The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (21 page)

Trace the call, an officer shouted to a group of other officers in a nearby van.

Listeners, they traced the call, and it was coming from the phone booth behind the Taco Bell. On the other end of the line was an adult man's detached hand named Megan, the daughter of Tock and Hershel Wallaby.

She was alone, all alone, except for the telephone booth (as forgotten technologies have been young Megan's only friends). This broke the heart of the Sheriff's Secret Police. This broke the heart of the two men who had skulked away from the submarine. This broke the heart of the unidentified man from Nulogorsk. And from this moment came wonderful news, listeners.

The unidentified man told the Secret Police in stiff but practiced English: “I am a gift from Nulogorsk, in appreciation of Night Vale's many years of friendship and kindness.” And the unidentified man offered himself as an organ donor, or rather, a body donor, for Night Vale's very own Megan Wallaby. The young girl, born with congenital hand-bodiness, was rushed from the telephone booth behind the Taco Bell. The unidentified man has been rushed from the submarine in the Sandwastes. Megan has been surgically attached to the wrist stump of the unidentified man. Or rather, the unidentified man has been surgically attached to the single-hand body of Megan Wallaby.

Megan's surgeons have declared the operation a quick and complete success. After emerging from recovery, Megan even rose from her bed, her face dour, and took a few toneless steps, like a man balancing the weight of a wet overcoat on a failing hanger, before collapsing onto the floor of her hospital room while nurses screamed and called for help.

Megan has a long road of therapy ahead of her, learning how to . . . everything . . . but we believe in her, don't we, Night Vale? That little girl is going to enjoy the childhood she feels she has missed out on. We won't mind if she smashes through a few walls or crushes a few rib cages in hugs. If this is what she wants, we will support her, because she is beautiful. And the unidentified man from Nulogorsk? Sadly, we will never see him again, nor may we ever learn why his truth was so different from our own.

But Megan's truth is she is finally happy, happy in the body she was born without.

Maybe one day we will see her, six-foot-ten and bald, shambling down the street. We will say, “Hello, Megan,” and maybe, with enough hard work, she will be able to answer back, in the singsong voice of a child, “Hello, Cecil,” as she jauntily waves the hand that used to be her entire body.

Yes, Night Vale, that sounds just about right.

Stay tuned next for live coverage of college basketball, as two universities select a dozen students to perform unnatural physical tasks on a wooden rectangle inside a cavernous scream-chamber.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

PROVERB: You can't get blood from a turnip. Listen, you need some blood? I can totally get you some blood. Set that turnip down and follow me to the blood. There's a lot of blood.

EPISODE 41:

“WALK”

FEBRUARY 15, 2014

GUEST VOICE: JASIKA NICOLE

I
OFFICIALLY MET
J
EFFREY FOR THE FIRST TIME SEVERAL YEARS AGO AT A
birthday party for Kevin R. Free. Kevin danced about, greeting each of his twenty thousand guests graciously and introducing them to one another (fact: Kevin has met every person living in or visiting New York City at least twice). I think he paired Jeffrey and me together because of the looks of bewilderment on each of our faces; introverted individuals tend to seek refuge in people who look kind and quiet. I spent most of my time at the party with Jeffrey. We laughed and talked about our lives and our partners and I gushed over the work he had done in a play I had recently seen him in. When he made a comment about “writing something” for me one day, I laughed politely. I knew that was just a nice thing that artists sometimes said to other artists to make them feel seen.

Years later, I found myself in a dressing room at the Largo theater in West Hollywood, eagerly shaking the hand of a man who looked like a young, hot Santa Claus (this turned out to be Joseph), and subsequently being introduced to the gorgeous
Welcome to Night Vale
players: the undoubtedly talented Cecil, with his crisp, cool voice and hearty laugh, and Dylan, a man who turned out to be one of the loves of my life. Jeffrey had made good on his word—he and Joseph had written something for me, the voice of a character about a million times braver than myself and only half as scared.

As I stood in the wings that night preparing to go onstage, I worried whether or not I could deliver Dana as courageously as she had been created.
Welcome to Night Vale
had been gaining steady momentum at this point, and its fandom was far-reaching and devout. I had voiced her on a few episodes, but Dana had never had a physical manifestation before, and I didn't want to detract from Jeffrey and Joseph's eloquent writing. Cecil's voice boomed through the microphone and I glimpsed the audience sprawled out before him, utterly spellbound. I had never seen anything like it.

Moments later when I walked out onto the stage, the audience's applause was a wall. They cheered and hooted and screamed and threw their hands in the air and stomped their feet and it was so thunderous that I had to wait to say the first line. I couldn't stop myself from grinning. It turned out that I had nothing to worry about. Jeffrey and Joseph had already done the hard work of building the story; all I had to do was be seen, open my mouth, and let Dana speak.

—Jasika Nicole, Voice of former intern Dana

At a loss for words? Here's a few you can use:

WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

Hello listeners.

We have some news that will affect your morning commute, so let's dive right into it.

Walk signals across the whole of Night Vale are malfunctioning. Of course usually they show either a graphic photo of a run-over pedestrian, indicating you should wait, or time lapse photography of flowers wilting, indicating that it is safe to cross. But this morning, commuters all over Night Vale are reporting that, bafflingly, they now all have just the word
WALK
in bold, white letters.

Citizens are standing by the side of the road, unsure of whether they are allowed to—

DANA:
Cecil! Cecil, it's Dana. Oh, it's so good to be able to communicate again.

Cecil? Where did he go? I don't think he can hear me, but I'll keep talking just in case.

Cecil, I've been in this desert for months now. Years, maybe. Get enough minutes and you have days, have months, have years, have the whole of your life. There's never a great shift, only a gradual sliding downwards.

I can still see the blinking light up on the mountain. I looked into it and my head went one way while my mind went another. A lurch outside of all that seems to be.

I moved my head just a touch to the left, a glance in a world of perspectives, and I was here, in your studio. Well, not
here
here. I don't know how it happened, or how long this vision in which we all pretend to be real will last.

I am pretending as hard as I can.

When I first got here, being a good mountain unbeliever, I turned my back to it and marched directly into the flat desert. But soon enough I had somehow come back to the mountain. I turned and marched away again, but ended up right back here. There is a blinking light up on the mountain, and I blink in and out of its vicinity against my will.

Occasionally I see huge masked figures. Warlike, towering, but also distant and listless. They haven't seen me. Or if they've seen me, they haven't cared. Or if they've cared, they haven't done anything with that feeling. I'm not scared of them. There are so many things in this world to be scared of. Why add to that number when the only cause is you know nothing about them and they are huge? It would make no sense.

I found a door out in the desert, but it was chained shut on the other side. From behind it, I thought I smelled that particular Night Vale smell. The smell of home. Like sour peaches and linen. Like freshly cut wood and burnt almonds. I knocked and knocked, hoping someone from back there would hear and let me through. But it never opened. I wasn't even sure which side was supposed to open. I knocked on both sides, but nothing. I kept walking and found myself back at the mountain.

There is a blinking light up on the mountain. And so there is nothing else for it. It is time for me to climb. The face of the mountain is steep, and lined with sharp ridges and crumbling ledges. This will not be easy. I wonder if anything ever will be.

Hopefully I will know something when I am up there that I did not know when I was down here. Elevation must equal knowledge. It must. Because nothing else has.

Cecil, I will keep trying. I don't have to keep trying. There is no obligation for me to not just give up, just slump down until I fall away and join the inanimate matter of this strange other world. I don't have to keep trying. Remember that, I say to myself, as I keep trying.

I don't know if you've heard any of this. I'd like to think you did. I'd like to think that I'm home. I'd like to think that mountains aren't real, even though I know now, without doubt, that they are.

I will see you again, perhaps. From up there, wherever that is. Just me, always me, but from higher up.

Good-bye, Cecil.

CECIL:
—unable to stop walking. Walk, the signals say, and the pedestrians walk. In unison, arms swinging in a rigid rhythm. This is the worst malfunctioning of walk signals Night Vale has seen since the time all their lightbulbs were accidentally replaced with poison gas dispensers. More on this story, as it looms closer to us.

And now, a word from our sponsors.

A balding grassland beneath a low cliffside. There is a monk. Picture what a monk looks like. A bell rings, from his hand maybe, then he takes a small step, then there's that bell again. It will take him a long time to make it from this bit of grass to whatever there is beyond it. An entire lifetime it will take him, and even then he will die unfinished, undone in midst of doing, having gone slowly to nowhere much. Then a bell will ring, from his hand maybe, or from somewhere else, and then nothing. Mountain Dew. Do the Dew.

And now back to—

DANA:
Hello, Cecil? Cecil can you hear me? Dammit.

Cecil, it is beautiful here. It is empty here. I found a lighthouse up on the mountain.

Tall, maybe forty feet, built of brownstone and about fifteen feet in diameter. Beyond the lighthouse, I found a settlement of sorts. It was bound inside the stone walls of a tightly wound gorge. I hoped to find answers in this settlement. I hoped to find anything.

Here is what I found: Dust, mostly. Emptiness. A sense of loss as I thought about the distance between myself and those I love. An interesting rock, but I can't find it anymore. I miss my brother. A sense of loss as I thought about the people who never returned home to this settlement. If they no longer exist to feel loss, then I shall feel it for them.

Also, there were strange drawings along the walls of the gorge. Orange triangles, growing bigger and bigger as I traced my way deeper into the spiral. There was a soft light just around the edges of the triangles. When I looked at them, I felt the light in my head and it pounded like a migraine against the back of my eyes. I could not look at them. I could not look away.

I was lost in the spiral. It was built by good people, but they were gone, taken by something larger and stronger than them. Much larger and stronger even than the masked warriors I saw before. I worried about what . . . who would be taken next. My eyes hurt, so through my subjectivity, the entire world hurt.

And then a bright blackness, from somewhere beyond the spiral. That was when I realized I had forgotten that there was anything outside of the spiral. It had become the entirety, the totality. All of that.

But I followed the bright blackness, a near blinding beam of pure darkness, and it led me back out again. The orange triangles grew smaller and smaller, until they were little dots, a freckled rock face.