There was a cluster of trees up ahead, gathered together as though around a campfire, tall and short, and thick and scraggly. Charlie dragged her foot along the track as she walked, as if it might vanish if she ceased to touch it.
“What is that, an old station?” John asked, squinting and blocking the sun with his hand. There was a long building nestled in the trees, its color blending in with the small grove, making it difficult to spot.
The tracks veered away, heading off toward the mountains, and Charlie stopped dragging her foot along them, letting them go. John finally caught up and they walked through the dry grass together toward the grove of trees, not far away now.
“There has to be a road.” Charlie strayed almost randomly, heading away from the building. John hesitated.
“But…” He gestured toward the building, then followed her, looking back to make sure he knew the way back to the car. Before long, the ground leveled out beneath their feet. Old pavement, broken with weeds and mounds of crumbling rock stretched across the field in a narrow, almost hidden path, leading once again toward the small building.
“This is it.” Charlie said softly. John approached her carefully then stood at her side. They walked the road together, dodging around the pillars of grass that shot up from the breaks and holes. The tree was there, the one with reaching arms and a ghastly face, but it was no longer frightening, no longer as Charlie remembered. It must have already been dead when she was a child, she realized. Its limbs had fallen off, leaving jagged holes where they had been, and they lay where they fell, rotting into the ground. The tree seemed a frail and weak shade of its former self, only recognizable by the stumps and bulges on its side that had made its face. Now even the face looked tired.
The building itself was long and dilapidated. It was a single story, with a dark roof and weather-beaten walls. The place had once been painted red, but time and sun and rain had won out over the paint; it was peeled and curling, whole long strips of it gone and the wood beneath showing, dark with what might be rot. Its foundation was overgrown with tall grass, and Charlie thought it looked as if it were sinking, as though the whole structure were slowly being swallowed by the earth. Charlie grabbed John’s arm as they neared it, then let it go and straightened her back. She felt as though she were preparing for a fight, as if the building itself might attack if it sensed weakness.
Charlie went warily up the few steps to the door, sticking to the edges and testing the wood before she let down her full weight. The stairs held, but there were soft, splintered patches in the middle she would not have liked to try. John didn’t follow her right away, sidetracked by something nearly hidden in the grass.
“Charlie,” he held it up: a battered metal sign, with the painted words: “Fredbear’s Family Diner” in red script.
Charlie gave a gentle smile. Of course this is it. I’m home.
John came up the stairs behind her quickly and set the sign down carefully by the door, and they went inside. The door swung open easily. Light streamed in through the windows on all sides, revealing emptiness and decay. Unlike Freddy’s, this place had been cleaned out. The wooden floors seemed intact, but were warped from weather. Sunlight was streaming in, unobstructed, and went where it wanted without furniture or people to block its path. Charlie looked up at the ceiling fan: it was still there, but one of its blades was missing.
There was a double door to their right with circular windows. Unlike the dining area, which was breached with sunlight and the sounds of the outside, the room behind the double doors was still pitch black. John was more interested in this than Charlie, and he carefully peered into one of the windows, obviously tempted to nudge it open and see what was inside. Charlie left him to his curiosity and walked further into the dining room, which she only knew as the dining room through memory. Now it was a vacant and lonely room, stretching long and narrow: at least fifty feet, growing darker as it went. There was a slightly elevated stage at the end of the room, and Charlie realized as she looked around that the place had probably once been a dance hall, and the long desk by the entrance that her parents had used for a cash register had probably been a bar. She went over to it and saw that she was right: there were even grooves and scratches in the wood floor, where barstools had once dug their feet. She tried to picture it, a dark bar with a country western band playing on the stage, but she could not.
When Charlie looked at the stage, she could still see two animatronic animals in shadow, moving in unnatural twists and turns. She could hear echoes of carnival music, and distant laughter. She could still smell the cigarette smoke in the air. She hesitated before going further, as though the ghosts she remembered might linger on the stage. She tried to catch a glimpse of where John was. He finally had the door to the kitchen half-open and was sticking his head inside. Charlie turned her attention back to the stage and walked toward it across the creaking floor. Even the smallest sound was deafening, accompanied by faint whistles as the wind slipped through cracks in the windows and walls. Strips of wallpaper had peeled down and hung flat against the wall, inert until a breeze lifted them up, and they wagged like thin fingers pointing at Charlie as she walked.
Charlie stood at the base of the stage, studying the floor carefully for traces of what might have stood there before. All that remained were holes where bolts had once been. The corners looked blackened, with the shapes of coils and wires etched into dirt and wood.
Everything is gone.
Her head jerked toward the corner to her right; there was another door. Of course there is another door. This is why you are here. She stood still, looking at the door, but not ready to touch it. She was grasped with a strange and illogical fear, as though spiders and boogeymen might come rushing out.
The door was ajar. Charlie looked back toward John again, hesitant to go on without him. As though he heard her calling to him, he leaned out of the kitchen door with a wide-eyed expression. “This is really creepy.” He was obviously enjoying himself, like a kid in a haunted house.
“Can you come with me?” Charlie’s plea came as a surprise to John, who seemed pleased but irritated at the same time, having been enjoying his own adventure on the other side of the building. “Two seconds,” he promised, then disappeared again.
She rolled her eyes, disappointed but not surprised that his childish curiosity would take priority. She rested the back of her hand against the aged wooden door and gently guided it open, bracing herself against whatever might be inside.
Whatever she had been expecting, this wasn’t it. It was a closet, the inside extending off to her left, about eight or nine feet into darkness. There were horizontal poles mounted along the walls where hangers had once been. Square shapes imprinted in the dust filled her mind with images of boxes, maybe speakers.
As she stepped inside, she pushed the door open all the way, trying to let in as much light as possible. As she walked further in, she let her hand drag along the wall. Although nothing was there now, she could feel heavy cloth, coats and sweaters hanging.
No. These were costumes.
Costumes had hung here in the dark, hiding their colors but allowing themselves to be felt by every cheek and small hand that passed through. Rubber padded palms and fingers swayed this way and that. Reflections on false eyes passed overhead.
Charlie reached the end and turned to look back. She crouched down, looking up at the empty space. It didn’t feel empty. She could still feel the costumes; they were hanging all around her. There was someone else in the closet with her, kneeling down at her own height. It was her friend, the little boy.
My little brother.
They were both playing and hiding together as they always did. This time was different. The little boy looked up toward the door suddenly as though they had been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been doing. Charlie looked up as well. There was a figure in the door. It looked like one of the costumes was standing on its own, but it was motionless, so still that Charlie wasn’t sure
what she was seeing.
It was the rabbit, the yellowish brown rabbit they loved, but it did not dance or sing, just stood there and stared at them, unblinking. They began to squirm under its gaze, and the little boy screwed up his face to wail, and Charlie pinched his arm, seized with an instinctual sense that they must not cry. The rabbit looked back and forth from one to the other with those all too human eyes, ponderous, as though weighing and measuring them in some way that Charlie could not understand, as though it were making a momentous decision. Charlie could see its eyes, its human eyes, and she was cold with terror. She felt the fear in her brother as well, felt it echoing between them, reverberating and growing because it was shared. They could not move, they could not scream, and finally the creature inside that patchwork, ragged yellow rabbit suit reached forward for the boy. There was a moment, one single moment, when the children still clung together, gripping hands, but the rabbit snatched the boy to his breast, yanking them apart, and fled. From that moment the entire memory shattered with piercing and unrelenting screams, not her brother’s, but her own. People rushed to help, her father picked her up and held her, but nothing could console her; she screamed and screamed, louder and louder. Charlie snapped back from her dream, the sound still high and painful in her ears. She was crouched down in silence; John stood at the door, not daring to interrupt.
She did not remember much of what had happened next, everything was dark, it was all a blur of images and facts she had pieced together later, things she might remember, and others she might have imagined. She was never in the restaurant again. She knew her parents shuttered the doors immediately.
Then they moved to the new house, and Charlie’s mother left a little while after that. Charlie did not remember her saying goodbye, although she knew she must have. Her mother would not have left without a goodbye, it was just lost in the mist of time and grief like so much else. She remembered the first time she stood in the doorway of her father’s workshop, the first day they were alone, in everything. It was the day he began to build her a mechanical toy, a little dog who tilted its head from side to side. She smiled when she saw it finished, and her father looked at her the way he would look at her for the rest of his life: as though he loved her more than life itself, and as though his love made him unbearably sad. She knew even then that something vital inside him had broken, something that could never be repaired. Sometimes he seemed to look right through her, as if he couldn’t see her even when she was standing right in front of him.
Her father never again spoke her brother’s name, and so Charlie learned not to speak it either, as though to speak it would send them back to that time and unravel them both. She woke in the mornings and looked for the little boy, having forgotten in her dreams that he was gone. When she turned to where he would be, and saw only her stuffed toys, she would cry, but she would not say his name. She was afraid to even think it, and she trained her mind to shrink from it until she truly forgot, but deep inside she knew it: Sammy.
A rumbling sound rose, loud and low like a train passing, and Charlie startled.
“A train?” She looked around her, eyes wide; she was disoriented, not sure if she was in the past or present.
“It’s ok. I don’t think it’s anywhere near here. Might just be a big truck.” John took Charlie’s arm and pulled her to her feet. “Did you remember something?” He whispered. He was trying to catch her gaze, but she was focused elsewhere.
“A lot.” Charlie put her hand to her mouth, still staring into the darkness as if she could see the scene. John’s hand on her arm was an anchor, and she clung fast to it. This is real. This is now, she thought, and she turned to him, seized by a fierce gratitude that he was there with her. She buried her face in his chest as if his body could shield her from what she had seen, and let herself cry. John hugged her tight, one hand on her head, cautiously stroking her hair. They stayed that way for long moments, and at last she calmed, her breathing deep and even again. John loosened his grip on her, and as soon as he did, Charlie stepped back, suddenly aware of how close they had been.
John’s hands were still suspended in mid-air from where Charlie had been. After a moment of shock he lowered one and used the other to scratch his head.
“So…” He hoped for an answer to fill the silence.
“A rabbit.” Charlie said calmly, looking toward the doorway. “A yellow rabbit.” Her voice became graver as the image was still fresh in her mind.
The one I saw the night Michael disappeared, the bear, I’m pretty sure he was yellow too.”
“I thought you said it was like the others,” Charlie said.
“I thought it was. When everybody said Freddy was brown, that night we first met up, I just thought I was remembering it wrong. I mean, I really don’t have a great memory for back then, you know? I didn’t even remember what color my old house was. But then you said he was yellow, too.”
“Yeah, they were yellow.” She nodded; it was the answer he was expecting.
“I think it’s connected—the animals from here, and the one I saw at Freddy’s.”
And the one that took my brother, Charlie thought. She took a final look around the place.
“Let’s go back,” she said. “I want to get out of here.”
“Okay,” John said.
As they headed to the door, a small object caught Charlie’s eye, and she snatched it up. It was a twisted piece of metal, and as John watched, close by, she stretched it out, then let it snap back together with a loud snap, like a cracking whip. John jumped.
“What is that?” He said, composing himself.
“I’m not sure,” she said, but she slipped it into her pocket. John was watching her like there was something he wanted to say. “Let’s go,” Charlie said.
They began the trek back to the car. Sammy, then years later Michael and the other kids—of course it’s connected, Charlie thought. Lightning might strike twice, but not murder.
“Can you drive again?” She asked after a long period of silence. The only sounds so far had been their shoes crunching through the dry grass.
“Yeah, of course,” he said.
John managed to get the car turned around in the constricted space, and Charlie settled against the window, her eyes half closed already. She watched the trees fly by outside her window, and felt herself beginning to doze. The metal object in her pocket was digging into her leg, keeping her awake, and she repositioned it, thinking dreamily of the first time she saw one of the things.
She was sitting with Sammy in the restaurant, before it opened for the day; they were under a window, in a dusty beam of light, playing some invented game she could no longer remember, and their father came over grinning: he had something to show them.
He held up the piece of twisted metal, and showed them how it opened, then let it snap back in his hand. They both cried out in surprised, then started giggling and clapping their hands.
Their father did it again. “I could snap off your nose!” He said, and again they laughed, but quickly his face turned serious.
“I mean it,” he said. “This is a spring lock, and I want you to know how it works because it’s very dangerous, and I don’t ever want you touching these. This is why we never put our hands in the animal costumes; it’s very easy to trigger these if you don’t know what you’re doing, and you could get hurt. It’s like touching the stove—do we ever touch the stove?
They shook their heads with a solemnity beyond their years.
“Good. Because I want you both to grow up with all your noses!” He cried, and he swept them up, one in each arm, swinging them around as they laughed. Suddenly there was a loud snap.
Charlie jolted out of sleep.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” John said. The car was off. Charlie looked around; they were back at the motel.
Charlie took a moment to reorient herself then gave a reluctant smile. “Thanks for driving.”
“What were you dreaming ab
out?” John said. “You looked happy.”
Charlie shook her head.
“I don’t remember.”
Chapter Six
The other car was gone from the lot, and when they went into the room, there was a note on Charlie’s pillow, written in Marla’s big, loopy handwriting.
We’re meeting for dinner at 6:30, and then going to you-know-where! She had written. See you two soon; don’t forget about the rest of us! XOXO Marla
She had drawn a smiley face and a heart below her name. Charlie smiled to herself, folding the note and slipping it into her pocket without showing it to John.
“What does it say?” He asked.
“We have to meet them at the diner in—” she checked her watch. “An hour.” John nodded. He was still standing in the door, waiting for something. “What?” Charlie said.
“I need to go change,” he said, gesturing at the rumpled clothing he was wearing. “Can I take your car?” He held up the keys and jangled them.
“Oh, yeah, of course. Just come back for me,” Charlie said with a grin.
He smiled. “Of course,” he added with a wink.
When the door closed behind him, Charlie let out a sigh. Alone at last. She was unaccustomed to so much company; she and Aunt Jen moved in their own orbits, meeting gladly from time to time throughout the day, but with the assumption that Charlie could take care of her own needs, or would speak up if she could not. Charlie never spoke up. She could feed herself, get to school and back, and maintain her high grades and casual friendships. What could Aunt Jen do about nightmares? About questions she did not really want the answers to? What could Aunt Jen tell her that was not even more horrific than what she already knew? And so, she was not used to the sustained presence of other people, and it was a little tiring.
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