Welcome to Night Vale

Chapter 3

“KING CITY,” said the paper.

Jackie had never felt fear in her entire life. She had felt caution, and unease, and sadness, and joy, which are all similar to fear. But she had never felt fear itself.

She did not feel it then.

She got to the work of closing: wiping down the bathroom sink, sweeping the floor, and adjusting the thick burlap covering up items that were forbidden or secret, like the time machine that Larry Leroy had stolen from the Museum of Forbidden Technologies, and the pens and pencils (writing utensils having long been outlawed in Night Vale for reasons of public well-being, although everyone still surreptitiously used them).

The paper was still in her hand. She hadn’t realized it, had been going about everything without realizing, but there it was. Still there. Dull pencil. Smudged. Hurried handwriting. She put it down on the cracked glass of the countertop.

Now it was time to feed those items that were alive. Some of the items were alive. Some of them were dogs, and some weren’t.

There were lights now, in the desert. Low bubbles of light coming and going. She had never seen them before. She ignored them, as she ignored all things that were not part of the small circle of her days.

There were always things she had never seen before in Night Vale. There was the man she passed in the desert using a pair of scissors on the top of a cactus, as if he were cutting its hair. There was the cactus that had a full head of hair. There was the day where the small crack that’s always visible in the sky suddenly opened up, and several pterodactyls flew out. Later it was revealed they were just pteranodons, and all the panic was for nothing.

She finished her check of the inventory. The paper was in her hand.

“KING CITY,” said the paper.

How did it get there?

“How did this get here?” she asked. The dogs did not respond, nor did anything less sentient.

She put the paper in a drawer in the back room, in the desk she did not use for the work she did not have.

There was nothing more to be done to close the shop. If she were honest, and she tried to be, she had been looking for excuses not to leave. If she were honest, and she tried to be, the floor had been clean enough to begin with. A glance out the window. The low bubbles of light in the desert were gone. Nothing there but a distant airplane crawling across the sky, red blinking lights, vulnerable in the vast empty, faint red beacons flashing the message HELLO. A SMALL ISLAND OF LIFE UP HERE, VERY CLOSE TO SPACE. PRAY FOR US. PRAY FOR US.

The paper was in her hand.

“KING CITY,” the paper said.

Jackie felt fear for the first time, and she did not know what it was.

For the first time in a long time, she wished she had a friend to call. She had had friends in high school, she knew that, although the memory of high school was distant and vague. The rest of her friends hadn’t stopped at nineteen. They had gotten older, living full lives. They had tried to stay in touch, but it was difficult as they moved on to adult careers and kids and retirement and Jackie just kept being nineteen years old.

“So, still nineteen?” Noelle Connolly had said, when they spoke on the phone for the final time. Her disapproval was clear in her voice. “Oh, Jackie, did you ever think of just turning twenty?”

They had been friends since sophomore Spanish class, but Noelle had been fifty-eight at the point she had finally asked Jackie that question, and spoke in tones that felt sickeningly parental to Jackie. Jackie had said so, and Noelle had become openly condescending, and they had both hung up, and she and Noelle had never spoken again. People who grow older think they are so wise, she thought. Like time means anything at all.

The radio came on by itself as she stood there, paper in hand. It always did at this time of night. Cecil Palmer, the host of Night Vale Community Radio, spoke to her. News, the community calendar, traffic.

She listened when she could to Cecil. Most of the town did. At home, Jackie had a small radio, only about two feet wide, a foot and a half tall. It was the lightweight portable edition (“under 14 lbs.!”) with a mother-of-pearl handle and sharply angled, open-beaked eagles carved into the upper corners.

Her mother had gotten it for her whenever her sixteenth birthday was, however long ago that had been, and it was one of Jackie’s favorite possessions, along with her record collection, which she never listened to because she didn’t have a license to own a record player yet.

Cecil Palmer spoke of the horrors of everyday life. Nearly every broadcast told a story of impending doom or death, or worse: a long life lived in fruitless fear of doom or death. It wasn’t that Jackie wanted to know all of the bad news of the world. It was that she loved sitting in the dark of her bedroom, swaddled in blankets and invisible radio waves.

Look, life is stressful. This is true everywhere. But life in Night Vale is more stressful. There are things lurking in the shadows. Not the projections of a worried mind, but literal Things, lurking, literally, in shadows. Conspiracies are hidden in every storefront, under every street, and floating in helicopters above. And with all that there is still the bland tragedy of life. Births, deaths, comings, goings, the gulf of subjectivity and bravado between us and everyone we care about. All is sorrow, as a man once said without really doing much about it.

But when Cecil talked it was possible to let some of that go. To let go of the worries. To let go of the questions. To let go of letting or going.

The slip of paper, however, Jackie could not let go of. She opened her hand, and watched it flutter to the floor. She stared at it. It was on the floor. “Dot dot dot,” the blank back of the paper said, not literally, but like in a comic book speech-bubble. She stared and stared, and it sat and sat, and then she blinked her eyes and it was back in her hand.

“KING CITY,” it said.

“This is getting me nowhere,” she said, to no one, or to the dogs, or to the Thing that lurked in her corner.

She tried calling Cecil at the station, to see if he had heard anything about a man in a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase. She couldn’t remember Cecil ever mentioning a person by that description on his show, but it was worth a shot.

One of the station interns picked up, promising to take a message, but who knew if the poor kid would even survive long enough to deliver it?

“That’s okay,” Jackie said. “Hey, listen, I think the Arby’s is hiring. Have you considered that? Their death rate is really low for the area.”

But the kid was already hanging up. Oh well, not Jackie’s job to worry about the life of someone foolhardy enough to be a community radio intern.

The shop was well and truly closed. At this point if she waited any longer she might as well lay out a sleeping bag and spend the night. Which, nope. So she stepped out into the parking lot, jumpy for sure.

There was a black sedan with tinted windows at the end of the lot—the windows cracked down enough for her to see two sunglassed agents of a vague yet menacing government agency watching her intently. One of them had a camera that kept going off, but the agent didn’t seem to know how to deactivate the flash. The light against the tinted windows made the shots worthless, and the agent cursed and tried again and it flashed again. Jackie waved good night to them, as she always did.

Maybe she would take the Mercedes home. Drive with the roof down, see how fast she could make it go before the Sheriff’s Secret Police stopped her. But she wouldn’t, of course. She walked to her car, a blue Mazda coupe with double red stripes that had been washed, presumably, at some point before she owned it.

“King City,” she said. The paper in her hand agreed.

It had been a mistake to accept what the man in the tan jacket had offered her. She didn’t know what it was, or what it meant, or what information it was trying to convey and to whom. But she knew that it had changed something. The world was slipping into her life. And she had to push it out, starting with this slip of paper, and the man in the tan jacket.

She announced her intentions, as all Night Vale citizens must.

“I will find the man in the tan jacket, and I will make him take this piece of paper back,” she announced. “If I could do that without having to learn anything about him or about what the paper means, that would be just ideal.” The agents in the car, holding index fingers to earpieces, dutifully wrote this down.

Out in the desert, bubbles of light, low to the ground. The echo of a crowd arguing and then cheering. For a moment, a tall building, all glass and angles and business, where there had definitely been nothing but sand, and then it was gone, and there were more lights, shifting, warping the air around them. And the echo of crowds. And the lights.

She put the car in reverse, and pulled onto the highway, tossing the slip of paper out the window and watching with satisfaction as it fluttered into the night behind her, and then, snapping her fingers, caught the paper between them, where it was, where it had always been.