Because: Ray feels himself going now, in the Japanese sense. Knows just how late it’s getting, how soon the high from this last wrench and spurt will fade. Knows that no possible climax to this drama will ever seem good enough, climactic enough, no matter WHAT he does to “me”. I can see it in his eyes. I can-
(see it)
See it. “I” can. And “I”, I, I…
I feel myself. Feel myself. Coming, too.
Feel myself there. At last.
Feel Ray hug me to him and hug him back, arms contracting floppily — feel that pin Pat put in my shoulder last time snap as the joint finally pulls free, and tighten my grip with the other before Ray can start to slip. Feel my clotty lashes bat, a wet cough in my dry throat; the sudden gasp of breath comes out like a sneeze, spraying his face with reddish-brown gunk. See Ray goggle up at me, as Lyle gives a girly little scream: Cry to God and Pat’s full name, reduced to panicked consonants. HolyshitPahtriSHA-FUCKl
Pat’s head comes up fast, hair flipping. Eyes so wide they seem square.
My tongue creaks and Ray hasn’t left me much lip to shape words with, but I know we understand each other. Like I said, I can SEE it.
Gotta go, Ray. You want to come with?
Well, do you?
And Ray… nods.
And I…
… I give him. What he wants.
And oh, but the angels are screaming at me now like a Balkan choir massacre, all at once — glorious, polyphonic, chanting chains of scream: Sing No, sing stop, sing thou shalt thou shalt thou shalt NOT. Their halos flare like sunspots, making the whole room pulse — hiss and pop, paparazzi flashbulb storm, a million-sparkler overdrip curtain of angry white light.
(Sorry, guys. Looks like revenge comes before redemption, this time round.)
Ray pulls me close, spasming, as my front teeth find his Adam’s apple. Blood jets up. The audience shrieks, almost in unison.
I look over Ray’s shoulder at Pat, frozen, her board so hot that it’s starting to smoke. And I smile, with Ray’s blood all over my mouth.
So hook him up to the Bone Machine now, Pats — make a movie, while you’re at it. Take a picture, it’ll last longer. Take your turn. Take your time.
But this is how it breaks down: He’s gone, long gone, like I’m gone, too. Like we’re gone, together. Gone.
Gone to lie down.
Gone to forgive, to forget.
Gone, gone, finally-
— To sleep.
Aaaaaah, yes.
The sheep look up, the angels down. And I’m done, at long, long last — blown far, far away, the last of my shredded self trailing behind like skin, like wings, a plastic bag blowing.
Done, and I’m out: Forgiven, forgotten, sleeping. Loving nothing. Being nothing. Feeling none of your pain, fearing none of your anger, craving none of your — anything. Anymore.
Down here where things settle, down below the bridge, the weighing-room, the House of Dust itself — down here, where our faces fall away, where we lose our names, where we no longer care what brought us here, or why… I don’t care, finally, because (finally) I don’t have to. And in this way, I’m just the same as every other dead person — thank that God I’ve never met, and probably never wilclass="underline" No longer mere trembling meaty prey for the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to; no longer cursed to live with death breathing down my neck, metaphoric or literal.
Which only makes the predicament of people like Ray — or like Pat, for that matter — seem all the crueller, in context. Since the weakness of the living is their enduring need to still love us, and to feel we still love them in return; to believe that we are still the same people who were once capable of loving them back. Even though we’re, simply…
… Not.
Down here, down here: The psychic sponge-bed, the hole at the world’s heart, that well of poison loneliness every cemetery elm knows with its great tap-root. Here’s where we float, my fellow dead and I — one of whom might be Ray, not that he or I would recognize each other now.
The keenest irony of all being that I suppose Ray killed himself for me, in a way — killed himself, by letting me kill him. Even though… until that very last moment we shared together… we’d never really even met.
Come with me, I said. Not caring if he could, but suspecting-
(rightly, it turns out)
— I’d probably never know, in the final analysis, if he actually did.
Down here, where we float in a comforting soup of nondescription — charred and eyeless, Creation’s joke. Big Bang detritus bought with Jesus’ blood.
Ash, drifting free, from an eternally burning heaven.
Mark Samuels
The White Hands
Mark Samuels is the author of two short-story collections, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales from Tartarus Press, and Black Altars, published by Rainfall Books. New stories were recently published in A Walk on the Darkside edited by John Pelan, and Strange Attractor Journal #2, edited by Mark Pilkington.
When not writing weird fiction, the author often spends his time wandering the London streets in search of scenes of glamorous decay with his wife, the acclaimed Mexican writer Adriana Diaz-Enciso.
About “The White Hands”, Samuels explains: “For editorial reasons it was not possible to include the complete text of this story in my Tartarus book, so I’m therefore delighted to see it finally appear here in the form which I consider most satisfactory.”
You may remember Alfred Muswell, whom devotees of the weird tale will know as the author of numerous articles on the subject of literary ghost stories. He died in obscurity just over a year ago.
Muswell had been an Oxford don for a time, but left the cloisters of the University after an academic scandal. A former student (now a journalist) wrote of him in a privately published memoir:
Muswell attempted single-handedly to alter the academic criteria of excellence in literature. He sought to eradicate what he termed the “tyranny of materialism and realism” from his teaching. He would loom over us in his black robes at lectures and tutorials, tearing prescribed and classic books to shreds with his gloved hands, urging us to read instead work by the likes of Sheridan Le Fanu, Vernon Lee, M.R. James and Lilith Blake. Muswell was a familiar sight amongst the squares and courtyards of the colleges at night and would stalk abroad like some bookish revenant. He had a very plump face and a pair of circular spectacles. His eyes peered into the darkness with an indefinable expression that could be somewhat disturbing.
You will recall that Muswell’s eccentric theories about literature enjoyed a brief but notorious vogue in the 1950s. In a series of essays in the short-lived American fantasy magazine The Necrophile, he championed the supernatural tale. This was at a time when other academics and critics were turning away from the genre in disgust, following the illiterate excesses of pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. Muswell argued that the anthropocentric concerns of realism had the effect of stifling the much more profound study of infinity. Contemplation of the infinite, he contended, was the faculty that separated man from beast. Realism, in his view, was the literature of the prosaic. It was the quest for the hidden mysteries, he contended, which formed the proper subject of all great literature. Muswell also believed that literature, in its highest form, should unravel the secrets of life and death. This latter concept was never fully explained by him but he hinted that its attainment would involve some actual alteration in the structure of reality itself. This, perhaps inevitably, led to him being dismissed in academic circles as a foolish mystic.