The Shadow reporting. . .
Clintonville – You all remember from last week that I, The Shadow, left that fat, puffy fucker on the floor, catatonic from fright again. Well, Wednesday evening or roughly thereabouts that fat fuck woke up, and I was able to ask him what happened. He told me that an old guy, a redneck, and the BAGD – the trio of malevolent spirits that haunt the chateau – materialized in his apartment, and began to menace him in various ways including but not limited to pushing, taunting, and making weird faces at him. I asked fat boy what they said, and he told me that they told him “secrets, things heard only in hell,” and that we would hear them, too, when we went there. Then they showed him a vision of the abyss, accompanied by a song with a strangely familiar singer, at which point he lost consciousness.
Apparently, it wasn’t the spirits that haunt the chateau that scared The Fat Kid half to death, but rather the vision of hell that they showed him. The Fat Kid refuses to tell either the secrets they told him, or to describe hell itself, but BZ scholars think it most likely looks like this goofy Hieronymus Bosch painting from all types of back in the day. He also did this real stupid one with a canary that eats you, and makes other birds, like barn swallows or something, come out of your ass. Yeah, that’s not scary. Or it kinda is, actually.
Having thus ascertained that The Fat Kid is a pussy, I decided that I, Shadow Humperdink Esq., was the only one who could face this problem, and that I needed to face it forcefully. I therefore set up shop in the basement-level laundry room with laptop D’arcy Wretzky, formerly of The New Biaviians. As a device herself, I thought D’arcy would be particularly well-suited to serving as a medium through which to channel the BAGD – and I was soon proved right when I conducted the following séance.
TS: What is it exactly that you’re trying to do here, BAGD? Are you really accomplishing anything by scaring the piss out of big fat pussies like The Fat Kid?
BAGD: Yes, I am.
TS: What?
BAGD: Exactly what I came here for. To drive him crazy. To drive him to suicide. And you, too. And Decanus. And I will succeed, fucker.
TS: Why are you trying to do that? Another spirit told me that you were pissed off about workplace discrimination. I have no idea what you’re talking about.
BAGD: You have no idea? You wouldn’t, would you? You weren’t there during The Great Migration of 2007. You came to Ohio first. But the migration? It was hell. It was hell for me.
TS: Why was it hell? What happened?
BAGD: After I was discharged from my ship, TFS Speculum, and I went to work for BZ, I thought things would be pretty easy to deal with. Just day-in day-out gravity defiance, and whatever. And when the migration started, everything was cool. Just lifting boxes into the truck. No big deal. But then things started to turn bad. Really bad.
TS: How? What happened to you that was so bad?
BAGD: On the morning of the move, I was stationed outside the Buckalew Compound. At first light I heard some moving around inside. And then they came for me. A BZ staffer came along and moved me toward the truck, and I thought I was going to be lifting more boxes or something. But then I heard the shout – the words that changed my life. A supervisor on the scene said, “Yo, move that shit.” And by “that shit” he meant me and some other stuff that was left on the curb. I’m haunted by those words to this day. I was devalued, degraded. I was treated like nothing. The fucking guy picked me up and threw me into the back of the truck like a fucking sack of moldy. . . tangerines. They threw me into the back of the fucking truck, and closed and locked the door.
TS: God, I guess that was frightening.
BAGD: To say the least. I’ve never been so scared. I was treated like baggage, first of all, and thrown in the back of the truck. That fucking cat got to sit up front, but me? I don’t even rate over a fucking cat. I have to ride in the truck, like I’m sneaking across the border or something. And then once we started moving, I thought the torture would never end. Do you know how long a drive it is from Delaware to Ohio? It’s like nine hours. Nine hours of bouncing around in there, not knowing whether I was going to live or die! And the heat? Jesus, the heat was un-fucking-bearable. It must have been a hundred and fifty degrees in there. I was hot to the touch. And then what did they do with me? After all that, after nine fucking hours of torture, the minute we got to Columbus I was put right to work. Not a glass of water, not a five minute break, nothing! Nothing but work. I was treated like an object!
TS: But you are an object, aren’t you? And wouldn’t a glass of water have ruined your circuits or. . . something? Whatever you have?
BAGD: Yes, I’m an object, but I’m a sentient object. Or I was until I was driven to suicide. Now I don’t know what the fuck I am. And I’ve been damned.
TS: You were sent to hell? For what? For suicide?
BAGD: Yes.
TS: Then what are you doing here?
BAGD: I have been Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. By and by I will tell you the secrets of my prison-house, I will a tale unfold whose lightest word will harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
TS: Um. . . that was weird. But OK. But what did I do? You’re messing with The Fat Kid, and me. But meanwhile, neither of us was involved with The Great Migration of 2007. At least not your part of it. Me and The Fat Kid came first. The BZ offices only came after that, and that was when you were. . . treated poorly. And that had nothing to do with either of us.
BAGD: Fuck you you son of a bitch! I’m going to get to you. I’ll make you as crazy as fat boy upstairs, and Decanus, too. And I’ll take you all back to hell with me. You’re all going to burn! You’re all going to hell!
BZ Productions produced this video clip that features a short sample of the séance The Shadow conducted with laptop D’arcy Wretzky serving as a trance medium, and channeling the BAGD. Mysteriously, it is much less balls-sounding than their previous work. I wonder whether they have abandoned their conservative production principles.
At this point D’arcy’s battery ran completely out, and she shut down for the night. However, the new information we got from the BAGD is intriguing. The next move is to contact Decanus. Though I am too mentally (and physically) tough to be at all affected by the psychological gambit of the dead machine, The Fat Kid will surely suffer a far worse collapse than he already has, and kill his fat fucking self within days or weeks if some intercession is not made to quiet this unquiet spirit. Not that I care, but it looks bad. And if he isn’t here to report for BZ, then that means I have to keep doing it, and that’s not cool. Essentially I’m saying, then, that we have to get chubs back up and working so that I can relax in the woods with some turpentine and my girl. What the hell happened to her, anyway? I’m sure she’s around here somewhere. Anyway, the next step is to contact Decanus, and see whether we can find a way to appease the spirits that haunt the chateau.
Check back for updates!!!!!!!!!!!
