My story does not end there, for I was - after a fashion - saved by the benefices of that most sanguine of Gauls Gilles de Pantalon-Rouge. This ambassador of Quads & Pex down like fuckin' Easton afterwards explained to me that some vague unspecified portent or presentiment had taken him out of doors shortly before the final panic which seized the foule in the salon. Withal he was a good man generally desiring to be of service to his fellows, and did turn back again to offer succour to the victims of that denouement, alas the press of bodies did hinder and impeach this noble purpose, leaving him the wrong side of the door, the impotent witness to the sufferings of the poor woebegone wretches the other side of the glass. —
Gilles de Pantalon-Rouge
There was no summoning of the emergency services, it being judged better to keep the whole thing in-house, or at the very least intra-industry. For a start, there was the vexed question of Dives the billionaire. His taciturn Praetorians, whom Gilles de Pantalon-Rouge had summoned to assist in breaking down the door to the Spa Elysium, eventually found that slougher of skin under a pile of bodies, face-down, either suffocated or drowned - it was hard and also nugatory to decide which - in the muck which puddled the salon floor. A discreet gentleman came then, a balding, diminutive and smiling cove in a beautifully tailored suit, softly spoken withal brooking no dissent, a self-effacing and cultured and emollient sort of Colloid if such a personage could be conceived. The smyler with the Walther PPK. For some reason, accompanied by that horrid little Gestapo type, who once long ago, acting at the behest of Rype-Cheyse & Smegma (Claims Management) Ltd, had delivered into Herod's unwitting hands that writ for the Boner's Palsy, which Emanuel Künt the Haruspex of Quads & Pex down like fuckin' Easton claimed to have suffered from coming into contact with the White Willy. This personage politely examined the corpse of Dives the billionaire, and more or less wordlessly took in the scene, certain orders or memoranda then being muttered into the mobile couched in an exquisitely gloved hand. —
White Willy, Herod, Dives the billionaire
I was the only person found alive in that Tartarus of a spa. The Kurts and Troys of Quads & Pex down like fuckin' Easton had to be summoned from down like fuckin' Easton, for Pex 'n' Quads had gone down with all hands. At the behest of Gilles de Pantalon Rouge, these Easton Kurts and Troys bore me thence, a raw and bloodied and writhing thing, much diminished in my physical person, for the chymical preparations of Petra Mountjoy and Colloid had wrought their depredations on me, consuming various digits, appendages and extremities. In my agony, I begged Gilles de Pantalon-Rouge to put an end to me, but that noble Gaul demurred, averring that it was not for him to do God's work and that my end must come when it must come, and for this reason stayed his hand. —
Pex ‘n’ Quads
The strangest matter that I must relate, is that, withal indistinct persons in biohazard suits scoured the place of death, all trace of that terrible dildo, the White Willy, was quite effaced; so that ever thereafter, men did in their idle moments scratch their heads and ponder much the metaphysics thereof, whether the White Willy had ever been there among them in any genuinely material sense, whether it had truly occupied space and time; or whether the people in Pex 'n' Quads had laboured under some kind of collective hallucination, the imagining that a thing which was a mere creature of fancy, to whit an incidental appendage of the ARCANE PORMFIWM, had been reified and attached to Herod's haunches. For my part, that disgusting thing was real enough for me, being as I had been prodded by it whenever its owner chanced upon me in some sequestered nook, or by the water-cooler. Moreover, I do not cleave to the weird metaphysics of conspiraloons and, deftly wielding my Occamic Razor must infer that some one of those indistinct persons in biohazard suits did at the behest of the well-tailored gentleman spirit the beastly thing, what was left of it, out of there. Pound to a penny, it is even now in some secret museum or reliquary at the Dept. of Terrorism Studies at Buckfast, or some comparable institution. —
The well-tailored gentleman
I was removed, under heavy sedation, unto that very same establishment in the Forest of Dean, the place of palliative care, whither so many of my predecessors had been taken to live out and suffer their final days. There, sad to relate, I proved to be the final victim of the Aeromonas hydrophila, this microbe taking it upon itself to finish that which the chemicals of Colloid and Petra Mountjoy had begun. Whilst those hungry enzymes gnawed my limbs and chewed my lips, and gobbled even my very nethers, I was visited by that self-same well-tailored gentleman, he being desirous that I should impart unto him certain intelligences, wherefore he did menace me with certain indignities, not least that I should be placed under the auspices of the Court of Endangerment and there languish at the pleasure of Mr Justice Ybnum. The well-tailored gentleman most particularly wished to be apprised of the contents of the bucket of Mr John Virgil Haruspex; and this proved to be his undoing, for I suffered that gentleman to incline his head towards me, and with my mutilated lips whispered the salient facts into the shell of his ear. Wonderful to relate, this intelligence did drive him stark staring mad, for he did utterly tear and rend his Savile Row weeds, and beshitte himself, and was transformed into a yahoo, so that he got down onto all fours, and in that naked manner did beast-like gallop out of the nursing home and disappear into the mediaeval sylvan landscape in which the Forest of Dean abounds, and was seen no more, withal it being supposed that he was absorbed easily enough into the idiosyncratic society of those purlieus. —
The Forest of Dean, Aeromonas hydrophila
For my part, I live on. I cannot tell you where, for I am kept in ignorance myself. It is a poor, twilit, censored existence, lived entirely in the shadows. All records of my swinking have been effaced, my book removed from the library shelves, my YouTube comments deleted, my personal friends and professional enemies sworn to secrecy with the most blood-curdling threats. It is as though I had never been. The same goes for Pex 'n' Quads, for I am given to understand that there was an expensive refurbishment, and that there now flourishes in that premises upon the Hotwells Road a form of yoga bordello going by the name of … er … Squats and Pox. At all events, let this memento, inscribed on toilet roll with secreted plastic implements dipped in my own body fluids, be my final testament. My name is Titus now, and I did the things described in this chronicle. —
Titus
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