CHAPTER EIGHT — " making adults run "
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"... EVEN WHEN THEY EVENTUALLY remember enough to recognize me again, what more can they really do to me that they haven't already done?" A deep voice faded into Haley's return to perception, a good moment before any of her other bodily sensations, leaving her in the sort of sleep paralysis shiver of fear, where the line between reality and dreams disappears, overlapping the two realms into a convoluted and terrible new world. Her world was dark, apparently inhabited only by a mildly familiar voice, one that felt to her like it had crawled from the very bottom of her most scream-worthy nightmares.
"I would have let them kill me sooner if I knew it would give me this much power," the voice continued on a rant that Haley was unsure if it was truly directed towards her anymore. "Sure, there's the pain — this damned pain," a loud metal banging sound and a groan of consequence interrupted his speech, "that just won't let me breathe anymore — but pain can be fuel too." He agreed with himself in a hum that picked up his tone from mournful to cheerful in a disturbing upward curve. "Of course, you know all about breathlessness, don't you, Haley Anne?" He continued with a dark chuckle.
Calling her by her name sent a shiver down Haley's spine and awakened that part of her mind that stored memories:
The key twisted back in the lock, then fell out. The signal on the phone went out. The door creaked open slowly, revealing onto her fast beating heart a vision of complete darkness. There was no breath for her to draw in on. Her shriveled hand lifted the inhaler, but from the darkness lunged forward a horrid creature of synthetic fur and mechanical springs, dripping in blood and opening its mouth below glowing eyes to reveal sharp teeth. The Yellow Bunny on the brochures had been covered in dirt and decay and stained in red and rust, but it sprunged towards her, stopping right in her face.
Like a broken record, her memories went blank after that.
"If only I knew," the voice sang along, then plunged into a sigh. "So much time wasted on waiting for the right opportunity, when my perfect little attack dogs were already at my disposal," he couldn't contain a chuckle. "You see, children have very simple minds. They hold grudges, yes," that contagious chuckle followed, "I mean, look at me — but at the end of the day, they're still just children, waiting for an adult to tell them what to do. Wanting it. It's so very easy to point fingers, to convince them of that or the other. Such simple minds ready to be bent and modeled. And I don't lie to them!" That sudden crescendo marked an exaggerated anger, as if he was suddenly defending something he would never stand by. "No no no. I only tell them the truths they need."
A cough followed by a fleshly sound morphed into a rusted creaking commenced, and the man changed his voice to be a little thinner, mimicking himself in those moments when he must convince the children, "No, because you see, had Vanessa been a better child, you would all still be alive. She stood by and watched while I did what I did and she did nothing. Aren't you angry with her, children? Aren't you? I killed you, yes, but she let it happen."
A shorter cough returned him to his normal voice, albeit a bit bemused, "Let me do another, let me do another." After a short break, he returned to the pathetically thinned voice, "But if I had Haley Anne when I wanted her, she could have taken your place. Why, if only she hadn't run away! If only she hadn't been so fast. How selfish of her to run away! Look what she did to you. She abandoned you all."
After a brief sigh, his voice returned to an apathetic numbness, "Or rather the truths I need. Makes little difference. None of those little jerks will admit it, but they needed to be used. They needed me to use them. After they left me there, bleeding out, it's not like they were any better. Hah, of course they weren't. Boredom is the most merciless facet of afterlife. It feeds on your good memories until you have only nightmares left to keep you company. It feasts on your sanity until you understand eternity is torture. Oh, they needed me to give them purpose again, and like a nice creator that I am, I forgave them and gave them a new meaning. After all... Why shouldn't I take advantage of this condition they put me into?"
Alas, Haley's senses started to wake up, at first as a body-wide ache similar to a thousand needels pushing in and out of her skin at once.
"Of course, before I could do any of that, I had to wipe out you lot," the man continued with the pathos of someone who hasn't had a proper chat in so very long that even monologues had to do in quenching their thirst for company. With her eyelids flinching, sight returned to Haley in a spotted blur, revealing to her slowly the absolutely horrendous yellow of the synthetic fur glued to the mechanism of a suit drenched in blood and the miasma of death. The Yellow Rabbit was standing over the desk the side of Haley's garage, working under the dim light of her lamp there, onto an oxygen tank, rather dexterous, given those large thumbs the costume turned flesh provided.
"Those who knew William Afton. Those who saw the man I was before I became this. I can't fully embrace my new existence until all of you are gone. Unfortunately, adults are no fun to kill and you've all grown too much. Look at you for—" The man turned around and tilted his head, surprised to look Haley right in her widening eyes. "Ah," he humed, pleased. "You're awake."
A single step taken to approach her fired adrenaline inside her sufficient to kickstart every single sense in her still sleeping. All at once, Haley was overwhelmed by pain in various parts of her body, but especially in her chest. Finally acknowledging that pain made her choke on the insufficient air before she even went through with her attempt to push herself away.
She was about to fall over, gaping like a fish out of water, but just as her back slid from the wall to the side, the hand of the Yellow Rabbit caught her and propped her back up to sit there.
There was very little strength left in her, but she decided to use all of it into shaking her head to avoid being put on the breathing mask he approached her with. It was a puerile, pathetic attempt, because he forced the mask around her nose and mouth and strapped it around her head in almost no time, knowing damn well she would sooner start breathing than deliberately die of asphyxiation.
"That's it, Haley Anne," he snickered, watching through eyes of a glowing white dot. He tilted his head to the side the moment her chest rose on a desperate breath, and lifted his left hand back up to graze one finger across the skin of her cheek. "Don't you wish you had come with me that day now? You would have been warm and cozy, because I am no liar," he accentuated each word, his overly gentle caress suddenly turning into him grasping her chin. "But instead you chose to ruin yourself. To grow up weak and flawed. A mere puny shadow of who you used to be. Your potential could have been eternal!" He shouted in her face, causing Haley to hiccup in a second deep breath.
"I could fix you," he let go and stood up, looking down pointedly, pleased that she lifted her gaze to meet his. "I could," he nodded. "But I won't. You were far too easy to catch!" The sudden exclamation followed and in a surge of exasperation, he stomped around. It was then, on her third big inhale, that Haley realized the oxygen she was inhaling... it smelled odd. "You all are too easy to catch. There's no fun in cornering a scared little rabbit. Even kids put up more of a fight, Haley Anne."
Her head was growing light. Whatever she was breathing, Haley realized it was no good, so she took the strength of no longer suffocating towards raising her hands to her face to pry that mask off.
Instantly, with a creaking stop, the Yellow Rabbit was back in her face, catching both her hands into one of his and tightening his grip until at least one of her bones threatened to crack — one surely did because she found herself amidst a new wave of pain.
"Don't worry," he reassured mockingly. "I'll give you a chance. Your odds are not looking very good, but I'll give you a chance to make it into a costume of your own rather than as part of Scraps. What you're breathing now is oxygen with a little bit of something special. Something I made... Something," he considered his words, "to make adults run."
He inched closer, bringing his free hand to her face. Haley realized then that the light-headed state was working against her, because though she wanted to kick and move away, her legs were struggling in slow motion and her head a second too slow to actually move away from the robotic hand widening her left eye to look at her pupils.
"I haven't had sufficient test subjects yet, but what I know so far is that it doesn't work for everyone," he explained himself. "For those that it works on," laughter escaped uncontrollably, "it makes things so much funnier. Tell me." The tone of the Yellow Rabbit took a plunge, as he slid to the side, flopping down to sit next to Haley and let her take a look at the dark garage filled with boxed. He leant over and whispered, his hand finally releasing hers, "Do you see them yet?"
Haley had enough of her consciousness conserved to know she should have continued with taking off that mask, stopping whatever hallucinogenic gas he made her inhale from tampering with her perceptions, but oh God — she saw them.
Creatures torn from a kid's worst nightmares that would make a grown up's skin crawl all the same into a guttural scream that she too let out. It was the sort of fearsome sight that wiped the board clean in any normal mind of any sort of reason about limits or conserving energy.
In that moment when her eyes looked at vaguely familiar animatronics with mouths opening and revealing three sets of sharp teeth, hands with long sharp claws of shining metal moving boxes out of their way as they crawled from the darkest corner of the garage, Haley Anne Reed lost that part of herself that could discern this was a hallucination.
"You do," the Yellow Rabbit laughed while she struggled pointlessly to push herself further into the wall, away from those things. "I tell you what, Haley Anne, your odds are looking better now," he sung along, sounding excited. "Run, little rabbit, run while you still can!"
Run, Haley's mind allowed that thought to pass and instantly, she got herself on all fours dragging herself to her feet and stumbling first into the table to the side then forward in a sloppy run for the door. She slammed right into it, hand clasped over the handle and pointlessly tugging: the door of the garage was locked.
She cried out in exasperation, turning around and pulling on the cord of her oxygen mask until the tank was in her hands. She couldn't help herself that one glance upwards — the monsters were closing in, the hand of the animatronic reassembling Foxy opening up to reveal a dozen more sharp edges, a sight threatening Haley to imagine in just how many tiny pieces these things could cut her if they got her.
Though she had wanted to use the oxygen tank to break the lock on the door, desperation made her toss it forward, into the animatronic closest to her.
The taunting laughter from the Yellow Rabbit haunted her every move, but with her heart pounding in her chest her tunnel vision focused on survival alone. Haley grasped the axe the previous owners used to cut wood, back when that house had a different heating system, an axe that she thought best not to throw away with the rest of the trash they left behind when she bought the place — Thank God I didn't throw it away, Haley caught herself thinking.
Throwing the oxygen tank away had ripped the mask from her face and already, her breath turned shaky, lungs struggling to keep up with her adrenaline-driven motions.
Haley smashed the axe into the door like her life depended on it. As far as she was concerned, looking back over her shoulder at those monster only confirmed to her that she had to get out of there and fast, no matter the cost. Pushing past her physical limits in absolute desperation, Haley smashed the axe into the door a second time and dropped a hit on it with her shoulder, falling through into the narrow halway of her house.
Not wanting to keep her back on those creatures, she was quick to allow instead the back of her head to be the one getting an impact with the wall. She fell on her butt and looked back at those creatures of nightmare, reaching out for the exit to get her.
The Yellow Rabbit stepped into view, slowly making his way between the horrors and her. He reached out and grasped the door to close it, with him in the garage with the monsters. "Good luck," he tilted his head right before slamming the door.
The sound matched a similar one coming from the very end of the hallway, where the front door was kicked open. Though the sound alone had made Haley flinch to starting to get up, the sight she caught in the doorway was the knife widening the wound of fear in her soul.
"Just leave me alone!" She shouted at the shadow figure that stared her down, the best she could shout with thinned voice crawling up an aching throat. Something inside Haley snapped when she saw that thing approach her. On her last breath, this last impossible danger she faced was the final drop in her overflowing glass.
Haley grasped the handle of the axe that got her out of the garage and propped herself up to stand before charging right for the shadow. She swung her axe at its head and it dodged right under it. The blade dug right into the front door and she stumbled forward with it, unable to pull it out immediately.
The hands of the shadowy figure went on her shoulders and she elbowed the thing away from her, gritting her teeth with a creak and pulling on the axe until it was out. She swung it back as she turned around and the shadow creature jumped out of her way, raising its arms as it slammed against the wall.
"Haley—!"
"I said leave me alone, you fucking psycho!" She charged forward again and the shadow dove out of her way at the very last second. The axe stuck halfway into the wall and, with her last breath spent, Haley fell down to her knees before the wall, arms limp by her side. This is it, she thought then. I am done for now.
The hands of the shadow grasped her shoulders and, certain she was about to die, she burst into tears. Her lips had grown cold and blue, her skin closer to death than to life and her eyes so bloodshot she barely even saw anything.
"Haley, please, it's me."
The shadow helped her on her back and for a brief moment she thought she saw features standing out from beneath that nightmarish cloack of darkness. "Mike?" The gasp stood out between rapidly heaving breaths.
He hadn't a clue what had happened for her to attack him with the axe as soon as she got inside the house, but that didn't matter to Mike, not as he held her, cold as a corpse, with life leaving her eyes.
"Hold on, Haley," he begged, setting her head down and getting up. "Just hold on, baby."
Knowing exactly where she kept the oxygen tanks, Mike ran to the garage through a door he had found butchered by that same axe she attacked him with most likely. Confusion however had no chance in stopping him for second thoughts.
She looked after him wanting to warn him, but there were no more words for her to speak. Her sight was growing spotty and the pain was starting to spread from her chest into a corrupting numbness.
Mike spotted one oxygen tank thrown in the middle of the empty garage, whose doors towards the street he saw them for the first time open. Given the purple stain that discarded oxygen tank had up the tube and into the mask attached to it, he went and got a fresh one from the locker to the side, along with the mask and tube that he assembled while hurrying back to Haley left before door.
There are some things in life you learn in preparation of what you would never want to come true. CPR was one of those skills Mike Schmidt learnt which he wished with all his being he would never actually need.
With his hands on top of Haley's chest he was more aware than ever that there was no such thing for him as getting lucky twice.
AUTHOR'S NOTE :
Is that really such a bad cliffhanger if I say now we have only two more chapters of this book left? 😅✨️