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the hecc
where am i
why are you a ghost
I deleted that tho
TL;DR -- A year after Charlie's death, Henry surprises Phone Guy at the cemetery and learns that they share a very sad and mysterious secret.
Warning: This chapter contains disturbing content, including lengthy discussion of death, suicidal ideation and alcohol use. Also, since the novels gave conflicting dates for Charlie's birth year and other events in her life, I'm sticking with the original date of 1978 as her birth year. And for those who missed the first chapter of this, Clyde is Phone Guy. There will be more context in other chapters, but in this one he's feeling unwarranted guilt for what happened on Halloween the previous year. During Henry's absence, he's been recruited to take part in a clandestine experiment run by Will Afton, testing a "vitamin formula" that's really remnant injections. Clyde knows it's sketchy but has no clue what remnant is.
October 1981
Clyde cursed under his breath as a pair of car headlights cut through the cemetery, causing a row of tombstones not far from where he'd been quietly reflecting to light up before him like a jawful of crooked, mismatched teeth. He pressed his back against the stone where he'd been leaning, feeling its cool granite against his shoulder blades, and bit his lower lip, waiting. The driver killed the lights and then a car door closed quietly, no doubt in the hopes of avoiding attention. Whoever the other late-night mourner was, he had no more right to be in the cemetery after dusk than he did, Clyde tried to assure himself.
Gravel crunched beneath shoes as the late-night trespasser made his way along the drive. So he, too, had a relative buried in the "cheap seats," as Clyde's father had ruefully called the section of the cemetery set awkwardly near the highway and on hilly ground overtaken by crabgrass. Not that Clyde was about to judge, for much of his departed family was interred here and his parents had even pre-purchased their own flat headstone amidst the others, already engraved with their birth years. Heck, thought the young man without emotion, if he'd managed to go through with it not so long ago, he would have joined the ranks of late Millers in this beyond humble resting place, unless the rumors were true that cemeteries wouldn't allow the burials of those who took their own li--
"Clyde!" His former boss's voice was unmistakable, though even more thin and weary than he'd remembered. It had been too long since Henry had been driven from the restaurant he had cofounded, his flight fueled by intense grief that had devolved into sheer psychosis, or so Clyde's remaining boss, William Afton, had hinted more than once.
"What are you doing here?" Henry demanded, his steely eyes fixing on the shaken young man before him, at least until his gaze fell to the surname on the tombstone behind him. "Oh, geez, I'm sorry. I guess you have someone you miss as well. It's just that if you were trying to be sneaky, you might as well have been carrying a tiny torch around. That thing gives you away like nobody's business."
Clyde self-consciously remembered the lit cigarette dangling from between his lips and wanted to slap his forehead in annoyance, but instead he made his best effort to explain himself.
"I never managed 'sneaky' very well, sir. My brother Todd's buried here; he was born too soon when I was just a kid." Failing to feel his eyes sting with the tears that usually appeared when he mentioned his lost sibling's name, he shrugged, having grown used to the numbness. "What can I say, some might find it creepy but I like this place at night better. It's even quieter, you have your thoughts to yourself and you feel closer to, uh, them."
Henry nodded, extending a hand to help Clyde to his feet. "I feel the same way, and there's nobody to keep track of how long you've been mourning or whether you've 'moved on,' whatever the hell that's supposed to mean." Not releasing his grip, Henry pulled him along past the tombstones. Clyde already knew their destination all too well, four rows down from Todd's grave, then eight to the left.
"Thanks for volunteering to join me," Henry said with a wry smirk once they reached the grave of his toddler daughter. A year after her burial, the crabgrass had overtaken the soil around her headstone in scrubby patches, and Clyde reluctantly followed Henry's lead after he sank to the ground, as if sitting down for a casual chat.
"So, I've been out of the loop for a while. Is Will treating you well? That's a nice jacket, by the way."
Clyde's eyes widened and he hugged his denim-covered arms around himself. "Thanks, sir. I always kinda wanted one, and Will gave me a bit of a raise so I finally went for it."
"You mean he paid you extra under the table for taking part in those experiments he was always raving about. I always knew he'd go through with those once he found a willing volunteer. He tried to recruit me, but I always turned him down." Henry's accusation came pointedly, and Clyde straightened up in defense, his hand straying to the nylon backpack that seemed permanently affixed to his torso in recent months.
"I-it's not drugs or anything, sir," he protested weakly, fiddling with the backpack's zipper as if struggling with a decision before opening the bag and extracting a squat glass bottle that Henry could only assume contained some vile, bottom-shelf liquor. Wordlessly challenging the other man to stop him, he took a long swig, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and never broke his defiant stare. He hardly drank like this often but had fallen into the occasional habit in recent months, especially when he tried to reconcile in his mind the source of his newfound windfall.
"Will always had an interest in nutrition and human biology, aside from his fascination with robotic technology, but don't fool yourself, he's no doctor and he never played one on TV," Henry joked, forcing himself to ignore Clyde's inappropriate drinking. From what he could tell, the kid had arrived on foot anyway and would exit the same way. It wouldn't be his fault if he tripped over a half-dozen headstones on his way out.
"He may call it a new 'vitamin formula,' but he might as well be injecting you with windshield-washing fluid for all you care," Henry pressed, and Clyde's grip on the bottle neck tightened. "He's hardly got your best interests in mind, y'know."
"Hey, I needed the money, okay?" Clyde almost added, not all of us can afford to take a year off to grieve, especially if we have eight younger siblings back at home to help take care of. As soon as the thought struck him, a fresh wave of guilt struggled its way to the surface. Henry had lost one of his children and who was he to decide how long the man should mourn his loss? As much as the tragedy a year before had forever changed the course of his own life right at the cusp of adulthood, Henry was the one who had undoubtedly been hurt the most.
"I--I see you brought Ella." Clyde's attention fell for the first time to the rag doll Henry had carried into the cemetery, and the other man self-consciously grinned, carefully propping the soft little character up against his Charlotte's tombstone. Beloved daughter, read the inscription, along with Charlie's birth and death dates, separated by a mere two years.
"Yeah." Henry tousled the yarn hair of the store-bought doll. "Sammy took Elroy with him when he moved out, but I sorta told Charlotte I'd take good care of Ella for her." Before the horrific murder that had destroyed his small family, he had regaled his twins with stories of their dolls, giving the cheap mass-produced toys personalities of their own and grand adventures that only took place when their young caretakers were fast asleep. Now, with his wife and son driven away by his constant diet of grief and regret for what had been, he had clung to Ella as the only remnant of a family he might ever hope for again. Actually, when it came to that, Clyde didn't know the half of it.
Clyde swallowed hard, fumbling for something kind to say. "Y-you're doing a fine job, sir, and Ella's in good hands."
Henry smirked again, and to Clyde's surprise he beckoned for the bottle, taking a long swig of his own. "I've told you before, knock it off with the 'sir' business, especially now that I'm no longer your boss. I'm only, what, five years older than you? Seven, at most."
Clyde felt his face flush and he silently prayed Henry wouldn't notice. He had hardly forgotten that he had once harbored a bewildering crush on his former boss, though he had never once acted on it out of respect for Henry's marriage, and later, his grieving solitude.
"Guess you got me." Clyde reached to the lawn near Ella, where something was resting near the base of the tombstone, barely visible in the faint glow of his cigarette. He studied the small item he had retrieved and ran a finger along its jagged edge. "Hey, what's this, a circuit board? Too bad it got whacked by a lawn mower."
"It must have fallen from one of Charlie's old toys I've brought here from time to time." Henry snatched the mangled piece of circuitry from Clyde as though it still had some value known only to him, reverently tucking it into the pocket on his flannel shirt. "Y'know, the animatronic buddies I made for her back in the day? Call me sentimental but I like to bring them along on visits; I think it registers in their A.I."
Self-conscious he had said too much, Henry fell silent, watching Clyde's chest rise and fall as he took in the idea of an animatronic's artificial intelligence processing something as profound as death. Time had not been any kinder to his former worker than it had been to himself, and Clyde's face was sallow and drained for someone so young. Only his weary eyes, shielded by the lenses of his eyeglasses, remained familiar, a mere shadow of the enthusiastic and happy-go-lucky individual he had hired two years before.
"You're looking a little queasy, and it's not the booze." Henry's voice was almost timid, yet inquisitive, and Clyde answered with a shake of his head, fearing where this was leading.
"So you sense it too, and it's been drawing you back to this place," he pressed on, watching the younger man tug at his shirt collar in discomfort. "Almost like a radio is on far away, but you can't make out any of the words. You're not going crazy, but at last, someone else who can detect it! Here, follow me." He half-dragged a reluctant Clyde headlong past several rows of tombstones into another unkempt section with overgrown grass.
"It's stronger here," agreed Clyde, his eyes tightly shut. He yelped when he felt his hands seized and found himself spun in a giddy circle that hardly seemed appropriate for a solemn cemetery after dark.
"Don't you see what it is? Haven't you guessed by now?"
I don't want to know. Clyde rubbed his jacket-clad arms briskly, overcome by a sudden chill, but Henry was in his element, bending to stroke the tall blades of grass beneath their feet.
"What we're both able to pick up on is the energy that was left behind!" Henry's excited revelation was met with a dull stare, yet he continued, undeterred. "Underneath us and around us, there's something that remains! It's the pacemakers, Clyde. There have to be at least a half-dozen around us right now, buried with those they served in life. They're still faithfully sending out their electromagnetic energy to the dead in hopes of returning their hearts to a proper rhythm, and they'll keep on doing that for years, at least until their batteries finally give out--"
"T-that's ghastly, sir!" Clyde protested, stunned at the thought of the implanted medical devices trying in vain to revive their late masters. "And like hell that's gonna work, though I can't blame 'em for trying since it's all they're programmed to do. There's no reviving embalmed heart tissue, and I don't see what you're getting at here." I hardly like where this conversation is headed...
"What if something remained from Charlotte's bond with Ella, something that her A.I. cannot let go? What if those memories weren't retained in a medical device, but in the inner workings of her closest friend and confidante, her pal Ella? I can feel it, Clyde. That doll has something very special, something well beyond the primitive animatronic devices I've been using to improve her -- what if she's not gone forever?"
"Th-that's enough!" Clyde's mind was reeling as he shook free from Henry's grasp, overwhelmed by the acute awareness of the pacemakers silently running down their batteries beneath the rocky soil of the cemetery. He stood a few feet away, violently shivering now. "I miss Charlie like nothing else, but we're talking souls here, not machines. You asked how Will's been treating me? Fine, the answer is like dirt! And the A.I. in the spring-lock hybrids has gone all to hell, to the point I hardly feel safe performing in your old Fredbear costume." He grasped the sides of his head, scowling. "Dammit, you're right. They have witnessed something terrible, it's implanted in their A.I. and they haven't been the same since. But that's still quite a leap from believing that A.I. can, what, hold some part of a human soul? That's just sick, man and I for one can't bring myself to believe it."
"I thought you of all folks would be the one to believe it," Henry said in sharp disappointment at what he saw as a betrayal, even blasphemy of the deep beliefs he had come to hold. The kid was already sensitive to the energy around them; how could he deny the rest? "What's in the backpack, by the way?"
"Nothing you need to know about." Clyde's hand flew again to the zipper on the worn nylon bag, a leftover from his high school days, and he forced a smile with great effort. "On second thought, pick your poison and there's at least a misdemeanor's worth in there. You got me there."
"You're a lousy liar," Henry scolded, putting an abrupt end to Clyde's half-hearted joking. Uncomfortable silence filled the space until Henry pressed on. "How'd you do it, and what drove you to it? Did you cry your soul out into that old puppet friend of yours, or did you bleed out in other ways?"
Sane people don't talk that way! In a state of abject horror, Clyde ran a hand through his sweaty hair before stumbling backwards, gracelessly tumbling over a headstone and making his way to his grass-stained knees.
"That's it, I'm outta here," he finally made out, taking off at a headlong sprint through the cemetery. Henry stood forlornly watching him before he returned to Charlotte's grave, retrieving Ella and smoothing out her fancy dress and crinolines. His face stung with shame for humiliating the other man and sending him into a panic, but that was overridden by a burning curiosity.
Henry knew full well that he had somehow transferred a very part of his own essence, his soul, to his daughter's rag doll, and after a year of tinkering with his most ambitious animatronics project yet he was soon to make an enormous leap of faith for his Charlotte's sake. He had failed her once, but there would be no letting her down again.
How Clyde had lost such a big remnant of his former self into that ridiculous puppet of his was anyone's guess, and Henry was far less optimistic about his future but helpless to do much about it. His old worker had already been drained of his spirit and zest for life, having fallen in with Will and his mad experimentation. Too naive to grasp what was at play, Clyde was now left toting around what he had lost like the heavy burden it had no doubt become, contained in that worn backpack.
"I can't see this ending well, Ella," Henry said to the doll in his arms as he made his way back to the car. Unless I can help him out someday, but I can't see how he can hold out that long. I've only begun to grasp this myself.
Please stop this talk, Into Madness isn't even out yet and y'all are being the namesake-