Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink

  “Okay. We’ll try that. My son’s name is Josh. He’s the one who’s gone missing. We’re not from here. We’re from a town called Night Vale, but I think Josh may have come to King City. And if he’s here, he certainly loves VHS stores. Also comic book stores. Have you seen any fifteen-year-old boys here? He probably would have been shopping by himself?”

  No reply.

  “Or maybe a comic store nearby. He definitely would have gone there.”

  The shop was silent.

  “Hello?”

  She looked at Jackie.

  “It was real, don’t worry,” Jackie said. “I heard it too.”

  Some of the shelves just had empty cardboard VHS sleeves, no sign of their corresponding tapes. There were puddles on the floor and cobwebs along the top shelves. The more Jackie looked around, the more she thought they should leave, as soon as possible. Diane did not believe Jackie to be frightened, just impatient to go. They hobbled together to the front door with no hissing, no screams.

  As they stepped outside into the sandy dusk, the bell on the door jingled faintly in Jackie’s mind like a favorite song to which she could no longer quite remember the tune.

  There was no police station in sight. Diane and Jackie leaned into each other. They walked as one, their arms intertwined so it wasn’t clear who was holding up whom. They entered one of the few other stores that appeared open: FISH AND BAIT. The shelves were full of empty jars. A man stood behind the counter. He was towering, the tallest man either of them had ever seen.

  “Hello,” managed Diane. Her head seemed to be several feet behind her, and her hands floated in front of her like balloons. “We’re looking for a boy, a teenager. He looks like . . . well, a lot of things. He’s—”

  The man nodded absently, saying nothing. Jackie’s entire body felt liquid and heavy, sloughing off her fragile skeleton. She had never been in more pain. Each step was a decision that she had to make, every time.

  “Feel free to look around,” the tall man said. He gestured with an open palm. Behind him one of the empty jars exploded with a pop. A few shards of it went into the back of his hand. It began immediately to drip blood. His face did not change at all.

  “We’re looking for a boy. My son.” Diane couldn’t stop looking at his fresh wounds.

  The man frowned. He looked closely at them, as though they were not who he had thought they would be.

  “Who did you say you were?” he said. Another jar exploded. This time some of the glass went into his face. Blood went down his cheek like tears, dripping with loud taps onto the counter. He frowned at the sound.

  “We’re just looking,” said Jackie, pulling with all of her strength, which was not so much at all, on Diane, who was frozen staring into the man’s eyes. The man was staring at Jackie. “Nice shop you have here. Have to go.”

  The two women hobbled out. Two more jars exploded. The man had quite a lot of blood coming from all different parts of him. He looked down at their leaving from the height of his body.

  “We try to remember but we always forget,” he said.

  Diane turned, hand on the glass door.

  “What was that?”

  “Have a nice day and thanks for shopping with us,” he said.

  His words were coming out slurred. There was a long shard of glass through his tongue.

  The two of them pushed their way back outside, nearly falling over one another.

  “This is all wrong,” said Diane. “This is not a safe place for Josh to be.”

  “It’s not like we haven’t been in stores where clerks bleed a lot,” said Jackie, “but—” She trailed off, her gaze focused on no fixed point.

  Most any bath gel or greeting card store in Night Vale has a full staff of bleeding salesclerks, struggling to maintain consciousness and constantly mopping the floors. But somehow in King City, it felt incorrect, like the people were not supposed to be bleeding constantly. Like they had once been normal, whatever that meant outside of the only context she had ever known.

  In her mind, Diane saw a different man than the one covered in glass shards, or it was the same man, but he was running a store in which he did not bleed, in which nothing exploded, in which he sold supplies for fishing and at night went home to his family, watched old television shows, one episode right after the other, and then slept, one episode right after the other. She saw that man and this man at the same time. He was multiple, and becoming less with each iteration.

  “We can’t hear the freeway,” said Jackie.

  “What?”

  Jackie pointed at the 101, so close they could see the writing on the big trucks carrying things from the north of California to the south.

  “There’s no sound.”

  She was right. It was completely silent. Even their footsteps seemed to be absorbed by the sidewalk. The loud hum from the sky was gone. They walked in silence past planters teeming with drought-resistant succulents blooming big purple flowers.

  Diane felt herself carrying clothes from her dryer, organizing the warm cotton piles into manageable squares on her bed. She felt a King City street full of cars and shoppers, ordinary stores run ordinarily. She felt these things, and at the same time she felt Jackie against her, felt the empty horror of the silent city.

  The next store had a sign saying GUITARS. An elderly woman sat in a folding chair at the back. The store was otherwise empty. No furniture, no merchandise, just walls that had been sloppily painted into streaks of different off-whites, and a hideous green carpet traversed by a pink, jagged line and speckled with yellow diamonds. The carpet was torn and fixed with silver duct tape here and there, the tape bright under bare fluorescents.

  The woman looked up from what she was doing, which was staring at her hands. She now stared at Diane and Jackie.

  “We’re looking for a boy about fifteen.”

  The woman squinted.

  “We’re looking for a boy who might have come here. He was—”

  The woman opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. Her tongue and gums were gray. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her mouth was as wide as she could make it. She started making a wet, huffing noise, like a drowned engine trying to start.

  “Okay,” said Jackie. “We’re going to leave now. Thank you.”

  Jackie turned Diane around and leaned on her to get her to leave the store. Diane’s eyes never left the clerk. She saw a wall full of acoustic guitars, a middle-aged woman behind a counter selling a set of strings to a customer. She saw blank walls and, as the door swung shut, an old woman, eyes squeezed shut, huffing and wheezing with that wide gray mouth. She saw both, equally real before her.

  “What now?” said Jackie, wincing into the words as she leaned against the hot stucco of the guitar shop wall. Her ability to hide her pain was faltering.

  “One more store. Then City Hall,” said Diane. Her ability to hide her despair was faltering.

  “I’m worried we won’t make it out of the next store if we go in it.”

  “That’s a worry, yes. Yes it is.”

  The next store said CELLULAR in red letters. Inside were display cases full of the newest models of cell phones. There were signs explaining about contracts and data plans. A young woman in a baseball cap and gray polo smiled at them as they walked in.

  “Hello!” she said.

  “This isn’t what I expected,” said Diane.

  “Oh, did you read our sign?” said the woman. “We’re a cell phone store.”

  “We read it,” said Jackie.

  “We also do repair. Do you need a phone repaired?”

  “No,” said Diane. “I’m sorry. We’ve come a long way in a very short amount of time.”

  “Dude, what’s up with your town?”

  “King City?” said the woman. Concern passed briefly through her expression, and then it was bright again. “It’s a great place.”

  “Great . . . how?”

  “Not sure,” said the woman. “Not a lot sticks in my memory. First
thing I remember is you guys coming in. Do you want a cell phone?”

  “No,” said Jackie.

  “We’re looking for my son. He’s about fifteen years old,” Diane said.

  One of the phones in the case started ringing. Concern returned to the woman’s face, and stayed.

  “Those don’t even have circuits in them,” she said. There were sweat rings on her shirt. “They’re cardboard boxes with stickers to simulate the display. All the real phones are in the back.”

  “Do you mind if we try answering it?” said Diane.

  “Just don’t tell me what you hear, okay?” She no longer looked at all happy to see them. She pulled a key from a green rubber belt loop and used it to unlock the case.

  The phone that was ringing was an older touch-screen model. Diane picked it up. Definitely empty cardboard, and the display was a faded sticker. She pushed on the sticker where she would push to answer a cell phone, and then held the cardboard phone to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Stop being so obvious about yourselves,” said a man’s voice, one that she was familiar with although she could not place it.

  “Obvious about ourselves?”

  “Everyone knows you’re here. It’s not safe.” Diane pulled the cardboard phone away from her ear. Printed on the fake phone’s fake cardboard screen was a familiar-looking name.

  “Evan?”

  “No, it’s Evan.”

  “That’s what I said. Evan.”

  “Meet me at City Hall. Head straight back. Ignore what anyone tells you and ignore any signs. Just go down the hall from the front door and turn left when you see a door marked MAYOR. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

  There was a click. She guessed he had hung up, but she didn’t know how he had called a cardboard phone in the first place.

  “Evan,” she said to Jackie. “He asked us to meet him in the mayor’s office at City Hall.”

  “Please. I don’t want to know what any of that was about,” said the woman. Her face was a grimace and her shivering arms were crossed over her chest. “Please just leave.”

  “What is this town, really?” Jackie said tenderly, hoping to coax a memory out of her.

  The woman relaxed and exhaled. Jackie felt a breakthrough, a confession or revelation coming, but there was only another, weaker “Please leave.” The woman’s face tightened back into sweat-drenched angst.

  “I’m sorry,” said Diane. “Can you just tell me which direction down Pleasant Street to get to City Hall?”

  The woman grunted and ran through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, slamming and locking it behind her. Her voice came muffled through the closed door: “We don’t even have a mayor. We haven’t had one in years.”

  “So. City Hall?” Jackie said, once they were outside.

  “That’s where he is, I guess,” said Diane. She shielded her eyes and looked down Pleasant Street. “Let’s just start walking this way and see if we can find it.”

  “It shouldn’t be hard to find. City halls are always huge and ornate and topped with ancient volcanic stone towers. Or, I mean, the only city hall we’ve ever seen is like that.”

  There was nothing that looked remotely like that. There was a Safeway that was boarded up. CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, said a sign hung crookedly on the boards, and then someone had crossed out RENOVATIONS with a paint pen and written in GOOD.

  There was only one building left. It was low and small, with curtained windows, like a storefront church or a campaign office.

  “I don’t suppose that could be City Hall,” said Diane. She started to move to it.

  Jackie was looking the other way.

  “Troy,” she said.

  “What?”

  Troy was casually trotting across the road, and then he was gone down a side street.

  “You go meet the man in the tan jacket. I’m going to find out what Troy’s doing here.”

  Jackie took off after him, running as hard as her pain-racked body would let her, which wasn’t fast, but it was going, all right, and in the right direction, dammit. Shock waves of agony exploded up her legs as she ran.

  “Wait, Jackie,” Diane called. “We shouldn’t get separated. This place is wrong. I don’t know if we’ll be able to find each other again. Jackie!”

  But Jackie was gone. Diane started after her but stopped, thinking of Josh. Josh was what mattered. Jackie could take care of herself. She needed to find Josh. She sighed and walked across the street to the building. It was brick, with a mirrored front window, and a small plastic card that said CITY HALL on the door.

  “Okay,” Diane said, as loudly as she could. “Here we go.”

  She pushed open the door. Somewhere else, at that same moment, she was petting a kitten in a shelter pen. The kitten purred and rolled on its back. “I have to take this one,” she said. Somewhere else she was repainting an old dresser. Somewhere else, she was standing in a fish market, overpowered by the smell. Somewhere else, at that same moment, she was dead. She did not feel anything at all from that version of herself. It was just a gap in her consciousness, a nothing superimposed on her multiplying selves. The door of City Hall shut behind her.

  43

  Inside City Hall there were stacks of files and papers around a groaning titan of a copier, the machine constantly churning out paper, collating it, and then pushing it aside onto the floor as more came. A woman in a dress with a dizzying pattern of blue roses repeating against a white background sat at a desk next to the copier. As Diane pushed open the door, the gust from outside caused the sign-in sheet in front of the woman to flutter into her face. She did not seem to notice.

  Behind the woman’s desk was an enormous oil painting of a man in a tan jacket. His face was clear. It was more or less symmetrical. He was not quite smiling, but not quite frowning either. Was that not quite a smile? She could remember everything about the painting when she looked away from it. She looked back and then looked away again. Her memory retained all of it.

  “Can I help you?” said the woman, without looking up. She was typing away at her computer, which did not appear to be on. She was crying, silently and profusely.

  “I don’t think so,” said Diane, feeling herself here and elsewhere. Without Jackie the feeling of becoming more people and less of a person was worse. Without Jackie she had no one to lean against, to touch, to reinforce with physical contact that she, the Diane in King City, the Diane looking for Josh, was the only Diane that mattered.

  Another version of herself was eating shredded wheat at the counter of an unfamiliar kitchen, trying to decide what to do about some information she had just received by phone. Another version of herself was driving and had to swerve. She had only seconds to swerve. Her heart pounded and she wondered if she would swerve in time, and if she would be able to regain control after she had. The version of herself that was dead was still dead and had been for a long time, a blank spot sitting in the way of her other thoughts.

  “All right,” said the City Hall receptionist. Tears poured down her face. Her body shook.

  “Are you okay?” Diane asked.

  The woman looked up. Her eyes were red and hollowed out by the sheer quantity of salt water passing through them.

  “No. I don’t think I am.”

  She looked back down and continued to type on her switched-off computer.

  “What’s wrong?” Diane wanted to help, but the woman did not respond.

  A man who looked identical to the large oil painting above her stuck his head from around the corner down the hall.

  “What did I say about trying to interact with anyone else?” He sounded tired and annoyed. “Get down here.”

  His head disappeared, and Diane couldn’t remember what he had looked like. She could remember the painting, though, and grafted the painting’s features on that blank in her mind.

  “I have to go,” Diane said to the woman at the desk.

  The woman didn’t seem to hear or see Diane anymore. She typed aw
ay on her useless keyboard.

  Diane went down the hall. The building was bigger on the inside. There were many doors, some marked with abstruse letter and number combinations. Most were unmarked. She could hear no one else in the building besides the weeping woman and the man down the hall. Nothing except the roar of the copier, an avalanche of paper tumbling from its maw. Had it been the copier they had been hearing since coming to King City? That distant, ceaseless roar? She dismissed the thought.

  The hallway continued in seemingly unending bends. Left turn after left turn. Strangely labeled door after unlabeled door. Then a door marked MAYOR.

  “Come in, come in,” he said from his desk. His office was piled high with more paper. There were several corkboards with papers thumbtacked to them, and a whiteboard covered in frantic, illegible writing. Some of the writing was circled with arrows pointing to other parts of the writing. A window was open onto a back alley, and there was a garbage can just outside. The room smelled rich and earthy, like decay just turning to loam.

  His deerskin suitcase was open on the desk beside him, between the piles of papers. Hundreds of large black flies were inside it, crawling over each other in heaving, buzzing piles. Flies were leaving the suitcase and flying out the window to the garbage can, and other flies were returning through the window. Diane felt dizzy, frightened that her fear would overtake her body, even more frightened that the flies would. Somewhere another version of herself was sitting at her bedroom window in the morning, looking out at a tree she liked, and this kept her together.

  “Sit down,” said the man, continuing to tell her what she should do next like it was the most natural thing to him.

  “No, I’ll stand I think,” she said. The man rolled his eyes. The flies buzzed louder.

  “Suit yourself.” He swept a pile of papers off his desk and replaced it with another pile of papers from the floor.

  “Where’s Josh?”

  “We have much to talk about.”

  “No we don’t. Where’s Josh? I’m taking Josh and I’m going home.”

  “I’m sorry, Diane, but you’re not going to do that.”

  He folded his hands in front of him. A fly landed on his shoulder and also folded its appendages in front of it.