Category Archives: Franklyn de Gashe

Ripped from his own time by an unseemly portal, De Gashe travels back and forth through the universe at the whim of fate, a deity or some devious scoundrel with a button. Perhaps one day he will discover this.

In the meantime what can any Victorian gentleman with a penchant for blades and intoxicants (and an enviable collection of rings) do except seek such such divers entertainments as the world has to offer.

The Priests of Tzazanoth

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Twixt Earth and Moon lie creatures whose existence I’d never even suspected. Unless you peer upwards through a device wrought by the dark astronomical arts you’d never perceive them. Vile, amorphous shapes loose in the Earth’s halo, sheltered by the mystic shroud the Moon casts over them. Wizened travellers from the birth of time, they lie in wait about our tiny hub of life; they wait to consume it.Extolling the virtues of Nethersight the priesthood of Tzazanoth hold rituals ghastly and foul at the Lunar apex. “Yield to our influence, embrace the sacred blinding hood and have your will sapped and fed to the masters”. Zealotry drives them and their combination of archaic speech and sensory deprivation appealed to me.

After I succumbed to their ideals I found myself clad in black, kneeling in a ring about their temple enclave. By midnight we were cold and bored, the other devotees and I. Calling for the undead gods of a dimension twisted between our own and the death of the universe was tiring.

Despite the lack of response from hours of incantation and exhortation the Tzazanothian priesthood’s spirits remained high. Ever optimistic of summoning the end of the world they bade us rise and bear flaming brands. “Fling them moonward” they cried with their slackened faces and blazing eyes. Galling though it is to admit now I too tossed my torch into the air. I was stunned when it hung there, seemingly lodged in some invisible structure. Just as I was thinking of slipping out the back too.

Keys were produced by the priests, great horned pieces of filigreed iron which they raised and twisted in the air. Light of a dark and ethereal nature rained down on us like burning rainbows. My eyes burned with unnatural hues, men fell screaming to the ground, their minds unable to grasp the palette of the undead gods. Near the heart of the temple formed an apparition: a twisting figure of wings and writhing tentacles which obscured a fanged skull and hungry leer.

Obsidian blood spattered over us, soaking the ground, rising to our knees and hardening the portal into the undead realm. Perhaps it was then that the reality of the ritual finally hit me – I could not be party to this welcoming of death. Quickly I leaped for the nearest key which had become ossified in the air and with a savage twist, snapped the head off it.

Really, that was the diametric opposite to my intention. So the gateway could not now be closed; gargantuan forms laughed at us their horrid laughter echoing like the death of stars through time. That was my part in the revenance of Earth my friends, and that is why we huddle now in this cellar as Tzazanoth’s hordes scratch at the door.

The Primeval Entertainment

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Oh the horror of humanity. Their dreadful lowing as they mimble incompetently. The noisome clots of mankind, reeking enthusiastically. Their hateful prattle drove me to a killing spree. But all the murders in the borough could not salve the fire in my mind ignited by their endless empty chatter. Even my habitual practice of mounting their husks in rustic dioramas with concentric alphabetised rings of their innards could not calm me. My hands were bloodied and shaking; I could not even drink to satisfaction. In despair, I fled into the past, to a time free of man babbling without cease.

The time tunnel flared and spun around me. I gripped my time hamster a little too tightly and the universe streamed past, like an over-watered horse. The tunnel whirled and squeezed us out into a puddle of Earth’s past.

There in a world before time was sliced into a dial, numbered, named and made man’s I found love. I met Oo-nag. We met dramatically. I: twelve feet above the ground gazing down through the netting that suspended me. She: spear in hand, clubbing me to a quietude. When I awoke the first thing I noticed were the filthy fingerprints marring my formerly spotless overcoat. Displeasing. However, my second vision of note was the frustrated slapping of fingers and fists in a pre-vocal exchange of thoughts. Using mime, and my  Tesla-shiv I made it known that I was a stranger here, akin to a god and that worship would be both appreciated and the best way to evade further jabbing with my ‘lectrickal stick. These intriguingly foul creatures were clearly some ancient cousin of humanity, though few and wretched in number.

Oo-nag soon came to my attention as the least backwards of these shadowy apes, and I took her as my cave bride. Her name I derived from her bestial expression and the clacking of her knuckles upon the ground. The ceremony was as primitive as one might expect although I did attempt to imbue it with some dignity. True, her features might have been as well-defined as a Welsh slag heap; her hair a jungly thatch of diseased creepers; an odour to shame the working man. And yet… and yet indeed. She was mute, silent save for the odd emphatic grunt as are all of her troglodytic clan. I dressed the apish folk in coat and tails, but to little avail; they ate the hats and chased the tails in circles. We lived together happily, she in her dank cave and I in the luxurious if ungainly two-wheeled apartment which I’d stolen from the future. It was an idyllic life. I micro-waved the animalcules out of the hunted and gathered food while my wife cracked open the ashy bones and gnawed the marrow from them.

I believe that for a time I was happy. They were brutish folk but blissfully silent. The sole exception being their lusty matings. They lacked even skill in that matter – ‘tis a wonder their breed’s breeding bred a brood at all. Perhaps this is why men of my time have their manly parts in a visible region – to avoid such pointless spatterings. Their inept rutting drove me to distraction and I set out to educate them in effective mounting.

Their improbable procreative plumbing directed my task towards diagrammatical education. They had crude finger-painting sludge with which they marred their cave walls. I introduced them to paint brushes and oils, and then I shoved them out of the cave before they ate too much of it. I barricaded the cave mouth so that my creation of their Gentlemen’s Guide to Cave Swiving would be spared their curious interruptions. They grunted and thumped in disgruntlement for the barring of their wretched hovel.

Night had fallen and the sun risen before I finished my works. My illustrations of their prehensile recursive appendages and the proper manner for intimate interlocution with their ab-organed wives was complete. The manimals had fallen silent after some hammering in the night. Clearly they had finally realised the importance of my investigation for the sake of their race. Even though it had required that I retain an ageing mating pair (Mrrrungel and Neh) to meet Mr and Mrs Scalpel. Their exploded organs had been well sketched by my fair hand on the walls of their cave. It would undoubtedly improve their chances of offspring and improve the smell.

I knocked down the wall of mammoth bones, brambles and mud (a superlative barricade emulsifier). I… may have become absorbed in my work… the happy hearth area outside the cave was a bloodbath. Scarlet pools with hairy limbs and tatters of face  scattered about like a dreadfully neglected beach. I stumbled out aghast into the massacre blinking in the bright sun, just in time to see Oo-nag. I hailed her and she turned to me with a quieting finger upon her lips. Silly girl, she hardly makes a sound anyway. I cried out and bounded towards her, bursting with enquiry.

A shadow fell across the plain. Its owner followed – a vast scaly lizard face descended and toothily snatched off my mud-maiden’s head. Her torso blundered, comically animate until it too was hoicked aloft and consumed. This was a disappointing outcome.

Filled with rage I bellowed at the monstrous reptile and jabbed it with my prickling staff, blasting the beast with Tesla’s art. It squealed and fled, its legs on fire. Damn them, damn them all. My work – wasted. This last pocket of proto-humanity snuffed out by beast-lizards – and all because they were incapable of modulating their throaty choking into a simple cry for help. Curse their baffling biology – were they better prepared to copulate I’d have had no cause to sequester their monster-proof cave.

I resolved to slaughter their butchers, those monsters that rendered my sketchings and study worthless. I, a scholar without subject, a husband without lady-apery. And so it is, many aeons later that we no longer have tortoises. My apologies.

The Cloistered Entertainment

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I was rousted from my slumbering bower by a titanic shrieking. The previous evening I’d taken to bed amidst the trees following an indulgence of absinthe and laudanum. The tree I presume, must have presented the best vantage when surveying the territory for tigers and other beasts which might offer untimely wounding. That said I could not imagine how I’d mastered it; the tree rose up above a less towering but still imposing wall of stone which held within it gardens, paths, dwellings and doubtless the source of the banshee wailing. My clothes, or lack thereof I could not account for. Nor the brassiere and manacles which encircled my slender, yet manly waist.

The act of discovering my near-nudity was sufficient to tumble me hand over toe from branch to leaf and finally to earth with a thump. Praise be the analgesia of opiate drowsing. So I was able to gain footing despite the probable bruising, sprain and fracturation I’d likely endured. From my limb tangle I arose in the presence of ladies. Or at least I thought them ladies, their convent attire did their figures little credit, and their hullaballoo was more vulture than vestal virgin.

Nonetheless I do prefer to shave and dress before greeting clergy, for they are wild and bewildering folk, prone to unnatural abstinence and raving. I realised it would be difficult to make a good impression in my state of undress, and made the concession of shrouding my excitable young gentleman in the capacious hollow of the ladies’ mallow-garb which otherwise batted him. This did little to soothe my morning amour but did serve to shield most of the dapper chap from the greedy eyes of the clucking nuns into whose tree I’d trespassed. They had dimmed their clamour somewhat and ringed me with an air of expectation. I was powerfully aware of my inopportune priapism. There seemed only one way to distract the spiritual harpy maidens.

“Behold,” I cried – my eyes red-rimmed and wide, “I have come unto ye like an owl.” They seemed ill at ease with my pronouncement; their pursed lips of confusion begged for elaboration. “Yea, an owl. For I fly by the light of the moon with wisdom and a taste for mice my weapons. And lo, my head doth revolve at least part-way round.” I was beginning to get through to them. “Does a mouse flee from its winged foe by instinct, or fear of a love unnatural twixt them? And so, fear not my feathered fronds for you have minds and a will of sorts. My feathers are but motes in the skies of chance; this is the beak of a man and to ye I have come.”

It is within the realm of possibility that I had not made myself entirely clear for their ecclesiastical squawks resumed. Such is the nature of revelation. The penguine women clustered about me. Their monochrome garb menaced the polychromatic joy of my hazed morning mind-fever. I had descended too swiftly, and the fruits of my concussion and hangover were overwhelming me. I plunged into darkness as they grew near.

I awoke a second time enchained within the convent. This was either a very bad, or a very good thing. I was grateful that I at least bore still the ladylump-lifter for they’d spread-eagled me despite my claims of owl-hood. The room was spare, much as I’d expected but the handsomely erect cruciform gentleman on the wall was a surprise. I distinguished a chanting from the rattling of my chains (myself of course, striking for freedom). The fervour was with the nuns, though not for their Lord. They had had a dry spell for visitors, or so the crone crouching by the cot croaked into my ear.

It was to be a day of short shocks and surprises; I’d not even noticed her presence till she hissed into my aural canal. Her tone and visage quite competed to deflate my rousing charm against the uncloaked ascetics eager to reject their vows. And yet I could not but endure her ear-tonguing whispers. Nor could I refuse the monastical parade that carouseled through my room all  day and night. It probably would have been impolite. I was fed and watered, that I might prolong their licentious festival. And also soothed with balms, ointments, unguents and creams when rasped too far.

Eventually they wearied of me, though by then I’d fallen into the gap between the twin stools of delirium and epiphany from their monastic moaning and cloistral coitus. My final waking was to being unshackled, clothed and supported in hobbling to the convent wall. There I was eased up a ladder and with a gentle shove thrust over the wall’s edge.

I’d been rudely treated, of that I had no doubt. Due to my periods of exhausted slumber I’d never be sure of the depths of the nuns’ depravity. However, the Papal Bull issued a month later which declared them ‘Satan’s Sweetmeats’ certainly implied that it had been a fine evening.

I’d recently amassed a considerable fortune in the underground city of Nottingham. Their love of the gambling and remedial grasp of counting had quite undone them. I took their pennies and left them to the vile stench of their troglodytic tanneries. On an impulse I snapped up the ailing convent and established the first Grande Maison of Infamy. The ex-nuns’ gratitude has never abated; they kept their beds, and kept them warm. For there are those who seek out such rude treatment.

Alphabetic Dialogues 11 ~ Your Daughter, Sir

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Franklyn de Gashe fresh returned from adventures with android zombies in the past has crashed a party and fallen in love. It is not appropriate to his station, nonethless he is a persistent man. At length he consults with the father of his newfound love Emily, in the drawing room of her father’s house Greypairs, the seat of the Duke of Welmschably. It is not a comfortable conversation.

FdG “Gallantly, I stalked her across the ballroom”
DoW “Have you a different definition of gallantry, sir?”
FdG “I implore you to be silent while I recount my adventure, else you are like to misunderstand me”
DoW “Just get on with it”
FdG “Knife in hand I slipped past the champagne-touting waiters, and behind the chaise”
DoW “Let’s see, stalking and armed. This is how you come to my party?”
FdG “My dear fellow, one ought not to invite a chap if he can’t attend in comfort”
DoW “No – that’s not the same as arriving without a tie”
FdG “Oh, you and your rules. My dear duke, have you never wanted to feel free?”
DoW “Perhaps you’d consider loosening my bonds that I might embrace liberty myself.”
FdG “Quell your passions man, you’re among friends here.”
[a call from without] “Rally the guards!”
DoW “Spare me and my family and I’ll make you a wealthy man”
FdG “That’s the difference between you and she my good man. While you cower and bribe, she draped herself upon the chaise, surrounded by admirers as I approached, knifely.”
DoW “Unless you release me I shall call for my manservants.”
FdG “Very well. An honest ploy. And yet I doubt they’ll hear you”
DoW “Why you devil. You monster.”
FdG “eXhibiting a great deal of your daughter’s passion now Dukey. I like it”
DoW “Zounds man, if you’ve harmed her-”
FdG “And what if I have?”
DoW “By the good lord I’ll hunt you down if you’ve laid a finger on her”
FdG “Calm yourself. The knife was a gift.”
DoW “Doubtless your stalking was merely a dance step of sorts”
“Every move I make is a kind of dance. With death, with fate. With a lady”
DoW “FRANKLYN!”
FdG “Good lord, I’d no idea it was inheriting your lungs that made her chest so proud.”
DoW “Have you quite finished”
FdG “I have not, I’d planned to recount in full the joys of your daughter”
DoW “Joys!”
FdG “‘kerchief to wipe away your tears?”
DoW “Let me free and I’ll show you where you can put your handkerchief”
FdG “My my, perhaps I’ll have to gag you to prevent your spoiling of my tale”
DoW “No nummmph, nng, nmmuumph”
FdG “Oh, now you are tiresomely inarticulate.”
DoW “Pfah! You’re a monster de Gashe”
FdG “Query: would you commonly insult a man who’s tied you up and expressed his love for your first-born?”
DoW “Relinquish your claims to love sir, for you are a but an uncommonly debauched man and your pretense does you no favours”
FdG “So, you doubt the purity of my love for your daughter’s pale yet musuclar thighs, the bruising of her lips upon mine, the naughty twinkling in her starry eyes, the soft envelopes of her?”
DoW “Talk not of her lady parts lest I call you out in a duel”
FdG “Understand me now Dukey, after I despatched her watchers she and I eloped to a room of finery, gilded about the walls and strewn about with comfort…”
DoW “Vileness! You bedded her in her grandmother’s chamber?!”
FdG “Well there was a bony thing in the bed, but I thought it an odd doll or somesuch”
DoW “Xandria, my beloved mother”
FdG “You might find her somewhat flattened by our passions”
DoW “Zealously we shall hunt you down and make you pay”
FdG “And that’s why I offer to your charming and uninhibited daughter my hand in marriage”
DoW “Believe me when I say I’d rather endure her shame than have you as a son”
FdG “Calm now father, you’re becoming quite purple”
DoW “Don’t patronise me you scoundrel”
FdG “Everyone needs time to think things through, I’m sure you’ll reach the same conclusion about Emily that I have”
DoW “For the last time de Gashe, your insult to my family’s honour will not go unavenged”
FdG “Gallantly then, I shall now go and stalk your second, less attractive daughter.”

Franklyn de Gashe ~ The Theatrical Entertainment

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Space convulsed. Flames of black snaked around me as I warped in and out of existence before being squeezed out of the temporal effluvium. I stuffed the time hamster back into its velvet pouch. The poor thing was shaking and clearly needed the sunflower seeds I tapped its face with. I’d been hard at work before the peelers had disturbed the Duke and I, prompting my chrono-rodential translation into this musty hole. My escape through the rodent’s portal had been as rough as ever. My cuffs were quite disarrayed although the time hole had apparently scraped clean my jacket and taken the bloodstains from my favourite strangling gloves. I’d just have to re-sanguinate them.

With the feel of the hamster stuffing its cheeks against my liver I mustered an interest in our surroundings. The stench of failure squatted in the air like a fetid whore in the gutter. The room, dark; dimly lit by dangling brass orbs. The floor boarded and scuffed, obscured by a vulgar rug depicting nothing but the weaver’s limited imagination. The chairs had been wisely bolted to the floor (how I loathe the habit of guests rearranging furniture), the table in the centre bore manacles, straps and a curious patchwork pigmentation. Promising. I’d marbled a slab or two myself. I was reminded of the lair of the Mire people on whom I’d preyed whilst dwelling amongst the shark giraffes in the Afric valleys. Of course their torturous habits were as nothing to the agony of their conversation, which marked them as victims for any philanthropically inclined assassin.

The damp aggravated my asthma so I prepared a pipe of ‘Victor Shartbritches’ Finest Health Shag’ which happily displaced both the lung clag and my general dismay. Pipe in teeth I browsed the ground floor which had been curiously carpeted with a littering of springs, bolts and metallic detritus. The pantry was a tumble of limbs and assorted torso bits; hardly appetising. The kitchen sink was stacked with skull caps and liquefying brain matter. There were no vittles to fill my growling belly. I did find tea, which I enhanced with the phials and vials of tonics I carry constantly. I resumed my rifling revived and twitchy.

I received no gentlemanly warning before I was hurled across the drawing room to demolish a bookcase and vase with the force of my en-lobment. With a grin I drew my twin gutting blades from their ingenious homes in my sleeves. Across the room, hunched in a mockery of manhood was a fabulous fellow, who whilst largely comprising a grisly mass of ill-stitched meat owned a gleaming skull and glass piston limbs which belied his organic naissance. The thing’s arms pumped hard, winding strength for further blows. I pressed my advantage, pirouetting through the air in a whirlwind of flashing blades, gashing the concertinaed bellows in his shoulders and hip. I landed some feet away, leisurely tooting on my medicine which I retained in my toothy embrace.

The automaton cocked its clockwork head as I lectured it on the proper treatment of guests. But at length I concluded that it was either dumb or damaged, for it offered neither retort nor explanation for its behaviour. A tedious affair. I sipped my tea and regarded it over my crossed knees. The house was clearly abandoned and this tin headed ogre left as a guard dog. I took up a screwdriver and playfully tinkered at the robot’s skull. The convulsive twitching gave it the semblance of pain but it wasn’t until I’d triggered a speaker function that I was prepared to regard it useful. At first I could scarcely tease it through jabbing and soft words to sing me a nursery rhyme. In time though he mastered Baa Baa Black Sheep and we moved on to Daisy. The metallic gnarl of his voice grated against my delicate aesthetics but I persevered.

By the third day he could declaim Shakespeare; I cast him in the role of Juliet. I hauled him upstairs and balanced him across the banister while I beseeched him from below. My eyes fairly fizzled as I eagerly constructed a rude stage at the foot of the staircase and dragged out the brass orbs to be our footlights. Having need of further players I plundered the cadaver cast-offs in the cupboards, and while brewing yet more tinctured tea, copied the mechanisms that operated my Juliet with the cutlery and sinew I found strewn about the kitchen. Soon I had a fine cast with whom to enact Shakespeare’s tragic romance in full.

Despite the corpsey plenitude there was something missing. My tea-induced frenzy abated, the mists of glory de-clouding my eyes. Before me stood my animated zombie players and Juliet, all powered by the field of concocted fire I’d electrified the stage with. With a flick of my toe act one would commence, lead of course with the fabulous “Two houses” speech of which we’re all so fond. I was about to engage the whole affair when I realised that I could not watch this art alone – I was the director, twas only fitting that I have an audience fit to receive it.

The gloom was seizing me – what use these decrepit actors and my machinations if I’d no audience to gasp and lavish their praise upon me? It was then that the doorbell rang. A quandary dear sirs: when one has supplanted the perhaps proper denizen, how should one answer their bell? It tickled my conscience for all of a moment before flinging the door open, puppeting the corpse of my Benvolio (whose gaping face I fancied likely fit the bill of the bell-owner) through the gap. It seems my attempts at make-up were in vain. Perhaps I’d made him too orange (to compensate for the stage luminance), perhaps it was his skeletal throat or my rude stitching. Perhaps both, for with a gasp and eyeball stretching the poor milk wench fainted away on the step. I cast Benvolio to one side and drew her in, settling her in a chair with bonds and cushion.

 Over the next three days I drank tea, ground my teeth and made adjustments to the animatronic controls of my cadaverous troupe. At regular intervals some other spectator would knock on the door with concern for the last to join my dainty auditoria. And so I achieved three ranks of restless eyewitnesses to my creative opus.

 It was precisely six days since I’d emerged in this creatively fertile time when I ordered the curtains open before my wide-eyed audience. They looked thrilled, and were hungry for theatre, and a meal. The careless former owner had made no allowance for the belly needs of is guests and I’d been able only to nurture their spirits with the backstage excitement of a play in progress. There were a number I had to slap awake lest they miss the third act, but most sat rigidly to attention, the sweat of anticipation dribbling down their faces. I was proud of my puppet players, from little Benvolio to Nursie (whom I’d constructed largely with an armchair), they played their parts while I provided their voices from falsetto to tenor; except for the scenes with my beloved Juliet. The wig I’d pasted onto his shiny pate quite deceived me and I truly believed our love would last forever, despite our families’ rancour.

 Alas, my spectacle was cut short by a hammering at the door. Though we tried to ignore it (my audience gamely blocking it out by the stamp of their feet) it was more than I (or any other artiste) could endure. Deeply affronted I hurled the door wide and bellowed for peace in the faces of the constables crowding the door. They fell back in surprise and I slammed the door once more. Their tiresome noise resumed at once. Is there to be no calm for a theatre director?

 We achieved act four before they pounded the door to pieces. I’d blocked the windows thoroughly to attain the darkness and suspension of disbelief my crowd deserved. Clearly I had no choice but to turn my thespians upon the interlopers. As the animated bodies attacked I realised I should have undertaken one of the histories, perhaps Henry V. “Once more, dear friends,” I cried as the tenuously twined torsos burst upon the bobbies, “unto the breach”. The rabble had no appreciation of the work and had the temerity to adopt expressions of anger, as if their interruption were not the travesty at hand. With a sigh I set the android to ‘kill’ and withdrew my time hamster from his pouch. I tickled him in that special way and he squealed forth the temporal orifice. With luck our next stop would be a more cultural realm.

The King’s Cross Entertainment

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I alighted at Kings Cross, exhausted by my enforced convalescence in the country. The presence of Doriana my cousin’s young daughter, charged with nursing me in her mother’s absence, had kept me abed for weeks. Still, a change is almost as good as a rest. London’s toxic atmosphere was a tonic to my replenished organs, infusing my blood with its murky oils.

I’d planned to take a carriage to the nearest brothel in accordance with my own traditions. To know a city’s whores is to know the city. But the sight of an hobgoblin tickled me onto a diversion. He was skulking past mountains of luggage on the platform’s edge. The fellow seemed normal but for his legs, which were so truncated as to bely the speed at which he scuttled past the last of the disembarking passengers. I have a fascination with the freakish and he fit neatly into my Case of Intriguement. His unwholesome facial hair attempting to escape his chin and cheek by clinging to the woolen scarf and hood which enshrouded his lumpy skull. Startling eyes attempted to climb out of his face, subtly aglaze; perhaps more promising than my intended diversion.

I followed him obliquely, taking time to read the Times and the pornographic graffiti as he scurried through the station. Pausing beside a peeling Cadbury’s advertisement he seemed rather like the pixieish child depicted there, though grotesquely mangled. Then he bared his frightful teeth and ducked through a chained doorway. Allowing him some headway, I slipped through the forbidden exit behind him.

There followed a dark corridor (ever the route to bliss), dripping darkly about my boots. Stubs of candles guttered hazily in the gloom. My quarry had slipped out of sight. I sensed that this subterranean realm could hold a treasure greater than the Cave of Methylated Spirits or the Fungal Palace of Leeds. The tunnel seemed endless and its dampness became entwined with a smell I assumed to be from fish oil candles. Promising…

Abruptly my passage was blocked by the emergence of two shadowy figures and their rather obvious clubs. I scarcely had time to comment on the pairing of a burly thug and mincing goon before I was beaten into a violent slumber.

A greasy orange firelight pushed at my eyelids and the ill-educated chanting of Londoners thrust their way into my ears. Reluctantly I split my lids to find my view occluded by an over-tufted moon waxing out of its breeches; my gaze was fixed until it shuffled away. I was bound to a pillar in a cellar thronging with the refuse of the capitals misbegetting population. Da Vinci would have been horrified by these digressions from his golden proportions. Bestial would be too kind and I suspected I was witness to the birth of a new species. Or possibly several. I can scare enumerate the variations of hue, limb and facial architecture.

Oh, I’d also been stripped save for my decency-maintaining cravat, and smeared with the fishy waste their culture was based upon. Whilst I am used to disporting my talents at a dinner party, I rarely find myself with quite such attention upon me as was weighed upon me in that dank cavern.

Indeed, as they waved their stumps and webley appendages I recognised in their manner the frothy spasms of spiritualism, here hijacked by the gutter-tongued cockneys. The hobgoblin I’d followed from the railway beat his way to my side and in a passable imitation of English brought order, or at least a grunting silence to the gathering.

They brought forth a chalice of some frothy liquid, intending to force it down me. I’d a powerful thirst by this point and cheerfully tossed it back, to the sub-trolls audible awe. The fluid foamed in my mouth tickling my teeth with its narcotic buzz. Now here was something new – not a poison as I’d feared it might be. Witnessing the horde also guzzling away – more a liberating liqueur.

Suddenly freed from my bonds I gave in to the intoxicants urging and scampered, hooting like an elegant baboon. The crowd capered with me, at the hobgoblin’s signal. Feeling a little delirious I clambered onto a rude dais and began a mighty oration. Its exact subject eludes me now, but my invective and imperation were loud and clear. Quite what decisions I’d made I shall never know, but I led that horde of manimals out of their troglodytic meeting place, proudly bearing one of their trouty braziers, into the midst of the English public.

The Times informs me that we razed much of the British Museum and tainted the rest with our disdain for anatomical perfection. I apparently lead my convoy of ugly into a freny of vileness when we gatecrashed a gathering of the gentry. It’s possible they took us for clowns or a theatrical troupe seized with success or despair at our latest show. By all accounts it was a fine afternoon. We occupied a shopping arcade, performed unelective surgery in Harley Street and stole all the clotted fudge we could find.

The police responded according to their nature by clubbing wildly at the fray, harming beast and man equally until both parties fled. I myself awoke under a railway arch, the cloven feet of a dwarven girl clasped to my chin. What an exciting return to the City, but I figured I ought to quit London just as swiftly despite the rebellious thrills I’d tasted. Ah, Doriana’s freckled cheeks beckoned once more.

Franklyn de Gashe – The Simian Entertainment

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After several week of intensive work in my laboratories, I’d decided to take the afternoon off to imbibe sweet smoke and brandy. But after only an hour of dawdling in my drawing room I’d felt a need to have my buttocks more securely clasped and I adjourned to my club. Once there I swiftly re-seated myself in my favoured leather chair bounded by the great hearth on one side and the collected works of Alan Derriere on the other.

I was drifting into a pleasant insensibility when a hubbub ruffled the club‘s atmosphere. At best its members are a somnolent bunch and so anything breaching the murmur of private discourse sends a ripple through the smoky peace. I risked a peek. There was a clamour at the windows where the sunlight fluttered erratically, casting satanic shadows into the room. Engaged, despite my languor, I joined the group squawking by the window. I was halfway through a witty remark when the panes crashed inward, followed by black mass of panic.

And then the flying monkeys fell upon me. The air was filled with their angry whooping and fiendishly accurate faeces flinging. They were my greatest success and failure together in one terribly malformed hybridisation. I’d sought only to equip myself with the perfect manservant, companion and pet. I was surprised to find that once more, science had not done exactly as I asked.

Using my considerable powers of reasoning and mastery of the empirical method I had expended the majority of a local menagerie in my experiments. The only creatures that proved compatible were the humble barbary ape and the majestic goose. How my heart swelled as the brute barked, sneezed and immediately brewed a perfect cup of lemon tea. So flushed was I with triumph that I foresaw a brave new future of mankind and goose-ape ruling the earth hand in claw-wing.

After a short apprenticeship Mister Tribblings, for such I had be-monickered him, took to experimenting alone at night whilst I slept, supervised by the moon and the fitfully active medical waste I’d inserted into his expanded cranium. To my great sadness, the beast was afflicted with a melancholy whose bitterness he turned upon me, for reasons I struggle even now to grasp. For did not his fur and feathers almost grow together in a convivial manner? Even the wing grafts had eventually healed with a minimum of residual weeping and infection.

However, I was unaware of the animosity which grew every time I gently chucked him on his beaky chin or explained how all of his kin had died when I forgot to clean my knives. His nocturnal activities continued in secret until Mr Tribblings was ready to unleash the flapping horde which now plagued me.

The club members fought back with typical Britishness, tutting and brandishing a jumble-sale’s worth of weaponry at the squalling apes. For the most part this was unsuccessful. The gentlemen were soon overwhelmed by the superior wielding capacity of the winged monkeys. The intruders took advantage of their flight to equip both hands and feet with tools gleaned from the laboratory. The rate of damage to my priceless equipment was growing unacceptably, and the wall of leisurely fodder between the monkeys and me was shrinking alarmingly.

It was clear that I would be required to participate. With a view to such activity I finished my glass and extricated myself from beneath the bar-billiards table; immediately there came a howl of triumph, and Mr Tribblings himself flapped into view. I snatched up a cue, and offering a brief apology to the club’s sportsmaster – one Joshua Ballhugger (briefer still when I spotted his head gaping wordlessly on a futon), snapped it down across my knee. Realising my error, I unscrewed it instead. Favouring my bruised thigh, I stood with bipartite ball potter at the ready.

We duelled for a time, Mr Tribblings and I, as I batted away his brutish implements. The nail studded thighbone went first, followed by the footful of dermis penetrating needles. Using the ancient techniques taught to me by the monks of Alermo da Quim I battered the monkey into the baise, and used the shredded cues to fire the billiards rapidly at his skull, stunning the treacherous ape.

With a drooling-level impairment in place I mounted the brutish renegade and took a firm grip of his wings. Mr Tribblings lurched beneath me as I tried to control him with my thighs squeezed tightly about his chest. Somehow he lurched into drunken flight, careening off the bookshelves and light fittings. I managed to wrench one of his wings free of its sutures and the flight ended abruptly, as the halfwinged ape crashed into a gramophone, the winding handle puncturing his jaw.

At first I thought him dead, but his angry rambling continued, accompanied by the mournful yawing of a slow-turning gramophone record. The very action of his jaw was engaging the device’s machinery, and the more enraged his denunciations the faster the handle ground round and the more manic the tune. The rest of the hybrids were easily subdued once they’d finished savaging the more elderly club members.

Mr Tribbling’s evil plan had been foiled, and the club had a new attraction: the mono-winged ape was installed in a cage on the ground floor and wound up by passers-by to produce the unholy music and accompanying spasms which so entertained them. In time Mr Tribbling’s reluctant contribution to the club’s funds outweighed the damage his creatures had wrought. He died shortly afterward from a combination of sepsis and brass poisoning. His bones (with gramophone intact) now occupy a display case in the club’s museum. He was the monkey who ground his own organ.

Ensnuggled

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It had been my considerable misfortune to share a snug with a trio of post-adolescent pre-intelligent vermin. Cheerfully engaged in their inane banter, the soaring pitches of their execrably formed discourses began to inflame those sensitive portions of my soul.

To be frank, I was overdue in sating that part of myself most comfortable when extracting the kidneys from some wailing street creature. Indeed, I was only passing the time before catching my train to the city (where I aimed to indulge my cravings without arousing suspicion).

It was only by chance that I was seated so close to these purveyors of prattle with their relentless stream of failed similies and repetitious drooling.

To gain myself a moment’s peace I withdrew my favourite lady-filleter and placed it on the table with a well-practiced thunk. I discovered that this, in combination with an avuncular smile was sufficient to settle the wretches into a nervous silence; perfectly adequate for my drinking needs.

Though it might delay my journey, there was an alley with convenient drainage at the rear of the tavern. All I now needed was to lure one of the mis-brained youths outside. However, at that precise moment my guinea pig began to vibrate alarmingly.

Pigges in Wigges

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I was almost knocked down by the squealing porcine form that barrelled down my dark passageway. As I turned into the parlour I found myself agog at the gaggle of gorgeous girls gathered before me. Heinz had no doubt fled in shame at the ill-fitting lederhosen I insisted the rotund little German wear.

De Gashe – Origins

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The son of an offal miner and a milliner, Franklyn soon learned that people are like gloves stuffed with organs. If you remove the organs, you can wear the glove. He was destined for a life in either career, but like so many young people of his generation he was spared from early labour by his parents’ class aspirations.
Cruelly denied an opportunity to develop chimney lung he was sent to an Academy of Competence in the local borough. There he learned little but graduated with a plethora of qualifications, none recognisable to employers.

Engorged with ignorance, Franklyn undertook a world tour of Europe, embracing art, history, culture and night life. During this adventure he learned the value of the fairer sex (omitted from his school curriculum), and was inducted into a number of influential sects. Mysteries were revealed to him by way of near fatal intoxicants and implausible rituals. 
He returned to England a different man; the real Franklyn lived on, in a tiny amulet worn about De Gashe’s neck.
His first murder was committed on the site of a now fictional genocide site, triggering a catastrophic wave of temporal destruction which annihilated his own reality and flung De Gashe into a future.
Thus ripped from his own time by the unseemly portal, De Gashe travels back and forth through the universe at the whim of fate, a deity or some devious scoundrel with a button. Perhaps one day he will discover this.
In the meantime what can any Victorian gentleman with a penchant for blades and intoxicants (and an enviable collection of rings) do except seek such such divers entertainments as the world has to offer.