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When Vanessa went back to the pizzeria to check on what Abby had meant by saying that Chica and Freddy helped her with her science project, she half expected to find that Charlotte had somehow managed to escape from her slumber. Though she really hoped that Abby had just been making things up to cope with the loss of her friends.
But Vanessa was wrong. Of course she was. Charlotte was awake and she had possessed someone. A teenager. Probably someone trying to vandalize or cannibalize this place as a haunted house. It hardly mattered anyway. Whoever she’d been, she was most definitely dead by now.
And as if that itself wasn’t bad enough, Vanessa let herself be forced into revealing the code for the perimeter lock. The animatronics had escaped and she couldn’t do a single thing about it.
Once again, she tugged on the ropes cinched tight around her wrists; to no avail. Maybe if she would’ve gotten her jacket off, she could’ve wiggled out of the ropes but the locker Charlotte had stuffed her into was way too damn narrow for her to even stretch an arm out. She was stuck. The frustrated grunt that escaped her was immediately muffled by the piece of cloth in her mouth, stopping it before it even got somewhere. She flinched as the fabric cut into the corners of her mouth.
Vanessa puzzled why Charlotte hadn’t just killed her. Though she wouldn’t put it past her old friend to make it hurt and watch her squirm just because.
Charlotte wasn’t herself anymore, Vanessa knew that. She was a lost soul, blinded by justified rage and wrong execution. But never in all of her years would she have thought that Charlotte would go as far as threatening to kill Abby. A child. A child with a soul so pure she wasn’t surprised that the ghost children took a liking to her.
Now, Abby was out there, all alone with no one knowing where she was, except some murderous tin cans. And Vanessa would be stuck here until she suffocated, died of thirst or until Charlotte changed her mind and killed her herself.
Because contrary to Abby, Vanessa wasn’t innocent. And she never had been. After all, she knew what her father did, or suspected it at least. Even back then when she was a child. That’s why she had tried to stop Charlotte from saving that boy. Because Vanessa knew that William would kill her. She knew it the moment Charlotte pulled away from her grasp and pushed through that door. Her scream echoed in her mind.
Charlotte’s death was as much her fault, as it was her father’s. No matter if she never twisted the knife, no matter if she was a child-
Vanessa blamed herself and she always would.
And she would take it with her to the grave.