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There's a shiver up Carlos' spine the first time his truck's tires lurch over the boundary to Night Vale—a shiver like the kind Carlos usually gets when he stands outside right before a thunderstorm, and some unseen charge in the air makes every hair on the back of his neck stand up right before the clouds break and rain pours to the Earth.
Welcome to Night Vale! a sign on the side of the road says, spelled out in fading black paint. Below the official lettering, someone's painted on a strangely elaborate eye, with a gaping black pupil that seems almost inhumanly large and dark. Carlos has just enough time to think that there's something off about the paint, something that makes it look like that eye is actually watching him—and then he's driven past the sign and forgets exactly what seemed so strange about it in the first place.
“Weird,” Carlos says to himself, and then makes the turn to take him down Main Street.
Sometimes, a year later, he'll look back at this moment, and realize he had literally no idea what he was getting himself into.
…
His neighbor, a nice middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Lena, insists on helping Carlos move in. It's not that he needs the help—Carlos isn't the sort of person who owns a lot of things, and most of what he does own is his equipment, which is all being shipped in sometime later in the week—but he understands the importance of making friends with your neighbors, so he lets Lena in and offers her a drink.
“No thanks,” she says, with a smile. “Though, actually—you do have a radio, don't you?”
As it turns out, Carlos doesn't, and Lena clucks her tongue disapprovingly and heads back to her apartment to get one. The radio she drags back in looks old, the sort of model you only see in movies about the 1930's, complete with dials to change the channels and rust creeping up one side. “You can't live in Night Vale without a radio,” Lena says, scolding, and her tone implies she's saying something very obvious, that Carlos should have realized by now. “The City Council keeps track of those sorts of things, you know.”
Carlos blinks in mild surprise. Either there's some sort of town-wide sense of humor that Carlos hasn't been around long enough to understand, or this is just another part of the oddities of Night Vale—everyone he's spoken to here seems utterly convinced that their municipal government is some sort of shadow organization that watches its citizens, that the Sheriff has a secret police, that..oh, any number of things that just don't seem quite...sane.
Before he's quite worked out what to say in response, Lena has expertly wrangled the rusted dials into picking up an actual station, and suddenly this voice, a man's voice, deep and soothing and strangely frightening all at once, is rumbling out through the radio. Lena lets out this little satisfied noise, not quite a sigh but not really anything else either. Carlos has the strange feeling—and he can never explain later why this is—that this voice is Important complete with the implied capital letter. It seems to flow from the radio in waves and pool in the available space of Carlos' apartment, filling the air from wall to wall until it seems like there's no room for anything else, for any other sounds at all.
But that's ridiculous, Carlos knows—and he's a man of science, of rational investigation, not of half-baked superstition. He clears his throat and somehow makes himself say, “Who is that?” Every word takes a sort of effort to get out.
“The Voice of Night Vale,” Lena says, and she doesn't seem to be struggling to get words out, she just looks...oddly blissful. “Cecil.”
Cecil. Carlos remembers that name, for some reason—he's fairly certain he met the man earlier, during the town meeting the City Council held two nights ago, when Carlos first came to make sure his lab and his apartment were in working order. He doesn't exactly remember what Cecil looked like; actually, the only thing he does remember is the impression of having eyes fixed on him, almost hungrily, throughout the entire meeting. “So Cecil's the news announcer here?” Carlos asks, to be perfectly clear.
From the radio, Cecil's rich, dark voice continues to flow, his words, for all their perfect enunciation, melting together into some sort of indistinct stream of sound. Lena looks at Carlos and says, again, “He's the Voice of Night Vale.” And somehow, it seems like there are volumes of other meanings there, like Lena is not precisely agreeing with Carlos so much as correcting him gently.
Carlos is a man of science, but he shies from those other meanings now, from the feeling he's about to discuss something very big and probably very confusing, and just says, “Alright. If you want to help me with that box, right there—”
…
The way Cecil says his name makes him feel like he's never heard his own name before, like he's been shut away in the dark all his life with no sound, and Cecil's voice is the first thing he's ever heard, Cecil is the first one to ever shape those syllables into something with meaning. Cecil says his name like a lover, already, impossibly, within days of their first meeting—Cecil says his name like it's a word as impossible as Night Vale itself, like his name is something that might disappear any moment, or be suddenly declared illegal by the City Council, or turn out to have never existed at all.
“Carlos,” Cecil says for the first time, over the air, and a test tube slips from Carlos' suddenly numb fingers and shatters, unnoticed, on the ground below.
After that, Carlos never tries to double task when Cecil's show is on—and Cecil, for all that he must say Carlos' name a thousand times, never lets those two syllables leave with mouth with anything less than that initial, terrible wonder.
…
It's strange, but it turns out like this—Cecil loves Carlos from the start, and so Night Vale does too. Cecil gushes about Carlos' hair on the radio, and Lena knocks on his door the next morning and lets him know that if he ever needs anything (say, a cup of sugar, a bloodstone of his very own, hair products, anything really) he shouldn't hesitate to ask. Cecil calls Carlos an invaluable part of the community, and random citizens pull him aside in the street to mention that every Thursday the Night Vale knitting club occupies the street he was just about to walk down looking for volunteers, and he's really too important to Night Vale as a whole to face that sort of fate. Cecil's voice goes high and bright when he mentions Carlos on the radio, and the entire town seems to always have a smile and a moment to spare for Carlos' experiments when he talks to them, even the Sheriff's secret police.
Carlos doesn't notice the two being interrelated, at first, just thinks that Night Vale, for all its bizarreness, is populated by kind people. Eventually, though, the little comments that get dropped become a little hard to ignore. The final straw comes when Carlos wants to hike out to Radon Canyon to get some readings, and the Sheriff's secret police actually offer him a ride out in their helicopter (because it's ever so much quicker, and doesn't he want to be back in time to hear the Voice tonight?), which is, frankly, more than a bit creepy.
And then, after the miscommunication with the clocks—though how come quickly I have an important scientific inquiry turns into let's go on a date, Carlos still isn't entirely sure, and it's not that he isn't flattered, he just doesn't know Cecil all that well—Carlos for the first time faces the town without Cecil's influence. For the first time, no one stops him from being accidentally roped into the Parade of Silence, and when he finally manages to get out and check to see if his feet are actually bleeding, no one stops by to helpfully offer a bottle of hydrogen peroxide or an easy two-step curse to lay on whoever did him harm.
He limps his way home, paying especially careful attention to the streets he walks down—and it was stupid on his part to forget, it's the third Monday of the month and a full moon beside, so of course he should have paid better attention in the first place. In the hall of his apartment, Lena pokes her head out of her apartment door and takes in the sight of him, clutching his worn down shoes in one hand and leaning against a wall with the other, and clucks her tongue. “You should be more careful,” she says, and her tone makes it clear that she isn't telling Carlos to be careful of himself.
For two weeks, this goes on, and Carlos gets the double-edged sword of being able to really see Night Vale as it is, with the disadvantage of suddenly realizing that most of what he was fixating on as strange was really just benign oddities as compared to everything else out there he was being protected from. It's an educational two weeks, for Carlos—and it's after those two weeks that Carlos stops noticing the little things like the lights a hundred feet above the Arby's, or the way some of the people of Night Vale stop looking entirely human when you look at them from the corner of your eye.
At the end of the two weeks, Cecil comes on the radio and says, “Well, listeners, there's been an exciting new breakthrough from our town's greatest scientific mind—by which, of course, I mean our beloved, perfect Carlos, whose flawless intelligence is only matched by his equally flawless hair—” and Carlos lets out a deep, easy breath, the tensions of the previous two weeks bleeding away.
It's not a small thing, to be so important to the Voice of a place as powerful and impossible as Night Vale. Carlos is learning that, now.
…
The problem is, Carlos realizes later, is that he was still thinking like someone who lived outside of Night Vale, when he thought of Cecil. Because outside of Night Vale—he hesitates to say in the real world, even though that's what it feels like sometimes, like Night Vale is some sort of faerie world that exists outside of time and space, and Carlos is the mortal that's stumbled in and is likely to die by the end of the story—outside of Night Vale, people don't do what Cecil does. Love at first sight is for children and the hopelessly optimistic, and Carlos is too much of a pragmatist to see Cecil's immediate infatuation as genuine. Carlos is a man of science, and the way Cecil feels doesn't make sense, can't be logically broken down and explained by intimate knowledge of Carlos or shared interests or any sort of compatibility beyond the purely physical. It doesn't fit into the abstract formula Carlos has built for these sorts of things, over years and years of trial and error.
The mistake Carlos makes is in thinking that, just because it seems impossible, it isn't real. After a year in Night Vale, you'd think he'd know better than to make that mistake—but Carlos is still only human, even after that year.
…
A radio plays inside the bowling alley, just like a radio plays in every home in Night Vale, in every municipal building and abandoned ramshackle construction sites and probably even inside the dog park—because when the Voice of Night Vale speaks, the people of Night Vale listen, raptly. They would listen whether the City Council mandated it or not, because it's Cecil, and Carlos understands the importance of that now.
So Carlos hears. He hears about the trophy, about Cecil's celebration for Carlos' one year tenancy in Night Vale, he hears his own discovery about the miniature city reflected back at him through Cecil's voice. He hears everything.
And everything includes the moment where Cecil says, his voice small and fragile and a shade short of broken, “I can't,” and Carlos, huddled and stunned on the incline leading to the miniature city, realizes that he's going to die an idiot, because, for all that he's heard Cecil's voice on the radio for a year now, apparently he never really listened before.
…
After, they sit together in the parking lot out back of the Arby's, leaning together. Cecil is a warm, mostly-human weight against Carlos' side, his head resting heavy on Carlos' shoulder, and he's letting out these small, contented humming noises, seemingly without realizing it. It's oddly adorable, like Cecil isn't capable of complete silence even now—ever the Voice of Night Vale, even when Night Vale itself is nearly silent, almost peaceful.
They lean together, and look up at the lights. And they say nothing, because nothing needs to be said.