It’s pretty obvious when Jon wakes up on Wednesday morning that not only is Tim already awake, he never really went to sleep. He doesn’t seem tired, though, and in fact seems well rested and healthy, so Jon, perhaps unwisely, lets it pass without comment. Martin had a bit more of a restless night, but he says he’s fine, and Jon decides to believe him.
Breakfast is eggs and bacon and fruit salad. The fruit salad is made of strawberries and cherries and peaches, which Martin looks askance at before—Jon presumes—remembering what Carlos said their first night about how Cecil doesn’t let him buy canned food anymore. These peaches are fresh and still crisp and firm, with no sign of having been packed in syrup, and they taste delicious. Charlie and Esteban match each other bowl for bowl until Cecil, laughing, finally urges them to stop before they explode.
“You’re going to need a bath before we go anywhere,” Carlos says with a sigh, looking at Esteban’s face, hands, and neck liberally striped with pink and orange juices.
Charlie starts to wipe his mouth with the back of his arm before Tim catches it gently and hands him a napkin. “Not that that’s going to help much, buddy. You look like you fell face first in a wine tub.”
“Go wash your face,” Martin tells him gently, and Charlie nods sheepishly and gets up. Esteban, who’s been fussing since the word bath was mentioned, subsides when Charlie moves and allows himself to be hauled off to the bathroom by Cecil.
Jon automatically starts gathering the dishes; Tim disappears into the kitchen and returns with a damp cloth and begins cleaning up the mess. And there is a lot of mess. Carlos looks down at the floor and sighs. “We should really put down one of those plastic mats like Aunt Sarah had under the table when you were little.”
“I wasn’t that messy,” Jon says defensively, not that he remembers. He wouldn’t even remember what his father sounded like if they hadn’t found that tape. His heart clenches momentarily at the memory.
“No, but Aunt Sarah was always afraid you would be. You were meticulous, though.” Carlos smiles at the memory. “I, on the other hand, made an enormous mess and Mama was very embarrassed.”
“She shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t your fault.” Jon nudges his cousin’s hip lightly. They’re similar enough that he knows this isn’t a hug day for him, but a quick hip check should be fine. “So tell me about Pine Cliff. Is it really populated entirely by ghosts?”
“It really is. They even have a high school that’s part of the intramural sports league,” Carlos confirms. “Obviously they aren’t great on defense, but their offense is without par.”
“I’d imagine.” Tim dumps a handful of mashed fruit onto a plate. “How’s their wheelchair basketball team doing this season?”
“They beat the Desert Bluffs Vultures, but that’s about it. Whispering Forest doesn’t have a wheelchair basketball team.”
Cecil, Esteban, and Charlie reappear several minutes later, Charlie in a clean shirt and with his face scrubbed and Esteban wearing an entirely new outfit, and they pile into the minivan. Carlos slides behind the wheel this time; Martin offers to let Jon sit up front with him, but Jon insists that Martin is taller and will be less comfortable crammed in the back, he’ll be fine. Instead, Cecil climbs into the backseat with Jon and Tim.
“I need to check in at the lab before we head out,” Carlos announces as they pull away. “Nils texted this morning, she’s worried about some readings and I promised I would take a look, but it won’t be more than ten minutes. Honest.”
“That’s fine,” Cecil assures him. “We have the time.”
Jon stares out the window at the town that is by now becoming quite familiar. Cars, pedestrians, and hooded figures they all know not to make eye contact with hurry past them; some wave, but most don’t. The houses give way to businesses and they find themselves passing City Hall and the radio station before pulling up to the lab next to Big Rico’s Pizza. Carlos again promises to be just a few minutes, then heads into the lab, leaving the car running.
“Has Pine Cliff always been entirely populated by ghosts?” Tim asks Cecil. “Or is it a recent development?”
“It’s only been since 2008. Before that most people residing there—not all—were living people,” Cecil explains. “After the Great Cataclysm, though, every single resident was turned into a ghost simultaneously.”
Charlie twists around in his seat. “What’s a cataclysm?” He enunciates the word carefully, like it’s for a spelling bee.
“A sudden, violent change,” Cecil says gravely. “In this case, I seem to recall it was a leak of hexachirphastalpine from the spotlight in the high school auditorium.” His voice drops into its radio cadence. “A significant portion of population of Pine Cliff was seated in the auditorium for the performance of the spring musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Stephen Sondheim’s critically acclaimed 1962 musical about the joys and dangers of internet chat rooms. Senior Robert Preston, no relation, who was playing Pseudolus, had just begun his solo when the lens on the spotlight cracked, releasing the chemical into the auditorium. The only one not changed at first was junior Mary Sue Poots, who was working the sound booth at the time and thus was sealed away from the gas. Unfortunately, she opened the door to find out what had happened because she couldn’t hear the screaming and was turned as well. The gas then escaped the high school and spread throughout the town, turning everyone it came in contact with. Its final encounter was with the Great Guardian Ourobos that encircled the town of Pine Cliff. Ourobos, whose purpose was to protect the town from invaders and contagions from the outside by keeping its tail in its mouth over the gate unless people wanted to leave or enter, absorbed the remainder of the hexachirphastalpine, but unfortunately it too was turned into a ghost. No longer able to fulfill its function as a guardian of the town because it couldn’t stop people from passing through the gates, or eat them if it felt they were a threat or worried they might be or was just a little peckish, it left that fall and went to Hollywood, where it now has a thriving career in special effects.”
Charlie’s eyes are huge and round, but all he can say is, “Gosh.”
“What was the rate of successful passage through the gates of Pine Cliff before Ourobos got ghosted?” Tim asks, as if he’s asking the average rainfall for the town.
Cecil purses his lips briefly. “Eighty-three percent, except on Tuesdays, when it was seventeen percent. Or if you were wearing a bucket with sticks stuck to it on your head, in which case it was guaranteed to leave you alone.”
Carlos comes back then, beaming, and slides behind the wheel. Jon is thankful, because that was getting quite confusing.
They sing a few of the travel songs Jon remembers from his childhood on the twenty minute drive to Pine Cliff. Tim studies the ground outside the town and hums thoughtfully; Jon isn’t sure why until he realizes there’s still a faint impression of a ditch around the outer edge of the town, where the Ourobos must have lain once upon a time. Carlos parks in front of a community center and shuts the car off.
“It’s smaller than Night Vale,” he explains. “We can walk it easily enough.”
Cecil swings Esteban up onto his shoulders; Martin does the same for Charlie, who hasn’t hit a growth spurt yet this year and still fits comfortably, although Jon is willing to wager that won’t last long. They set off through the town, which reminds Jon powerfully of some of the smaller hamlets near Bournemouth except for the differences in flora…and the people who pass by them, all of whom are slightly translucent and shimmer a bit. A few of them greet Cecil or Carlos, and one mother is forced to stop for several minutes while her toddler, who’s about Esteban’s age, reacts in shock to what must be his first living baby—and Esteban reacts similarly to seeing his first ghost baby. For the most part, though, the residents treat them as normal, so Jon does his best to treat them the same.
There’s one woman, though, who just…doesn’t leave them alone.
Jon notices her first when they pass the park—not a dog park, just an ordinary green space with benches and trees and what looks like a playground in the distance. She shimmers out of nothing and becomes visible as they pass, staring intently at them in a way that makes Jon unaccountably nervous. She hasn’t actually done anything, she’s just…looking. Still, he’s not altogether sure he likes it.
He tries to put it out of his mind, but when they turn a corner towards Main Street, he sees her again, just a few feet behind them, still staring intently. At first he wonders if she’s somehow teleporting herself, or perhaps if she has an identical twin. He’s quickly disabused of that notion when he glances over his shoulder and sees her feet move as she approaches. She could catch up with them if she wanted to—they aren’t moving that fast—but she’s keeping back for some reason.
Jon tells himself he doesn’t need to worry. That she’s a ghost, that she can’t hurt them, that she wouldn’t hurt them in such a public place, in a place that has laws that apply to ghosts. But he can’t help but think of Melanie and what happened to her in Sheffield and India. Ghosts can hurt people, if they want to, and murderers rarely care about things like laws.
Twenty minutes later, she’s still following them, and she seems to be getting closer every time he looks, and he can’t help it, he slips his arm through Tim’s and moves closer to him. Tim and Martin always make him feel safer, but if she does spring for him, he doesn’t want Charlie to get caught in the crossfire. Tim slides his arm around Jon’s shoulders and pulls him to his side, as naturally as anything.
“You okay?” he asks quietly.
“I think we’re being followed,” Jon murmurs back, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. He’s already running scenarios in his head. The Slaughter was his first thought because of Melanie, but it’s following them—it could be the Stranger, it could be the Hunt, it could even be the Spiral trying to make him think he’s losing his mind, especially if no one else can see her…
Tim rolls his head on his neck, stretching, and looks over his shoulder as natural as anything. He gives a small hum, then glances towards Cecil and jerks his head towards the ghost. “Friend of yours?”
“Hmm?” Cecil glances towards the ghost and gives her a wide, friendly smile before turning back to Tim and shaking his head. “No, I’ve never met her, but I don’t get up to Pine Cliff very often.”
“Huh.” Tim turns and waves to the ghost. Jon glances over his shoulder nervously, but she doesn’t wave back or say anything. She just moves closer, still staring at them intently.
Jon tries to concentrate on the tour, but he’s having a hard time of it. The presence of the ghost, who’s now almost part of their group, is distracting him more than he realized and he isn’t sure why. Tim and Cecil are aware of her, and they’re arguably the two most powerful people in the group, possibly in the entire Greater Night Vale area, so they’re safe enough…aren’t they? Still. He’s unaccountably nervous. The other ghosts—and they encounter several, when they stop into shops or say hello to folks Cecil and Carlos do seem to know—are friendly and kind, and none of them give him the same nervous vibe the other ghost does. But none of them acknowledge her, either, and that’s disconcerting at best.
Just before his nerves break completely, Cecil comes to a halt, lifts Esteban off his shoulders, and hands him to Carlos. “Here, babe, can you take him for a minute?”
“Sure,” Carlos says, seeming surprised as he accepts Esteban and settles him on his hip. “You’ve been carrying him all morning, you must be…”
He trails off as Cecil reaches into the pocket of his black parachute pants and withdraws an entire microphone. Jon blinks at him in surprise. He’s even more surprised when Tim takes his arm from around his shoulders, reaches into his jacket, and withdraws a tape recorder. Wordlessly, he turns it towards Cecil, who plugs the microphone into the jack.
Click! The recorder turns itself on.
Cecil steps over to the ghost, whose eyes are pleading and hopeful, and nods to her, then speaks into the microphone. “Listeners, I’m here with a resident of Pine Cliff, who wants to tell us her story. Can you tell us your name for the record?”
“Hephzibah McLean,” the ghost says. Jon would have expected her voice to echo slightly, or something, but no, it sounds perfectly normal, if a bit faint.
“And how long have you been a resident of Pine Cliff?”
Hephzibah blinks, as if she’s never thought about it before, then answers, “Two hundred and eighteen years.”
“Were you a ghost before the Great Cataclysm?” Cecil asks, as if it’s perfectly logical for someone to have lived two hundred and eighteen years.
Again the blink, slower this time. “Yes.”
Tim nods to a bench nearby. Hephzibah sits down, and Tim and Cecil sit opposite her. Cecil cocks his head at her for a moment, then begins. “Hephzibah McLean was the first resident of the Greater Night Vale Metropolitan Area born in the nineteenth century. Pine Cliff did not have a hospital at that time, so like most residents, she was born at home, the youngest of seven. Her three-year-old brother dubbed her ‘Eppie’, a name she was to carry all her life…”
Jon stares, slightly awed and slightly afraid, as Cecil narrates Hephzibah’s—Eppie’s—history. The tiny remaining shred of skepticism he carried up until meeting the Primes points out that they have no way of proving this is actually how her life went—Cecil could just be telling a story that sounds good—but one look at Eppie’s face and it’s obvious he’s telling the truth. She has the relaxed expression of someone hearing a familiar story, while also anticipating a moment she’s never had before. He covers most of her childhood and young adulthood, then—to Jon’s surprise—stops just before her sixteenth birthday.
Tim leans forward slightly and drops into the voice he uses on the people who come to the Archives, the voice they’ve all heard on the tapes. “Statement of Hephzibah McLean, regarding her refusal to fight in the Blood Space War. Statement taken direct from subject, twenty-fourth October, 2018. Statement begins.”
Eppie exhales…and begins.
Jon’s jaw drops. The statement sounds to him perfectly normal for Night Vale…at least now…but from the look in Eppie’s eyes, even as she speaks calmly, it’s obvious that back then, all of this was new and terrifying and unexpected. She tells them everything—the appearance of the recruiting party, the huge honor they claimed the war would be, the promises they made, but also the war she saw within them, the blood in one eye and the stars in the other. It’s very clearly both the Slaughter—like he feared at first—and the Vast, but it’s also clear that Eppie herself is not a danger.
She’s merely the one thing they’ve never had: someone who did not survive their encounter with the Fourteen and is still able to give a statement about it.
“Statement ends,” Tim says when she finishes. He holds out his free hand, palm upwards. “Thank you, Eppie.”
Cecil, too, holds out his free hand. Eppie places her hands in theirs, smiles, mouths something that might be thank you…
…and fades away to nothing.
Click! The recorder shuts itself off once more.
As if nothing unusual has just happened, Cecil frees his microphone from the tape recorder and pockets it as Tim does the same with the recorder. Jon reaches up and manually closes his jaw.
“That was very scientifically interesting,” Carlos says, in a voice that clearly implies that were they not in public or in front of their children, he would have pounced Cecil then and there and showed him a very specific definition of interesting. “How did you do that?”
Tim and Cecil, in the process of rising from their seat, look at one another for a moment and then, simultaneously, shrug. It’s Tim who answers. “I suppose she couldn’t move on until she knew she wouldn’t be forgotten.”
Jon spends the rest of the tour—the rest of the day, really—thinking about that.