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On Thursday Carlos says, “Are those new pyjamas?”
Cecil often slept over at Carlos' apartment these days. Not after dates or anything. He would just ring up late in the evening and say, "Carlos, I'd like to come over," and Carlos would usually assent and within a couple of minutes Cecil would turn up at the door with a satchel full of pyjamas and toiletries. Oddly, ‘a couple of minutes’ was quite a lot quicker than Carlos took to drive to Cecil’s house, but Carlos had yet to work out whether Cecil actually had some mechanism for crossing town at impossible speeds, or whether he was just ringing him from the car.
(“Don’t use your cellphone while you’re driving!” Carlos scolded him once, when Cecil answered a call from Intern Maureen on their way out to Radon Canyon, and Cecil had said with deep remorse mixed with confusion, “But the car likes it.” Carlos hadn’t known how to reply, so he didn’t say it again).
In the beginning he thought the sleepovers were just Cecil's way of propositioning him, and the visits would rapidly descend from a cup of herbal tea (parsley for Carlos, cayenne pepper for Cecil) into sex on the couch. However, he soon discovered that Cecil was so burstingly happy afterwards that he wriggled all night. Carlos' bed was big, but it was not big enough to get a good night's sleep while your partner was rolling back and forth in his sleep mumbling 'perfect, perfect' in his dreams.
After that Carlos tried not pulling Cecil onto the couch by his lapels as soon as the tea was finished. Instead they just did things like talking about their day, and playing Cuneiform Scrabble (Cecil usually won, until Carlos began inventing words and claiming they were taxonomy names and chemical elements). Cecil seemed just as happy after such evenings, except that he did not wriggle at all in bed afterwards. And when he did want to be dragged onto the couch by his lapels, he made it pretty clear.
But let us return the present. Carlos has just asked, “Are those new pyjamas?”
“No,” Cecil is standing in the doorway between the bedroom and the living room. He looks down at the cotton patchwork draped over his body. He seems to be impersonating a shattered, stain-glass window. “I thought you’d seen all my pyjamas.”
“I’ve seen your exhausted pyjamas, your anticipatory nightgown and your vengeful T-shirt and boxers combination,” Carlos comes closer. He tilts his head to one side and reaches across to pick at the neck of Cecil’s shirt, where several disjointed sections combine to irradiate out from Cecil’s neck. It gives the rather eye-aching impression of a decapitated head sitting on a lottery wheel. “I have not seen these pyjamas. Are… is every section joined together with domes?”
“Yes,” Cecil says brightly. “Making sure the limb-holes line up is like a fun puzzle before bedtime. They’re my happy pyjamas, by the way.”
“That must take a while to put on,” Carlos frowns, going back into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water.
“I’ve had some practice,” says Cecil, following him.
“I still don’t see why they’re your happy pyjamas,” he is half distracted by holding the glass of water up to the light to make sure the colour is tinged very slightly mint-green. Anything else requires, at the least, a consultation with Cecil. “Aren’t the domes uncomfortable to sleep in?”
When he looks over, Cecil’s smile has widened. His eyes have also widened, which Carlos is still not used to. Eyes are, in his experience, supposed to crinkle up when a person smiles. Cecil’s do not.
“Slow to put together,” explains Cecil. “Fast to disassemble. Did you ever play pass-the-parcel as a kid?”
Carlos freezes with the edge of the water glass pressed against his bottom lip. Cecil holds his gaze. He takes a small sip, swallows (is that sound as loud as he thinks it is?) and licks his mouth. “Did I ever…? Yes.”
“I love pass-the-parcel,” Cecil smiles, eyes gazing off into his memory. “The anticipation of opening presents. It’s almost more fun than actual presents.”
Carlos takes a couple of steps closer and touches another seam of Cecil’s pyjamas, where it is splayed across his ribs. “So… the domes open up… anywhere you want?”
“It would be inconsistent not to,” says Cecil, as Carlos’ fingers slip between the domes and brush against the trail of hair on his flat stomach. “Are you coming to bed?”
“Yes,” he says very, very quickly. “Yes, I am.”
So the next few days are Carlos’ fault, really. Carlos and the happy pyjamas.
On Friday Carlos walks into the bedroom to find Cecil already in it, with the sheets shoved down to his waist and one arm thrown over the side of the bed as if it is a particularly hot night. It is not a hot night; it is an unusually cool and comfortable night for this town, in fact.
"Are you alright?" Carlos asks. "You're wearing your sad pyjamas."
"My stomach hurts," Cecil mutters, not opening his eyes. "Maybe I ate too much offal at lunch.”
"Do you want me to put a bucket by the bed?"
Cecil wriggles until he is lying entirely face-down with his arms folded under his torso. Through the pillow comes his muffled reply. "It's okay. I think I took your buckets to the station anyway. The soundboard was leaking."
"What's wrong with it?"
"It was leaking," Cecil repeated.
"What was it leaking?"
"Sound, obviously."
During the night, Carlos thinks he can hear a sort of wet grinding sound, like steak being fed into a meat mincer. But there are a lot of night noises in this town far more disturbing than that, so he rolls over and goes back to sleep.
He awakes to the distant, muffled sound of an infant crying. It takes a while to pull him out of sleep, like drawing a clump of long hairs out of a drain. He raises his head at last. The sound was not part of his dream. There is definitely a child crying nearby – it sounds like it might be in the next room. Or under the bed. The sound makes Carlos feel ill more than frightened, because whether there is actually a baby in need of help or whether it is simply the lure of a predatory hell-beast hiding in their wardrobe, he is not going to get a good night’s sleep, and he hates that.
“Cecil,” he whispered. He puts his hand on Cecil’s arm and squeezes. “Cecil, wake up.”
Cecil’s bicep is strangely flaccid and he rolls with the shaking but does not react to it. Carlos frowns. “Cecil?”
His hand slides over Cecil’s shoulder and brushes his knuckles across his neck. The skin there is cool and clammy with sweat, and Cecil’s head seems to loll against the pillow like a puppet with cut strings.
“Cecil!” Carlos whispers, shaking his shoulder harder, but there is no answering twitch, no shift to consciousness. Somewhere far away, the child is still crying. “Cecil!”
He rolls over and fumbles for the lamp switch. Yellow light fills the room and Carlos grabs his glasses and slides them on. He rolls back towards Cecil and props himself up on one elbow. Cecil is curled on his side. The shaking has turned his face upwards towards the ceiling, his eyes still closed, his mouth hanging open. His brow and the muscles around his eyes are clenched, the corners of his jaw tightened as if in pain. Carlos holds his palm over Cecil’s mouth and feels a faint, panting breath.
His heart is starting to pound. He sits up and – thinking of putting Cecil into the recovery position until he can get medical assistance – he rips back the bedclothes.
Two groups of sensations reach his cortex at the same time; the child's crying increases intensely and there is the smell of blood, so much blood. So, so much blood. Carlos’ bed is full of blood except that it is all on Cecil’s side of the mattress, it has come out of Cecil, it is still coming out of Cecil, and there is what looks like a human infant lying tucked into the abdominal region of his mangled pyjamas and there are trailing bits of skin and flesh across the infant’s face. It is screaming, face screwed up, mouth open, and its jaws are full of triangular, silver teeth like a shark. Every inch of it is dyed with crimson, stinking blood.
“Oh, God,” Carlos chokes, sliding backwards off the bed. For half moment he can only gape, and then he realizes that his friend is bleeding to death.
He grabs fistfuls of Cecil’s pyjamas and drags him away from the creature, dizzy from standing up too quickly or perhaps from the sight of the blood. He slides his arms around Cecil’s shoulders and knees and picks him up. He’s strangely, sickeningly light all of a sudden. Carlos carries him across the bedroom and kicks open the bathroom door.
(Carlos has pretty strong arms anyway, or so Cecil is always telling him. He grabs Carlos’ arm right when Carlos is trying to cook or write an email and says something like, “You have such strong arms. It’s probably from carrying all those big bottles of chemicals.” And Carlos replies, “It’s probably because I work out,” and Cecil says, “Yes! Working out equations and sums and things,” and Carlos just looks at him and laughs and says, “Yes, Cecil.” He says that a lot these days. It is like slowly unlearning reality, but in a good way – in the way that science removes all surety and reliable intuition the more you explore it until he is left wide-eyed in awe at all that he does not know in the universe.)
But right now reality is real and instinct is rule and Cecil’s inside are turning into outsides. In the bathroom, Carlos lays him down without gentleness, though Cecil’s head at least hits the bathmat rather than the tiles. His limbs flop with gravity and lie still. Carlos sees his bare arms by the better light and for a moment he thinks Cecil’s tattoos are missing. Then he notices dark, clustered scribbles on the underside of Cecil’s arm and he lifts the limb up to find the tattoos have all sunk to the lowest parts of Cecil’s body, like silt at the bottom of a jar, overlapping and tangling with each other. They are looking grey and sag like heated toffee. Carlos has long suspected that the tattoos move of their own accord but this is the first time he has proof. He does not even give it a split-second thought. He has no time for second thoughts.
There is a first aid kit under the sink. Cecil gave it to him in his first week in Nightvale. Carlos was cautious about Cecil then and has never opened the kit. Now he rips it out of the cabinet and almost breaks the lid trying to get it open. There is a ringing in his ears and his ribs are constricting together like laced fingers. On top the kit displays rubbing alcohol, a box of aspirin, and a jar of honey. Carlos tosses it all onto the floor. Next there are two plastic-wrapped hypodermics labeled ‘rabies vaccine’, what appears to be a set of antique blood-letting equipment, A Quick Guide to Fifteen Handy Exorcisms and a zip-lock baggie of pencil shavings. And then finally, at the bottom, there are sterile packets of bandages and rolls of gauze and butterfly stitches and tape and Carlos has to push up his glasses and wipe his face on his sleeve because his eyes are full of sweat.
“Cecil,” he keeps saying. “Talk to me. Tell me what just happened. Tell me which merciless deity to pray to. Cecil, talk to me!”
Cecil lies panting and says nothing. Carlos rolls the remains of his shirt up and tries to pull together the torn edges of the wound with butterfly stitches. It is impossible. It looks as if somebody has punched their fist out of his abdomen. Carlos settles for thick pads of cloth and wrapping bandages around Cecil’s body, pulling them tighter and tighter.
In the bedroom, the child continues to scream.
Carlos pulls towels off the railing and piles them over Cecil to keep him warm while he goes into the other room to find the phone. The old, yellowed cord only just stretches from the bedroom into Carlos’ makeshift triage station beside the bath. Cecil had written various phone numbers around the empty plastic spaces all over the phone, with no apparent system. Carlos dials old woman Josie, the first person he finds that he is sure is still alive, and pins the headset between his ear and his shoulder while he pulls Cecil's head onto his lap. He slaps Cecil's face gently, not realising that his hands are covered in blood until it smears on Cecil's cheek. His face is substantially greyer than its normal hue. The phone rings and rings and rings, though Carlos can barely hear it above the crying of the baby. With a growl he manages to stretch out and kick the bathroom door shut.
Josie's voice, thin but still strong and supple like slink-leather gloves, answers at last. Carlos groans, "Josie! Josie, it's Carlos, the scientist, I need help – Cecil's hurt, he's hurt bad – this thing – I think this thing chewed its way out of his intestines and there's a huge hole and there's blood but I don't know what to do. Cecil always says not to go to the hospital. He says ‘Don't ever go to the hospital, Carlos’ and then he leans in and stares right in my eyes and says it again slightly slower and, and..." his voice cracks and fades.
"Oh, dear," Josie says, after a short pause. "Well, you're quite right, sweetheart. How about you take him to the maternity ward instead?"
"What?" Carlos croaks. He is shaking so much that the phone keeps trying to slip away. His hands absently pet Cecil's head. He has stopped caring that he is getting blood in Cecil's hair. There is blood everywhere, just everywhere.
"Well, you're right not to go to the hospital, but the maternity wing is very safe. Lots of people go there for all sorts ailments. I'm sure they'll be able to look after him."
"He needs an ER team, not a midwife!"
Josie gives an offended sigh. There arises a low, slightly angry hum some distance from her end of the phone. She says patiently, "Dr Fatemi the gynecologist is very good at appendectomies too, Carlos. I'm sure he can handle this gaping wound problem Cecil has. Now, when you go, drive around until you find the entrance under the trees. Don't go in the front where the big neon emergency sign is, there's a good chap. That’s a product advertisement. The maternity ward asks for a password to get in but if you've got a lot of blood on you they usually just let you through."
"Entrance under the trees, show lots of blood," Carlos stammers out the instructions. "Thank you, Josie, thank you. I'm going to go now."
"It'll all work out fine, dear, I'm quite sure."
He drops the phone back onto the receiver, goes out and rips the big woollen blanket off the bed. As he is lifting Cecil up to try and wrap the blanket around him, Cecil's throat bobs and his mouth moves. Carlos puts his arm under his shoulders and bends his ear as low as he can.
"Cecil! Cecil, don't worry," says Carlos, who is also not worrying, because he has gone well past worry by now into abject terror.
Cecil whispers. "There's. Protocol."
"What?" Carlos lowers his head even further, his glasses almost sliding off his nose.
"A protocol," Cecil swallows. His voice is very small and thin, unrecognisable from the grand broadcast with which he usually fills the airwaves. "For the interns. In the. Likely event. Of my death. It's in a. Locked drawer under. The cabinet full of blacklights."
"Cecil, that's not going to be necessary, you're going to be fine," Carlos pleads to the aether, pushing Cecil's hair away from his forehead and gripping his face.
Cecil gives a surprisingly stoic smile, which of course is exceedingly weak and pitiful, but even a smile at all in such a situation is surprising. He finishes, "Wouldn't want. Anyone. Getting hurt," and closes his eyes.
"Hang on for me!" Carlos croaks. "The scientific community will be angry with you if you leave, do you hear me? The scientific community will be extremely upset. You wouldn't let the scientific community down, would you?"
Cecil does not answer.
Trying to keep his hands as steady as he can, Carlos tightens the blanket around his body and heaves him up into his arms. He carries Cecil out of the bedroom, through the lab down to the car. He is shaking so much his teeth are clacking together. It is not from the cold.
The nurse says Cecil will be in surgery for a very long time, and then rolls away. Carlos can do nothing more, so he goes home to change his clothes. There are spots of blood trailed through the lab and across his bedroom carpet. The sheets are ruined, probably the mattress too. That much blood will never come out.
The baby is still lying in a pool of it on Cecil's side of the bed. It begins to cry again as Carlos opens the door. Carlos stares at it for a while, his hand on the doorknob, not daring to approach the monster. The sharp, silver teeth are visible even from across the room. At last he pushes a pile of papers and clothes and a yellow and purple afghan off the chair, picks the chair up and approaches the creature slowly, ready to bolt back into the hall if it makes any sudden moves. It does not. It lies on its back, eyes squeezed shut, mewling.
Carlos takes the worn afghan off the floor. He picks up the baby with the blanket like someone taking a hot dish out of the oven, shuffles to the wardrobe and nudges it open with his foot. He puts it on a the pile of shoes and then shuts the door. He can still hear it crying, but it is very faint now. Carlos sets about stripping the bed, mopping the bathroom and putting baking soda on the bloodstains that have got onto the carpet. He showers, gets dressed, eats a bowl of cereal and checks the baby. It is where he left it. It has stopped crying. He needs to figure out what it is and whether it’s dangerous. He’s so tired. He can’t think.
He wonders if he should bring Cecil some spare clothes for when he gets out of surgery. The hospital gowns had looked like they were made of the same kind of material as household rubber gloves. Carlos decides he'll go to Cecil’s house and bring him a pair of pyjamas. He gets as far as finding Cecil's keys – there are only two of them on the ring, one jet-black and one that appears to be made of very hard wood – before he changes his mind. He's never been alone in Cecil's house and it feels somehow like an invasion of his privacy to go now, without permission. Also he has the nagging feeling that Cecil's house will be different without Cecil inside of it. Possibly it will treat Carlos as an invader. Better not risk it.
Carlos finds a spare pair of his own pyjamas and takes these back to the hospital instead.
It is Saturday. Carlos has gone for lunch and come back to find Cecil lying in the exact same position where he had left him, with even more tubes snaking under his skin than before, except that now he is wearing the pyjamas that Carlos had left by his bedside on top of his rubbery hospital gown. The very edge of his tattoos peer from the sleeves. They seem to be back in their usual spots. That has to be a good sign.
Carlos gets a book out and has read a couple of chapters when Cecil wakes up. His eyes snap open and his breathing becomes strong and steady. He stares at the ceiling. Carlos leans over him. Cecil’s mouth goes from flat and shut to smiling broadly, if a little more pained than usual.
“What year is it?” he asks. His voice is hoarse and soft.
“You’ve only been asleep for fourteen hours, Cecil,” Carlos says.
Cecil clicks his tongue and closes his eyes in a disappointed grimace. He raises a shuddering hand to touch the oxygen tube hooked into his nose and then the drip in his arm. His hand moves down to find the source of his pain and hisses when he touches the layers of cloth over his wound.
“You’re gonna survive,” Carlos says. “I don’t know how, but you pulled through.”
“Years of practise,” Cecil whispers. Carlos brings him a glass of water (faint mint green – he checks) and holds his head up for him while he drinks. Cecil’s skull is warm beneath its soft hair. It seems incredibly fragile in Carlos’ hand, like a porcelain antique that should be behind glass in a museum. He has never felt so instinctively, gut-wrenchingly protective in his life. If some monstrous, multi-tentacled threat crawled through the door right at this moment, Carlos would probably turn into a Viking berserker and drive it back with his bare fists, howling and beating his chest.
They have a short conversation about nothing, and Cecil sleeps for a while, and Carlos dozes, and wakes to a nurse changing Cecil’s blood transfusion to a fresh bag of AB-infinite. Cecil seems a little brighter after she leaves.
“It’s not too bad,” he insists. “I think whatever attacked me had some kind of anaesthetic in its saliva.”
“Not too bad?” Carlos digs his fingers into his (thick, luxurious, says Cecil’s voice in his mind) hair. “You were in surgery for nine hours. You lost four inches of your small intestine.”
“Oh, stop making a fuss,” Cecil smiles past the oxygen tube, his head sunk into the pillows. “I did fourth grade cadaver studies just like everyone else. There’s plenty of small intestine to spare.”
Someone has put a radio on the nightstand beside Cecil’s bed. It is emitting a number of very low, alternating hums, like someone playing music around the rim of water glasses. During the conversation’s pause, the hums fade and there are a couple of clicks and a distant mumble of, “Is that working? Oh. There’s the light.” The woman’s voice comes closer to her microphone. “Hello. Welcome to the Nightvale. My name is Annisa. I’m filling in for Cecil today, as we are not sure where he is. Old Woman Josie has updated her facebook wishing him best of luck recovering from the monster that chewed its way out of his hole in his abdomen last night, but when we called her she said she wasn’t sure whether Cecil was announcing the happy news yet and it wasn’t her place to gossip, so we’re not clear if he’s alive or not. If you’re listening to this, get well soon, Cecil! Please, get well soon. We need you. Nobody can find the weather tapes and a voice in the pipes keeps complaining that it hasn’t been fed. Please come to work. Please, Cecil. We are very afraid for our lives.”
“Aw, that is so sweet,” Cecil smiles. “Whatever does Josie mean about gossip?”
Carlos fiddles with a stray thread on his flannel sleeve. He rubs the bridge of his nose under his spectacles. “The… thing that chewed you open… it was a baby. Human-looking. Sort of.”
"A baby?" frowns Cecil. "I wonder where it came from. Have you asked the Sheriff's Secret Police if anyone reported a baby missing last night?"
"Cecil, I think it came from inside you," Carlos puts his hand over Cecil's long fingers.
“Don’t be silly! I definitely didn’t have any babies inside me when I went to sleep.”
“I saw it all happen, Cecil. There’s no mistake,” Carlos closes his eyes for a moment, the wrinkles deep in his brow. He wishes he could argue the whole thing away.
Cecil raises his eyebrows. "As a scientist, I would have expected you to at least entertain the possibility of an alternative explanation. Perhaps this baby appeared in our bedroom through some wayward portal, crawled up onto the bed and then proceeded to consume the flesh of my tender belly," Cecil tilts his head as if Carlos has forgotten how to tie his shoelaces. "Poor thing must have been very hungry."
"After a year of living in this town, I know perfectly well what an exit wound looks like," Carlos frowns. "That baby came out of you."
"Well, I suppose I will have to trust you on that. But somebody will still want it back. Maybe you should go down to the station and put a bulletin out over the radio."
"You’re not listening, Cecil! I mean, I think you made it somehow," Carlos explains. "It grew inside you."
"Alright fine, I’ll play along. Even if you’re right it doesn't belong to us all the same," Cecil insists. "Just because it's been leeching proteins and nutrients out of my blood supply doesn't mean I can keep it. That would be silly. Babies have parents, Carlos, which we are obviously not. We had better find the owners of this one before they worry themselves sick."
Carlos doesn't like the maternity ward. He doesn't know what the machines are doing or what drugs they're putting into Cecil or what the doctor's scribble on Cecil's charts mean. Carlos hates not knowing exactly why things are happening and whether the doctor's decisions are based on good, peer-reviewed evidence. He is itching to get his fingers onto his laptop to look things up, and Cecil keeps falling asleep, so he decides to head home for the day. It is late afternoon already.
“Excuse me?” Carlos asks one of the nurses, wringing his hands as she rotates on the spot to look at him. “Do you have… like… some sort of new parents’ basket? Or preferably an unexpected parents’ basket? Because I would like to get one. Quietly.”
The baby seems to be sleeping fitfully with Carlos returns to the flat. He picks it up carefully under its arms and carries it very slowly at arms' length into the bathroom (which is still full of crimson smears from last night). He puts a clean towel in the sink and lays the baby inside it. It wakes up and begins to cry. He doesn’t know how much longer he can stand that noise. How long do babies tend to cry for? Eighteen years? He squeezes his eyes shut, takes a breath and runs the water until it is just above blood temperature. He washes the gore and mess off the baby with his soft facecloth as it wriggles and whines. He makes a mental note to buy a new facecloth.
He realises at last that it is actually a girl baby. Until now he sort of thought of it neutrally, with a slight lean towards male, but he supposes it is a bit sexist of him to assume that just because it instinctively chewed its way through several layers of living muscle and fibrous membrane, it must be a boy. He still cannot think "she". She is for known variables in the equation. It is for the x and y and omega, the unknowns, the questions.
Slowly, (very slowly) soft, new skin begins to emerge from under the sticky, dry blood. It is a beautiful, healthy skin colour, not quite the same as Carlos' skin and not quite the same as Cecil's. It is somewhere in between. The baby is still crying. Her silver teeth click together every now and then before a fresh wail.
"I think I might have just won worst father of the year," Carlos says to the empty bathroom. He drains the water and very, very gently towels the baby dry. He puts it on the floor and struggles with a diaper for a few minutes, but eventually decides it looks about right. The baby is still crying.
He wraps the baby in the tight folds of his labcoat and takes it back into the other room. He balances the bundle on his lap while he works out how the bottle of formula is supposed to function. At last he manages to mimic that ancient, evolution-honed pose of parenthood, with the screaming infant wriggling in the crook of his arm until its mouth finds the nipple of the baby bottle. After a couple more whimpers there is sudden, glorious silence. Carlos stares at the baby's face by the light of the bedside lamp as it suckles. It has dark, hazel-flecked brown eyes. His eyes, he realises. It has his eyes. And the size of those ears, the ratio of nose to mouth – those are all Cecil.
He begins to think about testing a few representative genetic markers and is wondering whether he has the necessary reagents to extract DNA and how long it will take to order in phenol if the stock is empty when it occurs to him that he doesn’t need to bother. He doesn’t have to do tests. He knows. He is sure of it. It is as clear as the nose on Cecil's face.
Silently, Carlos begins to cry. He tries to keep his shoulders from shaking too much and disturbing the baby. In Nightvale, random fits of crying are business as usual. Even when there isn’t a soulless telepathic entity pressing down on the town’s weak and unshielded psyches, it is not uncommon for a person, with no accompanying emotional feeling, to simply burst into tears and heartfelt sobs without warning. In public, people often respond with "gesundheit!" or offer a glass of water as if they are trying to cure hiccoughs. But Carlos knows that right now this is not a random, detached burst of crying. This is him actually crying.
The baby finishes eating and begins to squeak again. There is something small and glinting on the nipple of the bottle, slowly sliding down the side within a bubble of saliva. Carlos reaches to pick it off without thinking, worried about choking hazards. It is a sharp sliver of metal and he grimaces in horror that it had almost been inside the baby's mouth.
Not almost. It has been inside her mouth. It is a tooth.
Carlos looks at the baby, which is suddenly a she at last. A second tooth is resting on her bottom lip. Carlos wipes the first one onto the bedside table and grabs for the second before she can suck it into her throat. His brows contract and the baby grizzles as he gently nudges her chin, trying to convince her to open her mouth. He catches a glimpse of two gaps in her silver smile. The gums where the teeth have dropped out are flushed but the skin is already healed over, puckered yet unbroken.
Her baby teeth are falling out. Evidently she does not need them anymore.
Carlos has to carry the thing around after that, obviously. He can’t leave her in the cupboard again. He doesn’t have a bassinet or anything, so he just ties his labcoat as a sling around his neck and lugs the baby around like that. When he tries to bring his new ward into the hospital, however, the receptionist glares at him.
“Sir, you’ll have to leave that outside,” she raises her painted eyebrows at him.
“But,” Carlos glances down at the baby, who is finally sleeping in the sling, “…this is a maternity ward?”
The nurse taps a sign on the wall beside her. It reads: NOT SPAWNED HERE? NOT OUR PROBLEM. And underneath in smaller letters Help us prevent cuckoo infestations; only registered infants allowed.
So then he has to drive all the way back out to Josie’s house and leave the baby with her. She puts it on the meal-tray bolted to her television chair and waves him away. As he leaves, he sees a transparent, shadowy, eight-foot tall figure lifting the baby up and (by the sound of it) blowing raspberries at it. With some trepidation, he returns to the hospital. Visiting hours are almost over, so he talks fast. He has so much to say to Cecil, so much to ask.
"I think she's our baby," Carlos explains, gesturing broadly. "Do you get this, Cecil? I think we," he indicates them both as if conducting a vibrant lecture for young children in the wonders of quantum mechanics, "made a baby."
"It's not ours," Cecil repeats from his hospital bed. "Even if you're right, that doesn't make us its real parents. That's not how things work."
"I don't see why you're not more excited by this," Carlos pouts. “This may be the most exciting biological discovery I’ve come across in all of Nightvale!” he scrubs his face with both hands. “Cecil, did you know you could do this? Has this ever happened to anyone else in your family?”
“I don’t know,” Cecil mumbles. “Not anyone in my real family, that’s for sure.”
“The gametic chromosomal coordination required is mind-boggling,” Carlos is now pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed, hands moving from his hips to clasp behind his back and then to scratching his chin. “But as for arranging normal methylation… well… oh, who am I kidding? We’re talking overnight gestation without any known method of fertilization.”
Cecil swallows. “I expect there’s a pill I could take to stop it happening again. I’ll talk to the doctor.”
“I wonder if the surgeons took photographs of your insides… I need to know if there was any abnormal anatomy… but perhaps it’s a host-parasite sort of initiation…?”
"Carlos,” Cecil says. He has to say it again because Carlos is moving around so much. “Carlos! I'm trying to regrow part of my liver, and it's very exhausting," he leans back into the pillows. "Could you… could you leave me alone to sleep?"
Carlos stops and stares at him. He wonders if he has ever, in the entire time they have known each other, heard Cecil tell him ‘leave me alone’. He is pretty sure he hasn’t. He most definitely hasn’t while he is talking science. Something much worse than he thought is definitely going on. Until now Carlos thought that the worst thing right now was a massive, ragged hole in Cecil's abdomen and an unexpected addition to his tax form. It is going to take some thinking to imagine something worse.
But Carlos is a scientist and he is good at thinking. Pretty soon he starts to see the shape of things. Cecil is feeling things and afraid to speak them aloud. Cecil wants him to do something but refuses to come out and say. Carlos hates the idea of doing things – drastic things – without Cecil’s express consent, but he has got used to doing a lot of things in backwards and round-about ways since he met Cecil. And he begins to see that it is indeed a very difficult thing to say, even for Cecil, who reports all sorts of terrible things with good sense and a quick injection of optimism if necessary. Cecil is good at saying awful things, yes, definitely. But there is still no easy way to say, I don’t want that child, and, Not now, not here, not with you, and This kid is going to be better off if it gets as far away from here as possible.
And Carlos thinks he sees what Cecil is thinking (which is never easy at the best of times) and he sees what he has to do.
On Sunday he rings a number he finds online on a webpage for the Nightvale Adoption Agency. A receptionist who sounds as if he is chewing gum listens to his story and asks him which branch he wants to talk to.
“Pardon?”
“What type of baby is it?” the receptionist asks. Carlos can hear him rolling his eyes. “We deal with two categories; ‘Human-Indistinguishable’ and ‘Misc’.”
Carlos looks down at the baby. She is sleeping in the basket of clean sheets he just brought in from the washing line on the roof of the lab (the stains did not come out completely, but there's no sense throwing out perfectly good sheets because of a few bloodstains). She looks pretty normal. All her silver teeth have fallen out now. Carlos is keeping them in an empty mug by his computer.
After a long silence he says, “Human-Indistinguishable, please.”
He is connected through to a second line. A woman walks him through the explanation again and then the process he'll have to follow. She doesn’t ask a lot of questions about where the baby actually came from, only confirming that Carlos has thought about his decision at length and has no doubts.
He is told to wait until one in the morning that night and then drive to a particular dirt road outside of town. He should park his car beside the split rock with a cactus growing out of it. He should wear white. He should bring the baby.
Carlos wears his least favourite labcoat (the dust from Nightvale's dirt roads is impossible to get out of white clothes). He leans against the hood of the car for twenty minutes before a black SUV crawls along the road towards him. He reaches back into the car and flicks his headlights five times to the beat of the first riff of Bohemian Rapsody, as he has been instructed. The SUV grumbles closer and a grey-haired woman with a clipboard gets out. Her face is full of frown lines and her clothes are about ten years out of fashion, but they’re clean and ironed, and she has a firm grip when she shakes Carlos’ hand.
“You can’t be too careful,” she says. “You know what it’s like around here. You take your eyes off a kid and zip! They’re snatched by angels or they walk back into the room forty years older or hell knows what. You can’t let anyone know a kid is spare around these parts. It’s just asking for trouble. Anyway, let’s get the paperwork sorted.”
He signs a lot of forms and papers, resting the clipboard on the boot of his car. The adoption agent goes around to the passenger-side door and coos over the baby. Carlos feels guilty for not having a carseat for infants, though he supposes it doesn’t really matter now. The paperwork asks him if he is smuggling anything inside this baby. He ticks ‘no’ and feels guilty about that, too. She looks human all over. He checked.
The adoption woman produces a well-worn lemon onesie and dresses the baby while he finishes dating the last of the forms. She comes around the car with the baby in the crook of her arm to make sure he’s done everything correctly.
"Do you ever get adoptions from outside into Nightvale?" he asks, handing her back the papers. "Like, do you get calls from other cities about… miscellaneous children… who need good homes in Nightvale?"
"On occasion," the woman nods, bouncing the baby gently. The baby makes bubbles and flaps her arms in her new yellow romper.
"Did you have a baby come into town in, uh," Carlos realises he does not have the first clue about when Cecil was born. He is not even sure Nightvale uses the Gregorian Calender in a linear fashion. He shrugs, "Do you remember a baby a few decades ago named Cecil?"
"Dr Carlos," says the woman with a frown. "Even if I knew the answer, our service is completely confidential. I would never give you such information."
"I totally understand," agrees Carlos. He nods at her. "Thank you again."
"I'll give you a call to let you know she's been settled," says the woman, turning to get into her car. Carlos suddenly feels his heart race.
"Wait – just a moment – can I —" he hurries around to where she stands above the passenger side door. There is a cozy bassinet strapped into the seat. Carlos bends down and kisses the baby on top of her head. She smells like the back of Cecil’s neck, and like the feeling of getting into a warm bed at the end of a winter’s day. The woman is watching Carlos, so she doesn’t see what he sees as he straightens up again. For just a moment, there is a tiny, purple glow from the baby's forehead, a simple outline of an enigmatic rune. But it fades so quickly that he isn't even sure he's really seen it.
As he drives back to Nightvale, he wonders if there are any baby pictures of Cecil in Nightvale, and what Cecil would look like with sharp, silver teeth.
He does not go home. He goes to the maternity ward. It is quiet and dim in the corridors, but the nurses let him through. He falls asleep in the chair beside Cecil’s bed.
“How’d it go?”
Carlos raises his head from his knuckles. Cecil is blinking sleepily, stretching one arm out to brush his palm over the very tip of the mussed hairs above Carlos’ forehead. The first of the morning sunlight is creeping through the blinds.
“How’d what go?” Carlos asks.
“Returning the baby.”
“Oh, good,” Carlos forces himself to wear a broad grin and squeezes Cecil’s hand, his heart beating in slow, heavy thumps. “She’s heading to a nice home.”
“Neat,” says Cecil, and goes back to sleep.
It is Monday morning.
On Wednesday Carlos is in the lab sectioning local flora. He leaves the radio on. He almost always leaves the radio on now, wherever he is. Usually there is music in no genre Carlos can name. Sometimes there is soft static, almost more easy on the ears than the music. Occasionally there are screams or barking noises, and he turns it off for a while. But sooner or later there is Cecil's voice, and that is worth the wait.
“Good morning, listeners," he drawls today. "I must apologise for my absence these past few days. The interns have been filling up the airwaves very well with – I am surprised but pleased to say – no fatalities. But in good news, I have a heartwarming story for you, dear listeners. This weekend, Carlos and I,” he sighs so long and lovingly Carlos wonders if he has deflated, “Had a baby. Only for the weekend, of course. And also, I spent most of the weekend on the stiff and ectoplasm-stained sheets of a maternity ward bed, with a tube stuck in my you-know-where, all the while listening to the distant, echoing weeping of the doomed souls next door. I did not, in fact, see the baby at all. But Carlos says that for the few hours we hosted her, she was the cutest little button in allllll of Nightvale.”
After the day's broadcast, Carlos drives over to the station to pick Cecil up. From out of his trunk he unfolds a wheelchair borrowed from the maternity ward. Cecil might be out of bed, but he is not up to walking very far yet, so Carlos has been pushing him around in the chair, cooking and cleaning and helping him get dressed ever since he insisted on checking himself out of the hospital (against Dr. Fatemi’s advice). Carlos doesn't mind playing nurse until Cecil is healed up. He has only just managed to scrub the blood out of his bathroom tiles. It could all be so much worse. Also, he enjoys bossing Cecil around and forcing him to sit still instead of hobbling about moaning about how the interns are botching up the interviews he should be doing.
In the booth, Intern Annisa and Carlos each take one of Cecil’s arms and help him into the wheelchair. He is jabbering on about tomorrow’s show and what they have to catch up on and how embarrassing it would be if anyone realised he’d made up the traffic report today because he was in too much pain to get up and check that fax machine across the room (the one that isn’t plugged in but still produces messages during rush hour and pile-ups on the freeway.)
“I have something for you,” Carlos says as he maneuvers Cecil’s chair towards the door. It’s not easy. The studio is a mess. It looks like someone was sleeping in here for a couple of days.
“Something for me?” Cecil looks up at him with a broad smile and then frowns. “I’m suspicious. You’ve been very overbearing very recently.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Carlos laughs. He fumbles in the pocket of his lab coat. “Here.”
Cecil gasps and flings his legs out, almost tipping over the wheelchair. The gift is not particularly well crafted; it looks like the sort of thing kids bring home from their first art class in middle school. It’s made from a spare strip of leather Carlos had lying around, with tiny, silver, triangular beads at regular intervals all the way around, a hole bored through each one and then carefully sown by hand into the tough leather. Carlos has the band-aids on his fingers to prove it.
“I told you I was taking a core from the baby’s teeth to look at it under the electron microscope,” Carlos wheels him out into the hallway. “Well, I had so many spare teeth, and I was waiting for the centrifuge to finish, I thought I’d do something productive for once.” He has to stop the chair to tie the leather band around Cecil’s wrist. Cecil is biting his bottom lip and evidently fighting tooth and nail not to squeal with delight.
“It’s beautiful,” he grips Carlos by his tie and pulls him down to peck him on the lips. And then he hollers, “Annisa! Come quick! Come see this perfect thing that my perrr-fect Carlos has made me!”
Carlos laughs. He’s still amazed at all he has learned during his time in Nightvale, but right now this amazes him the most – that he has learned how Cecil (sometimes) thinks. That he can predict how Cecil will react to being gifted a bracelet made out of a baby’s teeth, as a memento of a near-fatal encounter with an impossible child. How romantic. Carlos wonders if Cecil only likes the bracelet because he loves Carlos. But then he thinks, no, that’s not the only thing he loves. Cecil loves Nightvale, and everything in it, and all the oddities the bracelet embodies. Cecil loves his own life, and everything about it, and does not want very much of it to change. Cecil loves a lot of things, often intensely and sometimes instantly and always passionately.
Besides (Carlos thinks) the bracelet will do as a pair of knuckle dusters in a pinch, because Nightvale can be a dangerous place. Especially for children.