Editor’s Note: After vanishing while researching the apocryphal Ornithicus Obscuro1 in the South Sandwich Islands, various rumors began to surface regarding the whereabouts of our missing Foreign Correspondent, who had been writing for Vex under the code name of Jonathan Bell.
The most persistent of these rumors involved him either doing piles of cocaine with Nazi war criminals in Argentina, or searching for the chupacabra in the northern Mexican town of Caracabrón. Other stories, however, held that it was ratigators in the sewers of the Bronx that he was investigating, or perhaps something even more unnatural than that. Oddly enough, many rumors that seemed to have little to do with each other all made mention of a Shih-tzu named Ling Ling as being in some way involved.
We followed every lead we could, but it was one dead end after another, and despite the fact that Bell had been a master of disguise and clever as a silver-backed weasel to boot, many of us began to fear his demise. However, shortly before press time, a Vex intern whom I had sent out to fetch me some hot-buttered ass returned with a note, which he said had been pressed into his hand by a vomit-stained drunk2. The missive, signed Ray Shields, contained coded references revealing that it had been penned by none other than our vanished Foreign Correspondent.
I pondered his message, as I munched my hot-buttered ass. Was time travel possible? Did the chupacabra and the ratigators really exist? Did mantis-like entities cling to the tops of utility poles at night, obfuscated by leathery wings wrapped around their bodies? How often do we catch something moving out of the corner of our eye, and tell ourselves that it is just a plastic bag or piece of newsprint blowing in the wind? Would the truth destroy us if we could but fathom it?
And what the hell was up with Ling Ling?
I don’t know how long I’ve got. The bell has tolled for Jonathan. The entity denoted by that name passed through the entropic curtain deep in the ice caves beneath Bologna Bay. I am Ray Shields now, and I have been chased by Balzac across the very sands of time. Every place I go, Balzac finds me. He wrote himself into the fabric and it goes beyond croissants.
Any crackhead knows the story of Balzac3 of course, but let me repeat a few of its particulars while I can. Born in 1799 to French people, Honoré de Balzac (not his real name) was the same age as the dead Jesus when he hit on the notion of “La Comédie humaine”, in which all of French society was to be condensed into a single nut. The realism in his technique even inspired the worst sex-fiend of all authors, Guy de Maupassant.
A suicidally committed writer, it’s no surprise that Balzac started out a cynic, his reporter’s instinct toward the human element gifting him with an eye for the downpressed of this world; but he was a people person, relying on pluck and coffee, burning his candle at both ends to hack it out. He mellowed in time, and then died, of course, and today Balzac lies in Père Lachaise, where Jim Morrison is entombed in bottle-caps. Superficially it is one of those happy stories.
But, gentlemen, it cuts deeper: it is thought that the earliest point of infection of this unified field of work by slobbering madness may have been due to the vigorous example of business success presented in Balzac’s father, Bernard-François; and the debts Honore incurred in trying to emulate him. Whatever the case, Balzac wrote himself into everything, and it is Balzac, ultimately, who has orchestrated the entire plot against you. For example, did you know that Balzac was conceived in a basket of flies? – that he fed sauces of his own recipe to modern-day camels?4 – and that Balzac faked the moon landings?
The form he has assumed is a soft and shapeless consumer, a ravenous bag of pulsating ectoplasmic ooze. Perhaps he was never human. A voice in your mind tells you all is well; that’s Balzac lying to you, gentlemen, and you must all kick one another in the balls, right this second, if you’re serious about survival. Do it for your countrymen!
Oh, Jesus! Here comes Ling Ling!
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1. See “True Tall Tales of the Bat Mandagon,” Vex #5.
2. Could this be the same vomit-stained drunk who had borne witness to the reaping away of a man’s testicles by the jaws of an angry camel, as reported in this column in Vex #4? -Ed.
3. For more on Balzac, see “Hangin’ with Balzac,” Vex #4.
4. Another reference to said camel? -Ed.