Deceptive

Enter

Somebody was approaching the door.

Shit.

Charlie turned her flashlight off, hastily stuffed everything back into the box, and kicked it back under the cabinet.

The door handle started to turn.

She practically threw herself into the space under the desk.

The door opened.

Somebody stepped in. The clown herself.

She didn't bother turning on the light.

Charlie held her breath as Elizabeth made her way over to the desk. By some miracle of Scott, she didn't walk around to the other side. She simply stopped in front of it, muttering something under her breath.

To her horror, Charlie realized that she had forgotten to put the journal back where she had found it.

She could hear it being flipped through. There was a pause and a short laugh before the journal was carelessly tossed back onto the desk.

Charlie willed herself not to flinch too hard at the sudden thud.

The drawer above her head opened. She shrunk further into the desk.

Rummaging sounds followed.

The drawer loudly closed.

Elizabeth left the room and closed the door.

Charlie sat there unmoving for a solid minute afterward. Once she was sure nobody was coming back in, she took the deepest breath she had ever taken in her life and let her head fall back against the desk.

She looked down at the small stack of photos that were still in her hand, but she didn't really need to. The images would definitely be seared into her mind, the blood running off of that mutilated face and seeping into her thoughts without warning, much like synthetic fur and cold human eyes did.

Somebody else here needed to know about this.

After crawling back out from under the desk, Charlie re-rolled the pictures and placed the rubber band back around them. Not all of them, though. She left two out. The first two that she had looked at. The rest were placed back into the blood-stained jacket. She attempted to rearrange the items in the box so that it didn't look like someone had been rifling through them.

Her hand lingered over the pushbutton knife for a second. Charlie thought that maybe she ought to take it with her too. It suddenly felt very wrong to leave a knife in Elizabeth's possession. She picked it up and released the blade, nearly slicing her hand open. It was slightly rusty near the handle and there were splotches of something dark staining it. She didn't want to think about who those came from...

Closing the blade while making as little contact with it as possible, Charlie stuffed it into one of her jacket pockets. With everything else put back properly, she slid the box back into the position that she found it in.

Standing up, Charlie grabbed a pen out of the cup on the desk. She wrote something onto the back of both photos, folded them, and then stuck them into the pocket of her faded jeans.

Nobody appeared to be nearby when she opened the door just a crack, so Charlie took the opportunity to leave the office as quickly as possible.

Not long after, she rounded a corner and nearly slammed into somebody. Perfect.

"Charlie! When did you get back here?"

She didn't answer his question. Instead, she casually stuck something into the chest pocket of his suit coat.

"Uh—?"

"I've gotta go again, but I think you ought to know about this. This is the sort of thing that you... have to see to accept, I think. This isn't objectively worse than things you've already seen—"

"Wait, what is it?"

Charlie leaned closer to him, lowering her voice so much that he had to strain his ears to hear. "I'll just... be blunt. It's... it's, pictures of somebody that's... likely dead. It's... um, somebody that you know. I'll explain things. Not now, though. Because I... I don't even know how. I'll come back around sometime soon. Try not to do anything without me."

"But didn't you just get here?"

Charlie didn't respond. She was already halfway down the hall, trying to swallow the lump in her throat.

Foxy was now thoroughly confused and alarmed. For one thing, apparently, somebody that he knew had died and Charlie had somehow acquired pictures of their body. While he appreciated the content warning for what she had given him, he was now hit was a combination of desperately wanting to look and not wanting to subject himself to that. As far as he was aware, nobody he knew was missing or anything like that... If Charlie knew that it was someone he knew, that sort of narrowed it down.

Slowly, Foxy left the spot where he stood and went to his room -- which was where he had been heading before that encounter. His heart was pounding in his chest.

He didn't check his pocket until the door was closed behind him. It seemed that Charlie had given him a cassette as well as the photos. He set the tape down onto his vanity and decided to focus on the pictures. On the back of each one, written in Charlie's slanted handwriting, was, 'If you look, listen to yourself again. Wait for me.'

Foxy unfolded them and flipped them over.

His heart dropped.