Nestled, sloping down off of a forgotten department store of a Medway Town high street in North Kent, South East England was an odd wasteland of vast, void parking lots. An L-shape kicked parallel they were bordered with salt-rickety, exposed iron stair-rails and tall, red-brick buildings uncertain as to their current direction in life. This small patch of abandoned land was tucked a dermis between the once historic dockland town, now laminated in asphalt, dotted with pop-up Poundlands and five-pound pizza palaces, and the actual dockland of blackened, rotting driftwood and vulture impersonating seagull.

The department store of black vignette windows and green carpet tiles had an odd-ratio of too much hall and landing space to shop space and held a shadowy sensation of being haunted by poltergeists in trilbys grasping semi-spectral cups of Tetley. In its heyday, the mid-thirties, it had been advertised as a Universal Provider meaning you could rent a cubicle of space to sell from cloth to coal on zero-interest credit. Sadly as the years drew on, it shrank in the line up of single structures offering mass product under one roof and by the eighties, passed down through a couple of disinterested generations, it became an odd, dormant relic of consumerism’s Deco past.

It was, however, still possible to rent space in the building, which, on its sub-level floor, sheltered by those godforsaken parking lots and loutish seagulls was what the demon Morax had been doing for the last eight months in manner of a holiday shed.

Pseudomonarchia Daemonum has to date exchanged such the number of underhanded non-disclosures from various strata of Morax employment, PD-RAP, the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum Research and Amendment Press, resolved it simpler to replace constructive entry with an unresolvable error message on digital content, entirely omit hardcopy beyond 'House Morax' and then went on to pay self-evidently into their private pension funds.

Measured by column inches printed post the turn of seventeen hundred Morax, indeed House Gremory as the infamous trio, tallied the most immortalised copy. He'd paid off PD's official listing on the basis that gossip positioned him infinitely more fantastically god-like than fact and he considered himself a private man. His sadistic notoriety a celebritised feed for lower legion damned, spun by the press with a charming twist due to lingering traits of honour, decency and not opening his mouth unless he had something of reputable point to say, the only way to remain a private man was to allow a self-sustaining gossip birthed public persona of partial fiction keeping the truth, and those he cared for, behind bar and key.

He had several sheds. However his intimate, borderline spiritual attachment to them was confounded each for its own reasons. He had, for example a converted brick out house on the Chateau De Gaul estate on the banks of the Dordogne. His relationship with this shed had ended in the late nineteen twenties when Lewis, his first born, suffering a homicidal breakdown had been involuntarily, both relative to Lewis and, most traumatising for Morax, himself, reconditioned there. This climaxed in Lewis occasionally referring to himself as Louis whilst swapping a thick Chicago accent for a French alternative at Gremory's expense.

He claimed a variety of shed evolutions at his ancestral holdings in the Northwest Scottish highlands. A sturdy oak shelter with a pleasant musk of wood chippings. A modernised workspace with sleek, chrome paneled in-wall cupboards for tools medieval to repurposed surgical. Storage had been important to him. The skill of decimating another psychologically, more permanently, was the sans pareil of the industry of late with only amateurs relying on instrument and paraphernalia. The room's pit, empty, minimalist, left Morax eye to eye with his subject in a semi-reflective cube. One subject, many Moraxs.

The delcine of physical torture's populartity was an, in Morax's opinion, en vogue pity, blunt aggression and dismemberment to the carols of blood curdling screams was testosterone cathartic. A good tavern brawl for example or, better yet though gone were the days, a meeting on the dunes to the clash of steel under bitter cold sleet. He silently blamed the declines in male mental health and increase in domestic sexual violence to the twenty first century's snobbish and overly cerebral pedastolling of the Y chromosome.

He had a playroom with a three sixty high definition rec feed embedded floor to ceiling to St Andrews cross which captured every crease of fat and dirt streaked sweat stain back to his personal computer. The only porn he cared to view was that where either he, or a close relative, was the protagonist.

It was entirely impossible to be in any of these spaces and not be desturbed by vital, vital at least to the cunt wielding said update, information on shipments, business deals, gang activity, sponsored legions and goddamn politics.

The basement here had been a flourishing auction house in the early noughties which he’d visited once with a spare day in the area and had a jolly time enjoying the partnering auctioneers rampant sexual innuendos. It too had been abandoned leaving only another L-shaped, powder blue concrete shell it’s flooring stained by a corpse-yard of trodden-in cigarette buds. He’d chosen it for it’s privacy, its endearing offensiveness and that his one Saturday afternoon spent here was random and entirely impossible to place him at should he be being searched for in the present.

At the space’s back rump he’d set up a curtained off operating space improvised with an Amazon Prime massage table, a cheap aluminum floor lamp and some charity shop bed sheets which smelt squint-inducingingly of old-lady lavender. The space's pale blue painted concrete had been graffiti streaked, as though attacked by a giantess' terrible twos toddler wielding a daffodil yellow crayon, walls, floor and ceiling with powdered brimstone.

Morax stood, bent lightly, over a moist, lilac and silver semi-flayed carcass it's pastel marbled skin rolled tightly back to an athletically-set waist gashed through to bone by a hound's bite marks. Thrown open and left beneath the body was an orange and gold robe embroidered with the sigil of House Agares and streaked with caked mud and scaling flecks of a periwinkle blood bundling a waterfall of heavy, opulent linens against the dusty floor.

Several rectangular electric heaters revolved soothingly on their pivots casting a warm orange glow in the otherwise fluorescent limelight. Anarkhos, cub of Cerberus, glanced his flat yellow eyes to Morax with a rare excitement.