Many years ago, the hand once trespassed into an abandoned cottage hospital. They say it did it for a dare, on a night around Halloween although there had been warnings in school assembly not to venture anywhere near, Let me be absolutely clear, it is a very dangerous place! followed by threats of severe punishment for anyone caught inside. Once within, it trembled at the deep shadows, the stink of piss, the screaming quiet. It moved around the building spider-like, feeling its way along graffitied walls, railings, around door frames, banistered up the wide gothic staircase, wound through wards that clung onto pain, and into the operating theatre. It was there that terror got the better of it. There was no question about it, the hand wanted out, so forced open a third-floor window and scrambled onto the sill where the beam of a policeman’s torch lit it up like the silk glove of a moustachioed magician whose well-staged finale involved a Zinc-Lined Cabinet of Death. To the policeman’s barked order of, Come down from there! the hand, in a panic, leapt into the air, flapping its fingers like the leathery wings of a bat and vanished, jittering into ghostly smoke coils drifting up from the bonfire crackling on the green beside the cemetery. The young policeman never told anyone what he witnessed but for the rest of his life he suffered recurring nightmares of the hand’s return, galloping through the chambers of sleep toward his throat.
Bob Beagrie