The Blood on Satan's Claw

Early 18th-century rural England. Ralph Gower, a young ploughman, turns up a strange skull in the soil — fur on the bone, an empty deformed socket, a shape that is neither beast nor man. He fetches the village's visiting Judge to see it; when they return to the field the relic is gone. The Judge is a sceptic and dismisses the matter.

The same week, a young woman named Rosalind Barton arrives at the squire's manor as the fiancée of Peter Edmonton, the squire's nephew. Her first night in the attic bedroom she suffers terrible visions, attacks the housekeeper, and grows a furred patch on her hand. She is locked away, raves, is taken away in restraints, and dies. Peter soon discovers a similar mark on his own arm.

Other young people in the parish are marked the same way. A teenage girl, Angel Blake — the daughter of a vicar's family — emerges as the cold, beautiful leader of a coven of marked children that meets in the woods at the edge of the parish. They are peeling the demonic skin from one another's bodies in a slow, deliberate ritual.

Angel sets her sights on the village schoolteacher and tries to seduce him; when he refuses she accuses him to the parish of obscenity and the cult attacks him. She moves on to the local reverend. In the ruined chapel in the woods the cult ritually rapes and murders a young girl named Cathy Vespers, offering her body to the thing they are growing.

The Judge returns from London with old books and a sword. He gathers the squire and his men and takes the marked children one by one, forcibly cutting the demon-flesh from their skin to break their connection to the thing in the woods.

In a final confrontation the demon Behemoth manifests fully in a field clearing — a goat-headed, half-shaped horror rising from the soil. The Judge runs it through with his sword, the cult breaks, and the corruption is ended. The surviving villagers are left to bury what is left.