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A few years ago, there was this really stupid trend that went viral. The killer clowns of 2016, or whatever the fuck people called it. Basically, people got dressed up in clown outfits, ran around like idiots, and scared the absolute crap out of people. Granted, it was usually just dumb teenagers who wanted to be famous, but there’s always one little problem with stuff like that. There had been some cases where people were actually harmed. Schools would go on lockdown if there was a clown nearby. People wouldn’t leave their houses at night. People were actually scared that the clowns would kill them when, logically, that wasn’t the case. The problem was that nobody, in the moment, could tell if that stupid shit was a prank or not. In that situation, what the hell are you supposed to do, anyway? If a clown is chasing you, what do you do? Do you give in to fight or flight? Or do you just laugh?
October had been so disappointing this year, though. I would’ve been happy if someone called my phone pretending to be Ghostface. Would it have scared me? No, but it would have been entertaining. People were all anticipating some bullshit like that, but it never happened. For some reason, it really got people into the Halloween spirit thinking that Michael Myers was going to show up at their front door and kill them. I never saw the appeal. The famous Halloween slashers never did anything for me. They never scared me because I knew they weren’t real. None of that over-the-top horror shit was real.
The weirdest thing I’d heard was that this haunted house attraction not far from my college had burned down to the ground. I was pretty bummed because it was the one thing I actually wanted to do. It was built by an independent company and it was based off this video game I’d played as a kid. Everybody knows it. You get attacked by killer animatronics if you don’t pay attention and watch your back. The attraction was based off the third game in the series – Five Nights at Freddy’s 3. Tickets were always sold out, the lines were insane, and it trended on Twitter like crazy. People online said that artificial intelligence was used to program the animatronics and that they acted a little too real for comfort. Burning it down was a bit extreme, though. Following the plot of the game must have been important to them.
Either commuting made me really tired, or I was just an adult and I’d gotten desensitized to Halloween altogether. Every day was the same. Wake up, go to college, come home, and sleep. On weekends, I would work. The only blip in that pattern was the text message I received one night.
SUSPICIOUS INDIVIDUAL REPORTED IN PARKING GARAGE A, USE CAUTION IN THE AREA. REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY TO POLICE.
When you’re at home in bed, you really don’t care about shit like that. There were reports of that nature coming from my campus all the time. It was placed in a big city, and big cities would never change. There would always be suspicious individuals. There would always be crime. You can’t shield a college campus from the outside world. You just have to be vigilant and, well, not fucking stupid.
The person that went missing that night was not being vigilant.
The only reason anyone knew that someone went missing was because someone had the absolute delight of finding a lone, human arm in Garage A. Just the arm. Everybody was posting about it, and if you went too far into Twitter, someone posted a picture of it. Nobody knew who it belonged to, but a sophomore girl never returned to her dorm the night before. People just put two and two together. Needless to say, nobody parked in Garage A after that. I didn’t really care. It meant more parking spots for me.
The next night, I had a late class. Was I being vigilant? Yes, but no more than usual. I didn’t think anyone was going to rip my arm off and leave it on the ground. The sheer concept of a human ripping another human’s arm off was so insane that I could barely convince myself that it wasn’t a prank. When I’d gotten to my car, I checked my phone to find the same text message campus alerts that I’d gotten the night before.
SUSPICIOUS INDIVIDUAL REPORTED IN PARKING GARAGE A, USE CAUTION IN THE AREA. REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY TO POLICE.
I just drove out and didn’t look back. I didn’t see anyone out of the ordinary, either. There were still a few cars in the garage, so it was easy to look around. There was nobody loitering, nobody breaking into vehicles, nobody chasing people – it was all normal. Yet, someone else went missing that night. A junior on the baseball team. Of course, the college never sent out a statement about it. Like every big institution, they expected the problem to quietly go away in order to avoid publicity. There was barely any campus security, too. Nobody seemed concerned. Everything continued on like normal.
That night, I got that message for the third time.
SUSPICIOUS INDIVIDUAL REPORTED IN PARKING GARAGE A, USE CAUTION IN THE AREA. REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY TO POLICE.
Nobody went missing that night, but I woke up to my college trending on Twitter. That was never a good thing, and I assumed they were charging more for student fees next semester without notifying anyone. I was surprised to see that the student, a senior who didn’t want to be named, was claiming that he was chased down by a seven-foot-tall rabbit suit. A person in a fucking rabbit costume. I initially laughed. It sounded like those stupid clowns. I expected to find funny tweets about it, but I immediately scrolled down to a video of a girl crying. It was a video she took in Garage A.
She was hidden behind a car, sitting on the ground. Her hand was over her mouth, and her eyes were wide. She was watching everything play out in front of her. I could hear the screams of the person being chased. I could hear the way they echoed out. I could hear the pure fear in his voice. The girl recording could barely hold her phone steady. She was trying to describe everything as quietly as she could, but her voice was teetering on the edge of being completely silent. She looked terrified. She looked like she couldn’t comprehend the situation at hand. Each time the student screamed for help, the fear in her eyes got more intense. What prevailed over all, however, was the malicious laughing coming from a third party in the situation. It sounded robotic and twisted. The video ended with a blood curdling scream and the girl running into her car.
I watched the video repeatedly. I analyzed every emotion present in the video, and I found myself wanting to throw up. I had too many questions for my own good. Why would someone choose to dress up like a rabbit? Who could be strong enough to remove a limb from a person’s body? What human being could be laughing like that?
I meant to close my phone, but I saw that Fazbear’s Fright was trending with my university. I clicked on it, partially out of curiosity, and saw that one of the animatronics had gone missing in the fire. It was the only one unaccounted for after the blaze was put out. Again, this whole thing was just following the plot of the video game. People were connecting the events at my college to that missing robot, but that was insane. Fazbear’s Fright wasn’t actually real. Five Nights at Freddy’s is a fictional game. Animatronics do not have the ability to get up and operate on their own, nor can they act maliciously. Animatronics cannot walk period.
That still didn’t stop me from getting a text message that night.
SUSPICIOUS INDIVIDUAL REPORTED IN PARKING GARAGE A, USE CAUTION IN THE AREA. REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY TO POLICE.
I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t avoid the feeling in my stomach. I couldn’t avoid the pressure in my chest. I couldn’t stop hearing those screams from the video. I couldn’t forget that laughter.
Just my luck, I had to park in Garage A. The rest of the garages were packed full. I was forced to park in that hellhole along with a few other poor souls. It poured all day. I had no chance to move my car. My class let out at ten. I’d been checking my phone over and over, waiting for that campus alerts message. It never came. I was never given a reason to avoid my car and have an Uber take me home. What made it even better was the fact that I made the stupid decision to park on the roof like normal – five floors up from the entrance.
The garage was almost pitch black. It had dingy yellow lights in it that flickered like some cheesy haunted house. They were motion sensitive and would randomly turn on and off. Nobody wanted to be anywhere near this hellhole besides the few unfortunate souls who were forced to be there. It was stupid. The whole thing was stupid. It was so fucking stupid that my legs were shaking.
I stepped forward carefully. I walked like my body couldn’t handle its own weight. The garage itself was completely empty. The keychains on my backpack sounded like shattering glass. The wind was pushing around trash, and every single sound made the feeling in my gut get exponentially worse. I looked left, right, left, right. I was anticipating something that I knew was fucking impossible. I’d seen the video, but it was still impossible. I heard the screams, but it was still impossible. Each time I checked my phone, I had no notifications whatsoever.
The elevators were silver and dirty. The button lights were faded and flickered on and off. The whole thing creaked when it moved. It sounded like sheet metal when I pressed the button. There was a light above me that was making a buzzing sound just loud enough for my ears to pick up. Everything was normal, but it felt like every breath I took was going to be my last. I just needed to go up five floors and everything would be fine.
When the elevator stopped, the ding it made was the loudest thing I’d ever heard in my life. It made a lurching sound when it stopped, but it only made that sound when people were packed into it. It should’ve been empty. Maybe it was the squeaking. Maybe it was the flickering lights. Maybe it was the wind. Maybe it was the silence. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was the fact that I was alone. Maybe it was how slowly every second was going by. Maybe it was all in my head, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. That’s when it occurred to me:
The elevator moved downwards. At night, it was usually empty and stayed stationary at the bottom level.
When the elevator door opened, I felt my phone vibrate in my hand. I couldn’t find the heart to look at it. I saw the campus alerts number, and I knew. My eyes couldn’t focus on anything. I couldn’t breathe. The elevator itself had always been dark. It hadn’t been renovated in ages, but there wasn’t any light coming out of it at all. I didn’t have to look up to notice the large silhouette standing there. When the doors tried to close, I heard a hand move to keep it open. On my phone, I read out the same words that I’d been reading all week.
SUSPICIOUS INDIVIDUAL REPORTED IN PARKING GARAGE A, USE CAUTION IN THE AREA. REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY TO POLICE.
When I found the strength to look upwards, I couldn’t comprehend what I was looking at. It smelled rancid. It smelled like mold. It smelled like it’d been stuffed in a basement for decades, left there to rot. I’d never personally smelled rotting flesh, but if I had to describe it, it would’ve been that thing. It was a very large rabbit, yes, but it was nothing like a rabbit at all. It was green and brown. Its body was filled with rotted out holes, like it was deteriorating right in front of me. The mechanical endoskeleton was left exposed. All the wires in the body were broken and frayed, dangling out in random places. The wires weren’t even the worst part. Through those holes, I could have sworn I saw bones. Behind the toothy grin of the mouth, I could see the toothy grin of a human skull. It had enough holes in it for me to be able to tell that there was absolutely nobody standing it and there was nobody operating it.
That Twitter video wasn’t impossible anymore. This wasn’t some person in a costume. This wasn’t a clown. This wasn’t someone identifiable. This wasn’t Ghostface. This wasn’t Michael Myers. This wasn’t Chucky. This wasn’t Jason Voorhees. This was a decayed animatronic that had ended up in this parking garage and was moving entirely of its own will. Its entire body contorted when I made eye contact with it, and the lights behind the eyes went from yellow to red. I could feel the malice coming off it in waves. Its head tilted to the side, and then it grinned at me. It was looking down at me like I was lesser than it. Like I was prey. When I mentioned fight or flight earlier, this is the exact instance I was speaking of. In the second of time when you are being pulled between the two, what do you do? Is your reaction up to you, or up to your subconscious? When you are looking death in the face, what is the appropriate reaction? When a situation has only two ways out – escape or die – which is the easier option? Or is your fate sealed from the moment you realize that the end of your life is being served to you on a silver platter?
I turned and ran like my life depended on it, because it did. All I could comprehend was the sound of its metal feet slamming and scraping against the ground. When I looked back, I saw that it walked with a cryptic limp. Its body was hanging like it was dead, but it chased me nonetheless. Even worse, as it chased me, it laughed maniacally like it knew it would be able to catch me. Getting caught meant death. Tripping meant death. Making the wrong choice meant death. Letting that thing outsmart me and lay one mechanical finger on me meant death. It was just like the stupid fucking fictional game, except this wasn’t fiction at all. This was happening in real life. This was happening to me.
I’d only made my way up two floors before my lungs started burning. That robot was persistent, keeping a fifteen-foot distance from me. It was enough to give me a false sense of security that I would live, yet it was also enough for it to keep an eye on my next move. It had issues pulling itself uphill though, so I took the opportunity to hide behind a nearby car before the pressure in my chest made me vomit.
When it got to the third floor, it stopped. I could hear the metal parts inside of it screech, and the rotted-out voice box made this awful sound that came straight from Hell. It was like it was trying to communicate something with me, but I didn’t want to stick around to translate it. I was flat on the ground, praying to God for the first time since I was a child that it wouldn’t hear me. I could keep an eye on it from under the car. It paced around in circles, babbling demonically and dragging its limp foot around with it. It wasn’t supposed to be real. It was supposed to mimic something fictional. It wasn’t supposed to be sentient. It wasn’t supposed to have the ability to rip people’s bodies apart. It wasn’t supposed to have emotions. It wasn’t supposed to show frustration and anger, but the way it punched a concrete post told me it had the capacity to feel.
Then, as if God chose not to answer me, I made eye contact with it.
It ran at me with renewed speed, and I continued my useless pursuit of saving my own life. It wasn’t far behind me when I reached the fourth floor. I didn’t bother looking at it anymore. If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve been convinced that I was stuck in a nightmare without the ability to wake myself up.
When I reached the fifth floor, I saw salvation. I saw my car. I pushed myself to run for it, not bothering to pay attention to the fact that I could barely feel my own legs. When I opened the door, I threw my backpack to the floor and jumped in. I would have to fight that robot with a machine. I shoved the key in the ignition and didn’t bother letting the car warm up before I sped off. When I turned the corner to drive down into the garage, there it was. It pissed me off. It stood there like it wanted me to hit it. It stood there like it knew I was stupid enough to do that. I swerved past it like I was playing Grand Theft Auto. This was my game, and I was determined to win.
When I reached the exit, I could see my ticket to survival. I could feel the weight come off my chest. I could feel my own determination and I pressed the gas pedal down. I never cared too much about life, but in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to live. I wanted to live so fucking badly that I could feel it in my blood.
Then, my car slammed into something. More like something jumped onto the hood of my car, and I instinctively screamed and slammed my foot on the brake. For a moment I thought I hit a person, but when I saw the red eyes looking at me, I felt my heart drop into my stomach. It was that God damn rabbit, and it was looking right at me through my windshield.
I kept driving, convincing myself that I could somehow use momentum to throw it off. I was never one for physics, but I knew a turn at a good enough speed could send it flying. I drove out of the garage as fast as I could and turned a corner, which knocked it to the side. It tried to punch a hole through my windshield, cracking the entire thing. I screamed and kept driving. I just wanted to fucking live. It kept punching the windshield until glass went flying everywhere. This was like playing the game. This was the fifth night at the last hour.
I kept driving, turning every corner as fast as I could. It clawed at my dashboard, leaving marks in the leather. It kept sliding down the hood of my car. It smelled awful up close. I drove based on my gut feeling alone. All I could see was this animatronic. It was evil in its truest form. In all honesty, I didn’t think it could die.
Right when it reached for my arm, I turned a corner going about sixty miles per hour. My car almost flipped over, but the animatronic slid off my car and rolled into the street, barely missing a car that was driving in the opposite direction. It was letting out demonic screeches, trying to pick itself up. I could see machine parts and wiring scattered about. It looked like it wasn’t done, but I was. My headlights were broken, my hood was dented and destroyed, there was glass all over my car, fragments of my windshield stuck in my skin, and my dashboard had been torn apart. I was bleeding, but I was still breathing. I’d never been so close to death, but I lived. I survived the game.