The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

THE RIPPER’S TUNE by Gregory Nicoll

“Well,” said Dark Annie, “what do you think of it, Liz?”

Long Liz ran her hand appreciatively up the length of the bass guitar’s neck. Its body was shaped like a screaming skull, the fretboard an extended arm. The peghead was a twisted skeletal hand, its irregularly spaced tuning pegs sculpted as heavy-gauge nails.

“In-fucking-credible!” Long Liz gasped. She shook her head disbelievingly. Her short red hair bobbed and the little skeleton earrings she wore in both ears rattled. “Where’d ya get it?”

Dark Annie (nee Joan Thomas) brushed back the errant shock of purple hair which continually spilled over her forehead. “The shop where Karl works,” she said, “and if it hadn’t been for that last check from Moonlight, there’s no way I could’ve afforded it.”

Long Liz (nee Pamela Elizabeth Jones) passed the guitar back to her. “Just think of all the great gear we can score once we sign to a big label.”

The dressing room door banged open, admitting a blast of cold air and the sound of a stirring crowd. Jackie Slash (nee Tammy Mills) leaned in, smiling. Her long blonde hair was fluffed up magnificently and her wide blue eyes gleamed. “Are you cunts ready to rock’n’roll?”

It was something of a sore point with Jackie and the Rippers that Gary, their manager, had held them back from the public for so long. “You need more time to develop,” he explained patiently, month after month. “When you make your debut you’ve got to be the greatest band this city has ever seen!” He’d not even let them do a video. “The promo photos are all they need to see for now. Let’s keep the suspense building.”

Meanwhile their single on the tiny Moonlight Records label had gone back for six re-pressings, made the dance-rock and alternative/college radio charts for 32 straight weeks, had been voted Single of the Year in both The Village Voice and Rolling Stone’s critics’ polls, and had been licensed for inclusion in no less than three compilation albums. A remixed 12-inch edition of the single (featuring a different and even more provocative cover photo) was due out in three weeks. The only thing keeping Jackie and the Rippers from being the hottest group in the country—and from getting signed to a major label—was one simple technicality.

They had never, ever played a live concert.

Until now.

Sure, they were only the support group—the Wandering Jews were the nominal headliners tonight—but it was common street talk that better than half the audience had come only to see them. Jackie and the Rippers. Hard rock that scraped the cutting edge like a whetstone, and that stung like a razor.

Karl handed Jackie her red Gibson Firebird. “I changed the high E string for you. Hope a gauge nine will do.”

She grinned, nodded, and slung the axe around her arm.

Gary leaned out onstage and signaled the sound and lights crew. Immediately the house lights dimmed. The crowd screamed.

“We want the Rippers! We want the Rippers!” they chanted.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” roared the emcee. “Presenting… for the first time anywhere…”

They sprinted onstage, capes flowing out behind them. Jackie and Annie plugged in their guitars while Liz took her seat behind the drum kit and found her sticks. In the darkness it wasn’t easy.

“… Jackie and the Rippers!”

A single spotlight winked on, framing Jackie’s face in a disc of light.

“ ’Ello, dearies!” she shouted.

The crowd came totally unglued. They shrieked, yelled, whistled. More than 150 different voices shouted the titles of the two songs on their single. One young man with a mohawk haircut scrambled up onto stage and lunged toward Jackie, his hands outstretched. Gary and Karl ran interference.

Jackie beamed. She was basking in it, eating it with a spoon, and loving every sweet precious fleeting sound. “We’re Jackie and the Rippers,” she said, “and tonight, we’re gonna smash you!”

Liz pounded both sticks on her floor toms and laid down a machinegun beat. Annie joined her on the bass, setting up a propulsive rhythm. As the stage lights came up full, Jackie leaped into the air and ripped a savage chord from her Gibson with a windmill stroke delivered while her feet were still high off the stage.

The song was “Smash You,” the fastest number in their repertoire. And it sounded good.

The second tune was even better—a killer cover of the old Blondie song “Sex Offender.” Jackie’s voice had been likened to Debbie Harry’s by some critics, although a more accurate comparison would have been Patsy Cline’s. Patsy Cline, however, never sang anything like this.

And so it went through the set: “Bend Me, Shape Me,” “Let’s Have a War,” “Gotta Keep A-Rockin’,” “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” “Walkin’ the Beat,” “Venus in Furs,” “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” “In the Past,” and “Streets of London.” They played hard enough to splinter three drumsticks, snap two guitar strings (something about Jackie and high E just didn’t agree), and pop one string on Annie’s skeleton bass. They played fast enough to keep the crowd in a continuous frenzy. And they played loose and raw enough to make Beethoven roll over.

Jackie and the Rippers closed the set by performing the B-side of their single, “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” It was really a showcase for Liz, a “Wipeout”-style drum piece which let her display some of the most intense percussion work the city’s rock fans had ever witnessed. No Vanilla Fudge tedium here—the tune was fast and musical, catchy and melodic, even though its principal instrument was the drumkit. Jackie and Annie joined in on guitars only during the chorus, where Jackie would deliver the song’s sole vocal: a quick cry of, “Catch me when you can, Mister Lusk!” which she let loose when all the instruments simultaneously stopped dead during the electric three-second tacet at the refrain’s end.

The song completed, they marched triumphantly offstage to the tumultuous cheering and applause of the crowd. They hadn’t played the A-side of their record, “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel.” This was intentional. It was a trick—part of Gary’s strategy—a stunt for which an experienced band might be crucified, but one which a fresh, young band could get away with. By omitting their one and only hit from the set, they had guaranteed themselves an encore.

The precaution proved unnecessary; the cheering which greeted their reappearance was harder and heavier than before. It continued for almost two full minutes and might have gone on longer if Jackie hadn’t beckoned for silence.

“This next song,” she said, “is one that I’m sure most of you—”

“Lone! Ly! Nights! In! White! Chap! El!” they chanted. “Lone! Ly! Nights! In! White! Chap! El!”

“—have heard. It’s been out for about a year now—”

“Lone! Ly! Nights! In! White! Chap! El!”

“—and it’s been doin’ real well for us. It’s called…” She paused, smiling broadly, and held the microphone down to a short girl with white-orange-white hair who was almost crushed against the stage monitors by the surging mob.

“Lonely Nights in Whitechapel!” the girl shrieked.

Liz struck up the drumbeat and Annie pumped out the bass line.

Jackie stuck the microphone back on its post and danced around the stage with her guitar, her cape flying out behind, as her bandmates played the song’s hypnotic instrumental intro. As the intro concluded, Jackie picked out a two-note melody on her (freshly replaced) high E string and let the last note hang in the air, lingering like a ghost through the phenomenon of electronic sustain. Then she spun back around, pressing her lips close to the knob end of the microphone, and began to sing:

She chopped out a barrage of eight fast power chords (A-A, A-D, A-D-E-A) before singing the second line:

She repeated the chord sequence. The crowd was dancing en masse, many of the fans shouting the lyrics along with her as she sang.

Liz and Dark Annie kicked the rhythm into high gear for the chorus. The song’s tempo suddenly, dramatically doubled.

All three of the musicians were singing now, the rhythm section backing Jackie on the chorus.

In eleven months of intense rehearsals, Jackie and the Rippers had never sounded as good as they did right now. And they knew it. They were smiling at each other, their instruments locked in perfect union, the music flowing like liquid magic from their hands.

Backstage after their set, Liz and Dark Annie hugged each other as they tumbled elatedly against the cold walls of their dressing room. Gary popped a champagne cork and Karl passed around the glasses. He had one left over.

“Where’s Jackie?”

About fifteen minutes later they found her at the bar across the street, surrounded closely by a group of admirers. Gary shooed them out the door. Karl made sure they stayed there.

Jackie set her can of malt liquor down on the counter. There were two more beside it, one of them already drained dry. “Christ, did you see that guy out there tonight? Christ, did you see him?”

“What’d he look like?” asked Liz. “I couldn’t see anything from back behind the cymbals. The glare, ya know.”

“He looked… well… he looked creepy. Like one of those devils in those old-time pictures, those whatchamacallits, uh, woodcuts.”

They walked back across the street together, bootheels clicking on the asphalt. It was late. The moon loomed large and bright in the clear night sky, stars winking.

“This dude you saw,” said Liz, “did he do something, or was it just the way he looked?”

“Both,” Jackie answered quickly. “The worst was when we were playing ‘Venus in Furs.’ He pointed at me.”

“Big fat hairy deal,” groaned Liz. “Everybody in the whole fuckin’ club was pointing at us.”

“Not like this,” said Jackie. She shivered and took another slug from her malt liquor can. “It was a real mad kind of pointing. Like he was out to get me or something. He made me break a string,”

“You always break strings. It’s that note-bending you do.”

“The first time was note-bending. The second was him.”

“What was this cat wearing?” asked Gary. “Did he have a mask on or something?”

She shook her head. “No, he had a real face. And he was wearing a cape and a Sherlock Holmes hat.”

“A deerstalker,” Gary muttered. “Sounds like this cat was dressed as Jack the Ripper.”

Jackie nodded. “Yeah… yeah! He was Jack the Ripper!”

Their van, a bright red Ford Econoline painted with the band’s logo on each side, was parked out behind the auditorium. It listed grotesquely to one side. Three of its tires had been slashed.

“I bet it was The Wandering Jews,” said Liz.

“No,” Jackie said, shaking her head slowly. “It was Jack the Ripper.”

Dark Annie crouched down by the left front wheel. “Eh, what’s this shit? Somebody wrote something down here—scratched it into the paint.”

Gary pushed her aside. “It says: ‘Yu better stop playing mi songges’.”

“See there,” said Jackie. “I told you. It was Jack the Ripper.”

Gary shrugged. “Well, you know where I got those lyrics for your songs, don’t you?”

Liz shrugged. “From that little paperback about Jack the Ripper, right?”

Two weeks later Jackie and the Rippers played their first headlining gig. Gary wanted The Wandering Jews to open the show for them, but the Jews’ manager never returned his phone calls. The Yellow Snowmen did the honors.

“I went out and took a look at the crowd,” said Dark Annie as she walked into the dressing room. “I think your friend with the itchy index finger is back.”

Jackie dropped her beer bottle. It shattered on the concrete, spreading hissing foam across the floor. “He is?”

Dark Annie nodded, her skeleton earrings rattling. “Yep. And he brought his brothers this time. All five hundred of them.”

“What do you mean?”

Dark Annie shrugged. “Well, I mean that about half the guys in the crowd are dressed like Jack the Ripper, most of ’em with rubber knives. At least I hope they’re rubber. Security must be goin’ apeshit. It’s a madhouse out there. Real horrorshow.”

The band went onstage a few minutes early. The Yellow Snowmen had been booed off midway through their set.

The girls opened with “Streets of London” and from the first note the crowd was theirs. It was an almost perfect show—new, well-oiled drumsticks and heavier gauge guitar picks (and high E strings) prevented midperformance accidents, although Karl was kept quite busy retuning Dark Annie’s custom skeleton bass. The only noticeable false note in the performance that night came during the final verse of “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel”:

On the final line, Jackie’s voice seemed to catch on the name “Jack”—and as she made the first downstroke in the salvo of power chords at the lyric’s conclusion, the tip of her guitar pick completely missed the strings. Fortunately Dark Annie’s bass was miked loud enough to take up the slack, keeping the chop-chop rhythm steady.

“What happened out there at the end?” Long Liz asked afterwards during the backstage hubbub, adding, “Don’t tell me it was Jack the Ripper.”

Jackie took a slug from a bottle of Wild Turkey before she answered. “That fucker pointed at me, just like the last time.”

“Forget it, Jackie. He’s probably just some geek working for The Wandering Jews. As long as you keep letting him break your concentration during shows, even if it’s just for a second, you’re giving him exactly what he wants.”

Jackie took a long, deep draw from the bottle.

Long Liz stood up. “And givin’ head to that Turkey isn’t gonna help anything.”

Jackie walked out of the dressing room, bottle in hand.

It was the last time they ever saw her alive.

Half an hour later Karl found her in the stairwell at the far end of the backstage area, “with her belly opened up like it was a suitcase.” The Fulton County coroner later determined she’d died before the mutilations began. Somebody’d strangled her. They used a guitar string.

A high E.

On the wall beside her corpse, the murderer had written something in her blood: “The Jews are nott the bande that will be blamed for nuthing.”

The detectives working the case immediately descended on the four members of The Wandering Jews, but cleared them within hours. The Jews had been playing a sold-out date at a club in South Carolina at the time of the killing. Their alibi was irrefutable. They had 623 witnesses.

A week after the murder, Gary received a small parcel mailed to his home address. It contained a dried lump of flesh. A bloodstained note enclosed said, “Them is mi sonnges yu were playing. Never play them agin.”

The police were unable to trace the package, but their forensic joes matched the bloodtype to Jackie’s.

“The only thing they’ve really figured out for sure,” Gary told the surviving Rippers, “is that the killer is definitely left-handed.”

“Oh, that really narrows it down, doesn’t it?” said Dark Annie, shaking her head in disbelief. The shock of purple hair flopped down over her forehead.

“Yeah,” Liz muttered. She dabbed a tissue to her eyes. “Now it’s narrowed down to what? Only a few million, maybe a few billion suspects?”

Gary nodded slowly. “I know it’s not much to go on, but there’s one thing about it that’s sorta important—a hundred years ago the London police were pretty sure that the real Jack the Ripper was left-handed. The cops told me something about pursuing that angle.”

Dark Annie stomped on the floor with her bootheel. “Fuckin’ terrific. They’re gonna go out lookin’ for a left-handed guy who’s dead and buried? That oughta make it real easy to find the sicko who killed Jackie.”

“Yeah,” said Liz. “Somebody who’s left-handed and dead. Could be anyone from Billy the Kid to Jimi Hendrix.”

At first Gary tried to keep the story quiet, holding back the details from the rock press. But when absurdly distorted rumors began to surface in some of the more widely distributed fanzines—and when the band’s single suddenly became a nationwide sensation as a result of the attendant publicity—he switched tracks and decided to milk the story for all it was worth. A cassette of the final concert, recorded off the mix board, was remastered and immediately released on Moonlight Records. It sold briskly, and when Jackie and the Rippers were featured on the cover of Spin the next month, Gary’s phone rang off the hook with major labels making offers on the rights to reissue the record under their own imprint.

A deal was struck. Within 60 days, Warner Brothers put out The Final Encore by Jackie and the Rippers on their Sire Records affiliate. It hit the top ten on the Billboard charts just three weeks later, a feat accomplished with the aid of a hastily assembled video made up from publicity photos and a reel of sloppy camcorder footage that Karl had shot at one of their rehearsals. Tour offers poured in.

Gary licked his lips. “Call yourselves the Rippers. No Jackie. Just the Rippers.”

Anne nodded. “So far so good. What else? A new guitarist?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But the way I see it, for now anyway, it’s just the two of you. Liz can switch to guitar; we’ll scrap the drums for a little while. And I’m talkin’ acoustic here.”

A month later they were ready.

The house was full. The established fans, the recent converts, the curious, the ghoulish, the record company reps, and the press. The mood in the crowd was electric, but strangely subdued. Only a brief cheer passed through the hall as the lights went down.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” came the emcee’s voice, “Sire Records recording artists, the Rippers!”

Applause.

A large overhead spotlight cast a disc of light on the stage floor. Two black barstools stood there, each with a Martin acoustic guitar propped beside it. Long Liz and Dark Annie entered from opposite sides, each wearing a hooded black robe and moving somberly toward their instrument. They took their seats on the stools and lifted the guitars to their laps.

Dark Annie brushed her hood back.

There was a loud gasp from near the front of the crowd, and a buzz passed quickly through the multitude.

Dark Annie’s purple hair was gone. She was shaved bald.

And so was Long Liz, who pulled back her own hood a moment later. “Because we remember Jackie,” she said, “we’d like—”

Annie completed the sentence. “—to do some very special songs tonight, in her honor.” She ran her pick down the 12 strings of her guitar and slowly, beautifully, began to play the melody to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart Again,” her voice heavy with emotion as she mimicked the breathy vocals of Joy Division’s suicidal singer, Ian Curtis.

Long Liz joined in, playing rhythm on a six-string and providing backing vocals. There were tears in her eyes.

The crowd watched in hushed awe. Hardly anyone moved throughout the entire 80-minute set.

And what a set.

Each song had been carefully selected—every one of them a haunting tune made popular by a rock star who’d died prematurely. “Three Steps to Heaven” by Eddie Cochran (car crash). “Sad Mood” by Sam Cooke (gunshot). “Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding (plane crash). “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley (drugs). “No Matter What” by Badfinger (hanging). “Lost Woman” by the Yardbirds (electrocution). “Rave On” by Buddy Holly (plane crash). “Piece of My Heart” by Janis Joplin (drugs).

And more.

Each song played with somber reverence on the two mellow instruments and sung clearly, with heartfelt passion by Dark Annie.

The crowd remained silent through the performance. The only sound they made was an occasional cough or, more frequently, a faint sob. Their applause didn’t begin until almost 15 full seconds after the two girls left the stage.

The chanting began very slowly, but it built to a tremendous roar. “We want the Rippers! We want the Rippers!”

Walking back onto the stage, gripping each other’s hands tightly, Liz and Annie faced the chanting multitude and beckoned for silence. When it finally came, Annie said only, “Listen and you might hear Jackie tonight.”

They played “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel” as an instrumental.

In the dressing room afterward, Dark Annie was the first to speak. “He was out there,” she said. “I saw him. The one who points.”

Liz plopped down into a chair. “When?”

“Right there at the end of ‘Lonely Nights.’ He pushed up front and pointed. Just like Jackie said he pointed at her. He was pointing at me like that!” Annie started to cry.

Liz went over and put her arms around her. “Maybe it was just some sickie who read about that pointing stuff in the papers and figured he’d scare us.”

Gary shook his head. “No way. I anticipated that a long time ago. The pointing bit was one of the few things I managed to keep from the press.”

“Annie, I think you should have a good strong drink—but just one—and go straight home.”

She did.

The neighbors found her early the next morning.

She’d been tied to the back railing of her apartment building, her hands bound with guitar strings. The coroner estimated that the murderer spent more than a quarter of an hour working on her with his knife. The worst was what he’d done after he killed her.

The police couldn’t find him. What they did find was another note, written in the same ragged script.

It said, “I told yu to stoppe playing mi songges.”

A year later, having unearthed no further clues, they retired the case.

“Gary,” Long Liz shrieked, hysterical with anger, “get it through your goddamn concrete skull once and for all—I am never, ever going to play onstage again! You got that straight?”

“Okay, okay, okay. But just listen to me. Just listen.”

She did. Not at first, though. It took years.

Long Liz reverted to her birthname and became Pam Jones, a wildly successful session drummer. Her shaved hair grew back and she groomed it into a fashionable mohawk. She left Atlanta and took an apartment in Los Angeles, where Gary managed to get her some work right away doing percussion for the soundtracks of low budget movies. She played drums on two songs recorded for a Peter Gabriel tribute album, cut a hit single with Madonna, did a few sessions with Aerosmith, and filled in for an ailing drummer at a Barbara Streisand date when she happened to be hanging around the studio one afternoon. Sometimes she got credit on the records; sometimes she didn’t. But she always got paid. Handsomely.

She met a lot of people, and offers came in all the time. Would she like to join this band or that? Some years it seemed that any girl group—from lightweight popsters to heavy metal sirens—who needed to replace a departed member would call her before they’d try anyone else. She always refused.

Liz made plenty of money off studio work. Concerts, tours, clubs—she didn’t need them. She was rich and successful. Musician magazine even featured her on its cover and did a seven-page article about her career, with a full checklist of her recorded output and a small sample CD—bound right into the magazine—which demonstrated two of her specialized melodic drum licks.

Liz found that she’d become a living legend. Her name was a recurring feature in music magazines’ annual polls of outstanding drummers. Her style was widely imitated, and her halting efforts at songwriting—the occasional filler track on another artist’s album—were invariably given prominent mention in reviews.

Significantly, however, there were no cover versions of either “Lonely Nights in Whitechapel” or “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” Not even one.

Not even Muzak—that omnivorous corporate consumer of musical compositions, that ubiquitous purveyor of “elevator music” which homogenized everything from The Rolling Stones and Iggy Pop to The Strawberry Alarm Clock and The Clash—not even Muzak would re-record them.

Liz discovered that a rumor had spread though the industry. A dark, ugly rumor. A rumor whispered—never spoken aloud—by everyone from studio janitors to the major recording artists of the day: The two songs on Jackie and the Rippers’ single were cursed. So while the single became a radio airplay standard and eventually went triple-platinum, no musician ever dared to record their own version of either of its sides.

It was 11 years before Liz and Gary saw each other again.

The occasion was a show Gary promoted at Madison Square Garden. Opening that night was a new, all-female supergroup called Raincoat Brigade which featured former members of Girlschool, Mystery Date, and the Carrie Nations. It was their debut performance, and they were all quite nervous. Gary had invited Liz as a special backstage guest. He’d hoped her presence would give the band some encouragement.

Raincoat Brigade’s debut was sensational. They went over as well as Jackie and the Rippers had done a dozen years earlier, but this was a much larger venue. Thousands of people were standing and cheering for them—for them, a new band without even a CD in release yet. Liz watched from the edge of the stage curtain, her heart racing as the show brought back bittersweet memories of her own performing debut so many years before.

And then it was over.

The audience demanded more. “We want the Raincoats!” they chanted. “We want the Raincoats!”

Strutting back onstage to the shrill cheers of the crowd, Raincoat Brigade’s lead vocalist seized the microphone and motioned for silence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said once the crowd was calm again, “we have a special visitor here tonight and I’m sure you’d all love to meet her. Some of you know her as Pam Jones, the little lady who’s put the kick in hit records by more bands than I’ve got time to name.”

The audience stirred with excitement.

Liz felt her heartbeat quickening. “Oh, my God,” she whispered, “I hope she’s not going to—”

“But you older rock’n’rollers out there will remember her by another name. Folks, everyone please give a great big New York welcome for the former drummer of Jackie and the Rippers, Miss Long Liz!”

Liz looked around in panic. “Am I supposed to go out there?”

The crowd went wild. The cheering was even greater than that which had greeted Raincoat Brigade. It was a thundering ocean of shrieks, clapping, floor-stomping, airhorns, and firecrackers. It was infectious, hypnotic, more powerful than anything Liz had ever experienced. Someone pushed her gently from behind and she stepped slowly out onto the stage, her eyes widening at the scene. A constellation of flashbulbs lit up.

And then, in the midst of the uproar, a familiar chant emerged.

“We want the Rippers! We want the Rippers!”

Inebriated with the excitement, only dimly aware what was happening, Liz was led over to the drumkit. Raincoat Brigade’s drummer yielded her seat and handed Liz a set of sticks.

“We want the Rippers! We want the Rippers!”

In that instant, twelve years melted away.

Liz smiled, raised the drumsticks high in the air, brought them down hard on the floor toms, then up at the cymbals.

Raincoat Brigade recognized the intro at once—the classic “Pretty Maids All in a Row.” A nervous glance passed between the band members. The bass guitarist shrugged, picked a note, and began to play. The others joined in where appropriate, providing the minimal accompaniment necessary to re-create the tune from the single. The group’s vocalist even did a passable imitation of Jackie’s sole lyric, “Catch me if you can, Mister Lusk!”

About 40 seconds shy of the tune’s finale, as Liz was dealing jackhammer blows to the bass drum while setting up a countermelody with cymbal splash, she noticed the scene in the front of the crowd.

There was a surging mob crushed right up against the edge of the stage, partially obscured by the row of black monitors. The jumble of bodies was so thick it would have been impossible to count them. Moving as one writhing, throbbing, dancing, jumping waving mass of arms and heads, they crashed against the border of the stage like ocean waves on a rocky coastline—but with the surreal speed of a fast-motion film.

And somewhere in this chaos of shaking flesh, almost lost in the confusion of limbs, was a large human hand.

The instant she saw it, Liz could not take her eyes off it.

It was a dark hand, olive in complexion with heavy patches of thick black hair on its back. The fingernails were sharpened, long and hooked at their tips. The hand bounced with the music, following the motion of the crowd.

As she continued to play, Liz noticed that the hand seemed to emerge from a long, black sleeve somewhere out there, and that there was a wide white cuff between the hand and sleeve. The hand was held straight up, shaking with the music’s beat. And then, as the song crashed to its finale, the hand descended. It angled down toward the stage, the thumb and the three lower fingers folding back gradually while the index finger remained extended.

It was a left hand, and it was pointing directly at Liz.