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Chapter 40: Childhood 1/2
The marshy smell of humidity had always been there, but in Alastor’s memory, before everything was stained in red, that smell used to smell like home.
After Lucifer left, Alastor had simply dedicated himself to walking, lost in the haze of his own thoughts and the alcohol. His boots moved out of pure instinct, dragging him away from the lights of the French Quarter and into the muddy trails he knew by heart; leading him right to the place where it all began. To his childhood. To the time when he had been happy. He didn’t have much back then, but his mother made him feel as though he had everything.
The small, dilapidated wooden cabin on the outskirts of the bayou had no luxuries. For Alastor’s mother, the lack of money was a suffocating daily routine that shaped everything. It meant working daily miracles to stretch a handful of stale rice and a few roots gathered from the swamp so that the boy would have something in his stomach. It meant patching Alastor’s same worn-out shirt over and over again until the original thread was unnoticeable, and silently enduring the cold that seeped through the rotten floorboards and a tin roof whose leaks they could never manage to cover with patches.
They barely had enough for the basics, and any comfort was an unattainable dream. That was why that old radio belonging to the Richmond neighbors—which could barely be tuned in from afar when the breeze blew in their favor—was not just an appliance; it was the only window to a world where misery did not exist.
On hot afternoons, when the sun began to fall behind the canopy of the cypresses, she would sit in the rocking chair by the entrance with Alastor curled up in her lap. She would stroke his brown hair while singing old melodies to him in Creole and soft jazz, barely whispering over the croaking of the frogs.
—If you sing with enough joy, Al, sadness forgets where you live —she would always tell him, tracing a soft smile on his cheeks with her thumb—. Music is the only way to show your teeth to bad luck.
His mother, seeing the devotion in her son’s brown eyes for those distant frequencies, used to play-pretend that he was the broadcaster of the house. With an old wooden spoon as a microphone, little Alastor would narrate the "events of the day" to her: the flight of a dragonfly or the imaginary recipe for the pecan pie that poverty never allowed them to taste. She would listen to him with absolute devotion, applauding enthusiastically at the end of each homemade transmission.
That was how their days had been since her son had discovered the magnetism of sound waves. Alastor still remembered the first time he heard a real radio; he had started working at his young age as a shoeshine boy in the city, and when passing in front of an electrical appliance store, he couldn’t help but stop. He stood there spellbound, listening to a broadcaster who spoke with such luxury of detail that he captivated all the passersby. Little Alastor noticed that power and knew he wanted the same: he wanted people to look at him, to make others smile with his charisma and, especially, to make his dear mother laugh with his childhood antics every time he returned to the cabin.
But... those were the only moments of light in a childhood gripped by a constant shadow: his father.
For that man, poverty was an aged bitterness that fed on desperation. Every miserable day’s wage he managed to get or every day of unemployment ended in the same drink of cheap, worst-quality alcohol, paid for with the few coins that were supposed to buy food. That constant frustration of having nothing transformed the cabin into a powder keg. He was a man of heavy shoulders and a cloudy gaze whose mere presence suffocated the music. His mother always became a human shield between the violent man and the frightened child, receiving the blunt blows while ordering Alastor to hide in the closet and close his eyes.
But on the last night of October, misery was the dry detonator, and Alastor’s eyes could not close.
Outside, a storm was falling with heartbreaking fury, making the weak walls of the cabin groan. The father arrived later than usual, soaked and with the stench of gin filling the dense air. The argument didn’t start over some big secret, but over the most vile and small thing: the last coins that the mother had jealously guarded to buy a piece of bread for Alastor the next morning.
The man, blinded by vice and desperation, demanded the money. She firmly refused in order to defend her son’s food.
—There is nothing left! —the mother pleaded, her voice cracking with tears from the kitchen—. It is all we have for the boy!
—I don’t give a damn about the boy, and I don’t care about you either! —the man roared, out of his mind.
From the crack of the closet door, Alastor watched trembling, squeezing the wooden spoon between his little hands. A flash of steel gleamed in the light of a lightning bolt. His father drew a long hunting knife from his belt, a rusty work tool that was the only thing of value in the house. The mother took a step back, stumbling against the table, raising her hands in a desperate attempt at defense.
—No... please... —she managed to mutter.
The man lunged at her with a savage growl. Alastor saw the flash of metal descending one, two, three times. The sound was a dull, wet, and frightful noise, followed by a choked sigh that cut off abruptly. His father had taken his mother’s life right before his eyes.
The mother fell onto the floorboards, and a mantle of dark blood began to spread rapidly, filtering through the cracks in the wood.
The father stood there for a few seconds, breathing heavily. A cowardly panic replaced the drunkenness; he dropped the weapon onto the red puddle, turned around, and fled into the storm, leaving the front door wide open, allowing the cold rain to pour into the room.
Alastor came out of the closet slowly, as if he were walking in a grotesque dream. He approached step by step and knelt beside the warm puddle that was beginning to cool.
—Mom? —Alastor whispered, his voice small.
He took his mother’s hand. She was pale, losing her warmth at a heartbreaking speed. The woman’s eyes stared fixedly at the ceiling without seeing anything. Alastor waited for her to blink, waited for her to intone one last melody to drive away the bad luck. But the only response was the whistling of the wind.
The six-year-old boy sat there for hours, in the darkness of the night, holding the dead hand of the only person who had loved him. Tears slipped down his cheeks while the absolute weight of loneliness and helplessness fell upon him in a cabin where not even a piece of bread remained.
It was in that early morning, amid the smell of blood and misery, where Alastor’s mind suffered its first great fracture. He remembered his mother’s last lesson: “Your smile can change the world... show your teeth to bad luck.”
Slowly, Alastor’s tears ceased. The trembling of his body stopped. He looked at his mother’s pale face and the corners of his mouth began to forcefully stretch upward. He sketched a small, twisted, and broken smile. If the world was a cruel place where monsters won, he would never show himself weak again. He would show his teeth to fate, no matter what happened.
The next morning, when the county police arrived, alerted by the neighbors, they found little Alastor sitting on the porch under the drizzle. He was wearing his patched clothes, stained with dry blood, hugging the old wooden spoon against his chest, and maintaining a fixed, expressionless smile on his face. The officers didn’t just see the child of a tragedy, but a destitute orphan with no one in the world. That absolute poverty expedited the paperwork, pushing his destiny directly toward the cold and merciless door of the Garden Destiny orphanage.
He left that place carrying with him the old, abandoned radio of the Richmonds. It barely worked, but the crackle of the static was the only thing capable of maintaining his sanity in the isolation of the world; a battered treasure that, some time later, would end up left in the corners of the orphanage after his escape with Lucifer. Almost three months after entering that boarding school, a blonde boy named Lucifer would use his hands to carve him a real wooden microphone, sealing a promise that today, in the mud of New Orleans, had been broken forever.
Alastor walked by instinct, letting the gin and whiskey flow through his veins like pure static, clouding his judgment but sharpening the pain. He didn’t want to go to the studio, he didn’t want to return to the empty living room. His steps, erratic yet heavy, guided him outside the city limits, where the pavement died and the mud of the bayou reclaimed the earth.
When he raised his gaze through the mist, he saw it.
The ruins of the small wooden cabin stood like a rotten skeleton among the cypresses. The tin roof had collapsed decades ago, eaten away by rust, and wild vines climbed up the decaying boards, as if the swamp were trying to bury the scene of the massacre.
Alastor approached slowly, dragging his bronze cane through the high weeds. Crossing the threshold, where not even a door remained, was like breaking the barrier of time. The smell of mold and wet earth was still the same. The floor groaned beneath his boots, threatening to give way.
He stopped exactly in the center of what was once the kitchen. He stared fixedly at the floorboards, covered in fallen leaves and moss, but in his mind, the mud parted to reveal the mantle of dark blood and his mother’s pale body.
The bronze cane slipped from his gloved fingers, hitting the rotten wood with a dull thud.
Alastor fell to his knees in the exact same spot where, at six years old, he had held a hand that was losing its warmth. The alcohol finally stripped away what little composure he had left. He placed his hands on the floor, sinking his fingers into the damp moss, and lowered his head.
His smile collapsed again, breaking into a grimace of raw agony.
—Look at me, mama... —Alastor whispered, and his voice was not that of the star radio broadcaster, but a sharp, childish whimpering, choked by the static of an uncontrollable weeping—. I smile always... Even when they made less of me, even when they beat me, even when they tried to kill me so many times in the streets... I killed someone for the first time, and then more. I became known. My dream has come true, I am the most well-known broadcaster in all of New Orleans... But you aren't there to see me.
The hot tears dripped onto the rotten boards, mixing with the rainwater filtering through the open ceiling. In the midst of the ruins of his first misery, Alastor bled emotionally, understanding that the French Quarter apartment was now just another empty cabin, another fracture in his frequency, and that Lucifer had taken with him the last melody that kept bad luck away.
Alastor buried his gloved fingers into the moss claiming the floorboards, feeling how the coldness of the earth seeped into his bones. The gin burned his stomach, but it failed to anesthetize the revelation that had just struck his mind with the violence of an electrical discharge.
He looked at his own hands. The dark mud of the swamp clung to the leather of his gloves, covering them completely. In the gloom of the ruined cabin, under the effects of alcohol and delirium, the black earth began to transform before his eyes into a dense, warm, and scarlet fluid.
His mother’s blood. His father’s hands.
A spasm of pure, horrific terror ran down his spine. He pulled away from the floor abruptly, stumbling backward until his back collided with one of the rotten posts that still held up the structure. He stared at his palms with ragged breath, his chest rising and falling as a sharp, deafening buzz of broken frequencies invaded his ears.
—No... no, no, no... —the radio hiss broke from his throat, distorted, loud, laden with a savage interference.
He rubbed his hands against his crimson coat compulsively, trying to rid himself of an invisible stain that was engraved much deeper than the skin. Lucifer’s accusation—“You are a carcelero, Alastor!”—echoed in the walls of his skull like the reverberation of a gunshot in the radio booth.
Controlling. Rigid. Frigid. A man who suffocated the music of others to impose his own frequency by force.
Alastor let himself slide down with his back against the post until he was sitting on the floor, hugging his knees against his chest, shrinking in a desperate attempt to become the six-year-old boy who hid in the closet again. He looked at the empty space of the kitchen, the ruins where the rocking chair once stood, and fixed his hazel eyes, flooded with tears, on the darkness.
—Mama? —he called in a broken whisper, with a small voice, stripped of any aristocratic elegance—. Mama, look at me... tell me if I did things right. Please, tell me what I did wrong...
He stretched a trembling hand toward the darkness, searching for a warm touch that would never arrive.
—I showed my teeth to the world... just like you asked me to —he sobbed, and the weeping finally deformed the corners of his lips entirely, breaking the chalk smile into a gesture of absolute agony—. I stayed strong. I built an empire in the mud so that no one could ever trample on us again, so that no one would see that we were hungry, that we were cold... I made sure to have control of everything... of every frequency, of every street, of every life...
He stopped, swallowing a sob that tasted of gall and cheap gin. The weight of guilt oppressed his chest as he remembered Lucifer’s blue eyes filled with frustration and disappointment before packing his brown leather suitcases.
—Why did he call me a carcelero, mama? —he asked the silence of the bayou, his gaze lost and his soul empty—. Am I like him? Tell me I didn't become like my father... Tell me I didn't become the monster that turned off your music. I only wanted to protect him... I wanted his frequency to be mine because it was the only clean thing I had left... But I suffocated him. I clipped his wings... and he abandoned me. I'm left alone in the cabin again, mama... I'm left in the dark again.
The only answer he obtained was the whistling of the cold wind slipping between the decaying boards and the distant croaking of frogs in the swamp. There were no songs in Creole, no caresses in his hair.
Alastor dropped his forehead onto his knees, allowing the internal storm to finish destroying the last remnants of his pride. The star broadcaster of New Orleans remained there, in the middle of the rotten skeleton of his past, completely aware that his worst curse had not been poverty nor the Garden Destiny orphanage, but discovering that, in his obsession with never being the victim again, he had learned to use the very same chains as the man who took his mother’s life.
The mud of the swamp seemed to have swallowed time. Alastor didn’t know how many hours or days had passed since the floor of the WNOL was left empty. The alcohol no longer burned; it was just a dense fog that numbed the cold of the rotten boards of the cabin where he remained on his knees, his forehead resting on the moss and his bronze cane cast a few steps away. The great broadcaster of New Orleans was now just an exhausted body, trapped in the echo of his own ghosts.
The heavy splashing of tall boots against the mud broke the silence of the bayou.
Alastor didn’t move. Not even when the shadow of an elegant figure silhouetted against the rotten frame of the entrance. He heard a long sigh, laden with a mixture of relief and deep sorrow.
—Look at you... Three days searching for you throughout the entire district, Alastor. The radio directors are ready to declare you dead and you are here, trying to become part of the landscape —Rosie’s voice sounded tired, but stripped of her usual irony. She was genuinely worried.
She approached slowly, careful of where she stepped so as not to sink into the buckled floor. As she knelt beside Alastor, she didn’t care that the hem of her dark skirt became stained with mud. She placed a hand on his back. Alastor barely emitted a choked hiss of static, lacking the strength to raise his head.
—Let’s go home, dear —she whispered to him firmly, taking him by the arm—. You’ve spent enough time in the dark already.
The journey back to the French Quarter was a blur of fever, chills, and the rattling of a horse-drawn carriage that Rosie had rented. Alastor was barely conscious when she helped him up the steps of the apartment, stripped him of his moisture-soaked crimson coat, and settled him in bed, covering him with heavy blankets.
Rosie moved through the house with the familiarity of someone who knows every corner. She prepared ginger tea and placed a damp cloth over the broadcaster’s forehead, whose smile had been reduced to a tense, trembling line from the fever of the hangover and the cold of the swamp.
Upon feeling the cold cloth on his skin, Alastor’s mind, weakened by delirium, did not remain in the present. It traveled backward, dragged by the current of memories, to a time where the mud of the streets was his only home.
(Flashback: New Orleans, 8 years ago)
The New Orleans winter could be inclement for those without a roof. Alastor, barely fifteen years old, curled up against the back alley of one of the most luxurious pawnshops in the commercial district. He had a skinny body, bony shoulders, and wore a jacket three sizes too big that he had found in the trash. His hands, bare and cracked from the cold, held a wooden box with polish and brushes for shining shoes.
He had gone days without eating well, surviving on stale bread and water from public taps. That afternoon, a group of older men, port stevedores resentful from alcohol, had pushed him into the alley to take the few coins he had earned. Alastor had defended himself like a stray cat, biting and scratching, but the blows had left him on the ground, with a split lip and aching ribs.
Despite the pain, Alastor crawled to gather his brushes. His eyes were blurred with tears of rage, but his lips stretched in a superhuman, almost macabre effort to smile. “Show your teeth to bad luck,” he repeated in his mind like a mantra of survival, even though the blood stained his teeth red.
—That is a rather peculiar expression for someone who has just been used as a doormat, boy.
Alastor raised his gaze with clenched fists, ready for another fight. In front of him stood Rosie. She was twenty-five years old back then, and already radiated the aura of a woman who knew exactly how to move in the city's underworld. She wore an impeccable fur coat and a wide-brimmed hat with feathers. Her dark eyes scanned him from head to toe, pausing on the boy’s forced smile.
—Leave me alone —the young Alastor spat, his voice broken by puberty and the cold—. I’m cleaning my tools.
—I see you're cleaning your tools, but I also see that you have two broken ribs and that you haven’t tasted a bite since yesterday —Rosie took a step forward, without showing a shred of fear at the adolescent's hostile glare. She crouched down, meeting his level, and pulled a silk handkerchief from her bag—. Wipe the blood from your mouth. It gives me a headache to see such a poorly done job by those brutes from the port.
Alastor rejected the handkerchief with a swat.
—I don’t need your pity. I can work. I can do whatever. Tomorrow I’ll have more customers.
Rosie looked at him fixedly for a few seconds. Instead of taking offense at his rudeness, she let out a clean, loud laugh that echoed through the grey alley.
—I don’t pity you, boy. I like you. You have too much pride for such empty pockets, and that smile... well, it’s a bit frightening, but it shows you have guts. What’s your name?
—Alastor —he replied, distrustful, hugging his polish box against his chest.
—Well, Alastor. I am Rosie. I own an antiques and distribution business a couple of streets down, and my boys sometimes need someone who is quick with errands and doesn’t ask polite questions. If you’re going to smile at the world while bleeding out, at least do it earning a good wad of bills. Walk with me, I'll buy you a hot bowl of gumbo and we’ll discuss your salary.
That night, in the back of Rosie’s shop, Alastor ate hot food for the first time in months while she, patiently but bluntly, bandaged his ribs and taught him that in New Orleans weakness was a sin, but cunning was a currency. Rosie became his mentor, the only person who saw the birth of the monster and helped to shape it, transforming the starving orphan into the respected man he was today.
Alastor opened his eyes slowly. The ceiling of the French Quarter apartment came back into focus. The fever had broken a bit, leaving only a cold sweat and deep weakness.
To one side of the bed, Rosie was sitting in a chair, calmly sewing a tear in the hem of Alastor’s crimson coat. Noticing that he was moving, she set the needle aside and looked at him with those dark eyes that had known him since he was nobody.
—Back from the dead, I see —she said softly, bringing a cup of hot tea closer to him—. You had a long night in your dreams, Al. You were murmuring things about the streets and the pawnshop.
Alastor accepted the cup with trembling fingers. He tried to force his smile to its maximum, but Rosie simply gave him a gentle tap on the forehead with her index finger.
—I already told you fourteen years ago in that alley, and I repeat it to you today in your bed of silk sheets: with me you don’t have to act, Alastor. I know exactly how many teeth you have and how many times you’ve used them so you wouldn’t cry.
The broadcaster drank a sip of tea, letting the warmth spread through his chest. The radio filter remained off, leaving only the voice of the friend Rosie had saved from the mud more than once.
—It feels the same, Rosie —Alastor confessed, looking at the steam from the tea—. It feels like the alley. As if the empire I built didn't serve to retain the only thing I wanted to take care of.
Rosie reached out and took his hand, squeezing it with the same strength with which she had lifted him from the mud when he was fifteen.
—The empire serves so that no one ever tramples on you again, dear. But people are not territories that you can conquer or frequencies that you can tune by force. Lucifer left, yes. But you are alive, you are safe, and you have a radio booth waiting for you when you stop looking pitiful in this bed. Now, rest. Tomorrow I will accompany you to the WNOL myself to ensure you walk in as the owner of the city that you are.
