Dead Man's Party (10)

I sat down at a table and tried to make sense of my situation while I stared at the empty stage before me.

I had been sent to Freddy’s on a mission. A mission to kill Phil Banks, by his resentful wife. Money is money so I went there, and  I got much more than I bargained for. I found Phil, or what was left of him. I  was caught, and I was dragged into the kitchen and as they started to lower the helmet on me, I was  saved by the ringing of six o clock. The rumors were true. But what they said was a lie. There is something wrong with those robots, but it wasn’t “ghosts”. Was it?

Or would it be more accurate to say there was something wrong with those robots? I’m not sure if they’re around anymore. I had walked around the pizzeria, looked on stage, looked in the parts room. Nothing. There wasn’t a camera nor was there a head or body parts or anything vaguely robotic in the pizzeria.

It was like a dream. It was bizarre; the silence. I thought the coast to be clear, so I decided to leave where I came from. There was still no back door in the security guard’s office, as I had suspected. But rather than a mural, the wall was completely blank. Sterile whiteness.

I went back to the party room, hoping for some answers.
The robots were on stage now. But they weren’t robots. They had joints. They weren’t organic. But they had nothing inside them. Their colors were splashed on with paint, and they all had dopey, empty stares. They were like dolls; dead and still.  I ran to the bathroom, and hoped to splash some sense into myself with water. I looked into the mirror for affirmation of my existence, and what I saw unnerved me.

Nothing. The mirror was a solid piece of plastic. The sink’s “taps” didn’t move, and I doubt there was any piping in this building.

In a last ditch, I went back to the party room, and opened the glass door. No longer did I see the outside parking lot; the shining sun.

Instead, as I opened it, I stared at darkness. Two eyes flickered at me from the distance; massive ones.  They were blue, and I could recognize the vague shape of Freddy’s head, illuminated by the LEDs. But there was nothing below, that was all there was to him. A head.  More eyes flickered on, a countless number of heads.

When I looked outside the pizzeria;  when I opened up the glass door, the walls came down. I saw things for what they really were. The dream was no longer a dream. It was a nightmare. My hands were not my own hands. They were more like a robot’s prongs. I could only move them from my sides up and down up and down. My legs could only shuffle forward and backward a little bit. My head was incapable of movement. I didn’t want to look at the rest of me anyways.

Behind me, the restaurant turned into darkness. I could feel a cold wind blowing at me from the altitude. I thought I heard footsteps. So I shuffled forward. One foot in front of the other. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left.

Off into the darkness I tumbled.


“Jesus!”, Juan shouted, jumping back in startlement.

“What was it?” Daniel asked.

Juan took a deep breath. “Nothing. One of the little figures fell off the shelf.”

He flicked a light switch and walked forward to get a better look at it. It was a wind-up toy. Someone had cranked it’s wheel, because it’s feet were still shuffling forward, even if one of the legs had flew across to the other side of the room from the long fall it took. Daniel could see that the shelf was a little crooked. It probably forced the dollhouse to tip it’s occupants out a little.

Juan sweeped up the broken toy into his dustpan, and tried to forget about who might’ve cranked it’s wheel.

“Thank god we don’t have to do clean-up this morning,” Daniel said.