by Joseph Fink
“Hush,” the bullhorn boomed.
She was investigating some of the other sites where the rumbling had been detected. They were pits, similar to the first one she had seen, but scattered out in the desert, far from any buildings. She stared off at the distant mountains. She knew people didn’t believe in mountains, and that seemed a bit strange to her, but not entirely unreasonable.
We see things all the time that we can’t explain, and we take them for granted. Like clouds. There are some scientists who will say that clouds are water droplets that rise into the sky forming these white or gray puffs. Unless you’re a cloud scientist, you’ll never have a chance to test that information. You just have to take what people tell you as truth.
But given what happened with the lunar landing in 1969, why would anyone do that? For years the government told its people that they had sent men to the moon, and in 1976, when the people figured out that it was all a lie, the government came clean and admitted that it was all staged. They had faked the photos, and they had hired famed Hollywood director Stanley Kubrick to film the moon landing scenes. Then in 1985, under pressure from the Screen Actors Guild and the CIA, Kubrick admitted publicly that he never shot that footage because he was a hologram invented in NASA labs. At the end of that press conference from his home in St. Albans, England, he vanished from sight, and several entertainment reporters began asking one another what they were all doing there. The estate they had been in front of was gone. They were all in an open field, with only scratches of notes about someone named Kubrick and a moon landing. Later the government revealed that they had indeed landed men on the moon, but they had lied about it because they didn’t want everyone to know that they had failed their core mission: to destroy the moon with explosives. The bombs never ignited. Perhaps they will someday, but in 1969 they failed. We failed, the government said, slumping over. We failed America, the government sobbed.
There, there. The important thing is you tried, America said, patting its government on the back, but knowing it could never trust anything the government said ever again.
Nilanjana knew most people would never set foot on a mountain, and without that living proof and a chance to affirm a theory, it would be hard for them to ever believe anything was true. Science is fact-based, but those facts have to come from hypotheses, and hypotheses come from inferences from what one sees, or wants to see.
For instance, hypothesis: Gordon was the Wordsmith.
In Nilanjana’s memory, Gordon bared his teeth with an off-puttingly wide smile. He acted as the messenger for the pastor, delivering her thoughts to the outside world. He was, in that way, a kind of wordsmith for her. He had gone to the City Council and told them . . . what? What message had Gordon delivered to the council on behalf of the church that had so totally set the city against Carlos and science?
And then there had been Darryl’s description of the church’s idea of heaven. Entering through an old oak door into another world, which is a desert. Had the church made contact with the same desert otherworld Carlos had encountered? If so, what had they found there? What did they believe would be emerging from that otherworld during the “Devouring”?
From the pit she was standing near, she could see two other pits in the distance. None of them had been anywhere near town. It seemed most likely that the city was the one carrying out these attacks, since they had many more resources and much more power than a church. But why had the city gone from harmless pits in the desert to the murder of Larry Leroy? Or, if their intent was to strike terror, to threaten Carlos, then why had they bothered with creating pits out where no one would find them? Tests maybe? For a system that was now perfected?
The din of the helicopter rotors overhead drowned out the sound of Darryl’s car. Nilanjana didn’t notice him until the slam of his door.
Data gathering: She was alone in the desert with a possible murderous cult member.
Hypothesis: shit.
“I brought you a sandwich,” Darryl said, waving the foil-wrapped object over his head. “I stopped by the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. It’s falafel. Wasn’t sure if you ate meat or not.”
“I don’t. Thanks for thinking of that.” Nilanjana stared at the sandwich, wondering if there was a way to see if something was poisoned. She smelled it. It smelled the way any falafel smelled: like chocolate.
“I eat meat occasionally,” Darryl said, leaning on Nilanjana’s car, taking a bite of his own sandwich. “But not much lately. Hard to tell what kind of stuff they put in meat these days. Hey,” he added, seeming to realize that there might be something unusual about showing up in the middle of nowhere to give a new acquaintance a sandwich, “hope you don’t mind me joining you out here. You mentioned you were going to be out in the desert so I went to where the surveillance helicopter was. Figured if it was all the way out here it was probably watching you.”
“Oh,” she said, not opening her sandwich.
“Yeah, it’s just that you’re the first person I’ve had show a lot of interest in the church since I started doing this. I wanted to follow up. No pressure or anything. We don’t even have to talk about that. I just . . . I brought you a sandwich.”
“Factory farms use a lot of antibiotics and hormones,” Nilanjana said, as a way of changing the conversation’s course.
“Absolutely, factory farming is an issue. But my real problem with meat manufacturing is the marketing materials. I found a fifty-cents-off coupon from American Airlines in a top round roast a few years ago. And during Thanksgiving, we found an AOL CD inside the turkey breast.”
“The meat industry really sold out.”
“It’s silly. I’m much happier with vegetables.”
Nilanjana picked at the corner of the sandwich wrapper.
“What were you looking for from the church, Nilanjana?” Darryl said, violating his promise to steer clear of the topic. “You don’t seem like a person seeking religion.”
“Why do I need a reason to want a tour?”
“I’m just curious. People don’t often respond to our tracts. Not people your age. Definitely not scientists. And when they do, they usually come to a mixer, not to the church during off-hours.”
“I wasn’t snooping.”
“Whoa.” Darryl looked at her suspiciously for the first time. “I wasn’t even thinking you were snooping. Were you snooping?”
“No.” She peeled open the foil and took a large bite from her sandwich. There was no pita. It was just falafel balls, vegetables, maple syrup, and tahini. Wheat and wheat by-products were still banned in Night Vale because of the incident back in 2012 when all wheat and wheat by-products turned into snakes. There had been many injuries, but the greatest injury was the burden the subsequent ban put on people who loved bread.
“I wanted to give you my number at the coffee shop the other day. I didn’t want to be forward, so I gave you the tract instead. I was just shocked it brought you to me. Do you want to go on a date?”
Nilanjana had a mouthful of sandwich, so all she said was “Mmmmp.”
“Okay, I didn’t land that question well. Not a date. Maybe, like, catching up. I remember you now. You’re the one that was talking to me about time back when I worked at the watch store. That conversation really made me think for a while. We didn’t agree, but I had fun. I thought we could go somewhere, talk some more. I guess that’s kind of a date. I’m just going to own it. Do you want to go on a date?”
Nilanjana swallowed some, still chewing.
He continued to fill the silence. “Anyway, my attempt to not be forward turned into me being incredibly forward. I’m sorry about that. Also about following you to work. This must seem creepy.”
“Also you bought me a sandwich,” Nilanjana said, her mouth finally free. “It’s a pretty creepy sandwich.”
“I didn’t even buy that for you. I was out picking up sandwiches for me and Stephanie.”
“This was supposed to be for Stephanie?”
“I’ll get her another one on my way bac
k.”
“Oh,” she said. Of course the sandwich was an afterthought from his interest in Stephanie. She shouldn’t have interpreted it as anything more.
“That is pretty creepy,” the helicopter bullhorn announced.
“Sorry, sorry. Let’s start over. You’re interested in something at the church. Is it me? I don’t know. You don’t have to answer. Wait, is it me?” Darryl said.
“Dude,” the helicopter said.
Nilanjana quickly took a giant bite of the sandwich and then pointed at her mouth and rolled her head back and forth, as if to say, “Caught me with my mouth full. Can’t talk. Gimme a minute.”
“Not trying to be weird. But I am being weird. I’m sorry. I have this thing where I try to convey one thing, and people think I’m conveying something else. Like I’ll be sincere and people will think I’m sarcastic. I just—” The box with blinking lights that Nilanjana had set at the edge of the pit started beeping, interrupting him.
“Mmmmp,” Nilanjana said, an index finger up in a gesture of “hang on.” She wrote down the order of the blinking lights. She counted each one and made tick marks on her paper. She would have to take the data back to the lab to decipher it. She would love to get a license to own a computer. It would make her work way easier.
“Let’s go out sometime,” she said once she was done. This wasn’t a good idea, seeing someone related to her investigation on a casual basis. But wasn’t she entitled to some fun? And, she justified to herself, maybe she could gather more useful data this way. “I’m not much into dating, I don’t think, so let’s just . . . go out. Eat. Talk. Is that a phrase people use?”
“Yes. ‘Go out. Eat. Talk.’ is how people say that. Yes.”
“Great. And maybe we can talk a bit about my interest in the church. But let’s not make that the focus. Tomorrow night, okay?”
“Tomorrow’s great. Do you think we’re up to bad things at the church?” he blurted.
“I don’t know, Darryl,” she said cautiously. “Are you up to bad things?”
“No, of course not,” he said. “It’s just everyone else thought you were there investigating us or something.”
He looked so genuinely worried that she almost asked him about the Wordsmith. But it was better for no one at the church to know she was following that lead, no matter how harmless they seemed. She wanted him to leave now, to go eat, to talk with him some other time, and not let him in on too much of her work or life.
“Let me get your number, okay?” she said instead. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
They exchanged texts.
“I better go get Stephanie another sandwich,” Darryl said, getting back in his car. “How was the falafel?”
“The least poisoned sandwich I ever had,” she joked, and also hoped.
As she watched his car leave Nilanjana adjusted her hypothesis. Not a psychopath. A nervous dork, but maybe in kind of a cute way.
But that wasn’t why she had come out here. She turned back to the pits. These powerful attacks that were, for some reason, done out in the middle of the desert. Another possibility for the lack of apparent logic behind the pits’ placement was that they were created by a creature, following instinct rather than logic. She thought again of words like swallow and devour. She thought of the enormous stained-glass windows in the church. What kind of creature would create pits like this? And how big would it have to be to make the earth shake all the way back in town? Was it possible there was a monster hiding out here in the desert?
She scanned the horizon, but all she could see were the mountains. Most people would choose to not even see that.
10
After looking at the evidence, all Nilanjana had was a hunch that there was a living creature creating these pits, and a hunch wasn’t scientific at all.
She was exhausted, ready to end her day, but first she wanted to see how Carlos had fared on his side of the investigation. She pulled her car back into the parking lot that Carlos’s lab shared with Big Rico’s Pizza, the last pizza place left in town, thanks to the passionate cooking and arson expertise of Big Rico himself.
Luisa and Mark were hanging out in the break area of the lab, eating pizza on paper plates. (Because of the whole wheat and its by-products thing, Rico’s slices were just globs of cheese and sauce.) Having the lab next door to the pizza place was a real blessing. But sometimes, as she got out of bed in the morning, Nilanjana’s sour stomach would remind her that there were downsides to that kind of constant temptation too.
“Where did you disappear to yesterday?” Luisa asked, in her usual tone of gentle disappointment. “It’s unlike you to ignore your experiment like that. You’ll never win awards for ignoring experiments. They just don’t give awards for that.”
“Roger Arliner Young won a Nobel for her studies on ignoring whale sharks,” Mark countered, “which was incredibly brave given how insistent whale sharks can be.”
“But still,” Luisa said.
“A new project came up,” Nilanjana said. “I had to get some readings. It took longer than I thought.”
“A new project?” said Mark. His face went slack, like a child who didn’t get the present he wanted on Bloodstone Day. “How come you didn’t talk to us about it? I’m real sick of trying to get this machine to work. A new project would have been great. Is taking on new projects a thing famous scientists do? Maybe I should try that.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t mention it. There wasn’t time. Mmm, that pizza looks great, though. I’ll be right back to talk to you all about it. I just need to check with Carlos real quick. Sorry!”
She rushed past them into Carlos’s office. He had entrusted this problem to her, and she wanted to be the one to solve it. She didn’t need anyone’s company or help to do that. As she shut the door behind her, she could hear Mark say, “That project sounds secret and fun,” and Luisa sigh, “I bet she wins an award.”
“Everything okay?” Carlos said. “I was worried when you didn’t come back yesterday.”
“I’m fine,” she said, touched. Carlos cared deeply about science, but he cared most of all about the people around him. “Find anything new?”
He showed her the dials, which were set to his favorite numbers. He had a pad of paper where he had written down all the numbers with a smiley face next to each one. He was an excellent scientist.
“I think I was too obvious about my experiments the last few times. I set up the lasers earlier today in discreet places around the house, and can run them all remotely from this machine. Hopefully, the city, or whoever is sabotaging me, won’t notice.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course. You have the human perception of free will, same as the rest of us.”
“What was the otherworld like?”
Carlos searched for an explanation but found only ache. He had never even told Cecil the full truth of his time in that place, and he couldn’t start now.
“Endless,” he said, “but also limited. That sounds like a contradiction, but think of our world. You could keep going in any direction for your entire life, an endless journey, but you would be going over the same limited space again and again. It was like that.”
“A globe?”
“Not a globe. More like a bowl, all curved down to the center, and at the center was a mountain. No matter how much you walked, you circled the mountain. Being that distant from everyone I loved . . . some mornings right after I wake up I worry that I’m still there, still circling that mountain.”
He shivered.
“My going there and coming back means other things can cross. And they shouldn’t. No one here should go there. And if there is anything there, we don’t want it coming here. The City Council doesn’t understand that we need science to protect us from that otherworld.”
“Whatever they learned from the person called Wordsmith has them spooked,” she said.
“We don’t have time for more talking. I want to run another experiment, and i
t’s getting late.” He looked at his wrist.
“You’re not wearing a watch.”
He nodded.
“Watches don’t work here anyway. Time is weird.”
“It definitely is.”
She went over to the panel and checked all the dials, set to his favorite numbers. One dial was colors, and had been set to red. She didn’t like red much, preferring green. She turned it to green.
“Good catch,” he said. “All right, on my count.”
They put their fingers on buttons that would activate the machine.
“If this works, the information should be instantaneous, right?” she said.
He shrugged.
“Things work strangely with that house. Even laser readings might take a while. No one has tried shooting lasers into alternate universes since the Civil War. Okay. One, two, three.”
The machine started up, whirring away.
“That should do it,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll have something soon, without the city running interference on it. This is, well, it’s quite neat.”
“Sure,” she said. “Neat.” Nilanjana had never described anything as neat on her own, but it was one of Carlos’s favorite words.
There was a heavy knock on the door, which turned into a banging, which turned into the door bursting open.
On the other side was Pamela Winchell. Pamela used to be mayor of Night Vale, but she stepped down before the end of her term. Most suspected it was because she never wanted to govern a city. She just liked delivering emergency press conferences—sometimes during an emergency, sometimes during an impromptu rant in a department store. Whatever the situation, she loved the power of shouting orders and decrees, calling for citywide restrictions, and locking down citizens and services, even if the emergency was just that she was feeling sad.
The current mayor, Dana Cardinal, on taking office, had appointed Pamela to the new position of Director of Emergency Press Conferences. Pamela relished her role as a fiery spokesperson. She spent most of her time plotting with the City Council to create emergencies she could hold press conferences about.