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Five Thin Fingers

Face Your Past

Generative Motion

Five Thin Fingers

   The fluorescent tubes in the billing department had hummed at a pitch that always gave me a dull, throbbing pressure behind my temples by three in the afternoon. I was on auto pilot from that time onwards. By the time I finally pushed through the heavy glass doors of the council offices, the street-lights were already flickering to life against a violet sky.
   It was late October. The kind of damp, clinging evening where the cold bites your cheeks. I had missed the 6:10 bus by a matter of seconds, watching its red tail-lights bleed into the rising mist at the end of the high street. That left me with a choice. A forty-minute trudge along the roaring, fume-choked dual carriageway or the fifteen-minute cut through Miller’s Recreation Ground. My hip was already aching from hours of sitting, so I chose the park. I always did, despite how much I disliked the place after the sun went down.
   Miller’s was a Victorian relic. A sprawling pocket of municipal pride that the local council had long since abandoned to the weeds. A perimeter of rusted iron railings choked with black ivy kept the surrounding housing estates at bay, but inside, the gravel paths had been overtaken by moss and damp earth that muffled the soles of my shoes.
   The air beneath the canopy of skeletal sycamores was thick with the smell of wet, decaying leaves and the sour, stagnant odour of the duck pond.
   As I passed the first row of empty black flowerbeds the yellow glare of the high-street shops faded behind the tree line, replaced by the sparse, jaundiced glow of the park’s few remaining sodium lamps. They were the old style bulbs that buzzed with a low, irritating rattle. Long, jittery shadows stretched across the grass as I walked. The mist had become thicker now. It drifted in front of me swallowing the distant hum of traffic.
   Suddenly a new sound inserted itself into the quiet.
   It was a soft sound. A dragging friction like a heavy branch being pulled over gravel or perhaps a stiff piece of cardboard scraping against the wet leaves.
   I didn't stop immediately. I merely slowed my pace, my ears straining to isolate the noise over the quiet rustle of my own coat. The sound slowed too, mimicking my hesitation. It was faint, perhaps ten yards behind me, nestled somewhere in the thick margin of overgrown grass that bordered the path.
   I stopped.
   There was now nothing but silence, except for the low, electric rattle of the nearest lamppost. I turned my head slowly, my eyes scanning the grey-black expanse of the lawn. The mist distorted the distances, making the trunks of the sycamores look like towering, limbless figures standing in the gloom.
   "Hello?" I called out. There was no echo to my voice. No one answered.
   I took a deep breath. The cold air stung the back of my throat. I tried to force my heart rate back down and told myself it was a hedgehog or perhaps a stray cat hunting among the fallen leaves. But the logic felt thin.
   My throat went dry. I pictured a feral dog waiting in the shadows or perhaps one of the local teenagers hiding in the bushes, waiting to jump out and snatch my briefcase. My hand instinctively went to my collar. My fingers felt cold and stiff.
   I started walking again. Faster this time, my stride lengthening as I tried to put distance between myself and the sound.
   The sound returned instantly, matching my increased tempo with a frantic, scraping urgency. It wasn't behind me any more. It was parallel to me now, deep within the shadows of the overgrown rhododendron bushes that lined the left side of the path.
   I stopped again, my breath catching in my throat. I stood perfectly still, holding the air in my lungs until my chest ached. Listening to hear if the thing would betray itself by moving while I was stationary.
   For ten agonising seconds there was nothing. Then, a twig snapped. A soft, wet slap followed, like a piece of raw meat dropping onto the damp earth.
   The path ahead curved toward the old Victorian bandstand, a dome of wrought iron that stood in a wide, circular clearing. A single sodium lamp hung directly above it. The bulb was flickering, dying in sickly gasps that cast the surrounding benches into alternating waves of harsh light and deep, impenetrable shadow.
   Underneath the bench closest to the bandstand, a warped wooden structure with rusted green iron legs, something was moving. The original sound had stopped, replaced by a delicate, crinkling sound.
   I stood at the edge of the clearing, my feet frozen to the gravel. Every rational impulse screamed at me to turn around. To run back to the safety of the high street. But a hypnotic curiosity held me anchored to the spot. My mind frantically looped through possible explanations. A discarded plastic bag caught in an eddy of wind. A nesting bird. A rat tearing at rubbish.
   I stepped off the gravel path, my shoes squelching softly in the wet grass as I edged closer to the bench. The light of the dying lamp flickered, dying out for three long seconds before buzzing back to life with a harsh glare. In that brief window of light, I saw it.
   It was a hand.
   It was pale, the colour of curdled milk, and it was entirely severed at the wrist. The skin where the arm should have been was gathered into a neat, dark ring of dry scar tissue. A perfectly healed, bloodless stump that looked as though it had been closed with a drawstring. There was no blood, no bone protruding, no raw meat. It was using its fingers like the legs of a monstrous, fleshy spider.
   The index and middle fingers splayed forward while the thumb and pinky acted as outriggers, stabilising the weight of the palm as it hoisted itself forward. The nails were trimmed short, but they were worn down at the tips, raw and grey.
   I watched, unable to draw breath, as the fingers flexed and contracted. It was rummaging through a discarded crisp packet that lay half-buried in the mud beneath the bench. The fingers spread flat against the plastic before curling to drag the packet an inch closer.
   The physical manifestation of my fear was immediate. A cold, heavy weight seemed to drop into the pit of my stomach and I felt a frantic urge to laugh. To giggle at the sheer, absurd impossibility of what my eyes were seeing. But the laughter immediately died in my throat, choked by the primal, screaming certainty that I was looking at something that violated the very laws of the world.
   I took an involuntary step backward, my heel clicking against a loose stone. The hand stopped.
   The fingers, which had been buried in the crinkling plastic, suddenly straightened. They rose off the ground, the palm tilting upward as if the thing were lifting its head to sniff the air. It remained poised like that for a second, the pale, gray flesh trembling slightly in the light of the lamp.
   I stood rooted, my heart hammering against my ribs. I didn't breathe. I didn't move.
   Then, with a sudden, violent jerk, the hand pivoted toward me. The fingers dug deep into the mud and it launched itself out from under the bench, scuttling across the wet grass with a frantic speed that made me let out a choked, desperate gasp.
   It didn't attack. Instead, it darted past my feet, a pale streak of gray flesh in the grass, and vanished into the thick rhododendron bushes that led toward the old keeper's cottage.
   The silence returned, but the air felt different now. Colder and charged with a terrifying thought that the night was only just beginning.
   My breathing was coming in ragged gasps that blossomed into plumes of mist in the intermittent light. Every rational cell in my brain was screaming at me to turn back. To run toward the safety of the park gates and the reassurance of the high street. Yet, a strange gravity seemed to pull at my feet. It was a sick curiosity. The absolute necessity to prove to myself that I had not finally succumbed to some sort of madness.
   The darkness beyond the bandstand’s flickering ring of light beckoned me.
   I pushed past the first row of overgrown rhododendron bushes, their thick, waxy leaves brushing against my face. The smell of wet earth and rotting wood was stronger here, trapped beneath the low canopy of the shrubs.
   I stopped to listen, tilting my head, holding my breath until the blood roared in my ears. There it was. A faint scratching. It was perhaps twenty yards ahead of me, moving purposefully through the fallen sycamore leaves. It was heading deeper into the neglected northern corner of the park, a strip of land that had been fenced off years ago after a series of vandals had ruined the old rose gardens.
   My phone vibrated in my coat pocket. The sudden violent hum against my thigh made me jump. My heel caught on a thick, half-buried root and I stumbled, catching myself against the rough bark of a dead elder tree.
   I pulled the phone out. The bright blue glare of the screen was blinding in the deep dark of the thicket.
   Helen.
   My thumb hovered over the screen. I wanted to ignore it. To keep tracking that scratching ahead of me, but the thought of her waiting in our quiet, draughty semi-detached house, getting more anxious with every passing minute, made me press the button. I held the cold glass to my ear.
   "David?" her voice was thin, slightly distorted by the poor signal, but her tone was immediately sharp with that familiar, defensive edge. "Where on earth are you? The clock in the hall has already chimed seven."
   "I'm... I'm just crossing the park," I said, my voice sounding tight, squeezed by the sudden constriction in my throat. I tried to sound casual.
   There was a pregnant pause on the other end.
   "You're late," she said, her voice dropping into a flatter, colder register. "The soup is cold. It’s been sitting on the stove for twenty minutes."
   "I know, Helen. I'm sorry. I got... delayed."
   "Delayed? By what?"
   I stared into the dark. Ahead of me, the scratching sound stopped. Had the hand heard my voice? Was it waiting, listening to us?
   "I thought I saw someone," I muttered, my eyes darting frantically between the black shapes of the tree trunks. "A stray dog, maybe. Or a teenager. I wanted to make sure they weren't... getting into trouble."
   "In the dark? In Miller's?" Helen's sigh was sharp, whistling through the speaker. "Get home, David. It’s freezing outside and you know how the park is after dark. It’s not safe."
   "I'm nearly at the other side," I lied, my chest tightening at the deception. "Five minutes. Ten at most."
   "The latch on the back gate is rattling again," she said suddenly, her voice dropping to a whisper. The irritation was gone, replaced by a thin vail of anxiety. "I told you to fix it at the weekend. The wind is picking up and it keeps banging against the post. It sounds like... like someone trying to get in."
   "It's just the wind, Helen," I said, though my own words sent a chill down my spine. "Just lock the kitchen door. I’ll look at it when I get back."
   "Just hurry up," she said, her tone snapping back to a defensive brittleness. "I don't like this house when it's this quiet."
   "I'm coming," I whispered, and ended the call before she could reply.
   I lowered the phone, the screen blacking out and plunging me back into the suffocating dark of the undergrowth. The silence of the park rushed back in, thicker and colder than before.
   I stood frozen, listening.
   For a long minute there was nothing. No wind. No distant traffic. No rustling leaves. Just the heavy, frantic thud of my own heart.
   Then, the scratching started again.
   It was further away now, moving with a quick, jerky speed. I began to walk again, no longer caring about the noise I was making as my shoes broke twigs and trampled the wet weeds. The branches of the rhododendrons caught at my coat, tearing at the material, but I kept my eyes fixed on the faint, pale movement that occasionally flickered in the gap between the bushes ahead.
   In the gloom the hand was navigating the rough terrain with terrifying efficiency, its fingers splaying wide to grip the wet earth, then contracting to hoist the dead weight of the wrist forward. It looked like a crab scuttling across a dark beach, but the texture, the dull, bloodless human skin and the neatly sealed stump, was unmistakably human.
   The trees and bushes began to thin, opening up into a small, overgrown clearing where the ruins of the old keeper’s cottage stood.
   Built in the late nineteenth century, the cottage was a gothic, red-brick structure that had once housed the park’s head gardener. Now, it was empty, half-choked by the thick cords of old ivy that crawled up its walls. The slate roof had partially collapsed leaving a jagged gap that looked like a broken tooth against the gray sky. The windows on the ground floor were either boarded up with rotting plywood or shattered into shards of glass. The hand reached the base of the cottage’s brickwork.
   I stopped at the edge of the clearing hiding behind the trunk of a large, dead oak. My breathing was ragged and my hands were trembling as I watched it.
   It didn't hesitate.
   The fingers reached up, gripping the crumbling mortar between the bricks. With a slick, fluid heave, the hand hauled itself up the vertical wall. It moved with a spider-like agility, its fingers finding traction in the smallest crevices of the decaying brickwork. It climbed two feet until it reached a low, narrow window that led into the cottage's cellar. The glass was long gone, leaving only a dark, gaping hole.
   The hand paused on the stone sill. For a second, the fingers flexed, splaying wide against the gray stone, before it slipped over the edge and vanished into the pitch-black interior of the cellar.
   I stood in the cold clearing, the wind finally beginning to pick up, rattling the ivy against the brickwork. The side door of the cottage, a heavy, swollen piece of timber with rusted iron hinges, was slightly ajar, leaving a narrow sliver of blackness visible.
   I looked down at my phone. The screen was dark. I thought of Helen, waiting in our quiet kitchen, the soup on the stove, the back gate rattling in the wind.
   I took a deep, shuddering breath and quickly made it to door as stealthily as possible. My hand trembled as I reached out toward the cold, wet wood. It resisted my touch with a stubbornness. I placed my shoulder against the peeling green paint and shoved. It yielded with a high, agonised screech of its hinges. I flinched, holding my breath, half-expecting some immediate, violent response from the darkness inside. But there was only the wind and the moving ivy behind me.
   I stepped over the threshold. The door swung shut of its own accord, clicking softly into its frame. I grabbed at the handle in panic, but it wouldn’t budge. I spun round, back against the door expecting the worst.
Silence.
   The air inside was suffocatingly dry, a stark contrast to the wet chill of the park. It tasted of old soot, lime dust and a faint, cloying sweetness that was barely perceptible, but clung to the back of my tongue. I clicked on my phone’s flash-light. The narrow, blue-white beam cut through the suspended particles of dust revealing a narrow hallway where the wallpaper hung in long ribbons like peeled skin.
   I edged forward into what must have been the kitchen. The floorboards were bare and warped, bowing under my feet with soft creaks. Boards of rotting plywood covered the windows sealing the room in a heavy, tomb-like quiet. I swept the light across the corners of the room. A rusted cast-iron stove stood in the corner, its door hanging loose. On the counter top, a broken terracotta pot lay spilled, its dry soil scattered across the linoleum.
   I searched every shadow, my heart hammering. I checked behind the rotting cupboards, under the rusted sink and in the deep recesses of the pantry.
   Nothing.
   I turned back toward the hallway. I took two steps before my foot sank into something soft and yielding. It didn't crunch like dry wood or squelch like mud. It felt dry, thin and slightly leathery like stepping on an old deflated balloon.
I lowered the flash-light, directing the beam at my feet.
   A pile of pale, gray shapes lay scattered across the floorboards near the cellar door. At first glance, they looked like discarded leather work gloves, perhaps left behind by the workmen who had boarded up the windows. But as I leaned closer my breath caught in my throat. The blue-white light revealed the fine, unmistakable ridges of human fingerprints.
   They weren't gloves.
   They were hollowed-out skins of human hands.
   They had been split neatly down the centre of the palm, completely empty, like the discarded skins of snakes. There were dozens of them piled in a heap, some of them still retaining the curved, grasping shape of the fingers that had once filled them.
   The physical reaction was instantaneous. My stomach pitched violently and a cold, greasy sweat broke out across my forehead. My initial panic escalated and paralysed my limbs. Then, from the dark, open stairwell of the cellar, the sound began.
   It was a collective, rhythmic rustling.
   It sounded like a thousand dry autumn leaves being stirred by a gentle breeze, but there was a sickening coordination to it. It was the sound of fingernails, hundreds of them, scraping against the cold stone of the cellar steps.
   I couldn't move. My feet felt as though they had been poured into concrete. My hand shook so violently that the beam of my flash-light danced across the open doorway of the cellar, illuminating the first few steps.
   The rustling grew louder, closer, rising up from the black throat of the house.
   I forced my arm steady, tilting the beam of my phone into the deep gloom of the cellar. At the bottom of the stairs, in a small alcove, sat a figure in a rusted metal garden chair.
   It was a man, or what remained of one. He was completely naked, his skin the colour of bloated lard, his torso swollen and soft. His limbs had been neatly removed at the elbows and knees, the stumps healed into smooth knobs of flesh. He was blind, his milky white eyes stared blankly up into the light, completely vacant. Yet, as the beam of my flash-light hit his face, his mouth stretched into a wide, toothless grin of pure, ecstatic welcome.
   Nesting on his lap and draping over his bare shoulders like a living, writhing shawl were dozens of the severed hands. They were grooming him. They were caressing his cheeks, parting his thin hair and running their pale fingers over his sightless eyes. On the stone floor beside the chair several of the hands were systematically sorting through a pile of stolen objects. Glinting gold watches, key rings, silver coins, and lipsticks. Stacking them into neat piles with a terrifying, insect-like coordination.
   The light of my phone held them in a harsh, blue glare.
   Suddenly, the collective rustling stopped. Every single hand froze.
   The hands grooming the man’s face slid down his neck. The hands sorting the jewellery abandoned the gold. Together, in a single, fluid movement, dozens of pale, bloodless wrists tilted upward. The fingers spreading and flexing before they all turned their fingertips toward the stairs.
   Toward me.
   The blind man’s grin widened, his throat letting out a rattling sigh. The hands launched themselves forward. They poured off his lap and down his legs like a wave of grey water, their fingernails clicking frantically against the stone steps as they began to swarm up the stairs.
   I was beyond panic now which somehow freed up my limbs. I dropped the phone. The light shattered against the stone step plunging the room into pitch darkness.
   I turned and ran. I screamed a raw, choked sound that died in my throat as I threw my weight against the swollen side door. It splintered apart and I burst out into the cold night air, tumbling onto the wet grass of the clearing. I didn't look back. I scrambled to my feet, my shoes slipping in the mud, and sprinted blindly through the black thickets of the park, the branches tearing at my face and hands until I finally burst through the iron gates and onto the bright, empty high street.
   I don't remember the walk home.
   Now, I sit in my armchair. The television is muttering quietly in the corner, casting a flickering light over the living room walls. The front door is locked. The back door is bolted. The house is warm, smelling of the pine disinfectant I used to scrub my hands until the skin was red and raw.
   Helen is asleep upstairs. She had been angry when I finally crept in, my clothes torn and covered in mud, but she had been too tired to argue. She had left a bowl of cold soup on the kitchen table, which I heated up and forced myself to swallow just to feel something warm in my stomach.
   But the warmth didn't last.
   The television screen flickers, a silent commercial playing. From the hallway, beneath the heavy oak of the front door, a sound begins. It is very faint, almost imperceptible. A dry, rhythmic sound.
   It pauses, then starts again, a soft, scraping friction against the bottom of the wood.
   And outside, in the quiet of the garden, the latch on the back gate begins to rattle. It isn't the wind. The rattle is steady and patient. The sound of five thin fingers, working at the iron bar, trying to lift it from its post.

The End