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This is how it ends in Night Vale. Not with a bang, but…
First it’s the Glow Cloud. It had been looking peaky for a while, but then all of a sudden, it was - gone. No one quite knows how, or why. Some say it left, went to Desert Bluffs and even now is raining down cow corpses on their football field. Others claim it faded out, spreading until it was just a pearlescent glow against the harsh clear sky. It rains down spiders every now and again, just to remind people that it’s still there (although in the dark years since, even those have stopped…)
(No one ever considers Mr Cumulus, the head of the PTA, a small angry man prone to turning a variety of colours when riled. If asked, no one can remember where he came from or when he arrived in Night Vale. But no one does ask - they’re all too busy arguing about the school cafeteria menu, these days.)
Next it’s the hooded figures, and as they vanish one by one there is near panic in Night Vale, until they have all gone and someone dares venture inside the dog park. And all that’s there is municipally-clipped grass and half-chewed remains of frisbees and abandoned tennis balls. (As one, the Night Valeans think “well, what on earth did we expect from a dog park?” and the terror of this place fades from them like frost in the morning sun.)
City Council is unmasked, and holds elections (Dana Cardinal, the young political rising star, wins by a landslide with Pamela Winchell running her PR campaign. Hiram McDaniels, the sharply-dressed ex-con, runs her a close race. He earns the nickname “Dragon” during the campaign, although no one can quite remember why.) The Sheriff’s Secret police come out of hiding, lay to rest their black leather balaclavas and take up the tan uniform of the County Sheriffs. They are still watching you, but none are in the bushes, not anymore.
And, like that, Night Vale dies. Oh, of course, there are still people and roads and all the things a city needs to function, but it bears only the name of Night Vale now, and none of its spirit. People walk the streets unafraid and unperturbed. Radon Canyon becomes a genuine tourist attraction, and breaths are only taken away metaphorically. Someone fills in the hole in the lot out back of Ralph’s. People walk their dogs in the dog park in the mornings.
(The lights above the Arby’s are the last thing to go, but go they do, blinking out one by one).
There is, however, one place that still holds fear for Night Vale. There is that one mausoleum, at the bottom of the cemetery, where no one will dare go. Something lurks, curling its eldritch tendrils around the place, and none have the courage to go into that darkness. Instead they walk the desert streets, listening to the weather reports (dry and hot, always dry and hot, they may as well play music over the weather reports for all the good they do) and shaking their heads at the quirkiness of the community radio programming. (“That Maureen,” they say, laughing and shaking their heads. “What a kook!”) And they push to the back of their minds the dark place in the graveyard, and tell themselves that Night Vale is safe, and normal, and ordinary.
There is one time, once a week, when they forget this. Because that is when the one person who dares approach the crypt makes his journey there. (Mayor Cardinal went once, but the look on her face when she returned meant that none have ever asked her what she saw.) He’s old now, long thick hair iron grey, once-delicate dark skin weathered by age and the desert sun. The citizens of the place hold him in something like awe. In the back of their minds, they remember a time of darkness and terror, and wonder if that this man’s offering is all that keeps the shadow world at bay. It must cost him something terrible. Every time he ventures in, he is straight-backed and carries a package in his hand. Every time he returns, his shoulder have slumped, his face is pale and he is empty-handed.
The gate-guard at the cemetery watches, with an almost religious faith, for this man’s approach. The park wardens watch him walk through the manicured topiary. The bravest ones nod as he passes. When he passes through the palm trees at the end of the drive, they lose sight of him. (A gravedigger once crept past these trees and to the gate of the mausoleum’s plot, but that is the furthest anyone has ever dared follow, and therefore none have ever seen what happens next.)
And what happens is, that Carlos sits in the shade of the small mausoleum, his back against the warm stone, and opens the package that contains his lunch. While he eats, he talks. About as much as he can remember of the goings-on of Night Vale, of those of his friends still alive, those who remember the old days. He tries to make it interesting, tries to inject character into it, but he was never the one who was good with words. (He does always mention Steve Carlsberg, hoping the ground will shake or lightning split the sky, but it has yet to happen.) But Carlos will sit, and speak and eat, and when he is done he will sit for a little longer, listening to the strange keening winds coming off the sand dunes. He always hopes he’ll hear his name, but he never does. For the best, really, for he’d run to it without a second thought.
After a while, Carlos will stand, brush off his jeans and turn to leave. He will take one long look at the mausoleum door, and say “I miss you, Cecil.” There are variations, but that is, always, the main sentiment. Sometimes Carlos wishes that, like the rest of the citizenry, he could be overcome with the amnesia that lets them forget the eldritch glory Night Vale used to be. But that would mean forgetting Cecil, and no matter how much it hurts to remember, forgetting would be sacrilege.
And so he returns, to his lab by Big Rico’s (no longer mandatory, although still very popular) and his neighbours watch him with fear and thanks in their eyes, never realising that the cost is not in venturing into the shadows, but in returning out into the harsh desert light.