Mostly Void, Partially Stars

by Joseph Fink

  I wasn’t really clamoring to play D&D, but it looked fun, and I had friends that were into it. Horror movies had taught me that if you are a kid and you break any kind of rule, you will be chased down and chopped up.

  Then the Saturday morning cartoon of D&D came on and I saw Tiamat, a five-headed dragon. I wasn’t able to watch the show at home with my mom around, because of the whole TV news murder and suicide story. So I watched it at my friend Nick’s house, and I wanted to play this game and to battle Tiamat.

  I didn’t actually play D&D until high school, but by then I felt like the people I knew who played it were way better than I could be so I just started watching sports and collecting football cards instead.

  Tiamat stuck with me, though. He was the coolest and the obvious visual basis for Hiram McDaniels, a literal five-headed dragon in Night Vale, and in this episode hopeful Night Vale mayor.

  Hiram’s heads are different colors from Tiamat’s, and he’s quite a bit more charming and social than Tiamat. And having Jackson Publick voice his five different heads has really led to Hiram having five different personalities in one body. As a writer, I couldn’t want for a better character.

  Other notes about this episode:

  • Walton Kinkade: last name spelled like Thomas Kinkade because I love only the finest of art. Also Kinkade (the fictional one) has an arachnid-like eight eyes because I hate myself.

  • Upon rereading this episode I wondered, “Whatever happened to Intern Stacey?” Then I found her next mention in episode 17. Oh, poor Stacey. How depressing.

  • You remember when Oprah would have one of those shows where everyone in the audience would get a gift and Oprah would shout “A VOLKSWAGEN BEEEEEEE-TLLLLLE!” or “UGG BOOOOOTS!” Cut to the audience who were all jumping and screaming. I always imagined Oprah saying “IM-MOR-TAL-I-TYYYYYYY!” and then cut to the audience who would all be jumping and screaming, but the camera would zoom closer and we would see that there were tears and that they were screaming in terror.

  —Jeffrey Cranor

  The policeman in that intersection is not directing traffic, he’s coding an urgent message to all of us.

  WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

  First, the news. Old Town Night Vale residents are complaining about extremely noisy sunsets. Several agitated citizens are pushing for the City Council to do something about the solar shrieking every evening for the past few weeks. One homeowner described the sound as “the parched cries of sad buzzards, or perhaps even the unholy voice of Old Scratch himself.”

  The City Council, speaking in unison at a televised press conference, said that the noise is just the windmill farms that litter the unfortunate wastelands of Desert Bluffs, and that the noises do not fall under Night Vale jurisdiction.

  Walton Kinkade, president of the community group Soundproof Old Town!, said that the windmills can’t possibly be the source of the noise, as they are nonexistent and also don’t work because of Desert Bluff’s staggering incompetence.

  The City Council called a second press conference wherein they all wordlessly stared down Kinkade for fourteen uninterrupted minutes. Their dark eyes tore holes straight through the community spokesman, metaphorically speaking, until his soul was compacted into what looked like a partially chewed black-eyed pea, literally.

  To date, only Old Town residents have reported hearing these inconceivable noises every evening as the sun crosses the indifferent horizon. And the noises seem to be taking their toll. There have been two heart attacks, twelve cases of significant muscular atrophy, and at least two dozen claims of folks growing third eyes (including Kinkade himself, who had an arachnid-like eight eyes when he spoke before City Council yesterday morning).

  No other neighborhood can hear the sounds. I spoke to Simone Rigadeau in the Earth Sciences building at Night Vale Community College about this scientifically fascinating story and she called it a simple case of celestial “just deserts.” Full disclosure listeners, Rigadeau does not work in Earth Sciences. She is a transient living in the recycling closet of the Earth Sciences building, and she collects cans as pets.

  There is another hearing scheduled at four a.m. tomorrow on the highest ledge overlooking Skeleton Gorge, which can only be accessed by government helicopters. (All previous endeavors to scale the cliffside by rock-climbing enthusiasts have failed in extravagantly gory fashion.)

  The council issued a statement wishing Kinkade luck in attending this mandatory hearing.

  Breaking news: We’ve received confirmation from the Sheriff’s Secret Police that fugitive Hiram McDaniels was finally apprehended. McDaniels has been on the lam since August. He was wanted on several counts of insurance fraud, falsifying identification papers, evading arrest, and assaulting a police vehicle with fire. McDaniels was spotted near his Earl Road apartment early Saturday morning by several alert neighbors.

  The neighbors said they were able to identify McDaniels because he matched police sketches of an eighteen-foot-tall, five-headed dragon that had been posted across Night Vale. Fingerprints later confirmed that McDaniels was definitely a dragon.

  Secret Police are still unsure of McDaniels’s motive for returning home, and . . . well, listeners, our station intern, Stacey, just handed me a photo of Hiram McDaniels. He is a very dynamic-looking dragon. The raw power. The intensity in those five faces, those many sets of piercing blue and red and black and green and yellow eyes.

  I can certainly see how he charmed his way out of an arrest. He must never get tickets! What a guy.

  An unsigned press release I found under my pillow this morning announces the following: There is a free party this Friday at the abandoned missile silo outside of town. The purpose of this party is to celebrate. There will be no sign or music, but the party is inside the silo. This party takes place at three a.m. and will be over at 3:05. It will be dark, both inside and outside the silo. Grope blindly toward happiness. Keep your mouth open and your teeth together, to indicate you are at a party. You will hear noises and later you will not. This party will feature special guest Bon Jovi, although he does not yet know it. See you there!

  An interesting note on Hiram McDaniels: Intern Stacey tells me that she’s been googling the roguish dragon. Did you know he had a blog? He’s a very smart fellow—some really groundbreaking ideas! Here’s one post from last week: “If I were mayor of Night Vale, I would give incentives for small business development and focus on youth physical fitness programs. Human youth are the human future, after all.”

  Well, it seems a certain multi-headed fugitive wants to become mayor of Night Vale. You have my vote, Hiram!

  Thursday night, the City Council is voting on a new measure that would prohibit breathing as an involuntary muscular action. Historically, the human body has been able to control breathing without the brain needing to consciously activate the diaphragm. Under the new rule, all residents of Night Vale would be required to make the physical choice of whether or not (and when) to breathe.

  The City Council said that we have too long taken the receipt of oxygen for granted and that this sense of entitlement must cease. If the vote passes, residents will have until March 1 of next year to learn to control these involuntary muscle groups during lucid sleep.

  Detractors say that it is our constitutional right to breathe how we want, and that it is not the government’s job to legislate breathing. The council responded by waving a brick in the air at reporters and shouting, “We learned to beat our own hearts! We taught ourselves to wet our own corneas! We have pulled ourselves up from nothing! It is the American dream!” They then took a deep breath all together, lowered the brick, broke it into pieces, and devoured it.

  And now a word from our sponsor.

  We all want to live forever, right? Wrong! Think about watching your family die as you selfishly carry on. Your children aging and passing, your grandchildren, and so on. Think of all of the friends you’ll make but eventually lose. You don’t want that! No! You know the earth is eventually going to be
swallowed by the sun, right? And one day you would be present for this greatest of all apocalypses. As fascinating as this event would be, scientifically speaking, this excitement would fade as the pain of thousand-degree flames engulfed your tender body and your aged mind would be so alone in this interminable torture. Does this sound like something you want? We didn’t think so.

  Immortality is stupid. Think before you wish.

  This message brought to you by DIRECTV.

  Dear listeners, right after we reported on Hiram McDaniels’s interest in becoming Night Vale mayor, the dirty campaign tactics came into play, stirring up bad feelings and slinging the old municipal mud. Incumbent mayor Pamela Winchell issued a statement citing township bylaws that prohibit prisoners from running for public office.

  Now, isn’t it just like a career politician, such as Mayor Winchell, to make such unethical, ad hominem attacks on a great reptilian beast, simply because he’s in jail? It sounds to me like the mayor is feeling McDaniels breathing down her neck. Breathing dragon fire that is! Give ’em hell, Hiram!

  The following is a test of the Emergency Dream Broadcast System. In the event of an actual emergency, you would just now be experiencing a dream in which you were in the neighborhood where you grew up, only all the houses are now black, featureless cylinders. Just row after row of these blank, dark cylinders stretching out around you. You are home, but you are also somewhere from whence you will never find home again. There is someone waiting for you, at the end of the longest street. You know that, although you do not know who. You try to run down the street and it grows longer and longer. You pass by one cylinder in particular and know that it’s your house. You stop running. You approach the blank face of the cylinder, its surface seeming to devour light and sound. You reach out, and you are inches from touching it. Just then you hear a ding. You look above you to see words in the sky. POSSIBLE FLASH FLOODS, they say, ALERT VALID UNTIL 3:00 P.M. Once again, this has been a test of the Emergency Dream Broadcast System.

  The Night Vale Mall is having to deal with angry calls from parents after the Santa they hired for Christmas photos was once again a no-show. Mall public relations officials said that the missing Santa is actually a performance-art piece meant to show people how our capitalist idols are truly nonexistent; ghosts of materialistic ideals that we have embraced as replacements for true spiritual meaning.

  A long line of upset parents and crying children stretched from Santa’s empty chair to just past the Hollister. The mall PR officials added that they have a really cool idea for Valentine’s Day. They’re thinking, like, moving pictures of actual beating hearts projected onto a large teddy bear, which has been stretched open like a vivisected frog from seventh-grade life science. Officials added: “It’s going to be monstrous and beautiful. You don’t even know what art really is. You don’t even know yourself.”

  They concluded by chanting and pumping their arms in unison, like a Lower Paleolithic version of the “YMCA” dance.

  And now, the weather.

  WEATHER: “Of a Friday Night” by Anais Mitchell

  During the break, I received a message from Mayor Winchell’s office responding to our previous reports. According to the mayor, mayoral elections aren’t for another three years, and Hiram McDaniels is ineligible to run not only because of his jail stay, but also because he is neither a Night Vale resident nor a human being. There is, she says, no precedent for a five-headed dragon as elected official.

  Mayor Winchell also pointed out that writing the throwaway phrase “if I were mayor of Night Vale” on a blog is not an official declaration of candidacy. “There is paperwork!” Mayor Winchell shouted into my voice mail. “You can’t just . . . Aaaaggghh,” she continued, trailing off slightly at the end. What followed was about ninety-five seconds of loud stomping and what sounded like wood chopping in the distance before the message finally ended.

  Allow me a retort, dear listeners, with this brief editorial.

  With all due respect, Madam Mayor, have we not had enough dragon bashing? Our great country once held to some terrible old customs, but we grew up. We learned. We abolished slavery. Women won the right to vote. Ghosts can now marry (but of course, not have children. I mean, that would be a real slippery slope!). And our own little burg is on the verge of becoming the first city in this great nation to legalize time travel.

  So let’s loosen our collars. Let’s march into the reptilian future, not cling to the narrow past. Just because a dragon is a dragon and has five heads doesn’t mean he can’t lead our community.

  Sure, critics will say, “Oh, but Cecil, what if his five heads don’t agree on something. What if one’s like ‘Yeah, let’s build this school,’ but another’s like ‘No more schools,’ and the others are drunk or sleepy or something? How can we agree to elect five heads that can’t agree with themselves?”

  To this I say, shame on you for your negative stereotypes of multi-headed beings. Free your mind. The rest, as our official town song says, will follow. The song also says “Lap deeply of the scarlet mud after the bloodrains of the apocalypse,” but I don’t think that quite applies here.

  So with this, I am proud to offer my endorsement of Hiram McDaniels for mayor of Night Vale.

  Sure the election isn’t for three years, but it’s never too early to effect change!

  And in that time, we will rally, we will petition to get what we want. And soon a great leader will rise. Lead us to that future, Hiram.

  Ah, but that is later. Now? It is dark. It is quiet. Just you and me, dear listener. Just my voice, traveling from this microphone, traveling silent and immediate across sleepy homes and lost souls to your ears. You curl under a blanket, protecting your body from the world (excepting a few clever spiders), and you are listening, hearing me. Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you now. The past is gone and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first and settles in as the gentle present. This now? This us? We can cope with that. We can do this together, you and I. Drowsily but comfortably.

  Stay tuned now for our two-hour special: Car Alarms and Their Variations, brought to you, commercial-free, by Canada Dry.

  Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.

  PROVERB: Does the carpet match the drapes? No, it doesn’t. You’re the worst interior decorator. Please leave my home.

  EPISODE 13:

  “A STORY ABOUT YOU”

  DECEMBER 15, 2012

  THIS EPISODE STARTED AS A DOCUMENT IN OUR SHARED GOOGLE DOCS folder that I titled “A Story About You (an experiment in Night Vale storytelling).” I had this idea of doing an episode with a completely different format from all the previous ones, but I didn’t know if it would work. I stuck it in that separate document so there was no pressure for it to turn into a producible episode.

  What ended up saving it was a disastrous beach vacation. My wife and I were staying in a beach house for a week, and both got sick on the first day, so that we spent the week on the couch not doing much and feeling bad. Also it rained the whole week. It was during this enforced week of having nothing to do but sit indoors in a beach house and be sick that I finally got this episode into shape.

  Who are you in this story about you? Several episodes later it occurred to me that I really wish we had implied that you were Larry Leroy, out on the edge of town. But by then we had already done other things with Larry that contradicted that idea, so instead you are just some nameless Night Vale resident, now never to be seen again.

  Originally the “dark planet of awesome size, lit by no sun” only appeared once in the story. It was an image I loved but didn’t know how it related to the story. On a second run, I restructured the story to center around the image. Once I figured out that the dead planet was the heart of the story, the rewriting into its final form was quick and easy. That planet has appeared occasionally in later episodes and in the Night Vale novel. The dark planet has a very specific meaning and logic for me within the Night Vale world
that I won’t spell out here or anywhere else.

  A word about the music in this episode. I wanted the episode to center around a single musical theme, since it centered on a single story, and I found a Disparition track that for whatever reason I hadn’t used before called “Vortex Shedding” that was both distinctive and gorgeous. It’s a track I love and still try to use only for very special moments.

  —Joseph Fink

  This is a story about you, said the man on the radio, and you were pleased, because you always wanted to hear about yourself on the radio.

  WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE

  This is a story about you. You live in a trailer, out near the car lot, next to Old Woman Josie’s house. Occasionally she’ll wave to you, on her way out to get the mail, or more snacks for the angels. Occasionally, you’ll wave back. You’re not a terrible neighbor, as far as it goes. At night you can see the red light blinking on and off on top of the radio tower, a tiny flurry of human activity against the implacable backdrop of stars and void. You’ll sit out on the steps of your trailer, with your back to the brightness of the car lot, watching the radio tower for hours. But only sometimes. Mostly you do other things. This is a story about you.

  You didn’t always live in Night Vale. You lived somewhere else, where there were more trees, more water. You wrote direct-mail campaigns for companies, selling their products. Dear resident, you wrote often, Finally some good news in this dreary world. At last, a reason not to kill yourself. Then you would delete that and write something else, and it would be sent out and it would not be read by anyone.

  You had a friend, and then a girlfriend, and then a fiancée. The same person. She cooked dinner sometimes, but sometimes you cooked. You often touched.