The Other Empty Desert

“

Somewhere else, not here, there is a woman wandering a desert—a desert not unlike this one, but not like this one either. It's not the same desert, I need to clarify that.

”

Somewhere other than Night Vale, not part of the regular empty desert surrounding Night Vale, there is another empty desert, which seems to surround a parallel-universe version of Night Vale. A horoscope refers to it as "an alternate desert dimension."

Dana found herself in this desert after exiting the house that does not exist. She left the house and found herself in the empty desert, while the house actually fails to exist (at least in the "Night Vale prime" dimension) in the Desert Creek Housing Development in Night Vale.

Cell phones seem to be completely, if intermittently, functional while in the desert. Intern Dana sends frequent texts to Cecil, and occasionally is able to call him. However, it is rarely possible to respond to contact from the Empty Desert, and when Cecil attempts this, his touchscreen will crack and leak blood, or show a picture of his face, rotting and covered in flies. When Carlos ends up in the alternate desert, his communication is much more stable, and two-sided, sending and recieving frequent texts and snapchats.

In Dana, while out in the parallel dimension empty desert, Dana is breifly trapped in a "geographical loop" surrounding a mountain with a red blinking light on top of it in the distance.

In A Blinking Light up on the Mountain, the mountain with the red blinking light suddenly appears in the empty desert outside of Night Vale itself, rising out of a great alluvial floodplain strewn with bones. A great masked army then appears in the desert, marching towards Night Vale. Residents are terrified for their lives, but the army turns out to simply be on their way to attack somewhere else, passing through Night Vale and supporting local businesses on their way.

In WALK, Dana journeys to the mountain, finding a deserted settlement bound inside the stone walls of a tightly wound spiral gorge. The walls of the gorge were covered in strange drawings of orange triangles with soft light around the edges. She also describes a lighthouse on the mountain, 40 feet tall, 15 feet in diameter, made of brown stone.

In Voicemail, Carllos discovers a group of people who entered the Forbidden Dog Park with Dana during Poetry Week, and concludes that the desert otherworld must be the Forbidden Dog Park.