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Cecil Baldwin died twenty years ago. The building where the radio station used to be was torn down to make room for a strip mall. Thousands of people thought they were living in a perfectly normal Arizona town.
Then the broadcasts started.
At first, people thought it was a joke. A spooky prank; some kids with access sneaking into the new radio station that had been built on the opposite side of town with old recordings which was exactly what it was, for the first few weeks. But it was too late for April fool’s and too early for Halloween, and by the time June rolled around, “Cecil’s” show was producing all-new material.
The new material began playing the week that a paranormal research team from Phoenix came to town. The head scientist, Carlos, was stunned to hear his name in the broadcasts, as he’d been told to expect pre-recorded material with an untraceable signal.
But this material wasn’t pre-recorded.
It was live.
And they were able to trace the signal back to the masquerade shop in the strip mall, whose storage room was in about the same spot as the old Welcome to Night Vale studio had been, if blueprint comparisons were to be believed.
Two of the team denounced it as bunk and left for home, unwilling to stick around and be mocked. They were the lucky ones.
Over the next year, the remaining team members interviewed almost everyone in town, paying special attention to the people ‘Cecil’ mentioned in his show.
Old Woman Josie was exactly that, a senile old woman whose personal nurse denied them access to her. She’d been caring for the woman for almost a decade, and all she knew about 'Cecil’ was that he’d been a nice young man her patient had seen often. Her neighbors, however, were able to tell them more. Apparently, Josie had been a friend of his mother’s, and since she’d had no children of her own to help her out in her golden years, it wasn’t an unusual occurrence to see Cecil puttering about in her garden, or cleaning leaves out of the gutters. She used to call him her angel, and was devastated by his death.
John Peters, the farmer, was actually the owner of the only non-chain grocery store in town. He didn’t take well to questioning, merely responded that he was not a farmer, had never been a farmer, and the sooner they found out where the damn broadcasts were coming from and stopped them, the sooner he could get back to his life without some teenager coming into the store to talk to 'Farmer John’.
On the other hand, not only was Hiram McDaniels not an eighteen foot tall, five-headed dragon, he was not a person at all. Several people that 'Cecil’ talked about on his show weren’t people, at least, not people that had ever lived in Night Vale. There were never any hooded figures, no police reports regarding a man in a tan jacket with a briefcase acting suspiciously had ever turned up, no white man pretended to be native or, alternatively, no native man that only spoke Russian. But possibly the oddest interview that was conducted by the team was on Carlos himself. They’d decided to hold it in the masquerade shop, after closing. The shop owner, a middle-aged woman named Dana, had been more than happy to offer her store up for investigation. She found the whole thing thrilling, and left the team with a copy of her keys, for them to lock up with afterwards.
“I’ve never known anyone named Cecil.” He said into the camera, every word the honest truth. “This is my first trip to Night Vale, and besides. I would have been nine when the Cecil in question died.” Carlos took a moment to read through his notes, as they’d received several different 'official’ accounts of how Cecil had left this world. “The subject was supposedly very ill when he and his,” He shuffled the pages, searching for the proper name. “His companion, Earl Harlan, decided to take a trip to the nearby town of Desert Bluffs. His condition took a rapid turn for the worse, and he was hospitalized. Cecil Baldwin died in a private room at Desert Bluffs General in 1993, aged thirty-six, of lung cancer. The things his show reports on can’t possibly be happening, anywhere. There is nothing unusual about Night Vale. The show is most likely just a bunch of kids with good mimicry skills playing a prank. For the last fourteen months, we have conducted hundreds of interviews, and no one has been able to prove that this phenomenon was not a prank. And so, with this testimony, I call an end to our study.” Around him, the faces of his team began to light up in realization. They were leaving. They were going to go home. “This is the final interview. Tomorrow, we pack up and head back to Phoenix. It’s been a hell of a year, guys.” He chuckled, a thought coming to mind. “So I guess this is the part where I say, 'goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight’.”
And that was when every light in the strip mall went out.
When they came back on, Carlos was nowhere to be found.