Latest Update:COMPLETE
Summary: When Ana learns that her beloved
Aunt Easter has been declared dead after being
missing for twelve years she finds herself pulled
back to the town of her childhood, Mammon
Utah. While she struggles to clean up the hoard
of garbage filling her aunt's house from the
basement to the rafters, she rediscovers an
abandoned pizzeria she was never allowed
inside of as a child, and the rotting animatronics
inside. But Mammon holds its secrets dearly,
and the ones Ana is unearthing might just
swallow her whole.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7000954/chapters/15948751
Word count:4 works (1.4 million in total)
Chapters:18 in first work
Chapter 1
Chapter Text
"Welcome to Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a magical place for kids and grown-ups alike, where fantasy and fun come to life! Fazbear Entertainment is not responsible for damage to property or person. Upon discovering that damage or death has occurred, a missing person report will be filed within 90 days, or as soon as property and premises have been thoroughly cleaned and bleached, and the carpets have been replaced…"
CHAPTER ONE
November 5th, 1993
Ana Stark waited up all night, but he didn't come, and when the grey glow of morning began to light her window, she slipped the knife back into its hiding place beneath her mattress and cried herself to sleep. In another hour, her mother's shrill alarm clock woke her through the wall and she cried again, silently, because she could hear her mother thumping and swearing her way down the hall, still alive. But she didn't cry long. It was Friday, a school day. She had only to get through this one last day and then she had the whole weekend with David over at Aunt Easter's house to figure out what went wrong.
Moving quietly, so as not to attract her mother's attention, Ana pushed back the old sleeping bag that was her winter blanket and climbed up off the bare mattress that was her bed. She dragged the heavy army surplus trunk where she kept her clothes away from the door and quickly dressed. It was still too dark to see very well, but she didn't need the light; she kept her jeans on the left and her t-shirts on the right, separated by a barrier of ragged panties and rolled-up pairs of socks. Her long-sleeved stuff hung in the closet and she'd need one today. She couldn't let her arms be seen for at least another week.
Ana took a sweatshirt from her closet and pulled it on over her tee. It was one of David's old ones and had a Batman symbol on it. Ana did not like Batman. Superheroes were like Santa Claus; they did not exist, or if they did, they didn't think Ana Stark existed. Either way, she didn't like them, but David loved them, so it was all Ana ever had.
Mom was still in the kitchen when Ana finished tying her shoes (they were also David's hand-me-downs and too big, but they fit okay with a little toilet paper wadded up in the toes), so she took her backpack over to the window and double-checked to make sure she had her homework and all her books. She knew she did. It was the last thing she did every night before she went to sleep, but last night had been…different…and she wanted to be extra-sure.
There was a spare t-shirt and a pair of jeans rolled up small in the bottom of her backpack. Ana took them out and folded them away back in her trunk. Then she sat on it, hugging her backpack to her chest and wiping away silent tears as she waited for Mom to leave.
When the front door slammed, Ana went out to the kitchen. She poured herself a bowl of cereal and ate it dry; there was no milk, only Mom's coffee creamer and she knew better than to ever touch that again. She made herself a lunch from the mostly empty fridge and cupboards—a slice of bread with ketchup and mustard smeared on it, a little baggie with stale crackers in it and another little baggie with green olives—knowing David would give her some of his. Aunt Easter made him extra-big lunches and he always came to find her at middle recess, even though he was in the sixth grade and she was stuck in fifth.
As always, whenever her mind turned in this direction, the cold thought came to her that next year, David would be away at Elizabeth Gaskell Middle School and Ana would be alone at George WM Reynolds Elementary, with no lunches and no one to sit with in the library or at field days and assemblies. She'd heard there was no recess at middle school, just classes and lunch-times that the different grades didn't share. She might see him in the halls and bike home with him on the weekends, but that was it. He'd make other friends. He'd forget her. He'd grow up and marry someone else.
She did not cry again. The fear was too great to cry over. She put her lunch in a plastic bag from the store and put that in her backpack. She put her backpack on her back and snapped the snap to keep it on. She turned off all the lights, even the one in her Mom's bedroom, knowing she might get in trouble for going in there, but knowing also she'd get in trouble for leaving the light on. She locked the front door and went out through the garage, struggling her bike down off the wall where she kept it hung up out of Mom's way and carried it out through the so-called garden door, even though the house didn't have a garden, just a bunch of weeds and grass.
There were a couple of bigger kids standing out at the ends of their driveways, waiting for the high school bus, but all the elementary school kids were still inside, eating their breakfasts and maybe even still in bed. They could do that if they took the bus, but Ana didn't like the bus. Kids made fun of her. Her clothes never fit and she got teased a lot for wearing stuff too worn-down or too boyish. Some kids said she never brushed her hair, but she did. She just didn't fuss over it in girly ways and it was all naturally shaggy and curly and never laid flat, no matter how many times she brushed it. Some kids said her mom was crazy and that meant she was crazy too, and Ana didn't know what to say to that. She was afraid it might be true.
Ana pedaled six blocks to Main Street and two blocks east to wait for David at their usual place by the bank, because the bank had a clock out front. She lived in town, in a cul-de-sac with lots of other houses as small as hers and some that even looked as ratty, but not many. David and Aunt Easter lived far, far away—from Cawthon all the way out to where there was only a few houses and some pastures, then on Old Quarry Road and out past the rocky pit where she and David liked to play (although not as often now. The water never drained all the way away, even in the summer time, and it smelled worse and worse every year), and onto the dirt road that went forever through the rocks and pines and over the gully, ending at just Aunt Easter's house because there was nothing else around for miles. She and David biked together to school from this point almost every day and tonight, because it was Friday, she'd bike all the way home with him to that lonely house in the dark woods and bike all the way to school again on Monday.
And maybe someday, it would be like that every day. They'd be a real family and not just the one Ana pretended she had. David could be her brother until they grew up and she could marry him. Aunt Easter would be her new mom. Someone had told her once that you didn't have to stay in the family you were born into. You could make your own. And she believed it, with all her heart. But before you could have the new one, the old one had to be gone.
But Foxy hadn't come last night.
And David wasn't coming now.
Where was he? She didn't have a watch, but every few seconds, the bank's clock showed her the passing of time. Ana waited as long as she dared, but she couldn't be late for school. Regretfully, she got back on her bike and started pedaling. It was a grey day, after all. Cool and damp. Maybe Aunt Easter had given him a ride. If they'd seen her, they would have stopped to pick her up, but they didn't always see her. They probably had to go to the gas station or the store or something first. It was okay. Everything was okay.
Ana's vision blurred, but she blinked it clear. Couldn't cry while she was on the bike. She might fall off and get hurt. Mom said Ana fell off her bike a lot, but she didn't. She was a very careful biker.
David wasn't waiting for her out by the flagpole when Ana arrived at school, but that was all right. She'd waited too long on the street corner by the bank and kids were already going in to class. She put her bike in the strut and locked it—just a regular chain and dollar-store padlock, rusty and dumpster-looking next to all those colorful locks—running her eyes over the rest of the bikes and not seeing David's. If Aunt Easter had given him a ride to school, she must be coming by to pick him up, too.
But it was Friday. Ana and David always went home together on Fridays. Always.
Then Aunt Easter would pick Ana up also. It was nothing to get nervous about. Everything was all right.
For the first time, the Awful Thought stole into her heart: Foxy hadn't come…or had he?
The bell for the start of school rang. The principal came on with the morning announcements. All the kids who hadn't already gone in now went at a run, because when she was done talking, all the kids who weren't in their seats would be marked tardy. David still hadn't come and Ana didn't know what else to do except go to class, so that was what she did.
Her first class was Reading, which was mostly silent, because it was Mr. Ulster and Mr. Ulster usually had a headache first thing in the mornings. He gave homework, which he rarely did, but it was a Friday and everyone gave homework on Fridays. But that was okay, because it was just to read the next story in her textbook and answer the four questions about it. Ana was a good reader and had already read her entire story textbook (as well as David's), but she was so tired and the Awful Thought made her stomach feel sick, and between the two, she could not concentrate. She pulled out a piece of paper and carefully printed her name, the date, and First Period up in the corner, then wrote in the title of the story—Treasure Island—and a number 1 so she wouldn't forget. After that, while every other kid in class did their homework now to keep their weekend free, she sat and watched the clock.
It was the longest wait of her life, longer than the last day of school before a whole glorious summer at Aunt Easter's house, longer than the night she'd had to spend in the hospital that one time, longer than any night in the closet.
When the bell rang, Ana went outside with the other kids for first recess long enough to look at the softball field—sixth grader territory. He wasn't there and Ana didn't know any of the sixth graders well enough to ask if any of them had seen David, so she ran clear across the yard and out to the flat, sandy area that was allegedly the 'track' field, but which was really just the fifth grader district, in case David was looking for her. He wasn't, and before she had time to check the library—She should have gone to the library first! Stupid!—the bell rang.
Second period was Social Studies with Mrs. Pierce. When Ana filed by her desk to hand in her paper (all about the history of Mammon, which amounted to six paragraphs of 'Mormons are sure great!' because Mrs. Pierce wore a beehive pin and she had already warned the whole class that anyone who mentioned ghosts of hungry miners in the quarry would get an automatic zero), Mrs. Pierce asked her if she was okay. She said she was, but Mrs. Pierce's eyes were moving over the bruised and scratched places on Ana's face where she hadn't been able to hide it under her hair.
"Are you sure?" Mrs. Pierce asked, now actually reaching like she wanted to move Ana's bangs and look at the whole thing.
Ana stepped back and said, "I'm fine!" loud enough that other kids looked at them. Putting her head down and shaking it so that her hair fell more thickly around her face, Ana went to her desk and waited out the time under Mrs. Pierce's nerve-wracking stare.
Third period was Math with Mrs. Kellar, who was a b-i-t-c-h, so even though Math was Ana's best subject, it was also her worst class. Mrs. Kellar gave out homework every day and quizzes every Friday and Monday. She was tall and thin and clapped her hands a lot to get kids' attention and sometimes slapped her hand down on the desk, which made a loud noise, and then yelled at them if they jumped. She kept hard math—the kind the big kids did, all numbers and letters mixed together—written on the blackboard and if you did something she considered 'bad' in her class, she'd make you get up and try to solve it, and she'd keep you there all period long, just looking at those letters and numbers, until the bell rang.
Mrs. Kellar had done that to Ana once, but only once, because Ana knew the magic of the letters, the letters that could be any number, every number, and she solved that problem right away. Ana could do any kind of hard math, even fractions, and she could do it in ink. David was the same way, although he didn't always get perfect scores on his assignments. Ana thought he was doing that on purpose, because the other kids made fun of kids who got too many perfect scores. They made fun of Ana for that too, but they were already making fun of her for other stuff, so who cared? David cared, though, so David was sneaky, always missing one or two obvious answers, even on quizzes and tests. But he was good, whether he acted like he was or not.
In fact, David could do things with numbers that even Ana couldn't understand, using them in his computer in some mystical fashion that turned them into programs. Ana didn't understand the point of most of his computer programs, but he'd made one that said anything out loud when you typed it into a command box (even if you told it to say "butts" or "boobies"), and that was kind of fun still, even if they'd made it say all the dirty words they knew already. He had also made lots and lots of games, most of them pretty primitive by today's standards, with graphics resembling those on his old Atari console rather than the SNES and Playstation currently plugged into the TV in his room, but they were still fun and worked just like real computer games. Aunt Easter called it his knack and said it was no different than how Ana could take things like the broken toaster apart and put it back together so it worked again. But that wasn't a knack at all, that was just how things worked. She wasn't special, not the way David was.
Where was he?
Mrs. Kellar's hand slammed down on the desk in front of Ana, shattering her thoughts and making her jerk her pencil across her math sheet, tearing it. The other kids stared at her as Mrs. Kellar yelled at her for not paying attention. Someone threw a wadded bit of paper at Ana when the teacher moved on up the rows of desks, but Ana just picked it out of her hair and did her math. Her heart was too full of that sick fear to feel embarrassed. If she found David—When she found him, they could tell each other mean things about what a fat b-i-t-c-h Mrs. Kellar was, but until then, Ana kept quiet.
When the bell rang, Ana was first out the door, not quite running but walking very fast to the lunchroom, but she didn't eat her lunch. She was hungry and she knew it in a vague, sideways sort of way, but her stomach was all knotted up and she didn't think she could keep her lunch down even if she ate it. She stood in the corner where she could see both sets of doors and the lunch line and watched until the steady stream of kids slackened and she knew for sure David wasn't there.
He wasn't there.
Like Foxy hadn't been there last night. And just maybe the reason Foxy hadn't come…had been because he'd been somewhere else.
When Mr. Fitzgerald, the janitor, came in to start emptying the first full bags of trash, he asked if she was okay. It wasn't until she heard her voice shake telling him she was fine that she realized she was crying. Scrubbing at her eyes, Ana left and went to the library, still not running but walking even faster.
The library wasn't very big, so Ana could see from the moment she walked in that David wasn't there either, but she looked anyway. David almost never went outside, preferring to spend his middle recess in here on the computers. He had a better computer at home, but he said he liked the library ones. He only said that because Ana didn't have a computer and she liked to use these to type her homework on, because teachers loved it when you typed stuff. Almost every day, they'd be here, Ana typing and David playing one of the educational games the school provided, laughing and talking back and forth until Mr. Engleston had to tell them to be quiet.
But not today. Not today.
Ana sat at one of the computers, holding her backpack on her lap, and watched the door, occasionally wiping at her eyes, until the bell rang.
Fourth period was Ana's study period, with Mr. Ulster again. She sat and pretended to read for a while, then put her head down on the desk and pretended to sleep while she hid in her arms and silently cried.
For fifth period, she had Mrs. Pierce again for English. Ana turned in her vocabulary words, keeping her eyes down so Mrs. Pierce wouldn't see how red they were, and sat down at her desk, already taking out a fresh piece of paper for the spelling quiz Mrs. Pierce always gave on Fridays. The first word was 'consequence'.
When the bell rang for last recess, Ana could only put her head down on her desk and sleep. Mrs. Pierce woke her with a hand on her back just before the bell rang to end recess and asked her again if she was okay. Ana again said she was, but she couldn't go anywhere. She had Mrs. Pierce for sixth period too—Science—and even though that was her second-best subject next to Math, she was no good at all that day. She looked at her textbook, pushing her tired eyes over words without reading them, and just waited for the bell. Homework was to pick an animal, any animal in the world, and write a full report, which for Mrs. Pierce meant at least two pages and one picture. This news was met with groans by the whole class, except for Ana, who put her head back down on her desk.
After a while, with the whole class quiet so everyone could hear, Mrs. Pierce touched Ana's back and said, "Aren't you feeling well, honey?"
"I'm not your honey," said Ana into her arms.
Mrs. Pierce took her hand away, but didn't leave. "Do you need help?"
Someone in the classroom whispered, "Mental help," and several kids snickered.
Ana sat up and mutely pulled out a piece of paper. She printed her name, date, and Sixth Period, then stared at Mrs. Pierce until she walked away.
There were lots of animals she'd love to write about under normal circumstances—squids, platypuses, armadillos, hedgehogs, and just every kind of dinosaur—but she was tired and the Awful Thought was eating her up, so in the end, she went with the trapdoor spider, because she and David had found one last week in the quarry and she had the advantage of real, live photographs she could include in her report. Teachers loved crap like that. Also, trapdoor spiders were cool. They dug out little homes underground and covered them over with dirt so other bugs couldn't see it. Some bug would just come strolling along, thinking everything was hunky-dory, and suddenly, a spider would jump out of em-effing nowhere and snatch them. In fact, that would be the title of Ana's essay. She printed it out so she wouldn't forget, centered in the middle of the page in all-capital letters: SUDDENLY, A SPIDER!!! With three exclamation points, so Mrs. Pierce would know it was serious.
The other kids were leaving as Ana folded her future report away with the rest of her homework papers, and when the room was empty except for Ana, Mrs. Pierce came over and squatted down next to Ana's desk.
"Are you all right, sweetie?" Mrs. Pierce asked, because she was always asking, whether Ana had bruises or not.
Ana put her textbook into her backpack and zipped it up. "I'm fine," she said. "I have to go."
"Is everything all right at home?"
"What do you mean?" Ana asked, looking Mrs. Pierce right in the eye, her heart so full of fear that she didn't even care what happened to her next. If Mrs. Pierce asked her if her mom was crazy like the kids said, well, the heck with it, Ana would just say, 'Yes, I really think she is and what are you going to do about it, huh? What do any of you stupid darn—stupid damn!—grown-ups ever do about it? Nothing, that's what! All you'll do is call my mom and get me in more trouble!'
But Mrs. Pierce didn't ask, so Ana didn't say it and at last, Mrs. Pierce stood up and moved back out of Ana's way, allowing her to shoulder her backpack and walk out.
Her bike was the only one left in the struts when Ana got out to the front of the school and the last of the yellow buses was already pulling away. She waited by the flag pole as all the rest of the kids trickled out of the school and across the parking lot and were gone. Then came the teachers. Some of them looked at her as she stood by herself below the snapping flags—the Stars and Stripes, the Beehive, and the DARE banner boasting that George WM Reynolds Elementary was drug-free—but none of them came over to ask why she was still there.
It got later. Darker. It was November and the sun went down early. When the streetlamps came on, Ana gave up and went back to the school doors. They were locked, but she could see Mr. Fitzgerald inside sweeping the hall and when he heard her knock, he came to let her in.
"I need to use the phone," she said, trying and failing to keep the tears out of her voice and off her cheeks. "Can I please come in?"
He walked with her to the short row of pay phones and stood by while she looked helplessly at them, then reached into his own pockets and took out some coins.
She dialed Aunt Easter's house first. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang, but David never answered.
She cried then, really cried, with big tears and breaths and even a little noise, although not much. Mr. Fitzgerald shifted like he wanted to do something, but he didn't do anything but look at her. Grown-ups weren't supposed to touch kids, especially men and little girls. Ana knew this from the Stranger Danger assemblies. She also knew that a lot of teachers and even some kids didn't like Mr. Fitzgerald. He used to be a teacher here when Ana was still in kindergarten, but his son had got hurt bad a few years ago. At Freddy's, the kids said, but they always said that whenever anyone got hurt bad or disappeared and since lots of kids disappeared in Mammon, someone was always saying it happened at Freddy's. Either that, or the ghosts of the miners down in the quarry ate them up.
Anyway, something had happened and Mr. Fitzgerald had done something bad because of it and now he was the janitor. Ana didn't know what the bad thing he'd done was, but she sure knew that touching a little girl, even to give a crying one a hug, was just as bad if not worse. They had already made him stop teaching; if he got in trouble again, Mr. Fitzgerald would probably have to stop being the janitor too.
So Ana cried and Mr. Fitzgerald stood and watched her, wiping at his mouth now and then with the dirty rag he kept in his pocket and looking off down the halls. When she was done crying, she opened up the big yellow book chained to the wall and looked up the number for Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. She was afraid she wouldn't find it. A lot of pages were ripped out. But the business section was still more or less intact and it was there, although some kid had drawn a big cartoon bear over the whole page, one with sharp teeth and claws, with all-black eyes that looked like sockets in a skull. Freddy Lives said words that dripped like blood.
Ana wiped her eyes one more time and dialed, picking out the numbers where the lines of the mean-looking drawing cut across them. She held the heavy handset to her ear and listened as it rang. Once. Twice. Three times. And just when she thought no one would ever answer, someone did.
"Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria. Our business hours are currently eleven to five. We are closed. Please call back tomorrow."
Even before the relief had fully hit, Ana could feel it cracking. That was her aunt's voice, it could be no other, but there was something wrong with it. She didn't know how, but there was.
"Aunt Easter?" she said cautiously.
"Ana." A pause, scarcely longer than a heartbeat. "Honey." Another pause. "How are you?"
Wrong. All the right words, but said so wrong. She got like this sometimes—still smiling on the outside, but sad and far away on the inside—and when she got like this, the things she said didn't always make sense.
"I called your house, but no one answered."
"No," said Aunt Easter in that same vague way. "I'm here. Everything's all right, I'm just…working late tonight."
What to say next? Just the fact that Aunt Easter was at work meant everything was normal. If he was home sick, she'd be with him. Ana hesitated, then plunged ahead. "David wasn't at school today."
"I know, honey. He's here with me."
There? At Freddy's? While Ana was making herself sick wondering where he was, David was, what, just watching the band? She'd missed lunch while he was eating pizza. She'd been running all over the playground looking for him while he was playing video games in the arcade? Here stood Ana with snot on her face from crying and David was just at Freddy's with his mom the whole time!
She didn't believe it. Ana knew David went to Freddy's a lot, just like he knew she could never go, but he'd never ditched school just to go there. Why would he? His mom worked there and before she'd worked there, she'd worked at the other one. Probably every single day that David wasn't hanging out with Ana after school, he was at Freddy's, so why would he ditch a whole day of school just to do what he did all the time anyway?
"Why?" Ana asked, because she knew there had to be a reason and when she heard it, she'd feel a little silly and a little stupid, but in the meantime, none of this made any sense and it was scaring her.
But Aunt Easter said, "It was just time, sweetheart. Sometimes things just have to change," and that was no kind of reason at all.
"What things?" Ana asked, but something in her must have already known, because a tear fell out of her. She could feel it, burning all the way down her cheek, but she didn't dare let go of the phone to rub it away.
Was there a shudder in Aunt Easter's next breath? There might have been, but there was a little static on the line that made it impossible to know for sure. In any case, her voice was steady, if sad, when she said, "David won't be going to school anymore. He's going to stay with his father from now on."
With his father? What father? David didn't have a father, any more than Ana did. But then, lots of kids in Ana's class had two sets of parents and had to split their time between them, sometimes just on weekends and sometimes over the whole summer. Some of them even had new moms and dads that went with the old halves, and new sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and grandparents and even dogs and cats they only saw sometimes. They didn't always want to go, but when did that ever matter? Kids had to go where grown-ups told them to go and if David had a father who wanted him, David had to go.
"What…What happens to me now?" Ana asked finally. It was all she could think to say.
"Oh, honey. Honeybunny, you'll be just fine."
Honeybunny? Aunt Easter hadn't called her that in years. That was her baby name, from the days when she'd been Honeybunny and David had been Honeybear. Hearing it now—when she was all of ten fricking years old!—confused and terrified her.
The static on the line was getting louder, popping and crackling in Ana's ear loud enough to hurt a little. Aunt Easter started to say something else, but she stopped and maybe put a hand over the phone because her next words were muffled: "Is he awake? Can I see him?"
Someone must have answered, but the static distorted the sound into something impossibly deep and rough. Rotten, somehow. Rusted.
"No," Aunt Easter replied. "No, it's Ana. Please, can I—"
The voice came closer and with it, the static, filling Ana's skull like a swarm of angry bees through which words came and went, echoing and obscured, like the footsteps of a monster in the movies she and David weren't old enough to watch yet, but still did.
The silence that followed was of that peculiar kind that did not happen just because someone put the phone down, but switched it to that dead space where nothing happened and no time passed. Ana waited and Mr. Fitzgerald waited with her. The phone book was still open across her bent arm, pressed between her thin body and the wall; Mr. Fitzgerald looked at the drawing and did not blink or even seem to breathe.
At last, the phone clicked and came alive again. The static was gone and it was just Aunt Easter's voice, soft and sad, trying to sound as if she were smiling when she said, "Are you there, Honeybunny?"
Ana squeezed a sound of assent through her too-tight throat, gripping the phone with both hands to hold it, and herself, steady.
"We had a…a bad connection for a moment there, didn't we? Sometimes it can be hard to say things over the phone." Aunt Easter took another of those shuddery breaths and said, too brightly, "Why don't you come over? Come…Come to Freddy's, sweetheart."
"I can't," Ana stammered, startled even deeper into that heavy apprehension that was eating up her heart. Aunt Easter knew Ana couldn't go to Freddy's. She'd been there the one time Ana had tried.
"It'll be our secret," Aunt Easter said soothingly. "Your mother will never know. It's after hours, no one is here to see you. We'll have the whole place all to ourselves. You can play all the games as long as you want and see all the shows. We're all having such a good time, but it's not the same without you."
All? All who? David and Aunt Easter…and who? David's stupid new father? Ana squeezed her eyes shut tight, trying to hate him, this man she didn't know, this man who'd just up and decided after all these years that he wanted a little boy…but she couldn't.
If only he wanted a little girl, too.
"Can I talk to him?" Ana asked. "To David? Please?"
Aunt Easter did not answer for several seconds and when she did, her voice was the wrongest it had ever been, although she still said all the right things and sounded like she said it with a smile. "He's sleeping, honey. Why don't you just come over? I'm sure he'll be awake by the time you get here and I know he'll want to see you."
"I don't think I'd better," said Ana, for whom Freddy's was the golden city she yearned for every hour of every awful day. "It's dark and my bike doesn't have a light. I should just go home."
Static, soft as the hand that lurks underneath the open-stepped stairs, waiting to close around the unprotected ankle of little girls who walk down into dark places.
"All right," said Aunt Easter, but not to Ana. And not to David, if David was really there and really asleep. For a little while, the only sounds were soft breathing and the whispering of the static. Then the static stopped again and in this new unsettling silence, Aunt Easter said, "Should I come and get you?"
Ana could think of no way to say no, and just the thought that she wanted to made her feel sick to her stomach. This was Aunt Easter and Aunt Easter loved her, so she said, "Okay."
"You go on home then and I'll be there as soon as I can. I just have to…to clean up a few things first. But I won't be long." And then, with a normalness and rightness that made all the wrong so much wronger, she said, "Be careful in the dark, honey. I worry about you in the dark."
Aunt Easter hung up her end of the phone, so Ana did too. Mr. Fitzgerald was still staring at the picture in the phone book and didn't stop until Ana closed it. He blinked and raised his head, then looked at her.
"I have to go now," she told him. "Thank you for the money."
This was where she was supposed to promise to pay him back, but she knew she never would.
He seemed to understand that, because he didn't ask. He just said, "Is someone coming to pick you up?"
"Yes," she lied.
He nodded, even though she could see he didn't believe her, and took her to the doors. He started to unlock them, then stopped and just stood there, his head down and his hand shaking on the hundred keys that hung from the big ring he carried clipped to his belt.
Ana waited, fidgeting from one foot to the other, not scared, but intensely aware of how empty the school was and how far away from other houses.
"You are going home, aren't you?" Mr. Fitzgerald said, his eyes shut tight. "You're going straight home and you're not going anywhere else."
"Yes, sir."
Now he looked at her, but she wasn't sure he saw her. His eyes seemed to go right through her and straight on, through the walls and through the whole town, out into the desert. "Don't ever go there," he said. "Don't you ever go there."
"Where?" asked Ana, trying to sound like she didn't know.
Mr. Fitzgerald didn't hear her any more than he saw her, but he answered. "They look fun. Oh yes, they do. They sing and they dance…but he's still a bear and bears will bite. Don't you ever go there."
Then he let her out, and as soon as the door was open even a little, Ana bolted through and was running away, her too-big shoes slapping on the damp pavement. He didn't chase her. He just locked the doors again, watching through the glass as she got on her bike and pedaled away.
Halfway home, it started raining. Cars splashed her as they passed her by and sometimes honked to let her know it was too late for her to be biking without lights. The November wind snapped through the wet streets, freezing the water through her clothes and into her skin. She tried to keep her mind off the cold—both the outside kind and the inside kind—by thinking of all the homework that was waiting for her, but it didn't work. Oddly, it was the science essay that kept coming back. Trapdoor spiders. There you were, just pedaling along on a dark street, and suddenly, a spider.
* * *
Mom still wasn't home when she walked her bike up the driveway and let herself in by the garden door. Ana wasn't sure what her mother did for work. She didn't wear a uniform like Aunt Easter, just normal clothes and she didn't come home at the same time every night. Sometimes she was there and sometimes she wasn't. Sometimes she didn't come back until the next day and once, she'd been gone almost a whole week. Anytime, for any reason, the door could slam open and there she'd be.
Ana hung her bike up and took her backpack off. She left it in the kitchen while she went to her room and changed into dry clothes, then came back and took out the lunch she hadn't eaten. The crackers were all crunched, as were the olives, and the sandwich was soggy, but she put everything together and ate it anyway. She was still hungry when she finished, but she didn't bother to make herself anything else. Aunt Easter would be here soon and she always had leftover pizza after work. Ana had only eaten her gross, smushed lunch because she'd already stolen the food that went into making it and if Mom came home and found that food untouched in the trash, Ana would be in big trouble.
Mom thought everything Ana did was bad. Mom hated her. Hated her. But Aunt Easter loved her. Aunt Easter hugged her and called her honey (but not Honeybunny, her dark side whispered, not in years and that was still scary) and told her she was so smart and promised someday they'd be a real family. And right now, Aunt Easter was coming to get her. There'd be pizza in the car and she and David could have a slice while Aunt Easter drove them home and they'd all talk and laugh together over how worked up Ana had gotten, just because David wasn't at school.
She wished she believed that. Any of that. And especially that David would be waiting for her in the backseat of Aunt Easter's car.
Where was he? She didn't like wondering, because it meant she didn't believe Aunt Easter when she'd said he was safe with her at Freddy's, but she did wonder. Where was he? Was he really at Freddy's? And if he was (oh, she hated thinking it), was he really safe?
She couldn't think about it anymore, so Ana did her homework, beginning with her reading assignment, getting the worst out of the way first. Ana had already read Treasure Island—the real book, not just this fake cut-up version of it—and she normally liked any story that had pirates in it, but not today. Today, every pirate was Foxy, the Black Spot was under her mother's mattress, and Ana was marooned and alone, without even a ship to watch sailing away. She answered the questions the way she thought Mr. Ulster would want them answered, although she secretly suspected he never read them at all, just checked to make sure there was writing in the right number of places. Mrs. Pierce was harder to fool, though. She had to make sure all her weekend vocabulary words were not only spelled right, but used right.
Disappeared, she wrote, printing neatly. Last night, my cousin disappeared.
And then the front door banged open. Really banged. Something in the living room fell over and broke, and Mom didn't even stop to swear at it.
Ana froze, her hand still poised above the next line on her paper and trembling just a little in the air as she stared at the kitchen door, knowing Mom would come here next. The kitchen had the phone, the booze, and Ana herself; no matter what Mom wanted, she was coming here. If Ana ran, if she made Mom chase her, it would only be worse when she got caught. There was no way out. All she could do was make it so it didn't hurt as much or last as long and that meant she had to sit right here and wait for it.
The kitchen door banged open, even louder than the front door. Mom put up one hand against the light, then lowered it and looked at Ana. Her angry face turned angrily confused. "What the fuck are you doing here?"
Ana's mouth moved, but she didn't—couldn't—speak. That was dangerous, but it was just as dangerous to answer. Ana didn't know what to do.
"It's Friday, isn't it?" Mom's eyes shifted to the calendar over by the phone. It was still set to September. "Isn't it Friday?"
Ana nodded.
Mom's face had begun the scary shift away from confusion and back toward just angry. "Then what the fuck are you doing here?"
"David…"
"What?"
"D-D-David…"
"What? Speak up! God damn it, why are you always mumbling? What about David?"
But Ana couldn't finish.
Exasperated, her mother stomped out of the doorway and grabbed Ana's arm for a good shake. "Answer me when I ask you a fucking question! Why do I always have to hit you before you start to listen?"
"David wasn't at school," said Ana, her heart beginning to beat faster and her skin itching, anticipating the slap. Sometimes it stopped at slapping. Sometimes it didn't. "Aunt Easter's coming to pick me up."
Mom looked at the clock, then went over to the phone. She punched at the numbers and waited, muttering and swearing as she took down one of the tall bottles from the cupboard. She had one drink and then another and then said, "Marion. What the fuck is my daughter doing in my house on a Friday night?"
Ana ducked her head and looked at her paper, but did not write the next vocabulary word.
"That was not the deal…I don't care! I've got plans for this weekend and I'm not letting that little shit fuck it all up! This is so typical. This is just like you. All I wanted to do was come home and relax for five fucking minutes, get something to eat, get off my feet, but no. Now I've got to drive her all the way out to your place—what?…What are you talking about? Who's we?" Her mother's tone sharpened and her hand gripped the phone harder. "Who's we, Marion?…Yes, you did. Don't you fucking try that, I heard you! Who's we?"
Silence. The sound of her aunt's voice scratching through the phone was no louder than a mouse in the wall. Her mother's breath was louder, rougher.
"You're crazy," she said at last. "You're crazy, you know that? He's dead."
Ana's heart stopped cold in her chest. David? No. She believed and did not believe it, both at the same time. David could not be dead. She'd seen him only yesterday, out at the quarry. They'd played together there after school, when they weren't supposed to go there at all on a weekday, which was why Ana's mom had to come looking for her and why she had to wear a sweater and hide the scrape on her forehead under her hair and why Foxy was supposed to come last night. But he didn't. And he hadn't gone anywhere else either, she told herself, breathing hard and fast. David wasn't dead, he was with his father. He wasn't dead.
"Yes, he is," Ana's mom was saying. "You always do this, damn it, and I am not in the fucking mood! It's been over five years. Get it through your fucking head. He's not coming back. He's gone forever and good fucking riddance!" She punctuated this triumphant declaration with a drink, but choked on her first swallow and pushed the phone away from her ear like it had bit her.
Ana heard something. Not her aunt's voice, made small through the phone. Something else, something awful. It talked. Even at this distance and through the distortion of the handset's speakers, Ana could tell the sounds she heard were words, but they were broken up, distorted by the electronic clicks and piercing whistles that sometimes overtook the line if there was a radio playing too close. Nonetheless, there were words and that made it a voice and the voice said, "We made a deal, Melanie."
"You," said Ana's mom in a tiny little voice that made her almost sound like Ana herself. "You…You're not you. You can't be you, I know you're dead."
Laughter, scratching through the phone, full of static.
Ana's mom put the bottle down, her knuckles white where she gripped it. Slowly, she put the phone back to her ear, staring into the open cupboard, listening. After a long time, her mother turned around and looked at Ana and her face was like a dead face—white and big-eyed and empty. She didn't say anything, didn't do anything, just stared until she was done staring. Then, without a word, she turned away again and looked back at the cupboard.
The static spoke. Ana could no longer hear the words, but she could hear the voice and it talked a long time. She watched, gripping her pen as tightly as her mother gripped the bottle, her chest too full of fear to let her breathe.
"Well, you can't," her mother said at last, nearly in a whisper. "No." And then screamed it, "No! You're dead and if you aren't, by Christ, I'll kill her myself! You hear me? I'll kill her myself before I let you have her! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!"
Suddenly, her mother was banging down the phone, not into the cradle, but just on the counter, hammering it down over and over until the plastic broke and pieces flew, some of them landing clear over on the kitchen table where Ana sat, frozen.
Her mother spun around, her eyes wild and chest heaving.
'I'm going to die,' thought Ana and she thought of Mrs. Pierce asking her if everything was all right at home and how she hadn't said anything. She had all those chances, but she hadn't said anything. And now she was going to die.
But before she died, Ana screwed up all her little courage and whispered, "Where's David?"
"He's gone," said her mother. And laughed. Not in a funny way or even in a mean way, but in a high, shrill scared way that made it almost sound like she was screaming. "He took him."
The Awful Thought swelled up like a black bubble and popped and now it was all true. The coin was cursed. She'd known it and she'd put it under her mother's bed anyway. The coin was cursed, but Foxy didn't come for the person who had the coin after all. He came for the one who took it.
And now David was gone.
Her mother looked at the ruins of the phone. Then she swooped away and out the kitchen door, also with a bang. Ana heard the closet open and her stomach clenched in anticipation, but when her mother came back, it wasn't to grab her and pull her down the hall, but to throw the smaller of two worn suitcases at her, hard enough to hurt. "Go to your room right now and pack."
"W-What?"
"I said, now!" her mother snapped, already running up the stairs herself to her own room.
Ana slithered out of her chair onto her feet, staggering under the suitcase. It wasn't heavy at all, being empty, but it wasn't much smaller than she was and the handle had broken a long time ago, making it difficult for her short arms to hold. She dragged it up the stairs one step at a time, peeking into her mother's room as she passed it to see her mother yanking the drawers from her dresser and dumping them out into the suitcase, stomping on them with her foot to make everything fit.
She had been numb all this time, numb without realizing it, thinking she was frightened only until she began to understand what being frightened really felt like.
Ana hurried down the hall as fast as she could and dropped the suitcase on her bedroom floor. She looked around, seeing everything and nothing, knowing in the same unspoken, overwhelming manner of dream-knowledge that this was the last time she would ever be in this room, the last chance she would ever have to take anything with her. She was leaving, not to the store or to school or even to the next town over, but forever and all time. She was being taken. And when children are taken in Mammon, they never come back. Everyone knew that. Never ever ever.
Something crashed over in her mother's bathroom, startling Ana out of the hypnotic hold that her thoughts had on her heart. She looked around again, now feeling panic like a caged moth pounding at her ribs. She didn't have much time.
There, on the wall, in a cheap plastic frame, her Lisa Frank poster of the rainbow-colored seascape with a pegasus flying overhead, streaking light like a comet's tail from its hooves and feathers.
Ana's heart leapt. She ran, tripping over the suitcase and banging her chin on the corner of the old trunk that served as her dresser. She got up bleeding and stumbled to the wall, wiping her chin and her hands before reaching up to pull it down. There were tabs on the frame holding the backing in place and she couldn't pry them up; she bit her fingernails.
Ana worried at them through a haze of tears for a few seconds, then rushed over to her mattress and groped beneath it to her hiding place and the little paring knife she kept there. She took it back and used it to pry up the tabs, breaking most of them, and pulled the cardboard backing away. She took the poster out—the real poster, not the stupid pegasus it hid behind, and rolled it up with shaking hands, securing it with an elastic hairband she found on the floor. She put it in her suitcase and, hearing her mother's footsteps slamming down the hall, desperately buried it beneath a mountain of clean and dirty laundry of all kinds.
Her mother banged open her door in the very next instant and pointed at the suitcase. "Get it. Let's go. Now!"
Ana shut the lid and zipped it up, then pulled the whole heavy thing into her arms. She dropped it twice on the way out of the house. The first time, Mom let her pick it up again; the second time, she swung around and punched Ana three times in the face and six times on the back and butt as Ana hunched over to weather the storm. Then she ran out without her, leaving Ana to follow after as best she could with her ringing ears and throbbing head.
Mom had left the car pulled all the way up to the door, its tires on the lawn. She grabbed Ana's suitcase from her and threw it into the back seat with her own, then got behind the wheel. The car began to move before Ana was all the way in, so that she fell into her seat more than sitting on it. She pulled the door closed even as the car bumped over the curb and onto the street in a blare of horns, and buckled her belt while Mom screamed at a lady who had been walking her dog there to get the fuck out of her way.
The lady stared at Ana, gape-mouthed, as she rode by. Any other day, Ana would have slouched low and tried not to be seen, but not today. She would never see that lady again. That lady would never again see her. Aunt Easter might be coming right this second, but she'd never get here in time. Ana was being taken away and she would never come back. She would never see Aunt Easter again. She would never see David. She would never go to Elizabeth Gaskell Middle School in two years or Blackwood High in five. That life, that promise of a family and a home with hugs and leftover pizza and a bedroom with a TV and a computer or even just a real bed instead of a mattress on the floor and a smelly, stuffy closet, was gone, killed in the night along with David.
It was her fault. It had been his plan, but he'd done it for her, so it was her fault. David was gone and Ana was taken and it was all her fault.
She started to cry, silent, but her mom noticed anyway and smashed her in the face with one wild fist. Ana pressed both hands over her eyes, shivering, until they stopped making tears, then twisted around in her seat to watch her house grow small under the November sky. There were tire tracks in the grass. The front door was wide open. At the end of the dark hall, her homework was still sitting on the kitchen table, with her literature book open to the chapter of Treasure Island where Billy Bones gets the Black Spot and her unfinished vocabulary paper and unwritten essay laid out by her backpack. Last night, my cousin disappeared, it said, and underneath that, SUDDENLY, A SPIDER!!! With three exclamation points, so the cops would know it was serious.
Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7000954/chapters/15948751