Welcome to Night Vale (24 page)

Diane stood in Josh's empty room, dialing again. Each time it went straight to voice mail. She checked her texts, reading his last text (“Good. Be home later.”) again and again.

She called the Sheriff's Secret Police. She called Josh's friends. She called Josh again. She called the comic book and video stores again. She called Josh again. She called Josh again.

He had to have his phone with him. It was illegal for any person to not carry at all times some sort of device by which the World Government could track their location. Most people opted for a cell phone because it also could do useful things like make phone calls and attract birds. A few holdouts still preferred the old tracking collars, bulky and impossible to take off though they were.

She rifled through the papers on Josh's desk and the ones shoved in his books. She found all kinds of sketches and doodles and homework worksheets. She pulled open his drawers, finding his illicit writing utensils (She didn't care. He was a teenager. What are you going to do, stop a kid from writing because it's illegal?), some cockroaches with corporate logos on them, and a partial tarot deck. She confiscated the tarot deck, making a mental note to lecture him about that once he was safely home (he would be safely home soon, she was sure), but also keeping it for her own use later.

There was nothing from Josh, and no one else she had gotten hold of knew where he was. They all offered their heartfelt
condolences. She could taste her worry about Josh as an actual taste on her tongue, and it tasted like rotten citrus.

Diane tried texting him again. When she pressed her thumb to send, she felt a familiar sharp pain. She did it again. She felt it again. Her phone's touch screen grew cloudy with smudged blood. He was unavailable or, even worse, forbidden to call by civil ordinance.

She let out a high-pitched yelp of anger and kicked the open desk drawer shut. The framed movie poster above Josh's desk of Lee Marvin in
Cat Ballou
rattled.

She sat on the corner of his bed, put her head in her hands, and let out a sob that swelled her face and burned her eyes. She slid down the side of the bed, her butt thudding to the floor. She intentionally inhaled and exhaled toward the sky. The ceiling fan blew her breath back at her.

From this vantage point, she could see under the desk. There was a pale fluttering, like a white moth.

“Josh?” she asked hopefully, foolishly. He had never been a moth before, but he liked to try out new forms.

She reached under the desk and felt something light, thin, small. Not a moth. Paper?

Paper. Before she pulled it out and held it up to her face, she knew what it said.

“KING CITY.” Over and over, as though the writer was unable to write any other words.

It was not the same as the paper the man in the tan jacket had given her. It was lighter, cheaper stock. The lettering was different too. It was shakier; the curves of the
G
and the
C
were bulbous and crooked, written in thin pen. The words on the paper Evan had told her to pass on to Josh was written in a thick, assured pencil.

She reopened the desk drawer. She ran her hand through the illegal writing utensils and found a pen that matched the color and gauge of the writing in her hand.

How did he know about King City? Diane pulled her purse off her shoulder and threw it against the wall. She smacked the desktop with her palms. She cursed. She stomped. Nothing helped.

She looked at her purse, lying open near the doorway. She remembered the paper Evan had given her. She had gone to throw it away behind the Moonlite All-Nite but put it in her purse after seeing Troy. She rifled through the purse. And just like her car keys, the paper was not there.

“No,” Diane said again and again on the floor of Josh's empty room.

“KING CITY,” the paper said again and again in Jackie's hand and probably now in Josh's hand as well.

Diane grabbed her phone and tried calling him one more time. She could feel the phone burning her ear. She could smell it burning her hair. She let it ring and ring, until the pain was searing, until her hair caught on fire, until she could not physically hold the phone to her head a moment longer, and then she let it ring a moment past that.

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.

Diane bought a bus ticket to King City. It was as easy at that.

The bus left at 7:00
A.M
. She brought a small suitcase and a little bit of cash. She boarded the bus, which was a standard bus, flint gray, with a long, rectangular body, two flat front windows, seven wheels, and several narrow viewing slots along the sides, so that the passengers could have a heavily obstructed view of the outside world.

The bus pulled out of the station and onto the highway. Diane tried texting and calling Josh again. It was painful, emotionally and physically, to do so, but she kept doing it anyway. She wished Jackie were with her. It would be easier with another person on her side, someone so steady and fearless, as young as she was, but Jackie was on her own painful journey, and Diane would have to do this alone.

The man sitting across the aisle from her was asleep moments into the ride. He was wearing overalls and a wooden hat. He had only one arm, which he kept folded behind his head. There was a tattoo along his tricep of a head of Boston lettuce crawling with ants. From between the broad leaves came two bare human legs, and below it all was a banner that read,
CORAZÓN.

She listened to him breathe. His inhale was long and pinched, a thread of breath pulled taut into his sinuses. His exhale began with a muffled pop, like the sound of a freezer door opening, and spiraled out to a wheeze.

Diane closed her eyes. She tried to breathe synchronously with the man across the aisle. She put one arm behind her head, and breathed intentionally.

Yesterday, she had called the Sheriff's Secret Police and reported her car and her son missing. When asked for a description of the car, she described colors and shapes. This matched the police's understanding of what a missing burgundy Ford hatchback looked like. When asked for a description of Josh, she cried. This matched their understanding of what a missing teenage son looked like.

The Secret Police—who were standing in Diane's doorway only seconds after she had said “Secret Police” into the poorly hidden microphone mounted above her refrigerator—had said they would look for him.

“We're looking for him now,” they had said, standing completely still. A helicopter had flown over the house, but this had been unrelated. Helicopters were almost always flying over the house.

Helicopters keep us free, the house had thought.

HELICOPTERS KEEP US FREE
, the billboards all over town said.

Helicopters keep us free, the Sheriff's Secret Police had said to Diane then, in her kitchen, and also during all routine traffic stops and at community events and through bullhorns mounted atop cruisers cruising through quiet neighborhoods on Sunday mornings.

She had shown the police the paper with “KING CITY” written all over it.

One of the officers had held the paper to his face and then showed it to another officer, who had smelled it and then dropped it to the floor, where another officer had belly-crawled by quickly with a clear plastic bag and thick rubber gloves. The
crawling officer had grabbed the paper with the gloved hand, put it in the plastic bag, sealed it, and written “nope!” on the bag in black marker. The officer had belly-crawled away, leaving the bag behind.

It didn't look like they were going to help her at all. The next day she had gotten up early and taken a taxi to the bus station.

As the bus drove on, she tried to sleep but could not. She urged herself to hold still, but would eventually feel an itch on her side and would have to start over. The bus kept its lateral trajectory, which felt flat and straight. Every time she squinted out her viewing slot, she saw desert sameness.

Her phone's battery was almost dead, even though she had charged it before leaving the house. Anyway, it had no signal to call out or in. She wished she had brought a municipally approved book to read, like
Vacation
by Deb Olin Unferth or
The Complete Plays and Verse of Kurt Russell
.

The man across the aisle never moved. His legato breaths stayed constant, a windy metronome.

The bus had been in motion, nonstop, for several hours, and she had not been able to sleep or read or use her phone. There was no visual complexity to the passing scenery or visceral texture to the drive. She was thankful for the man with the lettuce tattoo. She loved him, this man. He was, aesthetically and aurally, perfect. She loved him the way one loves an old bridge or a wool sweater or the sound of a growing tulip.

As she stared at him, the bus slowed and veered right. King City at last. She had only a vague plan for when she arrived. She would first try to find their Secret Police department, wherever it was hidden. Perhaps there was a radio host, some version of a Cecil Palmer for King City, California. She could contact that person and ask for them to put out a call for Josh, the way Cecil
generously announced over the radio the location and personal details of Night Vale citizens without even being asked at all.

The bus came to a stop at a traffic light. They were clearly out on the edge of town. There was a used car lot. The bus turned, and her viewing slot showed her an old house that looked similar to Josie's. Diane leaned into the aisle and looked out the front of the bus, at a familiar low skyline: the library, the Rec Center, the Pinkberry, the distant Brown Stone Spire.

She walked to the front of the bus and leaned over the white line, careful to keep her feet behind it.

“Is this Night Vale?” Diane asked.

“It is,” said the driver. Her name tag said
MAB
.

“But this was the King City bus.”

“Right.” Mab's sunglasses hid any feelings she might be having about the questions.

“But we never stopped or turned.”

“Not many turns on that road.”

They passed the Antiques Mall. Today the antiques in the window were playful, jumping over each other and wrestling.

Diane stumbled over the white line as the bus turned onto Somerset.

“Feet behind the line please.”

She obeyed.

“I don't understand. Why did we never stop in King City?”

Mab eased the bus to a stop at the downtown bus/train/paddleboat terminal. She turned and pulled off her sunglasses. Her feelings about Diane's questions still weren't clear because she had no eyes.

“My bus started in King City. Why would I stop in King City?”

“I'm sorry.”

“You got on the bus in King City. It is a nonstop bus from King City to Night Vale. No turns, like you said.”

“Okay, I'm sorry.”

Diane turned toward the other passengers, hoping someone would join her confusion or plead her case. The bus had started in Night Vale. It had, right? But all of the seats were empty. No one on board but her and the driver. Not even the driver now. Mab was standing outside, sunglasses back on, smoking a clove cigarette.

Diane walked back to her seat and grabbed her suitcase. Before leaving, she knelt down and put her hand to the seat directly across the aisle from hers, where the man had been. It was cold.

She got off the bus.

She called Steve Carlsberg, who had a car. Steve was happy to take Diane to King City. He was excited to go. He complained about not having received anything from a man in a tan jacket and agreed to skip work. He would pick her up from the bus station and they would leave this very morning.

“Morning?” she said. “What time is it?”

“Eight o'clock. Good and early start. Oh, this will be fun!” Steve said. She could hear the dinging of his car. He was already on his way.

She hung up and checked the time. Her bus had left at 7:00 and had been on the road for at least six hours. It was 8:03
A.M
.

Mab pinched out her cigarette and swallowed it. She climbed back into her bus, pulled the doors shut, and drove away.

Diane waited. She bought a coffee and a banana in the station and waited. She bought another coffee and waited. She stared at the arrival and departure screens and waited. She checked the time and waited. It was 9:34.

She called Steve.

“Where are you? Is everything okay?”

“What do you mean, Diane?”

“I thought you were coming to pick me up and we were going to drive to King City.”

“Drive to King City? Gosh, I'd love to. That sounds so exciting. When did you want to go?”

“As soon as you can.”

“Listen, I'll take the rest of the day off. Where are you?”

“I'm at the bus station downtown.”

“Okie doke!”

Diane waited. 11:15
A.M.

“Steve! Where are you?”

“Work. Why? What's up?”

Diane called a cab and asked the driver to take her to the airport.

Yesterday, she had called her insurance company. She was hoping she could get a replacement car to drive to King City.

The insurance company had asked her where her car was.

“I don't know.”

“If you do not know where your current car is, how can we replace it?”

“It was stolen.”

“So you don't see your car right now?”

“No.”

“If you cannot see a thing, how can you be sure it exists at all? Are you familiar with Schrödinger's c—”

Diane had hung up and called back, hoping for a different agent.

“You did not answer our question.” There had been only one ring, and the voice had immediately started in. “We cannot replace a vehicle that does not exist.”

“You have my VIN number and all of the pertinent information in your system.”

“This? This is just ones and zeros. This is just lights flashing various colors and shapes. There is nothing physical or real about data. Here. I just changed your middle name to five
f
's in a row. ‘Diane Fffff Crayton.' It says right here on my screen: ‘Diane Fffff Crayton.' Do you accept that is your name because it is in our quote system?”

“No.”

“No, you do not. Just as we would not accept that a vehicle exists simply because there is a number here in my quote sys——”

“Shut up and listen!” She had shouted this. She wasn't sure she had ever shouted on the phone before. “My son is missing. My car is missing. I need to find him, and I need a car to do that. I have no time for your absurd logic.”

“Absurd logic is an oxymoron.”

“Absurd logic!” she had screamed into the phone.

“Hissssssssssssssss!” the representative had replied.

“You are an insurance company. I pay you to replace or repair my vehicle, or compensate me in the event that something happens to my vehicle. Something has happened to my vehicle.”

No response.

“I need a car because I need my son. Can you understand me? Can you sympathize here? Just a small amount of compassion to get this done?”

Another long silence.

“Are you—” she had said.

“Yes. We're still here.”

“Have you—”

“Quiet, Diane. We heard you. We are sorry. Give us a mo
ment. This is difficult for us. Hearing that a customer has a missing child hurts us deeply. Please give us some space.”

Diane had held back another eruption. Of the stages of grief, Diane had already gone through denial, sadness, and despair. Now she had been on the verge of the final step, vengeance.

The voice on the other end, clearly crying, had said: “We'll see what we can do. It will take no more than two weeks.”

“Two weeks.”

“This is hard on us, too,” the representative had sobbed. Diane had hung up.

The cab pulled up to the airport. Night Vale Airport is not big. Most of the planes are propeller planes, private planes, secret military drones, and government planes that are used to make chemtrails, but she found a commuter airline to fly her from Night Vale to King City. She was one of four people on board the twenty-seat plane.

She had never flown before, having never left Night Vale. She wasn't sure whether she was a nervous flier or not, but the plane certainly felt small and fragile. It took off with a whirring shudder, and she felt dizzy as it rose through the clouds. She leaned her head against the window, but the rough ride caused her to bump her head against the hard plastic, making it impossible to sleep, so she watched the red flatness of the desert pass slowly below them. She looked out to the horizon, wondering if she could ever believe in mountains again having seen this flatness from above, and whether anyone would ever learn what clouds were made of. It was probably best we never know.

She glanced about at her fellow travelers, finding it interesting that they were all wearing blue earphones and horn-rimmed glasses. They were most likely part of a vague, yet menacing government agency. Diane wasn't sure if they were following her or the pilot or what, but they looked bored and tired.

After a two-hour flight, the plane touched down. It had been a long and expensive day, and she had only enough money for a few more cab rides in King City.

As the plane taxied to the gate, which was simply a wood stepladder on the tarmac near the terminal, Diane watched the world scroll from right to left across her window. Behind the airport, she could see a small city watched over by a distant Brown Stone Spire.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached our final destination of Night Vale. Please remain seated until we come to a complete stop and the captain turns on the Free Will sign.”

Diane punched the window, crying, “No. No!” her voice cracking and eyes watering. She couldn't help it. She turned to look around the cabin, conscious of the scene she was causing. There were twelve other passengers on the plane. They all wore baseball caps and knit shirts. They were sitting together in the back rows, not showing any awareness at all of her outburst.

“Thank you for flying with us,” said the pilot, as Diane dragged her suitcase off the plane. She put down the suitcase and sat on it, right there on the tarmac, having no idea at all what she should do next.