Dr Fostux

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Mad scientist and organ recitalist extraordinaire, Dr Fostux was a figure of some intrigue, scandal and notoriety in early 1900’s Cthornwall. He was rumoured by some to be the secret lovechild of Lord St Leviathan and an unnamed other. Raised by the family of one of the Lord’s boatmen, his stepfather was a keeper of the giant squid pool at St Michael’s Mound. It was here the young Fostux developed an early fascination and aptitude for all things monstrous and scientific, working as night-porter, and then later apprentice, in Lord St Leviathan’s oceanic genetic breeding programme.

However, following an unspecified splicing disaster involving a young child from the local foundling hospital in Penzance, and a rare strain of lobster discovered in a flooded pitchblende mine, Fostux was banished from his home in extremus opprobrium , and was not heard from again for some time.

It was not until 10 years later, in 1923, that vague stories began to circulate about late night deliveries and unsettling lights observed at an old lighthouse in Restormel Bay. Along with advertisements in the St Austell Gazette of that year, requesting “reminiscence, relics and old toenail clippings (cash price paid in genuine coinage on receipt)” it became evident that Dr Fostux had returned to the county and was embarked upon a new vein of scientific enquiry.

Within months the fashion for highly addictive distilled and bottled ‘narrative essences’ began to sweep the county, causing much social malaise and domestic strife among the general population. With much of the local workforce swiftly addicted to such “chymical experience and virtual living” the Stannary Parliament of the time demanded the source of the outbreak be quickly found and cauterised. Much suspicion automatically focused upon the activities of the newly returned Dr Fostux, but only circumstantial evidence was ever uncovered, and that in the form of a discarded packing case for Bunsen burners and a sea stained receipt from the Vatican, for the purchase of fifteen shin bones of St George and a pornographic snuff box once belonging to Pope Pious IX.