Mostly Void, Partially Stars: Welcome to Night Vale Episodes, Volume 1

by Joseph Fink

  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.

  One day you were walking from the glass box of your office to your old Ford Probe and a vision came to you. You saw above you a planet of awesome size, lit by no sun. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. It was so far away, so desolate, and so impossibly, terrifyingly dark, and that day you did not go home. You drove instead. You drove a long time, and eventually you ended up in Night Vale and you stopped driving.

  You have been haunted, ever since, by how easy it was to walk away from your life, how few the repercussions were. You never heard from your fiancée or your job again. They never looked for you, which doesn’t seem likely, or maybe it’s that in Night Vale you cannot be found. The complete freedom, the lack of consequence, it terrifies you.

  You have a new job now. Every day except Sunday you drive out into the sand wastes, and there you find two trucks. You move wooden crates from one truck to the other while a man in a suit silently watches. It is a different man each time. Sometimes the crates tick. Mostly they do not. When you are done, the man in the suit hands you an amount of cash, also different each time, and you go home. It is the best job you’ve ever had.

  Except today it was different. You moved the crates. The man in the suit, a stranger, watched. But then, as had never happened before, the man in the suit received a phone call. He walked off at some distance to take it. “Yes sir,” he said. And “No sir.” Also he made hawk-shrieking sounds. It wasn’t terribly interesting. You moved crates. But then an impulse, an awful impulse, came over you. And for no other reason than that you are trapped by the freedom to do anything in this life, you took one of the crates and put it in your trunk. By the time the man came back from his phone call, you were done with your job. He gave you the money. It was nearly $500 today, the second highest it had ever been. And you drove home, with the crate in your trunk.

  When you got home, you took the crate into your trailer and left it in the kitchen. The crate did not make a ticking sound. It made no sound at all. Nothing made a sound, except you, breathing in and breathing out. You cooked dinner. You always cook dinner. The red light on the radio tower blinked on and off in your peripheral vision, a message that was there and then wasn’t, and that you could never quite read. You wondered how long it would take them to miss the crate. You did not wonder who “they” were. Some mysteries aren’t questions to be answered but just a kind of opaque fact, a thing which exists to be not known.

  Which brings us to now, to this story. This story about you. You are listening to the radio. The announcer is talking about you. And then you hear something else, a guttural howl out of the desert distance, and you know that the crate’s absence has been discovered.

  The crate, well it sits, that’s all, on the kitchen floor, that’s all. It’s warm, warmer than the air around it. It smells sharp and earthy, like freshly ground cinnamon. And when you put your ear against the rough, warm wood, you hear a soft humming, an indistinct melody. It does not appear to be difficult to open. All you would need to do is remove a few nails. You do not open it. You decide, instead, to go to the Moonlite All-Nite Diner and have a slice of pie.

  The wind is hot, like always, and smells like honey and mud. Night is your favorite time. Daylight brings only a chain of visual sensations, none of which cohere into meaning for you anymore. Life has become out of focus, free of consequence. As you drive, you turn off the headlights for a moment. In that moment, you feel again above you, not even far away now, that planet of awesome size, lit by no sun. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. You see nothing but the faint moonlight on your dashboard, but you know the planet is out there, yawning in the unseen spaces. The moment passes. You turn your headlights back on and all you see is a road, just asphalt, just that, and you pass a man waving semaphore flags, indicating that the speed limit for this stretch is forty-five.

  The Moonlite All-Nite is radiant green, a slab of mint light in the warm darkness. You squint when you see it, like it hurts your eyes, but it does not hurt your eyes. You park near the front door. A man rolls by on the ground, his eyes bleary and sightless, whispering the word “MudWomb” over and over, but you don’t have the money to tip him, so you go inside. You order a slice of strawberry pie, and the waitress indicates, through words and movements, that it will be brought to you presently. The radio speaks soothingly to you from staticky speakers set into a foam tile ceiling. It is telling a story about you, your story, at last.

  A man slides into the booth across from you. You recognize him vaguely, although he looks considerably different now. It is that man who appeared to be of Slavic origin but who dressed in an absurd caricature of an Indian chief and called himself the Apache Tracker. Except now, it’s difficult for you to miss, he has actually transformed into a Native American. You wonder if the pie will get there soon. The Apache Tracker smells of potting soil and sweat. He leans across the table and touches your hand lightly. You do not pull the hand away, because you know that there will be no consequence for any of this.

  “Вы находитесь в опасности,” he says. “Они идут.”

  You nod. He taps the table, then, bringing his thick eyebrows together and pursing his lips, he leans down and taps the ground. You nod again.

  “I think my pie is here now,” you say, unnecessarily, as the pie is quite visibly placed in front of you. You did not order invisible pie. You hate invisible pie.

  He looks at the pie for a long time then lets his breath hiss out slowly through his nose.

  “Они придут снизу. Пирог не поможет.” He leaves. What an asshole that guy is.

  You finish the pie and ask for the check.

  “Check, please,” you say, whispering it into your drinking glass as is custom, and then lifting the tray of sugar packets to find it, filled out and ready to be paid. You drop a few dollars onto the check, place it back under the sugars, wait for the sound of swallowing, and leave the diner. The waitress nods as you leave, but not at you. She nods slowly and rhythmically to music only she can hear, her eyes riding the curved line of neon lights above the menu.

  As you start the car, the man on the radio says something about the weather.

  WEATHER: “You Don’t Know” by Mount Moon

  The crate is in your kitchen, where you left it, and you get down on your knees to embrace it more fully. It has grown warmer, even hot. It still is not ticking.

  It had taken you no time to get back home. Now that you think about it, were there any other cars on the road? Where did all the cars go? The man with the semaphore flags, explaining the speed limit, he wasn’t there either. Your heart pounds.

  Without allowing another stray thought to wander through your mind and delay you, you grab the crate and throw it in your trunk. You turn the ignition, and your car radio comes alive with a pop just as the announcer says that your car radio comes alive with a pop.

  Where to now? You don’t know, but you go there anyway, a pair of headlights, a pair of eyes, and two shaky hands speeding through the silent town. Behind you, you see helicopter searchlights sweeping down onto your trailer. There are sirens. A purplish cloud hangs over the town, glittering occasionally as it rotates. The whole works.

  You drive past the Moonlite All-Nite, still aglow and full of people slowly eating what sounds good only late at night, and Teddy Williams’s Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, which has taken to not only locking, but barricading its doors at closing time. You pass by city hall, which, as always, is completely shrouded after dark in black velvet. Moving farther out, following the pull of the distant, uncertain moon, you pass by the car lot, where the salesmen have been put away for the night, and Old Woman Josie’s house, where the only sign that the unassuming little home could be a place of resi
dence for angels is the bright halo of heavenly light surrounding it, and the sign out front that says ANGELS’ RESIDENCE. Then the town is behind you, and you are out in the scrublands and the sand wastes. By the road you see a man holding a cactus in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. He shakes both at you as you pass and howls.

  And then you are alone. Just you and the desert. You stop the car and get out. Pebbles crunch in the sand in response to your movement. The radio murmurs behind the closed door of the car. The headlights illuminate only a few stray plants and the wide dumb eyes of some nocturnal animal. Looking back, you see the bulge of light that is your Night Vale.

  The purple cloud, now floating over the heart of the city, reaches its tendrils in and out of buildings. You hear screams and gunfire. You open the trunk and lay one hand on the crate. It pulses with some kind of life. Still no ticking, though. You look back. Several buildings are on fire. Crowds of people are floating in the air, held aloft by beams of light, and struggling feebly against power they cannot begin to understand. The ground shifts, like it was startled.

  It’s so quiet when it finally comes. You see the black car long before it arrives. It comes to a halt nearby, and two men step out. You don’t run. Neither do they.

  “How did you find me?” you ask.

  “Everything you do is being broadcast on the radio for some reason. That made it pretty easy,” says one of the men, the one that isn’t tall.

  “Yeah,” you say, “I see that now.”

  “You have the item?” the man who is not tall asks. You say nothing. The man who is not tall signals the man who is not short, and he walks past you, looks into the trunk, and nods.

  “Even easier,” says the man who is not tall.

  There is an unexpected click. One of the rear doors of the black car has opened, and your fiancée has stepped out. Her eyes are wet like they were the night you left. She does not appear to have aged, but then you can’t actually remember how long it has been. Could it have been last week? Or was it ten years ago?

  “Why?” she says. “Why? Why?”

  You don’t know what to say.

  The man who is not short steps up to you, puts a knife against your throat. Nobody says anything. Your fiancée shakes her head. Her eyes are empty, broken, gushing. The radio is saying all of this as it happens. You hear it dimly through the car door. You can’t stop smiling.

  All at once, the consequences. All at once, you are no longer free. It’s all coming back around, all at once. Life, bleary, washed out, snaps back into focus. The red light on the radio tower still blinks in the distance and every message in this world has a meaning. It all makes sense and you are finally being punished. You can’t think of a time you have ever been happier.

  Your fiancée abruptly gets back into the car. Neither of the men seems to notice her. One opens the crate with a couple of quick taps and pulls out of it an intricate miniature house. The hours that must have been spent building it, every detail is accounted for. Inside the house, you think you see for a moment lights and movement.

  “Undamaged,” says the man who is not tall.

  You beam at him. The knife presses harder against your throat, but it doesn’t hurt. Your eyes wander up, and you see above you the dark planet of awesome size, perched in its sunless void. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep, turbulent oceans. A monster spinning soundless, forgotten. It’s so close now. You see it just above you. Maybe, even, if you tried very hard, you could touch it. You reach up.

  This has been your story. The radio moves on to other things. News. Traffic. Political opinions, and corrections to political opinions. But there was time, one day, one single day, in which it was only one story, a story about you. And you were pleased, because you always wanted to hear about yourself on the radio.

  Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.

  PROVERB: I’d never join a PEN15 club that would allow a person like me to become a member.

  EPISODE 14:

  “THE MAN IN THE TAN JACKET”

  JANUARY 1, 2013

  IN 2004 I WAS AT A TEACHER’S CONFERENCE IN NEW ORLEANS AND I drove up one night to Jackson, Mississippi, to have dinner with an old friend of mine. I drove back to my New Orleans hotel late that night.

  The highways around the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Mississippi are mostly elevated above swampland. Low concrete bridges contained by guardrails and green marsh. At night you can feel how isolated you are on those miles-long passages without exits or direct access to real land.

  Around one or two in the morning as I had crossed into Louisiana, the only car on the road, I could see an orange light up ahead, more powerful than the dull street lamps arching over my path. It was bright, shimmering. I could see it was on the road itself.

  It became clear as I approached, slowing down to less than thirty mph trying to understand what was happening and see if anyone was in danger. On the narrow shoulder was a sedan (in my memory it was an early ’80s Chevy Malibu, but who knows?) completely engulfed in flames. I took my flip phone out and dialed 911.

  As I passed the fiery vehicle, about one hundred feet up the road, leaning against the guardrail, was a man half-shadowed by the blaze. He was smoking a cigarette and appeared completely relaxed.

  I told the operator my mile marker and what I saw and then hung up and carried on with the rest of my weekend and teacher’s conference.

  Nearly a decade later, that image still haunted me. Like, did he set the fire? What level of sinister was that man? Or perhaps it was an engine fire on an old car, and he just happened to have great auto coverage and a fresh pack of 100s.

  It only took fourteen episodes to put this mystery into Night Vale. I gave him a tan jacket and a forgettable name and face. Also a refrigerator for some reason. I mean listen, not everything needs to make sense all the time.

  —Jeffrey Cranor

  Look to the obelisk. We don’t know where it came from, but it’s attracting a lot of cats.

  WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

  Happy New Year Night Vale! Last night’s fireworks extravaganza at the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area was beautiful. This is despite the fact that the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area never really existed, and was in no way a multimillion-dollar failure of municipal planning. And just because the only things remaining on the premises are several large piles of rubble and a red sign reading NOTHING IS HERE. NOTHING WAS EVER HERE does not mean that they failed to correctly use tax dollars to build a harbor, a waterfront, or a recreation area.

  Anyway, the fireworks over the city-made sign were lovely. Happy 2013.

  Ladies and gentlemen, surely you have noticed: there’s a man in a tan jacket. Countless residents have seen him, but no one can seem to remember exactly what he looks like. Just that he has a tan jacket and a deerskin suitcase. And he has been spotted all over town. But no one can quite recall specifically where they saw him or what time of day it was, just that they saw him.

  Frances Donaldson, the tall woman with the green eyes who manages the antiques mall, thinks maybe the man in the tan jacket is simply a shared dream, but I know I saw him, Night Vale. I know what I saw. This man couldn’t possibly be a dream, he was so vivid. His eyes were . . . Well, his nose and chin . . . Oh, I can just see. I just can’t remember. The man was clear as day. He had a tan jacket and a deerskin suitcase. He can’t be a dream, can he? Please call in, listeners, and let us know if you can remember anything else.

  This Monday through Friday is the annual Night Vale Career Fair at the downtown convention center. There will be dozens of booths representing phony local businesses that will take your résumés and photos (via hidden surveillance cameras) and conduct sample interviews designed to badger you into implicating yourself in nefarious activities.

  First-generation Night Vale residents (particularly those whose parents were originally born in Maine, Massachusetts, Canada, Micronesia, and Suriname) are strongly encouraged
to attend.

  This year’s keynote speaker is an audio tape of droning moans laden with subliminal tips about achieving personal prosperity and how to come clean about the terrible things you have done, you cretin.

  Last year’s fair featured several very high-profile arrests and exciting door prizes. Tickets are twenty-five dollars, or fifteen if you still have working retinas to scan.

  Over the weekend, Teddy Williams, owner of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, sent us some security camera footage of what he believes to be the first ever glimpse of citizens of the underground city deep below lane five.

  Early Saturday morning, Fun Complex cameras picked up blurry motion near the soda machine. The footage is quite fuzzy and difficult to discern. Perhaps it is merely rats or raccoons digging through an uncovered supply of junk food, but it is, of course, much more likely that a lost nation of people living in the bowels of a small-town bowling alley are finally revealing themselves, taking our food supplies, and preparing for war.

  Teddy told us that he believes this city to be thousands strong and ready to move into Night Vale, ready to take arms against the “Upper World,” as they probably call us, ready to conquer this heaven and become the righteous owners of our sun-soaked precious land, we assume! It takes very little extrapolation to believe that they worship a god named Huntokar who demands sacrifice to keep their underground city thriving in the absence of nourishing sunlight, and a fair assumption is that they are ruled by a child king, recently coronated, who is too weak to rein back the generals intent on marching upon us in war.

  Ladies and gentlemen, if you care for your community, your town, your Night Vale—like I do—you will arm yourselves. You will rally your neighbors to militia. You will point fingers at those who do not wish to fight and have them rounded up into pens. This is no time for the weak. We are at a presumptive war with a projected enemy whom we cannot yet see or even be certain of, but who are probably bloodthirsty giants.