Thursday, January the 29th, 2004

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The Cabinet of Doctor Calicagcag

It was a stormy and hideous night. A ferocious gale uprooted sycamores, hollyhocks, and strange unearthly shrubs which grow only in Finland. Thunderclaps deafened the major domo of the orphanage. Lightning bolts blinded the crapulous Stalinist funeral director. Then came the rain, a torrential downpour unleashed by storm-clouds blacker than the blackest thing the human mind can comprehend. The temperature plummeted. Rain turned to hail, assailing with ten thousand merciless pin-pricks the pathetic figure of a man trudging through the streets of Helsinki dressed only in shirt-sleeves and boxer shorts. The man was the notorious forger, quack and charlatan Inigo Hoist. Moments before, he had been denuded of the rest of his clothing and ejected from the hovel of his concubine, who had taken exception to the odour on his breath of sour custard and hibiscus. Hoist managed to reach his doctor's surgery without being crushed by a felled sycamore. He hammered on the door, wailing desperately. At long last Doctor Calicagcag drew back the fourteen bolts on his door and let Hoist in. The good doctor was wearing a rhinoceros mask of beaten bronze. He cackled, and shoved the snivelling Hoist into his sinister cabinet. Then he began to adjust the dials on the control panel……

To be continued