Blood and Water and Other Tales (18 page)

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But when they got to the lounge, the hand was gone.

“It’s gone!” cried Dicky.

“What?” said Yvonne.

“There was a severed hand on the bar!”

Yvonne sighed, and began to make himself a drink. Dicky Dee turned to young Gunther, who was still sitting on the couch and still flexing his pecs.

“Gunther, what happened to the hand?” Dicky appeared rattled. He generated emotion.

Gunther shrugged.

“Hands don’t just—disappear!” whispered Dicky, blanching.

Yvonne shrugged. Gunther shrugged again. Lily was looking under the bar, joggling the bottles. “Maybe it slipped down,” she said. Then she screamed—for out of the darkness leaped the hand itself!

It scampered across the bar, hurled itself onto the floor, then scuttled down the room and out the door at the end. There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Yvonne dropped his drink. It shattered messily on the floor.

“Mein Gott,”
breathed Gunther. “The dead hand lives.”

Dicky strode manfully toward the door. “I’m going after it,” he said. Then he stopped, turned, and came back to the bar. “I think I need a little drink first,” he said. “This is extremely fucking weird.”

None of them mentioned what they’d seen. They sensed, rightly, that others would be skeptical; the staff of Babylonia had never been known for rigor in perceptual matters. Three nights later, Saint Mark and his Evangelists were playing the upstairs room. Toward the end of their late set, Saint Mark paused to catch his breath and introduce the next “song.”

“This one’s called ‘Witch-Bitch,’” he grunted, fingering his iron cross. “Dedicated to my mother—”

Then he screamed.

The audience thought the scream was all part of it. The band knew it wasn’t, and so did Dicky Dee. He’d seen the hand dropping from the ceiling, and he rushed for the stage as Saint Mark staggered backwards into the drums, clawing at the thing clamped to his neck. The kids applauded with gusto as the skinny singer overturned a cymbal, and by the time Dicky got onstage the rest of the band was desperately attempting to pry the hand off Saint Mark’s neck. But the diabolical fingers could not be moved. Saint Mark’s face, meanwhile, had turned scarlet, his eyes were bulging grotesquely, and his tongue protruded thickly from his throat. The applause had by this time turned to a hubbub of confusion and horror, but through it all Dicky could hear one clear voice:

“Burn it off! Burn it off!”

Of course! Dicky Dee lit a cigarette with trembling fingers and ground it into the back of the hand. It was a dramatically effective move. The hand immediately loosed its grip and scuttled under an upset drum—and not a moment too soon, as far as Saint Mark was concerned. They helped him offstage, and by a stroke of good fortune there were stimulants on hand to help revive the half-choked performer. He was soon his old “self” again, apparently none the worse for his encounter with the hand.

“But where did it come from?” he said, gently fingering his long white stringy neck. No one could answer him. “What a grip,” he said, in a tone of some respect. “Look at those bruises!” They looked at the bruises; and within an hour, a number of leading Babylonians were sporting on their necks cosmetic stranglemarks in exquisitely brutal shades of red, purple, and black.

Three days later Lily was tending bar upstairs when she noticed a rather unusual character enter the club. He stood close to the door, grinning wildly at nothing in particular as his eyes darted suspiciously from side to side. But what struck Lily as odd was this: when he paid for his Guinness, and she caught a glimpse of his palm—there were hairs growing on it! She was about to strike up a conversation on the topic when the tranquility of Babylonia was yet again shattered by a hideous scream. It came from the ladies’ washroom—and a moment later a young woman came crashing through the door, still pulling up her fishnet tights.

“Fucking men!” she shouted. “You can’t take a piss without being molested!” She collapsed onto a barstool, and to the small crowd of anxious drinkers that quickly gathered round she pointed with trembling finger into the washroom. “In there!” she cried.

“What, a man?” said Lily. It had happened before.

“No!” wailed the distressed girl. “A man’s
hand!”

Lily looked at Dicky, who had just emerged from the office, and Dicky dashed into the washroom. A moment later he came out again. “It’s gone,” he said.

“Back where it came from, I hope!” said the girl, with a shudder of deep distaste.

The story, as Dicky and Lily told it to Yvonne in the office a few minutes later, was that the hand had been lurking in the U-bend of the toilet upon which the unfortunate girl had seated herself, and the temptation, clearly, had been irresistible. When the girl had fled, shrieking, the hand had in all probability returned to the safety of the U-bend.

“So at least we know it’s amphibious,” murmured Yvonne.

“It’s amphibious, cunning, murderous—and horny,” said Dicky, pacing back and forth. “The question is—” At that moment there was a loud rap at the door. “Go away!” shouted Yvonne.

There was a moment’s silence; then the rap came again.

“Go away!” shouted Yvonne and Lily. But the door opened, and there stood the black-clad stranger whom Lily had noticed earlier—the one with hair on the palm of his hand!

“Excuse me,” he said in deep, hollow tones.

Yvonne rose irritably to his feet. “We’re in a meeting,” he grumbled. “Can’t you—”

“The hand,” said the stranger. “I can help you.” Yvonne stopped in his tracks. “You can?” he said. “What do you know?”

“May I come in?” said the stranger.

“Come in, come in,” said Yvonne, pushing a chair forward. “Tell us what you know.”

“Very well,” said the stranger, seating himself and pulling a cigarette from his pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Smoke, smoke,” said Yvonne. “Just tell us about the hand.”

So the stranger told them about the hand.

The stranger accepted a light from Yvonne, drew heavily on his cigarette, and stared at the floor. At last he lifted his eyes—tormented, bloodshot eyes, filmed with despair—and Lily felt a small gush of pity for the man. There were deep bags under his eyes, and his skin was unnaturally pale. “You see before you,” he said at last, in those hollow tones of his, “a victim of human desire. Not a pretty sight, is it?” There was another pause. Yvonne cleared his voice and said: “Who—”

“Oh, my name doesn’t matter,” said the stranger. “I am just one of many, a ruined man, ruined by...” Here he was unable to finish his sentence; a sob racked his frame.

“Human desire?” said Dicky.

“Exactly!” said the stranger. “Everywhere I look I see lips, breasts, bottoms, legs—and I’ve had enough!

I can’t stand it anymore—this constant itch—this
compulsion!
I’m a sick man!” he cried—and then his voice dropped an octave, or more. “I’m a compulsive masturbator, you see,” he whispered. “I have to wank. And this”—he slowly opened his hand—“is the result.” It was then that Dicky and Yvonne saw what Lily had seen earlier: dead in the center of his palm sprouted a small clump of fine black hairs.

“Just like an armpit,” murmured Yvonne. “Go on.”

“It all began,” continued the stranger, “with the onset of puberty. Slowly it took over my life. I couldn’t escape; it was like a machine, constantly filling my head with these—images!” He shuddered. “I lost my job. Dishonorable discharge. Ha! Story of my life....” There was a long silence. Then, lifting his eyes, the stranger said quietly: “How long can a man live with shame?”

Dicky looked at Yvonne. Yvonne shrugged. “We don’t know,” he said. “How long?”

“Only so long!” the stranger cried, and suddenly rising to his feet, he pulled from his pocket, where it had been tucked since the beginning of the interview, his right hand—only there was no right hand! He hauled up his sleeve to show how the wrist ended in a smooth, round, dimpled stump. Wordlessly the three Babylonians gazed at the stranger’s stump. They’d not met a story like this one before, and Lily slipped out to get them all a drink.

“You can still do it with your left one, I suppose?” said Yvonne.

“Masturbation guilt drove me to it,” said the stranger, resuming his seat. “Yes, masturbation guilt! I hacked it off myself, and I should have drowned it, I suppose, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it... There was a pregnant silence. “I come from a sentimental race, you see,” he went on. “I put it in a shoe box and kept it under the sink instead.”

“A shoe box,” said Lily, who had returned with drinks. “Cute.”

“Oh, there were holes in it,” said the stranger, taking a long swallow of his Guinness. “But anyway, for a week I wasn’t troubled by the curse of human desire—yes, for the first time since puberty I didn’t feel the itch! Can you imagine it—a world without breasts, without skin, without bums and lips and legs... a world free of desire, where everything is what it seems and your brain isn’t polluted with longing and your loins aren’t constantly stirring with a life of their own... can you imagine what it is to be free of human desire?”

They all nodded.

“It couldn’t last. It returned in the depths of the night, as I slept. I felt it creep under the blankets. I felt its fingers on my thigh, soft as silk. I felt it gently laying hold of me;—and I rose up from my bed with a shout and I
hurled
the thing from me! Oh, I couldn’t have it starting again, not after all I’d been through! ‘Back to your box!’ I shouted; and to see it drag itself out the door and into the kitchen—it was a pathetic sight, so it was. But I had to be firm, you see that?”

They all nodded.

“I never saw it again,” said the stranger. There was a long pause. A muted roar of conversation was audible from the bar beyond. At last Dicky spoke. “And you think it’s your hand that’s been causing the trouble here?” he said.

“I do,” said the stranger, who had finished his Guinness and pulled out another cigarette. “I was in here the night before—before I cut it off. I think it remembers. I think it came back.” He clutched his face in his hand. “Oh, God,” he sobbed, “if only I’d been strong. If only I’d flushed it down the toilet in the beginning—”

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” Dicky cut in. “It’s amphibious.”

“No!” said the stranger.

“But more to the point,” said Dicky, “how can we catch it?”

“Oh, I’ll tell you how to catch it,” said the stranger. “And I’ll tell you what to do with it once you’ve caught it.” And he pulled from inside his coat a hefty meat cleaver—the very same one, he told them, he’d used on the hand in the first place. And then he outlined his plan...

Late that night—very late, when the club had emptied and everyone had gone home to bed—or to the after-hours place on Avenue B—Lily de Villiers sat alone in the ill-lit mood lounge of Babylonia. She was looking her best. Her red hair was piled up on top, with thick strands curling saucily down around her face and throat. Her eyes were heavily mascaraed, and her lips were scarlet. Rouge highlights on her cheeks created an impression of mounting inner passion. She was in deep decolletage, her cleavage shadow sharply accentuated by the subdued lighting of the mood lounge, and her little leather skirt riding high up thighs sheathed in black seamed nylon stockings with runs and ladders and other tarty insignia. Her legs were crossed and her heels, as ever, were like needles. She was heavily perfumed. She exuded availability. She was the whore of Babylonia, and she was there to bait the hand.

An hour passed, and Lily sat smoking cigarettes and pouting provocatively. She crossed and recrossed her legs every few minutes, and the ashtray on the couch beside her gradually filled. Lily got to her feet and, unsure what strange eye might be watching, tottered sexily over to the bar and emptied the ashtray into a garbage can. Then she returned to the couch and resumed sitting, smoking, pouting, waiting, and crossing and recrossing her legs.

Another hour passed. Poor Lily was starting to yawn. The sun was coming up. Honest citizens were going to work. She was about to call it a night and go upstairs to the others when a tiny sound caught her attention. Could it be? It could; someone—or something—was coming down the stairs!

Lily smoked with a careless nonchalance honed to perfection by years of practice. She was very cool. And there it was!—pattering across the floor like a hideous pink crab, slapping the linoleum as it scampered toward her in lusty and intemperate haste. From fifteen feet it hurled itself upon her, groping like a maniac at her bosom! Lily rose into the air with a wild shriek of horror, then toppled backwards as from beneath the couch reared young Gunther, who had been waiting there all the while, and who now brandished aloft the stranger’s meat cleaver! Lily seized the hand and plucked it from her bosom like a limpet from a rock and hurled it with a cry of disgust against the wall. The hand fell, stunned, to the floor, and lay on its back, its white, tender, hairy underside exposed to the fierce lunge of the young German. Then down came the cleaver and mercilessly hacked the dazed hand in two! The shattered and bleeding half-hands lurched off in opposite directions, but far too shakily to escape Gunther’s terrible wrath. Slash slash! Down came the cleaver twice more, and the hand was severed in four. From four to eight and from eight to sixteen; and when the cursed creature that had spilled the stranger’s seed so needlessly all those years was finally reduced to somewhere in the region of fifty parts, and none of them was moving, Gunther stopped. He mopped his brow and lifted his head, his breast damp and heaving, to the light, which Dicky Dee had just flicked on.

“Good work, Gunther,” said Dicky, his eyes burning with a morbid and unnatural gleam. “And Lily”—he went to the poor girl, who was rising unsteadily to her feet after gazing aghast at Gunther’s grunty choppings; “my poor dear Lily. A hero!”

“Heroine,” gasped Lily.

“Heroine!” cried Dicky.

“Heroine,” murmured Yvonne, entering.

“Heroine!” thundered Gunther, brandishing the bloody cleaver.

At that moment the stranger’s hollow tones were heard. “The hand is dead,” he said, from the doorway at the top of the stairs. “Feed it to the lizard. Long live the hand!” And with a dry, bitter laugh—or was it just a bad cough, a dirty hack spawned of some putrid existential miasma that seethed within his guilt-ridden soul?—anyway, with a sound that chilled the racing, roaring blood of the four young people, the stranger waved his stump over his head and limped off into the sharp Manhattan dawn.