It had been a mistake to accept what the man in the tan jacket had offered her. She didn’t know what it was, or what it meant, or what information it was trying to convey and to whom. But she knew that it had changed something. The world was slipping into her life. And she had to push it out, starting with this slip of paper, and the man in the tan jacket.

She announced her intentions, as all Night Vale citizens must.

“I will find the man in the tan jacket, and I will make him take this piece of paper back,” she announced. “If I could do that without having to learn anything about him or about what the paper means, that would be just ideal.” The agents in the car, holding index fingers to earpieces, dutifully wrote this down.

Out in the desert, bubbles of light, low to the ground. The echo of a crowd arguing and then cheering. For a moment, a tall building, all glass and angles and business, where there had definitely been nothing but sand, and then it was gone, and there were more lights, shifting, warping the air around them. And the echo of crowds. And the lights.

She put the car in reverse, and pulled onto the highway, tossing the slip of paper out the window and watching with satisfaction as it fluttered into the night behind her, and then, snapping her fingers, caught the paper between them, where it was, where it had always been.

THE VOICE OF NIGHT VALE

CECIL: Hello, listeners, Cecil here, your voice from the darkness, the quiet whisperer in your empty night, speaking to you now from a booth at the Night Vale Community Radio station. Here to bring you all the news and community goings-on that you need to know, and hide from you all forbidden and dangerous knowledge.

Now, the news.

There are lights above our town, Night Vale. I am not talking here about the stars. No one knows what the stars are or what they intend, but they have remained in mostly the same order and have indicated no harm for as long as anyone around here can remember. Astronomers keep trying to explain that stars are distant suns in distant galaxies, but, of course, you have to take everything astronomers say with a grain of salt.

But these new lights are not stars. They are low bubbles of light coming and going overhead. They are not the same lights that sometimes hover hundreds of feet above the Arby’s. Those lights are different. We understand those lights. The new lights, however, are concerning.