THE BACK OF MY HANDS

by RICK HAUTALA

This eBook edition published 2010 at Smashwords by Ghostwriter Publications, Dorchester, Dorset, England

www.thepennydreadfulcompany.com

www.rickhautala.com

© Neil Jackson 2010

PRAISE FOR RICK HAUTALA!

“Rick Hautala’s work shines with dedication, hard-earned craft and devotion.” - Peter Straub

“A master of contemporary horror and suspense.” - Cemetery Dance

“Rick Hautala proves each time out that he understands and respects the inner workings of the traditional horror novel as well or better than anyone writing.” - Joe R. Lansdale

THE BACK OF MY HANDS

The back of my hands started looking like a man’s back when I was—oh, maybe ten or eleven years old.

I remember how fascinated I was by the curling, black hairs I saw sprouting there; how amazed I was when I flexed and unflexed my hands, and watched the twitching blue lines of veins, the knitting needle–thin tendons, and the bony knobs of cartilage and knuckle. Sometimes, I used to constrict the flow of blood to my arms—you know, like a junkie—to make the veins inflate until they fairly bulged through the skin. The bigger they got, the more “manly” I thought my arms and hands looked.

It might seem laughable now, but I still believe hands are a God-given miracle. They let us touch and manipulate the world outside of ourselves. Sure, scientists say that vision is the only sense where the nerve connects directly to the brain, but hands are the only things that let us reach out, to touch and explore the world. They allow us to feel love and to create what we know and feel, both internally and externally.

They’re our only real solid connection to what’s “out there.”

Our other senses—sight, sound, taste, and smell—can all deceive us. They trick us into thinking we’re experiencing something that might not really be there.

But when we touch something, when we hold it in our hands and caress it, we have no doubt whatsoever that it truly exists. When I look at my own hands now, though, I can’t help but be filled with revulsion and horror.

Yes, horror!

That’s probably an overused word these days, but there’s no better word for what I feel.

These hands, my hands—have done things so terrible, so hideous that I can truly say they are no longer mine.

They’ve acted as if powered by a will of their own—a will with a dark, twisted purpose. And in the process, they’ve ended the life of someone—of the one person I’ve ever really been close to—a life I should have cherished above all others.

Okay, let me start at the beginning.

The easiest part was killing my twin brother, Derrick. No problem there.

I’m serious.

It certainly wasn’t very difficult to orchestrate. You’d think I was a musician, talking like this, but when it actually came time to do it, to aim the gun at him and squeeze the trigger, I didn’t flinch or have the slightest hesitation.

And I’ve had no qualms about it afterwards, either.

Why should I?

Derrick had it all. Everything. He was everything I wanted to be.

I know, I know...sure, he worked just as hard for it, maybe even harder than I did; but everything came so easily to him, almost as if it fell out of the sky and landed in his lap.

They’re our only real solid connection to what’s “out there.”

Our other senses—sight, sound, taste, and smell—can all deceive us. They trick us into thinking we’re experiencing something that might not really be there.

But when we touch something, when we hold it in our hands and caress it, we have no doubt whatsoever that it truly exists. When I look at my own hands now, though, I can’t help but be filled with revulsion and horror.

Yes, horror!

That’s probably an overused word these days, but there’s no better word for what I feel.

These hands my hands—have done things so terrible, so hideous that I can truly say they are no longer mine.

They’ve acted as if powered by a will of their own—a will with a dark, twisted purpose. And in the process, they've ended the life of someone—of the one person I’ve ever really been close to—a life I should have cherished above all others.

Okay, let me start at the beginning.

The easiest part was killing my twin brother, Derrick. No problem there.

I’m serious.

It certainly wasn’t very difficult to orchestrate. You’d think I was a musician, talking like this, but when it actually came time to do it, to aim the gun at him and squeeze the trigger, I didn’t flinch or have the slightest hesitation.

And I’ve had no qualms about it afterwards, either.

Why should I?

Derrick had it all. Everything. He was everything I wanted to be.

I know, I know...sure, he worked just as hard for it, maybe even harder than I did; but everything came so easily to him, almost as if it fell out of the sky and landed in his lap.

And it never came to me. Certainly not as easily, anyway, and no way near as much.

You see, he was the one who was born with all the talent. I couldn’t help but think that because I’d heard it my whole life, growing up. All through high school, Derrick was an honor student—popular, handsome, smart, and talented. He had it all. He graduated at the top of his class from college, too, married a gorgeous and intelligent woman, had a wonderful family—three kids and a beautiful country home about two hours north of Portland.

Far as I could see, he had it all.

And what did I have?

Nothing.

Squat.

The leftovers.

Sloppy seconds, if you’ll excuse such an inelegant expression.

All my life, I've had to listen to teachers and friends’ parents—even our own parents—exclaim with surprise that sometimes bordered on absolute shock how Derrick was so amazingly gifted, and that I was so...well, that I didn’t quite measure up to the standard he set.

The worst of it was when people would question, sometimes even to my face, how identical twins could be so...so different. Oh, we looked enough alike, so anyone who didn't know us well couldn’t tell us apart, but it seemed as if all the intelligence, personality, and talent went into his half of the egg, and I was left with...

Well, with sloppy seconds, like I said.

Maybe that really was the case.

I used to wonder about it, mostly late at night as I lay in bed, staring up at the bottom of Derrick’s upper bunk. I still lie awake at nights, wondering. Now I have plenty of time to think about things. Back when we were kids, I could hear my brother’s deep, rhythmic breathing coming from the top bunk, as if even sleeping was something he simply did better than I ever could.

It didn’t surprise anyone that Derrick and I both entered the field of art. Ever since we were kids, we’d both shown unusual talent for the visual arts although, as usual, Derrick’s paintings and drawings—hell, even his throw-away sketches—always seemed to be several notches better than anything I ever produced.

Not that my stuff was bad, mind you. I do have quite a bit of talent.

Now that I think about it, when I first started drawing was probably when I first really noticed the back of my hands. I remember how I’d spend a lot of the time not even paying attention to whatever it was I was drawing because I would be so fascinated by the interplay of muscle and tendons beneath my skin as I held the pencil or brush in my hands and rolled it back and forth or whatever. Probably the one thing I ever did better than Derrick was anatomy drawing. Especially hands. I seemed to have quite a knack for drawing hands.

So like I said, it didn’t surprise anyone when we both went off to college—the same school, of course. We both majored in art, but my grades were never quite up to Derrick’s level...and neither was my work. He graduated summa cum laude while I was simply lucky to graduate with honors.

Following graduation, we both landed jobs within our chosen field. Derrick started right out as a painter—an “artist” with a capital A. Within a year or so, he was having one-man shows of his work at galleries in Boston and New York. The “art scene” had apparently already taken notice of him, and his paintings were selling for astronomical amounts. Personally, I thought they weren’t worth the price of the canvas they were painted on, but there’s no accounting for taste, is there?

Arid what about me?

I went to work, pasting up ads fora local newspaper, all the while trying to convince myself of the worth of a steady paycheck while I concentrated on my own art during evenings and weekends.

I think—hell, no! I don’t have to lie about it anymore, right? I know that’s when the full measure of the resentment I felt toward my brother began to blossom.

Until then, that resentment had always been there, festering inside me, maybe even since before we were born; but it had always been—you know, buried deep, like a seed in the soil that was struggling hard to push its way up to the sunlight. It was only after college, once we were out there in the real world, settling into our respective careers and trying to make a living that I finally allowed the seed to break through the surface. Over the next few years, as I watched my brother accumulate success and wealth and fame—everything I wanted and felt I deserved—I watered and nourished that seed of envy and hatred....

Yes, hatred.

I cursed the fate that I had been born to, wondering why?—what cruel, uncaring God could do this to me? Why couldn’t I have been given at least something—just one single fucking thing more than my brother?

But he had it all, and I had...much less.

That’s when I started planning to change it all by killing him.

You know, one person I talked to a few days ago, maybe a few weeks ago, now, said that she thought I didn’t really want to kill Derrick. That what I really wanted to do was kill myself. She said that by identifying so closely with my twin brother, and by envying his success so much, I was turning all my pent-up anger against myself. She used all sorts of fancy psycho-babble terms like “transference” and “guilt projection” and “displacement”—stuff like that, but I’m pretty sure she was wrong.

I really wanted to kill Derrick.

I had to kill him.

The way I saw it, there was no way around it.

Getting to do it was much easier than I thought it would be.

Derrick and I live—I should say “lived”—about two hours away from each other. I have a place here in Portland, and he lives up past Fryberg. Driving up there was no problem. Last March, I knew his wife, Alice, had taken the kids to Orlando for the week at Disney World. I figured he’d be at the house alone, no doubt working on some paintings for a show or something. I wasn’t expected or anything, but I guess I was lucky that no one saw or recognized my car. Just to be safe, I took back roads. It added a little time to the drive, but then again, what did I care?

Derrick lived in a fairly secluded area—a development on a secluded lake with a lot of fancy-ass houses spaced pretty far apart. He didn’t have any security or anything, no bodyguards or electronic gates, so getting into his house was easy.

Hey! Who would want to kill a famous artist, right?

I was right. When I got there, he was home...alone.

Before I got out of the car, I pulled on the two pairs of rubber gloves I’d brought. I’d seen something on a cop show once about how a detective lifted a fingerprint even though the burglar or whatever had been wearing rubber gloves. The rubber, you see, was so thin that it still left a faint impression—at least enough to identify the culprit.

I wasn’t going to take any chances.

Just shooting him wasn’t going to be enough, though. I had to even the score a little bit, too.

But like I said earlier, shooting him didn’t bother me any. I just aimed the gun at him, pulled the trigger, and...

Pop!

Of course, before I got to the house, the whole time I was driving, I couldn’t stop thinking about why I was doing this. I came up with a whole slew of excuses, but I knew they were all bullshit.

The real reason was quite simple.

Even I can see that, now.

He had more talent than I did, and I knew why.

It was all in his hands!

I already told you how I didn’t feel anything, not even a tremor of elation when the gun went off, and Derrick was blown back off his feet. He landed on the kitchen floor kind of funny, leaning against the wall with his legs splayed out and bent at the knees. One of his shoes had flipped off. He looked a little like a puppet that’s had its strings cut. There was a big splash of blood on the wall behind him, but he was down now, with both hands clamped over the bullet hole in his chest. He was breathing real hard, making this watery, rattling sound in his throat. It sounded something terrible, like he was drowning. After a few seconds, his legs started twitching like he was trying to do a dance or something. It was only when I saw blood leaking out between his fingers that I got a little panicky, thinking that the blood might ruin his hands.

I wasn’t worried about any of the neighbors hearing the shot. I’d been to Derrick’s house plenty of times before, so I knew what to do next, and I took my time doing it right. There was an ax down in the cellar that Derrick used to split firewood. He never heated the house with wood or anything. Like the rest of his life, having a fire blazing away in the fireplace on a winter evening was just a quaint little “artsy” touch.

All image.

I went back up into the kitchen, made sure he was good and dead, and then chopped off both his hands, halfway between the wrist and elbow. It took me a few whacks on both arms, but I think I could have done them each with one hit if I hadn’t been shaking so damned much with excitement.

Yeah, now that I think about it, I guess once he was dead I was pretty excited about it. I’ll tell you one thing—I was glad he was dead by then because when I was trying to cut off his arms, I kept missing, and I think that would have really hurt.

I took his severed hands over to the sink and washed the blood off before drying them and putting them into a little plastic trash bag I’d brought along. On the way out, confident there weren’t any fingerprints on anything to identify me, I dropped the ax beside Derrick’s body. He was staring up at the ceiling with this glassy-eyed stare, looking for all the world like a wax statue.

I wonder what he was looking at...

Anyway, I closed the door behind me, looked around to make sure there wasn’t any activity at any of the neighbors’ houses, then got into my car and drove away.

I only stopped once on the way home, to get rid of the gun and rubber gloves. What I did was tie the gun up inside one of the gloves, tie the other one around it, and then throw it off the bridge into the river. You know where Route 25 crosses the Ossipee River in Limington? The water runs real fast there and hardly ever freezes.

That was pretty much it until I got home.

I was still a little nervous, I guess, kind of jittery when I got back to my apartment. I knew the cops would be coming around sooner or later to tell me what had happened. They might start asking all sorts of questions. I didn’t have a decent alibi, but I figured they weren’t going to suspect me much. Hell, Alice and the kids were going to get whatever inheritance was coming, and I’m sure there was plenty of that. I might get a little something, a token, but certainly not enough to make anyone suspicious.

Besides, who’d even think I’d want to kill my twin brother?

All I had to do was act like I was real broken up about it, and I was sure they’d let it slide. And anyway, I already had everything I wanted from Derrick.

I had his hands.

In case the cops came around, I didn’t do anything with the hands, not right away, anyway. I put the trash bag into the freezer under the frozen peas and carrots, and tried to forget about them. Of course, that didn’t work because I knew they were there, and I knew sooner or later what I was going to do with them.

As it turned out, the next night after work, I took the plastic bag out of the freezer and defrosted the frozen hands. The skin was as pale as polished white marble. What I did was throw them into a pot of boiling water. You have to understand, I had no idea if what I was planning to do was really going to work. I mean, I figured it would because skin is so tough, but you never know until you try something.

After boiling the hands for a while, I took them out with some tongs, got the sharpest paring knife I could find, and made a nice, deep incision all the way around each wrist, a few inches above the thumb joint, right about where you wear a wristwatch. It took some doing to hold onto the skin because it was so slippery. Pretty tough, too, but once I got a good grip on it with the tongs, the skin peeled right off, turning inside out like I was removing a glove or a dirty sock. Of course, there was no blood involved. I had a little problem with the skin tearing around the fingernails, but nothing serious.

When I was done and turned them back right-side out, I had two pretty close to perfect gloves made out of my brother’s hands. I put them down on the counter, and I swear to God I thought they might start moving around on their own or something.

My biggest concern was that they wouldn’t fit—that Derrick and I weren’t still exactly the same size; but with a little bit of tugging and a few tiny slits here and there to loosen them up, I was able to pull them on over my own hands.

Man, I’m telling you, I could barely contain my excitement as I raised my new hands up in front of my face and looked at them. I flexed the fingers, thrilled by the taunt pulling of my new skin.

It was exquisite beyond belief.

My hands—Derrick’s hands, really—were trembling as I reached out to touch something...for the first time...with someone else’s hands.

I picked up the paring knife I had used to cut and peel the skin. Turning it back and forth, I hardly noticed the light reflecting off the blade because I was so entranced by the way the skin on the back of my hands shifted with every subtle movement.

I can’t tell you how excited I was, but I stopped myself because I knew I had other things to take care of, first.

Unrolling my new skin gloves, I carefully laid them aside while I cleaned up. It took a bit of doing, but I scraped most of the flesh off the bone before grinding everything up in the garbage disposal. The bones knocked around some, making quite a racket, but I made sure it all washed down completely. Then I took my new hands—because that’s the only way I could think of them—and went into my work room.

I tell you, I was so excited I was dizzy. I felt like I was drunk or tripping or something as I pulled the skin gloves back on over my own hands and wiggled my fingers to make sure everything fit perfectly.

Custom made!

Once I was ready, I picked up a pencil, tacked a clean sheet of drawing paper to the drawing board, and began to draw.

At first I couldn’t stop staring at the back of my hands. Just like when I was a kid, I watched the skin shift and slide across my muscles and tendons as I drew. I was amazed how the skin still felt supple and alive. I could almost feel it bonding with the flesh of my own hands—my less talented hands.

This is it! I told myself—the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life! I’m going to draw what I see inside my own bead with someone else’s hands!

But it didn’t work out quite as I’d planned.

The sketch I started working on that night still seemed flat and uninspired. The spark wasn’t there. I had to remind myself that I was too excited, that I was distracted by watching the way my new hands moved; but deep inside, I started to feel this gnawing worry that I still didn’t have it. The picture still looked like it was being drawn by...

Me.

It’ll take time, I told myself, hoping I could calm down enough to concentrate.

That made sense.

Right off the bat, I couldn’t expect to be able to feel and touch and control things the way Derrick did. I had to adapt to this new way of feeling and manipulating the world. Everyone’s hands are different.

After all, art doesn’t happen overnight.

After trying for an hour or so, I carefully peeled the skin gloves off my hands. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them afterwards. I knew if I left them out, they’d rot. I wondered how to go about drying them out, maybe tanning the skin like leather so they would retain their suppleness.

While I was wondering what to do, the phone rang.

It was Alice, calling from Florida. She had just gotten a call from the Maine State Police, informing her that someone had broken into the house and killed Derrick. The gardener had found him that after-noon. I tried my best to sound upset and supportive when she told me she was flying back in the morning. I even told her I’d pick her and the kids up at the airport.

What a guy, huh?

After I got off the phone, I toyed with the idea of wearing Derrick’s hands when I picked up Alice and the kids at the airport. I was curious to see if she’d recognize her husband’s touch when I hugged her, but I decided that wouldn’t be such a good idea. I had no idea what else to do, so I put Derrick’s hands back into the freezer for the night so they wouldn’t rot.

The next few days were tough if only because I had to act a lot more upset about Derrick’s death than I actually was. As expected, the cops came around and asked me all sorts of questions about how Derrick and I got along, about where I was the day he was killed, and was there someone who could corroborate my whereabouts—things like that.

I held up perfectly, I must say.

One time, a couple of days after Derrick died, when I was heading down to the police station to be interviewed, I did wear Derrick’s hands. I was a little self-conscious about them, but no one even noticed.

But every night, when I put them on and sat down at the drawing board, I started to get some pretty unusual sensations. My drawings didn’t appear to be any better than before, at least not to me, but there was a feeling inside the gloves, inside my own hands when I was wearing the skin that was...well, strange.

I had finally come up with a method of preserving the skin. Every night, before I began to draw, I would take fifteen or twenty minutes to rub hand cream into the skin. I didn’t scrimp, either. I bought the most expensive kinds of hand cream available, and I spent a lot of time, working it into the thirsty pores. Over the next few days, I learned a lot about emollients and whatever. Night after night, it seemed as though the new skin—my new hands—became increasingly supple and sensitive. Touching things—anything—became a thrill. Vibrant ripples of pure energy tingled from my fingertips, up my arms and neck, all the way to the center of my brain.

Let me tell you, it was exhilarating!

I could barely concentrate on my drawing because I

spent so much time simply touching things...feeling them as if for the first time.

And that’s what it was like.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was really feeling things. It was just a matter of time before I could translate what I felt onto canvas and paper. Soon, I would have it. all—my brother’s talent...maybe even the fame and money I deserved even more than he did!

But gradually—and I’m not sure when, maybe a month or so after Derrick died—something happened. It seemed as though my own hands inside the skin of Derrick’s hands were changing. At first, all of the sensations were pleasant—warm and moist, comforting, almost as if this new layer was my real skin; but after a couple of nights, the feelings turned more intense. The gentle warmth got steadily hotter until it began to feel like there was a slow-burning fire, smoldering deep beneath my skin. Every time I flexed my hands, watching the veins wiggle beneath the extra layer of skin, I gloried in the way the outermost skin—and I no longer thought of it as Derrick’s skin—stretched and pulled.

One night I had been drawing, lost—as always—in watching the way the skin on the back of my hands moved, when suddenly my hands felt like they had burst into flames. At first I tried to ignore the pain and keep drawing. Then I tried to endure it. After a while, though, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I put my drawing pencil down and started to roll one of the gloves off, the one on my right hand. Over the past few weeks, the skin had been treated so well that it usually rolled right off. This time, though, when I lifted the top edge, the skin caught. When I tried to pull it down, the skin on my own wrist started to rip.

Let me tell you, I panicked.

It took a great deal of effort to sit back, take a few deep breaths, and then try again. I sure as hell didn’t want to damage the hands. Where was I going to get another pair like this? I thought maybe it was just a matter of decay, but when I took the edge of the skin on the other hand and lifted it up, I once again felt my own flesh lift with it.

This can't he happening, I told myself.

Someone—I think it was that lady shrink I talked to a while ago—told me that I was imagining all of this. That Derrick’s skin had rotted away by then, and I was pulling at my own flesh. I listened to her, but like all that transference stuff she’d been talking about, I think she was wrong.

I lowered my drawing light and shined it straight down onto my hands, looking closely as I tried several times to peel back the skin. Each time I got the same result. The skin wouldn’t roll down. It was fused to my own skin. Hell, I can't deny it; it looked like it had become my own skin.

I’m telling you, I was some scared at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to accept it.

This ain’t so bad, I told myself. In fact, isn’t this exactly what I’d wanted all along?

Why have hands that I have to put on and off like gloves?

Why not make them permanent?

Didn't I want to feel the way Derrick had felt, and be able to control my pencils and brushes the way Derrick had controlled his?

I had wanted Derrick’s hands, had coveted them so much that I was willing to kill him to get them. So what was so wrong if his skin was permanently attached to mine?

We’d been twins in the womb! We shared everything else right down to our chromosomes. Other than the women in our lives, there wasn’t anything we hadn’t shared!

The only problem was, no matter what I did—whether I massaged hand cream into them or held them under a steady flow of cool water or held them inside the freezer—I couldn’t make that burning itch go away. It penetrated all the way to my bones, bringing tears to my eyes. I told myself that I’d eventually get used to it, that this was just a stage as Derrick’s skin and mine fused, but I didn’t sleep much that night.

The pain—oh, the pain!

It was a pure, silver singing inside my hands, and it never let up!

That next morning, a couple of weeks after Derrick’s death, I was supposed to be at a memorial service being held in my brother’s honor at one of the art galleries in Portland. I forget the name of the gallery, but I’m sure the invitation is still on my desk, back at my apartment. Everyone was going to be there—a lot of important people in the art community as well as Alice and Derrick’s kids. I’ve been trying to feel bad for them, losing their father like that, but pity just doesn’t seem to be inside me.

When I got out of bed that morning, hardly having slept a wink, I considered calling the gallery and canceling. I was supposed to say a few words about my brother, but I hoped Andrew—the gallery director—would understand that I was still too shattered and couldn't cope with doing it.

Before I dialed the gallery, though, I started thinking about how suspicious canceling out might look. Sure, the cops had stopped asking me questions, apparently satisfied that I’d had nothing to do with my brother’s murder, but I couldn’t be sure. They might still think I had done it, and they might just be waiting for me to slip up so they could nail me.

Maybe they even recognized Derrick’s hands!

So I determined, no matter how bad the pain in my hands got, I’d go through with this farce of a memorial service.

The problem was, I had no idea how bad it could get.

Even before I walked into the gallery that morning and saw how many people had gathered to honor my brother, my hands were clammy with sweat and trembling deep inside. I shook hands with as few people as possible, but couldn’t help but notice the startled reactions most of them gave me when we clasped hands.

Being one of the guests of honor, as it were, I had to sit in the front row along with Alice and the kids. Every wall in the room was adorned with Derrick’s paintings. None of them were really very good, I thought. I would do much better.

Andrew spoke first—a bit too long, I thought—about how he had been one of the first people in the “Art world” to recognize Derrick’s extraordinary talent, and how we and all of humanity have suffered a great loss in such a senseless, brutal act of butchery. I could hear people sniffing back their tears, but I hardly paid any attention to them. I couldn’t stop looking down at my hands. They felt like they were on fire.

I tried rubbing them, scratching them, folding my arms across my chest and pressing them against my sides—anything, but nothing would relieve the pain and burning itch. It got so intense I thought I was going to scream.

I didn’t notice when Andrew stopped speaking, but after a moment or two, I noticed that the room had fallen silent...a hushed expectancy. I glanced around and realized that everyone was staring at me.

A boiling blush raced up my arms and across my face. My heart was slamming hard inside my chest when I realized that Andrew must have introduced me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, preparing to stand, but I wasn't even sure my legs would support me, much less carry me all the way to the podium.

The crowd was utterly still.

A steady, low, throbbing sound filled my ears as I inhaled and held my breath. I took a single step forward. My shoe, scraping across the carpet, made a sound like the rough scratching of sandpaper. Cold sweat broke out on my brow and trickled down the sides of my neck.

I wanted to scream, I tell you, but as I made my way up to the podium, I noticed a glass pitcher and several clean glasses on the small table beside the podium. The pitcher was filled with ice water.

That gave me an idea.

With each halting step forward, the agonizing sensation in my hands grew steadily worse until it became intolerable.

I had no idea what to do with my hands, whether to shove them deep into my jacket pockets so no one could see them, clasp them behind my back, shake them wildly above my head, or claw at them and start screaming.

That’s what I wanted to do—scream.

The thought crossed my mind that if I fell completely apart, everyone in the room would think it was simply an outpouring of my grief over the loss of my brother. They would all react respectfully, with sympathy and understanding.

But my throat was closing off. My chest and lungs were so constricted I could hardly breathe, much less scream. I was suddenly afraid that, if I opened my mouth and tried to say a few words—something about my dear, departed brother--deathly cold hands would clasp around my throat and begin to choke me.

I had jotted down a few notes of what I wanted to say, only because I was afraid of what I might say if I started rambling. The problem was, the sheet of paper with my notes on it was in the breast pocket of my jacket, and I didn’t dare reach for it. I was suddenly fearful that I would no longer be able to control my hands. The skin—Derrick’s skin—had long since dissolved into my own hands, fusing with my hands.

It had become me.

I glanced down at my hands and was suddenly quite convinced that I didn't even recognize them.

They were someone else’s hands!

They really were Derrick’s hands!

I know it isn’t possible. You’re not the first person to tell me it was all in my mind; but even if it was, it was nonetheless true!

The silence in the room continued to pulsate. When someone toward the back of the room cleared his throat, it sounded like distant cannon shot. Somehow, though, I made it to the podium. Leaning forward and gripping the edge of the podium with both hands, I forced a smile, but I could tell by the way the skin stretched around my mouth that it was more of a grimace. As if moving by its own volition, my right hand reached up and inside my jacket, and clasped the sheet of paper in my pocket. The heat inside my jacket was intolerable, as if I had just reached into a blazing furnace. I almost cried out. Bone-deep tremors shook my body as I unfolded my notes and, without looking at them, spread the page on the podium.

Glancing to my left, I once again saw the pitcher of water. I wanted more than anything to plunge my hands into that icy water to soothe the pain, but I stood there, immobile.

I could tell that the audience was getting restless. It was awkward for them to see me so obviously distraught, but it was just as obvious—to me, at least—that they didn’t see the real reason why I was so upset.

I nearly fainted when I lowered my gaze and looked down at my hands, holding the sheet of paper in place. The backs of my hands were discolored a sickly yellow. They were wrinkled like an old man’s hands. Fora dizzying instant, I felt as though I was looking at my hands through a huge magnifying glass. Every hair, every pore and blemish, every vein and tendon stood out in stark relief. The feeling that these were not my own hands—that they were Derrick’s—grew terrifyingly stronger. I thought that—somehow—maybe Derrick was still alive and standing behind me, reaching around and manipulating things for me.

I tried to push these thoughts away, cleared my throat. With great effort, I began to speak.

“I want to...thank you all for...being here today,” I said, forcing my grimacing smile to widen.

I locked eyes with Alice, sitting there with her children in the front row. Her expression as she looked at me was soft and sympathetic. I could see that she was on the verge of crying, but she nodded to me, offering her silent support.

The choking sensation in my throat was growing steadily stronger. When I reached up to loosen my collar, I was suddenly fearful that my hands—Derrick’s hands—were going to clasp me by the throat and start to squeeze until they choked the life out of me.

I lowered my eyes and shook my head, taking a moment to compose myself. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand, but it was like striking a match against a sunbaked sidewalk. A line of flames seemed to erupt across my brow.

It was intolerable, I tell you!

I wanted to say something—anything—just a few words about how much I mourned my brother, what a tragic loss his death was to me and his family and friends, but I couldn't focus on the few notes in front of me. All I could think about was the burning pain that was flaming inside my hands and spreading up my arms.

I looked again at the pitcher of water and knew what I had to do. You see, I knew then—or if I had known it before, I finally admitted it to myself then—that these really weren't my hands.

They truly were Derrick’s!

His dry, desiccated skin may have rotted away, but some part of my dead brother had fused with me, and this small part of him—the one small part I thought I could possess and control—was not under my control.

Maybe I would have been better off if I had killed myself, had strangled myself right there in front of that crowd.

It would have ended it all, and maybe the people there would have thought that I had been unable to contain my grief and had finally snapped.

But that’s not what happened.

I didn’t plunge my hands into that pitcher of ice water, either.

I had tried that before, and I knew that it wouldn’t work.

No, what I did—well, you probably read about it in the papers, but what I did was take the water pitcher and smash it against the side of the podium. I don’t remember hearing the sound of breaking glass or feeling the cold dash of water. I sensed some reaction from the crowd, but not much. I was lost inside a cocoon of silence where there was just the raging roar of my breathing and the unbearable burning knowledge that my hands were not my own.

Holding the handle of the shattered pitcher, I turned the jagged edge around and began slashing and sawing at the back of my hands.

“These aren’t my hands! These aren’t my hands!”

I remember screaming that or something like it, but I was lost in a blind frenzy of panic as I tried to cut and scrape the flesh from the back of my hands. Suddenly, I had the unnerving sensation that I was somehow outside of myself—that I was floating above it all and watching what I was doing as if this were all a movie or a play.

I felt no pain—none whatsoever—but I could see the ragged strips of flesh I was removing from the back of my hands. There was blood everywhere, but no matter how much I tore at the skin on my hands, it didn’t stop the burning sensation.

Oh, no.

It continued to spiral up higher and higher until it was all I knew. The mere physical pain of tearing the flesh from my hands was nothing...literally, nothing.

From my vantage point, hovering above it all, I watched as I continued to rake the broken glass across the back of my hands, first the left one, then the right. My sheet of notes was splattered with bright red smears, like ruby teardrops. I almost started laughing when I realized that one splotch of blood—the biggest—looked exactly like the splash of blood on Derrick's kitchen wall, the night I killed him.

Every other sound in the room was muffled, but I sensed a rush of motion as someone—I have no idea who...probably Andrew—ran up to me to help...to try to stop me.

Then I heard a sizzling, crackling sound, and everything went black.

I woke up sometime later, here in the hospital. I realize now that I must have grabbed onto the microphone and, because I was standing in the puddle of water I had spilled, had gotten one hell of an electric shock.

Not enough to kill me, mind you, and—well, the emergency room doctor said that, thankfully, I hadn't severed any arteries, so I didn’t bleed to death.

The most horrible thing about it all, though, was that I didn’t get rid of Derrick’s skin. It's still here, on the back of my hands.

See?

It’s still growing. Maybe you can’t see it, but it’s inside me now, still growing...and look at this. It’s spreading out, moving like a fungus up my arm. Pretty soon it’s going to cover my whole body!

I swear, it’s true.

Look at my hands.

Can’t you see?

I still can’t control them, either. Even with these bandages on, I’ve been trying to do a little bit of drawing while I’ve been here, and you can see that I’m not drawing anything very good...certainly not what I want to draw.

Look at these sketches. Every single one of them depicts something from the night I killed my brother.

See here?

This is him lying on the floor, leaning up against the wall. Remember how I said he looked like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Well, doesn’t he?

That's exactly what he looked like!

And check this one out.

This is the design the splash of blood made on the wall behind him, after I’d shot him. You’ll have to take my word for it, but it’s exactly like the bloody smear on my sheet of notes.

And look at this one.

See?

It’s a close up of Derrick’s face, once he was good and dead. He looks really relaxed, doesn’t he? It's amazing how much he looks like me. I also did a couple of sketches of what his arms looked like after I’d hacked off his hands, but I had to throw them away. I didn’t like the way they were coming out even though I always was pretty good at drawing anatomy, especially hands.

The problem is, you see, I’m not the one who’s doing these drawings.

Derrick is.

He’s using my eyes and memory to record what happened to him.

His hands are doing all of this!

They betrayed me!

The police never would have even found out that I had killed my brother if his hands hadn’t started drawing these pictures.

That’s how they finally got me to confess.

They wore me down by telling me that no one except the murderer could have done these sketches, not with such exact detail. They even showed me a couple of photographs taken at the murder scene. I don’t know if that was before or after I drew these pictures. They give me drugs and have got me pretty confused here.

And yes, the backs of my hands still hurt like hell. I don’t even like looking at them anymore. Sure, they’re healing up just fine, but the burning sensation just keeps getting worse, day after day. I tell you, it’s driving me insane! Even when the nurse gives me a shot of something, it doesn’t really stop the pain. And I know, once these bandages come off, it won’t get any better.

Oh, no.

That’s why I asked you to come up and see me again today, doctor. I know we talked about all this before, but I’m positive I want you to do it.

Why do you keep saying you won’t?

I know you can! You have the equipment here, don’t you?

You have to cut Derrick’s hands off before they do something even more horrible!

ALSO FROM RICK HAUTALA

SCARED CROWS

One of the most respected names in genre fiction, Rick Hautala, delivers his second chapbook...and this one has it all...and one of the greatest comic book characters of all time...HELLBOY.

It’s a dark and stormy night somewhere in the backwoods of Maine,and when Hellboy and his friend, The Finn, stop by a bar for more than a few ‘cold ones,’ HB enchants a pretty young woman with a story designed to impress her. But every bar has its local punk just itching to make a name for himself, but he’s about to learn a valuable life lesson...that it never pays to interrupt Hellboy...especially when he’s trying to tell a story.

CHRYSALIS

Just outside of the sleepy town of Thornton, road crews have begun blasting the area to prepare for the straighten of Route 25. Young Stan Walters finds the caves that have been opened up by the crews just too much of a temptation...and explores.

Once inside the labyrinth, he comes upon something about the size of football - cold and almost certainly dead. But what he and his brother, Chet, soon discover is something far from dead...something very much at the beginning of it’s life-cycle. An untcigahunk...