Chapter Text
Through the Gates of the Silver Mic
By DJ Clawson
Chapter 1
1998
"No.”
It was offered firmly but also a bit impassively, as if Cecil should have expected this somehow, or at least should be very accepting of the answer without being offended.
But Cecil was, of course. “Why?” He looked at the résumé on the desk between them, the one that Algonquin hadn’t even looked at. He didn’t need to; he knew everything Cecil had ever done. He knew that Cecil was vastly overqualified for this job. He had a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism with a minor in Communications. He’d worked an uncertain amount of time at the Night Vale Daily Journal, though that information just said that and the words ‘REDACTED BY ORDERS OF THE SHERRIF’S SECRET POLICE’ in red ink under it. Whatever he’d done, none of which Ceil remembered, it must have been important enough to earn a thorough reeducation and a lifetime ban on working there again. He was secretly proud that he had made some investigations so thoroughly that they came to the attention of the police. And Cecil had been to Europe, broadening his horizons beyond the average Night Vale citizen. People rarely left, except maybe to attend another college, and they often didn’t come back. Cecil blamed at least half of Steve Carlsberg’s dickishness on him going to UC-Berkeley.
Algonquin, the Voice of Night Vale, looked at him sympathetically, but leaned back in very large and very well-build chair with an air of resignation. “Cecil, I have seven interns. That’s four more than Station Management wants me to have. And yes, I know that you would probably do a better job because of your experience even if we don’t remember it, but to be honest, mostly they get me coffee and try not to die. It’s beneath you.”
“And picking invisible corn for John Peters isn’t?” Night Vale didn’t exactly have a booking job market for a young journalist in a town with precisely two media outlets. “Al, you know I’ll do whatever the job requires. I’ll clean the toilets. I’ll be the one who shouts at Station Management’s door – “
Al’s eyes widened and he said, “That would be a very bad idea. But you should already know that.”
There was not a lot about the station that Cecil didn’t know. He could not remember his first visit, as he was very young. Al had a playpen in the recording booth where Cecil played as a child when his current foster parent was busy or temporarily deceased. He was allowed to use an empty office for a study room in high school when his house got to noisy.
Cecil could even remember when Al had been human, or just more human-looking. He was even taller now, muscular and just big, his body so covered with bright pink fur that he no longer had to wear clothes, and just wore a vest with the station logo on it. He resembled a gorilla with fangs and could stand up straight. And had horns. He resembled a stuffed animal, which wasn’t a good thing to think about when you were looking in his eyes, because Al seemed to be at least a little telepathic and he would look back at you and know you were thinking it.
“Seriously. Give me a good reason,” Cecil demanded. Because they both knew this was the only thing in the world he wanted to do with his life.
Al looked out the window, as if an answer was sitting just outside it, but it was only scrubland. “I’ll talk with Management. But it will take some time to get back to you, so don’t let your hopes ride on it. You need time, Cecil. You just got back from Europe.”
“Three months ago! And I did my month of reeducation right away.” As if he had any choice in the matter. It was important for returning citizens to be updated on new laws and realities, and old realities that had to be forgotten immediately. “Just tell me you’ll call.”
“Of course I’ll call.” Al smiled at him, showing two conical fangs sticking up from his lower jaw. “Just keep a clean collared shirt ready. We have a dress code.” Unconsciously he scratched his bare stomach. “Sometimes.”
****************************************
“Maybe he just doesn’t want you to die,” Pam said, sucking up the last of her soda in a way that made the ice at the bottom of the cup shake.
Cecil leaned against the wall of their booth at Arby’s. He was famished when he arrived after work, and had torn through his sandwich and fries long ago. “I think he still thinks I’m a little kid. I’m not! I’m almost thirty-ish!”
“So he doesn’t have an opening. We’re all waiting for opening when the summer interns clear out. If you get it before me I will murder you,” she said. “Cecil, I like you, but I will murder you and I know how to avoid that incompetent vigilante group that would go after me. I put my résumé in months ago.”
“Why do you want to work at the station?” he asked. Pamela was not a student gunning for the full tuition free ride at Community College if she survived the internship. She did not want the position of Voice of Night Vale so far as he knew. He was pretty old to be an intern, and she had a few years on him.
“I basically need it to run for city government these days. You can’t get your name on the ballot for alderman without a letter of recommendation from Community Radio in this town.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Know what?”
“That you wanted to be a politician. I mean, you haven’t ... what have you been doing?” He was a little out of touch because of his long trip abroad, something he occasionally had to remind people.
“I’ve been picking up whatever’s in the classifieds,” she said, which was a code for contract work with a secret-yet-menacing government agency. So if she was qualified for leadership, she couldn’t prove it. The job was actually fairly respectable, but you couldn’t openly say it.
He wasn’t surprised. Pamela Winchell had always been a tough, no-nonsense kind of person. She had been three years ahead of him in school, but he remembered her running the school board as if it was her personal army until machete-wielding rebels forced her out of office after a ten-hour standoff in the teacher’s lounge that involved grenades and claymores.
“What are you two moping about?”
It was Earl Harlan, wearing his scout leader uniform, of course. It was hard to catch him wearing anything else. He joined them without invitation, sliding his tray next to Cecil’s, but it wasn’t as if they rejected his presence.
“Complaining about our stalled careers,” Pam said. “Some of us have to worry about that.”
“Al rejected my application again,” Cecil explained.
“You? You don’t have an in with Algonquin?” Earl opened various condiment packets to prepare his meal. “The man who let you bring the jar of intern ashes to show-and-tell? Who let you sleep on his couch when your landlady kicked you out for – what did she kick you out for?”
“I don’t remember,” he said, but he was lying. He wanted that wolf immunity, so he set what was supposed to be a very small, contained fire on his porch, but the winds picked up at the wrong time. “Al says he can’t make any more openings, and there’s no other work for me since banned from the paper. On the other hand John does give me all the free imaginary corn I can carry home, if either of you want some of that. He thinks that makes a good bonus.”
“Oh, so you’re above working with your hands now?” Earl said with that shit-eating grin of his. “How were those European resorts? They must have really pampered you.”
Cecil glared at Pam because he knew she was holding back laughter. “They were hostels. On the edge of cliffs.”
“Right.” Earl smiled in a way that indicated he was content to let Cecil mope, which was really what Cecil wanted to do. “Since you have so much spare time, you could always come by and help with the troop! He could always used an uninjured supervisor!”
Cecil glared at him, but his heart wasn’t in it.
****************************************
Cecil’s heart wasn’t in much of anything for the next few months. He harvested invisible corn, he ate invisible corn, and he listened to the radio. Sometimes he would scribble and doodle in his diary, but it was getting so hard to get pen shipments in. He attended mandatory municipal events and didn’t die at any of them, so that was something. And he tried very, very hard not to think of anything too investigative, because he was not allowed to freelance investigate or report. No one was – they at least needed a contract job and preferably approved steady employment.
Cecil was starting to look and feel like a piece of invisible corn when the call finally came in. It was a pre-cordered message. “You’ve been chosen for a Night Vale Community Radio internship beginning on – “
He screamed so loud he didn’t hear the date and had to wait for the message to repeat.
He shaved for the first time in weeks, put on his remaining unstained clothing, and reported for duty to find a crowd of people in the station break room. Flowers were still out for the memorial service for all the previous interns, who had been killed when the water pressure was turned up too high in the sprinkler system. When there were more than twenty people, the break room had to be abandoned for downstairs storage just to fit everyone, and that was when Algonquin appeared, looking particularly serious, and maybe not just because he’d lost all of his interns in one swoop.
“As some of you may know, my contract both permits and requires me to retire as the Voice of Night Vale when the stars are right,” Al said, which brought an even greater silence to the room around him. “Not a moment before and hopefully not a moment after. I can’t say when that is going to be, and I would rather not date myself in front of you youngsters, but there’s a reason no one is old enough to remember my predecessor.” He managed a pleasant grin for that, possibly at the memory. “Now I know some of you are just here because you want to complete an internship to pay for college or qualify for government and that’s great. But there will be an extra form for all of you to fill out today.”
He turned to the woman holding the folder full of sheets next to him and held one up. “On this form you will indicate if you’re planning on taking a normal course of internship or submitting yourself as a candidate for the Voice of Night Vale. If you do the latter, additional things will be required. You have twenty-four hours to produce blood, bile, urine, spit, fingernail, hair, and spinal fluid samples. You will also have additional duties and responsibilities, but the biggest difference is that Station Management will be watching you. If you don’t understand why this is serious business you probably should reconsider your candidacy.”
There was a stifled chuckle from a few people in the group.
“Candidates will have six months to withdraw their candidacy before there are penalties. They will also not be paid for the first six months. And you should know the internship period will probably last a good deal longer than that, so you’d better make some other financial arrangements. I recommend ramen noodles.” He put the sheet back in the pile. “Once you application for either position is submitted, we will sort you into a shift. Good luck to all of you.”
Without hesitating, he turned and left them to wonder.
****************************************
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Cecil was still just standing in line with his paperwork and samples, actually, waiting to put his application, when he heard it for the first time. “Um, yeah. I am a journalist.”
Leanne Hart promptly cut in line to be next to him. “Cecil Baldwin.”
“That is my name.”
“As the Voice of Night Vale?”
“I wouldn’t have gotten a needle in my spine if I didn’t – “
“The guy who spent seven years in speech therapy for stuttering?”
He blushed with a bit of anger. “It was five years. And I didn’t start out that way. I just got the worm and I couldn’t shake it.” He had a tapeworm living in his belly from ages seven to nine. They didn’t find it until it had been there long enough to claim squatter’s rights and it took them two years of legal battles to evict it. The tapeworm had a stutter and Cecil caught it, and even after his sublet-ter was gone the habit stuck. “I’m a journalist. A real journalist, Leanne.”
Her degree was in English, with a minor in creative writing. He didn’t know what happened to her great American novel, but apparently she turned thirty before finishing it because it certainly wasn’t in stores. “You don’t have to be a real journalist for this job. You have to read the municipal news on the air. With a clear and smooth voice.”
“Al is a journalist.”
Before she could contradict him – if she was even going to – he heard someone else shout, “Is that you, Stuttering Cecil?”
He looked at his shoes. “Come on. We’re not in elementary school anymore.” Or junior high. Or high school. Or some of college.
“But you are kidding, right?” Jared, a former classmate, had a wide smile. “About the application?”
“Do you think I just pull out hair samples for fun?” he growled. The sheet said they needed the roots, because that was where the DNA was. And boy, did they need a lot of roots. “Yes, okay. I want to be the Voice of Night Vale.”
It was the first time he’d said it out loud, and it felt strange, like he was revealing something too private for a small town where people hoarded secrets when they knew too much about each other. Because he’d always wanted to be in radio because Al was in radio and that was that. Never even given it a lot of thought, really. Aside from the obvious influence he wasn’t even sure where the drive came from. He wasn’t a particularly talkative child before the stutter and it only got worse with that. He just knew that if there was any other radio job in Night Vale, he would have claimed it by now, no matter what he had to do or who he had to legally murder.
“Good luck, I guess,” his former classmate said with a slap on the back. The implication was, You’re going to need it.
****************************************
For the next three months, Cecil didn’t have to worry about his old stutter returning (which it did sometimes, when he was nervous) or being nervous in front of Al, or even seeing much of Al, because he didn’t have time to worry about anything except his job.
There was no instruction for candidates. There were just shift schedules and job demands, and they were anything from “coffee, three sugars” to “spend the next twelve hours checking the random numbers broadcast from the spire against the transcript and note any mistakes.” The shift seemed to belong in another dimension where there was both more and less time, and cancelled Wednesdays were still Wednesdays and you had to show up to work even if it was illegal to do Wednesday work. Then there were three day spans of nothing, his name nowhere on a list, and Cecil was back hauling surprisingly heavy stalks of imaginary corn to the thresher.
He really needed the extra food. The candidate interns did take Al’s advice, and went in on a bulk shipment of ramen, which became their diet. Cecil lost so much weight he had to poke a new hole in his belt, which he now needed to keep up his pants. When the second batch arrived tainted, the plumbing was constantly being fixed after being plugged with intern vomit, along with other available containers. The third batch was better, but the interns remained weak and somewhat shiftless, a sorry bunch.
Cecil was heading into the women’s bathroom with his emergency plumbing supplies again when he saw Al standing in the door of his booth, silently shaking his head. The next day, with what literally had to be magic because no one saw it arrive, a refrigerator appeared in the break room labeled “unpaid interns only.” It contained a variety of fresh fruit, vegetables, and various cheeses. Al did not explain; he didn’t even talk to them very much, as he was always either in his office preparing for the broadcast or doing the broadcasting, but they got him a number of thank you cards.
There were reporting jobs. Several of them irregularly staffed the pres corps when mayor or City Council spoke. A couple snuck into PTA meetings, which was unnecessary because Al was always there in person as part of his responsibilities to the town. Two enterprising interns tried to investigate the lights in Radon Canyon in their spare time, but the report was inconclusive and there was no visible reward for their effort. Also they were dead by Friday morning, and it was difficult to tell if the events were related.
Cecil was patient in his own way. He knew others were trying to get ahead by doing various things to impress Al, who seemed totally oblivious to them even though there was no way he possibly could be, but Cecil also knew the value of conserving energy. If he was given something important to do, he would do the heck out of it. He knew two things that were definitely needed for the job: reliability and the ability to avoid an untimely death. So he fixed the plumbing if he technically didn’t know how. He made transcripts of live shows. He ritually burned the transcripts at the stroke of midnight on the station’s bloodstone altar. And he showed up every day – famished, sick, or temporarily missing a leg that seemed to be stuck in the portal in his apartment that had swallowed up the people he was letting sleep there to help pay the rent. After being emotionally crippled by an interview with a baseball player, he pondered his meaningless existence while polishing floors and cried his way through installing new audio equipment after chasing the anteaters away from the wiring. Days blurs into nights when he worked in the basement, where it was always cool and stuffy at the same time and smelled of freshly-buried bodies even when there weren’t any. He didn’t know why the station needed to do an inventory of headphones every week – possibly just busywork to sort out the twenty different candidates still alive until someone made an impression – but he counted cans and filled out acquisition forms before drowning them in a pot of boiling acid.
Which was all fine, in the service of Night Vale Community Radio, until he got an assignment to request material from the Night Vale Daily Journal. Maybe because he was sick with hard cheese poisoning, or maybe because he hadn’t slept in four straight days, but he didn’t give a thought to their restraining order against him until he was at the office, putting in the request. They gave the material over suspiciously quickly, and he returned to the studio and mechanically went through the rest of his day, which contained no details that he remembered after collapsing in his bed and sleeping through until dangerously close to the start of his new work day.
Cursing himself, he doused his last collared shirt in air freshener and ran downstairs. He was wheeling his bike out to street when the Sheriff’s Secret Police emerged from the bushes. It must have been bad, because there were three of them.
“Cecil Baldwin,” the officer said after clearing his throat, “you have been found to be in violation of the Night Vale Daily’s restraining order against you, having failed to maintain a 200-foot distance from the building as of yesterday at 2:43 pm. We’ll have to take you in for questioning – “
With no emotion whatsoever in his voice, he answered hoarsely, “I have to go to work. My shift starts in five minutes.”
“Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. Mr. Baldwin, you’re under arrest for – “
“I have to go to work.” He was halfway on his bike now, and that was all he needed to get going. The officers were on foot, perhaps not expecting a chase (because it was something you didn’t do), and he didn’t live far from the station. He could make it. He could go to work, tell them he was being arrested, hope that would count as a sick day –
He felt something sharp in his back. He couldn’t slow down enough to take his concentration off the road and pull it out, but he guessed it was a dark, hopefully just a tranquilizer. Well, good. Those took a few minutes to kick in. It might just be like riding a bike drunk, something he had a lot of experience doing.
The second one hit right around the moment a patrol car pulled around the Pizza Barn restaurant. He avoided hitting it by inches. Swerving around things (mostly potholes, wormholes, portals, and temporary unmentionable statuary) was a basic requirement for kids to master in order to keep their bike license. He was quickly aware that while the first dark had gone into his shoulder blade, the second was buried in the back of his arm, and it was already starting to go numb. Hopefully that would be it and it wouldn’t try to strangle him.
As he lost motor function on his left side he put his right hand firmly in the center to try to steer the bike down an alleyway behind the Payless Shore Store that he knew was too narrow for cars and helicopters. There were two blue ones in the sky now – or he assumed they were blue, because it would be stupid to look up right now – but they could only land on rooftops and weren’t much danger to him.
When he turned the corner, he saw the barricades two officers were erecting. He knew how flimsy those barricades were. Too high to jump, but they really were meant to intimidate people, not stop them. He pumped as hard as he could, probably taking the officers genuinely by surprise when he rammed it on the left side, knocking it away but also tossing him off his bike.
It hurt his hip more than his face, which he didn’t fall on, thankfully, and he said, “I have to get to work,” though his voice was heavily slurred because the left side of his face didn’t seem to be working. He was a thin guy, often mistaken for a weakling, but he knew that so he knew the officer closer to him wasn’t expecting to be pile-driven out of the way so Cecil could take off down sidewalk.
The radio station was in sight. Or he hoped it was the station, with the giant tour, because his vision was a little blurry. He was so concentrated on running because it now required 100% of his focus that he ran right into Pam, who was also reporting for work, knocking her down two as his hand reached the door, which opened at the commotion.
“Sorry,” he told her, but it came out more like “shorrrreeyy” before he could spit out the dirt in his mouth, take a deep breath, and look at Al’s memorable visage. “Ayy’m here fer werkkkk...”
He reached for Al – reached for anyone – when an unknown number of officers tackled him like a football in the closing seconds of a championship game. Of course he never found out how many because they were dressed in black and the sky was black and soon everything was black. But he dreamed Al was smiling.
****************************************
Whatever happened over the next three days was a mystery to Cecil. Trying to remember it after waking in his bathtub, covered in bruises and bandages, caused a seizure. Or that was what his nice neighbor the ghost told him later, after a lot of thrashing that just made him hurt more. None of it damaged the tracking device cuffed to his ankle in a manner that they must have known would be uncomfortably tight.
It took him an unperceivable amount of time for him to climb out and notice the paperwork on the counter. He had signed away a number of things during his new probationary period, including his right to operate a vehicle of any kind or eat cheese. How did they know it was the only protein in his diet? But there was his signature in blood at the bottom, acknowledging that he had one week to pay a significant fine for resisting arrest. The number didn’t matter – it might as well have been monopoly money to him because he didn’t have that kind of money and he didn’t know where he could get it. And he didn’t care at all because he only cared about one thing: that he was fired. He had to be fired. He’d failed to show up for work and properly request permission for a sick day and he was pretty sure he didn’t get sick days anyway.
He cried for a stupid amount of time about it. Just plain stupid. He didn’t move from his fetal position on the bathroom phone until he phone rang several times in a row. On the caller’s fourth try, he decided to answer it. “Hello?”
“Christ, I finally got you.” It was Pam. “You’ve got an hour.”
His watch had been broken. He didn’t know if it was during the chase or the three days of incarceration. “An hour until what? The paper says I have a week.”
“An hour to be at work, dummy,” she said. “And hurry it up because the toilet’s clogged again. All of them. I think there’s too much roughage in our diets.”
He stammered for a bit, but ultimately said nothing.
“And you think you can be in radio,” she said and hung up.
On his walk to work, he was crying for a whole different reason.
****************************************
With a song in his heart and a limp in his step, Cecil found himself confronted by Jared. “Algonquin would like to see you in his office.” Cecil mentally shrugged and moved in that direction, and he heard Jared say, “And thanks for ruining it for the rest of us.”
Cecil spun around, which was quite painful. “What did you say?”
“It’s more about what Al said,” Jared seethed. “I guess you were already unconscious. They were dragging you away and we were all staring like idiots and Al said, "‘Of course, I would expect the same from all of you.’”
Cecil laughed, much to Jared’s irritation, and knocked on the office door.
“Come in.” Al was at this desk, scribbling notes on the printed script with an ostrich-feather pen that he had to re-sharpen with a knife. Al loved pens, and a giant cup of all kinds, from cheap Bic ballpoints to felt tip to those gold and silver pens that required a ton of shaking before you use them, as well as some so obscure Cecil wasn’t sure how they worked. Writing implements were frowned upon in polite society, a rule Al completely ignored whether he was somewhere as a journalist or not. When Cecil shut the door, Al put his pen down and directed all of attention to his guest, which was rare so close to show time. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay.” Which was a very obvious lie.
“How did they treat you? Without thinking too hard about it.”
“Um.” It was not an easy request. “They have really good ice cream.”
“Good. I know it might have seemed like too much of a sacrifice in the end, but I think you showed excellent work ethic. I hope they weren’t unduly harsh.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Are you still facing charges?”
Cecil gestured to the ankle bracelet. “I’m on probation. I can’t go back to the paper’s offices again. And, um, I owe them some money. Fined for resisting arrest.”
“How much money?”
“A lot.”
“Be a little more specific.”
Cecil frowned as he tried to remember. Everything was still fuzzy around the edges. “Something like four hundred and fifty – “ He looked down, and Al had opened the metal safe box and was counting crisp twenties. “You don’t have to do that.”
Al ignored him completely until he had double-checked his math and practically shoved the cash in Cecil’s good hand. “The station has a very large discretionary fund. And if you still feel badly about it when we start paying you, you can pay me back. Now please get to work. And when you’re done with your current task, got to the grocery store and get all the Metamucil you can find, then put it on top of the of the intern fridge.”
Cecil grinned. “Yes, sir.”