“So promise me you will leave this all alone. And I will promise you that I will find out more about him, and, when the time is right, I will tell you.”

“Okay,” the horsefly said. He didn’t sound like he thought it was okay.

“Get moving, so you don’t miss your bus. No more of this, okay?”

Diane pressed her finger to the automatic window button for the front passenger side. With a robotic whir, the window cracked open. The horsefly flew up and out in a loose spiral.

“I love you,” she called out. “No flying.”

“Okay,” came back the soft buzz from the human boy with the horsefly face.

Later she would go over this conversation again and again in her head, one of the last they would have before he disappeared.

24

Jackie hit the steering wheel of her car, which did not hurt the car at all. Sometimes it is easy to forget which things in the world can feel pain and which cannot.

What did Diane know about this? What was her connection? Could she be the mastermind behind the blond man and the man in the tan jacket holding a deerskin suitcase and maybe even Jackie’s mother’s strange behavior?

John Peters certainly seemed to think she was involved. And why not Diane? Wasn’t Night Vale a town full of hidden evils and the secretly malevolent? That was what the Tourism Board’s new brochures said right on the front (“A town full of hidden evils and the secretly malevolent”) along with a picture of a diverse group of townsfolk smiling and looking up at the camera in the windowless prison they would be kept in until enough tourists visited town to buy their release.

If it was possible that Diane was behind any of this, then Jackie needed to talk to someone who knew her. Sure, she seemed nice, but lots of people and things seem nice yet are terrible underneath: like poisonous berries, rabid squirrels, or a smiling god. (Is that a smile?)

This was how it was that Jackie ended up at the Night Vale Elementary Multipurpose Room, which was, among its multiple purposes, the headquarters of the Night Vale PTA. Diane had been the treasurer since back when her son was a student at the school, and had kept it up even as he had gone on to high school and puberty (and the myriad physical forms it had brought him). Josh was just a few years younger than Jackie, and she liked him well enough. Some of his shapes were a little scary, especially the dream forms, but in general he was a good kid. Jackie had always hoped that things would turn out well for him, in the vague way one feels goodwill toward semi-strangers. May his life turn out better than hers had.