It Devours!

by Joseph Fink

  “But it wasn’t. And you don’t. And it will.”

  Carlos ate his mint ice cream in silence for a bit. A drop fell from the cone onto his lab coat, a single pastel stain on the otherwise impeccable white. Nilanjana winced, but it didn’t seem to bother Carlos and so she said nothing. She tried not to look at that annoying smudge on his coat.

  “Science is important,” he said eventually. “Science is very important. But so are you. Never start thinking that science is more important than yourself. That’s what Cecil taught me. Before I met him, I was like you. But his hand on my cheek, you know? When I come home and he’s surprised me by cooking dinner? That’s way more important than science.”

  He gestured for them to get up, and they started walking down the street, back to her car.

  “I don’t have a Cecil,” she said. “And I don’t belong to this town, I just live here. So the only thing I have right now is understanding. This isn’t for you anymore. I need to understand this.”

  “And how will you do that?”

  “I have strong evidence that it is some sort of creature making these attacks. I have a video of it.”

  “Yes, I know about that. Pamela sent me an email with that video attached and told me that you had gotten it somehow and you weren’t supposed to have it and that you needed to forget it and that I also needed to forget it as soon as I was done watching it. Then she sent it to me four more times. I don’t think she’s great with computers.”

  “I was trying to get more evidence when I was caught,” Nilanjana said. “But as she was arresting me, she let slip that the city believes we are working with the church to do something dangerous. The church is definitely involved in this. So my next step is to find out what the church is up to.”

  Carlos didn’t look at her. He didn’t have anything to say to that.

  “Don’t silently judge,” she said at last.

  “I’ve already spoken my concerns and you have spoken yours. We both argued our points well and we still disagree. I can’t tie you to your desk. All I can do is judge.”

  He shrugged.

  “But point taken. I will work on better acknowledging what you say. Like that. I just acknowledged something. How was that?”

  “I acknowledge that it was pretty good,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said. “So assume the church is involved. What is your next step?”

  Nilanjana thought about the church. “Joyfully It Devours,” read their pamphlets. Also their T-shirts. Also their tapestries. Also their needlework crafts. Also probably several tattoos. The Smiling God devours the sins of its followers. The entire religion is predicated on this lore, and belief is the economy of religion. Fervor, its currency. Was it possible that they had created or called forth some monstrous creature to demonstrate their joyful devouring?

  Consider the Glow Cloud. Night Vale had a glowing cloud, which caused anyone near it to chant fealty to its awesome size and power, and which continually rained dead animals down on the city. The Glow Cloud was the president of the Night Vale School Board and had been doing an efficient job, but this was mostly because the Glow Cloud could get the rest of the school board to do whatever it wanted using its mind control powers. Most of what it wanted was good for students and teachers, because the Glow Cloud had a child attending the high school. Once the young cloud graduated, things could be different. The off-track-betting sites had set the over/under for number of days after the young cloud’s graduation until the Glow Cloud crushed every school building under dead animals at twenty-five days. People could also bet on which dead animals would be most abundant in the crushing. Cows were far and away the favorite at five-to-three odds. Hardly seemed worth the bet.

  If the Glow Cloud was possible, anything was possible.

  That of course was a leap in logic, Nilanjana corrected herself. Just because one bizarre thing exists doesn’t mean all bizarre things exist. And who’s to say a glow cloud is that extraordinary? For some reason tiny, hard specks we find on the inside of fruits can be put into dirt and then months later there’s a damned tree with a bunch more of that same fruit on it, also filled with a bunch more of those tiny, hard specks.

  The point is, Nilanjana focused her thoughts, that fruit trees and even the Glow Cloud can be scientifically explained. They have been studied by botanists and meteorologists quite extensively. But whatever was happening under the desert floor was leaving her little evidence to work with. She had insufficient data to come up with a useful hypothesis. Her only source for more data was the city, and that avenue of investigation, for now, was unavailable.

  She would have to turn back to the church itself. They were involved somehow, she was more and more sure, but, to her great frustration, she couldn’t say exactly why she was sure. This was not scientific, Nilanjana reminded herself, but then again it would be bad science to rule out anything she couldn’t understand as simply impossible.

  All the things we don’t understand in the universe comprise religion. Diseases are curses. Animals are ancestral reincarnation. The stars are heavenly signals of the future. Science studied many of these things and found that there were complex but empirical and logical data for them, and thus they were removed from the domain of religion.

  Diseases are not curses from the gods but simply viruses and bacteria which attack the human body, causing symptoms as innocuous as the sniffles and as ghastly as throat spiders. Animals are their own living creatures. Some of them (deer) house real estate agents inside of them. Some of them (birds) are human-made animatronic cameras. And yes, some of them are reincarnated humans, but this is not because the human soul upon leaving its mortal body drifts into a newborn cub or calf. It is because that person registered with the zoo’s reincarnation program. It isn’t really reincarnation. It’s just that for a sizable donation to the zoo’s endowment, animal handlers will train an animal of your choice to behave like you after you die. They will teach it your physical mannerisms and vocal inflections, maybe play it some of your favorite songs. The program had only achieved middling results, but still a lot of the more wealthy citizens of Night Vale had signed up for it.

  As for the stars, no one knows what those are. Some more fanciful scientists say they’re continually exploding gas giants hundreds of millions of miles away, but that is more urban legend than scientific model.

  “Nils,” Carlos said. “I promise I’m always on your side. I will stick up for you no matter what. Just be careful and smart, okay?”

  “I want to infiltrate the church.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You on my side?”

  “I am. I just hope you know what you’re doing. This is getting a long way from science as we understand it. There aren’t any numbers written on chalkboards or anything.”

  “I don’t know for certain that they’re connected, but I want to see their rituals. I think it’s possible that they are the ones who created or are controlling the attacks against us.”

  He shook his head.

  “Religious rituals aren’t science. Spying isn’t science. Science is bubbling beakers and electrical devices that occasionally send a visible spark of electricity buzzing back and forth.”

  “Everything is science.”

  “I hear that you think that.”

  “Thanks for hearing me, Carlos.”

  He walked her to the parking lot by the Hall of Public Records, where Nilanjana’s car still sat, a bright orange ticket on the windshield. She pulled it off and read it. She had no idea where she was going to get that amount of adult human hair, but she would worry about it later.

  Nilanjana told him she’d be careful.

  Carlos smiled. He could feel his face tighten. He tried to keep his eyes wide and caring, but he knew they were narrow and tired. Still, he forced the look.

  “Thanks for picking me up,” Nilanjana said, “and for listening.” She started toward her car, and then stopped and came back to him. He wasn’t fond of hugs, and so she just p
ut her hand on his upper arm and squeezed it. He smiled.

  “I wouldn’t have lasted this long in Night Vale without you,” she said. “You’ve never steered me wrong. But I hope you trust me on this.”

  “I trust you.”

  “Science is neat.”

  “You’re neat,” he said.

  She got in her car and drove off. As she rounded the corner of the lot to the main road, the hot exhaust created a glistening, wavering mirage of a moving car. In the undulating waves of hot air, Nilanjana and her car looked like a dream scrawled across a visible reality.

  20

  Nilanjana sat at her kitchen counter, reading What’s with All the Stuff About Teeth?: The Joyous Congregation Exposed. It wasn’t the most scholarly place to start, but it was a quick, gripping read, and public information about the congregation was limited. Most of the books on the subject were bought up by the church, and so here she was with the one widely available book. She was pretty sure that a lot of it was made up, and that the author, Leann Hart, was writing more from a bias than from any attempt to understand. Nilanjana found it hard to believe the stuff about the vats of brain fluid that church clergy soaked in in order to stay young.

  She was just getting to the chapter called “Don’t Get Me Started on the Sex Scandals (Get Me Started on the Sex Scandals!)” when her phone buzzed. Probably Carlos checking on her, or Mark wanting to continue their debate about which scientists owned the tallest dogs (Mark had a blog on the subject). She didn’t feel like she needed checking in on, and she didn’t care how tall a dog was as long as it was the most adorable, best little boy ever. The good news is that almost every dog fits that criterion.

  But it was neither Carlos nor Mark. It was Darryl.

  u up?

  What she wouldn’t do for a good debate about tall dogs right now. She could always just ignore it. She would ignore it. She went back to the book, ready to read about some sex scandals. Her phone buzzed again.

  we still friends?

  Had they ever been friends? They had had lunch and then sex and then breakfast, but if that was all it took to become friends then the definition of friendship needed work. She decided it would be easier to answer the first question.

  Yes, I’m up. What’s going on?

  She barely had opened the book again when the reply came.

  mind if i come over?

  It’s late. I have work tomorrow. [emoji of a tired scientist causing a workplace accident]

  k. feel like things were weird when we left the diner. everything ok?

  Then, a moment later,

  [emoji of a horse for some reason]

  Then,

  sorry, meant [emoji of a friendly but concerned face]

  No, everything was not okay. People had died. There was possibly a huge and dangerous creature moving out in the desert, and the way the Joyous Congregation depicted and talked about their god made her suspect that that dangerous creature was the Smiling God, or whatever it was they mistook for a smiling god.

  Darryl was a member of the church, and had apparently consulted with the City Council about that desert otherworld. He was absolutely the last person she should trust, it was clear. And yet.

  When she inventoried herself, Nilanjana found that among the things she could definitely use, along with solid evidence of what was destroying Night Vale, and healthier food, and better sleep, was company. Nothing he had done had proved Darryl a bad person. He didn’t hide his nickname. His explanation of his meeting with the city was borderline naïve. Their date had been nice. So had the sex. Even a gut check found that she felt okay about him. It was the church she didn’t trust, but he and the church weren’t necessarily the same.

  Or she was looking for excuses, trying to make the data fit a hypothesis she wanted to be true. Science is designed to be an objective system of proof and disproof, but it is a system created by subjective people, so bias often enters into it in subtle, insidious ways.

  We’re fine. Do you want to come over?

  Immediately:

  yeah! on my way

  She quickly added,

  Just for a little bit. I do have work tomorrow.

  He didn’t reply. She tried to go back to reading, but Leann’s insinuations and unfounded accusations just slid past her. Instead she decided to change out of her leisure lab coat, which had a few stains and was visibly fraying at the edges, into a newer, more stylish lab coat, a move she decided had nothing to do with who was coming over and everything to do with her newfound dedication to finally get rid of that old ratty lab coat.

  Darryl knocked on the door, and she went to open it and then decided it would be better to just shout, “It’s open.” But since she had started to the door, she was standing weirdly in the hallway when he opened it. Then he went for a hug, but she was already turning to walk back to the living room, and so he started to retract the hug but she was turning back to receive the hug.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is awkward.”

  Saying a moment is awkward has never made an awkward moment better, but it’s a tactic that humans keep trying over and over.

  “Do you want a drink? I have, well, I don’t have much. Orange juice and tap water.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Which one?”

  “Oh. Orange juice and tap water. If you combine them, you get orangey water. It’s fun.”

  That did not sound fun to Nilanjana, but she wasn’t interested in arguing about the entertainment levels of beverages.

  It wasn’t until they were sitting down in the living room that she realized she had left the Joyous Congregation exposé out. This was carelessness, but it could come across as aggression. So much that comes across as aggression is carelessness, and vice versa.

  “Sorry,” she said, but he hadn’t noticed the book yet, and so he said, “Huh?,” and so she said, “About the book,” and he still hadn’t noticed it and so he said, “Okay,” and then he did notice the book and said nothing.

  “I was doing research,” she said, as shorthand for a lack of available documentation on the church, and so her settling for any source of information, but this came across as flippant.

  “That stuff is all made up, you know. Leann Hart never even went to the church. She didn’t talk to any of us.”

  “I know. You should read some of the stuff she’s written about the theory of gravity. She tries to use a few politically motivated fringe scientists to ignore the massive scientific consensus that gravity is real and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries a year.”

  “But don’t you think it’s worth hearing all sides on that? Gravity’s just a theory, you know.”

  Oh god, what am I doing with this guy? she thought.

  “Maybe you could tell me,” she said, changing the subject, “what do you find in all this Joyous Congregation stuff? Like what does it do for you?”

  “The Smiling God devours our sins. You must first accept—” he began.

  “No,” she interrupted. “What do you find in all of it? What does it do for you?”

  He swirled his orangey water, looking in its murk for the right words.

  “My friends there. I love them. I grew up with them. Community means a lot to me. The church gave me my family, my friends, my life. I don’t know if I believe all of this stuff. Or no.” He shook his head. “I definitely believe it all. I was just saying that to make you comfortable, but I’m going to try to be honest here. I believe in it because believing in it gave me Stephanie and Jamillah, my two best friends. Their families, among others in the church, let me stay in their homes when my parents died. They helped me buy school supplies and robes, and they fed me and prayed with me. Belief gave me the life that I am living now.

  “Maybe it’s not true. But what would finding that out give me? What use is the truth in a world where we die either way? Isn’t it better to live happy until that last moment, believing the story you are living, shoulder to shoulder with others who believe
and live that same story? Why flounder in the void when there is no need to do so? The story ends the same way, no matter how you choose to perceive it. Why not choose to perceive it as meaningful?”

  She thought about that. In some ways it made sense. But in most ways, it was absurd. To live in the world as it truly is, is the only way worth living in the world. That is objectively better than living in a fiction, right?

  “That’s sweet,” she said. “But what if that belief leads to bad actions? What if a lot of people could get hurt because of what that belief leads people to do?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  She still didn’t trust him. But she chose to believe.

  “I’m going to sneak into your church and try to figure out what they’re planning. Will you help me?”

  21

  The sun rose quietly for once. Nilanjana never bothered to set an alarm, because the racket of first light had her up early every morning. Some people—Carlos, for instance—slept right through it, but she was a light sleeper under the best of conditions.

  This morning, though, she woke to find that the sunrise had been smooth and uneventful, or as smooth and uneventful as a million-mile-wide nuclear explosion seemingly emerging from the ground can be, and that the sun had been up for a couple hours. Even though it was still quite early, she felt as if she had slept in. That feeling came as a combination of luxury and guilt.

  Darryl was still asleep. A sprawling, snoring slumber that made it tricky to share a full bed with him. She retrieved her legs from under his legs and got out of bed, intentionally shaking the mattress as she did, but he slept through it.

  He wandered out an hour after she had had breakfast, poured himself a cup of cold coffee, and toasted her with it.

  “Feeling ready?” he said.

  “I feel determined. Is that anything like ready?”

  “It’s the closest most people get.”

  She nodded, offering him the box of Flakey O’s, but he shook his head.