Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/77

76 afflicted children were hurried to the parsonage, where their parents besought Mr. Parris to pray for them. Dismissing the elders, the minister locked himself in his study with the bewitched persons. At the end of an hour, he opened the door and announced the children had accused Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn as the witches who had cast the spell upon them.

Sarah Good was a poor, friendless old woman, subsisting largely on the charity of her neighbors. Sarah Osburn was nearing eighty years of age, and had been confined to bed by a lingering illness for several weeks.

Both of these hapless creatures were dragged to the church, where a tribunal of clergymen, hastily summoned by Mr. Parris, bullied and hectored them for hours on end. No third degree imposed by modern police ever approached the methods employed by these godly men in attempting to extort confessions from two distracted and friendless old women. But the prisoners stood firm in maintaining their innocence.

Then it was that Mr. Parris took counsel with the bewitched girls again, exhorting them to name some other witch responsible for their agony. Soon he returned with the scandalous intelligence that Tituba, his own slave, had been denounced by the "afilicted children."

Tituba was haled before the meeting, but her terror was so great that no intelligent answers could be extracted from her. She was paroled in the custody of her master, who promised his reverend colleagues he would reason with her and impress her with the error of her ways. Years later, when she had heen sold to another master, Tituba, then an old woman, told of terrible beatings administered by her reverend owner, beatings merciless and unceasing, until she willingly agreed to confess herself a witch and implicate Goody Osburn and Goody Good in her confession.

Before a court composed of John Hathorn and Jonathan Corwin, the two leading magistrates of the neighborhood, assisted by Mr. Parris and several other eminent divines, Tituba gave her testimony. The devil, she said, had appeared to her and asked her to serve him. She agreed to do his bidding, and was told to attend a witches' meeting in a near-by wood. Together with Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn, she had mounted a wagon pole and been whisked through the air with the speed of the wind. In the heart of a deep, dark grove, the location of which she was unable to give, the devil awaited them in the form of a huge black man with one eye in the center of his forehead. She and the other two women had signed their names in his book with a pen dipped in their own blood, kissed him on an unusual part of his anatomy, and acknowledged themselves his servants forevermore.

All this time the "afflicted children" had been keeping up an incessant noise, screaming, groaning and writhing on the floor. When Goody Osburn's poor old hands twitched with nervousness, the children declared they suffered agonies, for she was pinching them. When Sarah Good brought her toothless gums together in senile terror, the shameless little wretches shricked out that they were being bitten.

Poor, bedridden Sarah Osburn showed conclusively that she could not have attended any such meeting as that described by Tituba, for she had been confined to her home with illness at the time she was supposed to be attending the assignation. That, the court decided, was all the more proof of her witchcraft. Only a witch could be in two places at once, and, since Tituba had testified Sarah Osburn was present at the meeting