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This is a story about you, says the man on the radio. Normally, you would think that this was some kind of hyperbolic marketing ploy where the you in question is a general one which has nothing to do with your specific life, but things have been different since you first crossed the border into this town.
Welcome to Night Vale.
You wake to the sound of the radio calling out to you, as you do every day. You thought clock radios were a thing of the eighties, but after the first night you spent in this town without yet assassinating the scientist who your handler had assured you was so dangerous, you walked to the local thrift shop to see what they had for alarm clocks. You don’t set alarms on your phone because your phone is a burner which you keep switched off and remove the SIM card from at all times except for when checking for text messages. The thrift store offered an array of nostalgic technology including the clock radio, several VCRs, and a gramophone you felt sure belonged in a museum, as well as several pieces of technology you had never seen before in your life and were unsure of the purpose of. And why did that one have spines?
Still, you like the little clock radio, and the fact that pretty much any time you feel like switching it on, the odd radio host with the voice like velvet and the strange, venomous cat living in the ducts of the radio station seems to be talking to you. You know his job is to talk to everyone, to talk to the entire town, but somewhere underneath that entirely rational knowledge, you can’t help but feel sure that, more often than not, he’s actually talking to you.
The radio alarm wakes you, but you don’t get up just yet. You take a moment to bask in being in a bed you’ve slept in often enough that you know where to expect your body to be before you even open your eyes in the morning. The fact that your task for the morning is mostly self-appointed takes some of the urgency away, too, in a way that feels novel in its languid lack of expectation. You roll over and settle deeper into the warm spot, and let the radio host speak to you — just you — a little longer.
It’s lucky, actually, that the scientist wakes so early, since it will give you a couple of hours to surveil the lab as she works before your shift as a bag boy at the Stop, Drop and Speed-Shop begins. When you interviewed for the job, the manager at the store asked you if you had any experience working under pressure in high-stress environments. When you told him that you did, you smiled to yourself a little — a tiny private joke about how all of the skills you rely on most heavily in your adult life were developed under the threat of artillery fire. You couldn’t imagine that anything this grocery store had to offer could compete with that stress level, but Stop, Drop enforces its requirement of speed-shopping strictly and without mercy, which means that there have been times in the last few weeks when you’ve found yourself rattled. It’s strange. You thought, once, that after the only thing that could ever matter had ended in disaster, you didn’t really have the capacity to feel shaken anymore. Night Vale speed-shopping runs have managed to prove you wrong.
Finally, you get up and prepare for the day. The man on the radio is talking to you even more than usual today, and it unsettles you enough that you switch the radio off as you eat your breakfast. You like the idea of being spoken to, but the sense that you’re being watched is one that you like significantly less.
The drive out to the scientist’s lab is quiet. Sometimes, when you peer in her window, instead of training the useless sites of your useless rifle on her head, you like to try to get a look at what she’s working on. Yesterday’s project involved a topographical map of the area, with different areas shaded in different colors, forming an eerie, shifting, inorganic-looking pattern. You think you’d like to ask her what the pattern means, but that’s not really your role as the person contracted to kill her, and you think the fact that you really ought to have succeeded in doing so several times now has probably soured any relationship you might have had with her.
You think so, but when you park around the corner from the building you’ll be using for surveillance, she crosses the street to meet you. You startle a little, clutching the handle of your case which your rifle is disassembled inside. You had thought that you and the scientist were not interacting in a kind of unspoken understanding that talking to each other was not in the terms of your relationship, but she says to you, “Hello — Tim?” and you don’t have the heart not to answer someone you’ve watched bleed out maybe ten times over the last few weeks. It never gets less unsettling, but it does seem to confer a kind of intimacy which you never would have predicted.
“Hello,” you say. That part of the social contract is clear. It’s what you’re meant to say after that which you’re less sure of.
Raphaella has no such problem. She looks you up and down like she can read you as well as she presumably reads the multitude of charts and read-outs her lab has already become filled with in such a short time, then says, “Would you like to come in for a cup of tea?”
It’s the last thing you expect her to say. You’re not sure whether you do want to come in, but you’re shivering in the morning light, and you realize that you very much do want a cup of tea. You also want to know why she’s asking and what she wants.
She leads you into the lab without speaking, though, and sets a kettle up over the open flame of a bunsen burner. While the water heats, you walk over to the topographical maps you were looking at through the window yesterday. “It’s moving,” Raphaella says from directly behind you.
She’s not a stealthy person, she doesn’t move with the kind of quiet you trained into yourself so long ago that it feels like second nature, so you don’t know how she keeps managing to startle you. Maybe it’s just that nothing about this town is what or where you expect it to be, and you’re a little on-edge.
“What?” You ask her.
“The elevation of the town,” she says, indicating the maps, which, you can see as you look closer, are all of the same area, Night Vale’s downtown. “It shifts. I took this one down in the morning, see, and then this two hours later, and this two hours after that, all the way through to the next day, and look, the landscape, it’s like it’s—”
“Breathing,” you finish for her, after a long pause when it becomes clear that she’s not going to finish the thought. Now that she has explained the charts, you can see it, too.
“Which doesn’t make any sense!” She sounds frustrated, but not with you — the exclamation is an agreeing one, and she punctuates it by handing you a mug of tea.
You take a sip to fortify yourself, then ask, “Why are you telling me this?” It’s not that you’re not interested — you are, in a way that feels odd and foreign as it tries to find a space inside your mind — but you have the sense that she does few things without a purpose, and you would like to know what the one for this conversation is.
“Because I don’t have time to get shot twice a day!” She snaps. “Can’t you see — this town could be preparing to disappear into a sink hole for all anybody here would know. It’s not, I don’t think, but this place barely even appears on the U.S. geological survey’s records, and every reading I get looks catastrophic, and there are, you know, people who live here.”
You think the concern in her voice is for the town doctor who hangs around her office while you watch several nights a week. He always sports a grin that looks a little mad, it’s so bright, and you’ve seen Raphaella laugh at things he says fairly often as you watch her. You’re thinking of the voice on the radio, though, and of the strange, electric purr of the cat who lives in the vents at the radio station, and of the woman you bought your car from a few days ago, Nastya who runs the garage and sells used cars and didn’t seem to see anything strange about the fact that when she asked you what kind you wanted, all you could think to say was blue.
Raphaella draws in a breath, then says more calmly, “And surely — well, it can’t be very satisfying for you, can it? The way I just seem to keep — not dying?”
“I don’t want to hurt you.” You know even as you say it that this is going to seem strange, given the pattern of your behavior. Still, it feels important to clarify this part, especially since she appears to be here to hear it for the long haul. “I mean, I will, I would, I tried, but that’s the job. It’s not personal. It’s not—” something about the word she’d used had struck you the wrong way, but you can’t quite articulate why. “It’s not satisfying.”
You feel sure this can’t have cleared anything up for her, but she nods like it wasn’t completely incomprehensible, then cocks her head, thinking through her next words before she finally speaks. “That’s — I understand that. And truly, in a way it’s somewhat flattering, the thought that my research seemed dangerous enough that someone—” and here she looks at you, waiting to see if you’ll reveal your employer.
You think about it a moment — nothing about your life right now feels real enough to give the idea the sense of consequence you’re used to, so what’s the harm? — but there’s little enough of the professional pride you’ve rebuilt yourself out of for the last decade left that you’re not going to go and give away one of the last scraps of it. You shake your head.
For a moment you think that perhaps she’s going to push, but she just nods and goes on, “But the job — we’ve had proof that you’r not going to be able to complete, uh, complete your job—” for a moment here she sounds shaken, and you think that if you let the door in the back of your mind open, here is where the wave of emotion about what she must have felt, and about what you’ve done, could overwhelm you. She shakes her head like she’s clearing the emotion away, though, and so you let the threat of the wave of your own pass as well. “At least while I’m in town. And I don’t know how, that is, I don’t know why, but we know that, right?” She doesn’t wait for your nod here, but you offer it anyway. “And I have work to do, and it goes slower when I have to pause to radiate light and float above the ground for half an hour or so twice a day, so I was wondering if you’d be willing to set the job aside until something changes.”
It’s a reasonable request — more than reasonable, too reasonable, maybe. Agreeing to it would mean giving up your reason to be here, though, and for reasons which feel muddy even to you, you think that you don’t want that. You ask her, “Would it—” and your voice sounds creaky as if you haven’t spoken in years even though you spoke only moments ago. “Would it be alright if I still—“ you don’t know how to say it because watch you sounds creepy, but the idea of giving the surveillance up feels like drowning. You gesture to the window you’ve been watching her through and hope that she understands.
She does seem to get it, although it takes her a moment. Then she says, “Oh — I mean, if you want to? It’s a little awkward to just have you out there watching all the time, though. You could come and watch us from over here? I could use a little extra lab assistance.”
“I don’t know anything about science,” you warn her.
“That’s fine. We know you know how to observe, anyway,” she says, “And that’s the first step.”
After you’ve had breakfast of tea and a couple of the strange, purple, almost furry cookies Raphaella offered you from a tin, you head to the Stop, Drop for your shift. As you drive over, the man on the radio describes the encounter that you just had with Raphaella. You appreciate that there’s a bit of a delay, that he isn’t just describing the way your hands fall steady on the steering wheel of the new-used blue car, although you don’t know how he’s finding out now, either. You imagine Raphaella on the phone with him, describing the scene as it unfolded, but the idea feels laughable. That’s not how the man on the radio gets his information.
At the Stop, Drop, you check Nastya and her groceries — mostly engine oil and oat milk — out. “How’s the car treating you?” She asks. She alone seems immune to the enforced hustle of the atmosphere of the store. She counts out her change with an almost-insolently leisurely pace, eyes trained on you, waiting for your answer.
“Oh, it’s. Great.” It gets you where you need to go, and it’s the right shade of blue, and when you’re going a little bit too fast out on the highway late at night, you feel like maybe you could fly, and nothing about being in this town contradicts that feeling. It’s good. But you don’t say any of that to Nastya.
“I wasn’t expecting to see you in the shop again,” she says, and her accent is interesting in that it’s clearly meant to be Russian, but it doesn’t sound quite real. She’s a grown woman who runs her own business and illegally married a spaceship recently, though, so you don’t think she’s the kind of person who would walk around constantly faking an accent. When the voice on the radio talks about her, he never mentions it, either. “When Jonny brought you to the reception,” she said, “You sounded like you were planning on leaving town.”
You had been, because at that time you still thought that when you shot Raphaella la Cognizi, she would die, and then your job here would be done. That’s not the part of the sentence that catches your attention, though.
“I brought myself to the reception,” you tell her.
“Yeah, because he asked you.” Nastya isn’t rolling her eyes as she says this, but her tone of voice says that if she were just a little bit less mature, she would be.
“He asked everyone,” you say, and you know this to be true. “He announced it on the radio.”
“Yeah,” Nastya says, leaning forward on the counter, and it’s moment like this that make you wonder if this whole town is some bizarre dream, because what she says next is, “But you know he was really talking to you.”
Because you do know that.
But that’s impossible.
Then again, the way the radio playing the the Stop, Drop and Speed-Shop’s speakers is quietly narrating your day at a half hour’s delay is also impossible, and so is the fact that Raphaella is still alive, and so is the fact that the earth under this town is slowly, almost imperceptibly, breathing in and out.
Impossible things happen all the time, here.
Sometimes, you dream of another desert, and the sound of shells going off behind you as you retreat. Other times, you dream of another conflict entirely — muddy, dusty, cold, and pitch dark until someone catches fire beside you, swept up in an invisible beam of heat. In this dream, you watch them burn and you know that you should be able to put a name to each of their faces, and the fact that you can’t feels like an impossible loss.
After Nastya leaves the store, you take your break out in the back alley behind the store. You lean back against the sun-warm brick and enjoy the silence that is the absence of the radio following you, just a few steps behind every part of your day, but seeing too deep and too far into you just the same. Down at the end of the alley, you hear shouting and laughter and, weirdly, a growling sound that doesn’t fit either the urban or the desert aspect of the setting. Then you hear a voice say, “Hey, can I, uh, can I interview you? It’s for WTNV, I’m, uh, I’m an intern.”
You haven’t lived in this town long, but you’ve been here long enough to have picked up on the fact that Night Vale Radio interns don’t tend to live long, and that growling sound feels a little ominous. You wonder if you should run back to your car, where your rifle is stored, disassembled in its case, but you don’t think you have the time.
You’re right. Even sprinting down to the end of the alley after your moment of indecision isn’t fast enough to save Intern Osiris.
“Shame,” the other, alive kid at the end of the alley says. You know him, his name is Hereward and he works at the store, which explains some of why he’s in this area but none of why he’d standing with one foot propped on the carcass of what can only be an actual bear, the kind you could have sworn didn’t actually exist in this area. “He should have left it to the experts.” The cocky way he’s standing looking down at the bear, clearly very pleased with himself, reveals exactly who he believes the experts to be.
All that’s left of Intern Osiris is his recording equipment, which is standing in a bloody heap at the mouth of the alley. Hereward notices you looking at it. “You want it? I thought about hauling it to the city council’s floating heresy collection, but it’s jankety-ass shit, it probably won’t even get me a get-out-of-mindwipe-free token.”
“I—” you don’t know what to do with any part of that sentence. Instead, “Is he dead?” You ask. It seems impossible that Intern Osiris can be so completely gone without a trace. Surely he must have gotten away.
“Oh yeah,” Hereward says. “Torn to pieces. Hey, have you see Martin?”
You shake your head, and he goes, leaving you alone in the alley with the dead bear and the tape recorder. You think about it for another long moment, until long after your break should be up, before you finally decide to pick up the recording equipment. You’re not sure you want to get any closer to the man on the radio again — some nights you think about the way his pulse felt under your knife in the parking lot that first night and something in you yearns — but you can pick it up and carry it out to your car, and you can store it there, and then you can decide later whether or not to return it.
When the gear is stowed in the trunk of your new, blue car, the one you use not to go places but to grow more entangled in staying here, you head back into the store. The Stop, Drop and Speed-Shop is in its now-familiar chaos, and the voice on the radio is still talking to you.
This is a story about you, the man on the radio says, and you know that he means you, specifically — you who have not been quite sure of exactly who you are for a very long time. But you think you’re starting to know yourself again, and so is the man on the radio.
Good night, Tim. Good night, Night Vale.