Many years ago, deep in a Mexican coastal swamp near the ruins of Playa Bagdad, notable for being spelled without the H like its Middle Eastern counter part. A woman drags several small children to see the local Brujas. Witches, whose lair lies in hidden brambles deep in the gloom. Walking among pecking chickens, territorial peacocks and swooping fowl. Its a place that smells of rot and potent herbs roiling in cauldrons of human meat. Sharp smoke hurts the eyes and chimes of bones tinkle in sour wind.
The Witches scowl from faces worn down by centuries of sin and vice. Picking rotting black teeth with barbed branches. There are three of them. Diana, Priscilla and Milagros. Each more grotesque than the next. Black cats, flightless crows and drunk goats wander about their hobbled thatch huts. These hags make offerings to the Goddesses of the underworld and witchcraft, Lamashtu. An entity that relishes in child sacrifice, cruel mothers and trading innocence for wealth. Sometimes they pray to a benevolent mother Santisma Muerte, the patron Saint of criminals and smugglers.
There is no holy death here, only the horror of a half-seen world of furtive dealings with unseen Spirits. No one knows if they are sisters, just that they were deathless wraiths. Stalking the edges of towns, burial grounds and lonely cross roads for their prey. They trade in offering lucky coins to the gambler, candles to the mourning widow, victory to the craven and sorrowful delights to the depraved.
Diana glides with an air of a noblewoman. The head witch wears others skin pulled taut over her face. Her hairline held on by staples and silk thread. A youthful skin covering wretched wood-like ancient bones. She is covered in ornate gold and jewels, a baroque death mask of a nasty Goddess, Hecate. Scars and signs of removed bulbous rolls of blubber cover her artificially thin visage. Her breath is hateful like rotting teeth, feces and cheap tobacco. She seems more at home in a tomb than sitting beside the warm golden glow of a fire in a swamp.
She carries a spear impaled by human skulls, gold teeth and barbed thorns. She is regal, but her false youth mask betrays a ghoulish old woman who sees herself as an ageless vixen not a gnarled harpy. She is the leader of this cabal of craven whores. Rumor is her name was once Malinche, traitor to the Meso-Americans, leading a conquistador army into Tenochtitlan. Cursing her people forever in return for trinkets and glass beads. Only to die of Syphilis in the belly of a ship. Her remains thrown overboard to wash up on the same coastal Yucatan shore she was born, in undeath. Behind her is always a swarm of nesting botflies.
Priscilla is much younger and far heavier. Veiled and seductive, vaguely European. Sallow with fat cheeks, stark nose and porky body. She might have been a beauty once. Pox and plague left her sickly. Like a corpse in the final stages of bloat. Pale and pasty like uncooked chicken. She only wears black formal evening gowns, they reek with a damp fishy odor like they were pulled from a bloated murder victim floating in a creek.
Priscilla has a cherub-like face of morbidly obese fashionista framed by rolls of her neck and double chin. Her eyes and lips horribly colored in gaudy makeup made from missing children’s blood and soot from cremation grounds. Her gigantic bosom covered in dried blood and grease, her mouth full of malformed teeth, crooked and fang-like like spines grow from her gums.
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Priscilla’s hair is styled with a ratty antiquated glamor only she sees, pinned over one eye in a farcical attempt at beauty. Covering one misshapen large and offset glass eye with a drooping lid. She carries a whip and feeblemindedly breaks out into cackling mid sentence and staring off into space like a crazed dog with yellow eyes. She is constantly snacking on fried intestines, noses and ears. Popping raw eyeballs in her oafish mouth like grapes from a bowl of red wine and mushroom sauce. She rocks back and forth in oafish oblivion. Maggots fall from her eyes and nose occasionally.
Milagros is the smallest but by far most intimidating. Dirty and musky. Sweaty and strong from daily chores over a cooking fire and metal forge. She is squat and hunching. Deep black circles under her beady eyes. Long brutish arms covered in wild black fur drag beside her knees in a chimp-like subhuman gait. She is the cannibal cook, her face black with dirt from the cremation grounds. Self conscious of her descent into animal-like depravity she is constantly scraping the hair from her arms and neck with a dagger, pulling long black hairs from her neck and chin.
You get the impression she was born of a werewolf bitch in heat, or sired by an escaped gorilla and a feral bat. But you can’t quite place why her goblinesque snout and large ears fill you with unease. She picks sores on her flesh with dirty nails. Millagros smile is like a condemned convict staring longingly at a victims family in court, wishing for one more chance to rip them apart. Picturing the victims children’s plump flesh and picturing their corpse spinning over a low fire. Self conscious Millagros hides her bestial body under a threadbare black shroud, shy and quietly anguished by her lot in life. An extra set of webbed nubby fingers at her elbows and leathery black wings fall from her armpits.
This ritual was part of the Mother’s vanity. Desperation to remain young and thin inspired treason of the highest order. Selling children is the most vile of crimes. The witches never seemed eager to take her children. They would come up with far fetched requests about birthdays on the solstice, or specific birthmarks, or some magical quality that the woman didn’t understand. If they wanted a child with 9 toes, 11 fingers or born a hair-lip; she was happy to attempt alterations. But the witches seemed to be toying with her. Whispering to each other and breaking out into fits of laugher.
They had no use for unfortunate children in a country full of them. They also had no specific love for inadequate mothers when they are capable of grabbing lost children off the roads themselves. But they did know a wealthy American with contracts to the Government who had a use for their trade. They were not sure if his desires were magical or some kind of deviancy, but he did seem happy to take on unwanted children to work for him.
The Mother begged to pass off some of her 8 children, but only the youngest seemed to have the kind of spirit the witches wanted. They decided to wait until she was almost of age. This was not helpful to the rejecting mother. She wanted less mouths to feed right away, and she always felt an anger at this girl who seemed to never have a rainy day gloom, or react to her emotional terror tactics like the older girls.
This infuriated the Mother and finally when a deal could be struck she was happy to sign in blood. Unfortunately for her, the gods do not take well to this kind of endeavor and cursed the mother more with hair and sagging features for her acts of evil. Her habitual smoking of hashish and opium give her a sleepy drawl, leaning and drooling as she tries to sound witty. Coming across as a hawkish double dealer.
The youngest Girl could wait, now there was a deal on the table for her second and third sons to be gambled to the fates, the fourth son too dim to be claimed by the witches. Maybe they could use him to carry buckets of water or build chicken coops but he would not do for magical incantations that require a perfect child. The child traffickers have long scoured the wastes for the unfortunate and sick. Reaping the riches of plagues and lands plunged into political turmoil.
The Mother could not bring her self to condemn her oldest son like the others. She held out. But two less was a win and maybe she could recapture the vigor of youth from the witches. She was happy to make the arrangements, sending them to join a war band that would bring them to the arranged time and place set forth by the fates. She hates being second guessed by these bitches, she quietly threatens to bring in the authorities if her demands aren’t met. A double dealing spite sends her into wrathful black moods, undeserved beatings for children on weeks where she is with out tequila and wine.