That horrid, preserved hand, yet clutching a fat black candle captivated me…. I knew from a passage of a book on folklore, read to me by some chippie I humped in college, that what I was looking at must be a hand of glory. Hacked from a murderer and pickled for use in the blackest of magic rituals. I couldn’t quite recall what it was supposed to do, exactly. Paralyzing jackasses such as myself, for one, obviously.
“Say, Johnny, did Conrad happen to tell you where he stowed the key to his vault?” The magician was in high spirits. He glided toward me, waltzing to the notes of Blackwood’s flute.
I discovered my mouth was in working order. I coughed to clear my throat. “Nope,” I said.
He nodded and poured himself a glass of sherry from a decanter and drank it with relish. “Indeed, I imagine this is the blood of my foes.”
“Hey,” I said. “How’d you turn the Blackwood Boys anyhow?”
“Them? The boys are true believers, and with good reason considering who roams the woods around here. I got my hands on a film of Eadweard’s, one that might’ve seen him burned alive even in this modern age. In the film, young Conrad and some other nubile youths were having congress with the great ram of the black forest. Old Bill stepped from the grove of blood and took a bow. I must confess, it was a spectacular bit of photography. I informed the boys that instead of hoarding Muybridge’s genius for myself, it would be share and share alike. Dan and his associates were convinced.”
“I’m sorry I asked.”
“Does everyone beg you for mercy at the end?”
“The ones who see it coming.”
“Do you ever grant quarter?”
“Nope.”
“Will you beg me for mercy?”
“Sure, why not?”
The magician laughed and snapped his fingers. “Alas! Alack! I would spare you, for sentimental reasons, and because I was such a cad to send the Long and the Short gunning for you, and to curse Donald purely from spite. Unfortunately, ’tis Danny of the Blackwood who means to skin you alive on a corroded altar to Old Bill. Sorry, lad. Entertaining as I’m sure that will prove, I’m on a mission. You sit tight, Uncle Phil needs to see to his prize. Thanks oodles, boy. As the heathens and savages are wont to say, you done good.” He ignored the torrent of profanity that I unleashed upon his revelation that he’d killed my father, and casually swirled his elegant cape around his shoulders and used my own matches to strike a flame to the black candle. Woe and gloom, it was a macabre and chilling sight, that flame guttering and licking at dead fingers as he thrust it forth as a torch.
Helios Augustus proved familiar with the layout. He promptly made an adjustment to the devil statue and ten feet away one of the massive bookcases pivoted to reveal a steel door, blank save for a keyhole. The magician drew a deep breath and spent several minutes chanting in Latin or Greek, or bits of both and soon the door gave way with a mere push from his index finger. He threw back his head and laughed. I admit, that sound was so cold and diabolical if I’d been able to piss myself right then, I would’ve. Then he wiped his eyes and disappeared into a well of darkness and was gone for what felt like an age.
I spent the duration listening to the Blackwood Boys reciting an opera while straining with all of my might and main to lift my hand, turn my head, wiggle a toe, to no avail. This reminded me, most unpleasantly, of soldiers in France I’d seen lying trussed up in bandages at the hospital, the poor bastards unable to blink as they rotted in their ruined bodies. I sweated and tried to reconcile myself with an imminent fate worse than death, accompanied by death. ‘Hacked to pieces by a band of hillbilly satanists’ hadn’t ever made my list of imagined ways of getting rubbed out—and as the Samurai warriors of yore meditated on a thousand demises, I too had imagined a whole lot of ways of kicking.
Helios Augustus’s candle flame flickered in the black opening. He carried a satchel and it appeared heavily laden by its bulges; doubtless stuffed with Eadweard Muybridge’s priceless lost films. He paused to set the grisly hand in its sconce before me on the desk. The candle had melted to a blob of shallow grease. It smelled of burnt human flesh, which I figured was about right. Probably baby fat, assuming my former chippie girlfriend was on the money in her description.
Helios said, “Tata, lad. By the by, since you’ve naught else to occupy you, it may be in order to inspect this talisman more closely. I’d rather thought you might twig to my ruse back in Olympia. You’re a nice boy, but not much of a detective, sorry to say.” He waved cheerily and departed.
I stared into the flame and thought murderous thoughts and a glint on the ring finger arrested my attention. The ring was slightly sunken into the flesh, and that’s why I hadn’t noted it straight away. My father’s wedding band. Helios Augustus, that louse, that conniving, filthy sonofawhore, had not only murdered my father by his own admission, but later defiled his grave and chopped off his left hand to make a grotesque charm.
Rage had a sobering effect upon me. The agony from my wounds receded, along with the rising panic at being trapped like a rabbit in a snare and my brain ticked along its circuit, methodical and accountant-like. It occurred to me that despite his callous speech, the magician might’ve left me a chance, whether intentionally or as an oversight, the devil only knew. I huffed and puffed and blew out the candle, and the invisible force that had clamped me in its vise evaporated. Not one to sit around contemplating my navel, nor one to look askance at good fortune, I lurched to my feet and into action.
I took a few moments to set the curtains aflame, fueling the blaze with the crystal decanter of booze. I wrapped Dad’s awful hand in a kerchief and jammed it into my pocket. Wasn’t going to leave even this small, gruesome remnant of him in the house of Satan.
An excellent thing I made my escape when I did, because I met a couple of Blackwood’s boys on the grand staircase. “Hello, fellas,” I said, and sprayed them with hellfire of my own, sent them tumbling like Jack and Jill down the steps, notched the columns and the walls with bullet holes. I exulted at their destruction. My hand didn’t bother me a whit.
Somebody, somewhere, cut the electricity and the mansion went dark as a tomb except for the fire licking along the upper reaches of the balcony and the sporadic muzzle flashes of my trench broom, the guns of my enemies, for indeed those rat bastards, slicked and powdered for the performance, yet animals by their inbred faces and bestial snarls, poured in from everywhere and I was chivvied through the foyer and an antechamber where I swung the Thompson like a fireman with a hose. When the drum clicked empty I dropped the rifle and jumped through the patio doors in a crash of glass and splintered wood, and loped, dragging curtains in my wake, across the lawn for the trees. I weaved between the mighty lines of the burning pentagrams that now merely smoldered, and the trailing edge of my train caught fire and flames consumed the curtains and began eating their way toward me, made me Kipling’s rogue tiger zigzagging into the night, enemies in close pursuit. Back there in the yard echoed a chorus of screams as the top of the house bloomed red and orange and the hillbillies swarmed after me, small arms popping and cracking and it was just like the war all over again.
The fox hunt lasted half the night. I blundered through the woods while the enemy gave chase, and it was an eerie, eerie several hours as Dan Blackwood’s pipe and his cousins’ fiddle and banjo continued to play and they drove me through briar and marsh and barbwire fence until I stumbled across a lonely dirt road and stole a farm truck from behind a barn and roared out of the Hollow, skin intact. Didn’t slow down until the sun crept over the horizon and I’d reached the Seattle city limits. The world tottered and fell on my head and I coasted through a guardrail and came to a grinding halt in a field, grass scraping against the metal of the cab like a thousand fingernails. It got hazy after that.