Fourth Broadcast: [audio/action]

[nvcr]

I'll admit, I got the strangest sense during the fog last week that Night Vale had followed me here. Back in March this year a sandstorm came to our town.

The runes Old Woman Josie, a friend of mine who lived out by the car lot--and one of our town's most eminent citizens--found during the sandstorm said only this: "THEY COME IN TWOS. YOU COME IN TWOS. YOU. AND YOU. KILL YOUR DOUBLE."

And sure enough, our doubles did come, fighting their original counterparts to the death wherever they could. One of my interns, Dana, managed to kill hers with a stapler, and I found a vortex in my office. I entered it, and I saw a studio spattered in blood, with...ugh. Animal viscera, dripping all over the furniture and recording console.

And my double walking back to what was presumably his studio as I rushed back, his face twisted into a smile. A-and when I got home, after the show, Dana said that she heard the man in my studio, and that he said...oh god, he said something about my equipment being "much drier" than it ought to be.

I let him live.

Why did I let him live?

I still don't know why I let him live. I tried my best to forget about that entire afternoon, and I was fine for a while, until a week or so before I arrived here in Ponyville. I was cleaning out some of my old stuff at home, and I found a few tapes that I apparently made when I was a teenager. Well, I didn't remember making the tapes, but they must have been so important to me once, so I played them.

I wish I hadn't.

The boy on those tapes said he had a brother, and I don't remember having a brother at all. At least, I didn't, until that week someone changed our ages around, and now I remember blurry fragments of what he was like: shrieking, hollow eyes and howling, sneering, staring at me from across the breakfast table.

The boy on those tapes said he'd been an intern for the previous radio host, Leonard Burton. I didn't remember any of this either, until the boy I turned into that fateful week remembered Leonard sending him to investigate the swamp that appeared by the 7-Eleven.

On those tapes, the boy was followed by a flickering movement, stalking him continuously.

And...and this is the worst thing of all, listeners, the younger me in those tapes looked into a mirror--something that my mother warned me not to do, lest I suffer a horrible death for it--and he was attacked and strangled to death.

And while I may have shared a life with the boy from those tapes--which I'm sure of, since I turned into him briefly during that week when we were all versions of ourselves from a different time--that doesn't mean that we're the same person. Or thing.

If I am the boy from those tapes, then...what happened that made me forget something as important as having a brother? Was that vicious doppelganger I saw in the sandstorm my brother, or is my brother another man I have yet to meet?

If I'm not the boy from those tapes, well...I have a few ideas on who I could be instead, and that person, or thing, may have killed a teenager. May be walking around in that teenager's skin, pretending to grow into a man with that boy's name and memories, and yet this charade is unknown to himself.

I crushed that tape into tiny pieces, and I resolved never to think much of it again. But my shadow knew that I wouldn't forget, and my shadow reminded me.

Trying to forget all of this won't change the fact that it happened. I could have crushed that tape into a fine powder, and its words would still ring like deathly keening in the ears of my memory. And your denial only feeds your nightmares until they grow bloated and their jowls quiver like a great unearthly beast.

I saw all of this when I stared into the eyes of my Shadow, and I understood.

I'm looking in a mirror right now. The mirror is not covered. And I see...

I see a unicorn. And that's all I see.

I... I think I better put the curtain back on this mirror now. Uh, yeah. I mean, I'm not left wondering what sort of monstrosity lurks within its shiny surface. But that still seems like the right thing to do. If I'm not dead yet, there's still the chance that I might be if the mirror's uncovered too long.

If anyone else here has experience with crises of identity, or if they'd like to talk at all about Night Vale, or shadowy doppelgangers, or, well, anything, I think I could use some company right now.

Comments

[personalgentlepony]

Indeed. I've been in Mr Wooster's employ for roughly five years. And I understand that you hosted a radio program in a curious desert municipality known as Night Vale. Having heard your voice, I see why you've made broadcasting into a career.

[nvcr]

Why, thank you. The stone tablets at City Hall said I was supposed to be the next Voice of Night Vale, so. It wasn't exactly a situation where I could say no. That kind of disobedience to your civic duty is what gets you detained in the abandoned mineshaft outside of town! Or worse.