Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.
The glow faded, circular dials shifting from a warm white to a deep blue as the sound of a star dying (in A Minor) took NVPR’s place. Stiles jittered his fingers against his palm, torn between clinging on to the light, any light, some kind of light, and the resonating screeching in his teeth.
After a third screaming throb to the bone marrow the answer was xfgjdg! OFF! OFF!!, and the abandoned radio tower plunged back into not-quite darkness, interspersed with pockets of malevolently meandering mist.
Stiles glanced at the staircase.
It wasn't like he didn’t know where he was, or even who'd put him there (even though ‘who’ was more like an abstract concept, and couldn't entirely be said to encompass names, faces, or biological designations). The Sheriff’s Secret Police were so unsecret that everyone knew how they worked, though no-one, not even Stiles, could tell you how that was -- and his dad was the Sheriff.
Well, at the very least, he was one of the Sheriffs.
(Stiles had never actually seen his dad’s work, or his dad work, but since he left every morning from the upstairs window, carried away by a blue helicopter, Stiles was fairly sure that was what he did.)
He was a lot surer of that than whatever it was he was supposed to have done. He’d been here for hours, woken up in a storage closet on the 7th floor, and every staircase from 3 on down kept making distant growling sounds, like they were echoing the hunger-pangs of a monster deep within. That, or trying to burp. The first few times Stiles had tried luring it to one stairwell and bolting down another, at the loss of one chemistry text book and a shoe, the growling hadn't been fooled. The overwhelming sense of teeth scrabbling at his ankles had chased him back up again, and since he’d had a couple of Snickers left in his bag, Stiles hadn’t worked up the adequate starvation necessary to try again.
His cellphone said it had reception, but all that happened whenever he tried to call anyone was an automated message, reading off the cinema listings for December 19th, 1976. He was never watching King Kong, Carrie or Rocky ever again. (He'd stopped calling before it thought about 1977; Star Wars was a sacrifice he just wasn't ready to make.)