Touch of Death

 Touch of Death

written by Graham Swanson

Travis balanced a pool cue on the groove on his forearm where the flesh healed into a thick cuff hanging off the smooth scabs of his wrist stub. He still felt painful spams of a phantom hand 6 months after the accident and he still smelled his own blood searing against the hot blade of the spinning torch machine at the factory. Losing his hand made it hard to rest a pool cue, but the bridge of bone and scar tissue formed a convenient slot. He slid the cue into the fleshy slot, set his stub on the table, and took aim at the shots he needed to take. He nestled the cue deeper into the groove, and used the hanging layer of scab and scar tissue as a guide, and like a magic hand helped him, his shot tapped the cue ball into his target, and it nearly fell into the corner pocket but it clacked against another ball by just a sliver.

Travis’s friends surrounded him and told him how close he came to winning the game. Beautiful women dressed in their best kept looking over at him from across the sticky floor, and he hid his gnarled stub behind his friends as he stood behind them in fear of being noticed. He wanted them to notice his eyes, how young he looked despite his age, flesh never scarred by acne, almost graduated with a degree in laser engineering, volunteered on weekends to clean litter from the park, but all people notice is the gnarled joint bone sticking out from purple layers of soft foamy crust. He still felt his hand crawling at their necks. The machine didn’t make a clean cut on his hand, it grabbed his hand and spun it around the center of a drill.

The girls at the bar laughed at him as the machine clamped around his hand twisted the wrist joint and tore veins from his arm until it left a string of blue and pink nerves coiled on the open safety guard. The tag lock hung on the ring splattered in blood. The engineer shouted at the supervisor, “I just drained its power!” As emergency whistles flashed and the machine shot out pieces of bone and sprays of blood at the people getting near. His blood covered the walls, the lights, the neighboring machines, and the entire workload nearby. The entire shop closed for calibration and cleaning, but that day never came because anyone who tried to get close to that machine or any other lost something or fell ill of a fatal disease.

At night he woke up from nightmares of his severed hand crawling up the bedside still beaten and bruised but dragging along tangles of vein and nerves in a tight blue rope. The pains in his missing hand shot up his arm and pulsed in his shoulder. He felt pockets of soreness throb in his neck and lungs. The factory blamed him for the accident. He never worked again because any time he stood before an appliance or piece of machinery, he felt his marrow exposed to the cold air, and the deep shame shadowing his sunken, marbled face.

The pretty girls knew it too. When they smiled and laughed with their friends, it was because they pondered about his condition, they called him a loser behind his back. Lots of people did. In Travis’s time, if you didn't get married at 18 or right out of college, you never got married. They wanted millionaires, lawyers, athletes, not amputees. Those available had hundreds of men available on their phones and dismissed anyone who couldn’t hold their attention every six seconds.

So Travis lived alone in an empty apartment in the run-down slums of town in the shadow of the abandoned factory that took his hand. The landlord lived in Florida, and let the apartment building fall into disrepair. Water didn’t run in the bathroom at all and only ran in the kitchen for two hours a day. Only the hall had a light. The smells of every bathroom in the building rose up into his sink. The stovetop melted when he lit the propane. He paid two thousand dollars a month for this pace. Rent rose again, beetles covered the windows, the heat didn’t come on and only one room had a window.

It took so much out of him that he bought a gun and tried to shoot himself with it in the bathtub but just before he pulled the trigger someone knocked at his door. He swung the door open. A little kid stood there. He held open a sack and asked for candy. He forgot that it was Halloween. He almost told the kid he didn’t have any candy when three men pushed their way through the door and backed each other up with pistols.

They demanded his car keys.

For the first time in his life, he used the phantasms to his advantage. He still felt his missing hand, but now on the cold steel grip of his own pistol. He told the invaders that he’d get the keys for them because he just changed after a shower. He put his hands up, they pressed their guns into his face.

“don't you scream, just tell us where the keys are, and we’ll be gone.” All three of them looked like teenagers, the oldest and biggest one did the talking while the other watched the hall and the third watched the door. Travis felt his phantom hand squeeze the handle, he left it in the bathroom.

“It’s on the sink, near the bathroom, in my jeans pocket.”

The older trespasser told his two accomplices to stay put, and he pounced into the hall and entered the bathroom. He saw no dirty clothes or wet towels, nor did he feel the humidity of trapped steam in the ventless bathroom, but Travis felt his finger clip the trigger. He flexed the muscles in his invisible hand, and gunshots exploded in the bathroom. The oldest trespasser fall against the hall wall under the only light bleeding from several wounds in his chest, neck, thigh, and jaw.

The teenagers panicked and started shooting at Travis who hurried into his bedroom. He pushed his dresser against the door, but it didn’t hold them for long. Hands pried open the door and reached inside. Travis took the mobile radiator that heated his bedroom and slammed it against one of the hands. Two fingers bent backward. The last land reached inside with a gun. Travis hid on the other side of the dresser as fiery shots lit up the room and shattered the TV. He forced his hips into the dresser and pinned the kid’s arm to the doorway with the door. He screamed in pain, but Travis went through his pillows searching for the knife he kept sheathed in bear leather. With the spearhead-shaped blade he sliced at the hand until fingers dropped of, and then he impaled it to the doorway, and let it there with the boy still crying for help.

Travis kicked out the screen and jumped out the only window and escaped to the neighboring building where he hid away for the night. As he dozed waiting for the police, he felt the phantom hand crawling up his chest, onto his shoulder, and against his mouth and eyes. In the morning no police arrived, but bloody handprints covered his face. The right stars aligned in the sky, and the fortune-tellers with rotten faces living in the gutter told him as much. The worlds far away, much different and obscure, gave him their light and turned the machines against him, but in turn, gave him the phantom hand. He still felt it when pains shook his arm.

After the attack, he left the city to live in his hometown. The phantom hand followed him on the bus ride back. He wandered the foggy streets after a heavy rain shook the leaves from the trees until he found a narrow path open up in the forest where there was no path before. There, trees there turned white among black misshapen branches. He smelled hot food and bells and followed the path until he lost sight of the town, crossed a bridge, and come across a red cottage surrounded by hay and brambles. An old man with yellow eyes and a long white beard opened the front door and beckoned him inside with a plate of cabbage and fish fried in vinegar. He also had only one hand.

Travis went inside. Candles lit the rooms, and a coal furnace burned. Red sparks fluttered onto the dusty floor. The old man sat before an open book etched full of graphic scenes of ritual and sacrifice. Naked women kneeling before a two-legged behemoth with wings for arms and 9 appendages leaking from its stomach. Arms and legs hanging from racks cut off by tiny people with giant cleavers in an ancient city.

As the walls reddened with blood, the old man looked up at the Christmas tree in the corner and spoke as if wishing back on dear memories. The imagination he showed Travis depicted a crimson hand holding a candle over the moon as packs of hungry wolves drew near the halo of its light. “The stars will be up high for you. No matter how dark, they will find you through the clouds. There is no escape.” The pages flipped and turned carefully without the old man touching the book. The next page illustrated a hooded man with a crimson hand raising the dead from their catacombs.

In the news that night the town sighed in relief. The serial killer that stalked the town finally got buried, but to their shock, in the same cemetery as the town's founders. They all spat on the floor and felt sick knowing what he did, but no one spoke of it. The partially devoured victims still lived somewhere in town, and he swore vengeance on them all when the needles injected him with poison. Everyone wanted to forget, but too many still remembered him tapping on their windows late at night and asking for a phone to call help.

The killer murdered one entire family with four young kids, and 2 women living alone. Before the police arrested him, he tried to get into 12 other houses. He carried the bodies into the woods, butchered them on a stump in the middle of an ivy grove, and devoured the bones. He made sure to cut off each of his victim's hands and feet before he killed them.

Travis found work in a diner kitchen but thought about quitting every day. Some people he knew in High School came in one morning, with their spouses. These kids beat up on him back then while their girlfriends encouraged them. They moved away to the city once they graduated but still owned homes in the small town but only came back to collect on rent and deposit the money in the bank.

“Still living in town, Travis?” one asked in mock pity and they all pretended to care.

The phantom hand pulsed against their necks as they ate. Travis flexed it softly as if holding a little girl’s hand until it itched the back of a throat. He grabbed hard and raised his stub into the air, and one of them vomited all over the booth. He kept his hand raised and squeezed until they convulsed on the floor, grabbing at their neck blood and vomit oozed from their nose.

The others called for an ambulance but it never came. The snotty brat died on the diner floor covered in omelet, blood, and bile. The others ran outside but didn’t get too far. Large hounds guarded their cars and chased them out into the street with the other meat-eaters of the forest.

Travis spent the night watching young lovers kiss in the park, his hand tickling the back of their necks, and lifting each other's shirts. They giggled and acted innocent. They never knew Travis watched them and guided his phantom hand around their bodies. He felt the girl’s breasts and squeezed so hard that she slapped her boyfriend and stormed off. He felt sorry for them but decided to be more subtle next time.

Travis visited the graveyard and spent all night moving from grave to grave. They didn’t make it easy to find, but the stars shined for him, and the north wind blew, and there amid fluttering cloaks and ghost fog, glowed a halo around the grave of the infamous serial killer. The old man’s voice chanted with a coven of witches beneath underground tunnels. They rose their hands into the smoke of a thousand melting candles, as Travis rose his wrist into the waxy halo of light, and a new bone grew from the melting stub. A red flame burned where his hand once was as a new claw grew out from the newly formed flesh. The ground ripped open.