The ritual involved showing the child the family journals, explaining Josiah’s original ordeal, walking them through the elaborate justifications for why consuming executed criminals was morally acceptable, and swearing them to absolute secrecy. For children born in recent generations who had never known normal food, the ritual was more about identity formation than explanation.
Teaching them that they were different but not evil, cursed but not damned, forced into something horrible, but maintaining their humanity through strict ethical rules. Samuel described performing this ritual with his own children, watching the weight of understanding settle onto their young shoulders, seeing their innocence replaced by the burden of knowledge that would shape every day of their lives.
Dr. Harrow listened to all of this with growing horror and pity, unable to categorize the Witmores as simple monsters, but equally unable to accept their situation as somehow morally defensible, he asked the question that had been building throughout the evening. What happened if the supply was interrupted? What if their network of contacts failed? What if executions became less frequent or bodies became unavailable? Samuel’s face grew grave, and he admitted that this was the family’s greatest fear, that circumstances beyond their control would
leave them without access to the only food they could consume. In the past, during periods of disruption, the family had survived on carefully rationed preserved supplies, but there had been times when those reserves had run dangerously low. He did not elaborate on what desperation might drive the family to do if faced with actual starvation, but the implication hung in the air between them.
Would their moral framework hold if the alternative was death? Would they maintain their insistence on only consuming executed criminals? Or would the fundamental human drive for survival override generations of carefully constructed ethical boundaries? The next morning, Dr. Harrow awoke in the guest room that the Witmore had prepared for him, a comfortable space with clean linens and a window overlooking the snowcovered valley.
He had slept poorly, his dreams filled with images of ships wrecking on volcanic shores, caves filled with ancient carvings and families gathered around tables eating meals that his mind refused to fully visualize. As he dressed and prepared to continue his investigation, he could hear the family moving about downstairs, their voices carrying the ordinary rhythms of any household beginning its day.
Margaret was directing the children in their morning chores. Samuel was discussing something about firewood with Thomas, and young Rebecca was practicing her reading aloud, her clear voice stumbling occasionally over difficult words. The normaly of these sounds created a cognitive dissonance that made Dr. Harrow question his own sanity.
Had last night really happened or had he somehow fallen into a fever dream brought on by the reverend’s disturbing letter and his own overactive imagination. But when he descended the stairs and joined the family for breakfast, the reality of their situation reasserted itself immediately. The family was not eating. They explained that they typically only consumed one meal per day in the evening as their bodies processed their food very efficiently and required less frequent sustenance than normal people.Margaret offered Dr. Harrow bread,
butter, preserves, and tea that she had obtained from the town specifically for visitors, keeping these items in a separate pantry that the family members never touched. As he ate his solitary breakfast, the Witmore sat with him at the table, drinking only water, and continued their conversation from the previous evening.
Samuel seemed eager, almost desperate, for Dr. Harrow to understand the full scope of their condition, as though having a medical professional witness and document their situation might provide some form of validation or perhaps absolution. He suggested that the doctor might want to examine the family’s medical records more thoroughly to review six generations of documentation to see the patterns and progressions that had been meticulously recorded.
After breakfast, Samuel led Dr. Harrow to a locked room on the second floor that served as the family archive. The space was lined with shelves containing hundreds of journals, ledgers, letters, and documents spanning 120 years of Witmore history. Samuel explained that each generation had been tasked with maintaining these records, not just as medical documentation, but as a form of testimony, a way of bearing witness to their own existence and ensuring that if the family was ever discovered or destroyed, there would be some record of what they had endured and
how they had tried to maintain their humanity despite their curse. The archive was organized chronologically with sections devoted to each generation. And Samuel guided Dr. Herrow through the collection, pulling out key documents that illustrated the progression of the condition and the family’s evolving understanding of their situation.
The earliest journals written by Josiah himself in the 1720s and 1730s were filled with precise medical observations, detailed anatomical drawings, and increasingly desperate theoretical speculations about the nature of his transformation. Dr. Harrow spent hours reading through these documents, and as he did, a picture emerged that was far more complex and tragic than he had initially understood.
Josiah Witmore had been a brilliant physician, educated at one of Europe’s finest medical schools, trained in the scientific method, and deeply committed to understanding his condition rather than simply succumbing to it. His early journals revealed a man conducting experiments on himself with ruthless objectivity, documenting his body’s reactions to various substances, measuring the nutritional value of different tissues, analyzing his own digestive processes through dissection of his own expelled waste.
He had tried to understand the biochemistry of his transformation using the limited tools available in the early 18th century. examining his blood, his saliva, his stomach acid, looking for differences that might explain why his body rejected normal food. Some of his observations were remarkably precient for the era.
He had noted that his digestive enzymes seemed to have altered properties, that his intestinal lining appeared structurally different when he had examined tissue samples from his own body, that something fundamental in his metabolism had been rewired at a level he couldn’t fully comprehend with 1720s. Medical knowledge what struck Dr.
Harrow most powerfully was the moral anguish evident throughout Josiah’s writings. This was not a man who had embraced his condition or rationalized it easily. He had been horrified by what he had become, tormented by guilt over the survival cannibalism that had preceded his transformation and desperate to find any alternative to his dietary requirements.
Multiple entries described suicide attempts that he had ultimately abandoned because of his responsibilities to his wife and children. He wrote extensively about his religious faith, wrestling with theological questions about whether his survival on that island had been God’s will or a demonic curse, whether his condition marked him as damned or simply as afflicted with a terrible disease.
no different in principle from leprosy or consumption. He had consulted with several ministers under carefully constructed pretexts, asking hypothetical questions about survival cannibalism, about whether consuming the already dead to preserve one’s own life was murder, about whether continuing to live in a state of sin was preferable to suicide.
The answers he received had apparently provided little comfort. Most clergy had condemned survival cannibalism, even in extremists, and none had addressed the possibility of it becoming a permanent biological necessity. The second generation’s records maintained primarily by Nathaniel and his siblings in the mid to late 1700s showed a shift in perspective where Josiah had been consumed with finding a cure and maintaining his former identity as a normal human afflicted with an aberant condition.
The second generation had begun to construct a new identity around their curse. Theyhad developed the elaborate moral framework that Samuel had described. the insistence that they were not murderers because they only consumed those who had already been executed for crimes. The belief that they were somehow serving a form of justice by ensuring that even in death criminals served a purpose.
Nathaniel’s journals contained long philosophical passages arguing that executed criminals had forfeited their right to normal burial through their crimes. That using their bodies to sustain innocent people afflicted with an incurable condition was a form of poetic justice. That the Witors were in fact performing a service by preventing these bodies from simply rotting uselessly in unmarked graves.
It was a tortured logic built on layer upon layer of rationalization. But Dr. Harrow could see how desperately the family needed these beliefs to maintain their sanity across multiple generations. One journal entry from 1778, written by Nathaniel when he was 57 years old, revealed the origin of what Samuel had called the transition ritual.
Nathaniel described the profound trauma of watching his own children, initially normal and innocent, gradually transform into creatures who shared his curse. He wrote about his eldest daughter, Patience, who had been a bright, cheerful child until her fth birthday, when she had suddenly been unable to eat the porridge she had consumed happily every morning of her life.
Nathaniel described the weeks of terror as they realized she was transforming. the desperate attempts to force normal food into her body, the agonizing decision to finally feed her, the only thing her changed biology would accept. He wrote about the look in her eyes when she understood what she was eating, the way her innocence shattered in a single moment, and the guilt that had haunted him ever since.
After going through this trauma with several children, Nathaniel had developed the ritual as a way to make the transition more controlled and less traumatic, preparing the children psychologically before the physical symptoms fully manifested, giving them a framework for understanding their condition and incorporating them into the family’s shared narrative of justified survival.
The ritual, as Nathaniel had originally conceived it, involved three stages. First, the child would be taught the family’s complete history. Starting with Josiah’s shipwreck and transformation, explaining that this was not the child’s fault, not a punishment for any wrongdoing, but simply an inherited condition like any other hereditary disease.
Second, the child would be educated about the moral boundaries that the family maintained, the absolute prohibition against harming innocents, the restriction to consuming only executed criminals, the elaborate network and expenses involved in maintaining their supply. Third, and most disturbingly, the child would participate in what Nathaniel called the feast of understanding, a formal meal where the child would knowingly consume their cursed diet for the first time, accepting their place in the family’s terrible legacy. The ritual was designed
to create a sense of shared burden rather than isolated horror to bind each generation together through common experience and to establish from the earliest age that there were rules and limits even in their monstrous existence. Dr. Harrow found detailed descriptions of these rituals throughout the subsequent generation’s journals, and he noticed that they had evolved over time, becoming more elaborate and more explicitly focused on moral instruction.
By the fourth generation in the early 1800s, the ritual included formal vows that the children would swear, promising never to harm an innocent person, never to reveal the family’s secret, and never to stray from the ethical guidelines that Nathaniel had established. The journals contained transcripts of these vows written in the careful handwriting of children ranging from 5 to 12 years old.
Each one solemnly pledging to uphold the family’s code. Some entries included the children’s own reflections written years later describing how they had felt during the ritual. The confusion and horror mixed with a strange sense of acceptance. the way the ceremony had made them feel simultaneously isolated from humanity and bonded to their family in an intimacy that normal people could never understand.
Samuel entered the archive room as Dr. Harrow was reading these accounts and the doctor asked him to describe his own experience of the transition ritual. Samuel sat down heavily, his expression distant, and explained that he had undergone the ritual at age 4, shortly before his fifth birthday, when symptoms were expected to manifest.
He remembered his father Aaron gathering the entire family in the study. Remembered the weight of three previous generations journals stacked on the desk. Remembered his father’s stern voice explaining that Samuel was about to learn what he truly was, what his family had always been,and what he would be for the rest of his life.
Erin had been a harsh man, made bitter by his failed attempt at normal life, and convinced that the only way to survive the curse was to accept it completely and without sentiment. He had shown young Samuel anatomical drawings from Josiah’s journals, had explained in clinical detail what the family consumed and where it came from, and had given the child no room for tears or protests.
Samuel remembered feeling terrified, but also strangely proud that he was being trusted with this enormous secret, that he was being welcomed into the adult world of the family’s burden. The feast that followed was the most traumatic memory of Samuel’s childhood. He remembered sitting at the table, the prepared meal before him, understanding exactly what it was and where it had come from.
His father had explained that this particular portion came from a man named John Hartley, executed in Boston 3 months earlier for the murder of two travelers on the post road, and that by consuming him, Samuel would be participating in a form of justice, ensuring that even Hartley’s death served a purpose beyond simple punishment.
Samuel remembered forcing himself to eat, his father’s stern gaze allowing no refusal, and the horrifying realization that his body accepted the food readily, that it tasted not terrible, but actually satisfying in a way that no other food had ever been. That acceptance, that satisfaction, had perhaps been the most disturbing part, the realization that his body had been preparing for this all along, that he had been born for this specific and terrible purpose.
He had nightmares for years afterward, dreams where he was eating normally like other children until he looked down and saw what was really on his plate. dreams where his classmates from the hypothetical school he would never attend discovered his secret and hunted him like a monster. Dr. Harrow asked whether Samuel had performed the same ritual with his own children.
And Samuel nodded slowly, explaining that he had modified it somewhat, trying to make it less harsh than his father’s approach, but maintaining the essential elements. With Thomas, the ritual had occurred when the boy was 3 years old, earlier than traditional because the sixth generation symptoms had manifested from birth. Samuel had tried to be gentler than his own father, emphasizing that Thomas was not evil or damned, that he was simply different, that the family loved him and would help him navigate his condition.
He had allowed Thomas to ask questions, to express his fears, and had tried to provide reassurance that many normal people throughout history had endured terrible afflictions and still lived meaningful lives. The feast had still been necessary, Samuel explained. Because there was something important about the act of consciously choosing to participate in the family’s survival, about taking responsibility for what they were rather than pretending they could be something else.
With Elizabeth, the ritual had been even more emotional because she was a sensitive, imaginative child who had already begun to sense that something was different about her family. She had asked Samuel directly at age four why they never went to town, why they had no friends, why the reverend looked at them with such troubled eyes during his rare visits.
Samuel had decided to perform the ritual early rather than let her suspicions grow into wild speculation, and he had tried to frame their condition as a tragic inheritance that required courage and strength to bear. Elizabeth had wept during the feast of understanding, not from disgust at what she was eating, but from grief for the normal life she would never have, the friends she would never make, the simple pleasures she would never experience.
Samuel had held her afterward and promised that the family would find ways to create joy and meaning despite their curse, that they would have music and books and learning, that their isolation didn’t have to mean emptiness. He had kept that promise, ensuring that his children were well educated, that the house was filled with culture and intellectual stimulation, that they had as much richness in their lives as he could provide within the constraints of their terrible secret.
Young Rebecca’s ritual had been the most difficult for Samuel because she was his youngest, his last child, and he knew when he performed the ceremony that he was sealing her fate just as his had been sealed. Rebecca had been surprisingly stoic, perhaps because she had observed her older siblings, and understood from their behavior what was expected of her.
She’d listened to the family history with wide, serious eyes, had asked practical questions about how they obtained their food, and whether they might ever be discovered, and had accepted her first conscious meal with a composure that had broken Samuel’s heart. Afterward, she had asked him whether she would ever be able to befriends with normal children, whether she might ever marry someone from outside the family, whether her own children, if she had any, might somehow be born normal.
Samuel had been forced to tell her that the condition appeared to grow stronger with each generation, that marriage outside the family was impossible because no one would accept what they were, that any children she might have would almost certainly inherit the curse in an even more severe form.
Rebecca had nodded and never asked about such things again, accepting at age seven the complete foreclosure of any hope for a different life. Dr. Harrow listened to these accounts with growing distress, recognizing that whatever the biological reality of the Witmore’s condition, the psychological damage inflicted by generations of this ritual was itself a form of inherited trauma.
These children were being systematically stripped of innocence, burdened with knowledge and guilt that no child should carry, and indoctrinated into a moral framework designed to make the unbearable seem bearable. He asked Samuel whether he had ever considered not having children, allowing the curse to die with his generation rather than perpetuating it.
Samuel’s response was anguished, but honest. He explained that each generation had wrestled with that question, that his own father and several aunts and uncles, had chosen childlessness, but that others, including Samuel himself, had clung to a desperate hope that future generations might find a cure, that medical science might eventually advance enough to understand and reverse their condition.
He admitted that this hope was probably foolish, that 120 years of medical progress had brought them no closer to a cure, but that the alternative, accepting that the family line should end, that all the suffering and survival had been for nothing, was psychologically unbearable. There was another factor that Samuel admitted only reluctantly, a fear that existed beneath all the family’s rationalizations and moral frameworks.
He explained that when Witmore family members were deprived of their necessary sustenance for extended periods, they experienced not just physical starvation, but a deterioration of mental faculties and moral judgment. His grandfather had documented an incident in the 1790s when a supply disruption had lasted nearly 4 months and the family members had begun experiencing what could only be described as a consuming hunger that went beyond normal starvation.
A psychological obsession with feeding that made it increasingly difficult to think about anything else. They had not broken their prohibition against harming innocents, but only because the supply was restored just before complete desperation set in. The incident had terrified the family because it suggested that their moral framework, their carefully constructed ethical boundaries, might not survive prolonged deprivation, that they might ultimately be no different from the monsters they insisted they were not. Samuel admitted
that this fear was part of why the family continued. Because if they allowed the line to die out naturally through childlessness, the final generation would eventually face starvation without the possibility of successes to maintain their supply network, and what they might become in those final desperate months was too horrible to contemplate.
Dr. Harrow spent the rest of that day reviewing more documents, reading accounts from each generation, noting the patterns and progressions. He observed that the family’s wealth had grown substantially over time, partly through careful investments, but also through what appeared to be occasional inheritances from family members who had died without descendants of their own.
He found extensive correspondence between various branches of the family. Whitors who had established themselves in different regions to spread risk and diversify their supply networks. Not all of these branches had survived. One family in New York had been discovered in 1802 when a servant had witnessed something suspicious, and they had been forced to flee in the night, abandoning everything and assuming new identities elsewhere.
Another branch in Pennsylvania had apparently died out in the 1810s. Though the circumstances were unclear, the correspondents simply stopped without explanation, leaving Samuel’s family to wonder whether they had found a cure, perished from some disaster, or been discovered and destroyed. The archive also contained disturbing evidence of the family’s increasing alienation from normal human society over six generations.
Early letters from Josiah and the second generation showed people trying desperately to maintain connections with the outside world, attending church services, participating in community events as much as possible, attempting to live as normally as their condition allowed. But by the fourth and fifth generations, the isolation had become nearly complete.
The Wit Moors hadwithdrawn into themselves, seeing interaction with normal people as a dangerous risk rather than a valued connection. Samuel admitted that his children had never met another child outside the family, had never played games with peers, had never experienced any of the social development that normal children took for granted. He wondered aloud what effect this isolation was having on their psychological development.
characterized her older siblings understanding, and Dr. Harrow recognized this as potentially the most disturbing aspect of the sixth generation. They had been born into the condition so completely that they lacked even the capacity to be properly horrified by it. However, when Dr. Harrow probed deeper asking Rebecca what she thought about when she was alone or what she hoped for in her future.
Cracks began to appear in her carefully constructed normaly. She admitted that she sometimes felt scared for reasons she couldn’t explain a general anxiety that something bad was going to happen even though nothing in her daily life suggested any immediate danger. She described having strange dreams where she was running through dark forests being chased by people whose faces she couldn’t see.
Dreams where she was sitting at tables surrounded by strangers who were all staring at her with expressions of disgust and horror. Dreams where she tried to speak but found she had forgotten how to form words. These dreams clearly disturbed her, but she had learned not to mention them to her parents because she didn’t want to worry them or seem weak.
Rebecca also confessed that she sometimes talked to imaginary friends. Children her own age who existed only in her mind, and that these conversations were so vivid that she sometimes forgot they weren’t real. Startling when she realized she had been speaking. Aloud to empty air, Dr. Harrow recognized these symptoms as potential signs of developing psychological problems related to her extreme isolation and the burden of her family’s secret.
But he also understood that in the context of the Witmore family’s situation, such symptoms were probably inevitable and perhaps even adaptive. Rebecca’s imaginary companions provided her with the social interaction, her developing mind desperately needed, and her nightmares were her psyches way of processing fears and anxieties that she had no other outlet for expressing.
He asked Rebecca if she had ever wished she could meet other children, and her response was unexpectedly sophisticated for a 12year-old. She explained that she used to wish for that when she was younger, but she had gradually realized that even if she met other children, she could never truly be friends with them because she would always have to hide the most important things about herself, and friendship based on lies wasn’t real friendship.
She had decided it was better to be honestly alone than to have false connections based on deception. This conclusion, reached by a child not yet in her teens, struck Dr. Harrow as heartbreaking in its premature wisdom and resignation. That evening, after the children had been interviewed, Dr. Harrow sat with Samuel and Margaret in the study and shared his observations, carefully framing them in clinical terms to avoid seeming judgmental.
He explained that all three children showed signs of psychological stress related to their isolation and the burden of the family secret, though the manifestations differed based on their ages and temperaments. Thomas was experiencing what might be called an identity crisis, struggling to define himself as either human or something else, wrestling with intrusive thoughts that suggested his neurology might be adapting in ways that paralleled his biochemical changes.
Elizabeth was dealing with the emotional and social deprivation of adolescence without any of the normal outlets or experiences that helped young people navigate that developmental stage. Rebecca was showing early signs of social development problems that might become more severe as she aged. Though her situation was complicated by the fact that she had no baseline of normal experience to compare against.
Dr. Harrow emphasized that none of these issues were the fault of Samuel and Margaret, who were clearly devoted parents doing their best in an impossible situation, but rather the inevitable consequences of trying to raise children in complete isolation while burdening them with a terrible secret from their earliest consciousness.
Samuel listened to this assessment with visible distress, and he asked the question that Dr. Harrow had been anticipating. Was there anything that could be done to improve the children’s psychological well-being while still maintaining the secrecy essential to the family’s survival? Dr. Harrow struggled to answer, recognizing that the family’s fundamental problem had no good solution.
He suggested that perhaps they could arrange for the children to have limited, carefullycontrolled interactions with others under circumstances where the family secret was not at risk. perhaps corresponding with other families through letters under assumed names or allowing the children to observe town life from a distance to give them some sense of the broader world.
But even as he made these suggestions, he recognized how inadequate they were, how they couldn’t address the core issue that these children were being raised in an environment so abnormal that psychological problems were virtually guaranteed. The real solution, if one existed, would be finding a cure for their biological condition.
But 120 years of effort, had produced nothing, and Dr. Harrow’s own medical knowledge offered no new insights. Margaret asked a question that revealed her own anguish as a mother. Whether Dr. Harrow thought they had been wrong to have children, whether they should have allowed the family line to die rather than bringing another generation into this cursed existence.
The doctor found himself unable to give a definitive answer, recognizing that this was ultimately a moral and philosophical question rather than a medical one. He acknowledged that the children were suffering in ways that normal children did not, that their isolation and the burden of the family secret were causing genuine psychological harm, and that bringing future generations into the same situation would perpetuate that suffering indefinitely.
But he also observed that the children despite their struggles seemed to find moments of genuine happiness and meaning that they loved and were loved. That they were developing their minds and talents in ways that suggested they were more than just victims of their condition. He admitted that he didn’t know whether a difficult life was better than no life at all.
Whether the suffering inherent in the Witmore condition made existence itself a cruelty or whether the capacity for love and learning and growth redeemed that suffering to some degree. The conversation continued late into the night with Samuel and Margaret sharing their own fears and doubts about the choices they had made and the future they were creating for their children.
Samuel admitted that he sometimes dreamed about his children being normal, living ordinary lives in a town somewhere, having friends and spouses and children of their own without the curse that had defined six generations of Witmor. But these were only dreams, and the waking reality was that his children would live and die as he had, isolated and different, maintaining the terrible secret that was both their burden and their strange source of family unity.
Margaret confessed that she sometimes felt like they were all ghosts, existing on the margins of the human world, but never truly part of it, going through the motions of life while being fundamentally separated from the species they resembled. She wondered whether future generations would look back on them with pity or horror, or both, whether the elaborate moral framework they had constructed would seem noble or simply delusional to people examining their story from the safety of a distance that their family members could never achieve. Dr. Harrow
left that conversation feeling more uncertain than when he had arrived. His scientific investigation had confirmed that the Witmore condition was real, biological, and currently beyond medical intervention. But his exploration of the family’s psychological state had raised questions that had no clear answers.
Were the Witmore’s human beings afflicted with a tragic condition? Or had six generations of biological and psychological adaptation transformed them into something genuinely other than human? Was their elaborate system of ethical boundaries evidence of maintained humanity, or simply a comforting delusion that allowed them to continue existing without confronting the true nature of what they had become? Could children raised in such complete isolation and burdened with such terrible knowledge ever be considered to
have had anything resembling a normal psychological development? or were they fundamentally damaged from birth by circumstances they had no power to change? These questions haunted Dr. Harrow as he lay in his guest room that night, listening to the old house creek and settle around him, knowing that in the cellar beneath the barn were the preserved remains that sustained this strange family’s existence.
On the fifth day, Dr. Harrow decided to conduct what he considered the most crucial test of his entire investigation. An experiment that would either validate the Witmore’s claims about their biological necessity or reveal the entire situation as an elaborate psychological delusion. He proposed to Samuel that one family member volunteer to attempt sustained consumption of normal food under carefully monitored medical supervision.
With Dr. Harrow present to intervene if the reactions became life-threatening. The goal was not to cure the condition,which 120 years of family history suggested was impossible, but to document with scientific precision exactly what happened when a Witmore body was forced to process conventional sustenance.
Samuel was reluctant, knowing from family history and personal experience how agonizing such an experiment would be. But he also recognized that having a trained physician document their condition might provide validation that could be valuable if the family ever needed to prove they were victims of a medical affliction rather than voluntary practitioners of cannibalism.
Thomas volunteered immediately, explaining that he was young and strong enough to survive the experiment, and that he had already been conducting less rigorous tests on himself in his secret laboratory, so he understood what he would be facing. Margaret protested strongly, not wanting to see her son suffer.
But Thomas insisted with a determination that surprised even his father. He explained that he needed to know definitively and under proper medical observation whether their condition was truly as immutable as family history suggested, or whether there might be some possibility, however small, that adaptation was possible. Dr. Harrow appreciated the young man’s scientific curiosity, even as he worried about the ethics of conducting an experiment that would certainly cause significant suffering.
They agreed on a protocol that would last 3 days with Thomas attempting to consume gradually increasing amounts of normal food while Dr. Harrow monitored his vital signs, documented his symptoms, and stood ready to terminate the experiment if the reactions became too severe. The experiment began on the morning of the sixth day with the entire family gathered in the parlor that had been converted into a medical examination room.
Dr. Harrow had prepared a selection of foods representing different categories, grain products, animal proteins, dairy, fruits, and vegetables, all in small, measured portions that could be carefully documented. Thomas sat in a chair positioned near the fireplace, dressed in loose clothing that would allow easy medical examination, and Dr.
Harrow took baseline measurements of his pulse, respiration, temperature, and blood pressure using the equipment he had brought. Thomas appeared calm, almost eager, his scientific curiosity temporarily overriding his apprehension about the pain he knew was coming. Samuel stood near the door with Margaret and the two girls, their faces showing varying degrees of concern and morbid fascination. Dr.
Harrow recorded that Thomas’s baseline vital signs were excellent, pulse steady at 68 beats per minute, respiration normal at 14 breaths per minute, temperature a perfect 98.6°, blood pressure healthy and stable. The first test involved a single small piece of bread, approximately 1 ounce, freshly baked and still slightly warm.
Thomas held it for a moment, examining it as though it was some exotic specimen rather than one of humanity’s most basic foods, then placed it in his mouth and began to chew. For the first 30 seconds, nothing happened. And Dr. Harrow noted this carefully, wondering if perhaps the initial contact wasn’t sufficient to trigger the reaction.
But then Thomas’s face began to change, his skin paling noticeably sweat. Early entries were relatively normal, describing physical weakness and increasing discomfort. But by the fourth day, Thomas’s writing had changed dramatically. He described his consciousness shifting into what he called the hunting mind. A state where his perception of the world transformed completely, where everything around him became evaluated in terms of food potential, where even his imaginary friends from childhood became objects of assessment rather than companions. Most
disturbingly, he had written about experiencing a clarity in this state that felt more real than his normal consciousness, as though the hungry mind was his true nature, and his civilized persona was just a learned mask. Thomas had terminated the experiment after 5 days, frightened by how difficult he found it to shift back to normal consciousness, by how appealing the hunting mind had felt despite its horror, by the realization that whatever had changed in Josiah’s biology included neurological alterations that might
eventually overwhelm the family’s carefully maintained humanity. He had written a final entry after resuming his normal diet, expressing terror that the sixth generation might be approaching a threshold where the biological changes would make it impossible to maintain human moral reasoning, where the instincts and perceptions that had been background noise for earlier generations would become the dominant mode of consciousness.
He had speculated that perhaps this was nature’s way of ending the Witmore curse by transforming the family into something that could no longer function within human society that would inevitably be discovered and destroyed before the condition couldspread or perpetuate further. Samuel had found this journal entry and confronted his son.
And Thomas had admitted that he had been conducting these experiments specifically to understand what the family was becoming, whether they had a future at all, or whether the sixth generation might be the last one capable of maintaining the moral framework that had sustained them for 120 years. Dr. hero listened to all of this with mounting horror, recognizing that what he had documented as a stable hereditary condition was apparently not stable at all, but actively progressing towards some unknown end point.
He asked Samuel the obvious question. If the family’s neurological changes were making it increasingly difficult to maintain their humanity, why continue having children? Why risk bringing a seventh generation into existence that might lack the moral capacity to uphold the ethical boundaries that had prevented them from becoming actual monsters? Samuel’s response revealed a desperation that the doctor had not fully appreciated before.
He explained that the family clung to hope, irrational and possibly delusional hope that someone would eventually understand their condition and find a treatment or cure. Each new generation that came into being extended the timeline during which such a discovery might occur. If they allowed the family line to die, they would be accepting that 120 years of suffering and survival had been for nothing.
That Josiah’s original ordeal and every sacrifice made by every subsequent generation would end in extinction without resolution. The alternative, continuing to have children despite knowing what they would face and what they might become, was morally questionable, but at least left open the possibility of an eventual positive outcome. Dr.
Harrow pressed further, asking what would happen if no cure was ever found, if the neurological progression continued, if future generations lost the capacity to maintain the moral boundaries that the family had constructed. Samuel’s response was chilling in its honesty. He admitted that the family had discussed this possibility and had made certain preparations.
In the event that a Witmore family member showed signs of losing their moral reasoning, of becoming genuinely dangerous to innocent people, the family had agreed that they would take responsibility for ending that person’s life before they could harm anyone. It was a pact that had been formalized in writing and signed by every adult member of the family, a mutual agreement that they would not allow their condition to transform them into the monsters that society would rightly condemn. Samuel showed Dr.
Harrow this document. And the doctor saw the signatures of not just Samuel and Margaret, but also Thomas and Elizabeth, who had both signed on their 18th and 16th birthdays, respectively, swearing that they would accept death at their families, hands, rather than allow themselves to become dangers to innocent people. This revelation transformed Dr.
Harrow’s understanding of the Witmore family situation entirely. They were not just victims of a biological curse trying to survive. They were people living under a permanent death sentence that they had imposed on themselves. Knowing that at any moment they might show signs of becoming something that their own ethical code required them to destroy.
The psychological burden of living with that awareness, of knowing that your own family might be forced to kill you if your biology overwhelmed your morality, was almost incomprehensible. Dr. Harrow asked how they maintained any semblance of normal family life under such circumstances and Samuel explained that they simply didn’t think about it most of the time that they focused on daily routines and immediate concerns and tried not to dwell on the larger horror of their situation.
But the knowledge was always there underlying every interaction, creating a fragility in their relationships that normal families couldn’t imagine. turning every moment of irritability or unusual behavior into a potential warning sign that the transformation might be beginning. Samuel then shared something that he clearly had been reluctant to reveal, but felt Dr.
Harrow needed to know to fully understand their situation. He explained that there had been one case in the family’s history where the pact had been enacted. a fourth generation Whitmore named Jonathan who had begun showing signs of what the family recognized as dangerous psychological deterioration around 1815. Jonathan had been 28 years old, educated and intelligent, seemingly normal in every way, but he had begun experiencing what he described as compulsions, intrusive thoughts that were not just uncomfortable mental images, but felt
like commands that required increasing amounts of willpower to resist. He had started following people in town, not close enough to be noticed, but close enough to observe their patterns and habits. He had begun making detailednotes about individuals, their schedules, their vulnerabilities, information that served no purpose for someone who had no intention of acting on it.
Jonathan had recognized what was happening to him and had gone to his family, shown them his notes, and asked them to fulfill the pact before he lost the capacity to consent to it. The family had agonized over the decision for weeks, hoping that Jonathan’s condition might stabilize or improve. But his deterioration had continued and accelerated.
He began experiencing periods where he couldn’t remember hours of time, gaps in his awareness during which he had apparently been active, but had no conscious memory of what he had done. During one of these episodes, he had been found several miles from the family property near a farm where a young family lived, though he had no memory of traveling there or what his intentions had been.
The family had concluded that Jonathan had become too dangerous to allow to live, that the risk of him harming an innocent person was too high, and that his own wishes expressed during his lucid moments had to be honored. Samuel’s father, Aaron, who had been Jonathan’s first cousin, had been chosen to administer the Lord overdose, and Jonathan had been buried in an unmarked grave in the forest.
His death explained to the few people who knew of his existence as a sudden illness. The family had documented everything, including Jonathan’s own final journal entry, where he had thanked them for their courage in doing what he could no longer trust himself not to become too dangerous to justify. Dr.
Harrow was shaken by this account, recognizing that he was dealing with a family that had not just adapted to their condition, but had developed their own system of justice and control that operated completely outside normal legal and social frameworks. He asked Samuel if he worried that the same fate might await his own children, whether Thomas’s experiments and Elizabeth’s isolation and Rebecca’s strange dreams might be early warning signs of the same deterioration that had claimed Jonathan.
Samuel admitted that he thought about this constantly, that he watched his children with a vigilance that went beyond normal parental concern, looking for any indication that they might be losing their humanity to their biology. He had memorized Jonathan’s documented symptoms, knew exactly what signs to watch for, and lived in daily fear that he might see them manifesting in Thomas or Elizabeth or Rebecca.
The possibility that he might one day be called upon to fulfill the family packed with his own children was a horror that haunted his dreams and made every moment of normal family life feel precious and fragile. Borrowed time that could end at any moment. The conversation turned to the question of what Dr.
Harrow intended to do with the information he had gathered, and Samuel’s demeanor changed, becoming more guarded and concerned. He explained that the family had allowed this investigation because they had hoped for medical validation and possibly insights that might lead toward treatment, but they had also taken a considerable risk in revealing themselves so completely to an outsider. Dr.
Harrow’s notes and observations, if they ever became public, could destroy the family’s carefully maintained secrecy and expose them to consequences that ranged from social ostracism to legal prosecution to mob violence. Samuel asked directly what the doctor planned to do with his documentation, whether he would publish his findings, whether he would report the family to authorities, whether he would maintain the confidentiality that their survival depended upon.
The question hung in the air between them, and Dr. Harrow realized that he was facing an ethical dilemma that his medical training had not prepared him for. Dr. Harrow explained that his professional obligation was to advance medical knowledge, that the Witmore case represented a phenomenon so unusual and so well documented that it could contribute significantly to understanding of hereditary conditions, metabolic disorders, and the plasticity of human biology.
Publishing his findings could potentially help other individuals or families suffering from unusual conditions, could advance scientific understanding in ways that might eventually lead to treatments not just for the Witmors, but for others afflicted with rare hereditary disorders. But he also recognized that publishing would almost certainly lead to the family being identified despite any precautions he might take to disguise their identity.
That the specificity of their condition and their location and their history would make anonymity nearly impossible to maintain. He was torn between his duty to science and his duty to his patients, between the potential benefits of sharing knowledge and the certain harm that such sharing would cause to this particular family.
Samuel listened carefully, then made an argument that Dr. Harrow foundcompelling despite its self-serving nature. He pointed out that publishing the Witmore case would not actually help anyone because their condition was apparently unique, tied to whatever had happened on that specific island to that specific individual in 1719.
Not a generalizable hereditary disorder that might affect other families. There was no treatment that Dr. Harrow could offer, no cure that publication would lead to, no therapeutic intervention that his documentation suggested. The only result of making the case public would be satisfying scientific curiosity while destroying the lives of six people, three of them children, who had done nothing wrong except be born into circumstances they had no power to change.
Samuel argued that medical ethics required doing no harm and that publishing despite knowing it would harm his patients would be a violation of the trust that they had placed in Dr. Harrow by allowing him into their lives and their secrets. The doctor had to admit that Samuel’s argument had merit, that the scientific value of publication was questionable, while the harm to the family would be certain and severe.
As the evening grew late, Samuel made one final request of Dr. Harrow. He asked the doctor to write a sealed medical opinion to be held by the family and opened only if circumstances required them to prove that their condition was genuine and medical rather than voluntary and criminal. This document would not contain enough detail to allow the family to be identified if it was somehow discovered by outsiders, but would provide authoritative medical testimony that could be used in their defense if they were ever exposed and
faced legal consequences. Dr. Harrow agreed to this request, recognizing it as a reasonable compromise between his professional obligations and his ethical duty to his patients. He spent the next two hours writing a careful document that described the Witmore condition in clinical terms, confirmed its biological reality based on his observations and tests, and offered his professional opinion that individuals suffering from this condition should be considered victims of a medical affliction rather than perpetrators of voluntary crimes.
He signed and sealed the document, and Samuel locked it away in the family archive. Insurance against a future that they all hoped would never come to pass, but that the family’s 120year history suggested was always a possibility.
