“I know,” John said, setting the can on the countertop next to him. He eyed it for a second but did not pick it up, feeling like if he drank it, he would be giving in, accepting everything he was told. It would be like taking whatever pill everyone else had already swallowed.
John eyed the back door.
“Don’t even think about it,” Clay said abruptly. John didn’t try to pretend it wasn’t what he was thinking. Clay sighed. “I know how hard this must be for you.”
“Do you?” John responded sharply, but Clay’s expression didn’t change.
“Stay and talk to her. I think you owe that to her, and to yourself.”
John’s eyes were still fixed on the door.
“All of this heartache that you’re putting yourself through; that can’t be what you want.” Clay leaned to the side, interrupting John’s gaze.
“You’re right,” John said. He stood up straight and met Clay’s eyes. “This isn’t what I want.” He went to the back door and pushed it open, rushing down the concrete steps as though Clay might pursue him, then walking around the side of the house toward his car, his heart pounding. He felt a little light-headed, and completely unsure he was making the right decision.
“John!” someone called from behind him. The familiar voice sent a jolt through him, and he stopped, closing his eyes for a second.
He heard her heels tapping on the stone walk, the sound vanishing as she crossed the grass to him. He opened his eyes and turned toward the voice; she was standing a few feet from him.
“Thanks for stopping,” Charlie said. Her face was anxious, her arms wrapped tightly across her body like she was cold, despite the mild weather.
“I was just going to get my jacket,” John said, trying to sound casual in the midst of an obvious lie. He looked her up and down, and she didn’t move, like she knew what he was doing, and why. It’s not her. She looked like some stunning cousin of Charlie’s, maybe, but not her. Not the round-faced, frizzy-haired, awkward girl he had known almost all his life. She was taller, thinner, her hair longer, darker. Her face was uncannily different, though he could not have explained how. Her posture, even as she stood hugging herself in anxiety, was somehow elegant. As he looked at her, the first shock of recognition gave way to an acute revulsion; he took an involuntary step back. How can anyone think that’s her? he thought. How can anyone think that’s my Charlie?
She bit her lip. “John, say something,” she said, pleading in her voice. He shrugged, holding both hands up in resignation.
“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted.
She nodded. She uncrossed her arms as if she had just realized she was holding them that way, and began to pick at her nails instead. “I’m so happy to see you,” she said, sounding like she was about to cry. John softened, but tamped the feeling down.
“Me too,” he said in a monotone.
“I missed you,” she began, searching his face for something. John had no idea what he might look like, but he felt like stone. “I, uh, I had to get away for a while,” she went on uncertainly. “That night, John, I thought I was going to die.”
“I thought you did,” he said, trying to swallow the lump rising in his throat.
She hesitated.
“You don’t think I’m me?” she asked softly at last.
He looked down at his feet for a moment, unable to say the words to her face.
“Jessica told me. It’s okay, John,” she said. “I just want you to know that it’s okay.” Her eyes were bright with tears. His heart lurched, and in an instant, the world came into a different focus.
He gazed at the woman huddled in front of him trying to suppress her sobs. The stark differences he saw in her were suddenly things that seemed so easily explained. Her shoes had heels, so she was taller. She was wearing a form-fitting dress, instead of her usual jeans and T-shirt, so she appeared thinner. She was wearing elegant clothing, and her gestures were confident, sophisticated, but it was all no more than if Jessica had given her the makeover she was always threatening. No more than if Charlie had just grown up.
We’ve all had to grow up.
John thought of the way he drove home from work—or, had until this morning—the way he avoided ever driving past her house, or the site of Freddy Fazbear’s. Maybe Charlie had things she wanted to avoid. Maybe she just wanted to be different.
Maybe she wanted to change, like you did. When you think of that moment, what it did to you—what must it have done to her? What kind of nightmares do you have, Charlie? He was seized by a sudden, visceral desire to ask her, and for the first time he allowed himself to meet her eyes. His stomach jolted as he did, his heart racing. Tentatively, she smiled at him, and he smiled back, unconsciously mirroring her, but something frigid twitched inside him. Those aren’t her eyes.
John shifted his gaze, a calm coming over him; Charlie looked momentarily confused. “Charlie,” John said carefully. “Do you remember the last thing I said to you, before you—were trapped in the suit?” She held his gaze for a moment, then shook her head.
“I’m sorry, John,” she said. “I don’t remember a lot about that night, whole pieces are just—missing. I remember being in the suit—I passed out, I think for hours.”
“So, you don’t remember?” he repeated gravely. It seemed impossible that she could have forgotten. Maybe she didn’t hear me.
“Were you hurt?” he asked brusquely.
She nodded silently, her eyes filling again with tears, and she hugged herself; this time she didn’t look cold, she looked like she was in pain. Maybe she was. John took a step closer to her, wanting suddenly, desperately, to promise her that everything would be all right. But then her eyes met his again, and he stopped, stepped back. She extended a hand, but he didn’t take it, and again she crossed her arms over her body.
“John, would you meet me tomorrow?” she asked steadily.
“Why?” he said before he could stop himself, but she did not react.
“I just want to talk. Give me a chance.” Her voice rose shakily, and he nodded.
“Sure. Yeah, I’ll meet you tomorrow.” He paused. “That same place, okay?” he added carefully, waiting to see how she would reply.
“The Italian place? Our first date?” she said easily and gave a gentle smile; her tears seemed to have stopped. “Around six?”
John let out a deep breath. “Yeah.” He met her gaze again and did not look away, letting himself take rest in her eyes for the first time that night. She looked back at him, motionless, like she was afraid she might scare him away. John nodded, then turned and left without another word. He walked quickly back to his car, struggling to keep his pace even. He felt like he had done something wonderful, and also like he had made a horrible mistake. He felt strange, riding an adrenaline rush, and as he drove through the dark he pictured her face again.
Those weren’t her eyes.
* * *
Charlie watched him go, rooted to the spot as if it were the only place she’d ever stood. He doesn’t believe me. Jessica had not wanted to tell her about John’s strange yet adamant conviction, but his refusal to speak to her now, his unwillingness even to acknowledge her presence that day in the diner was too bizarre to be dismissed. How can he think I’m not me?
The taillights of John’s car vanished around a bend. Charlie stared into the dark where he had been, not wanting to return to the bright, noisy house. Carlton would tell her a joke; Jessica and Marla would comfort her the way they had in the diner that day, when she had come to show them that somehow, impossibly, she had survived. The walk from her car—really Aunt Jen’s borrowed car—toward the diner had felt like miles that day, her stomach fluttering anxiously even though she knew, of course, that they would be happy to see her. How could they not be? Every step was stiff, uncertain; every time she moved it hurt, her body sore all over from the day before, though there were no marks on her to show it. Even breathing was strained and unfamiliar, and she had a persistent feeling th
at if she forgot to do it, she would stop, die of asphyxiation right there on the pavement, unless she was reminded, take a breath. She could see them through the window as she made her way to the front of the diner, her heart racing, and then they saw her and it was everything she had dared to hope: Marla and Jessica ran to the door, jostling over who would hug her first, crying at the sight of her living face. She let herself be wrapped in the warmth of their relief, but before they even let her go, she was looking for John.
When she saw him, his back to the door, she almost called out his name, but something stopped her. He said something she could not hear, and she watched, incredulous, as he failed to come to her, clenching a spoon in his hand like a weapon. “John!” she called at last. But he did not turn around. Marla and Jessica ushered her out of the restaurant, making reassuring sounds that must have been words, and Charlie strained to see him through the window: he had not moved. How can he pretend I’m not here?
A shock of pain hit her suddenly, yanking her back to the present, and Charlie hugged herself tightly, though it didn’t really help: it was everywhere, sharp and hot. She clenched her jaw, unwilling to make a sound. Sometimes it eased to an ache she could push to the back of her awareness; sometimes it vanished for days at a time, but always it came back.
Were you hurt? John had asked, the first—the only—sign he’d given that he might still care, and she had been unable to reply. Yes, she could have said. Yes, I was and I still am. Sometimes I think I’ll die of it, and what I feel now is just an echo of what it used to be. It feels like all my bones are broken; it feels like my guts are twisted and torn; it feels like my head has cracked open, and things are leaking out, and it happens again and again. She clenched her teeth, taking deliberate breaths, until it began slowly to recede.
“Charlie? Are you okay?” Jessica said quietly, appearing beside her on the sidewalk outside Clay’s house. Charlie nodded.
“I didn’t hear you come over,” she said hoarsely.
“He doesn’t mean to hurt you. He’s just—”
“Traumatized,” Charlie snapped. “I know.” Jessica sighed, and Charlie shook her head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“I know,” Jessica said. Charlie sighed, closing her eyes. He’s not the one who died—and it did feel like dying. She could only remember that crucial night in fragments: her thoughts were all scraps and whispers, hazy and muddled, everything circling slowly around a central point: the single unmistakable snapping sound of the spring locks. Charlie shivered, and felt Jessica’s hand touch her shoulder. She opened her eyes, looking helplessly at her friend.
“I think he just needs time,” Jessica said gently.
“How much time can he need?” Charlie asked, and the words sounded like stone.
It’s ready.” A soft voice rang out in the dark.
“I’ll tell you when it’s ready,” said the man slumped in the corner, studying a monitor intently. “Raise it a few more degrees,” he whispered.
“You’ve said before that might be too much,” she said from the opposite corner, leaning over a table. The light shimmered off her contours as she carefully examined what lay before her.
“Do it,” the slumped man said. The woman touched a dial, then recoiled suddenly.
“What is it?” he demanded. He didn’t take his eyes off the monitor. “Raise it two more degrees,” he ordered, his voice rising. For a moment, the room was silent. Finally, the man turned toward the table. “Is there a problem?”
“I think it’s …” The woman trailed off.
“What?”
“Moving,” she finished.
“Of course it is. Of course, they are.”
“It looks like it’s … in pain?” she whispered. The man smiled.
“Yes.”
A bright light flashed on abruptly as a sudden noise resounded from the center of the room. Red, green, and blue lights flashed in sequence and a cheerful voice erupted from the speakers embedded in the walls, filling the room with song.
Every light shone down on him: the sleek white-and-purple bear. His joints clicked with every pivot; his eyes jolted back and forth randomly. He stood about six feet high; his rosy cheeks like two balls of bright cotton candy, and he wielded a microphone with a head like a shimmering disco ball.
“Shut that thing off!” the slouched man shouted, getting to his feet with obvious difficulty. He moved slowly toward the center of the room, leaning heavily on his cane. “Get back, I’ll do it myself!” he screamed as the woman retreated to the table in the corner. The man pried a white plastic plate off the chest of the singing bear, and reached inside the cavity, extending his arm all the way into the opening and pulling at whatever he could find. As he disconnected the wires inside, first the eyes stopped turning, then the eyelids stopped clapping shut, then the mouth stopped singing and the head stopped turning. Finally, with one last jostle, the eyelids clamped shut and the head dropped to the side lifelessly. The man stepped back, and the heavy plate of the bear’s chest cavity swung shut with a clang, as the animatronic bear filled with the sounds of servos and wheels, broken and disconnected, unable to move or function. Spurts of air burst from between the seams of his body casing as the air hoses misfired.
The sound came to a stop, the echoes from it lingering for a moment before dying away. The man turned his attention back to the table and lurched to it. He looked down, studying the writhing figure that lay there for a moment. The table’s surface was glowing orange, and the hot metal hissed. He took a syringe from the woman’s hand and thrust it into the squirming thing forcefully. He drew the plunger up, holding the needle steady as the syringe filled with molten substance, then finally pulled away with a jolt. He staggered back toward the bear.
“Now, let us put you to greater purpose,” he said to the glowing syringe. The man again pried open the heavy chest plate of the standing, broken bear, then carefully inserted the syringe he held directly into the chest cavity and began to press the plunger down. The cavity snapped shut, too heavy for the frail man to hold open, and he fell backward clutching his arm. The syringe clattered to the ground, still nearly full. The woman rushed to kneel by his side, feeling his arm for breaks. “I’m fine,” he grumbled, and glanced up at the still motionless bear. “It needs to be heated more.” The hissing sound continued as the figure turned on the table, pushing off plumes of steam as it rolled on the hot surface.
“We can’t heat it more,” the woman said. “You’ll destroy them.”
The man looked up at her with a warm smile, then jerked his eyes back to the bear: he was now looking down at them, his eyes open wide and tracking their subtlest movements. “Their lives will now have a greater purpose,” the man said contentedly. “They will become more, just like you did.” He looked up at the woman kneeling over him, and she looked back, her glossy painted cheeks gleaming in the light.
* * *
John let himself into his apartment and locked the deadbolt behind him, sliding the chain into place for the first time since he moved in. He went to the window and fiddled with the blinds, then stopped, pushing back the impulse to close them and seal himself away completely from the outside world. On the other side of the glass, the parking lot was still and silent, cast in the eerie light of a single streetlamp and the blue neon sign of a nearby car dealership. There was an unfamiliar whirring sound coming from somewhere, and John watched the parking lot for a moment, not sure what he was expecting to see. The sound was gone soon after anyway, and he went into the bathroom to splash water on his face. When he came back into his bedroom, he froze: it was the sound again, this time louder—it was in the room with him.
John held his breath, straining to listen. It was a quiet noise, the sound of something moving, but it was too regular, too mechanical to be a mouse. He flipped on the light: the noise continued, and he slowly turned, trying to hear where it was coming from, and found himself looking at Theodore.
“Is that you?” he asked. He stepped
closer and picked up the disembodied rabbit’s head. He held it to his ear, listening to the strange sound emanating from inside the stuffed creature. There was a sudden click, and the sound stopped. John waited, but the toy was silent. He put Theodore back down on the dresser and waited for a moment to see if the sound would begin again.
“I’m not crazy.” John said to the rabbit. “And I won’t let you, or anyone else, convince me that I am.” He went to his bed, reaching under the mattress with a suspicious glance at the toy rabbit, suddenly feeling watched. He took out the notebook he had hidden there, and sat back on the bed, looking at its black-and-white cover. It was a plain composition notebook, the kind with a little place on the front for your name and class subject. John had left that blank, and now he traced the empty lines with his finger, not really wanting to open the book that had sat, untouched, beneath his mattress for nearly three months now.
At last he sighed and opened to the first page.
“I’m not crazy,” he spoke to the rabbit again. “I know what I saw.”
Charlie. He filled up the first page with nothing but facts and statistics, of which he knew embarrassingly few, he realized. He’d known Charlie’s father, but not her mother. Her brother was still a mystery. He didn’t even know if she’d been born in New Harmony, or if there was some other town before Fredbear’s, the diner they had discovered that first time they all returned to Freddy’s. He had painstakingly written out their shared history: childhood in Hurricane, then the tragedy at Freddy’s, then her father’s suicide. She had moved in with her aunt Jen after that. As he wrote that down, John realized that he had never known where Charlie and Jen lived. Close enough to Hurricane that she had driven rather than flown there for the dedication of Michael’s memorial scholarship, nearly two years ago, but it seemed odd that she had never even mentioned the name of the town where she now—and then—lived.
He flipped through the pages; they grew less and less sparse as he had continued, the details filling in more and more as he called them over and over to mind. He had scribbled whole scenes of memory: like the time he put gum in her hair, thinking it would be funny. Charlie had stared at him with an impish look on her face as their first-grade teacher cut it out of her hair with little blue-handled safety scissors. Charlie had managed to retrieve that clump of hairy gum from the trash when no one was looking, and took it outside with her during recess. As soon as they were out the door, Charlie grinned at John. “I want to give you your gum back,” she said, and the afternoon became a game of chase, as they careened around the schoolyard, Charlie determined to shove the hair-encrusted piece of chewing gum back into John’s mouth. She had not succeeded: They were caught, and both given time-out. John smiled as he read the scribbled version of the story. It had seemed important to start with their childhood, to ground himself in the Charlie-that-was, and the John-that-was, as well. Now he sighed, and flipped ahead.
The Fourth Closet Page 3
