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heavenly-vincentine · 28 days ago

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The First Frost and The Second Hand, a short story by Jamie Mykaela.

I awoke into the velvet middle distance, gasping and grasping at my neck again, feeling the ice cold eyes boring into me and straight through to the pillow beneath. It’s been over a year and every evening is the same - a sick and twisted routine that I have yet to grow used to. The moment 2.45am hits, as if on cue, the frozen hand wraps ever gently around my larynx and pushes down with diamond pressure. Pulling me from whatever joyous dream filled slumber I may be immersed in and back to the immediate dread and acute horrors only the dead of night has to offer.

I have tried everything. Sage smudging, exorcisms, fortune telling carnies, shamans, priests, rabbis, cult members, psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, witches, warlocks, self professed experts of the supernatural - all of them cowards, once they witness the nightly assault, flee back to whatever office, chapel or church they pedal their flimsy faith from, abandoning the ever haunted girl - leaving her and whatever apparition from hell that accompanied her to the warmth on the canals.

I haven’t figured out whose hand it is around my throat. The fingers are too decomposed to make out prints, the forensics powder sits on top of the peach fuzz on my neck, clinging to thin air and thinner hope. The scientists send me on my way with a polite pat on the ass and a sorry smile. The wall of newspaper cut outs and red string glares at me, mocking my many efforts; telling me what I already know - accept your nightly fate or fall prey to the abyss.

The hand came to me the next evening. Quiet. Deliberate. Simply summoned by the clock. Inching its way beneath the duvet, the weighted blanket and the sheet, finding pillowy flesh betwixt my nightgown - dragging its nails between the cotton and collagen, up through the valley of my breasts - returning to its home, my neck like memory foam - perfectly dented after two years of rehearsal for this new normality.

But this time it was different.

Tonight it was not alone.

A second hand followed. An equally rancid and familiar caress that gripped my chin tightly, forcing my lips into a hard unnatural pout against my front teeth, my plump cheeks bulging hard into my eyelids, restricting what little sight I had in the dark of the morning. The second hand tilts my head to the side, almost tenderly, like a lover. Its fifth finger and thumb digging into the joints of my jaw, my eyes rolling back into my head - CRACK - my jaw slackens in the unhinging, dangling by the threads of gristle and tendons. All I can taste is coins - the convulsions leaving me unable to swallow. All I can smell is rank, rotted, and unrelenting. I collapse off the axis and fall into oblivion.

The sun plays amidst the lace and mesh of the curtains, painting pretty patterns across my contorted body sprawled out on the bed. My eyes ever dry, peel my lids off of them in fluttering adjustment. My jaw is heavy, aching and intact - much to my confusion. How? I bring my hands to my face and cup my chin softly. Was I not cracked open like a saltwater crustacean, my bottom jaw swinging amongst the elastic flesh? I look down my front - no marks left on my sternum or decolletage, not a bruised breast or marked rib in sight. No signs of attack, no residue of where putrid hands had roamed.

The children keep playing, the cars keep driving, the stores continue to open and close amidst doom and dread. I had been safe within the sun’s rays, lulled into this strange sense of security that the hands would not appear in the daylight hours, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Every moment of solitude, they creep into my peripheral vision - the corner table at Zedel, I feel the pustulous fingers on my knee - disappearing as soon as I look to it. In a dressing room, I feel the same sensation on the nape of my neck - the small of my back, and yet - I see nothing in the mirrors. The boundaries of night and day becoming a sensational blur - the hands getting bolder, every face and set of eyes that makes contact with mine; a mask - hiding the hideous corpse-like body that insists on invading my autonomy in the midwinter sun. Every stranger’s hands vex me as I search to the point of obsession. Every twitch, flex and curve a potential sign of that familiar decomposition and hidden decay that visits me every evening. The daylight offering so little reprieve - only ghosts in human form.

It could be any of them. The older man, hacking near blood into the cold, dragging his bicycle past the realtors like some sort of suburban Sisyphus with paper lungs. The middle-aged man with dark features and a high-vis vest, his eyes following my form up and down as I lock the doors of my workplace. Or the boy at the bus stop, svelte and wasted, with the stench of weed clinging to him - his sharp gestures slashing the air, daring strangers to challenge his stare too long.

Good God, I look away.

I focus on their hands with an interest that veers into compulsion. The fleshy buds, intact and human, their delicate padding untouched by decay. I watch for the giveaway, the foggiest suggestion of rotting beneath the skin, but the muscles beneath their warm, bloody dermis move with the ease of the living. None of these men, none of these ghosts in daylight, bear the identifiers of my assailant.

I have taken to walking along the stone and mud paths every evening until my legs cannot hold my body up anymore. It is January and the air is heavy and thick. I struggle to breathe in the rank vixen smell that permeates the browning canals of my residence. How can there be so much rain, and yet no freshness of the flowing water. The Thames perpetually tainted by dreck and death. Human? Animal? It matters not when the rotting hands have begun to infiltrate the daylight. My city feels�� off kilter and nauseating; its beating heart filling me with dread and claustrophobia. The bare, wintered anorexic trees recall arachnid limbs ready to reach down and feast on fresh flesh if it merely stumbles in passing. I do not feel well, nor do I feel safe. My head aches in the dense heady atmosphere and the fog is creeping in once again. I will have to sleep at some point, the hands will have to arrive once again. It has been three weeks by this point and I too have joined the slew of living ghosts.

My eyes have sunken into my head and the imminent impending exoskeleton reveals itself at an alarming rate - I drag my body in and out of the apartment complex day after day, feeling my entrails dragging behind me. I cannot eat, I cannot sleep, all I do is walk until I collapse - and yet no reprieve from the nightly and now daily terrors. The yellowed jagged fingernails live in the corners of my eyes, and I pray that one day they reach a little further and just… pierce my vitreous humor like a cocktail olive, and take at least one sense away from me. I would crave death if I was less of a coward, but my mortality sadly clings onto the absolute sliver of hope for the desist of this perverted routine. I am beyond weary and beyond help.

It is February and I no longer resemble the woman I once did before the second hand took shape upon my jaw. My hair is dry and thin, my cheeks sunken, my sternum presenting itself proudly alongside my ribs, my lips an anaemic pale pink, and my hands pale, rigid, and ungiving - a body once warm, soft and made for physical contact and love now lies in the frosted soil of the moors; bare and wet, grasping into the dirt like an animal - whether hunting for answers or digging a grave for myself; I do not know. I sink my wrists further into the fertile depths and grip for something, anything to hold onto - something stable and substantial enough to pull me from the cruelty of the spectre’s foul hands. I cannot handle it any longer, my body is emaciated and slight - running hotter than it ever has before. My nails tear from the ground and rip at the wool, cotton and viscose covering the monstrous feminine I have become.

Straddling the damp dirt, sinking my knees into the earth - wailing to a waxing crescent moon. The chill eating at my edges. The moist soil and freshly dead skin buried itself under my nails further and further. Shadows cast by the fragile outline of the trees, framing my woman-creature visage. Does such a grotesque beast deserve mercy or the small grace of a force playing a malevolent god? The hands return and I gnash my teeth - a two year long hunger comes to an inevitable and ongoing climax in which five minutes feels like an increasing eternity. I’ll drink the sap that pours from the hands and onto pulped browning leaves that crush beneath my body. There is a mess of filth, flesh, blood, and noise. I can no longer discern where I begin and the hands end amidst the cacophony amongst the trees. Once a functional, even happy, young woman once stood; now devolved into a small pale monster chasing its own tail and spiraling into deep, disturbing desecration.

I came to in the fog. A fox, cold and hungry, sniffing at my naked hypothermic body, shivering involuntarily. My mouth, once again, tastes of coins. My eyes, forever dry, peel my lids off of them in fluttering adjustment. My body has a deep, dull ache and I cannot feel my extremities. The fox sniffs at my wrist and it takes all my energy to lift my arm. The fog is so thick, I can barely make myself out. I close my eyes. I bring my hand to my face. My face must be numb as well. I rub my eyes.

Nothing.

I go to rub my eyes again.

Nothing.

I go to cup my jaw.

Nothing.

I lay my arms back onto the soil and turn my head to the fox making its way up to my torso. He leans his little face up to me, proudly displaying a dismembered hand - yellowed, dirty fingernails and dead, welted skin. I smile softly in recognition and relief. Perhaps my nights will have some peace now. However, I do not remember the hand wearing my great grandmother’s engagement ring she left me. The earth is hot and bloody beneath me, and finally, I can rest.

#horror #horror fiction #shirley jackson #gothic fiction #gothic #short story #gothic literature #body horrow cw #daphne du maurier #edgar allan poe #mary shelley #english literature

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heavenly-vincentine · 2 years ago

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