Little of the early life of this major War-era participant is know to be true; however, certain suppositions and conjectures can be assumed based on known facts. The story appears to be close to this. Peter Lazarus began his working life as a lay preacher in Victorian England. It is unclear who his parents were, though he is believed to have run away from home at a young age. His work as a preacher on a box in either a Derbyshire or Yorkshire town (records are ambiguous on the location) soon gave way to his love of the performing arts. His first appearance as a male psychic coincided with his bizarre inheritance of a travelling carnival from an unknown source. Contemporary reports were impressed by his psychic abilities, perhaps suggesting he had genuine powers; or at least, those reports from his audience were. Reports from the only known audience participant in his act, a man, seem less-than-amazed by his art.

This contradiction appears to have been a major factor in Peter Lazarus’s first life, being as he was, very much a man of contradictions: psychic v not psychic, performer for the people v hater of the people, black v white.

His taking over of and touring with the circus coincided with the disappearance of a large number of women in each town or village the group played, and it wasn’t long before Lazarus himself became a source of suspicion. He claimed he was just a kindly old man who enjoyed tending to his steadily growing collection of circus animals, and that outsiders and performers were, as far back as he could remember, the target for any problems that happened along; he’d said as much to Dave Christ.

Either way, he was a natural target for Faction Paradox, who recruited him as a field agent at an unspecified date. Latterly rechristened ‘Father Lazarou’, he is believed to still operate his circus on behalf of the Faction with his collection of geeks and freaks, including the famous Mohandas and the infamous Barbara. With his long Edwardian top hat and coat, and cruel black and white visage, complete with gold-tooth-bearing rictus grin, the nightmarish ghoul’s peg-selling antics have become a major Faction Paradox saga now.