Baxter Ffilthe

PROLOGUE.................. HER NAME WAS LIBERATA ET Aperta, and you have never met a book like her. From her jacket of pale human skin to her spine of dried dead men’s ligaments, to her name embossed in finely-strung man-guts, to her endsheets anointed in her maker’s own blood; she wasn’t so much a book as a sentient vessel designed to hold exotic magic from every corner of the globe. Written in a fine, flowing script, her pages were filled with invocations and hymns to beings both wondrous and nefarious. Picture this: the first heavy summer raindrop falls from the heavens onto the wing of a feisty butterfly greedily feasting on pollen from inside a delicate pink crocus in a verdant park. The butterfly, surprised by the sudden weight upon its wings, tumbles unexpectedly to the ground. It catches the attention of a kitten lounging about on the grass just a few metres away. The furry little monster then runs across the lawn to harass the fallen butterfly, as kittens usually do. And as it happily bounds with curious innocence towards its new fluttering toy, it in turn catches the attention of the large German Shepherd marching by, attached to a leash held by a slender young man in a tight T-shirt and fashionable infertility-inducing jeans clutching a steaming-hot cup of Seattle-style coffee. The massive dog starts barking and runs towards the kitten, barking ferociously and accidentally causes its owner – busy sipping his steaming cup of venti (venti being Italian for “spend more money on me, get caffeine in your bo-dy”) soybean latte held in one hand, talking on his phone precariously balanced between his shoulder and ear while holding onto a monstrous dog with his other hand to boot – to lose his balance, fall dramatically and splash the near-lava-hot aromatic liquid all over his chest, ending up with second-degree burns on his n*****s. In the grand scheme of things, Liberata would be the butterfly; Hilaria Ffilthe, a modern-day witch with a hideous name, the raindrop; her grandson Baxter, the kitten; a large slumbering demon named Pres, the German Shepherd; and dozens of innocent lives would be the skinny young man’s severely-burned n*****s and scorched barely-existent chest hair follicles. A disastrously effed-up conjunction of random circumstances, as some would say. Several months ago, Baxter Ffilthe – nice boy, unfortunate name – had, upon his grandmother Hilaria’s suggestion, searched for a very special book of spells in Esoterica, her bookshop. Finally locating her amidst the constantly-shifting labyrinthine rows of shelves, he laid his awkward, sweaty hands on Liberata’s body, lifted her from her spot, opened her leather jacket and caressed her soft pages. Baxter, an unlikely writer and illustrator of prostitutes and prostitution, had stared at her naked pages in bright-eyed wonder and proceeded to pleasure her as his fingers explored the multitude of incantations decorating her splayed inner flesh, still smooth and legible despite her great age. He then read the words that would change his life forever. But wait. “Writer and illustrator of prostitutes and prostitution?” you ask. Go ahead, what are you waiting for, bring out your damned talking boxes, the synthetic brains lurking in your pockets and handbags. Well go on, ask those dreadful children of talking wire and invisible wave. Let them fill their brightly-lit glass and plastic faces with their soullessly-worded answers. A writer and illustrator of prostitutes and prostitution is a “pornographer”. Pornography, being after all, the bastard child of the Greek words for “prostitute” and “to write”. Who would have thought that this foreign b***h issuing from an illicit mating would become one of the most misunderstood words in the modern English language? This little Greek immigrant minx, creeping quietly into the language, is now freely whoring herself to the digital masses; in an epoch ruled by the electronic offspring of talking wire and invisible wave, words like s*x, PORN, EXPLICIT, ADULTS ONLY sold millions of products across the world. Yes, Baxter Ffilthe, or just Baxt as everyone called him, was a pornographer. And thanks to Liberata’s dark magic; a soon-to-be highly successful one. Before you shake your heads in judgement, remember that his was a great tradition, stretching back further than your Internet, than 8mm, than adult cinemas, than the Kinsey Institute with its massive collection of erotica for “research purposes”, further back even then the naughty murals on the walls of Pompeii brothels, the shockingly explicit pottery of an advanced anal-s*x-obsessed tribe in ancient Peru, that great work of literature that is the Kama Sutra. Pornography. How could so beautiful-sounding a collection of syllables ever evoke such extreme reactions in people? The universality of this ancient concept can best be illustrated by asking, “Who doesn’t like porn?” The world divides itself into two groups of people. The real honest folk who tell you they like it, no, love it even. Then there are the prissy hypocritical types who publicly blush at the mere mention of the various P-words (porn, p***y, p***s, prick, pecker), but keep secret drawers full of s*x toys, magazines, DVDs, hard drives, whatever perverse paraphernalia their s****l appetites demand. Oh, and who sometimes conveniently forget to clear the nasty stuff they’d been viewing online from their browsers, inviting uncomfortable questions from parents, spouses, roommates, children. Like that celebrity movie star who told reporters from a tell-all gossip mag that she had just found out, after looking through her late husband’s laptop last week that she was married for 30 years to a bisexual bat furry with a penchant for big black c**k AND b********y. We now live in a world transformed; normalness having taken a sharp turn towards the bizarre. No longer the provenance of the wealthy and the powerful; aided by the Internet and the Demon of Social Media, Pornography has gently inserted her countless fingers lubricated with fantasies and coated with desire, into the sensitive orifices of the very fabric of our daily lives. So kids, if you’re reading this (and you shouldn’t be), it might be a good idea to always have your hard drive religiously cleared of any compromising obscene material meant for your masturbatory pleasure with even a whiff of a smidgen of a tinge of a hint of a possibility of being found. Like maggots feasting on a rotting carcass, these filthy things have a knack for gnawing their way to the surface. The following pages document the sordid tale of Baxter Ffilthe’s meteoric rise to fame from not-so-innocent occult bookshop assistant to the upper strata of porndom to well, something else entirely. Baxter’s tale is heavily spiced with supernatural horror, violence, murder, debauchery, very graphic s*x and barmy political incorrectness, with various combinations of these elements occurring simultaneously throughout and in good measure. You have been warned. This tale is neither for the faint of heart… Nor for children.