Thackery Claybourn heard the call of cosmos incarnate ... or so she imagined, her madness having descended to depths rarely seen but for the darkest cellars of asylums long-closed. The resonant, rousing cry of the earth itself from far across the sea summoned her to these moonlit shores of one Wailing Rock. Her footsteps sank into the shifting sands of timeless, tide-worn earth, sea creatures disturbed by each successive step in her plodding journey. Bubbles errupted from her clogged lungs, bursting on the surface not far above now as she drew nearer to her destined destination.
The veiled head of an old, weary woman breached the surface, her one cloudy eye gazing around the cliffs while the light-house beam sweeps across them. Bubbles disturb the water of her half-submerged face and she strides onward, rising out of the water with a steady strength that betrays her apparent age. Confident steps take her onto solid land, soaked to the bone with sea water and skin like a shrivelled prune. In one hand, a hook, in the other, a crook, raising both to the full moon in a deep, rumbling roar that rises to a shriek.
Her knees buckle beneath her and they thump into the sand, the rest following suit until she's prostrate before the fateful cliffs, making unnatural, unseemly sounds like a cat out of hell with a hairball stuck in her guts. She retches, she gags, she pukes and spasms as gob after gob of stringy seaweed erupts from her very lungs where she'd shoved it with ritual purpose. Now it flails from her mouth like salty tentacles, wriggling as the last few air-pockets pop and hiss their enchanted breath into the night. The drooling old woman suddenly seems every bit her age; gone was the strength that saw her across the sea bed.
Lights in clifftop dwellings turn on here and there, but curiosity gives way to fear and indifference for the most part. T'was just a beast in heat, surely. Thackery Claybourn, Green Hag of Pendle Hill, had reached her final destination; the invigorating thought being all that kept her from passing out with exhaustion and magical fatigue. Certainly if not for the full moon's boon this would never have happened by her hand alone. Her arthritic head turns on a creaky old neck.... noticing the smaller island shimmering offshore. "Gamorrah's hairy balls.. I'm on the wrong cunting island" said the dear old lady, and promptly fell comatose in the soothing surf, which whispered promises of a pleasant death in her ear.
Her sleeping mouth gaped like a fish out of water, wider and wider still... until a brown raggedy rat struggles out. Thackery manages two words, though they may be her last "Jenkins... Fetch..." Her vermin, familiar with the cryptic command, scuttles into town to lure a cat that lures a dog, in turn its owner to the cliff edge - where a woman lays dying on the beach. A bell was rung. Ropes were cast. A call went out for aid.