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The bell over the bowling alley’s door jangled, and Teddy looked up from what he was doing – solitaire on the computer, but oh well – to check the security monitor and saw what looked like either a homeless old man or a lost wizard come into the building and just stand there, looking around. He peeled himself up out of his chair and lumbered out of his office, finding the man still standing there, looking around. Up close he looked more homeless and less wizard; the staff was a branch from a tree and the man was leaning on it, he had on layers of ragged clothes and more rags wrapped mummy-like around both arms in lieu of sleeves, and his hair was almost pure white, as was the bit of beard Teddy could see. The man’s hair was ridiculously long, falling down past his waist in a wind-tangled ponytail. “If you’re here to bowl, then welcome,” he called out, figuring he’d give the old guy the benefit of the doubt. “But if you’re here looking for a meal, or a place to crash for a while, then sorry, go find another place.”
The man turned to look at him, favoring one leg, and to Teddy’s surprise he was almost smiling. “Actually, I was hoping I could get my old job back. I figured a man who loses at solitaire on the easy level probably needs all the help he can get.”
Teddy’s mouth dropped open, and he was almost certain his heart had skipped a beat. “No, it can’t be…Cecil?!”
The other man’s half-smile fell off. “It hasn’t been that long, has it? You don’t look much older…but I could be remembering wrong, I lost the picture I had of you in my wallet years ago.”
“Years…” Teddy walked over to him, slowly. “You left…my god, Cecil, you left three months ago.” Once he got close enough, he reached out and tentatively grasped one rag-bound arm. Real, solid, warm. “What…how…dammit.”
He reeled his formerly younger cousin in for a hug, and after a moment of resistance – fear, Teddy could tell now – Cecil melted into his hold and returned the hug. “I left the valley,” he said quietly. “Time works differently out there, and I had a hard time finding the right spot to get back in. It was…around ten years or so, for me.”
Teddy pushed him back and looked at him again, fighting back a shudder; Cecil was fifteen years younger than he was, but now…he tugged on the too-thin arm, feeling the taut muscles under the rags even as he made that evaluation. “Come on, come sit down. You just got back?”
His cousin nodded. “I came straight here. I didn’t dare go…home, not yet. If she was still there I might have.”
Teddy froze again. “You know?”
Cecil nodded once. “I know. You took her ashes to the library, like she wanted?”
“I kept them here so you could do it. You said you’d be back at the end of the summer.” They were at one of the red booths now, and Teddy pushed his cousin down into the vinyl seat. “You want something to drink?”
The brown eyes he wasn’t used to seeing without glasses over them lit up. “Soda?”
“What kind?”
“I don’t care.”
Teddy went to the fountain and got a medium-sized cup, filling it with ice and then with soda – half regular, half diet, because the part of him that was a doctor was worried about giving a man who looked just this side of starving a cup full of carbonated sugar-syrup on what had to be an empty stomach. The part of him that saw Cecil as his baby brother, though, wanted to give him anything he asked for, no matter what it was, so they compromised. He put a lid on the cup and tucked a straw into it, then took it back to the table…but before he could issue a warning about not drinking it too quickly Cecil had wrapped his hands around the cup and taken one very slow sip, closing his eyes, an expression of pure bliss crossing his thin, bearded face. “Mmmm.”
Teddy remembered the young man in his twenties who just a few months ago had considered soda a food group and swallowed hard, sinking into the other side of the booth. “Cecil, what happened?”
Cecil opened his eyes. And blinked. “Like I said, I left the valley. Because I could. I wanted to see what was out there…and I did.” He shook his head, though, before Teddy could open his mouth again, and waved one hand like he was trying to push the subject away. “I’ll tell you, if you really want to know…but please, not now. Not yet. I just…”
Teddy caught the gesturing hand with his own. “No, it’s okay, you don’t have to. It can wait.” He made a face. “You were limping, are you hurt?”
Cecil shrugged. “I tripped over a rock about a week ago, cut my leg. It’s fine.” He saw the look. “Really, it’s healing. And if I hadn’t tripped, the animal I was fighting with might have gotten me, so it was a fair trade.”
Pushing, Teddy decided, was not what the situation required, even thought pushing was usually the way he did things. “You’ll let me look at it later?”
Another shrug and a half-smile. “If you want to. Right now, though, I just need to…settle for a little bit.”
“You can settle for as long as you want,” Teddy told him. He waved a hand at the empty bowling alley. “It’s dead today, as you can see, and the league practice isn’t until tomorrow night. I was going to close early because I was bored.” The phone rang at the front, and he heaved himself back out of the seat. “Ten to one that’s some idiot who can’t remember when league night is, I’ll be right back.”
It turned out to be four idiots, the sorting out of which took him a few minutes he really resented giving to them. But he gruffly sorted them out, and he was walking back to the table when Cecil shifted his leg and something fell out of the ragged pants he was wearing – something small and pale that writhed on the floor unhappily, and Teddy’s eyes widened. He backtracked, got his tackle box/medical kit, and returned to the table. He looked down again to verify that the thing was what he’d thought it was, and then he swallowed. “Cecil,” he said with forced calmness. “Exactly how bad was the gash on your leg?”
Cecil raised a white eyebrow, and then he glanced down. “Oh, yeah. I told you it was healing. They’re keeping it clean, it was kind of deep. And I couldn’t really stitch it on the back of my calf, so I just wrapped it up to hold the edges together. The bandage must have come loose.”
Teddy took a breath. Calm, he was going to stay calm. “I think I should take a look at that before we try to go back to the house – because I walked today, and I don’t want to drag you all the way over there on foot if that could make your leg worse. May I?”
His cousin sighed, but turned enough so he could stretch that leg out in Teddy’s direction. “Just don’t yell, okay?”
“I won’t yell,” Teddy promised. He pulled over two chairs from a nearby table, sat on one of them and then lifted Cecil’s leg up onto the other and pushed the ragged, dirty fabric of the pants up to Cecil’s knee. There was a discolored rag wrapped tightly around his calf, apparently the aforementioned ‘bandage’. Teddy unwrapped it; more little squirming insects fell down. He looked. He couldn’t see bone at the bottom of the gash, but he wasn’t sure why because it certainly looked that deep. Thanks to the maggots, though, it was clean enough. He got back up and went back to his office, returning with more supplies and a little hand-broom and dustpan to collect the maggots with. He irrigated the wound, washing out all of them he could see, and then he very gently squeezed Cecil’s calf muscle on either side to see if anything else was going to come out. Nothing did, so he rinsed it out one more time, patted it dry, and then arranged his hands on both sides of the gash and pushed.
He’d expected a yell – hell, he’d expected Cecil to scream, that’s what usually happened when he healed someone who had an injury as bad as this one was. A quick glance up, however, showed that his cousin had put down his soda and was just sitting there, tense but silent. Teddy finished as quickly as he could – which wasn’t all that quickly, since he had never been able to heal Cecil as easily as he did everyone else – and then checked again. The wound was closed, a thick red line on the back of Cecil’s calf muscle which was probably going to scar just because the wound had been a week old. He pulled the ragged pants leg back down, more carefully than necessary. “What about the ones on your arms?”
Cecil didn’t answer immediately. He took a deep breath, and his eyes – which had closed during the ten minutes or so of healing – reopened. He looked at Teddy oddly, like he wasn’t sure he was actually there, and then even more oddly he looked around the bowling alley and patted the table top, feeling it like he was trying to make sure it was actually there too. And then, finally, he took another breath and relaxed as he blew it out, pulling his leg down off the chair. “Thanks. And the wrappings on my arms are in lieu of sleeves, there’s nothing under them but skin and tattoos.”
Teddy put the chairs back where they belonged and slid back into the booth. “You got tattoos?”
“Special tattoos.” He pulled back one of the rags, and a stylized eye looked out. “I didn’t want anyone in town to see them, I don’t know who might actually know what they’re for.” He frowned, then pulled the rag back into place. “Someone must have their dates mixed. Bill Vargus is on his way in, with his bowling shirt on.”
“What…” The bell over the door rang, and to his shock Teddy saw Bill Vargus walk in wearing his league bowling shirt. He recovered himself. “Bill, league practice is tomorrow night!”
“It is?” Vargus made a face, then drooped. “Dammit. Oh well, guess I’ll see you tomorrow night, then.”
“Yep, see you tomorrow.” Teddy watched the man trundle out, then turned back to his cousin and swallowed. “Cecil…”
“You didn’t ask how I knew you were playing solitaire and on what level when I first came in, or how I knew you were losing.” Cecil shrugged. “I can see things that are happening now. Not the future, not the past, just now. And within a limited radius – I could probably see most of Night Vale if I was standing in the right place, but I wouldn’t be able to see as far as Desert Bluffs.” He shrugged again. “It came in handy out there. And I uncovered them long enough to get a good feel for what was going on in town before I came the rest of the way in, didn’t want to run into trouble on my way to the bowling alley.” His hand came down, though, when Teddy reached for the wrapped rags. “No, not here. Someone could walk in.”
Teddy might have argued with that, but sadly he knew all too well why his cousin might want to keep the ‘special’ tattoos under wraps, so to speak – even in Night Vale, there was no telling how some people might react. Namely the Sheriff’s Secret Police, or anyone involved with the City Council. “You’re right, good thinking.” He shook his head. “You know, I’m gonna go ahead and lock up, then we’ll head back to the house and figure out something for dinner.”
That got a half-smile. “Hmm, dinner I don’t have to catch or skin. Sounds good.” He took another sip of soda, the same blissful look as before crossing his face, and then put the cup down. “I can help…”
“I’ve got it tonight, you just stay put.” Cecil raised an eyebrow. “You just got back, I’m being nice. I’ll make you work next week, if I decide to give you your old job back.”
His cousin frowned. “Business has slowed down? Because I can…”
Oops. Ten years, not three months; he was going to have to go easy on the sarcasm until his cousin got used to the way he talked again. “Cecil, I was joking. I expected you to come back to work once you came back. And business isn’t any slower than it always is right before school starts – two weeks from now I won’t be able to do it without you.” This time Teddy was the one who frowned. “Although I’m going to have to insist on a haircut, really.”
The half-smile came back. “That time you weren’t joking.”
“Nope, not at all.” Teddy made a show of looking him over. “Yeah, sorry, you are just not pretty enough to carry off full-length princess hair. Nowhere to get it cut…out there?”
Cecil shrugged. “I could have cut it off, I suppose, but I didn’t see the need. It’s warm, and that was more than worth the aggravation of keeping it combed out.”
“Yeah, that makes sense.” It made too much sense, actually, and Teddy made tracks away from the table to close up before someone could show up wanting to bowl – there was no way he could keep his cousin in the bowling alley, looking the way he did right now, talking the way he was, with other people coming in and out. He hurried through his nightly shutdown routine, locking the doors and turning over the Closed sign first just to make sure nobody came in, keeping half an eye on his cousin while he bustled around. Cecil just sat there, though, slowly, blissfully sipping his soda, looking out of place. At one point a night bug that had probably come in with Bill flew by him and Teddy saw him reach up and catch the bug in midair without even looking at it. Teddy expected him to throw the bug away, but instead his hand went to his mouth and popped the bug in – absently, the way someone would take popcorn from a bowl and eat it. And it was in that moment that Teddy, who’d thought he’d seen everything and couldn’t be shocked anymore, knew what horror actually felt like.
Horror is having your baby brother come back a decade older after being gone for three months, and having it be more than obvious that he’s been surviving alone in the wild for years. Fighting animals, doing whatever he could to keep warm, tending to his own injuries as best he could…eating whatever was available, whenever it was available, no matter what it was. Horror is realizing you really didn’t want to know what was outside of the comfortable, familiar valley you’ve always lived in, because your baby brother is now living proof that outside of your often dangerous little pocket of time and space is where the horror lives, where it comes from, where it seethes and boils in the shadows and bakes in the heat of the day and prowls around on sharp, icy claws through the long, cold nights. And horror is, finally, knowing that you could have stopped him from leaving but you didn’t and now this unimaginable aftermath is all your fault.
Teddy went home with the horror that night, grappled with it, and then finally pushed it into a corner while he worked on all the things he needed to do to make it easier to pretend that nothing much had changed. Physical things. Mundane things. Hair-related things. And he also stopped himself from asking more questions, from pursing half-finished stories or requesting details of obliquely disturbing anecdotes, and as the days and then weeks and then months went by it got easier and easier not to ask, not to wonder too much. And Cecil, obliging his desire not to know any more than he already did, re-adapted to life in civilization as quickly as he could and never offered to tell Teddy the whole story again.
Teddy still couldn’t hold back a shudder whenever he saw one of those little black bugs, though.