Who is that tap-tapping, tap-tapping in my walls? I hear someone rap-rapping, rap-rapping in my walls. Welcome to Night Vale.

Most of you know Susan Willman. Used to be a…valued member of the PTA. Then she had that encounter with the obelisk and, ever since, has made a real spectacle of herself about town, sitting in the diner for hours on end with cold, empty eyes. And trudging through the scrublands and the sandwastes, the wind making her hair swirl strange behind her. It’s like, could you try harder to get attention? Well, apparently yes, because Susan Willman is here at the radio station and says that it is time for her to come clean. I have no idea what she means. Maybe she was embezzling funds from the PTA.

[to Susan out in the waiting room] Was that it, Susan? Were you embezzling funds?

[back to the listener] That’s probably it. Anyway, I told her we’d do our best to get her on the air, but no promises, you know? The world doesn’t stop for Susan Willman. We have news and sponsored spots to get to, and I’m going to get to them right now. Maybe Susan can talk a bit later. Maybe.

A lot of you have been asking about Khoshekh and I am heartbroken to say he’s still missing. I just can’t think where he could have gone to, given that he could not move from his spot four feet in the air in the bathroom here at the station. I put up posters around town, but I keep finding them slashed to ribbons, with “Do Not Look For Us” in an unfamiliar scrawl across his picture. If anyone has any information on my sweet little kitty, we are all very worried. He’s elderly, and also extraordinarily toxic to the touch. Be careful.

In other news, the artificial star that was generated in the underground Pulsar Development Facility some ten years ago has continued to be a clean and nearly inexhaustible source of energy. This energy is exclusively used to power the lights at the high school football stadium. These lights have been described as “painfully bright”, “so searingly bright that they render vision functionally useless” and “basically worse than if we just played football in total darkness.”

However, this fantastically successful city program is not without its critics.

Leann Hart, editor of the Night Vale Daily Journal, publishes editorials weekly calling for the closing of the Pulsar Facility, citing the brutally high cost of maintenance and the fact that, quote, “stars are dumb and we shouldn’t have to depend on them”. John Peters, you know, the farmer, also stages protests a few times a year. As the biggest landholder in town, he pays millions in taxes that go directly to the pulsar. “Listen,” he said. “I’m all for taxes. I just don’t think I should be paying them. I want the benefits of society without the responsibilities. Hold on, don’t quote me on that. Let me find a better way to phrase it.”

Unfortunately, he never did find a better way to phrase it, and so his protests have had limited impact.

Listeners, what do you think? Should the pulsar be allowed to continue generating power? And should that power be used for other things besides the high school stadium? For instance, the little train that kids ride in Grove Park probably uses a lot of energy.

We’d love to hear what you have to say on the issue. Simply send a letter addressed to Cecil, Radio Station, Earth, and I’m sure it’ll find its way to me.

Well, Susan is still here. She keeps making a lot of declarative statements. I am this. I am that. Like ok, Susan. I am getting bored. And I have a lot more radio to get through before you can just pop on the mic like you have the training to do so. Do you know how long I spent interning with the former host Leonard Burton before I got to take over this important community position? Years, that’s how long. Years and years. An impossible number of years. An amount of years that makes me feel cold and panicked when I think about it. According to Malcolm Gladwell, in order to become a master at something, you must practice it until the thought of doing it even a minute longer makes you scream and break down sobbing. So ok, now you want to skip all that and get right to broadcasting? Sure. Ok. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, my producer tells me that since this is a community radio station, the community in fact owns it, and as Susan is a member of that community, she is one of its owners. So she has a right to broadcast when requested. Of course. I wouldn’t think of standing in her way. There are just a few things we have to get to first.

SUSAN: (distantly) No action is without consequence. I am the destroyer.

CECIL: Yes ok, Susan. Hold on.

First, we have a public service announcement.

The moon will be closed for renovations this week, paid for by the Night Vale Astronomical Society. The society raised the funds through a series of bake sales and Ponzi schemes, and are pleased to announce that work will commence imminently. Most designers agree that the moon’s look is extremely dated, and that it is about time for a refresh.

“Ugh, that old thing,” said Astronomical Society president Linda Suarez. “It’s like, white and cratery. Oh wow, what is this, 2002? Do you plan to also put on a Von Dutch trucker hat and some True Religion jeans? No, this new look will be clean and modern.”

Workers will be reaching the moon using what the society describes as, quote “a pretty tall ladder” and that, quote “we think it’s probably tall enough. It looks tall enough to you, right?”

The society asks that you do not look at or think about the moon during this time.

This has been a public service announcement.

And now for a word from our sponsors.

Today’s show is brought to you by DuoLingo. There have been some big improvements at DuoLingo that we would love to tell you about.

Yes, we’re still basically Candy Crush except that we pretend to teach you a language. But the example sentences no longer all describe how you, specifically, will die. How did we even have that information, right? Weird.

We’ve added several new languages, including Yiddish, silence, and Hector, which is a language that doesn’t exist yet but will be commonplace in the Midwestern Dustlands of 2420. Get a head start on the future.

Sure, you could learn a language by taking classes at a community college. Or by walking out of your house, getting on a bus, riding, forehead pressed against the cold glass, until you cross a border, and then another border, and maybe a third. Get out in a town that’s name you’ve never heard. Walk several blocks, until the streets grow quiet, until you see a house that seems like it could be a home. Maybe it is made of cinderblocks, with yellow accents painted by an amateur hand around the windows. There is a chain-link fence, and a small concrete yard scattered with a child’s toys that do not look like they have been used in a long time. You knock on the door until someone answers, staring at you suspiciously from a house that smells of dust, where every curtain is drawn. Their hand rests against the inside of the door, wanting any excuse to slam it closed. And you could say “Please, I don’t know where I am, or how to speak like you speak. Could I stay with you, just a while? Just a while, here in your home. Please.” And you could move in, live a day, and then a week, and then a month, and then a year, and then a lifetime, together with the person in that house, learning how to speak their language, but also how to live their life, how to extinguish their loneliness with your tender presence. And when they die, or you die (and remember, we at Duolingo know how it will happen), you could say in their language “thank you. You made my life so much better just by being there.”

So yeah, you could do all that. But boy is that a time-suck. Instead, just use DuoLingo, the app that goes bing when you get the right answer. Bing! Love it. I just earned a star. If I get three stars, I get a treasure chest. I’ll know Yiddish in no time.

This has been a word from our sponsors.

I’m sorry. I don’t know if you can hear this, but Susan Willman is shouting something at me through the glass. It sounds like “I am the destroyer.” Yes Susan, if what you’re talking about destroying is the pristine quiet I expect to accompany my broadcasts, then yes you are. This is very distracting.

Listen, I’m going to try to be nicer. I got a text from my brother-in-law, Steve Carlsberg. Lovely man, won’t hear a word said against him. But he told me that there have been times that people have said hurtful things about him publicly, on this radio station even, and it was difficult for him. He thinks that no matter how annoying Susan Willman is, she deserves some basic human respect.

And fair enough. Susan, I am sorry. I deeply apologize that….ok, now she has opened her mouth wider than I thought possible and black smoke is pouring out of her. That’s deeply inconsiderate. I take back my apology. Now she is shouting something else. What is that?

She’s saying “I’m not who you think I am. I have become Other.”

Well, she still looks like Susan to me. I can tell by those beige shoes.

And now for Cecil’s Media Corner.

I think we all agree on what media is for: It’s for reinforcing our worldviews via simple morality tales portrayed with as little ambiguity as possible and hopefully a couple explosions just to keep it from being boring. What media is not for is teaching us anything new, or exposing us to novel forms of thought, or showing us how it is to live as a different type of person. And you know why it’s not for that? Because of the children.

Won’t you think of the children? What if they see something that they, literal children, don’t immediately understand? What if any aspect of our cultural stories isn’t instantly graspable by actual children? How would I explain that to them? By sitting down? In the same room as them? And talking to them about it? Ugh. No. Ugh.

It’s just better and easier if we make all of our media only fit what a five-year-old child who has never been exposed to anything outside of his immediate neighborhood will understand instantly and without further explanation. It’s called decency. Look it up. In a dictionary. Which is a book full of words I don’t understand and refuse to learn.

This has been Cecil’s Media Corner

Susan Willman is standing outside of my booth waving her arms and shouting. Yes Susan. I see you. I’m sorry, but once you resigned from the PTA, you forfeited any say in what we…ok, I think she’s coming in. Her eyes have gone empty, like the deepest reaches of space have infested her skull, and her mouth is still emitting a thick fog. I think it’s time that we hear her out. More on whatever that will be, after the weath---- hey! Not yet!

SUSAN WILLMAN: I am Huntokar, the destroyer. You have already been destroyed, you just don’t know it yet.

[weather]

SUSAN:

I was born Susan Willman, in 1975, at Night Vale General Hospital, to Edward and Donna Willman. I was born Huntokar, in the Mudwomb before the universe. Both of these things are true.

Once, I was merely Susan. And then I communed with the obelisk, and I learned its name. Its name rattled around inside me, and gradually, I found myself changed. Time slipped away from me. Hours and days no longer meant anything at all. I was removed from the burden of chronology, and I found I had always been. Yes, I was still born Susan Willman, but also I had always been, since before the first scrawling of history. Both of these things are true.

I am the destroyer. You have already been destroyed, you just don’t know it yet.

Cecil hates me because Susan Willman was annoying to him. Fine. Susan Willman hated Cecil because Cecil was annoying to her. These things were once true. But they do not matter. Not since I was lost to my former self, spread out through the years. I am simultaneously at the beginning and the end of time. It sears, being this scattered.

I remember, as Susan, worrying about the little things. PTA meetings. Bake sales. My hobby building gaming PCs and then selling them on reddit. I remember, as Huntokar, worrying about the little things. The scrambling creatures building the town that would be Night Vale. Their worship with meat crowns and blood stone circles. The tiresome century by century life of a god. These sit equally in my head. They are both me, as I transform from one creature into another.

I will miss Susan Willman. She was a good person, doing her best. She had friends and a family and a life, which is all one can ask for. But in many ways she is already gone. Instead there is me, who once saw disaster and attempted to save her town, and instead cast it into a kind of hell.

I was, of all of us, the only good one. But it was I who would end up truly destroying them.

I don’t know when you will hear this story. I tell it to you now, but it may surface anywhere in my timeline. Perhaps some lizards, a million years before the first sapient species, will hear my murmuring and think it thunder. Or perhaps I am speaking now into the tedious void of the universe at heat death. It little matters when this story will be heard, which listeners will listen to it. A story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells.

So let me begin.

This is a story about Huntokar, said a voice on the radio. A voice you had never heard before, though she has been speaking to you your whole life.

[her voice swirls away into a strange static, which perhaps turns musical]