Chapter 3: Where Monsters Go to Die

Chapter 3: Where Monsters Go to Die

The whispers coiled in the silence of Robbie’s perfect room.

“…obbie…”

“…nine…”

They weren’t just sounds he’d heard; they were hooks that had snagged deep in his mind, pulling him toward the one place he was forbidden to go. His father’s explanation about “broken toys” and “defective props” crumbled into dust against the memory of that desperate, electronic voice. It had known his name. It had called to him.

Linda’s warning echoed with a chilling new significance. Some doors are meant to stay closed forever. But how could he stay away? How could he sleep in this quiet, sterile room, play with these bright, silent toys, knowing that a terrible secret was festering in the dark just a few hundred yards away? The studio no longer felt like a cage; it felt like the pristine, observable area of an experiment, and the Ossuary was the grim dissection room next door.

His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs, a drumbeat of fear and resolve. He had to know.

Slipping out of his room was easy. The hallways were as empty and silent as a tomb. The air outside was cool and carried the scent of night-blooming jasmine from the manicured gardens, a sweet perfume that felt like a lie. He stayed in the shadows, his red t-shirt a dangerously bright beacon under the cold, electric moons of the studio lamps. Every flicker of a light, every rustle of leaves, sent a jolt of panic through him, but no one appeared. The guards, the staff—wherever they were, they weren't watching now. Or so he hoped.

The chain-link fence surrounding the Ossuary was taller than it looked, its rusted diamonds sharp and menacing. But near the back, where the cypress trees grew thickest, a heavy branch had fallen in a long-ago storm, caving in a small section near the ground. It was just big enough. Sucking in his breath, Robbie wriggled through the gap, the sharp metal teeth of the fence catching on the back of his shirt with a soft rip.

He was in. The air immediately changed. The sweet jasmine was gone, replaced by the thick, metallic tang of rust and the sharp, clean smell of ozone he’d noticed when he first arrived, only now it was ten times stronger, acrid and overwhelming. He crept toward the building, a hulking shadow against the dark sky. The main door was just as Linda had described: a slab of solid steel, held fast by a chain thick enough to moor a ship and a padlock that looked like it had been forged in a dragon’s furnace. Impossible.

Panic fluttered in his chest. Had he come all this way for nothing? He ran a hand along the corrugated wall, the rust flaking off like dried blood under his fingertips. Then he saw it. A few feet to the side of the main door was a low, square maintenance hatch, its cover pried half-open and held in place by a single, straining bolt. It was dark inside, a square of perfect blackness.

This was it. Taking one last, shuddering breath, Robbie gripped the edge of the panel and pulled. The bolt groaned in protest and then snapped with a loud crack that seemed to echo across the entire studio. The panel swung free. He scrambled through the opening, dropping with a soft thud onto a dusty concrete floor.

The darkness was absolute, a physical presence that pressed in on him. The stench was almost suffocating now—rust, ozone, stale oil, and something else, something faintly organic and rotten, like meat left too long in the sun. He fumbled along the wall, his hands patting desperately for a light switch. His fingers brushed against a cold, metal plate. He flicked the switch.

With a deafening CLANK that echoed through the cavernous space, a single, bare bulb suspended from the high ceiling flickered erratically. It sputtered, buzzed, and finally cast a weak, sickly yellow light over the scene below.

Robbie’s breath hitched in his throat. This was no warehouse. This was a charnel house.

He stood on a narrow gantry overlooking a vast pit filled with a metallic nightmare. Mountains of mangled animatronic parts rose in jagged peaks and valleys. There were heaps of twisted chrome endoskeletons, their limbs bent at impossible angles. Piles of servo-motors and wiring harnesses lay tangled like nests of metallic snakes. A pyramid of shattered heads stared up at him from the floor, their synthetic skin peeling back from chrome skulls, their lifeless glass eyes reflecting the single, swinging bulb with a dead, accusing light. He saw the snarling muzzle of a werewolf from one of his father’s films, its jaw ripped clean off. He saw the serene face of a princess android, her cheek caved in, revealing the complex clockwork beneath.

This was where monsters came to die. His father hadn’t been lying, but he hadn’t told even a fraction of the truth. These weren’t just broken toys. The sheer violence of their dismemberment, the agony frozen in their shattered forms, screamed of something more. This was a graveyard built by rage.

Driven by a morbid need to find the source of the voice, Robbie descended a rickety metal staircase into the pit. His sneakers crunched on shattered plastic and grated against loose gears. The air was cold, the kind of deep, penetrating cold that came from tons of sunless metal. With every step, he felt the weight of a thousand dead eyes watching him. The light above him flickered again, and for a terrifying half-second, it seemed like one of the heads in the pile turned to follow his progress. A glitch. It had to be a glitch.

He moved cautiously toward the center of the pit, where the wreckage was thickest. "Hello?" he whispered, his own voice sounding fragile and thin.

There was no answer but the drip of condensation from a pipe somewhere high above.

He took another step, placing his foot on what he thought was a solid sheet of metal plating. It shifted under his weight. He stumbled, his arms flailing for balance. He reached out to steady himself against a pile of torso assemblies stacked like firewood.

And the pile moved.

Before he could even scream, a torso from the middle of the stack lunged with the speed of a striking cobra. Its arm, ending in a five-fingered hand of bare steel, shot out. The cold, unyielding fingers clamped around his ankle like a vice.

Robbie shrieked, a raw, primal sound of pure terror. He fell backward, kicking wildly, but the grip was unbreakable, the metal digging painfully into his skin. He twisted his head to look at his attacker. It was the upper half of a simple, humanoid robot, its chest plate ripped open to expose a snarl of severed wires. Its head was tilted at a broken angle, and one of its optic sensors glowed with a faint, crimson light.

A wave of static erupted from a speaker grille in its chest. The sound was a painful grinding, the noise of a machine forcing itself to perform a function it was never designed for. Then, the static resolved into a voice—the same distorted, desperate rasp he had heard on the wind.

It spoke, each word a struggle, a gasp of sound clawed from a dying throat.

“He… gave us… pain.”

The red light in its eye flickered, focusing on Robbie with an unnerving intensity. The metallic fingers tightened their grip.

“He’ll do the same… to you.”

Robbie stared in horror, his mind refusing to process the words. A cold dread, far deeper and more terrifying than the simple fear of being caught, washed over him. The animatronic’s head tilted, a slow, grinding movement of protesting servos.

“You’re the replacement,” it rasped, the words crackling with static and despair. “You’re next.”