Chapter 4: The Janitor's Keys

Chapter 4: The Janitor's Keys

“She’s gone,” Leo breathed, the words barely a whisper against the cold glass of the locked door. “Mitzi’s gone.”

A terrified gasp came from the darkness behind him. “Leo? What’s going on? The kitchen door is locked, too!” Maya stumbled into the dim light of the main hall, her face a pale mask of fear. Trailing her was Dale, the night janitor, a portly man whose usual gruff demeanor had dissolved into wide-eyed panic.

“All the service exits are locked. Bolted from the inside,” Dale stammered, wringing his greasy hands. “It’s impossible. I’m the only one who locks up.”

Leo pushed himself away from the door, his mind a maelstrom of terror and frantic calculation. The impossible head-turn in the maintenance room. The missing animatronic. The sealed exits. These were not separate events; they were a sequence. A closing trap.

“The keys, Dale,” Leo said, his voice sharp with adrenaline. “Where are the master keys?”

Dale’s hands flew to his belt, then to the pockets of his coveralls, slapping them with increasing desperation. His face crumpled. “They’re… they’re not here. They were on my belt clip. I had them not twenty minutes ago in the supply closet.”

Panic, hot and acidic, erupted. Three people. Locked in a building where the laws of physics had apparently been suspended. Maya’s earlier words about the place waking up at night no longer sounded like superstition; they sounded like a statement of fact.

“Okay, okay, think,” Leo commanded, forcing his voice to be steady, trying to build a dam of logic against the tide of hysteria. He was the mechanic. He understood systems. This was a system, just a terrifyingly new and hostile one. “We retrace Dale’s steps. The keys have to be here somewhere. Maya, check the staff room again. Dale, the supply closet. I’ll check the back hallways.”

The other two nodded, their faces grim, and scurried off into the oppressive darkness, their footsteps swallowed by the vast, silent building.

Leo turned and plunged back into the service corridors, the concrete maze that felt like the building’s skeletal underbelly. The familiar path he walked every day was now an alien landscape fraught with peril. He moved quickly, his flashlight beam cutting a nervous, bouncing path through the gloom. It swept over stacks of pizza boxes, cobweb-draped pipes, and hulking, silent ice machines. Every shadow seemed to writhe just at the edge of his vision, every drip of condensation a footstep.

He rounded a corner into a long, straight corridor that led to the loading bay. And he froze.

At the far end of the hall, perhaps fifty feet away, a single, bare bulb on the ceiling flickered erratically, casting the passage in a strobe-like, sickly yellow light. And standing directly beneath it, perfectly still, was a silhouette he knew as well as his own.

Mitzi Mozzarella.

She wasn't posed in her usual cheerful, pre-programmed stance. She stood unnaturally erect, her arms hanging limply at her sides, her head tilted at a slight, inquisitive angle. In the flickering light, her familiar yellow sweater and cheerleader skirt looked like a funeral shroud. She was a monument of wrongness, an idol of misplaced childhood joy now radiating pure menace.

Leo’s heart hammered against his ribs. He felt the cold sweat on his neck. His first instinct was to turn and run, to scream for the others. But then, as the light flickered again, he saw it.

Something was hanging from her right hand, her fuzzy, four-fingered animatronic paw. It was a cluster of metal, catching the sputtering light with a small, sharp glint.

The keys. Dale’s master keys, dangling from her limp fingers.

Leo’s terror was instantly flooded by a wave of white-hot anger. This had to be a prank. A sick, elaborate prank. Maybe Dale had dropped them, and Mitzi’s rudimentary cleaning-cycle programming—a long-abandoned subroutine he’d only read about in the old manuals—had kicked in. Or worse, maybe Dale was in on this, controlling her from some hidden remote as a twisted joke. The thought was absurd, but it was infinitely more palatable than the alternative that was clawing at the edges of his sanity.

“Very funny, Dale!” he shouted, his voice echoing unnaturally in the long hall. “You can cut it out now!”

There was no reply. Just the rhythmic buzz-flicker-buzz of the dying lightbulb. Mitzi didn’t move.

“Alright, fine,” Leo snarled under his breath. He was done being scared. He was going to get those keys and get them all out of this nightmare. Fueled by a desperate surge of adrenaline and denial, he started walking, his heavy work boots stomping down the corridor, the sound a defiant drumbeat against the silence. He was a mechanic, damn it. This was his domain. He was going to take back control from this malfunctioning pile of wires and fur.

He closed the distance, the animatronic growing larger with every step. Ten feet away. He could see the grimy texture of her synthetic fur, the faint cracks in the plastic of her unblinking, painted eyes. The cheerful, rosy cheeks painted on her face looked like feverish splotches in the jaundiced light.

Five feet away. He could smell the ozone and old dust clinging to her. She was utterly, unnervingly still. He reached out his right hand, his eyes fixed on the glinting prize. He wasn’t even looking at her face anymore, only the keys. The keys were freedom.

He stormed past her side, his fingers brushing against the coarse, fuzzy fabric of her arm. He curled his hand around the cold, familiar shape of the keys. The moment his skin touched the metal, it began.

HIIISSSSSSSSSSS.

It was the sound of a pneumatic valve opening, of compressed air flooding a piston in a fraction of a second.

Before he could even process the sound, her head, powered by machinery designed for a thousand shows a day, snapped to the side. Her jaw, a mechanism of steel and rods hidden beneath a thin rubber skin, shot open and then slammed shut.

On his hand.

A sound like a bundle of thick sticks being snapped over a knee echoed in the corridor. It was followed a millisecond later by a wet, sickening crunch.

White-hot, blinding agony exploded from his hand, shooting up his arm and detonating behind his eyes. He looked down. Mitzi’s head was turned at a ninety-degree angle, her dead, painted eyes staring directly into his. Her cheerful, smiling mouth was clamped down on his hand with the force of an industrial press. The metal teeth of her endoskeleton, never meant to touch anything but air, had sheared through flesh and bone. Blood, shockingly dark in the flickering light, gushed between her smiling plastic lips, dripping onto the concrete floor.

A scream, raw and animal, tore itself from Leo’s throat. The sound was swallowed by the long, dark hallway, a desperate, agonizing cry that was answered only by the indifferent, flickering light above. The prank was over. The malfunction had a purpose. The keys had been bait.