In everything there was omen and portent.
Folk still read tea leaves and examined the placentas of newborn calves searching for prophecy. Blood sacrifice in the form of sheep were given to ensure the harvest. But these things, of course, were done purely in secret… for the churches frowned upon them.
At night, entrances were sensibly bolted, livestock locked-down in barns, windows carefully shuttered. Horseshoes were nailed over thresholds to turn back demons, salt sprinkled in cribs and at doorways to keep witches at bay. No sane man ventured out into the midnight fields where frosted pumpkins were shrouded by ropes of fog and nebulous shapes danced in dark glades and oceans of groundmist.
Squatting in their moldering 17th century brick houses, the people of Procton mumbled White Paternoster, hung out clumps of Vervain and St. John’s Wort, and prayed to Christ on the Cross.
For evil was always afoot.
And for once, they were right… James Lee Cobb was about to come into the world.
2
In Procton, it began with the missing children.
In six weeks, five children had gone missing. They disappeared in the fields, on woodland trails, the far pastures… always just out of sight. The evidence was scarce-a dropped wicker of apples here, a few threads of cloth there. High Sheriff Bolton made what he considered a thorough and exhaustive inquiry into the matters, but came up with a nary a thing. Unless you wanted to count witch tales and chimney-corner whispers of dark forces at work. And Bolton, a very practical man in all manners, did not.
For the next three weeks… nothing, then in the first week of October, three infants were snatched from their cradles on the same grim night. Bolton made a flurry of arrests-more to allay wild suspicion and mob mentality than anything else-but in each case, the arrested were released for lack of evidence. Regardless, the tally was up to eight children by then. No longer could suppositions concerning marauding Indians or outlaw brigands suffice… there had to be a more concrete explanation. From the pulpits of Procton’s three churches, ministers were descrying with a passion that what was happening in the village was not mere human evil, but grave evidence of diabolic intervention. Despite the arguments to the contrary by Sheriff Bolton and Magistrate Corey, the clergy fanned the flames of public indignation.
Witchcraft, they said. And demanded action.
So Elizabeth Hagen was arrested, charged with the practice of witchcraft, sorcery, and murder.
Elizabeth Hagen.
She was known as the Widow Hagen and most did not know her Christian name. When someone in or around Procton mentioned “The Widow”, there was surely no doubt as to whom they were speaking of. Widow Hagen then, it was known, had lived in the vicinity at least sixty years, and possibly as many as eighty, depending on which account was listened to. She had outlived no less than four husbands… and, in all those years, had not appeared to age beyond a few years. She was not some spindly, wizened hag… but a stout and robust woman with silver hair and a remarkably unlined face.
This, of course, spawned suspicion… but the people of Procton admitted freely that she “had her uses”. And she did. Despite their puritanical God-fearing ways, those were hard, uncertain times. And the Widow Hagen was expert in folk remedy and herb medicine. She could and had cured the sick, lame, and terminal. And although the village preachers condemned her from their pulpits through the years, more than a few of them had been her customers when they suffered maladies ranging from arthritis to constipation, heart troubles to skin disease. She was considered to be “second-sighted” and could divine your future (and past) through divination: examining entrails and bones, melted wax and dead animals. There was little that she could not do… for a price. And that was rarely coin, but more commonly by barter… livestock, grain, vegetables. That sort of thing. And payment was rarely a problem, for the Widow Hagen, it was said, could visit tragedy and disease down upon you and your kin in the wink of an eye… and had more than once.
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.