Hag Night (28 page)

DerGroot was convinced that only the blood of innocents would wash free the stain upon Cobton. Since he had no children and could not offer his firstborn to his god, he offered those of three other families. He abducted them and sacrificed them as burnt offerings. It was said he waited in the woods until he saw a lone child and then he grabbed them, doing it all without so much as a sound, clasping his hand over the child’s mouth so there were no cries whatsoever. Then he gagged the child and stuffed them into a potato sack, making off into the woods with them. How he managed to get three in one day is anyone’s guess. But, according to tradition, he got them, all right. He took them out into a grove of oaks bordering his property and nailed each of them to a tree before disemboweling them and burning their entrails upon a fire. It was all darkly pagan and fitting, I suppose, since at its roots the Old Testament is a wellspring of pre-Christian depravity and paganistic practices whose origins were born in the darkness of prehistory.

DerGroot was arrested, of course, and duly hanged.

But his wasn’t the only shocking crime. A woman named Sarah Goodchild, a rosy-cheeked and pleasant new mother by all accounts, decided to give her baby boy—Jacob or Johanne, depending on which account you read—a bath in the family washtub. What happened we shall never know. Her husband, Peter, went off into the fields to scythe wheat, leaving a giggling baby boy and a happy and content
ed mother behind. When he came back, the child was floating in water long gone cold and Sarah was hanging above him from a noose of hemp tied off to a rafter beam. Her neck was broken, eyes bulging and tongue hanging from her blackened mouth. Her toes were just brushing the water. The child had been strangled. Presumably, after she’d killed the child, Sarah tied her noose then opened her left wrist and wrote something on the wall in her own blood. What that was, no one dared speak of. It’s an unpleasant image, isn’t it? Sarah bathing her boy and then, overwhelmed by some strain of madness, strangling him and leaving him bobbing in the water as she tied the rope, slit her wrist, dipped her index finger into her open gushing artery and wrote on the wall before hanging herself.

As they say, trouble comes in threes and so it did in Cobton. Less than a week following the execution of Farmer DerGroot and only two days after the Sarah Goodchild tragedy, suspicions were raised concerning a woodsman named Harrow, Todd Harrow. By all accounts Harrow was an old man by this point, but large and robust from a life spent felling trees in the fresh air. His wife, Regina, was nearly legendary in the village for her baked goods. Each morning she would bring her cart into Cobton piled high with loaves, buns, and pies. They were certain to sell out within the hour. Regina was not known to miss a day. But after she’d missed four of them consecutively, concerns were raised and particularly after the son of a local mason returned to the village claiming he had been chased through the woods by a naked man with an axe. He identified the man as Todd Harrow. The high sheriff went out to the Harrow cabin with a party of armed men and what they found was utterly horrible. Quite naked, Todd Harrow was sitting before the cookstove. Regina’s dismembered remains were arranged atop the kitchen table. Todd was feeding her limbs into the stove fire, one by one. Far from being the lunatic that chased the mason’s son, it was reported that Todd Harrow was quite calm and relaxed, even hospitable. He invited the sheriff and his men to stay and warm themselves, inquiring as to whether any of them would like a hot cup off coffee. The pot was steaming on the stovetop, heating over the remains of Regina Harrow. What transpired following that is unknown as there are no official records. Rumor had it that Todd was hanged on the spot or gunned down in his cabin. One tale, and a far more imaginative one, claimed that the Harrow cabin was lit on fire and while it blazed, Todd sat contentedly in his chair and burned.

Now these three horrors happening in such a short period of time are alarming to say the least, but it is my belief—and one that is probably illogical and harebrained—that the soil of Cobton and its environs was made fertile for evil by these acts of violence and the Jorva incident.

After that, things were peaceful again in Cobton until late summer of 1828 when a group of foreigners arrived. They were led by a man named Griska. Neither he nor his followers were ever seen, it was said, by the light of day. They situated themselves in an old mill above the town. And it was then that another outbreak of infectious disease began. This plague, however, was much more virulent than its predecessor and by December of 1828, Cobton was a ghost town.

Most of that was never documented for there was no one
left
to document it. What we know comes from rumors and hearsay and tales handed down generation to generation: that a group of local militiamen led by the high sheriff again entered the Cobton Burying Ground the following spring once the ground was soft again. Apparently, the depopulated plague village was not their only concern for it was written that the previous winter there had been a number of sheep mutilated, all of which were drained of blood and badly mutilated. There were also no less than a dozen instances of what was known as the “Cobton Pox” in surrounding hamlets. According to the tales, which were still making the rounds when Robert Bale collected them, the graves of forty persons—men, women, and children—were opened. Save for three, which were decomposed acceptably, the corpses were found to be uncorrupted. They were swollen with blood, ruddy-cheeked, and looked very much like they were sleeping. They were disposed of in the traditional manner by being staked, at which point, all screamed and copious amounts of blood issued from their mouths and noses and other orifices. They were burned in a pyre, it was said, the charred remains interred in a single mass grave in unconsecrated ground. It may be of interest to note, that Griska and his “followers” were not among them.

After that, it seems, there were no more troubles. The town was shunned, of course, and no one dared go there. It was left to rot and fall apart, which it did. So that’s the dark history of Cobton. How much of it is true is anyone’s guess by this point in time. What I’m going to tell you next I can verify personally—because I was there.

21

Let me preface this by saying that God never created a more reckless and impulsive tribe than boys. And it was in the company of two of them that I visited Cobton. This was back in ’57 when I was but ten years old, bright-eyed and naïve and thick-headed, in thrall to my brother Andy who was three years older than me and, in my narrow mindset, the greatest human being that had ever lived.

Andy was one of those kids that comes into this world ready to take it by the
horns and conquer it, to squeeze every drop of life from it and drink it like sweet wine. He climbed the highest trees, knocked balls over the fence, beat up bullies, dated the cutest girls, ran faster and jumped higher and spit farther than any kid I had ever known before or since. He was a natural. We’ve all known kids who are gawky and unsure like colts that need to get their legs under them, but Andy was never a colt—he was a stallion and he was born to run. He was smart, he was fast, he was good-looking, he was athletic, and he was brave. He climbed to the top of the town water tower, he spent the midnight hour in an eighteenth century tomb on Halloween night, he shimmied up flagpoles, swam the deepest rivers in July, built box kites that really flew, and rushed for touchdowns on September nights.

And lucky.

God, that kid was lucky.

He had the Midas touch. Everything went his way. Even things that should have been absolute tragedies turned to gold for him and only enhanced his near-legendary status with us kids. One rainy afternoon he ran across the street without looking and was hit by a car. It should have ended in broken bones and traction
at the very least…but not for Andy. He was hit, thrown over the top of the car, rolled down the trunk and…
miraculously
, like a stuntman, he landed on his feet and walked away from it all. Impossible, you say? You didn’t know Andy. He was bruised and banged-up, but he was back in school the next day. One year he decided to climb the high pines that enclosed our local athletic field—where one day he would be a star—simply because they were towering and they were there. Here’s the problem with that. Just behind the pines there were telephone poles, and strung through the boughs of those pines were the wires. Thirty feet up, Andy reached for a branch and grabbed the hot line. What happened at that point is that he became a ground and 2400 volts shot through him. Well, at the moment he grabbed that line, at the very
same
moment, the limb he was standing on broke and he fell to the ground. There was burnt hole in his palm where the voltage entered him and another at his ankle where it grounded out into the tree. But he survived and the chances of that are probably a million to one.

Just being his brother carried status for me and though I tried very hard to emulate him, I just didn’t have it. If it hadn’t been for what happened the night I’m going to tell you about, I have no doubt that Andy’s sense of adventure would have led him into the Vietnam War and his daring would have earned him a body bag…but who knows? With that luck of his anything was possible. I might add here that, unlike m
any older brothers, he was not a mean and spiteful creature. He was kind to me, supportive, and was more of a father to me than my real father was. Andy liked having me tag along with him. He seemed to get a kick out of introducing me to people.
“This is my kid brother, Denny,”
he’d say. Andy would have been seventy next month and you know what? I bet he would
still
be introducing me as his kid brother.

But you’ll excuse an old man for getting lost in his memories. When you get on the wrong side of sixty like me, it’s really all there is. You don’t live life; you remember it.

Now…in all Andy’s years of daring-do there was one thing he did not even attempt and that was paying a visit to the ruins of Cobton. Even when I was a kid, the ghost stories of Cobton were rife and the name of Griska had not been forgotten: he or
it
had become the local boogeyman. What didn’t survive was talk of vampires. I did not know what Griska was. He was just a ghost that haunted Cobton and that was enough. Why Andy decided to visit Cobton in the dead of winter and not summer is a question I can’t answer. I went with him as did Bugs Baker, his best friend. We decided the simplest way—well,
they
decided actually—was to follow the railroad tracks that ran from our town and passed just outside Cobton. In those days, the New York Central had a line that crossed the river and Hobart Stream, then sidled up along Lost Creek for about two miles, swinging away just above Cobton. The tracks were kept plowed so it would be an easy walk.

The night was fairly temperate for February, the mercury barely dipping into the teens. Chill, but not oppressively cold. Not like tonight. Once mom and dad were asleep, we bundled up good in boots and wool socks, long underwear and snow pants, parkas and mittens and scarves. We were ready. We grabbed a couple flashlights and off we went.

Bugs was outside waiting for us. “You bringing the squirt?” he said, indicating me.

“Yeah,” Andy told him, “and shut up about it.”

Bugs did.

We crossed
the town and climbed up the embankment to the tracks and began our walk. Let me say it was a cold and lonely stretch down those tracks. Outside town, the forest pressed in and if it hadn’t been for the full moon above, it would have been unbearably black out there away from the streetlights. I can’t say how many times I wondered what I was doing during that trek and how many times I asked myself why I was out there and not curled up warm in my bed. I wanted badly to go back home, but it was too late by then and I wasn’t about to lose face in front of Andy and Bugs. Just no way. Some things are just more important than your sanity when you’re a boy.

By that point, the lights of town were distant. The angle of the tracks and the encroaching forest had canceled them out, snuffing them like the wicks of candles, and the town itself
became just a vague glow on the horizon. It was then it began to occur to me that nobody really knew where we were. If something happened, we were entirely on our own. Anything could happen. And that scared me, I recall. That scared me very badly. My imagination was fully activated and showing me one unpleasant scenario after another.

What bothered me the most was the idea that we were slowly being shut off from civilization, from lights and people and safety. We were being led out into a lonely place and I remember wondering if it had been on purpose. If maybe this is the way it happened when kids disappeared without a trace. Maybe they didn’t really get picked up by perverts in long black cars or fall through the ice of lonely lakes or get lost in the woods like adults said. Maybe there was nothing accidental at all. Maybe
something
planned it that way, baiting them, drawing them away from the fold, getting them out somewhere desolate so it could do the worst possible things to them. My brain was rioting from all those horror comic books I read. I was seeing malefic forces gathering around us and I was seeing them the way Graham Ingels drew them in
The Haunt of Fear
and
Vault of Horror
…horrible shambling monstrosities that would drive you mad to look upon them (when they decided it was time for you to see them, that was).

I didn’t admit that to Andy or Bugs, though.