Animatronics Nightmare Novels & Stories

"You already have the deadpan sarcasm down to an art form." Gavin laughed, taking off his glasses to clean them on his shirt. "Hey, if I'm being forced into participating in this elaborate Halloween production, I'm going all in. I already ordered Thing. You know, the creepy disembodied hand that crawls around. It's animatronic and everything." Lucas groaned from the couch, looking genuinely pained. "You're all taking this way too seriously." "That's because you have no Halloween spirit," Piper teased, pointing an accusing finger at him. "You're like the Scrooge of Halloween."

After three back-to-back nights of working until 3:00 am, I dropped dead. Honestly, I thought it was a relief and that my 23 years of corporate misery had finally come to a blissful end. But when I opened my eyes, I found myself transmigrated into a horror game. Right now, I was sitting in a classroom. A hanging ghost dangled from the blackboard, and its long tongue was dragging across the floor. A jumper ghost was doing a handstand on the desk with its eyeballs stretched six feet out of their sockets.

The screeching of the brakes tore through the Crownpoint night. Because of the sudden stop, my body lurched forward, then my seatbelt yanked me back. "Dante" turned and stared straight at me, a storm barely contained in his eyes. "Did you get a good look at them?" His intensity scared me. I shrank back a little and nodded. "Y-Yeah… That woman was smoking, like a runway model." "Where were they?" His voice was icy and hard, like it had been tempered in frost.

My breath hitched in my throat when my eyes met his. "It's been a long time,” he spoke, his lips turning upwards in his sweetest smile but I knew what was behind that smile. A monster. The monster who tortured me, who killed my sister and now wanted to kill me. A voice in my head screamed to give up. I was tired of running. Tired of being scared and tired of always looking over my shoulder for his shadow that always followed me.

And—I remember now—that furball outside was from Crescent Moon. Heat warmed Roy’s face when he realized he hadn’t seen anything new since stepping foot in the house. The same smell that had wafted from the first animatronic perfumed the space, speaking of fresh grease on old, steel limbs. He shook his head, getting more pissed by the second. This isn’t a haunted house; it’s a goddamned shrine to his own career! He’ll probably keep it open all year-round. Stroking that big Hollywood ego. “Prick. Goddamned prick!” Roy whispered in a sputter when he again coaxed his feet to move. Any fear still lingering inside him quickly gave way to rage. He identified each of his rival’s creations as they ca

[Welcome to Eternal Nightmare. Survival is victory.] The cold, robotic female voice blasted through the dark while I was sprawled on the couch doomscrolling. The next second, a white flash nuked my vision and forced my eyes shut. When I opened them again, my living room had straight-up rage quit and turned into a blood-red wasteland. "Okay, what the hell?" I squinted and spotted my six-foot-two husband, Adrian Chase, already doing the whole protective-dad thing with one arm around our son.

I slowly opened my teary eyes and turned to see Shantel. What the hell was she doing here? And how was she able to find me? So many thoughts ran through my head, but that would be later to think about because I watched Shantel begin to chant some words, facing me. Samantha lunged forward, but Shantel merely lifted one finger. An invisible force slammed Samantha backward. My eyes widened in shock. How the hell was Shantel able to do that? It was a pity, five years ago when she didn't shift like the others, then, she had recently been replaced by my first maid who had died from wolfsbane poison.

Lucian wheezed, his knuckles cracking as he gripped the floorboards. "They're inside," Phineas whispered, checking the cylinder of his gun. "I can hear the boots." The heavy double doors of the nursery didn't just open; they disintegrated. Standing in the cloud of splinters was a nightmare of chrome and meat. Ignatius. The man was a walking graveyard of science. His left arm was a piston-driven limb of matte-black titanium, and his chest was a transparent cage of glass and wires, housing a heart that glowed with a synthetic, pulsing blue light.

It was the silence that followed the cannon fire. ​“Cassian, look out!” Winnie cried. ​I spun just in time to see a mechanical monstrosity crashing through a glass storefront. It was a ‘Clockwork Hound’—a terrifying blend of brass gears and biological components, its eyes glowing with a red, artificial light. It lunged at me, its steel jaws snapping with enough force to crush a boulder. ​I didn’t move. I let the shadow take me.

It cracks against the drywall, splintering the frame, and then slumps to the ground. Lucas moves so fast I can’t tell what he’s doing until a sickening crack of bones rings out, twisting the creature’s head around. As soon as he drops it, the thing explodes into rats, all dead expect one. “Wait,” I yell as Lucas goes to stomp on it. The thing writhes around on the ground, trying to get off its back. “It might go back to—I don’t know—a home base or something.” Lucas nods. “A pied piper, so to speak.”