The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Witch-Hazel ^{Jeffrey Ford}

Back in the day, in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, from October 31 to November 2, All Souls’ Day, people who lived in the woods or close to them would pin to their coats, their blouses, the lapels of their jackets, a flowering sprig of witch hazel. It’s a shrub that grows naturally in the barrens and blossoms right around Halloween. The flower looks like a creature from a deep-sea trench, yellow tentacles instead of petals radiating from a dark brown center that holds a single seed.

The name of the plant could have something to do with real witches and witching but not necessarily. The word “witch” is derived from Middle English wicche, and all it means is “pliable” or “bendable.” It’s a reference to the use of the branches of the witch hazel shrub in the art of dowsing by early homesteaders to the barrens. Dowsing is the practice of locating things underground with and through the vibrations of a Y-shaped tree branch. One thing’s for sure, the “hazel” part of the word comes from the fact that in England the branches from the hazel tree supposedly made the best dowsing rods. That tree didn’t grow in the barrens, though, and so the settlers found a substitute that was equally pliant—a shrub with crazy flowers that blossoms in the season of Jack-o’-lanterns.

The practice was fairly prevalent until well after World War II, but most of those who still don witch hazel for the holiday don’t know its symbolism, and only do so because they remember a parent or grandparent wearing it. In this manner the tradition might limp a little further into the future before completely disappearing. There’s a tale, though, that is now rarely repeated save around the kitchen tables and fireplaces of real old-timers. It begins in the year 1853, in the barrens village of Cadalbog, a place that presently exists as only one crumbling chimney and the foundation of a vanished glass factory lost among the pines. The loose-knit community of glassmakers, blueberry harvesters, colliers, and moss rakers, had been there since 1845. By 1857, the village was deserted.

A reminiscence of the place that has survived in the diary of one Fate Shaw, the wife of the factory owner, describes Cadalbog as “an idyllic place of silence and sugar sand as soft and white as a cloud. The local cedar ponds are the color of strong tea, and along lower Sleepy Creek there always seems to be a breeze shifting through the pines, even in the heart of August.” Supposedly Mrs. Shaw did everything within her power to provide for her husband’s workers and their families. She was well liked and well respected, as was Mr. Shaw. One of the events she put on every year was a Halloween celebration.

Unlike the citizenry of most of the other settlements of the barrens, either Swedish or Puritans from Long Island, Cadalbog was founded by Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine back home. Their Halloween antics were brought with them from the Old World. There was disguise, not as monsters or ghouls, but people would dress up and pretend to be dead relatives. Turnips were carved instead of pumpkins. There was always a huge bonfire, dancing, fiddle and tin whistle music. Out in the middle of a million and a quarter acres of pine forest, in the spooky autumn night, it didn’t seem so outlandish that those who’d passed on might return to beg for prayers to shorten their stays in purgatory. In that setting, even these pragmatic people, who’d survived much, could believe for a few nights that spirits were afoot.

In 1853, Halloween fell on a Monday, and the celebration could not be held on the night of a workday. Likewise, Sunday was out of the question, as it was given over to the lord. So it was Friday, October 29 that the incident occurred. There was a cold breeze out of the north. A roaring bonfire licked the three-quarter moon with a snapping flame, and the music reeled. A strong fermented brew called heignith, concocted from crab apples, wild blueberries, cranberries, and raw honey, among other ingredients (its full recipe is lost), was consumed by the barrelful.

Attending the celebration that night was Miss Mavis Kane and her sister, Gillany. These two women, identical twins, were well-known even though they lived on the outskirts of the village. Gillany had been married at one time, but her husband, Peter, a Quaker collier who’d been born in those woods, succumbed to a rattlesnake bite, leaving the sisters to fend for themselves. By the account of Fate Shaw, they managed quite well. To quote from her diary, “The Kane sisters are a stoic pair—dour and pale and of few words. They move silently like ghosts around their property, chopping wood, repairing the steps to the front door, throwing a stick for that black dog of theirs, Brogan.”

As reported by Fate, their sole uniforms were ankle-length black dresses of a sateen weave. Even in summer, out in the forest, hunting the yellow shelf fungus that grows on the sides of trees (they made a good profit drying it, crumbling it up, and curing it with honey to make a kind of sweet brittle), they wore light corsets and high collars. Their long black hair was gathered into one large knot and left to lay upon the spine. To the Halloween celebration they brought a basket of Kane’s Crumbs, as the local treat had come to be known. The sisters, though both handsome women, weren’t asked to dance. They didn’t drink or eat but sat and simply stared at the fire and the goings-on. Their fixed expressions were the only masks they needed.

Sometime after the drunken singing had turned to whispered laughter a small meat cleaver appeared, as if from nowhere, in Gillany’s left hand. Its blade glistened in the glow of the dying fire as it sliced the air, struck, and split the backbone of Ray Walton, the foreman at the glass factory. As he screamed, blood immediately issuing from his mouth, Mavis put a knife through the throat of the Ahearn girl, who folded to the ground like a paper doll. They each went on hacking out their own private trails of horror: fingers flying, blood and bowels falling, eyes skewered, ribs cracked, wrists hacked. A storm of screams broke the stillness of the barrens.

It took some time for a group of factory laborers—male and female—to subdue the sisters. The Kanes fought, it seemed, without awareness—as if they were under a spell. By the time the two murderers were tied up and being led away, there were six dead and twenty wounded. That’s a lot of people to dispatch in a relatively short time with only sharp kitchen utensils. The Burlington County sheriff in Mount Holly was sent for, and the twins were incarcerated in separate store rooms in the glass factory. Old Dr. Boyle, once of Atsion and since run away to the woods after accusations of malpractice, was already on hand, drunk, pronouncing death and treating the wounded. He agreed with Mr. Shaw’s assessment that the attack was too random and mindless to have carried an intention of murder. Most everyone who witnessed it firsthand agreed.

When his duty to those injured at the celebration was finished, Boyle went to the factory to inspect the Kanes. By then the sun was coming up, and the breeze dropped yellow oak leaves in his path. The smoke from the bonfire pervaded the air, bottles lay strewn about the clearing behind the factory and down the path into the deep pines. He entered the brick structure and was greeted by Shaw, who showed him down a back hallway to a small door hidden by shadow. Boyle, a careful man, put his ear to the door and listened. The factory was empty and unusually silent.

“Who can tell the difference, but I think someone who would know said this was Gillany,” said Shaw.

“Is she tied up?” asked Boyle.

“Oh, yes, quite securely.”

“Did she say anything when you got her in here?”

“Nothing. She foamed at the mouth and spit. Growled some.”

“Okay,” said Boyle, and nodded.

Shaw moved forward and inserted a long iron key into the door’s lock. He turned it, there was a vicious squeal from the hinges, and they entered. The room was small, with a low ceiling and one window at eye level looking out across an expanse of reed grass toward the pond. The only light in the dim room came from that source. Boyle felt claustrophobic. He set down his bag, took off his hat and coat, and hung them on the back of a chair. The only sound was that of the woman’s breathing, steady and strong. She was asleep on the floor, her hands bound behind her back, feet tied. Her black hair was unknotted and covered her face. Blood soaked the sleeves and skirt of her dress.

The doctor had Shaw fetch him a lantern, and by that, he examined her. When he rolled her onto her back, he discovered her eyes were wide open as she slept. “Most unusual,” he said, bringing the light closer and closer to them, unable to make the dilated pupils constrict. As he wrote in his personal report of the case (held, along with surviving files of his other cases, at the Joseph Truncer Memorial Library at Batsto Village), “There were a number of odd signs upon the first of the Kane women I examined, not the least of which was a high fever. The eyes were like saucers, the skin around the sites of her lymph nodes had gone a vague green, her eyelashes had fallen out, and there was a silvery substance dribbling from her left ear. All of these struck me as potent signs of disease. When I inspected her lower body, I found her legs covered with insect bites, which I knew were chiggers from that feel of sand when I brushed my open palm against her shins.”

According to the story, it’s then that Shaw, standing by for support along with his wife, who had since joined him and Boyle in the store room, took a small jump backward and gave a grunt, pointing at something white wriggling out from beneath Gillany Kane’s undergarments. Boyle swung the lantern to give a better view. There wasn’t just one bloodless worm inching down her legs, but it was clear there were a dozen or more. Fate Shaw put her hand to her mouth and gagged. The doctor got to his feet and moved away as fast as a man of seventy-five with a bad liver and bad knees could. He went to his bag, hands shaking, and removed his tools to extract a blood sample. As he leaned over the body again, he called over his shoulder for Shaw and his wife to get out. “No one is to enter this room or the one in which the sister is being kept until I return. Make sure to lock them both as soon as I’m gone.”

Back in his home halfway between Cadalbog and Harrisville, Boyle brewed himself a pot of coffee and brought out the brass microscope a wealthy Dutch patient of his had gifted him early in his career for saving a favorite son. Still not having slept from the previous night’s festivities and mayhem, he peered bleary eyed into the tube of the mechanism at a slide holding Gillany’s blood. What he wrote in response to what he witnessed through the eyepiece was only this—“A strange pathogen, blossoming, from the woman’s blood cells—many armed, like the wild witch-hazel flower. I’ve never seen the like.” He stood from his table on which the microscope rested and stumbled to bed. There he slept for a brief interval before heading back to Cadalbog.

He arrived at the factory in late afternoon to find a commotion. It seems that the woman who was hot with fever and in a trance, sleeping with eyes open, somehow revived enough to smash through the small window that looked out upon the cedar pond. As Fate Shaw put it, “We were novices as prison guards. No one ever suspected she’d break out. It was beyond possibility to us. A search party has been sent out after her.”

Boyle told the Shaws and a few of the workers not home grieving for murdered loved ones or caring for those wounded, “Gillany’s got a disease I’ve not ever heard of or seen before. Something that has crawled out of the dark heart of the barrens, no doubt centuries old. She’s got the telltale signs of a bad chigger infestation on her legs. I believe she spends a good deal of time in the woods? She and her sister are mushroom gatherers, if I’m not mistaken.”

Fate Shaw nodded.

“I’m guessing the chiggers carry the bacterium. She’s infected. We’ve got to find her and treat her, or if she’s discovered already dead, burn her.”

“Not to mention, she’s diabolical with a meat cleaver,” said Fate.

“Whatever it is, it’s like typhus, a parasite that affects the brain.”

“What about her sister?” asked Shaw.

“Take me to her,” said the doctor.

The factory owner handed Boyle a rusty Colt revolver. “In case she becomes murderous. It’s loaded.”

“You hold on to that. I’ll end up shooting myself in the foot,” he said.

On the opposite side of the factory, they came to another door cast in shadow. This one opened into a storeroom with no window, but larger than the first. In the middle of it, surrounded by shelves holding various bottles and tools, was Mavis Kane, bound to a straight-backed chair with her arms joined behind her. Boyle noticed immediately that she was awake and alert. She too had blood on her black dress, but her hair was still in a single knot. He found another chair in the corner of the room and moved it around so he could sit facing her. He found the resemblance to her sister distracting. As he set his bag on the floor, he said, “Miss Kane, how are you feeling?” She was placid, expressionless. She stared straight through him. Her lips moved, though, and she answered.

“I’ve a fever,” she said. “An infernal itching down below.”

“Your sister is also ill. When did she begin not feeling well?”

“After we met the woman out by the salt marshes.”

“Who would that be?”

“An old woman, Mother Ignod, the color of oak leaves in spring. She wore rags and told us she was a witch who had been put to death by settlers almost a century before because she spoke to the deer and they listened. She found magical power in the lonesome, remote nature of the barrens.”

“How did they dispatch her?”

“Drowned her in a bog.”

“And now she’s back?”

“‘For revenge,’ she told us.”

“Upon whom?”

Mavis remained silent.

“Do you recall your sister being afflicted by a bad case of chiggers?”

“Yes.”

“What about you? Did you also have them on your legs?”

“Yes.”

Boyle retrieved from his bag at his feet a blue bottle with a cork in the top. “I’m going to give you something to drink. It’s going to cure you,” he told her.

Mavis didn’t say a word, didn’t look at him when he stood from his chair and came toward her, pulling the stopper from the blue bottle. “Drink this,” he said, and handed it to her. He was a little surprised when she took it, put it to her lips, and did as he commanded without a question, without spilling a drop, without grimacing at the bitter taste. What he’d given her was a tea made from the witch-hazel blossom, toadleaf, and ghost sedge. She drank till her mouth filled and overflowed and dribbled down her bloody dress. He let her finish the entire bottle. She handed it back to him; he put the cork in it and returned it to his bag. As he sat in his chair, he reached back into the bag and took out a different bottle, this one brown. Black Dirt Bourbon, Boyle’s self-prescribed cure-all. He sipped and mused while he waited for his elixir to work.

In his notes on the case, the doctor stated that he believed the invading parasite had caused swelling of the women’s brains, which caused their psychotic behavior. The witch hazel was an anti-inflammatory, and the other two ingredients had what today would be called antibiotic properties. Although he’d been trained at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school, a few years living in the barrens and he’d combined his formal knowledge with the teachings of folk medicine. He writes, “The two of them must have been under the influence of the disease for weeks as it slowly grew within them. Gillany was further along for some reason, and I had lost hope for her—feverish, catatonic, birthing worms, wandering through a labyrinthine wilderness.”

Shaw woke Boyle from a sound sleep. Though there was no window in the room, immediately the doctor could tell it was night. The factory owner held a lantern. Mavis was sleeping peacefully, her eyes closed, her bosom heaving slowly up and down at regular intervals. Boyle got out of his chair and walked across to her. Lightly slapping her face, he spoke her name, rousing her. Before long her eyelids fluttered, and she made a soft moaning noise.

“She looks better,” he said to Shaw.

“Remarkable.”

“Her sister?”

“The search party just returned without her. They combed the woods, twenty men and Chandra O’Neal, the tracker, and not a trace of her.”

“Even if you could find her, and I could administer my cure, she’s no doubt too far gone,” said Boyle.

Shaw was about to admit defeat as well when Mavis opened her eyes and murmured something. Boyle put his ear down to her lips. “What was that?” he asked. She mumbled some more, and Shaw asked, “Is she speaking?” The doctor nodded.

Boyle went back to his bag and pulled out another blue bottle full of the witch-hazel elixir. He slipped it into the pocket of his coat.

“What did she say?” asked Shaw.

“She said to get the dog, Brogan. The dog will track Gillany if you speak her name to him.”

Heading out into the Pine Barrens at night, even with a torch and a gun, was daunting. People who knew how unpredictable the wilderness could be usually stayed close to home at night. Still, the doctor, the factory owner, Fate, and three other workers most loyal to the Shaws headed out with guns loaded. There were two shotguns and two pistols among the party. Fate carried an over-under, double-barreled pistol, and the doctor went armed only with his elixir.

The night was cold as the world moved toward winter. There was a strong breeze, and the leaves from scarlet and blackjack oak to maple and tupelo showered down around them. The moon was a sight brighter than on Halloween, and in the clearings it reflected off the sugar sand, glowing against the dark. They found the black dog, Brogan, a powerful beast with a thick neck and broad chest, chained up next to the outhouse beside the sisters’ home. He was happy to see them, having gone unfed since the morning of the day prior. Fate thought to bring a cut of salted venison from her kitchen for the beast. This made her and the dog fast friends. Shaw undid the collar from Brogan’s neck while he devoured the meat.

“Find Gillany,” said Fate in her most soothing voice. “Find Gillany.”

The dog looked from one member of the party gathered around him to another. Mrs. Shaw repeated her order one more time. Brogan barked twice and padded down the path into the pines.

“Stick together,” said Boyle, and they were off at a slow jog trying to keep up with the dog. The torches crackled and threw light but also made it difficult to see anything near the intensity of the flame. They passed down a sandy trail all of them were familiar with and then the dog dove into the brush and all followed him winding among the pitch pine and cedar. Luckily, there were no chiggers or mosquitos still active. The doctor heaved for breath as they moved quickly along, wishing he’d brought another bottle of bourbon. An owl called far off to the west. He knew from the direction they were heading that the dog was leading them toward the marsh.

It wasn’t long before the doctor found himself alone in a meadow of marsh fern gone red with the season. He’d lost the others a good twenty minutes earlier but could hear the dog barking not too far ahead. The ground was soggy, and he moved slowly, knowing that in a moment he could be in water up to his neck. At first, he intended to call out, but on second thought he realized that Gillany might be somewhere close by with a sharp weapon of some kind. He thought silence a better strategy. It’s then that he heard the dog yelp and whimper in a manner that could crack ice. A gun went off. There was a human scream followed hard by a splash.

A brief moment of silence and then more screaming, more shots. The din of the commotion sparked Boyle’s adrenaline, and he so wanted to run away. Finally, he called out, “Shaw!” at the top of his voice, and then stood still, listening to the night over the pounding of his heart. He shivered in the breeze for a long while, and then he heard the crack of brittle twigs and the crunch of dry leaves. “Shaw? Is that you?” he called. But it wasn’t Shaw. A pale figure staggered through the marsh ferns toward him. He backed up into a clearing of sand, wanting to flee but was unable, as fear robbed his energy.

She came toward him in the moonlight, her hair loose in the wind like the tail of a black comet. She wore nothing but carried a hatchet stained with blood. He swept the torch in front of him as a means of warding her off. As she approached, he could see a gunshot wound to the hip, the bloody hole writhing with white worms. “That’s it,” said Boyle. He turned and ran as best he could, which wasn’t all that good. With no idea which direction he was headed, he stumbled forward through the marsh ferns toward where the moonlight showed him a tree line. Not even a hundred yards, and he’d slowed to a hobble, out of breath and caught in the grip of a coughing fit.

It was work to get control of his breathing, but he finally managed. Behind him he heard or thought he heard, even above the sound of the wind, the tread of Gillany. He turned and saw her only yards away. Her breathing was like a whistle, and she limped stiffly. She lifted the weapon when she saw him looking, and he groaned, knowing there’d be no more running. His heart was pounding. She came for him and he crouched away from her. She lifted the hatchet, and from above his head, he saw an arm descend from behind him. At the end of that arm there was a hand aiming a derringer. The finger pulled the trigger just as Gillany was upon him. The pistol exploded with a dull thud, smoke and sparks, and the two balls of shot ripped off her face. There was blood and flesh, and just below the skin there was a tangled layer of worms. She fell on him and he screamed.

Fate Shaw and the doctor made it back to the village at daybreak. Once there, she turned doctor and prescribed a bottle of bourbon for Boyle. When he was comfortable, she called the village together by ringing the bell outside the factory. She told those who gathered how they’d tracked Gillany Kane into the marshes and how she’d attacked Mr. Shaw and the others. A dozen men volunteered to go and search for survivors in the daylight. Fate decided to accompany them as did two of the wives whose husbands had been part of the posse. They uncovered the remains of Brogan’s mangled body, but no sign of any of the men. They searched every day for the better part of a week. Nothing. They followed the creeks and streams in case the bodies had been deposited in the water and swept along with the tranquil current. Nothing.

Finally, the sheriff from Mount Holly arrived and was told the tale just as it happened. Fate and Boyle gave much of the testimony, and the other half was supplied by Mavis, who had made a full recovery from the disease that gripped her sister. She referred to the illness as the suspicions, for the paranoia it engendered with a fury that took over the mind. The sheriff couldn’t make heads nor tails of it and eventually slunk back to Mount Holly to file five missing persons reports. Somewhere in the middle of that very harsh winter, Mavis Kane disappeared. No one was sure exactly when it happened, but everyone was certain it was after the snow came and before it left. She could have slipped away from Cadalbog, but there were also many who weren’t willing to forgive her part of the Halloween mayhem. Maybe the barrens took her, but after that most forgot, leaving only Fate and Boyle to wonder what actually had happened.

Three years later, in spring, Fate Shaw reported in her diary on the passing of Dr. Boyle. “I’d go to see him out there at his place on the way to Harrisville. He’d drink and talk, and I’d listen. He was the one individual who didn’t mind hashing over the enigma of the Kane sisters’ disease. He was convinced it was a matter of biology and chemistry, the psychosis of a fevered mind. I, on the other hand, knew better, because I was privy to the end of the story. The helper I’d hired to look after the doctor reported to me that the day the old man died he’d had a visitor, an old woman in tattered clothes with a strange green-tinged complexion. She was accompanied by a black dog. The helper didn’t know how long the old woman had been there, but when he returned the next morning to make a fire and cook breakfast for the doctor, he found Boyle in a chair, head flung back and white worms crawling from his nose and ears, squirming out through his tear ducts.

“The last thing he told me on my final visit to him was, as he put it, ‘His confession.’ It so happened that the reason he’d come to the Pine Barrens in the first place was due to a botched delivery. It was a breech birth, and he was pie-eyed drunk. ‘Twin sisters with the cord wrapped round their necks,’ he said. ‘As they struggled for their freedom, they strangled each other. I was passed out on the floor. Unsettling that the tragedy occurred on All Souls’ Day. The parents wanted to put me in jail, and I fled like a thief in the night.’ I didn’t have the heart to wonder aloud about the twin connection and neither did he. The strangeness we’d been part of was already too complicated.

Before I left him that day, he gave me, written out in a shaky hand, the recipe for his elixir against the suspicion. ‘Sooner or later, it’ll be back,’ he told me. Twenty years have passed since then, and I’ve long ago misplaced that scrap of paper. But every year at Halloween, I wear a blossom of the witch hazel in honor of Boyle, and oddly enough, it’s beginning to catch on.”