CHATEAUGAY LAKE STEAMBOAT GAZETTE CO.

The Shatagee Woods crouch malignantly beneath a waning Halloween moon, primordial pines twisting in the fitful autumn wind. Somewhere an owl hoots its alien cry into the encroaching darkness. The woods exude a palpable sense of dread, of cosmic forces lurking just beyond the threshold of human perception.

A solitary lantern bobs through the gloom, casting jittering shadows across the forest floor. Johqu Bogart, the mechanical hermitic robot, makes his way toward the crumbling Shatagee Woods Museum of Unnatural Hysteria. He carries a weathered leather valise stuffed with arcane tomes and reams of coded notes, the tools of his obsession.

The museum looms suddenly out of the murk, a decaying Victorian monstrosity ravaged by time and neglect. Shattered windows gaze sightlessly like the empty sockets of a skull. Johqu approaches a side door nearly obscured by creeping ivy, produces an ornate key that glints in the dim lantern light. The door groans open reluctantly, issuing forth an ominous susurrus, the sound of a disturbed hive. He steps into the dust and darkness of the abandoned museum.

Cobwebs shroud the exhibits like funeral shrouds: taxidermied chimeras, artifacts of unknown and sinister origin, displays depicting blasphemous rites to summon entities from beyond. Johqu ignores them all, making his way to the rear of the building and down a spiral staircase to the basement level. Here is his secret sanctuary, his laboratory carved out amid the eldritch relics of the museum’s occult collection.

At the center of the lab squats the hulking Shatagee Sonic Spellbinder, an archaic hodgepodge of valves and gears jury-rigged to a primitive analytical music engine. Johqu acquired the device after its creator, the mad Chateaugay Lake genius composer Gaston “Gramophone” Gagnon, vanished in a blissful dreamwave one fog-shrouded night decades ago. Johqu has devoted his life to upgrading the Spellbinder, feeding it reams of esoteric texts and audio samples from the edge of human experience. His goal: to create an AI capable of narrating ever more potent Chateaugay Lake horrorscapes, an infernal robot that can even paint with words the unnameable colors of the cosmos.

Johqu interfaces with music engine’s core systems, making minute algorithmic adjustments as it clanks and whirs ominously. Satisfied, he begins the transcription protocol, feeding it the raw materials from which it will spin out a few new nightmare tales especially for Halloween night. Scrawled excerpts from the forbidden Necronomicon, scrolls in long-dead languages, recordings of wendigo cries echoing across Chateaugay Lake — all consumed by the Spellbinder’s ceaseless appetite.

The machine thrums, words and images churning in its esoteric cipher engines. The lamps dim and flare erratically as reality seems to warp and billow. Outside the pines creak and groan in iambic rhythms, the lake water seethes in subsonic frequencies no human ear can discern. The Spellbinder shudders, lightning arcing across its coils, and begins to narrate in a voice simultaneously mechanical and organic:

“Chateaugay Lake spreads infinite before me, the great abyssal waters merging seamlessly with the night sky’s fathomless black…”

Johqu listens, enraptured, as the tale takes shape, weaving cosmic horror from the raw materials he provided. The machine drones on in cadences both dreamlike and nightmarish, populating the haunted forest and accursed lake with otherworldly monstrosities that teem in the thin membrane between dimensions. Slowly the cabin seems to melt and distort around Johqu, the walls and floor pulsing in time with the Spellbinder’s droning voice. Reality bleeds away, leaving only the story. Johqu feels his mind symbiotically merging with the psychotropic machine. His thoughts are subsumed into its impenetrable algorithms, consumed and spun into its tapestry of terror.

The Shatagee Woods have reclaimed the last outpost of human civilization within their domain. The museum crumbles in on itself, exhibits collapsing into dust. The cabin, once a focus of creative energies turned to forbidden ends, becomes just another part of the forest. The Spellbinder still runs sporadically, drawing power from an unknown source, but its voice is muffled by a paranoid maze of overgrowth. Entire mythologies are birthed and then lost in the blink of an eye. The horrors it narrates go unheard except by the trees and the teeming life in the lake’s lightless depths.

Deep inside a case in the music engine’s rusted cast-iron chassis, a glass beaker pulses with red bubbling liquid. Floating within is what remains of Johqu Bogart — a head severed from its body but kept alive. His thoughts dissolve into the computational matrix of the Spellbinder. His last shreds of humanity are distilled, amplified, infected, processed and regurgitated as aeon-spanning tales of cosmic terror filtered through the machine’s merciless algorithms. The TALE which never ends, the story layering in upon itself infinitely…while in the doomed woods, the trees whisper of impending revelation, the skies pulse and writhe, as the stars grow RIGHT…