by Joseph Fink
She looked around the office. She was holding one of Luisa’s potatoes, eating it raw and crisp like an apple. Luisa was in the doorway, looking disappointed that Pamela would do such a thing.
“There was no need to prepare anything fancy for me,” Pamela said. “And I see you did not prepare anything fancy for me. Not even balloons or streamers or flutes of champagne. Basic courtesy.”
Carlos stepped back, hoping his human frame could impossibly hide the massive machinery behind him. Nilanjana hoped they could distract Pamela long enough for a useful reading to result.
“Mmm,” she said, putting down the potato and exchanging it for a notebook on Carlos’s desk. She said this through a mic connected to a portable amp she always carried in case an emergency press conference came up. She looked through page after page of Carlos’s favorite numbers. “Mmm,” she said again, loud and breathy into the mic.
“Always a pleasant surprise, a visit from you, Pamela,” said Carlos. “But I’m afraid today is quite busy, so . . .”
Pamela raised an eyebrow. Then she sneezed. The sound of it was distorted through the portable amp.
“Dammit. I think a raised eyebrow is so effective, but it also makes me sneeze. Every time.”
“It was still pretty effective,” Nilanjana offered.
“Don’t patronize me. Now, I am here on behalf of your mayor and your City Council. You were ordered to ignore certain things and to stop doing other things. It seems you have continued to do things and pay attention to stuff. That will not stand.”
“It’s not within City Council’s purview——” Nilanjana started.
“PURVIEW!” Pamela shouted. She didn’t sound angry, just loud. “Such a fancy word. Did you know that it comes from the Greek purvien, which means ‘a sow at half term’?”
“No, I didn’t, that’s fascina——”
“Of course you didn’t. Because I just made it up.” She sneered at Carlos’s whiteboard, covered in equations. “That’s what we do. We make things up, and then everything we’ve made up is true as long as no one looks at it too closely. I’ve been having foot cramps. Are there certain foods that cause foot cramps?”
“Yes!” Carlos said, excited. “I was just studying this, let me get the resul——”
“Don’t interrupt. That was a rhetorical question. It might have also been a metaphor. I’m not confident what a metaphor is and I refuse to let anyone tell me.”
A light on Carlos’s machine started blinking (this was a light that detected if there was science going on), and Pamela frowned at it.
“You have ignored our warnings. That makes me unhappy.”
The ground began to vibrate a little.
“When I get unhappy, any number of events can result. I once got unhappy at a Burger King. Do you know what happened to that Burger King?”
“No, Pamela, what happened?” Carlos said.
“I cried in it. I cried in that Burger King. Deep, gulping sobs, until the muscles in my chest ached from the tensing and untensing of them. Everyone in that Burger King was made to feel deeply uncomfortable. That’s what happened. And then later I got unhappy at a Best Buy. Do you know what happened there?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. The vibration in the ground had turned into definite shaking. The floor was unreasonably warm.
“I imprisoned every employee in the abandoned mine shaft outside of town and hired a crew to turn the Best Buy into a large, impractical house. I live in that Best Buy now. I call it Best By, a small and meaningless piece of wordplay, which is also a by-product of my unhappiness.”
The shaking was now a strong rolling. Carlos and Nilanjana edged toward the door out of concern.
“If you continue to make me unhappy, who knows what could happen? Who could say what the consequences will be for you all?”
The walls groaned with the force of the shaking. The floor was almost unbearably hot now.
“Even I couldn’t say,” she said. “And I can say almost anything. Like: My feet are extremely hot, which is painful, but is helping alleviate my foot cramps.”
There was a pop, or a sizzle, or a tear. A horribly loud, unwelcome sound from outside the lab. The shaking stopped with the sound. Then, moments later, a second sound. Mark screaming.
Carlos and Nilanjana hurried out of the office, across the lab, which was strewn with what had been shaken off the shelves and tables, and out into the parking lot, where Mark and Luisa were staring at something. Luisa looked more disappointed than usual, so disappointed that it verged on sorrow. Mark had his hand over his mouth, and his face was flushed.
Nilanjana followed their horror, and saw. Big Rico’s Pizza was gone. In its place was a deep pit surrounded by shattered pavement.
11
“What did they do?” was all Nilanjana could think to say, looking at the deep pit before her. Her fingers were at her mouth. She could only inhale over and over.
Tragedy is so usually witnessed now through a screen, prerecorded, ready for playback whenever convenient. Seeing it here before her, playing out in real time, she still felt as though she were watching it through a screen, that at any moment she could pause to get herself together, or rewind to check on a detail she hadn’t caught the first time.
Where there had once been a busy pizza restaurant there was now only the sinkhole. The pavement drooped down toward where the restaurant had been, like slowly dripping fudge, and beyond that it spiderwebbed out into a shattered ring.
“How could they have done this?” Carlos said, and Nilanjana didn’t know whether he meant practically or morally. Probably a little of each.
Pamela stood behind them, impassively watching others scrambling to look for survivors.
“It is interesting what can happen in this world,” Pamela said. “Even thunderstorms, if you think about it. Or trees. Trees are a surprise too.”
Carlos turned to her, and Nilanjana was startled to see disgust on his face. He was a man who rarely showed anger or rage, mostly restricting his visible emotions to kindness, concern, worry, and scientific intrigue (which was the same as his face for sheer joy). But now he wrinkled his face as though smelling a dumpster left in the sun.
“Pamela, you’ve gone too far.”
She smiled.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Generally, I have no idea what anyone is talking about, because I never care enough to find out. Remember what the council has told you today, Carlos. I hope we don’t have to tell you again. Now, please excuse me. I need to call an emergency press conference.”
She nodded at the hole in the ground as though it were an acquaintance she was greeting from across the street, and then she placed her portable amp carefully in her passenger seat and drove away.
Carlos sputtered at her car as she left.
“Unimaginable,” he said. “It’s a . . . well . . . I can’t believe that anyone, let alone Pamela . . .”
He slumped, and Nilanjana touched his back. He flinched. He didn’t like people touching him. She removed her hand.
“Forget about her,” she said. “We should see if there’s anything we can do to help. And after everyone’s safe, let’s do our best to learn from this site while it’s still . . .”
The word was fresh, but that seemed abhorrent given the tragedy of what had happened, so instead she waggled her hand toward the smoking pit.
“Right,” he said. He pulled himself together, a curious scientist once more. “Let’s see what we can learn to prevent this from ever happening again.”
Mark, Luisa, Carlos, and Nilanjana tended to bystanders with burns and cuts. They called ambulances for those with deeper injuries. But injuries were few. Anyone who was in Big Rico’s when it disappeared was just gone. Like Larry Leroy. No bodies, no rubble. Swallowed, she tried not to think.
The Sheriff’s Secret Police arrived and prepared to rope off the area, so Nilanjana and Carlos studied what they could before being forced out of the crime scene.
The pit looked much like the one Nilanjana had initially investigated in the desert. Nearly vertical sides, and a bottom that was flat and damp. Smoke rose from the dirt. Nilanjana saw one difference. The bottom of this pit was squirming with earthworms, dipping in and out of the soil. There seemed to be thousands. The dirt was alive with them.
“Worms don’t naturally exist in that kind of density,” she said.
“No,” Carlos said. “Another problem to consider. A related problem?” He shrugged. “Correlation does not indicate causation.”
“But correlation suggests the possibility of causation. Did you see that?”
She pointed. There was light from the pit. And movement. It was difficult to reconcile with the rest of what they were looking at. It was like a movie was being projected on the wriggling mass of worms. No specific images. Shapes, colors, light. She could smell, within the harsh smoke and the melted soil, a dry and ancient smell, like a creature that had been mummified in a desert tomb.
Hypothesis: The worms and the moving lights were an illusion caused by a traumatic experience.
Evidence: She’d just had a traumatic experience.
She wasn’t alone in that.
The bystanders who had seen the disaster at Big Rico’s told others. The cumulative terror of what had been happening in town began to weigh on its citizens. First Larry Leroy, now Big Rico. Both vanished along with entire buildings. Any citizen of Night Vale could be next. The Secret Police interviewed witnesses, asking them questions like “You didn’t see anything, did you?” and “Did you?” and “Would you like to shut up and go home now?”
Basimah Bishara hadn’t seen either of the pits herself, but she heard a lot about them through friends. She was a high school senior, mostly worried about whether she should attend Night Vale Community College or risk leaving town for college, knowing that many who manage to leave Night Vale never find their way home. Perhaps it was this anxiety that amplified the fear for her. Or the fact that her father had left to fight in a distant war when she was little, and would never come home.
Either way, the disappearances, and the terrible gaps they left in the earth, became something of an obsession for her. She would lie in bed at night and doubt the stability of the earth, the reliability of gravity. Even air seemed like it might be a temporary construct. Every breath she took could be the one that drew in nothing and left her choking.
“Mom,” she said one day. “Tell me everything you remember about Dad.”
And her mom told her, without asking why. It was an act of kindness on the part of her mother, and an act of cruelty on the part of Basimah, making her mother go back through the memories of the person they had both lost.
During the day, Basimah would walk the perimeter of her house, each loop laying down more footprints she could follow. She would feel the solid packed earth beneath her bare feet, and she would doubt it. She would circle her house, and wait, each loop, for the house to be gone before her next step.
After weeks of this, she decided she would attend a school in California. If she couldn’t find her way back, she couldn’t find her way back. There was no safety anywhere. Houses could disappear. Fathers could disappear. If she disappeared too, so what? And in making that decision, her fear left her, and she slept soundly again, in a house that was no different than it had been the night before, but felt solid and safe once more.
Mab, unlike Basimah, had witnessed the disaster firsthand. She had been on her way to lunch at Big Rico’s between routes. Mab was a long-distance bus driver, who drove round trips that usually took her all over the region, leaving Night Vale as the sun was a band of light blue on the horizon, and pulling back into the bus station as the last pink was fading out from the other horizon.
That day she had been scheduled for two shorter runs, over to Pine Cliff and back, twice. She hadn’t made it to either of those destinations, as it’s incredibly difficult to leave Night Vale, but people bought bus tickets, and it’s important as a bus driver to at least attempt your route. It didn’t matter much to Mab anyway. Those weren’t her normal routes. She had been covering for a colleague who had come down with a mild case of throat spiders and needed to take a few days off for all of the eggs to clear.
Usually Mab ate whatever was available at the gas stations or fast-food restaurants where the bus stopped for bathroom breaks, but today she had the unbelievable luxury of being in her hometown at lunchtime and decided to celebrate with pizza made the way no one but Big Rico could make without their pizza restaurant mysteriously burning down. She had been almost to the restaurant’s door when she realized she had left her wallet in the vehicle and had to go back to get it. If it hadn’t been for that lapse in memory, she would have been in the store when, well, when whatever happened happened.
As it was, she had just shut the passenger side door and was turning, shoving the wallet into her pocket with one hand, when the restaurant had gone. There was a strange light that stung her skin. The place didn’t collapse, but instead seemed to be lowered, as though on a high-speed elevator. She had frozen, hand still in her pocket, and then turned, got into her car, and started driving. She didn’t feel panic. She felt fine. It wasn’t until she was back on her bus attempting to reach Pine Cliff for the second time that day that she realized she had never eaten lunch.
There was a movement in the driver’s side mirror of the bus. Some jerk trying to pass her. She glanced out of the window. Nothing there. Must have been a bird or a ghost or something innocuous and common like that. Another flicker in the mirror. What was that?
She was fine, there was simply a terrible driver endangering her bus by trying to pass her. Except there was no car there. The road toward Pine Cliff was empty that day. She could see that. But every time she looked forward, she would see movement in her mirrors. Someone endangering her and her passengers. She wasn’t safe. She didn’t feel safe. Her hands were taut and pale on the steering wheel. Eventually, she and her Pine Cliff–bound passengers would arrive back in Night Vale, wondering how anyone got anywhere at all.
Terry Williams also saw the restaurant disappear. He was only seven, and didn’t understand what he had seen. He understood little. His brain was still forming out the model of what a world is, and how a world works.
The disappearance, and all that would come after it, didn’t have much of an immediate effect on him. He played with his friends. He made paper airplanes but didn’t throw them, instead whooshing them around the backyard in his hand. He wanted to be a pilot. He didn’t even consciously remember the day that Big Rico’s Pizza had slipped into the waiting earth, like something snatched by a thief.
He did become a pilot. This was after high school, after college. Like Basimah, he decided to leave Night Vale to go to college, to get some experience of the world. It took him more than a dozen attempts, but he was finally able to leave the city. He even spent a European semester abroad in Svitz, where the legal age for talking about clouds was eighteen. He spent many long nights, more than he should have, staying up till dawn discussing clouds, thrilled at the taboo of it. It was only when he returned to the United States that he had some regret, that he didn’t truly understand Svitz as a country or a culture, and had missed his chance to really experience it, because he had wasted his time reveling in a place where he could legally talk about clouds.
He never did leave the country again, even after becoming a commercial pilot. Domestic routes only, and he was okay with it. Not everyone gets to do everything, and he knew that.
Mostly, he had forgotten Night Vale. It was a strange place to grow up, but many people have strange childhoods, and he had no way of comparing if his had been more or less strange than others. He definitely didn’t remember the day that a building had disappeared, just like that, before his eyes.
But on his fortieth birthday, heading to a local pizza and beer joint to meet some friends, he found that his hands were shaking. He stood in the parking lot, by himself, his friends waiting inside at a
table, ready to celebrate with him, and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. And then he was crying, and on his knees, and a puddle in the parking lot ruined one leg of his pants. And he didn’t know why he was crying or shaking, but for some reason, looking at the pizza place where he would celebrate his birthday, he felt all at once the absolute tenuous nature of his life. He felt it all slipping away from him. He sat on his knees, remembering without remembering, crying without knowing why, a man who had been taught a lesson thirty-three years earlier that he was only now starting to learn.
12
They had spent several hours going over what they had collected from the pit. The soil was soil, although the composition of it was unusual, with some of it perfectly dry, some of it melted, and the rest wet and muddy. How dry dirt had ended up mixing in with wet soil without soaking up any water they hadn’t been able to figure out. The worms were just earthworms, notable only in their unusual quantity.
Nilanjana needed to approach the problem from a different angle, a human one. Pamela had threatened them. And then Big Rico’s had gone.
Hypothesis: Pamela and the City Council had done this.
Nilanjana thought back to the sign in front of the church, and the word Devoured. She thought back to the Wordsmith meeting with the City Council and “warning them,” whatever that meant. She thought about the stained-glass image of a centipede rising up and devouring.
Hypothesis: The church is also involved somehow. Helping the city. Or the city is helping them.
Either way, what they had here was likely not a natural phenomenon, but a crime. And when investigating a crime, it was helpful to look for a motive.
The first and most obvious motive would be an attempt to stop Carlos from researching further into the desert otherworld. But why, instead of directly going after him or the lab, were they instead swallowing entire buildings with innocents inside who had nothing to do with his research?
To find a motive that matched the crime, Nilanjana told Carlos she needed to look at the victims who had been targeted, Big Rico and Larry Leroy, and see if there was any particular reason why the city or the church or whoever was doing this would go after them.