by Lola Swain
When Alexander was twelve, he asked his mother who he would marry. Mrs. Battle made it quite clear that the boy would never find a woman worthy of him to marry and he should just resign himself to living with her for the rest of his life. When Alexander spoke of other girls, Patrice so feared a whore would come steal her son away that she pulled him out of school, had a classroom built on their property in Cambridge and hired a male teacher to instruct Alexander. Any time the boy tried to assert a shred of independence, Patrice bound the boy tighter.
If this behavior concerned Mr. Battle, he never said much. He was out of town a lot and he never crossed his wife. But for all their coddling and praise, Alexander did not grow up with a bit of self-confidence. Painfully shy and troubled, Alexander spent the majority of his time alone. And the visions, when they came, did not help him connect with anyone.
Alexander began having terrible dreams around the age of ten. Disgusting nightmares of him ripping other children apart with his hands, rape, murder, necrophilia infiltrated his brain during sleep. But more disturbing than Alexander’s visions, was the fact that rather than scare him, he was extremely aroused as he recalled the dreams.
As Alexander got a little older, the visions continued and aroused him more. Alexander took to making himself fall asleep by drinking one of his mother’s many tonics to induce unconsciousness just so he could have a dream. When he woke, he’d recall the dream and masturbate violently.
Beginning when he was fifteen, the visions crossed over into his waking life. When he saw a child stroll by his bedroom window, he fantasized about following that child. He envisioned himself snatching the child up, dragging it into his basement and then defiling the child in the most violent and disgusting ways.
When Alexander Battle turned sixteen-years-old, he started sneaking out of his house and going on, what he referred to as wanders. These wanders occurred at all hours of the day and night. He never did anything to anyone, but he fantasized as he took horse-cars all over the area. It was during one of his wanders that Alexander Battle met Jesse Pomeroy as Jesse brutalized a young boy in an outbuilding in the town of Chelsea.
Alexander stood in the corner of the building and watched Jesse beat a boy with a belt. The child was suspended from the ceiling of the outbuilding by a rope tied around his wrists. Jesse made the tortured child scream swear words in exchange for his life. While the child screamed profanities, Jesse took his own pants down and fondled himself.
When Jesse saw Alexander standing in the corner watching Jesse’s display, he was ready to retreat, but Alexander told Jesse everything was okay and encouraged him to finish, adding that he would join Jesse to assuage his fears. Alexander Battle finally found a friend in the twelve-year-old homicidal maniac Jesse Pomeroy.
Alexander and Jesse went on many wanders together and Alexander was finally emboldened to act out his visions on real children. After all, Jesse was the perfect partner in crime, just as sick as he and more likely to be accused than a wealthy boy from a good family.
Even though Jesse began torturing children on his own, there was no doubt that Alexander became the puppet master after he and Jesse became friends. Alexander scouted out the locations and the children and while Jesse actually committed most of the blunt force on the children, Alexander told Jesse what to do and how to do it while he masturbated in the corner.
The hardest part for this maniacal team was finding places to carry out their crimes. Though Boston and its surrounding areas did not have a population near what it is now and had plenty of open space, it was still heartily populated.
Alexander had a wonderful thought. He decided to find a place where he and Jesse could carry out their torture sessions; a place only for them and a place where they would never get caught.
Alexander announced one evening at a family supper that he wanted to become an architect and he required all sorts of draftsman tools to pursue his goal. This made Mr. and Mrs. Battle very happy as they never heard Alexander speak of a goal or even the future and they supplied his classroom with everything a budding architect needed. While Alexander continued his wanders with Jesse, he set to work and drew out grand plans for a building to carry out every fantasy Alexander had. There wasn’t just one building on the site, but many. Torture chambers, every one.
When Jesse Pomeroy was finally captured and convicted, Alexander Battle was despondent. He never feared for a moment that Jesse would give the police his name. Jesse Pomeroy was a true friend. He missed his only friend terribly and he thought he didn’t have the courage to carry out their wander games on his own. Alexander scrapped the plans for the community and retreated to his room where he did not emerge for two weeks.
During the time of Alexander’s retreat, Patrice Battle, very concerned about her son’s despondency, snooped around his classroom looking for clues. And when Patrice found those clues, she nearly fainted. Patrice uncovered Alexander’s diary which went into graphic detail about Alexander’s and Jesse’s adventures, a handful of hair, with scalp attached, filthy rags covered in a dried substance, several erotic photographs of nude men and women that appeared to come from Paris and drawings of horrific scenes that seemed to involve two older boys and children. She also found maps and Alexander’s draftings of the buildings and dungeons.
As a Boston Brahmin family, Patrice Battle knew that if they wanted to keep their membership in this elite club, no one, including her husband, could ever find out about what she found in Alexander’s classroom. After the cook went home for the evening, Patrice threw everything she found in Alexander’s classroom in the fireplace in the kitchen.
Patrice always felt there was something that wasn’t quite right about her son, even though a lot of what wasn’t quite right about Alexander was caused by Patrice herself. But after she found the atrocities in Alexander’s classroom, she stayed far away from her son and fantasized about the day when he would leave her and Mr. Battle.
Alexander eventually came out of his fugue state and went back to work in his classroom. He knew that his mother found his things even though she never spoke of them, but it mattered not to Alexander because he had everything in his mind. Alexander expanded his vision based on his penchant for violence and his desperation for connection. He decided to develop not just a compound for himself to carry out his acts, but a community where he and other like-minded wanderers could live and be free.
Alexander never gave up hope that his best friend Jesse Pomeroy would be released and he sent his allowance, a healthy sum for that time, to the prison every week to be deposited into Jesse’s account. He sent letters to Jesse regularly, the only letters Jesse ever received during his lifetime incarceration, outlining his plans for their special place and told Jesse he would have a job waiting as soon as he was free.
Alexander perfected his drawings and spent much of his time in government offices in Boston studying land maps of Massachusetts. One day, he came across an ancient map, unlike the others he pored over, outlining a large parcel of land on Cape Cod. He asked the Land Surveyor why this parcel was left off the other maps he had access to and became more curious when the surveyor couldn’t offer much information on the deserted area. The truth was, after 1699 when the settlers of the Witch Colony were captured and hung, the site was left off subsequent maps and surveys of the area and the last map, the map Alexander Battle came across, that depicted the site was dated 1672.
Five years after Alexander Battle befriended Jesse Pomeroy, he chartered a boat and paid a reluctant Captain handsomely to take him to the site. Alexander was now twenty-years-old and going full steam ahead with his plans.
When Alexander arrived at the site, it was once again overgrown with wild weeds and brambles. He brought his machete, a tool that Jesse made for him years before to make their wanders more interesting and hacked away at the brush. He felt like an early explorer and as he came to the area where the abandoned outbuildings were erected, he felt as if he discovered a new world. The wind howled through the wild t
rees and the temperature in that area seemed many degrees cooler and much damper.
Alexander came upon the meeting house, vacant since the last day Jonas Dashiell walked the stone floor in 1802, and found a large box made of metal on top of a worm-hole covered table. In it contained the Formicarius, the Malleus Maleficarum, diaries and notes from the settlers of the Witch Colony and Jonas Dashiell’s diary. After a cursory glance of the texts, Alexander Battle knew he was among kindred spirits. He tucked the box under his coat to take back to his home in Cambridge for further inspection and set off back to the boat.
As Alexander made his way back to shore, a great tower of earth and weeds erected from the ground caught his eye. He chiseled at the muck, hardened by one hundred years, with the tip of his machete.
White stone, gleaming beneath the dirt, appeared in the areas he chiseled. Alexander worked to free whatever lay under the thick shell of soil. And finally, he found a face and Adelaide was freed once again. Alexander Battle’s fate was sealed.
After making it back to Boston, Alexander marched into the Provincial Assessor’s office with a fistful of cash and announced his intention to purchase the land. The Assessor wanted nothing to do with Alexander Battle’s insane notion of buying the cursed land. He discouraged Alexander from buying the property, even saying it was not for sale, thinking he’d ingratiate himself to Alexander’s wealthy and influential father by preventing what the Assessor thought a most costly mistake. But Alexander would not be swayed.
He told his father of his plan to purchase the land and how the Provincial Assessor refused him. Mr. Battle was not in the habit of being refused by anyone and he certainly would not stand for his son to be refused. Patrice Battle, now a crazed wreck because she lived every day knowing the monster who was her boy, just wanted Alexander gone and begged her husband to help her son make his dream a reality. No one said no to a Brahmin and after the Battle men descended on the Assessor, negotiations were underway for Alexander Battle to purchase the land.
In the beginning, the Commonwealth rejected Alexander’s plan. Regardless of Battle’s Brahmin status, those who were well-entrenched in Boston’s historic government did not want any more witch hysteria entered into Massachusetts folklore. The government was also concerned that when questioned about his intended use for the land, Alexander Battle never gave the courts a clear answer. Alexander once again went to his father and Mr. Battle came up with a perfect plan.
The Battle men presented the Commonwealth with new plans for the site. A grand hotel was now the land’s intended use. The Commonwealth quickly conferred and decided to grant Alexander Battle’s request thinking that they had something that would not only dispel the curse, but provide Massachusetts with an economic stimulus.
The Battleroy Hotel, Alexander’s compound of his and Jesse Pomeroy’s names, was born.
“Humanity I love you because when you’re hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.”
e.e. cummings
After many stops and starts, ground finally broke on the Battleroy site in 1890. Fourteen years passed since Alexander drew up the plans of his dreams and now they were about to become a reality. The Commonwealth was pleased with the final plans and contracts were awarded to Mr. Battle’s metal company, Battle Metals and the Quincy Quarries.
Alexander refused any help from his father, other than his money and Patrice actually funneled money from her own inheritance into Alexander’s building fund just to make sure that nothing stood in the way of getting Alexander out of her house. Alexander was now thirty-four-years-old and showed no signs of leaving the family home. It was Patrice’s secret hope, now that she and her husband were in their later years, that as soon as the Battleroy Hotel was built, Alexander would take residence there.
Alexander never ended his wanders and Patrice knew this. She watched Alexander continue to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night and every time she read of a child abducted or found murdered in the area, she knew in her heart that her son was involved. Since the day she found Alexander’s disgusting treasures, Patrice never stepped beyond the doorway of Alexander’s classroom, renamed his office as he aged. But when Alexander was gone, she walked through the back garden toward the freestanding building.
Her heels clicked snappily across the cobblestone path that she had laid many years before to ensure her brilliant boy had a grand entrance to his classroom. Her gait slowed and she wrung her now-arthritic hands as she came upon the door, still as glossy and red as the day it was painted. She put her hand on the glass door knob, something she had crafted especially for Alexander in Spain, figurines cast of gold suspended in the glass of the knob: a book, a ball and a teddy bear. She turned the knob slowly and steeled herself as the hot air of the room hit her in the face as the door creaked open.
And when she was hit with the odor, the same odor that she now associated with her once beloved son, she held her breath to prevent the smell of rot from infecting her further. She wondered how long it would take for the distinctive stench of decomposition to waft its way through the neighborhood. How long would it take before the good citizens of the area to realize that in her house, a murderer lived?
For all his planning and excitement about the Battleroy site, Alexander rarely went out there to check on its progress. He communicated via post with the construction foremen, a burly former criminal by the name of Thomas Conway who was a friend of Jesse Pomeroy’s brother. Alexander was only interested in going out when it was completed and he left a strict schedule for Mr. Conway to adhere to, including specific instructions on how the restoration of the statue, who Alexander learned through the diaries was called Adelaide, should occur.
As he was an obsessive and psychotic personality, Alexander was now consumed with the Formicarius and the Malleus Maleficarum, as well as the other texts he brought home with him when he first visited the land. He became enthralled with the ideas of the men from the Witch Colony, bolstered by the claims of the Malleus Maleficarum, that all women will become witches if they have the right Devil to inseminate them.
Alexander gazed at his handsome reflection in his mirror and smiled.
“But for me, who is more of a devil?” he said as he straightened his tie.
Alexander decided that it was time to pick a bride, a queen to preside with him over the Battleroy and aid him in his devilish pursuits.
While Alexander’s tastes always veered toward young male children, he was intelligent enough, or at least, cunning enough, to realize that he needed to use someone to put a public facade over his private desires. For all his insanity, Alexander Battle was not insane enough to believe that his avarice for bloodlust and young boys would not eventually get him thrown in the gallows.
But who does a man, who spent much of his life in solitude, save for a brief span in the company of another psychotic, choose for a bride? Alexander Battle sought out his cousin, the only child of his father’s brother David, the beautiful and youthful Athena Battle as the perfect succubus to his incubus.
Athena Battle was sixteen-years-old at the time of her courtship with Alexander. When Alexander made his intention known to his mother, she was horrified. An incestuous relationship between cousins would not be tolerated in such a wealthy family of stature and civility. However, Patrice Battle also knew that her monster of a son would only bring more scourges upon the family if this was not allowed. Better he should putrefy his own home with his sick, twisted perversions than continue to do so in hers.
Patrice Battle went to her husband and told Mr. Battle of their son’s wish to marry Athena Battle. Mr. Battle scoffed at his wife at first, but the old man was in increasingly declining health and no match for his much stronger and passionate wife. Patrice explained that with his wealth, Mr. Battle could fix anything. A meeting was arranged between the cousins, a trick perpetrated on the daft Athena by Mrs. Battle herself.
Patrice arranged a boat trip for Athena and Alexander to Cape Cod so Alexander could take Athena o
n a tour of the Battleroy site. It was assumed that after Athena saw the magnificence of what Alexander built, any possible reservations the girl had about marrying her cousin would be gone. After all, Patrice posited, everyone eventually lies down for money.
Alexander continued to send Jesse Pomeroy his money, as he still received an allowance, and wrote to his incarcerated friend to update him on the Battleroy’s progress. Alexander told Jesse of the fraud he perpetrated on the officials of the Commonwealth and of how they bought the story of the proposed hotel.
He also told his forever friend of his plans to trick his cousin Athena into marriage by the invocation of the Devil, something he studied in the Formicarius and the Malleus Maleficarum. Like those before him and many after, Alexander Battle did not see the ancient texts as cautionary tales against witchcraft, rather he used them as instruction manuals for his own gain.
For all of her beauty, Athena Battle was as stupid as a sack of tacks. Patrice knew this to be true, as did Athena’s own parents who wondered how their only child could be such an idiot. Athena’s father realized that the only hope to carry on the good Battle name was for Athena to marry. It was this angle Patrice used to convince all parties involved that marriage to Alexander was the Battle clan’s only hope of continuation. If Alexander or Athena did not marry, the Battle name died with their children.
In a culture where women were taught to be seen and not heard, no one was more surprised than Athena’s parents that their exquisite child did not any suitors. Athena herself was responsible for this problem, for when she opened her mouth, the sheer stupidity of her words, boggled the minds of men and women alike. So with much reservation, but knowing the truth as it was, the Battle family agreed to allow Alexander Battle to court and quietly marry his cousin Athena.