Chapter Text
Fire. Drowning. Heat. Liquid. Burning. She was choking. She was dying. She was…
“Ack!”
The girl coughed with a gurgling cry. Her body spasmed on…was it the floor? She felt herself leaning, then falling, and her head crashed into something hard with a crack that reverberated around her skull. Her vision came to life like the flash of a lightbulb in a dark room and she saw squares of black and white tile swimming sideways before her eyes. No, this was the floor.
She coughed again. There was something stuck in her throat, burbling up from a cavernous depth further down in her stomach than she could have thought possible. There was a bitter taste, a cancerous mass that was swelling up inside of her. She retched and the sickly sound echoed and reverberated around whatever place she was in. She coughed once more with a deep and angry-sounding rasp and a thick mass of…something…flew out of her mouth and splattered against the floor. Her vision swam even more and fingers of black tinted the edges of her vision. She fought against them, forcing them to push back out of her sight.
Her eyes focused as best they could on the substance that she had just expelled. She flailed but slid futilely against the smooth floor as she recoiled in fear, her arms and legs desperately flailing as she tried to pull herself away. It was as if she had forgotten how to use her limbs. The substance she had coughed up was a gelatinous black sludge, obviously something that hadn’t belonged in her body. But something about it felt…off. Wrong.
She closed her eyes against her better judgement. She didn’t want to fall back into the darkness but she had to compose herself. She took a ragged breath in, held it, and then let it out with an even more ragged exhale. Her eyes grew hot with the ghosts of tears and she fought to not let her emotions get the better of her despite her fear. She had to focus. First things first. Where was she?
She opened her eyes and made a point to not focus too intently on the mess immediately before her face. Her eyes slid across the walls of the room. The darkness was deep but not absolute. She could make out some details on the walls despite the dim lighting. There were posters on the walls, and the more that she focused on them, the more she could make out the cartoonish characters printed on their faded surfaces. Her eyes, now filled with more life, darted over to a large circular structure that filled the room just beyond this one. A…carousel?
“Freddy,” she said. Her voice was a soft croak that was barely able to form sound. Something about it sounded odd. It was somehow both familiar and strange at the same time. Her vocal cords flared with heat as she spoke. Her throat felt the same way it felt whenever she was coming down with a cold.
But the name she’d spoken brought back memory and with the memory came fear. If only she could remember the origin of the fear. It was as if someone had wrapped a thick blanket around her mind and tucked the corners in tight beneath it. Every thought, every action was a desperate swim against a raging current.
“Rob,” she whispered. “Alex.”
The names ignited something in her. They lit a fire of resolve that she was able to feed with her fear.
“Rob!” she said, her voice rising in pitch and volume. “Alex!”
The darkness before her gave no answer.
She grunted and rocked her body against the floor, trying to find purchase enough to stand. Every part of her body ached. Bones that she had never known existed seemed to flare and protest in anger. But still she persisted.
She managed to roll onto her stomach. The world still swirled around her but not as badly as before. She positioned herself against the floor with her knees, braced herself, and slowly pushed upward until she was on all fours. The seemingly simple action drained what little energy reserves she had built up. She was forced to take a moment to simply breathe.
She was starting to remember. They had come here to shoot footage for their upcoming special. She had managed to talk the network into giving her an entire hour-long block, after all. Whatever episode they made had to be a big one. It was a chance to move out of the cursed Thursday 10pm timeslot they had given her and into something closer to primetime. A chance for her passion project-turned-career to finally stretch its legs. And what better place to do that than the haunted pizzeria whose presence lurked in the background of the collective thoughts of an entire town? It would be even more of a win for them if they were able to get the special filmed alongside the Fazfest going on downtown. It would be a great chance for some B-roll, if not an entire segment with interviews.
But something had gone wrong, hadn’t it? If only she could remember what it was.
She gave the tiniest shake of her head, desperate to clear her mind without throwing herself back into a spiral of dizziness. She’d think about that later. Right now she had to focus on finding her crew…her friends. And then they had to get the hell out of here.
She decided it was now or never. She pushed herself hard against the floor and managed to rock herself onto her feet. She instantly felt as tall as a mountain as she tottered on legs unstable as a newborn fawn’s. She closed her eyes. Another breath in. Another breath out. One at a time. Her stability grew. So did her dread.
“Rob!” she shouted. Her voice was sharp now, piercing through the veil of darkness. It held a desperation that betrayed her growing strength. “Alex!”
Still no answer.
She took a shuddering step forward, small but comparatively monumental to where she had been just a few minutes before. Then came another step. And another, and another.
She was able to scan the room now without fear of passing out. It still felt a bit like she was walking on the deck of a ship in a storm, but each step anchored her more to the ground. Something about this place felt off. It had felt off when they had arrived and only grown more so when they met Mike…no, Michael. And after that there was...what had there been? But whatever uneasy feeling that had been was now multiplied by easily a dozen. The atmosphere now felt oppressive. The air felt thick and alive with crackling hate. The building seemed to groan in anger, its rafters and beams forced to shield something dark and dangerous.
Her foot thudded against something on the floor and she had to fight with all her strength to not topple forward back onto the ground. She looked down and her heart fell to her knees. It was a camera, far too unwieldy and far too expensive for their low-budget show but one that she knew all too well from the number of times she had started into its lens. Alex had always treated the camera as if it were made of gold. There was no world where he’d have decided to leave it laying sideways on the floor like this. And as her gaze drifted across the floor from the camera, she realized why he had.
At first she thought it was some kind of dead rodent. At least, that’s probably what her mind wanted her to think. Then as she realized what the shape was, she tried to convince herself that it was a prop. Maybe some kind of sick toy from the prize counter across the room, left there forgotten for decades by a careless child. But now she was starting to see the details of the thing. The torn skin was too pallid. The bone snapped off in a jagged break was too sharp. The pool of blood in which it lay was too dark, too fresh. Alex hadn’t dropped the camera. It had fallen out of his grip when something ripped off the hand that was now laying before her.
Bile rose to her throat, hot and acrid this time instead of the thick whatever-it-was that she had expelled earlier. Though nothing came out of her mouth except for the shriek that sliced through the air like the blade of a knife.
She stumbled away from the sight before her. An exit sign, faded and beaten but somehow still lit, shone through the darkness in the direction of the front doors. She moved as quickly as she could through the room that now seemed cavernous, across the floor that she now realized was dotted with patches of drying blood. She stumbled over the bridge and collapsed against the counter that lined the front wall. She looked down and her heart leapt with what little hope remained as she saw a telephone sitting neatly on the desk. She said a silent prayer that was more fervent than she’d ever pleaded before and she grabbed the receiver off the hook.
The uncaring drone of the dial tone made her cry out with a choked sob. She reached down with a trembling finger and pecked out 9-1-1 on the number pad. The speaker crackled as it rang.
“What’s your emergency?” a male voice said in a quick, no-nonsense tone as the call connected.
“Please!” she cried. “Please help! They’re…I think they’re hurt. Really hurt.” Her breath started to quicken. Her dread had turned into fear and it was quickly building into a panic. "They're...they're..."
“Miss, please take a breath,” the voice said. “I can get some help to you. You’re going to be okay. Just listen to my voice.”
She nodded her head and sucked in a rattling gasp of air. Her ribs and lungs protested but she was beyond the point of caring.
“You’re doing great,” the operator said. “I can see the number you’re calling from. It looks like—” His voice cut off for a moment. “Miss, are you at the old Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza location?”
“Yes,” she choked out. “The original one. Please, hurry.”
“Okay, I’m getting first responders sent your way now,” he said. His voice had grown more clipped. It seemed to be a mixture between questioning and accusatory. “They’ll be there soon. Just tell me your name.”
“My—”
The girl paused. She had seen nothing but horrors in the short minutes since she had regained consciousness. And whatever she couldn’t remember that was buried in the back of her mind threatened to be even more horrifying. But none of that compared to the dread she felt at this moment as she struggled to think.
“Are you still there, miss?”
“Yes,” she said, almost robotically. “My name is…”
She closed her eyes. Why was this hard? She knew what she wanted to say, it was on the tip of her tongue. This was her name. The easiest question she could have been asked.
“Lisa,” she finally said. A wave of relief swept through her and it felt like a dam had burst inside her as her name came rushing to her lips. “My name is Lisa.”
“Okay, Lisa,” the operator said, his voice growing ever so slightly more wary. “Just stay where you are, okay? Things will all get better very soon.”
Lisa swallowed. Somehow she doubted that.