Manheim Eidelman loved his job. A couple times a week he could really hurt somebody. He was skilled in flaying men alive so delicately they scarcely bleed, he knew about dislocation and stress positions. He could hang a man so all his weight was at an angle where he had to suffer extreme pain to breathe, and then had to rest in a way that caused his ribs to constrict. Alternating between life saving trauma and tormented lapses in breathing with out sleep or water for days until the nervous system short circuited.
Manheim preferred the old fashioned beating. Knuckles, wet leather straps, branding iron and boots on shivering flesh. Leaving the subject broken and doused in cold water over night, until the elements did the deed. He was the Lion Tamer, but that really means he disposes of bodies. When the Fist Fighting Clowns get carried away, or a local tough guy offends the Carnies he is right there with the Elephant hook. Something between a fire poker and a lead pipe with a barbed end like a medieval club. It was useful to break legs, pulling a floating corpse out of the water by the eye socket or shatter a cringing mans forearms and teeth.
His job was cruelty, interrogation, catching runaways and torturing the cheaters. Manheim enjoyed watching bodies torn to ribbons by animals. He loved seeing what a train could do to arms and legs. Flattening necks and folding bodies in ways that seemed impossible like a twisted screw. Women, children, priests, police, rangers it made no difference to him. Food for the wolves and stray dogs that prowl just out of torchlight.
Manheim grew up in Hungary, his family had already fled Elisavetgrad during a Cossack purge against his people in 1881. He watched his Mother and Father burn to death during a Blood Libel accusation in his village. Hundreds of families homes were burned that night. He only escaped because a group of youths at his back window hesitated as his mother threw him into the unknown. He can barely remember when he came to the Circus.
Barstowe must have smelled blood in the air. He was trained as a butcher to feed the Tigers. Then he was the shit shoveler. He did all the jobs, he was even a Fist Fighting clown. Manheim has always had to keep an eye on the Fortune Teller. Esma... She had a tendency to try to escape. He always enjoyed manhandling her roughly. He never forced him self on her but he could. He pinched her breasts, strangled her, whipped her face with belts and injured her spine once so badly she spent an entire pregnancy unable to walk.
Manheim wasn’t sure if he was in love with her, or if it was lust. He could barely look women in the eye since a firestorm in Norway scarred the left third of his face. Causing a deformity of a third of his face. Skin that looks like purple zebra stripes in a long series of X patterns from his chin to his ear which was missing. He was Barstowe’s spy, torturer and executioner. When he was alone Manheim would repeat her name in a mantra. Esma Bireli over and over again. She was a gypsy and came from a detestable place in the world not that different than his.
On occasion Barstowe has a rage and wants her humiliated. He will either have to wrestle her down from horseback, or tie her up for the abuse of the Carnies. Barstowe likes to take his dinner while witnessing a prolonged whipping, while making snide quotations from the Bible. Her spirit nearly broken he left her in Barstowe’s library collapsed on the floor among candles and strange markings in blood.
Tonight was another escape attempt. The Fortune Teller had taken to crying spells and become so despondent that she had to be chained to the desk in the “House of Spirits,” to keep her from cutting her self. Inside the House of Spirits there was a “Magic Lantern Seance.” Barstowe had added a corpse photography side business. Families would bring dead loved ones to be posed among the family in a life like position. The photographer was a man born with deformities so profound he was covered head to toe in bloody rags.
There were many tricks to create the air of life on the recently dead. Barstowe was quite the industrious merchant of death. He had a train car specifically for bodies to be cleaned by beetles and later sold to medical schools in the Northeast, Ontario, Mexico City and as far afield as London. “Barstowe’s Premium Bones” had an ornate bass label on a waiting stack of crates. Another of antique weapons pulled from the earth at sites of slaughter.
Barstowe led the show in the “House of Spirits.” Giving oratory about his travels and studies, showing photos of Post Mortem photos superimposed onto pictures of the loved ones. He was able to project “Spirits” among the audience. It was a horrifying show. During one such event the Fortune Teller was laying out Tarot Cards decorated with Corpse Photos and something disturbed her. She knew it was not all a confidence game.
It was staged to seem like a parlor trick. Enough to get the skeptic to sooth his wife with scientific explanations for the wind that picks up in the room, for the shrieks of saints and the maligned who are pushed out of their body in possession. There must be some unseen hands shaking the floor, blowing out candles with a bellows, scratching the walls. People would pay well to see their daughter alive, so talk to a husband taken by war, or ask a grandmother about buried jewels or a deed hidden behind a wall.
The fortune teller Esma Bireli, hated this show. She didn’t mind reading cards or horoscopes. She wanted no part of rituals to bring back the dead or attempt to control ancient spirits. The chalk used to draw magical incantations and sigils to hellish kings and demonic warlords made her skin crawl. Voices from Beyond the Grave are not something to visit lightly. The “Holy Guardian Angel” ritual of Abramelin the Mage specifically. Esma remembers the Bible verse. "Beware, your old enemy the devil... stalks the darkness like a roaring lion. Seeking whom he may devour." That is Barstowe and his brood of demons.
Esma hated the worm-eaten books Barstowe made her copy and transcribe from Arabic and Greek. Lemegeton known as “The Lesser Key of Solomon The King,” Shams al-Ma'arif known as The Sun of Knowledge, The Book of Higher Spheres, The Grand Grimoire of Le Dragon Rouge, The Shahnameh of Ancient Persia, Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm, which translates to “The Aim of the Sage.” They smelled of decay, like they had been wrestled from the grasp of a warlocks tomb. She had learned to undo the shackle around her foot hidden by the table cloth. A hairpin or a sewing needle was enough to unlock it.
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While Barstowe was raving about his connections to the spirit world and Solomon’s 72 Demon Princes, she knocked a Lantern over and in the resulting fire, escaped into the chaos. Out in the night she felt alive. The cold Autumn air she was unable to hold her pain in. She fell down beside a creek and wailed into her arms to keep from making so much noise she would be easily caught. She knew it was inevitable but she needed moments alone to keep from killing her self. She thought about it often. She felt a little comfort near flowing water, the beach at night, flowing rivers and rushing waterfalls.
Esma has always had a way with Spirits. In places of carnage, former battle grounds, sites of massacres or political violence she felt eyes on her. She could see restless spirits all over the west. The Americas like Europe and the Middle East were one giant endless graveyard. Where most see spring flowers and mountains in eastward flowing mist. She sees Indian families peeled of flesh, wailing from the beyond. She sees wagon trains burning and women being savaged and stabbed among the rusty bolts and charred wood of a massacre site from decades before. She would panic sometimes. Often she kept her composure but more and more when Barstowe would fixate on a victim. She remembers the terror and pleading first hand.
As a medium she was prepared to hear the life stories of the restless dead. She could not stand is being cornered by angry spirits while in the bath or alone in the woods. Esma would feel as if all the restless undead he has killed before were peering from the other side. Even in bright daylight there seemed to be a scratching. A twisting in her chest and creaking of the boards in the room. It was as if the edges of reality were bending, the foreground and background shimmering. Time and space melted away in a stir of echoes. Her head feels like it is slowly spinning, just enough to make her sick.
Esma loses all depth perception and falls to the floor. She tries to crawl away but like shadows in the dusk she sees morbid visions of casualties, their eyes reflecting light like owls. Esma hallucinates an eclipse where the sky runs backward, the cloud vibrate with powerful energy. Silver, peach, purple, orange, gold eyes in the dark. Wounds dry and skin pale, teeth bloody with their last breath turned into an endless alarmed state of unrest. The stars bleed a putrid discharge, dripping hostility and a million hateful eyes open at once at the corners of her vision.
It’s too much darkness. Too powerless in her own mind. She grasps a torch and dashes into the Amaranth and Coquelicot colored Autumn dusk. She runs as far as her legs will take her until she feels a tugging in her right side from a heart mummer that has always impeded her hurried movement. She walks among the reeds by the creek in the moonlight. She comes to old gravestones. It smells sweet here, some last romance of the summer lingered. Fresh flowers in a vase, frankincense and myrrh comfort her, much more pleasant than sage. Wild licorice grows here, wormwood and nightshade bloom in the light of the harvest moon.
Esma loves the gothic beauty of graveyards from centuries past. Angels of Death and Cherubim do not guard this simple frontier potters field. Humble granite edifices, angular names black with age. Moss grows here. Rain and time make some of the more fancy marble stones almost smooth. Names lost to time. Farther out she sees wrought iron victorian fencing low to the ground marking a particular families plot. She sees oblisks made of pink and vermilion rock of different sizes and widths. Some just taller than her, others double her height. Esoteric symbols exude a feeling of awe, some strange lost teachings.
Esma can’t guess the date but knows at least here, these spirits are at rest. Farther down she sees a dull light dancing among the floating logs and decaying leaves in a stagnant pond. Following these blue flickers into a field she feels untroubled, more curious. Meandering down a deer trail up a rise she comes to a place where the crickets and night birds are so loud. Wiping tears from her eyes she smiles at the pleasant moment.
Something unnerves her. Esma feels eyes on her as the wind picks up. The branches of trees strain and crack. In a pool of darkness there is something unpleasant. Something that gives her pause. A stillness washes over the prairie as the last wind bends the willows and leaves. Her torch struggles to stay lit. In the bushes small animals thrash and scurry among the the shadows all around her. A large owl comes flapping down from the black sky in a threatening and territorial display. Another and another land in the trees around her. Stumbling backwards she is harshly grasped around the throat.
Turning around and lashing out her hand hits something moving. She sees the corpse of a ghoulish witch, with eyes of fire that glow from sunken pools of darkness. Older than her and smelling of old earth and decay. She feels a name come into her soul. “Hecate!” Almost as if it was a snarling whisper, like a splinter in the middle of her foot digging deeper, like her soul is being penetrated by a spiders teeth. She feels a buzzing in her head like a parasitic wasp in burrowing through the membrane in her nose and ears to reach her cerebral cortex. Her teeth suddenly hurt. A sharp shock of pain in her throat causes her to bite her tongue, a fast trickle of blood rushes down her chin.
The spirit named Hecate… is horrifying. An ancient corpse with skin so grey it’s almost purple. Her fingernails brown and hands stained of rancid blood. On Hecate’s head a crown of green bronze infested with snakes and tree roots, brambles and thorns. Leaves and dried insects like a nest of spiders. Her face covered by cobwebs to the point of looking like a wedding veil. She reaches for the Fortune teller with skeletal fingers. Hecate is somewhere between nude and covered in a burial shroud. A body mutilated and proudly displaying a menstrual flow. Around her neck half decayed skulls various animals, birds and human infants.
Like a nightmare Hecate rushes up to the Fortune Teller and twists one of her fingers until it breaks free. A wash of pain and terror comes over her like cockroaches running down her spine. Moments go by and she comes to her senses alone by a babbling brook. Trying to psych her self into not screaming.
Esma tries to think of the name of this little town. She can’t help it, the pain is too severe. Flashing light and pounding of her heart beat makes each pulse of pain in her hand feel like a infernal roller coaster is pounding in her loins to the tips of her feet, tingling the most abject suffering around her aura. Wailing beside the creek she stumbles bleeding from the wound on her hand.
Esma never sees Manheim the Lion Tamer as he stalks up behind her, clubbing her unconscious like a seal on a beach. His mind too dull to see spirits, he has no idea the Evil Spirit watches him with cold eyes from some plane of existence between the underworld and lands not visited by the undead.
Esma awakes panicked in The gypsy wagon as it tilts and a creaks over a bumpy road. She grasps an amulet to ward off the evil eye called a Hamsa, with a doubled thumbed palm with an eye in the center made out of her birthstone. She prays for a way out of this dismal life. The bleakness of her situation can’t go on forever. There must be some Angel watching out for her. Some curve in the path of life to give her a way out.
Opening the window it has started to rain, she soothes her kicking baby in her stomach. Esma tries to focus on the rain, the cool air and not think of the ritual knife or the burning Tophet that await this unborn Angel. She plans to plead to keep at least one. Barstowe could let her keep this one pregnancy to see the child grow and feel the joy and pain of living a full life. This time she is willing to do what ever it takes to ensure it.