Work Text:
Cecil hears the door click open behind him in the middle of his broadcast.
“The local Walgreens would like to announce that they just got their latest shipment of vaccines in, which they ask citizens to get at their earliest convenience. Recent outbreaks of formerly uncommon diseases in our surrounding communities such as Desert Bluffs and Pine Cliff have increased risks of contracting diseases such as spider-pox, the purple death, and of course, the flu. A Walgreens representative says that they are so desperate for people to vaccinate that…”
He trails off at the sound of the door clicking open, which had definitely not been there before but was certainly there now. It sat redundantly next to his usual office door, which was still closed and had station management’s black sludge drooling underneath it.
Cecil stays seated, staring across the room at the door. He wants to enter it, to find out what lies beyond, but his mind drifts to his year away from his beloved husband Carlos, which had also happened because of a door that certainly did not exist. Then again, that year away was the result of difficult scientific work on Carlos’s part. Carlos would have wanted to know what lay beyond the door, might have even encouraged Cecil to see for himself, But Cecil isn’t so sure.
He realizes the air has been dead for far too long and speaks to the microphone on his desk without turning around.
“Listeners,” he begins.“A door has just appeared in my office. It looks exactly like my office door, but there are two now, and one hangs open into a dark hallway that certainly isn’t the one in the radio station. I...I’m not sure whether I should go through. The hallway beyond looks dark, far too dark to mean anything good. But...it’s pulling me. I can feel a desire to go through it, though I would much rather not. I’m not sure…”
Cecil realizes he has gotten to his feet and walked to the door without his own permission. His right hand is outstretched for the handle. He shakes himself and strides purposefully back toward his desk, a finger on the control board.
“Listeners, I’m going to sort this out,” he says resolutely. “This new door will take me to wherever it leads, and I will take you to the weather.”
He pushes the button down, turns on his heels, and strides through the door.
****
Jonathan Sims is sorting through statements on his desk, trying to discern which are real, and therefore worth recording, and which are the creations of the bored, the drunk, and the delusional. He rubs his face with his unburnt hand and shoves a clearly nonsense statement about a ghost of a Victorian child in a nightgown into the pile he’s made for statements he won’t be recording, which is much taller than his to-be-recorded pile, when the whirring of a tape recorder catches his attention.
One has appeared at the other end of his desk, just out of his reach. Jon sighs, clears the extra chair across from his desk of files for whoever is about to walk through his door, and grabs the recorder, placing it in front of him.
A knock comes from the door, and Jon calls for the people on the other side to come in.
Martin leads the way in, followed by a man with shockingly blond hair, brown at the roots, which sweeps over his forehead for the moment, just brushing his square framed glasses. He’s wearing a pair of thoroughly bedazzled clogs, a black crop top with the word “SCIENCE” on it in orange letters, and violently pink, high waisted capris. Purple tattoos- one of which Jon’s fairly certain just twitched- spiral their way up his arms.
“This is Cecil. He was in artefact storage,” Martin explains. “Lucy found him in the stacks and had to drag him away from the Leitners.”
Cecil is looking around Jon’s office with mild interest. Jon watches him do so. He pushes his hair back, revealing a semicircle on his forehead, which flutters open into an eye and stares at Jon for a moment before closing again. His two normal eyes turn to Jon, studying him with a piercing gaze.
“You must be Jon.” He says in a smooth, deep voice that doesn’t match his exterior in the slightest. “Martin told me all about you on the way over.”
Martin goes very red and takes a sudden interest in the clock on the wall over Jon’s head. Jon pretends not to notice.
“How did he get in?” Jon addresses Martin directly, glad to be able to redirect the conversation.
Martin shrugs. “I don’t know and he’s not really making any sense. Lucy says she left artefact storage for all of a moment, and when she came back in, he was just there, poking around.”
“There was a door that didn’t exist.” The man pipes up. “In my broadcasting booth. I went through it and I was here, wherever here is.”
“The Magnus Institute, London.” Jon supplies. “Where are you from? Your accent sounds American.”
“No, I’m from Night Vale.” The man replies. “Sorry did you say London? Is that near Svitz? I had a wonderful few months there once.”
“Why don’t you sit down,” Jon suggests, because he deals with the esoteric and paranormal every day, but this feels like a whole other zone of weird. “Thank you, Martin.”
His assistant nods and exits, clicking the door closed gently behind him. The tape recorder continues to whir on the table as the man takes a seat.
“What’s your full name?” Jon asks, because that’s usually where things start with these statements.
“Oh, Cecil Gershwin Palmer.” The man says pleasantly. “And yours?”
“Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist.” Jon replies. “Do you mind answering a few questions?”
The man shakes his head. “Not at all. Though I may not answer them all.”
Jon doubts this, but doesn’t mention it. He leans in toward the tape recorder and speaks in a clear voice.
“Statement of Cecil Palmer, regarding…” Jon hesitates, unsure what to say. The Eye is not particularly forthcoming at the moment. “His hometown and life. Statement taken direct from subject, June 15th, 2019. Statement begins.”
He turns back to Cecil. “You said you were from a town called Night Vale? Can you tell me about it?”
Cecil nods eagerly, his eyes lighting up. “It’s a pretty typical small town. We have Walgreens, an Arby’s, an arcade fun complex, a pizza joint, a dog park that no one’s allowed to go into, and a house that doesn’t exist. You know, the usual. I work at the radio station, broadcasting to the whole town about the schedule, happenings around town, that sort of thing. My husband, Carlos, is a scientist. We’ve been married for about a year and a half now. What else? We have angels named Erika out behind the Car Lot that only just got recognized as actually angels by the city council, who’s dating station management right now, but I’m not sure how it’s going. Station management’s been leaving black goo everywhere and it only does that when it’s mad about something, the goo is typically green. We have a high school, an elementary school, and a community college. Carlos, that’s my husband, the scientist…”
“Hang on.” Jon stops him, because he can feel the frustration of the Beholding building in the back of his mind. Cecil has touched on several aspects of his home town that would have any other statement giver shaking in fear, crying, or both, a state of mind which frequently slows the statement’s progress. Yet the way Cecil talks about it is so uncaring, so blasé that the Eye doesn’t know how to deal with it. The contents of his statement ought to leave Cecil terrified, but they don’t.
“Yes?” Cecil tilts his head.
Jon’s mind is having so much trouble latching onto a single part of Cecil’s statement that he isn’t sure where to start. “You said there’s a house that doesn’t exist. Can you expand on that?”
“Sorry?” The man looks genuinely confused, and Jon could swear that he can see the tattoos on his arms twitching gently.
“What do you mean by that?” Jon tries.
Cecil’s expression remains impassive. “You can look at it, and it looks like it's there, but it’s not. Which, when you think about it, it would make sense for it to be there, because it’s between two houses that are identical to it, but it just doesn’t exist. My husband Carlos, and his team of scientists studied it for a year or so after he got to town about five and a half years ago now. I fell in love instantly, but he took about a year to come around. On our first date, there were shadow people everywhere. They completely blocked up the road and stopped traffic, which wasn’t good at all, but Carlos kissed me at the end of the night and we’ve been together ever since.”
Jon can feel waves of soft affection drifting off of the man, and images of a dark skinned man in a lab coat with grey touched temples and full head of dark hair enter his mind unbidden.
He shakes the images off and attempts to redirect. “What do you mean by’ shadow people’?”
“Oh, people all over town were turning into shadow people. Some tried to escape but most of the town were turned into shadows by the end of the night” He shrugs “Carlos took care of it though. I dropped him off at his lab at the end of the night and the shadow people were gone by morning. He’s so smart and self reliant and just perfectly imperfect.”
Cecil sighs blissfully and barrels onward. “We started dating about a year after he got to town, and moved in together, and got married a few years later. He’s so smart, but he can be a little bit messy too, like when he got intangibility goo all over the house and my foot kept slipping through the floorboards. The faceless old woman who secretly lives in our home, yours too probably, got stuck as well, which would’ve been funny if she hadn’t exploded all the light bulbs in the house. Khoshekh, our cat that floats around our house, wasn’t happy about it, but he was fine and nobody was hurt. Khoshekh used to live in the men’s bathroom in the radio station but he gave birth to a lot of kittens and they all needed homes, so... ”
Jon feels like his head is spinning as questions build up in his brain with each word that Cecil speaks.
“Carlos got stuck in a desert otherworld for about a year, which he found absolutely fascinating and he didn’t really want to come home, so I was going to join him but then he came back. We’re really happy together, I love him a lot.”
“That’s great,” Jon manages.
“Do you have a significant other of some sort?” Cecil asks. “That man, Martin talked about you the whole way from artefact storage and I wondered-”
Jon bristles at the intrusion and feels his ears heat up. “Martin’s my assistant...just my assistant.”
“Oh, hmm.” Cecil hums. “What did you say you do here?”
“I didn’t.” Jon says. For once, he’s glad the statement giver has stopped talking. “This is the Magnus Institute, we collect and curate statements about the esoteric and supernatural.”
“Oh,” Cecil says again. “I haven't experienced anything like that.”
Jon would beg to differ based on what he’s heard so far, but he decides not to push it. Instead, he asks, “You said you got here through a door that appeared in your booth?”
Cecil nods. “I wasn’t sure whether to explore it or not, but then I thought about what my husband Carlos would do, which is tell me that there is no science without exploration and discovery, so I decided to go through it.”
Helen’s fault, most likely. Jon considers getting her to send Cecil back, but decides against it for the moment. Surely there’s some sort of rhyme or reason to the man and his hometown. His eyes settle on Cecil’s forehead marking which blinks lazily at him, and for the first time, Jon finds himself wondering whether this man might be bound to the Beholding too.
“What’s on your forehead?” Jon asks. It sounds awfully blunt as it comes out of his mouth, but Jon can’t bring himself to care.
“Oh, this?” Cecil pushes his hair back and points at the eye, the pupil of which darts away at his touch. “Every Voice of Night Vale has one. I was born with it closed and it opened the day my predecessor, Leonard Burton died and the position passed to me. I was his intern. It makes me aware of the happenings in town, more effective for broadcasts, you see.”
Definitely at least touched by the Beholding then, if not outright an avatar, which seems unlikely to Jon at this point. There’s something about Cecil that upsets the Beholding, as if it had attempted to lay its grasp on him and failed to take hold. He’s too gentle, too relaxed. Jon envies him for a moment. He feels a sudden tug, a need to Know, to understand. He certainly won’t be able to get a straightforward answer to any of his questions without taking certain measures that his coworkers would not approve of.
But he needs answers to Cecil’s ramblings. There has to be some sort of coherency to be found here. For the first time since meeting this strange man, he pulls the force of Compulsion into his voice.
****
“Tell me your story.”
Cecil can feel a tingle in the back of his mind and a tug on his voice box which drags the words forcibly from his throat as though he’s vomiting. It’s an unpleasant sensation, but he can’t seem to stop. He tells the man, Jon, about the cassette tapes when he was fifteen, the flickering in the mirror, his internship, taking over Leonard’s job at the station, about Carlos’s first day in town, the time he nearly died, about their first date and first kiss and when he could finally call Carlos his boyfriend. He tells Jon about Strex Corp and Kevin, about the glow cloud and station management and the city council and Hiram McDaniels and Dana Cardinal. The year away from Carlos, Old Woman Josie’s death, Kevin’s fate. He spills every last bit of his life story to this man he hardly knows, who has had doubt and frustration written on his face for all of Cecil’s story so far, until he has nothing left to give or tell and exhales as he is released from the hold of the man in front of him.
“I don’t understand.” Jon says finally. “Your town, everything you’ve experienced, you ought to be terrified. You ought to move away and not look back. Yet you still love it, and you’re not scared. How are you not scared?”
Cecil looks at him for a long moment. “What is there to be scared of, really?” He asks. “Either you’ll live through the next moment or you won’t, and there’s little anyone can do about it. Why bother living in fear?”
The man laughs humorlessly as Cecil watches. This man is being torn apart at the seams, he realizes. He has physical scars to prove it, there’s a burn scar on his right hand, the imprint of a hand wrapped around his, a series of scarred over divots in his body, as though something had tried to burrow its way into his skin. But there’s something else, something that runs deeper. A sense of anxiety and desperation and unending exhaustion hangs around Jonathan Sims too, and Cecil realizes that whatever Jon has experienced, it’s something far beyond the routine horrors of Night Vale
A lot’s been taken from Cecil over the years, but he thinks that perhaps much more has been taken from Jon.
Martin pokes his head in sometime after Jon shuts the tape recorder off and asks if they’d like tea or something to eat. Cecil sees the way that man’s eyes are on Jon as he asks about food, studying him, ensuring that he won’t lie about having eaten lunch. Jon lies anyways, even Cecil can tell, and Martin just frowns in response and says that he’s going to bring Jon a sandwich.
Later, Jon walks Cecil back through the twisting halls of the institute to artefact storage, where they find the door back to Cecil’s studio still there behind the stacks of books that have an undeniable pull to them, but it’s locked, and Jon calls out a frustrated “Helen!” before a woman appears and lets Cecil back into the hall. It’s just as short as it was before, and Cecil turns back to Jon, sending a smile his way.
“Tell your assistant thank you for the tea.” He says, and disappears through the door.
****
Things are unchanged back in Cecil’s office. The weather is still playing, and the night sky outside of his office has stayed in nearly the same position as before, the moon hanging low over the town like a watchful eye. Cecil seats himself at his desk and puts his headset back onto his head. The community calendar catches his eye briefly, but he can deal with that later.
He has a different story to tell.