[moving from baby talk to a dog, to a serious, urgent question] Who’s a good boy? Who’s the good boy? Who is it? Who is it? Welcome to Night Vale.

All over town, the question, painted on walls. Written in the sky by our flying aces. Tapped out in morse code from within the walls of our homes.

Who’s a good boy?

The radio station is…unavailable, as so much of the town is currently…unavailable. Down for maintenance. Wiped off the map. However you want to say it.

The strangers who do not move, but who seem closer every time you look, they have torn our town apart. They do not seem to have an agenda, no plan, just destruction. They only seek to rend, to shatter.

Carlos has locked himself in the lab with his team of scientists, working without sleep to find a solution to this crisis, as they have found solutions to so many crises before. He wanted me to stay there with him, since within the proximity of science is of course the safest place to be in any natural or unnatural disaster. But I am a reporter. I can’t not report. My town needs me to witness. And so I will walk through my city. And I will witness.

I sent my sister Abby and her family to the lab, so they could keep my niece safe.

“Keep them safe,” I said to my brother-in-law, Steve.

“Ah geez,” he said. “With Abby around, I can’t imagine a bad thing that could happen.”

He really loves my sister. If I am to spend this time witnessing, maybe I should start there. Maybe I should finally allow myself to see the depth of his love for my sister and their daughter. Ugh, and then he tried to hug me and he smelled like onions and I shouted “oh no, we better get you barricaded in there Steve, I think I see some strangers not moving” while I slammed the lab door on him.

The wreckage of Night Vale is complete. It is even worse than Valentines Day, 2013, when much of the town was reduced to rubble and candy hearts.

I passed by the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, site of so many great and terrible memories. Old Woman Josie throwing the ceremonial first pitch of the Bowling Tournament. City Council and Station Management finding horrifying love on the skating rink. And other memories too that I don’t like to talk or think about.

Now the complex was boarded up, under siege from the strangers. There were three of them in its parking lot. None of them were moving. The only car in the lot was upside down and on fire.

Dark Owl Records was somehow untouched. It was the only building in blocks without smashed windows, and it somehow still had electricity.

Michelle Nguyen and former Intern Maureen were leaning casually outside, smoking candy cigarettes. This took a lot of relighting as candy cigarettes do not burn well at all.

“Maureen! Michelle!” I said. “You’re ok!”

They both rolled their eyes.

“Michelle, how did you keep Dark Owl from being destroyed along with everything else?”

She glanced at Maureen.

“Um…” she said.

“Well,” Maureen said, “say someone was leading an army or whatever. Then they could command that army to not attack a specific person or place. Or whatever. So maybe that’s what happened. Anyway, if that’s what happened, then that person wouldn’t be leading that army anymore.”

“You quit your internship?”

“I didn’t like my boss. Especially since I found out what…who he is. I didn’t have all the details before. Feels like I was misled. That’s a familiar feeling, Cecil,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me. “At least you were just clueless.”

“What?” I said.

“Never mind.”

“Maureen and I have, like, a plan,” said Michelle. “It’s very secret. But we’re teaming up to save Night Vale.”

“I’m so glad you two have become such good friends,” I said.

They looked at each other for a long moment.

“We don’t want to, like, put a label on this,” said Michelle. “Not everything has to be named.”

“Yeah,” said Maureen. “So anyway we have a secret plan. Plus Chad is now panicking about what the thing he summoned has ended up doing, so he’s been trying to figure out how to reverse the ritual.”

“LOL,” said Michelle.

“LOL,” agreed Maureen, putting the lighter to the end of her cigarette, and letting off a cloud of smoke that smelled like overcooked caramel.

Let’s have a look now at the community calendar.

All events this week are canceled. This week is also canceled. You might be canceled too.

This has been the community calendar.

I found Lusia, the ghost that haunts the haunted baseball diamond, looking sadly at the nearby Shambling Orphan housing development. The development somehow has been hit even harder than the rest of Night Vale. There was almost nothing left to show that life had once existed there.

“Ah Cecil,” she said. “It is all happening as I was afraid it would.”

“Do you know how we can stop them?” I asked.

“No, I have no ideas. Only the fear. A writhing, biting thing within me.” She slapped her spectral chest with her spectral hand, making a deep resonant pop. “In here, Cecil.”

She narrowed her eyes and pointed.

“There. The beast.”

I saw, a few blocks away, a beagle puppy cross the street.

“The beast?”

“He is so adorable, yes? Just the cutest. So cute that you would do anything for his little face, for his dumb floppy ears, yes? That is how he controls you. That is how he controls everyone. He is so cute you would just do anything for him, and you will. You will do everything for him, things you never dreamed you would be capable of doing. Ghastly things.”

“Who’s a good boy?” I said.

“Who indeed,” she said.

I called Carlos to see how far along he was in saving the day. He said that he wasn’t very far along at all and it was frustrating to him. He said he’s been letting brightly colored liquid bubble in beakers and has been writing numbers all over chalkboards and it hasn’t helped anything at all. He even drew a structural formula for cyclohexane, but it also didn’t help.

“It’s like,” he said, “this is somehow a problem that can’t be solved with science. But there are no problems that can’t be solved with science. Science fixes everything and is always on the side of good. I just…I can’t figure out what these strangers want. They don’t seem to want anything.”

“You sound very upset,” I told Carlos. “You know that it’s not good for you to get worked up like this. Take a break. Play some Bloodborne. That’ll relax you.”

“Ok, yeah, I guess,” he said. But I knew he didn’t mean it. He was going to keep trying to save Night Vale, and I loved him for it even as I wished he wouldn’t be so hard on himself.

And now a word from our sponsors. It is possible the world is ending. If you cannot hide, then you must run. If you cannot run, then you must die. This message brought to you by Clorox Bleach.

Two blocks past Mission Grove Park I saw the house of Frances Donaldson, the manager of the Antiques Mall. The door was off its hinges. The mailbox had been killed and skinned. For reasons I couldn’t explain to myself, I crossed that ruined front yard and entered the house. I needed to see. I needed to report on this disaster.

Three feet into the door, I looked up to see a stranger before me. Her shoulders went up and down, a deep, constant breathing. Otherwise she did not move. At this distance, I could see the pupils of her eyes, unfocused, frozen on a point in the room several feet above my head. Her hair was greasy, and it stuck to her face. Her skin had faded into gray, like a person dying, or a person carved from stone. She stood in the ruined living room, surrounded by a pattern of destruction that splashed out from her, the echo of a flurry of movement even as she was perfectly still.

I was distracted by the mess, and when I looked back she was much closer to me. I could feel her breath. It was room temperature, unchanged by her body. Air in, air out, but no transformation.

“Hello Cecil,” she said.

Her mouth did not move. Her voice came not from her but from a glass of water on a side table that had somehow been spared the destruction. The water vibrated slightly with the voice.

“Hello?” I said to the glass. “What do you want?”

The lamp hanging above me laughed. There was no joy to it, just a replication of the sound of laughter. It went on and on, slowly petering out to a quiet choking and then nothing.

“What do I want?” asked the glass of water. “I want nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

The lamp snickered. My left shoe joined in, and I jumped back. But the stranger was even closer than before.

“We want nothing at all. Everywhere there is something. All of these things. Like this glass.”

The glass of water shattered.

“One less thing,” said my left shoe. “Soon there will be no things. We will take away your government, your laws, your infrastructure. All of your possessions. All of you. What we want is nothing.”

“But why?”

“A why is a thing,” the lamp said sternly. “We destroy whys. We destroy explanations.”

I recognized the stranger. Behind the slack stillness, there was a human face. It was Frances herself, in the wreckage of her own home.

“Frances. What happened to you?”

At the sound of her name, her eyes focused in for a moment, and flicked down toward me, before drifting back up to the ceiling.

“I was made strange,” the lamp said. “So strange that I became a stranger. There is a cavern.”

I merely looked at the lamp, confused.

“There is a cavern, Cecil. I was taken there. The ground is covered in mud. You walk through the mud, in the darkness, because you think there must be something else. But there is never anything else. For years, you walk through the mud.”

My shoe chimed in: “Sometimes you feel as though there might be other lost people, also searching through the mud. Maybe you can even hear the soft swish of them in the black, but your hands never meet, and you cannot speak out. You are alone. Sometimes the mud goes over your head, and sometimes it is just a slight damp beneath your feet.”

The lamp spoke again: “Years go by. You feel yourself hollowed out by time. Everything that was you slips away. There is a great power that replaces you with his desires. He is your leader. And you want what he wants. And he wants nothing.”

“When did you leave the mud and come back to Night Vale?”

“Leave?” This time Frances herself spoke. Her vocal cords cracked with lack of use. Her eyes focused on me again. Her parched lips clung to each other as she spoke.

[there is some fear or panic that grows in her voice as she repeats this]

“Cecil, I’m still in the mud. I’m still in the mud Cecil. I’m still in the mud. I’m still in the mud.”

She said this over and over, quickly losing control of volume and articulation. Tears rolled down her face from her unblinking eyes. I turned and ran. Behind me, her cracked voice, more and more distant. “I’m still in the mud. I’m still in the mud.”

I had a vision of the beagle, loping adorably through a burning building, his big stupid ears flapping as humans screamed and pleaded around him. He watched them burn, and replied only: “woof”. “Woof,” he said, as Night Vale fell.

I am passing Louie Blasko on the street right now. He is frantically working the pumps of his pipe organ, tipping his hat at me while keeping time with a simple gamelan set-up.

He is holding out his hat for spare change.

“Louie, I’m sorry,” I am saying to him. “But…” And here I am gesturing around at the decimated street.

“Just say ‘weather’” he is telling me.

I am not responding.

“Say the word ‘weather’,” he is hissing.

“Weather?”

[weather: "Plunder" by The Felice Brothers]

“What was that about?” I asked Louie. But he was gone. In his place there was a stranger. Unmoving. Breathing. I hurried on, and did not look back.

A black sedan drove slowly through the streets, the first functioning vehicle I had seen among the carnage.

I waved it down and two men got out. One was not tall and the other was not short.

“We had nothing to do with this,” said the man who was not tall.

The man who was not short nodded vigorously.

“Do you know what happened?” I asked.

The man who was not tall stood between me and the man who was not short and said “Don’t talk to him. He’s new,” though I had directed the question at both of them.

The man who was not short said “The question isn’t ‘what happened.’”

“What is the question?” I said.

“Don’t talk to him, he’s new,” the man who was not tall said. “Anyway, you know what the question is.”

He leaned in close to me. I could smell anise on his breath.

“Who is a good boy?” he whispered.

“Do you have a pen I could borrow?” said the man who was not short.

“Sure,” I said, handing him the one from my reporter’s notebook.

“Thanks,” he said. He opened the trunk of the sedan, tossed the pen into it, slammed it shut, and got back into the passenger seat.

“Don’t talk to him, he’s new,” said the other man, and then he too got into the sedan and the strange pair drove away.

Finally I reached city hall. It had been ravaged. There was no sign of City Council. Likely they have fled, as they often do during danger to our town. Or, I’m supposed to say, taken a sudden and fortuitous vacation. But I am not on the radio. I do not have to say what I am supposed to say. I wonder if Station Management is even in town. I suspect that they may have taken the same sudden and fortuitous vacation as City Council, their many strange and endless appendages entwined on some beach somewhere.

Deputy mayor Trish Hidge came running out of the building, holding a desk lamp in one hand. She ran by me, wild with panic, huffing. She was barefoot.

Huff huff huff.

Or no. That was not her at all. A wet, rapid breathing. Waiting for me at the door to city hall. What she had been fleeing from. The beagle puppy.

Huff huff huff.

He padded forwards. He was adorable. Or was he? I had thought he was a cute beagle puppy, but there was something off about him. A sneer in his lips. A strange bend to his legs. His body was misshapen. He was not cute at all.

Breath came in and out of his mouth, which was gray and squishy within.

Huff huff huff.

The beagle rose onto his hind legs, higher and higher, until he was standing fully upright, his spine elongated and straightened.

I felt something rising in my throat. I did not want to open my mouth for fear of an organ or bile or hot black tar pouring out. But that was not what was pushing its way out of my mouth. It was words. The words sputtered out of my lips, against my will:

“Who’s a good boy?” I said.

“I am the good boy, Cecil,” the beagle said. “You wanted to witness, so witness. I am the good boy, and I rule over the dark, wet caverns of Hell.”

Huff huff huff.

He cocked his little beagle head. He stood so much taller than I thought a dog could stand. His breath was thick and wet and labored.

“I want nothing, Cecil. Nothing at all. And I will have it.”

Huff huff huff. Huff huff Huff.