By Scarthur Ole’Sole Ivan
The following is the final entry in the journal of Arthur Gothicus Bloodedgeicus Mychemicalromancia Afton, nephew of serial murderer William Afton, who had taken a job as a night-shift security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria after the sudden departure of the previous employee, who had only worked there for five nights…
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Such were the sounds that I had heard upon turning on the phone in the security office. Supposedly, this was to be my day-shift counterpart training me for the job that I had been so hastily substituted into. Workplace protocol, however, I could not discern from the cacophony of the answering machine, absent a liberal interpretation conjured by many an undergraduate humanities major. I, however, being a proud Englishman, scorned such abstraction from my continental counterparts, and proceeded based on an analytic understanding of the message sent to me, and therefore followed suit.
Sore-throated now, I turned my attention to the photoluminescent panels and spigots before me. Clearly, this was the apparatus that I was to operate in order to maintain the security of this building. Upon it laid a small paper note, scrawled upon with untidy handwriting, not unlike that of a madman’s. Furiously, this messenger wrote,
the animatronics are possessed by the souls of children who were murdered by William Afton in the 1980s and will kill you if you don’t keep them out of your room!!!1!11!!!
Respectfully,
Matthew Patrick
Aghast at this reckless slander against my dear uncle, I purposefully cast the paper into the nearest dustbin. Surely these animatronics are deactivated, I thought, a psychosis must have seized my predecessor, perhaps brought on by too much love from his mother. No sooner had I conjured my expert psychoanalysis than I scarcely had time to question whether Lady Madness herself had seized me in her voluptuous bosom: for I saw a most terrible sight on my panopticonic screens: these “deactivated” automata were not only operant, but likewise ambulant!
“EGADS,” I ejaculated “THE DEVIL IS ALIVE IN THIS WORLD AND SO HAUNTS THIS ESTABLISHMENT!!!!!!!11!!!11!” At this, I wept bitter black tears mixed with black eyeliner onto my black leather Radiohead t-shirt, purchased from a Hot Topic in Leeds several decades ago. The tears flowed such that the black dye on the leather began to reveal and stain my black corset that I was wearing underneath my black leather Radiohead t-shirt as well as the red fishnet stockings that I had worn to work to accompany my bunny ears that I wore.
My ejaculation and subsequent moistening of my particulars through multiple orifices seemed to have alerted one of the more spry robots: a vulpine individual who had abandoned his stately post at the nearby amphitheatre (the so-called “Pirate Cove”). Despite his nautical affect, sea-legs were lacking when I beheld him sprinting through the various rooms that my screens could show. With horror I looked to the camera screens and likewise to the schematic of the building provided to discover, to my horror, the ineluctable fact that this animatronic fox was expeditiously wending towards my room, much to my horror. From my calculus, he had but seconds to reach my room, where I suspected that he did not mean me well.
With vague memories of instruction in case of emergency being in the messages recorded for me, I switched on the telephone. I swiftly switched it off when I once again heard the screech that began my night shift.
Pacing about the room now, I tried to remember what had happened after I first heard the telephone’s scream. Aha, thought I, there was a comprehensible note on the screen-panels. I turned my attention back to the video screens, only to discover that the note was not there. Defeated, I slumped into my chair, attempting to make peace with an Anglican God I had forsworn when I had read the first few words of a John Stuart Mill essay.
Suddenly, in a moment of grace, I was struck by a vivid memory of life several minutes ago:
“Aghast at this reckless slander against my dear uncle, I purposefully cast the paper into the nearest dustbin.”
I therefore made haste to that selfsame dustbin, and to my delight found the note I had in my arrogance dispossessed myself of beforehand. Again quoth the note,
the animatronics are possessed by the souls of children who were murdered by William Afton in the 1980s and will kill you if you don’t keep them out of your room!!!1!11!!!
Respectfully,
Matthew Patrick
Understanding my predicament now, I realized that my object, were I to survive this night, would be to obstruct these beings of demonic instrumentality from entering this very room, which I understood to be my safe haven. Hearing the pounding footsteps of what could only have been the fox, I realized that haste would be necessary to take proper action in order to exclude his presence. To that end, I disrobed myself of those things that encumbered me: my black-gold stiletto heels, my jet-black woolen cloak, soaking wet from my previous fit of lacrimation, my black-silver and blood-diamond tiara among other things which for brevity’s sake I shall omit from this journal.
I gingerly proceeded to the apparatus which so intimidated me moments before, resolute now, like as Horatio Nelson was at Trafalgar, to frustrate the knavish tricks of my foe. I saw a button on my left side which read “door.” Being an expert in logical positivism, I adduced this button as being instrumental in the sealing of this office against the xeno-thaumata that so riddled this place, and with due haste and enthusiasm pressed it. With due expediency and noise, the door slammed downwards, in just enough time for me to see the fox’s torn nautical frame attempt to breach the rapidly closing gap betwixt door and floor to no avail.
Cachinnating now at the fox’s misfortune, I turned around to discover that in my myopic focus on the one animatronic, as well as the time spent attempting to address the problem, I had allowed in four different humanoid automata: a yellow female chicken, a purple bunny, a brown bear, and a golden freddy.
It was then that I realized the source of the scream I had heard at the beginning of the night: for the cry of the children’s souls in unison with my own voice created a discordant hymn to the demonic horrors that this place had seen, wrought by my uncle so many years ago, and yet still resonant today. I continued to scream as they made me one of their own, forcing my body into one of the animatronic exoskeletons in an obscure back-room where no child deserves to see, much less have their body kept as a rotting costume-host forever. Mechanical whirrs and screeches began to replace my waning voice, still in the form of a scream, as bone gave way to crushing metal, and eyes became fused to that of my lupine exoskeleton’s skull. I could see now more clearly: the souls of the children, still trapped inside of their long-dead and decomposed cadavers, still feeling the ontological pain of the fusion betwixt man and machine, despite their physical nerve-endings having become dust long ago.
I walk now among them, one of them, in soul and spirit, the youngest among them. By day we placidly stand in fain performance for those children, who have the infinite fortune of maintaining their Edenic innocence, as the society in which I once lived yet feeds into that delusion. By night the wolf comes out in all of us, in myself most literally, as my animatronic was to be the new attraction, “Niceguy the Wolf.” I, however, took on a new name for myself, one that better reflects what society pushed me and my fellow children into, the crushing exoskeleton of lost innocence. It is said that on occasion, were you to look close enough, you could spot some “tomato sauce” dripping from my mouth. Haha, like, anyone over twelve could understand that’s not true. Such tomato sauce was not tomato sauce, but blood! Sometimes it was my own, sometimes it was the new security guards’ who try to maintain the façade of normality to society. It only follows, then, that my new name should reflect my gothic and macabre origin: by day I may still be “Niceguy the Wolf,” but by night I am the Wolf crusader, “SOCIETYBLEED!”