The Business of Perdition

I’ve seen Hell, and it’s not a fiery eternity of demons torturing the spirit. Nay, 'tis a sinister place, swirling about under our very nose and woven into the fabrics of our mundane day-to-days. Therein, the demons - the true demons, are not behemoths and leviathans but rather a meandering, malignant trudging of a repulsive continuum left to suppurate in the soul like some abhorrent spiritual sickness.

Times spent amongst the indigents, and crawling haggard paupers of the London outcasts left a festering wound on the heart. On a morning stroll, one might find those dapper, fat aristocrats en route to tend to their own daily affairs. However, amongst the dark dead ends and beneath the dreary windowsills, forlorn shadows leaned motionless against ashen walls. Disregarded like strays, you’d see them there, day after day, longing for some mutual warmth or consolation of their extreme misery. They were victims of vice and circumstance discarded upon the stoops of the London workhouses, reduced to a degree of desolation and wretchedness that destroyed even the energy to beg. They had not the strength to struggle for bread, and rather settled for starvation over the activities which the ordinary mendicants would employ. Thereupon that waning existence, they seeped through the cracks of social order to be cast into pervasive mires of repugnance.

In those gutters, the beggars and urchins were the upper echelon of a bleak society, there to care for the inferior souls of those old, frail folk. Thus, the mendicant might do their part, giving a morsel of what they had managed to beg to those less fortunate than they. So it was that such meager lives were prolonged with stale tea and bread or perhaps on better days, a flyblown bone. This subsistence however, diminished them to some lethargic state which I scarcely imagine is preferable to death itself; constantly dozing, yet never truly asleep.

It was that living hell that sparked an imploring interest to know what great eternity waited beyond this grueling, belligerent toiling. I shan’t claim to be a spiritual man, for God and I have an arduous history, but surely there was something more.

Those more fortunate folk such as I, spend our lives carrying on, ignorant, to the fathomless beyond. We fear death, not in the sense of it stalking us like a predator, but rather the unknown. Thus, we struggle day after day to prolong what life we have. It thins the heart and body in ways not physically observable, but rather the feint spark within that drives our aspirations and partnerships. It eventually wanes to scant more than cold ash wherein roaring fire once burned. Hollow and sunken we become. Alive, but not truly living. All this to avoid that unknown expanse of the thereafter – the intangible void of eternity.

I yearned for it. That aimless existence amongst my arrogant and unpleasant peers drove me to escape the futility. Not to die, for there was nothing to me worth dying for, yet neither was there something worth living. To carry on the façade of propriety in a society where the poor and meek toilers were held in hock to backstairs dealings and clandestine fortunes seemed more a hell than that grotesque misery that loomed in the shadows and alleys among those wretched folk who were beggared by our own fat decadence.

Avarice after all was but a common methodology used in everyday dealings, from us aristocrats, to the friars and priests of the church. Masked with all good intentions, trades and bonds were always more than they seemed. It was the churning miasma of business that spewed the frothing refuse of discarded vagrants and abandoned undesirables. I longed to distance myself from it all and thus began my studies of the mystical.

I was born into wealth and spent my youth learning tradecrafts and stockjobbing. Through the stern, impassive teachings of my bastard father, I became a shrewd businessman. I hoped at times for some encouragement or, dare I say, affection but it never came. I’d contented myself with the understanding that I was simply a means to ensure the family business endured long after he was unable to continue the job. As such, I saw myself not as a successor, but merely a clause on a paper buried somewhere in a lawyer’s desk. My father made it clear in the beginning that he held no affection for me, perhaps not in words, but his indifference was always palpable. He, however, never absconded from his duty to raise me. I never went hungry, nor had I gone without clothing. I had ample roof over my head, and more money at hand than I could readily spend. Such was the opulent life of a financier’s son, and though it was a far cry from the grinding anguish of those shadowy outcasts, it was, in its own right, a singularly hellish life.

The frenzied nature of business and finance after all, was as cutthroat and deceitful as the roman empire’s bloodied history. We were snakes, preying on equally wealthy but less cunning predators in the trade. Similar to antiquity, empires were crushed and expunged from history, not with sword but with tradecraft. It was those conquests that determined the fate of the luckless destitutes and indebted sods of the straitened masses. I kept myself as far from the outcomes as I could, but never was I unaware of those souls that languished beneath my stoic perch atop the sanguinary precipice of affluence.

It was those exasperating thoughts of the inadvertent casualties of business; those raddled masses, that gave me restless nights. A petulant whining of afterthoughts afore retiring for the evening. Whereupon mindful consolidations of that day’s business always concluded with a sickening catharsis of the indigent hordes left ragged and starved by my own dealings. I felt a shame – guilt that such poverty was, by some degree, my own making. Though my life was its own hell, I knew, it contributed to yet someone else’s.

I wanted freedom from it but couldn’t simply run away, for my father wouldn’t allow it. Though I was a man grown, I had not the resources nor the connections to make my own way in the din of London’s commercialism. After all, I was little more than a business negotiation - heir apparent to his wanton empire. Therein I divulged the solution, though as distasteful and dishonest as it was, my father’s lessons taught me to be anything but virtuous.

I could have killed him; strangled him in his sleep or slipped some poison into his evening brandy, but that was too good for my father. His name would have lingered on, endlessly enshrouding the orderly pandemonium of London commerce. No, I had resolved to utterly and unequivocally destroy him wherein his memory would be a pock upon the opulent ledgers of English businessmen.

In that regard, it was advantageous to live in London, for the undercrofts of reputable businesses housed all manners of the obscene and unsavory. Though I lacked certain business connections, my dealings and ventures financing expeditions to the far-flung continental coasts afforded me certain relationships with remarkably well-traveled, and superstitious lots. The unspoken laws that governed the maritime industry garnered many deviant rumors. Though most were readily dismissed as sailor’s superstition, others were rather considered well kept secrets of the trade. As I’ve said, business was nothing more than predators preying on each other and nowhere was that more apparent than the seas.

As I was taught, I cared little for the methods those mariners used to conduct their business, I cared only for the profit that such expeditions would bring. There was, however, more to their continued patronage than money. Sailors brought back stories, and none were more intriguing than the Ars Goetia. It carried a certain reverence amongst those mariners who sailed along the Persian coasts. They told lofty tales of the summoning rites of the Solomonic demons, granting wishes, forbidden knowledge, and as most sailors cared, stormy or quiet seas. The understanding and unlocking of those secrets was chief among my early pursuits, but superstitions garner a certain hushed whispering and harshly silenced fables. Few men spoke of it and fewer seemed to know more than broken fragments of information.

I spent months deciphering the disjointed ramblings, and fearful tall-tales to discern the cryptic keys to unlock that great mystery. Over time, I melded in with those clandestine folk as though I were but another crawling urchin myself. Ashen and ragged so not to raise questions or concerns though it was a constant obsession to discover this unknown mysticism that left my appearance so neglected. I spent all my waking moments rattling about those shards of knowledge to wrench any threads of useful information, each day closer - yet so far from the truth. The lingering, always vigilant crows and rooks carried on as always, from the rooftops, and were my only audience as I scurried about those shadowy, shuttered nooks and recesses, pressing every mariner for their own tales. Cackles and caws became my laughter and thunderous applause.

It was after those long months in the mud and drudgery and the flippant throng of the corvids on the rooftops that my obsession was noted by a peculiar, eccentric indigent. He was grotesquely caked with the filth of poverty that I could not discern his ethnicity, but he was clearly not an Englishman. His dirty skin festered and cracked when he moved, bleeding deep crimson over his coat of black, scaly dried mud. Dark voids of eyes stared down, quiet and angry, but ancient and wise as the cosmos. When he beckoned, I felt a gnawing, unfathomable urgency to heed his summons. He spoke soft, but curiously forceful as though he shouted from across the stars.

"The Rookery," he wheezed out, with a sharp, ragged voice akin to the scraping of gravel beneath boots.

A long, crooked, cracked finger pointed away south when he spoke. His eyes kept averted down into the muck upon which he sat, as if afraid to look at me. He rocked himself, humming low some indiscernable melody, all the while, his other hand traced some strange scrawling in the mud. His bony hand shook with the tremors of one as old as the dirt upon which they sat, but it was deft and abrupt, scraping away at the ground in circles and zigzags, bisecting and circling back on one another in a peculiar and enchanting dance.

"What will I find there?" My voice rattled, sheepish and strangled as though I were being scolded by my father.

A hollow, empty maw curled as he looked up at me, toothless and smiling - constantly humming that forlorn tune as he rocked. Cracked, bleeding eyelids blinked over his abyssal voids of eyes as he grinned that hollow, bedraggled grin. There was about him, something monstrous. He was frail and old, bleeding all over from his wrinkly cracking skin, but somehow fearsome. An air of calamity and apocalyptic prognostication seemed to blanket him, yet his old, gnarled figure was warm and comforting like that of the grandparents of fairy tales; loving and calm.

"That that will depend on you," he croaked, phlegmy and rough but clear and airy.

He looked back down at his work as his dirty, yellow fingernail scraped along the coarse, half-dry mud. It traced along an unsettling yet strangely familiar scrawling. I could not quite place it, but in the teeming chasms of my deepest afterthoughts I could feel it there - the same etching.

A nail pulled away from his fragile finger as he scraped deep letters into the ground along the outside of his etched circle. Trickles of crimson dripped into each letter, vanishing into the mud like water when it drops on sand - yet blackening the deep troughs he'd dug, until finally hed completed his work. His bony finger stopped at the terminus of the last letter. As he pulled his injured finger away drops of blood trickled into the scored earth beneath, leaving in the dirt, a haunting scrawling.

"Go to the rookery," he croaked again, curling his bony hands into his ragged clothes.

I knew of the area to which he referred - St. Giles Rookery. A seething cluster of hovels and shacks, bursting from the overcrowded, unthinkably impoverished immigrants of London. 'Twas a place where the rules of English law did not reach, for it was scarcely if ever patrolled by police. The fine folks of the aristocracy, such as myself, avoided such places. For in those festering and gloomy alleys, we were the vermin more so than its residents.

"They will find you," his crooked, festering voice trailed away.

I rattled it about over and over in my head as I stared into the expanse of the glyphic scraping in the mud. The scathing raucous laughter of the crows called out to me from voids beyond my sight, from some far-flung expanse across an unseen frigid mountain range. It echoed in depths, a coarse and harsh cawing, scratching against the back of my skull and into the pits of my ears. In that chattering clamor, that bedraggled man slithered away into those dark dead ends. I hadn't noticed it in the commotions of the mind, but he was gone. Somewhere in that screaching and scraping ruckus, a harsh whisper chanted on.

They will find you

Then, it had stopped. The ruckus, the roaring, the scraping, all of it - gone. Even that most astute audience upon the rooftops, my corvid witnesses had flown away, but still that whispering remained. It was an unsettling statement that lingered in the back of mind, skittering and biting at me like midge swarms, but I understood. For all that time spent feverishly in search of answers, someone or something had taken notice, thus they extended to me my invitation, and it was a summons I would surely attend.