Lord Maledor was excited – he was to have a private session with the Octopus, and this was, to put it mildly, a stunning privilege. Goodness and beauty smelt like roses, a banal bloom that filled Maledor with nausea. Evil smelt juicy. Stench was perfume.

Lord Maledor was a being to whom beauty meant nothing. Beauty was vapid, tiresome, symmetrically insipid and pulseless. Irrelevant, ridiculous, superfluous, and full of its own importance. Beauty was flanked in the dictionary by beauté du diable and beaux arts, words with no purchase on the Skorpean psyche and with meanings so obscure as to be meaningless as Monsieur Derrida tells us in the cold porridge of his neo-theological hokum. When Maledor contemplated the hollow horror of beauty he realised it was a chamber pot brimming with warm ordure, a monsoon bucket topped up with entrails, cold ash, and the dead theories of the destructive deconstructions. Beauty was the under-armpit of a papal courtesan after she had crawled for her chestnuts and been swived by a randy pope in order to get her indulged indulgence. Beauty was the evanescent quality left at the doorstop of arranged marriage. Beauty was the alternative curse that launched a million advertising campaigns and marooned a thousand rotting barges in Nilotic mud. Beauty was as dull as the forms that needed to be filled out to buy an asteroid.

Ugliness and deformity aroused Lord Maledor’s jaded spirit, and the Octopus, who lived in a vat of oil that reeked of decaying blubber and gave off the sound of decadent slither, was said to be the ugliest being in the galaxy. Its ugliness left the banality of beauty in its wake, like a child born with the stump of a tail who would one day learn the trick of standing upright and writing sonnets about the cheerful immensity of the ocean after a dawn as cold as a sharpened axehead. Who could doubt it? Unfortunately, the Octopus was surrounded by a horde of banally beautiful Jezebels who catered to its every whim, of which there were an abundance. For a hideously ugly entity should have whim-caterers – even though, by Lord Maledor’s standards, a power that was so coarsely expressed was, well… barbaric. Still, there was a crude excitement in barbarism, though of course Lord Maledor himself had never been barbaric. He was a plumed aristocrat of evil. Even his masked ravishing of Queen Beia had been accomplished with aristocratic panache.

Proudly crouched by the foyer of the Sargasso pond, he waited patiently. A seven-foot-tall Jezebel parted blood-red lips to inform him that the Octopus would see him presently. Imagine he, Lord Maledor, the greatest evil mind in the galaxy, being kept waiting by a seven-foot chit of a naked Jezebel! He reminded himself that the nude sexpot was only doing her job.

To help pass time, he imagined what deliciously horrible things the Octopus might require of him. Possibly he might have to lick the fabled mollusc’s armpits – a daunting task which had (according to Fleschimorean rumour) defeated some of the most determined sensualists in the galaxy. Lord Maledor felt more than equal to the challenge.

Conversely, there were the lewd delights the Octopus might bestow upon him. Possibly its longest tentacle would…