Stone Mattress: Nine Tales

THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU

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The Dead Hand Loves You started as a joke. Or more like a dare. He should have been more careful about it, but the fact was he’d been blowing a fair amount of dope around that time and drinking too much inferior-grade booze, so he hadn’t been fully responsible. He shouldn’t be held responsible. He shouldn’t be held to the terms of the fucking contract. That’s what had shackled his ankles: the contract.

And he can never get rid of that contract, because there wasn’t any drop-dead date on it. He should have included a good-only-until clause, like milk cartons, like tubs of yogourt, like mayonnaise jars; but what did he know about contracts back then? He’d been twenty-two.

He’d needed the money.

It was so little money. It was such a crappy deal. He was exploited. How could the three of them have taken advantage of him like that? Though they refuse to admit the unfairness of it. They just cite the fucking contract, with those undeniable signatures on it, including his, and then he has to suck it up and fork out. He resisted paying them at first, until Irena got a lawyer; now the three of them have lawyers the way dogs have fleas. Irena should have cut him some slack in view of how close they were once, but no, Irena has a heart of asphalt, harder and drier and more sun-baked every year. Money has ruined her.

His money, since it’s because of him that Irena and the other two are rich enough to afford those lawyers of theirs. Top-quality lawyers too, as good as his; not that he wants to get into a snarling, snapping, rending contest among lawyers. It’s the client who’s always the cracked-bone hyena’s breakfast: they take bites out of you, they nibble away at you like a sackful of ferrets, of rats, of piranhas, until you’re reduced to a shred, a tendon, a toenail.

So he’s had to ante up, decade after decade; since, as they rightfully point out, in a court case he wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d signed it, that infernal contract. He’d signed it in red-hot blood.

At the time of the contract, the four of them had been students. Not exactly dirt poor or they wouldn’t have been getting a so-called higher education, they’d have been patching frost-heave in the roadways or setting fire to hamburgers for minimum wage, or turning tricks in cheap, vomit-scented bars, at least Irena would; but though not paupers, they didn’t have a lot of loose change. They were getting by on summer-job earnings and grudging loans from relatives, and in the case of Irena, a mingy scholarship.

They’d met initially through a ten-cent-a-draft beer parlour group given to snide quips and whining and boasting — not Irena, of course, who never did such things. She was more like a den mother, picking up the tab when the rest of them were too pissed to remember where they’d put their dimes and quarters or too slippery to have brought any along, not that she didn’t get her cash back later. The four of them had discovered a common need to spend less on accommodations, so they’d rented a house together, right near the university.

It was in the early ’60s, back when you could be a student and rent a house in that area, if only a narrow, pointy-roofed, three-storey, stifling in summer, freezing in winter, run-down, pee-flavoured, peeling-wallpapered, warped-floored, clanking-radiatored, rodent-plagued, cockroach-riddled, red-brick Victorian row house. That was before those houses turned into restored Heritage Buildings worth an arm and a bladder, with historical plaques on them affixed by halfwits with nothing better to do than dodder around sticking plaques on overpriced, snootied-up real estate.

His own building — the building in which the ill-advised contract had been signed — has a plaque on it too, saying — surprise! — that he himself once lived there. He knows he once lived there, he doesn’t need to be reminded. He doesn’t need to read his name, Jack Dace, 1963–64, as if he’d only been alive for one fucking year, with underneath it the tiny print that says, “In this building was written the International Horror Classic, THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU.”

I’m not a moron! I know all that! he wants to shout at the oval, enamelled blue-and-white plaque. He should forget about it, he should forget the whole episode as much as possible, but he can’t because it’s chained to his leg. He can’t resist peeking at the thing every time he’s in town for some filmfest or litfest or comicfest or monsterfest or other. On the one hand, it’s a reminder to him of his idiocy in signing the contract; on the other hand, it’s pathetically satisfying to read those three words: International Horror Classic. He obsesses over it too much, that plaque. Still, it’s a tribute to his major life accomplishment. Such as it is.

Maybe that’s what it will say on his tombstone: THE DEAD HAND LOVES YOU, INTERNATIONAL HORROR CLASSSIC. Maybe nubile teeny girl fans with Goth eye makeup, and stitch marks tattooed on their necks like the Frankenstein creature, and dotted lines around their wrists with CUT HERE instructions, will visit his grave and leave him tributes composed of withered roses and whitened chicken bones. They send stuff like that to him already, and he’s not even dead.

Sometimes they lurk around events he’s attending — panel discussions at which he’s expected to drone on about the inherent worthiness of “genres,” or retrospectives of the various movies spawned by his magnum opus — clad in ripped shrouds, with their faces painted a sickly green, bringing envelopes containing photos of themselves naked and/or with black ropes around their necks and their tongues sticking out, and/or baggies containing tufts of their pubic hair and offers of spectacular blowjobs to be performed by themselves while wearing vampire teeth — edgy, that, and he’s never accepted one of those jobs. But he hasn’t resisted other blandishments. How could he?

It’s always a risk though, a risk to his ego. What if he underperforms in the sack, or rather — because these girls like a stimulant of moderate discomfort — on a floor, up against a wall, or on a chair with ropes and knots? What if they say, “I thought you would be different” while adjusting their leather undergear and slipping back into their spiderweb stockings and repairing their glued-on festering wounds in the bathroom mirror? It’s been known to happen, more frequently as age has withered him and custom staled.

“You wrecked my wound” — they’ve even said things like that. Worse, they’ve said them straight, without irony. Pouting. Accusing. Dismissive. So it’s best to keep such girls at a distance, to let them worship his decadent satanic powers from afar. Anyway, these girls are getting younger and younger, so it’s difficult to make conversation with them at those moments when they expect him to talk. Half the time he has no idea what’s coming out of their mouths, when it isn’t tongues. They have a whole new vocabulary. Some days he thinks he’s been buried underground for a hundred years.

Who could have predicted this odd form of success for him? Back when everyone who knew him thought he was a wastrel, including him. The Dead Hand Loves You must have been pure inspiration, from some tacky, pulp-hearted, flea-bitten muse; because he’d written that book straight off, with none of the usual stops and starts and dawdlings, the crumpling of the pages, the tossings into the wastebasket, the fits of lethargy and despair that had usually kept him from finishing anything. He’d sat down and typed it out, eight or nine or ten pages a day, on the old Remington he’d scored at a pawn shop. How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies. It had taken him maybe three weeks. A month, at the max.

Of course he hadn’t known it was going to be an International Horror Classic. He hadn’t run down two flights of stairs in his underwear and yelled in the kitchen, “I’ve just written an International Horror Classic!” And if he had, the other three would only have laughed at him as they sat at the Formica table drinking their instant coffee and eating the pallid casseroles Irena used to cook up for them, using a lot of rice and noodles and onions and cans of mushroom soup and tuna because those ingredients were cheap though nourishing. Irena was big on nourishing. Value for the dollar, that was her thing.

The four of them would deposit their weekly food money in the dinner kitty, a cookie jar in the shape of a pig, but Irena contributed less cash because she did the actual cooking. The cooking, the shopping, the paying of the household bills such as light and heat — Irena liked doing all that. Women once did like performing such roles, and men liked that part too. He himself had enjoyed being clucked over and told he should eat more, no denying it. The deal was that the other three, including him, were supposed to do the dishes, though he can’t say that happened with any regularity, or not in his case.

To do the cooking, Irena put on an apron. It had a pie appliquéd onto it, and he has to admit she looked good in that apron, partly because it tied around her waist so you could actually see that she had a waist. Her waist was usually concealed under the layers of thick knitted or woven clothing she wore to keep warm. Dark grey clothing, black clothing, like a secular nun.

Having a waist meant she also had a visible bum and some tits, and Jack could not keep himself from picturing what she’d look like without any of her sturdy, nubbly garments on, not even the apron. And with her hair falling down, her blond hair she wore rolled up in the back. She’d look delectable and nourishing, plump and yielding; passively welcoming, like a flesh hot water bottle covered in pink velvet. She could have fooled him, she did fool him: he’d thought she had a soft heart, a heart like a down-filled pillow. He’d idealized her. What a sucker.

Anyway, if he’d come into the noodle-and-tuna-scented kitchen and said he’d just written an International Horror Classic, the three of them would only have laughed at him, because they didn’t take him seriously then and they don’t take him seriously now.

Jack had the top floor. The attic. It was the worst location. Boiling in summer, freezing in winter. The fumes went up there: cooking fumes, dirty sock fumes from the floors below, toilet stenches — they all wafted upward. There was nothing he could do in retaliation for the heat and the cold and the smells except stomp around on the floor; but that would bother only Irena, who was directly below him, and he didn’t want to annoy her because he wanted to get into her underthings.

These were black in colour, as he’d shortly had an opportunity to discover. He’d thought black underwear was sexy at the time, sexy in a sleazy way, as in grotty five-and-dime police magazines. He’d been unacquainted with real-life panty colours other than white and pink, which was what his dates in high school had worn, not that he’d ever managed a good look at those panties in the frustrating darkness of parked cars. He’s realized in hindsight that Irena’s choice of black was not provocative but pragmatic: her black was a penny-pinching black, devoid of lace or any crisscross or peek-a-boo features, and had been selected not to display flesh but merely to hide the dirt and save on washings.

Having sex with Irena was like having sex with a waffle iron, he used to joke to himself later, but that was after the sequel had distorted his retrospective glance and sheathed her in metal.

Irena was not alone on the second floor. Jaffrey lived there too, a cause of jealous brooding for Jack: how easy for Jaffrey to slither along the hall in his malodorous wool sock feet, drooling and slavering with unwholesome lust, to Irena’s door, unseen, unheard, when Jack himself was dead to the world in his attic cubbyhole. But Jaffrey’s room was over the tacked-on, tar-papered, insufficiently insulated and subcutaneously grime-ridden kitchen that jutted out from the back of the house, so there was no ceiling above Jaffrey’s head that could be stomped on.

Rod was similarly out of stomping range, and he, too, was suspected by Jack of having designs on Irena. His room was on the ground floor, in what would originally have been the dining room. They’d nailed shut the double doors with frosted glass panels that led to what was once the parlour and was now a kind of opium den, though they didn’t have any opium, only some fusty maroon cushions, a carpet in dog-vomit brown with potato chips and nut fragments ground into it, and a broken-down easy chair that stank of sickly sweet Old Sailor Port, the winos’ tipple of choice, drunk ironically by visiting philosophy students because it cost nearly nothing.

That parlour was where they lounged around and had parties, not that it was large enough for that, so the parties spilled out into the narrow hall and up the stairs and back into the kitchen, the party-goers self-segregating into pot-smokers and drinkers — the pot-smokers not being hippies as such because those hadn’t happened yet, but a whiff of things to come, a mangy, self-conscious, quasi-beatnik group who hung out with jazz players and took up with their marginally transgressive ways; and at such times he — Jack Dace, the now be-plaqued one, revered author of an International Horror Classic — at such times he was glad his room was at the very top of the house, apart from the milling throng and the stench of alcohol and cigarette smoke and weed, and sometimes of upchuck because people didn’t know when to stop.

With a room of his own, a room at the top, he could proffer a temporary refuge to some lovely, fatigued, world-weary, sophisticated, black-turtlenecked, heavily-eyelinered girl he might lure up the stairs into his newspaper-strewn boudoir and onto his Indian-bedspreaded bed with the promise of artistic talk about the craft of writing, and the throes and torments of creation, and the need for integrity, and the temptations of selling out, and the nobility of resisting such temptations, and so forth. A promise offered with a hint of self-mockery in case such a girl might think he was pompous and cocksure and full of himself. Which he was, because at that age you have to be that way in order to crawl out of bed in the morning and sustain your faith in your own illusory potential for the next twelve hours of being awake.

But a successful luring of such a girl never actually took place, and if it had, it might have ruined his chances with Irena, who was giving tiny signs of maybe coming across. Irena did not drink or smoke weed herself, though she went around wiping up after those who did, and took mental notes of who was doing what to whom, and remembered everything in the morning. She never said that in so many words, she was discreet, but you could tell by what she avoided saying.

After The Dead Hand Loves You was published to such acclaim — no, not acclaim, because that kind of book didn’t gather anything you could call acclaim, not then; only much later, once pulp and genre had established a toehold and then a beachhead on the shores of writerly legitimacy — after the book had been made into a film, then — that kind of luring became much easier for him. Once he had a reputation, at least as a commercial writer, a commercial writer with large paperback sales and book covers with raised gold lettering. He couldn’t get away with the Art gambit any more; but, in compensation, quite a few girls liked the macabre, or said they did. They liked it even then, before the Goth wave hit. Maybe it reminded them of their inner lives. Though maybe they were just hoping he’d help get them into the movies.

Oh Jack, Jack, he tells himself, eyeing his baggy eyes in the mirror, fingering the thin patch at the back of his head, sucking in his belly, though he can’t hold it in for long. You’re such a wreck. You’re such a dupe. You’re so alone. Oh Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, with your once-dependable candlestick and your knack for impromptu bullshit. You used to be so full of beans. You used to be so trusting. You used to be so young.

The contract thing had started off in an aggravating way. It was a day in late March, the lawns heaped with grey and porous melting snow, the air chilly and damp, the tempers peevish. It was lunchtime. Jack’s three roomies were sitting at the Formica kitchen table — red, with pearly swirls and chrome legs — chewing their way through the leftovers Irena typically dished up for lunch because she didn’t like to waste food. He himself had slept in, and no wonder: there had been a party the night before, an unusually foul and tedious party at which, thanks to Jaffrey — who liked to hold forth at length on the subject of foreign, impenetrable authors — Nietzsche and Camus had been under discussion, which was worse luck for him, Jack Dace, since what he knew about either of them could fit in a salt shaker. Though he could do a fair-enough riff on Kafka, who’d written the side-splitter in which the guy turns into a beetle, which was what he himself felt like on most mornings anyway. Some sadist had brought a flask of lab alcohol to the night-before party and mixed it with grape juice and vodka, and, crazed by the droning of competitive literary display, he, Jack Dace, had drunk too much of it and puked up his kneecaps. That, in addition to whatever he’d been smoking, which was most likely cut with crotch-itch powder.

So he’d been in no mood to discuss the topic that was produced by Irena over the noodle-and-tuna leftovers, mercilessly, right off the bat.

“You’re three months behind on the rent money,” she said. Before he even had a chance to drink his instant coffee.

“Christ,” he said. “Look at that, my hands are shaking. I really tied one on last night!” Why couldn’t she be more understanding and nurturing, for fuck’s sake? Even a perceptive comment would have been assuaging. “You look like hell,” for instance.

“Don’t change the subject,” said Irena. “As you’re aware, the rest of us have been forced to pay your share of the rent for you; otherwise we’ll all get evicted. But this has to stop. Either you find some way of paying or you’ll have to leave. We’ll need to rent out your room to someone who actually does pay.”

Jack slumped down at the table. “I know, I know,” he said. “Geez. I’m sorry. I’ll make it good, I just need a little more time.”

“Time for what?” said Jaffrey with a disbelieving smirk. “Absolute time, or relative time? Internal or measurable? Euclidean or Kantean?” It was way too early in the day for him to be starting up with the hair-splitting Philosophy 101 wordplay. He was such an asshole that way.

“Anyone have an aspirin?” said Jack. It was a weak move, but the only one he could lay his hands on. He did in truth have a fearsome headache. Irena stood up to get him a painkiller. She couldn’t resist the urge to play nursie.

“How much more time?” said Rod. He had out his little greenish-brown notebook, the one in which he made his mathematical calculations: he was the bookkeeper for their joint enterprise.

“You’ve been needing more time for weeks,” said Irena. “Months, actually.” She set down two aspirins and a glass of water. “There’s Alka-Seltzer too,” she added.

“My novel,” said Jack, not that he hadn’t waved this excuse around before. “I need the time, I really. . I’m almost finished.” This was untrue. In fact, he was stuck on the third chapter. He’d outlined the characters: four people — four attractive, hormone-sodden students — living in a three-storey pointy brick Victorian row house near the university, uttering cryptic sentences about their psyches and fornicating a lot, but he couldn’t move beyond that because he didn’t know what else they could possibly do. “I’ll get a job,” he said feebly.

“Such as what?” said obsidian-hearted Irena. “There’s ginger-ale, if you want some.”

“Maybe you could sell encyclopedias,” said Rod, and the three of them laughed. Encyclopedia-selling was known to be the last resort of the feckless, the inept, and the desperate; in addition to which the idea of him, Jack Dace, actually selling anything to anyone struck them as funny. Their view of him was that he was a fuck-up and a jinx from whom stray dogs fled because they could smell failure on him like catshit. Of late the three of them wouldn’t even let him dry the dishes because he’d dropped too many of them on the floor. He’d done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division, but it was working against him now.

“Why don’t you sell shares in your novel?” said Rod. He was in Economics; he played the stock market with his spare change and wasn’t too bad at it, which was how he paid his own fucking rent. It made him smug and insufferable on the subject of money, characteristics he has retained ever since.

“Okay, I’m game,” Jack said. It was make-believe at that point. The three of them were humouring him — giving him a break, pretending to acknowledge his claim to talent, opening up a pathway to fiscal rectitude for him, if only a theoretical one. That was their story later: that they’d colluded in order to give him a boost up, lead him to believe that they believed in him, toss him some validation. Then he might actually get off his ass and do something, not that they expected this to actually happen. It wasn’t their fault that it had worked, and so spectacularly.

Rod was the one who drew up the contract. Rent for three months plus one — the three Jack hadn’t paid in the past, and the one that was about to happen. In return, the shares of the proceeds from his yet-to-be-completed novel were divided into four, with a quarter going to each of them, including Jack. It would be negatively motivating if there was no upside built in for Jack himself. With nothing to gain he might not feel energized about finishing the thing, said Rod, who was a believer in Economic Man. He sniggered at this last point, since he didn’t think Jack would finish it anyway.

Would Jack have signed such a contract if he hadn’t been so hung over? Probably. He didn’t want to be evicted. He didn’t want to land on the street, or, worse, back in his parents’ rec room in Don Mills, besieged by hand-wringing and pot roasts from his mother and tut-tutting lectures from his dad. So he’d agreed to every term, and signed, and breathed a sigh of relief, and, at Irena’s urging, had eaten a couple of forkfuls of noodle casserole because it was best to get something into his stomach, and had gone upstairs to take a nap.

But then he had to write the fucker.

No hope with the four student characters living in the Victorian row house. It was clear they’d refuse to get their paralyzed buttocks off the third-hand kitchen chairs onto which their anuses were at present stuck like the suckers of a collective octopus, even if he lit their feet on fire. He’d have to try something else, something very different; and fast, because writing the novel — any novel — had become a matter of pride. He couldn’t allow Jaffrey and Rod to continue jeering at him; he could no longer endure the pitying, dismissive look in Irena’s lovely blue eyes.

Please, please, he prayed to the gelid, fume-filled air. Help me out here! Anything, whatever! Anything that will sell!

In such ways are devil’s bargains made.

And there, suddenly, shimmering before him like a phosphorescent toadstool, was the vision of The Hand, fully formed: all he needed to do was more or less write it down, or so he said later on talk shows. Where did it come from, The Dead Hand Loves You? Who knows? Out of desperation. Out from under the bed. Out of his childhood nightmares. More possibly, out from the gruesome black-and-white comic books he used to filch from the corner drugstore when he was twelve: detached, dried-up, self-propelling body parts were a regular feature of those.

The plot was simple. Violet, a beautiful but cold-hearted girl who bore a resemblance to Irena, but an Irena even thinner of waist and plumper of boob, threw over her lovelorn fiancé, William, a handsome, sensitive young man at least six inches taller than Jack but with the same hair colour. She did this for crass motives: her other suitor, Alf, a dead ringer for Jaffrey as far as appearance went, was rich as stink.

Violet did her act of jilting in the most humiliating way possible. Straight-arrow William had a date with Violet and had arrived at her moderately substantial house to pick her up. But Alf was there before him, and William caught Violet and Alf locked in a hot and immodest clinch on the porch swing. Worse, Alf had his hand up Violet’s skirt, a liberty William had never even attempted, the fool.

Outraged and shocked, William angrily challenged the two of them, but this got him nowhere. After scornfully flinging William’s hand-gathered bouquet of meadow daisies and wild roses down on the sidewalk along with the plain gold engagement band that had cost him two months’ earnings from his job at the encyclopedia company, Violet marched emphatically away on her audacious, red, high-heeled shoes, and she and Alf drove off in Alf’s silver Alfa Romeo convertible, a vehicle he had bought on a whim because it fitted with his name: he could afford flamboyant gestures like that. Their mocking laughter echoed in poor William’s ears; and to cap it off, the engagement band rolled along the street and clinked down through a sewer grating.

William was mortally wounded. His dreams were shattered, his image of perfect womanhood destroyed. He moped along to his cheap but clean rooming house, where he wrote down his will: he wanted his right hand cut off and buried separately from him, beside the park bench where he and Violet had spent so many idyllic evenings necking smooching tenderly embracing. Then he shot himself in the head with a service revolver inherited from his dead father — for William was an orphan — and used by the father, heroically, during the Second World War. That detail added a note of symbolic nobility, Jack felt.

William’s landlady, a kindly widow with a European accent and gypsy intuition, saw to it that his wish about the cut-off hand was honoured. In fact, she crept into the funeral parlour at night and severed the appendage herself with a fretsaw from her departed husband’s woodworking bench, a scene that, in the film — both films, the original and the remake — allowed for some ominous shadows and an eerie glow coming from the hand. That glow gave the landlady quite a turn, but she carried on. Then she buried the hand beside the park bench, deep enough so that it would not be dug up by skunks. She placed her crucifix on top of it; for, being from the old country, she was superstitious.

Like the hardhearted bitch she was, Violet snubbed the funeral, and she didn’t know about the severed hand. Nobody knew about it except the landlady, who shortly thereafter moved far away to Croatia, where she became a nun in order to expunge from her soul the possibly satanic act she had committed.

Time passed. Violet was now engaged to Alf. Their lavish wedding was being planned. Violet felt a little guilty about William and a little sorry for him, but all in all she gave him scarcely a passing thought. She was too busy trying on expensive new clothes and showing off the various diamond and sapphire objects bestowed on her by crass Alf, whose motto was that the way to a girl’s heart was through jewellery: dead right, in the case of Violet.

Jack diddled around with the next part of the story. Should he keep the Hand hidden right up to the wedding itself? Should he conceal it in the long satin wedding-dress train and have it follow Violet up the aisle, only to pop forth and cause a sensation just before she said, I do? No, too many witnesses. They’d all chase it around the church like an escaped monkey, and the effect would be farcical rather than terrifying. Best to have it catch Violet alone; and, if possible, in a state of undress.

Several weeks before the wedding was to take place, a child at play in the park saw the housekeeper’s crucifix glittering in the sun, picked it up, and took it home with her, thus nullifying its protective role. (In the film — the first film, not the remake — this scene was accompanied by an ominous, retro soundtrack. In the remake the child was replaced by a dog that carried the religious trinket to its owner, who, not being versed in any kind of useful lore, tossed it into a shrub.)

Then, on the night of the next full moon, up through the soil beside the park bench came William’s hand, emerging like a sand crab or a mutated daffodil shoot. It was the worse for wear: brown and shrivelled, with long fingernails. It crept out of the park and down into a culvert, only to reappear with the callously discarded gold engagement band encircling its little finger.

It groped and scuttled its way to Violet’s house and shinnied up the ivy and in through Violet’s bedroom window, where it hid behind the dainty floral-patterned skirts of her dressing table and leered at her as she was taking off her clothes. Could it see? No, because it didn’t have eyes. But it had a kind of visionless vision, since it was animated by the spirit of William. Or by part of that spirit: not the nicer part.

(The ancient Freudian critic at the special session of the Modern Language Association dedicated to Dead Hand, thirteen or was it fifteen years ago, said that the Hand meant the Return of the Repressed. The Jungian critic took issue with this interpretation, citing many instances of hacked-off hands in myth and magic: the Hand, she said, was an echo of the Hand of Glory cut from a hanged criminal’s corpse and pickled, then set alight with embedded candles, long used in break-and-entering charms. It was known in French as main de gloire, thus giving its name to mandragore, or mandrake. The Freudian expert said this folkloric information was both obsolete and beside the point. Voices were raised. Jack, the honourary guest, excused himself and went for a smoke; that was when he was still smoking, and had not yet been ordered by his heart doctor to quit or die.)

While the Hand peeping-tommed from under the dressing table, Violet divested herself of all her clothing, then disported herself in the shower, leaving the door to her ensuite bathroom ajar to afford both the Hand and the reader a tantalizing view. Pink sumptuousness was described, curvaceous voluptuousness. Jack overwrote this part, he knows that now, but twenty-two-year-old guys go for broke on such details. (The director of the first film shot the shower scene as a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, all the more appropriate as the first Violet was played by SueEllen Blake, a blond demigoddess who was a cross between Janet Leigh and Tippi Hedren, and whom Jack pursued relentlessly only to be disappointed: SueEllen was narcissistic enough to relish the preliminary gifts and acts of worship, but she didn’t like sex per se and hated getting her makeup smeared.)

Irena in her student days had not been a wearer of makeup, probably because it cost money, but the effect had been a fresh delicacy, unadorned and honestly itself, like a shucked oyster. Also she left no beige and red smears on pillowcases. (Jack has come to appreciate this, in retrospect.)

The Hand, watching Violet soaping various parts of her body, could barely contain itself. But it did not choose this moment to tip its hand, so to speak. Instead it waited patiently as adjective after adjective was applied to Violet. Hand, reader, and Violet admired Violet’s body as she patted it dry and teasingly rubbed aromatic lotion over its flawless, creamy surfaces. Then she slithered into a clinging, gold-sequined gown, outlined her lush mouth with ruby lipstick, clasped a glittering necklace around her sinuous, chokeable neck, draped a priceless white fur around her soft, inviting shoulders, and lilted out of the room with a jaw-dropping hip swivel. The Hand, of course, did not have a jaw that could be dropped, but it suffered from erotic frustration in its own way, signalled in both of the film versions by a fit of truly repulsive writhing.

Once Violet was out of the room, the Hand rummaged through her writing desk. It discovered her distinctive pink notepaper, embossed with her initials. Then, with her own silver fountain pen, it wrote a note, using the handwriting of the departed William, which needless to say it remembered.

I will love you forever, my darling Violet. Even after death. Yours everlastingly, William.

It placed this note on Violet’s pillow along with a red rose it had plucked from the bouquet on her dressing table. The bouquet was fresh, since Alf of the Alfa Romeo sent her a dozen red roses every day.

Then the Hand scurried into Violet’s closet and hid in a shoebox to await developments. The shoes in that box were the very same audacious red high heels Violet had been wearing while heartlessly spurning William, and the symbolism was not lost on the Hand. It ran its dried-up, long-nailed fingers over the red shoes in a manner both gloating and fetishistic. (This scene has come in for much analysis in the academic articles — largely French, but also Spanish — that have treated the film — the original, not the remake, which is dismissed with scorn by European cinéastes — as a late example of Puritanical American Neo-surrealism. Jack could give a fuck about that: he’d just wanted a dead hand getting it off with a pair of hot shoes. Though he’s willing to admit it might amount to the same thing.)

The Hand waited for hours in the shoebox. It did not mind waiting: it had nothing else that it wanted to do. In the film (the original, not the remake), it occasionally drummed its fingers, indicating its impatience, but this was an afterthought, added at the request of the director — Stanislaus Ludz, an odd duck who thought of himself as a sort of Mozart of horror, and who later jumped off a tugboat — in the belief that watching a hand in a box doing nothing was not suspenseful.

In both of the films, the action cut back and forth between the Hand in the shoebox and Violet and Alf in a nightclub, dancing cheek to cheek and thigh to thigh, with Alf fingering Violet’s jewel-bestrewn neck in a possessive way while whispering, “Soon you’ll be mine.” Jack hadn’t written the nightclub scene in the book, but he would have if he’d thought of it; and he did think of it when he was writing the screenplay — both screenplays — so it was almost the same thing.

After enough of this dancing, fingering, and waiting in a box, Violet returned to her room, having swilled down several glasses of champagne with close-ups of her neck swallowing, and threw herself into bed without even a glance at the Hand’s carefully composed love note and the rose on her pillow. She had two pillows, and the note and the rose were on the other one, which is why she neither saw the note nor got stuck with rose thorns.

What emotions was the Hand feeling, now that it had been overlooked once more? Sorrow or anger, or some of each? Hard to tell with a hand.

Stealthily it sidled out of the closet and made its way up via the carelessly flung bedspread to Violet in her lacework nightie as she lay in dishevelled slumber. Was it going to strangle her? Its gruesome fingers hesitated above her neck — screams from the film audiences here — but no, it still loved her. It began to stroke her hair, tenderly, longingly, lingeringly; then, unable to restrain itself, it stroked her cheek.

This wakened Violet, who, in the shadowy but moonlit room, found something like a huge five-legged spider on her pillow. More screams, this time from Violet. The startled Hand made itself scarce, so by the time that Violet, gibbering with fright, managed to turn on the bedside lamp, it was cowering under the bed and thus nowhere in sight.

In tears, Violet phoned Alf and babbled incoherently, as a girl does under such circumstances, and Alf manfully soothed her by telling her she must have been having a nightmare. Comforted, she hung up and prepared to switch off the light; but then, what should catch her eye but the rose, and then the note, written in William’s unmistakable and once beloved handwriting?

Wide eyes. Terrified gasp. This could not be happening! Not daring to remain in the room long enough to phone Alf again, Violet locked herself in the bathroom, where she spent a restless night huddled in the tub, covered inadequately with towels. (In the book she had some torturing memories of William, but it was decided not to show these in either of the films, so their place was taken by an episode of anguished finger-biting and stifled sobbing.)

In the morning, Violet cautiously emerged into a room flooded with cheerful sunlight. No pink note was to be seen, the Hand having done away with it. The rose was residing once more in its accustomed vase.

Deep breath. Sigh of relief. Only a nightmare, after all. Nonetheless Violet was spooked, and cast several nervous backward glances as she and her expensively sheath-skirted haunches prepared to go off for lunch with Alf.

Now the Hand busied itself once more. It riffled through Violet’s diary and practised copying her writing. It stole several more sheets of her pink notepaper, and penned a torrid and obscene love letter to another man, proposing yet one more pre-marriage tryst at their usual meeting place, a seedy hooker-frequented motel on the outskirts of town right beside a wholesale carpet outlet. “Darling, I know it’s a risk, but I can’t stay away,” it said. It made disparaging remarks about Alf and his inadequate lovemaking, with particular reference to the size of his dick. The note concluded by anticipating the delights in store once rich Alf had been married to Violet and then disposed of. A little antimony in his martini should do the trick, said the note, before ending with a paragraph of hot-blooded longing for the moment when the invented lover’s electric eel would slide once more into Violet’s moist and palpitating nest of seaweed.

(You couldn’t use such euphemisms now, you’d have to name the names; but there was a limit in those days as to which unprintable words you could actually print. Jack regrets the lifting of those old taboos: they spurred inventive metaphors. With the young writers now it’s F and C all day long, which he, personally, finds boring. Is he becoming a fogey? No: objectively speaking, it is boring.)

The pretend lover was called Roland. There was a real Roland, who had been an earlier admirer of Violet’s, though an unsuccessful one. Violet had preferred handsome William to him, and no wonder, because Roland was not only a yawn-making economist, but a mean-minded, shrivel-souled, corkscrew-hearted prick, sort of like Rod with his greenish-brown notebook. He was a dork, a dink, a dong. .

This sounded too musical, so Jack scratched it out. Then he went into a caffeine-induced reverie: why should the male member be used as a term of abuse? No man hated his own dorkdinkdong, quite the opposite. But maybe it was an affront that any other man had one. That must be the truth. He should brush up this thesis and haul it out for display purposes at the next house party when the intellectual sparring got too irksome.

That way procrastination lay. Jack had pages to type before he slept. He had blood to spill.

“I brought you some soup,” said Irena, who’d come silently up the stairs to Jack’s crow’s-nest. She slid a plate and bowl onto the bridge table Jack was using as a writing desk. The soup was mushroom, and there were crackers.

“Thanks,” Jack said. This was more like it in the nurturing department. He thought about making a grab for Irena’s be-aproned torso, overcoming her with impetuous and urgent élan vital, and pinning her to the floor, where she would swoon in surrender. But now was not the time: Roland needed to be massacred, Alf destroyed, Violet terrified out of her wits. First things first.

Over the next few days, Jack had to go back in the manuscript and insert Roland towards the beginning, now that he was needed for the plot. When asked for some scissors and Scotch tape, Irena briskly supplied them: anything that showed the novel project was moving forward was prompting new displays of helpfulness in her.

The Hand tucked its deceptive missive to Roland in among Violet’s frothy underthings. Then it printed an anonymous message on another sheet of pink notepaper — Alf, you’re a fool. She’s two-timing you, look in the frillies, second bureau drawer — after which it scampered down the ivy-clad wall and across town to Alf’s luxury penthouse pad, where it climbed the elevator shaft to the rooftop, holding the anonymous letter between pinky and ring finger. It slid the accusing note under the door, then capered back to Violet’s house and concealed itself in a potted philodendron.

Violet returned from lunch and — a deft touch here, thought Jack — was trying on her wedding dress with the aid of a pudgy, sycophantic, comic-relief dressmaker when red-faced Alf stormed in, hurled wild accusations, and began flinging underpants out of Violet’s bureau drawers. Had he gone mad? No! For look — here was the torrid letter, on Violet’s own notepaper, in Violet’s own handwriting!

Weeping touchingly, Violet — towards whom the film audiences were, by now, feeling sympathetic — protested that she had never, ever written such a thing, nor had she seen Roland for — well, for a very long time. Then she told the story of the night before, and the frightening billet-doux she herself had discovered on her pillow.

It was clear now that the two of them were the victims of a vile hoax, perpetrated no doubt by that scoundrel and jealous rat, Roland, who was attempting to break them up so he could have Violet for himself. Alf vowed he would get to the bottom of this: he would confront Roland and make him confess, and the sooner the better.

Violet pleaded with him not to do anything rash, which, however, only made Alf distrust her. Why was she trying to defend Roland from his righteous fury? If she was not telling the truth, he’d twist that beautiful neck of hers, he growled, and anyway, where was that note she’d claimed was on her pillow? Was she lying? He took tearful Violet by the throat and kissed her viciously, then threw her roughly onto the bed. By now, both reader and Violet were beginning to fear that Alf was unbalanced. The scarlet-winged Angel of Rape hovered in the air, but Alf satisfied himself with some cursing and with the flinging of his latest bouquet of roses onto the floor, where the vase shattered in a manner that gave both the Jungians and the Freudians much food for thought later.

No sooner had Alf stormed out than Violet found another note on the dressing table where no note had been just moments before: You shall belong to no one but me. Death cannot part us. Watch your neck. Eternally yours, William.

Violet’s mouth opened and closed like that of a beached grouper. She was beyond screaming. Whoever was writing these notes was right in the house with her now! And she was all alone, the dressmaker having departed. It was too horrible!

The more horrible it became, the faster Jack wrote. He mainlined instant coffee, gobbled packaged peanuts, and snatched only a few hours of sleep per night. Irena, fascinated by his manic energy, brought him plates of noodle casserole in aid of his creative efforts. She even went so far as to do his laundry for him, tidy up his room, and change his sheets.

It was shortly after the change of sheets that Jack succeeded in wrestling her into bed. Or did she succeed in wrestling him into bed? He’s never been sure. In any case his bed was where they’d ended up, and he didn’t much care how they’d got there.

He’d looked forward to such an event for a long time, he’d fantasized about it, he’d strategized; but now that the opportunity had come he was rapid in the execution and inattentive in the aftermath: he’d neglected to murmur any terms of endearment, and he’d zonked off to sleep almost immediately. He admits that wasn’t too suave. But there were reasons: he was young, he was overtired, he had a lot on his mind. His energies were needed elsewhere, because he was almost up to the dénouement in The Dead Hand Loves You.

Alf was about to batter Roland to a pulp in an insane rage. Then, covered with blood, he would stagger off to his Alfa Romeo, where the Hand was lurking in the custom leather upholstery and would attempt to throttle him from behind. This would cause Alf to lose control of the car and crash it into a viaduct, incinerating him in the process. The Hand, though badly singed, would crawl out of the wreckage and limp over to Violet’s house.

The unfortunate girl would just have been informed by the police about the murder of Roland and also the fatal accident; she’d be emotional rubble. The doctor would prescribe a sedative, and Violet would be drifting into an irresistible sleep when she would see, blistered, scarred, and charred to a crisp, the unstoppable Hand, dragging itself painfully but relentlessly towards her across the pillow. .

“What are you writing about?” said Irena from Jack’s own pillow, or one of them. He now had two, the second having been supplied by Irena herself. Her visits to his attic cubbyhole were becoming a habit. Sometimes she brought cocoa, and more and more frequently she stayed overnight, though her rump was not skinny, and Jack’s old-fashioned double bed was a tight squeeze. Thus far she’d been content to cast herself in the role of handmaid to greatness — she’d even offered to retype the manuscript for him, being a fast and efficient typist, unlike Jack — but he’d fended her off. This was the first time she’d been inquisitive as to the nature of his project, though she’d assumed he was writing Literature; she had no idea that he was spinning a cheap and tawdry horror yarn about a dried-up hand.

“The materialism of our modern age, from an existential perspective,” said Jack. “Inspired by Steppenwolf.” (Steppenwolf! How could he? Jack thinks now. Forgivable, however: Steppenwolf had not yet achieved the vulgar popularity that was just around the corner for it.) This answer wasn’t exactly a lie, but, though truth of a kind, it was thinly stretched.

Irena was pleased. She kissed him lightly, put her economical black underwear back on, followed by her thick pullover and tweed skirt, and bustled downstairs to warm up some leftover meatballs for the collective mid-day meal.

In due course Jack finished the last chapter and slept for twelve hours straight, dreaming of nothing. Then he turned his attention to the peddling of his manuscript, because if he didn’t show some alacrity in his efforts to make up the past and future rent owing he might still find himself ignominiously evicted. Though nobody could say he wasn’t industrious. He’d gone all out on the typing part — Irena was his witness, he’d covered the pages — so maybe he’d get brownie points from his roommates for trying.

There were several publishing houses in New York that specialized in horror and terror, so Jack purchased some brown paper envelopes and mailed off the manuscript to three of them. Sooner than he’d expected — in reality, he hadn’t expected anything — he received a terse reply. The book had been accepted. An advance was offered. It was a modest advance, but large enough to cover the rent owed, with enough left over to pay for the rest of his term.

There was even enough for a celebration party, which Jack threw, Irena assisting. Everyone congratulated him and wanted to know when the masterpiece was due to appear and who was publishing it. Jack dodged these questions, smoked some dope and drank too much Old Sailor Port and vodka punch, and retched up the cheeseballs baked by Irena in homage to his talent. He wasn’t looking forward to the publication of his own book: too many cats would come swarming out of the bag, and his roommates were sure to recognize the funhouse mirror distortions of themselves he’d thoughtlessly inserted into his tale. Truth to tell, he hadn’t believed it would ever see daylight.

Having recovered from the party, and with his obligations fulfilled and his degree just barely obtained, Jack was free to get on with the rest of his life, which turned out to involve advertising. He had a facility with adjectives and adverbs, he was told, which would come in handy once he’d learned the ropes. Though the four roommates had given up their house and found separate abodes, he was still seeing Irena, who’d decided to go to law school. Sex with her was an ongoing revelation to him. The first time had been rapturous for him, not to say jubilant, and repeated encounters were the same, despite Irena’s traditional man-on-top parameters. She was a woman of few words, which he appreciated — more words for him — but he wouldn’t have minded a phrase or two as to how he was doing, not having anything to compare his own performance with. Wasn’t she supposed to do more moaning? He had to content himself with her blue-eyed gaze, which he found unreadable. Adoring? He certainly hoped so.

Although it was obvious from her dexterity that Irena herself had the wherewithal for comparisons, she had the tact not to mention it, another thing he appreciated. She wasn’t his first love — that had been Linda, a pigtailed brunette in second grade — but she was his first sex. Like it or not, Irena had been a milestone. So whatever else, she exists in a mental grotto consecrated to her alone: Saint Irena of the Holy Orgasm. A plaster saint, as it’s turned out, but still there in his head, posed in the act of removing her pragmatic black panties, her thighs incandescently white, her eyes downcast but sly, her half-open mouth smiling enigmatically. That image is quite different from the later image of the flinty, grasping harridan who cashes his cheques twice a year. He can’t fit them together.

Over the next months, Irena bought him a set of mixing bowls and a kitchen garbage pail because she said he needed them — translation, she needed them in order to cook dinner for them over at his place — and she cleaned his bathroom, more than once. Not only was she moving in on him physically, she was beginning to dictate. She disapproved of his advertising job, and felt he should begin a second work of art, and by the way, wasn’t the first work of art — which she was longing to read — due to be published soon? Meanwhile The Dead Hand Loves You lay doggo, and Jack hoped that the publisher had left the manuscript in a taxi.

But no such luck; for, like the severed hand of its title, The Dead Hand Loves You clawed its way to the surface and made its debut on the drugstore shelves of the nation. Jack had some furniture by then, including a beanbag chair and a good sound system, and he also had three suits, with ties to match. He regretted that he’d used his real name for the book instead of a nom de plume: would his new employers think he was a deranged pervert for writing this stuff? All he could do was keep his head down and hope no one noticed.

Again, no such luck. There was a chilly row with Irena when she discovered that his masterwork had in fact appeared and he hadn’t told her. Then there were more stiff words when she read it and saw what kind of masterwork it was — a waste of his talent, a sellout, and a shameless act of slumming, so very much beneath him — and that the characters in it were thinly disguised portraits of his three former roommates, including herself.

“So this is what you really think of us all!” she said.

“But Violet is beautiful!” he protested. “But the hero loves her!” It cut no ice. The love of a dried-up hand — however devoted — was not in any way flattering, according to Irena.

The final blow came after she’d been nosing through his mail when he was out — he never should have given her a key to his apartment — and realized that he was banking his royalty cheques rather than dividing them with his fellow shareholders. He was not honouring their contract! He was a crappy writer, a crappy lover, and a criminal cheat of a human being, she said. She would be contacting Jaffrey and Rod immediately, and she could imagine what they would have to say about this.

“But,” said Jack. “I forgot about the contract thing. It isn’t a real contract, it was only a joke, it was just a sort of. .”

“It is a real contract,” said Irena icily. She knew quite a lot by then about real contracts. “It proves intentionality.”

“Okay. I was going to do the split. I hadn’t got around to it.”

“That’s rubbish and you know it.”

“Since when can you read my mind? You think you know everything about me. Just because I’m fucking you. .”

“I will not have that language,” said Irena, who was a prude when it came to words, though in no other way.

“What do you want me to call it? You like it well enough when I do it. Okay, just because I’m sticking my carrot into your well-visited. .”

Stomp, stomp, stomp. Across the floor, out the door. Slam. Was he happy or sad about that?

There followed a letter from the collective lawyer of the three irate shareholders. Demands. Threats. Then, on the part of Jack, capitulation. They had him dead to rights. As Irena claimed, there had indeed been intentionality.

Jack was upset about the departure of Irena — more upset than he could admit. He did make some attempts at fence-mending. What had he done? he asked her. Why was she writing him off?

No dice. She’d made an evaluation of him, she’d added him up and found him wanting, and no, she did not want to discuss it, and no, there wasn’t anyone else, and no, she would not give them another chance. There was one thing Jack could do — should already have done, she said — but the fact that he had no idea of what it was merely underscored why she had left.

What did she want? he pleaded, though feebly. Why couldn’t she tell him? She wouldn’t say. It was baffling.

He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected.

On the sunny side, The Dead Hand Loves You was a hit in its own field, neglected though that field was by serious literati. As his editor put it, “Yeah, it’s a piece of shit, but it’s good shit.” Even better, there was a film deal in the offing, and who more suitable than Jack to write the screenplay? And then to produce a sequel to The Dead Hand Loves You, or at any rate some other piece of good shit? Jack quit his advertising job and devoted himself to the life of the pen. Or rather, to the life of the Remington, soon to be replaced with an IBM Selectric, with the bouncing ball that let you change the typeface. Now that was cool!

His life as a scribe has had its ups and downs. Truth to tell, he’s never lived up to the success of his first book, which is still the one he’s known for and provides the bulk of his income; an income that, thanks to that youthful contract, is three times smaller than it ought to be. Which rankles. And as time passes and he finds it ever more difficult to churn out the verbiage, it’s rankling more and more. The Dead Hand was his big thing; he won’t, now, be able to repeat it. Worse, he’s at the age at which younger, sicker, more violent writers are patronizing and dismissing him. The Dead Hand, yeah, it was, like, seminal, but tame by today’s standards. Violet, for instance, did not get her intestines ripped out. There wasn’t any torture, nobody’s liver got fried in a pan, there wasn’t any gang rape. So what’s the fun of that?

They’re likely to reserve their spike-haired, nose-ringed respect for the film, rather than the book — the original film, not the remake. The remake was more accomplished, yeah, like, if that’s what you want. It had better technical values, it had — god knows — better special effects; but it wasn’t fresh, it didn’t have that raw, primitive energy. It was too manicured, it was too self-conscious, it lacked. .

Here’s our special guest for tonight: Jack Dace, the grand old man of horror. And what do you think about the film, Mr. Dace? The second one, the dud, the failure. Oh. That was your screenplay? Wow, who knew? Nobody on this panel was even born then, right, guys? Haha, yes, Marsha, I know you aren’t a guy, but you’re an honorary guy. You’ve got more balls than half the guys in the audience! Am I right? Witless giggling.

Had he himself ever been that brash, that callow? Yes. He had.

Last week he received a proposal for a TV miniseries, linked to a video-game tie-in; both forms unhappily subject to the original four-party contract, according to his lawyer. There’s also to be an entire symposium — in Austin, Texas, home of super-cool nerdery — devoted to Jack Dace and his work, his total oeuvre, and especially to The Dead Hand Loves You. This renewed activity and the accompanying social-media blitz will lead to more book sales, and more residuals, and more of everything that — fuckit! — has to be split four ways. This is his last gasp, it’s his last hurrah, and he won’t be able to enjoy it; he’ll only be able to enjoy a quarter of it. The four-way splitting is supremely unfair and it’s gone on long enough. Something has to give, someone has to go. Or several people.

How best to make it look natural?

He’s kept track of all three of them, not that he had a choice. Their lawyers saw to that.

Rod was briefly married to Irena, but that’s long over. He’s retired from his position with an international brokerage firm and lives in Sarasota, Florida, where he’s involved in the ballet and theatre communities as a volunteer financial adviser.

Jaffrey — who was also briefly married to Irena, but after Rod — is in Chicago, having tailored his philosophical debating talents to municipal politics. Fourteen years ago he was almost convicted on a charge of bribery, but he dodged the bullet and has carried on as a well-known backroom boy, spin-doctor, and candidate’s consultant.

Irena is still in Toronto, where she heads up a company devoted to raising funds for worthy non-profits, such as kidneys. She’s the widow of a man who did well in potash, and throws a lot of high-end dinner parties. She sends Jack a Christmas card every year, enclosing a form-letter account of her banal society doings.

Jack is not outwardly on bad terms with the threesome, having floated it about years ago that he accepts the situation for what it is. Still, he hasn’t seen any of them for years. Make that decades. Why would he want to? He’s had no desire to experience a burp from the past.

Not until now.

He decides to start with Rod, who lives the farthest away. Rather than emailing, he leaves a voice message: he’ll be passing through Sarasota in connection with a film he’s considering — he’s looking for the right kind of setting — and how would Rod like to have lunch and catch up on old times? He’s ready for a brush-off, but somewhat to his surprise Rod sends an acceptance.

They don’t meet in a restaurant, or even at Rod’s home. They meet in the discouraging cafeteria of the Buddhist palliative care centre where Rod is now a resident. White folks clad in saffron robes drift here and there, smiling benign smiles; bells ding; in the distance, chants are chanted.

Formerly stocky Rod has dwindled: he’s yellowish grey and looks like an empty glove. “Pancreatic cancer,” he tells Jack. “It’s a death sentence.” Jack says he had no idea, which is true. He also says — how does he come up with these platitudes? — that he hopes Rod is receiving the proper spiritual care. Rod says he isn’t a Buddhist, but they do death well, and, having no family, he might as well be here as anywhere.

Jack says he is sorry. Rod says it could be worse and he can’t complain. He’s had a good run — partly thanks to Jack, he has the grace to add, since that Dead Hand money gave him the leg-up he needed at the beginning of his career.

They sit looking at their plates of vegetarian Buddhist-temple cuisine. There’s not a lot more to say.

Jack is relieved he won’t have to murder Rod after all. Did he really intend to go that far? Would he have been up to it? Most likely not. He never disliked Rod as such. That’s a lie: he did dislike Rod, but not enough to kill him, then or now.

“You weren’t really Roland,” he says. He owes at least this much of a lie to the suffering little bugger.

“I know that,” says Rod. He smiles, a watery smile. A middle-aged woman in an orange robe brings them green tea. “We had fun, didn’t we?” he says. “In that old house. It was a more innocent age.”

“Yes,” says Jack. “We did have fun.” From this distance it does resemble fun. Fun is not knowing how it will end.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” Rod says finally. “About that book of yours, and the contract.”

“Don’t worry about it,” says Jack.

“No, listen,” says Rod. “There’s a side deal.”

“A side deal?” says Jack. “How do you mean?”

“Between the three of us,” says Rod. “If one of us dies, their share is split between the other two. It was Irena’s idea.”

It would have been, thinks Jack. She’s never missed a trick. “I see,” he says.

“I know that’s not fair,” says Rod. “It should go to you. But Irena was angry because of the way you wrote about Violet, in the book. She thought it was a dig at her. After she’d been so, well, so kind to you.”

“It wasn’t a dig,” says Jack, another semi-lie. “What happens if all of you die?”

“Then our shares revert to you,” says Rod. “Irena wanted everything to go to her kidney charity, but I drew the line.”

“Thanks,” says Jack. So, it’s last man standing. At least he now has an overview of the state of affairs. “And thanks for telling me.” He shakes Rod’s wan hand.

“It’s only money, Jack,” says Rod. “Take it from me. At the end of the line, money means nothing. Let it go.”

Jaffrey is delighted to hear from Jack, or so he claims. What fine times those were, the days of their youth! What a blast! He seems to have forgotten that some of those days were spent in defrauding Jack, but since Jaffrey now devotes his entire life to defrauding people en masse, that long-ago, minor piece of sharp practice must have got lost in his inner shuffle. Not that Jaffrey hasn’t feathered his nest plumply enough with Jack’s earnings.

They’re on a golf course, Jaffrey’s suggestion. Play a round, have a couple of beers, what could be better? Jack hates golf, but is good at losing, and has a lot of practice at it: losing to film producers greases the wheels.

Smart Jaffrey: golf courses are the perfect cover. Private conversation is possible, but they’re never out of view of others, so Jack can’t simply brain the garrulous old fraud out of sight of witnesses. And Jaffrey is old, he’s really old: his remaining hair is white, his spine is curved, his paunch is flabby. Jack himself is no printemps chicken, but at least he’s kept in better shape than that.

Jaffrey garbles on about that slummy brick house where they’d had such carefree times: does Jack know there’s a historical plaque on it? Commemorating Jack and The Dead Hand, of all things! How amazing that people now mistake that clumsy, cliché-ridden book of his for some kind of artistic accomplishment! Trust the French to do that, they think Jerry Lewis is a genius, but other people? Jaffrey has always found The Dead Hand side-splittingly funny, and he can only suppose Jack wrote it with that end in view. But great that it turned into such a gold mine, right? For all concerned. Chuckle, wink.

“Irena didn’t find it funny,” Jack says. “The book. She was pissed at me. She thought I’d led her on. She wanted me to be writing War and Peace, when all along it was about. .”

“She knew what it was about,” Jaffrey says with that I’ve-scored-a-point philosophy-student grin of his. “While you were writing it.”

“What?” says Jack. “How do you mean? I never told. .”

“Irena’s the nosiest woman alive,” says Jaffrey. “I should know, I was married to her. She’s got a sixth sense. I only cheated on her seven or eight times, ten max, and she caught me out immediately every time. She’s hell to play golf with too. You can’t steal an inch.”

“She couldn’t have known,” says Jack. “I kept it under wraps.”

“You think she wasn’t peeking at the manuscript every chance she could get?” says Jaffrey. “You’d go to the can, she’d flip a few pages. She was riveted by it. She wanted to see if you were going to kill Violet. And she knew a pop-culture hit when she saw it.”

“But then she gave me shit,” says Jack. “I don’t get it.” He’s feeling a little addled. Maybe it’s the sun: he’s not used to being out in it. “She broke up with me because of that book. Betraying my true talent and yadda yadda.”

“That wasn’t the reason,” says Jaffrey. “She was in love with you. You didn’t notice that? She wanted you to propose to her, she wanted to get married. She’s very conventional, Irena. But you didn’t come across. She felt very rejected.”

Jack is surprised. “But she was in law school!” he says. Jaffrey laughs.

“That’s no excuse,” he says.

“If that’s what she wanted,” says Jack sulkily, “why didn’t she say so?”

“And have you turn her down?” says Jaffrey. “You know her. She’d never put herself in such a vulnerable position.”

“But maybe I might have said yes,” says Jack. His life would have been very different if only he’d guessed, and then taken the chance. Better, or worse? He has no idea. Still, different. He might not feel so alone right now, just for instance.

He never did marry any of those other girls; none of the fangirls, none of the actresses he’d met through the films. He’d suspected all of them of loving his book and/or his money more than they loved him. But Irena, he now reflects, came before The Dead Hand hit the stands; before his success. Whatever else, he couldn’t accuse her of ulterior motives.

“I think she’s still carrying a torch for you,” says Jaffrey.

“She gave me holy hell for years,” says Jack. “Over the royalties. If she hated the book that much, she should’ve refused any profit from it.”

“It was her way of keeping in touch with you,” says Jaffrey. “Ever thought of that?” His divorce settlement with her — he tells Jack— was bizarre: Irena insisted that it had to include Jaffrey’s share in The Dead Hand Loves You, the proceeds from which are paid over to her as soon as Jaffrey himself receives them. “She thinks she inspired you,” he says. “So she has a right.”

“Maybe she did inspire me,” says Jack. He’d been contemplating the various methods he might use to eliminate Jaffrey. Ice pick in the men’s room, radioactive dust in the beer? It would have taken some planning, as Jaffrey must have made some powerful enemies during his backroom-boy decades and is surely alert to danger. But it seems Jack won’t have to implement any of these schemes, since Jaffrey is out of the picture as far as The Dead Hand is concerned: he no longer benefits from it at all.

Jack sends Irena a note. Not an email, a note, with a stamp and everything: he wishes to create an aura of romance, all the better to lull her into a sense of security so he can lure her into an out-of-the-way place and shove her over a cliff, figuratively speaking. Why don’t they meet for dinner? he suggests. He has some news about the future of their mutual book that he would like to share with her. She should choose the restaurant, cost no object. He’d really like to see her after all this time. She’s always been very, very special to him, and she still is.

There’s a hiatus; then he receives a reply: Certainly, that would be appropriate. It will be so pleasant to recall the long and complex journey we have been on, both together and then on the parallel paths we have travelled along in our different but similar ways. There are invisible vibrations that have attached us to each other, as you yourself must realize. Cordially, your very old friend, Irena. P.S.: Our horoscopes have predicted this reunion.

How to read this? Love, hate, indifference, camouflage? Or is Irena going batshit?

They meet at the upscale Canoe, far away from tuna-and-noodle casseroles. The venue is Irena’s suggestion. They have one of the best tables, with a view out over the brightly lit city that gives Jack vertigo.

He turns away from the window, focuses instead on Irena. She’s a bit wrinkled and quite a lot thinner, but all in all she’s held up well. Her cheekbones stand out; she looks distinguished and expensive. Her astonishingly blue eyes are still unreadable. She’s much better dressed than when they were roommates; but then, so is he.

The white wine comes, a cabernet sauvignon. They lift glasses. “Here we are again,” says Irena with a trembly little smile. Is she nervous? Irena was never nervous before; or not that he could tell.

“It’s wonderful to see you,” says Jack. Surprisingly, he means it.

“The foie gras is especially good here,” says Irena. “I know you’ll like it. That’s why I chose this place for you: I always did know what you like.” She licks her lips.

“You were my inspiration,” Jack finds himself saying. Jack, you shameless cornball, he admonishes himself; but it seems he wants to give her pleasure. How did that happen? He needs to cut to the chase, toss her off a balcony, heave her down some stairs.

“I know,” says Irena, smiling wistfully. “I was Violet, wasn’t I? Only she was more beautiful, and I was never that selfish.”

“You were more beautiful to me,” Jack says.

Is that a tear, is she having an emotion? Now he’s frightened. He always depended on Irena to keep herself under control, he now realizes. He won’t be able to murder a sniffling Irena: to be murdered, she needs to be heartless.

“I bought those shoes, the red ones,” she says. “Just like the ones in the book.”

“That’s. .” says Jack. “That’s wild.”

“I’ve always kept them. In their shoebox.”

“Oh,” says Jack. This is getting too strange. She’s as nutty as some of his little Goth girls, she’s fetishized him. Maybe he should forget about killing her. Make a run for it. Plead indigestion.

“It opened things up for me, that book,” she says. “It gave me confidence.”

“Being stalked by a dead hand?” says Jack. He’s losing focus. Had he really intended to steer Irena down a dark alley and hit her with a brick? That had only been a daydream, surely.

“I guess you must have hated me all those years, because of the money,” says Irena.

“No, not really,” says Jack untruthfully. He has indeed hated her. But he doesn’t hate her now.

“It wasn’t the money,” she says. “I didn’t want to hurt you, I just wanted to stay connected. I didn’t want you to forget all about me, in your glamorous new life.”

“It’s not so glamorous,” Jack says. “I wouldn’t have forgotten you. I could never forget you.” Is this bullshit, or does he really mean it? He’s been in the bullshit world for so long it’s hard to distinguish.

“I liked it that you didn’t kill Violet,” she says. “I mean, the Hand didn’t. It was so touching, the way you ended it. It was beautiful. I cried.”

Jack had been intending to let the Hand strangle Violet: it seemed right, it seemed fitting. The Hand would cover her nose, her mouth; then it would close around her neck and squeeze with its dead shrivelled fingers, and her eyes would roll up like a saint’s in ecstasy.

But at the last minute Violet had bravely overcome her terror and revulsion, and had taken the initiative. She’d extended her own hand, and reached out in love, and stroked the Hand, because she knew it was William really, or part of William. Then the Hand had vaporized in a silvery mist. Jack had stolen that from Nosferatu: the love of a pure woman had an uncanny power over the things of darkness. Maybe 1964 was the last moment when you could get away with that: try such a thing now and people would only laugh.

“I’ve always thought that ending was a message you were sending,” says Irena. “To me.”

“A message?” says Jack. Is she wacko, or is she right? The Jungians and the Freudians would agree with her. Though if it was a message, fucked if he knows what it meant.

“You were afraid,” says Irena, as if in answer. “You were afraid that if I really touched you, if I reached out and touched your heart — if you let me come too close to the truly fine, spiritual person you kept hidden inside — then you’d vanish. And that’s why you couldn’t, why you didn’t. . why it fell apart. But you can now.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” says Jack. He grins what he hopes is a boyish grin. Does he have a fine spiritual person hidden inside? If he does, Irene is the only one who’s ever believed in it.

“I guess we will,” says Irena. She smiles again and puts her hand on top of his; he can feel the bones inside her fingers. He covers their two joined hands with his second hand. He squeezes.

“I’m sending you a bouquet of roses tomorrow,” he says. “Red ones.” He gazes into her eyes. “Consider it a proposal.”

There. He’s taken the plunge, but the plunge into what? Jack, be nimble, he tells himself. Avoid traps. She may be too much for you, not to mention crazy. Don’t make a mistake. But how much time does he have left in his life to worry about mistakes?