Before They Were Night Vale: The Dental Underground (part 2)

Welcome to "Before They Were Night Vale", our feature in which Night Vale creators Jeffrey and Joseph share writing from before their Welcome to Night Vale collaboration, along with commentary. Come explore their early writing, both good and bad

Joseph: Shortly before starting work on Night Vale, I wrote a surreal novel that I never ended up doing anything with. You can read more about it in my previous post here.

In that previous excerpt, I introduced "The Dental Underground", which were the antagonists of the novel. You might note a lot of overlap between this imaginary conspiracy, and the kind of imaginary conspiracies that show up regularly in Welcome to Night Vale. There is definitely a lot in this novel of me working out ideas that I would end up improving later in podcast form. 

Also, after posting this, my agent emailed me to say she wanted to take a look at the novel. I assured her that she didn't, but she insisted, so I passed it along. That was on February 22, and she never responded, so I think she agrees with my decision to let this novel lie peacefully in the graveyard of my hard drive. 

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What we know about the Dental Underground

The Underground hasn’t been around forever, but we only infer that from the fact that humans haven’t been around forever, and the Underground has proven, so far at least, an entirely human operation. No crafts of impossible design hovering over desert outposts or creatures from another dimension, gods for all practical purposes, meddling omnisciently in our race’s progress. This will come as a surprise to some members of the conspiracy watching world, but we don’t give enough credit to the human ability for shadow bureaucracy and quiet evil. The which we are entirely capable of on our own, thank you very much, without help from creatures of the above and beyond.

Given the finite nature we have established for the Underground, we can then conclude that there was a point at which it started. When this point was, exactly, is difficult to pin down. An organization so vast and complex does not spring forth fully formed, but grows out of earlier and simpler iterations, which themselves grow out of even simpler ones, and back and back through the poorly recorded history of dental brotherhoods, all the way back, perhaps, to the first dentists and the first decision to keep records of patients’ teeth. Of course, the first dentists were more dental shamans, serving the needs of hunter gatherer tribes, examining their mouths once a moon cycle. Eventually as the tribes grew, one such shaman found that he could no longer hold all the various teeth in memory, and that shaman established a system of differently colored pebbles to remind him of particular problems that needed to be monitored. And the moment the first pebble was laid out, this, it could be said, is where the Underground was born.

Because this, at heart, is the entirety of the Dental Underground: Records attaching a person’s identity to information about them. Dentists keeping an eye on that information.

How did it go from the presumably innocent dental shaman and his bits of stone to the monster that lurks beneath our cities today?  Few clues can been found. The Renaissance dental pioneer Duke Flynn Bamford, in a letter to a colleague, warned of “crooked alleys and winding paths hid beneath our colleges and studies, full of great stacks of paper guarded by ill-dressed, mournful men.” That the Duke disappeared soon after writing this letter, only to reappear firmly denying his authorship of the document in question, and living the rest of his life in guarded silence with a stack of papers tucked always under one arm, has not gone unnoticed by watchers of the Dental Underground, nor by the Underground’s enemy, the Winged Tooth.

Incidents and coincidences of this kind abound through our people’s history. The first dental college in the United States was built, for instance, atop one of the largest cave systems in North America. Why a tree-filled campus populated by quiet dental students would be built atop extremely geologically unstable land has not adequately been explained by the college’s administration. A committee commissioned by the governor in 1915 to see about moving the campus to a nearby, considerably safer, area, was quickly disbanded without comment, and the governor did not seek reelection, retiring from politics altogether to live on a small lot in the south of Florida, where he spent the rest of his life tending to his three orange trees and smoking through the night, cigarette after cigarette, on his rickety front porch.

The conspiracy spread with the spread of civilization, as best can be told. Because the spread of civilization meant the spread of dentists, unremarked on, into every human settlement. There are few towns not infested with dentists now, and those few without dentists often find strange vans cruising their streets at night, observing the goings on and filming with mounted cameras.

How many world leaders are chosen and directly controlled by the Underground? We cannot know for sure. There are a few suspicions we may reasonably point to. The Forbes Act of 1892, for instance, pushed through Congress with no debate and signed by the president with no comment, exempted dentist offices from several basic legal requirements, such as the ability of police to search or even enter one under any official pretense, and also exempted them from all past and future international treaties. No one who voted on this act ever spoke about it, and any dentist asked about it will dismiss it as a bit of arcane and mildly amusing historical trivia.

Meanwhile, over seas, Queen Victoria declared in 1870 that all men, upon reaching the age of 15, would submit to a complete examination by a dentist. This examination was an almost hour long process and ventured into areas that would seem quite outside of dental purview. The order came straight from the Queen, however, and so generations of boys dutifully bore the pokings and proddings for almost a hundred years until the upheaval of the sixties, where it was dropped with as little explanation as it had been adopted.

In summary, their influence is apparently endless, and their history extends, we believe, into the “pre” era. That still leaves unanswered the most important of questions. What do they want?

And here we admit defeat. Without entrance into their organization, it is impossible to ascertain the purpose of their plans. Even membership of the organization is uncertain. There have been a few successful double agents worked into the ranks throughout the Underground’s long history, but the overall goals are kept obscured to lower-ranking members, and none of the double agents survived undetected long enough to advance up the hierarchy. Then there is the most frightening prospect, which we must out of thoroughness contemplate: that this ignorance of purpose extends to the very top, if a very top even exists, in which terrible case it is not the work of an clever mastermind, but an absent monster, programmed with an obscure mission at the dawn of history, and carrying out this mission blindly upon their fellow humans ever since. If this is the case, perhaps we should think of it less as a conspiracy or brotherhood, and more a disease, one with diffuse symptoms and unknown prognosis.

Even without knowing the intended endpoint of the Underground, if indeed that endpoint was not reached centuries ago by a cabal of fools no longer able to recognize it, we can still identify the Underground’s basic concerns. Most obvious is their thirst for data. The vast majority of members’ time is spent on the collection of information, more specifically the personal information of individual people. It is apparent after even cursory espionage that they have complete records on every human on earth, continuously updated and corrected. These records are stored, as we have seen, in vast filing cabinets of peach folders, all hidden sub-dentist, and updated with only a sharpened number 2 pencil..

The other known fact, and one that is not surprising for a global and ancient organization about which nothing is known, is that they are absolutely merciless in the protection of their secrets. It is, of course, impossible to even guess how many of history’s murders and disappearances can be dropped directly into the Dental Underground’s bloody hands, but a safe assumption lands us in the range of hundreds of victims every year. Even the vaguest, accidental knowledge of one of their secrets marks you as a target, and they are, it must be said, an extremely efficient organization.

We are certain of a few of these murders, of course. Double agents who were escorted from their homes in the middle of the night by men in dull suits designed to make no impression on witnessing eyes. Centuries of broken families, and awful absences in the lives of others, these are the terrible wake of the Underground. Their careful watch over our lives and their secrets, those are worrying. But it is their violence, their indifferent cruelty that forces us to stage an endless battle against this enemy half-seen.

Who put Bella in the Wytch Elm?