My work continues...

I lie here now on the floor of my paltry hotel room in Pinner, a tray of bread and beans a few inches from my right hand, a combination spanner clutched in my left. My eyes are itchy and bloodshot from the hours that I have spent here staring at the machine which I have been constructing since I arrived. 

My host, an ugly man with greasy hair named Rupert, bothers me with knocks upon my door as I try to go about my business. I realise that he wishes to know what causes the strange metallic thumps that he hears in the night, emanating from my door. 

If I were to tell him, I fear he would run screaming in terror from his home, to know what horror will soon alight upon this hitherto peaceful enclave. 

I have few other words to say, other than that I am aware that the time is drawing short, and I must continue for my work must be complete before the day arrives.

A room with a view

... Duly I awoke from this most delicious reverie to find that my mysterious attendee had instantly departed. I rose from my seat and walked briskly towards the exit, just as the mandrills sprung upon the serving boy and wrenched the gizzard from his neck.

The evening light was dusking as I walked down The Strand through the bustle of wenches, pederasts, ablutophobes, kanomaniacs, whores, pedlers, tapsters, scatomancers, virgins, traipsers and trawlers, bellygods, bastards, apes, idlomancers, rapers, morons, slavocrats, idolators and tapeworm-diners, broadsmen, didikkos, mandrakes, shofulmen and tea leaves, until finally I found that I had arrived at Bishopsgate Metropolitan railway station.

Entering the station, I handed over a penny to the man from the Metropolitan Railway, and boarded a standard gauge locomotive, taking a seat in a carriage next to a vicar and an elderly lady who was engaged in work upon a needlepoint cushion. Looking closely I noticed that the image she was creating was one of a man waiting outside a schoolyard with a gun. Noticing my interest, she smiled primly.

The train pulled into Pinner, and it was here that I disembarked, and quickly paced across the village green towards the high street. I found a lodging house and ventured inside, ringing the bell at the reception. A short ugly man walked in from an office and after some brief pleasantries I requested to take a room for the forseeable future, one that must have a north-facing aspect. He nodded in knowing accordance, and escorted me to a room. I immediately went to the window and found it to have a perfect view over the Pinner Memorial Park.

"I'll take it," I  told the fellow, and placed a rusty button in his hairy palm. He smiled inanely and left me to my business. And so it was that I began to plot my task in hand.

A meeting at The Grand Cigar Divan on The Strand

My rendezvous was to be in The Grand Cigar Divan on The Strand, where I was greeted by a towering doorman who with a single enormous hand smeared the venerable juices of the establishment across my face. He, I immediately recognised from a recent brannigan on the North End Road. He seemed not to betray any observable fear, despite the fact that I had witnessed the cur during a terrible bout of cynanthropy. I made a mental note to issue him with some black-mail as the deviant walked me to my table.

Taking my seat I surveyed the immeasurably cavernous dining room before me. The Grand Cigar Divan is decaying to the point where large areas have been fenced off due to sections of the wall having collapsed, allowing the stenchwater of The Thames to come lapping through the rubble. In the distance, an ageing gentleman waited patiently for his companion to take his turn at chess, not realising that the latter was a cadaver. Finally the former collapsed face down upon the board, at which a group of shrieking mandrills at a nearby table took their moment and tore the two limb from limb with their magnificent jaws.

It was as I observed this incident with a surge of scientific intrigue upon me, that my vision was suddenly obscured by a gentleman. Adjusting my focus, a man in a grey suit stood between myself and the mandrills. He walked slowly forward, past a serving boy carving a roast antelope, and stood some feet before me.

"Centipede reproduction does not involve copulation," he began sonorously. "Males deposit a spermatophore for the female to take up. In one clade, this spermatophore is deposited in a web, and the male undertakes a courtship dance to encourage the female to engulf his sperm. In other cases, the males just leave them for the females to find. In temperate areas egg laying occurs in spring and summer, but in subtropical and tropical areas there appears to be little seasonality to centipede breeding. It is also notable that there are a few known species of parthenogenetic centipedes..."

His grim, droning voice had a soporific effect upon my mind, which began to wander then fell into the lightest of slumbers. My mind became focused on the image of a decaying body lying at the bottom of a lift shaft. As I focused closer on this dream-image I noticed that the bloated carcass was dressed in the tousled garments of Friar Tuck.

TO BE CONTINUED...

A brief recap...

And so sirs, let us reconsider the activities that have brought our cast of actors to this juncture.

Having taken in a ginger-haired streetwalker by the name of Rebekah Brooks, I was surprised to discover she was still in the wage of her former paymaster, Rupert Murdoch. After I watched her walk into an alleyway where there was a peculiar interchange with a chameleon-like man, I had my barnacled chum Lumpy Pete follow her, and he did so all the way to the icy wastes of non-London. It was here that he observed her meet with Murdoch, after which she transformed into a gigantic orb-weaver spider and had sexual congress with a poplar-hawk moth, which had itself once been Nick Clegg.

I met with two of my fellow Devotees of Rakuu, who explained that the purpose of the inter-arthropod intercourse was for the spider to birth a giant centipede with which Murdoch could bring the civilised world to its knees. My spirit wife came to me a few nights ago, and during the first act of love we have experienced together since her death, she passed psychic images to me, revealing that the centipede (which appeared to be of the genus Lithobius forficatus) has already begun its inexorable journey towards London, to wreak certain destruction.

As you can see, dear readers, I am in a pretty pickle. I endeavour to save the world from this creature - but to do so, I must harness of all my powers of deduction, all of my years of anthropological learning, and of course my numerous experiences of slaughtering things that are different to me.

Lumpy Pete has arranged for me to meet a fellow scientist, an expert in matters of myriapoda - something of which I have only a cursory knowledge. Let us pray that the meeting will be useful.

The final segment bears a telson

It was while which arched its legs around eating a banana, sleep and the house free, and, since flitting sunlight cascading across my face and dropped from my hand arms, how to of the moth Clegg, Rebekah has been absent from this house, and I have wandered this house wondering I lay in my robe, fell upon the body lying this evening upon he observed her turn into that huge monster of a spider my ottoman with the deal with this issue at hand, leading me finally to take my seat upon the ottoman where Lumpy out at some task me, and the banana and I clawed down towards me as if to draw me towards herself. Then she drawed down and enclose me, encase me in silken gripped and pulled aside and grasped and opened me and pulled my robe inside her deep dead hole and thrusting within and without as he dark ceiling aghast message seemed beaten into me as I lay there held in a delicate balance trying bright eyes flashed aside, legs to find my way out or my way in, grasping within and pulling staring she brought her shawled air aside she spread open for me and in it went glanced up and my girl, my former wife was there hanging above me, pale white and gripped back at me with her darling wet eyes and her arms icy cold into mine and a my stiff prick out, pulling it within her, as against the gaseous forms, her silken skin so skeined and drawn and into those arms it took, my she flashed me an wittling the caves of that deadness crawled an elongated creature, upon many legs she crawled, in disc-like structure with a central pore surrounded by sensory cells. Its shiny mandibles this vision, the crawling beast was yellow and segmented and a hugely away. Compound eyes staring…… An unusual sense organ found in some groups are the organs of Tömösvary. These are located at the base of the antennae, and consist of a glistened in the sunlight. Venom glands run itself a huge image of darkness tip of each forcipule. Venom glands run through a tube almost to the tip through a tube almost to the to the mouthparts. The creature scrabbled forward to London. reproductive organs. The digestive tract forms a simple tube, with digestive glands attached and holes thing with demented fury into the bright light, revealing claws CENTIPEDE which some twenty feet in length was scrabbling in fury venom where of each forcipule. The final segment bears a telson and includes the openings of the caves and deadness lies, and from that deadness, from scrabble crawling It was later waiting for Lumpy lay of drool "sunshine pallett".to return… collecting upon my naked and dissolate upon the hearthrug, a thick corpus after this aparition had passed that I felt what terror it is, this vision she gave me, and I

A meeting with two Devotees of Rakuu leads to an Earth-shattering discovery

Sirs, my meeting at "The Porcupine" began with the usual measures: the special combination of knocks upon the forgettable door on ------ Street, the knowing squint from the bird/man hybrid while removing my cloak, the raucous din of yabbering gents emanating from the Front Bar... However this time the scent of rotting flesh was even more overwhelming than normal - I felt as though my very olfactory bulbs would implode.

Following the odour, my eyes met with the celebrated Xanixi's latest artwork, a fascinating hillock of decomposing whale blubber scattered with the eyeballs of seals and topped with a single magnificent walrus ivory. Clearly a critique of Gladstone's maricultural legislation, it was a masterwork. Around it, a number of prancing aesthetes exchanged comments briefly punctuated by expressions of vomit, so moved were they by the powerful radiation.

I moved on, coursing through the deeper velvet folds of the club, nearly trampling a pastor perusing a pornographic pamphlet entitled "Horace Goes Skiing", until I arrived in the Back Bar, a place where the more desperate sort of drinker would go to seek silent solace in vinegary measures. At the bar I spied my two special colleagues of worship - Devotee Roger and Devotee Mycroft.

We greeted each other in the customary manner, and I divulged all from the previous evening - the sexual congress of those two horrifically gigantified lifeforms. As I imparted this story, my fellow Devotees began to look increasingly agitated, until finally Devotee Mycroft broke in:

"Dear God, Devotee Augustus! Are you aware what your unknowing chap has witnessed?" he uttered, wiping mustard from his huge whiskers. "The Demi-Lord Rupert Murdoch was clearly intent on gestating one or more daemons to work under his service! And if I am not mistaken, the produce of this sickening intercourse are to be monstrous towering Centipedes. Surely with such all-devouring beasts, Murdoch could bring the world to his feet!"

Devotee Roger, who had remained quiet up until this point, was moved to ejaculate: "Augustus - he has to be stopped!"

The Earth threatened by Death In Centipede! Such a terrible vision, that I and my colleagues plotted how we are to deal with the news long into the night, remaining at "The Porcupine" until morning, from whence I emerged, my androgenic hair singed and a buttery tinge to my features...