It Devours!

by Joseph Fink

  She felt the same way. She was just starting to become close to making friends in Night Vale, to maybe finding a partner, to feeling like she belonged here. She had put her life on the line to help, or so she had thought, save the city from destruction. Just when she was thinking of it in terms of a town, a community, that might include her in it, it revealed itself for what it was: an unravelable knot of mistruths and misdirection that would never belong to a person like her who believed in simple scientific truths.

  Carlos banged his fist into a wall, the most aggressive gesture Nilanjana had ever seen from him.

  “Not this time,” he said, retreating to his office. “This time I will finish the experiments, no matter what they do to me. I will science so hard and so fast that they won’t be able to stop me. I will be safe from that otherworld, and so will my family and all of you. No one else gets lost. This ends now.”

  He slammed the door. Nilanjana considered the closed door and then looked back at the pit across the street. She agreed with Carlos’s feelings, but his response was rash and unconsidered.

  “If the centipede wasn’t causing any of this, then did we kill an innocent creature?” Mark asked.

  “It would seem so,” said Nilanjana.

  “We’re going to lose our jobs, aren’t we?” he groaned.

  “That’s what I was going to ask,” Luisa said. “The city’s going to shut us down or blow us up.”

  “Calm down. Just give me a second, okay?” Nilanjana said. “Let me drink some coffee, breathe, think, get rid of this hangover.”

  “For a hangover, you should get water, or a banana, or some orangemilk,” Mark said.

  “Don’t bother me,” Nilanjana snapped. “Especially over shit like that.”

  “I was trying to help.”

  She sat down at her desk, closed her eyes, and rolled back her head. She let out a long breath. She held her coffee with one hand, and rubbed her forehead with the other. She thought through the time line of the destructive attacks over the past several weeks in Night Vale. A new hypothesis occurred to her, one that fit all the available data, but one that also terrified her. It just couldn’t be true, she thought, unscientifically. Her stomach rolled. She felt sick and unprepared for what to do if her hypothesis proved true.

  She heard a knock far back behind her, at the lab’s front door. Another knock. The timing of the attacks. Correlation is not causation, but it suggests the possibility of causation. The knocking continued.

  “Somebody get that,” she shouted.

  More knocking, and then the door opened and Mark was talking to someone. They carried on a bit, Mark sounded like he was arguing. She and Carlos might have been backward in their thinking, their hypothesis based on faulty assumptions, but she couldn’t follow her own logic clearly with this noise.

  Mark said: “Nils.”

  “Don’t call me Nils.”

  “Sorry. Nilanjana, I know you said not to bother you, but this guy wants to see Carlos. Says it’s important.”

  “Mark, please, figure this shit out yourself. I’m trying to think through—”

  She saw the man standing at the front desk of the lab, past Mark. She knew that man.

  “Larry? Larry Leroy?” she asked, quietly.

  “From out on the edge of town, yes,” said Larry Leroy.

  36

  There was a lighthouse, he said.

  On top of a mountain, he said.

  In the middle of a vast waterless desert, he said.

  Nilanjana offered Larry some more water. His glass was empty. It had been empty many times.

  After returning to Night Vale, he had not gone home because he had no home. He had not gone to the police, because he didn’t think they would do anything to help him. He had not gone to see family, because he knew no family. Instead he had come to the scientists, who could maybe help him understand what had happened to him.

  He had been living in some kind of desert otherworld, at first alone, and then later with people who began to show up. He had befriended the people, and they were all from Night Vale. They had all had similar experiences to Larry’s: living their normal lives when suddenly the ground became hot and gave way, sending them out into a vast desert nothing.

  People from Big Rico’s Pizza. Big Rico himself. Most of a high school basketball team. Charlie Bair, the weekday shift manager at the Ralphs, who arrived with a huge pile of lactose-free milk.

  “Larry, you’re one of the only people who saw a centipede attack up close,” Nilanjana said. “We thought you were dead. We thought all of those people were dead.”

  “Well, we may be. I don’t know. Rico brought me back to his establishment, but it’s no longer there. He told me a handsome scientist fellow named Carlos worked next door and that maybe I should see him about all this stuff.”

  “How did you get back? How did you live through what the centipede did to you?” she asked. “I went to your house, when I heard about your disappearance. The whole thing was gone, just a sand pit now. All I found was a diorama among the debris. I have it at my apartment. It’s of Dorothy.”

  “Oh, I remember that one.” He chuckled while wincing. “I put a lot of work into those. Wish more than one could have been saved.”

  “It’s stunning, Larry. You’re a beautiful artist.”

  He didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure how to receive a compliment. He wasn’t sure about a lot of things.

  “You keep talking about a centipede,” he said. “I’ve seen this centipede, but it never attacked me. It certainly didn’t attack my house.”

  He used to live in a house out on the edge of town. He used to paint and compose and write. He used to water plants and work on his yard. Sometimes he would do crossword puzzles, and often he would read or cook.

  One day the floor had disappeared beneath him, along with his art and books and music. The house had fallen away, as had he. There had been no monster. No devouring. Only a sudden pit, and sudden falling. Larry had fallen for a long time, for so long it stopped feeling like falling, but floating. He would imagine, sometimes, that he was moving upward, and with enough concentration he could convince his body of that sensation, switching between falling and rising like an optical illusion that is two different images at once. Eventually he had gotten bored with falling and had dozed off. When he woke up, he was on the floor of an unfamiliar room.

  There was no furniture and no sign of any residents, except a picture of a lighthouse on the wall. He had looked at the picture for a long time, trying to decipher it. To him it was meaningful and cryptic, as was all art. But many hours of study and contemplation over the subsequent weeks led Larry to believe it was simply a picture. Of a lighthouse. Nothing more. Nothing less. And, as far as Larry was concerned, that was the most complex anything could be: a pure neutral self, expressing nothing but its own existence.

  He had left the house to find he was in a vast desert. Above him was a mountain. He didn’t believe in mountains, but there was nothing else there to believe in instead, so he walked toward the mountain. Atop it, he could see a building. He climbed the mountain, seeking out trails and smaller, more climbable ledges. Night came all at once, with no noise or fuss from the sun. It occurred to him that he hadn’t seen any sun, only a bright light that came from everywhere, and then was abruptly gone. He had camped out with no supplies in a hollow half cavern of stone and brush.

  He had watched the stars. They were not any of the stars he had been used to seeing. Back at home, on warm nights, he would look for Orion the Hunter, with his three-star belt, or Ursa Major, also known as the Big Dipper. There were so many arrangements of long-ago gods and creatures: Taurus the Bull, Draco the Dragon, Buddy the Golden Retriever. But none of those formations had been in this sky. He could not even find the moon. The night was bright but, like the day, had no visible source for its brightness.

  That first night, in his semi-cave, he lay down, looking up at the top of the mountain. There was a blinking red light there
, and he let its steady rhythm lull him to sleep. The next morning, or whatever time it was when the sky became light again, he went to find food and water, but despite discovering none, and not having eaten in more than a day, he did not feel the need to drink or eat. His body felt healthy, full of energy, and he continued up the mountain to the building.

  It was the lighthouse from the picture. Over its door was a pattern carved into the plaster, three interlocking triangles. He made the lighthouse his new home. From there, he could see all of the desert otherworld he inhabited. There was nothing much to see. There was a mountain, which he lived on, a lighthouse, which he lived in, and a little house at the base of the mountain, from which he had come. Other than that: sand and a sky that was a searing blue that felt almost aggressive.

  By his count he had lived in the desert for a little over nine months, despite having only disappeared from Night Vale a couple weeks ago. He had used leaves and stems and flowers he found in that world to create his own materials and paints so he could continue his art. He wandered about the desert, but he didn’t want to venture too far from the lighthouse. No matter which direction he went, he ended up back at the mountain anyway.

  He began drawing maps of this new desert, and then drawing, from memory, maps of Night Vale. The geography was similar. The mountain he was on was similar to the mountain range to the north of Night Vale, which no one believes to be real. There was a tall cactus with four distinct arms, one of which was engorged around its middle, much of the top of it cut away as if by barber’s shears. It was exactly like a cactus he had seen for years near his home. The otherworld looked a lot like the desert he had grown up in, except without the buildings or cars or people or hooded figures.

  Then one day more people arrived from the house. He avoided them for a while, watching them from the lighthouse. They wandered around the mountain, and argued, and tried again and again to return home through the house they had emerged from. Eventually he stopped avoiding them, realizing they were people he knew from around town. Some of them stayed at the bottom of the mountain, others joined him in the lighthouse. None of them needed to eat or drink either.

  From the top of his mountain, he saw movement under the sand. Slithering movements from something unimaginably long. He also saw doors around the desert. Old oak doors, unattached to any building. They did not last long. Each time a door appeared, more people emerged from the house at the bottom of the mountain. The house seemed to be the way into the desert otherworld. Perhaps the doors were the way out. But there was no predicting where a door would appear, and they never lasted long enough for him to get to one. When a door appeared, the slithering under the sand would speed toward it. It seemed like the doors were letting whatever the creature under the sand was come and go from its world. But the creature did not seem to be able to predict when and where the doors would be, so Larry decided it wasn’t creating the doors, just reacting to them. Before a door appeared, there would be rumbling, and the creature would be attracted to the rumbling.

  “I don’t know if it even knew where the doors led,” Larry said. “I don’t know if it knew anything. I think it felt the rumbling and was attracted to the movement.”

  Before a door would appear in this desert otherworld, two things would happen. First he could feel a terrible rumbling, and then he would hear an awful mechanical whirring sound. Like gears moving, or like the faint scampering of rodent feet amplified to deafening volumes.

  “What do you think was causing those doors if it wasn’t the centipede, Larry?” Nilanjana asked.

  “I don’t know. But I know that the first few I saw seemed to be timed out, controlled. Like someone just pressed a ‘Desert Door’ button, and it was there for a minute or two and then it was gone.

  “After a while, doors started appearing in the old house at the bottom of the mountain too. They would flicker and flash and then disappear. It was like the house was waking up. Like the other doors were waking it. Like the house was alive.”

  He went back to that house, but it was still empty except for the picture of the lighthouse. He looked closely into the photo. He could see himself in it. It was a photo of him, inside the lighthouse, at the top of a mountain. He stared at this photo of himself inside the lighthouse for a long time, and then he realized he no longer was in the picture. The lighthouse in the photo was empty. But the room he was in was not. There was a coffee table and sofa, photos of a family, old music playing, flowers in a vase, a television. He could smell cooking.

  When he walked to the windows, he was looking out into a neighborhood of Night Vale. Cars and people and dogs and bikes and helicopters and spying secret agents. It wasn’t a neighborhood he knew, but he was certain it was his hometown. He ran to the front door and opened it, but it opened to the desert otherworld, and when he looked into the house, it was empty again, save for the chair and the picture.

  “I did that over and over. Looking at me in the picture until the furniture appeared, and then I could watch Night Vale from the window of the house,” he said. “And at first it felt great. I missed my old home. But it started to fill me with anxiety. Because the more the doors appeared, the easier it was to see Night Vale through the house. It was like a boundary there was becoming thinner. The air became hot inside the house, and smelled like metal. I wanted to go home, but I wasn’t sure if Night Vale would survive the boundary in the house tearing open. And then I heard about the worms.”

  “Worms?” Nilanjana asked. “What about worms? We found a bunch where Big Rico’s pizzeria used to be.”

  “Yeah, Rico said he kept worms in his basement. He wouldn’t tell me why. He would only say that when anyone else tried to start a pizza restaurant in Night Vale, he would invite the owner over for a meeting. He would take the owner of that other restaurant down to the basement, where they could talk without being interrupted. Then the other pizza restaurant would stop being a problem, and he wouldn’t ever see that other owner again. As a result, there was a lot of stuff down there for the worms to eat. Rico winked at me after he said that.

  “Then Rico told me that wasn’t the point. The point was that as the worms dug more and more holes, the soil had become softer, more aerated, more water and air moving between layers. He said that was maybe sort of like what was happening to the house out there in the desert. The more things that forced their way through into the world, the softer that portal, that house, would become, allowing even more to move through it, with even less effort.

  “And then, yesterday, everything changed. The slithering underground thing came right for our mountain, and then it rose from the sand. It was a giant centipede, like you mentioned earlier. The people who had stayed at the bottom of the mountain ran screaming, but it ignored them. It dove right into the house, until all of it disappeared into the tiny building. Once it was clear it was not coming back, we followed it into the house. Its passage had finally torn the boundary of the house wide open. All of the furniture was there, without us having to do anything at all. And the door was wide open. And beyond that door was Night Vale. We all walked through, and came home.

  “I thought it was over. I thought we were free. But then this morning, I was going to get coffee before coming to your lab, and I heard the noise again. That whirring sound. And the coffee place in front of me just vanished. That terrible noise, an unbearable heat. I think the boundary between the worlds that broke open yesterday is collapsing.”

  “And you heard that noise again?” she said.

  “Yes. I never figured out what it was, though. I wish I could replicate it for you, ma’am. It’s awful.”

  Nilanjana wanted to find out what Carlos thought of all this, but he was locked in his office, irrational and angry like she’d never seen him, setting up his experiment, and was uninterested in anything else until it was complete. For him, the safety of his family was more important than any truth Larry could give him, but this was important to his studies. She didn’t know what to do. She was considering
again the terrible hypothesis she had conceived right before Larry arrived, and the thought of it made her dizzy.

  As she vacillated about what to do next, she could hear Carlos restarting the machine, preparing for the next test.

  She turned back to Larry, and his eyes were wide. His jaw was slack. He was barely breathing.

  “Larry?”

  He turned and ran out of the lab. She went to the front door to follow, but he was already out to the street and still running.

  “Larry, what’s wrong?” she shouted, but he wouldn’t even look back.

  She felt the floor getting hot. She thought again of her hypothesis. The one that she wanted to believe wasn’t true, against all available data. And that’s when she noticed the whirring of Carlos’s machine. An awful, mechanical whirring.

  37

  The centipede had only ever been a simple insect. The city had only ever been the Secret Police surveillance state it had always been. Neither of them had caused the pits or the disappearing people.

  Her hypothesis had become a working theory. She ran with that theory across the lab and pounded on the office door.

  “Turn it off. Turn that thing off. Carlos!”

  He opened the door, alarmed at her alarm. The floor was getting hotter.

  “Not now, Nils. My family is on the line. Only science can save them.”

  “It’s the machine, Carlos. It’s the experiments.”

  “What’s the machine? What are you talking about?”

  “Carlos.” She lowered her voice, forced herself to sound calmer, so that he would not write off what she was saying as an emotional outburst. “Your experiments are what has been opening up those pits. Your experiments have been destroying the town. It’s not that the city or anyone else is causing the destruction to stop you. Every time you start one of the experiments, the destruction happens. Our causation was backward the whole time.”