Skin Medicine

Although equally feared and respected, she was not generally considered evil. She could be found digging roots and tubers in the fields, sifting through graveyard dirt and mumbling prayers to the full moon. She had a shack out by the edge of the salt marshes that was reached via a winding trail that cut through a loathsome stand of woods, where? it was said? that high grasses rustled and the tree limbs shook even when there was no wind.

The shack was dim and smoky, lit by hearth and whale oil lamp. It was strewn with hides and bones, feathers and baskets of dried insects. Shelving was crowded with a dusty array of jugs and retorts, flasks and alembics. There were corked bottles of vile liquids, vessels of unknown powder. And jars of brine which contained preserved dead things, things that had never been born, and others which could not have lived in the first place. So the Widow Hagen amused herself with her old and profane books, the skulls of murderers and suicides, Hand of Glory and exotic medicinals. Folk came to her for remedy and prophecy, for a needed blessing over child and harvest field.

She was never part of the community as such, but her power was unmistakable.

Then things changed.

New ministers replaced the old. They were not tolerant of paganism, regardless of its promise. These young upstarts not only attacked Hagen from the pulpit, but threw together town meetings which they vehemently banned any interaction with the old witch. Saying in no uncertain terms, that to have commerce with her was to have commerce with Satan incarnate. The ministers fed on Procton’s puritanism and repressive worldviews, turning them once and for all against what they considered the enemy of Christianity-Widow Hagen and her curious ways.

Year by year, then, less and less sought out the Widow’s wisdom and expertise. No more charms and talismans, love potions and cure-alls. Her shack became a shunned place and she became ostracized to the point where she could not even buy her goods in the village.

A month before the first child disappeared, a group of men tried to burn down her shack. When that failed-the wood refused to catch fire-she was publicly stoned in the market square. Raising her hands to the sky, the bloodied and broken Widow Hagen said loud enough for all to hear: “A curse then, breathern…on ye and yer ways!”

Then the children began to disappear.

Village livestock were plagued with nameless afflictions.

Weird storms raked the countryside.

Crops withered in the fields…practically overnight.

And no less than four village women gave birth to stillborn infants.

So when the children turned up missing on top of everything else, there could only be one possible miscreant: Elizabeth Hagen.

Witch.

***

She was duly arrested by High Sheriff Bolton and a posse of deputized men and placed in the Procton stockade: a windowless, insect-infested sweatbox with dirty straw on the floor where the accused lived in his or her own waste and was fed perhaps every second day. The crude walls were scratched with supplications to God above.

And the investigation, as it were, began.

Sheriff Bolton was in complete agreement with Magistrate Corey and the learned members of the village General Assembly-it was all superstitious rubbish.

Then, Widow Hagen’s shack was searched.

Upon entering, the posse smelled a vulgar, nauseous stench as of spoiled meat. And no man who went in there that windy, misting October afternoon would soon forget what was uncovered. There were soiled canvas sacks of human bones-children’s bones, still stained with blood and plastered with stringy bits of sinew. The skulls were soon uncovered buried beneath the dirt floor. As were the maggoty and headless bodies of the infants. All of which bore the marks of ritual hacking and slashing. And at the hearth in a greasy black pot, some pustulant and ghastly stew made of human remains.

But in the root cellar below was found the most gruesome and unspeakable of horrors, something swimming in a cask of human blood and entrails. Sheriff Bolton later described it as “something like a fetus…a hissing, mewling mass of flesh…a blubbery human fungus with more limbs than it had any right to possess”. It was shot and brought into town wrapped in a tarp. The village physician, Dr. Lewyn, a man of some scientific background and possessed of a microscope and other modern equipment, dissected it. Bolton’s observations were proven correct, for Lewyn’s inspection revealed the creature to be human in form only. It’s anatomy was terribly rudimentary, reversed from that of a normal human child and was entirely boneless, unless one wished to count the “rubbery, fungous structure within”. The cadaver gave off a hideous, fishy odor and was immediately burned, the ashes buried in unconsecrated ground.

It was said the Widow Hagen screamed from her cell when that particular blasphemy was given to the flames.