was outside, and the room was now cast in shadows. Somehow, without the bright sunlight, the toys’ flaws, their deterioration, were thrown into sharp relief. Theodore’s eyes no longer shone, and his thin fur and hanging ear made him look like a sickly vagabond. When she looked down at Stanley the rust around his eyes made them look like hollow sockets, and his bared teeth, which she had always thought of as a smile, became the awful, knowing grin of a skull. Charlie stood up, careful not to touch him, and hurried toward the door, but she tripped on the tracks and fell sprawling on the floor, her foot catching on the wheel beside the bed as she went. There was a whir of spinning metal, and as she raised her head, a small pair of feet appeared under her nose, clad in shining patent leather. She looked up.
There above her was Ella, staring down at her, silent and uninvited, her glassy eyes almost appearing to see. The teacup and saucer were held out before her with a military stiffness, and Charlie got up cautiously, taking care not to disturb the doll. She went out of the room, stepping carefully to avoid accidentally activating any other toys, and as she went Ella almost matched her pace, retreating to her closet.
Charlie hurried down the stairs, seized by an urgency to get away. In the car she fumbled the key three times before sliding it into place. She backed too fast down the driveway, running recklessly over the grass of the front yard, and sped away. After about a mile, Charlie pulled over on the shoulder and turned the car off, staring straight ahead through the windshield, her eyes focused on nothing. She forced herself to breathe slowly. She reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror so she could see herself.
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