“She remembers, Jen. She remembers me. She remembers our family.”
“No, Henry. You remember. Zap your head with enough of those rays and I bet you can get the teakettle to tell you about your lost family.”
“My lost family,” Henry repeated.
Jen took pause, looking regretful. “It doesn’t have to be that way, but you need to let go of this. Your wife; your son, they can still be a part of your life, but you have to let go of this.”
“She is in this doll.” He gestured to Ella, who was standing upright with her teacup perched on the tray. A little rag doll sat in a wooden chair in the corner, its head draped over the armrest, its eyes staring out over the room.
“It took him a while to figure out that it was the rag doll, the little store-bought rag doll. Maybe he never sensed you when it wasn’t around, I don’t know. But over time, he started putting it inside his Charlie, whatever new Charlie he built.”
Charlie sat speechless, remembering all the times with her father, questioning each of them. Sitting on the floor of his workshop, building a block tower out of scraps of wood as he bent over his work. He turned back to her and smiled, and she smiled back, beloved. Her father went back to his work, and the jumbled creature in the far, dark corner twitched. Charlie startled, knocking her blocks to the ground, but her father did not seem to hear. She began to rebuild the tower, but the creature kept drawing her gaze: the twisted metal skeleton with its burning, silver eyes. It twitched again, and she wanted to ask, but could not make herself speak the words.
“Does it hurt?” Charlie whispered, the image so clear that she could almost smell the hot, metallic scent of the workshop. Elizabeth froze, then all at once the illusion vanished and the metal plates of her clown-painted face stripped back, baring the coils and wires, and jagged teeth. Charlie shrank back, and Elizabeth moved with her, maintaining the distance between them.
“Yes,” she whispered, and her eyes blazed silver. “Yes. It hurt.”
The plates of her face folded back in, but her eyes still glowed. Charlie blinked and looked away; the light blinded her, poking pinpoint holes in her vision. Elizabeth stared bitterly. “So, you remember me, then?”
“Yes.” Charlie rubbed her eyes as her vision began to clear. “In the corner. I didn’t want to look. I thought it was … I thought you were … someone else,” she said, her voice sounding thin and childish to her own ears.
Elizabeth laughed. “Did any of those other things really look like me? I’m unique. Look at me.”
“It hurts my eyes,” Charlie said faintly, and Elizabeth grabbed her by the chin and pulled her close. Charlie shied away, closing her eyes against the light, and Elizabeth slapped her cheek with painful force.
“Look at me.”
Charlie took a shaky breath and obeyed. Elizabeth’s face looked like Charlie’s again, but the silver light poured out coldly from the place where her eyes should be. Charlie let it flood her vision, blotting out everything else.
“Do you know why my eyes were always glowing?” Elizabeth asked softly. “Do you know why I twitched and shuddered in the dark?” Charlie shook her head slightly, and Elizabeth let go of her chin. “It was because your father left me turned on all the time. Every moment, every day, I was aware, and unfinished. Watching him as the hours passed, and he created toys for the little Charlie, unicorns and bunnies that moved and talked as I hung in the dark, waiting. Abandoned.” The glare from her eyes faded a little, and Charlie blinked, trying not to show her relief.
“Why am I even talking to you about this. You weren’t even there yet.” Elizabeth turned her face, almost in disgust.
“I was,” Charlie answered. “I was there. I remember.”
“You remember,” Elizabeth mocked. “Are you sure you were there for all of those memories?” Charlie searched her thoughts for anything that could confirm the memories she clung to.
“Look down,” Elizabeth whispered.
“What?” Charlie whimpered.
“Your memory. I’m sure it’s crystal clear, since you were there and all.” Elizabeth smiled. “Look down.”
Charlie returned to her memory, standing in front of her father’s workbench. She was immobile; she didn’t have a voice. “Look down,” Elizabeth whispered again. Charlie looked to her feet, but didn’t see feet at all, only three legs of a camera tripod anchored to the ground.
“He was making memories for you; making a life for his little rag doll, making her a real girl.
“I’m sure many of those memories have been elaborated upon, edited, and embellished, but make no mistake, Charlie wasn’t there.” Elizabeth leaned closer to Charlie.
“He made us one, two, three.” Elizabeth touched Charlie’s shoulder lightly, then brought her hand back to her own chest. “Four.” Her eyes flickered, and the silver glow faded until her eyes looked nearly human.
“Charlie would be a baby, then a little girl, and then a sulky teenager.” She looked Charlie up and down with a pointed sneer, then her expression cleared as she continued. “Then at last she would be a woman. She would be finished. Perfect. Me.” Elizabeth’s face tightened. “But something changed, as Henry labored, racked with grief, over his little girl.
“The littlest Charlotte was made with a broken heart. She cried all the time, day and night. The second Charlotte he made when he was at the depth of madness, almost believing the lies he told himself; she was as hopelessly desperate for her father’s love as he was for hers. The third Charlotte he made when he began to realize he’d gone mad, when he questioned every thought he had, and begged his sister Jen to remind him what was real. The third Charlotte was strange.” Elizabeth gave Charlie a contemptuous look, but Charlie scarcely saw it. The third Charlotte was strange, she repeated silently. She ducked her head and rubbed the flannel of her father’s shirt with her thumb, then looked back up. Elizabeth’s face was stiff with rage; she was nearly trembling.
“What about the fourth?” Charlie asked hesitantly.
“There was no fourth,” she snapped. “When Henry began to make the fourth, his despair turned to rage. He seethed as he soldered her skeleton together, pouring his anger into the forge where he shaped her very bones. I was not Charlotte-drenched-in-grief. I was made alive with Henry’s fury.” Her eyes flared again with silver light, and Charlie stayed herself, forcing herself not to blink. Elizabeth leaned in closer, her face inches from Charlie’s. “Do you know the first words your father ever spoke to me?” she hissed. Charlie shook her head minutely. “He said to me, ‘You are wrong.’
“He tried to fix the flaw he saw in me, at first, but what was wrong, as Henry saw it, was the very thing that made me alive.”
“Rage,” Charlie said softly.
“Rage.” Elizabeth drew herself up and shook her head. “My father abandoned me.” Her face twitched. “Henry abandoned me,” she corrected herself. “Of course, I could not comprehend those memories until I had received a soul of my own—once I took it for myself.” She smiled. “Once I had endowed myself with a soul, I experienced those memories anew: not as an uncomprehending toy, twitching and seizing with an all-consuming rage I could not fathom, but as a person. As a daughter. It’s rather a cruel irony that I would escape the life of one neglected daughter only to embody another.”
Charlie was silent, and for a moment her father’s face returned to her, his smile that was always so sad. Elizabeth laughed abruptly, shaking her out of her memories.
“You’re not Charlie, either, you know. You’re not even the soul of Charlie,” Elizabeth mocked. “You aren’t even a person. You’re a ghost of a man’s regret, you’re what’s left of a man who lost everything, you’re the sad little tears that fell unceremoniously into a doll that used to belong to Charlie.” Elizabeth suddenly glared at her as if looking through her. “And if I had to take a guess …” She grabbed Charlie under her chin and pulled her upright, studying her torso for a moment. She made a quick motion with her other hand and Charlie gasped; t
he room was spinning again. Elizabeth’s hand had disappeared, but it soon reemerged, and she was holding something.
“Look before you lose consciousness,” Elizabeth whispered. There, before Charlie’s eyes, was a rag doll, and recognition flared.
“Ella,” she tried to whisper.
“This is you.”
The room went dark.
* * *
What was that? Carlton lifted his head, holding his breath as he waited to hear it again. After a moment he did: someone was whimpering, and the sound was coming from nearby. Carlton took in a renewed gulp of air, instantly filled with new purpose. After hours of flickering bulbs and distant echoes, this was right beside him. Carlton leaped to his feet: across the hall a door was ajar, with an orange light glowing unsteadily from inside. How did I not notice that? Carlton made his way across the hall, sliding his feet along the floor so as not to make a sound. When he reached the door, he peered in cautiously through the crack: The orange light was from an open furnace set into the wall, its mouth large enough to fit a small car. The furnace was the only light in the dark room, but he could make out a long table, with something dark lying on it.
The whimpering came again, and this time Carlton’s eyes lit on its source: a small, blond-haired boy was huddled in the darkest corner of the room, opposite the furnace. Carlton ran into the room and knelt beside the boy, who looked up at him numbly. He was bleeding from shallow cuts on his arm and one corner of his mouth, but Carlton saw no other visible injuries.
“Hey,” he whispered nervously. “Are you okay?” The boy didn’t respond, and Carlton took hold of his arms, readying to pick him up. When he touched the child, he could feel the tremors throughout his body. He’s terrified. “Come on, we’re getting out of here,” Carlton said. The little boy pointed to the creature on the table.
“Save him, too,” the boy whispered tearfully. “He hurts so bad.” He squeezed his eyes shut. Carlton glanced at the large, motionless figure on the table by the furnace: he hadn’t considered that it might be a person. He scanned the room to make sure nothing else was moving, then patted the boy on the shoulder and got to his feet.
He approached the table cautiously, keeping to the wall instead of walking across the center of the room. As he got closer, the burning smell of metal and oil rushed up against him, and he covered his face with his sleeve, trying not to gag as he examined the prone figure.
It’s not a person. On the table, illuminated by the flickering orange light, was a mass of metal: a melted, clumpy skeleton of metal bulges and blobs, barely resembling anything at all. Carlton studied the thing for a long moment, then looked back at the little boy, uncertain what to say.
“Heat,” a voice snarled, and Carlton spun around to face a twisted man, creeping out from the shadows. “Heat is the key to all of this,” the man went on as he haltingly approached the table. “If you keep all this at just the right temperature, it’s malleable, it’s moldable, and it’s highly, highly effective; or maybe contagious is the word. I suspect you could put it in anything, but it’s best to put it into something that you can control—at least to a certain extent.” William Afton lurched into the light, and Carlton stepped back reflexively, though the table was between them. “It’s an interesting alchemy,” William continued. “You can make something that you control completely, but that has no will of its own, like a gun, I suppose.” He ran his withered hand over the silver arm of the creature. “Or you can take a drop of … pixie dust.” He smiled. “And you can create a monster that you … mostly control, one with unlimited potential.”
Carlton. He stepped back with a shout of surprise: the voice was so clear in his head that he recognized it instantly. “Michael?” The single word was enough. Carlton turned to the table with a new, terrible clarity. He knew exactly what he was looking at: the endoskeletons of the original Freddy’s animatronics, welded and melted together, immobile and featureless. And still inhabited by the spirits of the children who had been murdered inside of them so many years ago. Still filled with life, and motion, and thought—all trapped; all in terrible pain. Carlton forced himself to look William Afton in the eye.
“How could you do this to them?” he asked, nearly trembling with rage.
“They do everything willingly,” William said plainly. “The process only truly works if they freely release a portion of themselves.” The flames rose without warning, and heat radiated in painful waves from the gaping furnace. Carlton shielded his eyes, and the creature on the table convulsed. William smiled. “Scared of fire. But they still trust me. They don’t see me as I am now; they only remember me as I was, you see.”
Carlton broke his eyes away, feeling like he was waking from hypnosis. He darted his eyes desperately around the room, looking for something, anything, to attack with. The chamber was strewn with scrap metal and parts, and Carlton grabbed a metal pipe that lay by his feet and hefted it like a baseball bat. Afton was gazing down at the creature on the table, apparently insensible to anything else around him, and Carlton hesitated, considering the man for a moment. He looks like he could fall apart all on his own, he thought, taking in Afton’s fragile, hunched body and the thin skin of his head, seeming to scarcely cover the skull beneath. Then he looked back to the creature on the table. I think I’ve got the moral high ground here, he decided grimly, and raised the pipe over his head as he stalked around the table toward Afton.
Suddenly, his arms were jerked above his head, the pipe dropping from his hands and hitting the ground with a bang. Carlton struggled with the cables that gripped his wrists, but he could not wrestle free. Slowly, he was lifted off his feet, his arms stretched painfully out to his sides by two cables that extended from opposite sides of the room, seeming to attach to nothing.
“I’ve never tried this on a human being before,” William muttered, pressing some kind of mechanical syringe into the chest of the molten creature on the table. He wrenched the tool sideways, extracting something with great difficulty. The syringe was opaque, and Carlton could not see what filled it, but his heart raced as he began to suspect he knew where this was going. He tugged harder at the cables that bound him, but each time he pulled, he only wrenched his shoulders from side to side. Afton pulled the syringe out of the creature and gave a satisfied nod, then turned to Carlton.
“Usually this goes into something mechanical; something I made. I’ve never attempted it on something … sentient.” William gave Carlton a measured stare. “This will be an interesting experiment.” William lifted the mechanical syringe, carefully placing it over Carlton’s heart. Carlton gasped, but before he could try to move, William plunged the long needle into his chest. Carlton screamed, then realized distantly it was really the blond boy in the corner screaming: Carlton wheezed and gasped, but could make no sound as his chest burned with a blinding agony. Blood soaked his shirt, and it clung to his skin as he convulsed in his bonds.
“For your sake, you’d better hope my little experiment does something; because I doubt you will survive otherwise,” William said mildly. He nodded toward the cables and Carlton dropped to the ground; the pain in his chest was unthinkable, he felt like he’d been hit full-on with a shotgun. Blood sputtered from his mouth, dripping onto the floor, and Carlton curled around himself, squeezing his eyes shut as the pain intensified. Please make it stop, he thought, then, Please don’t let me die.
“Maybe the heart was too direct,” William lamented. “Well, that’s the point of this, to learn, trial and error.” He turned his gaze toward the blond-haired child, who still huddled weeping in the corner.
Steps echoed endlessly in the dark, pacing back and forth across the enclosed space.
“Are you still listening to me?” a voice rang out.
Charlie was lost in the dark, spinning silently and trying to get to the surface of whatever void she was in.
“Unlike you,” the other Charlie uttered, unseen, “I was real. I was an actual little girl, one who deserved the kind of attention show
ered over you. You were nothing.”
Charlie opened her eyes, the room still spinning. She tried to breathe but all her breaths stopped short of going in or out. There was a doll laying on the floor a few feet in front of her. She reached for it convulsively, like gasping for air.
“Do you want to know where my hate comes from? It’s not from this machine that I reside in, and it’s not from my past life, if that’s what you want to call it.”
Charlie clawed at the floor with her fingers, unable to move the rest of her body. She gripped the doll with her fingertips and pulled it closer.
“I hate because, even now, I’m still not enough,” Elizabeth whispered. She held out her sleek metallic fingers in front of her face. “Even after this; embodying the one thing Father did love, I’m not enough. Because he can’t duplicate this, he can’t make himself like me.” Her voice began to grow angry again. “He can’t duplicate what happened to me, or maybe he’s too scared to try it on himself. I broke free of my prison, I emerged from the flames and the wreckage of Henry’s last great failure, and I went to my father. I gave myself to him, to study, to use, to learn the secrets of my creation. And still it is you he wants.”
Charlie clambered up onto her hands and knees and dragged herself toward the hallway. Elizabeth didn’t seem concerned, taking slow steps behind her, not trying to catch her, only to keep her in sight.
“You, maybe he can re-create. Henry somehow got a piece of himself into you, and that’s something we haven’t seen before. That’s … unique.”
Charlie kept crawling steadily: She was beginning to feel stronger, but she kept her movements slow and clumsy, getting as much distance as she could between herself and Elizabeth. Charlie looked up and down the hall, searching for something—anything—that might give her an advantage. The door to the next room was open, and she could see a desk: sitting on it was a round stone paperweight. Without picking up her pace, Charlie crawled across the room, dragging her legs as if they pained her, while Elizabeth’s slow, patient steps followed a pace behind.
The Fourth Closet Page 23
