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I tell you, I am not mad. I'm not. Anyone would have caved in theskulls of their closest friends and eaten their brains in my situation.It was the only rational thing to do. I can tell you don't believe me. Ifyou ate MY brain, you'd know the truth. Not that I'm volunteering, mindyou. Instead, I'll just tell you of the strange case of the Insects fromShaggy and how doom came to the Mystery Machine.**************The Insects from ShaggyorThe Last Testament of Daphne PickmanorThe Doom that came to the Mystery Machineby John Biles***************My name is Daphne Pickman. Perhaps you've seen some of thefictionalized versions of our adventures. Don't believe them. The truthis far more horrible. Yes, we have exposed a fair number of frauds, butthere were cases we covered up. We had to. The feeble minds of themasses, laden in sitcom tripe, could not bear the lonely burdens we haveborne. Perhaps some day, I'll write down how we battled the band God's
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Lost Children' or how we proved that Rush Limbaugh was a Deep One, hisshow an elaborate rite for unleashing Cthulhu upon the world. I laughedfor relief when we successfully turned a shoggoth loose during one of hisbroadcasts and it ate him, then choked to death in the process. But thatis a story for another time, and assumes your sanity survives reading thistale intact. Indeed, when I look back on the horrors we have faced, it ishard for me to understand how I have kept my sanity. Perhaps it is not sosurprising that the dark knowledge which alone suffices to defeat theforces of the Mythos finally consumed the hearts and souls of mycompanions, thus forcing me to kill them and eat their brains.But I'm getting ahead of myself. Our careers began in the latesixties and early seventies when one of Fred's fraternity brothers triedto sacrifice the entire fraternity and its guests to Shub-Niggurath duringa fraternity party. The four of us were forced to lock the doors and burndown the building. It killed a few frat boys, but even Fred agreed thatfrat boys were easily replacable. There were five of us in those days,six if you counted Scooby. You look surprised. You've never heard of thefifth human in our band. Well, Johnny Quest didn't stay with us for verylong. His dog, Bandit, and Scooby kept fighting all the time, and he wasyounger than us, anyway. But for about six months, he had to stay with myfolks after his father's compound blew up for the eighteenth time in threeweeks, and I got stuck babysitting him. We were better off when he left;our orgies worked better with an even number of males and females.After that disaster, we started investigating supernaturalevents. At first, we mostly exposed frauds in our spare time. Graduallyit became more serious, and about the time that Johnny split, we had ourfirst really serious clash with the forces of the Mythos, not countingburning frat boys to death back at Miskatonic University. (I did mentionwe all went there, right?)
 
We were all heavily into drugs at the time, but so was everyoneelse our age in the late sixties. Shaggy likes to claim he inventedcrack, but I don't believe him. Still, he was the worst. He and Velmawould shoot up a mixture of heroin, speed, cocaine, tumbleweed, Pepsi,lettuce, and sixteen secret spices and listen to Ethel Merman backwards,trying to find the hidden messages in it. One day, however, they tried itwith Pat Boone, and were shocked to find the message Sacrifice the local
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Democratic Party Headquarters to Hastur. Do it now, with an axe. And geta haircut, you bum.'.Velma had heard her mother mutter about Hastur in her finaldelirium when insectoid bat winged monstrosities had stalked through thehouse, slaying everyone in Velma's family except for Velma and the cat.She had blanked all this out from sheer horror, but hearing this broughtback the memories. Even worse, she remembered her mother's last words toone of the Byakhee: "Take the family rifle, go to the grassy knoll inDallas, and shoot the President". And I bet you thought Oliver Stone shotJFK.Anyway, Velma had been in a coma for years after that awfulnight, only reviving when she heard the song Baby, Won't You Light My
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Fire?'. She had risen in a frenzy and destroyed the radio, and soon madea full recovery, going to Miskatonic at the same time as us, but havingforgotten that her parents had been baby-sacrificing Hastur worshippers.Until now.So, we went to her family reunion in Kingsport. The stuffupstairs was fairly mild, but the stuff down in the basement...I never didlearn if that was really Sonny Bono, and I don't think you could stand itif I told you what he was doing. We locked the doors and used an ancientrite that Velma found in her mother's diary to summon Cthugha, whoresembles a huge ball of flame. The entire house went up like a torch andVelma's family was burnt to a crisp. When I think about it, I suspectthat Sonny Bono must be a sorceror; he couldn't have survived that. Andthe skiing accident? Clearly a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath REALLY killedhim.But I digress. From that point, our investigations becameserious. We bought, borrowed, and stole occult tomes. We learned how tosummon and dismiss Cthulhu, Nylarhotep, Elvis, Zoth-Hotdog, Hastur,Hamstur, Hamburg, Yig, Nodens, Tsathoggua, Alf, and Benny Goodman. Welearned how the music of Ethel Merman could banish Cthulhu's servants whoremembered their master's messy marriage to her, but tended to draw downDimensional Shamblers, on whom it has an effect like heroin. We coveredthe Mystery Machine with Voorish Signs, Elder Signs, Yellow Signs, StopSigns, The Sigil of Baruk Kaah, I visited Hali and all I got was this
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lousy bumper sticker' stickers, an Eye of Light and Darkness, the Barrierof Reef, the Seal of Ry'leh, a painting by my great-uncle, Richard UptonPickman, and those odd swirlies Shaggy drew after he tried injecting purenicotine into his veins to see what would happen. We read theNecronomicon, Unausprelichten Kulten, Cultes des Goules, the PnakoticManuscripts, the Piltdown Shards, both of Reagan's campaign platforms, theUnauthorized Biography of Abdul Alhazred, the B'harne Fragments, the Bookof Eibon, the Little Big Book of Cthulhu, everything ever written by LabanShrewsbury, I was Cthulhu's Lover, and the Weekly World News.Our studies paid off. Ever wonder how Scooby could talk? Shaggyused a spell from the Book of Eibon to turn Scooby into his familiar,
 
making Scooby more intelligent and capable of speech. Ever wonder how wegot money? Velma summoned Byakhee to rob banks for us in the first fewyears, then later, we used the secrets of the Time Gate we got from theB'harne fragments to plunder the past of its treasures and sell them.Hey, we needed the money! We also used certain alchemical formulae fromDe Vermis Mysteris to lengthen our lifespans so we would have more time tohunt the forces of the Mythos.Our usual method was to investigate and try to discover if thethreat was real or bogus. If it was bogus, we exposed it. If it wasreal, we locked the doors and summoned Cthugha, then emptied shotguns intoanything that tried to escape. Sure, we slaughtered a few hostages, buttheir minds would have been destroyed by their experiences, anyway, so weviewed it as a mercy killing. Too many ex-victims later became servantsof the Mythos anyway. So did a lot of investigators we encountered overthe years. We thought that could never happen to us.Looking back at it, I can see now that the crucial moment camewith the day that we acquired Scrappy. This twisted chiuahua had been thefamiliar of a sorceror we killed, whose family had degenerated into ratthings. We summoned Cthugha, then used a mind-control spell on an AirForce captain we had met, and got him to nuke the site as well. Before weleft, though, Fred bit off one of the man's fingers in personal combatwith him, and that finger had a magic ring. When Fred put it on, Scrappyshowed up, and announced he was Fred's magic servant. He also claimed tobe related to Scooby, and for some reason, we believed him, despite thefact that over a decade, he never got any bigger.It was at that moment that things went down hill. In the earlynineties, we had to take a six month break, because Velma and Shaggy hadto go into drug rehab. I went to stay with my cousins in Samson,California. Fred's mother was dying, so he went to visit her, up inMassachusetts.Velma got better, mostly. She was rational for the first time inyears and she'd finally gotten rid of those fits where she would try toput Scooby in the oven and eat him. She'd also furthered her occultstudies and learned a ritual that her psychiatrist had tried to use onher; basically, you gain someone's skills by eating their brain and youcan shapechange into their form. He'd tried to do that to her, so she hadsummoned Yog- Sothoth and designated him as the human sacrifice. However,she now obsessively watched Full House, and I was somewhat worried forher.Shaggy never recovered from therapy. Due to multiple overdoseson Liao, he now had to stay drugged constantly, or he kept finding himselfstaring at Daoloth constantly. He and Scooby had summoned Cthugha duringa group therapy session, and then laughed as everyone burned. I wasworried about him, as he was becoming obsessed with fire. He also stoppedbathing, believing that Deep Ones were living in all water faucets, andstarted to attract insects.Fred was the worst. His mother hadn't died; she'd simply run offto the ocean to go live with the Deep Ones, passing on her copy of theSeven Cryptical Books of Hsan to him, and giving him a few bottles ofhomebrew Space Mead she'd made. Fred had translated them with Scrappy'shelp and was beginning to talk wildly of summoning up Bholes to eat theDemocratic party. Fred had gone Republican on us during the eighties, you
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