Bob’s light revealed the upper half of Ralpho already through the window.
Bob let out a choked cry. Thankfully his astonishment cut off the sound in his throat, and his boys snored on.
Gaping at Ralpho, Bob was momentarily paralyzed. This situation was so far beyond anything his mind could process that he felt fully and thoroughly shut down. All Bob could do was stare.
But he had to move. He had to keep Ralpho away from his family.
Why did he just keep gawking?
And suddenly … Ralpho paused in his climb through the window. He gazed back at Bob, and neither of them made a sound.
Bob trembled and clutched the loft ladder so hard his hands throbbed.
Outside, dawn arrived, and light shined around Ralpho’s orange head, making him look, for an instant, like some kind of supernova monster. Bob was superglued to the ladder. He listened to his own uneven breathing.
And Ralpho began backing out of the window.
Ralpho retreated completely from the cabin. His head dropped below the level of the window.
Then …
silence.
Silence all around.
Bob closed his eyes and dropped his head to the top step of the loft ladder.
“Dad?”
Abruptly, the cabin was filled with intense white light. The luminous intrusion into his consciousness felt so invasive that Bob blinked several times and tried to figure out where he was. It felt like he’d been transported to another, otherworldly place.
Bob squinted. He recognized the wide-eyed face of his sleep-rumpled son.
“What’re you doing?” Aaron asked. He stood underneath the pull string to the exposed lightbulb that now lit up the loft.
Everything cascaded back into place: the Bunny Call, Ralpho, Bob’s frenzied determination to stop the threat to his family.
“What time is it?” Bob asked.
“Huh?”
“The time.”
Aaron picked up his cell phone from his nightstand. Really the only function their phones had out here was as a clock.
“It’s six,” Aaron said.
Tears filled Bob’s eyes.
“Dad?” Aaron repeated. “What’re you doing?”
Bob ignored him. Now Tyler was sitting up, rubbing his eyes.
“Momma, up!” Cindy’s high-pitched voice demanded down below the loft.
“Dad, why are you hanging on to the ladder?” Tyler asked. He threw back his covers and shifted to the edge of his bed.
Bob didn’t know if he could move. He felt like all his muscles had left his body. But he couldn’t stay where he was. He didn’t have the strength.
So up or down? Up was closer. Bob climbed the rest of the way into the loft. Without answering Tyler’s question, because he didn’t yet know how to answer it, Bob collapsed next to Tyler. He motioned for Aaron to join them.
Looking at his father as if he had grown a second head, Aaron slowly crossed to Tyler’s bed. Bob patted the space next to his hip, and Aaron frowned but sat down.
Tyler and Aaron exchanged a look. Then Bob reached around the back of the boys’ necks and pulled them both close. He dropped his arms around their shoulders and he squeezed them in a long, tight hug. He wanted to say something, but he was too emotional to talk. He just wanted to hold on to his boys, his precious boys, for as long as …
“Dad? You’re kind of squeezing the life out of us,” Tyler said.
Bob let up on the hug but didn’t let them go. He cleared his throat and got his voice to work. “I love you guys,” he said. “So much.” He looked at both of them in turn.
Both boys had creases on their cheeks from their night’s sleep. Their eyes were crusty, and they had sour morning breath. Bob didn’t care. They were his sons. They were perfect.
“You know how much I love you, right?” he asked them.
Tyler and Aaron looked at each other again. “Um, yeah?” Aaron said.
“Yeah,” Tyler agreed.
“We love you, too, Dad,” Aaron said.
A click came from the cabin’s first floor, and more light blasted through the little building. Wanda was up.
“Bob, what are you doing up there?” Wanda’s scratchy early-morning voice sounded wonderfully normal.
“Come on, boys,” Bob said.
The boys didn’t move when Bob got up. But Bob grinned at them before heading down the ladder.
What a wonderful morning! It was great to be alive!
At the bottom of the ladder, Bob turned toward the double bed and scooped up his daughter from it. “Cindy Lee, my buzzy honeybee!” he exclaimed before buzzing in her little ear.
Cindy immediately began giggling hysterically. Then she put her arms straight out to her sides and instructed, “Fly, Daddy, fly!”
Bob happily picked her up, and he ran around the room with her, yelling, “Zoom goes the buzzy honeybee. Zoom, zoom. Buzz, buzz.”
“Zoom, zoom. Buzz, buzz!” Cindy repeated. Then she let loose with a high-pitched squeal of glee.
“Bob?” Wanda said. She was standing by the bed in her bright yellow silk pajamas, her hands on her hips.
“What?” he asked.
“Something weird is going on.”
“What makes you say that?”
Wanda frowned. “I have no idea.” She shook her head. “I must have been having a strange dream.”
Cindy squealed again. Wanda looked at her daughter … and at Bob. Her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened.
The bright light in the cabin brought out the reddest strands in Wanda’s hair. Bob couldn’t remember her ever being more beautiful. He flew his buzzy honeybee over to his wife, and he engulfed both wife and daughter in a long, tight hug.
“I love you. I love you. I love you,” he declared while Cindy said, “Buzz, buzz,” and Wanda said, “What’s going on?”
Bob didn’t answer her. He just squeezed.
“Bee skished,” Cindy said. “Ow.”
Bob released them. He looked at their gorgeous faces, flushed and smiling. Admittedly, Wanda’s smile was tentative, and it was mixed with what appeared to be confusion. But she was smiling.
“Daddy, pee pee,” Cindy said.
Bob set his daughter down. Wanda took Cindy’s hand and led her into the bathroom.
The second Wanda and Cindy were in the bathroom, Bob looked around the cabin, checking his blood cleanup. He didn’t see anything he’d missed.
And what did he do with the paper towels he’d used?
He checked his pockets and felt them there, but he didn’t pull them out because Aaron and Tyler were coming down the ladder. Putting Ralpho out of his mind, Bob hugged his boys again. They tolerated the hugs for a few seconds, until Tyler announced, “I’m hungry.”
The bathroom door opened. Cindy, her arms straight out from her sides, started buzzing again. Bob reached out and grabbed Wanda by the hand to pull her close.
“It’s a beautiful day and we’re together, and we have lots to do today,” he said, spinning Wanda into a dance around the cabin.
Wanda laughed. “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” Then she gave up and allowed him to sweep her up into the dance.
Heading to breakfast at the main lodge, Cindy skipped ahead, but Bob held tight to Wanda’s hand.
The sun was already ascending into a brilliant blue sky. The evergreens’ boughs were bright green in the morning light, and they seemed to be reaching toward that sky, as if in celebration of the new day. Chickadees played in the forest undergrowth. Their “Fee bee” calls joined with the “Phew chuck” cries of the Western bluebirds Bob could see flitting through the higher tree branches. A woodpecker added a rat-a-tat from a tree just out of view. On a low-hanging branch near the trail, a chipmunk chattered, “Spwik, spwik, spwik,” as it fluffed its tail. Bob felt like he and everything around him had been cartooned. It all felt too colorful, too cheerful, too, well, cartoony. After everything that had happened the night before, he w
ouldn’t have been surprised if the families around him broke into song.
Camp Etenia was hopping this morning, as everyone was heading to the lodge for breakfast. Kids were running and playing as they went. Aaron and Tyler raced off to join some new friends in a game that involved a lot of shouting. Today, all the activity didn’t bother Bob. He was still riding the high of his profound relief.
“I take it you’ve decided this place isn’t so bad?” Wanda asked.
Bob grinned at her. “There are worse places.”
Much worse, Bob thought fifteen minutes later as he sat at the table with his family, eating his way through some of the thickest, tastiest pancakes he’d ever known. “Wow. What’s in these?” he asked one of the camp employees who came by to top off his coffee.
The perky gray-haired woman leaned over and whispered, “The secret is cinnamon and vanilla, but don’t tell anyone I told you.” She grinned and bustled off.
Breakfast was being served in the main dining room, which, like the main lobby of the lodge, had a vaulted log ceiling and golden log walls. Bob appreciated that the room was filled with dozens of round tables so families could eat together instead of being forced to join everyone else at long communal tables. The only long table was the one at the front of the room, and it seemed to be reserved for the Camp Etenia staff.
Bob took another bite and watched his kids eat. Aaron and Tyler were stuffing as many pancakes in as they could, acting like they’d never have another chance to eat, ever. Cindy had both pancake and syrup smeared adorably all over her face.
Around them dozens of conversations filled the room with a lively hum that blended with the clinks and clatters of silverware and stoneware. The air was sweet with the aroma of maple and butter.
“Excuse me! Excuse me!” The loud tink, tink, tink of a spoon hitting the side of a glass lowered the decibel level in the room partway.
“Could I have your attention, everyone?” Bob and his family, and most of the other diners, looked toward the staff table. In the middle of it, a tall, tanned man with a beard waved at everyone. “Over here,” he called. Bob recognized him from the picnic and the campfire the night before.
Talking died down. A few more rustlings and murmurings gave way to silence. Everyone looked at the man.
“Remember me from last night? I’m Evan, the owner of Camp Etenia, and your host. I hope everyone had a good first night.”
Bob tensed but kept a smile on his face. Most everyone else cheered.
“Good, good,” Evan said. “Okay. A few announcements.”
Bob prepared to zone out. He figured Wanda would let him know whatever he needed to know.
“First,” Evan said, “regarding the Bunny Calls.”
Every cell in Bob’s body went on high alert. He tuned in.
“My apologies to those who signed up for a Bunny Call,” Evan said.
They should apologize, Bob thought.
“The Bunny Calls couldn’t be done this morning because the counselor who usually does Bunny Calls overslept. Ralpho wasn’t able to make his rounds today.”
Bob stared at Evan.
“These are really great pancakes,” Wanda said. “Aren’t they, Bob?”
You’re so lucky. You just get to sit around and play video games all day.”
If Matt had a dollar for every time someone had said this to him, he actually could sit around and play video games all day instead of going into the office and working on developing the things.
Game development was harder than people thought. It was a great job—the job Matt had always dreamed of back when he was a kid pretending to be sick so he could stay home from school and make simple games on his family’s home computer. But there was a huge difference between working on games and playing them. Many parts of the process were exhilarating—that first burst of inspiration when an idea came to you, the triumphant moment when you saw all of your plans come to fruition. But between first inspiration and final fulfillment, there were lots of opportunities for head-banging frustration and punching-a-fist-through-the-wall rage. One small programming error could mess up a whole game, and backtracking to try to identify such an error was incredibly tedious. People who loved to play games often thought their skills in gaming gave them the skills to design games as well, but this wasn’t any truer than thinking that since you knew how to read a good book, you also knew how to write one.
For now Matt was eating, sleeping, and breathing his job. He had landed the role of creating and refining the AI in Springtrap’s Revenge, a new cutting-edge virtual reality game that was to be the next installment in the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s series. It was the most high-profile game he had ever worked on, and he knew it was going to be a tremendous hit. How could it not be, with the exciting combination of virtual reality and the established Five Nights at Freddy’s characters that gamers already
loved to fear? The early glitches of the game had been worked out, and now Matt was about to do what nongamers assumed the only part of his job was: he was getting to play-test the game.
Matt secured the VR headset over his eyes and made sure the whole device fit him tightly. He was going in.
There was a wall on either side of him. These walls formed the dark hallway that was the entrance to the maze. At this point Matt could only see down the hall straight ahead; no entrances to the left or right were visible yet. Just as he was about to move forward, he saw his creation and his adversary—a large green rabbit—appear at the end of the hall and then exit to the left.
Just because it was a rabbit didn’t mean it was cute. Matt had always found humans in rabbit costumes creepy, as was evidenced by an old picture his mom had taken of him when he was three years old, screaming bloody murder on the lap of a blankly grinning Easter Bunny at the mall. Springtrap, the rabbit in the game, was even scarier than the uncanny–valley–dwelling mall Easter Bunny. Its costume was so tattered that some of its mechanical parts were visible beneath the fabric, and the better part of one ear was missing. Its eyes were evil orbs that glowed green when it spotted its prey, and its grin was wide and ghastly. It was definitely nightmare fuel, which was absolutely what Matt had intended for it to be.
Matt was especially proud of his titular character. He wanted to make Springtrap the kind of horrifying character who would endure, who would visit people’s nightmares for generations to come. From Dracula to Hannibal Lecter, there was a kind of immortality in a truly horrifying creation, and somehow a bit of this immortality touched the creator as well. Matt had done an exhaustive amount of research in developing the murderous rabbit. He had watched dozens of classic horror movies, studying the personalities of their cold-blooded killers. He read books and articles on serial killers, about how their appetite for violence could only be sated for a little while … until they had to choose another victim.
The more Matt watched and read, the more he understood. For the killers who lived on in people’s imaginations, murder was a source of joy, a means of self-expression, like painting for the artist or playing an instrument for the musician. Matt wanted Springtrap to show this kind of joy, this kind of deep self-realization, in the art of killing.
He had wanted to create a character who could open your jugular with the same happy excitement as a kid opening a birthday present.
Matt was no murderer, of course. If he were, he wouldn’t have had to do so much research. But Matt knew what it was to feel rage—to feel so wronged, so ill used, that he burned with the desire to destroy, to smash, to teach the people who had wronged him a lesson they would never forget. During the game’s development, Springtrap became the place Matt could put all these feelings, a repository for all his destructive urges. Springtrap was the child of Matt’s rage.
The goal at the beginning part of the game sounded simple: find your way out of the maze before Springtrap can kill you. But the maze was absurdly difficult, made even more so by the first-person perspective that the VR necessitated. Springtrap was both swift and
stealthy and was able to appear seemingly from nowhere and kill you before you knew what hit you.
Matt made his way to the end of the entrance hallway and decided to turn right since it was the opposite of the direction he had seen the rabbit choose. He ended up, as he knew he would, in a large, square room with four closed doors. Three of these doors led to new passages in the maze. One led to Springtrap and certain death. Because of the way the game was programmed, Matt didn’t have any more idea of which door hid Springtrap than any other gamer would. Which door should he choose?
After a quick round of eeny-meeny-miney-mo, Matt chose the door that was straight in front of him. He stepped toward it, turned the knob, and pushed the door open. The soundtrack emitted a deafening screech, and the bunny lunged at him, its arm outstretched, slashing at him with a big, shining knife. The VR made Springtrap’s attack feel disturbingly realistic. The knife slashed what felt like dangerously close to his eyes, and when Springtrap lifted the knife high and plunged it downward, Matt couldn’t help bracing himself as though he were about to experience real physical pain. Then the perspective shifted to third person so that Matt could see the corpse of his avatar sprawled facedown on the floor. Springtrap, showing the twisted joy that Matt had intended, smiled with a look of true bliss. He knelt beside Matt’s avatar and used his knife to slice off Matt’s ear. Springtrap held up the blood-dripping ear, a trophy commemorating his achievement. The words GAME OVER appeared on the screen.
Matt was furious at himself for choosing the wrong door, furious at his rabbit creation for taking such obvious pleasure in his defeat. He didn’t even remove the headset to take a break. He just restarted the game and ran down the hallway until he was in the room with the four doors again. He had a gut instinct that the door on the left was the one to pick.
He approached the door, turned the knob, and pulled it open.
Springtrap lurched out at him with his jaws open wide. There was the soundtrack’s screech, followed by a gruesome snapping sound. Matt flinched because it felt for all the world like Springtrap was a split second away from biting his face off. Matt’s avatar’s corpse once again lay facedown (what was left of his face, anyway) in a fresh pool of blood. Springtrap grinned at his victory, his teeth stained red. He slowly licked the blood from his lips. The words GAME OVER filled the screen again.
Bunny Call Page 6
