The Followers of the Wad

a parody of cosmic horror
 
The terror was unaccountable, and I should know, I'm an accountant. When I came down to Essex, I didn't foresee the grim spectres that would assail me, not the least of which was a dishevelled chap in the Clacton McDonald's, screaming that he just wanted his chicken nuggets and didn't know anything about a needle in the toilet bowl. Poor mad soul, I thought, and offered to find him sanctuary at a local church or charity hostel. He spat at and called me a "right nonce," which I took to be a dialectic way of affirming gratitude. At that point, however, he was pulled away by five or six men. Together they performed a display of ritual violence, recorded for posterity by a woman with a camera-phone. Apparently, the barbaric rite has something to do with customs of trade, as the fellow who performed the most brutal acts kept shouting "where's my fifty quid?!"
 
The ways of these rustics can be alarming to a scholar, but we must persevere on our path to hitherto forbidden knowledge. Nonetheless, I decided to forego my evening meal lest I disturb the dance and offend these noble savages. I retired to my lodgings, a quaint B&B whose garage door was painted with runes, no doubt intended to deter evil spirits. I discerned from a moment's study that they resembled crude lettering, conveying the message F--- OFF DICKWAD.
 
My landlady was a skeletal and underdressed woman in a dirty bathrobe. She led me up a flight of stairs to a door whose hinges squealed with generations of hard use. After letting me in, she demanded to know if I was staring at her tits. I assured her that I was not some amateur ornithologist, come to disturb the local fauna with my harry and cry about the local parkland. She threw a key on the dresser and left. As I reached for the key I noticed a stack of gentlemen's periodicals, encrusted with a viscous white substance. 'Ectoplasm!' I whispered. So, there was truth to the tale, Clacton-on-Sea was host to spirits, and not just the type which I saw a tramp hurl at a dog outside my window.
 
Though I tried to rest my head on the rather feculent pillows, my toenails digging into the polyester comforter, I found that a night's sleep was impossible. Not least because my landlady, clearly possessed of a religious delirium, kept scourging herself with what sounded like a buzz-saw while crying out for Christ the Redeemer. That in this age of reason such rustic women are still compelled to mortify themselves for their so-called sins offends intellectual idealism, but human progress can be slow, and I was at least heartened to hear her barbaric practice end in a measure of relief, as she screamed an affirmation to the winds. I heard her declare at one point that she was 'so feckin' wet.' Poor creature, I hope she seeks medical advice as to managing overactive sweat glands.
 
I should state at this juncture that, although trained as an accountant, my true interest rests with the pursuit of shadows. Beings once referred to and understood as gods, who may in truth be alien entities so vastly superior to mortal men that even perceiving is to be enslaved by them. It occurred to me that the mythical DICKWAD might be such a malevolence...
 
In a vain attempt at relaxation I turned on the television, and was diverted for a moment by an advertisement for 'gay singles.' Ah, to be gay again! Only in youth, I fear. There was a frightful pounding on the wall, and a gravel-voiced daemon implored me to 'turn it off' or 'get your face smashed in.' I was petrified, clinging to the polyester bedsheet, eyes wider than a child's on hearing a growl from their closet. Plucking up what little courage I had, I climbed out of bed, clutched at the diary in which I'd written various imprecations from the Necronomicon, and cried out 'begone, Dickwad, you foul unmentionable! Back to the charnel-houses of distant Jupiter!'  
 
The beast came thundering down the hall and smashed my door off its hinges, revealing itself to be a half-man, half-gorilla hybrid. A swastika was tattooed on his left bicep, that Eurasian religious symbol corrupted for the fascist cause, and it occurred to me that I was dealing now with an entity once worshipped by Nazi occultists. As in the bunkers of Berlin, so in Clacton-on-Sea. Just as alarming, he was fully nude.
 
He charged at me, and using the balletic athleticism I learned from my Queensberry days, I pivoted out of danger. He crashed into a wall, knocking himself unconscious, and started to emit a noxious gas. I escaped just in time, grabbing my coat on the way, and breathed in the fresh night air outside. Since sleep was now impossible, I decided to take a walk to the seaside hostelries.
 
You can only imagine my terror and loathing on finding there the residents of this backwoods town, cavorting in an orgiastic whirlwind of liquor and debauchery. At a place called Tom Pepper's women were lifted, breasts exposed, onto pool tables. Their navels were filled with a transparent intoxicant, which was then sucked out by male worshippers of this strange, feral religion. Even the lapping of the waves on the shore were lent an air of horror by this abominable display.
 
I admit that my sanity was brought into question by the scene before me. Unable to control myself, I screamed 'WHAT HAVE YOU LET YOURSELVES BECOME?! Are you not human, you Followers of Dickwad?! Do you have no respect for the reasoning capacities gifted you by evolution, the civilisation wrought in the human frame across centuries, millennia?!' My tenuous grip on reality must have been lost at this point, as the last sensation I recall before losing consciousness is a sharp pain at the back of my head.
 
I woke up in Clacton Hospital the next afternoon, where I gave a summary of my experiences. The nurse taking notes left her pad on my nightstand, however, and on secreting this I saw what she'd written: 'Twatted by Smirnoff.' It was then that I knew what I was up against. If the Russians were involved, soon this little seaside town would be dominated by its own Rasputin, serving as the instrument of Dickwad in the spiritual subjugation of this world. I decided to flee, but was confronted as I neared the exit by two women who claimed to be volunteers from St Helena's. 'You shan't fool me with your pretence at Christian goodness!' I screamed, grabbing the large one by the cardigan. 'Get off her!' shouted the other woman, 'leave Mary alone!'
 
'Mary? Ha! No Virgin, she, but a whore of daemons!' But before I could choke the life from this grotesque heretic slut, a hypodermic was sunk in my neck, and now I spend my days in this padded cell. But at least I am back among men of science. Deranged, they call me. I say it is they who are deranged, and blissfully so, not knowing the depths to which humanity has sunk on the Essex coastline.