The Cliffs, page 15
How could he fight something powered by such evil?
Before he could answer that question, the creature that looked like both a man-shaped pile of junk and a deformed rabbit turned and went deeper into the factory. What was it doing?
Larson crept out from behind the forklift and sidled through the entryway. Reaching his sedan, he crouched and listened. He noticed the bag of parts he’d left on the ground by his open driver’s side door. He grabbed the bag. He had a feeling he might need it.
Inside the building, the thing crunched and huffed. Looping the bag around his wrist as he’d done earlier, Larson ran toward the sound.
Although following the sound was easy, understanding it was harder. The noises Larson was hearing kept changing. Maybe they shifted when the thing’s parts shifted.
Sometimes the sound was a chittering noise. Sometimes it was a crackle. Sometimes it was the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard caterwaul of metal being torn from metal. It was always something that made Larson forget to breathe.
But he didn’t stop moving. He couldn’t.
Following the sounds, he went past the trash compacting room and found himself in a wide hallway. A series of what looked like storage rooms or equipment rooms opened up off the hallway. From the now squalling and skidding sounds ahead of him, he knew he was going in the right direction. The skidding devolved into a snarling wet popping sound. It reminded Larson of the autopsies he sometimes had to attend. A corpse made a similar sound when its ribcage was being parted and its organs were being removed. Larson felt his stomach turn against the roast beef sandwich he’d had for lunch, but he commanded the sandwich to stay where it was.
The hallway turned a corner, and Larson hesitated. He waited until the squishy taps moved farther away from him. Then he sidled around the corner.
The second he looked ahead, he almost turned and ran.
Hulking shadows skated along the walls of the hallway in front of him. The shadows, like the rabbit monster, were in perpetual motion. They rose and fell, billowed and contracted. They looked alive, and for all Larson knew, they were.
No matter. He had to go on.
Larson took another step.
And another.
Afton’s Amalgamation crashed through the interior wall of the hallway.
Larson attempted to leap forward to clear the thing’s line of sight, but he wasn’t fast enough. He had just a second, if that, to register the appalling composite of animatronic body parts and faces that came at him with the speed of a race car and the force of a battering ram. Did he just see an eye on a kneecap? And was that kneecap where a shoulder should have been? Had feet been protruding from the thing’s neck? And did the feet have mouths? How many mouths had he just seen? Dozens?
He didn’t have time to answer any of these questions before he was hurled not just into, but through the other hallway wall. Aware of only pain as he flew through the air, he collided with something hard, and then he felt nothing.
* * *
As soon as the trash monster had integrated the girl-endoskeleton, it had turned away and clomped into the factory’s interior. It hadn’t given Jake even a glance as it had passed him. It apparently had enough parts to be satisfied.
For a few seconds after the metal man-thing had disappeared from Jake’s view, Jake considered running away. But he couldn’t. The detective was still here. And he was still in danger. Jake had to help.
So Jake made himself get up and follow the monster. It wasn’t hard to do. It was making a racket. Jake ran toward the sound.
* * *
Piercing jabs of light stabbed at the blackness that surrounded Larson. He squeezed his eyes shut and moaned. Why couldn’t he be left in peace?
His head pounded. Touching his forehead, he felt a knot above his left eyebrow, and his fingers came away wet. His chest and his side throbbed, too. He was sure he’d cracked a rib or two, maybe more. He felt warm wetness at his side. Maybe he did more than crack a rib. Maybe he broke one and it pierced his skin. Or maybe something sharp had cut him. He was barely aware of leaning against something jagged and hard. Some kind of equipment? Maybe he’d been cut on that.
Voices whispered at him in the dark. Their words capered around the flashes of light in his head. He screwed up his forehead, both to combat the throbbing pain in his skull and to help him focus on what the words meant.
He suddenly remembered how he got into this place of darkness and light, of pain and whispering voices. Afton’s Amalgamation.
He stiffened. Where was it?
“Hurry.” That was one of the words in his head.
Or were the words in his head? Were they outside his head? If they were outside his head, where were they coming from?
It sounded like children whispering. Or did it? His left ear burned like he’d been slapped hard on the side of the head. His right ear felt like it was filled with cotton. The whispers rose and fell. He could see the words in his mind like ballet dancers spinning and leaping and dipping.
Then three words joined together in perfect choreography. “Open your eyes,” they said.
Larson did.
Afton was standing over him. So close. Too close.
Larson looked into the enormous face hovering above his own. It was a face of nightmares. With eyes made of metal sockets and spark plugs, a mouth formed from long pistons, and cheekbones composed of large gears and bolts, the face seemed to be held together with bits of pointed metal, rusted pipes, and what appeared to be actual bone … but not the bones one would expect to see in a face. An animatronic elbow acting as a chin was attached with a rat skeleton, and a brow made from part of a motor was affixed by a bird’s foot.
As repulsive as all of this was, though, it wasn’t the metal junk that sent chills skittering down Larson’s spine. The truly repugnant thing about Afton’s new face was that it was … in motion. Tucked in and around the metal scrap and bone, animatronic parts wriggled and writhed. And they were singing, or at least that’s what it sounded like. Larson could hear a harmonized chorus; various parts of it seemed to be coming from Afton’s spinning ankle-joint nose, shimmying shoulder-socket forehead, and tapping metal-footed jaws.
Each of Afton’s ears was made of a different animatronic part. One ear was three-quarters of a metal hand, and the other ear was a metal jaw. Both the hand and the jaw were moving in time to the music, which seemed to be snippets from the old floor shows the Freddy’s animatronics used to do.
Thankfully, Larson didn’t have time to examine Afton’s makeshift face any further, because Afton’s Amalgamation raised a hand that was actually a foot and a hip joint. Larson lunged to his right, but he wasn’t fast enough. The sharp metal toes of the foot Afton was using as a hand impaled Larson’s belly.
Larson cried out when hot pain shot through his gut and radiated across his entire torso, but he was able to jerk free and stagger out of the hideous thing’s reach. Grabbing his lower belly, Larson felt warmth flow from between his fingers, down over his right hipbone as he busted out of the room he’d been thrown into and ran down the hall to the south exit of the warehouse.
* * *
Jake watched the detective flee down the hall. He called out, but the detective didn’t hear him.
Jake was mad at himself. If he hadn’t hesitated after the girl-endoskeleton attacked him, he could have gotten to the detective in time to prevent what had just happened. But Jake had been weak and selfish. As a result, he’d been too late.
The detective would know, of course, that he’d been stabbed, but he’d think that was all that had happened. He would think the injury was bad, but what he didn’t know was that the injury itself wasn’t the problem. The problem was that when the trash monster stabbed the detective, it infected him with the spirit of the horrible man who animated it.
Jake had known that the evil junk demon was controlled by the awful thing that had wanted Andrew. Spirits, Jake had discovered, possessed something that was similar to a smell. Each one was distinct.
This particular spirit smelled really, really bad. And when it had stabbed the detective, the smell had gone into the detective’s body. Jake was afraid the detective had been infected, and he didn’t know exactly how bad the infection would be. Pretty bad, was his guess. For sure, Afton’s spirit would fill the detective with evil. But what if it did more than that? What if it killed him? Jake had to get the infection out.
The metal monster thundered past Jake, again paying no attention to him. The monster was intent on catching the detective, so Jake chased after it.
* * *
Behind Larson, Afton’s Amalgamation howled like a demented hound from hell. Larson could hear its ponderous steps pursing him as he ran, each footfall sounding like a thunderclap, each thunderclap louder than the last.
If Afton had been breathing, Larson would have felt that breath on his neck as he threw his shoulder into the closed door and fell out into the dwindling daylight. He turned and ran north along the side of the factory. He knew where he needed to go next, but he might or might not make it.
He ignored his pain and ran as fast as he could.
The second after Larson got where he was going, Afton ripped a hole in the side of the building to pursue the detective. Larson heard the clamorous rending of metal and Afton’s bawling shout. Then he heard the singing he’d heard earlier. It was louder now, almost frantic, as if the cannibalized animatronic parts were trying to comfort themselves with music.
Larson imagined the amalgamation’s unholy head rotating this way and that, looking for Larson. As Larson did what he needed to do next, he hoped Afton’s current form had no supernatural powers other than its ability to animate junk. If Afton was telepathic, Larson was screwed. But he had to try.
* * *
To Larson’s amazement, he was able to get to the forklift without Afton being aware of it. As he climbed onto the driver’s seat, Larson hefted the bag of parts he’d been carrying around. He started to tuck the bag onto the floorboard by his feet, but suddenly, its contents started moving.
For a moment, Larson forgot all about the trash rabbit because not only was the bag moving, but voices were coming from inside it, too. Holding his breath, Larson gingerly opened the bag.
As soon as the bag opened, the voices got louder. Larson gasped and jerked his hand back.
The last thing Larson had put in this bag was a mask. The mask was cracked and muddied, but its features were clear. With rosy red cheeks and purple stripes that stretched from the bottom of its hollow black eyes to the top of its wide-open mouth, red lipstick highlighting an amplified pucker, the mask could have been amusing. But it wasn’t—especially now, because now the mask had come alive. Its mouth was wide open, and it was wailing something unintelligible.
Larson didn’t need to understand its cries, though. Disturbingly, he could hear the mask’s intent in his head. It felt like he was receiving the download of a single thought: “Take me to him.”
Not far away, a crash resounded. It spurred Larson into action.
Grabbing the bag, Larson hung it on the forklift’s prongs. Then he got back into the driver’s seat and started up the forklift’s engine.
The sounds of Afton’s Amalgamation were getting closer. They were coming from right on the other side of the wall!
Larson put the forklift in gear and drove it into the wall, shearing through the metal and impaling Afton in his hip-shaped gut. The bag containing the mask led the way. When the forklift impacted Afton, Larson saw the bag open; he got a glimpse of black-and-white stripes.
But Larson didn’t care about the bag now. He cared about driving Afton into the lake.
With one hand on his wound and the other on the wheel, Larson kept his foot smashed against the forklift’s accelerator.
Afton, however, wasn’t going into the lake without a fight. He planted his hand/jaw/joint–constructed feet and leaned into the forklift. Larson’s forward progress slowed. But it didn’t stop. He dug in. “Come on,” he urged the machine. “Come on.”
The machine gave a great grumble and surged forward. Afton was pushed to the very edge of the dock.
“Go, go, go, go,” Larson muttered, his gaze locked on Afton’s soul-freezing eye sockets.
Afton was almost at the edge. He was going to …
Pieces of the forklift began peeling away and flying through the air toward Afton. First the mast, then the lift cylinder, then the backrest. One after the other, parts of the forklift disconnected from the whole and swept toward Afton’s Amalgamation.
The tilt cylinder, the wheels, the overhead guard—they went in quick succession, followed by the fork’s prongs. Everything was being absorbed into Afton’s merger of metal, plastic, and wire.
Larson watched in frightened awe when even the evidence he’d hung on the front of the forklift got slurped into Afton’s continually evolving construction. He thought he saw one black-and-white-striped arm get siphoned up into Afton’s left leg. Then the steering wheel was snatched from his grasp, and he felt the operator’s seat gyrate under him.
Larson jumped off the forklift, and fell to the dock. Holding his gut again, he began crawling backward, away from Afton’s macabre evolution. It continued to consume the forklift.
Within seconds, the forklift was nearly gone. Just a few pieces of battered yellow metal remained. The rest was wriggling through Afton’s crevices, joining with a jaw here, a gear there.
The monster lifted its face to Larson. The detective had nowhere to hide now, and he wouldn’t make it far with his injuries. He had one trick left: stalling.
“Afton?” Larson asked. “That is you in there, isn’t it? Though I’m not even sure what to call you now.”
Afton’s Amalgamation glared back at the detective. Repositioning his pieces so he stood taller and broader on the end of the dock, the loathsome atrocity that was William Afton announced in such sonorous tones that the dock juddered, “I am Agony.”
Larson felt his lip curl. He said nothing. But his mouth dropped open when all the faces and mouths on Afton’s trash-body began talking at once. No, not talking. It was the singing again.
Larson hadn’t had time to examine all of the Afton behemoth when he got up-close-and-personal with Afton’s jigsaw-puzzle face, so Larson hadn’t noticed then whether the totality of Afton’s junk had been part of the mutant stage show he’d glimpsed. But now he could see that every animatronic part crammed into Afton’s warped configuration was doing its best to sing and dance. All over Afton, animatronic arms and legs, hands and feet, and fingers and toes were swaying and bopping to the music the mouths were attempting to perform.
Goosebumps erupted on Larson’s skin. He covered his ears, then, disgusted with himself for letting the creep-show unnerve him. He groaned, got up on one knee, and then pushed himself into an upright, standing position. He faced Afton.
“Enough!” Larson shouted.
The voices stopped. The animatronic parts went still.
Larson closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He was preparing himself for what he thought might be his final battle.
* * *
Jake had caught up with the rabbit-shaped trash monster just as the detective had attacked it with the forklift. Not sure how to help at that point, Jake had just hung back and watched as the forklift had driven the monster closer and closer to the lake.
When the forklift began coming apart, Jake still wasn’t sure what to do. He was thinking hard, though. He figured that at the very least, if the trash rabbit got the upper hand, Jake could charge over and pick up the detective. Maybe he could carry the man to safety before the monster could catch them.
While Jake was thinking this through, though, something strange happened. The instant the detective closed his eyes, the girl-endoskeleton separated herself from the rest of the trash rabbit’s parts.
Undulating past an arm, a leg, and a hip joint, the girl-endoskeleton wormed her way to the outer layer of the trash rabbit, and she leaped away from him. As soon as she launched herself free, Jake pressed back into the shadows. He didn’t want another encounter with the girl-thing. She was scary.
Tense enough that he’d have been holding his breath if he actually breathed, Jake watched the girl-endoskeleton wriggle across the dock. He kept his gaze riveted on her until he saw her slink toward a gaping vent opening in the side of the factory.
* * *
When Larson opened his eyes, he expected Afton would still be glaring at him. But Afton wasn’t looking at Larson at all. He was staring past Larson intently, almost pleadingly.
Larson turned to see what Afton was looking at, and he saw what appeared to be a female-shaped metal endoskeleton disappearing into a vent opening—it seemed to be the same endoskeleton he’d seen before. Larson frowned. He returned his gaze to Afton … and he saw the plea dissolve into despair. Afton was still a horrifying synthesis of scrap, but he’d taken on an eerily human-looking demeanor. In spite of its size, Afton’s mountain of metal seemed to shrink inward, as if becoming weak and frail. Afton’s visage now looked lost and defeated. Afton’s Amalgamation dropped its head, and then Afton’s expression shifted into what could have been puzzlement.
Larson refocused, and he immediately could see what Afton was looking at. Afton was staring at his right side, where the purple-striped mask from the bag was congealed to the animatronic parts. The mask was no longer wailing as it had been when Larson had last seen it. It’s white face now looked satisfied, victorious.
Larson watched, amazed, as Afton’s Amalgamation started to pull itself apart. Or, at least, that’s what appeared to be happening.
The destruction started with an arm embedded in the animated junk heap’s shoulder. The arm reached out and grabbed a gear-shaped cheekbone. Wrenching the cheekbone from the face, the arm moved on to the ear made from a jaw.
