Welcome to Night Vale - Bonus: Excerpt 2 from "The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home"

Episode Date: March 24, 2020

An excerpt (read by Mara Wilson) of Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor's new novel The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home. Out today… wherever you get books, or order from some fantastic independent book stores: http://welcometonightvale.com/books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is the big day. The newest welcome to Nightville novel, The Faceless Old Woman, who secretly lives in your home, is out. It's out in the wild, waiting for you to buy it and read it, and be thrilled and scared and blown away by it. And I know you're going to read it all in one night, but don't be spoiling, okay? So, as you probably know, me and Joseph's multi-city book tour is canceled because of reasons,

but we are doing a giant online book tour. tour from 3 to 7 p.m. Eastern time, today, March 24th. Go to the Welcome to Nightville YouTube page to join me and Joseph Live, talking about the book, visiting with super special guests, reading passages from the novel, and even taking your questions. And if you miss the live experience, you can still watch the entire feed or part of the feed on YouTube. For more information on the faceless old woman and this feed and anything else, go to welcome to nightville.com slash books. Listen, I'm really excited for this novel. I'm really proud of this epic story of terror and vengeance.

Plus, there's a giant in it, and she is cool as heck. Here is one more excerpt from the audiobook, read by Nightvale's own Mara Wilson. Again, welcome to nightvill.com slash books for details on cool independent bookstores you can buy it from, or go to wherever you usually get your books. enjoy an estate by the sea 1792 to 1805 1 I was born on the Mediterranean on the water itself in a small boat that my father was frantically rowing in order to take my

mother to medical care she would never live to need what chance did I have when my first act was to take another's life my father let the oars fall once I had arrived and my mother had left He cradled me with one hand and his wife with the other, and then he made his way back to shore. I was his first and his last child. From then on, we would only have each other. Maybe lesser men would have responded to the trauma of losing a wife

by resenting my existence, or by forever associating me with sorrow. But my father was not a lesser man. He buried my mother on the edge of our estate, on a hill overlooking the water she had died upon. When I was very young he would take me to visit the grave regularly, but as I grew older, he realized I had no memory of a mother, and he himself needed no reminder, and so gradually we visited less, and then eventually not at all. Still, once a year, he would go out by himself

to the grave and carefully tend to it, clearing off weeds, making sure the path to it was passable, that the view from her plot to the water was unhindered. He never married again, nor showed any interest in women. This wasn't an act of misguided nobility. He was so fully occupied by raising a daughter, and by his mysterious work that there simply was never space for a second act his romantic life. Maybe if this story had turned out differently,

he would have eventually, as an older man, found room in his life for love. But this story can only turn out the way things happened. I cannot conjure a happy ending where none exists. I never missed my mother. I don't mean this to sound strong or uncaring. I just never knew what a mother was enough to miss one. And my father was such a warm and loving parrot

that I did not feel a missing peace in my life. Any sorrow I felt was on my father's behalf. For I loved him completely, and I knew that her death had been a great blow to him. So at night, in bed, listening to the whispering of the same warm seawater upon which I had come to be, and my mother had come to pass,

I would lay awake and wish that the tragedy could be undone. But it was never for my own sake. I only ever wanted my father to be happy. Here is what an orange tree smells like. At the base of the tree it smells of soil, the churn of earth and the sun that heats it. If it is warm enough to grow oranges, then it is warm enough to bake the soil,

and the scent will rise up a dense, gritty smell, pleasant without being beautiful. When rain comes, the smell changes. becoming sharper, a smell that is as squishy and thick as the mud that makes it. The tree itself smells like a house that will never be finished building, the dust of wood and all that binds wood together. It is a smell that grows with the tree, gaining the smells of what lives on and around it. A squirrel runs up the bark, and now the squirrel's nest,

a faint trace of pungent animal mixes in with a stolid smell of wood. between the continuous vegetable hum of the leaves there are the flowers that smell more like fruit than the fruit itself a perfume that smells like a miracle but also a reminder that life does not end with the humanity the smell of the flowers is extrahuman and it does not need us it is the smell of running under a hot sun the smell of falling into cool water the flowers are the dream of the fruit

and the dream of sweetness to come and then the fruit themselves echoes of the flower's perfume but more tangible there's a weight to their smell and when punched open with a thumb the fizzy aroma of pulp and juice that is what an orange tree smells like our estate had many orange trees and many other fruit trees besides it was a large and lush place on a hidden inlet protected from the damage of storms and the curiosity of passing ships The Mediterranean was a dangerous and wild place at the time, full of warships on patrol, and merchant ships passing to and from the ports of the east, and pirate and bandit ships, and other ships with strange flags belonging to mysterious organizations whose membership and purpose were unclear, but whose menace was evident to all.

Our tiny inlet was a blessing, allowing us a modicum of peace despite the apparent richness of our estate. And our estate was quite rich. The land had belonged to my mother's family, wealthy beneficiaries who luxuriated in fine arts and foods, the fawning attention that comes from kind donations to the poor, and a carefree life not beholden to any business or industry. Wealth is either a blight upon the soul or a balm. My mother's family saw money as a privilege,

allowing them to read poetry and explore intellectual gentility, which is why they approved of her marriage to my father, a working man with an average education. few rich families of that time would have allowed their daughter to marry into a family without wealth for fear that a dowry would be taken and the young bride and her family ignored. As the son of a merchant, my father spent much of his youth traveling to farms to purchase livestock and produce to then sell at larger markets in the city. He met my mother one summer while stocking figs in a market not far from the estate.

A quick errand into town to buy food turned into a long afternoon of discussion about the sweetest figs in late June You can tell the ripest by the smell, he told her, gently holding the green bulb to her nose as she inhaled the aromas of golden syrup and earth. The long afternoon turned to weeks of not-so-accidental meetings between the two, and that became a courtship. The family trusted him so thoroughly, and my mother loved him so fully that no question of the integrity of their marriage ever arose.

They were married on the grounds of this estate, which was then handed over to the new couple by my mother's parents. My father loved this home. Why would he not? He had developed a nose for the finest produce, and here he could savor every rich grape, every spring onion, every plump orange. Beside the citrus groves there was the main house, a vast thing inhabited now by only my father and me. There were servants' wings and towers that we left sealed to gather dust. Eventually we reduced our presence to one small wing of the house, sleeping in adjacent bedrooms,

using what was once a small kitchenette for the stable workers as our place for both cooking and eating. My father carried the habits of the small merchant family he'd grown up in and didn't know what to do with luxury on the scale it was being offered. Still, the lands were maintained by a variety of servants who came regularly, and the area of our house that we lived in was also well kept, and I did eventually begin to wonder, as the years went on, how my father was able to pay for the upkeep of such a large and lush estate

when he did not seem to have any job in particular, having given up his merchant travels after I was born. This was all so long ago. To parse through my earliest years is difficult. I am an old woman. Perhaps the oldest there has ever been. A mind was never meant to catalog this much. A life was never meant to be this long. But I do retain some memories of my earliest and greatest period of joy when I lived in ignorance of what the world could do to a person. I am three years old. This is my earliest memory. I am running through the orange groves. I'm chasing my father, or he is chasing me. It is a radiant and clear day. I decide to hide. I wiggle my way up into one of the trees. I wedge myself against the trunk a few feet up into the leaves.

I see my father looking for me. Where is my daughter? He says, an exaggerated confusion. Where is her beautiful face? I must see that face again. Where could it be? Soon I allow myself to fall onto the soft dirt where my father scoops me up and both of us are laughing.

Was my face actually beautiful? My father would say so either way. Another moment. I don't know how old I am. probably five or so. We are in our little kitchen in our big house, and my father is cooking. I don't remember what he is cooking. I only remember the smell, which is meaty and green,

the smell of vegetables cooking in fat. He asks me to cut the bread for our dinner, and he shows me how, supervising my use of the knife, but allowing me to do it myself. There are only two of us, little one, he says. Both of us need to be able to take care of the other. He shows me where I should cut. But it is I who carefully lowers the knife through the hard crust.

The smells of onions and herbs and lamb fill this memory and anchors it forever in my mind. One more memory of my earliest years is not like the others. I am six years old. Again, I am in the orange groves, but this time on my own. My father is away for the afternoon on business, as happened every week or so, and I am left to play around the estate. I know every disused shed, every good swimming spot, and each climbable tree in the groves,

where I could hide and secretly watch the groundskeepers, or the ships in the harbor, or even the deer. I'm playing in one of these hidden places, and I see a shape moving forward in an odd, stop and start way across a line of trees. I assume it was one of the gardeners and called for them. No one answers. I'm scared, but determined to be able to tell my father how brave I had been, so I run after the figure. Soon I reach the end of the line of trees and break out into the broad grass leading down to the shore,

and thereby the shore is a man lurching in a strange, stiff manner. He does not turn to look back at me, only shambles to the edge of the rock, and then tips forward into the water. I run down to look. Where he had fallen, the water is clear and shallow, but there is no sign of the man. I decide I must have been mistaken, and do not tell anyone what I have seen. If you liked this excerpt, go get the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home wherever you get your books, and head to Welcome to Nightville.com slash books for details on our live stream book launch,

some great independent bookstores you can buy it from, and for links to exclusive signed editions.