NEW YORK – The United Nations General Assembly held a closed door meeting on Wednesday with ambassadors from the dwarf planet Pluto to discuss the future of diplomatic relations between Earth and the sub-planet. This meeting was highly anticipated after learning that a transmission of the scientific community’s consensus decision in 2006, which downgraded Pluto to a dwarf planet, had finally reached the former ninth planet this past August. The Plutonian ambassadors, who traversed the cold, barren wastes of the solar system on their membranous wings, arrived late Tuesday evening and spoke to the assembly in a morning session.
The Plutonians, also known in ages past as the Mi-Go, Outer Beings, or Outer Ones, have unilaterally suspended normal diplomatic relations with Earth, seeking remedy for the perceived insult to their planet and other conditions unintelligible to translators. Felix Schäfer, a simultaneous translator in attendance, remarked that, “For the most part, the Plutonians spoke in a hideous approximation of American English, albeit with a fiendish buzzing sound underlying their words, like a cacophonous and maddening assembly of wasps! But some words none of us understood, guttural utterings so evil and pervasive to the mind that we had to break early for coffee.”
This affable reporter arranged an interview for that evening with the Plutonian ambassadors in their suite in the East 42nd Street Westin Hotel, so as early afternoon fell, I left the United Nations Headquarters on 1st Avenue, taking only my valise and notebook. A hideous miasma drifted off the foul East River behind me, bringing with it odors of fish and decay, acrid to my nose. I traveled in a westerly direction, curiously noting that the cloud cover completely obscured the moon, doing little to darken the well-lit East Side of Manhattan.
Throngs of human-like shapes lined 42nd Street, speaking all of the languages of Europe and far-away Asia, as if this area adjacent to the United Nations Headquarters had transformed into the veritable Tower of Babel! I adapted the walking patterns of these people, sometimes checking my phone or the map that the helpful bus driver had drawn for me before I descended to the irregular and haunting architecture of the UN Plaza. After traveling the two blocks to The Westin, my mind and musculature thoroughly convinced of the insanity of my endeavor, I entered the large and cryptical lobby and found a bank of elevators as eerie in their silent composure as they were threatening to mind and memory.
The walk to the Outer Ones’ suite was a twisted, dim-litten, and disturbing descent worthy of Dante or the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and it was with an ill heart and trembling hand that I knocked on the door of that 41st Floor chamber. Despite my insistent rapping, I heard no answer from inside, and only once did I hear what I thought was a sound from beyond the door – a shuffling, clacking noise as if multiple sets of ill-coordinated appendages were stirring beyond the iron portal that stood between my form and the expansive luxury suite. But as hard as I strained my ears, I could hear no more commotion, and slipped my business card under the door with a plaintive plea to “DM me.”
Few men would believe my tale, save for a tow-headed greengrocer named Timmy Hartnell, working at a corner bodega, who elaborated at great length and unrivaled detail about how the beings from Pluto, which they call Yuggoth, with their hideous, crustacean-like winged anatomy they harness to travel from their lightless abyss, used whispered methods and uncommon rituals to condition astronomers in the early 20th century to train their telescopes past Neptune and upon the dark and hideous Yuggoth. They wanted men to know that Pluto – their Yuggoth – was a full size planet, albeit a lightness one where no sane soul should ever venture. Young Timmy spoke with me for over an hour, and was extremely candid about that which no man should deign to unearth from the wretched bowels of stellar history, laying out everything I needed to know in order to write my article. My hideous dollar slice rested limply in my hands as I listened to his words, trembling at the implications of his cosmic revelations.
It was then that I realized my inmost fears, for on the cash register in front of him, perfect in every detail, and affixed with two cryptic strips of cellophane tape, was my business card! The very business card, which I had only hours earlier slipped underneath the infernal door of that penthouse abode, was now taped to the cash register in front of me! And I knew then that I would never get an on-the-record interview.
Ronald Sampson
