Before They Were Night Vale: The Dental Underground (part 1)

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 I started writing the first episode of Night Vale, I finished the rough draft of a novel. The novel was called "The 100% Accurate and Completely Authorized Biography of Banksy". The joke of the novel is that it was a surreal and obviously fictional story, playing with the fascination that people had at the time with the real identity of Banksy. My thought was that Banksy couldn't exactly come after me for using his name without revealing who he was, so I was probably safe.

I've never done anything with this novel. I've never even tried to edit it into any sort of final form. I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote it, so it's very baggy and the plot is almost non-existent. Mainly it's an excuse to write a series of strange scenes. And some of those strange scenes I think are very interesting. But I don't know if I'll ever do anything with this manuscript. Probably it will forever just be practice for the books I wrote after.

But hey, what is Patreon if not for sharing some of this work? So over the next few months I'll try to find some interesting moments from this never published and probably never-to-be-published novel. 

Today's excerpt involves the villains of the story, a very Night Vale-esque secret society called The Dental Underground. Here we have the passage in which I introduce the idea. It will also give you an idea of the overwrought prose style that plagues the whole book, unfortunately.

The. Dental. Underground.

In a town, any town (given a town, then this) there is a dentist office. Perhaps it’s a luxury dental resort, with a hot tub in the waiting room and HBO On-Demand during procedures. Perhaps it is a blank-faced storefront in the nowhere of the prairie, with venetian blinds as crooked and visibly aged as the streets of their city namesake. Perhaps it is a tent staffed by volunteers serving the war-torn, the impoverished, the picturesquely unwestern. People have teeth, and someone needs to keep track of them.

And that dentist office, any dentist office (given a dentist office, then this) has a secret. Forget the receptionist, ignore the magazines announcing “10 Hot Waterfalls for Summer 1998” and “How Your Dog Decides Who You Vote For”. Ignore the little bathroom, with its framed warning by the mirror about gum rot. Pass by the dentist with goggle upon glasses (wheels within wheels) rooting around in an old woman’s yawn of a mouth. Here, on the left, just here. This closet, with a chart about plaque and a note for the after-hours cleaners about which chemical to use on which surface. Inside this closet, enter quickly now, are said chemicals, as well as new magazines aging until they are old enough to put out in the waiting room, locked cabinets full of pleasant stupor, and then this shelf here, our destination, with some medically outdated pamphlets and loose cardboard boxes of indistinct purpose and origin.

Press on the bolt on the backside of this strut. See, a latch has lifted in the wall and the back of the closet is swinging open. Slip through it and close it quickly before one of the young hygienists, on his way from a youth of mild comfort to an old age of mild comfort, comes in for this or that bottle. Now we are in a bare concrete cube lit by a single strip of fluorescent. It does not appear interesting, as far as secret rooms go. Do not be fooled. This is another trick (within wheels). Plausible deniability for the dentist in the event of accidental discovery. Ah, how strange Becky. How did you find this room? Accidentally leaned on the shelf, did you? Huh, seems to be a shelter from the age when there were dangers it was possible to be sheltered from. Doesn’t look like it’s been used in decades. Come on now, let me show you an interesting case I looked at today. Close that behind you now, won’t you? And so on.

But disregard that lie. Run your hands along the wall until you feel the concrete sag like cardboard gone wet. There it is. Now push and the entire room slips down, less like an elevator than a person ducking into a hiding place. We are now in a small, bare antechamber, with a large steel locked door and above it, stamped directly onto the wall, a seal of a single tooth wrapped in chains and the letters “D U”.  Already you know more than they can let you walk away from. So: only one direction to proceed. I have the key here. I leave it to you to open the lock.

Bravely now. Quietly now. Down the long steel throat. There is every kind of camera and hidden laser tripwire protecting this place, but do not worry. I’ve disabled every one. We are in it now. The heart of the Underground. Or one of its multitude of hearts. Given a dentist’s office, then this.

Any one of these doors along the hall will do, so let’s open this one here, the third on the right. A large metal table in the middle and a chair serving it, but more arresting: Hundreds of filing cabinets, towering filing cabinets, windowless sky scrapers. The Underground has not taken to computers, having long established a miraculous aptitude with the peach folder. It’ll take us decades of technological development to get close to what They can do with a pen and a well thought out filing system. Each folder is marked with a name, and filled with sheet after sheet of measurements, obvious and obscure, notated in careful columns and transformed through equations of science and kabbalah, mystic truths arrived at in neat sums. Here is the diameter of the rib cage divided by the number of cloudy days in a given year and added to the subject’s average rate of blinking to produce a number that will predict the future value of any house bought by the subject. And so on.

Above the filing cabinets, rows of small lightbulbs alerting the Underground instantly of any new information that needs notating in one of the thousands of files, thousands in this room alone. To run the world as long as the Underground has, secrecy and ruthlessness can only go so far. More important is an almost supernatural ability to keep accurate records.

And, it goes without saying, they have perfect molds of every tooth.

One of the lightbulbs has just switched on. Quick, hide here behind this cabinet. Almost immediately arrives a worried man in a worried suit, premature gray and a youthful face aging fast. It is tired business to run the world. He pulls a pencil out of his jacket, rattles out one of the metal drawers, finds and removes a single peach folder, and, flipping it open, begins to jot down new numbers, consulting a table of formulas from a large book left open on the table. Occasionally he stops to run complex equations on a pocket calculator and fills in the result in its designated spot, adding a checkmark in a box asking him to confirm that he had written the answer in the other box.

Don’t make a noise. Don’t even move. We must not alert him to our presence. Do not. Do not.

It is too late for you. See how he sets down the pen and scans the room with his eyes. It is only a matter of time. They are meticulous and they are unrelenting. I must leave you now. I am, after all, only the narrator. I can melt into the walls that I brought to being by saying they were there. You, foolishly following me into this construct, are not so lucky. You will not be heard from again. All records of you will disappear. The Dental Underground has power you cannot imagine. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.