First Things First…
I don’t know this story, and I only know the author by name. I don’t think I’ve read any of his work. But much like “The Monkey’s Paw,” another hand-related creepy story I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, this one is in a collection called The Book of the Living Dead. And it seems like an ideal story to read and write about in mid-October.
3 Things I Like
3. “Supernatural” Vs “Inexplicable”
“I believe only in normal causes. And, if in place of using the word ‘supernatural’ to express what we cannot comprehend we should simply use the word ‘inexplicable,’ it would be much better.”
Judge Bermutier
It’s an open question, even after the story ends, whether the events the judge describes are supernatural. He doesn’t believe so. But he admits sometimes you can’t explain how something happened. It doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation, though, just that no one can identify it. That’s why he insists on using “inexplicable” to describe these circumstances.
Even though I love supernatural stories, I also respect the simplicity of his dismissal of any supernatural explanation, and the way he uses “inexplicable” as a catchall that basically means “shit we don’t understand.”
2. The Judge’s Murder Theory
When the judge tells the story of the hand, everything is set up for the audience—the ladies he’s talking to and us as readers—to believe the severed human hand Sir John Rowell had chained to his wall somehow escaped its chains and strangled Rowell. After all, Rowell even told the judge when he first saw the hand…
“It always wishes to escape. The chain is necessary.”
As a horror fan, I’d like to think that’s actually what happened. But, the judge, who doesn’t believe in the supernatural, offers an equally chilling theory…
He suggests the man to whom the hand belonged wasn’t actually dead, and that he came and murdered Rowell.
It struck me because I took it for granted that, if Rowell had a human hand as a trophy on his wall, he must’ve killed the man he took it from. But looking back, it never says that in the story.
1. The Hand
The hand is creepy as shit. There’s no two ways about it. Here’s the first description of the hand…
“Upon a square of red velvet, a black object was attached. I approached and found it was a hand, the hand of a man. Not a skeleton hand, white and characteristic, but a black, dessicated hand, with yellow joints with the muscles bare and on them traces of old blood, of blood that seemed like a scale, over the bones sharply cut off at about the middle of the fore-arm, as with a blow of a hatchet. About the wrist was an enormous iron chain, riveted, soldered to this unclean member, attaching it to the wall by a ring sufficiently strong to hold an elephant.”
The hand’s origin adds to the story. Rowell tells the judge that it belonged to his worst enemy, an American. As for how he got it, he says…
“It was broken with a saber, cut off with a sharp stone, and dried in the sun for eight days.”
Whether or not the hand actually came to life and strangled Rowell, or if the judge’s theory that the hand’s rightful owner wasn’t dead and murdered Rowell, the atmosphere created by these descriptions is incredibly creepy.
0 Things I’m Mixed On
1 Thing I Don’t Like
1. Cold Case Disconnected from Current Case
The story isn’t about the hand, at first. It starts with another inexplicable crime that has all of Paris, including Judge Bermutier, stumped. It’s only when a lady says the crime “touches the supernatural” that the judge goes into his spiel about “inexplicable vs. supernatural,” and then tells the story of the hand.
My nitpick is that they never bring things back to the current case. It ends with the judge revealing his theory about the one-handed man coming back for revenge in the past.
We don’t know anything about the current case, so the severed hand is more interesting. But if you’re going to use a framing device like this to get to the severed hand story, it’d be nice to bring things back around at the end and draw a clearer connection between the two cases.
Tim Matassa
