Welcome to Night Vale (20 page)

A fluorescent light flickered on the high gray ceiling above them. Jackie squinted. She hadn't seen anything. That had been nothing, she was sure.

BRRGGHHHHH. The fountain. But was that a noise hanging on for just a moment after the fountain's moan?

Jackie turned and put her hand back on Diane's shoulder.

“We need to go.”

Diane looked out over the reading area. It looked no different than it had the last time she had looked or, anyway, almost no different.

“Why don't you just do whatever it is you need to do and let me do this? I'm sure you'll be just fine on your own.”

She had adopted a mom's voice, and they both heard her do it. Jackie gave one last look to where the noise had come from, which, as far as she could tell, was the magazine room in the complete opposite corner of the library. The angle was such that she couldn't see into the room. She might have been able to see the shadow jutting out on the floor from its doorway, but she didn't want to see that so her brain skimmed past it.

One aisle over, Jackie found the archives of the
Daily Journal,
back when it had had physical form. She started flipping through the binders of old issues. A microfiche system had been deemed too expensive by city government, and anyway would likely just have been ruined by librarian fluids or the blood of one of their victims.

“King City has to have come up at some point.”

“Mmm,” Diane said.

She wasn't listening because she had found something she'd missed earlier. Stuck to the back of the aura report was an old photo. She couldn't tell how old, because it was stuck image-side down. She picked at the edges of it, trying to get it to come off, but the photo was stuck firm.

“Dammit,” Jackie said, not in response to anything but just to have something to say as she searched, tediously, for information that might or might not exist.

Diane yanked at the photo, and it came unstuck with a pop. She turned it faceup. It was a photo from the era where people are stiffly arranged through the long minutes it took to register their image on chemical paper. She considered it as carefully and rationally as she could before coming to the verbal conclusion: “Oh, shit.”

“Why ‘oh, shit'?” Jackie popped her head up from behind a binder.

Diane held up the photo, and Jackie studied it closely, bringing her face in toward the flat faces looking back from long ago.

“Oh shit,” Jackie said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, my news isn't great either.”

Jackie held up an index card that said, in neat block letters,

ALL MATERIALS ON KING CITY HAVE BEEN CATALOGUED

UNDER GEOGRAPHY, FORBIDDEN.

And then another sentence that had been blacked out with a scribbled marker, so much so that the black ink leaked through to the other side of the card.

Diane nodded, unsurprised. It had seemed too easy up to that point, and so she had been expecting something like this.

“The forbidden materials shelf is just past the biography section, near fiction.”

She pointed. The area where she pointed was as far from them as the entrance, in the opposite direction. There would be no escape if they were noticed. They both considered this. Jackie sat down on institutionally patterned carpet, her head in her hands, and allowed herself a few seconds of self-pity. Then she stood up, her eyes steady on her destination.

“Listen, Diane,” she said softly, clearly. “It made sense for us to do this together because we both need something. But you can go now. You've found . . .” She looked again at the photograph in Diane's hand and shuddered. “Anyway, you have a son who needs you. You have to go home to him. I can do this.”

Diane thought about Josh, and she wanted to agree. The important thing was to get out of the library to her family, her sullen, solitary, teenage family. And so she felt furious about what she was going to say next.

“No. We came into the library together, we'll leave it together.”

“Diane, you don't have—”

“Jackie, if I left you here and you died, I would feel bad about it. I'd probably feel bad about it for the rest of my life. And I don't like to feel bad. So let's go.”

Jackie smiled. She didn't mean much by it, but she meant some by it. Diane smiled back, meaning mostly the same.

She looked at Troy's useless file and shrugged, deciding to take it with her. There wasn't much to it, and they had come this far. She tucked it under one arm.

They started out for the forbidden shelf, past the biography section and, terrifyingly, the fiction section near it.

Nothing attracts a librarian more than fiction, as even the smallest child of Night Vale knows.

“I hope there is anything there about King City,” Jackie said.

“BRRGGHHHHH,” the fountain said.

This time there was definitely another noise along with it. Like a laugh but angry. Like crying but aggressive. Like a claw or a tail or a wing moving against bookshelves.

Diane and Jackie didn't hear it, although there was nothing they could have done differently if they had.

CECIL: . . . or anyway, all of them that had survived. And that is why police and emergency medical crews no longer feel obligated to search for remains in any public library.

We are getting confirmation from several concerned citizens that something is very wrong with those cute plastic flamingos everyone bought from Lenny's Bargain House. Those who get too close to the flamingos or, worse, touch them, are disappearing. Some of these unfortunates appeared again just moments later, sagging into shriveled skin with long gray hair, as though a lifetime had passed.

“Oh, I'm back! I'm back!” those people all said. “I thought I'd never see this place again.”

When asked where they had gone, many promptly died of old age.

Others have not reappeared at all.

Even those who were lucky enough not to disappear still reported odd side effects of the flamingos.

“Yeah, I touched one,” said Sheila, the woman who always marks people's activities down on her clipboard at the Moonlite All-Nite. “And the world shown clear for the first time in my life. Like I had never seen any of it before. I
had
never seen any of it before, and I understood none of it. Which is when I realized that I had become myself as a baby again. I lived my entire life over again, making the same choices, surviving the same tragedy and surviving the same joy, and going through
all the same mistakes, unable to stop myself, until I reached the moment again where I touched the flamingo, and then I was an infant again. I have gone through this loop hundreds of times. My life, which once seemed like an organic movement, now has become a hideous script that I must play out, with an ending that is forever forestalled. I won't ever die, but I won't ever live. Please help.”

And then, weeping, she touched the flamingo again.

There have also been some complaints that the plastic on the flamingos is cheaply produced and warped. Has Lenny's Bargain House been selling us substandard and possibly time-bending decorative birds? We will investigate at some point in the future, when we feel like we are maybe more interested than we are now. Until then, we will continue on in ignorance, happy as we ever were.

And now, we are pleased to present three commercial-free hours of advertisements.

They ran past the nonfiction shelves, filled with informative books on every subject not currently outlawed by city government, or the Sheriff's Secret Police, or the World Government. The shelves were mostly empty. They tried to keep their footfalls as soft as possible.

In Jackie's case, this resulted in only her usual heavy-heeled thuds.

Gently. Silence over speed, Diane thought, glaring at the teenager's back but not wanting to say it out loud.

Hurry the hell up, Jackie thought, as Diane lagged behind.

After nonfiction was science fiction. No one knows why science fiction is kept separately from the rest of the nonfiction. Tradition is a powerful thing. These shelves were much less censored than the main nonfiction section, since science fiction tended to be about day-to-day stuff that everyone already knew.

They hid against a long row of novels, most titles unreadable under a gnashing of teeth and claw marks. Diane looked up to see a shelf full of Ursula K. Le Guin books, streaked with four long, brownish stains. Poor book lover, Diane thought, dragged away just as they found that perfect read.

Jackie smelled something. It was different than the usual library smell of basement closets and bleach. This smelled like burnt coffee during a sinus infection, a stale sting in her nose. She turned to Diane, whose eyes were pointed down, cheeks flushed, nostrils flared.

“You smell it too.”

Diane nodded, putting her finger to her lips.

A distant hum. They looked around. Diane took Jackie's hand. Jackie didn't notice. The distant hum was perhaps a nearby growl.

“Keep moving,” Jackie said.

Diane did nothing. Jackie stood, pulling her up by the hand. The noise was between distant and nearby. It was between a growl and a hum.

“Hiding won't make whatever that was go away,” Jackie said.

Diane clutched at the science fiction shelf as Jackie led her, heel-toe, heel-toe, quiet, into the biography section.

The section was extensive, taking up most of the wall leading to the back of the library. The only book in the section was the
Official Biography of Helen Hunt
. There were a lot of copies. It was a well-stocked biography section. If anyone needed to know about the life of a person, for instance Helen Hunt, then this section was extremely helpful.

A few turned-out copies of the book revealed a smiling Helen Hunt on its cover. Helen's eyes stared back directly at the viewer. Helen's smile had a hard edge, a tight anger to it. Her hair was pulled back to display the intricate clover-shaped forehead tattoos that Helen Hunt is known for. Between the actor's teeth, Diane could see a gray smudge in the famous dark of the famous maw. The gray seemed to move, to flicker. It was pacing to and fro. Jackie saw it too. A bright glint, like a cat's eye in a dark room, flashed out from between the award-winning actor's teeth. Jackie put one hand to her own mouth and tried not to breathe. Diane pulled herself close to Jackie's shoulder. Helen wasn't smiling at all. They must have seen it wrong. She was frowning, angry, still showing all of her
teeth. Or no, the woman on the book covers was definitely moving.

Her mouth was opening and the gray movement inside became fast and agitated. Diane gave a light shove and they ran out of the biography section before Helen could do anything more.

Now they were deep in the fiction section, surrounded by books that told nothing but lies. They breathed heavily from their run, but tried to keep their breathing as quiet as they could. They could not keep it very quiet at all.

From one of the shelves, an arm reached out to them. It appeared to be more or less human. Diane made a sound that was not quite but similar to a scream. Jackie stopped, turned, and put her hand over Diane's mouth.

“Librarian,” Diane said into Jackie's palm. The human arm was connected to a figure that was leaking out of the wall, with wet skin and sandpaper eyes and a body that shimmered variations on the human form.

Diane sank into Jackie's body in terror, feeling a moment where she just gave up. Jackie held her up, eyes steady on the figure.

“Too human-looking to be a librarian,” Jackie whispered. “I think that's just the specter that haunts the biography section. It's harmless.”

The bit at the end of the specter's arm that wasn't quite a hand reached out toward them. Its body dripped out of the wall like oil, black and viscous.

“Are you sure?” Diane said. The figure hovered closer. Its face was cratered and oozing, its eyes rough and gray. She pushed back into Jackie, unable to help herself.

“Oh, you know what?” Jackie said. “The specter regularly
takes people. It's taken a ton of people. Presumably they're all dead. We should go.”

She took Diane's arm and moved her down the aisle, toward the creature. A cleft opened below the thing's eyes, splitting into a distorted mouth stuck in the shape of a final, mortal scream. Diane tried to lead Jackie into another run, but Jackie kept the pace even and slow. The creature loomed and Jackie leaned out an elbow, pushing it sharply aside. They tumbled forward, into, through, and beyond the specter. Diane turned to see if the specter had followed. It was gone.

“That wasn't funny,” she said.

“It was kind of funny.” Jackie considered Diane's face. “Oh, come on, dude. It's not like knowing would have helped you any. I've had to do school reports on Helen Hunt enough times that I've learned to deal with the specter. Its intentions aren't good, sure, but it's too slow and weak to be much of a problem.”

Diane glared at Jackie, with irritation but also with a new respect. Jackie was braver than she, Diane knew, suddenly and solidly, as much as she had ever known any fact in her life. And while, as the older person, she was more responsible, still Jackie was capable in ways that Diane was not. She didn't know what to do with that information, but she knew it.

They had made it past the books, past the ghost, to a beige metal shelf, bolted to the wall, a few dozen books and folders on it. There was a stepladder available for the convenience of shorter patrons or those seeking information from the top shelf. Handwritten on a piece of paper taped to the shelf was a note: FORBIDDEN MATERIAL SHELF.

“According to the index, should be here.”

“Probably it's that,” Diane said, pointing. On the shelf, between a teach-yourself-calligraphy book (the powers-that-be worried it would serve as a gateway to pen ownership) and a
1988 calendar called “Mountains of Our World,” was a shoe box marked
KING CITY
.

“That's probably it, yes, I agree.”

Jackie grabbed it.

“Cool, well, this has been fun, but let's go,” Jackie said. They turned toward the exit but didn't move.

The distant hum had returned. Between them and the exit was the fiction section, and inside the fiction section was the noise. A gurgling, like a person trying to breathe with severe lung trouble, and a clicking like bad joints moving in old bodies. A growl and a hum; threatening crying and angry laughter. All sounds happened at once, coming from the one huge form, a shadow defining its way into the light. Tendrils whipped in and out between the books. The smell of burnt coffee was overwhelming.

“Is that—?” Jackie asked, and a ropy white limb wrapped around her neck. Jackie had no air to register her distress, so she widened her eyes, and heaved back and forth. The limb was glistening, and whatever sticky substance was all over it stung her skin. She started to go pale; her head seemed to be miles above her body. She saw shapes and colors but couldn't be sure if that was still the world or only the inside of her head.

Diane froze. She had never physically fought off even a human being. She had never been attacked. Even in the hypothetical imagining of being attacked, even just by a human, she imagined failing to defend herself. Jackie was braver than Diane, but if she didn't do anything, Jackie was about to die. That was it really. She was about to die, and Diane was doing nothing, was too scared.

Jackie dropped the King City box and held out her arms as she was pulled toward the shadows. She reached for anything that might slow her journey backwards.

The librarian made a gurgling howl, and there were matching
howls from all over the library. Soon there would be more of them.

Diane looked around desperately, but all that surrounded her were books. Useless books. She looked down into Troy's file, cradled in her arms. There. The rock that had reminded someone of Troy. One edge of it had eroded into jagged sharpness.

She pulled it out and stabbed it into the ropy limb that was dragging Jackie away from her. The limb slackened.

Diane stepped forward against every instinct and shoved her arm between it and Jackie's neck. She pulled as hard as she could, and Jackie wriggled frantically. It seemed that even with Diane pulling, the gap was not nearly big enough for Jackie to escape, but the limb was so slimy with its toxic substance (now burning through Diane's jacket) that Jackie was able to slip her head out.

They stumbled backwards. Jackie's neck and face were a mess of purple blotches, and she was sweating hard through her clothes. Still she remembered to scoop the King City box back off the floor. Diane took off her rapidly dissolving jacket and tossed it to the ground. The librarian's limb recoiled, curled back into the massive body, then shot out at them again.

As they ducked and ran down a parallel aisle, Diane saw, through the gaps between the books, the librarian emerge from the shadows. She saw, exactly and in full, what a librarian looked like. Her stomach lurched.

She would not forget the sight, recurring in dreams and panic attacks, until the moment she died, at which point she would forget it. Eventually, on the day she finally died, one of things that ran through her mind was: Well, at least I won't have to remember that anymore. It made her happy, and she died smiling.

But that was much later.

Jackie did her best to keep up with Diane. She was younger and faster, but the poison was coursing through her. Her gait was unsteady, and she hissed hard through clenched teeth.

They tore through the fiction section, and into biographies. Helen Hunt's face was completely gone, replaced by a gaping mouth, distended from chin to hairline, a buzz of gray rushing at them from its depths.

Then the shelves ran out and there was only space. Ahead was the wide open reading room. A death trap. The moment they stepped out into that, every librarian would see them, and then it would be over. They turned to look, and that white, ropy limb was hissing toward them, leaving a thick, oily trail on the carpet.

They looked at each other. Jackie leaned on Diane's arm, struggling a bit now with standing up.

“We can do this,” Jackie said. “Just move before you can think about consequences.”

Diane nodded, and they ran as thoughtlessly as they could manage into the reading area. There was a bellow from all around them, and more of the white limbs seethed out of the floor and the shelves. Bulbous shapes loomed at them from the ceiling. The librarians had all come out to greet them.

The skittering of hundreds of spindly legs. A buzzing. Red eyes, maybe, or red spots or blood squirted into the air. There were primary jaws and secondary jaws and tertiary vestigial jaws, and each of them turned to two women running toward the exit.

They couldn't run straight because of the broken fountain, and so they curved around it. Jackie, even with her body weakening, had found a reckless energy inside and was running faster. Diane was gasping and slowing, cursing years of
intended workouts that had never happened. The younger woman took her by the shoulders and pushed her ahead. They became a four-legged animal of escape. Fangs and stingers and those boneless white limbs slapped the tile of the fountain just behind them. There was buzzing all around.

To the left was the reference section. Jackie didn't look, but she could hear whatever had been in the shadows rushing out at them. Then the checkout area. The return slot's lid was lifting up, a tentacle-like tongue, or tongue-like tentacle, glopping out of it like sludge.

There was a roaring, incoherent voice. It sounded like the entire building, the walls and floors and metal skeleton of its structure, telling them they would die.

Diane watched the front doors of the library approach, and the boneless limbs of the librarians worked their way in and through the handles, shutting the doors with their bodies.

They weren't going to make it.

“We're not going to make it,” Diane said.

“We'll make it.”

Jackie turned her shoulder forward, putting her entire flung weight into the glass doors and the poisonous limbs. Broken glass and toxic librarian blood spat out onto the tiles of the entrance corridor. Jackie landed in a pile of the glass and a puddle of the gray ooze. Diane ran through the resulting hole and scooped Jackie up. She was so light, really.

They were out of the foyer, out into the empty parking lot. The building behind them expanded and then came back together with a humf. They turned, but nothing was pursuing them. The front doors were unbroken, and there was no sign of any creatures. It was quiet and waiting once again.

Jackie gasped as much air as she could into her throbbing lungs. Her legs were shaking, but she was standing.

“I said we would make it. Who was right?” Jackie said at the ground, bent in two. “Who was right?”

“Are you okay? Do you have any glass in you?”

“A little bit, man, but I'm okay.”

Diane smiled at Jackie. After a moment, Jackie smiled back. Then they started laughing. They couldn't stop. They stood and leaned into each other and laughed. Jackie was still covered in purple blotches and pouring sweat, but they laughed about that too.

“You were right,” said Diane. “You were right. Oh my god, we're actually alive, aren't we?”

Jackie waved it off.

“More important, we have answers.” Jackie nodded to the box in her hand and the folder in Diane's. “I mean, god, I hope we have answers.”