LAST WEEK’S TERRIFYING CHAPTER: “BLOOD & BASS NOTES AT CHATEAUGAY”
Beneath Park Avenue’s gaslit gentility, composer Charles Ives rots in a delirium of dread, haunted by the eldritch cacophony that clawed into his soul at Chateaugay Lake—a fortnight after fleeing that Adirondack abyss, its savage symphony still gnaws his nerves raw! Picture the scene: a reeking backwoods tavern, thick with the stink of unwashed lumbermen and bootleg whiskey, where the so-called Steamboat Pirates—grinning ghouls with gnarled hands clawing at banjos and brass—unleashed a “music” no civilized ear should survive! Ives, that pale city specter, stumbled into their den seeking art, only to be ensnared by Quinn, a wolf-eyed “sportsman” with a hunter’s smirk, and Nathaniel Collins, a guide whose silent stares sliced sharper than a skinning knife. When the Pirates’ discordant symphony swelled—a screeching, pulsing thing that seemed to crawl from the lake’s black depths—Ives convulsed like a marionette, howling guttural loon hymns atop a splintered table, his makeshift instrument shrieking as if possessed! Witnesses recoiled, crossing themselves as the composer’s fingers bled, his eyes white with frenzy—a Wendigo waltz made flesh! Now, back in his Brahmin cage, Ives claws at his piano, desperate to cage the uncageable, while Quinn’s shadow looms… What hellish pact did that Adirondack night forge? What primal curse now seethes in his sonatas? Boston’s golden boy is gone; in his place, a vessel of vengeance—or madness. The wilderness whispers. The Wendigo waits. And the Pirates’ next performance? All tickets are one-way.
THE STEAMBOAT DISPATCH
A SHOCKING EXPOSÉ OF PIRACY AND DECEIT!
By Our Fearless Saranac Lake Correspondent
CHAPTER VII: THE DEVIL’S TIDE—BLOOD & SMOKE ON CHATEAUGAY LAKE
DISPATCH FROM THE DARKENING SHORES
As the autumn sun sank like a guttered candle, painting the skies in hues of gangrenous gold and arterial crimson, the wooden-hulled steamer Adirondack loomed at dock, its smokestacks belching filth into the ether. Upon its weather-rotted deck stood CAPTAIN EBEN SABLE—a brute carved from Adirondack granite, his face a roadmap of scars earned not in honorable combat, but in back-alley knifings and riverfront treachery. His eyes, twin flintlocks primed to kill, scanned the fog-choked horizon. Behind him, the STEAMBOAT PIRATES—a crew of cutthroats with souls blacker than engine soot—scurried like rats, their whispers hissing of contraband, coercion, and corpses.
Beneath the lake’s placid veneer, a festering truth rotted. Sable’s so-called “cultural renaissance”—a honeyed lie to lure bluebloods and composers—was but a VENOMOUS MASQUERADE. While silk-gloved elites sipped champagne and swooned to symphonies, the Pirates’ true trade festered in the shadows: opium from Montreal, stolen rifles bound for anarchist dens, and bribes greasing palms from Albany to the Canadian border.
CULTURAL DECEPTION: A SYMPHONY OF LIES
The fiend’s masterstroke? Charles Ives, the avant-garde composer, lured to Chateaugay under false pretenses. Sable’s men paraded Ives as the lake’s “artistic savior,” while smuggling crates of Turkish morphine beneath the man’s dissonant concertos. “Culture is a weapon,” Sable growled to his first mate, as Ives’s cacophonous notes drowned out the screams of a dockworker tossed overboard for asking too many questions.
ECONOMIC RAPACITY: SMUGGLERS’ COVE UNMASKED
Every moonless night, the Adirondack disgorged its cursed cargo into skiffs rowed by men with no names and fewer scruples. The coves near Pine Hollow reeked of gunpowder and betrayal, while Sable’s enforcers—led by the knife-wielding harpy “Red Molly”—silenced dissenters with garrote wire and promises of unmarked graves. Even the sheriff, a spineless lickspittle named Harlan Greaves, turned blind eyes for a cut of the spoils.
POLITICAL CORRUPTION: THE CAPTAIN’S CLAWS IN THE STATEHOUSE
Sable’s ambition stretched beyond mere profit. Through blackmail and blood money, he’d ensnared Senator Thaddeus Vane, a bloated peacock of Albany’s elite, into drafting legislation to “privatize” Chateaugay’s docks—a legal smokescreen for the Pirates’ monopoly. Those who resisted? Vanished. Judge Elias Whittemore found floating face-down in Duck Harbor, his throat slit ear-to-ear, a Pirate’s Mark—a rusted rivet—clutched in his rigor-stiff fist.
HEROES IN THE SHADOWS?
Yet hope flickers in the gloom. Nathaniel Collins, a woodsman whose kin have haunted these pines since the Mohawk Wars, stalks Sable’s men with a Hawken rifle and a vendetta. Meanwhile, the dandy Quinn—a serpent in satin waistcoats—plays both sides, feeding secrets to the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency between sips of absinthe. But trust is a currency scarcer than honesty here. One misstep, and Collins’s scalp may adorn the Adirondack’s mast, while Quinn’s guts could bait sturgeon lines.
A STORM BREWS
As this correspondent files his dispatch, the lake whispers of impending carnage. Sable’s patience frays; his pirates grow restless. Ives, sensing the rot beneath his patron’s commissions, scribbles mad cowboy songs to Charlie Rutlage in a locked Baker’s Point cabin. And Collins? He’s rallied a band of trappers, river-men, and disgraced lawmen for a last, desperate stand.
WARNING, READERS—
When next week’s Chronicle hits the stands, blood will blacken these shores. Will the Pirates’ reign endure, or will Chateaugay’s waters choke on their cursed bones?
The answer—or your doom—awaits in CHAPTER VIII: THE REAPER OF RIPTIDE RAPIDS
Printed by the Steamboat Dispatch steam-powered press, October 1892. All rights secured by the Withering Fen Postcard Amusements Co.
What mysteries of Chateaugay Lake haunt you?