Today was a most unfortuitous day. Even the wind and the sky seemed to mourn the coming change in her life. Angry clouds built great heights as if to warn of straying too far from safety. This was the day she got the fatal attention of the Circus millionaire Hiram Tiberius Barstowe and his European Circus.
An Englishman of ill repute. Known for cruelty and battering his employees to death on a whim, throwing drunkards to Lions and tossing missing children into his trains boiler in fits of rage. He has a Lion Tamer on call named Manheim Eidelman who walks the edges of town with a barbed whip and blood stains on his hands.
Barstowe was a brooding and cruel man. Top heavy, with spindly thin legs that moved far too fast for such a morbidly obese body. He was an angry man with a double chin, streaks of wild white hair. He always wore a top hat, pin striped suit with tails, with sleepless circles around his eyes seeming to be much older than his 67 years. Walks briskly with a heavy cane headed with a silver Elephant with ruby eyes. A cane notorious for bashing brains out of beggars, thieves and pickpockets.
Barstowe is always flanked by his 3 advisors. The Abyssinian, a mysterious Ethiopian Holyman. The Arabian, a traveler whose origins beyond the mystic sands and lost cities are unclear. The Hindu, an Aghori Sadhu adherent of Maha Kali Cult.
The Wisemen would never speak to any one but Barstowe and glared as passers by with a ferocious hate unhidden by any pretense of class or honor. They seemed almost like wraiths, so silent and stoic they always seemed to be watching, unblinking, speaking only to Barstowe in conspiratorial whispers of malice and ill intent.
Any time there was a dispute about money or contracts not honored the Wisemen would converge on the accuser and whisk him to some antechamber bellow the bigtop to count out the missing coin. But the accuser would rarely be seen again, in the same state.
Maybe years later you could guess one of the geeks or mindless freaks could be familiar in their mutilation shows or chasing mice and stray cats to eat among the garbage pits behind the carnival. Wisemen he picked up while touring the ancient cities of the Middle East along the Silk Road.
Barstowe was consolidating the local traveling Carnivals on both sides of the border. Buying up Tigers, Bears, Exotic Birds, Freak-show acts, Fist Fighting Clowns. Mighty Amazonian Snakes and a group of man killer lions that had put their original Circus out of business with a series of serious maulings up in Wisconsin that made the animals dirt cheap to the unscrupulous Barstowe.
His ancestors come from some long extinct house of central European Royalty. Intermarried with the Saxe Von-Coberg rulers of England, Dukes and Baronets of Poland and Austria. They made their money as arms dealers. Reselling deadmen’s horses and cannons. A fertile trade among the mass graves of war torn sacked cities and plague ridden ghost towns of the middle ages.
Be it rumors of plague or endless war. There was always hidden jewels and stolen wealth among the burning remains and boarded up houses of the dead and dying. Stolen treasures from the crusades in dry wells, huddled skeletons of persecuted religious orders in fields, lost mines and fallen fortresses. The Barstowe family seemed to have a distinct Godlike foresight for discovering vast riches from moldy bones and clutching hands of lost travelers in shallow pits and stark cliffside accident scenes.
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Barstowe comes from a long line of Circus Impresarios, his great-great Grandfather Wolfgang Albrecht Batorowscu ran a Circus in the time of Shakespeare that traveled from Moscow to Brussels and settled in the region of Burgundy and later London. Touring the battle weary towns of Europe during nameless wars. Collecting all manner of bones, armor, swords, shields, banners and orphans to join their performers. From the land of the Turks in Wallachian mountains of Romania and deep gloomy Russian steppe his ancestors have travelled. To the heart of India and the edges of coastal Yemen. Growing ever richer among the Incan holdouts of the Andes and distant Borneo in the Indonesian archipelago. Skulking among ruins of the ancients in the Aegean and Asia Minor.
Bartowe has stalked the lonely trails of the Himalayas and spent moonless nights on mountain tops calling to strange spirits in Tibet. He has sailed seas with Pirates and made deals for arms with Maroons. Took Opium from Afghanistan to smoke with Kings and Ladies of the fading Royal courts from Siam to the short lived Chilean and Argentinian kingdoms of Araucania and Patagonia. His life was like the nightmare version of all of Dorotea’s dreams of adventure and travel. A cruel trade of knives in the night and ropes around the necks of the unweary.
He has known Habsbergs and sat with British monarchs in the tombs of their Stuart rivals. His ancestors made millions cajoling and making plots for infiltration, networks of spies and saboteurs. They walked with Queen Ann and Bavarian warlords, traded spiked wine with Thuggee and white slaves with the Hungarian Cossacks. Explored wind swept tundra by Camel and Ox cart collecting rare books and epitaphs from the libraries of Alchemists burned alive for their knowledge.
He speaks a dozen languages and keeps books on dozens more. He is a collector of books and curiosities, he has an enlightened gentleman’s taste for all things ghoulish and depraved. Any time of conflict his wagons seem to come along to pick from the dead and entertain the wounded. His ancestors dined with the Ottoman Sultans, with Napoleon and famous Bandits of the coastal lip of Spain and the British Isles.
Barstowe’s family has a reputation as silver tongued devils. Cunning with eyes as ferocious as any predator. He loved tales of barbaric acts, had a encyclopedic memory for historical executions and torture. He loved to talk about the Spanish Inquisition and Imperial Chinese methods of justice like “death by 1000 cuts” or “death by elephant.” Talking by firelight of ritual magic and esoteric hierarchies of angels with the Catholic and Protestant elite. He founded secret societies and speculated on the meaning of dead languages last diatribes scrawled on temple walls. But the Americas were the land of the future.
Barstowe was growing weary of mundane life on the dusty roads of ignorant and backwards customs. His interests were hunting, adventure, grave robbing, mountain climbing, finding lost tombs and traveling among the sands of the strange and distant kingdoms on the off season. His acts weren’t drawing the crowds to learn their futures in the “House of Spirits”, the freak show was hemorrhaging money as the freaks had a never ending list of severe medical maladies. The Animals kept killing trainers and slowly but surely the rumors of missing children in each city they went through followed the Barstowe European Circus. Like a dark rain cloud looming just out of reach and the troop would break up their show and hit the road before the law could ask any questions.
Barstowe was now thinking of turning his carnival acts into a theater production touring the major cities. With the invention of the Movie Camera and Lithograph it was possible to show illuminated pictures of the circus and cut out all the traveling costs. He could permanently camp the show down in their winter quarters in Matamoros, and move the picture show around theaters in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Boston, Manhattan. He fancied himself an artist, seeking out young women to take studio photos and his private train.
He would offer all the spectacle of the show in his brand new attraction “the moving picture”. He was able to buy reels of film from great happenings around the world, but there was a darker lust in the audience for executions, war and the erotic. Things unheard of the polite world of the first decades of 20th century. Much of Barstowe’s dark intentions were obvious, but despite the air of ill intent unscrupulous mothers would eagerly push their daughters into visits with the photographer to do artful nudes and recreate orientalist fantasies of ancient Greece and Egypt.