Dorotea had her own goals for the day, seeing to the sick Baby Pony on the Moran farm. She loved working for the grandmother Nann there who let her have the run of the place. All day she could play with Bunnies, Ducklings, Chicks, Calves and Baby Goats. She got paid too. The old woman knew Dorotea’s mother was cruel and took all her earnings, so Grandma Nann paid Dorotea extra to save, for her future. She even gave her jewelry and rings that were old fashioned but still very nice.
Dorotea was always glowing when leaving the job, she felt hope for the future and cherished visiting the comfort of a loving home where sweet smells of warm food always came from the kitchen. She would bring home banana bread, cherry pastries, carrot cake and fresh fruit but her family was ungrateful, would take everything she had and chastise her for not bringing more.
The fateful day is when she woke to see her mother meeting with Barstowe and three Brujas talking before dawn about her joining his troop. Dorotea had heard of three loathsome Hags down in the swampland named Pricilla, Diana and Milagros who sell missing children to wealthy Americans.
Rumors say they also stole body parts and eat children who strayed too far on the Passover, Purim and the Sabbath. Dorotea thought it was just a story that the child hunting Brujas lived in a underground Crypt in a flooded graveyard was another myth, a Blood Libel.
A horrible fable to keep children from exploring ruins at night or swimming after dark. Like the La Llorona, a vengeful Spirit who haunts the Rio Bravo to drown children playing too near the banks. Or the nights of the year Ghostly soldiers returned from an old Spanish Battlefield’s that had long grown over to be marshland to come to their villages and feast with their families.
Old Witches who collect bones and bodies to sell them to shady doctors couldn’t be true. Not in the U.S. or Mexico, maybe in India. All the missing children must be due to some coincidence. The theme of neglected children who must beware of dark forrest’s and abandoned Temples is the same all over the world.
Here there is a singular threat of becoming prey, part of the thousands of yearly Los Desaparecidos. Untold missing or exploited along the Mexican / American border as if some Maelstrom of Hades opened to claim the unloved and unwanted to some unknown abyss. A howling wilderness of hungry eyes and heavy souls watch the unwary.
This wasn’t a story to scare children. The Witches and Barstowe were really here, and really talking about her. He had drawn up adoption papers and her mother eagerly signed. Dorotea feeling terror and betrayal ran into the dark with her pet bunny Ophelia.
As she dashed away down the country road she heard yelling from her bedroom and angry eyes peering from the curtains. As she reached the end of the collection of shacks that made up their nameless village, she would see the motorcar of H.T. Barstowe racing down the road. Lanterns bouncing on the dirt road like hellish golden eyes of a wildcat about to pounce. Dorotea dashes off the road into a irrigation ditch. Barstowe turns slowly, eyes darting the darkness looking for Dorotea. Two large black dogs leer from the cab of the motorcar, ready to seize her in pursuit.
Her bunny Ophelia is spooked and jumps from her arms crossing the road into a cornfield, the dogs leap from the Model T motorcar and rush into the darkness. Barstowe lights a cigar, his eyes hawkish in the red glow. Dorotea sees the eyes of submerged Alligators. Blinking slowly but patient. She inches away, crying silently for her Bunny who sacrificed her self for her.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
She tries to navigate the grassy berm and not fall into the water. Losing a shoe she makes it about 40 feet behind the Model T, the farther away she gets the more bold she gets making noise, finally in the blackness of the morning bellow a scarlet sky she dashes towards the Moran farm. With a crooked fat finger Barstowe adjusts his mirror and sees her silhouette running into the burning dawn.
All day she has a gloom over her work. As she brushed the animals and said goodbye to the newborns and her small bit of joy in her dismal life. She thought of the scary clowns with bloody knuckles and soulless eyes. The angry Lion Tamer and his barbed whip. The evil looking guests of the Barstowe Circus. She knew the truth of it. Older girls had been paid handsomely to take pictures, or entertain wealthy men. Still others were never heard of again. The border has always been known as a place where people and whole families disappeared suddenly.
H. T. Barstowe’s grandfather Lord San-Bartholomeo Batorowscu started their American operations nearly 100 years before. Sometime between the war of 1812 and end of the Mexican American war. Hiring fugitive scalp hunters from the notorious Pike & Chamberlain gang to secure their place on the prairies and lonely roads of the still wild and unsettled 19th Century.
These marauding cowboys were once hired by the US and Mexican governments to seek out and make war with massacring tribes on the border who had carved a bloody trail across the wagon trains West. These criminals were not careful with who they hired or told their abusive tales to, instead of limiting their butchery to raiding bands of Apache and Comanchero horse thieves. They would hunt down any one with black hair earning the hostility of Texas Rangers and Mexican Army to hang them wherever they found them.
There were terrifying groups of ruthless killers like the Glanton gang. A militia formed of veterans of the Spanish American war. Ex-law men fired for too much drink, shooting men in card games and whoring. Who took up a gruesome trade in ridding the territories of all Indians. Well known to be just as ferocious as their tribal foes, they were double dealers, slavers and vicious in every imaginable way to men, women and children. That was long before, they would have to be pretty long in the tooth to still be on the run, hiding out among the ruins, abandoned churches and day laborer camps here.
It was a common practice to see staged crime scenes of massacre. Meant to frame the Mexican peasants, who they saw as no different than Indios and Raiders. Leaving shrines decorated with bloody skulls beside roads, flags made of human skin strung from poles and leaving bizarre motifs like flayed bodies of families arranged playing poker in recreation of the Last Supper of Christ. A ghastly sight to come to a burning farm with shrieking victims skinned alive, mutilated and telling tales of white men painted like fearsome clowns carving off long strips of flesh for their bounty trade.
Rumors among the peasants of massacres by men in clown paint spread to children to not be caught alone after dark. Drifters and Carnival folks had committed atrocities in their former lives and still had the hungry eyes of ambushers and bandits. Known for such malevolent acts in isolated homesteads. This area was always plagued with war, and mercenaries willing to burn and plunder lonely ships and migrating families had no background check. This is who was coming for her…
This scared Dorotea. The Carnies certainly looked guilty of these horrors. She was becoming a woman but nothing terrified her more. She was immature and small, not even as big as a teen. At 16 she looked more like 12. She knew her hateful Mother wanted to be rid of her, reminding her of her lost youth. She was beaten a million times for invented transgressions, accusations and outright lies by a mother who loved to bully her.
Dorotea knew this was another act of abuse, some kind of malicious joy her mother felt in hurting her. Her mothers smile was never friendly, it had a glare of hostility just under the surface. A burning rage of lost dreams, burning envy, inadequate spite and a dark soul. She knew now she was sold into prostitution, and nothing would stop her from fighting to her last breath to stop it.
She thought of her oldest brother Xavier, fighting in the streetlights. Despite being the most renowned fighter in the valley, he was kind and took time to counsel her. Many a day sticking up for his baby sister. He knew she was a tomboy, so he taught her all the dangerous things he knew about how to throw a nasty punch to put someones lights out, how to reach a mans lung through his armpit with a knife or how to push in the eyes of an attacker who has already gotten too close.
Dorotea knew today she would have to fight for her life, and she did but it wasn’t enough.