Do you hear that sweet melody, that sweet melody on the breeze? No one else hears that sweet melody, that sweet melody on the breeze. Welcome to Night Vale

Frances did her best to pretend that she had imagined what she had seen that night in the house of Nazr al-Mujaheed, when Barks Ennui, the cartoon spokesdog for the Sheriff’s Secret Police, had come out of the television and told her that she did not belong, and that they were both doomed. This, obviously, wasn’t an easy thing to forget, but people forget difficult things every day. We are all of us carrying around difficult things like cannon balls rolling, unstable, in our heads, occasionally throwing us off balance when they shift too much to one side, but mostly just slowing us down while we pretend nothing is wrong.

She and Nazr continued to see each other. He let people know at school, and the faculty and administration were happy for him. Everyone felt that he was always too consumed by high school football (especially Principal Frieman, who grumbled to himself that the team didn’t even have a good record to show for all of that obsession).

Nazr took Frances to a faculty afterschool drinks meet up, the first one he had ever gone to, because he had always spent his evenings prepping for that week’s practice: studying game film, drawing up defensive schemes, and slithering around his living room on his belly while hissing like a snake.

Frances, in turn, took him to her monthly book club meet up. This month’s book had been Irvine Welsh’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the controversial follow up to his classic novel Trainspotting. Everyone agreed that it wasn’t nearly as good as the original, since it only shared a couple of the main characters. They also agreed that Frances’s relationship was having a real effect on her.

“You hardly seem like the same person,” said Jeremy, who had liked Frances before and was jealous that she might change and grow as a person outside of his influence. Jeremy was, all in all, being a real shit. Everyone else agreed that she seemed to be happier and more open to the world than before she had started dating. Frances quietly wondered if changing so quickly just because you are eating meals with and sometimes sleeping with someone was a good or bad or neutral thing. She thought that change was hardly ever neutral.

Through all of this, she pretended that Barks Ennui, the cartoon dog, did not appear to her most evenings in her home. But he did. He would crawl out of her television, even if she was watching a channel his commercials didn’t play on, or even if the television was off. The proportions of his body, lovably clumsy in two dimensions, seemed a horrifying mistake of nature in three dimensions, and his features warped and blurred as though seen through static.

“You don’t belong together,” Barks Ennui said, in a goofy cartoon voice that occasionally veered dizzyingly into other pitches, becoming a child’s giggle or a bassy growl for a few seconds before sliding back to the middle. She would hide under her covers, and she would hear, from within the hot dark of her blanket, his familiar cartoon voice say “There is a price that must be paid.” And she would scream and scream and then realize she was alone, and then she would choose to pretend that none of this had happened.

Nazr did not see Barks Ennui. But he was not without his own troubles. He would find, some evenings, that when he looked in the mirror there were two of him. One of him sitting behind the other. He would stand and the second reflection would stand too. It would follow all of his movements from behind his primary reflection. This went on for days.

Then, one night, he looked in the mirror and there was only one of him. He sighed, feeling some relief to the tension that had been with him so long as to become his new normal. And that is when, in the mirror, his second reflection stepped into the room, followed by Frances Donaldson.

Nazr whirled. The room he was in was empty. He looked back in the mirror. There was his own face, terrified. And behind that, on the bed, there was himself again, with Frances. The two of them were kissing, passionately. He watched himself kiss. And then his reflection and the Frances in the mirror stopped kissing and looked up at him, with startled faces. They stayed frozen that way, and he stayed frozen too. After several moments, the mirror couple smiled. Their smiles got wider and wider, and then they were both dead, blood covered and sprawling at irregular angles. And then they were alive again and smiling at him.

He shouted and stumbled back from the mirror. From then on, he took to covering his mirrors, and that worked for a few days, but then one day he came home to find himself in his bedroom, already sitting in front of the covered bedroom mirror. The him that was in his bedroom looked up at him who had just entered with wide eyes and a yawning mouth, and Nazr (who believed himself to be the real Nazr) turned and walked out his house. He checked into a motel and decided to stay there for awhile.

Finally the strain broke on Nazr and Frances. At Applebees over lunch she started crying, and he was so surprised that he started crying, and they were crying at each other and didn’t know why the other was crying. And she said, “this is going to sound so crazy” and he said “you’re not going to believe me” and then they told each other, and it didn’t sound crazy and she believed him. “What does it mean?” she said. “Why are we being punished just because we’re finally seeing someone?”

“That’s a good question,” said Barks Ennui. He was sitting in the booth next to them. They both yelled in surprise, and the other people in the restaurant looked over with a mix of confusion and annoyance. None of them could see Barks, and so they assumed the couple must have accidentally ordered the Electrolysis Nachos appetizer.

“Who are you?” asked Nazr.

“Me?” said Barks, his animated dog face stretching and compressing in mesmerizingly horrible ways. “I’m a construct,” he said. “in order to allow communication.”

“Communication with who?” said Frances.

“I represent the Brown Stone Spire,” said Barks. The Brown Stone Spire was a strange monument at the edge of town. It offered great gifts in exchange for even greater sacrifices. It was extremely dangerous, and neither of them had ever heard of it trying to communicate with anyone.

Barks continued: “Everything’s gone strange since you started dating. You know what I’m talking about.”

“Maybe,” Nazr said, thinking of the mirrors in his home.

“Maybe,” repeated Barks mildly. “Maybe it will get even stranger. Maybe your conditions will continue to deteriorate.”

“What do you mean deteriorate?” she said. “We’re two people dating. What’s wrong with that?”

“This town is a point where many universes meet,” said Barks. He was on the other side of the table, next to Frances now. “Recently those universes collapsed into each other. When the mess was finally sorted out, not everyone ended up in the right universe.”

“It’s me,” said Nazr. “That explains it. The other me in my house. Plus my tongue is like two feet long, and that doesn’t seem right. I don’t belong in this universe.”

“No,” said Barks. “It’s Frances. She doesn’t belong here. Frances, you switched places during the collapse with the Frances of this world. And you are coming into contact with a person from a different universe, which has an exceptionally detrimental effect on reality. I believe,” he said to Nazr “you were saying something about reflections in your house?”

And now a look at traffic.

The cosmology of the universe is thus. First there is the sphere. The indications of the sphere are warmth and bristle. The colors of the sphere are blue and yellow. Then there is the cube. The indications of the cube are touch and lift. The colors of the cube are red and white. Then there is the expansive plane. The indications of the expansive plane are speed and shadow. The colors of the expansive plane are myriad. And finally there is the outward fade. The indications of the outward fade are a ringing bell and a rush of water. The colors of the outward fade are none.

This has been traffic.

And now a word from our sponsors

Mute children perched atop strange formations on desert plateaus. Our eyes gaze toward a horizon that will never change. There is no movement here. No sun, but there is light. No darkness, but there is night. We do not need to eat but we are hungry. We have no way to drink, but we are thirsty. We have nothing to sell you. Remember us.

This has been a word from our sponsors.

Frances couldn’t believe it. Or she could, but she resolutely chose not to. Nazr thought again and again of the other him and the other her, lying dead on his bed and then smiling and then dead again. It was true that something was horribly wrong. Perhaps they didn’t belong together. Perhaps they didn’t belong together so much that the universe itself was collapsing around their relationship. It wasn’t fair. Didn’t both of them deserve happiness?

Cecil here. I’ll go ahead and answer that. They did. But what a person receives and what they deserve is only ever tangentially and coincidentally related.

They decided they should go to the Brown Stone Spire. It had offered to help them. They should at least hear out what it was asking for in return. Nazr drove them. Cars stop working within a few hundred feet of the spire. As the spire prefers humans to approach on foot. Actually it prefers humans to approach on their bellies, but it takes humble walking as a compromise. The closest parking lot is the Radioshack, but of course that one is always full of customers, and so they parked at the Wendy’s and walked. Her foot started bothering her, but she didn’t know if it was actually bothering her or if she was just afraid of the what the Brown Stone Spire would say.

The Brown Stone Spire hummed. They fell to their knees before it.

“Help us,” said Nazr.

“We just want to be together,” Frances said. “I don’t know if we belong together. But we make each other happy. Isn’t that something worthwhile? Don’t we get at least that?”

The Brown Stone Spire heard. It hummed. It already knew the problem and it already knew the solution, and it already knew the price. It told these humans all three, by implanting the thoughts directly in their brains. Frances threw up. Nazr wept. There was a solution. But the price was unthinkable. It was impossible. It was inhuman. Of course, the Spire isn’t human, nor possible, nor even thinkable.

They walked back to the car in silence. And now, the weather.

[WEATHER: “Fire Drills” by Dessa]

That evening they sat in Frances Donaldson’s living room and thought about what to do.

“Impossible,” she said.

“Unthinkable,” he said.

“Then we agree,” she said.

“Of course we agree,” he said. “What else is there?” he said. “We’re not monsters,” he said.

“Right,” she said.

“I want to show you something,” said Barks Ennui. He was on the TV screen, so close that whatever backdrop was invisible, just his exaggerated snout and his wild eyes. “Come here.”

Both of them knew for certain they would refuse and both stepped forward obediently.

“In here,” said Barks. “Into the TV.”

Frances put her hand on the screen and felt nothing. It was a hollow frame. She put her hand through that frame. Her hand felt like her hand, no different than it had a moment before. She leaned down and put her torso in, and she felt a pull, like gravity, and she fell downwards through the TV screen. She was in her living room again. It looked very much like her living room, although a few details were different. The framed poster from the International Musee du Cats in Paris was now from the Museo Internacional de los Gatos in Mexico City. The taxidermy deer foot pen holder on the mantel was now a taxidermy boar’s foot pen holder.

Nazr tumbled in next to her.

“Oh, cool pen holder” he said.

Frances took his hand and helped him up. They looked around, and then out the front window. Frances was outside, working in the garden. A different Frances, in the garden, being watched by the first Frances, in the living room.

“The Frances from your universe, Nazr,” said Barks. His three dimensional form was enormous this time, taking up the living room from floor to ceiling although he displaced nothing in it, and Frances and Nazr had plenty of room to stand. “She ended up in this universe, and the Frances from this universe, that’s you, Frances, ended up in her’s. A silly mix-up. But these things do need to be set right. Or else both of you will slip farther and farther into the gap between universes until neither of you exist anymore”

Frances couldn’t take her eyes off herself in the garden.

“Try to stay together,” said Barks, “and you both will cease to exist.”

The Frances in the garden waved to Jackie Fierro, who was biking past. A car drove by. In it was Dana Cardinal and her brother. They waved too.

“Enough,” said Barks, grabbing them and pulling them upward. They were all back on the couch in Frances’s living room, or the living room she had thought was hers. There was only one Frances here.

“You know the price,” said Barks. He crawled backwards into the TV, staring intently with his droopy animated eyes. “There are only two ways forward. The first is that this Frances returns to her correct universe, and you two never see each other again. The other would allow the two of you to live as long and as happy as anyone can together. It would be simple. But in order for that to happen, the Spire will destroy the other universe and every person who lives within it. That Frances, and every other person in that world will cease to exist. But then you would be able to flourish in this universe.” He was fully back onto the screen, a two dimensional cartoon dog in a neon yellow cartoon backdrop, but his eyes were still huge, like they were inches away. “You don’t have long to decide.” He gave a silly laugh, the kind he did at the end of his appearance on children’s shows, the laugh that made children laugh back at how silly it was. But this silly laugh did not end. For several minutes, Nazr and Frances stared at him, and he stared back, laughing.

Stay tuned next for a decision to be made.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.