“What is that?” Jessica whispered, searching the walls and ceiling, unable to make sense of the noises. Then everything fell silent. They waited. Jessica listened, counting to ten, then twenty, and the sound did not come again. She counted to thirty, then sixty. I have to do something. She straightened, carefully extracting herself from Alanna’s grasp. “Wait here,” she whispered. She crept toward the door, stepping as softly as she could; as she moved she could feel their eyes on her. The door was ordinary-looking, a wooden door with a brass knob—the kind you’d see on a closet. Jessica took a quick, deep breath, then stretched out her arm to take the knob.

Before she could touch it, the knob turned, and the door began to slide open. Jessica held her breath, and took steady steps backward, desperately wanting to rejoin the group, even if they were just children. At first, Jessica saw only pink and white, the shapes indistinct, then her mind made sense of it: slowly, the enormous head of a garishly painted fox peered into the room.

Foxy? Jessica thought, hazily taking in pointed pink ears and yellow eyes. Its cheeks were painted with red circles, like the animatronic girl’s had been. The creature looked at her for a long moment, and she stared back, unable to remember how to move her feet, and then the fox head retreated, and all the children screamed. Something new sprang violently into the room, a long and segmented metal limb like a spider’s leg. It braced against the floor just as a second metal leg violently invaded the space, embedding itself in the nearest wall. The children screamed, and Jessica raced toward them, looking frantically for a way out. The room was filling with arms and legs, extended and contorted, some with hands, others without. Jessica searched for a place to run through the steadily thickening mass of legs. Her eyes met the yellow eyes of the fox head, now suspended in the air by rods and beams. But there was another set of eyes as well. Does it have two heads? The unskinned metal skull lowered itself; it was connected to the mass above by cables and cords, and seemed to move of its own will.

One high-pitched scream rose above the others, a blood-curdling wail. “LISA!” Ron cried, and Jessica saw that the thing had one hand on the little girl’s arm and was pulling her toward it. The skinless metal head studied her, then swiveled and swung on its cables to the others, taking an aggressive stance toward them as the metal limbs entangled the little girl and pulled her toward the door.