Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 42

Jackie could not remember the highway exactly, but she knew she was in a car, and that car must have come from somewhere. She cast a rearward glance. Empty fields and low hills and the 101 freeway, a distant, growling ribbon with no obvious way to get from there to here.

“How did we get here?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Did we take a highway?”

“We took the highway. We used these.” Diane indicated the flamingos under their hands. Somewhere during the journey they had grasped each other’s hands after all.

A sign by the road said, KING CITY WELCOMES YOU across a drawing of two dolphins leaping in fat, blue arcs over a faded sketch of a factory. The wooden sign had grown pale with water damage and disrepair, so the factory building looked hidden in its own smog.

Below the factory was a banner that read MAYOR E… But the remaining letters had long ago lost their legibility. There was a very large crow standing just below the sign in the red desert dirt, but, as they drove slowly past, Jackie realized it wasn’t a large crow at all, but a very strange dog.

The dog (or perhaps it was a crow; it was tough to tell) stared at Jackie as they rolled by, mouth agape, displaying small, sharp teeth and a thin, red tongue.

“Guess it worked,” Diane said, smiling, but not feeling any joy.

“Yes,” Jackie said, cringing, but not feeling any fear.

There were few cars on the road as they entered what seemed to be the business district. The cars that were there were taupe, long, flat-hooded with short windshields, and they moved slowly, well below speed limits. No pedestrians were on the streets.

The dusk brought a sandy mist to the hot air, turning the sky ocher. There was a dull roar from above, as if a seashell had been placed directly atop the town.

Diane drove past the post office, which was a one-story stucco building with no front door, a splintered parapet wall with letters missing from its marquee, and a tree that had grown through the broken sidewalk and into one of the many shattered windows lining its front. There was no sign of movement inside.

The hum of the sky did not let up. It sounded like a low-flying jet in a never-ending holding pattern. Diane began to hear whispers in the noise, the way one sees patterns in clouds. The whispers were not words but had the rhythm of language, the tone was needy and desperate, but no matter how much she concentrated she couldn’t understand any of it. The whispers sounded like her own voice.

Diane felt both here and elsewhere. Like she was in the car with Jackie, but also entering addresses into a spreadsheet at work. She was sitting at her desk, clicking keyboard keys, with headphones in listening to soft rock. Diane felt two of herself. She had never looked at herself before, not like this. She did not recognize herself, but she understood who she was. Diane looked at her hand on the flamingos and felt her hand on her work desk.

Jackie’s good arm was out the window, the sandy air tickling her skin with hundreds of inconsequential stings, a tangible Morse code saying something meaningless. Jackie could almost hear the staccato pings of grains, the sound traveling through her skin into her body, bypassing her ears. She closed her eyes, partially to force rest on herself, partially to block out the deep amber of King City’s early evening.

Neither told the other what she felt.

Diane noticed a store with a charcoal canvas eave with bold silver sans-serif font reading VHS AND VHS AND VHS… She parked the car in front of the store. Neither of them knew exactly where to begin, but if Josh were here out of his own free will, he would certainly find his way to a store like this. He had the teenage attraction to petty bravery, like doing skateboard tricks and watching unmarked VHS tapes.

Jackie stuck a quarter in the parking meter, which was bent in the middle, like it was bowing. There was a hollow clink followed by a hiss. The meter hissed continuously. She circled it, trying to find the source of the noise, and realized it wasn’t coming from the meter but from a few feet to her right.

The hiss was coming from the very large crow, or the very strange dog. It had four legs, but stood on only one. It had sharp teeth and a sharp face.

The dog’s mouth (Jackie was going with very strange dog) was open, and it was hissing. It didn’t seem to need to stop for breath. She took a step backward, and its three unused legs unfurled from its thick barrel body. The legs dragged its body toward her, and then curled back into itself like landing gear. The hiss continued.

Jackie yelped and limped around the back of the Mercedes, grabbing Diane with her good hand. They crossed to the VHS store, Jackie turning to see the dog following them, disappearing and appearing like a figure in a badly constructed flip-book, a little closer each time she looked at it, still hissing, still staring.

Diane was alarmed by Jackie’s alarm as she was firmly pushed into the shop. The store was dark. It was unlocked and the lights were on, but the lights were dim and inconsistently placed, leaving pockets of deep shadow throughout.

There was no clerk’s counter at the front of the store. Only tall shelves full of loose tapes, some labeled and some not. Some shelves were densely packed to the point where tapes lay horizontally across the tops of the vertically pressed rows. Others were nearly empty save a couple of loose tapes scattered on their sides.

They walked down the best-lit aisle toward the back of the store. After several feet, the light grew dimmer, and their aisle grew dark. There were no side aisles to turn down, so they kept walking. Jackie, a teenager herself, couldn’t help but run her hand over the tapes on the shelves. Most had stickers with handwritten titles. She did not stop to browse the selection, but she was certain that some simply had rows of Xs instead of titles or descriptions.

The dog, or whatever it was, was not visible through the shop window, but Jackie could still hear the hissing coming from somewhere. She hurried them down the aisle. It was too dark at this point to see the dead end until they were right up on it. Diane extended her hand just before running into the shelf. She expected her hand to hit a wall of tapes but instead felt something damp and soft and cold. It gave way slightly to her touch. Her jaw tightened and she pulled her hand away. It was wet, and in the low light she could see her fingers were covered in what looked like soil.

As they headed back to where they had entered, there was the hissing again in front of them, source unseen in the distant light or, worse, unseen in the nearby dark. Diane walked behind Jackie, Jackie’s hand on her own shoulder, fingers intertwined with Diane’s. As they walked faster, the hissing grew louder. Ahead was a deep shadow in the aisle. Neither could see anything beyond it.

Jackie’s left arm pulsed. Her body hurt badly. Her legs wobbled, and her eyes felt tender and loose in her skull.

“Diane,” Jackie whispered. The hissing was only a few feet in front of them. She heard the soft click of claws on the floor. “Diane. Grab those tapes.”

“What?” Diane was alarmed by Jackie’s alarm. Jackie was grabbing tapes off the shelf near her waist, and so Diane did the same.

The sides of the tapes were all marked with strings of Xs or Js or Ps or Us. As she pitched them to the floor, she felt the same cold dampness as before. The tapes came apart in their hands, falling away into soft clumps of wet soil. A long beetle crawled out of one and tentatively made its way across the pile they were forming.

There was another soft click on the wood floor as they tore away enough tapes to reveal an open passage to another aisle. Bright light poured through. The hissing stopped.

In the dark quiet of the store, Diane felt the wet tapes pool around her ankles. Jackie felt her atoms letting go of one another. They both watched the shadow where the hiss had been.

“Jackie.” Diane’s eyes filled but did not flood. She placed her hand on Jackie’s back.

They stood, hand to back, teeth together, feet apart, faces parallel to an unknown unseen. They waited for an attack. A tear came loose and trailed down Diane’s cheek. They waited.

A scream came from the shadow ahead of them, a scream like that of a terrified child.

Jackie crouched and dove through the hole in the shelves. Diane stayed, staring, streaks down her face as her mouth loosed itself open, silent, lip-synching the scream she was hearing. Her ears hurt. The scream burrowed into her head, splitting her brain, crawling down her throat, and coming to rest deep in her guts.

She felt a soft touch. Something was tapping lightly at her hand. It was wrapping around her little finger. She could not look. She wanted to follow Jackie, but she could not move. She was trying to scream, but could not find space for it in the continuing, sobbing scream from the shadow around her. The thing grabbed her hand tightly and pulled.

“Diane! Diane, please!”

Jackie, reaching through the hole in the shelf, was pulling on her hand. The moment broken, Diane crouched and crawled through the hole. The other side was bright, fluorescent lights and well-organized, clean shelves. She grabbed a stack of the tapes and used them to fill the hole they had come through. Jackie helped, and soon the hole was completely gone. The scream was muffled, but it continued.

They sat up, leaning against the opposite shelf. The scream stopped. There was no scream. No hiss. Jackie thought she still heard the quiet click of claws on the wood floor, but she couldn’t say for sure.

They exhaled, and then again, over and over until they were exhaling together, Jackie’s arm around Diane’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Diane said after however long, seconds or minutes, they had sat there breathing. “I’m sorry I froze. I’m sorry I brought you here when this is my problem.”

“No, man. I’m sorry I’m broken. I’m sorry I’m weighing you down.”

“Jackie, I know what that was.”

“Seriously?”

“When I was a child, I would, like all children, cry because childhood is traumatic and confusing. And when crying wasn’t enough? When I felt that despair children feel because they don’t understand and won’t be able to for years? Well, then I would scream. I would scream as loud and long as I could. That scream from the shadows was my voice. That was me screaming.”

“Diane, shh.” Jackie’s head rolled onto Diane’s shoulder. “Shh. Let’s just rest for a while.”

Jackie didn’t sleep, but she closed her eyes and wheezed through the pain. Diane looked at the way Jackie’s legs curled outward from the knee across the dusty floor, the way her right arm lolled loosely over her torso.

Diane felt herself standing in her kitchen at home, heating soup on the stove, listening to the radio. She could smell the vegetable broth. She could hear Cecil’s voice. She could feel the steam on her face. She could see herself. This was not a memory but a moment happening now. Lying with Jackie on the floor of a King City video store, she felt herself splitting, becoming multiple, and, in doing so, becoming less with each iteration.

She stood up. Jackie had rested enough. Diane helped her, groaning, to her feet.

“Hello,” Diane tried calling to someone, anyone, in the store who could help.

“Hello,” came a voice past the shelves.

“Hi, how do I find you?”

“What are you looking for?”

“You.”

“What do you need me for?”

“We’re looking for someone. We’re new to town and we just wanted to see if you can help us. We just have a couple of questions.”

“So ask them.”

Diane decided not to walk any farther, not wanting to get lost in the aisles again.

“Do you have a Secret Police? We’re looking for a missing child.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. The Secret Police sounds secret. I wouldn’t know about that. We have nonsecret police.”

“We’re looking for a police station. Also the City Hall. Maybe the mayor’s office. I mean, if you just had some phone numbers that would be helpful.” Diane was half shouting. She had no sense how far away the voice was, or from which direction it was coming.

“Well, City Hall is where the mayor’s office is. It’s four and a half blocks down Pleasant Street here. That’s the street you’re on now. Of course, we haven’t had a mayor in years. Gonna be an election soon, I hear. Don’t know why, but we haven’t had a mayor, for, oh, I don’t know how long.”

“Where are you?”

“If you got a missing child, I’d try the police first. I think there’s gotta be one nearby. I mean, I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been arrested, you know?” The voice laughed the insipid laugh of casual conversation.

“Okay. We’ll try that. My son’s name is Josh. He’s the one who’s gone missing. We’re not from here. We’re from a town called Night Vale, but I think Josh may have come to King City. And if he’s here, he certainly loves VHS stores. Also comic book stores. Have you seen any fifteen-year-old boys here? He probably would have been shopping by himself?”

No reply.

“Or maybe a comic store nearby. He definitely would have gone there.”

The shop was silent.

“Hello?”

She looked at Jackie.

“It was real, don’t worry,” Jackie said. “I heard it too.”

Some of the shelves just had empty cardboard VHS sleeves, no sign of their corresponding tapes. There were puddles on the floor and cobwebs along the top shelves. The more Jackie looked around, the more she thought they should leave, as soon as possible. Diane did not believe Jackie to be frightened, just impatient to go. They hobbled together to the front door with no hissing, no screams.

As they stepped outside into the sandy dusk, the bell on the door jingled faintly in Jackie’s mind like a favorite song to which she could no longer quite remember the tune.

There was no police station in sight. Diane and Jackie leaned into each other. They walked as one, their arms intertwined so it wasn’t clear who was holding up whom. They entered one of the few other stores that appeared open: FISH AND BAIT. The shelves were full of empty jars. A man stood behind the counter. He was towering, the tallest man either of them had ever seen.

“Hello,” managed Diane. Her head seemed to be several feet behind her, and her hands floated in front of her like balloons. “We’re looking for a boy, a teenager. He looks like… well, a lot of things. He’s—”

The man nodded absently, saying nothing. Jackie’s entire body felt liquid and heavy, sloughing off her fragile skeleton. She had never been in more pain. Each step was a decision that she had to make, every time.

“Feel free to look around,” the tall man said. He gestured with an open palm. Behind him one of the empty jars exploded with a pop. A few shards of it went into the back of his hand. It began immediately to drip blood. His face did not change at all.

“We’re looking for a boy. My son.” Diane couldn’t stop looking at his fresh wounds.

The man frowned. He looked closely at them, as though they were not who he had thought they would be.

“Who did you say you were?” he said. Another jar exploded. This time some of the glass went into his face. Blood went down his cheek like tears, dripping with loud taps onto the counter. He frowned at the sound.

“We’re just looking,” said Jackie, pulling with all of her strength, which was not so much at all, on Diane, who was frozen staring into the man’s eyes. The man was staring at Jackie. “Nice shop you have here. Have to go.”

The two women hobbled out. Two more jars exploded. The man had quite a lot of blood coming from all different parts of him. He looked down at their leaving from the height of his body.

“We try to remember but we always forget,” he said.

Diane turned, hand on the glass door.

“What was that?”

“Have a nice day and thanks for shopping with us,” he said.

His words were coming out slurred. There was a long shard of glass through his tongue.

The two of them pushed their way back outside, nearly falling over one another.

“This is all wrong,” said Diane. “This is not a safe place for Josh to be.”

“It’s not like we haven’t been in stores where clerks bleed a lot,” said Jackie, “but—” She trailed off, her gaze focused on no fixed point.

Most any bath gel or greeting card store in Night Vale has a full staff of bleeding salesclerks, struggling to maintain consciousness and constantly mopping the floors. But somehow in King City, it felt incorrect, like the people were not supposed to be bleeding constantly. Like they had once been normal, whatever that meant outside of the only context she had ever known.

In her mind, Diane saw a different man than the one covered in glass shards, or it was the same man, but he was running a store in which he did not bleed, in which nothing exploded, in which he sold supplies for fishing and at night went home to his family, watched old television shows, one episode right after the other, and then slept, one episode right after the other. She saw that man and this man at the same time. He was multiple, and becoming less with each iteration.

“We can’t hear the freeway,” said Jackie.

“What?”

Jackie pointed at the 101, so close they could see the writing on the big trucks carrying things from the north of California to the south.

“There’s no sound.”

She was right. It was completely silent. Even their footsteps seemed to be absorbed by the sidewalk. The loud hum from the sky was gone. They walked in silence past planters teeming with drought-resistant succulents blooming big purple flowers.

Diane felt herself carrying clothes from her dryer, organizing the warm cotton piles into manageable squares on her bed. She felt a King City street full of cars and shoppers, ordinary stores run ordinarily. She felt these things, and at the same time she felt Jackie against her, felt the empty horror of the silent city.

The next store had a sign saying GUITARS. An elderly woman sat in a folding chair at the back. The store was otherwise empty. No furniture, no merchandise, just walls that had been sloppily painted into streaks of different off-whites, and a hideous green carpet traversed by a pink, jagged line and speckled with yellow diamonds. The carpet was torn and fixed with silver duct tape here and there, the tape bright under bare fluorescents.

The woman looked up from what she was doing, which was staring at her hands. She now stared at Diane and Jackie.

“We’re looking for a boy about fifteen.”

The woman squinted.

“We’re looking for a boy who might have come here. He was—”

The woman opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue. Her tongue and gums were gray. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her mouth was as wide as she could make it. She started making a wet, huffing noise, like a drowned engine trying to start.

“Okay,” said Jackie. “We’re going to leave now. Thank you.”

Jackie turned Diane around and leaned on her to get her to leave the store. Diane’s eyes never left the clerk. She saw a wall full of acoustic guitars, a middle-aged woman behind a counter selling a set of strings to a customer. She saw blank walls and, as the door swung shut, an old woman, eyes squeezed shut, huffing and wheezing with that wide gray mouth. She saw both, equally real before her.

“What now?” said Jackie, wincing into the words as she leaned against the hot stucco of the guitar shop wall. Her ability to hide her pain was faltering.

“One more store. Then City Hall,” said Diane. Her ability to hide her despair was faltering.

“I’m worried we won’t make it out of the next store if we go in it.”

“That’s a worry, yes. Yes it is.”

The next store said CELLULAR in red letters. Inside were display cases full of the newest models of cell phones. There were signs explaining about contracts and data plans. A young woman in a baseball cap and gray polo smiled at them as they walked in.

“Hello!” she said.

“This isn’t what I expected,” said Diane.

“Oh, did you read our sign?” said the woman. “We’re a cell phone store.”

“We read it,” said Jackie.

“We also do repair. Do you need a phone repaired?”

“No,” said Diane. “I’m sorry. We’ve come a long way in a very short amount of time.”

“Dude, what’s up with your town?”

“King City?” said the woman. Concern passed briefly through her expression, and then it was bright again. “It’s a great place.”

“Great… how?”

“Not sure,” said the woman. “Not a lot sticks in my memory. First thing I remember is you guys coming in. Do you want a cell phone?”

“No,” said Jackie.

“We’re looking for my son. He’s about fifteen years old,” Diane said.

One of the phones in the case started ringing. Concern returned to the woman’s face, and stayed.

“Those don’t even have circuits in them,” she said. There were sweat rings on her shirt. “They’re cardboard boxes with stickers to simulate the display. All the real phones are in the back.”

“Do you mind if we try answering it?” said Diane.

“Just don’t tell me what you hear, okay?” She no longer looked at all happy to see them. She pulled a key from a green rubber belt loop and used it to unlock the case.

The phone that was ringing was an older touch-screen model. Diane picked it up. Definitely empty cardboard, and the display was a faded sticker. She pushed on the sticker where she would push to answer a cell phone, and then held the cardboard phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Stop being so obvious about yourselves,” said a man’s voice, one that she was familiar with although she could not place it.

“Obvious about ourselves?”

“Everyone knows you’re here. It’s not safe.” Diane pulled the cardboard phone away from her ear. Printed on the fake phone’s fake cardboard screen was a familiar-looking name.

“Evan?”

“No, it’s Evan.”

“That’s what I said. Evan.”

“Meet me at City Hall. Head straight back. Ignore what anyone tells you and ignore any signs. Just go down the hall from the front door and turn left when you see a door marked MAYOR. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

There was a click. She guessed he had hung up, but she didn’t know how he had called a cardboard phone in the first place.

“Evan,” she said to Jackie. “He asked us to meet him in the mayor’s office at City Hall.”

“Please. I don’t want to know what any of that was about,” said the woman. Her face was a grimace and her shivering arms were crossed over her chest. “Please just leave.”

“What is this town, really?” Jackie said tenderly, hoping to coax a memory out of her.

The woman relaxed and exhaled. Jackie felt a breakthrough, a confession or revelation coming, but there was only another, weaker “Please leave.” The woman’s face tightened back into sweat-drenched angst.

“I’m sorry,” said Diane. “Can you just tell me which direction down Pleasant Street to get to City Hall?”

The woman grunted and ran through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, slamming and locking it behind her. Her voice came muffled through the closed door: “We don’t even have a mayor. We haven’t had one in years.”

“So. City Hall?” Jackie said, once they were outside.

“That’s where he is, I guess,” said Diane. She shielded her eyes and looked down Pleasant Street. “Let’s just start walking this way and see if we can find it.”

“It shouldn’t be hard to find. City halls are always huge and ornate and topped with ancient volcanic stone towers. Or, I mean, the only city hall we’ve ever seen is like that.”

There was nothing that looked remotely like that. There was a Safeway that was boarded up. CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, said a sign hung crookedly on the boards, and then someone had crossed out RENOVATIONS with a paint pen and written in GOOD.

There was only one building left. It was low and small, with curtained windows, like a storefront church or a campaign office.

“I don’t suppose that could be City Hall,” said Diane. She started to move to it.

Jackie was looking the other way.

“Troy,” she said.

“What?”

Troy was casually trotting across the road, and then he was gone down a side street.

“You go meet the man in the tan jacket. I’m going to find out what Troy’s doing here.”

Jackie took off after him, running as hard as her pain-racked body would let her, which wasn’t fast, but it was going, all right, and in the right direction, dammit. Shock waves of agony exploded up her legs as she ran.

“Wait, Jackie,” Diane called. “We shouldn’t get separated. This place is wrong. I don’t know if we’ll be able to find each other again. Jackie!”

But Jackie was gone. Diane started after her but stopped, thinking of Josh. Josh was what mattered. Jackie could take care of herself. She needed to find Josh. She sighed and walked across the street to the building. It was brick, with a mirrored front window, and a small plastic card that said CITY HALL on the door.

“Okay,” Diane said, as loudly as she could. “Here we go.”

She pushed open the door. Somewhere else, at that same moment, she was petting a kitten in a shelter pen. The kitten purred and rolled on its back. “I have to take this one,” she said. Somewhere else she was repainting an old dresser. Somewhere else, she was standing in a fish market, overpowered by the smell. Somewhere else, at that same moment, she was dead. She did not feel anything at all from that version of herself. It was just a gap in her consciousness, a nothing superimposed on her multiplying selves. The door of City Hall shut behind her.