Cecil's initial reaction was to call the Sheriff's Secret Police or enlist the help of angels, or to at least get on the air and warn Night Vale citizens not to answer their doors to a certain pair of robots—but leaving a carnation in his mailbox only yielded a Secret Policeman who explained, "Not our job, not our problem," and to enlist the help of angels was to acknowledge their existence. Cecil had several unpaid parking tickets for doing that already. After warning Night Vale citizens about the robots by yelling this below Steve Carlsburg's bedroom window, he tried to find Tamika Flynn by opening a book he was not supposed to own entitled, The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification, and looking for her inside it. Young Ms. Flynn was offended by this, and hooted at him from inside of the book that she was found, and to stop looking for her already—when asked if she would rile up yet another army of feral children and take on the robots who had abducted Carlos, she claimed that she was learning about the merits of capitalism from Ayn Rand's famous children's classic, My Little Pop-Up Book of Social Darwinism, and demanded several million dollars in Fabergé eggs for her services.
Cecil then attempted to recruit a drunken posse of gun-carrying thugs by shouting, "NRA!" over and over beneath Steve Carlsburg's bedroom window, but only received bumper stickers for his efforts.
Realizing that he was alone in this, Cecil invoked his spirit animal, a wolf-sized, brownish moth named Peyote Chan, put on caliginous hooded robes, and made the appropriate sacrifices to the Elder Gods that one must make to equip one's Soul-Dousing Merit Badge. He then outstretched his still-dripping hand, which held a moonstone dagger. The crystal knife began to glow purple, the lightning danced behind him, and the arrows and dotted lines in the sky that he didn't like to admit were there all realigned themselves to point north-by-northwest. Soul-dousing is an inexact science, if a mystical practice of the Boy Scouts can be called a science, but when you're especially close to someone the answer you receive is usually the correct one. Also, when he gazed at that direction for too long, north-by-northwest, the way that the arrows and dotted lines wanted him to go, his heart began to palpitate, and his aura glimmered and flickered with radiant hues.
Yet there was no sign that the robots had gone in any one direction in particular, including this one, and there was nothing out this way but creosote and cholla cacti—abandoned washers and dryers that one would find contained elderly, smiling members of the nouveau riche upon lifting the lid—and a crescent moon like a wicked grin. Twin stars Betelgeuse and Bellatrix shone above it in the constellation of Fakimby the Morose Porcupine, and coupled with that lunar smirk they seemed like a pair of shining eyes—Cecil could not shake the notion that they really were eyes, and that the moon really was a smile—that these three, luminous objects, separated by lightyears, and in no way aligning to form a face when seen from any other place in the void but his own, really were a face, and that it was watching him, and that it was unkind. It reminded him of the grin of his twin brother Kevi—Cecil didn't have a brother—and he didn't know where such a foul and false memory had come from. Wind blew from that place where the moon shone, a breeze of cool and slithering bad dreams, and for once this man with the gift of gab found himself completely silent. He realized how haunting it was, to simply stand still and hear the world when he was so accustomed to hearing himself speak—or hearing others speak—or hearing soft snoring beside him on nights like these—or, at the very least, to hear the sound of the Faceless Old Woman tapping away on his computer in another room. He couldn't hear her now. Only the sound of a planet exhaling cool winds. And he was . . . afraid.
But then the weather changed—The Cat Empire's "Still Young" played as extratropical lava-cyclones, blood-tsunamis and demoniac winged horses began to destroy the town to the tune of up-tempo ska, and he wondered why he'd been worried at all. He meant, it was very festive, what with Panic Day coming up and all, and couldn't wait to see what holiday horrors the City Council would unleash on the town when that day finally came once again. He was looking forward to it now, and the hope—no, certainty—of having someone to share it with. Maybe he and Carlos would go door to door as carollers, and scream in high-pitched unison when people opened their doors while they held songbooks printed with the usual lyrics of, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
The sight of flaming hell-tempests and oceans of incarnadine gore laying waste to Dark Owl Records and the Ralph's—it filled him with determination—and he decided to prance gaily into the unknown using the quickest transportation method he had available to him, that of flight.
All radio hosts, of course, have the ability to fly—or rather, to fly through a series of leaps and bounds—or rather, Cecil assumed all radio hosts could do this. He ordinarily didn't like to show off too much, but there was something about the way that the rampaging fire-cyclones were tossing elated Night Vale citizens into the cursed abomination that had become the sky that made him want to throw caution—and himself—to the boiling hell-winds. Normally Cecil could only leap about as high as the top of a telephone poll, but he figured that he might get a boost from the raging inferno-tempest—he crouched, cracking the ground, and leapt, soaring into the funnel clouds, drifting in a high and reprobate gale as hot as Vulcan's forge. In the distance the clouds, having rained out the last of their blood-virga, had already begun to clear, and in that patch of sky he could still see the dotted lines and the arrows, which still directed him north-by-northwest—he could still see the moon that way, too. Cactus Judy waved to him from atop her saguaro cactus, and he descended to ask her if she had seen Carlos—Cactus Jade responded by turning into a foul-smelling liquid that can breed death and pestilence, as was her usual reply since she was actually a mythic beast called a Chinese Celestial Stag, and only looked human.
It seemed that no one was going to help him, or offer him information of any kind.
Leaving Cactus Stuart behind, he bounded to the top of a Joshua Tree, and then to the top of a stone giant's shoulder, and soon arrived in a secluded vale brimming with datura, Jimson weed, angel's trumpet, or whatever new name the rebellious nightshade had invented for itself this week. Here the arrows and dotted lines all converged, and pointed straight down at the hatch. The hatch was round, tarnished, and looked like it belonged in a bank vault or on a ship—it was bolted and welded to a concrete slab, and its handwheel could not be turned. He was sure this was the place—freckles of oobleck flecked the hatch, that roughly-hewn crystal dagger of his turned aubergine and emitted a low-frequency hum, and his aura was now popping with sparks and shone like the Aurora Borealis. He'd left scores of voice mail and text messages for Carlos already, but as he wearily checked his phone again there still was no reply—heavy-limbed, the Voice of Night Vale curled up beside that misplaced bank vault door that would not admit his passage, and curled up in such a manner so that he was in effect hugging himself, but thinking it was someone else. The memory that came to mind, for seemingly no reason in particular, was the night of the bowling alley incident, when he had met with Carlos in the Arby's parking lot and, seated on the hood of his car, had been asked if it wasn't all a joke.
"You're a funny guy, Cecil," Carlos had remarked, "with your satirical news bulletins about the dog park and the Brownstone Spire and station management—and your comedy show is great."
"I don't know what you mean."
"Ah! You are so good at deadpan—I am really jealous! Like, okay, not laughing at your own jokes is one of the hardest things to pull off in theatre," he rambled, "right after that natural gargling falsetto all actors have to do when playing Javert or Old Deuteronomy, but you do that every time you quote Juanita Jefferson saying, Trees! Trees! Dey are us!" Carlos spoke like a Mafioso.
". . . I do?"
"Oh, totally!" Despite his injuries he was unusually spirited tonight, blushing, glowing, and simpering in the waning and waxing light of the ignis fatuus above, and the sum of these parts was too precious for Cecil to question anything.
". . . Neat!" he said.
"Anyways—I'm getting ahead of myself." It began to lightly rain buttered toast as part of a promotional for Costco, and with this change in the weather The Fratellis' "Whistle for the Choir" played. As sluices of the wheat-based and therefore highly dangerous breakfast staple ran below their dangling feet they—the pieces of toast—turned into deadly snakes—and then poltergeists—and then into long-time presidential hopeful Ron Paul. Carlos sighed as Paul slithered like a fish into several nearby storm drains, and he—Carlos—bit his lip with worry. "I don't know how to say this—but due to the highly satirical nature of your show, I've been under the impression that you . . . that you uh . . . were joking about—about liking me?" He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose in a manner suggestive of a facepalm. "Heh! And I mean, it's funny, right?! Make fun of the new, clearly gay scientist in town, and ironically pretend to like him when that, that would never occur to anyone, that a nerd like me might be even remotely appealing, let alone p—perfect!" He choked on nervous laughter more like an involuntary shudder than anything else.
". . . That would be really mean, Carlos," Cecil expressed utter astonishment.
"I know, that's why I've been avoiding—I—I mean—heh!—that's—that's what I thought—until—until . . . tonight." Like a rare species of moth attracted not to light but to awkward, self-inflicted horrors and the desire to throw oneself in the trash, the lights above the Arby's lowered themselves from the sphere of heaven and crowded around Carlos. Cecil could not recall them ever having done this, and in doing so they revealed their true nature, and it was not horrible and shocking like so many things in Night Vale turn out to be, but something pure, and innocent. Both Carlos and the small, luminous fairies that surrounded him were perfect and beautiful as he said,
"I heard you, Cecil. There was a radio playing somewhere, and I heard you when I was—well." He lowered his eyes but took his hand, and then he smiled, and then he said, "I have something to confess. Back when I first saw you, when I first came to town . . . I fell in love instantly, too."
". . . AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! OMIGAWDOMIGAWD OMIGAWD! Ah! I! I! Da! I! Oh! Oh I have to tell EVERYOOOOONE!" Cecil had whooped.
That Cecil faded and gave way to this Cecil, who was cold, and huddled, and clinging to rosy memories in the hope that they might make the present seem less lonely. He'd already been through a separation of one year when Carlos was trapped in that desert otherworld, but this was somehow worse, even if, so far, a shorter separation—for one, he wasn't getting any text messages back—so far, he reminded himself desperately. He mused over what a core might be. What was a core? If they had been thinking of turning Cecil into one . . .
Heavy-limbed and yawning despite his concerns, his palm still aching even if the blood had coagulated, and no longer crying but not because he felt better, Cecil fell asleep. Hypnagogic night-terrors jarred him awake again, he fell asleep again, and the nightmares woke him back up. He checked his phone and found that only a few minutes had passed, and, as usual, there were no new messages—he tried to calm himself down by playing Secret Crush, which was like Candy Crush Soda Saga except that instead of breaking the ice to free a bear, you broke the ice to reveal hidden clues. Below the ice in the first level that he played he found a PDF containing a single page from Project Bluebook. In the next level, once he got the bear above the string, a zipped folder began to download. It contained a single JPG image of a deer sprinting through a flaming woodland, which, when opened up in Notepad, revealed a series of coordinates. It was very relaxing, and the phone slumped in his hand, and when he finally did descend into a deep, full sleep, he didn't even truly wake up when what must've been a vampire bat, or a vampire finch, or maybe just a vampire, bit hard into his neck—he merely slapped at it.
And so he slept—and so he dreamed—but not just dreamed: he double-dreamed.
He double-dreamed of a tall island surrounded by tempestuous skies and turbulent seas, its cliffs ascending into the towers of a bluestone castle of unusual architectural design. Rake-plants and rope-plants and vines climbed its sides, and people blew in on the wind, flying through those stormy grey skies of ominous, yet weirdly engilded thunderheads from another continent. The island was named Klaus, or he thought it was—the members of some kind of high school sports team who wore uncanny red robes were on holiday here, as were a lot of rich tourists who kept the island's existence a secret from the lower classes of the Pangean super-continent on the other side of the planet where they had come from. There was a second island, which was incredibly narrow and consisted of a mountain like a granite spire and a deep, granite cavern descending to the centre of the earth. Somehow this island reminded him of New Zealand, perhaps because of its brilliant green verdure. There was a third island as well, but he would not remember it when he woke up. At some point in his dreams he must've left these cold, ill-lit islands for somewhere hot and tropical, but the transition to this new land was instantaneous and illogical. In this fictive, Latin American nation, where the flowers were so painfully blue, Cecil got drunk—he got drunk in a bar overrun with all manner of plants, had some nachos, and enjoyed the companionship of a pair of old professors who were seated with him at a round table, as well as the radiant waitress.
With his dream-passport featuring several new stamps, he awoke wanting nothing more than to slip back into that dream again. He hadn't travelled in a long while—clearly he wanted to do that again—and the dream had expressed another latent desire of his: Cecil really, really wanted to get drunk. He was certain that he'd had this dream before, but knew, simultaneously, that this was the first time he'd dreamed it—hence the term, double-dream.
In the waking world all he saw around him was the colour black—it was the vague and empty world of a blind man, or else could be likened to the experience of being the last living creature in the cosmos, drifting through space after all the stars had gone out: it seemed far less real than the dream had. What little light there was came from the pocket of his robes, where something hummed and purred. His cell phone. Cecil seemed to have lost all basic motor function and dropped the phone several times on whatever it was he was lying on—he figured he must be nervous, yet his heart beat so slowly, and he felt not so much panicked as overwhelmingly sleepy. He wanted so badly to fall back asleep again. When he finally managed to bring his phone up to his face he found that the time was 4:08 AM. Only a few minutes had passed, but he felt like he'd been asleep for hours, maybe even days. He found it nearly impossible to work his hands to unlock the lock screen. They moved sluggishly and with their own intentions, like the incoherent thrashing limbs of a poisoned insect, and it took several fumbling tries before the text message app appeared. The bright white light of its background made him wince, and all three of his eyes slammed shut. Once he'd finally adjusted to the light he saw the barrage of messages he'd left for Carlos, at the bottom of which was one new message—and yet it was blurry and indistinct, and it took him a while to focus his eyes on what it said:
nOo000 NN0 sSS5t0 D0oNnt wANT tH11s 0000 n0 LiSt3n 2 mE I d0 n0t 3 want
It took him even longer to make sense of the garbled message, longer still to comprehend what it meant—he badly needed to sleep—badly needed—the words of the message floated around in his head, looking for something to connect with—he tried to type, what but it came out more like, rjsuu, and he couldn't tell that he hadn't written what he wanted until after he'd sent it. Maybe he was drunk—had he—he laid on his back and stared up at the ceiling, and that was when the world began to solidify into a confusing shape. He knew he had definitely fallen asleep on a cold, concrete slab out in the desert, under the stars, and yet now he was looking up at a ceiling that was not his own—there was a rail of some kind curving along the ceiling, and directly above his head was a gaping hole through which could be seen insulation and trusses. Cracks in the plaster spiralled outward like a spider web from this hole and scurried down the walls—his phone turned itself off, and he turned it back on again.
No, not 4:08 AM.
4:08 PM.
Instantly he sprang up and immediately regretted it, the room spun, a feeling of faintness and nausea roiled within him and he collapsed to his knees beside the bed he'd been lying in—yes, it was a bed, but such a horrible bed he had never before seen, for the thing he had been lying on was stained and rotting and there, in the right side of the mattress when he was sure he'd been lying on the left, was the indented shape of a person. Sickened and disturbed moreso than he had ever been by anything save that recording studio in Desert Bluffs, he lurched away from the bed, collided with a night stand, and toppled it. A voice filled the room, the voice of a mechanical announcer:
"Good morning. You have been in suspension for [9999999]—this courtesy call is to inform you that all test subjects should vaaaaa-aacate vac-vac-vacate theEnrichmentCenter for whoooeuur
huuuurnghrrrrrrrrbeeeeeeeep . . ." The message cut out, and something clicked. Whatever it was that had brought him here—now it knew he was awake. Biting his lip he looked for an escape route—he could go out the door, like they were expecting—or he could go through the hole in the wall. Crawling on palms and knees he made it across the room—and then managed to stand—and then, shining his phone into the gap, he looked into it to see what was on the other side.
A seemingly infinite drop spiralled downwards, revealing floor upon floor of broken rebar and metal support beams, shattered glass walls, the jagged lips of collapsed concrete floors, panels connected to disjointed robotic arms, and trees and plants growing where nature had reclaimed the facility. Cecil steadied his trembling hand on the edge of the hole, and the part of the mangled wall he had grasped fractured and broke away—he pitched forward, but managed to catch himself on a jutting chunk of rebar and concrete. He could see gleaming, red eyes down there, and voices called to him in a saccharine sing-song: "Heeeeello? Heeeello? Is anyone there?"
The insurmountable task of finding Carlos in such a vast network of chambers seemed to be beyond him, especially without the arrows and the dotted lines to direct him. The crystal dagger's mutating hue and the flickering of his own aura would be his only guides, and the only way to go was down—he could easily leap to the protruding concrete floor of the room immediately below, but due to the angle he was at he couldn't see what might be inside it. There was a narrow ledge of broken flooring outside the hole in the wall, and he swung a leg cautiously over the broken wall and stepped down on it—it held. Fingertips splayed and pressed against the outer wall he steadily raised his other foot and the ledge collapsed, sending him whirling downwards past the room he'd been intending to drop down into—red lasers and a barrage of bullets sprayed from that room, and he dropped down instead onto a series of metal grates that formed a sort of catwalk below it. There were more of those panels connected to robotic arms on either side of the curvaceous catwalk, but these panels were covered in spikes—they didn't seem to be in use, but instead hung loosely as if supported by nothing but wires and a few scraps of metal, ready to fall. The dagger now shone a deep indigo, almost black—as he focussed on sensing his own aura with his third eye he found it to be a searing, hot white-yellow. He was close—so very close—he decided to risk calling out.
"CARLOS?" His voice echoed oddly in the vast chasm, seeming to gain volume with each repetition rather than losing it—he nervously licked his lips and tried again. "CARLOS!"
There was a reply—he could hear him, but due to the odd acoustics of this place it sounded as if he were coming from everywhere all at once, loud and full and clear: ". . . Cecil?"
"CARLOS! WHERE ARE YOU?" Cecil was making an awful lot of noise on those metal catwalks, and by shouting like that, but he didn't care—Carlos, his Carlos, was so close he could hear him like he was standing right beside him.
"I don't know," came the reply. "Oh, but I have all these great ideas for some new scientific tests—"
"DO YOU—do you see anything?" he tried a bit more quietly. The catwalks curled around a wall of panels and let off in a lofty, dark corridor—his aura was white and his dagger shone black.
"I can see everything, Cecil," Carlos reassured him, but there was something in his voice—something that sounded—creepy. "I can see everything," he reiterated, "through so many different eyes all at once."
The radio host sprinted down the corridor, heart pounding and feet pounding, and came to a dome-shaped room with a high ceiling—the black silhouettes of panels lined the chamber and stood out against the scarlet light behind them, and some sort of a wire and metal contraption hung from a torus in the ceiling, almost embryonic in its shape and design. From the end of it hung a white ball with a green disc of light in its centre, almost like an eyeball it seemed—there was a dais and a platform with steps, and there were monitors rapidly flashing subliminal messages, but there was no sign of Carlos. That embryonic, robotic thing in the centre of the room twitched as if it were alive, and it lurched upwards with a bizarre jerking motion and swivelled to face him—it was so unnatural in its movements and shape that Cecil couldn't fully comprehend what he was looking at, but then Carlos spoke, and in speaking the green iris flickered and flashed in time with his every syllable.
With the sensation of all the blood draining from his body, out the soles of his feet, and into the ground, Cecil understood.
"You look . . . scared, Cecil. Why do you look scared?" CaRLOS said.