If Edger Allen Poe were an architect he would have designed the city of Mansfordshire in 1889. With the Thames river on one side, Mansfordshire is a haunted city etched in varying shades of gray regardless of the time of day or night, clinging desperately to it's past and the secrets buried there in. All despite the turn of the century inching closer with every tick of the clock.
On the EAST END, affectionately known as "The Narrows" because the people who live there are said to live in the spaces between the cracks of gentile society, the patchwork design of careless, shabby concrete, wood, and steel construction raked at the sky almost in anguish of the existence. While on the streets below the dregs of society, the people drawn and colored in the the very same varying shades of gray as the city itself from bangtail to butcher, larcenist to blacksmith, school teacher to dancehall feature, shop keep to chimney sweep, put up a desperate struggle to find a place on the food chain as either predator or prey with little if any difference between the two.
If the East End is halloween, the WEST END is christmas. Known as "The Heights" because the rich people who live there are above it all, the only real color to be found in Mansfordshire resides on the West End. Emitted from the almost countless lavish shops, upscale boutiques, and the grandeur of the theatre district that drew top hatted gentlemen and parasol toting ladies of society like moths to a flame with their seductive glow. But beneath the "to do" and the "much ado" of the West End, there is an inherent coldness, an emptiness, that exists from the soil itself to the tops of the elaborately designed and constructed buildings and mansions built upon it and within every man, woman, and child that called the West End home. Because unlike the natural gray of the East end, the brightness of the West End is false color. Color without warmth, humor, or soul. Less compliment to life that true color should be, and more a trick of the light. It is color that camouflages the dirty dealings, underhandedness, money lending, and back stabbings that have gained many paradise here on earth at the expense of heaven hereafter.
As it has been since the beginning of time, the "haves" and the "have nots" are separated only by chance, circumstance and, in Mansfordshire, a series of back alleys where the East and West end's of the city met, but did not touch known simply as "THE DIVIDE" (also known as "the ass crack of Mansfordshire"). The serpent like twisting of the series of inter-connecting back alley's formed a generally recognized land boundary between the East and West ends and literally divided the city in two.
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