Blink, and you’ll miss it. Oh, that’s not advice, that’s just the next two things you are going to do. Welcome to Night Vale.

Hey, does anyone hear that sound behind the sky? It’s like a hundred matches being struck at once, or it’s like the bones in your pinky finger snapping, or it’s like teeth being run through an industrial grinder. I would say in the sky but that’s not right. In the sky there are clouds and black helicopters and unidentified aircraft. Normal stuff like that. But this sound is coming from behind the sky.

Does anyone hear it? It sounds like a heart breaking, or it sounds like an important letter being torn up, or it sounds like the way that losing at chess feels. It’s the darndest thing. Haven’t heard anything like it, and I also didn’t know sounds came from behind the sky, so I’m learning a lot right now.

If anyone else is hearing that, please call in. You’ll know the sound if you hear it. It sounds like a Toyota truck being slowly covered by thousands of tons of sand.

More on that, if anything more happens, but first:

Dana’s investigation of the murders of Marcus Vanston and intern Jalen Rutherford continues. She has called and left me a voicemail. Let’s give it a listen together:

DANA:

Hi Cecil, I keep coming back to certain strange financial transactions that Marcus Vanston made in the days before his death. As the saying goes: if you want to get to the truth, give chase to the cash.

Marcus was making regular donations to his local church, Our Lady of Temporary Salvation. He said he wasn’t personally religious, but that whenever anyone gets mad about the egregious oppressive power billionaires have on our country, it looked good if he sort of gestured at religion every once in a while. Plus he was literally an angel.

But his donations stopped after he had a private meeting with Harrison Kip. The rumor is that he promised Harrison Kip’s religion a lot of money. Then, instead of donating to Harrison directly, he donated a few million dollars to the community college, but at that point, I lost track of it. It gets shuffled around in bookkeeping that’s way more complicated than a community college needs. One thing I know for sure, the donation never made it to Harrison Kip, if that’s where it was supposed to go. So where did that money disappear to? And how did Harrison Kip react when he didn’t receive the promised funds?

Cecil: Wow, that sounds like some exciting intrigue. It’s almost like an episode of Antler Cove, except of course that a real person, uh, angel, died.

And now, cooking tips from an old stone tablet I found in the parking lot.

Need to cook after a busy workday? Feeling tired but still need to consume? Try this simple one pot recipe. Start with mud. Put mud in the pot. Once the pot is full of mud, add more mud. Keep putting mud in there. Feel like something’s missing? Fill that absence with mud. Slosh mud on in until it overflows the pot, and overflows the kitchen and you sludge out of the back door of your house on a river of mud and keep adding mud until the mud has devoured your town, and then your country, and then your world. Finally, top with a grilled chicken breast if desired.

Mmm mmm mmm, old stone tablet. That sounds delicious

Hey does anyone hear that sound behind the sky? It sounds like a bike skidding out of control on an unexpected patch of ice. Or like a tree being slowly eaten by insects and we think it can’t feel it but it absolutely can. You know how when you’re around a lot of electricity, you can almost smell it? This sickly green burning smell that makes your hair float? Well, this sounds like how that smells.

I got a call from Nilanjana Sikdar, down at Labs ‘n More, her new mega-lab and lab supply store in the Science district. She says that she has heard the sound as well, and that it sounds like when the solution to a problem should be obvious but you just can’t quite articulate it. Or when you make a mistake that you know will be waiting for you every time you close your eyes for the rest of your life. It sounds exactly like that, she says.

I asked her if there was any scientific explanation and she said yes. And I said, oh great, what is it? And she said, oh, I don’t know the explanation, I just know that if something exists, then science can explain it. And then she said that it sounds like falling from the top of a three story building onto a large pile of empty ice cream cones.

So I’m not the only one who hears it. Whew.

Please keep calling in if you hear it too.

And now a message from the Night Vale Philosophical Society.

Attachment to the world is your problem. You think that your value is the value of your possessions. You think your car means something about you as a person. You think that what is in your wallet is related in any way to the substance of your soul.

We want to help you with that. So we have decided to speak your language.

Break yourself free from the cycle of desire, and there is a crisp one hundred dollar bill in it for you. That’s right. Realize that we are all one with the universe and that material things are no more valuable than soil, and we will smack that one hundo right in your hand. Make big bucks by seeing past the trap of wealth.

The choice is yours. Stay tied to the heavy burden of everything you own. Or realize that the only difference between you and the sun is an arrangement of atoms, and that you never needed anything at all, and baby this Benjamin is yours.

All is eternal and all is nothing, and if you can realize that, you’ll be one hundred big ones richer.

This has been a message from the Night Vale Philosophical Society.

Hey, does anyone hear that sound behind the sky? It sounds like a hand mixer in a tub of hair gel. Or like the last cough you make before you die. Like that.

I got a call from Big Rico. He said he heard the sound down at Big Rico’s Pizza, and that it sounded like crunching into a delicious pepperoni pizza. Yeah I guess, I said. I mean sort of. Do you think it sounds like anything else? I said.

Nah, said Big Rico. It’s exactly the sound of crunching into the best pepperoni pizza of your life. I’d know it anywhere. Maybe someone is eating a big pepperoni pizza behind the sky, he suggested.

Well, it’s the first explanation we’ve been offered, so that’s something.

I wish I knew for sure what that sound behind the sky was though.

Now everyone’s favorite part of the night, your latest Antler Cove recap

I’m realizing now that the only way I can get anyone to listen to my show is if I give you a quick recap of what’s happening on the hit TV series Antler Cove that airs exactly during my broadcast time slot.

These have been prepared for me by a trusted source, thanks Michelle, so do not worry, these are all completely accurate. Ok.

It seems that Troy and Bronson were in cahoots the whole time, and were working to trick Ebony out of her rightful share of the sulfur fortune. I know! But then, it turns out Bronson wasn’t even Bronson, but was instead Magnus, the illegitimate son of the powerful Randell family. Magnus had returned to Antler Cove in disguise in order to get his revenge. His revenge plan had been complicated, however, when he fell in love with Troy, and now Troy thinks that he’s Bronson, and Magnus doesn’t know how to tell Troy who he really is without ruining everything.

Meanwhile! Poppie – the owner of the town bait shop which also serves as a secret front for the illegal and violent marble-racing scene – she has spotted strange lights on Dead Man’s Rock, far out in the turbulent waters of Antler Cove. And she is convinced that those lights are, wait for it, you’re not going to believe this, David who has been missing since season 2. I know! None of the other characters believe her, so Poppie is getting ready to row herself out to the rock, even though no one has ever made it across Antler Cove without being crushed by the waves. And Lionel, who knows that David actually moved to New York City for a work thing, has been trying to convince her not to, but Poppie won’t listen, and now the entire future of the marble racing business is in doubt.

Whew. I’ll be honest, that sounds pretty good. And Michelle said she even had to leave out a few things for time, like a fun little subplot about a new cook at the diner who keeps getting everyone’s order wrong, and the whole thing about how the aliens have given everyone three days to meet their demands or they destroy the entire world.

So that’s what you missed on Antler Cove. Thanks for spending that time with me instead.

And now: traffic.

Out by the bus station, a woman sits on a bench. She fiddles with a ring on her finger. Next to her is a cardboard box. It contains some but not all of the items in her life she considers indispensable. She wishes it contained all of those items, but she had packed it in a hurry, hadn’t known she was leaving until a few minutes before she did. She thinks about what she left behind and feels a deep regret, but she knows she’ll never go back to get them.

She breathes in through her nose, and out through her mouth. She smells wild sage, baking in the late afternoon sun. And she smells the exhaust of the cars from the highway. She fiddles with the ring again, and then, acting on her decision a second before her mind is aware she’s made it, she takes the ring off and throws it. It disappears into the dirt and brush across the road. She wouldn’t be able to find it again if she tried. She’s not going to try.

She looks again at the cardboard box. Sifts through the contents. Sees the bus coming. She puts the box down, stands, and waves at bus, and it pulls over. It has no destination card, but she knows where it is going. She doesn’t glance back at the bench. When the doors open with a low woosh, she steps up onto the bus, and the doors click shut again. And the bus pulls away. The cardboard box still sits on the bench.

So, a free box of stuff by the bus station, if anyone wants to grab it.

This has been traffic.

Hey, does anyone hear that sound behind the sky? It sounds like a duck if the duck was the size of the universe and also quite ill. It sounds like a blender full of egg shells and glass. Do you hear that?

Who even knows what could be causing it. Invaders from another world? A scientific experiment on what is the worst sound all of us will put up with? An attempt by our government to control…the weather?

[WEATHER]

Hey, does anyone not hear that sound behind the sky anymore? I thought it was bad when it was happening, because it sounded like someone was tapping on the inside of my skull. Or like the cracking of a building right before it falls down around you. Like that.

But somehow it’s worse now that the sound is gone. The silence is like after the spin and crack of a car crash, when the people in the car try to tell if they are still altogether there. It’s the pause when something is said that cannot be taken back, and everyone is still sitting with the poison of the words. Like that.

I’m getting a call. Oh, it’s from Stacey Jennings, the park ranger out in the scrublands. There is no official state or national park there, but as long as I can remember, Stacey has been out there in her park ranger uniform, shambling about, whispering nature facts to kids, and subsisting on insects dug from the ground with her long blunt claws.

Stacey says there’s some kind of to-do out in the scrublands and she’s never seen the like. She says a hole has appeared in the sky. Not like a black hole or anything cosmic. More like a hole kicked through drywall.

Now she says – and she’s screaming a little bit – try to keep a hold of yourself Stacey – she says a figure is crawling out from the hole. It looks no more than the size of a normal adult human, but the figure also easily descended from the hole in the sky to the ground, like it was no more distance than a single step on a staircase.

Stacey, can you describe the figure?

Stacey says, and now she’s sobbing so it’s really hard to understand her, please try to speak more clearly Stacey! She says the figure has a kind of flicker where the face should go. What does that mean Stacey? She says it’s like a tv screen that has gone out of whack, mostly black, with flickers of light, and sometimes something that is like a face, but she can’t quite keep a hold of it. Every time she sees it, she receives it as a pain in her stomach rather than as visual information.

The figure with the flickering face is turning toward her, and speaking. She says the voice is like licking concrete. She says the voice is like almost looking at a laser pointer and thinking about what would have happened if you let it actually blind you. Like that. She says she can’t make out the words, because the voice causes her head to buzz and the world around her swoon. She says the figure is walking toward her. She says it is holding out its hand. She says I’m going to take the hand. She’s crying quite hard now. She says it’s going to undo me, it’s going to reverse my entire existence and not only will I be gone, but I will never have been. But I’m going to take the hand. I wish someone were here to stop me. I’m taking the hand now, she says.

Oh, she got cut off. There was a sound like a deck of cards scattering to the ground, and then nothing. You know, cell service has been so unreliable lately. Anyway, I wish Stacey had been a little more detailed in her narrative and I’m certainly going to give her a ribbing about that the next time I see her, which I assume will be soon.

Stay tuned next for the pitter patter of little feet running down the hall. Ah, the kids have woken up and are coming to see you. Of course, you don’t have kids. The pitter patter is getting closer now.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.