In 1888 Esma Bireli was 11 years old when her mother was butchered. Her mother was a part time hostess at a underground club for Lords and the London elite called “Hellfire.” Esma spent most of her days playing in the streets while her mother kept a night schedule. Esma would look for food and toys discarded in wealthy sections of the city. Often bringing home fruits and vegetables from trees hanging over grand fences. Her mother was also a prostitute. Not a street walker, but serviced men she met at work. One day while walking with Esma near the docks. She caught the eye of an Ships Captain with good disposition.
This man Barstowe, was well connected in England. He was on an assignment to plot a hostile banking takeover in America with Baron Rothschild Sr, a member of Parliament. He would be in London for 2 months and wanted to act as the mentor and lover of Esma’s mother. He enjoyed her exotic eastern looks and used to regale her with stories of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. He was very generous with gold coins, bought them expensive meals, spelter busts of figures from antiquity, finest silks and perfumes so long as they could keep him company until sunrise.
Barstowe seemed to never be available during the day. Esma didn’t like him. His wide mustache ending in jowled muttonchops reminded her of some lurking beast, like a Grey-wolf or bloodthirsty Bat in his top hat and tails. Even when smiling he radiated a subdued hostility, there was a hunger in his eyes. The way he fooled her Mother didn’t fool her. He seemed more like a stalking Lion than a suitor. Sometimes he came smelling like heavy cologne masking the coppery smell of blood. Many times his clothes had a stickiness matted in velvet and lace, stinking of ammonia and lye. Once he had unmissable scratch marks on his face and neck, one eye bloodshot like a ruby melting in the sun.
This was the time of the Jack The Ripper killings. Esma’s mother seemed unbothered by girls bring killed in White Chapel because she “didn’t work the streets.” But Esma was wise beyond her years. She felt a dread around Barstowe. Like the devil had put on a mans flesh to walk the foggy streets and feast on the souls of the unwary. Esma followed Barstowe back to his quarters once before dawn, he stopped to argue with a drunk and beat the man and his oldest son to death with his cane. Leaving silenced cries with out so much as a glance over his shoulder or cautious glance then he went and slipped through the wrought-iron gate of ruined Church.
Esma knew this was important. She ran home to tell her mother but she was asleep. Esma couldn’t stay awake so she curled up with her mother, not knowing this would be the last embrace they ever shared. By the time Esma awoke. Her mother had went to work and Esma planned to find out why Barstowe spent his days in a gated catacomb bellow a ruined Cathedral. Esma found some local children to accompany her journey into mystery. The kids waited until they were sure there was no-one inside. Climbing the old stone walls they gained access to the Church.
It was one of the casualties of the purge of English Protestants against Catholics during the Holy Wars of Succession. This place and many others were burned down, and their lands gifted to friends of the King to enlarge their estates. Some did not and sat empty and shunned by passersby. Amongst overgrown bushes and tall windowless walls the once princely surrounding graveyard is not sinister. Wet statues of mourning mothers and weeping angels stand watch over putrid pools of forgotten Mausoleums.
Entering the Churchyard the friends of Esma are startled by restless birds taking flight. There is nothing inviting about the fallen down Cathedral named “Holy Ghosts of Gethsemane.” All that was once Holy is gone, leaving on shrill birds cries, crickets and the rustling of scurrying creatures underfoot among mossy stones and razor sharp grasses. Only that of a place where there was once life and songs was now an echoing chamber of dripping rain, where roof and floor hold pooled water reflecting the rainclouds above. Several peaked portals lead to lower depths were the children knew they must go.
Among the ruins there are many broken crypts showing bones in disarray. Esoteric carvings in Latin show the once Holy sepulchers now defaced and lying open to the sky. In a deep stairwell leading to a massive green bronze door is the lair where Barstowe’s co-conspirators hide. Vines and gnarled trees have upturned the ground here. Hundreds of years of dismal neglect leave a legacy of the cruel history of religions declaring war on civilians. Back and forth until only the rich and wellborn can live to see how the places of Catholic worship stand in looted squalor, among England’s stinking factories and polluted rivers.
Esma trips on a tree root as the other children go running into the depths leaving her alone. She hears their laughter and running feet echo until the sound is gone and she is alone. Feeling a rat run across her leg she leaps up and realizes she has injured her foot in the fall. Looking back to the Mausoleum doors slamming in the wind, she knows this is the moment she must choose between safety and ridicule of the other children. Or picking up her torch and limping into the catacombs to find what horrors Barstowe has bellow. Suddenly she is struck over the head with such force she paws at her scalp to see if her skull is fractured. She sees a shovel withdrawing from her sight beyond the iron door of the crypt She to crawl up the stairs when a large shadow looms above the heavy doors, slamming them shut and chaining the gate. She loses consciousness.
There is a reddish glow in the blackness. Sounds of crickets and night birds let her know she is outside again. Feeling an unbearable lightness like she is clothed only in the spirit, seeing her hands and body are gone, made of only black ash and sparkling gold dust. She was flying in her Phantom dreamworld. Slowly over a landscape that looked as if the horizon was painted by haunted hands. Esma knows she is not awake, amazing vistas of abject terror await her. This dream world is too beautiful to be the dingy decay and squalor of industrial London, of ghosts and starvation, of endless smoke stacks and cruel Lords carriages trampling limping families in the street.
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Esma dreams of screaming children and distant baying of packs of dogs, of funerals beside empty graves, of martyred saints. The sky and the grasses were the color of dried blood caked on a painters palette. The sun was a ferocious yellow like the eyes of night creatures in a lantern. Surrounded by a fiery red bleeding into a star field of a violet canvas. Faded into the blackest soot of a mass grave in the sky. She heard voices in hundreds of languages, but she understood them all to mean, “I don’t want to die.”
Her astral spirit fluttered in the jet stream like a kite caught between chaotic bands of air. Cool and warm flows of wind, tugging at her soul towards unknown destinations in the blackness bellow. She looked down at her hands and they were as white as clouds in the summer, and totally transparent but given more weight in the darkness. She knew in this dream she was an apparition lost in time. Bellow her she saw the same tragedy play out with different casts through time.
First she saw Barstowe soothing a little girl, above her his hand was raised with a dagger. The little girl was helping him paint a rough hewn sack in the shape of her self, with a expertly painted portrait of her face across the knotted fabric. In tears the little girl painting splotches of crimson, a bright arterial red. Barstowe seemed to be soothing her but he was chanting some obscure prayer lost to time.
Esma flew past them looking back as this shade of a dream blends into the black earth opposite the impressionist burning sun. In silhouette she sees fast movement and a tangle of forms that reminded her of cats or rabbits trying to scratch each others eyes out. She almost convinced her self she saw the dagger falling and piercing supple flesh and lovely eyes again and again.
Another scene with the same occult murder under way. A child too small to assign gender, could be a boy dressed in old fashioned smock of the era. The child is painting red on an effigy of himself self made out of rough potato sacks and balled up yarn stained by the grass. Barstowe or someone like him had a woman at his side and their clothes were that of tribal poverty, again the knives and before she could see the child’s murder her soul moved on.
She sees a new vista the golden rays of morning light across a river. Beside a ramshackle church made of recycled wood and stones, again a little funeral party of missing children. Two this time and a group of men wearing black robes and long beards. The girls in elegant dresses happily painting red wounds on life-size home-made dolls in their likeness. She sees horrid old men were holding books aloft with large pins, awls and trowels for digging. The golden rays on the water turned black as the day was battered to death by storm clouds.
Esma felt an instinctive terror. Now it was her. No longer third person. She was now in the body of a child walking in the woods with an armload of kindling. She hears angry screams coming from behind her. She tries to run and stumbles, trying to gather the sticks gathered to stave off the winter chill. She knows instinctively with a “God’s eye view” into a life that isn’t hers. This child is an orphan, living with siblings whose parents died of a sickness in the spring. She feels the anguish and panic of this girl. Trying to fend off starvation for her siblings, walking deep into the heart of the forrest with bleeding feet and frozen hands. Shivering of her spine and legs cramping with exhaustion.
These children managed to survive on roots, fruit and berries but had gained attention of a howling mob of craven blood letters who were now just over the last bramble of trees. Running with tiny legs she feels wolves surrounding her, maybe not wolves but beasts only a few generations from the packs of the forrest. One black set of gnashing teeth nips the back of her leg, Another goes for her neck and misses. She smells the odor of hot breath and matted fur, sour with rotting blood. Finding her tendon true, a hound rips into the back of her calf. Another rips into the front of her knee, spinning her around. She recognizes faces from town, the Mayor, the Money Lender, the Brick Layer, the Midwives. She even remembers the names Pricilla, Diana and Milagros.
Esma turns around and shrieks to see the hostile eyes of the pack of screaming town’s people and hunters of a lost age of some dark time in eastern Europe. Their eyes reflect a strange whitish pink light, almost as if they are glowing embers seen through stained glass. She forgets the wolf dogs and now is paralyzed in horror as the raving maniacs running down the path at her. They are hurling curses, hisses, accusations. Thousands of years of animosity, women and men, hair white as the snow that has started to fall. Hands raised with farm tools whose blades reveal sharp polished edges on rusted hay-forks, awls, axes and scythes. She feels in her heart innocent of what ever ravings this mob is screaming about.
As they descend on her she feels hundreds of voices of martyrs cry out from her throat. Languages the world has forgotten for centuries, pleas and cries for mercy. She feels stabbing like stings of bees. Hot alerts of anguish, she feels organs being punctured she doesn’t know the names of. She tries to fend off pummeling stabs and slices from every direction. She can feel metal moving the bones in her hand aside. She feels harsh slaps and sharp pummeling on her face and skull. Her vision becomes like music made out of color, each strike of pins and daggers paints a rainbow of suffering in her field of view.
She feels every thing slow down. She feels the pack of dogs twist her ankle out of its socket and with a pop, they tear her leg off and begin fighting over it in the shadows. The stabbing has stopped but a new terror comes as sees grubby hands and unclean teeth over her neck and chest. Fetid breath lashing the air from her nose and mouth, suffocating her. She feels a pang of pride has she feels them kicking and stomping on her with muddy feet smelling of horse manure, putrid dog droppings and rancid fungal odor on bare soles with long hawkish toe nails, blisters and open sores.
Esma hears some incantation in a hateful language of snarls and grunts. Old men and women with pale blue eyes, almost grey and skin like frost search her clothing for any thing of value. She feels so cold as hot rancid breath steams over her neck. She feels her spirit rising, above this scene of butchery she curses these human pigs, swarming over her blood like giant pregnant cockroaches. She sees golden cups and a cloth unfurled with ceremonial candle sticks. Incantations last into the night as she watches her body disassembled like a calf in a slaughterhouse. Even from the spiritual realm she can feel axes biting into her bones. Nothing but her head and spine and some fingers are left for the hounds. She sees an old woman put her head in a sack, eye lids still fluttering with the fading spark of life.
Esma awakens at dawn, Barstowe carries her into her dead Mother’s bed chamber. Her Mother has been vivisected, torn open as if by wild animals. Little more than a cherub-like face with sightless white eyes, mouth curled in youthful lust, yawning ribs emptied by pawing fiends. Legs still plump but not connected to anything, sprawled at unnatural angles, discarded by ravenous butchers. Barstowe in a mirthful tone declares. “You belong to me, your mother must stay on these shores. But you will be tutored and raised as my daughter. We sail at sunset. Say your goodbyes… They will come for you.”
Esma gasps as the windowsill is filled with unblinking golden eyes, glowing in the long shadows of dawn like candles on an alter. She blinks once, twice and hears the wings of owls taking flight. She is alone and her heart will never be unbroken after this night in the crypts. She is full of secrets, her hands clenched so tight she has broken her thumb. Her mother’s sightless eyes still hold tears for what was. Her hair was freshly bleached, she must have been looking forward to their future, perhaps sailing to the New World.