It Devours!

by Joseph Fink

  He still saw elongated dark figures in the corners of his home and outside his windows. They lurked behind the news anchors on the television. When he reheated his soup, he saw one in the reflection of the microwave window reaching out a spindly arm. Each time, he would scream and clutch his chest. And each time he would forget seeing them a moment later.

  Martin felt great stress without understanding why. He tried to calm himself by returning to his longtime passion of drawing and painting, but the figures showed up repeatedly in his work. The drawings disturbed him. He threw them away, disgusted by his own efforts.

  One day, three years after the day he ate chicken salad and planned a summer camp, a year and a half after he left the church because it ultimately had failed to help him with his problem, he’d accidentally left one of these drawings on the table instead of throwing it away. When he encountered it again a few days later, he found it less disturbing, perhaps even aesthetically interesting. He hung it up, and intentionally made more. Elongated dark specters, covering the page. He hung them all up. He grew to like them, his walls papered in landscapes and bowl-of-fruit still lifes, all with long, humanlike forms in the backgrounds. He no longer felt the same stress. He no longer saw these lurking figures in his real life, although since he did not remember ever seeing them, he did not consciously recognize the change. He simply noticed feeling more energy, more joy in life. He attributed this change to exercise and a series of books on self-confidence he was reading, but the effect of those was incidental. He rarely left his home. In narrow hallways cluttered with horrifying drawings, Martin would feel as happy as he had ever felt.

  25

  Carlos would know what to do. And he would also have to admit that infiltrating the church had been the correct next move, no matter how unscientific it had been. He was attending Big Rico’s Pizza’s grand reopening, so Nilanjana left her apartment to meet him there. She changed out of her sweaty clothes, got in her car, and put the air-conditioning on full blast. Trying to get the strong possibility that Darryl had betrayed her out of her head, Nilanjana switched on her car radio.

  Community radio was important in Night Vale. Cecil Palmer, regular radio host and, of course, handsome husband to Carlos, served as a voice of the community. Informing them, but also expressing their fears and grievances and joys so that everyone could share in them. He was in the middle of a news report when she turned the radio on (“City Hall announced plans to expand the rec center to include a secret survival bunker, a secondary even more secret bunker, two helipads for quick evacuations, and a children’s playroom. Children will not be allowed in the playroom so that they will not block evacuation routes to the bunkers or helipads.”) as well as a traffic report, which was a series of sonnets about a rhinoceros who liked kites. Just as she was arriving at the shopping center, Cecil got to the weather. The weather report was Sturgill Simpson’s song “Turtles All the Way Down,” which was a popular cover of the Canadian national anthem. The weather reports on the radio were never that informative about the weather, but they were superinformative about life.

  She stepped into the rare afternoon rain, unpredicted by the radio’s weather report, and walked toward the giant pit in the ground that once was Big Rico’s Pizza. The remaining employees were standing around the top of the pit, working under the worried and watchful eye of Arnie Goldblum. Arnie was feeling a lot of pressure, trying to honor the legacy of his brother. Plus people kept thinking that this would be the perfect time to catch their mailman, and he had to explain over and over that he wasn’t carrying the mail with him today.

  The establishment had technically reopened, but none of the walls or counters had been rebuilt, and no new cooking equipment or appliances purchased. There were no tables or chairs or self-serve soft drink machines. Just a deep pit in the earth with dozens of people milling around the edge holding out their hands as if supporting plates. They were lifting their other hands to their mouths and chewing on nothing, saying things like “It’s as good as it ever was” and “Delicious! So glad Rico’s is back” and “Oooh, I burned my mouth eating this scrumptious pizza too quickly,” and then fanning their empty mouths.

  Nilanjana could not determine if they were pretending to eat pizza in order to make Arnie feel better or if Arnie had staged this scene with friends in order to drum up publicity, or if perhaps he was making invisible slices. The Moonlite All-Night Diner served invisible pie, so it seemed plausible that Arnie was getting in on the invisible food movement. It was a popular fad, because it required almost no preparation to take a photo for social media of your own home-cooked invisible food, and so these days everyone’s time line was full of pictures of empty plates with proud captions like “Homemade invisible black bean chili! Healthy, delicious, and totally real!”

  “Hey, Nils.” Carlos stepped up beside her. He was holding out a nonexistent plate in one hand. His other hand was positioned like it was holding a slice of pizza. “This is way easier to eat than the old globs of cheese and sauce with no crust.”

  “Carlos, I have to talk to you,” she said. “I learned what the church is . . . Are you actually eating an invisible pizza or just pretending?”

  “I have no idea, but play along. Arnie’s having a tough go right now.”

  A man in a flannel shirt came by and slapped Carlos on the back.

  “Oh, howdy there, Carlos. This pizza sure is powerful tasty!” said the man. He nodded at Nilanjana. “Hi there, I’m John Peters. You know, the farmer?”

  “I know,” she said.

  John Peters had been the one to start the invisible food movement. He had the unenviable position of acting as a farmer in a desert. This is a common plight. Many of the nation’s crops are grown in corners of California that would be, without the steady flow of federal water, barren plains. Pour enough water on anything, and it’ll deliver food eventually. The problem for John Peters was that Night Vale’s relationship with the federal government was shaky at best, given that it mostly failed to appear on national maps or censuses, and that the reality of Night Vale and the reality of the rest of the country did not seem to line up exactly. This meant that John’s requests for canals or water deliveries from the government were often treated as hoaxes or filing errors by the officials who received them. So John’s land stayed dry and empty. Then he came up with his most inspired idea. He announced that he had planted “invisible corn” and invited fellow town members to come and look at his empty fields, which were where he said the invisible corn was coming up nicely. Soon he put up a farm stand, selling his invisible corn to excited foodies eager to try this new variety. The Moonlite All-Nite Diner started selling invisible corn muffins made from the invisible corn, and, when those did well, they added invisible pie to the menu. After that, invisible food was everywhere. Nilanjana had been part of the team that Carlos sent to investigate John’s claims about his crops. Their conclusion, a common one in science, was that looking into it too deeply would spoil the fun.

  “We’ve met,” Nilanjana said.

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, I’d shake your hand, but mine is all covered with invisible pizza grease right now.” John held up his perfectly clean hand and shrugged. “What’s your name?”

  “Nilanjana. We’ve met.”

  “Nice to meet you, Niljona.”

  He smiled in a distant way and walked on, cradling his invisible or imaginary slice in both hands.

  “I’ve met him so many times,” she said to Carlos. Maybe she should reopen their investigation into his invisible corn.

  “Sometimes I wonder if he always reminds us he’s a farmer because even he has trouble remembering,” Carlos said.

  “Can we go talk somewhere?” she said, but his gaze went over her shoulder and his face brightened.

  “Oh, Abby, Steve, over here!”

  Abby Palmer waved back and headed their way with her husband, Steve Carlsberg, and their teenage daughter, Janice. Abby was Cecil’s sister, and Janice was Carlos’s favorite (and on
ly) niece.

  “Uncle Carlos!” Janice said, wheeling her chair over toward him.

  “How’s my young scientist?” Carlos dropped to one knee.

  Janice grimaced.

  “I don’t like science,” she said. “I want to be a professional athlete.”

  “But athletics is science!” Carlos said. “All that movement is physics. And sports that involve test tubes, like golf or water polo, are especially scientific. Here, I have a chart.”

  The chart was a piece of paper that had a picture of a basketball and the words SPORTS = SCIENCE.

  “The data is irrefutable,” he said. She laughed and he smiled, happy to have gotten the laugh from her. “I heard your game on Friday went well.”

  “We crushed the Pine Cliff Lizard Monitors. I think we might make state if anyone can figure out where that is and how we would get there from Night Vale. Leaving Night Vale’s hard.”

  It is. Nilanjana felt a pang of homesickness for her family back in Indiana. She still went and visited them when she could (which wasn’t often, because, again, leaving Night Vale is difficult). It was also difficult to explain her job to people not from Night Vale. Any time she told them what was happening there, they thought she was making fun of them. And because time doesn’t work in Night Vale, she was never certain at what point in their lives she would arrive. Once she came home for Diwali to find that her mother was six years old, and her father was nowhere to be found, since he didn’t move to the United States until he was seventeen. She played with the little girl that was her mother, the little girl that would grow up to be a chemistry professor and the main driving force for Nilanjana’s fascination with the wonder of science. She remembered her mother teaching her about negative numbers when Nilanjana was only six, and how proud she had been to learn mathematics that seemed to belong to older people. And so she asked her six-year-old mother about negative numbers and listened to her mother chatter away about everything she knew on the subject as they sat on a park bench under the drifting fall leaves. Then she went back to Night Vale, and the next time she visited her parents, they were, more or less, the correct age. She had never dared ask her mother if she remembered meeting a visitor in a park when she was six.

  “You’re lucky to have your family so close around you,” Nilanjana said to Janice.

  “I know.” Janice beamed.

  “Now I’m sorry, I just have to borrow your uncle for one moment, because I need to talk to him about something important . . .”

  “I love her,” Carlos said as Nilanjana led him away. “You never think about a spouse’s family when you’re looking for the right person. But especially being from out of town. None of my own family is anywhere nearby, and so they’ve become my family here. It makes a difference, having family around.”

  Nilanjana felt another pang but ignored it.

  “I did what I told you I was going to do,” she said. “I snuck into the church. And then I got caught. But it worked out. Long story.”

  Carlos widened his eyes at something over her shoulder.

  “No, Carlos, listen. I know there’s lots of people to say hello to here, but I need to talk to you about what the church is planning.” Carlos pointed at whatever he was looking at. She sighed. “We can go chat with whoever it is as soon as we’re done here. Just give me five minutes. The Smiling God is real. It’s real and it’s . . .” She trailed off as she became aware of the hissing, like static from a badly tuned radio, but somehow the noise of it made a physical bubbling on her skin. It was awful. She started to turn and Carlos stopped her.

  “Act natural. Look into my eyes,” he said as he put on reflective sunglasses. “Don’t turn around.”

  She saw the bronzy, warped mirror of her own face on each lens. She saw behind her a deep pit surrounded by people, each tiny and curved in the reflective lenses, each standing in silent horror. And she saw behind them the row of figures in long cloaks and hoods. There were no faces visible in the hoods.

  People begin to run. Janice usually moved herself around, but Steve got behind her wheelchair and sprinted them away, Abby right after them.

  The hooded figures were a common sight in Night Vale, but no one knew who they were. They mostly gathered around the Municipal Dog Park, which was forbidden to enter. No one knew if the Dog Park was off-limits because of the hooded figures, or if the hooded figures gathered there because it was off-limits. An intern from the radio station had entered the Dog Park a few years back and had walked and walked through its seemingly limitless interior until she had found herself in a vast desert surrounding a single mountain. Through this, Carlos learned that the Dog Park, like the house that doesn’t exist, was a gateway to the other desert world. The hooded figures often made a sound like static. No one had ever seen their faces. If anyone was foolish enough to walk home alone at night, they were often tailed at a distance of one block by a hooded figure, who would stumble and lurch as though drunk, but would move with a directed purpose after their target. Most people made it home, and locked their doors, and stayed out of sight of windows for a while. Some did not make it home. Those who were caught by a hooded figure were never seen again, not by human eyes.

  John Peters froze, feeling a terror hold his body in place. The hooded figures had become a problem for him after the “planting” of his invisible corn. (Or maybe just planting, no scare quotes. The entire invisible food movement had caught on so strongly that even he was unsure if the corn was real or not.) Soon after the announcement of that first crop, he started to find, after the sun went down, hooded figures wandering his property. They would walk slowly through the fields, moving their hands as though pushing aside stalks of corn. He refused to go outside after dark, and eventually to even be in the dark in his own home. He slept with the lights on, wearing a sleep mask so that he could approximate a normal sleep cycle, but the thin band of light where the mask met his nose reminded him of his fear, which reminded him of the strange figures stalking through crops that weren’t there, which reminded him that he was only able to plant invisible crops, which reminded him of his failure as, you know, a farmer. He would lie wide-eyed and awake, staring into the fabric of his mask, until the light changed around his nose and he knew that it was dawn.

  The figures formed a circle around the pit. Carlos and Nilanjana hurried after the crowd, slipping away from the pit through a gap in the circle. The static was deafening and painful. The figures’ hoods billowed in the wind, but the darkness beneath them was complete and unchanging. John Peters finally tried to run, but all gaps were gone. He backed away until there was no more ground left, and then fell into the soft dirt below, still alive with worms. There was no way out of the pit. He was the only one left. There was a high-pitched sound, like a kitten’s mewl, elongated and looped. The hooded figures stood cloak to cloak, so the world outside the pit was no longer visible. And then the figures begin to violently shake. They shook and shook. John Peters curled into a ball against the squirming soil and hoped, best-case scenario, that he would just be killed.

  26

  Nilanjana didn’t like John Peters at all, but she wasn’t going to stand by as a person got taken by the hooded figures. Carlos was pulling her away, intent on his mission of survival, but she shook away his grasp and ran back toward the pit.

  “Nilanjana, what are you doing?”

  Good question. There was no gap in the ring around the pit, so, without giving herself time to assess the data and come up with a plan, she charged headlong into one of the figures. A squeal of feedback. The static doubled in volume. But she felt no actual body inside the cloak. It collapsed as she pushed through it like a curtain between rooms. Hopping down into the pit, she put her arm around John Peters, who was oblivious to anything but his fear. She dragged his stiff, resistant body to the edge, pulled him up, and, with the help of a waiting Carlos, moved him back through the gap in the ring to the sun-hot blacktop. John Peters was curled into a ball, his eyes and mouth distended, his only sound a s
eemingly endless, tremulous exhale.

  “It’s illegal to interfere with the hooded figures,” said a voice full of authority. Pamela Winchell stood over them, arms crossed.

  “So arrest me.”

  Pamela narrowed her eyes, but made no move toward them. John Peters coughed, coming back to the world.

  “Where am I? My god, what happened? I’m a farmer, in case anyone didn’t know.”

  Nilanjana didn’t have time for his shit, or Pamela’s.

  “You all right, John?” she asked, then, without waiting for an answer: “We good to leave?” she asked Pamela, then, without waiting for an answer: “Where’s your car, Carlos?”

  “I took the bus.”

  “Steve and Abby already got out of here,” Nilanjana said. “Let me give you a ride home.” And they left.

  “Thanks, this time of day the city buses are covered in tarantulas,” Carlos said on the way to her car. “They don’t harass me or anything, but I’m always afraid of sitting on one, or accidentally bringing one home if it crawls into my bag. I feel bad. The poor thing just wanted to get home from a long day, next thing it knows it’s in my living room and Cecil and I are screaming.”

  “Scared of tarantulas?”

  “Oh. Not at all. Screaming ‘You’re adorable!’ and ‘What’s your name, cutie?’”

  She pulled out of the parking lot. Behind her, Pamela got into her official government-issue car, a chrome and purple PT Cruiser. As she followed, she spoke into her wrist, where she did not appear to have any sort of microphone or radio. Nilanjana was still put off by a lot of Night Vale’s strangeness, but she had gotten used to being tailed by government agents, so she took the moment to fill Carlos in on her time at the church.