Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 35

Jackie leaned back, her feet on the counter. It was the first time she had been in the pawnshop in days.

When she left the hospital, she wasn’t sure where else to go. She didn’t love being at the shop, but it was home, and she just wanted to go home.

In most ways it felt like it always did. But now her entire body hurt. And she knew the paper was curled up in her cast like the hidden centipede nests that sometimes appear overnight in people’s beds.

The leaning, her usual position at the counter, was killing her back, and so she got off the stool and stood. She had never done that before. She looked out the window, where, not that long ago, she had watched a man in a tan jacket run away.

There were bubbles of light, low to the ground, out in the desert, and a tall building, and voices. As she watched, more buildings appeared, a forest of tall buildings, all glowing, their bulk wisping away to nothing as they approached the sand below them. Bubbles of light. And voices. A crowd of voices.

It was King City. She knew it now. Somehow, from all this distance, the city was calling to her. She spat at the lights but only hit her window.

She watched her spit roll down the glass and felt, for the first time in her short and long life, absolute despair. All of her and Diane’s investigations had not gotten rid of the paper, or allowed her to write down any words but “KING CITY,” or gotten rid of the visions out in the desert. Her life wasn’t what it had been, and it never would be again. For a brief moment, spending time with Diane as an equal, she had wanted to grow older. But that feeling was gone.

Her body ached. First the librarian poison and then the accident and then whatever they had done to her in the hospital. Her body no longer felt young. All of her energy had been robbed from her. She felt old, looked young, was neither.

The bell on the door rang.

“We’re not open,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know it says we’re open. But we’re not really.”

No answer.

She looked up and saw a woman in a business suit. The woman looked at Jackie but did not seem to see her. She was holding a small cardboard box in one hand, and a large metal hoe in the other. The wedge of the hoe had a dark brown stain with a few misshapen hairy lumps sticking out from it.

“Like I said,” Jackie said, “closed.”

The woman set both items on the counter and began to wash her hands, chanting to herself as she did.

“Hey, I’m sorry, man. I can’t take this. I can’t do that anymore.”

The visitor finished washing her hands. She was shaking, and her hair was over her face. She would not look down at the box or at Jackie.

“Take your things and go, goddammit.”

The woman did not go. She stood there, like she was waiting to be dismissed. Jackie sighed. Her back hurt so much, and her hand itched madly in the cast. She had never felt so distant from herself.

“All right. I can’t actually give you a ticket because it would just say ‘King City’ over and over, I won’t pay you anything, you won’t die for any period of time, and I won’t put it out for sale. But just sign here and you can go. Okay?”

The woman signed the name Catharine to the ticket, put the pen down, and asked in a small, shaken voice: “Is it over now?”

Jackie nodded. Catharine shuddered and walked out, upright and smiling, a different woman than had entered the shop.

Jackie took the hoe and, with her good arm, awkwardly leaned it on the trash can next to her. She opened the box. Inside was the mangled body of a tarantula. It had been hacked over and over until most of its body had detached from itself, a jigsaw puzzle way past solving. She looked out the door and watched the lights of Catharine’s car diminish into the highway distance. Jackie tossed the box in the trash, wincing as she did.

The lights and voices out in the desert were gone. She sat alone in the dark pawnshop, looking at nothing in particular, thinking about nothing in particular. Somewhere, Catharine felt better. Nowhere, the tarantula felt nothing at all.