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My daughter, if you can hear me, I knew you would return as well. It’s in your nature to protect the innocent. I’m sorry that on that day, the day you were shut out and left to die, no one was there to lift you up into their arms the way you lifted others into yours. And then what became of you. I should’ve known you wouldn’t have been content to disappear. Not my daughter. I couldn’t save you then, so let me save you now. It’s time to rest, for you and for those you have carried in your arms. This ends for all of us.
Charlotte Emily is a good kid.
She hears her teachers say so, at times she shouldn’t be listening, the parents’ evenings Aunt Jen attends because her dad is too busy, swept up by the tide of his mechanical creations, the call he never delays in heeding. The teachers hesitate after this praise. Aunt Jen pushes. They sigh, drum their fingers on their desks, ask the same, never-changing questions. The seasons crawl and then sprint by, Charlie moves up grades, and all of them continue to stick their beaks in places Charlie can’t understand their concern for. She is good, they themselves say so; nothing else matters.
Is Charlotte okay at home?
Aunt Jen is out most nights; when she comes home, a funny scent clings to her, one Charlie wrinkles her nose at if she’s up past her bedtime. She’s developed an unhealthy affinity for self-induced insomnia, addicted to the precious extra hours it grants her to be free of bad dreams and their strangling claws. Cheap and bitter and sharp, that’s how her aunt smells, like how Charlie thinks glass might taste if one were silly enough to swallow it. Daddy is burrowed away in the basement, tweaking and fiddling and wiring the parts of these massive, imposing golden robots that Charlie’s stomach flips at like a ravished gymnast whenever she sneaks a glimpse at them. Her dad’s in that damp, dim penitentiary even when the sky softens to scarlet and then sinks into sable and can still be found when a blaze of amber sunrise bleeds the horizon and announces dawn.
Aunt Jen never tells Charlie’s teachers this. There is another story for their ears. It changes with every year because Aunt Jen is a clumsy, careless spider tangled up in the infinite web of her own weaving, but every year brings different teachers from the last, so Charlie supposes that’s God’s kindness.
Daddy calls Charlie good. Called. Not often nowadays. More when she was younger, before Sammy vanished and her mother left shortly after. Rare and treasured are the times he does now.
Eavesdropping is a guilty hobby of Charlie’s and one evening she overhears Daddy and Mr Afton in her dad’s office, puffs of ashy smoke trickling past the door as they both inhale on something. Her dad’s voice is a rasp, but his tone fond when he speaks of her. Rosy heat dashes Charlie’s cheeks.
Uncle William’s tone is polar opposite, so different that Charlie freezes at it, flinches like she’s been slapped. There’s no love in his voice when he mentions his sons and the child on the way, seems to chew their names through his gritted teeth like they’ve gone horribly off. He speaks in blades and needles, honed pinpricks that better suit the tongue of a serpent. If Daddy notices, he doesn’t comment on it. Charlie considers the possibility that she, for whatever reason, is the only one who can scrape away the affable family-businessman façade in the same fervent fashion she picks the gum off from under the tables at Mr Afton’s and her father’s restaurant, the only one to see the inveterate fury Uncle William tries his hardest to camouflage and stuff somewhere undiscoverable.
“Your girl’s very perceptive,” Uncle William muses, seconds after he’s finished listing all the ways Michael drives him up the wall. It’s random. Daddy doesn’t remark on that as well. William says it so loudly that a twinge of fear scarpers up Charlie’s spine and she frets he’s aware she’s listening. It doesn’t sound like a compliment. Charlie will replay it over and over tomorrow and it won’t then either.
“I want her to be proud of me, Will. Charlie’s a good kid. She deserves better than me.”
Charlie’s lips split into the widest of beams as though she’s received the most wonderful news. She scampers away from the office door with a spring in her step, William’s words banished from her memory and hurled a million miles away. Only what her dad said orbits her brain; much like a twinkling star, it will take a hundred years before the recollection ignites and disintegrates.
Another parents’ evening.
Does Charlotte have friends outside of school?
The teachers ask this every semester. Spending company with no one in school, they assume she has people outside of it. They hope so. Charlie doesn’t like the way they look at her at recess, all pitying, sad, not-so-subtle glances that make her loathe them on principle.
Despite not attending this parents’ evening herself, overcome by a sudden shyness, frightened of the gloomy outside with its bleak sun and bulking sombre clouds, Charlie doesn’t need to. She knows how her aunt will respond. Aunt Jen is an old record, spinning around and around and no matter how many lacerations are wreaked, her track is perpetual. A tune of lies that will never morph into a truthful dirge. Maybe that’s for the best. Charlie’s not really sure.
At school, Charlie is a phantom aimlessly wandering the corridors. That’s fine. Preferable, in fact. She’s reminded of Evan, of how the boys in her year ceaselessly echo his footprints, what they do to him behind the shed in the playground where they think no one can see. Charlie, having resigned herself to watching everyone, the wild animals gnawing at each other’s flesh, sees.
She sees a lot. Perhaps suffocatingly aware, Charlie’s knowledge exists in extremes. The act of observing wraps her in comfort, but what she observes births a terror so tenaciously rooted that were she excavated it would still fester within her.
She considers one of the boys in particular. Sammy used to say it wasn’t Michael’s fault. He got in with a bad crowd, then got trapped by them. A cruel child, but ultimately just lost. Charlie could never bring herself to agree. Even now, she can’t, and her fists bunch into tight balls as she lingers on Michael and his friends. The anger rises in her, roiling and spuming like the scalding spit of molten lava. She’s a far too active volcano, erupting more than she wants to, embittered rancour rolling out in all-engulfing streams until she’s left hollow and aching in a manner she’s convinced she’ll never recover from, a smart that infests the marrow of her bones. She tries to swallow everything down but her throat is dry, lined with dust and sand, and her breath coagulates in her windpipe, clots like chunks of blood; she retches and keeps trying, jumping to slam down the lid on the pot of her rage, but her arms aren’t long enough to reach, and it’s okay that she’s choking, asphyxiated by the mangled load of her own turbulent emotions, because there’s no one she can call out to for help anyway.
She had friends, though that feels impossibly distant, a memory so smeared and neglected its quality has waned. Sammy and Michael. Sammy isn’t here anymore and the grown-ups never speak of him, which makes Charlie contemplate if she shouldn’t either. Michael is something very close to gone, something scary and dark with whetted teeth and snapping jaws. Even when Charlie squeezes her eyes shut, she can picture Michael, under the bed and ready to pounce.
When Charlie was younger, she would count down the days until her birthday with so much excitement that on the day she would have bags from lack of sleep under her eyes, though it never cut down on her joy. She is a long way away from old, but she isn’t as young as she was. Daddy would call them her happiest day, but Daddy hasn’t spent a birthday with her for years she can’t number without falling into stifled cries. Her birthdays aren’t fun anymore.
Other people’s birthdays Charlie likes. Their sugary smiles and their ripples of giggles. That fuzzy, sunny mass within her chest has unravelled, but there is peace in knowing it endures in the spirits of others.
Evan is having his birthday at the diner in five days. Charlie’s invited, of course. Uncle William wouldn’t have it any other way. Everyone seems to be going to the party, which is odd because one word Charlie will never use to describe Evan as is sociable. Marketing by Evan’s father, Charlie figures; Uncle William is very proud of the restaurant. So is Charlie’s dad, his heart full of love for his diner and the creations he’s built for it.
A terrible tragedy has struck the diner.
Unmonitored by his father, Evan was as light as a feather for the boys to lift, carried with the same lack of thought that preys when one flings a ball to see how far it can go. Raised higher, higher, higher, into the spring lock jaws of golden death, defiant and screaming and wriggling little limbs as he experienced his nightmares in the flesh, but lodged firmly, inescapably, between two pearl sets of metal teeth. Mounted pressure reached its zenith and smashed into a brittle skull, Charlie tasted pizza climbing up her throat and forced it down, and a sickening crunch raked Fredbear’s Family Diner into a breathless silence, the titular animatronic’s plastic yellow soiled a hot, slick crimson, bright as the ketchup bottles littered around the restaurant. An explosion of shrieks pursued and Charlie watched from her distance at one of the farther dining tables as Michael’s fox mask clattered to the glistening checkerboard floor and the boy stared up at what remained of his younger brother.
A scintillating flare of red and white, the moan of sirens. Parents embracing children, fleeing to leave. A father taking slow steps out of his office. Charlie trembles to recall the memory, sweats at the face of the man she considers an uncle as he skulks in her mind. Barely more than shadow, William was lurking in a corner of the restaurant. He wasn’t hesitating to move, wasn’t overcome by grief. He simply had no ambition to approach Evan or his other child. He could have passed for a statue. Dark like an endless night, his eyes held no woe to them, no horror. He looked like he was thinking, the riptide of his thoughts so chasmic that he might never swim out.
At an implausible speed, his neck whisked to Charlie’s direction. Any final speck of light perished in the frost of his gaze, searching her, prying apart the patchwork of her skin and leaping in, pervading her blood and capillaries. Charlie cowered under the intensity of his soulless stare, too cold for the sticky heat of summer. She shuddered, shook as tears overflowed and spilled from her in salty currents, sobbing for Evan, sobbing for a father who was not there, who arrived hours later and mourned for the unintended fatality of his creation, who then submerged them both in deathly quietude as he drove her home.
In the loneliness of midnight hours, Charlie is dragged from slumber with pants and a racing pulse, haunted. She outstretches arms covered in crescent-shaped gashes and marks, finds only the cool breeze of vacancy there to console her.
She does not return to the diner. It closes within the month.
Six days after, Evan flatlines.
Time, in its unabating stride, has flashed by in two years. Often do Charlie’s thoughts circle back to Evan Afton.
There is a new pizzeria. And today is her birthday.
Father insists she go to the party. Please, Charlotte. My good girl.
Charlie melts like butter and acquiesces.
He’ll be there, Father promises (though a little late—his admission is mumbled out like it’s painful to confess). He has a gift for her.
“What you’ve been working on?” she asks, picturing the lithe animatronic with spindly limbs that her father has spent hours upon hours with in their basement. He smiles, a confirmation in its warmth, and Charlie can’t help but grin back.
Rain lashes down in icy streaks. Pushing herself up on her tiptoes, Charlie hammers on the dense sheet of glass. Her heart pangs at how long she’s been frantically waving through the window.
She watches as something within the large cream-coloured box inside the pizzeria thrashes about, the other heftier gift box on top of the lid preventing it from leaving. Charlie flushes, wrought with embarrassment, frustration. Whatever’s inside is the present from her father, but the other kids suggested they should keep it in the box until she had her birthday cake, that way opening it would feel more special. Like an idiot, she agreed.
She shouldn’t have talked to those kids. Shouldn’t have believed they wanted to be friends.
When they’re sure none of the staff will spot them, when the bear animatronic’s back is turned to serve cake to the other children, one of them will return her wave, pulling a face and then exaggeratedly bending over in sniggers as if locking her out of the pizzeria on her birthday is the funniest thing in the world.
Water pricks at Charlie’s eyes like minute edged daggers, hot and blurry. Confident and paranoid, and so filled with dread at this certainty, that she is fated to play out Evan’s life, forgotten, kicked about like a ball, left to—she forbids herself from finishing the end of that awful sentence, but it waits in the isolated caverns of her brain, patient to attack her at a later point, pasted to her like tape and eating at her like maggots.
Startling, her ears pick up the grunts of a car not far away. Whipping around, Charlie blinks, a deer in headlights, as vivid white blinds her and casts her in an eerie, pale glow. The car whines to an abrupt stop, the light swiftly disperses, and a mauve door is opened. Charlie’s heart pounds against her ribcage with enough force to break through it like waves against rocks. A niggle at the back of her mind tries to whisper to her about the car, but she is more focused on scurrying backwards. She whimpers when her spine soon hits the windowsill.
“Charlotte,” ascertains a man, surprised, as he stands some inches before her, obscured in darkness by the lack of streetlight.
A relieved bolt of recognition shoots down her at that English accent. “Uncle William,” she breathes, scanning the familiar tall figure. “Uh, Mr Afton,” she corrects. “I—I got locked out. Um,” she kicks at the pebbles on the ground, “pushed out by the other kids, actually. Shoddy birthday, huh?”
The moment the reflection leaves her mouth, Charlie cringes. Mr Afton doesn’t like self-pity.
If Evan hadn’t been such a coward, they never would have had the idea to shove him into that damned thing’s mouth, she heard him sneer months ago to her father as way of dismissal after her father, for the millionth time, wept and apologised to William for what happened to his son. Tears rapidly dried when William said more, voice too low for Charlie to catch, and then both men’s voices were raised, taut like rope, and since that day Mr Afton has never visited their house again.
“Children can be very mean,” Mr Afton agrees, slowly. In the unilluminated ink of the night, his expression is unreadable. “Charlotte,” he starts after seconds of hardly-cloaked discomforted silence, “your father and I are still friends. I cherish Henry.” Another pause. “Much like how he cherishes you.”
“Oh.” Charlie wants to be glad. A note in Mr Afton’s tone warns her not to be.
“I’d like to make amends. You and your father could come round. Meet Elizabeth,” he offers. He steps closer. Despite the bustling noise emitting from Freddy’s, his footsteps are claps of thunder. “You must be soaked, poor thing. Charlie, there’s a back entrance, why don’t I take you through that way? It leads to the parts and service room, there are spare clothes there.”
Smoother than the scales of an ophidian and richer than the intrinsic threads of the skies, Uncle William’s voice transforms into something melodious, calming, where Charlie can picture him with a reassuring smile without needing to see his countenance. She blinks, reminded by his words of the violence in her constant shivers. She grimaces at how her sweater clings to her body, a shade deeper and damper than it is normally. “Okay,” she replies, considering. Evan wasn’t given help; when he looked up, there was no father or father figure there, only a golden muzzle and rows of serrated teeth waiting to be stained. With the back of her hand, she wipes away her tears. “Okay. Thank you, sir.”
Though, however kind he sounds, he can’t blot the slur out of his voice. Charlie swallows.
“No need for formality,” Uncle William places a large hand on her shoulder. “Follow me.”
As he takes the lead, Charlie scrunches her nose. “You smell like my Aunt Jen,” she blurts without thinking. Uncle William halts.
“I’ve had a difficult day,” he says softly and continues walking. He gestures for them to stop once they’re entrenched in an alley, the dumpsters and garbage cans of the pizzeria on the left side and another high brick wall on the right.
Charlie doesn’t notice any doors. Her heart rate surges, her lungs swell. She turns to go, but William grabs her arm with the strength of a vice.
“Henry,” he hisses out the name, scorns it with frenzied distaste. It’s even blacker in the alley, but in spite of that Charlie can sense his gaze pulverising her like a set of wrecking balls, slithering across her skin. “He was always undeserving, Charlotte.”
Charlie’s jaw tenses. This time when William calls her that, she scowls, petulant and concealed by midnight. Charlotte is a name that only her father should call her, a secret between the two that nobody else has the right to share. She bristles when teachers refer to her as it, but they don’t know her. Uncle William does. It feels like a violation when it passes from his lips.
“Please let go of me,” murmured so quietly it isn’t clear if the man hears—or cares. Charlie pleads again, and again, timid requests for freedom. Uncle William snarls at her to shut up, to let him think, curated tones stripped away, gutted like a fish and disembowelled. Worlds away from the soothing intonation he would use in the old diner when he was inside that yellow rabbit suit, the musicality of it now warped, alien. That mellow joviality ensnared so many children, a lifeline, the lighthouse’s gentle glow beating back the tempestuous ocean. But never a net Charlie became enmeshed in, able to scratch deep enough to find the rot beneath the surface. Vaguely, she wonders if he’s never been able to stand her for that. If it’s her fault she’s in this situation.
“We both wanted to love,” Mr Afton mutters, a cadence of feral hunger. “He doesn’t know what he’s done.”
Whatever slivers of the ruddy, robust persona left shrivel, survive only in the bane of his touch, his hand snaking up to Charlie’s slight neck. His fingers close around her windpipe.
Rain buzzes around them, harder now, bouncing off the ground. Gravel scuffles under Charlie’s feet as William raises his arm and lifts her high. “He couldn’t save that brat of your twin. He couldn’t protect my son. He couldn’t protect you with his puppet, it wasn’t enough, it’ll never be enough, and he can’t protect you now.” She’s so near she can smell his breath, thick with the drink. “He keeps on failing, Charlotte.”
“W-Why—”
The wind picks up, roars around them, but insufficient in deafening William’s words. His voice quivers, slurred, “Your father inflicted a wound on me, you see, one that won’t heal. It’s oozing, gushing blood, and you’ve been contaminated by it. Your father dirtied you with it. Now he’ll reap what he’s sown.”
Tears burn as they cascade down Charlie’s cheeks, fogging her vision as her eyelashes clump together. “My—” she trails off into a splutter, gasping for air.
“Your father?” William snorts, the baring of his teeth a shine in the tiny cower of moonlight peering out from behind gathering storm clouds. Charlie recoils on instinct, fearful of the rabid dog and his frothing gums, and his grip constricts. “Does it look like he’s here?”
In this desolate alleyway nobody will think of going to until long after closing for the night, no, it doesn’t. It’s Charlie and a man she’s never been more terrified of.
Enveloping her, William looms over her as her veil of death, consumes her in his burial shroud; he thrums with power, the type so ludicrously out of Charlie’s reach she would laugh if she could wrestle back any oxygen. Watercolour contusions of violet and azure pulsate in preparation to form, ironed onto her flesh. The acrid stroke of vomit glides up her, compressed by asphyxiation.
William’s vile fingers meet his thumb at her nape. Charlie wheezes and writhes and wails. As he squeezes, her movements falter. Scrap being pulped, flattened. Her eyes bulge, her blood jolting in fluttering paper veins as her face purples. Then she gurgles, and there’s a keen, frigid object embedded between her ribs.
Time grinds to termination as a smouldering, piercing sensation rips her apart; something boiling has been plunged into her and sets every nerve alight. With a ruby gleam, it is just as soon effortlessly withdrawn as though practised. William seizes her close to his chest, the embrace of a beast. “Your happiest day,” he hushes, and allows her to drop. The stench of the garbage brushing against her makes her gag, which causes her to rattle like bones.
Charlie registers hellishly little after that; the pitter-patter of the inclement weather, or perhaps that’s the footsteps leaving, the growl of an engine as it hurtles away, and a heavy weight, draping itself across her. It curls around her limp form almost in a hug, lanky arms intertwined with hers. Its eyes are emerald green, luminous August pastures, a replica shade of her own eyes and her daddy’s.
She bawls at the thought of her father, a gnarling agony that carves at her like twisted, monstrous branches. The creature hums as if in resonance, then crackles and groans as droplets seep into its technology.
Stop, Charlie yearns to demand at the weather, you’re hurting it. But her tongue is lead and her lips are sealed shut with tacky vermilion glue.
Her gaze connects with her bedfellow as the green fades from its eyes. It’s an animatronic. With its milky mask and painted cheeks, it’s meant to resemble a marionette. When she was younger, Charlie loved the puppet theatre, begged her parents to take her and Sammy every weekend.
The gift from Daddy, assembled to protect her so she won’t become another Evan.
Beneath the marionette’s eyes are rivulets of rain. They look like tear tracks.
It shuts down with a glum, puny sizzle. Charlie holds it tighter. Nobody is coming. She’s been thrown out with the rest of the trash, abandoned to decay and crumble. She’s never been meant for anything greater. She mulls over why she wasn’t—isn’t—good enough, then thinks no more.