Barstowe’s stronghold in the Americas is the lawless seaside town of Bagdad Beach. It was a Mexican port that was mostly populated by pirates, smugglers, fugitives and undesirables chased out of Texas. Built up as a possible location for fleeing Confederates hoping to board a ship to Europe, Australia or South America. In reality it was a dying port were local fishermen who went missing had their homes reclaimed by the tide and boats silted in by sinking buildings and moorings. Every day there was more salt water in the wells and once healthy ostiaries of birds and nature became places to toss unwanted bodies or hookers who talked too loud, one too many times.
This nuance was lost on majority of Americans who came to see the Carnival there. The Barstowe European Circus was like a gem in a dark world of decay. The semi permanent Carnival was set up on high ground overlooking Bagdad Beach. The most famous of the amusements that drew tourists were The House of Spirits, The fist fighting Clowns, The Freak-show and the Animals of India and the Orient.
This is what drew in trainloads of school children both chaperoned and unsupervised who flooded into the Carnival to see ghastly events like men who stuck swords through their chests, or medical oddities, “man eating” Indian tigers. Chief among them the Basilisk, a creature born so deformed it would be hard to find the descriptive words for it beyond a rooster head on a man but with arms and legs of a crab that eats whole cats before the crowd and fights off giant African snakes.
Among the fortune tellers and stable of hucksters of every racket like “mentalism” or reading cards, guessing birthdays or reading astrological charts there were “Three sages of the Orient.” These mute swarthy men, would put on shows of real magic that was unexplainable. With no curtains or hidden boxes they could conjure fire, survive decapitations and even seeming to meditate while burning alive. Despite some outcry in the conservative press this gained the most notoriety with catholic school girls and nuns who would come to marvel at the death defying feats.
On the morning of the storm, there was a group of 40 private school girls from a Catholic School in Louisiana who went missing. They arrived on a series of chartered local sail boats and carried them selves with the typical air of wealth you expected from private school girls, impressed by nothing, offended by everything and trying to humiliate the vendors at every opportunity while making quips in French and intentionally bad Spanish.
Rules did not apply to them, and the priests and nuns who accompanied them seemed to be as interested in amorous moments alone than keeping the girls out of “satanic acts” like the House of Spirits. The School Girls loved the aura of the place. Vaulted ceilings, nooks where statues of saints now lie toppled or defaced.
His lair was built in the catacombs of a seaside Cathedral that no longer stands above, smashed to dust by canon fire during the fall of the executed Habsberg Emperor of Mexico, Maximilian I. Installed against the Monroe Doctrine by Napoleon III. Executed for the “Black Decree” that killed 11,000 Mexican Partisans fighting against the French puppet Monarch. The ruins above connect to deep Pre-Colombian basements and annexes. It was a series of broad stone galleries lined with full length mirrors. Every few feet there was side corridor reflecting light of a magic show or display of some kind.
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Crazed birds of fabulous plumage flutter along the ceilings and real bats squeak and dart at guests. There was so much history in this place. The girls as rich as European nobility but without titles or storied history were in love with rich frescos of the old world, real dungeons and charnel houses where centuries of bones were arranged in morbid designs and mosaics. It was truly a house of death, they imagined the walls of skulls watched them, the mass graves of plague victims and religious persecution cried out from this hellish abyss. It was the kind setting for grotesque victorian stories they loved from Edgar Allan Poe, Lord Dunsany, Mary Shelly, Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen.
In the sections used by the Carnival were also dioramas of Salem Witch Trials, Spanish Inquisition, ancient purge of the Canaanites, Alchemy, the Knights Templar executions, other hideous displays like a black mass, human sacrifice and cannibalism in the south seas. But it was the Catacombs and Catholic Tombs they wanted to see, they heard tales of Aztec alters of sacrifice and wells filled with the gold and silver of beheaded Kings. They wanted some kind of relic to prove they were here, a gold tooth or Spanish locket, gold crucifix or skull small enough to hide in their blue velvet gloves.
The school girls loved these oddities above so much, but the overgrown tunnels called out to them. Tripping over tree roots and exploring with stolen torches sounded like so much more fun than following stern Nuns and sly Priests. So they gathered more girls in other cliques and groups of friends to come down and see the ghastly rooms bellow.
They compulsively went back in over and over until the Priests and Nuns who were ready to leave could no longer find the girls as warning of high waves and winds made many of the Americans pack up and leave. Acting on the tip the girls had decided to return to the school first as a prank on the clergy staff the teachers hurriedly left. This was a mistake as the girls were down the catacombs beneath the house of spirits as the weather turned ugly.
As the American tourists started to leave, the Catholic private school girls decided to play some pranks on each other. Going into the mirrored walls and galleries, they would lie in wait in pools of shadow to scare passers by. With out the sense to intuit there are actual denizens of the night who are not playing pranks.
At that time there were the unsightly members of the carnival, too “long in tooth” to come out during the day. These more bestial Carnies could be mistaken for wolves and bats with their feral eyes and matted fur. As the girls played jokes and giggled at pantomimes, they were being hunted, never to be seen alive again.
Water from above streams into ancient Pre-Colombian burial grounds. Mazes of Aztec tombs flood with the monsters within climbing tree roots in the walls. The girls laughter is silenced. Some unknown claws and beady red eyes came for them while the storm built above. These girls became Barstowe’s “most beloved family.” He enjoyed cultured playthings over the normal stray farm boys and battered wives who sought out this line of work to avoid violence at home.
Above ground the wind picks up to over 100 miles per hour. Wooden beams and metal rods whip by in black flashes. The temperature is bellow 40 degrees. Lightning and tornado forms out to sea whip around as waves of nearly 20 feet smash into the wooden shanties on the hills above the shore. Windows smash, trees are ripped up by the roots. Barstowe’s train is toppled by waves that drag horses and gypsies alike inland across farmsteads beyond Bagdad Beach. Where once neoclassical edifices stood with bright marble and bronze, now the land is green and hellish with upside down forests lie submerged in deep marshes.
Amusement rides and pavilions turned into piles of smoldering sticks. Tents full of exotic animals now funeral shrouds to bloated corpses of elephants and tigers, carrion for birds of prey that now fill the sky in clouds of hundreds of hungry vultures. A thriving trade center destroyed so it would never be a site of commerce again.
Ships carried inland miles now house bandits and where once prosperous traders owned fisheries and fleets, now they are soulless winos living beside creeks and scavenging gold teeth and rings from old Spanish cemeteries. Its said that 100 miles north in Galveston, the coastal town was turned into a debris field 30 feet tall and 2 miles long.