The Twisted Ones Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Scott Cawthon. All rights reserved.

  Photo of tv static: © Klikk/Dreamstime

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  ISBN 978-1-338-13930-3

  First printing 2017

  Cover art © 2017 Scott Cawthon.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Rick DeMonico

  Book design by Rick DeMonico

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-13931-0

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  Contents

  Half-Title Page

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  About the Authors

  Don’t trust your eyes.”

  Dr. Treadwell walked back and forth across the platform at the front of the auditorium. Her steps were slow and even, almost hypnotic.

  “Your eyes deceive you every day, filling in the blanks for you in a world of sensory overload.” An image of dizzying geometric detail lit up the canvas screen behind her. “When I say ‘sensory overload’ I mean that quite literally. At every moment, your senses are receiving far more information than they can process all at once, and your mind is forced to choose which signals to pay attention to. It does that based on your experiences, and your expectation of what is normal. The things we are familiar with are the things we can—for the most part—ignore. We see this most easily with olfactory fatigue: your nose ceases to perceive a smell when you’ve been around it for a while. You may be quite thankful for this phenomenon, depending on the habits of your roommate.”

  The class tittered dutifully, then became quiet as the image of another multicolored design flashed onto the screen.

  The professor gave a hint of a smile and continued.

  “Your mind creates motion when there is none. It fills in colors and trajectories based on what you’ve seen before, and calculates what you should be seeing now.” Another image flashed onto the overhead screen. “If your mind didn’t do this, then simply walking outside and seeing a tree would consume all your mental energy, leaving no resources to do anything else. In order for you to function in the world, your mind fills in the spaces of that tree with its own leaves and branches.” A hundred pencils scribbled all at once, filling the lecture hall with a sound like scurrying mice.

  “It’s why when you enter a house for the first time you experience a moment of dizziness. Your mind is taking in more than usual. It’s drawing a floor plan, creating a palette of colors, and saving an inventory of images to draw on later, so you don’t have to go through that exhausting intake every single time. The next time you enter that same house, you’ll already know where you are.”

  “Charlie!” An urgent voice whispered her name, inches from her ear. Charlie kept writing. She was staring straight ahead at the display at the front of the lecture hall. As Dr. Treadwell went on, she paced faster, occasionally flinging an arm toward the screen to illustrate her point. Her words seemed to be falling behind as her mind raced on ahead; Charlie had realized by the second day of classes that her professor sometimes broke off in the middle of one sentence, only to finish an entirely different one. It was like she skimmed the text in her head, reading out a few words here and there. Most of the students in her robotics class found it maddening, but Charlie liked it. It made the lesson kind of like doing a puzzle.

  The screen flashed again, displaying an assortment of mechanical parts and a diagram of an eye. “This is what you must re-create.” Dr. Treadwell stepped back from the image, turning to look at it with the class. “Basic artificial intelligence is all about sensory control. You won’t be dealing with a mind that can filter these things out for itself. You must design programs that recognize basic shapes, while discarding unimportant information. You must do for your robot what your own mind does for you: create a simplified and organized assembly of information based on what’s relevant. Let’s start by looking at some examples of basic shape recognition.”

  “Charlie,” hissed the voice again, and she waved her pencil impatiently at the figure peering over her shoulder—her friend Arty—trying to shoo him away. The gesture cost her a moment, put her half a step behind the professor. She hurried to catch up, anxious not to miss a single line.

  The paper in front of her was covered in formulas, notes in the margins, sketches, and diagrams. She wanted to get everything down all at once: not just the math, but all the things it made her think of. If she could tie the new facts to things she already knew, she’d retain it much more easily. She felt hungry for it, alert, watching for new tidbits of information like a dog under the dinner table.

  A boy near the front raised his hand to ask a question, and Charlie felt a brief flare of impatience. Now the whole class would have to stop while Treadwell went back to explain a simple concept. Charlie let her mind wander, sketching absently in the margins of her notebook.

  John would be here in—she glanced restlessly at her watch—an hour. I told him maybe someday we’ll see each other again. I guess it’s someday. He had called out of the blue: “I’m just going to be passing through,” he said, and Charlie hadn’t bothered to ask how he knew where she was. Of course he would know. There was no reason not to meet him, and she found herself alternately excited and filled with dread. Now, as she absently sketched rectangular forms along the bottom of her note paper, her stomach jumped, a little spasm of nerves. It felt like a lifetime since she last saw him. Sometimes, it felt like she’d seen him yesterday, as if the last year hadn’t passed. But of course it had, and everything had changed for Charlie once again.

  That May, the night of her eighteenth birthday, the dreams had begun. Charlie was long accustomed to nightmares, the worst moments of her past forced up like bile, into twisted versions of memories already too terrible to recall. She shoved these dreams into the back of her mind in the morning and sealed them away, knowing they would only breach it when night fell again.

  These dreams were different. When she woke, she was physically exhausted: not just drained but sore, her muscles weak. Her hands were stiff and aching, like they’d been clenched into fists for hours. These new dreams didn’t come every night, but when they did, they interrupted her regular nightmares and took them over. It didn’t matter if she was running and screaming for her life, or wandering aimlessly through a dull mishmash
of the various places she’d been all week. Suddenly, from nowhere, she would sense him: Sammy, her lost twin brother, was near.

  She knew he was present the same way she knew that she was present, and whatever the dream was, it dropped away—people, places, light, and sound. Now she was searching for him in the darkness, calling his name. He never answered. She would drop to her hands and knees, feeling her way through the dark, letting his presence guide her until she came to a barrier. It was smooth and cold, metal. She couldn’t see it, but she hit it hard with one fist and it echoed. “Sammy?” she would call, hitting harder. She stood, reaching up to see if she could scale the slick surface, but it stretched up far above her head. She beat her fists against the barricade until they hurt. She screamed her brother’s name until her throat was raw, until she fell to the floor and leaned on the solid metal, pressing her cheek to its cool surface and hoping for a whisper from the other side. He was there; she knew it as surely as if he were a part of herself.

  She knew in those dreams that he was present. Worse, when she was awake, she knew he was not there.

  In August, Charlie and Aunt Jen had their first fight. They’d always been too distant to really argue. Charlie never felt the need to rebel, because Jen provided no real authority. And Jen never took anything Charlie did personally, never tried to stop her from doing anything, as long as she was safe. The day Charlie moved in with her at the age of seven, Aunt Jen had told her plainly that she was not a replacement for Charlie’s parents. By now, Charlie was old enough to understand that Jen had meant it as a gesture of respect, a way to reassure Charlie that her father wouldn’t be forgotten, that she would always be his child. But at the time it had seemed like an admonishment. Don’t expect parenting. Don’t expect love. And so Charlie hadn’t. Jen had never failed to care for Charlie. Charlie had never wanted for food or clothing, and Jen had taught her to cook, to take care of the house, to manage her money, and to fix her own car. You have to be independent, Charlie. You have to know how to take care of yourself. You have to be stronger than—she’d cut herself off, but Charlie knew how the sentence ended. Than your father.

  Charlie shook her head, trying to jerk herself free of her own thoughts.

  “What’s wrong?” Arty said next to her.

  “Nothing,” she whispered. She ran her pencil again and again over the same lines: up, over, down, over, the graphite wearing thicker and thicker.

  Charlie had told Jen that she was going back to Hurricane, and Jen’s face turned stony, her skin paling.

  “Why would you want to do that?” she asked with a dangerous calm in her voice. Charlie’s heart beat faster. Because that’s where I lost him. Because I need him more than I need you. The thought of returning had been nagging at her for months, growing stronger with each passing week. One morning she awoke and the choice was made, final, sitting in her mind with a solid weight.

  “Jessica’s going to college at St. George,” she told her aunt. “She’s starting the summer semester so I can stay with her while I’m there. I want to see the house again. There’s still so much I don’t understand; it just feels … important,” she finished weakly, faltering as Jen’s eyes—dark blue, like marble—fixed on her.

  Jen didn’t answer for a long moment then she said simply, “No.”

  Why not? Charlie might once have said. You let me go before. But after what happened last year, when she and Jessica and the others went back to Freddy’s and discovered the horrifying truth behind the murders at her father’s old pizzeria, things had changed between them. Charlie had changed. Now she met Jen’s gaze, determined. “I’m going,” she said, trying to keep her own voice steady.

  Then everything exploded.

  Charlie didn’t know which of them started shouting first, but she screamed until her throat was fiery and sore, hurling at her aunt every pain she’d ever inflicted, every hurt she had failed to prevent. Jen shouted back that she only ever meant to care for Charlie, that she had always done her best, flinging reassuring words that somehow dripped with poison.

  “I’m leaving!” Charlie screamed with finality. She started for the door, but Jen grabbed her arm, yanking her violently back. Charlie stumbled, almost falling before she caught herself on the kitchen table, and Jen let her hand drop with a shocked expression. There was silence, and then Charlie left.

  She packed a bag, feeling as if she had somehow diverged from reality, into an impossible parallel world. Then she got in her car and drove away. She didn’t tell anyone she was going. Her friends here were not close friends; there was no one she owed an explanation.

  When Charlie got to Hurricane, she’d intended to go straight to her father’s house, to stay there for the next few days until Jessica arrived on campus. But as she reached the city limits, something stopped her. I can’t, she thought. I can’t ever go back. She turned the car around, drove straight to St. George, and slept in her car for a week.

  It was only after Charlie knocked, and Jessica opened the door with a startled expression that Charlie realized that she’d never actually mentioned her plans to Jessica, on whom they all depended. She told her everything, and Jessica, hesitantly, offered to let her stay. Charlie had slept on the floor the rest of the summer, and as the fall semester approached, Jessica didn’t ask her to leave.

  “It’s nice to have someone who knows me here,” she had said, and uncharacteristically, Charlie hugged her.

  Charlie had never cared about high school. She never paid much attention in her classes, but As and Bs came easily for her. She had never really thought about liking or disliking her subjects, though sometimes one teacher or another would make her feel a spark of interest for a year.

  Charlie hadn’t thought much beyond the end of the summer, but as she idly flipped through Jessica’s course catalog and saw advanced courses in robotics, something clicked into place. St. George was among the colleges she’d been accepted into earlier that year, though she hadn’t really intended to go to any of them. Now, however, she went to the administrative office and pleaded her case until she was allowed to enroll, despite having missed the deadline by months. There’s still so much I don’t understand. Charlie wanted to learn, and the things she wanted to learn were very specific.

  Of course there were things she had to learn before a robotics course would make any sense at all. Math had always been straightforward, functional, sort of like a game to Charlie; you did the thing you were supposed to do and got the answer. But it had never been a very interesting game. It was fun to learn something new, but then you had to keep doing it for weeks or months, bored out of your skull. That was high school. But in her first calculus class, something had happened. It was as if she’d been laying bricks for years, forced to work slowly, seeing nothing but her mortar and her trowel. Then suddenly someone pulled her back a few steps and said, “Here, look, you’ve been building this castle. Go play inside!”

  “And that’s all for today,” Professor Treadwell said at last. Charlie looked down at her paper, realizing she’d never stopped moving her pencil. She had worn dark lines right through the page, and drawn on the desk. She rubbed the marks halfheartedly with her sleeve, then opened her binder to put away her notes. Arty poked his head over her shoulder, and she closed it hastily, but he had already gotten a good look.

  “What is that, a secret code? Abstract art?”

  “It’s just math,” Charlie said a little curtly, and put the notebook in her bag. Arty was cute in a goofy way. He had a pleasant face, dark eyes, and curly brown hair that seemed to have a life of its own. He was in three of her four classes and had been following her around since the beginning of the semester like a stray duckling. To her surprise, Charlie found that she didn’t mind it.

  As Charlie left the auditorium, Arty took up his now-accustomed place at her side.

  “So, did you decide about the project?” he asked.

  “Project?” Charlie vaguely remembered something about a project he wanted to do together. He
gave a little nod, waiting for her to catch up.

  “Remember? We have to design an experiment for chem? I thought we could work together. You know, with your brains and my looks …” He trailed off, grinning.

  “Yeah, that sounds—I have to go meet someone,” she interrupted herself.

  “You never meet anyone,” he said, surprised, blushing bright red as soon as the words were out of his mouth. “I didn’t mean it that way. Not that it’s any of my business, but, who is it?” He gave a broad smile.

  “John,” Charlie said without elaboration. Arty looked crestfallen for a moment but recovered quickly.

  “Of course, yeah. John. Great guy,” he said teasingly. He raised his eyebrows, prompting for details, but she gave none. “I didn’t know you were—that you had a—that’s cool.” Arty’s face took on a look of careful neutrality. Charlie looked at him oddly. She hadn’t meant to imply that she and John were a couple but she didn’t know how to correct him. She couldn’t explain who John was to her without telling Arty far more than she wanted him to know.

  They walked in silence for a minute across the main quad, a small, grassy square surrounded by brick and concrete buildings.

  “So, is John from your hometown?” Arty asked at last.

  “My hometown is thirty minutes away. This place is basically just an extension of it,” Charlie said. “But yeah, he’s from Hurricane.” Arty hesitated, then leaned in closer to her, glancing around as if someone might be listening.

  “I always meant to ask you,” he said.

  Charlie looked at him wearily. Don’t ask about it.

  “I’m sure people ask you about it all the time, but come on—you can’t blame me for being curious. That stuff about the murders, it’s like an urban legend around here. I mean, not just around here. Everywhere. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza—”

  “Stop.” Charlie’s face was suddenly immobile. She felt as if moving it, making any expression at all, would require an arcane skill she no longer possessed. Arty’s face had changed, too. His easy smile drained away. He looked almost frightened. Charlie bit the inside of her lip, willing her mouth to move.