Episode 105 - What Happened at the Smithwick House
If you could press a button that would give you a great deal of money, but it would cause someone you don’t know in a distant part of the world to die, then you would have a good model for how our current economy works.
Welcome to Night Vale.
To start off, the story that everyone is talking about. In the interest of the common good, I feel I must report to you what happened at the Smithwick house.
Mr. and Mrs. Smithwick lived in a neat two-story home on Butterfield Lane. They had two small children, Lisa and Jake. Their lives were mostly normal.
Mr. Smithwick was a gloomy man. He had an anger inside of him. He hadn’t used this anger to do anything, but Mrs. Smithwick could smell it, and the children could smell it. They were always very careful around Mr. Smithwick. Sometimes it would be a day, just any day, and they would turn to find him looking at them with a blank stare, and they would feel as though teetering on the edge of something wild.. and final. And then they would look again and it would just be stolid Mr. Smithwick going about this day.
Even the neighbors could smell it. There was always something dark hanging over the Smithwick house. They never consciously thought but always felt. And because of this, they stayed away. Mrs. Smithwick was often lonely since few neighbors would talk to her. Mr. Smithwick was never lonely. He did not have the capacity for loneliness.
One day, Mrs. Smithwick discovered she was pregnant. An accident. And how would they care for a third child? But they would. There would be no choice. Dutifully, Mr. Smithwick began to prepare a nursery in what had previously been a guest room. He moved out the furniture that had only ever been used for guests once - a visit from a cousin three Thanksgivings before, never repeated.
He was in the process of painting the room a soothing green, when he first saw the hole in the wall opposite the wall. He called in the other members of the family, because the hole was.. so truly odd. Perfectly square and opening onto a tunnel that was also square. The tunnel’s sides were a cool damp concrete, leading away into darkness. On the other side of the wall was the outside of the house, but the hole seemed to lead somewhere very distant, although it was too dark to see.
A soft breeze came from the hole. It was too small to enter, only about a foot on each side, so the family stood in the unfinished nursery looking at the hole. Mr. Smithwick thought he could hear from far in the distance of its depths a soft humming.
More soon. But first, as many of you probably heard, two weeks ago I was arrested, after my explanation of the secret hierarchy of.. angels. Ahem. I was dragged in front of the City Council and informed I would be sent through a lengthy re-education and brain reconditioning program, before I would be allowed back on the air. But then I got City Council chatting about how Station Management is doing, their relationship is on a little bit of an icy patch again. And I see Station Management on a daily basis, so it was pretty easy to draw the Council into a series of questions about what Management’s mood has been like and how many hapless employees of the station have been lured to the Management’s office, and relieved of their life energy. Finally, the Council forgot what they had called me in to punish me about and let me go. So here I am, speaking to you once again.
By the way, there is a difference between a rough patch and an icy patch in a relationship. A rough patch is where there is a great deal of arguing and disagreement, a (chostle) [0:06:59] to both parties’ lives. An icy patch is where outwardly all seems to be smooth, but there is no actual connection made. Simple sentiments skitter off in unintended directions and both parties feel like they’re lurching without control towards destinations they had not foreseen. The angels, meanwhile, continue to fight for a legal acknowledgement of their existence. They’ve been protesting outside City Hall, blocking the entrance. Now this has made life extremely difficult for City Hall employees. The employees are unable to get inside the building, but since angels do not legally exist, these employees are also unable to accurately describe the reason for their absence from work. The angels have called on our unions, including the Steelworkers’ Union, the Taxi Drivers’ Union, the Tree Shrub and Moss Union, to join them in a general strike until the denial of their basic identity is finally purged from the books of law.
And now your Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner. Today, we will look at birth stones. If you were born in January, your birth stone is the garnet. If you were born in February, your birth stone is also the garnet. You have to fight with January to see who gets to have the garnet. Whoever wins gets to be born. That’s how birth works. If you were born in March, your birth stone is, that’s right – the garnet. This is going to be a brutal battle for that stone.
If you were born in April, your birthstone is flat and gray and sits next to a pond. It is dusty and warm in the sunshine, and if you put it against your cheek, it would feel like taking a long walk on a nice day.
If you were born in May, your birth stone is cemented into the wall of a rich person’s indoor shower. This stall has several different shower heads and built-in surround sound speakers, and your stone is near where the person’s butt usually goes. I’m sorry to have to inform you of this.
June, your birth stone is this one that I have in my hand. If you want it back, then you need to listen very carefully and [creepily] do everything I say.
July, you don’t have a birth stone, you have a birth rock. It’s in a park in San Diego and children sit on it to tie their shoes. August, your birth stone is in space! A shard broken off of an asteroid that is spinning away from the sun. Thousands of years from now, your birth stone will leave the solar system.
September, your birth stone was swallowed by a little boy who is very sorry about having swallowed a stone. Swallowing a stone is uncomfortable and dangerous. A lesson that little boy is learning now.
October, your birth stone was buried by drifting soil thousands of years ago. It will never again be uncovered.
November, your birth stone is falling from a great height. Soon it will land. I hope it will not land on anyone but then, life has no guarantees.
December. Your birth stone is a dump truck. You may correctly notice that this isn’t a type of stone, but you may also correctly notice that at least you didn’t get stuck fighting over a garnet.
This been the Children’s Fun Fact Science Corner.
And now back to what happened at the Smithwick house.
A few days after the discovery of the hole, Mrs. Smithwick disappeared. She did not pack any of her clothes. There was no sign of violence. She was just… gone. The children, Lisa and Jake, did not cry. They were too shocked to cry. They realized without realizing that they had passed through a threshold that there would be no way to ever return. Mr. Smithwick called the police, who investigated thoroughly. He tried to tell them about the hole, still in the wall of the unfinished nursery upstairs, but they were uninterested in that. They wanted to know where he had been last night and if he could prove it.
He had been with the children. They said so as well. The police didn’t like it. But they couldn’t find evidence of a crime, let alone evidence that any specific person had done a crime, and so they left. Mr. Smithwick took the children to school on his way to work. He made dinner that night. He felt as though he should be searching for his wife, but something in him did not seem to find that urgent. Instead, he went into the nursery, painted a green he now found overbearing.
The hole was where it had been before. He listened closely. Yes, still the humming from deep in the darkness. He bent over and looked, but in the depth of its perfectly square tunnel he could see only shadow. Then, there was a gurgle, a movement coming toward him. And he stumbled backwards, and a stream of clean fresh water begun to pour from the hole.
And now, traffic.
I have never seen snow in person, and yet I can taste it. I know its bite, but I have never felt it. We go places we never go. We achieve what we do not achieve. This is the power of imagination. Is imagination a blessing, or a prison? Would I be more driven to seek out snow if I could not imagine snow? If I could not project in my stomach what a ride down a hill might feel like, would I be compelled to seek out a slope and a sled? Does imagining make me less likely to act?
Here is what I think. Imagination might hold us back, but the exchange is worth it. By imagining, I can experience things that not only haven’t happened, but couldn’t happen. For instance, I will imagine an event now.
A.. creature with a long.. forehead and, wide golden eyes on the planet.. Zardaz, in a galaxy that is not even visible from our galaxy, this this creature who is named.. Ersdawn is on trial for the crime of having viewed the sacred animal. Tom..pet of the queen of Zardaz, when asked to defend themselves, Ersdawn looked over the assembled citizens of Zardaz. All six of them. It is an inhospitable planet, and their population is very low. [grandly] “Have we not all, at one time or another, viewed tom, the sacred animal? Have we not all?” Ersdawn asks. It turns out they have not all. No one has ever seen tom before, not even the queen, and the queen is annoyed at this. And Ersdawn is tossed off a cliff, and the population of Zardaz.. is now five.
What would our lives be without the ability to imagine nonsense like that? Anyway, there’s a patch of falling snow on Route 800 that scientists cannot explain, given that the rest of the region is currently in the usual early spring heatwave. I have never seen snow in person, but can imagine exactly what that snow looks like, and so feel no urge to go check it out.
This has been traffic.
More on what happened at the Smithwick house. The children were gone. They had not attended school in days. Mr. Smithwick could not say where they were. He expressed utter confusion. The police did not believe this and arrested him. He sat quietly in his cell, and when they were forced to let him go because there was no evidence of his involvement, he quietly went home.
The neighbors avoided him, but they had always avoided him. The police left a car outside his house indefinitely. He went about his days as he always had. He made breakfast, he went to work, he made dinner, he went to bed. His wife and children were missing. He did not look for them. Instead, he went each evening to the nursery, where the hideous green paint on the wall now seemed an act of violence upon him. And he sat crosslegged on the floor, looking at the hole. The air coming from within was cold, like air from a cave.
One evening, after several weeks of this, he stood and reached his arm into the hole. He felt something soft rush his fingers. He cried out and tried to grasp it. It felt like.. the faintest touch of a hand. He stretched his arm as far as it would go, and found a finger hold. He pulled it. What he had felt in the tunnel moved easily with his pull. To his astonishment, his arm emerged holding the branch of a tree, several feet long, covered in leaves the same shade as the wall. He sat back down. He did not try to reach into the hole again.
Soon, the rest of what happened at the Smithwick house, but now..
the weather.
[“You Cannot” by Erin McKeown, erinmckeown.com]
Mr. Smithwick no longer went to work. He did not make breakfast or dinner, he did not sleep. He sat in the nursery and looked at the hole. From deep in the tunnel, he heard humming. The neighbors noticed that he didn’t go out anymore, and they assumed the worst about this. they confirmed with each other that there had been something heavy and strange about the man. They agreed that this had all been a matter of time.
Time did not matter to Mr. Smithwick anymore. He didn’t notice if it was day or if it was night. Inside the tunnel, leading away from the unfinished nursery, it was always the same: dark and cool. When no one had seen Mr. Smithwick for several days, the police in the car outside decided to investigate. Earlier this week, they searched the house but.. There was no trace of Mr. Smithwick. All of his things were still there, and there was no sign of violence, he was just.. gone. One of the police officers wandered into the nursery, where the green paint on the walls resembled a person turning ill. It did not appear that anyone had been in the room for days. There was no hole in the wall.
Evidence was searched for, and evidence was not found. The Smithwick house stands empty, with all of the family’s things still inside – furniture and clothing. Even the food, rotting in the refrigerator. The neighbors still shake their heads and say that this just goes to show… Although none of them understand what it went to show.
And that is what happened at the Smithwick house. If there was anything to be learned from this, I… refuse to learn it.
Carlos has called in to the station to let me know that he is thinking quinoa balls for dinner. Also to remind me that the “Dancing on the Stars” finale is tonight and also to say that what happened at the Smithwick house happened a long time ago, and he has no idea how it happened. Again. And I told him that this is definitely the first time anything like this happened in Night Vale, I mean haha ah, I would have remembered something this weird happening in our quiet little town. But he insisted that he studied the Smithwick case already almost four years ago. He doesn’t understand how the whole incident could have repeated exactly as it happened before. Reality doesn’t allow for that, he said.
Well. I suppose there’s no accounting for reality.
Stay tuned next for a look back at your life, featuring the most embarrassing moments and biggest failures, hosted by your own brain. If you miss this showing, don’t worry! It plays on a nightly repeat.
Good night, Night Vale, good night.
Today’s proverb: you are what you eat. That’s very confusing phrasing. Let me simplify: you consume your own flesh. Much clearer.