This is in keeping with the spirit of the parody pieces at the autoaim forum. I didn’t bother trying to imitate Pacione’s meandering, redundant, error-riddled style, but the story’s pretty pointless. It involves a supposedly haunted house, Africanized bees and vampire spiders at a scene that our intrepid investigative reporter incorrectly identifies as a crime scene.
I’ll save Pacionese for the 26th. Besides, I have to be clear-headed for a meeting this afternoon, and writing like Pacione always gives me a headache.
Crime Investigation at the Haunted House
By Micky Fudgeone
Nickolas Rage, investigative reporter, awoke at 8pm to the sound of sirens outside his grandmother’s house. They were really loud. Wrapping his feeble mind around the events, from the fog of his slumber, he decided to investigate. For that, he would need his notebook, a tape recorder, and his video camera, so that he could take notes, conduct interviews, and film some footage. After all, he was an investigative reporter. By golly, he’d show up his archrival Jeraldo Riviera.
Rage grabbed his gear and mounted his tricycle to pedal down the street. The house where all the activity was taking place was allegedly haunted. Legend had it that there were ghosts, specters, and other scary ghouls. He’d been by the place many times, but had always been too scared to enter the decrepit structure. Two other reporters, from the Coal City Current, and the Morris Harold were already there. “Damn, how’d they get here so fast?” thought Rage.
Not one to waste time, Rage stormed up to one of the police officers, demanding to know what had happened. “Not now, Nickolas,” said Detective Harddon. “We’re in the middle of doing our own investigation. Why don’t you stand across the street with the other onlookers?”
“Fuck you, dick, and the horse you rode in on.” Harddon looked at Rage’s preferred mode of transportation, and laughed. The tricycle had pink plastic streamers hanging from each end of the handlebars, and a seat that probably gave Rage an atomic wedgie whenever he sat on it.
Rage walked his tricycle across the street to stand with Billy Pourass from the Current, who was his enemy, ever since he did that interview with Rage a few years ago that mocked him, and even worse, edited out all his cuss words. Rage hated it when his interviews were actually edited; his engaging personality never shone through when that happened.
Pourass was listening to his police scanner. Rage had always wanted a scanner, but couldn’t afford one. “So, Billy, can you tell what’s going on here? The cops are too busy to talk to me.”
“From what I can tell, Nickolas, a couple of squatters in the house were attacked by something, but the police don’t yet know what it was.
Just then, two ambulances arrived, and EMTs raced into the house with gurneys to administer first aid to the victims. They emerged about 10 minutes later with one victim on a stretcher, and loaded him into one of the ambulances.
It was winter, and had gotten dark hours earlier; it was hard to tell, but the victim appeared to be in his twenties, with a horribly swollen face and arms. The other victim, a woman, also apparently in her twenties, wasn’t in nearly as bad shape, and made do with pressing handfuls of snow on her stinging, painful welts, to make the swelling subside. She would be fine, but the man needed treatment in an ER, and was whisked away into the night.
One of the police officers sat with the woman on the front steps of the house, and asked her to tell him what happened. All Pourass and Rage could hear was sobbing.
Over the scanner came a crackling voice: “We’re going to take her in for a statement; right now, she’s a little too hysterical, and understandably doesn’t want to go back in the house. Can one of you go in and get her purse for her? She said something about the kitchen counter.” In the background, they could hear a woman’s voice wailing “Bees. Africanized bees, and vampire spiders the size of large dogs that are a previously undiscovered species.”
Rage reached in his pocket to grab his notebook and pencil, only to discover that he forgot to bring a pencil. He didn’t even have a pen. “Fuckity, fuck, fuck,” raged Rage. “Billy, you got a pen or pencil you can lend me?”
“I’m afraid not. Why don’t you turn on your tape recorder and use that?” Pourass shook his head, thinking that Rage was a complete tyro.
“Good idea. Thanks, man.” Rage turned on his tape recorder, but nothing happened. The batteries were dead. “Fuck, god damn it. How in the hell am I supposed to get this story when none of my equipment works?”
“What about your video camera? It does have audio, doesn’t it?”
The reporter from the Harold was on his cell phone, and, overhearing this exchange between the two others, reached into his breast pocket to pull out a pen. Anything that would make this moron shut up was worth it. He handed it to Rage. “I want it back.” It was a cheap plastic pen, swiped from a Hampton Inn.
It was awfully cold that evening, and the pen skipped horribly. “Pen don’t work, buddy. What’s the matter with you?”
“Christ on a cracker. Here, I’ll fix it.” He fished a lighter out of his pocket, flicked it, and warmed the nib of the pen with the flame. “Try it now.”
Rage scribbled furiously in his notebook, then pulled out his video camera to film some footage. “Can one of you guys film me? I lost my tripod in a McDonald’s after Gothicfest last year, and I’m too cold to hold the camera steady.” Both of the other reporters shook their heads “no.”
Pissed off that the others weren’t helping him with his story, he faced his camera and filmed the emergency vehicles. He could always dub in audio later, if it didn’t come out well.
“There was an incident this evening at the haunted house down the street from me. Two people got stung by Africanized bees and bitten by vampire spiders. One of them was taken to the hospital.” His research done, he returned the pen, and pedaled home to fire up his computer. He was going to write an article for Associated Content, and upload his video to YouTube.
Naturally, the camera didn’t work very well when it was dark, so most of his footage had a strange red glow to it, from the emergency vehicle lights. The audio was remarkably good, with Rage’s gerbil voice almost intelligible. Surely channel nine would use his footage, and he’d become famous. Maybe, his hero-rival Riviera would interview him.
Back in his basement hovel, he sat in the dark, in front of his glowing monitor, working his Vienna sausage fingers into a frenzy of typing. While he was gone, 32 messages had landed in his inbox from those fuckers at SA. After replying to each a half dozen times in rapid succession, he began writing his article for AC.
If he could stretch it out to five or six pages, it’d get millions of views, and the money would roll in for all his hard effort. It might even exceed the amount of one of his disability checks. He’d show those fuckers from the two local papers.
Exhausted, he collapsed on the sofa to take a nap.
Good stuff, Rusty.
On another nitwit, after a thorough look, I can’t seem to find Lorenzo listed for Polluto, a mag he listed as a publishing credit a month or so ago.
I might query them.
http://www.polluto.com/
I can’t find anything either on Dagstine at their site.
We really need a score card as I frequently forget who is who and what is what is this huge number of small press and zines. I went over the contact list and saw that Adam Lowe is the editor. He’s a good guy.
I wonder what happened?
Maybe he got wise and dropped DAggy.