And in her cell, Elizabeth Hagen chanted and sang songs and spoke in unearthly voices throughout the night.
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.
It was dragged from the coals with billhooks and twined tight with rope and chains. The Magistrates had it placed back in the stockade where it continued to howl and screech and profane all things holy. The cremated cadaver lived for days…until enraged locals dragged it out into the light and hacked it to bits with axes. Then it finally died. The pieces were buried in separate locations and the evil was at an end…or not quite.
For the demons that possessed the three girls did not vacate; they clung all that much tighter. They would not leave until their spawn was birthed.
Three months into their pregnancies…and scarce days since the destruction of the witch…the girls seemed to be ready to deliver…their bellies huge and round, their birth canals dilated. They had become wasted, skeletal things that gave off a pungent stink of carrion.
And so, they gave birth.
Clarice Ebers and Sarah Rice were first.
The labor pains were so intense, each fell unconscious. Copious amounts of blood and black bile drained from Sarah Rice’s vagina and she-a staring, sightless creature whose greasy flesh barely contained the skeleton beneath-ruptured. Or at least, it seemed that way. Dr. Lewyn used every trick he knew, but both child and mother perished in a sea of red. Later, he would-with the family’s consent-investigate matters more fully and discover that Sarah had ruptured because her child had teeth. A full set of teeth oddly sharp and long. And with these teeth, the child-a white, limbless horror with huge, lidless black eyes-had bitten its mother to death from inside, severing arteries in the process.
Dr. Lewyn decided wisely to keep this from the family…this and the fact that the child had not only bitten its mother, but had cannibalized her. Digesting no small amount of tissue in the process. He also kept secret the fact that Sarah’s child was not dead when he opened her up with a scalpel. That the grotesque little monster was living on inside its dead mother, feeding on her like some hellish prenatal ghoul. That when he pulled it from her cleaved open abdomen…an armless, squirming grub that had more in common with a maggot than a human being…he had to tear it free, for it hung tenaciously to its mother’s tissues by its teeth.
Lewyn dumped it in a bucket and poured acid on it, upon which, it dissolved like a salted slug.
Long before her child came into the world, Clarice Ebers lost her mind with the agony, if there was any mind left by that point. She cried out in the voice of Elizabeth Hagen, thrashed and fought and finally passed out. What she birthed into the world was a crawling thing, blistered and scorched. Like something that had been burned alive. Wisps of smoke wafted from its incinerated flesh and it, as it died, scratched a black, inverted cross into the stained bedsheets with one withered finger.
Clarice died moments later, her insides scalded.
The child was buried in Heretic’s Field, Clarice and Sarah entombed side by side in a Christian grave.
Marilynn Hope, however, lasted another month. Her child, when born in the winter of 1824, was healthy and normal in every possible way. A boy. The only irregularity was a birthmark on his back in the form of a tiny, four- fingered hand. But he was considered by townsfolk to be cursed, the progeny of unholy union. So Minister Hope sent his deranged daughter and her son to live with kin in Missouri where they could be sheltered from the world.
He named his grandson James Lee.
In Missouri he would take the family name of relations: Cobb.
