The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe (9 page)

As part of our service to our community, Night Vale Community Radio is taking this moment to allow one of the candidates for mayor to make a brief statement. The following is from the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home.

FACELESS OLD WOMAN:
I replaced your books with other books. The covers are the same, but the content has been altered. I don't think you read enough, but that is not why I did it. I changed every single word of some of the books. In others, only a single comma on a single page. This is a metaphor, but I'm not sure what it represents. That is also a metaphor. We all are.

Our political system has become too complicated. I am not complicated. I'm just a gentle old lady, who lives in your home. I'm touching your hand right now. No, not that one. Not that one either.

Do not think you are superior because you have a face and I do not. All of your books are now different books and you did not notice, so who is the lost child in the dark, howling woods of this fable?

Anyway, I hope you'll vote for me. One of the books is now my life story, if you'd like to know more about my background. No, not that one. Not that one either. You'll know it, because my life story is just like yours, starting with calamity and shouting, and ending with an empty room and a to-do list.

Also Hiram McDaniels has been exchanging e-mails with corn lobbyists looking to elbow in on our local imaginary corn market. Hiram: Bad for our community, bad for our interests, literally a five-headed dragon. Vote for the candidate you can trust. Vote for the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home.

CECIL:
And now a word from our sponsor.

Today's broadcast may have been brought to you by uncertainty.

And now back to our regular programming.

Ah, we have some sharp listeners. Several of you noted that the strangeness of today does not end with the blinking light up on the mountain, or the mountain itself, but also this vast, muddy plain it rises from. So yes, we are now reporting that there is a great floodplain, strewn with bones, around our city. Its wet patches glint slightly when the blinking light is illuminated. At night, when all distance is darkness, it appears that the universe itself is glimmering red and then gone. Red and then gone. The mud ripples under the footsteps of the approaching, masked army, and this warps the reflections in interesting ways. Carlos says he would like to study it, but that he promised to make a certain person dinner, and he has to learn how to put other things besides science first. Some of this realization might have come with help from those around him. Mayor Pamela Winchell was seen holding her official mayoral bloodstone aloft toward the mountain and the blinking light up on it. She was standing on that plain. The plain that exists now, which we should have mentioned earlier.

In other news, a man in a tan jacket carrying a deerskin suitcase was seen outside of one of the currently closed subway entrances, passing out flyers explaining the benefits of a mass transit system and encouraging citizens to push for the reopening of the subway as soon as possible. “Transit is the opposite of traffic!” the flyer reportedly said. And “Subway?? More like wowza!” Some citizens reported that the flyer went on to say: “Traverse the naval of the world. That secret, buried point. It is my home. Help me get home. It is already too late to be early, but not too late to be on time.” Here at the station, we can't confirm any of this, as those holding the flyer soon found that it had vanished from their hands, that they could barely remember their interaction with the man, and that, looking back, all they saw was a haze of dust and heat, distant and indecipherable, like a country they'd never live to visit, like the landscape of a fading dream, like fiction, like fiction.

All right, we're really going to get it right this time. We have been focusing too narrowly, and we realize that. As many of you pointed out, we should have spent less time on the blinking light and more time expanding on the bit about the approaching masked army. So: There is now a great, masked army, coming toward us across the bone-covered plain. We have no specific information about them, other than that they look small when far away, and then appear to grow as they come closer, which they are, coming closer. They also might be actually growing. They are quite large now. The blinking light up on the mountain has not changed its pace. There is a noise like growling, only less organic. Like wind hollowing through a canyon, only more . . . growly.

Ladies and gentlemen, here is what we know. There is a blinking light up on the mountain. There is a mountain on the floodplain. There is a floodplain under the imminent army. There is an imminent army maybe a couple hours' march from here. I do not believe now that we are leaving anything out.

If you have homes, I suggest you flee them. If you have friends, I suggest you warn them. If you have children, did you not know how dangerous and unpredictable the world was when you created a defenseless tiny human within it?

And much like Madeline LaFleur, head of the Night Vale Tourism Board, I will now control the one part of my life that is under my control. Let us go now, and I do hope we come back, to the weather.

WEATHER: “Never Be Famous” by Hussalonia

Well, we did come back. Here we are. Postweather.

Carlos finally took a look at the situation. The blinking light up on the mountain and all that came with it. Horrific invading army, etc.

“Oh that,” he said, gesturing with a spatula he had until moments before been using to cook, “that's a mirage. I've seen that one before. When you get the clouds in a certain way and the temperature is where it's at, you can sometimes get this blinking light–mountain floodplain–masked army mirage. Wow, this is a pretty strong one. Should disappear in an hour or two.”

And it did. Completely gone. Well, the mountain and the blinking light and the floodplain disappeared. The masked army turned out to be real, but they weren't coming to attack us, just passing through on their way to attacking someone else, and they provided some valuable traffic for local business. A few of them even took a bus tour of Radon Canyon.

Madeline LaFleur was both relieved and pleased. “I'm relieved,” she said. “I'm also pleased.” She still was sipping her coffee too often. Perhaps her feeling of lack of control stems from a personal issue rather than the impending doom we imagined. Stress from her failure to live up to her own self-imposed life goals for instance. Or a relationship that wasn't exactly the relationship she had envisioned it would be.

But who knows? No one. No one has ever known anything. Not really.

Still, nonetheless, we have come to another end. We have come to it as we always do: blind, ignorant, groping. I take comfort in that consistency.

There is no blinking light up on the mountain. There is no mountain towering over a muddy plain. There is no muddy plain under an invading army. There was an invading army, but they're gone now. What is left? Well, what is always left?

Night Vale. Our little city, our tiny town, our Night Vale. Proud. Safe. Existent.

Stay tuned next for the background hum of the universe, amplified, and with live color commentary.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.

PROVERB: Throw your hands in the air. Now your arms. Keep detaching limbs and throwing them in the air. Hopefully, the birds will be sated and leave.

EPISODE 32:

“YELLOW HELICOPTERS”

OCTOBER 1, 2013

GUEST VOICE: JACKSON PUBLICK

O
VER THE COURSE OF OUR FIRST YEAR, WE DEVELOPED THE STORY OF
Cecil and Carlos's relationship, culminating in their getting together in episode 25, “One Year Later.” When we first started we didn't really plan to have any long story arcs. It's not that we rejected the idea. We just didn't really plan any. Cecil and Carlos happened organically based on intuition.

As year two began, we continued writing some one-off episodes (“Summer Reading Program” and “Subway,” to name a couple) with the thought that these new story lines could and would come back later, but nothing as far as a major plot arc goes.

Then as the Dana story line unfolded with the desert otherworld, and as Joseph and I talked about what Desert Bluffs might be up to, we came to episode 32, “Yellow Helicopters.”

We had only loosely discussed down-the-road ideas. It was mostly things like: “I have an idea about Cecil finding old cassettes of himself” or “I think it'd be interesting to have an episode where Cecil suddenly isn't there and someone else is running the show.” More on these ideas soon.

I wrote the first draft of episode 32 wherein yellow helicopters with the Strexcorp logos start showing up in Night Vale. In episode 19, A and B, Kevin R. Free played such a delightfully evil Kevin from Desert Bluffs, I just wanted to find ways to get that story back into the show.

So here in episode 32, I had Strexcorp buy the Night Vale Community Radio Station.

When I sent over the first draft of the script, Joseph's response was “Oh, I guess we're doing this.” I didn't really recognize what we were doing until we were doing what we were doing, but he was right, we were doing it.

—Jeffrey Cranor

A lonely heart. A wandering eye. An empty stomach. A shoulder to cry on. This is what makes us us.

WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE.

Sad news, listeners. Old Woman Josie says that the angels who have been living with her, helping around the house, and ultimately protecting her from all evils, have disappeared. It's hard to say just how sad this news is, for two important reasons: One, angels are not real, and two, we are not allowed to know about their existence or hierarchical structure.

Josie called this weekend and spoke to Vithya our station intern. She said the angels often leave her for a few hours or days at a time, but they've never been gone for three straight weeks. She thinks they are off fighting an important war for good, but she's worried that maybe she just made them mad or bored. “Angels get bored very easily,” Josie said, “which is strange because they are eternal and there is a lot of downtime during immortality.”

Vithya told Josie that angels aren't real and that we cannot know such things about them, but this just made Vithya cry, because if you talk about angels and you are one who has been secretly chosen by angels for special angelic purposes, you will start crying. Vithya has been sobbing quite a bit this morning, as a matter of fact. I keep asking her “Are you okay?” But she just says “Angels aren't real,” and then buries her heaving face into her inner elbow and runs off.

Dear listeners, it appears the angels, if they are real, and they are not, have left Night Vale, and none of us are allowed to know this. So forget I said anything.

The Night Vale Medical Board wants to know: Are you heart healthy? How healthy is your heart? Have you ever checked? Doctors recommend checking your heart at least once a year. Simply separate the skin on your upper chest and break open the ribs. (Here's a tip: If you don't have a bone saw handy, just sterilize any old electric saw you might have in your work shed.) Right behind your ribs, kind of to the left is a potato-shaped muscle lump filled with straw and maybe some insects. That's your heart! Pull that out and sew your chest back up.

Wash your heart in warm water. Pat dry with a paper towel and roll flat on a floured surface. Brown on both sides in a sauté pan and eat immediately. Remember: A healthy heart is a healthy life.

This has been Community Health Tips.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've been getting reports that several yellow helicopters have been seen hovering above town. We all are aware of the black helicopters, which are world government, and blue helicopters, which are secret police, and the helicopters with detailed murals of diving birds of prey, which are the helicopters that took all the children in Night Vale away a few months ago. We still don't know what those helicopters are. But they did bring all the children back unharmed and much more well-behaved than before, so they are deemed just as safe as the other helicopters.