Welcome to Night Vale - You Feel It Just Below the Ribs (audiobook excerpt)

Episode Date: November 12, 2021

Here’s an excerpt from the new novel by Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson: You Feel It Just Below the Ribs. (coming November 16, wherever you get your books). More info (and for places to order): https://bit.ly/3oQujfC The voice of the meta-narrator (Introduction & footnotes) is Adepero Oduye. The voice of Miriam Gregory (Chapter 1) is Kirsten Potter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Nightville, it is Jeffrey Craneer speaking to you from April of 2026 with a couple of cool things coming up. First off, we're going to be in Europe touring our newest Nightville live show, Murder Night in Blood Forest. We're going to be in Edinburgh, UK, on May 27th. We'll be in Manchester on the 28th. We will be in London on May 29th, and we will be in Amsterdam on May the 30th. You can get tickets for these shows at Welcome to Nightville.com slash live, and hopefully we'll have more. shows coming up later this year. Who knows? Just get on our newsletter. Go to Welcome to Nightville.com. Sign up for our newsletter. We will send you emails twice a month to let you know all of the news

that you need to know about Welcome to Nightville. One of the big news things to tell you right now is that our other hit podcast, Alice Isn't Dead, is coming back on April the 13th, written by Joseph Fink, produced by Disparition and starring Jacica and Nicole. More episodes of Alice Isn't Dead return on April the 13th, so make sure you are still subscribed to that podcast. Finally, do you want some cool Nightville merch? Go to Welcome to Nightville.com, click on store, and we have all kinds of cool t-shirts, things for the summer, tank tops, beach towels. And if you like coffee mugs, if you want calendars, if you want backpacks, all kinds of cool

stuff there. So check out Welcome to Nightville.com and click on store, click on live. If you want to see our live shows, we will see you in Europe. And hey, thanks. Hey there, Nightville listener. It is Jeffrey Craneer, co-writer of this very show, and I'm bringing you some special audio today. So I wrote a novel with my friend and author, Janina Matheson. This book is called You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, and it comes out this Tuesday, November 16th. You Feel It Just Below the Ribs is a fictional autobiography set in an alternate 20th century timeline, and it chronicles one woman's unusual life, including the price she pays to survive, and the cost her choices hold for the society she is trying to save. We also chose the format of found manuscript that is annotated by an unnamed meta-narrator, which was a really fun way to play with how truth is perceived.

I think it's a really cool sci-fi drama, and if you love Night Vale or my other fiction podcast within the wires, I'm positive you will love. You feel it just below the ribs. So what follows my voice here is an excerpt from the audiobook narrated by Kirsten Potter and Adaparo Adduye. You can pre-order the book wherever you get your books or audiobooks. Do that today. Pre-orders are huge for us. So go do that now. It's like a gift to your future self. I mean, listen, it comes out November 16th. That's just four days away. So enjoy this excerpt from You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, Introduction and Chapter 1. Introduction. The following manuscript was found under the floorboards of an attic room in a bed sit in Stockholm in 1996.

The proprietor of the bed sit, being possessed of no small amount of insight, or perhaps a greater than usual amount of self-importance, donated the manuscript to the Staten's Historica Museum. At the time, the museum did not pay much attention to the manuscript, as it seemed to them to be a highly implausible personal memoir that held no cultural or historical significance, at least none that could be verified. Its author made bold claims,

but did not provide sufficient details to corroborate them. It wasn't until a staff member, by chance, learned about the body found with the manuscript that the museum began to take the work seriously. Whom that body belonged to changed the significance of the manuscript. The woman in question had been living under a false name for more than 20 years, so uncovering her identity took some time. Eventually, through dental records, it was determined that she was none other than Dr. Miriam Gregory. Dr. Gregory was a prominent psychologist during her lifetime, and her work contributed to the

better implementation of some of the foundational tenets of the new society. Her understanding of how to examine and manipulate the human mind was truly staggering, and the impact her work had on the world is impossible to quantify. She was reported missing in 1975 by her wife, Tésa Moyo, after she failed to come home from work. Teresa died in 1982, so we have not been able to verify those parts of the manuscript that deal with their relationship. Since the discovery of the author's body, the manuscript has come under intense scrutiny from a range of sources, including the central government of Western Europe and numerous academic institutions, questioning its veracity, if not its very authenticity.

There was much debate about the wisdom of making the document public, considering the many unverifiable claims and the outright misinformation it contains. Ultimately, the societal council decided it was best left unpublished. We, at the Uriatan Press, disagree. While we appreciate the dangers of certain texts, we are opposed to censorship,

and we have dedicated ourselves to finding and publishing those documents the society has seen fit to hide. If you're seeing this, it is because you are familiar with our work and our ethos and have passed through our vetting process. You can be trusted to approach this material responsibly. Dr. Gregory's manuscript did, however, pose a conundrum for us, given its unreliable bent. Some suggested that we published only the sections that were able to pass unscathed

through our fact-checking process, or that we simply release a summary of the book's claims rather than the entire text. After much discussion, we decided to publish the manuscript as it was written, at least almost as written. Dr. Gregory sometimes wrote using a typewriter, but large parts were written out by hand. There are places in which the author's writing becomes illegible, or otherwise unintelligible, and a few pages that appeared to be out of order. We have edited these sections for clarity based on what we believe to be her intent.

We have noted where any text has been altered. We have also provided additional information to add context to some of the author's statements. This ranges from correcting historical facts she has related erroneously, omitted, or even made up entirely, to including contradicting accounts of some of the personal elements of her story. We did our best to locate and interview people who knew the author while she was alive, in order to verify as much of the manuscript as possible. Of course, when alternate versions of events are reported by different people, it can be hard to distinguish whose version is closest to the truth.

We felt that having advised readers of the conflicting accounts, they could be left to draw their own conclusions. Most notably, perhaps we have not been able to confirm the, existence, let alone the practices of the Institute Dr. Gregory describes. We did manage to track down one or two personal accounts by people who claim to have spent time there, but they were far from credible and gave few details. In an interview with the fringe magazine, for example, a musician claimed to have served time in a closed facility somewhere near Providence, Rhode Island. A patient undergoing psychiatric care in Berlin asserted that they knew of a covert

North American Hospital. We were unable to verify these claims, so while they did alter our own perception of the text, we felt it would be unethical to include details of them. At this stage, they are a little more than rumor. We have refrained from editing the manuscript other than the small adjustments noted. Readers should be prepared to encounter the following text

as a largely unaltered, highly unreliable personal account of a life. Dr. Gregory has taken no pains to be consistent stylistically or even factually. She writes at times with clarity and intention, but often lets herself slip into stream of consciousness. It appears that the writing took place over the course of some years, with bursts of activity followed by long stretches of rest or disinterest. All of this makes for somewhat confusing reading at times, but we have endeavored to bring clarity where we can. As the author is now dead, and due to the lack of firm corroborating evidence for her story, we are somewhat reluctant even to label this text a memoir. Perhaps it is simply fiction, set against the backdrop of reality.

We leave it to the listener to judge. Part 1. The End. 1. I was born into the apocalypse. It's probably unhelpful to throw around a word like apocalypse, and to be honest, I couldn't tell you whether it's even apt. It looks like an apocalypse from here, or from now. From a distance, it looks like the world ended. Maybe it did.

But, and I suspect that this isn't something people like to admit, I've seen a lot of people who lived through that time not admitting this. It didn't feel like an apocalypse. It just felt like life. For the most part, anyway. I'm sure there were moments. You know, I'm sure there were times when the constant pressure of catastrophe shook my bones, but for the most part it went to unnoticed, familiar, like a nearby train that passes every day.

Moments pass, and it's hard to focus on the chaos about you, war and disease for miles around, when what's in front of you is so close. I grew up at the end of the world, and all that mattered was what was for dinner. The generations who did not experience the Great Reckoning think of it as a cataclysm with a clear beginning and end, like a curtain opening and closing on a 40-year-long epic tragedy. But the end of the world comes with neither whimper nor bang. It unfurls its blossoms slowly, majestically, one moist black petal at a time. When I was an infant, the reckoning was merely a war, born of allies and trekkest,

treaties of minor uprisings leading to fists pounding podiums across continents. As with many of her generation, Dr. Gregory's birth date is unknown. Due to the widespread bombing that took place during the Great Reckoning, many documents were lost. The New Society Records Department was established in 1943, several months after the official day of First Peace. It attempted to reissue key documents to survivors, but depended on personal recollections of the individuals themselves, which were not always reliable. Records list Dr. Gregory's birthday as the 10th of January, with no year.

It seems likely that she was born sometime between 1908 and 1911. The official start of the Great Reckoning is now considered to be the July riots in Ghent in 1912. The war was messy and sprawling, having nothing to do with land, or resources or acquisition. It was driven by nationalist identity crises and temper tantrums. It was waged by vast families with hurt feelings and destructive weapons standing under flags. I was born into war, and I grew up in something much, much worse. People tend to look at events of mass eradication as if they're simple, finite.

A pandemic kills 100,000, an earthquake kills. 5,000, and then it's done. We tend not to look too closely, so we miss the fact that disease, wars, and storms linger long after they're gone. The tornado passes and you are unscathed, only you die weeks later because of dehydration, malnutrition, you fall ill and seek assistance, but what medical facilities remain are overwhelmed by those with missing limbs or shattered bones? The idea of an apocalypse is a comfort, because it makes death seem like something we can all experience together in a single moment, a colorful firework burst. But mostly death is something you keep to yourself. In reality, the apocalypse is most likely to be you, alone in a room with the flu. I have known death all my life. I fear it, of course, but it is familiar. Death is.

is a stray dog I have taken in and fed, not because I love it, but because I don't want it biting me out of hunger. I had a family once. These days no one has families, so when I tell people about mine, it is all they want to talk about, that and what the war was like, I suppose. I can't help them, though. At this distance, all I remember of my family is their deaths. Miry, did you love your family, no matter what? Is one question people ask me? Even if you didn't like your family, you don't like your family, did you still care for and protect them, is another? Is it true that families are tribes, and tribalism is inherently violent, is another? Edited for clarity. Honestly, I do not know. It has been decades since my family was alive. I am sure I felt something for them, but I can only

recall for you my experiences. I remember being with my family. I remember huddling under the broken lumber of our home, hiding from German soldiers. Or maybe they were English. Maybe they were French. They were men with guns. That's all that really matters. I remember foraging in open fields, crouching in tall grass, my mother slapping my mouth if I spoke too loudly. I remember entering our neighbors home through a shattered window after learning they had all succumbed to illness. I remember eating their food and wearing their clothes and reading their books. I remember the books were mostly medical journals. I remember my father forbidding us from speaking to anyone.

I remember hiding, mostly in silence. I remember remembering them over and over again. How many times can you filter a memory before it's really just a fiction? How can you tell how many times your memories have been filtered? A strange thing to consider when you've sat down to write out your own memories. What is the point of doing this if memory is so unethical, reliable. But there is a point. I have to tell someone. I have to not confess exactly, because confession doesn't require action, and I need someone to take action. I have wanted to get

the truth out for years. I have tried once or twice, not as hard as I should have. I don't have much time left. So I suppose I'm using the time I have to write out the truth so that someone can read it and do something. But I'm selfish, and I want to be understood. so I'm starting here at the beginning, with my earliest memories. I'm starting here, so I can trace the entire path that led to my greatest accomplishment, my greatest crime. Maybe none of this is relevant, but it's mine to tell, and there's no one stopping me telling it however I want. So, this is what happened.

This is everything I remember happening, and you can judge me, if you like. But whoever reads this, I have left pain in this world. Someone needs to fix it. I had a sister once. Her name was Elizabeth. My parents were named Keith and Eva. I do not remember loving them or being loved by them. I remember being disciplined and fed and taught.

So in that way I remember familial love. My father knew how to grow things from the earth, even after the earth was poisoned. My mother knew how to manipulate things into other things, into whatever you needed. She could craft a tent out of sofa upholstery. She could make a bed out of gathered heather and shopping bags. I'm sure they could do more than that, of course.

I'm sure they had more to them, but time reduces memories to their least complex forms. What do you remember about your parents, Miriam? I remember they grew things. I remember they made things. I remember they made us survive. For a while. Elizabeth and I used to play together. She had a doll that I wanted. I had a doll too, but I had played with it too hard. It was battered and broken and barely a doll anymore. My sister kept her doll perfect, protecting it from dirt and rough play. She cleaned its face and restitched loose threads along its body. Sometimes she would hold her doll out to me, as if to let me take it, but at the last minute she would snatch it away and run off on her long, fast legs.

The doll held tightly to her chest, laughing at me as I tried to keep up with her. I remember crying as I ran after her, gasping for air, my cheeks red in the cold, my legs aching. I remember going inside and curling into a pile of blankets. I guess we didn't have heat that year, and watching my mother cook dinner. I remember, I think, my sister coming inside and sitting beside me. I remember her reading me a story and then braiding my hair. I remember her giving me some of her meat at dinner. It plays like a film in my head.

It plays like it happened all in one day. Maybe it didn't happen at all. It doesn't really matter. One day Elizabeth got sick. Hundreds of thousands of people got sick then, and my sister was one of them. The H4N2 influenza virus, known colloquially as the cobbler's flu, due to early and erroneous rumors that it was caused by, foot fungus was first reported in Salisbury, former United Kingdom, in the autumn of 1916.

Within six months, it had spread across the globe. The spread was exacerbated by the movements of the world's armies, and the virus in turn worsened the growing conflict. With a pandemic adding to the war was burden on hospitals, medical equipment became a precious resource. This flu outbreak had largely died down by the end of 1917, although there were smaller resurgence in 1921 and 1924. We took her to a hospital and there weren't any beds, so she lay on a mattress on the floor and she died. Sadness overtook me, I presume. I remember a period of inactivity, but I do not exactly remember the sadness that caused this. Perhaps those feelings evaporated under the heat of time.

I got Elizabeth's doll after all, but I do not remember playing with it. I was selfish, to be sure, but I was raised in the apocalypse, and selfishness helps you survive. I was my only concern. If my parents could grow food and make shelter and keep me occupied

with games, that was helpful to me. I remember moving somewhere else after my sister died. I don't remember. why. I suppose the fighting came too close. Dr. Gregory never spoke publicly about her early life and never shared where she was born or where she lived as a child. We know that she eventually entered North America, New York, former United States, on a ship from Trieste. But she never related how she got there. It seems likely she was from former Poland, but as infrastructure

broke down and her family moved around, it is possible they lost track of their own location. They may have even crossed borders unknowingly. I remember the new place was broken. The war had been through and left nothing behind, nothing but battered houses and empty people. My father made a garden there, as he made a garden everywhere. He worked in the earth with his hands and the earth delivered life to him. And eventually, it turned out, death. My father cut his fingers on shrapnel, left behind in the poisoned soil, a deep scratch that bled for days.

He bandaged it and went on working, but we saw dark veins like oak limbs grow across his hand and up his forearm. During his sleep, he gasped and clutched his breast. My mother and I burned his body in accordance with the new laws. It's not clear which laws she's referred. referring to, each country has its own methods of preventing the spread of disease. I remember being alone with my mother, and I remember holding her. She had lost her husband and her oldest daughter, and she cried most days. She could not cook anymore, and neither of us could

grow vegetables as well or as consistently as my father had been able to. She stopped crafting, and she seemed to find contentment in her sorrow, something like contentment, despair maybe. I held her whenever she felt sad, and soon I was holding her every night. Mourning was her escape, her reason not to do anything. She regressed toward infancy, and she turned me into her mother. We were alone together for long enough for it to feel normal. In all this war, she was the only one of my family to die through violence,

although the war didn't kill her, not directly. She was outside our home, praying to a god she had either recently discovered or invented altogether when a man approached her and asked for food. She said she could not spare any food. He asked for money, and she said she had no money. He asked for shelter, but my mother grew upset at being so needed. She was the one with needs. She no longer knew how to give, and she told him to leave. This man was a desperate man, one of the many. Someone who had seen horrible things happened. and to those he loved, and who, like my mother, was too broken to help himself. Bereft of anyone to help him, he was also too broken to grieve his terrible circumstances,

all he had left was rage. He struck her, and she fell. She did not cry out because she was confused. He hit her again and kicked her, and eventually she did not cry out because she was unconscious. Edited for clarity. I remember their deaths. If memory is ever true, that is how my family died. Keith, Eva, Elizabeth. I did not say their names again for a long time. What I don't remember is how it felt to be alone.

I don't remember my first moment of being just me, just Mary, all alone. I remember disciplining myself, feeding myself, and teaching myself. I think I was only 12, though, maybe younger, 11 maybe, or 10. So I must have been afraid. Where should I sleep? How should I get food? How do I protect myself from those who have nothing left but rage? There were still shops operating at that point, I think.

But how would I get money? My parents had never seemed to use money, but they must have traded something, their skills, perhaps, things they had grown or made. They had taught me to do those things, but I couldn't do them as well. I couldn't do them as quickly. I don't know how long I tried to survive like this, tried to survive like my family, without my family to survive with.

I don't know how long I tried to use their tools to keep my own life going. Probably not long. Well, no amount of time seems long to me now. Sometimes you get to the point where surviving takes so much work that you begin to ask yourself if it's worth it, or you would if you had the energy.

I'm not talking about depression, really, though I suppose there are similarities. I mean simply that sometimes, for some people, the amount of labor it takes to accrue the supplies you need to live through a day outweighs the value of the day itself. You spend each day working, striving, fighting to live, only to wake up faced with another day you have to survive. Can we blame a person for trying to lessen that burden, for trying to redress the imbursed, the imbursed, balance, for trying to make sure that the labor is worth it. I suspect there's one child and a million who wouldn't end up doing what I did to survive in the end. If you're alone at that age, if you have to look out for yourself, if you're in the middle of a war and there's no one around to care for lone children, you go a bit feral. You have to. Manners are for peace. A conscience is for

peace. It started small, of course. It started cowardly. A stolen loaf of bread, a lie told to claim shelter, promises broken, the gullible manipulated. I got better at it. It got easier, both practically and morally. I found weapons. I grew bold, ruthless. Sometimes in war it comes down to you or someone else, and both of you are innocent. Or neither of you are. It's the same thing, really. The world was ending. so what good were values, what good was neighborly sentiment. You're probably shocked reading this. I'm not even telling you details, and you're probably judging me. It's in times of strife that our true goodness can shine through, you're probably thinking.

I've heard people say that. Countless times I've heard that said by youngsters who have never seen so much as a backyard brawl. By idiots! Whether you're on the battlefield or in the aftermath, no one comes out of a war with their hands clean. Not a war like that. You do the best you can, and the only morality you have to cling to is the knowledge that you didn't choose to be there. A set of powerful men, who never even knew you existed, put you there. And why? For power? For a bit more land they'd likely never even walk over.

My sins, if I have sins, can be cast at their feet, at least in part. Those men and their nations destroyed the world. All I did was survive it. Thanks again for listening to this audiobook excerpt from You Feel It Just Below the Ribs, written by me, Jeffrey Kraner, and Janina Matheson. Pre-order wherever you get your books and audiobooks. Hi, I'm here to tell you about Good Morning Night Vale. Welcome to Night Vale's official recap show and unofficial best friend food podcast. Join me, Meg Bashwinner and fellow tri-hosts, Hal Lublin and Symphony Sanders, as we dissect all of the cool, squishy and slimy bits of every episode of Welcome to Nightvale. Come for the insightful and hilarious commentary and stay for all of

the weird and wild behind-the-scenes stories. Good morning Nightvale with new episodes every other Thursday. Get it wherever you get your podcasts. Yes, even there.