Welcome to Night Vale (26 page)

Steve Carlsberg left a couple of messages saying he wondered if maybe Josh's disappearance had something to do with King City and that Steve had this great idea that Diane should go to King City and that he could drive and to call him back when she could.

No one else had called. Diane tried saying “Secret Police” into the microphone above her fridge, but no one came.

She went to the garage and grabbed Josh's bike. She had never had much money, and, given the loss of her job, she thought it best to not keep getting cabs. Plus, Night Vale cabdrivers couldn't always be relied on to pick you up or drop you off in a timely manner, as they stopped constantly to take improv classes and pottery workshops.

Josh's bike was dusty and the rear tire was nearly flat. He had been anxious to leave the bike behind. It was definitely a kid's bicycle, with a thick frame and smaller wheels and brightly colored decals of scenes from Pieter Brueghel the Elder's
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
.

She stuck to side streets, riding slowly, with care. The trip took a little under an hour, and Diane was feeling a pulsing pain in her calf by the time she pulled up to the front of the pawnshop. 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. One of them raised her camera and tried to take
a photo of Diane, but the camera flashed, only reflecting the car window back at the lens. The agent swore. Diane waved a cursory hello at them and walked into the store.

Jackie slouched over the counter. She had her eyes closed and was breathing slowly and was inattentive to the living world around her and was deep in a complexity of vivid, nonsequential mental imagery, but she was not asleep.

Diane put her hand on the glass counter.

“Jackie?”

No response.

“Jackie.” Diane slapped the counter.

Jackie's eyes opened and focused on the counter. She knew that Diane was there but was too overwhelmed by the new information she had learned to care. It was an issue she was having with the world in general that day.

“Jackie, I need your help.”

Diane reached into her bag and pulled out a plastic bag marked “nope!”, and took out a piece of paper with “KING CITY” all over it in Josh's handwriting. She placed it on the counter.

Jackie winced. She batted the paper off the counter.

“Jackie I need you to—”

“Why did you bring that here?”

Diane didn't know what to say. There were a lot of reasons, but it sounded like Jackie didn't think any of them would be good reasons.

“This is not an arts and crafts project, Diane. I am living with this. This is real.” Jackie shook her cast, and they could both hear the rustle of paper inside. “I only just got out of the hospital.”

“I didn't mean—”

“You don't dress like a person and suddenly you're twins.
You don't get the same haircut and suddenly you're best friends. I'm not going to King City, okay? I can barely move. My mind doesn't seem to connect the way it used to. I don't have a car. I can't do my job. If no one would remind me of that goddamn paper I could sit here forever and never think of it or anything else again.”

She shook her head.

“I'm sorry. I know this is hard for you. I know this is so painful. You're a mother and you're trying very hard. But I can barely hold it together to just sit here. I can't help you. I can't even help myself.”

“I found that in Josh's room.” Diane did not raise her voice. She did not flush in anger or frustration. She did not cajole or cater. She said what she knew as she knew it and hoped it would be enough. “I don't know if it's somehow related to Troy, but I know that Josh has gone to King City. I don't know how I know, but I know. He's not in Night Vale anymore. One of the last things Ev . . . um . . .”

“Evan.”

“Evan mentioned to me was Josh. He tried to give Josh a paper like yours. I didn't give him the paper, but I think Josh got it. And I think Josh went to King City.”

Diane felt at a loss to the depth of her, an exhaustion that was not physical but that slowed her body all the same. Jackie felt the same exhaustion, her body a single, dull ache. They felt this next to each other, neither woman realizing it.

“But everything I do circles me back to King City,” said Diane. “Every attempt I make on my own to get there fails. I don't know what else to do. I think if we went together, I think if we worked together, then we could get there. We could make it.”

Diane leaned across the counter, meeting Jackie in her slump, so that their faces were very close. They felt each other's breath.

“Jackie,” she said. “Jackie.”

Jackie heard, but did not indicate it.

“I pawned that tear to you all those weeks ago for a reason. And I don't know what that reason was. Everything I do is for a reason, and I know none of them. Everything makes sense, and the sense is hidden from me. We live in a pattern that we'll never detect, and that will shuffle us through invisible hierarchies to the actual death of us.”

She had thought none of these thoughts before, exactly, but it was like a script before her. The sentences were obvious and immediate, and she said them as she came to know them.

“We are together on this. And I don't know why, and I never will, and we just are. Jackie?”

“Yeah, Diane?”

“I'm sorry I do such a bad job of expressing it, but I respect you a lot. There's no one I trust more to help me find my son than you. There's no one, okay?”

Diane felt warm around her eyes.

Jackie shrugged. “I feel bad for you, man, I do. I've learned some things today that I didn't remember before. I wish I could help you. But I hurt all over. I'm slouching onto my bones.”

“I can't heal you. You're going to hurt, hurt bad, either way. But I think if you come with me, we can find answers, Jackie. We made it out of the library together. We work well together, for whatever reason. I'm not asking you to . . . I'm just asking . . . I just want us to try.”

She drew her hands together in front of her chest like a person in prayer. Jackie considered this woman, the mother of what could one day be her brother. She thought of what Lucinda said about being a mother, slowly losing a child.

“Put your hands down. I don't know why you're doing that, it looks weird. Fine. Yes. I'll come with you.”

Diane clapped once and hugged her.

“I'll do my best to help,” said Jackie, “but my best might not be anything at all.”

She pulled herself gently from Diane's hug and pointed out the window at the bike.

“Neither of us has a car now. So how are we getting there? We gonna take that cute ride of yours, or what?”

Diane frowned.

“No, I don't suppose.”

Diane considered several options. The obvious was to rent a car, but she was basically out of money. Diane's only credit card was an American Express Uranium Card, which was a dangerous card to use because it does not allow revolving credit and is made entirely of enriched uranium. Few merchants accept American Express Uranium Cards, or even allow them in their stores, but she did get double mileage points if anyone accepted it and survived.

Diane leaned her head back, exhaling upward, hoping for a solid thump of a thought to fall into her mind. She blinked. She stared up. Nothing.

“Is there anyone whose car we could borrow?” Jackie said.

“Steve would definitely do that. He's always so helpful and nice. But he's not been so reliable these da—” A solid thump of a thought. “What about that?”

On one of the highest shelves, there was a Mercedes, only a few years old, and once offered with urgency by a young man wearing a gray pin-striped suit stained with dirt. The luxury sedan was perfectly balanced across the drive train, resting perpendicularly on the ten-foot wooden shelf.

Jackie smiled, and then winced. It hurt to smile. It hurt not
emotionally but physically, due to the trauma to her muscles. She had not smiled since the accident.

“Keys are in the ignition,” she said.

“Great,” Diane said but didn't do anything because: “How are we going to—”

“I don't know.”

“But how did you in the first place?”

“I don't remember.”

“So we're stuck again.”

“Looks like.”

No time passed and nothing happened, but the Mercedes was down from the shelf and out in the parking lot. Around them was an open toolbox, a trail of feathers, and a large quantity of ball bearings. The air smelled like a burnt match.

They took a long moment to absorb this new reality, and then, like good Night Vale citizens, categorized it as unexplainable and set it aside forever.

“Guess we took it down the same way I put it up,” said Jackie.

She couldn't remember what way that was.

“Wow,” said Diane. “I'm impressed with us. I hope I helped somehow.”

“Dude, I'm sure you did.”

“That's sweet of you.”

“Shall we?”

While Jackie headed upstairs to her desk to pack a couple of personal items, Diane wandered around the store, looking at what had been pawned. She found her tear, and was disappointed that no one had bought it yet, but pleased that Jackie had displayed it so prominently on her shelves. And then she saw something that gave her pause.

Below a series of cute porcelain figurines depicting young
couples committing thought crimes and hiding evidence, there was a trash can. Resting on top of the trash can was a box. It was a simple brown cardboard box. She knew exactly what kind of box it was. It was the box that No. 9 envelopes come in. She was familiar with this kind of box. The only office that used No. 9 envelopes in Night Vale was the one that she had, until recently, worked at.

She crouched down to examine it. There was a long wood handle leaning against the side, belonging to a four-foot garden hoe. The metal edge of the hoe was stained and sticky with clumps of dark brown fur.

She set down the hoe and touched the lid of the box. She grew sad. She did not know why she was sad. She grew scared. She did not know why she was scared.

She lifted the lid and saw. She saw. And she felt. And for a moment she was not. And then she was. She held her hand to her mouth.

When Jackie got to the Mercedes, slow and limping, Diane was already in the passenger seat.

“Let's do this,” Jackie said.

Diane's elbow was on the window ledge. She had lost some of her color and was staring out the window at nothing in particular.

Jackie did not know exactly what it must be like to have a son go missing, but it must be exhausting. She knew about exhaustion. She knew about pain.

“You feeling okay?”

“I pawned that tear to you because school was starting and I needed the money,” Diane said. “That was the only reason. I made up that other stuff because I thought it might get you to come with me.”

“I know.”

“Okay then.”

Jackie started the car, pressed her feet to both pedals, and backed out with a squeal of vulcanized rubber and a puff of gray smoke. The agent in the black sedan nearby snapped photos of their going, each one ruined by the flash, each ruin followed by a muttering of curses. The women drove away leaving two black curls, like horns, across the crumbling asphalt lot.

Two beings, definitely not angels, both named Erika, stepped out from behind the pawnshop, where they had been hiding. They were drenched in sweat and their hands were covered in black grease.

Jackie guided the Mercedes onto Route 800. It drove so differently from her old car. Her old car had felt like making a plan, whereas this car felt like an improvisation. Or maybe it was that she was driving with one arm.

Diane grinned at her and she grinned back. It was hard to fight the feeling of triumph. Diane clutched hard at the slip of paper that said “KING CITY” in Josh's handwriting. She couldn't let go of it. Or, unlike Jackie, she could, but, unlike Jackie, she wouldn't.

They passed Old Woman Josie's house, next to the used car lot. She was standing in the front yard with all the Erikas, as if she knew they were coming by. The Erikas seemed out of breath. Josie had her hand up but she wasn't waving. She was gesturing, but Jackie couldn't understand what the gesture was. She gave her own meaningless gesture back. A used car salesman stood on the roof of an old Toyota hatchback and howled. Jackie howled back. She hadn't been this happy since before the trouble had begun. The highway was a simple path laid out for her.

Diane turned around, watching Night Vale retreat into the distance.

“Seems small,” she said. “I mean, not just from here. It just seems so small now. Such a small place to live a whole life.”

“You haven't lived your whole life yet.”

“I really hope you're right.”

Larry Leroy's, out on the edge of town, was the last house they passed. Larry was nowhere to be seen. His house sagged into itself, an unmaintained heap of wood barely holding the shape of a house. It thought about nothing at all.

Then they were out in the open desert. Jackie tried to think of a time she had been even this far outside of Night Vale. All she could remember were endless days at the pawnshop. For the first time, she felt sad thinking about those days rather than nostalgic. She didn't know what that meant.

“Diane, what does it mean when you know you're feeling something but you don't know what that feeling is?”

Diane considered this seriously for a long time.

“It means you're growing older.”

“I never grow older.”

“I guess we all thought that once.”

The desert went on so far out into the distance that it was easy to imagine that it constituted the entire world. But Jackie knew, even though she didn't quite believe it, that the desert was barely a fraction of the world. It frightened her, the possibility of space. The tininess of home. Her chest felt like a bubble about to pop, and she tried to hold still.

“Is it hard getting old?”

“Only as hard as you let it be. Easier than the alternative.”

“Dying?”

“Oh no. No, that's actually easier than anything. I meant getting younger.”

Jackie laughed, although she didn't find it funny. There are other reasons for laughter.

They settled in for a long drive. Diane was closing her eyes for a nap before it was her turn to drive when Jackie pointed, swerving the car since her pointing hand was also her steering
hand, straightened the car back out, and said to the now wide awake Diane, “Look!”

There was a sign that said
KING CITY
with an arrow pointing at an exit looping away from the highway out into the sand.

“I guess we take that.”

Jackie pulled the car onto the exit. As she did, she felt her stomach start to rise, like she was being carried.

“Do you feel that?”

“Yes. Something's not right.”

The exit loop kept turning. She couldn't see how the loop could possibly be that long. The curve just wouldn't end. They went and went. For ten minutes they did a long, slow curve along the exit loop.

“This isn't good,” said Jackie.

“Well it's not great.”

Jackie started to wonder if she would be turning the car in to the gentle curve for the rest of her life, and just as she started to wonder that, the road straightened them out and spat them out on a highway. They drove past a house sagged into itself, an unmaintained heap of wood barely holding the shape of a house.

“Oh goddammit.”

Up ahead was Old Woman Josie's house, and the used car lot. This time Josie was alone. Her arms were crossed. She nodded at them, as if this, and everything else, was exactly as she suspected.

“Turns out working together doesn't make King City any easier to get to,” said Jackie.

“I was wrong,” said Diane, furiously staring at the paper in her hands. Tears were pouring from her eyes, but she didn't make a sound.

She looked up at Jackie, not making any move to wipe the
tears. Jackie held her gaze for a long moment, letting the car roll down the highway without watching where it was going.

“Okay, we'll find another way,” Jackie said.

“There is no other way.”

Jackie nodded at the houses and strip mall parking lots they were passing.

“This is Night Vale. Our mayor once led an army of masked warriors from another dimension through magic doors to defeat an army of smiling blood-covered office workers. There is definitely, definitely another way.”

They continued into Night Vale, without aim, listening only to the sound of the wind in the windows and the voice of Cecil Palmer from the radio.