A Victorian experiment in abortion gives birth to voodoo terror
Using herbs sent to him by his missionary brother Wilkins, Victorian gynecologist James Hartnell believes he has found a miraculous method of abortion. Unfortunately he does not realize these herbs are used in a Voodoo ritual for transferring the spirits of the dead into living fetuses.
Hartnell's policeman friend Henry Field's indiscretion with a young actress proves an ideal opportunity to test the herbs. Her inconvenient child is seemingly destroyed without a trace. But when she is murdered, shortly after, in ritualistic fashion, the blame seems to fall on James and his brother, recently returned from Haiti and mentally unstable after witnessing the harrowing voodoo rites.
Then Field's own wife, Elizabeth, after lifelong infertility, herself mysteriously conceives in her forties...
A tale of claustrophobic terror.