Eyes Wide Shut: 6

William. Will-Yum.
What a strange name.

Well, of course Mr. Afton would have a name. Who doesn’t? But I don’t remember hearing “William” attached to “Afton” before. He never talked about himself, or at least not when one of us were nearby. He never talked in front of us. It felt strange for him to have a name.

For a brief instant I wondered if I was getting the name from one of my dancers. But I couldn’t be sure. There were so many of them that I stopped trying to remember a long time ago. It had to have been something else.

It was as if the thought had always been there; I couldn’t trace the origin of it. I just “knew” it. It was like a dream.

Ruminating on this just wouldn’t do. I should get back to dancing. Perhaps that would clear my mind.
After one last indulgence, of course.

With a fingernail, I dug deep into William’s face, deepening the cut I had already made. Under the glow of my eyes, his skin had a pallid color and he was still unconscious, in spite of the dripping wound near his cheek. He was like a corpse; dead to the world. But I knew better.

When I withdrew my finger from William’s face, it was covered in red. I watched the crimson liquid trickle down my finger; the blood turning the blue fingernail into a shade of purple like that of his shirt. As I turned the finger over, and smelled the coppery stench of his mortality, I realized something.

 It’s been a very long time since I last spilled human blood.

We don’t get as many guards as we used to. When we were being rented out, there were always immediate replacements for those we took. Circus Baby, Freddy, and I were always prepared to hunt, while Foxy was content to sulk in her auditorium. The three of us (technically four) were quite good at it, racking up a sizable body count.

In the succeeding days after someone was caught, a new guard would be hired, with the added task of recovering their predecessor’s corpse. That would often be impossible.

Whenever Baby caught somebody, she would drag them back to her room and take them apart with her Bidybabs. There wouldn’t be much left of them after. I think the most of them I ever saw was a hand, which one of the Bidybabs was idly chewing on. I always thought that Baby would be a terrible parent. Neglectful, envious and most of all, extremely petty. I never understood why Afton entrusted her with those things.

Freddy and Bonnie, however, made for a good team. Bonnie would scout ahead, and tell Freddy important things about the guard. Are they fat? Is it a boy or girl? How scared do they look? Bonnie would come back, and then she would would guide Freddy into making all the right decisions. She was also a good mediator between him and the rest of us; Freddy sometimes forgot very important things in the middle of conversations and he had a violent streak. After he smashed her, he wasn’t quite the same. He stopped hunting, and as a result it was really just Baby and I who went out of our way to find guards.

I never saw where they took their catch, but I can surmise it had something to do with the parts room, as even before Bonnie’s death Freddy spent a lot of time in there. In any case, the guards were never seen again.

As for me, I compost. I make good use out of each guard. From even the most violent guard can come a good dancer. While the webbing soothes my children, it obliterates the human body. I like to wrap the guards in a cocoon, and wait.

Over a long period of time, ranging from a few hours to a couple weeks at the longest, their bodies are broken down into a viscous black slush, from which the dancer body forms. Eventually, they can be taken out of the cocoon when they’re stable enough. They’ll be born with a tank top or a skirt, depending on who they were made from.

A life for a life. I think it’s a fair exchange.

I know that there is a purpose in this. I don’t like killing anyone without using them for it. Not even the rowdiest of customers or violent of guards deserves such a senseless death. But I was willing to make an exception for William.

I don’t think he built me for this. I was to distract, deter, and detain. Not to give life. But it made me happy. The dancers were better company than anyone else in the facility. They were rarely malicious, and they could follow instructions fairly consistently. So I doubt they were anything Afton could’ve created.

One night at Circus Baby’s, there were some people who came to my stage. I had built up a group of my first five dancers, and would perform shows with them during the restaurant’s opening hours. They slept on the stage, curled up into balls. I was polishing myself in front of the mirror backstage when I heard footsteps. I came out from the curtains to see two intruders hunched over the dancers. One male, one female. Both in purple uniforms.

 I ruptured the male’s throat, and knocked down his partner while he fell to the floor. She was thrown to the ground, where I stomped her head with as much force as I could muster. After four or five stomps, there wasn’t much left of it. The male, holding one hand to his neck, dove for my legs with the other outstretched. I knew that he was reaching for the button to freeze me up.

I swatted him aside, and prepared to deliver the death blow. I pounced upon him, pinning him to the ground as his arms slapped my legs futilely. Both of us howled as I slid my fingers into the gash in his neck, and widened it. I dug and dug until his screams quieted, and all that was left was the drip-drip-drip of gore.

Pulling my fingers from the stringy maw of muscles and tendons, I stood up and surveyed the mess. I had done the best I could in the heat of the moment. Both of them had died swift deaths. A few seconds of pain, and then nothingness. A waste, but they had signed their own warrants when they accepted the job.

My legs had red handprints smeared onto it, while my hands were dripping with gore. It would be a long night to clean it all off. Not to mention the stage, which was covered in bone and gray matter. The five dancers gathered around the corpses, and stared. Pam, Joe, Benny, Annie, and Mike. Then they looked up at me.

In that moment, I was terrified. Not for myself, but for the children. In the morning, Mr. Afton would come for them. And he would get them. Then they would be subject to examination. Dissection. And who could say what else? I knew his cruelty very well. Hiding them wasn’t an option. He would find them. I was left with only one choice.

I bent down, and told them to come in for a group hug.

“Then we’re going to sleep,” I whispered.

They all obliged, climbing into my arms. I pulled them close, fulfilling my promise. Then I carried them backstage, where I killed each and every one of them.

Staring into the mirror, and seeing myself covered in red and black, I could only ask myself one question.

Why?

I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.

The dancers weren’t his idea. They came from something else. Like the name, I don’t remember exactly where this tidbit came from. But I do know that they weren’t from him. And it must have been that curiosity that drove him down here.

Before I went off to dance, I wrapped my finger in William’s shirt, and rubbed the blood off. Blood had a tendency to leave stains on the shells. I then slathered William’s right hand in webbing. It was laid much thicker than the other restraints on him, and would do some serious damage in a relatively short amount of time.

I took out the twenty dancers that partook in my last lesson, in addition to the two who had installed my eyes. I decided that it would be a “fun day” today. Together, we performed excerpts of Tchaikovsky. I hummed his more popular compositions to provide reference for the dancers. We spent the most time on the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy". William Afton was still in the distance, and he still distracted them now and then. But we had a fun, educational session.

The next lesson, focusing on the Vaganova method, will be more intensive. It incorporates the entire body, as opposed to using just the legs as a lot of dancers did. It would be tough, but I’m confident in my children.

As I put everyone to bed, I thought of William’s hand, and wondered how long it would take for it to slough off. I did not worry about blood loss; the wound would probably be cauterized by the melting.

I chose to sleep in the right corner at the back of the room, next to where he was stuck. I closed my eyes, and dreamed that I was walking through an endless corridor, as something horrible was chasing me. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that it would drag me it’s lair unless I found an escape route. There were open doorways at the sides occasionally, but they were always filled.

It was always William and a woman in a violet dress standing there, watching me go by. William was wearing a yellow polo shirt, holding the door open with an inviting smile on his face, while the woman had a glazed expression and was bleeding from a cut on her forehead. It was bruised to the point of being purple.

After a while, I stopped running and let the darkness pull me in.