To the Archbishop of New England at King Henry’s Cathedral, at Saint Mary’s Town:

Your Pious Authority, apology concerning the parallel voodoo chants—far more vile than any vagabond doggerel or that any animal-worshiping heathen might ever compose in offense to Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. May it be that Our Lord listens elsewhere. Yet, in His very Holy service we are compelled to preserve the words and indeed the nighted hide of the dark devil that uttered them.

In the wake of the outrageous Voodoo invasion of Christendom this late summertime the serf plantations at the four cardinal points of the cross [1] were infiltrated by the most dastard and wicked agents of this devil plague. For, it appears, as part of Pappa Doc Black O’ Roy’s ambitions of domination by damnation, that racing out ahead of the three hordes of Piney Wood, Mississippi and Haitian Voodooists [2] that certain spry “Flower Boys” were sent. These savage ciphers of the abyss were armed, not with machetes, but with blow guns and leashes and the nectar of the Dream Flower cultivated in far Hindoostan; their sacred task to procure the lowliest maidens out of serfdom, maze them, leash them, and bring them back to Old Vile Black O’ Roy. Thus delivered, these maidens were—and in many cases no doubt are as you read this—to be mated with His Hellish Ingratitude [3] to breed children to be trained in hatred of Christendom and in its infiltration by varied means, what to turn our own lower orders up against us in heresy and revolt!

Brilliant wicked as this scheme may be, Old Black O’ Roy did err, I see, in that in arming his Flower Boys with a lower English cant had from some mongrel vagabond scum, what with to maze the serf maids, he placed into our righteous hands one of their number—and only one, only this one, the rest having made off with their fair freight or since swung from a gallows pole—capable of speaking in human wise. For it is well versed to us that just as the Samaritans and Chaldeans in antiquity infiltrated and corrupted Israel, turning its folk against Our Christ who they cruelly slew, thus concealing the fact that English was the true speech of Scripture [4], that the sibilant and subhuman speech of the Africans brought by the slovenly French to our southerly shores is a vile pastiche unsufferable to the learned English ear!

I relate to you here that which was chanted before my official presence at Saint Peter’s Pulpit upon the Sanguine Gallows Just, at the Cathedral of Saint George, what moved my official capacity to forgo individual justice for the greater good of Christendom:

“Pappa Chriseman!

Iff’a you know stretch my neck long—

Iff’n you leave me da brett [h] o’ man;

Machete Boy Pantha’ Roy, he sing you song!

“Pappa Chriseman,

I sing o’ machete hunt,

You Chrise metal men—

Da stinkman hunt,

You Chrise gunmen—

Da Granny haunt,

You horse slave men—

Da boogerman haunt,

You fair flower women—

En ub Pappa Doc Black O’ Roy’s Helldoor trunk!”

So sang the creature, cavorting hooded upon the gallows floor. The henceward given account shall be followed, not preceded, by the words of the voodoo child of Hell. For a Christian hand stained with the blood of confession got from the fair hide of the lone Christian witness, in order to validate by The Question the chants of said vile voodooist, can not bring its stained fingers to press the ink quill to the parchment in advance of the words wrung through righteous gore from the lips of even the lowliest Christian soul. [5]

-Alfred the 9th, 52nd Confessor to The Order of Saint George of the Cross, for His Eminent Prior, piously bereft of past name, in Service to Jesus Christ Our Savior and Lord, October 1, in the Year of Our Lord, 2031

…

Notes

-1. For we, Oh Grace, hold with the English manner of direction, and unlike some such uncouth heretics, lazy New Spaniards and the decadent French, forswear the Asiatic compass as a device as prone to mazement as the Poppy of Hindoostan. Thus, each of our castles and cathedrals on the frontier, hath plantations at the terminus of the sorrowed arms and crowned apex of The Cardinal Cross, with the foot of the Cross thrust into Satan’s face and manned by a Crusader Station—such be our piety as to shape our military and tillage according to the suffering of HIM.

-2. I intuit, but will not suppose, that you know of the canoe exodus of Voodooists from French San Domingo, since it’s conquest by the Spanish Viceroy of Cuba, a dire fellow dedicated to extirpating the Voodoo scourge that the slovenly French have so long tolerated in the depths of their moral decay. This vast horde failed to drown in that dastard sea and has assisted Old Black O’ Roy in slaughtering or enslaving the last remnants of the French aristocracy in New Orleans, which has been fiendishly renamed Port O’ Negroprince.

-3. Glory to God that the Kings and Bishops of England never entertained the return of the slave-trading Latter Day Chaldeans and their merchanting of abysmal African spawn over the honest shackled souls of serfdom. The wisdom of this is seen in the sorry fact that the decadent sons of France, following the vile counsel of their Chaldean userers, imported great numbers of Africans suffering the ill-intentions of other dark devils. And yet, being delivered from that devil land, instead of serve their masters justly and embrace Christ as our lower orders do—with the exception of certain mongrel strains of hill-dwelling wastemen, in time to be hunted to a cull—that these thrice dastard devils have turned whole and afury upon the soft necks of their own benefactors. It is my opinion that the whole of New France, save Guadalupe, lies now under Voodoo webs to our south and in scarcely better heretical hands to our north.

-4. Our Doctrine yet follows Newton upon this account. Pray advise if the recent purge of that Order has altered this doctrine. If it has not, than I am prepared to send an expedition into the Nevada Country [currently occupied by weak Spanish and Czarist forces] to determine if the Lost Tribes of Israel truly found a home there in antiquity. There is said to be a vast Dead Sea which some suppose may have been a point of pilgrimage in the wake of the Chaldean-Samaritan Conspiracy.

-5. The main, prose account, is had by way of the cat-o’-nine tails from a gallows boy become a ranger with The Knights Trace fallen into service to The Knights Saint George. This will be followed, not preceded, by the nine vile verses of the doggerel of the captive Voodooist, who I swore before Our Lord not to slay in return for his account.