Chapter Text
i.
Carlos leaves Night Vale less than two weeks after arriving. It’s not a choice as much as it is an evacuation: a necessary response to emergency conditions.
This is what he tells himself, and this is what he plans to write in the report he will file when gets back to the university.
An aborted summer sabbatical isn’t going to hurt his credentials. This way he’ll have more time to prepare for his single fall class. He can get a head-start working on grant applications for a different, safer, saner fieldwork project for next year. Those are reasonable uses of time.
Whereas, from what he’s seen—and, god, the things he’s seen—more time spent in Night Vale can only amount to suicide.
Never mind the science.
Well.
No.
Try as he might, he can never never mind the science. He can, however, recite the other reasons—very good reasons—he has for leaving, and he does:
- He can’t keep a team that he has responsibility for here. It would be unconscionable. The lives of other scientists are important and deserve to be protected as far as he has the power to protect them.
- Night Vale might be fascinating—absolutely fascinating—but it is also terrifying. Minds effected by terror do not make for methodical, unbiased scientific research.
- Any research his team were to produce would be impossible to replicate, and therefore pretty much invalid, right from the start.
- Any research his team were to produce would only be applicable to describing this one small, scientifically fascinating town. There’s no broader potential to it, as far as Carlos can tell, which makes it an inadvisable allocation of resources. Money, time, equipment, precious human lives. There’s a lot at stake here.
- And just to reiterate: Night Vale, terrifying.
So after seeing the rest of his team off in their convoy of environmentally conscious vehicles, Carlos loads his possessions into his own hybrid coupe. It doesn’t take long. Almost everything he brought with him is still packed inside of taped and labeled boxes that are easy enough to shove into the trunk. The scientific equipment he’s fondest of rides shotgun.
When he turns the car on, the emergency indicators on the dashboard blink red. They’ve been going haywire since his arrival in Night Vale.
The Prius’s tires stir up a cloud of dust as he pulls out of the drive behind the lab, even though he goes slowly. Fleeing town at break-neck speed seems appropriate, but the resident Night Vale drivers—not to mention the packs of cars that seem to roam the streets without any drivers at all—are too unpredictable for him to even think of going over 30. He crawls along, waiting at intersections until all roads that approach them are clear before inching across.
He drives past Night Vale Community College and a park dotted with gnarled, sagging trees and a forlorn-looking Denny’s. Out on the edge of town, a man with a goatee is standing at the end of a long driveway in his slippers collecting the mail. He waves as the Prius goes by. Carlos does not wave back.
Carlos continues past patches of farmland and then for several minutes he drives past nothing worth remarking on. All evidence of civilization is behind him, with the exception of the upcoming sign at the side of road. It looms larger as he approaches, until he can see that it reads “Now Leaving Night Vale.” He braces himself. What he’s expecting, he honestly doesn’t know. It could be bad, though. It could be anything. He hasn’t heard from any of the other departing scientists yet. Maybe Dave and Kyung-ja and Nur and Rochelle have made it out of town without any trouble. Maybe they haven’t.
Even if they have, they might not be a reliable control group. There might be other variables. Unlike Carlos, none of the other scientists immediately became the center of the entire town’s attention upon their arrival. Maybe there are specific repercussions for that.
Carols rolls the Prius toward the boundary between Night Vale and not with his foot hovering over the brake. He clenches his jaw and tightens his hands on the steering wheel.
And then it’s behind him: the sign, the town, the past two weeks and all their oddity and horror.
The Prius coasts on, rumbling over uneven road.
The emergency indicators on the dash keep blinking red, just as they did in Night Vale, but everything seems to be fine.
He seems to be fine.
He breathes a sigh, and it’s one of relief.
Another mile or so along, he thinks to check the watch on his wrist against the Prius’s clock. For the first time in a duration he cannot be entirely certain of, they match.
Huh. He thought he’d be happier about that when it happened.
It’s not that he’s unhappy, either. It’s just so… normal. He’s never really found normalcy worth getting excited about.
He needs a distraction, he decides. Anything to drown out this unhelpful trajectory of thought and the sound of his own agitated breathing. He’s grown apprehensive about the radio lately—and for good reason—but he turns the car’s on anyway. It’s probably safe now.
He can’t help but wonder what sort of sorry lament for his departure that radio host might be fabricating, back in Night Vale. Or maybe that man—Cecil—will no longer have reason to talk about Carlos on the radio at all, now that he doesn’t have Carlos’s skin to get under.
That expression is probably literal in Night Vale. It’s good that he’s getting out now.
It is.
He messes with the radio buttons until he picks up a station. Luckily, there’s no talk, just music.
Just a man’s voice, singing hauntingly of love and desert beachfronts and other unlikely possibilities.
There must be a mathematical explanation for the sense of loss that wells up in him—some iteration of phi, the golden ratio, in the chord progressions, that’s making him feel so beautifully, perfectly sad. He can’t come up with any other justification.
His eyes start to feel prickly, so he turns the radio off. He grits his teeth. He can drive in silence. Or rather, he can drive to the quaver of his own breathing.
Carlos heads in the direction that will eventually take him away from the desert and its periodic mountains, toward the rolling plains.
Carlos heads for the university, which might as well be home.
He’s less than an hour along when he realizes, belatedly, that he’s been humming the song he heard on the radio.
And that’s when the storm hits.
ii.
Carlos decides to leave Night Vale one year after his arrival, to the day. He hopes no one will blame him for that decision. He hopes that if they begin to, they will remember the denizens of the underground city beneath the pin retrieval area of lane five, the explosive projectiles, and the blood. He hopes they will remember what he cannot: whatever happened after the blood—so much blood—spread across his chest as he towered over those tiny people, only to fall like a skyscraper crumbling. He hopes that in remembering, they will understand.
After a year of so many near-fatal disasters, he thought he’d gotten used to the idea of his own inevitable death.
If he’d been thinking, really thinking about it, he would have known that it isn’t truly possible to come to terms with the prospect of death.
The process of dying, however long it takes—one swift and sudden second, or the slow degradation of a lifetime—is fascinating in its own right.
But in death, there is nothing quantifiable; not even darkness or loneliness or emptiness to be empirically measured. In death, there is nothing.
Death itself holds no scientific interest.
Death is the absence of existence.
And existence is the most thrilling fact of all.
“I want to go home,” he tells the first person he sees, in a scrape of a whisper, when he can form words again.
It’s Teddy Williams, and he hoots and then says “shit” and drops the scalpel he’s holding in order to press an anesthesia mask over Carlos’s mouth and nose.
The next time Carlos comes to, he says it again: “I want to go home.”
His neck is stiff. His chest is stiff too, in a different way: he’s heavily bandaged.
Where is he? There is a strong smell of floral air freshener, and the seat beneath him is hard and metal. In front of him, there is light, and illuminated in the light there is a person of indeterminate gender in a balaclava. That certainly narrows it down.
“Are you taking me in for reeducation?” he asks.
“No,” says the Sheriff’s Secret Police officer. “We’re honoring your request. We’re letting you go. Home. For our purposes, it amounts to pretty much the same thing as reeducation.” They gesture for Carlos to join them outside of the van.
Carlos drags himself out into the light, shielding his eyes with the hand that’s not clinging to the edge of the door to support his woozy body.
He blinks and blinks and then he sees that he is in the parking lot of the Night Vale airport.
“This is what you meant, right?” the officer asks. Curly ends of red hair stick out from under their balaclava. Also, the curly ends of red snakes. “By going home?”
Carlos has a home somewhere that is not in Night Vale. He is sure of that.
“You’re in no shape to drive,” the officer continues. “So we’ve booked a flight for you. The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home collected the things she thought you were most likely to want, based on her close observation of your most intimate personal habits. You did mean you wanted to leave immediately, didn’t you? If there’s anything else you need to take care of first, anyone you need to see, now’s the time to say something.”
Anyone he needs to see? Anyone he needs—
Carlos has to close his eyes against the sudden, unbidden memory of Cecil’s mouth curling into a smile, of Cecil’s fingers curling around a mug of coffee, of Cecil’s lips curling around words.
He swallows so hard he’s sure the officer can hear. “No. No, there’s nothing else I need. You understood correctly.”
“We usually do,” the officer says, hair hissing lazily. They walk around to the front of the van and return with the backpack Carlos typically uses for fieldwork excursions. They hand it to him.
Inside, he finds his laptop, three separate external hard-drives that, if untampered with, should store identical back-up copies of his data, and a manila folder of print-outs. There are also a couple changes of clothes, including his newest (best fitting) and oldest (most beloved) lab coat.
He looks down at what he’s wearing and discovers that someone (presumably Teddy Williams) replaced his t-shirt (presumably burnt, torn, and blood-soaked) with an electric blue Desert Flower bowling shirt.
The officer twirls a strand of snake-hair around a finger, bored.
Carlos pulls on a lab coat (the old one) and twists his hands into the pockets.
The fingers of his left hand brush against something: a worn scrap of paper. He doesn’t have to look at it to know what it is. He knows its contents by heart. Not just the phone number but also the slanting, archaic handwriting with its quaint yet formidable serifs. He’s sure he didn’t put it there himself. In fact, he knows all too well where he left it: under a stack of questionably legal science textbooks on the nightstand, as if forgotten, but in actuality, intentionally hidden. Which means the Faceless Old Woman must have known and thought he’d need it.
But he doesn’t.
He most certainly doesn’t.
The world spins a little, but then, scientifically speaking, the world is constantly spinning.
He breathes.
He gives the officer a shaky smile and shoulders the backpack. In a last-ditch attempt at politeness, he asks, “You’re sure you don’t need to confiscate any of this?”
The officer shrugs. “We don't really have protocol for that. People don’t leave all that often, and you did at least give us some warning. You should be good. Better hurry or you’ll miss your flight.” They escort him to the entrance at a brusque distance and don’t follow him in.
On his own, he follows the signs that direct him to the security gate. There’s no line, and he comes to a halt only when the voice of a small child behind the steel grating in the ceiling asks him to name the people he’s kissed. He rattles off a short list. The last was three years ago.
His chest hurts.
His injury grants him disability status to skip certain parts of the security protocols, including the long crawl through a pitch-black tunnel. Instead, a TSA officer directs him to a side room where he’s allowed to sit in the dark while a monotone male voice lists possible ways of dying. Most of them are ways that Carlos has already thought about or almost experienced. Some of them are new, though, and Carlos is fondly impressed by Night Vale’s ability to generate new ways of meeting an untimely demise.
Fondly impressed?
No, he is terrified. He is numb with terror. As he should be.
He arrives at his terminal, which might, in fact, be the only terminal. It’s unclear. There’s no destination chiseled into the stone archway over the gate that leads to the airplane, but that’s okay. Carlos isn’t sure where he means to go anyway. He can’t quite remember where he came from, but he thinks if he sees or hears the name of that place again, he’ll be able to recognize it for what it is. As long he can just get out of Night Vale and clear his head, he can figure out where to go from there.
The plane is boarding, so he boards it. It’s the smallest he’s ever been on, if he’s ever been on a plane before—he can’t quite remember that either—and it’s empty except for a group of people in business suits who look like conference-goers: some of whom are busy punching each other’s shoulders and laughing, to the apparent chagrin of the others, who exchange perturbed looks and whispered gossip.
Carlos ignores them all and takes a seat at the front. He stares out the window, out onto open desert, which is as vacant as his mind feels.
The cabin rattles when the plane speeds down the runway, but otherwise takeoff is smooth. The world falls away from under him, and he watches it go.
Below him there are mountains. They grow smaller and smaller, until they are practically nothing, beneath the clouds. Until they might as well not exist.
When the plane reaches cruising altitude, Carlos takes out the manila folder out of his backpack and starts sorting through its contents as best he can on the tiny surface of his seat's tray table. He has a lot of data. Leaving Night Vale means facing the task of translating it into some sort of salvageable research.
He needs to make this past year mean something.
He can. He will. It’s all just a matter of arranging the numbers.
When the flight attendant comes around to take drink orders, Carlos keep his eyes on his graphs and asks for orange juice.
"What was that?" He looks up and meets two of the flight attendant's many eyes, which are domed and glassy like a spider's. The flight attendant is wearing a nametag that reads Erika, with a "k," and it towers over Carlos, though it's trying to take up as little space as possible, judging by the way it's keeping its wing tucked in as tight possible. They must be truly inconvenient in the small confines of the plane.
Carlos repeats himself.
The flight attendant snorts and its feathers rustle. Carlos just barely manages to slam a hand on his papers before they get caught in the breeze. "I'm sure that's not what you want. If it's orange you're going for, try the milk."
Carlos considers. "Is there any other juice?"
"Salted guava," the flight attendant says.
He nods and takes the drink once it’s poured for him.
"Divine inspiration?" the flight attendant offers, holding out small, crinkly packet that looks like it could contain peanuts or pretzels.
"I'm fine, thanks," says Carlos. "I like to figure things out on my own."
"Suit yourself," it says and shrugs, bumping the crest of a wing on the ceiling of the cabin. It curses sharply, and Carlos's vision turns to static, just for a moment.
He blinks hard and takes a sip of his juice to steady himself. He nearly spits it out before he remembers his graphs and forces himself to swallow.
It is very heavy on the salt.
He traces the line of a seismograph reading with his finger, but it doesn’t bring him any closer to focusing. His mind drifts and he finds himself wondering what it means to have an—well, to have Erika as his flight attendant. The plane must not be out of Night Vale airspace yet. It feels like a fair amount of time has passed since takeoff, but time is weird in Night Vale. It stands to reason that time would be weird above Night Vale, too.
How long will it take to leave? He can only imagine that it will happen when he’s not paying attention. He’ll get absorbed in his graphs, maybe. Or he’ll drift off. He won’t look around for a while, and when he finally does again, a tall flight attendant whose nametag reads “Erica” with a “c,” and who is black, will come around to collect his trash and remind him to put his tray table up.
And then he’ll… what? What will he do then?
He tastes salt on his lips. It takes him awhile to realize that it’s not the juice.
He’s crying.
He’s going to miss Night Vale, isn’t he, after everything that happened?
Ballistic-happy civilizations beneath the bowling alley and systematic violations of privacy at the hands of municipal law enforcement aside, there is so much about Night Vale to be grateful for. It is the most scientifically interesting place he’s ever encountered. It is home to a team of the country’s most determined and foolhardy scientists, whom he is abandoning, without acknowledgement. There are angels who apparently also serve as impromptu flight attendants, which is as exciting as it is baffling.
It is also home to the most interesting person—scientifically speaking or otherwise—he is ever likely to meet.
Carlos’s mind clears, like a plane coming out of clouds.
He shouldn’t be here, leaving.
But what can he do? Who could he tell?
The entire plane rumbles, and the red “fasten seat belt” light blinks on and then off and then on again. In an instant, the plane goes from being an admirable feat of science to an impossible steel deathtrap hurtling impossibly fast through the air impossibly far from the ground. He prays it will stay airborne.
One of the conference-goers screams.
“Passengers,” a voice preambles over the intercom.
“Oh, passengers,” continues a very familiar voice over the intercom.
Carlos’s heart races. His stomach drops. The plane lurches.
“I’ll admit, this is a little unconventional,” the voice says. “But unconventional circumstances often call for drastic measures. The last time radio waves from Night Vale were used to shoot down planes was in 1935. The results were… messy. Thankfully, our knowledge of the power of radio has improved dramatically since that time! So please fasten your seat belts and enjoy the ride.”
Carlos closes his eyes and counts his blessings, and then there is nothing he can do but hold on for dear, dear life.
iii.
It only looks like it’s his own decision, when he leaves.
It begins at The House That Doesn’t Exist. Carlos is using the danger meter to chart the fatality levels of the surrounding property, stopping to shade in any significant color fluctuations with crayon on his hand-drawn map.
The House has become the scientists’ main project. After spending most of the day providing scientific aide to the post-Valetine’s community clean-up, the team headed over to the House in the late afternoon to get their daily data collection in. Since John Peters was found inside the House, the readings from around it keep getting weirder. They need to gather as much data as they can from the outside before sending any of their own people in—all goading bets aside.
From Dave’s phone, balanced on top of one of the fenceposts, Cecil’s show plays. It’s getting close to dusk, but there’s still a little time to get a few more valuable readings in before dark, as long as the weather holds out. Thick clouds across the darkening sky promise a steady, gentle winter rain that will last for hours, maybe days, before drifting off to soak some other, less scientifically interesting desert town.
If all goes well, Carlos can send the equipment back to the lab with the other scientists and head off to meet Cecil. They’re not doing anything formal, just breakfast-for-dinner at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. Fond as he is of the diner, he’s come to prefer nights in. He’s tried to persuade Cecil that they could do breakfast-for-dinner in the comfort of one of their homes, but between the stovetop burners at Cecil’s (which have aspirations to become a barbershop quartet) and the fridge at his own place (which turns anything left inside it for longer than 24 hours into a half-full jar of grape jelly), it’s been tough to make much of a case.
Carlos turns his sigh into a scientific “hmm” and waves the danger meter over a planting bed. The blinking device glows a shade of green that’s probably Asparagus but might be edging closer to Pea Green and is, either way, only a little dangerous.
Most of his mind is trained on the task at hand, but being this close to the House, he finds it hard to help but think more generally—and less scientifically—about houses. Namely, about the house he has been thinking (and thinking and thinking) about sharing with Cecil. The house of his thoughts is still an entirely theoretical house. Cecil’s willingness to live with him is also, still, entirely theoretical.
He hasn’t posed the question yet. He hasn’t figured out how. There was a moment when Cecil pulled him out of the condos—was that really three months ago now?—that had almost seemed right. Swimming back to full consciousness to the sight of Cecil’s adoring smile and the feel of Cecil’s strong arms holding him aloft, he’d almost asked.
But something had held him back, like a paralyzing parody of a hug.
The truth is, in context, asking Cecil to live with him had felt too much like asking Cecil to protect to him. Without Cecil, he’d probably have been trapped inside that perfect dark cube forever. Since the condos incident, Night Vale hasn’t gotten any safer, and he hasn’t gotten any more immune to its dangers—Cecil’s suggestion that he incorporate more local honey into his diet notwithstanding.
A scientist is self-reliant, and so is a decent boyfriend. Carlos has been looking for evidence that his safety doesn’t have to be Cecil’s burden, hoping to recreate the buoyant confidence he remembers from after their first date, the thrill of success at solving one of Night Vale’s mysteries fusing with his growing affection for Cecil. But nothing he’s done since out-sciencing the buzzing shadows has felt monumental enough. Sure, he supplied Cecil with crucial information about the trans-dimensional oranges, but it wasn’t like he did anything active to keep Cecil—and Night Vale—safe. Cecil saved the day by hitting the John Peters impostor over the head with his cellphone. Carlos wasn’t even present. Carlos hadn’t even thought about leaving the lab to help.
He’s not asking to be a hero. He’s never wanted to be a hero. He’d just like to uphold his end of the relationship.
It’s frustrating that it has to be this complicated, because living with Cecil would be so nice. They haven’t seen much of each other lately. Work has been keeping Cecil later than usual, making it difficult to coordinate plans, and what with Valentine’s Day, it’s been a full five days since they’ve seen each other. (That part was at Cecil’s insistence. “The hype alone could kill us,” he’d muttered, grimacing, before bidding Carlos a forlorn goodbye for the week.)
In any case, he’s seeing Cecil tonight, and that’s wonderful.
Cecil’s voice on the radio is genially hypnotic, and Carlos lets the sound of it roll over him, listening for the soothing cadence more than the words.
They probably don’t need a house like this, with the yard and the fence and the porch with rockers. And preferably wherever they end up living will actually exist. Existence is pretty high on his list of priorities for a home.
The nice thing about this particular House's lack of existence, though, is that he can entertain any ideas about it he wants. It’s easy to imagine himself and Cecil filling its mysterious interior with their hopes and fears, material possessions and misplaced secrets. It’s easy, too, to conjure up mundane domestic fantasies: cuddling in front of the TV with Cecil, cooking him omelets, sitting by his bedside through bouts of sickness/minor possession until the house call doctor/exorcist arrives, coming home from the lab to find him waiting in nothing but those skin-tight leather pants—
He can imagine it all quite well until another, feminine voice cuts into Cecil’s familiar drone.
Jarred from his thoughts, Carlos doesn’t catch the first part of what the woman says, but she continues: “…our focus is always on good radio. And, Cecil, you are the best at good radio!”
In his hand, the read-out on the danger meter creeps from blue to green. On the radio, the woman goes on to praise Cecil, and then, unexpectedly, to praise him and his work on the trans-dimensional oranges. Wait. What?
“He's a good scientist you have there,” the woman concludes. “What's his name again?”
The danger meter in Carlos’s hand flashes bright red.
“Umm,” Cecil says on the radio. “Carlos?”
And keeps flashing.
“Right. That’s right. Carlos. Okay. Good talking to you! Gotta go. Bye!”
And the cheery voice is gone.
What was that? At a loss, Carlos looks around to see what the other scientists are making of this. He finds that they’ve stopped what they’re doing and moved in closer to get a better look at the danger meter in his hand, which calms to a nonthreatening violet as Cecil returns to monologuing. They all look like they can’t quite figure out whether they’re supposed to look concerned.
“Huh,” says Nur.
“Well,” says Kyung-ja.
Rochelle whistles low and says, “Your boyfriend sure needs to learn when to keep his mouth shut.”
Dave shoots her a warning look, saving Carlos the effort.
“Cecil hasn’t done anything,” Carlos says. “It’s not exactly a secret who I am. I’m sure she knows already—I mean, not to be immodest, it’s just—right? Everybody knows. Whoever that was, she must have been messing with him.” And that sounds right. Cecil had alluded to looming trouble at work. Though that hadn’t seemed like anything out of the ordinary to Carlos, whenever they talked about it. Whenever they last really had the chance to talk.
“So, uh, who was that?” Carlos asks.
“Cecil introduced her as Lauren Mallard. New program director at the radio station,” Nur answers.
“Strex?” Carlos asks.
“You couldn’t tell by the way she talked? That was corporate-level perkiness, I’ll bet you anything,” says Rochelle.
“Maybe you should be careful,” Kyung-ja says, at the same time Dave says, “If there’s anything we can do…” at the same time Rochelle scowls, at the same time Nur lays a supportive hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Carlos tries to say.
He’s interrupted by the sound of his stomach rumbling, loud enough for everyone to hear. Nur can’t suppress the start of a giggle, which is followed by a snort from Dave, and then all five of them are laughing. The tension breaks. Rochelle groans, “Jesus, Carlos. Have you eaten anything today?”
“I’m getting dinner with Cecil.”
“Good,” she says. “Then get. He’ll probably need some support after work, from the sound of it.”
“All right all right,” he says. Cecil’s already cut to the weather, and it wouldn’t hurt him to be early for once. “You’re sure you have everything under control here?”
“Of course we do,” the team choruses, rolling their eyes like synchronized eye-rolling is a competitive sport and they are champions.
After handing off his data and the danger meter, Carlos waves the team goodbye and leaves for the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. By the time he’s halfway across town, raindrops have already begun leaving their streaky homages to surface tension across the windshield.
It takes a few minutes before he realizes that the rain is glowing a faintly phosphorescent blue. That’s new. And really interesting. And definitely scientific.
Since he’s running early anyway…
He pulls off to the side of the road and twists to grab a vial from among the spare lab equipment rattling around in the backseat, before letting himself out into the rain, holding it aloft.
Twenty minutes later, he’s concluded that the rain must be sentient enough to avoid being collected in a vial, his hair is a disaster, and he is late.
Just a little late, though. Not enough for Cecil to really mind. Cecil will probably be way more upset about his hair. So that’s all right.
Back on track, Carlos pulls into the parking lot, choosing a space as close to the door as he can get. Just seeing the tacky faux-50s facade causes him to experience a rush of endorphins. During their first couple months of dating, the diner was the place he and Cecil consistently met up. The combination of rich milkshakes, low-lighting, and inattentive waitstaff made it conducive to ambling conversation and ample foot-rubbing under the table. Walking in the door still fills Carlos with the same anticipatory elation of nervous firsts; crossing the threshold feels more like falling from a great height than traversing a linear plane of his own volition. In a good way. In the best way.
Except this time something’s wrong.
He knows it before he’s even fully through the door.
There’s someone in their booth.
He doesn’t know what kind of power Cecil holds over this town that makes it so, but there is never someone in their booth.
And Cecil is nowhere in sight.
Maybe he texted earlier? Carlos realizes he hasn’t checked his phone all day, absorbed as he was with science. Maybe something came up and Cecil had to change the plan?
Carlos begins to backtrack, trying to wrestle his phone out of his pocket.
The person in the booth has already risen. She moves to greet him, hand extended like a weapon in front of her.
“Carlos, hi!” she enthuses. “It’s so nice to finally meet you in person.”
He recognizes her now, not by physical appearance but by her voice. It’s the woman on the radio. She smiles, and now he’s afraid, as much for Cecil as for himself.
“W-what?” he says, and hates himself for stammering. Then he hates himself more for delivering his hand into her clutches, unable to resist the pull of social convention.
“You’re practically a celebrity. Everyone speaks so highly of you and your scientific accomplishments. I hope you won’t mind giving me a few minutes of your time.”
“What do you want?” he asks, and wishes it came out more like a demand.
“Please have a seat, Carlos,” she says, sitting down herself.
“Why would I do that?”
“There’s no reason to be rude.”
He slides into the booth across from her.
“I’d offer to buy you coffee,” she says with a shrug, “but maybe next time. I’ll give you a raincheck for, say—two weeks. By then, this will be a Strex run enterprise. And the coffee will be much more effective.”
“What do you want?” Carlos repeats.
“All business,” Lauren observes. “I admire that. Well, Carlos, first and foremost, on behalf of Strexcorp Synernists Inc., I want to thank you. You’re a real inspiration to all of us, a model researcher who takes his job seriously. Your work on the oranges was efficient and effective. We’ve been taking our time, trying to figure out the best way to reward you for your efforts. Bureaucracy is beautiful, but it can be slow-moving. And we had to make sure we had the right leverage. Leverage?” She laughs. “No, that’s not the word I meant to use.” She pauses, tipping her head to the side. “Wait, yes, actually it is. It is exactly the right word.
“I’ll keep this simple and straightforward. We at Strex want to send you on a vacation. We’d like you to take some time to relax. On us. A well-deserved break every now and then makes for more productive employees, in the long run.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Believe me, Carlos, this offer is just as generous as it sounds. It’s better for everyone all around. Your team of scientists, for example. I’m sure they’ll miss you while you’re gone, but at least they’ll still be alive to miss you. And you won’t have to see what happens when Cecil is forced to choose between trying to save you and trying to save his precious town. We’d hate to have to convince you to cooperate. It’s so much more pleasant when everyone gets along of their own volition, don’t you think?” She smiles.
“Of course n—“
“Think a bit harder, then, Carlos.”
“Where’s Cecil?”
He is in over his head, in the wrong place at the wrong time yet again. He doesn’t know what he could have done to prepare for this. Cecil hadn’t really been forthcoming about changes at work, but then, Carlos hadn’t really pressed. Maybe if he’d asked more questions? Maybe if they’d seen each other more often?
But as long as Cecil is safe…
“Cecil?” Lauren titters. “Oh, he’s still at the station. Isn’t that great? He’s become so much more dedicated to his job lately. It just goes to show that anyone can become an ideal worker under the right influences.”
“Don’t hurt him,” Carlos protests, stalling for time as he tries to slip his phone out of his pocket inconspicuously under the table. “You can’t.”
“That’s a pretty inaccurate statement for a scientist. At Strex, we can do whatever we want. It’s practically our motto. Ha, maybe if I propose it, it will be. I think it would help clarify our brand, don’t you? With enough money, we at Strex can do whatever we want. As for you, though… Well, Carlos? What will it be? It’s your choice.”
Under the table, Carlos tries to guess at the right sequence of buttons to push to reach Cecil. If he could just send some sort of warning…
“We will, of course, take your phone.” She holds her hand out. “We wouldn’t want you getting distracted by work when you’re supposed to be putting your full concentration into relaxing.”
Carlos raises the phone above the table. He could do it, he realizes, just like Cecil did. He could swing his arm back and hit this maniac in the face, just like Cecil did to John Peters. He could fight.
Instead, he slides the phone across the table.
“Now,” says Lauren. “Let’s go.”
He goes.
From the entryway, Lauren gestures toward the bright yellow hummer double-parked across two handicapped spaces.
It takes what feels like a small eternity—the hummer spewing pollutant into the air, Carlos hardly breathing—before he realizes that as long as he continues to wait nothing is going to happen. Lauren will stand there with her arms crossed, tapping her foot against the tile, as long as it takes.
Strex isn’t going to throw a hood over his head and drag him away. He has to go himself.
As he walks out of the building, through the rain, he feels eyes on him. There are witnesses. Of course there are. There must be at least one police officer watching, and who knows what surveillance of their own Strex has devoted to capturing his departure. There will be recorded footage. Cecil will find out not only that Carlos has left but also how: seemingly of his own will. Without a fight.
He’ll work something out as he goes. He has to.
Carlos reaches for the door latch and hoists himself in. The windows are darkened so he can’t see outside. There’s an opaque panel between him and the front of the car. The hummer drives. Carlos counts seconds, so he can guess how far he’s traveled. He counts so he doesn’t have to think about what might be happening to Cecil right now. Doesn’t have to imagine Cecil beaten, tortured, hurting, injured, dying, crying, calling his name, or just turned into a lifeless puppet, or whoever knows what a corporate entity does to its enemies.
He counts and counts and counts and loses track somewhere in the eight thousands. He drifts off, probably. Time passes, presumably.
At some point, the sound of rain drumming on the metal shell of the vehicle ceases. Some time later, the hummer stops. The drone of the motor and the cold blast of air-conditioning vanish.
He holds still. He waits. The air gets stuffy and stale in no time at all.
Curiosity gets the better of him, eventually, and he decides to investigate. He tries the door and finds it unlocked. Outside, the first thing he sees, because it’s impossible not to, is the mountain. The hummer has stopped right at the foot of it.
The driver’s side door is open, but there’s no one inside.
Which doesn’t make any sense.
Where did his captor go?
What’s going on?
Why have they brought him here, to this mountain?
He’s lucky it’s not summer. There’s no risk of heat stroke. The sun is low in the sky—rising, without much intensity. The air is cool—cool enough that he wishes he had a warmer lab coat. But though the nighttime temperatures will be chilly, he won’t freeze.
He sits, slumped, with his back against the hummer’s massive wheel and makes a plan. He calculates how long he can go without provisions. He calculates how far he can walk in that duration of time. Based on his calculations, he resolves to climb the mountain. From higher ground, maybe he’ll be able to tell what to do next. Plan determined, he—
He squints hard.
There's movement on the mountainside. At first, he thinks he’s imagined it. But no.
There’s a figure coming toward him, down the slope of the mountain, and Carlos can’t see very well with the sun in his eyes, but it’s a form he would recognize anywhere.
Cecil.
Of course Cecil is fine.
Cecil can take care of himself.
And Cecil will take care of him, too.
Cecil will rescue him, like he did from the condos.
Cecil will lull him back to Night Vale. He’ll tell Carlos that they’ll make everything okay, together. He will speak and what he says will be true because of how he speaks it: with the incontestable rhythms and repetitions and subtle arrangements of persuasion.
Cecil will take Carlos home.
Carlos never wanted to be a hero.
The figure comes closer.
The figure looks like Cecil.
And then the figure speaks.
iv.
Carlos does not decide to leave Night Vale. Carlos wouldn’t choose that. He wouldn’t leave his lab or his team or his meticulously cleaned and calibrated equipment or his unfinished experiments. He’d been right in the middle of studying so many fascinating things, like the properties of wheat and the hypnotic lichen on the trees in Mission Grove Park and geology, and oh gosh, all his work on The House That Doesn’t Exist! And he certainly wouldn’t leave Cecil.
He loves Cecil, okay?
The decision is made for him, however, by the slamming of the old oak door.
It hurts. Of course it does. To be given such strong evidence that Night Vale is not the place he belongs, after he has invested so much time and effort and hope and love into starting a life with Cecil there…
The sting of exclusion would lessen, with time and distance, he’d thought. He had been so sure that it would.
It’s been months now, and he is not so sure.
But as long as there’s so much really interesting science to be done, he shouldn’t be complaining. So he resolves not to complain. For an otherworld desert hellscape, it’s not such a bad place. As far as the eye can see, there is desolate grayness, that might, to the unobservant, look like nothing. But Carlos knows better. He knows that though this place is a wasteland that is vast and endless, it also contains vast, endless science. And that’s a good thing. An amazing thing!
It’s frightening here, sometimes, with the unexplained rumbling. He is trying not to be scared. He is powerless over this strange phenomenon, and so there is no point in allowing fear to render him even more powerless. It takes a lot of work sometimes, trying.
But the desert offers its own distractions. There’s the science, first and foremost, of course. And the people are pretty nice, too. Even if he doesn’t see the point in going to much effort to make friends, it is at least good to be surrounded by people who direct their hostility toward others other than him.
He’s also been getting a lot of walking in, which is excellent exercise. Though the members of a giant masked army will carry him some of the time, as long as he promises to stop talking about science when they ask him to stop talking about science, he still ends up walking a lot. There’s an awful lot of science to be done on the ground, after all.
Carlos thinks of all of his walking in relation to the mountain. Either he is going toward the mountain or away from it, parallel or perpendicular, up and up and up or back down again. Like most other mountains he has encountered, this one with the blinking red light on top of it seems monumental and momentous. Unlike most other mountains he has encountered, this one seems particularly tricky to summit. When he has tried to climb it on his own, he has ended up stuck in a loop of forward motion that fails to move him further upward. He wishes he could make his way to the top, so that he can find out more about the lighthouse and its blinking red light. His reasons for wanting to do so are admittedly more personal than they are scientific.
The blinking red light always reminds him of the radio tower back in Night Vale.
Which of course reminds him of Cecil!
Not that he needs reminding, per se. His love for Cecil goes everywhere with him, much like the backpack of provisions he brought with him through The House That Doesn’t Exist, but thankfully not weighing nearly as much. (The fact that the backpack always replenishes itself is great. The fact that it never gets any lighter is not.)
It’s just that sometimes he gets so involved in what he’s doing—analyzing the components of rocks, or charting the stars, or exchanging noncommittal small-talk with Alicia or Doug like someone with the smallest semblance of a social life—that everything else falls away. He loses track of time or time loses track of him or… something like that. Words are so much more Cecil’s thing.
He thinks about Cecil a lot, even when he doesn’t find the time to call. And when he’s not actively thinking about Cecil, he knows Cecil is never far from the surface of his mind.
His dreams have proven that well. Since he arrived here, they all seem to involve Cecil or, to be more precise, Cecil’s voice.
They’re not those kinds of dreams. At least, not all of them are.
He has also definitely been having those dreams.
Often.
Like, so often.
But anyway.
In his most recent dream, Cecil's voice was a huge rush of water that came from nowhere and everywhere, flooding the desert, filling its dips and crevasses. He swam in it, buoyant. The water kept rising, rising, rising, until he and the lighthouse, on its small mountaintop peak of an island, were the only things above the surface.
Carlos remembers feeling comforted and calmed. There were waves, but they were only the natural peaks and troughs of Cecil’s inflection. They were guiding, and kind. Cecil's voice pushed him toward the lighthouse, toward darkness and toward coolness. The sun is still so hot, so much of the time, in this desert and in Carlos’s dreams.
Fortunately, now, the sun has gone down. He’s tired from the day’s long trek but not too tired to have scrambled up onto one of the smaller of this desert’s weird free-standing rock formations as the stars begin to come out. A little elevation does wonders for stargazing.
Carlos sits and thinks. It’s an important part of being a scientist, thinking, though science is only the second thing on his mind just now as he thinks about distance. There is the physical distance between him and Cecil to think about, but there is also the distance in Cecil’s voice lately when they’ve talked on the phone. The relationship between the first distance and the other isn’t directly causative, though. There are other factors. One is most certainly time. Carlos feels its passing in the trudge of his feet across the sand and the trudge of the hot sun across the sky. So far, he’s made no progress in figuring out how to get back to Night Vale. The more he tries, the more he ends up disappointed. The more he ends up disappointed, the less he says to Cecil about the possibility of returning. The farther away Cecil sounds.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to talk to Cecil. Sometimes, it’s easier to dream.
Someone calls his name, dragging him back into awareness of the world around him.
It’s Alicia approaching. Which is fine! He’s not exactly the most in the mood for company right now, but it’ll be all right. He gives them a wave.
“Hey,” Alicia greets him and sits cross-legged on the flat desert beside the rock he’s sprawled on top of. It puts the two of them at the eye level, or as close as they can come to it considering Alicia’s eyes are several times larger than his. Alicia takes a cursory look at the sky and then turns their head to look at him. Behind their mask, their expression is as impossible to read as ever. “How are you doing?” they ask.
There is so much he could say in response. He could tell them all about how he is feeling. He could explain that he still feels frustrated about the old oak doors and their utter stupidity—like who gave them the cosmic right to judge? He could admit that he feels trapped, because even with endless desert and endless science all around, the desert is strictly finite in its ability to replace Night Vale. He could confess that he is heartbroken because the only person he truly cares about is so far from him—far in a sense that he cannot quantify by any unit of measure he knows. He could tell them about Cecil—his adorable and idiosyncratic gestures and facial quirks, his tendency to mutter to himself in long-dead languages, his appealingly appalling fashion sense—in hopes of imparting to them why he is worth so much heartache in the first place. But even if Alicia did understand, even the slightest bit, what good would it do?
He says, “I’m fine. What’s up?”
“It’s my night to tell the story. I hoped you’d come to watch.”
Carlos knows what story they mean. He catches bits and pieces of the army’s story-sharing, most nights. After the stars have come out, the warriors gather close around the firelight to watch what is as much performance as it is narrative, the teller turning their back to swap their own mask for those of mythic characters as they play the different parts, enacting heroes and villains alike.
It doesn’t seem impenetrable as a medium. From what he’s seen, the tropes are familiar, the humor is more physical than referential, and each story provides enough context to stand on its own, without relying on the specifics of what came before it. Still, it’s theirs—the army’s—and Carlos hasn’t wanted to force himself into a space where he doesn’t belong. He’s been content to sift through his notes from the day, or take a walk—either to call Cecil or just to think—during the time between dusk and sleep.
“You don’t have to stay away, is all I’m saying,” Alicia says.
“Thanks,” he says. “But. That’s okay.”
“We do campfire s’mores,” Alicia adds.
He waves them off. “Don’t worry about me.”
They are quiet for a moment, and then they say, “Carlos… I’m sorry we haven’t been able to take into account which direction you might want to travel. Destinations are difficult for us. We have to keep wandering.”
“Of course you do. You’re a nomadic army. Wandering is the thing that you do.”
“You’ve seemed upset since we picked you up for this journey.”
“No, no, no. I’m definitely not upset about that.”
“Have we done something else wrong?”
That wasn’t what he meant. “Of course not! I’m not upset at all. I just don’t want to intrude on your evening.” It seems like it shouldn’t be possible to feel both so small and so obtrusive at the same time. “I’m fine on my own. I really am,” he says, giving them a firm smile.
They don’t return it. “What will you do this evening?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Probably take a walk.”
Alicia shakes their head. “Stay close. Stay close enough that we can find you without going beyond the campfire. It’s not safe for you to go off on your own. The rumbling has been louder. More frequent. And you’re difficult to spot when there’s danger.”
Carlos scuffs at the ground with the worn sole of his shoe.
Alicia rises, sand water-falling from their clothing. They hesitate before walking away, the tension obvious in their larger-than-life body. “In the stories we tell,” they say, slowly, “a hero is often searching for something that is difficult to find. Usually it’s an object. A precious stone. A weapon of some kind. It depends on the story, and who’s telling it, and what they find valuable. Most of the time, to find the object, the hero must first find something on the inside, too. Something that’s needed but missing.”
“Well,” Carlos says, not meeting their eyes. “Good thing I’m not a hero, I guess?”
“You’re sure you don’t want to come?” Alicia presses. “Mostly we tell stories before going to war, so that our heroes can show us how we might do well in the battle to come, by imitating their strength or their courage or their ingenuity at creating weapons out of desert debris. But there are also stories that are good for after a battle. For healing.” They pause for a long moment. “Stories can be powerful. Isn’t this also true where you come from?”
“Powerful how?” Carlos asks.
“Alicia!”
They both turn to look and see Doug coming toward them. His metal-edged mask and the tip of the spear he’s using as a walking stick glow silver in the starlight.
“Hey!” Alicia calls to him, waving. Then they turn back to Carlos. “You don’t have to keep everything to yourself all the time if you don’t want to,” they say. “That’s all.”
Even as they stride away from him to join Doug, they glance back over their shoulder, once, and then again.
It continues to surprise Carlos that these hulking, massive people, who are so war-like with those outside their close-knit group, are so gentle with those they consider kin.
He looks away, unable to help the way his cheeks warm when Alicia and Doug raise their hands to each other and brush the tips of their fingers together in the lightest, softest greeting.
*
Left alone, Carlos turns his phone over in his hand, again and again. He stares off into space, which is to say, he stares at the stars and comets and planets in the sky, mostly.
The night sky here is too beautiful not to share it with Cecil. If only he could describe it, the way he knows Cecil himself could, maybe Cecil would be able to feel like he knew it, like he was experiencing it with Carlos, as though they were sitting side by side. He wishes Cecil were here to tell him what it’s like so he could appreciate it some way other than scientifically.
But more than that, he wishes he were where Cecil is.
He is tired of walking, but he is more tired of feeling watched over. He feels a little guilty for disobeying Alicia, but they shouldn’t be ordering him around anyway. He can take care of himself, and everyone deserves privacy that can’t be disturbed in a few giant, bounding steps. He keeps his phone in his hand, as he walks on aching feet, until eventually the masked warriors’ wide circle of firelight is just a dot in the distance.
Then he calls Cecil. By the third ring his heart is racing. When he waits for Cecil to pick up, he can never quite tamp down the worry that whatever mysterious power has kept his calls going through will have given up on him, once and for all.
“Hello?” Cecil answers, and maybe it’s a far cry from his once-usual enthusiastic “Carlos!” Maybe he sounds far away and like he’s been crying? But then he clears his throat and says “Carlos?” and Carlos is sure he imagined whatever it was he thought he heard, because Cecil sounds fine.
They talk. It’s a little tough to draw words out of Cecil, who doesn’t seem to have done much he considers worth talking about since they last spoke, so Carlos fills the looming silence as best he can, by telling Cecil about the fossil of ferns with teeth he’d found late that afternoon, working his way backward through his scientific discoveries of the day until he gets to morning.
At morning there is more. There is the dream—or at least the memory of it that he woke with. He is, for some reason, reluctant to part with it. He is almost certain it will sound silly out loud, but silly shouldn’t matter. Who can he share these things with if not Cecil? He remembers what Alicia said, “You don’t have to keep everything to yourself,” and maybe they’re right. So he tells Cecil, in clumsy words, about his voice and the wash of water and the lighthouse and the sense of safety.
“I don’t know that it means anything,” he concludes. “Well, I know that it means something. Dreams are electrical brain impulses, and that’s of scientific interest, in and of itself. And it obviously corresponds to my own subconscious attempts to make sense of emotion and memory, but—“
“Do you dream about me… often?” Cecil asks, and Carlos’s heart thuds to fill the space of that pause.
“Actually,” he says, slipping into coyness, “every time I sleep.”
“Oh, well, that’s—” says Cecil, and Carlos hears both his words and the way his mouth moves around them, the small between-breaths and wet clicks that are the necessary negative of speech. “Oh,” says Cecil again. “I didn’t know.”
“It’s scientifically improbable,” Carlos says, slowly, suggestively. “But it’s a fact.”
Cecil sighs, but Carlos can tell, even over the phone, that it’s not the kind of breathless sigh he was hoping to elicit. It’s a sigh that sounds wistful, or maybe just sad. “I’m sorry I can’t reciprocate, Carlos. My dreams are filled with a dark planet lit by no sun.”
The red light on top of the mountain blinks.
“Wait, what did you say?” says Carlos, serious now, readjusting his phone against the side of his face.
“I don’t dream about you, Carlos. I don’t know if I’ve ever dreamed about you. But that doesn’t mean I don’t—“
“No,” says Carlos. “Your exact words. ‘My dreams…’”
“My dreams are filled with a dark planet lit by no sun?”
“Yeah,” says Carlos. “Yeah, that. Hang on a minute, okay?”
“Uh, okay,” says Cecil. “I’ll just—“
Carlos sets his phone down in the sand, stands up, and starts to pace back and forth. Pacing is a valuable scientific tool, and one of the few readily available at the moment.
He has all the pieces of… something. An answer. He can feel it. If he can just put all the disparate parts together!
He digs his hands into his hair, because it’s frustrating that it hasn’t come to him yet, whatever this building epiphany is. What he feels now—the intellectual ache of being almost there but not quite, hovering right on the verge of discovery—may be utterly essential to the scientific process, but it is nevertheless excruciating, every time. This time in particular, the mounting tension is worse because Cecil is still on the phone, waiting for him.
Cecil is waiting for him.
“Oh,” exclaims Carlos. “I think—“
And then he thinks a lot of things in one protracted burst:
He thinks of the masked army, of the quiet dedication with which they examine the stars and the booming voices with which they tell the stars’ stories. He thinks of myth and meaning written in the stars, of stars read to reflect what is already known to be possible.
Stories can be powerful, Alicia had said.
He thinks of Cecil. If anyone can tell a story with power, it’s him. After so many broadcasts, he can’t recall the specifics of each one, but he knows, at one point, Cecil reported—no, told a story—about people who were not him. A story that ended with a dark planet lit by no sun. None of the people involved were his listeners, but within his story, they listened. He remembers: Cecil’s voice; the progression of a narrative; a progression altered; a progression that Cecil altered, in the telling, on the radio. Or so he said.
The two thoughts collide like tectonic plates converging, crumpling against one another, folding and thrusting, ridging and rising, orogenic and ecstatic.
The red light on top of the mountain blinks, and in Night Vale, he suspects, the red light on top of the broadcast tower at the radio station blinks, too.
He has an idea.
It’s not an especially scientific idea. It’s weirder than that, and less precise. But it’s an idea. Maybe a good one. It’s been so long since he’s had a really good idea, it’s giving him jitters.
Cecil’s voice has been his tether to Night Vale. He hadn’t thought about using that tether to pull.
“Cecil, there’s—“ His voice cracks, a little hysterical with hope. “—there’s something I want to try. I can’t guarantee it will work. It’s a crazy hypothesis, but the only way to ever prove or disprove a hypothesis is by trying. And I’m going to need you to help me.”
“I’ll do whatever I can, Carlos.”
“You’ll be great at this, Cecil. You’ve been great at this. For months.” His face goes hot. “It’s almost like—oh god, it’s almost like we’ve been practicing. We just—it hasn’t been the right scenario.”
“Carlos?”
Enough babbling; he’s got to start explaining. A scientist is self-reliant, but this isn’t quite science, and he definitely can’t do this without Cecil.
“Honey. So you know how you can make wonderful things happen. To me. Just by talking?”
There’s a pause before Cecil drawls, “You’ve mentioned.” His voice is so darkly flirtatious that Carlos almost whimpers.
Instead, he clears his throat, and says what he has to say. “I’m going to need you to talk to me. And to your listeners in Night Vale. And to the masked army. To everyone, really. I’m going to need you to tell a story. On the radio.”
The red light blinks and the ground faintly rumbles and the stars tell their tales over and over to whoever can interpret them. Carlos has never believed in anyone else as much as he believes in Cecil right now.
He pushes on. “I’m going to need— that is, do you think you could tell me a story where I come home to you? A story about us?”
“No.”
Cecil’s answer is so abrupt that Carlos is taken aback. “Cecil?”
“Stupid, stupid Cecil. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that’s what you were—forgive me. It’s a … sweet suggestion,” Cecil says, sounding strained. “You give me a lot of credit, Carlos. But if there were a way for me to bring you home, I can promise you I would have tried it.”
“Not if you hadn’t thought of it! Maybe you just needed me to come up with the right idea. You’ve been so fixated on the oak doors, Cecil. Maybe there are other possibilities. Ones we’ve been overlooking, all this time!”
“The old oak doors are the right way to bring you home,” Cecil says flatly.
“Cecil, the doors… we don’t really know anything about them. I mean, are there certain conditions that make them more likely to manifest? Will they be locked? How would we unlock them? It’s been months, Cecil. Months! And I haven’t seen anything that so much as resembles a door.”
“Because you haven’t been looking,” Cecil says, the words like hot desert wind. “No, sorry, I didn’t mean that. You’ve been doing you’re best—I shouldn’t…“
This is something he’s avoided trying to explain to Cecil. Perhaps to Cecil, still in Night Vale, it seems like an entirely reasonable suggestion to search the desert over for doors, but here, tracking down one of those oak doors seems like a lost cause. The desert is infinitely vast, and he must have wandered so far from wherever he began. Besides, the doors are what shut him out. He has no reason to believe they will be the way back in.
“The only reason I haven’t been looking is because there hasn’t been anything to find! I know you’ve put all your hope into this one solution, but I have yet to find any empirical evidence that it’s worth hoping for. We have empirical evidence of other things, though.
“I think you have more power than you give yourself credit for. Scientifically speaking, your voice is amazing, Ceec. Back when … before, we’d linked it to all sorts of interesting—and anomalous—scientific phenomena. Under certain conditions, you were able to alter the flow of events just by telling them differently. And this place isn’t like any place else, the rules are different. If you can do all that in Night Vale, just think what sort of influence you might be able to have here. Cecil! Don’t you see? This could be the thing that works.”
“No, Carlos. No, it won’t. I know what I am capable of. I know what my words are capable of. Me, my words, we’re not capable of this. And even if such a thing were possible, I would not do that to you. I would not do that to us.”
“I don’t understand,” Carlos says.
“That is, unfortunately, my point exactly.”
“Explain to me, then, babe,” he urges.
“What you’re suggesting is the complete and total manipulation of your bodily control and free will.”
“Well, yeah, I guess so,” Carlos allows. “But I’m asking you, sweetie. That’s consent.”
“Consent given when you don’t understand the ramifications of what you’re offering isn’t really consent.”
“I’m sure it can’t be that—“
“You don’t know what it’s like for someone to hold that kind of power over you. And dear, sweet Carlos, I will not be the one to show you.”
“But… I trust you, Cecil.”
“Then trust that I’m right about this.”
“But—“
“Carlos. I didn’t want it to come to this, but … well, I’ve been talking some things over with … with some people, here in Night Vale… It’s been suggested that I could use time to myself to work out some of the issues I’ve been dealing with, without … well. I just … I need some space.”
“What?” Carlos asks. “What does that mean?” The desert around him is vast and empty, and he makes gestures toward it—empty ones, since Cecil can’t see them. “We have so much space. Space is the thing that we have in greatest abundance. Who have you been talking to?”
“I have to go now.”
“Cecil, don’t. Cecil, please,” Carlos begs. “Cecil, listen.” But Cecil, though no further from him than before, is gone. From Carlos’s phone comes silence.
“No,” Carlos whispers shakily.
Without Cecil’s voice, he can hear the rumbling. It’s grown louder. As he listens, staring into the darkness, it continues to grow louder at an alarming rate.
“No,” Carlos croaks, louder.
The rumbling sweeps over him, like a wave, filling his ears with deafening noise. The light on top of the mountain stops blinking, filling the empty desert with steady blood red light.
The ground beneath him shudders.
He lunges into a run, but the twisting sand throws him off balance. He lands wrong on his ankle, hobbles forward a few steps, and then, as sand continues to skitter and slide around him, slumps to the ground. He scrabbles backward, dragging his bad leg after the rest of him. But then he can only stop and gape and watch.
In front of him, the ground groans and splits, loose rocks skittering, unstoppable, toward the rift that keeps rending.
And Carlos waits for the earth to swallow him whole.