Welcome to Night Vale

by Joseph Fink

  Diane saw the familiar blond man ducking under the counter. She counted slowly to ten, but the man did not come back up. Maybe she hadn’t seen anything. Maybe she had come into existence seconds ago and had made up every moment until this moment to explain how she came to be sitting in this booth in this diner.

  Dawn took a sip of her coffee to cover the silence, which went longer than either of them had anticipated, so the sip ended up draining her mug. She set down the empty mug and wiped coffee and egg off her mouth.

  “Sometimes the only things we can know for sure are the things we feel. I believe you, Diane. I disagree with you, but I believe you.”

  Diane felt a gentle hand touch her own, a sympathetic pat. Dawn had both hands on her coffee cup. Diane looked back down at her own hand, and saw the final quick motion of a gray-gloved hand disappearing under her table.

  14

  Jackie felt, as the door swung her back out onto the sun-cracked asphalt, that science had taught her little. Carlos had suggested seeing the mayor. It would mean going to City Hall, which would put her in dangerous proximity to the City Council, but the mayor herself was a comforting figure, and probably safe enough.

  City Hall was certainly better than where Old Woman Josie wanted her to go. Anywhere was better than the library.

  She sauntered to her car, not in any hurry to leave the mild warmth of the evening sunlight. The desert beyond the roads and buildings was going pink at the edges, orange farther in, and then a deep yellow glow where the setting sun met the horizon. It was all very pretty to look at, and so she did. As a result, she did not notice what was in her car until it grabbed her as she opened the door.

  “Erika! You scared the shit out of me.” Jackie had to intentionally restart her breathing.

  The impossibly tall being, seemingly made of bright black beams of light, shrugged, and there was the flutter of hundreds of tiny wings all beating at once.

  “Fear is a reasonable response to life.”

  Jackie didn’t have time for general philosophizing from a being it was illegal to acknowledge existed. Or maybe she did have time. She wasn’t about to pretend she understood anything at all about time.

  “You’re in my car, so explain why or get out.”

  Erika turned to look at her. Where eyes might be on a human being was a shadowy glow that Jackie could taste in the back of her mouth. It tasted like strawberry candy covered in mud.

  “I come with a message on behalf of the angels. We are afraid. All of us. I am perhaps the most afraid.”

  Jackie forced herself to meet Erika’s gaze directly, or as directly as she could given that she could not locate their eyes.

  “Is that message supposed to be useful to me?”

  “It is not supposed to be anything. It is just a message. Messages are for the sender, not the receiver.”

  “Then, dude, I hope it helped you out, telling me that. I really do hope that, but could you get out of my car? Or else you’re going to end up at City Hall, because that’s where I’m going.”

  The fluttering of wings again. A soft voice singing somewhere far above them.

  Erika shrugged.

  “Actually, I could use a ride. Do you mind?”

  “Do you have gas money?” Jackie wadded up the piece of paper in her left hand and threw it into Erika’s chest. It bounced to the window and then back down into Erika’s lap.

  “I am afraid of this piece of paper,” said Erika.

  “KING CITY,” said the paper.

  “Even angels are afraid,” said Jackie. Erika stared blankly into a blank lap. Several listening antennas on nearby rooftops swung around to point at the car. A small blinking light on the dashboard repeated the warning

  ANGEL ACKNOWLEDGED.

  Jackie pushed the reset button to turn it off.

  “Sorry, I meant even you are afraid,” she articulated loudly for the listening devices. “Seriously, do you have gas money?”

  “There was a time where I was extremely wealthy. One of the most wealthy people. But angels don’t use money, as they keep telling me over and over.” Erika folded their hands in their lap.

  “Figures. All right, Erika, let’s go.”

  She started the car, somehow, even though nothing about the engine should have started. “Rocks. This is just a bag of rocks,” her mechanic had muttered during her last scheduled maintenance, tears running down his face.

  As she pulled the car out, Erika pointed into the desert.

  “Behold.”

  Out amidst the spectrum of sunset, the giant glass building had returned. There were others with it, a multitude of glass specters, and bubbles of light with a source that did not seem to be the rapidly departing sun. The voices of a crowd chanting something just on the edge of intelligible came with it.

  “So?” said Jackie, continuing to navigate out of the parking lot. “Sometimes in my mirror I see brief flashes of a faceless old woman. These things happen.”

  “Not these things,” said Erika. “This is all wrong. We are worried about Old Woman Josie. We are worried for her. I am terrified. I am terrified.” A few of their long hands were rubbing together.

  “I’m sure there’s nothing to be terrified of about visions in the desert. It’s just our eyes lying to us. Every part of our bodies lies to us constantly. Didn’t you ever take a health class in elementary school?” Jackie said.

  Erika turned in their seat to keep whatever they passed as eyes on the spot in the desert where the lights had been until the desert was no longer visible. They turned back.

  There was a comfortable quiet between Erika and Jackie, only breaths and breeze and faint traffic.

  After a few moments of this, Jackie asked, “So, seriously, man, no gas money?”

  “All right, I think I have maybe ten bucks,” said the angel.

  15

  “What are you looking for?” Dawn asked to the back of Diane’s head.

  Diane stopped. She had felt fine a second ago, but now a sharpness of nerves hit her chest. She knew how this looked, crouched low, lifting up the trash can in the custodial closet near the office elevator.

  “I lost something last week, a slip of paper.”

  “They’d have already taken last week’s trash.”

  “I know. I just thought maybe it had fallen out. Loose paper. Never mind.” Diane stood.

  She was significantly taller than Dawn. At least five inches taller. Diane did not see herself as taller.

  “What did you lose? Maybe I can help.”

  Diane hadn’t exactly avoided Dawn since their conversation at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, but she had allowed the natural processes of work to wear away any bridge that might have been formed between them. She was okay with distance. She was okay with being a stranger. And thinking about that day at the diner brought back the nausea; the egg on Dawn’s lip, the two realities in Dawn’s stories, and the blood dripping from Laura’s branches. Dawn’s face made her dizzy with memory.

  “No, it’s fine. It’s fine. It was a small piece of paper.”

  “Like a receipt?”

  “Yeah, but with handwriting, I think.”

  “So a note?”

  “Yeah, a note.”

  “What did the note say?”

  Diane was unintentionally not breathing. When she noticed, she started breathing again.

  “It’s fine. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “KING CITY,” Diane said without knowing how she knew to say it.

  “King City.”

  “I think it said ‘KING CITY,’ in pencil, all caps.”

  “That’s all it said?”

  “Yes. It just said ‘KING CITY.’”

  Dawn stared at her, and Diane didn’t know what else to say.

  “I don’t know how to help you, Diane,” Dawn said, a perfect mix of confused and disappointed, and went back to her desk.

  Diane stayed at work, not working on work, as everyone else left—Dawn, Catharine, the men (all named Sh
awn) who worked in sales, Piotr, Celia, Maya, Martellus, Ricardo, and Tina.

  Once everyone was gone, she logged on to Tina’s computer (as something of a party trick, she was excellent at guessing passwords based on a person’s personality, and had long ago correctly guessed that Tina’s password was “WhoAmIReally” followed by nineteen question marks), and looked up the office phone records.

  She glanced up every few moments, to make sure no one was coming back for a forgotten jacket, or to use the Bloodstone Circle at the office so they didn’t have to wait until home to use one. But the office was silent. She felt the silence more than heard it. In her tension it had become tactile.

  There was no record of people who called in to the office, only outgoing calls, so that was no good. She then searched the payroll folders for all staff lists. Any sign of someone named . . .

  Diane could not remember who she was looking for.

  Evan. She was looking for Evan. Diane grabbed blank paper from Tina’s printer and wrote “EVAN” in pencil, all caps, and slid it into a new manila folder.

  A search of Tina’s computer came back with no Evans. It found some usage of “griEVANces” in a folder titled “HR” and several usages of “relEVANt” in Tina’s e-mail program. No “Evan.”

  Diane walked around the empty office again, to reassure herself that it was empty. She imagined being watched.

  At Dawn’s computer (password “A11isL0ss”), Diane opened the web browser and typed in the address of every phone provider she could think of. Two letters into her third guess, the browser autofilled the address of a log-in screen. When she hit enter, the browser had already filled in a user name and password.

  Diane logged into Dawn’s phone account as Dawn.

  She looked up recent call history and found the four dates Dawn was gone but no record of her calling the office.

  Of course, this did not mean Dawn did not have another phone at home. Diane tried looking up more phone and cable providers. There were no other autofills.

  Outside Catharine’s office, Diane gripped the doorknob, but it did not turn. She stared at the brushed-nickel knob.

  She was not at all the type of person to break into her boss’s office. Or rather, as it turned out, she was that type of person, but she had never considered herself that type of person. The type to do anything that anyone might consider wrong or that anyone might report to a local government agency or amateur surveillance club. She was responsible and quiet, she thought, as she quietly started on the responsibility of getting through the door.

  She first imagined the old trick from television where a detective pops a lock with a credit card. Then she imagined having the power to walk through walls and, by extension, doors.

  Then she imagined being a professional locksmith, with a small backpack full of short wires that she would shove carefully into a standard lock, grease smudges on her knuckles and face, a cold, concentrated look in her eye and a plastic-handled screwdriver hanging by its flat-headed tip from her teeth.

  Then Diane imagined that a custodian probably keeps keys.

  Inside the unlocked custodial closet, Diane found a metal cabinet. Inside the unlocked metal cabinet, Diane found a cluster of keys, a jangling rat-king on a yellow rubber coil.

  Outside Catharine’s office, Diane imagined that she would just know the right key, and it would be the first key.

  Diane imagined the same thing with the second key, and the third through thirteenth keys. As she did, she imagined being watched. She looked up after every key, but there was no one. The Bloodstone Circle hummed a familiar melody in the corner.

  On the thirteenth key, the knob turned. There was a moment, the door was open but unstepped-through, where Diane thought that she could still walk away and not become a person who had broken into anywhere in her life, but then she stepped forward and became that person forever. She shut the door, made sure the blinds were closed, and sat in the chair with wheels at Catharine’s desk.

  Catharine’s computer didn’t have a password. It just had the question “Are you Catharine?” with yes and no buttons. Diane clicked the yes button, and the desktop blinked up.

  She ran a search for the name Evan. She got similar results to what she’d gotten on Tina’s computer. She found no “Evan” as a name or former employee.

  She searched for e-mails related to Dawn to see if there was any mention of Dawn’s absence, any unusual notes.

  Diane imagined she was a hacker, not an actual master of programming languages and network security, but a hacker from a movie, wildly typing, every finger expertly leaping from key to key as a long string of important secrets streamed down the screen in old-fashioned computerized font, her eyes flicking left and right, taking in every number and letter and significant bit of information.

  She imagined finding more than nothing.

  She felt a light itch on the hand holding the mouse. In the mild glow of the computer screen was the tarantula, one leg up on her little finger. The tarantula paused as if it was hesitant to move farther into Diane’s physical space. She spasmed a bit out of shock, but then settled down when she was able to process it.

  She would not have minded it, as Josh often appeared as any variety of arachnid, so she had no fear of spiders or most insects. She found it sweet that the animal appeared to be so shy or considerate.

  In actuality, the tarantula saw large blocks of moving colors and shapes and sensed it had made contact with a creature much larger than itself. It felt great fear and was holding still out of the if-you-move-you-will-be-seen-and-if-you-are-seen-you-will-be-eaten instinct.

  Diane continued looking up previous agendas and minutes from staff meetings. The tarantula took her movement as a threatening advance and scuttled away into the dark of the office.

  Diane imagined finding great clues. She imagined film noir, dim but high-contrast light pressing through the blinds creating smoky, white slices across the pitch-black room. Diane imagined her face lit softly in blue by the computer monitor. She imagined not her own face but the face of a hardened detective wearing an archetypal hat.

  She imagined being watched. She heard a soft thump from over her shoulder. She felt a warning zing up the back of her neck. She was being watched.

  She did not turn her head. She did not move. She looked only with her eyes, pressed so far to the right it hurt her sinuses.

  There was a shadow against the blinds. The blinds were closed. There was a person just on the other side.

  The person was neither tall nor short. She did not know if the person could see her. They were not leaving.

  If you are seen you will be eaten, the tarantula thought without human vocabulary.

  Diane was unintentionally not breathing. When she noticed, she continued to hold her breath. Her hands stayed where they were.

  There was a rapid clicking. The doorknob rattled back and forth. She couldn’t remember if she had locked it. She was eventually going to have to breathe. The doorknob rattled.

  She breathed. Her breath sounded so loud. Was it always this loud?

  The computer flashed to a screen saver. She did not know if this change in light was visible through the blinds.

  Again the doorknob rattled. Then a knock. Another. Three hard taps on the door.

  There was nothing she could do. She stayed where she was. Did nothing. The shadow returned to the window and stayed for a long moment. She didn’t know how long the moment was. It felt endless to her, motionless in the chair.

  Then the shadow blurred as its source moved away from the window. Light began to come in around the blinds’ edges.

  She heard a muffled creaking, like wheels. Wheels on a cart. A custodial cart. The sound moved away down the hall.

  Diane imagined that custodians worked long hours, and would not be out of the office for some time. Hours maybe. She turned off the computer monitor and waited in Catharine’s office, quietly, alone, breathing.

  THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE

  CECIL
: . . . allergies to shellfish, dislike of shellfish, apathy to shellfish, philosophical disagreement with shellfish, or a general uncertainty about the whole concept of shellfish should let the event planners know when making their reservation.

  And now a word from our sponsors:

  We know that sometimes in life you find yourself with nothing to do but wait. Maybe you have hours to wait. Maybe you have hours to wait hiding in a darkened office until the custodian leaves so that you won’t be caught snooping through confidential files at work. There’s lots of reasons you could be waiting. It just happens to be that the reason you are waiting right now is that one. Yes, we know a lot about you.

  Wouldn’t this period of malfeasant waiting be better if you were able to use it, say, catching up on the latest episodes of your favorite TV shows? Think how less boring illegally breaking into your boss’s office would be if you were watching TV right now, Diane.

  We all thought better of you.

  Hulu Plus: Good for criminals.

  This has been a word from our sponsors.

  And now a word about librarians. We are all, from our youngest years, warned that the most dangerous, untrustworthy creature is that which stalks our public libraries. We all remember as children having this told to us by frazzled men in rumpled suits clutching ancient tomes to their chests.

  “Agggh!” they would say, pointing at a diagram that was just a square with the word LIBRARY written neatly in the middle of it.

  “Ouuugh!” they would continue, pointing at the clearest photograph ever taken of a librarian, which is a blurry and badly burnt Polaroid.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!” they would conclude, pointing at the first diagram again. It was always a very short presentation.

  Then the men would run from our classrooms, looking fearfully around and muttering, “There’s no time, just no time,” and never would be seen again.

  These warnings, as playfully conveyed as they were, are serious matters that should be applied to your grown-up, serious life. Librarians are hideous creatures of unimaginable power. And even if you could imagine their power, it would be illegal. It is absolutely illegal to even try to picture what such a being would be like.