The Beast with Five Fingers

The CampfireThe openingFree

Adrian Borlsover was a scholar. A brilliant man, a naturalist, who knew everything about plants and birds. He was blind in his old age, but he kept working. His right hand read his books in raised type. His right hand did everything.

And then, in his last years, his right hand started doing something strange.

When he fell asleep in his chair, a pencil in his fingers, the hand would keep writing. By itself. While he slept. Long messages. In handwriting that wasn't his.

His nephew Eustace watched it happen once. The old man asleep, and the hand moving across the paper, quick and neat. When Eustace leaned over to read it, the hand stopped. Then it wrote, slowly and carefully:

Eustace, you are in my way.

The old man died a few months later. And Eustace got a letter from his lawyer.

His uncle had left him the house. And, the lawyer wrote, with some embarrassment, the old man had made a very strange request before his death.

He had asked that his right hand be cut off after he died. And sent to his nephew.

And it was. Eustace received a small wooden box, a little bigger than a cigar box, with holes drilled in the lid. Inside, wrapped in cotton, was his uncle's hand.

It was moving.