The Springtrap Saga Book Four: Darkness in the Stars

Chapter Ten

From the disembodied veil of darkness, hovering between life and death, garbled, raucous chatter scrapes his hearing receptors. The breaching of noise into his world, a world that was pressed down with silence, slowly drags him back to consciousness. Feeling seeps back into his weary limbs. Grogginess drags at his eyelids, threatening to seal them shut, but he slides them open nonetheless.

     Nothing could have prepared him for what his eyes are absorbing.

     The entities coiled before him are like nothing he's ever seen on Earth. Their bodies fold in elegant loops, and their undersides bristle with dozens of centipede-like legs. A crown of black antler-like horns garnishes each head like a helmet. Alternating bands of black and yellow circle their bodies. Prickles crawl along the fabric lining his suit as the beings appraise him with eyes like pools of night.

     A gasp jolts from his voice box. His limbs scrabble against the ground, instinctively pushing him against the sand-colored wall. Panic thuds against his chest until he wonders if his spring locks are going to snap. A grave musing slithers into his mind: these may be demons. He may be in some kind of hell. He never really knew what to believe regarding the afterlife, but he did know wherever his spirit would go after it slipped from life, it wouldn't be good.

     "Who are you?" The words are spiked with terror. After his voice box has been lying dormant for so long (save for shouting and sobbing), his intonations sound strange to his own ears. Desperation folds his brow into an upward furrow.

     "We are Dolorasian scientists." The words are steeped in serenity. The being's words are coated in a rasp, as though its vocal cords weren't quite strung right for the English language- which they probably weren't. "We are fascinated by beings from other planets- Earthlings, in particular."

     "Wait..." Disbelief slackens his jaw into a gape. Shock pushes his eyes into a bulge so far they jut past the sockets carved into his face. Dizziness fogs his thoughts. "Are you saying I'm IN SPACE?!"

     The being's head dips in a nod made fluid by calm. "Please. Tell us what you saw when you died?"

     It takes a moment for the question to penetrate his daze of shock. All of this stimulation barraging his senses is muddling his ability to think. One moment, he was wedged in a corner in his room, swamped in darkness- literally and figuratively. The next, he woke up in a strange room whose walls are peppered with a false pattern of sand!

     But he does manage to cobble together a response, albeit a shaken one. "I wasn't dead. I just went dormant because I was so sad without the kids..."

     Not many people know this, but when he was entombed in the dank shadows of the safe room, the air choked with must, he was wide awake for most of it. When he wasn't imprisoned in a torrent of nightmares (which he actually encouraged Cassidy to give him), he was languishing in isolation. His fists hammered against the metal door in the desperate hope the sound would bang into someone's ears and someone would save him. Without any windows to let sunlight stream in, he couldn't tell whether it was night or day or how much time was bleeding away (it's been scientifically proven such a thing peppers the mind with insanity- or worsens it, in his case). All he could hear was the echo of his own plaintive sobs as dust coated his tattered suit and the reek of his own rotting corpse boiled up from his animatronic shell. He only went dormant about three months before he was discovered.

     Suddenly, urgency fizzes through his soul and plucks him bolt upright. He aligns his gaze with the aliens' and inflates it into desperation. Tears paint a husk over his voice. "Have you seen them? Have you seen my little ones...?"

     The alien's head dips in another nod. "Yes. They are here."

     Once again, it takes a moment for the words to sink in. The news reverberates with such an impact it seems his hearing receptors don't absorb it at first. He's encased in a cocoon of numbness frosted with disbelief. His eyelids flutter up and down in several blinks as he tries to glean the meaning from the string of sounds.