by Joseph Fink
“Sounds like it.”
“You can read about it more in that booklet.”
“Well, cool to see you again, Darryl.” She was putting her things into her bag. “I need to be going.”
“Of course. Blessings.” He did that circling fist thing.
“You too. Hey, what time is it?”
“It’s ten twenty-eight. Hope I haven’t made you late.”
“Nah. I’ll be fine.” She grinned as she wrote “10:28” in her notebook, carefully placed it into its specified pocket in her bag, and stood up. Time is weird, Darryl, she thought. “Good luck with . . .” she said, indicating the room of potential converts in the coffee shop, “all this.”
She walked out the cafe door to a few last noncommittal calls of “Interloper” and the ding of the door chime. The day smelled of juniper and pine. As she drove the empty roads out in the scrublands toward the desert, Nilanjana watched the clouds drifting backward under the morning sky.
5
Agents from a vague yet menacing government agency had finished going over the site, and had placed tape around the entire area that said, TOP SECRET! PLEASE DON’T GO NEAR OR EVEN LOOK FOR TOO LONG! Nilanjana pulled the tape aside. All of the agents would be off investigating the next new event in Night Vale, and none of them would stick around to enforce their cordon.
The pit was larger than she had imagined. Based on the data, she had been picturing a hole the size of a car, maybe a little larger. But the pit was at least the size of a house, maybe even larger than that. In fact, it was almost exactly the size of a house and a yard. She considered the mailbox, which was leaning steeply over the drop like a daredevil preparing to jump.
Looking around, she realized where she was with a feeling that wasn’t grief but was adjacent to it. There was the used car dealership, and beyond that Old Woman Josie’s house. Which meant that this was the house of Larry Leroy. Or it had been Larry’s house. Now the house, and presumably Larry, was gone. She didn’t know Larry well because she didn’t know any of her fellow townspeople well. But he had always seemed kind and restrained. She had liked that he didn’t seem to need anyone else’s approval or disapproval to live. He just did his thing here on the edge of town, right up until whatever tragedy had occurred.
She unpacked her supplies from the stash of tools and materials she kept in her trunk: decibel meter, a number of glass jars to take earth samples, and a thick metal box with a series of blinking lights across the front and unmarked colored buttons on the top. In a place as scientifically interesting as Night Vale, she had learned that it was best to always keep her entire field kit with her in case, say, a time traveler appeared with a warning from the future, or a dog stood on its hind legs and began speaking, both of which had happened in front of her during her stay in town. Both times, she had no equipment with which to study the phenomena, and she had promised herself that a lapse like that would never happen again.
The box was not technically a computer. It was just a box with blinking lights that helped process data. The Night Vale government did not easily give out permits for owning computers, so scientists, mathematicians, computer programmers, and video game lovers had to do one of the following:
1. Try to do all of their work by hand. This was frustrating for computer programmers in particular.
2. Wait out the long, bureaucratic process for getting a computer permit. The several-month wait often ended in rejection based on some tiny paperwork issue.
3. Jump through the semantic loopholes of what is or isn’t a computer. For example, a phone is not a computer, depending on how you use it. Nilanjana’s metal box with blinking lights isn’t a computer, just a novelty device. Some birds aren’t computers, but, of course, most are, and only the government can own or produce birds.
Carlos circumvented his lack of computer permits by segmenting the computing process into dozens of esoteric machines, each of which could have been mistaken for something much simpler and less regulated, like a boom box, a homemade bomb, or a snow globe.
Nilanjana was from Indiana originally, where computers were legal. No government agency put any kind of restriction on what sorts of computers you had, or how many. That was left to the giant corporations who controlled the availability of information, helpfully colluding to fix prices for consumers, and thus keeping information freely available to those who could afford it. This had seemed the natural way of things, until she had learned about the town of Night Vale. She hadn’t actually learned about it so much as suddenly knew about it. No one else in Indiana had ever heard of such a place, or could find any record of it online. But one day she knew it existed and that it was the most scientifically interesting place in America. Even though she had no map or directions to guide her when she left home, driving in no specific direction, she eventually arrived in Night Vale. This was a typical story for residents of Night Vale who had not grown up in the area.
There was no natural way of things here, only the capricious whims of competing global conspiracies. She was no more used to it now than when she had arrived. She supposed she never would be.
She set the metal blinking box on the sand at the edge of the hole and pressed a few of the colored buttons on top. The box shook almost imperceptibly, just a tight hum, like a bug zapper.
While the box did its analysis, she did a visual sweep of the site. The walls of the pit didn’t taper much; they were nearly vertical. The pit floor was flat and looked damp. The pit itself was shallow for its size. Even if the house had fallen, debris from it should be easily visible. But it was as though the house had been swallowed whole. Or not swallowed. Swallowed seemed to assume something living, animal, and that was a bad assumption. She tried to think of a better word for swallowed and gave up around consumed. The house was gone, and she needed to figure out where it went.
She put on gloves and took some of the moist dirt from the side of the pit. The moisture felt viscous, dense. Not like mud. It wasn’t so much that the soil had gotten wet, but that it had melted somehow. It was hot in her hands. Hotter even than the desert ground around it. She tried to write a note in her journal about this, but her latex gloves were sticky. The soil had fused to her gloves like tar.
Nilanjana gathered more dirt, some rocks, three lizards who were oblivious to the direction their lives were about to go, and a piece of cactus. As she worked, she thought she heard an intermittent noise mixed in with the wind. Like the gears of a machine, or like the scampering of a mouse. It seemed to be coming from below her, but every time she stopped to listen she would lose track of it. As a scientist, she had no choice but to doubt that she was hearing anything at all.
Hypothesis: The complete disappearance of the house, property, and body of Larry Leroy had set her on edge, and ordinary background noises that would usually be tuned out were being magnified and analyzed by her overactive mind.
She sat on a rock near the hole trying to write up notes for her report, but instead hovered her pen over the page, not certain how to frame her experiment. It was difficult to know what hypothesis these samples and anecdotes were supporting.
There was a house that didn’t exist. It was a gateway to another desert world, where Carlos had once been trapped for a year. When he tried to investigate the house, or anything to do with the otherworld, these rumblings would start up, ruining the experiment and disappearing some part of Night Vale. Then city officials demanded he stop meddling.
Hypothesis: The City Council was using some unknown force to stop Carlos from investigating the otherworld.
Supporting evidence: The City Council had repeatedly told him to stop. They had connections with any number of government agencies and higher orders of the lizard people that could have caused the disaster, the aftermath of which she was currently sitting in. And then there was this Wordsmith who had provided some vital piece of information to the City Council, which had led them to order Carlos to stop his experiments. What was this Wordsmith’s goal? Who did they work for?<
br />
“We will not let that thing into our city,” the council had said to Carlos. What was “that thing”? Here she came back to words like swallow, consume, devour. These were not objective terms. They made assumptions she could not support. She tried to push them away. We will not let that thing into our city.
She looked across the empty scrublands, flat and drab, save the occasional newly formed hole caused by earthquakes or weapons tests or meteor showers or something. Or, she tried not to think, some Thing. But she had no evidence for that. She was looking at holes in the ground and her mind was showing her monsters. She heard the noise again, like hundreds of little legs, or like an engine right below her feet. No, she was being oversensitive to noise. The sound was just the helicopter overhead. There were always helicopters overhead. They were normal parts of everyday life.
The clouds had all disappeared and the wind was gone. The quiet of the desert and the endless sameness of the sky made the helicopter stand out. It made her stand out too. She tried to look casual, natural. It was important to not seem like she was looking at the helicopter, as that would be suspicious. But it would also be suspicious to not acknowledge the helicopter, as it was just the two of them together and alone in the scrublands.
She did what polite strangers do. She acknowledged the other. Shading her eyes from the bright sun, wincing under the cloudless white sky, she waved. “Hello, helicopter! How’s it going up there?” she called, certain the person flying that thing could not hear her over the noise of the motor.
“Hello, Interloper. It’s going fine up here. Thanks,” came the call of an electric bullhorn.
Staring straight up toward the sky, the sun was too bright for her. She dug into her bag to get her sunglasses. When she pulled them out, some paper fell to the dirt below.
“What’s that?” the helicopter called out. An antenna popped out of the helicopter’s side, scanning the paper with a red laser grid.
She picked the paper up. It was the tract from Darryl’s Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God. The metal box was still beeping, and Nilanjana knew it was quite a way from finishing its analysis, whatever it was. She knew she was far from understanding all of the evidence, whatever that might be.
“Just some religious tract a guy at the coffee shop handed me,” she said.
“Cool.”
“Just some guy,” she said, unnecessarily.
“Oh.”
Nilanjana opened the booklet. The pilot circled and descended, hovering behind her. Together, she and the pilot read about the Joyous Congregation.
6
7
For the second time that day, Nilanjana had come across this person known as the Wordsmith. This solidified it for her. The strongest hypothesis for this situation was active malice, rather than a coincidence of natural events. Someone wanted to stop Carlos’s work, and that person was the Wordsmith, or had employed the Wordsmith. And apparently the Wordsmith worked with the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God.
She hadn’t found anything useful in her samples from the pit. Her definitely-not-a-computer box with blinking lights had come back with no definite results. The only concrete piece of evidence she had pointed to this Joyous Congregation. And so that was where she would go next.
The helicopter lingered in the sky as she packed her car.
“Well,” Nilanjana shouted at it. “It was good seeing you. Have a nice rest of your day.”
“You too, Nilanjana,” the bullhorn called. “I’m not a religious person myself, so maybe this is lack of familiarity breeding fear, but there’s something cultlike about that church.”
“Yeah,” Nilanjana said. Not really said. It was more of a sound her mouth made. She moved to get into her car. “Well, good seeing—”
“You know, cultlike is unfair,” the bullhorn continued. “I mean that brochure—hope you didn’t mind me reading over your shoulder a bit—mostly focuses on good things, so maybe . . .”
The bullhorn carried on. Nilanjana had one foot in the car and a hand on top of the open driver side door. She maintained eye contact with the helicopter as far as eye contact could be made with a large flying machine, but tried not to show any interest or say anything that would encourage conversation.
“ . . . never went to church or temple or anything like that, although I had friends in high school who liked singing religious songs and playing guitars,” the bullhorn said.
“Hey, how much fuel does that helicopter have in it?” Nilanjana changed the subject.
“These things don’t take fuel.”
“What? Really? How are you fly——”
“THIS INFORMATION IS FORBIDDEN. WHY ARE YOU ASKING?”
“No reason. Science.” She waved. “Thanks for keeping me company. I gotta go.”
“Okay. Hope to see you again soon.” The bullhorn returned to its softer voice. “It gets pretty lonely this far off the ground.”
She had never considered that the pilots of the government helicopters would get lonely doing their jobs, but then, on a larger scale, she had considered only a tiny portion of true things in a world that is made almost entirely of them.
Nilanjana took off back toward town, toward the church of the Joyous Congregation of the Smiling God. She didn’t know much about their religion. She didn’t care to. Gods and beliefs and all that were fine for some, she supposed, but Nilanjana much preferred line graphs.
After several years of practicing out of storefront churches in half-empty strip malls, the Central Church of the Joyous Congregation in Night Vale had been completed earlier that year. It was a few miles off Route 800, but its tall silver steeple was visible from the highway. As Nilanjana pulled into the main parking lot, she saw the church’s sign. It had the full name of the church in backlit yellow plexiglass. Below that was a board with movable type that said:
THE SMILING GOD IS NEAR.
BE DEVOURED.
Nilanjana laughed. She loved church signs. They always had either clever idioms or funny misspellings. Like this sign. Obviously they meant “Be Devoted.” Although the word devour reminded her of Larry’s missing house. Of swallowing, consuming. The sign became less funny the more she looked at it.
The building was modern, stucco, businesslike. Half office park, half church. A church designed to be driven to on the way to other places. From the back of the church, the tall, modern steeple rose. Reflecting the glare of the cloudless noon sun, the steeple was a beacon to passing cars and the building’s only architectural indication of the spiritual practice within. The other decorative features were the front doors, which were wooden and made to look old, like they belonged to a historic church. The handles of the doors were large iron rings. Protruding from each iron ring, along the inside curves, were tiny spines. It hurt a bit to grab the door handles because of these spines. Looking closer, she realized that the spines were supposed to be legs. The rings were sculptures of many-legged insects.
The faux history of the doors indicated a dedication to appearing like a much older religion. It was branding, pure and simple. If they could look like an old institution, then their newish religion would feel more trustworthy to the people of Night Vale.
Corporations and chains do this. Like Medieval Times. All of their establishments have a fake castle look to them. Or Olive Garden. All of their restaurants are shaped like olive trees, and restaurant patrons get a taste of Tuscan dining traditions as they take an elevator up through the “trunk” of the “tree,” where they are put into oblong green sacks and hung from “branches” like leaves as waiters bring them giant olives to eat, each olive half the size of most diners’ bodies. But these were chain restaurants. Architectural branding at a church felt phony, manipulative.
She glanced back down at the pamphlet. “Wordsmith,” it reminded her. Someone from this church had been trying to turn the City Council against Carlos. Why?
“What are you up to in here?” she muttered to herself, tugging on the wrought-iron insect handle of the
front door. The doors had no give. She was fairly certain they were entirely for show. She went around the side and found a modest double glass door that was unlocked. Like the rest of the building, other than the wooden doors, it felt like it belonged in a suburban office building.
She shivered in the full blast of AC as she entered. The church followed the baffling belief, common in warmer states, that if it’s way too hot outside, then it should be way too cold inside to balance things out. The lobby was as businesslike as the exterior: beige carpet, low pile with stray strands spiraling up like sprouts in a garden; beige walls with brush marks still visible, paintwork uneven; a drinking fountain; and the usual six bathroom doors (Men, Women, No, Unsure, Angels, and This Too Too Solid Flesh). Towering over all of this, those ridiculous doors, even less convincing from the inside. Near the entrance was a kiosk marked “Visitors’ Center,” full of brochures and information about the church. She grabbed one and flipped through it. It was also credited to “Wordsmith.”
There was the tremolo hum of an electric organ, like the sound of a loose wire sculpted barely into music. It was coming from the congregation room. Through the half-open door, she could see a stack of folding chairs behind a low stage with a small projector screen, torn at the edges.
She turned away from the sound to a half-open door revealing a long hallway that seemed to contain offices.
If Wordsmith is writing pamphlets for the church, they probably work here. If they work here, they probably have an office. She touched the half-open door. The lights in the hallway flickered under a faulty fluorescent tube. The electric organ squealed off key through the crackling speakers and stopped.
“You don’t want to go back there,” said a voice behind her.