Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink

  “Nope.”

  “I’m sorry about earlier. I think I upset you. I can’t talk to younger people. I’ve failed a lot with Josh.”

  “Here’s the problem, dude. You keep seeing me as a number, and I’m not that. Or not just that. Or, oh, I don’t know. Jesus, everything hurts.”

  “Jackie, I want to help you find the man from King City. There’s a directness, a forcefulness to you that I just don’t have. I need that. I need you to help me understand what Troy and Evan and all the rest want with Josh. I need to protect my son.”

  “I’m tired, Diane.” Jackie wanted to yawn, but her jaw couldn’t open wide enough.

  “He’s my son, Jackie. You need to . . . I’m sorry. I can come back later.”

  “No, in general. Tired. Broken.”

  She held up her cast, newly reset, although the nurse had never come back into the room.

  “When this comes off, I’ll be holding a paper that says ‘KING CITY,’ and I’ll keep on holding it for centuries, not growing old, not growing at all, still in Night Vale, like I always have been. I’m never going to get my life back. I’m never going to get a life. I’ll be nineteen-year-old Jackie Fierro, no purpose, one slip of paper, forever.”

  Her entire body was a vibration of pain and frustration. Diane was silent. The nurse came in, pacing back and forth at the foot of the bed. After a couple minutes, Jackie fell asleep, from the drugs and from the energy spent on her speech.

  The television turned itself on to talk about some local weather issues. The news anchors bantered back and forth about what weather they liked best. One said “warm sunshine” while the other said “cool sunshine.” They both laughed, and the ground shook a little bit.

  “How’s she doing, Diane?” one anchor whispered to Diane.

  “She’s having a tough go of it, but she’s going to be okay, I think.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “It sure is, Tim,” said the other anchor. “How are you, Diane? How’s Josh doing?” A picture of Josh appeared in the top left corner of the screen. In this picture, he was a French press coffeemaker.

  “That your son?” Jackie managed. She was awake again, but barely.

  “Yes.” Diane felt concern. No, not concern, dread. No, not dread, terror.

  “Looks just like you.” Saying this seemed to take a lot out of Jackie. She closed her eyes again.

  “He’s fine,” Diane said to Trinh. “He’s fine,” she said again, as if that made it more true than before.

  “We heard he was on a search for his birth father,” Tim said.

  “Yes, exactly yes,” Trinh agreed.

  “Josh and I have been talking about it. I don’t want him looking for his father. But the important thing is—”

  There was an orchestral fanfare from the TV, cutting her off. An animated graphic flashed on the screen, below Josh’s photo. The graphic said, TEEN SLEUTH. The letters were red and yellow with a silver-lined bevel, and there was a grotesque digital arpeggio hammering home each letter as it appeared.

  Diane rubbed her forehead. “Is this going out to everyone?”

  “More news tonight on local teen Josh Crayton, the amateur sleuth in search of his birth father,” Tim said.

  “We’re getting reports now that the junior private eye has gone missing,” Trinh said. For emphasis, the word MISSING appeared over Josh’s photo.

  “What?” Diane stood up. “No, he’s just driving around looking for his father. It’s only been a couple hours.”

  “For a report on this breaking story,” Tim said, “we go now to Ben, who is live at Night Vale General Hospital.”

  “Yes, thank you, Tim,” another voice said. “I’m reporting live from just outside the ICU of NV General.”

  She could hear Ben’s voice both live outside the door and a few seconds later from the television. She felt like there was a gap where her chest had been.

  “Are you guys . . .” She turned. The nurse was gone. Jackie was asleep.

  Diane cried. As long as you have some control over your situation, her father used to tell her unhelpfully, there’s no need to cry, only to take action. That statement made sense right up until the tears came.

  “Jackie.” Diane’s voice cracked. “Are you hearing this?”

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Can we come in, Diane?” said the voice behind the door.

  “What’s up?” Jackie said, her eyes still closed.

  “Can we come in, Diane?” the same voice repeated from the television.

  “The TV news. They say Josh has gone missing.”

  Jackie opened her eyes and forced her body into an upright position. Her face went pale with the effort and pain.

  Diane was still crying, and did not cover her face. She let the tears fall openly. She thought of all the minutes, each individual minute, that she had left Josh home alone while she had chased useless ghosts all over town. If she had been home, he wouldn’t be gone.

  The Ben on the television screen was knocking on a hospital room door.

  Jackie turned her legs off the bed with slow, careful effort. “He’s a teenager. Probably ran away for a little bit. Call him. Get in a cab. Get home. Call him.”

  “He wouldn’t have run away. He just took the car without telling me. That’s all.”

  “Sometimes kids run away. You can sit here watching the TV talk about it, or you can do something.”

  Diane’s tears stopped. Her dry red eyes looked into Jackie’s tired, bruised eyes. She eased Jackie back into bed, gently helped her lie down, and pulled the cover up over her. She placed her hand on Jackie’s forehead and stroked her temple. Jackie let her eyes close again.

  “You’re right,” Diane said, trying to keep her panic from showing. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

  Jackie closed her eyes and was instantly asleep again.

  Diane opened the door and walked out into a completely empty hallway, hurrying toward the elevator. Behind her on the TV, Ben stood in an identical hallway frantically knocking on an identical door.

  “Ms. Crayton, a word about your missing son,” the reporter on the screen said into his microphone, pounding on the door. “Ms. Crayton, are you in there?”

  Diane stood in the elevator as the doors slid shut on an unpopulated and silent hallway.

  THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE

  CECIL: “. . . the hospital, which of course closed down years ago and is not being run by recognized medical professionals, or even by anyone who is, or ever was, alive. Do not go in there. Do not go,” the press release for the new Ralphs deli counter concluded. Well, I for one can’t wait to get a sandwich there.

  And now a look at traffic.

  There is a man with a gray pin-striped suit covered in dirt. His hands are more dirty than the rest of him, but they are differently dirty. They are covered in rust-colored streaks. The last few days have been unclear to him.

  There was a time when his life had seemed like a hallway proceeding to a door. Now it was a garden littered with rocks.

  How did his hands get dirty? He couldn’t remember. But the question made him drive faster in his nice car, even as he did not know why.

  He was in a desert. He kept looking at the mirror, which only showed him where he had already been. He wasn’t sure why he was doing that either.

  Looking at the sky, he saw, much closer now, a planet of awesome size, lit by no sun. Or he didn’t see it anymore. It was there, and it wasn’t. It was some ratio of literal and metaphorical. He drove faster. How fast can a nice car drive? How much longer could he keep driving faster before he was driving the fastest?

  There seemed to be a city up ahead. There definitely was a city up ahead. It was a definite city, and at the speed he was going, it would not be up ahead much longer. He looked again in the mirror. Only a landscape unmarked by his passing. Only a road going back. Nothing he didn’t already know. He knew nothing already.

  This has been traffic.

  An update
on the flamingo situation. The flamingos are extremely dangerous and appear to put you completely out of sync with reality if touched. You think it’ll be fun being out of sync with reality? It won’t be. You’re wrong about that, person who I just imagined disagreeing with me.

  Old Woman Josie said that she and her non-angelic friends named Erika who live with her are trying to track down all the flamingos scattered all over Night Vale. She had put some in the pawnshop earlier, but she has been unable to reach pawnshop owner Jackie Fierro. Since the pawnshop’s doors are removed and buried whenever the shop is closed, Josie and her not-at-all heavenly friends were able to easily walk in and reclaim the flamingos even with Jackie not around.

  Meanwhile the City Council announced that the flamingos sure seem like a serious situation, and probably they’d look into it someday.

  “Yeah, definitely,” they said in a monotone unison, swarming out of the shadows of the council chambers with eyes like flames, and mouths like flames, and bodies like flames, basically they were just giant flames. “We’ll get RIGHT on that. Haha sure. It’s a big thing for us and we’re taking it superseriously. It’s just that, ugh, we hate to bring this up. But today is the day where a human sacrifice is made in our honor. And, while the flamingo situation seems dire, it would be superdire to interrupt something so important as the sacrifice to the City Council. So yeah . . .” the monotone univoice concluded.

  We will update you with more news about the flamingo situation as we know things and feel compelled to speak those things aloud.

  Sheila, the woman who marks people down on her clipboard at the Moonlite All-Nite, came by the studio. She is now sitting outside my booth, looking at nothing in particular, and doodling listlessly on her clipboard. I asked her why she came here.

  “I just needed to do something different,” she said. “Even one different thing will end this cycle I’m in. I can’t go back through my life again. I don’t even remember what a life is like. I only remember a series of scripted events. I don’t remember ever coming to this station before though. I think maybe if I just quietly sit here long enough, not doing what I’m supposed to do, then finally I will be free.”

  I told her I’m fine with her sitting there. I’m here to serve the community. That’s what I said.

  Oh boy, she must really be in a state. Here I’ve been talking about her for a whole minute and she hasn’t looked up once. Sheila? Sheila? Okay. Sorry, listeners. I need to go make sure she’s all right. I take you now to the sound of a human stomach digesting, heavily amplified and electronically distorted.

  34

  Diane stood in Josh’s empty room, dialing again. Each time it went straight to voice mail. She checked her texts, reading his last text (“Good. Be home later.”) again and again.

  She called the Sheriff’s Secret Police. She called Josh’s friends. She called Josh again. She called the comic book and video stores again. She called Josh again. She called Josh again.

  He had to have his phone with him. It was illegal for any person to not carry at all times some sort of device by which the World Government could track their location. Most people opted for a cell phone because it also could do useful things like make phone calls and attract birds. A few holdouts still preferred the old tracking collars, bulky and impossible to take off though they were.

  She rifled through the papers on Josh’s desk and the ones shoved in his books. She found all kinds of sketches and doodles and homework worksheets. She pulled open his drawers, finding his illicit writing utensils (She didn’t care. He was a teenager. What are you going to do, stop a kid from writing because it’s illegal?), some cockroaches with corporate logos on them, and a partial tarot deck. She confiscated the tarot deck, making a mental note to lecture him about that once he was safely home (he would be safely home soon, she was sure), but also keeping it for her own use later.

  There was nothing from Josh, and no one else she had gotten hold of knew where he was. They all offered their heartfelt condolences. She could taste her worry about Josh as an actual taste on her tongue, and it tasted like rotten citrus.

  Diane tried texting him again. When she pressed her thumb to send, she felt a familiar sharp pain. She did it again. She felt it again. Her phone’s touch screen grew cloudy with smudged blood. He was unavailable or, even worse, forbidden to call by civil ordinance.

  She let out a high-pitched yelp of anger and kicked the open desk drawer shut. The framed movie poster above Josh’s desk of Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou rattled.

  She sat on the corner of his bed, put her head in her hands, and let out a sob that swelled her face and burned her eyes. She slid down the side of the bed, her butt thudding to the floor. She intentionally inhaled and exhaled toward the sky. The ceiling fan blew her breath back at her.

  From this vantage point, she could see under the desk. There was a pale fluttering, like a white moth.

  “Josh?” she asked hopefully, foolishly. He had never been a moth before, but he liked to try out new forms.

  She reached under the desk and felt something light, thin, small. Not a moth. Paper?

  Paper. Before she pulled it out and held it up to her face, she knew what it said.

  “KING CITY.” Over and over, as though the writer was unable to write any other words.

  It was not the same as the paper the man in the tan jacket had given her. It was lighter, cheaper stock. The lettering was different too. It was shakier; the curves of the G and the C were bulbous and crooked, written in thin pen. The words on the paper Evan had told her to pass on to Josh was written in a thick, assured pencil.

  She reopened the desk drawer. She ran her hand through the illegal writing utensils and found a pen that matched the color and gauge of the writing in her hand.

  How did he know about King City? Diane pulled her purse off her shoulder and threw it against the wall. She smacked the desktop with her palms. She cursed. She stomped. Nothing helped.

  She looked at her purse, lying open near the doorway. She remembered the paper Evan had given her. She had gone to throw it away behind the Moonlite All-Nite but put it in her purse after seeing Troy. She rifled through the purse. And just like her car keys, the paper was not there.

  “No,” Diane said again and again on the floor of Josh’s empty room.

  “KING CITY,” the paper said again and again in Jackie’s hand and probably now in Josh’s hand as well.

  Diane grabbed her phone and tried calling him one more time. She could feel the phone burning her ear. She could smell it burning her hair. She let it ring and ring, until the pain was searing, until her hair caught on fire, until she could not physically hold the phone to her head a moment longer, and then she let it ring a moment past that.

  35

  Jackie leaned back, her feet on the counter. It was the first time she had been in the pawnshop in days.

  When she left the hospital, she wasn’t sure where else to go. She didn’t love being at the shop, but it was home, and she just wanted to go home.

  In most ways it felt like it always did. But now her entire body hurt. And she knew the paper was curled up in her cast like the hidden centipede nests that sometimes appear overnight in people’s beds.

  The leaning, her usual position at the counter, was killing her back, and so she got off the stool and stood. She had never done that before. She looked out the window, where, not that long ago, she had watched a man in a tan jacket run away.

  There were bubbles of light, low to the ground, out in the desert, and a tall building, and voices. As she watched, more buildings appeared, a forest of tall buildings, all glowing, their bulk wisping away to nothing as they approached the sand below them. Bubbles of light. And voices. A crowd of voices.

  It was King City. She knew it now. Somehow, from all this distance, the city was calling to her. She spat at the lights but only hit her window.

  She watched her spit roll down the glass and felt, for the first time in her short and long life, absolute despai
r. All of her and Diane’s investigations had not gotten rid of the paper, or allowed her to write down any words but “KING CITY,” or gotten rid of the visions out in the desert. Her life wasn’t what it had been, and it never would be again. For a brief moment, spending time with Diane as an equal, she had wanted to grow older. But that feeling was gone.

  Her body ached. First the librarian poison and then the accident and then whatever they had done to her in the hospital. Her body no longer felt young. All of her energy had been robbed from her. She felt old, looked young, was neither.

  The bell on the door rang.

  “We’re not open,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know it says we’re open. But we’re not really.”

  No answer.

  She looked up and saw a woman in a business suit. The woman looked at Jackie but did not seem to see her. She was holding a small cardboard box in one hand, and a large metal hoe in the other. The wedge of the hoe had a dark brown stain with a few misshapen hairy lumps sticking out from it.

  “Like I said,” Jackie said, “closed.”

  The woman set both items on the counter and began to wash her hands, chanting to herself as she did.

  “Hey, I’m sorry, man. I can’t take this. I can’t do that anymore.”

  The visitor finished washing her hands. She was shaking, and her hair was over her face. She would not look down at the box or at Jackie.

  “Take your things and go, goddammit.”

  The woman did not go. She stood there, like she was waiting to be dismissed. Jackie sighed. Her back hurt so much, and her hand itched madly in the cast. She had never felt so distant from herself.

  “All right. I can’t actually give you a ticket because it would just say ‘King City’ over and over, I won’t pay you anything, you won’t die for any period of time, and I won’t put it out for sale. But just sign here and you can go. Okay?”

  The woman signed the name Catharine to the ticket, put the pen down, and asked in a small, shaken voice: “Is it over now?”