Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(53)
Please, please, he prayed to the gelid, fume-filled air. Help me out here! Anything, whatever! Anything that will sell!
In such ways are devil’s bargains made.
And there, suddenly, shimmering before him like a phosphorescent toadstool, was the vision of The Hand, fully formed: all he needed to do was more or less write it down, or so he said later on talk shows. Where did it come from, The Dead Hand Loves You? Who knows? Out of desperation. Out from under the bed. Out of his childhood nightmares. More possibly, out from the gruesome black-and-white comic books he used to filch from the corner drugstore when he was twelve: detached, dried-up, self-propelling body parts were a regular feature of those.
The plot was simple. Violet, a beautiful but cold-hearted girl who bore a resemblance to Irena, but an Irena even thinner of waist and plumper of boob, threw over her lovelorn fiancé, William, a handsome, sensitive young man at least six inches taller than Jack but with the same hair colour. She did this for crass motives: her other suitor, Alf, a dead ringer for Jaffrey as far as appearance went, was rich as stink.
Violet did her act of jilting in the most humiliating way possible. Straight-arrow William had a date with Violet and had arrived at her moderately substantial house to pick her up. But Alf was there before him, and William caught Violet and Alf locked in a hot and immodest clinch on the porch swing. Worse, Alf had his hand up Violet’s skirt, a liberty William had never even attempted, the fool.
Outraged and shocked, William angrily challenged the two of them, but this got him nowhere. After scornfully flinging William’s hand-gathered bouquet of meadow daisies and wild roses down on the sidewalk along with the plain gold engagement band that had cost him two months’ earnings from his job at the encyclopedia company, Violet marched emphatically away on her audacious, red, high-heeled shoes, and she and Alf drove off in Alf’s silver Alfa Romeo convertible, a vehicle he had bought on a whim because it fitted with his name: he could afford flamboyant gestures like that. Their mocking laughter echoed in poor William’s ears; and to cap it off, the engagement band rolled along the street and clinked down through a sewer grating.
William was mortally wounded. His dreams were shattered, his image of perfect womanhood destroyed. He moped along to his cheap but clean rooming house, where he wrote down his will: he wanted his right hand cut off and buried separately from him, beside the park bench where he and Violet had spent so many idyllic evenings necking smooching tenderly embracing. Then he shot himself in the head with a service revolver inherited from his dead father – for William was an orphan – and used by the father, heroically, during the Second World War. That detail added a note of symbolic nobility, Jack felt.
William’s landlady, a kindly widow with a European accent and gypsy intuition, saw to it that his wish about the cut-off hand was honoured. In fact, she crept into the funeral parlour at night and severed the appendage herself with a fretsaw from her departed husband’s woodworking bench, a scene that, in the film – both films, the original and the remake – allowed for some ominous shadows and an eerie glow coming from the hand. That glow gave the landlady quite a turn, but she carried on. Then she buried the hand beside the park bench, deep enough so that it would not be dug up by skunks. She placed her crucifix on top of it; for, being from the old country, she was superstitious.
Like the hardhearted bitch she was, Violet snubbed the funeral, and she didn’t know about the severed hand. Nobody knew about it except the landlady, who shortly thereafter moved far away to Croatia, where she became a nun in order to expunge from her soul the possibly satanic act she had committed.
Time passed. Violet was now engaged to Alf. Their lavish wedding was being planned. Violet felt a little guilty about William and a little sorry for him, but all in all she gave him scarcely a passing thought. She was too busy trying on expensive new clothes and showing off the various diamond and sapphire objects bestowed on her by crass Alf, whose motto was that the way to a girl’s heart was through jewellery: dead right, in the case of Violet.
Jack diddled around with the next part of the story. Should he keep the Hand hidden right up to the wedding itself? Should he conceal it in the long satin wedding-dress train and have it follow Violet up the aisle, only to pop forth and cause a sensation just before she said, I do? No, too many witnesses. They’d all chase it around the church like an escaped monkey, and the effect would be farcical rather than terrifying. Best to have it catch Violet alone; and, if possible, in a state of undress.
Several weeks before the wedding was to take place, a child at play in the park saw the housekeeper’s crucifix glittering in the sun, picked it up, and took it home with her, thus nullifying its protective role. (In the film – the first film, not the remake – this scene was accompanied by an ominous, retro soundtrack. In the remake the child was replaced by a dog that carried the religious trinket to its owner, who, not being versed in any kind of useful lore, tossed it into a shrub.)
Then, on the night of the next full moon, up through the soil beside the park bench came William’s hand, emerging like a sand crab or a mutated daffodil shoot. It was the worse for wear: brown and shrivelled, with long fingernails. It crept out of the park and down into a culvert, only to reappear with the callously discarded gold engagement band encircling its little finger.
It groped and scuttled its way to Violet’s house and shinnied up the ivy and in through Violet’s bedroom window, where it hid behind the dainty floral-patterned skirts of her dressing table and leered at her as she was taking off her clothes. Could it see? No, because it didn’t have eyes. But it had a kind of visionless vision, since it was animated by the spirit of William. Or by part of that spirit: not the nicer part.