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Remember Bianca from Theodore Sturgeon’s “Bianca’s Hands?” Imagine her growing up, except with a brain and with a penis, and you have the unnamed narrator of this story. It is also told in a most unusual fashion, which makes this story seem a lot more immediate than others.
It’s told in first person by a man in a loony bin. The reader, embodied by a nameless priest, has been sent here to take down the narrator’s story about what happened to him. After being a bit cryptic (more on that in the spoiler alert), the narrator gets down to what got him locked up here.
Apparently, when he was younger, he had perfect, beautiful hands. So much so that he liked to play with them. After getting caught doing just this by his mother, he decided to do his playing in secret. (That really isn’t as creepy, or sexual, as it sounds.) However, during one of these sessions, his hands continued to play, even though he tried to get them to stop. These spells would come and go, but he knew he was becoming dangerous when his hands, independent of any thought from him, approached a bird cage and crushed the canary within.
It’s when his hands try to strangle a little girl that he knows he must do something about this. Somehow, the little girl survives, and he manages to get her help without getting caught himself. To ensure this doesn’t happen again, the narrator plunges his hands into the heart of a fire. When he wakes up in the hospital, his hands are bandaged up, but they still have minds of their own.
SPOILER ALERT: The final night he loses control of his hands, he knows what they are about to do. A local bully named Bretner has been bothering him, and they have every intention of ending the guy’s life. He doesn’t like Bretner, but he also knows the evil of his own hands, so he does the only thing he can think to do: he manages, in kind of an inventive way, to cut both of his hands off. He passes out from the pain, glad to finally be free.
Except when he wakes up, Bretner is dead, and the narrator’s severed hands are wrapped around the corpse’s neck. Hence, him being locked up in a mental ward. END OF SPOILERS.
As frightening as Sturgeon’s story was, Bertin takes it to the next level. What if your own hands turned against you? What would you do? Would you have the fortitude to pluck away the offending limbs, as the Bible would advise?
And no, this is no psychological tale of an unreliable narrator. SORRY, ANOTHER SPOILER: There was an autopsy of both hands, and inside each were found organs, independent nerves, a heart, lungs, brains. These things were alive on their own. END OF THAT SPOILER ALERT.
Think about that the next time you crack your knuckles . . . .
[This story first appeared in THE YEAR'S BEST HORROR STORIES #3, and cannot be read online at this time.]
For the longest time the only thing I knew Bertin for was a story called "Darkness, My Name Is," in a mid-'70s anthology called DISCIPLES OF CTHULHU. I could never find any further information on the guy or any indication that he'd ever written anything else.
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