Carlton. He stepped back with a shout of surprise: the voice was so clear in his head that he recognized it instantly. “Michael?” The single word was enough. Carlton turned to the table with a new, terrible clarity. He knew exactly what he was looking at: the endoskeletons of the original Freddy’s animatronics, welded and melted together, immobile and featureless. And still inhabited by the spirits of the children who had been murdered inside of them so many years ago. Still filled with life, and motion, and thought—all trapped; all in terrible pain. Carlton forced himself to look William Afton in the eye.

“How could you do this to them?” he asked, nearly trembling with rage.

“They do everything willingly,” William said plainly. “The process only truly works if they freely release a portion of themselves.” The flames rose without warning, and heat radiated in painful waves from the gaping furnace. Carlton shielded his eyes, and the creature on the table convulsed. William smiled. “Scared of fire. But they still trust me. They don’t see me as I am now; they only remember me as I was, you see.”

Carlton broke his eyes away, feeling like he was waking from hypnosis. He darted his eyes desperately around the room, looking for something, anything, to attack with. The chamber was strewn with scrap metal and parts, and Carlton grabbed a metal pipe that lay by his feet and hefted it like a baseball bat. Afton was gazing down at the creature on the table, apparently insensible to anything else around him, and Carlton hesitated, considering the man for a moment. He looks like he could fall apart all on his own, he thought, taking in Afton’s fragile, hunched body and the thin skin of his head, seeming to scarcely cover the skull beneath. Then he looked back to the creature on the table. I think I’ve got the moral high ground here, he decided grimly, and raised the pipe over his head as he stalked around the table toward Afton.

Suddenly, his arms were jerked above his head, the pipe dropping from his hands and hitting the ground with a bang. Carlton struggled with the cables that gripped his wrists, but he could not wrestle free. Slowly, he was lifted off his feet, his arms stretched painfully out to his sides by two cables that extended from opposite sides of the room, seeming to attach to nothing.