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.
3
Until James Lee’s third year up in the Ozarks in Taney County, Missouri, the same ritual was repeated on a weekly basis. When Uncle Arlen returned from the lumber camps or the lead mine he sometimes found regular work at, he would take Marilynn Hope from the attic loft she was sequestered in and drag her bodily down to Bryant Creek. Along with James Lee’s Auntie Maretta, they would read from the Book of Common Prayer as Marilynn alternately whimpered and growled like an animal.
Though James Lee grew strong in the simple ways of hill folk, the taint on his mother never lessened. She was a filthy, mad thing dressed in rags with wild, glistening marbles for eyes. Uncle Arlen kept her tied up in the loft where she ate insects and shit herself, whispering to those no one else could see and scratching odd symbols and words into the roughhewn walls with her long yellow nails.
But once a week… purification.
James Lee would sit in the dirt, scratching around with a stick, watching with disinterest what they did with the crazy woman. Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta would drag her out with a rope looped around her throat. They’d strip her and toss her into the creek, jumping in with her. Taking turns, one would read from the prayer book and the other would dunk Marilynn into the water, holding her under until she quit thrashing. Uncle Arlen said it would drive the demons from her through baptismal in “Christ’s very waters”.
James Lee had seen it done many, many times, but it had not helped. Though at three years of age he could not understand nor fathom what it was all about, he knew whatever it was they were doing didn’t work. Dunk her, preach to her, dunk her some more, preach some more. He decided it was probably a game… but one only the adults could play. Because whenever he tried to edge closer, wanting badly to splash in the water, too, Uncle Arlen told him to keep away, keep away, hear?
But after three years of proper baptizing and the Lord’s word, Marilynn was no better. So Uncle Arlen imprisoned her in a shack in the hills above the cabin so they wouldn’t have to listen to “that heathen madness no more”. James Lee wasn’t allowed to go up there. Uncle Arlen and Auntie Maretta took care of the crazy woman’s needs-feeding and watering her like any of the stock on that hardscrabble farm.
It was a hard life up in the Ozarks, miles and miles from anywhere that might have been considered even remotely civilized. James Lee attended a ramshackle school over in the next hollow yonder, learned to read and write. The other children kept their distance, for they knew he was the son of the woman up in the shack, the woman everyone knew was “teched in the head”. The kids said-but only behind James Lee’s back for even as a schoolboy he had a virulent, raging temper-that the crazy woman ate rats and snakes and toads. That she had two heads, one she gibbered with and one she ate with. But maybe, too, they kept away from James Lee because they could smell something on him, something bad.
So he clung to the Cobb farm, slopping hogs and cleaning pens and picking rocks and chopping wood. He took great, unsavory relish in watching Uncle Arlen put chickens to the hatchet. Liked how their blood spurted from their necks and how, even when dead, they seemed to live on.
“Can folks do that, Uncle?” he asked one day. “Even if they’s all dead?”
Uncle Arlen made to swat at him as he often did, but held his hand back, fixed him with those fierce, unforgiving eyes. “Boy… that is, folks is dead they’s jus’ dead is all, they cain’t walk about and such and if’n they do…” He stopped himself there, scratched at his beard. “Well, they cain’t boy. They jus’ cain’t.”
“But—”
“Ain’t no buts, boy! No back to work with ye! Mind me, boy!”
And the years passed and James Lee got bigger and the children gave him a wider birth except for Rawley Cummings who took it upon himself to tell James Lee that he was no better than the crazy woman in the shack yonder. That, given time, he would drink piss and rut with hogs, too. It was a given. James Lee… though three years younger… jumped the boy like a mountain cat with a thorn digging into its ass. He kicked and punched, bit and clawed. It took four boys to pull him free. Schoolmaster Parnes gave him a good thrashing for that one and Uncle Arlen beat him so hard he closed both his eyes.
To which Auntie Maretta said, “Not m’ boy, not m’ sweet little angel Jimmy Lee… don’t ye lay a hand on him! Don’t ye dare lay a hand on him!”