Mostly Void, Partially Stars

by Joseph Fink

  The City Council voted this week to make death a meritocracy. For all of human existence, death has been a “communistic sort of event,” the council said in a prepared statement, and that “we live in America where it is not the government’s job to give death to every single citizen.”

  The council noted that from now on death would be earned through hard work and productivity, not just as a handout for every resource-sucking freeloader on the street. If you want to die, the council said, you will have to achieve death yourself. Not everyone gets to die, and that’s just how it will be.

  The vote won by a small margin with the opposition split between keeping death universal and others pushing for banning death altogether.

  Listen, Night Vale, I don’t know about you, but I am for this new merit-based system of death. If everyone gets to die, then no one will really value death. I used to be young and idealistic and think that death was a human right, that everyone deserved to die, but now I realize that dying is very hard work. I’m working hard every day trying to die, but you don’t hear me complaining, “Oh government, where’s my free death.” No, when I die, I want to have earned it.

  I don’t mean to sound insensitive to those less fortunate who don’t have the means to die without government help, which is why I support our local non-profit shelters that help ease our more down-on-their-luck brothers and sisters toward the death they truly want but just can’t yet afford.

  At her regular daily press conference today, Mayor Pamela Winchell extended a warm congratulations to Franklin and Barton for their Eternal Scout achievement.

  “FIRE IS ACTUALLY COLD,” she shrieked. “IT IS THE COLD THAT BURNS YOU.”

  She went on to produce several colorful balloons from her mouth, which she presented to strange, mute children in the audience, children whom none of the reporters remembered having been there just seconds before, and whom none of them recognized. The children thanked the mayor by vibrating and dissolving.

  The Scouts, meanwhile, have continued preparations for the ceremony. The vacant lot out back of the Ralphs is now covered by a thick burlap tent, and Scout leaders were seen rolling several oil drums into the tent, drums that rattled as they moved. They also have put up streamers and a hand-painted banner over the tent entrance that reads “GREAT JOB FRANKIE AND BARTIE.”

  Great job indeed. Oh, this is so exciting. What a wonderful little town we have.

  After a long battle with parents over the controversial soda machines in the recently reopened Night Vale High School, the school board has finally capitulated to pressure from the PTA. While the school board, led by the ethereal and menacing Glow Cloud, refused to remove the machines because of the much-needed extra revenue, they concurred that so much corn syrup was simply not good for students’ health.

  As a compromise, the school board agreed to booby-trap the machines with swinging blades and an electrical maze to promote healthier drink choices and physical activity, which can help burn off all that sugar. To make up for the potentially lowered income from fewer purchases, the school board said they would raise soda prices, remove all water fountains and sinks in the building, and double up the salt in all cafeteria dishes.

  The school board concluded their announcement with the following: “ALL HAIL. ALL PRAISE. ALL SUBMIT BEFORE THE GLOW CLOUD.” Then they sprayed themselves and reporters with shaken-up two-liters of warm Sierra Mist.

  Agents from the vague yet menacing government agency are having their annual recruitment drive at the abandoned missile silo outside of town next week. Those interested in joining whatever vague but important work it is that they do should submit résumés and headshots into one of several secret drop spots around town. At the event itself, the candidates will be ruthlessly interrogated to determine how they found out where the secret drop spots are, what exactly they know about the agency, and who told them.

  A representative for the agency, speaking through a representative, who in turn spoke through a heavily drugged proxy, said, “Oh, you know, it’ll be a lot of the standard job interview stuff. Asking you to name your greatest weakness so that we can use it to turn the screws on you even tighter, breaking you slowly through a series of hypnotic light pulses and disruptive sound patterns, stuff like that.”

  Those who make it through this rigorous process will vanish forever from our lives, presumably to join the vague yet menacing agency in some capacity. Those who fail the process will also vanish. Eventually, given enough time, we all will vanish, even the memories of us corroding and fading. The recruitment drive includes a potluck lunch, and the agency mentioned that they usually are overstocked on desserts and do not have enough main courses, so keep that in mind.

  If you want to witness the Eternal Scout ceremony, now is the time to run to the burlap tent over the vacant lot out back of the Ralphs. Scout leaders indicate that the ceremony will be starting any second now, although much of the ceremony is out of mere human control and so they could not give a specific time.

  Scoutmaster Earl Harlan said, “I’m proud to be the first Scout troop to achieve this rank. I’m also terrified to be the first Scout troop to achieve this rank. The two emotions are mixing inside my body, and it’s confusing. It’s confusing.” He shivered. “We could have had something, Cecil. Always remember that,” he concluded, clutching my arm, before walking, head bowed, out of the studio.

  Well, I think we’re all both proud and terrified most of the time, and that’s because we live in the best town in this county, in this state, and in this nation. That’s where the pride comes from. The terrified part is because life is terrifying. It just is.

  And now a word from our sponsors.

  Losing hope? Hard to see a way out? Hope? Losing it? Lost? Lost in a cave? Lost in a cave that spirals around a single obsidian column, lit dimly by a source that does not seem to be either above or below? Hard to see? Scrabbling among the rocks for any landmark that might tell you from whence you came, to where you should go? Depressed? Suffering from depression? Suffering? Tripped on a rock and tumbling for a painful eternity down the evenly lit featureless spiral? Losing hope? Six Flags Desert Springs. Just off Exit 64 in Night Vale.

  The Night Vale Medical Board announced today that they can’t help you. Not if you’re going to keep screaming like that. They also asked that you clean up a bit before you come in. They don’t want to get sick.

  “One of the major problems we face as doctors is the sheer amount of blood,” said Suzanne Thurgood, publicity director for the medical board. “We get so much blood all over our floors and jeans and copper magnetic bracelets, it becomes nearly untenable.”

  Thurgood added that the best thing to do if you are unable to stop bleeding is to first take a few breaths. Calm yourself. This should help you concentrate on not bleeding. Then, once you have finished bleeding, come to a doctor’s office. “It’s not a matter of medical training,” Thurgood said, “it’s simply a matter of respecting other people.”

  Thurgood then lit a cigarette and placed it expertly into the mouth of a low-flying hawk. As the bird flew away, a distant clock tower chimed the quarter hour, and a gentle rain began to fall.

  This has been Community Health Tips.

  Reports are coming in that the Eternal Scout ceremony has started, and that herds of strange, mute children are streaming out of the burlap tent, filling all public and private spaces and standing silently as though awaiting an order from some unknown higher source. The Sheriff’s Secret Police advise that the children are creepy, and that they are creeped out by them. I myself count five in this recording booth with me, exactly half of them boys and half of them girls.

  Who knows for what purpose these children have come to us, and to what end their actions will take us? Who knows anything, actually, for sure? Let’s go, surrounded and confused, vulnerable and trembling, to the weather.

  WEATHER: “Too Much Time” by John Vanderslice

  The ceremony is over, dear listeners. The children are gone.


  It seems we have come through this crisis, as all crises before, safe and sound, the alarm only a false alarm.

  The children that had surrounded us were not the threat we imagined. After their period of ominous silence, all they did was attack savagely, dragging many citizens with them into the tent over the vacant lot, out back of the Ralphs. Secret Police indicate only ten or so people were taken, and maybe a dozen more killed. How foolish we were to worry. How much of our lives we spend building complex prophecies of fear when the world itself is just the world we have always known and gotten along in.

  Scoutmaster Harlan was one of the ones taken. I hope that he continues to be both proud and terrified in whichever new reality he finds himself. I think often about the last moments with him, and the things that were said. I think often about many things. Other things I think less about.

  Franklin and Barton, now and forever holding the rank of Eternal Scout, have been preserved and placed in glass cases out front of the city hall, a reminder to all who pass of the risks and rewards of bravery, of loyalty, of being a Scout. May all children who see them feel a swelling of pride, except that hoard of mute children from some other world. Those children hopefully we will never see again.

  Listeners, listeners out there, listeners out in the vacant night, clinging to my voice as a simulacrum of companionship, remember:

  Fear is consciousness plus life. Regret is an attempt to avoid what has already happened. Toast is bread held under direct heat until crisp.

  The present tense of regret is indecision. The future tense of fear is either comedy or tragedy. And the past tense of toast is toasted.

  Stay tuned now for more voices, more reassuring noise in this quiet world.

  Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.

  PROVERB: Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Show them pictures of cows when they’re young and administer brief electrical shocks.

  EPISODE 24:

  “THE MAYOR”

  JUNE 1, 2013

  PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK US, “WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LINE FROM THE podcast?”

  I have a few answers for that. Usually I go with one Joseph wrote because 1) there are numerous good ones to choose, and 2) it feels a bit self-serving to choose one of my own. (Here’s a good one: “All tattoos are temporary tattoos.”)

  Well, the “Stay Tuned Next” at the end of this episode is one of my favorite lines, and I wrote it. You hear me? I wrote a funny joke. It was so funny that even I thought it was okay to admit that it was funny.

  Beyond it being funny—which after this buildup, it no longer is—​I loved this joke for being that perfect combination of funny, easy/obvious, and original. It’s hard to do all three. That’s usually one of those triangle drawings like “Fast, Cheap, Good: Pick only two.”

  Original and funny is not always the easiest and most obvious joke. Often an obvious joke is not funny and is almost never orig—

  What? What do you mean you looked ahead at the joke and you’ve heard it before?

  No you didn’t. You absolutely did not. It is fresh and orig—

  Oh, you thought of this joke a long time ago?

  Well, you should have written it down in a script and then recited that script into a mic and put it out as a podcast instead of just muttering it to your friend Devon while driving to get more tacos for the party. Too late. It’s my joke now.

  —Jeffrey Cranor

  It’s worth noting that it is also one of my favorite jokes in Night Vale, and my favorite “Stay Tuned Next” we’ve ever done. I’m still waiting for the full episode based on the idea.

  —Joseph Fink

  The sun has risen. You are awake. This symmetry is not without meaning.

  WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

  Listeners, I’m receiving word from the Sheriff’s Secret Police that Mayor Pamela Winchell has gone missing. After this morning’s press conference where she updated the media on standard mayoral news—stuff like her favorite kinds of rocks and a demonstration on hatchet sharpening—she walked to her office and then disappeared.

  Trish Hidge, one of Winchell’s staffers, said, “Mayors can disappear. It’s not a big deal. She disappears all the time. She can fly and turn into a horse, too. It’s perfectly within her rights as a mayor to turn invisible, to disintegrate into a thin cloud of imperceptible existence.” Hidge continued, “In fact, I can disappear if I want to. Because I work for the mayor I have all of the mayor’s powers. I just don’t use them all the time. Out of respect for the mayor.”

  When pressed by reporters to show her powers, Hidge reluctantly agreed, saying “Just this once,” and then standing in place, visibly straining, eyes bulging, cheeks reddening. There was a long, uncomfortable silence before Hidge said, “Well I can’t do it with everyone watching. Turn around, okay?” But then, before anyone could turn around she vanished, leaving behind only a light white puff, like baby powder, a faint smell of olives, and an echoing voice that said, “No wait. I got it. See?”

  If anyone has any information on the mayor’s whereabouts, please contact the Sheriff’s Secret Police or just speak into any phone. They are all bugged, of course.

  The Night Vale Community Theater is proud to announce the opening of their long-awaited production of Once on This Island. The location and cast are a secret. Curtain is promptly at eight o’clock, and those seeking autographs of cast members after the show should ask themselves why signatures are valuable and what that particular kind of transaction even means. The Night Vale Daily Journal has indicated their intention to review the musical, as soon as they can find out where the performances are taking place. They are interrogating anyone who might provide them the necessary information.

  I am, myself, an aficionado of the theater, having once played the role of Pippin in a high school production. The musical being produced was actually South Pacific, but our director had a real flair for experimental theater and felt the addition of characters from other famous plays would spice things up. He also hid dangerous traps all throughout the set, in order to keep us on our toes. Oh, it was a wonderful couple of months, preparing for and performing in front of parents and friends, and those of us who were left at the end of it felt like we had truly been through something, something we would never forget, not even in the middle of the night, staring blankly into the darkness, sweaty, pallid, trembling.

  Students and seniors receive a ten percent discount on all tickets to the hit musical.

  Here’s a public service message to all the children in our audience.

  Children, the night sky may seem like a scary thing sometimes. And it is. It’s a very scary thing. Look at the stars, twinkling silently. They are so far away that none of us will ever get to even the closest one. They are dead-eyed sigils of our own failures against distance and mortality. And behind them just the void, that nothingness that is everything, that everything that is nothing. Even the blinking light of an airplane streaking across it does not seem to assuage the tiniest bit of its blackness, like throwing a single stray ember into the depths of a vast arctic ocean. And what if the void is not as void as we thought? What could be coming toward us out of the distance? Insentient asteroid with a chance trajectory? Sentient beings with a malicious trajectory? What good could come of this? What good, children, could come of any of this? Fear the night sky, children. And sleep tight in your beds, and the inadequate shelters of blankets and parental love. Sleep sound, children.

  This has been our Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner.

  More on our missing mayor. Listeners, this might be worse than I could have imagined. I’m receiving word that Old Woman Josie and a gentleman that may or may not be an angel friend of hers (depending on whether or not angels are real, or if they are real but aren’t really friends with Josie, or not real but suddenly became real because Josie willed them into existence). However it is, Josie and her exceptionally tall, wingéd friend saw Mayor Winchell earlier this morning near the Moonlite All-Nite Diner talkin
g to a man in an offensively cartoonish Native American headdress.

  Listeners, that is most certainly the Apache Tracker. And, look, I don’t know what he is up to, but everywhere he goes, nothing good happens. For instance, last time he went to the post office they had to spend months cleaning the blood off the walls and hire who knows what kind of specialists to stop the disembodied screaming coming from every darkened corner. I mean, what kind of contractor even specializes in removing screams (besides Shriektronics, of course, but they moved their offices to several miles deep underground and mostly just generate earthquakes for the government these days).

  The point is that the Apache Tracker, despite his recent, unexplained transformation into a real Native American, is not who he claims to be and is not a trustworthy individual. I can only fear the worst for Mayor Winchell. Old Woman Josie said she saw the two in a heated discussion that culminated in the Apache Tracker opening a leather briefcase, which in turn released a thick cloud of black flies, more than you would think could fit into a normal-sized fly briefcase.

  The man with the insensitively feathered headdress then got into the backseat of a black sedan. Josie said she saw the driver clearly and recognized him but could no longer remember any details about his face. Josie did not see where the mayor went though, as her possible angel friend was spending a lot of time explaining why an unassisted triple play in baseball is so rare and she got distracted because it seemed like a really important story and she didn’t want to seem rude.

  Listeners, we have contacted the Sheriff’s Secret Police. If you see this black sedan, the mayor, or have any other information, including light and citrusy dessert recipes for our upcoming special on fresh summer cuisine, please contact us immediately.

  And now a word from our sponsor.