On the edge of town was an old house. An old woman was sitting on her rocking chair on the porch. She was smiling. The evening wind was so refreshing. At last, the heatwave ended. Yes, the wind was turning into a hurricane, but it didn't seem to bother her or her guests. Sitting in equilibrium on the balustrade of the veranda, two immense half-immaterial beings contemplated her with dozens of eyes. They didn't seem to be bothered by the wind that could have uprooted a tree. In fact, the wind seemed to go around them as if it was afraid. One of the two was dressed in a long black toga. It looked liked it was made of extinct stars. He was eating a slice of apple pie while filling a crossword puzzle. The second wore a deep V-neck sweater of an electric blue with white reindeer piercing each other with their corns. His face, devoid of eyes, mouths or nostrils, bent, focused, over an insect that had landed on his too long hand. His many fingers were covered with closed pupils.
The old woman opened her eyes when the sun disappeared on the horizon. Her entire body betrayed his excitement.
"Erika, dear, will you turn on the radio? Cecil is going to speak!"
The first of the two beings made a strange sound that might sound like a chuckle. He leaned down and snapped his fingers. The radio turned on. Behind him, the moon took the sun's place in a matter of seconds. It formed a halo on his head.
"Waves form in the night. A man speaks. Others listen.
Welcome to Night Vale.
The storm of uncertainty that has swept through our small town continues to rage. We remind all of our listeners to remember our previously recommended precautions. We are legally prohibited from repeating these instructions, as the municipal council made our program compulsory. So I will just wish good luck to all offenders. I hope your rehabilitation sessions will be painless.
I can only hope.
Dear listeners, I think you remember those two mysterious men who stopped yesterday at the entrance of our charming city. Well, we tried to find out more about them, and we learned some things! The youngest is called Sam, tall and shapely, and has voluptuous brown hair that did not dare to rebel. I could slip my hand through this hair and not found a single knot. I can assure you with the utmost sincerity that not even my beautiful Carlos can claim to have more beautiful hair. Well, I think they are equal, but your opinion may be different. In this world, everyone may have their own opinion. It proves that we are not all the same, and it can be a blessing.
The oldest is called Dean. He stood in front of our radio station for a long time earlier today. I looked him in the eye. It was strange, and a little sad, to see such old eyes in such a young village. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him, but I had the impression that he did not see me. Perhaps it is impossible that two beings can actually see each other.
The being eating a pie froze, all his eyes blinking repeatedly. The other had his eyes closed but made a throaty noise that evoked the rolling of stones in a dry torrent. His companion answered him with a thunderous noise that shook the surroundings. It was hard to tell if they were laughing or sharing their concern. On her rocking chair, the old woman froze and moved her lips in silence, her eyes rolled back.
Old Woman Josie says the angels came to her and told her that they knew these two young men as the 'Winchester brothers' and that they are armed and dangerous. According to the angels, they are wanted in Heaven for having committed the crime of bringing about or preventing the Apocalypse. Or maybe for both crimes.
But, as the city council keeps telling us, angels are not real, and therefore their opinions should not be taken seriously. Also, what does "dangerous" mean? Mirrors are dangerous. So are traffic signs. But humans are not dangerous. Weapons are not dangerous.
They're just badly used.
And now, a word from our sponsors.
That heartbeat that you hear all the time? It's not yours.
This message was brought to you by ... a company whose name is illegible and stained with blood. Well, these are things that happen, aren't they?
According to several witnesses, these two men seem to be known as the Winchester brothers, and they're coming to our radio station. Around them, the storm of uncertainty seems to flee, oppressed by their righteousness.
On a completely different subject, the nursery will definitively close its doors on the 30th of the current month. This closure is absolutely not because of the growing number of demons coming to tempt our children to murder their loved ones and to invoke Lucifer Morningstar out of his cage. Director Domenica Green said at a press conference, "Demons? That's so not a big deal. They're just grown-up kids who miss their daddy. Personally, I give them a little pat on the cheek and put them in the painting corner with the little ones." When a reporter asked her why she was closing the nursery, Domenica sobbed, repeating, "the little ones, the poor little ones". She then changed into a crow and made three turns over the nursery before soaring towards the sun and disappearing.
Monday, there will be a conference. The subject, time and place were not communicated to us. Tuesday, end of the world. Again. Thursday...
A strange noise could be heard behind Cecil's warm voice, cutting him off in the middle of his speech. After a moment of silence, the noise rose again.
Dear listeners, have you heard? It sounded like an axe plunging into the door. I would send an intern to see what happens, but we've been running out of interns since intern Melinda succumbed to the storm of uncertainty. Maybe it's my adorable Carlos coming to visit me? Or have I displeased my superiors again?
Wait. It's coming closer. I'll have a look. Let's pray that it's my sweet Carlos. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, dear listeners, let me take you... to the weather.
Through all the radios and transistors in the city arose a deep, melancholy female voice, singing of love and surrender. It gave an impression of heavy rain and promised clouds disappearing around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. One could reasonably expect floods of dead fish in the southern districts.
One of the two angels shook his short brown drawing on blood-red wings. They were extremely dark and translucent at the same time. The second angel's wings, golden as honey and much larger than his mate's, rustled softly in response. A shrill hiss rose. Their conversation was imperceptible to human ears. Old Woman Josie gave them a blind smile, then stood up without a word to clean up the debris of a light bulb that had exploded on the influx of ultrasound and infrasound.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
A few minutes earlier...
They were at a ruined building's entrance where a sign still stood, half-erased. It said "NIGHTVALE RADIO CENTER". The impala was parked near, all lights extinguished. The radio was quietly broadcasting the program emanating from inside the1 building. Dean sneered when he heard the description of his brother's hair. He frowned when the voice described him then delivered information supposedly delivered by angels. Angels' involvement in their business was bad news more often than not. With Cas stuck in Purgatory, by his fault, Dean had every right to fear the worst. No angel was giving out information for free, and many had a grudge against him and Sam, though most had been quiet since Cas's disappearance.
"Am I the only one who finds this show more and more threatening?"
"You aren't," Sam replied, looking up from the notes he was consulting. "This ... Cecil, whoever he is, knows too much he shouldn't. I'm not saying we should shoot on sight without asking questions, but..."
He sighed and expertly weighed his gun.
"I think we should go see what we're dealing with, right?"
The two brothers left the car in absolute silence. The building in front of them looked especially menacing in the faint glow of the crescent moon above it - a crescent moon with eerie purple shades - but neither of the brothers showed the slightest sign of fear.
The building's door bore scorch marks, but unlike the half-collapsed shutters which popped out of their gongs long ago, it still held firmly in place. Someone had written a huge message with an unsteady hand. "Stay far !", it said. Its pink color clashed with its content. Dean touched it then leaned down to pick up a small black tube.
"Lipstick," he whispered, almost amused.
It was so absurd Sam couldn't help but smile. He opened the door. He expected a terrible creak with the door's age and decay, but it opened in perfect silence. The Winchester brothers walked in, leaving the door slightly ajar to exit quickly if necessary without drawing too much attention from the street. Neither of them looked up, so they didn't see that there were two moons in the sky now, the purple crescent moon and an emerald green full moon.
Strangely, the building's interior didn't appear to have suffered as much damage from the fire as the exterior. They explored the ground floor in a matter of minutes. The walls were burnt, but the floor was intact. The shelves full of papers were scorched and soaked by rain seeping through cracks in the walls. The staircase and the corridor on the first floor were good, just a little dusty. They went upstairs. The first few rooms were empty, but Sam caught a glimpse of light breaking through a door at the end of a hallway. Without a word, their guns ready, the two brothers stepped forward.
They could read "recording studio n ° 4" written in black letters on an opaque glass panel. Hanging from the handle, a piece of paper read "recording in progress, do not disturb". Regardless, Dean opened the door and peeked inside.
The room he saw was not the recording box itself, although he could see it, separated from the rest of the room by a wall of light wood and a large window. On the wall were dozens of photos of cats and kittens floating in the air, all with too many huge yellow eyes. A poster proclaimed "you don't have to be crazy to work here; there's enough of them", alongside an advertisement for invisible chainsaws. An old wooden barometer's needle indicated "weather: blues, with a touch of soul music".
Dean walked in and tried to take a look in the recording studio itself. He saw something, a man sitting among the cables and buttons. He could only see his back. Headgear over his ears, with a horrible purple striped sleeveless vest, and a white shirt over his shoulders, the man spoke into a microphone, gesturing as he spoke with long, slender arms.
With a wave of his hand, Dean motioned for Sam to come forward. They approached the small room door, astonished to see all this equipment working perfectly in a crumbling building. They were about to open the door when a strange noise echoed throughout the building, like an axe ramming into a wooden door. The two brothers and the host froze. The man whispered something into his microphone and put a record in a player. He stood up. He didn't remove his headphones connected to his devices by a wire of an insane length, but he went to open the door to find himself face to face with the two brothers.
For a second, the three of them froze, not knowing how to react. Then, in one movement, the Winchester brothers pointed their weapons at the forehead of the creature standing in front of them.
Sitting at his post, he had seemed human and normal. But up close, it was obvious that "Cecil" was no longer alive. He looked like an ordinary young man, but it was difficult to determine his age and race. Thin and androgynous, he would undoubtedly have been very tall if his torso weren't floating in the middle of the room. Just under his navel, his shirt was covered with blood and ended in rags. From that point on, the body appeared to have been torn apart by teeth powerful enough to rip off two legs and part of the belly with a single blow of the jaw. Semitransparent drops of blood fell periodically on the ground where they seemed to assemble to draw moving signs, sometimes a pentacle, sometimes a strange kind of cross, and even a sort of three-headed cat.
"A ghost. We should have known." Dean muttered.
He put his gun in his belt and grabbed another, loaded with salt. Sam didn't take his eyes off the ghost, ready to shoot at the slightest threatening gesture, but the ghost just smirked and lifted his glasses up to his phosphorescent purple eyes.
"Oh. You must be the Winchester brothers. I am Cecil Palmer, the Voice of Night Vale. It's a pleasure!"
"Which is not reciprocal", Sam interrupted him. "How did you learn all these things? What do you want from us?"
"An interview? Maybe? Or a pizza from Big Ricco. Without anchovies, of course. Anchovies are illegal."
For a few seconds, Dean felt like he saw the ghost unravel before it became tangible again, like it was a human being. He gauged his two opponents, and his smile widened.
"Oh, you are hunters," he exclaimed, clapping his hands together. "It had been a long time since we had seen any. The city seems to be ... bothering them. I don't know why. Everything here is perfectly normal."
"No, it isn't", Dean said. "But maybe it will be normal again after you leave. We're gonna find your body, salt it and burn it."
"Oh," Cecil whispered in a shaken voice. "That might... get in the way of the show, right?"
Startled, Sam lowered her gun slightly. Dean gave him a quick glance before giving the ghost his full attention.
"Sam? What's wrong?"
Before his brother could answer, a man entered the room. He wore a scientist's coat, and was armed with something that looked very much like a bunsen burner. Dean recognized him as the man who wrote equations on a restaurant table the day before.
"Cecil!" the newcomer shouted. "Is everything fine? I heard... on the radio... I was working and..."
Cecil began to blush like a teenage girl.
"I'm fine, Carlos. I was chatting with these gentlemen. There was a noise. I think it was the manager stretching out in his office."
"Oh."
Carlos lowered his improvised weapon.
"These gentlemen are hunters," Cecil continued, and Carlos tightened his grip on the bunsen burner.
"I see the problem. You're strangers, aren't you? Nobody warned you about this town?"
"Why? What should we know? And you better go; this ghost could be very dangerous. "
Carlos laughed. He was about to speak again when suddenly he began to glow slightly. A third eye opened on his forehead. Above him, the studio's OFF sign changed to indicate ON in purple letters.
"Dear listeners, I'm back," Cecil said in a voice suddenly deeper, more serious and intense. "And you'll never believe what just happened here in this room. My sweet and tender Carlos came to my rescue. Can you imagine how handsome he was? His hair remained perfect despite his running! Is it possible to be more in love than I am?"
He didn't care about the three humans in the room anymore. Cecil went to the recording studio again, closing the door behind him. However, his voice continued to echo in the room as if he was still there. Dean took a step to follow him and finish the job. Carlos grabed him by the arm.
"You must understand," he explained quickly, "that Night Vale is not a normal town. I am a scientist, I came to study these phenomena, and I'm just beginning to understand. You must not interrupt the show. The consequences would be awful, perhaps even globally."
"What do you mean?" Sam asked, disturbed.
"Cecil is the Voice of Night Vale. There has to be a voice, and the show has to go on. After, after he's finished, I will explain. But Cecil is not dangerous."
"He's a ghost. Sooner or later, they all end up becoming dangerous."
"Not Cecil. Not here. "
"…Two very charming young men," Cecil continued, waving his hand at them and smiling from the studio. "I believe one of them was touched by an angel, if you know what I mean..."
Dean gasped. Sam gave him a funny look.
"And that's very good. It takes everything to make a world, even if we would prefer some people not to be part of it. Yes, Steve, I'm thinking of you. Steve Carlsberg... But. Would we find the world so beautiful if it only contained the things we love? No. It's the ugliness that makes it possible to see beauty where it hides. And I am moved every time I see beauty, whether it's in Carlos' hair, in a ray of sunlight, in the inimitable taste of an invisible pie... The beauty is there. Look for it."
"He's not dangerous," Sam whispered in amazement. "Do we... Is this the right thing to do?"
Sam had always been the one who sought to see humanity in monsters. Dean hadn't been able to do this for a long time, even though he knew there were exceptions. But he didn't think this Cecil was one. He was about to say so, when Sam started to shake. A terrible wind rose in the room, although it was closed. Sam seemed to fall apart, then disappeared, all in seconds. Dean didn't even have time to make a move to grab his brother. He stood there in disbelief, his arms hanging out. In his despair, everything seemed to have disappeared, light, shapes, sounds, except for Cecil's pained voice in the next room.
"Oh. It would seem ... What a pity! Sam Winchester succumbed before our eyes to the storm of uncertainty. He's the sixth victim since the start of the week. Wherever he is, I hope he is well. No, I'm sure he is. It's better to think so. And with that, goodnight Night Vale, goodnight."
As the voice died down, Dean felt like he was losing consciousness. Everything turned black.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
He waked up in a different room. Everything here was covered with complicated diagrams and scientific tools. Carlos and Cecil's ghost stood in front of him, looking concerned. Dean frowned, then his memories came back to him.
"Sam!" Dean cried.
Carlos forced him back into the chair he was sitting in.
"Calm down. Sam is fine. Hang on to that idea and stick to it. There's a storm of uncertainty out there. You can't afford the slightest doubt if you don't want to disappear like your brother. We can answer all your questions, but you can't have doubts. Too dangerous."
Dean forced himself to breathe deeply to calm himself down. Cecil placed a cup of tea in his hands. He took a few sips. The taste was strange, something he never tasted before. Better than the usual tea.
"If he's okay, where is he?"
"No idea at the moment. We'll know more tomorrow night when Cecil will talk.
"What do you mean? Why not now?"
Carlos took a chair and sat down, facing Dean. He looked uncomfortable. Dean summoned all the patience he had left to let him decide what he wanted to say. While he waited, Dean watched the room. It was a laboratory. Obviously, it received little fundings. Dust gathered on empty coffee cups and tons of scribbled papers. Cecil's ghost roamed in silence, leaving ghostly bloodstains behind him. Carlos followed Dean's gaze, smiled softly at Cecil and began to speak.
"For strangers like us, Night Vale is dangerous. To live there, you have to accept that standard rules don't apply. To anything. And I mean all rules, including the law of gravity."
He took a pen from his jacket and dropped it at eye level. The object fell to the ground, where it shattered into several pieces. Carlos sighed and removed his fingers from the handle of his cup. It remained in the air, perfectly still.
"I'm the only one left on the scientific team. The others are caning or changed. I can live by both Normal and Night Vale rules. It's quite rare, it seems. You're a hunter. You live in two worlds. This is a third word with it's own very peculiar rules.
"What do you mean?"
"Here you can vanish into the air but still live. We know that the missing are not dead, but not where they are or in what condition. These are the kinds of questions that you better not asked aloud here, and few people would have the answer. Cecil is the Voice of Night Vale. He is one of those who potentially have the answer."
"So, where is my brother? Let him answer my question!"
"He can't. He's not on air right now. It's only then that his third eye opens, and he becomes omniscient. Until then, you should be patient."
"Patient?" Dean yelled. "It's my brother we're talking about! The hell I will be patient!"
Without listening to the two men trying to convince him to stay, Dean left, slamming the door. Outside, it was still night. However, Dean was starting to see better now. He could see a part of the reality under the impression of normalcy Night Vale projected to his visitors. Dean was not standing under the sky, but under a purplish-black void, without stars, without moon. A strange cloud floated above the city, radiating an infinite number of shades that did not belong to the natural colour spectrum.
Silently, his eyes fixed on the ground, he walked back to his motel. He sat on his bed and called Sam's phone. He came across the familiar message. After several hours spent silently contemplating the laptop he was holding between his fingers, Dean fell asleep in a restless sleep.
The sunrise woke him up at almost eleven in the morning. Dean couldn't eat, so he went straight to the library. It was about time he got answers, and he only had one name. To his relief, he soon came across a Cecil Gershwin Palmer in the birth and death records. Born in 1937, died at the beginning of the Sixties. "His Voice will accompany us forever", the obituary said. Dean then found a reference to the radio station incident in a volume about the town history, but it had happened in the mid-1980s. Beyond that, there was no straight answer anywhere about the radio station, its host, or anything else concerning the city. Whatever book Dean consulted, half of the words were censored with a thick black line. Sometimes entire pages were censored and stamped with a "Sheriff's Secret Police Order".
More than a little annoyed, Dean left the library. He didn't notice the librarians murderous, greedy stares, nor the weapons and tentacles that protruded from under some of their clothes. If he had looked more closely, he would have noticed that other readers in the library were all armed and tried to never turn their backs on the librarians.
He wandered around the block, unable to settle down, but not knowing what to do other than wait for the evening show. If Carlos was right about the abilities of Cecil's ghost. Dean had seen many strange things, but this city was something else. He saw the opening of Hell's Gate and the breaking of Lilith's seal. Next to Night Vale, it seemed mundane and rational.
Dean walked past a high wooden fence reinforced with barbed wire and a "DO NOT approach the dog park" sign. On the other side, he heard a sort of hoarse oot that froze him to the bone. Puzzled, the hunter moved closer to the fence, looking for a door or a hole allowing him to see what was happening on the other side. A hand grabbed him by the collar and forced him back.
"Can't you read?", asked a dark-skinned man, wearing a shirt with big green flowers and fuchsia pants. "Stay away from the dog park!"
The man's face was familiar to Dean.
"Dany Grahms?"
"We know each other?"
"I spoke to your wife a few days ago. My brother and I were investigating your disappearance."
"Is she okay?" Dany asked, obviously eager for news. "You must tell me! But not here, you're still a foreigner, but the area is dangerous. There are things in the park."
He didn't give much choice to Dean. The hunter followed the man to a small painted wooden house, similar in every way to his neighbors. Dany Grahms ushered him in and served him a glass of water. The kitchen looked like any small American suburban kitchen, except for the pentagrams drawn all over the place. Dean had never seen that kind.
"I moved here when I arrived. The house was empty, it didn't bother anyone. It's a bit big for a single person, but hey..."
"Can you explain to me what happened?" Dean asked, drinking greedily after having to endure the heat of the desert.
"I don't know if you will believe me..."
"If it is about the supernatural, It's kind of my thing. Go ahead, I'm listening."
The man started talking. If Dean hadn't already spent more than a day in town, he would have found it hard to believe Dany Grahms' story. When he heard Cecil's show, Dany had felt the compulsive need to listen to it again. One evening, he had been caught in a kind of black hole, and when he had regained consciousness, he was in Night Vale. Three of his neighbours could tell a similar story.
"I miss my family, it's true," he said at last, "but… I've never been happier than since I arrived! As if I had dreamed all my life until then and started to live. I'm three hours late for a meeting, and I don't care. Before that would have put me in a trance! Sally, my wife ... she couldn't live here, couldn't she? She wouldn't get used to it. You can feel it right away, people who can get used to it and others."
"And you don't find ... this city weird?"
Dany Grahms looked surprised.
"No. It's normal to me. As long as you drink to forget what you've seen, it's as if nothing happened at all. And, well, what you haven't forgotten becomes normal after a while. I know what I'm saying shouldn't make sense to you, but trust me, it does."
"I understand, a little", Dean said, remembering how nothing made sense in Hell and how quickly, too quickly, he got used to it.
He pushed the thought out of his head. These memories were too unpleasant. He returned to what really interested him.
"And you got used to it easily? Who do you contact when you are a newcomer and want information?"
"The easiest way is to wait for Cecil to speak and think very hard about what you want to know, hoping that he answers. Steve Carsberg, a guy here, is always ready to answer your questions, but he's a pathological liar. If I was you, I would avoid asking your questions to the secret police. They tend to ... get angry and send you to rehab for the smallest thing. Otherwise, there's always Old Woman Josie. She lives at the end of town. She's the oldest in the area. Some say she's been living here for a least a hundred years. She's an authority on everything about Night Vale, almost as much as Cecil."
"Do you have a city map? Dean asked. "I'd like to see her while it is daylight. "
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
Dean set out with an annotated map. Crosses and skulls indicated the dangerous places to avoid. The library, the town hall, and the forest were each marked with three skulls. He took a shortcut through a graveyard that bore only one skull. He had been a hunter since he was old enough to hold a weapon and frankly doubted that he could come across anything in a cemetery in broad daylight that could worry him.
The cemetery looked like a mix of all the cemeteries in the world, seasoned with the perfect Gothic vibe, dead trees, moss and ancient pines. The vegetation was more reminiscent of an English cemetery in a bad Dracula movie way than northern Arizona. There were stones with crosses on them, others with Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Indian tribes symbols. Sometimes several religious symbols were mixed together. Dean recognized long-forgotten religious symbols that only a few hunters and researchers still knew.
There were also weirder monuments. A gravestone depicted a naked woman, tied to the ground by nails and trying to stand up. Every drop of blood that came from her wounds was painted blue. Another was carved in the shape of a human spine on which tiny figures climbed roped together. There were sculptures there representing things Dean had never seen in his life. He went around a crypt with a digital code next to the door and a doormat with "Things that we forget and that taste the storm" written in green ink. There was no overall architectural consistency.
The cemetery's only consistency was that the graves' concentric circles, the more recent on the outskirts. None were under 20 years old. After a few seconds of hesitation, Dean made a detour in an alley, finding himself in tombs dating from the beginning of the 60s. He almost passed next to the tomb he was looking for. It was very discreet, more than the others.
A simple square of brown earth surmounted by a stone in the shape of a round moon was marked "CECIL GERSHWIN PALMER 1937-196X. Radio Intern. Died in the performance of his duties. Promoted". The grave was too small to contain an entire adult body. On the brown earth, someone had placed a bouquet of wildflowers, already half-dried by the heat, in a lab measuring glass.
Spinning around, Dean looked for landmarks in case he needed to come back overnight to destroy the remains and wipe out Cecil's ghost. Maybe the people of Night Vale were right when they said Cecil was not dangerous or had to stay in his post, Dean thought. But he preferred to take precautions.
He stepped out of the thick wood of the cemetery to found himself again in the dry and stifling heat of Arizona. October was approaching, but the temperature seemed to have settled down definitively around August 15th. Dean wiped his forehead and continued on his way. He passed the last Night Vale house and continued on to an old mansion that appeared to date from the middle of the previous century. Its wooden porch, its unique ground floor, its wooden walls, and the old windmill next to the terrace make it look like a western setting. Someone was playing the harmonica in the backyard, reinforcing that sense of timelessness.
Sitting in an old rocking chair, a little old woman watched him approach her blind eyes, smiling. Without speaking, she motioned for Dean to sit across from her and continued to smoke from a clay pipe. Dean Winchester was known for his impulsiveness and his inability to remain silent when he wanted information. Yet, facing this old Native woman with long white hair, withered by her years, he stayed quiet.
"Dean Winchester," she said at last with a frail voice, putting down her pipe. "There's a lot of talk about you on the radios these days."
"The radios? Plural?"
"It is not only Cecil who speaks on the waves... There are others, even if they have been less and less in recent years... All these children who call for their father..."
"Are you Josie? -Old Woman Josie?"
"Yes... They call me that these days... But when I was younger, I was given another name ... I was young and beautiful, then old, and young again. But I got older and older. I am no longer Estsanatlehi. I'm Old Woman Josie."
The name vaguely meant something to Dean. Sam would know, he thought.
"I'm looking for my brother, Josie. Someone told me that..."
The old woman still smiled but interrupted him by hitting him on the knees with her cane.
"Old Woman Josie. If I have to carry this name now, give it to me in full. I am an old woman. I should be respected!"
"Okay! Okay", Dean nodded. "I'm looking for my brother. Sam. He's missing."
"I heard young Cecil yesterday. Uncertainty can be deadly. But it doesn't always kill, does it?"
"He's alive then?'
Old Woman Josie shook her head sadly.
"I once could have told you ... But winter is coming for me. Maybe Erika will know something. And if not, Erika will probably know. Erika?"
The old woman turned to the house.
"Erika, my little ones ?" she asked in a voice louder than Dean would have expected of her.
"Are you coming to say hello to your friend?"
From the other side of the house came a strange scraping sound. Dean heard light footsteps, then, circling the house on the balcony, appeared the two strangest beings he had ever seen. Huge, they seemed to be half solid and half made of light. They were near transparency. Dozens of eyes were spread over their bodies, light blue for the largest one, almost golden brown for the smallest. Their faces were a swarm of stars in almost human form, without eyes, mouths or nostrils. One was wearing a strange dress, the other a sweater in too bright colours, with V cut. They stared intently at Dean with all of their eyes, with both suspicion and amusement.
"You know Erika and Erika, of course," Old Woman Josie said.
Dean was going to refute this claim, but he thought he heard names other than Erika for a split second. As if he should have been able to recognize and hear those names. He looked at the two beings more closely and noticed two details that had escaped him before. Each of them had a wound in the chest, half-closed. From this wound escaped a gleam both weak and violent, shifting between blue and white. Dean had seen such a light before.
"Fuck me, are you kidding? Not goddamn angels!"
The two beings seemed to be laughing at him. Dean could now clearly see two immense wings that seemed to be both feathers and liquid light behind them.
"Do you want some tea, my little ones?" Asked the old woman, getting up. "It should be hot now. "