Skin Medicine

A week into the trial, for more and more witnesses kept coming forward, the three girls-Clarice Ebers, Marilynn Hope, and Sarah Rice-all in their sixteenth years, began to exhibit the physical characteristics of women in their fourth months. Their bellies were oddly swollen and this, seemingly overnight. Dr. Lewyn admitted it was impossible, that even one such case stretched the fabric of credibility…but that three surely canceled out the possibility of coincidence.

And it grew worse.

On the same night, all three girls underwent violent seizures. They fell into violent fits in which they attacked anyone nearby, screaming and cursing and destroying anything at hand. They scratched madly at their skins, as if trying to free themselves of something that burrowed within. Sarah Rice actually peeled a great deal of flesh from her arms and thighs. All three had to be restrained so as not to harm themselves or others… and to keep them from running off in the woods, to someone, they claimed, that beckoned to them and filled their heads with “horrible noises”.

Of course, it just got worse day by day.

They would not eat, claiming they could only consume blood and raw meat. They profaned their mothers, fathers, and anyone within earshot. Objects moved about their rooms, things were ripped from walls, timbers groaned and splintered, furniture toppled over. The girls spoke in tongues, in the voices of the dead. They told of hidden secrets that they could not possibly know of. Black, reeking fluids were discharged from all orifices. Profane melodies were heard emanating from their swollen bellies. Polluted, noxious smells seeped from them. And more than one person fled in terror when they heard voices whispering from the girls’ vaginas.

There was no doubt: the girls were possessed of demons.

Demons, no doubt, loosed by the hag herself, Widow Hagen.

Exorcisms were attempted by the ministers and all were glaring, horrendous failures. Minister John Rice of Christ Church battled with Marilynn Hope for hours upon hours, trying to wrest her soul from the malignancy that had consumed it. He read scripture over her and demanded she…or whatever lived in her…submit to the will of Jesus Christ. But the girl would only laugh and bark and writhe, speaking in various tongues and languages. She demanded meat and blood be brought her. She demanded the flesh of children. Minister Rice underwent physical attacks from objects flying about the room and from “a malefic force as of a cold wind that threw me about.”

The demon in Marilynn spoke in the voice of Minister Rice’s long-dead first wife, telling him in graphic detail how she was being sodomized in Hell. How his father and mother were there, fornicators and child-eaters, and to prove this she spoke in their voices…very often at the same time.

After some twelve hours of psychic, physical, and spiritual attacks, Minster Rice was led away…a beaten, broken man, his soul laid raw like a festering wound. Ebers tried next, for Marilynn’s father had not the strength to look upon his own daughter in such an obscene condition. Things went well at first and it seemed that whatever dwelled in the Hope girl was relenting. Marilynn began to cry and pour out her wracked soul over the macabre torments she had undergone. When Ebers bent forward to listen to her whispered confession…she licked his ear, said something only he could hear. Something which sucked the color from his face. Something which made him run from that room in that cursed house until he reached his own and was able to press a pistol against his temple. And end it.

It was hopeless.

The three girls were locked in the grip of a seemingly omnipotent evil that owned them body and soul. Whatever it was, it was malicious, perverse, and toxic to any who dared toy with it.

***

The trial of Elizabeth Hagen ended and she remained locked in the stockade. The Magistrates were unable to decide on her fate. If she were executed would the evil in Procton only get stronger? Or would it be purged? These were dangerous matters and ones, they decided, not to be considered lightly.

But public opinion ran high and strongly, so there was little choice in the matter. Elizabeth Hagen was dragged from her cell, lashed to a wagon wheel and rolled through the streets before a jeering, hateful crowd. In a clearing known to locals as Heretic’s Field for it served as a makeshift graveyard for “suicides, heathens, and those kin folks were ashamed of”, Elizabeth Hagen was burned. The wheel she was lashed upon was tied to the trunk of a blasted, dead oak and set afire.

But even this was no easy matter.

Though heaped with kindling and engulfed with flame, she would not die. She burned for hours…burned, blackened, crisped and curled, but refusing to die. She called out curses upon all present. The wagon wheel finally collapsed under her and the roasted, charred thing she became continued to shriek and wail and scream.