Prankster, p.15
Prankster, page 15
Her heart stuttered in her chest. Could it be? Was the Hiding Maze really still here?
Aimee quickly stepped forward and tried to shove aside the stack of boxes. It was too heavy to shove. Frowning, she pushed at the top box, which was above her head.
It wasn’t too heavy on its own, so she lifted it up and set it aside. The one below it was even lighter. She moved it, too. She shifted one more box, leaving the two bottom ones.
Now that she’d moved the top boxes, she could see that she’d definitely found the entrance of the Hiding Maze game. The grate was dirty, and it looked a little rusty, but it was the right size and shape, and it was surrounded by the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet of the old rainbow.
Aimee was surprised the new owners had left the grate and the rainbow. But then, the rainbow fit with the countryside theme of the place. They must have figured it went with the sky-blue paint. Or maybe they’d kept it as some kind of homage to the old pizzeria. She’d learned from watching her parents redo two old houses that if you didn’t have to fix something, it saved money to leave it. Why move an old grate and paint over a rainbow in what was going to be a storage room?
The bottom two boxes were the heaviest ones, but now that she’d moved the others, Aimee could shove aside the remaining ones. She pushed them just far enough to clear a path.
Stepping up to the grate, Aimee grabbed its edge and pulled. It didn’t move. She frowned. It hadn’t been nailed shut or anything, had it?
She ran her fingers around the edges of the grate. No. It didn’t feel like anything was holding it closed.
The sound of footsteps came from the hall again. They sounded different from the last footfalls Aimee had heard. These were heavier, slower. But they were coming closer.
Not willing to be caught now that she was so close to being able to investigate what she came here to see, Aimee quickly pulled back the boxes that had been blocking the grate. Positioning them just far enough from the grate to give her room to maneuver but close to where they had been when she’d come in here, she hustled to restack the other three boxes. She’d just put the last one on top when the door to the room opened.
Tucked behind the stack she’d just rebuilt in the nick of time, Aimee held her breath, this time on purpose. She listened as someone stomped into the room. She heard a soft shuffling sound and a heavy sigh, and then someone muttered, “And they yell at me for leaving the light on. Why should I turn it off if no one else will?”
More footsteps, moving away. The door closed.
Aimee took a deep breath and turned back to the grate. Maybe the rust on the grate was acting as a glue, holding the grate tight to the wall. Aimee frowned and tried tugging again.
She needed to hurry. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been back here. Two minutes? Five minutes? More than that? How long would it take before someone came looking for her?
Aimee could feel tension pulling up her shoulders. Her neck felt stiff.
She stepped back from the grate and rolled her head in a circle. That brought a little clarity.
“Dummy,” she said as she zipped open her purse.
Reaching into the small pouch, she pulled out a metal nail file. She may not have carried much in her purse, but she had the essentials.
She poked the end of the nail file between the wall and the rusty edge of the grate, and she worked it back and forth all along the top and part of the side. After just a minute or so, she felt something give.
Encouraged, she ran the file farther down the edge of the vent, continuing to jiggle the grate with her other hand. It took another several seconds, but suddenly, the grate came away from the wall.
Aimee pulled it back fully. Holding it open, she ducked down to peer in through the opening.
The storage room’s bright light landed on what Aimee had been hoping she’d find: the entrance room to the Hiding Maze game. It was still there.
Stretching out from the vent opening, the game tunnel disappeared into gloom, but the part Aimee could see was lined with fake trees and boulders and little wood cubbyhole doors. The doors looked like they were fuzzy with dust, as was the tunnel floor, but everything appeared to be intact.
It was obvious no one had been in the tunnel in years. A lot of years. Ten years, to be exact.
It wasn’t just the thick dust that made that clear. Just a few feet inside the tunnel, the same sock Aimee had seen the last time she’d been here, lay crumpled. It had to be the same sock because it had a distinctive, multicolored stripe and a hole in the toe. Aimee looked beyond the sock, and spotted all the other debris she remembered from her last time in the game: the deflated balloon, the piles of confetti, and the broken red plastic fork.
Aimee felt her pulse quicken. Maybe no one had been in the game since it was last played. If that was so, she actually had a good chance of finding the clues she was looking for!
Aimee dropped down onto her hands and knees and crawled into the game entrance room. As soon as she was in it, the vent cover dropped into place behind her. Immediately, Aimee noticed that the dining room sounds were even more muffled. She could barely hear anything at all from the restaurant’s eating area—just the occasional laughter, which sounded like it was miles away. She suddenly felt very, very alone.
“Calm down,” she told herself. She turned around and sat cross-legged in front of the game console.
Whenever she’d used the console as a kid, it was always lit up. Now it was dark. Dark and dirty. It was covered with dust.
Aimee reached out and pressed a button at random, hoping it would light up if she did. For a few seconds, the console stayed dormant. But then, suddenly, the old Freddy voice Aimee remembered said, “Welcome to Freddy’s Hiding Maze Hide-and-Seek Game. Please wait. A game is currently in progress.”
Aimee turned away from the console. She started crawling down the tunnel.
As soon as Aimee started moving, dust wafted up around her. She sneezed, and her eyes started to itch. Resisting the urge to rub them, she kept going.
The old tree bark, hanging branches, and moss crumbled around her as they hit her. They were brittle with age.
Aimee was thankful that whoever had come into the maintenance closet had defied the rules and left the light on. The light was strong enough to illuminate most of the main tunnel. She could even see traces of the old chocolate frosting stains on one of the boulders.
She wasn’t sure how well she was going to see after she turned off the main tunnel, but Aimee wasn’t too concerned about that. If she had to go back into the restaurant, eat a meal, leave to get a flashlight, and come back later, she would … as long as she could avoid being spotted by the police. But she couldn’t leave now without at least doing an initial search for some sign of what had happened to Mary Jo.
Aimee took her time crawling down the tunnel because she was scrutinizing every inch of it. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Signs of a struggle? Blood? A plea for help scratched into the tunnel walls? She’d thought about those kinds of clues whenever she’d thought about coming back to find Mary Jo. There had to be something. Tucker must have left behind something to prove he’d gotten into the game to take Mary Jo.
At the end of the first leg of the tunnel, where she’d be out of light if she kept going to the right or to the left, Aimee glanced at the other game console. This one was dusty, too, but it wasn’t totally dark. Instead of a blank display like the one at the entrance had, this one could be read.
Aimee peered at it. Was that …?
She crawled closer and rubbed her finger over the console’s name display. She gasped. The breathy sound bounced around her, then faded away as she stared at the display.
The console panel still listed her and Mary Jo as the active players!
They were the last ones to play the game?
She hadn’t known that.
Hoping that the game console and tunnel lights would come on, Aimee hit the RESET button on the console.
It worked! The console’s display lit up. It was flashing FAILURE, but so what? What mattered was that the rope lights that lined the tunnels and surrounded the cubbyhole doors lit up.
Aimee grinned. “Yes!”
This would make her investigation easier. She started to turn away from the console so she could get on with it.
The rain forest soundtrack started playing, and Aimee shivered. Hearing the old rain sounds and screeches creeped her out.
She shook herself like a dog. She was being silly.
Aimee crawled away from the console and started to pass a closed cubbyhole. As she did, the slithery edges of a dark and horrifying suspicion started seeping into her consciousness. She pulled her head out of the cubbyhole and looked back at the game console, which was still flashing FAILURE.
Aimee plummeted from the sunny heights of the exultation she’d felt moments before into a low, slimy bog of dread. She turned and looked left and right down the tunnels that extended from the entry tunnel. Her gaze flitted frantically from one cubbyhole door to the next.
Her head pounding, Aimee turned right out of the main tunnel and started crawling faster, her gaze flitting frantically around her as she went. In spite of the chill in the tunnels, Aimee was sweating. She was also breathing hard. Her inhales and exhales were so loud that they echoed off the walls of the crawl spaces; it sounded like a pack of panting dogs was pursuing her.
After just a few minutes of crawling at a breakneck pace up and down through the tunnels and this way and that through the game’s nooks and crannies, Aimee’s knees began to protest what she was doing. Not used to repeated impacts on a hard surface, they began to pulse with burning pain. Her neck ached, too, because of the strained position she was keeping it in to look into each cubbyhole.
Aimee was circling back to the point where the first leg of the main tunnel intersected with the main passageways to the left and to the right. She glanced into an open cubbyhole, and she did a double take. Was that …?
Aimee frowned and peered into the cubbyhole. She’d seen a flash of something red toward the back of the cubbyhole.
Crawling in through the open door, Aimee reached for what she’d seen. She couldn’t quite grasp it, so she crawled the rest of the way into the cubbyhole just as her fingers closed over … her lost friendship bracelet. Wow. How weird was that?
Suddenly, Aimee’s cubbyhole door swished shut, snapping into place. The tiny space went dim, lit only by the rope lights outside the cubbyhole. Their illumination just made it through the tiny window on the cubbyhole door.
“Hey!” Aimee shouted.
She twisted around so she could get the door open again. She whacked her head on the cubbyhole’s wall. “Ow!”
Reaching out, Aimee tried to push the cubbyhole door open. It wouldn’t open.
Outside the cubbyhole, Freddy announced, “Player Two has chosen a hiding spot! Player One, find Player Two! Go!”
“No, no, no!” Aimee shouted.
Aimee pounded on the door, but it still didn’t open. Gulping in ragged breaths, Aimee shifted to shove her shoulder against the door. As she did, her face pressed up against the viewing window.
She looked out at the open door to the cubbyhole across from hers. Not much light fell into the cubbyhole from the rope lights, but the light that did make it revealed …
Aimee’s breath caught, and then it released, along with a scream that contained every single particle of guilt she’d carried for the last ten years.
She now knew what had happened to Mary Jo.
“Player One, find Player Two,” Freddy’s voice ordered.
Sealed inside a cubbyhole for ten long years, Mary Jo’s desiccated corpse had practically mummified. Curled inward, drawn down probably by the dried-up skin, Mary Jo’s body was embracing her backpack, which she held like it was a baby. Had it given her any comfort? It didn’t look like it had.
The skin drawn tight against her bones, Mary Jo’s face was brown and leathery, frozen in what looked at first to be a rigid smile. Mary Jo’s lips were gone, and her mouth was pulled back from her big teeth.
Whimpering, Aimee understood, of course, that Mary Jo hadn’t been smiling when she’d died. She’d probably been screaming, crying out for someone to hear her, to find her.
Aimee frantically shifted positions and kicked out at the door with both feet. It didn’t do any good. She didn’t have the room to pull her feet back far enough to get any power behind the kick. They just thumped the door ineffectually.
Outside the cubbyhole, Freddy nudged, “Player One, find Player Two.”
Aimee pounded on her cubbyhole door again. She kicked at it over and over. She threw herself at it. It didn’t budge.
Clearly, the game wasn’t functioning right. The doors weren’t going to open.
Aimee’s heart crawled up into her throat. She began to hyperventilate, and she started begging, “Please, no!”
Once again, she pressed her face to the little window as if she could look for help. Nothing but Mary Jo’s silent corpse looked back at her. Aimee threw herself at the door. It remained closed.
She started scratching at the edges of it. She dug at the rubber seal, trying to gouge it out.
Crying and wincing as her nails broke off, Aimee clawed and clawed. But the rubber seal remained impervious to her attack. It didn’t even leave a mark on it.
Aimee sagged against the door. Sour-smelling sweat ran down her neck and trickled along her spine.
Surely someone would hear her eventually, wouldn’t they?
They didn’t hear Mary Jo, she thought.
Aimee began to tremble, and she forced herself to remain calm. It was going to be okay.
She wasn’t like Mary Jo. People cared about her. Her parents would come looking for her. Her friends would look for her. Her car was in the restaurant’s parking lot. Kim would remember her. Mary would remember that Aimee had asked where the restrooms were. They’d know she was in here.
But would they? Really?
No one knew the Hiding Maze was back here. Why would anyone look in an old crawl space for a missing woman?
Maybe they’d see the grate and—
“Find Player Two,” Freddy’s voice intoned.
Aimee lost all semblance of calm and gave in to panic. She started wailing, and then she shrieked. She shrieked until her throat burned and spasmed. And then she swallowed, and she screamed some more.
Aimee screamed until her lungs forced her to stop and fill them. Then she started crying. She sobbed at first, and then, thinking about her abandoned friend, she wailed.
Mary Jo had died the same way she’d lived, Aimee realized. She’d died because no one had cared enough about her to do whatever was necessary to take care of her.
“Find Player Two,” Freddy’s voice repeated.
Aimee pounded on the door of the cubbyhole and screamed at the top of her lungs.
* * *
Mary approached the nice young woman’s booth and frowned at the soda sitting on the table next to the unopened menu. The soda clearly hadn’t been touched. It was no longer fizzing, and at least half the ice had melted; a ring of condensation was pooling on the table’s slick wood surface.
No one stayed in a restroom that long. The woman must have left.
Mary glanced up and saw Kim heading her way with an elderly couple in tow. Shrugging, Mary picked up the abandoned soda and menu, quickly wiped the table, and pointed at it. “You can seat them here, Kim. My last customer took off, I guess.”
Kim smiled, nodded, and helped the couple get settled in the booth. As soon as Kim left, Mary grinned at her new customers. “Hi, I’m Mary,” she said. “How are you doing today?”
* * *
From the vent near the hallway leading to the restrooms, an ever-so-faint scream reached out into the dining room. Its echo lingered for a couple seconds, but the sound was inconsequential.
It didn’t stand a chance of being heard.
Scott Cawthon is the author of the bestselling video game series Five Nights at Freddy’s, and while he is a game designer by trade, he is first and foremost a storyteller at heart. He is a graduate of The Art Institute of Houston and lives in Texas with his family.
Elley Cooper writes fiction for young adults and adults. She has always loved horror and is grateful to Scott Cawthon for letting her spend time in his dark and twisted universe. Elley lives in Tennessee with her family and many spoiled pets and can often be found writing books with Kevin Anderson & Associates.
Andrea Rains Waggener is an author, novelist, ghostwriter, essayist, short story writer, screenwriter, copywriter, editor, poet, and a proud member of Kevin Anderson & Associates’ team of writers. In a past she prefers not to remember much, she was a claims adjuster, JCPenney’s catalog order-taker (before computers!), appellate court clerk, legal writing instructor, and lawyer. Writing in genres that vary from her chick-lit novel, Alternate Beauty, to her dog how-to book, Dog Parenting, to her self-help book, Healthy, Wealthy, & Wise, to ghostwritten memoirs to ghostwritten YA, horror, mystery, and mainstream fiction projects, Andrea still manages to find time to watch the rain and obsess over her dog and her knitting, art, and music projects. She lives with her husband and said dog on the Washington Coast, and if she isn’t at home creating something, she can be found walking on the beach.
“Blow out the candles! Blow out the candles!” Jake’s friends, wearing pointy cardboard party hats, surrounded him at the table. Right in front of him was a round, white-frosted cake decorated with nine rainbow-colored candles. Somehow Jake knew that the cake was red velvet with cream cheese frosting, his favorite.
Jake laughed at his friends’ cheers, took a deep breath, and then huffed and puffed like the Big Bad Wolf in “The Three Little Pigs.” He extinguished all the candles at once.
Jake’s heart was full of happiness. There were smiling faces all around him, smiling faces that were soon to be stuffed with cake and ice cream.
