“L’enfant diaboloque” The devil child

Louisiana, 1934.

A miss Rosalind McDermott, aged 52, died from massive blood loss on the work bench of one Max “mad axe man” Bonépart, the ring master of Bonépart circus. A man of enormous size, and known for flinging axes at his loving wife, Maximillian had spent the better part of five hours trying to keep his rotund yet steadily dying spouse alive, but to no avail. She passed away in the small hours of the morning and he sat there, covered in her blood, sobbing into her petty coat. His handyman, a Jeremiah Sway, comforted him for a while, before leaving to report the death to the authorities.

The morning sun bathed Max’s love in cold light, and through the clotted hemoglobin that drenched much of her lifeless corpse, was a small fleshy pallid lump. He wiped away the congealed blood and spied the instrument of his wife’s death. A baby, as dead as its mother – sat in the palm of Max’s massive hands. But this was no mere child, for atop its little head were two malformed, yet perfectly symmetrical horns.
Max cried out in pain at the sight before him, and ran from the tent, to hide away this aberration.

The coroner released the details of Rosalind’s death to the police, citing a massive rupture in her womb. He assumed that she had undergone some sort of phantom pregnancy which had eventually caused a blood clot. Without the horned fetus now hidden away in the widowed husbands caravan, the coroner could not account for the the ragged contusions, yet did not see any foul play in the event.

But max knew different. For three years he had attempted to get his wife pregnant, yet with her age, it was very unlikely that she would be able to carry a child. Despite this he continued to bully her for an heir to his carnival throne, but each year bore no fruit.
The circus travelled through to New Orleans, where he asked Jeremiah to find him a witch doctor to offer guidance in bringing him a son. Jeremiah returned with little more than offerings of orphans from the town, which he refused, until one dark night, in the back streets of a small french colonial dwelling, the high witchpriest Malaga entrusted a recipe to Max. “This will bring a child for you, but don’t count your blessings, for the child will carry a mark, the mark of evil, the sickening son, a deformed being that will bring little happiness to you and your wife.”

Max saw no harm in a deformed child, if anything it would bring another attraction to his circus. He realized now that the pro’s outweighed the con’s and brought the necessary ingredients for this concoction. Despite Jeremiah’s continued objections to use of the substance, Max fed it to his wife morning and noon for eight months, and low and behold, his wife fell pregnant.

The magic had brought him an heir, a tiny dead form with the horns of the devil – a son who had taken his wife and stripped him of his chances of a son.

He could not bring himself to honor the tiny form, blaming it for the death of his wife. In his rage he stuffed it in a jar and marched to the caravan of Jeremiah Sway. He threw the jar at Jeremiah’s feet, muttering ” a donation to freak alley” – with that he left and hid himself away.

A month later, Max had disappeared, leaving the deeds to the circus to Jeremiah. Jeremiah honored the gift and business continued as usual, rolling through the backwater towns of the deep south, bringing its many curiosities, sideshows and rides to those seeking a thrill.
A small tent in the corner of the big top housed a collection of freak show gaffs and pickled creatures of unknown origin. Many were fake – the head of a fish sewn uncomfortably to the body of a rat – and a five legged white rabbit named Bugs, with one crooked brown leg.

But in one small case was something very real, that carried with it an air of woe. The skeletal remains of a baby, still crouched in a fetal position, its two little horns curved to the heavens.
Jeremiah christened it the devil child, invented a past for it, and cared for it like the many other orphans of his fabled circus. But he knew the truth, for he had seen the deposits of a grayish substance in its lungs, a mixture of poisonous plant extracts that had caused the abnormal bone growth, and its death. He shook his head – it didn’t take an genius to know who this child had belonged to, and the price it had demanded for its birth.

Presented here in a large victorian specimen dome with a tiny skeletal bird, the pair locked in a timeless gaze..