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.