Before They Were Night Vale: The Murderer was Very Sorry

Welcome to "Before They Were Night Vale", our new 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: This is a short story I wrote many years ago. It would later find its way into the first thing Jeffrey and I ever wrote together, a play we staged in 2011 called What The Time Traveler Will Tell Us. The version in the play was tied directly into the plot of the show, and so wouldn't make much sense here, so I'm instead including a modified, stand alone version.

Not a great deal to say about this one. It's a clever little story, not quite as good as it thinks it is, but still pretty good.

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The murderer was very sorry.

You’d be sorry too if you had just killed a man. Maybe you don’t think so, but you would be.

The murderer had done it for private reasons. The reasons were her own, and I choose to respect that.

She did it with a rock that she had taken out of the koi pond. She hit the victim’s head with the rock again and again until the victim’s brain was too traumatized and shut down. The murderer was very sorry about that.

Would it help if I told you that no one really liked the victim? Certainly no one loved him. There were people who loved the murderer.

A detective arrived to investigate.

There were people who loved the detective, and many people who liked him, but none of them were at the scene of the murder, or near it.

The detective didn’t know about the murderer. Or he knew that one existed, of course, but was not aware that the murderer was the murderer.

The murderer stood to make no money from her crime. I checked. I thought that might’ve been it, but it wasn’t.

The detective looked at the evidence. There was evidence, certainly, although the rock had been hidden away some place.

I asked the murderer where she hid the rock.

“In the koi pond,” she said.

The murderer’s child was frightened of the detective, not because he thought his mother was guilty, but because the detective was large and had a mustache that seemed to move separately from the rest of his face.

The murderer comforted the child as best she could. Does her child change how you think about her? She was really very sorry about the murder.

Aha! thought the detective. He had discovered some evidence or something. I wasn’t paying attention.

The murderer had once painted a watercolor of a single orange poppy, blossom half open. She had copied it out of a book, having never painted before nor since. This was when she was younger, before she was a murderer. She had lost it years ago, and hadn’t mentioned it to anyone before meeting me. She didn’t mention it to me either. This has been character development.

The detective rounded all the likely suspects in a room. There were a lot of likely suspects. No one really liked the victim.

“I think it’s one of you,” he said to the suspects.

“Which one? You’ll have to be more specific,” said a suspect.

The detective was flustered. He didn’t know which one. The murderer knew which one.

She stood up. To confess, possibly. She never told me.

Everyone turned to look at her. There was a long moment of silence.

She lost her nerve, I think. Or maybe she planned it this way. Maybe she was less sorry than I thought.

“It was him,” she said, pointing at the detective.

This didn’t make any sense, of course. The evidence disproved it. No one cared about the evidence. The murderer had people who loved her. They grabbed the detective and tied him up. They shouted and shook his shoulders with their hands. He was a murderer, the murderer had said so. Someone grabbed a rock out of the koi pond and beat his head until he was dead.

The murderer’s child grew up to be a governor. The murderer never really lost that watercolor. She knew where it was, I’m sure of it.

I think the murderer did it to avenge someone she loved. Or maybe for fun. She was very, very sorry.