Here Comes Springtime [PART 1]

Fazbear’s Fright was one hell of a haunted house.

At least, that’s what everyone in town was saying. They spoke with gleeful whispers and furtive glances over their shoulders of real corpses strung up, of Fazbear merchandise haunted by former employees, of the whispering voices of murdered children echoing through the halls just at the edge of hearing. You weren’t sure where they got all these ideas, considering the place wasn’t even open yet.

The run-down appearance of Fazbear’s Fright didn’t have anything to do with it, although the place was very run-down even by haunted house standards. The building it was in, and the rest of the amusement park surrounding it if you were being truthful, had gone to seed before Freddy Fazbear’s even closed its doors back in 1993.

Speaking of the amusement park, it didn’t have anything to do with Fazbear’s Fright’s notoriety, either. In fact, other than the strange abundance of stray cats in the area and the stubborn weeds that tickled your ankles when you trudged through them, there was nothing special about the park. It was just one depressed, rotting spot hidden on the outskirts of town out of many.

No, the thing that kept Fazbear’s Fright on the tips of tongues was its legacy. Unsolved mysteries of missing children; mishaps and misfortunes plaguing the restaurant ever step of the way; urban legends told dramatically under blankets and around campfires about haunted animatronics. Yes, Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza had it all.

You were surprised nobody had tried the haunted house angle sooner, honestly. Maybe there was just never someone crazy enough before. Based on what little you could gleam from meeting the guy funding the whole shebang in a grocery store – you as a bagboy, him as a customer that was just a bit too enthusiastic about chocolate bars and handshakes – you supposed he more than fit the bill.

Actually, now that you thought about it, he was probably rich enough to be eccentric instead. Some guy with the most stereotypical “surfer dude” accent imaginable. He was in his early 30s – old money, people in town called him, not that you bothered to listen – and had inherited a hefty lump of cash and promptly spent it on Freddy Fazbear memorabilia. Apparently, he was just old enough to have gone there before it closed, and then he’d never grown out of loving it.

Night had long since fallen when you arrived at Fazbear’s Fright for your very first shift. The midsummer sun had been sweltering earlier that day, baking the pavement and driving everybody indoors to escape it. Not a trace of that heat remained by the time you stepped out of your car, and you took a moment to appreciate the replica Fazbear employee uniform your employer had given you to wear. Sure, it was rather scratchy and tacky – you weren’t even sure what to call this particular shade of purple – but it kept you from feeling the chill in the air.

In daylight the haunted house looked unimpressive, cheesy even, but lit as it was by twinkling starlight and pale moonlight you couldn’t suppress a twinge of foreboding. As you walked to Fazbear’s Fright’s front door, shaking off the aforementioned weeds and shooing away a few curious felines as you went, your eyes roamed across its visage. There was an uncanny feeling that the squat building was staring back at you.

Billed as a reproduction of the Fazbear spirit moreso than any particular incarnation of the franchise, it wasn’t a carbon copy of any of the Fazbear locations you had seen pictures of when preparing for this job. What it lacked in imitation it more than made up for in feel, though. It looked dilapidated and intimidating, with boarded up windows and peeling paint and flickering lights. What separated it from the three gas stations you’d passed by on the way here that also fit that description, however, was the sense of childlike wonder beneath it all. It was obvious the owner had put his heart and soul into this place; if you didn’t know any better you would’ve assumed it really was an old Fazbear restaurant.

For a single moment, as you passed through the front door, you felt what it must have felt like for a child to step into Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza for the first time. It was enough to make you wish you could have gone there, yourself.

If the outside looked dilapidated, the inside was something else entirely. A cheery poster of Freddy was plastered on a dirty wall to your left, as much to cover up the ripped wallpaper as it was to provide atmosphere to the place. The soft tapping of your footsteps on the black-and-white checkered tile floor and the electronic hum of the exit sign behind you were all you could hear as you wandered further into the haunted house.

Your employer had asked you to come in and work the traditional Fazbear night shift for the week before Fazbear’s Fright opened up. Extra authenticity, he’d said. After all, you were as much part of the attraction as you were a security guard. Whatever the reasoning, it let you admire the work put into the building as you slowly meandered to your office at the opposite end.

You figured there was enough time before midnight for you to check the place out, so why not?

A flicker of movement and what looked like staring eyes ahead of you as you stepped into another hallway made your heart pound. Your feet felt rooted to the floor, but when you worked up the courage to continue on you couldn’t help but laugh at yourself. It was just the head of one of the animatronics – Chica, if you remembered correctly – set up to act like a spotlight. Even as an employee here, it seemed you weren’t immune to the scares. You ignored how the eyes you thought you saw were too high off the ground to belong to Chica.

There were two doorways in this room, one leading to the next room and another to a side hallway full of arcade machines that looped into the next room. You ignored the arcade machines for now, having already peeked in there during an interview several days prior. They weren’t turned on then, and the soft padding of footsteps was definitely new, but it all seemed standard haunted house fare to you.

One long room with yet another arcade machine at the end later and a chuckle at a mounted fox animatronic’s head acting as a lamp and you were in the hallway outside of your new office. The Bonnie prop staring back at you from the other end gave you pause, but you sidled on past it, taking a quick peek through a wide window into your new office as you went.

It didn’t seem like much through the window, and that was proven to be the case when you stepped into it properly, but it was your new home for the next six hours. You could manage. The box of spare props in the corner next to the entrance made you snort. It looked like this office also acted as a storage room. A clean desk was pressed against the wall beneath the window; the walls were plastered with posters and what looked like childrens’ drawings; an old phone was placed off to the side with a red light blinking on it; exposed wiring hung from the ceiling; an almost sickly greenish-yellow light lit the whole room up. You nodded your head. Yep, this would do.

Before you forgot, you pressed a button on the phone to cycle through messages. Supposedly this was how management left messages for night guards at Freddy Fazbear’s, and your employer figured that if it was good enough for them it was good enough for him, too.

You hummed absentmindedly to yourself, letting your new boss’s voice act as white noise as you decorated the place. It wasn’t much: a few figurines on the desk, some posters moved around, the props in the box positioned just right. That sort of stuff.

The voice on the answering machine slowly filtered back into your consciousness as you were finishing up. “… prehistoric training tapes are vintage, dude! They’ve got all sorts of stuff in them, I think the dude was a manager or something. I was thinking we could, like, play them over the speakers or somethin’, I dunno. It’d be, like, really legit.”

You snorted, head still down as you rummaged through some of the drawers in your desk and examining all the odds found within.

“Oh, yeah, and I’ve got an even SICKER surprise for you, dude! I was looking through the old place and, like, I found a REAL one. A real animatronic! Can you believe it? What a sick score! It should be walking around in the place, I’m sure you’ve already seen it.”

Your head shot up at that, brows furrowed. It took you a moment to process that. It took a moment longer to realize that the animatronic in question was staring at you through the office’s window.

“h-hhHello,” it – her? – greeted you flatly.

You screamed.