Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink Page A

There is no disaster or accident to handle. They are simply wandering around town in large numbers. Some of these police are working, sitting in patrol cars waiting for minor traffic infractions or calls to duty.Some of these police are not working. They are out to dinner with their families, or watching a popular sporting event on a bar television with friends. Some are reading books or catching up on television shows. Some are working late in a secret precinct office probably hidden in that heavy-looking, unmoving cloud.
    The secret police are out in large numbers tonight. Nearly every member of the secret police is somewhere in Night Vale. They all exist. We feel very safe.
    More news next, but first a brief word from our sponsors.
    Pepsi. A refreshing drink. A soft tone playing when you wake up, but then it is gone and you don’t know if you dreamed it. A hallway glimpsed in the back of your refrigerator, but when you look again it is gone. The recurring feeling that your shower is losing faith in you. Desperation. Hunger. Starving, not literally, but still. That hallway again, lined with doors that you know you can open. Your fridge is empty. You haven’t left your home in days, and yet you come and go. This isn’t food. What are you eating?
    Pepsi: Drink Coke.
    The City Council held their third press conference in as many hours to reiterate the extreme dangers posed by angels.
    â€œThere is no such thing as an angel,” said the council, in their unified manyvoice, “but if there were, what a dangerous and disgusting creature it would be. Think of its many legs and its ghastly voice. Think of an angel as a murderer hiding in your home. Think of an angel as the very concept of meaningless injury and death. You’ll have to imagine all of this because angels do not exist.”
    â€œStay away from them,” they concluded.
    We now return you to the sound of whatever is around you, which is probably a great deal more sound than you think, only some of which indicates future harm for you.

7
    Old Woman Josie would come first. Jackie could visit her mother later.
    Josie’s house was near the edge of town, next to the used car lot. When a person was done with a car, and they didn’t need to pawn it, they would park it in the used car lot, open the door, and run as fast they could for the fence, before the used car salesmen could catch them. No one ever came to buy one. The used car salesmen loped between the lines of cars, their hackles raised and their fur on end. They would stroke the hood of a Toyota Sienna, radiant with heat in the desert sun, or poke curiously at the bumper of a Volkswagen Golf, nearly dislodged by potholes and tied on with a few zip ties. The used car salesmen were fast and ravenous, and sometimes a person who meant only to leave their car would leave much more than that.
    Jackie parked her car down the street to avoid any confusion with the salesmen. Her stomach hurt, not like she had eaten something bad but like she had done something bad. It was a stabbing pain on her right side. Maybe her appendix had burst. That’s a thing, right?
    Jackie was not at work. She had left her routines fully. In her hand was a paper. In her mind were vague memories of a man with a tan jacket, holding a deerskin suitcase.
    She approached the house. It was a low bungalow, avocado green, with a neat lawn kept well watered in the dry climate at the expense of some other place far away and out of mind.The lawn was surrounded by a border of pebbles, arranged into geometric patterns that were perhaps meant to ward away evil or might have just been the way earthquakes had left them. The fence between the house and the car lot was tall and chain link. A used car salesman howled, hopping from car roof to car roof with an animal joy. Jackie creaked open the metal gate into Josie’s side yard, with an outdoor sitting area made of rusted metal rocking chairs with cushions whose fabric was