An October in Libreville
It is early autumn, cold, October 1919. The world is recovering from war and the Spanish Flu. In national events, President Wilson suffered a stroke recently, and we have entered those last glorious months before the introduction of Prohibition. Scant weeks from now the Palmer Raids will visit mass deportation of leftists and radicals, part of the ongoing strife between the working class and the elites (represented in part by the likes of Willard Arthur Crump in the microcosm that is Libvil). The Libreville Sanitarium has just opened its doors for business, there's a new club opening downtown off what the locals call "Jazz Alley", and the mayoral elections are nigh. Oo-ray, oo-rah, the Roaring Twenties are upon us, friends!
Miles Cressbeckler has a busy day ahead of him. Today, he must train another set of delinquents to work his print shop on Earle Street, boys hailing from St. Regina School. Mild anxiety fills him as he reflects on the last group, considering if it isn't too soon to start taking on new charges. The police had certainly bought into the story that the miscreants had simply wandered off, and, though Cressbeckler was the last one to see them, it wasn't unheard of for such boys to simply skip town for weeks or months at a time.
"Ah crud, what a mess," he groans, stepping in a pile of chewing gum, ruining his new leather shoes.
"And how!" answers a passerby, gone before Miles can look up. Anger fills him. An indignity beneath the Cressbecklers, one that would have to be punished.
He rounds the corner, fuming, just in time to hear the chapel bells as St. Regina lets out for the day. A well-built ox of a man ushers out a pack of cheaply appointed boys through a side door; he is Mr. Bradley, the Physical Education Teacher, a man of little other than stern and unhappy expressions.
"Here is Mr. Cressbeckler, you boys. Don't talk back to him, now, and get going with him! You remember: better to work than to rot!" Bradley growls, his red face pinched. There is an air of disapproval about him.
"My thanks, Mr. Bradley," Cressbeckler offers distantly, his mind still on that damned gum. It was probably one of these very boys. Well, they'd get what was coming soon enough.
"Cheap labour for local business, a reduction in youth delinquency in the community. A work draft rather wasteful spending on jailing them," Adam Cressbeckler had told his fellow councilmen and the mayor. No-bid contracts for his own were, naturally, included in the offing, with Miles being the largest beneficiary.
He surveys the boys, all lined up as they are. He knows their names from the dossiers he reviewed earlier in the day. Names, faces, crimes against society. Travis Faunk and Tadwell Stickers, feared among the weaker and nerdlier segment of the local school population. Neville Statternby, son of a wealthy local landlord whose fortune was sufficient to ensure that an apprenticeship at the printer's would be the harshest punishment his boy would face for his increasingly horrific acts. Nicholas Naberius Lincolnship and Toby Crenshaw, caught worshipping the unspeakable in the basement of the Libreville Church in the Spring of 1919.
Miles Cressbeckler looks the young delinquents over and notes their physical imperfections, the sadness and frustration conveyed in their posture and bearing. He studies the muscular tensions in the face of each boy in turn, silently noting the obvious correspondence between their physical conditions and their invisible internal conditions, and he is unimpressed. With a sigh he proclaims each of the boys utterly predictable and thus accurately predicts the extent to which any of them might be found useful in the business of printing.
Lifting a tray full of cliches to the light, he decides that the Statternby and Crenshaw boys might be of some use to him.
The other three he will feed to his Queen.
Cynddelw Cystenian sat at his desk and tapped his pen against the open page of the notebook. He had been sitting in silence like this for hours. The notebook was open to what would be the last page for most people, but Cynddelw's left handedness and ruggish individualism led him to open his books from right to left.
The first set of worrisome thinking he'd been experiencing was the belief that he was a magician or wizard, and one of particular prowess. He believed he had, in a fit of rage, afflicted his next door neighbor with chronic and undiagnosable presentations of weeping sores on her hands and feet, as well as voices in her head. He had done this entirely in his imagination, vividly experiencing the process of filling little bags of ratskin with gunpowder, fecal matter, rusty nails, dried Coca Cola, and the like, then hiring local punks to bury them in a spiral around the woman's house.
He had also, one afternoon, afflicted the nation's most famous radio talk show host with Parkinson's Disease. He had done this by making a collage and showing it to his roommates.
The thing that was bothering Cystenian is that he'd done both of these things without really thinking he was doing anything other than using his imagination or playing around with photographs. He certainly had no belief in the occult.
Cynddelw rolled another joint and tapped the notebook with his pen some more. It was the year 1999.