Exit Wounds, page 17
“Three points in the bag, lads,” the one with the broken bottle said. “Easy home win.”
Vincent had learned a lot about what you gave away and what you kept hidden. They could have his phone and whatever money they could find. He would give them a little blood and a piece of his flesh if it came to it, and he would try his hardest to take some of theirs.
Vincent looked down the tunnel and saw them coming. He would not show them that he was afraid though. He would not give them that satisfaction.
He was Grade A.
KITTENS
DEAN KOONTZ
The cool green water slipped along the streambed, bubbling around smooth brown stones, reflecting the melancholy willows that lined the bank. Marnie sat on the grass, tossing stones into a deep pool, watching ripples spread in ever-widening circles and lap at the muddy banks. She was thinking about the kittens. This year’s kittens, not last year’s. A year ago, her parents had told her that the kittens had gone to Heaven. Pinkie’s litter had disappeared the third day after their squealing birth.
Marnie’s father had said, “God took them away to Heaven to live with Him.”
She didn’t exactly doubt her father. After all, he was a religious man. He taught Sunday school every week and was an officer or something in the church, whose duty it was to count collection money and mark it down in a little red book. He was always picked to give the sermon on Laymen’s Sunday. And every evening, he read passages to them from the Bible. She had been late for the reading last night and had been spanked. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” her father always said. No, she didn’t actually doubt her father, for if anyone would know about God and kittens, it was he.
But she continued to wonder. Why, when there were hundreds upon thousands of kittens in the world, did God have to take all four of hers? Was God selfish?
This was the first that she had thought of those kittens for some time. In the past twelve months, much had happened to make her forget. There was her first year in school, the furore of getting ready for the first day – the buying of paper, pencils, and books. And the first few weeks had been interesting, meeting Mr Alphabet and Mr Numbers. When school began to bore her, Christmas rushed in on polished runners and glistening ice: the shopping, the green and yellow and red and blue lights, the Santa Claus on the corner who staggered when he walked, the candlelit church on Christmas Eve when she had had to go to the bathroom and her father had made her wait until the service was over. When things began to lose momentum again in March, her mother had given birth to twins. Marnie had been surprised at how small they were and at how slowly they seemed to grow in the following weeks.
Here it was June again. The twins were three months old, finally beginning to grow a great deal heavier; school was out, and Christmas was an eternity away, and everything was getting dull again. Therefore, when she heard her father telling her mother that Pinkie was going to have another litter, she grasped at the news and wrenched every drop of excitement from it. She busied herself in the kitchen, preparing rags and cotton for the birth and a fancy box for the kittens’ home when they arrived.
As events ran their natural course, Pinkie slunk away and had the kittens during the night in a dark corner of the barn. There was no need for sterilized rags or cotton, but the box came in handy. There were six in this litter, all gray with black spots that looked like ink hastily blotted.
She liked the kittens, and she was worried about them. What if God was watching again like last year?
“What are you doing, Marnie?”
She didn’t have to look; she knew who was behind her. She turned anyway, out of deference, and saw her father glaring down at her, dark irregular splotches of perspiration discoloring the underarms of his faded blue work coveralls, dirt smeared on his chin and caked to the beard on his left cheek.
“Throwing stones,” she answered quietly.
“At the fish?”
“Oh, no, sir. Just throwing stones.”
“Do we remember who was the victim of stone throwing?” He smiled a patronizing smile.
“Saint Stephen,” she answered.
“Very good.” The smile faded. “Supper’s ready.”
* * *
She sat ramrod stiff in the old maroon easy chair, looking attentive as her father read to them from the ancient family Bible that was bound in black leather, all scuffed and with several torn pages. Her mother sat next to her father on the dark blue corduroy couch, hands folded in her lap, an isn’t-it-wonderful-what-God-has-given-us smile painted on her plain but pretty face.
“Suffer the little children to come to Me, and forbid them not; for such is the Kingdom of God.” Her father closed the book with a gentle slap that seemed to leap into the stale air and hang there, holding up a thick curtain of silence. No one spoke for several minutes. Then: “What chapter of what book did we just read, Marnie?”
“Saint Mark, chapter ten,” she said dutifully.
“Fine,” he said. Turning to his wife, whose smile had changed to a we’ve-done-what-a-Christian-family-should-do expression, he said, “Mary, how about coffee for us and a glass of milk for Marnie?”
“Right,” said her mother, getting up and pacing into the kitchen.
Her father sat there, examining the inside covers of the old holy book, running his fingers along the cracks in the yellow paper, scrutinizing the ghostly stains embedded forever in the title page where some great-uncle had accidentally spilled wine a million-billion years ago.
“Father,” she said tentatively.
He looked up from the book, not smiling, not frowning.
“What about the kittens?”
“What about them?” he countered.
“Will God take them again this year?”
The half-smile that had crept onto his face evaporated into the thick air of the living room. “Perhaps,” was all that he said.
“He can’t,” she almost sobbed.
“Are you saying what God can and cannot do, young lady?”
“No, sir.”
“God can do anything.”
“Yes, sir.” She fidgeted in her chair, pushing herself deeper into its rough, worn folds. “But why would He want my kittens again? Why always mine?”
“I’ve had quite enough of this, Marnie. Now be quiet.”
“But why mine?” she persisted.
He stood suddenly, crossed to the chair, and slapped her delicate face. A thin trickle of blood slipped from the corner of her mouth. She wiped it away with the palm of her hand.
“You must not doubt God’s motives!” her father insisted. “You are far too young to doubt.” The saliva glistened on his lips. He grabbed her by the arm and brought her to her feet. “Now you get up those stairs and into bed.”
She didn’t argue. On the way to the staircase, she wiped away the re-forming stream of blood. She walked slowly up the steps, allowing her hand to run along the smooth, polished wood railing.
“Here’s the milk,” she heard her mother saying below.
“We won’t be needing it,” her father answered curtly.
In her room, she lay in the semidarkness that came when the full moon shone through her window, its orange-yellow light glinting from a row of religious plaques that lined one wall. In her parents’ room, her mother was cooing to the twins, changing their diapers. “God’s little angels,” she heard her mother say. Her father was tickling them, and she could hear the “angels” chuckling – a deep gurgle that rippled from down in their fat throats.
Neither her father nor her mother came to say goodnight. She was being punished.
* * *
Marnie was sitting in the barn, petting one of the gray kittens, postponing an errand her mother had sent her on ten minutes earlier. The rich smell of dry, golden hay filled the air. Straw covered the floor and crackled underfoot. In the far end of the building, the cows were lowing to each other – only two of them, whose legs had been sliced by barbed wire and who were being made to convalesce. The kitten mewed and pawed the air below her chin.
“Where’s Marnie?” her father’s voice boomed from somewhere in the yard between the house and the barn.
She was about to answer when she heard her mother call from the house: “I sent her to Brown’s for a recipe of Helen’s. She’ll be gone another twenty minutes.”
“That’s plenty of time,” her father answered. The crunch of his heavy shoes on the cinder path echoed in military rhythm.
Marnie knew that something was wrong; something was happening that she was not supposed to see. Quickly, she put the kitten back in the red and gold box and sprawled behind a pile of straw to watch.
Her father entered, drew a bucket of water from the wall tap, and placed it in front of the kittens. Pinkie hissed and arched her back. The man picked her up and shut her in an empty oat bin from which her anguished squeals boomed in a ridiculously loud echo that belonged on the African veldt and not on an American farm. Marnie almost laughed, but remembered her father and suppressed the levity.
He turned again to the box of kittens. Carefully, he lifted one by the scruff of the neck, petted it twice, and thrust its head under the water in the bucket! There was a violent thrashing from within the bucket, and sparkling droplets of water sprayed into the air. Her father grimaced and shoved the entire body under the smothering pool. In time, the thrashing ceased. Marnie found that her fingers were digging into the concrete floor, hurting her.
Why? Why-why-why?
Her father lifted the limp body from the bucket. Something pink and bloody hung from the animal’s mouth. She couldn’t tell whether it was the tongue or whether the precious thing had spewed its entrails into the water in a last attempt to escape the heavy, horrible death of suffocation.
Soon six kittens were dead. Soon six silent fur balls were dropped in a burlap sack. The top was twisted shut. He let Pinkie out of the bin. The shivering cat followed him out of the barn, mewing softly, hissing when he turned to look at her.
Marnie lay very still for a long time, thinking of nothing but the execution and trying desperately to understand. Had God sent her father? Was it God who told him to kill the kittens – to take them away from her? If it was, she didn’t see how she could ever again stand before that gold and white altar, accepting communion. She stood and walked toward the house, blood dripping from her fingers, blood and cement.
“Did you get the recipe?” asked her mother as Marnie slammed the kitchen door.
“Mrs Brown couldn’t find it. She’ll send it over tomorrow.” She lied so well that she surprised herself. “Did God take my kittens?” she blurted suddenly.
Her mother looked confused. “Yes,” was all that she could say.
“I’ll get even with God! He can’t do that! He can’t!” She ran out of the kitchen toward the staircase.
Her mother watched but didn’t try to stop her.
Marnie Caufield walked slowly up the stairs, letting her hand run along the smooth, polished wood railing.
* * *
At noon, when Walter Caufield came in from the field, he heard a loud crash and the tinkling of china and the shattering of glass. He rushed into the living room to see his wife lying at the foot of the stairs. A novelty table was overturned, statuettes broken and cracked.
“Mary, Mary. Are you hurt?” He bent quickly to her side.
She looked up at him out of eyes that were far away in distant mists. “Walt! My Good God, Walt – our precious angels. The bathtub – our precious angels!”
TAKE MY HAND
A. K. BENEDICT
“And this is my favourite exhibit,” Dr Ruth Irving said, stopping in front of a closed cabinet. The tour guide turned to the group of fourteen-year-olds, her eyes sparking. “Has anyone heard of a Hand of Glory?”
Some shook their heads. Most didn’t bother – it was hot, and they’d already trudged round six rooms of dead things. There were better things to do, like drinking. What’s a school trip without an educational pop to the nearest pub?
“You’ll like this one,” Ruth said, taking the key out of her pocket.
“Don’t bet on it,” Matilda muttered to her best friend, Tara. Tara snorted.
Ruth’s eyebrows raised. “You won’t be laughing when you see what’s inside.”
Which just made Tara laugh harder. Giggles can’t be gagged by a woman in half-mast trousers.
Her right cheek twitching, Ruth unlocked the cabinet and opened the door. Inside, on a glass plinth, was a hand. Its remaining skin clung, sunken, to the bones. Tea-coloured and skeletal, each finger was tipped with a yellow nail.
“Urgh,” Tara said. “That’s gross.”
Ruth’s hands shot to her hip pockets as if she were in a dusty desert gunfight not a musty museum. “ That is a valuable artefact,” she said.
“I’ll give yer a pound,” Matilda said, rootling through her pockets and pulling out a gum-covered coin.
“Funny thing to have as your favourite, Miss,” Tara said. “Have you not got a dildo at home?”
Some of the class laughed. Ruth’s face flushed to the red of her jacket. She breathed in, closed her eyes, breathed out. “Doctor,” she said.
“What?” Tara replied.
“My title is Doctor, not Miss. Let’s get on, shall we? According to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources, a Hand of Glory came from a hanged convict, severed while they were still on the gibbet.”
“Cool,” said Brandon.
Ruth smiled at him. “Very cool. The hand, usually the left, would then be dried and pickled for a month. A candle, made from the fat of the dead criminal, was balanced on the severed hand then used in one of two ways. The most famous use is by a burglar. The legend states that householders remain asleep for as long as the candle burns. When they wake, their precious items have been stolen and the house smells of molten human tallow.”
“Disgusting,” Matilda said.
“Fascinating,” Ruth replied. “The perfect combination of folklore and crime.”
“Your dad could’ve done with one,” Tara shouted over to Brandon. “Then maybe he wouldn’t’ve gone down for five years.”
Brandon looked down at the chequered floor.
“You’re not the one who should be ashamed,” Ruth said to him quietly. “We can’t be blamed for the actions of those close to us.”
Brandon gave her a grateful grin.
“Now,” Ruth continued, “any questions about the exhibit?”
“Where’s the candle?” Brandon asked, his voice hardly audible.
Ruth managed to catch it, though. “That is an excellent question. Very well observed. Another way to use the Hand of Glory is to dip the fingertips in wax and light them. It’s thought that this is one example, although it’s never been used.”
The group pressed closer to the cabinet, staring intently at the withered fingers.
“What did he do to get himself hanged?” Matilda asked.
“That, sadly, isn’t in our records,” Ruth said. Her fingers trailed the shelf on which the Hand of Glory sat. “We received the hand by anonymous donation. We don’t know its provenance.”
“Are you French, Miss?” Tara asked.
“Doctor,” Ruth said again. “And no, I’m from Rotherham.”
“Only my uncle went to Provence. Said he saw a prostitute lying on a sofa in a window. Was it you?”
Ruth’s nostrils flared. “I said provenance, a word meaning ‘evidence of where something comes from’. Your provenance, for example, is clearly a family of Pringles-eating, sofa-shaped ingrates trapped in tracksuit trousers.”
Tara’s lips opened but no words came out.
“Not so mouthy now, are you?” said Ruth. “You really don’t want to mess with me.”
Matilda squared up to Ruth. “You can’t say that.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Ruth replied. “Turns out you can.”
“Come on,” Tara said, grabbing Matilda’s elbow. “Let’s leave her to her manky hand.” She stalked off, followed by Matilda.
Ruth watched them go, then smiled at the rest of the group as she locked the cabinet. “Shall we continue?”
* * *
The museum toilets were furnished with dark wood and hissing cisterns. Tara stood in front of the mirror, swiping a contour stick from her right earlobe down to the corner of her mouth. Smudging the dark stripe into her skin, she watched as her cheekbone popped. “We can’t let that bitch get away with speaking to me like that,” she said.
“Are you going to tell Mrs Crabbe?” Matilda asked.
“Mrs Crabbe wouldn’t care,” Tara replied, sculpting the other side of her face. “The lazy cow couldn’t even be bothered to come in with us.”
“What are you gonna do, then?”
“What are we going to do,” Tara corrected.
“Fine, what are we going to do?”
“We get revenge, that’s what.” Tara turned to Matilda. “And what do you do to someone to get revenge?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You take something they love.” Tara waggled the red-tipped fingers of her left hand.
* * *
“Excuse me, Miss,” Matilda said, tapping Ruth on the shoulder when the tour had finished.
Ruth spun round. “Doctor, not Miss. I thought you two had left.”
Tara sidled up next to her, real close. “We couldn’t go before we made up with you. Say sorry and that.”
“That’s not necessary,” Ruth said. She tried to back away but was blocked by a display case containing a frozen pandemonium of taxidermy parrots. Tara put her arm round Ruth’s shoulders.
Matilda stepped in, breathing spearmint and tooth decay in Ruth’s face as she slowly said: “We’re really, really sorry.”
“That’s OK,” Ruth replied, trying to smile.
“We wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Tara said into Ruth’s ear.
Ruth’s breath became ragged. She went to reach for her inhaler, but the girls had pinned her hands to her sides. “I’m fine,” she said. The muscles in her jaw clenched.
“That’s alright, then. See ya, Miss,” Tara said, stepping away so quickly that Ruth slumped against the display case. A parrot rocked on its branch.
Vincent had learned a lot about what you gave away and what you kept hidden. They could have his phone and whatever money they could find. He would give them a little blood and a piece of his flesh if it came to it, and he would try his hardest to take some of theirs.
Vincent looked down the tunnel and saw them coming. He would not show them that he was afraid though. He would not give them that satisfaction.
He was Grade A.
KITTENS
DEAN KOONTZ
The cool green water slipped along the streambed, bubbling around smooth brown stones, reflecting the melancholy willows that lined the bank. Marnie sat on the grass, tossing stones into a deep pool, watching ripples spread in ever-widening circles and lap at the muddy banks. She was thinking about the kittens. This year’s kittens, not last year’s. A year ago, her parents had told her that the kittens had gone to Heaven. Pinkie’s litter had disappeared the third day after their squealing birth.
Marnie’s father had said, “God took them away to Heaven to live with Him.”
She didn’t exactly doubt her father. After all, he was a religious man. He taught Sunday school every week and was an officer or something in the church, whose duty it was to count collection money and mark it down in a little red book. He was always picked to give the sermon on Laymen’s Sunday. And every evening, he read passages to them from the Bible. She had been late for the reading last night and had been spanked. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” her father always said. No, she didn’t actually doubt her father, for if anyone would know about God and kittens, it was he.
But she continued to wonder. Why, when there were hundreds upon thousands of kittens in the world, did God have to take all four of hers? Was God selfish?
This was the first that she had thought of those kittens for some time. In the past twelve months, much had happened to make her forget. There was her first year in school, the furore of getting ready for the first day – the buying of paper, pencils, and books. And the first few weeks had been interesting, meeting Mr Alphabet and Mr Numbers. When school began to bore her, Christmas rushed in on polished runners and glistening ice: the shopping, the green and yellow and red and blue lights, the Santa Claus on the corner who staggered when he walked, the candlelit church on Christmas Eve when she had had to go to the bathroom and her father had made her wait until the service was over. When things began to lose momentum again in March, her mother had given birth to twins. Marnie had been surprised at how small they were and at how slowly they seemed to grow in the following weeks.
Here it was June again. The twins were three months old, finally beginning to grow a great deal heavier; school was out, and Christmas was an eternity away, and everything was getting dull again. Therefore, when she heard her father telling her mother that Pinkie was going to have another litter, she grasped at the news and wrenched every drop of excitement from it. She busied herself in the kitchen, preparing rags and cotton for the birth and a fancy box for the kittens’ home when they arrived.
As events ran their natural course, Pinkie slunk away and had the kittens during the night in a dark corner of the barn. There was no need for sterilized rags or cotton, but the box came in handy. There were six in this litter, all gray with black spots that looked like ink hastily blotted.
She liked the kittens, and she was worried about them. What if God was watching again like last year?
“What are you doing, Marnie?”
She didn’t have to look; she knew who was behind her. She turned anyway, out of deference, and saw her father glaring down at her, dark irregular splotches of perspiration discoloring the underarms of his faded blue work coveralls, dirt smeared on his chin and caked to the beard on his left cheek.
“Throwing stones,” she answered quietly.
“At the fish?”
“Oh, no, sir. Just throwing stones.”
“Do we remember who was the victim of stone throwing?” He smiled a patronizing smile.
“Saint Stephen,” she answered.
“Very good.” The smile faded. “Supper’s ready.”
* * *
She sat ramrod stiff in the old maroon easy chair, looking attentive as her father read to them from the ancient family Bible that was bound in black leather, all scuffed and with several torn pages. Her mother sat next to her father on the dark blue corduroy couch, hands folded in her lap, an isn’t-it-wonderful-what-God-has-given-us smile painted on her plain but pretty face.
“Suffer the little children to come to Me, and forbid them not; for such is the Kingdom of God.” Her father closed the book with a gentle slap that seemed to leap into the stale air and hang there, holding up a thick curtain of silence. No one spoke for several minutes. Then: “What chapter of what book did we just read, Marnie?”
“Saint Mark, chapter ten,” she said dutifully.
“Fine,” he said. Turning to his wife, whose smile had changed to a we’ve-done-what-a-Christian-family-should-do expression, he said, “Mary, how about coffee for us and a glass of milk for Marnie?”
“Right,” said her mother, getting up and pacing into the kitchen.
Her father sat there, examining the inside covers of the old holy book, running his fingers along the cracks in the yellow paper, scrutinizing the ghostly stains embedded forever in the title page where some great-uncle had accidentally spilled wine a million-billion years ago.
“Father,” she said tentatively.
He looked up from the book, not smiling, not frowning.
“What about the kittens?”
“What about them?” he countered.
“Will God take them again this year?”
The half-smile that had crept onto his face evaporated into the thick air of the living room. “Perhaps,” was all that he said.
“He can’t,” she almost sobbed.
“Are you saying what God can and cannot do, young lady?”
“No, sir.”
“God can do anything.”
“Yes, sir.” She fidgeted in her chair, pushing herself deeper into its rough, worn folds. “But why would He want my kittens again? Why always mine?”
“I’ve had quite enough of this, Marnie. Now be quiet.”
“But why mine?” she persisted.
He stood suddenly, crossed to the chair, and slapped her delicate face. A thin trickle of blood slipped from the corner of her mouth. She wiped it away with the palm of her hand.
“You must not doubt God’s motives!” her father insisted. “You are far too young to doubt.” The saliva glistened on his lips. He grabbed her by the arm and brought her to her feet. “Now you get up those stairs and into bed.”
She didn’t argue. On the way to the staircase, she wiped away the re-forming stream of blood. She walked slowly up the steps, allowing her hand to run along the smooth, polished wood railing.
“Here’s the milk,” she heard her mother saying below.
“We won’t be needing it,” her father answered curtly.
In her room, she lay in the semidarkness that came when the full moon shone through her window, its orange-yellow light glinting from a row of religious plaques that lined one wall. In her parents’ room, her mother was cooing to the twins, changing their diapers. “God’s little angels,” she heard her mother say. Her father was tickling them, and she could hear the “angels” chuckling – a deep gurgle that rippled from down in their fat throats.
Neither her father nor her mother came to say goodnight. She was being punished.
* * *
Marnie was sitting in the barn, petting one of the gray kittens, postponing an errand her mother had sent her on ten minutes earlier. The rich smell of dry, golden hay filled the air. Straw covered the floor and crackled underfoot. In the far end of the building, the cows were lowing to each other – only two of them, whose legs had been sliced by barbed wire and who were being made to convalesce. The kitten mewed and pawed the air below her chin.
“Where’s Marnie?” her father’s voice boomed from somewhere in the yard between the house and the barn.
She was about to answer when she heard her mother call from the house: “I sent her to Brown’s for a recipe of Helen’s. She’ll be gone another twenty minutes.”
“That’s plenty of time,” her father answered. The crunch of his heavy shoes on the cinder path echoed in military rhythm.
Marnie knew that something was wrong; something was happening that she was not supposed to see. Quickly, she put the kitten back in the red and gold box and sprawled behind a pile of straw to watch.
Her father entered, drew a bucket of water from the wall tap, and placed it in front of the kittens. Pinkie hissed and arched her back. The man picked her up and shut her in an empty oat bin from which her anguished squeals boomed in a ridiculously loud echo that belonged on the African veldt and not on an American farm. Marnie almost laughed, but remembered her father and suppressed the levity.
He turned again to the box of kittens. Carefully, he lifted one by the scruff of the neck, petted it twice, and thrust its head under the water in the bucket! There was a violent thrashing from within the bucket, and sparkling droplets of water sprayed into the air. Her father grimaced and shoved the entire body under the smothering pool. In time, the thrashing ceased. Marnie found that her fingers were digging into the concrete floor, hurting her.
Why? Why-why-why?
Her father lifted the limp body from the bucket. Something pink and bloody hung from the animal’s mouth. She couldn’t tell whether it was the tongue or whether the precious thing had spewed its entrails into the water in a last attempt to escape the heavy, horrible death of suffocation.
Soon six kittens were dead. Soon six silent fur balls were dropped in a burlap sack. The top was twisted shut. He let Pinkie out of the bin. The shivering cat followed him out of the barn, mewing softly, hissing when he turned to look at her.
Marnie lay very still for a long time, thinking of nothing but the execution and trying desperately to understand. Had God sent her father? Was it God who told him to kill the kittens – to take them away from her? If it was, she didn’t see how she could ever again stand before that gold and white altar, accepting communion. She stood and walked toward the house, blood dripping from her fingers, blood and cement.
“Did you get the recipe?” asked her mother as Marnie slammed the kitchen door.
“Mrs Brown couldn’t find it. She’ll send it over tomorrow.” She lied so well that she surprised herself. “Did God take my kittens?” she blurted suddenly.
Her mother looked confused. “Yes,” was all that she could say.
“I’ll get even with God! He can’t do that! He can’t!” She ran out of the kitchen toward the staircase.
Her mother watched but didn’t try to stop her.
Marnie Caufield walked slowly up the stairs, letting her hand run along the smooth, polished wood railing.
* * *
At noon, when Walter Caufield came in from the field, he heard a loud crash and the tinkling of china and the shattering of glass. He rushed into the living room to see his wife lying at the foot of the stairs. A novelty table was overturned, statuettes broken and cracked.
“Mary, Mary. Are you hurt?” He bent quickly to her side.
She looked up at him out of eyes that were far away in distant mists. “Walt! My Good God, Walt – our precious angels. The bathtub – our precious angels!”
TAKE MY HAND
A. K. BENEDICT
“And this is my favourite exhibit,” Dr Ruth Irving said, stopping in front of a closed cabinet. The tour guide turned to the group of fourteen-year-olds, her eyes sparking. “Has anyone heard of a Hand of Glory?”
Some shook their heads. Most didn’t bother – it was hot, and they’d already trudged round six rooms of dead things. There were better things to do, like drinking. What’s a school trip without an educational pop to the nearest pub?
“You’ll like this one,” Ruth said, taking the key out of her pocket.
“Don’t bet on it,” Matilda muttered to her best friend, Tara. Tara snorted.
Ruth’s eyebrows raised. “You won’t be laughing when you see what’s inside.”
Which just made Tara laugh harder. Giggles can’t be gagged by a woman in half-mast trousers.
Her right cheek twitching, Ruth unlocked the cabinet and opened the door. Inside, on a glass plinth, was a hand. Its remaining skin clung, sunken, to the bones. Tea-coloured and skeletal, each finger was tipped with a yellow nail.
“Urgh,” Tara said. “That’s gross.”
Ruth’s hands shot to her hip pockets as if she were in a dusty desert gunfight not a musty museum. “ That is a valuable artefact,” she said.
“I’ll give yer a pound,” Matilda said, rootling through her pockets and pulling out a gum-covered coin.
“Funny thing to have as your favourite, Miss,” Tara said. “Have you not got a dildo at home?”
Some of the class laughed. Ruth’s face flushed to the red of her jacket. She breathed in, closed her eyes, breathed out. “Doctor,” she said.
“What?” Tara replied.
“My title is Doctor, not Miss. Let’s get on, shall we? According to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources, a Hand of Glory came from a hanged convict, severed while they were still on the gibbet.”
“Cool,” said Brandon.
Ruth smiled at him. “Very cool. The hand, usually the left, would then be dried and pickled for a month. A candle, made from the fat of the dead criminal, was balanced on the severed hand then used in one of two ways. The most famous use is by a burglar. The legend states that householders remain asleep for as long as the candle burns. When they wake, their precious items have been stolen and the house smells of molten human tallow.”
“Disgusting,” Matilda said.
“Fascinating,” Ruth replied. “The perfect combination of folklore and crime.”
“Your dad could’ve done with one,” Tara shouted over to Brandon. “Then maybe he wouldn’t’ve gone down for five years.”
Brandon looked down at the chequered floor.
“You’re not the one who should be ashamed,” Ruth said to him quietly. “We can’t be blamed for the actions of those close to us.”
Brandon gave her a grateful grin.
“Now,” Ruth continued, “any questions about the exhibit?”
“Where’s the candle?” Brandon asked, his voice hardly audible.
Ruth managed to catch it, though. “That is an excellent question. Very well observed. Another way to use the Hand of Glory is to dip the fingertips in wax and light them. It’s thought that this is one example, although it’s never been used.”
The group pressed closer to the cabinet, staring intently at the withered fingers.
“What did he do to get himself hanged?” Matilda asked.
“That, sadly, isn’t in our records,” Ruth said. Her fingers trailed the shelf on which the Hand of Glory sat. “We received the hand by anonymous donation. We don’t know its provenance.”
“Are you French, Miss?” Tara asked.
“Doctor,” Ruth said again. “And no, I’m from Rotherham.”
“Only my uncle went to Provence. Said he saw a prostitute lying on a sofa in a window. Was it you?”
Ruth’s nostrils flared. “I said provenance, a word meaning ‘evidence of where something comes from’. Your provenance, for example, is clearly a family of Pringles-eating, sofa-shaped ingrates trapped in tracksuit trousers.”
Tara’s lips opened but no words came out.
“Not so mouthy now, are you?” said Ruth. “You really don’t want to mess with me.”
Matilda squared up to Ruth. “You can’t say that.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Ruth replied. “Turns out you can.”
“Come on,” Tara said, grabbing Matilda’s elbow. “Let’s leave her to her manky hand.” She stalked off, followed by Matilda.
Ruth watched them go, then smiled at the rest of the group as she locked the cabinet. “Shall we continue?”
* * *
The museum toilets were furnished with dark wood and hissing cisterns. Tara stood in front of the mirror, swiping a contour stick from her right earlobe down to the corner of her mouth. Smudging the dark stripe into her skin, she watched as her cheekbone popped. “We can’t let that bitch get away with speaking to me like that,” she said.
“Are you going to tell Mrs Crabbe?” Matilda asked.
“Mrs Crabbe wouldn’t care,” Tara replied, sculpting the other side of her face. “The lazy cow couldn’t even be bothered to come in with us.”
“What are you gonna do, then?”
“What are we going to do,” Tara corrected.
“Fine, what are we going to do?”
“We get revenge, that’s what.” Tara turned to Matilda. “And what do you do to someone to get revenge?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You take something they love.” Tara waggled the red-tipped fingers of her left hand.
* * *
“Excuse me, Miss,” Matilda said, tapping Ruth on the shoulder when the tour had finished.
Ruth spun round. “Doctor, not Miss. I thought you two had left.”
Tara sidled up next to her, real close. “We couldn’t go before we made up with you. Say sorry and that.”
“That’s not necessary,” Ruth said. She tried to back away but was blocked by a display case containing a frozen pandemonium of taxidermy parrots. Tara put her arm round Ruth’s shoulders.
Matilda stepped in, breathing spearmint and tooth decay in Ruth’s face as she slowly said: “We’re really, really sorry.”
“That’s OK,” Ruth replied, trying to smile.
“We wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable,” Tara said into Ruth’s ear.
Ruth’s breath became ragged. She went to reach for her inhaler, but the girls had pinned her hands to her sides. “I’m fine,” she said. The muscles in her jaw clenched.
“That’s alright, then. See ya, Miss,” Tara said, stepping away so quickly that Ruth slumped against the display case. A parrot rocked on its branch.
