by Joseph Fink
SPOKESPERSON: [nods] Doesn’t sound like something I’d do. All right citizens, we’re out of here. Hope it all works out okay. Just write any messages you have for us on paper planes, and throw them at that one low hanging cloud that has windows and a ladder going up to it, and someone from the Secret Police will come to your aid as soon as there are no murderers around and it is safe to do so.
CECIL: Hey, wait . . .
SPOKESPERSON: No need to thank me, Cecil. But obviously I would appreciate it. It’s always nice to be thanked.
CECIL: I’m not going to thank you.
SPOKESPERSON: I’ll just give you like a moment more in case you change your mind. A thank-you would be nice. Okay, no, I get it, no need to thank me if you’re a jerk. Good-bye.
CECIL: Sensing that they would not be safe relying on the protection of others, the citizens in the Rec Center were getting nervous. They were shifting. Some of them were shifty. One of them was a murderer but we don’t know which one.
And so the citizens began to act in their own protection. They each looked back to the same stranger they had suspected before, each of them looking at the same person, except for those who had refused to look at someone before and so now found themselves partnerless. Those people took this opportunity to jump on board by looking around until they found a similarly reluctant stranger, and then those people became paired strangers and everyone had a stranger and everyone was looking at that stranger. Great.
And these two strangers were pointing at each other again. And, in their deepest, coolest voice, they said, “I don’t trust you.” They tried, successfully or not, to raise one eyebrow. And then they said, “But we’re in danger, kid.” If they were going to solve this, they would need to work together. They would need to solve this as partners. But they didn’t have to trust or like each other. No way.
In fact one of them was already holding up a fist and the other one was pointing a finger at the ceiling, and immediately they did not know which of them should be doing which since the description was not clear on that issue. And just as they wordlessly had settled that, it turned out that one of them was shaking their head while the other was nodding and again there was confusion between them about who was doing which. See how much their personalities clashed. See how uneasy their working relationship. What a comically odd pairing, what an unexpected duo. They were a classic trope, those two.
But there was a murder to solve, and so they would reluctantly partner up all the same. Then they looked away from each other once again. Watch out murderer, these two are on the case.
Also on the case are some middle schoolers as is standard these days when Night Vale is in danger. Yes, a brave group of child vigilantes and avid readers, led by Tamika Flynn, a courageous fourteen-year-old, and one of the few children to face down a librarian during the Summer Reading Program and survive.
Tamika’s army donned capes and bulletproof vests made from copies of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, keeping them safe from any murderer. And keeping any murderer very unsafe from them.
They did not trust the Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre to solve this case. “We must be ever vigilant, Night Vale,” Tamika shouted from atop the ancient Pepsi machine at the Rec Center. “This murderer will keep on murdering until there isn’t anyone left to murder and then they won’t be a murderer anymore. Actually, that would solve the problem. Huh,” Tamika considered aloud but then raised her fist anyway to bloodthirsty shouts from her followers.
I have to agree with Tamika. I’m a bit disappointed that the Sheriff’s Secret Police is staging a traditional “audience members staring at each other suspiciously and then deciding to solve the case on their own” stuff that we all know from every Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre we’ve ever been to. It’d be nice if they were putting on one of those great mystery tales from the masters of the craft, full of intrigue and plot twists and long lost twin brothers and fake mustaches, like The Fault in Our Stars or The Time Traveler’s Wife or James Joyce’s classic spy caper Araby.
I mean, I just love the helicopter chase at the end of The Time Traveler’s Wife. And that awesome line she says right before she arrests the main bad guy, “This one’s for my husband. He’s a time traveler.” It’s classic!
In any case, Tamika concluded her rallying speech. “What chance does one murderer stand against the power of books,” she cried out to her adoring, vengeance-minded supporters. “Heavy books,” she shouted. “Heavy, heavy books dropped on their head. I’m going to drop so many books on this criminal’s head as soon as we catch them,” she added.
“Dump them right on there. Bam. Bunch of books,” and the crowd cheered mightily.
So while the Secret Police get bogged down in the bureaucracy of standard police procedure, this highly motivated and heavily armed group of teenagers are crushing evil under complete hardback editions of all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s monumental novel Ramona Quimby, Age 8.
Truly the American Justice System is the greatest in the world.
Oh dear, listeners. We’re getting word that there has been a nearly fatal incident back at the Rec Center. And many suspect that this was no mere accident. The fifteen-gallon tub full of old socket wrenches that was balanced precariously atop a few two-by-six planks next to the Rec Center basketball courts fell over, nearly crushing the pair of strangers who recently came begrudgingly together to help solve a terrible murder.
The two strangers had been getting in each other’s way, challenging each other’s authority. Thinking things like, “You are getting in my way, buddy” and “Nuh-uh. You are,” and displaying their hurt feelings using the shapes of their mouths, worried that at any moment—in fact, in just a few moments—they might have to look the other in the eye and say words out loud again.
And all along, above them, the tub full of wrenches teetered. Eye contact can be uncomfortable, yes, but way less uncomfortable than the weight of heavy metal objects falling upon thin human skulls. The tub teetered. The narrow planks beneath it groaned. Groaned, and then gave. A snap. The strangers winced, both of them. Because the socket wrenches began their fall, a heavy scattering toward the pair’s unprotected heads.
The partners stopped wincing, and they looked at each other and simultaneously shouted, “DUCK!” And they were right. A duck had flown in through a nearby window and knocked the tub of wrenches harmlessly out of the way.
They nodded while smiling. They said, “You have duck telepathy too?” Then they laughed together. It was a completely natural, unforced laugh. A long, healthy, true laugh. And then they turned away from each other, back to the job of solving crimes. But each of them thought, “I’m starting to have a begrudging respect for your skills, kid.”
Sadly, that tub full of wrenches had been teetering twelve feet off the ground on those thin pine boards since the Rec Center was built five years ago, so it’s a real shame to lose this important architectural feature of a historic building.
CECIL: Listeners, I can see a slight movement in my periphery. I can feel a gentle, chilly touch along my neck. Also, my coffee mug has moved from where it was. Just a moment ago my mug was next to my left hand, and now it is upside down, on my right side, and crawling away on spiny white legs.
FACELESS OLD WOMAN: Hello, Cecil. It’s me. It’s the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home.
CECIL: I thought that was you. You know, it’s really hard having these conversations when I can’t ever quite see you.
FOW: Cecil, there’s a murderer on the loose, and everyone’s going to die.
CECIL: I doubt the murderer is going to kill everyone.
FOW: Oh, no. Sorry for the confusion. Those were two separate thoughts. One, there’s a murderer on the loose. Period. End of thought. Next, everyone’s going to die. End of second thought.
CECIL: Oh, that’s a relief. Hey, so you secretly live in every person’s home? Right, Faceless Old Woman? You must know who the murderer is!
FOW: Oh, I absolutely know
who the murderer is.
CECIL: Great! You can help us track down and find this criminal.
FOW: Sure, I’ll tell you what I know. The murderer has eaten hundreds of flies in their sleep. The murderer has several shirts with buttons, but I have removed some of those buttons with an old knife I found in Pamela Winchell’s mailbox. The murderer sometimes stares at birds. Sometimes the birds stare back. Bird-watching goes both ways. Did you know birds talk? Not through something so manipulative and corroded by history as words and sentences, but though the clear, clean language of hunger and horror and boredom and rote reproductive desires. A chattering of starlings told me once, and I quote, “Tree.” Then they said, “We’re in a tree.” They repeated that over and over, and it was the most interesting story I had ever heard.
CECIL: Do the birds know who the murderer is?
FOW: I was in Tristan Cortez’s house the other night, and he couldn’t find his remote. He just kept shouting, “STOP IT, YOU’RE THE WORST,” at his television.
CECIL: Faceless Old Woman, it would be superhelpful if we could learn—
FOW: And I started to feel sad for him because it was that Property Brothers episode where they keep taking out walls while lecturing the home buyers on the importance of an open floor concept. They remove every single interior wall, and then the outer walls of the home, and then the surrounding trees and vehicles and other homes and adjacent buildings until everything is gone and all is void. And the closing credits of the episode are just jumbles of letters drifting aimlessly on screen to the whispers of “open floor concept, open floor concept.”
CECIL: But—
FOW: They really jumped the shark with that episode. So out of pity, I revealed to Tristan where I hid his remote.
CECIL: Faceless Old Woman—
FOW: It was just behind his right eye. It took him a while to get it out but he finally did it because I gave him Pamela’s old knife. And now his remote is all sticky, and also he has to get a new rug and couch.
CECIL: So Tristan is the murderer? I’m confused.
FOW: We’re all murderers, Cecil. Where do you think meat comes from?
CECIL: Well, meat comes—
FOW: It sure doesn’t come from animals.
[pause]
CECIL: Wait. Where does our meat come from?
FOW: I didn’t finish my story. In conclusion, I know who the murderer is. Everything will be fine. I’ll keep a close watch on the situation. I won’t stop anything from happening, but I will watch it happen closely.
CECIL: Faceless Old Wom—— And she’s gone.
An update on last week’s power outages. The Night Vale Electric Utility announced today that there may be more power outages in coming weeks, this time due to sadness.
“We’ve been sad this week,” said the utility company. They continued, “Not for any reason. Sometimes we get sad. Why do we need a reason? Last week we were feeling vengeful, so thus power outages. This week, we’re sad, and we’re going to continue expressing ourselves through the medium of power outages.”
Power outages, of course, were certified by the Supreme Court as a protected form of free speech in the 1973 case of Hayworth Electrical Company versus the Hayworth Hospital. The court stated that reasonable causes for a power outage include: celebration of a special someone’s birthday; expression of undirected anger at an intransigent political system; and periods of just feeling sad for no reason.
The Night Vale Electric Utility also reminds you that power outages are no excuse not to pay your electric bill.
Electricity, after all, is a privilege, not a right. Failure to pay electric bills may result in localized lighting storms, shrouded figures standing silently in the background of familiar TV shows, and gout.
The Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre is still in full swing, but frankly, give or take a falling tub of socket wrenches, there seems to be not much of a murder mystery left to solve. The murderer hasn’t murdered anyone in a while. I mean, sure, a bunch of murders happened today, but those were several minutes ago, maybe even a whole hour, and it just feels like, I don’t know, why go digging through old dirt?
Plus I’m not sure we could even charge anyone with those crimes. I mean the Statue of Limitations . . . you know, that statue of our own limitations we carved last year, et cetera. Et cetera. It just feels like we might be done here.
Sorry to disappoint anyone who was looking for the whole mystery side of things to be res—— What was that?
I heard a noise. I heard a noise beyond my own voice and the small nest of owls kept in the corner like in any normal radio studio. But there shouldn’t be anyone here. Everyone has to be at the Rec Center. It’s the law. No one breaks the law. No one except . . . oh no . . . lawbreakers.
Listeners, I think the murderer might be in the studio with me. They have taken advantage of the fact that all citizens are at the Rec Center to creep over to the radio station, where I am all alone.
I see movement in the dim of the control booth. Hello? Are you here to feed the owls? No answer. Carlos? Could that be you? Nothing. Just my breath in and out.
Even as all of you are hearing my voice right now, I am alone. Or worse, I am not.
Is that a footstep behind me? Yes. There is a footstep behind me and another and another. It is a person walking toward me. I dare not turn my head. I cannot move. The murderer is here for me. A shadow across my desk. The shadow reaches for me. The murderer is here, and I am narrating my own demise. There is only one thing to do. I must act quickly. I must take you to the weather.
WEATHER: “Maker of My Sorrow” by Eliza Rickman
Hello, Night Vale. It is a relief to say those words aloud, alive, to you once again.
Just after introducing the weather, I felt movement. I heard footsteps. I saw my life flash before my eyes and its imminent ending made them water.
And then, the murderer attacked. I tried to scream, but managed only faint gargles to no one, except one person. The person least likely to provide me aid.
Fortunately, I had the copy of Lois Lowry’s novel The Giver, which Tamika Flynn had loaned to me recently. It was the limited edition that comes without cover or pages or words and is made entirely of wood and metal and is in the shape of a hammer. It’s a hammer. Tamika loaned me a hammer earlier.
Unfortunately, the hammer was just out of my reach. I stretched out a hand, struggling, heaving, grasping for that classic of contemporary children’s fiction so I could crack the head of my attacker.
And that is when I heard a noise. I thought it was my death rattle, or perhaps my death chime, or the even rarer death trombone. But it was a shout. Two shouts. Two people.
I felt warmth. I felt air gasp into my chest. I felt the hands upon me loosen. And I saw the two people who had saved me, and then they brought me here to the Rec Center. Here now with you.
Not just all of you. Specifically you.
[points]
You, the murderer. Yes, you’re the murderer, stand up.
Everyone in the crowd, all of you citizens, gasped and pointed at the murderer. The crowd all shook their heads, not in anger, but disappointment.
And I asked the murderer, “Why?”
And the murderer said an answer . . . but their answer was ultimately meaningless against the gravity of their actions, and anyway I talked over it.
We all knew that the murderer must be punished the way all murderers are punished in Night Vale. The punishment was coming. Here it came. The crowd, oh I couldn’t watch, the punishment was so severe, the crowd said to the murderer, in unison, “Please do not ever murder again.”
And the murderer shrugged their shoulders and said, “Sure.”
And they applauded the former criminal for reforming their evil ways. They wildly applauded this newly formed good citizen. And the new nonmurderer sat back down happy to know that everything was okay. And the rest of Night Vale let the tension relax from their shoulders, secure in the knowledge that this person would definitel
y never murder again.
But of course, I had not forgotten the two strangers, those two heroes, that odd couple, that unlikely duo. Those two that had saved my life at the radio station. They knew they had overcome their distrustful start, their discordant partnership, and had learned to lean on each other.
While all of Night Vale sat huddled in the Rec Center, shivering and hiding and dreading murderers and actors and live theater, these two put their seemingly incompatible minds to work.
One of them had noticed the murders had stopped and realized that the murderer had left to find others to murder. But who was left to murder in town? The other one realized it must be Cecil. For Cecil was by himself at the radio station. He alone was alone. And they both, without even having to exchange a word, with only a knowing glance, rushed to the radio station and saved my life.
These two—once strangers, now not—looked at each other one last time. The case was solved. The danger was over. No one else would die this day. Or if they did, it would be because their body simply stopped, just had an error and toppled over, not because of something as mundane as murder.
I want to reemphasize here that the strangers were looking at each other, unwavering in their eye contact. They had been through so much, and had seen each other through all of it. What luck they had in picking a counterpart so competent and trustworthy, so completely not a murderer. They winked at each other. Big winks. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe, for just one moment, they didn’t follow any instructions at all, and they just looked at each other as one human being looks at another, just themselves, with whatever face they had, with whatever feelings, with whatever moment is this moment, no expectations. Just their honest selves, for better or worse.
And then they smiled and gave a thumbs up. Bigger smiles. Bigger. More teeth. An unnatural amount of teeth. They looked back at the stage, still smiling.
Because these two, you two, had made it. They had done it. These ex-strangers. These friends. These great, these true, these investigators. You.
As Shakespeare’s famous detective character Veronica Mars once said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are frightened people blackmailed into acting upon it.”
